Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  “Seems a strange way to behave, Carlton. Very uncivilized.”

  “And maybe they, whoever they are, were getting desperate, and decided to ginger things up with an explosion. In all likelihood, Charlie Tinkelpaugh wasn’t meant to be killed; nobody was meant to be killed. The cops told me they found the remnants of some sort of triggering device in the hole with the explosive. Probably, the idea was to set it off when golfers were near, but not too near, just to scare people.”

  “I suppose you might be right, Carlton. Although,” she added, “it seems to me just as likely that it was cold-blooded murder.”

  “Aw, come on, Emma. Who would want to kill old Charlie Tinkelpaugh?”

  “I don’t know. He was a banker, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s no reason to kill him.” I paused and thought about some of the bankers I had known. “At least, it’s not a very good reason to kill him.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should just assume he was killed by accident. The police aren’t saying that.”

  “Why, what are the police saying?”

  “According to the radio, they’re considering all possibilities. That was on the news. And one of the possibilities is that somebody set out to kill Charlie, and did. It seems to me you might be more concerned about that than what happens to the old golf course.”

  “I am concerned, Emma, but I can’t do anything about Charlie. That’s a job for the cops. I can do something about the golf course, though.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I can find out what’s going on, and if there is a development in the works, I can write a story about it.”

  “You think if you wrote a story, it might stop the development?”

  “You never know.” The Lancer is crazy for development and the nice, big ads it generates in newspapers. If the Lancer had its way, the entire nation would be up to its hips in concrete, so I certainly wasn’t dreaming of unleashing a strong anti-development wave in the newspaper. I was just hoping that the news that we stood in danger might bring out the protesters.

  “There are lots of lawyers with summer places around here,” I continued. “Maybe when the story appears, one of them will dig into the legal end, and find a way to stop the bulldozers.”

  Emma didn’t sound convinced, but she said she’d see what she could find out for me, for my story. “Freddy and Henrietta Tompkins are coming over for this afternoon, and we’ll see about this business of selling the golf course. The very idea!”

  Freddy Tompkins is our deputy reeve, an amiable gent who works from the same precept as the merchant marine: Make No Waves. It would be interesting to see the widow ply him with tea, cakes, and cross-examination, but I would be elsewhere, nobly attending to the stern duties of a professional journalist.

  When I got to the office—a nine-dollar cab ride, since Marchepas was hors de combat—I found Tommy Macklin, of all people, at my workstation, trying to input a story. We used to write stories; now we input them. Tommy was stabbing away at the console, but nothing was showing on the screen except, “ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.”

  He didn’t like it much, and as soon as I arrived, he started to take it out on me.

  “What the hell have you done to this computer?” he fumed. “You’ve screwed it up. We buy you this valuable equipment, and you screw it up. Well, it’s coming out of your salary.”

  I soothed the old buzzard down, eased him to one side, and fired up the computer with a few deft strokes.

  “There,” I said. “Try it now.”

  Was he impressed? Of course not. “If you spent more time reporting and less time fooling around with this thing, you’d be a better journalist, Withers,” is all he said, as he bent to the difficult task of typing in a story. Naturally, I watched over his shoulder.

  “Hole in One at Bosky Dell,” he typed, on the top line, and then, underneath, “From Our Golfing Correspondent.”

  “Jesus, Tommy,” I blurted, “are you sure you want to do that?”

  He whirled in the chair—it’s one of those swivel affairs—and glowered at me.

  “Mind your own damn business,” he said.

  “But, Tommy, if we carry the story about your hole in one, aren’t we going to have to mention somewhere along the way that old Charlie Tinkelpaugh got blown to bits because of it?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Tommy. “We can run this story, which is a news story, on page one, and run an obit on Charlie Tinkelpaugh on the liner pages.”

  The liner pages are at the back, where we stick in items of little import, to keep the truss ads from bumping into each other.

  “Hey, that’s great,” I said. “We can use the same head on both of them: Hole in One.”

  Tommy glowered some more, but a gleam of comprehension came into his eyes, and I could see he was thinking that perhaps this was not such a good idea after all. He shoved himself back from the computer.

  “Ah, hell, I’ve got better things to do than write the news,” he said, and went off to ogle Olga in his office, which was certainly a better thing for him to be doing than writing about his golf game, though equally futile. I wiped out his news bulletin and sloped along to the office library to check the Bosky Dell file for background on the golf course.

  That sounds more sophisticated than it is. For office library, read, “back issues.” We keep old copies in piles in one corner of the office kitchen-cum-lunchroom, which has thus become the library. I found there, inter alia, half a deceased ham sandwich, a couple of porno magazines, representing the spiritual fodder of my fellow reporter, Billy Haldane, and a four-year-old feature story on Sir John Flannery and his bequest to Bosky Dell.

  It was headed, “They Called Him ‘St. John,’” which, incidentally, nobody ever, ever did, but which gives you some of the flavour of the thing. The story said that it was a condition of the Flannery bequest to the village that neither the golf course nor the church was to be sold; they were to be held in perpetuity for the “pleasure and instruction of future generations.” The village council had given the necessary undertaking at the time, which was sixty-four years ago. It was possible, of course, that the story was dead wrong; they often are, and since, as I noticed, this was one of my own effusions—I knew the subject had a familiar ring to it—there was a pretty good chance that it was wrong. There was also a chance that the council had said, “Yassiree, Bob,” six decades ago, and a new council had, more recently, said “Nuts to that.” We all know that “in perpetuity” in legal terms means whatever a gaggle of lawyers and a judge decide.

  Just the same, it seemed, on the face of it, that Winifred Martin was talking nonsense, and I was feeling more than somewhat puzzled as I laid the back issues to rest, chucked the sandwich in the wastebasket, stuffed the porno magazines in a jacket pocket—I would give them back to Billy Haldane and tell him to keep them out of the office—and strode briskly out into the newsroom and right smack, dab, into the form of H. Klovack, Photographer, who happened to be passing the library-cum-kitchen door just as I popped out of it. I clutched her for support, and Hanna clutched me for ditto, then drew back, affronted.

  “Carlton,” she snapped. “What is this? Lying in wait, are we?”

  “No, we’re not,” I informed her. “If you come barrelling along, not looking where you’re going . . .”

  “Lurking around corners until something female shows and then pouncing . . .”

  “. . . not honking your horn or anything, accidents are bound to occur.”

  “Accidents! Hah!”

  “If you think, Miss Klovack, that I would stoop so low as to force my attentions, unwanted . . .”

  “Well, if you think they’re wanted, Buster, you’ve got another think coming.”

  “. . . that I am so starved for female companionship . . .”

  “Oh, you’re not starved for female companionship, eh?”

&
nbsp; “No, of course not.”

  “Oh, yeah. Name one.”

  “One what?”

  “One female companion that you’re not starved for—you know what I mean.”

  “Surely, Klovack, you don’t expect a gentleman to . . . to bandy names?”

  “Yes. Sure. Bandy me a name.”

  “I would never,” I remarked stiffly, “bandy a name. One doesn’t treat the opposite sex as merely the plaything of an idle hour, and boast of one’s conquests; one doesn’t—

  “You know, Carlton, that line of talk would go down a lot better if you didn’t have a copy of Penthouse leering out of your coat pocket when you delivered it.”

  Argh. A guilty hand flew to my side. Too late.

  There was a stricken silence, and then it seemed to me that, all in all, it mightn’t be a bad idea to change the subject.

  “Klovack,” I said, “there are some new developments in this golf-course story. Literally.”

  And I told her about the supposed sale of the golf course and my theory as to how the prospect of a development might have pushed some nutcase over the edge and led to the planting of the bomb that killed poor old Charlie.

  “Pretty thin,” she said. “In fact, it’s about as thin as your explanation as to why you jumped me back there. But never mind, I can check it out this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon? What’s happening this afternoon?”

  “Oh, nothing much. I telephoned Winifred Martin this morning and asked her to make an appointment for me with the club’s golf pro. I plan to grill him, between strokes, about the staff and everything else at the golf course. Winifred fixed my first lesson for right after work this afternoon.”

  She turned on her heel and went into the darkroom, leaving me musing on that. I filed a preliminary story on the possibility that, any day now, they might be digging up the golf course with bulldozers instead of nine irons—“The Lancer has learned from usually reliable sources of a major real-estate development,” and so on and so forth. It wasn’t any more misinformed or full of guesswork than most of what appears in print. I dumped a copy marked for Tommy’s attention on Olga’s desk, and then went into the darkroom, where Hanna glowered through the infrared gloom.

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “Gee, Hanna, you sound a whole lot like Art Martin.”

  She smiled. I smiled back, and begged a ride out to Bosky Dell with her, giving as my excuse the immobility of Marchepas. The real truth, though, was that I was dying to be on hand for the first encounter between this puffed-up personage and our golf pro, who rejoices in the name of Running Elk.

  Chapter 8

  When we got out to the golf course, Hanna slung her bag of clubs over her shoulder and marched purposefully out to the little pitch-and-putt area back of the clubhouse, where, I told her, the pro hangs out. He was bending over, lining up a putt, when we came around the corner, so all Hanna got was a glimpse of bent back in a buckskin coat. She waited courteously until the ball plunked into the hole, and then advanced with one hand thrust out.

  “Hello, there,” she called out. “I’ve come for a golf lesson. I’m Hanna Klovack.”

  Then she dropped her bag and opened her mouth as six-foot-two of hawk-nosed, black-eyed, Ojibwa Indian turned around, gave her the old up and down, and sort of oozed forward to greet her.

  “Running Elk,” he said.

  “Er . . . urn . . . Hanna Klovack,” said Hanna.

  The swarthy rascal took Hanna’s proffered hand, gave her an incandescent smile, and murmured in a throaty baritone, “My golf course is your golf course.”

  Hanna blushed a rich vermilion.

  “Hanna, meet Joe Herkimer, a.k.a. Running Elk.” Like most Canadian Indians, Joe Herkimer is really only about one-sixteenth native, and in his case, the rest is pure WASP. I told Hanna, “He has an M.A. in English literature. He affects the Indian getup because he thinks it makes women go weak in the knees.”

  “It does,” said Hanna. “How come I haven’t seen you around here before this?” she asked.

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Communing with the Great Spirits?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” replied Joe.

  “He’s been in England,” I said, “working on his Ph.D. on ‘Minor Poets of the Nineteenth Century.’”

  The first Indian inhabitants hereabouts were Hurons, but they were nearly all chased away, even before the European settlers came onto the scene, and the land pretty well belonged to the Ojibway, or, as they are now spelled, Ojibwa, one of the Algonkian-speaking tribes. This was Joe’s tribe. I once did a piece on the Ojibwa, and discovered that the name comes from two native words, ajib, “to pucker up,” and ubway, “to roast.” Taken together, they signify “people whose moccasins are roasted until they pucker up.” I had once asked Joe if he thought this meant his ancestors had invented the hotfoot, but he said he had no information on the subject. The tribe was once almost as powerful as the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and was known as Chippewa in the United States and as Mississauga in southern Ontario. The French called the tribe members Saulteaux. Like nearly all our aboriginal peoples, under the careful stewardship of their European overlords they went from being proud warriors and accomplished agriculturalists to impoverished hangers-on.

  Joe had only recently become interested in his native background; during most of the time he was growing up, he was taught to be ashamed of it. His father, a white contractor, had been captivated by a schoolteacher from the Circle Lake Band whom he had met while building a new school on reserve land. Joe was brought up in Silver Falls as a white. His parents didn’t try to conceal his background from him, and he knew his grandparents were still reserve Indians, but nothing much was said on the subject.

  “It was like having an alcoholic in the family,” he told me once. “You knew about it, but you didn’t talk about it.”

  A brilliant student and athlete, he won a series of scholarships that took him, eventually, to Oxford, and it was over there that he finally got interested in his own culture. A delegation of Canadian Indians landed in England in 1981 to protest the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, with no provision for aboriginal rights, and Joe read about them in the English press. He decided, then and there, that he had been shortchanged, so he began to study Canadian Indian history and culture, and even got a pretty fair command of the Ojibwa tongue. He couldn’t join the Circle Lake Band, since he wasn’t a status Indian, but he attended their meetings, and did a lot of work for the Assembly of First Nations—mostly, as he said, “writing pamphlets in lucid prose telling the whites to get the hell off our land.” He had also taken an Indian name, for use on ceremonial occasions, but most of us still called him Joe.

  Joe doesn’t actually have to work as a golf pro, since his father died a few years back and left him quite a lot of money. He just happens to be a wonderful golfer, so he divides his time between academic studies and lecturing at Trent University, thirty miles away, and teaching golf for very low fees at the Bosky Dell course during the summer, and after work in spring and fall. He says he doesn’t mind the poor pay, because he gets reward enough out of whipping the ass off businessmen who have to bite their tongues to keep from calling him a dirty Indian. He believes that, if his ancestors had invented golf instead of lacrosse, they’d still own the continent.

  He gave Hanna another of his incandescent smiles.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  “Shall we what?” asked Hanna, then blushed again. “Oh, golf,” she said. “Sure.” She gathered her dropped clubs, and they moved off towards the first tee.

  “No straying into the rough, haha,” I said. I got a frozen look from Hanna.

  “What’s it to you?” she wanted to know.

  “I was thinking more of Joe’s wife, Darlene,” I replied. “She’s a Wood Cree, and they are noted for their fer
ocity.”

  “Ah,” said Hanna.

  “I was also thinking of his four children,” I added.

  “Ah, ha,” she said.

  “To say nothing of his fine and faithful Bassett Hound, Wordsworth.”

  Hanna turned to Joe. “You call your Bassett Hound Wordsworth?”

  “My family objected to Longfellow,” he explained.

  So off they went, chatting and smiling and looking pleased as punch with each other, for a golf lesson, while I mooched back to the cottage, where there was another unpleasant sight waiting for me.

  Chapter 9

  To wit, Thomas Heathcliffe Macklin, my managing editor. He was sitting amidst the debris in my living room, leafing through Billy Haldane’s magazines, which I had left out on top of the pile on the coffee table to remind me to take them around to him. Tommy looked up, briefly, then went on leafing. He was breathing rather strangely.

  “Ah, Tommy,” I said. “Catching up on your reading?”

  “This stuff is disgusting.”

  “Then you won’t mind putting it down while we chat. Unless you just came along to admire my housekeeping?”

  “In a minute, in a minute.”

  I wandered back to the bedroom, doffed my clothes, went in and had the cooling shower Tommy needed, and came back out, refreshed, about ten minutes later. Tommy was still busy leafing.

  “Really disgusting,” he said, but he didn’t look up. “I’m surprised at you, Carlton.”

  “We all have our weaknesses, Tommy. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about that you couldn’t raise over at the office?”

  He looked startled. “Sometimes you show an almost human intelligence, Carlton,” he said. “It’s about this golf-course thing. I read the story you filed this afternoon.”

  “Yes?”