Hole in One

by Walter Stewart

  Whenever I am up against it as a result of one of Tommy’s firings, I present myself, and Robinson, the major domo—he apparently has no second name, unless you count Count Dracula, which is how he is known hereabouts—takes me on staff for minimum wage to cut the grass, repair screens, or do whatever else needs doing. The Eagle’s Nest is my version of unemployment insurance. I began working there when I was seventeen, and reaped a solid fifty cents an hour for pushing a hand mower around the main front lawn for about four hours one Saturday afternoon. Conrad came by while I was toiling away, stood around watching me for about twenty minutes, correcting my many faults—it is remarkable how many wrong ways there are to push a lawn mower—and asked me how much Robinson was paying me.

  “Fifty cents an hour,” I said.

  “Too much,” said Conrad. And, then, like the big, bluff tycoon he is, he smiled, to show he was just kidding, see, dug down into his pocket, and extracted a whole buck, which he gave to me.

  “Be sure to tell your mother I gave you a raise,” he said, and he patted me on my tousled head.

  “Yazzur, boss, us do surely ’ppreciate it,” I replied, and he looked at me kind of sharply, as if he suspected a lack of sincerity on my part. When I duly reported to my mother, she thought it was amusing, but my father was furious and told me never to work for “that bloodsucker” again. My mother, on the other hand, took the position that being exploited a little wouldn’t hurt me, and the work would do me good, and, over the years, I got into the habit of performing odd chores over at the Jowett place whenever I was particularly hard up.

  As now. The morning after my departure from the staff of the Lancer, I strolled over to The Eagle’s Nest, knocked on the kitchen door, and when a maid produced Robinson for me—we still have maids in Bosky Dell, and protect them as an endangered species—asked him if he had any work that needed doing.

  “Certainly, my boy,” he said, gesturing for me to come in and sit at the kitchen table, where he had been eating breakfast. “We always have jobs for a good worker. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “if you’re available for a couple of weeks or so, there’s a rather big job I’d like you to take on.”

  He beamed at me. Robinson likes me, the strange fellow, and despite his weird looks—skinny, bent body, totally white skin, dainty, long white eyelashes, and pale, pale blue eyes (he is not a complete albino, with the pink orbs)—I like him, too.

  “Well,” I told him, “I’m between assignments down at the paper right now and . . .”

  “Fired you again, did they? Well, never you mind. We have work for you here any time you want it, and, as I say, there’s rather a big job that needs doing and I haven’t lined up anybody yet. I want you to paint The Nest Egg.”

  “The boathouse? The whole thing?”

  “The whole thing. Scrape it and paint it. It’s needed doing for years, but Mr. Jowett hasn’t wanted to use one of the usual contractors,” (translation, wants the thing done for minimum wage), “so I’ve been holding off on it.”

  “Well, sure, great. When do I start?”

  “You can start this very day, if you will. You can begin the scraping, and repair the screens, and I’ll phone and get the paint ordered in.”

  “Not paint, mostly; mostly it’s stain.”

  “There, you see. I knew you’d know. You just tell me what you want, and I’ll have it delivered.”

  So, sucks to you, Tommy Macklin. Less than twenty-four hours after leaving the staff of the Lancer, I was gainfully employed, at a tax-free four bucks an hour, in creative work. I would phone Hanna and tell her I had a new job, and she would sneer and say, “Oh, yeah, doing what?” and I would say I had taken up painting, and she would be impressed. No, she wouldn’t. She would say, “House painting, I’ll bet,” right off the bat. Not only that, it was going to be rather hard to solve the murder down at the golf course while I was up to my elbows in stain and solvent at The Nest Egg. Well, never mind, it was a job, and within the hour I was down at the lake, hauling the old screens off the lakeward side of the boathouse.

  When I say boathouse, do not imagine some crummy little shack with a slip in the middle; this is one of those two-storey jobs, with three boatslips, half-a-dozen changing rooms (when it was built, bathers would no more have paraded across the lawn in their swimming costumes than vote socialist; they wore their street clothes to the bathhouse and changed there, like good, Christian people), a storage room down below, and a two-bedroom apartment perched above, the whole clad in dark brown stain and outlined in white enamel, now chipped and peeling.

  I had hauled the screens out onto the acre of cement on one side of the boathouse that constitutes Conrad Jowett’s notion of a dock, and I was whistling to myself and wrestling with the screens, when I sensed a movement behind me and turned around and damn near fell into the water at the vision that presented itself to my astounded eyes.

  “Well, hello there,” said the vision.

  “Ah . . . er . . . um,” I said, which is what I always say when I am confronted by beauty on this scale. Do not condemn me. This was about five-foot-two of svelte blonde loveliness, wearing a demure-yet-revealing bathing suit—they can do that, these days—a red kerchief through which a shock of golden hair poured backwards and down onto tawny, bare shoulders, and what can only be called a dewy-eyed smile.

  “You must be Carlton?” said the vision, and thrust out a long, nail-polished, slim hand. “Robinson told me you were working down here? I’m Amelia? I’m staying upstairs in the apartment?”

  Most of her sentences sounded like questions, which I for one found entrancing.

  “Um,” I said, to keep up my end of the conversation.

  “I hope I won’t be a nuisance to you . . .”

  Vigorous shaking of head on my part.

  “. . . but I just wanted to get a little sun? Don’t you just love the sun?”

  “Er,” I responded, courteous to a fault.

  “Do you know that John Denver song ‘He Loved the Sun’? I just think it’s just so beautiful, don’t you?”

  Vigorous nodding of head.

  “Well, I’ll just lie here on this chaise longue and watch you working, if you don’t mind? No, please don’t put your shirt on? I so admire to watch a man work when he’s got such nice, smooth muscles? But if I’m a nuisance, you just shoo me away, you hear?”

  Nodding of head. Shaking of head.

  “Ah,” I found speech at last. “You’re Uncle Willie’s daughter.”

  “No, silly, his granddaughter.” She gave me the full, slow smile, which nearly knocked me off the dock again. “What gave me away?”

  “That ‘you hear?’ Your branch of the family moved to Maryland, didn’t they?”

  “Why, Mr. Carlton, I do believe you know all about us Jowetts?”

  “A little bit. You’re quite a local institution, you know.”

  “Little old us?”

  She batted her eyes at me. You know, the way they do in the old movies: the eyes go down, then up again, then very wide. Very corny. I liked it fine.

  “Are you here for a visit, then, Miss Jowett?”

  “Amelia. You must call me Amelia, if we’re going to be friends? And we are going to be friends, aren’t we, Carlton?”

  Well, of course. I was feeling friendly already, especially when she put her hand on my arm, where the smooth muscles rippled away like the dickens, looked me in the eye—her eyes were a kind of tawny colour, with flecks of gold—and gave a little squeeze on the old smooth muscles.

  “As for your question, yes, I’m here for a visit. I love September at the lake, don’t you? When the outsiders are gone? When it’s still warm in the days, but crisp and cool at night? Maybe I’ll stay longer, who knows? I’ve finished school and done the European trip? And I’m not doing anything particular these days?”

  So, I went to work, and Amelia lay dow
n on the chaise longue and soaked up sun, while I soaked up Amelia in between bouts of banging myself on the thumb with the hammer. And so the weary day wound to a close.

  The next morning, needless to say, I was on the job bright and early, ready to ripple those smooth muscles fit to bust. However, Amelia didn’t appear until about ten a.m., when she wandered out of the apartment on the top floor and came down the outside stairway to the chaise longue. Apparently she hadn’t heard me moving around, and I was working inside one of the changing rooms by this time. I could see Amelia through the window, but she obviously couldn’t see me, because, just as I was about to shout out a merry “Good Morning,” she suddenly doffed the top of her bathing costume—she was lying on her stomach on the chaise longue—and lifted her face, among other things, to bask in the warmth of the sun. She was wearing a different bathing suit from yesterday, but the same red kerchief, which she kept on, and the effect, for some reason, was to make her seem even more naked.

  We had now achieved a delicate point of etiquette. I could not allow this delicious moment to go on, could I? And yet, on the other hand, to reveal myself now would certainly startle the girl, quite possibly offend her. What to do? I stood there, with my brush full of paint and my heart full of a number of conflicting emotions, and I had just decided that the best thing would be to drop down below the window and begin to bang the screens about, to let Amelia know that I was there; I had determined, fully and absolutely to do this honourable thing, when suddenly a voice went off about six inches behind my left ear.

  “I see. Painting from life, are we?”

  Chapter 12

  It was Klovack, of course, looking fetching in a bright orange blouse, white slacks, and an expression of implacable hatred.

  “Ah, Hanna. I was just . . .”

  “I can see what you were just, and it doesn’t surprise me a bit. It goes with the magazines,” she snorted, and then charged ahead, before I could explain how wrong she was in what she was thinking—well, perhaps not so much wrong, as inconvenient. “However, that is none of my concern. I was told up at the house that you would be down here, but not,” she added, “that you were bruising your eyeballs.”

  “And perhaps you would be good enough to explain, Miss Klovack,” I responded—chilled steel, you understand—“why you have come here in the first place, butting in—”

  “I was not butting in. I came to deliver a message.”

  “Pardon me, butting in to deliver a message, interrupting my busy schedule—”

  “I thought you might be glad of a break. I was told by a very strange-looking gent that you were painting screens.”

  “I am painting screens.”

  “With what, your tongue? It was hanging out a foot when I came in here.”

  I did not deliver the stunning riposte this crack deserved, in part because I couldn’t think of anything to say and in part because, just at that moment, thank God, the screen door that led out to the dock banged open and in came Amelia. She was wearing all her bathing suit by now, such as it was, and yet managed to look just about as uncluttered by clothing as before. There was quite a lot more material in the kerchief than in the bathing suit, and I wondered if she had ever considered switching the two. She just stood there, gazing at us, and I may have done a certain amount of gazing myself, because I suddenly received the Klovack elbow in the midriff, just as Amelia crooned, “Why, Carlton, honey, aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “Certainly, certainly. This is . . .” And I couldn’t, for the life of me, what with one thing and another, immediately recall Hanna’s name.

  “Klovack. Hanna Klovack.” Hanna produced her name and her hand, which Amelia shook, uncertainly.

  “And this is . . .” Well, then, of course, I couldn’t remember her name, either. It was not one of my good mornings.

  “Amelia. Amelia Jowett. I’m surely pleased to meet you?”

  “Oh. Are you one of the daughters of the house?”

  “Great-niece of Mr. Conrad,” Amelia explained. “My granddaddy was Conrad’s brother? And you’re a friend of Carlton’s?”

  Well, that was a laugh.

  “No. Just a colleague. I came to deliver a message.”

  “Former colleague,” I explained. “Hanna and I worked together at the Silver Falls Lancer, before I decided to explore other avenues.”

  “Before you were fired, you mean.”

  “Carlton, honey, you’re a reporter?” Amelia seemed to think that was something—people do, who know nothing of journalism—and she kind of oozed over, reached out to put one cool hand on my trembling forearm, and gave me the business out of those tawny eyes that resembled limpid pools. “Maybe you’ll write something about little ol’ me?”

  Hanna, whose eyes are black, and resembled a couple of blowtorches, shot back, “Well, he won’t be writing anything about little ol’ anybody if he doesn’t get his ass over to the armoury. He’s supposed to cover the Dairy Queen contest. That’s the message,” she told me. “From Tommy. You’re hired again.”

  This needed thinking on. I turned to Amelia. “Miss Jowett, I wonder if you’d excuse us a minute, I need to discuss something with my . . . ah . . . former colleague.”

  “Certainly, honey. I just came in to see what the noise was all about?” she explained.

  With that, she swayed out the door, and it may be that I stared after her longer than is considered in the best of taste, because Hanna suddenly stamped on my foot.

  “Hey, that hurt!”

  “Good. Now, Tommy said to tell you you’re rehired. He said it wasn’t his idea, and I was to tell you that the publisher is the one who made the decision. I gather the Johnson chain lost a lawsuit recently for wrongful dismissal, so Mrs. Post told Tommy he had to have a good reason to fire you.”

  “But he did, for once! I told him I was working on this freelance assignment with you and couldn’t do a job for him, so he fired me.”

  “Hmm.” Something approaching remorse appeared in Hanna’s eyes, but it didn’t last long. “Well, be that as it may, Mrs. Post told him to put you back on the payroll. So you’re back on the payroll, and Tommy told me to tell you to get back to town and over to the armoury. The Dairy Queen contest kicks off in half an hour. I,” she added, “am going to take the pictures.”

  “Well, snappy shutters to you. But I’m not going.”

  “You’re not going? What do you mean, you’re not going?”

  “I’ve got a job. Here.”

  “Here? You mean painting screens and ogling Grits-for-Brains? You call that a job?”

  “I do. A good job, too. It pays almost as much as Tommy paid me, and I don’t have to put up with that little pipsqueak.”

  “Yes, well, now you’ve got that out of your system, stick your eyeballs back in their sockets, stop drooling, and come with me. We’re going to cover Miss Dairy Queen.”

  Hanna started out the door, then stopped as she realized I wasn’t coming.

  “Carlton, you’re smiling. Why are you smiling?”

  “I was just thinking of Tommy Macklin having to cover the Dairy Queen contest himself. He can’t send Billy Haldane; he’ll screw up all the names.”

  This was a lie. It was not a lie that Tommy couldn’t send Billy Haldane because he would screw up the names—history records that he once inscribed Betsy Teskey as Buzy Titsup, and I’m not even going to tell you what he did to Marilyn Farquahar—but it was a lie that I was smiling at the thought of Tommy having to cover the contest. I was smiling because I could see what must have happened. Hanna must have stuck up for me again, and made Tommy give me my job back. Why would Mrs. Post stick up for me? She never had on my previous firings. But I wasn’t going to take it back, no sir, not until I had straightened out this murder business and made Hanna see what a fathead she had been to bring in this outside hotshot from Toronto. Then, and only then, would
I consider re-employment at the Lancer. With a raise. But, of course, I couldn’t explain that to Hanna.

  “Carlton. This is serious.” She, in turn, came over and put a slender hand on my forearm—it was one of my forearm’s better days—and, in turn gave me the business with her eyes, and, if I tell you that the urge came over me to cover her upturned face with burning kisses such as we find on page 178 of My Vagrant Heart (Edith Primrose Wharton, Drool Romances, 1989), you must promise to keep it to yourself. “I went to some trouble to get Tommy to give you your job back, and, besides, Pete needs you to do some legwork for him.”

  “Pete? Peter Duke? Legwork?” I shook the Klovack mitt off my forearm. “He’s the hotshot. Let him do his own legwork.”

  “Oh, Carlton, get serious. He’s a television reporter.”

  Television reporters, it is pretty widely known, are hired for their throaty voices and cultured eyebrows. They read the news; they don’t report it.

  “Well, I guess it shows something, if he asked for me.”

  “He didn’t ask for you. He doesn’t even know about you.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. You said he needed me to do some legwork.”

  “So he does. But he doesn’t know that yet. He’s too busy signing autographs to get started on the case. But when he does, he’s going to need some help from someone who understands the local scene. And that, my boy, is you. C’mon.”