“Knock it off, Billy,” Pop says.
Virginia sticks two fingers next to her tonsils, threatening to blow just as Chimney sets a paw on the door threshold. “He could get a college scholarship to Michigan or Michigan State, Howard.”
“Hell, Virginia, the Walton old man hasn’t had to spend a dime on college.” He pours beer in a coffee mug full of ice. “He told me once they get room and board, too.”
“Don’t you have to be like poor as dirt to get that scholarship?” Billy frowns again.
Virginia digs a sarcastic knife into Pop’s belly. “It’s not like we’re rich.”
“Oh, yeah, how could I forget, Virginia?”
“Okay, that’s enough, Billy,” Pop says. He might blow at any moment with Billy’s prodding.
My brother laughs, thwacking me hard on the head on the way out the door. “Have fun this summer, golden boy.” The back door slams behind him. Billy enjoys rocking the family boat, but I’d rather stay out of the line of sight of Pop’s radioactive radar gun.
“When can I start caddying, Pop?”
“I’ll call Old Man Walton today and see if Bobby can get you to start tomorrow morning.” he says. “Remember, once you start something, you don’t quit.”
“What about Billy?” He quits everything.
Chimney slinks back into the TV room and drops a wet bone at my feet.
“Let me worry about your brother.” Bottoms up. “You’ll meet a lot of successful people. Maybe you’ll meet some good business contacts.”
“Howard, he’s only a teenager.”
Pop wipes his foamy lips. “It’s never too early.” He pours more beer down his gullet. “Oh, yeah. The club is closed on Mondays. Old Man Walton told me once the caddies get to play golf for free. You got a good swing, Ford.”
Enough with the golf, Pop.
If Billy had still been in the room, he would have told Pop it’s never too late. For as long as I can remember, Pop never held down a normal job for too long before moving on to the next, all in the industrial sales category. Mom told me Pop couldn’t hold a normal nine-to-five job because “no one can tell your father what to do.”
Pop was always trying to think—rather than work—his way out of our financial rut. He once invented a horrible new drink called Swamp Juice. For several weeks we were Pop’s guinea pigs, drinking disgusting, syrupy formulas. Pop tried other get-rich-quick schemes: penny stocks, rare-stamp collecting, a percentage share in a Kentucky Derby horse heir that never made it out of the gates of Ohio, let alone Kentucky. Needless to say, there won’t be college tuition in the Quinn budget.
I wonder what exactly I am getting into this summer. I know zip about caddying or golf. My lone exposure to golf was our annual Florida vacation when Grandpa Quinn took me to the local golf range. I borrowed his old driver once and smashed a Titanic-sized drive toward a bullseye target. The head popped loose and landed in the fifty-yard target circle. Grandpa’s eyeballs burned asteroid holes into my frontal lobe like it’d been my fault his old club fell apart. He didn’t blow because I was his grandson, but I’d enjoyed a frightful glimpse of Pop’s Christmas past. Pop unfairly grounded me inside the condo that day, while Billy and Kate inhaled sea salt air and sipped virgin daiquiris in the cabana on the windy, tar-streaked beach of the Atlantic Ocean.
Maybe I’ll meet some cool kids while caddying this summer. Kids who don’t know where you stand in the social pecking order, which was basically established in the first grade at Holy Redeemer. Since I’d quit baseball in the sixth grade, I really don’t know any public-school kids besides Rocket.
That’s one of my problems. My whole life has revolved around the kids at Holy Redeemer. It’s where I’d gone to school, attended church, played sports, spent most of my waking moments.
Caddying can’t be as bad as Billy suggests, can it?
n the afternoon heat, we pull up to the white plantation clubhouse of Kensington Hills Country Club in Pop’s red Impala. I’ve dragged Rocket along to avoid going it alone. He’ll normally try anything once.
A boy in an orange Polo shirt greets us with a towel wrapped around his neck. “Are you a member or a guest?”
Pop rolls down the window. “Neither. These kids came here to caddy. Bobby Walton’s expecting us.”
“He’s on the first tee,” the boy says. “Pull up to the curb and follow me.”
A minute later, we round a bank of perfectly groomed hedges without a leaf out of place and stroll into a postcard from Scotland—perfect rolling hills of fairway grass and tiny beachheads flanked by the violent bluish-green North Sea rough. The course reminds me of the Polaroid photos we receive every summer from Mom’s Aunt Shirley, a Foreign Service Officer who’d been exiled to Galloway. She writes us notes in her adopted Scot’s tongue none of us can decipher like “Lang may yer lum reek” or “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns!” or “Haste ye back!”
“Don’t move while I go talk to Bobby Walton,” Pop says, heading toward a lanky, curly-haired kid near the first tee. I travel in my mind to Aunt Shirley’s Scotland.
You’re a wee scunner!
Rocket and I sit down at the end of a green bench next to a kid hanging over a half door to a room housing golf bags. Bored boys in green shirts and white pants snap towels at fleeing fire ants on the white concrete.
Golf reminds me of endless sun-drenched Sunday afternoons. Pop’s eyes glued to TV golf, drowsing in his La-Z-Boy, and sipping beer from his ice-filled coffee mug. I’ve heard at least a thousand times how Pop’s family lived in Columbus on the fifth fairway of the Scioto Country Club where the Golden Bear, Jack Nicklaus, learned to play. Grandpa Quinn had been promoted from an engineer in Detroit to the plant manager position for a new Ford assembly plant in Columbus—the precursor to the Quinn heyday. Mom’s from Columbus, Ohio, and that’s where she met Pop. Eventually Grandpa Quinn got promoted again and again before running a whole division for the car giant.
Bobby Walton waves me over to the first tee and sets a golf bag in front of me that shades my chin. Bobby tells Rocket he’ll be caddying for the next group to tee off. I pick up the bag by the handle, suitcase style.
Bobby laughs, saying, “No, like this,” and he hangs the strap over my shoulder.
I drag the heavy bag over to the other caddies, standing at the first tee.
A redheaded kid sneers at me with contempt. “You gotta stand in a straight line. This isn’t some circle jerk.” This gets a snicker from the three other caddies.
“You haven’t caddied before?” This kid wears a red badge on his chest that reads “Chip.”
“No.”
Bobby Walton has thrown me to the golf wolves without any proper training.
“We got a plebe, boys, but we’ll teach him the ropes.”
I don’t have a clue what Chip means by “plebe,” but I can kind of guess by just the sound of the word that it isn’t positive.
“He’s going to bring our tips down.” The redheaded kid flicks a tee at me paper-football style. I duck, but it clips my earlobe. “Three points!”
What are we in third grade again, Howdy Doody? This place already reminds me of Holy Redeemer with its ranks and pranks.
“What’s your name?” Chip asks with a friendly tone. Finally, someone decent. I tell him. “Listen to me, Ford Quinn, and you’ll do okay.” I notice his spine has an S-curve. “Remember, if your guy’s away, you gotta take the pin …”
Aunt Shirley would tell him, Yer bum’s oot the windae!
“Got it?”
I nod. Away from what? I gaze down the fairway and see a mile-long green carpet. Off in the distance, a maintenance crew hangs off a small flatbed truck filled with shovels and large chunks of sod. Perhaps that’s a better job for me.
A golfer introduces himself to me as Mr. Sipe and tells me he’s a guest, not a member, who hails from Ken
tucky Bluegrass territory. He grabs a wood from his bag, tosses me a blue head cover, and swings like he’s been struck by an epileptic fit—eyes bulging and tongue twisting. I watch the man’s poorly glued toupee open and shut but forget to watch the flight of his ball—the main job of a caddy.
After the remaining golfers hit their balls, I traipse behind the rest of the group as we descend down a slight hill from the tee box and into the wonderful world of country-club golf. Chip’s player strides down the fairway with his cocky chest out and head high as if he owns the whole damned world. I follow my golfer through tall grass. “Did ya have an aah on mah baaall, son?”
“Yeah, I think it’s right ’round here,” I lie as we proceed to slog through waist-deep North Sea rough.
“Oh, yeah, here we go.” The player crouches down to eye his nestled, hairy lie, and I am treated to his plumber’s crack. I drop my heavy bag in the rough next to the golf ball and rub my aching shoulder, already figuring caddying isn’t easy-peasy. I hate when Billy’s right. The golfer uses his hand as a visor, like a sailor searching for shore. “How far you reckon it is?”
A football field away, I see a yellow flag flapping in the breeze. “I dunno.” Ah dinnae ken, Aunt Shirley whispers in my ear.
“Really?” He grunts. “Ain’t you all s’pose to know that?”
My cheeks turn purple-red. “Are we?”
A ball nearly shaves our heads from the other direction and “Foh-er!” echoes from a distant fairway.
“Well, I’ll be a naakeed crawdad.” He takes off his hat for emphasis. “You ain’t never done this before have ya, son?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Sipe laughs, and his belly shakes from above his bright-orange high-rise polyester golf pants. He yells across the fairway, asking for the yardage. Chip returns fire. “One ninety-five to the front edge, two ten to the stick.” Chip’s curly black hair hangs just above his hunched shoulders, his thin frame revealing his spine breaking through his tight-fitting green-meshed caddy shirt and white collar.
After he hacks his way up the first hole, Mr. Sipe manages to dribble his ball onto the edge of the green. I stand on the fringe, and he tosses his golf ball at me. I notice Chip cleaning a golf ball with his towel. My towel is bone dry. I spit on the ball and gave it a caddy shine, then take a leisurely stroll across the buzz-cut green to return Mr. Sipe’s ball to him.
The head member of the group erupts. “Hey! Don’t walk in a player’s line, boy.”
His words blow me back across the green. A line? I scurry back toward my bag with my head down, clueless as to what rule I’ve broken. A second reprimand strikes me as I mosey back to the spot on the green where I’d just come from.
“Are you deaf? There’s a line between the ball and the hole. Do you see?” The member draws an imaginary line with the staff of his club from the hole to his ball to make his point. Turns out golf has its own dress code, language, and purple crayon like Harold and the Purple Crayon.
“Sorry,” I mumble. Sorry, my ass.
In this crazy Alice in Wonderland nightmare, there’s no way I could know the bizarre rules of a stupid sport with its imaginary drawings. As if the dumb rules aren’t bad enough, Chip tells me “reading the greens” is part of my job, along with figuring out which way the wind is blowing. I would have had better luck understanding Bob Dylan songs sung in Danish. Chip gives me a tip on how to read the greens while crouching over his player’s putt.
“Just remember one thing. All putts break toward Kensington Road.”
All I know is that I want to make a break toward Kensington Road because the bag’s weighing me down. By the fourth hole, I stop to rest every ten yards, putting the bag down to switch shoulders.
On the next tee box, Chip bends down, grabs some grass, and throws it in the air. The grass blows across the tee, and the honor caddy barks out the yardage to the pin. He warns the golfers of an enormous golf-ball-eating bunker, stage left. By the sixth hole, my bag’s strap is digging welts into my raw skin. Maybe I should have listened to Billy for once in my life.
Noticing I’m lagging behind the group, Chip turns back toward me. “What’s the problem, Ford?”
I stop and massage my right shoulder. “Chip, I’m not sure I can make it, both of my shoulders are killing me.”
“We’ve all been there. Try putting the towel under the strap.”
I could have used this suggestion a few holes ago.
“Don’t worry,” Chip says. “We got a break coming up at the end of nine holes. We’ll get you fed, so hang in there.”
Chip tells me the Scots borrowed the term “caddy” from the French word “le cadet.” If I’m killed on this ancient battlefield, at least I wouldn’t have to face Pop’s firing squad after I quit. This leads me to imagine I’m one of those little green plastic army men, and a boy is moving me around his make-believe warfront in his basement.
On the ninth hole, Mr. Sipe’s errant bombing raid falls on an island of white marbled sand, and we embark on an eighty-yard march to secure the desolate beachhead. I surrender my player his sand weapon in this war game for grown-ups. Mr. Sipe swings, detonating a nuclear sandblast. The mushroom sand cloud settles on his toupee, and he curses his ball as it rolls back down toward his feet.
Chip stares down at us from above the green. “Play the ball back in your stance a bit and follow through, sir.”
Mr. Sipe salutes Chip and reloads, scoring a parachute landing next to the flag. “Thanks, Chip,” he drawls.
I smooth the footprints in the trap with a long-handled rake, thinking I’ve no desire to be a member of the caddy regiment. I’m the low man on the country-club totem pole—lower than the locker room boy, valet man, or the dishwasher. My brother was dead right. Caddying blows.
We finish the ninth hole as the sun spray paints my cheeks a glossy red and settle on a park bench next to the halfway shack. A sign above the entrance door to the shack warns: “Members Only: No Caddies Allowed.” No caddy genes mingling with the country club blue bloods. Modern-day segregation if you ask me. A thin gray-haired lady named Myrtle runs the grill and takes our orders from an open window in the shack. I order a chocolate milk and grilled hot dog smothered in butter, and it melts in my mouth. I figure Myrtle serves members oysters and savory truffles and Grey Poupon on their hot dogs.
Ten minutes later, I’m back on the course, gazing out at the trillion blades of grass I have remaining to conquer on the eleventh tee box. On the back nine, we hack our way through an imaginary jungle with Mr. Sipe’s machete posing as a 5-wood. I don’t dare make a hasty retreat—I’d sooner face a firing squad than let Pop down. My legs become weak and wobbly. By the end of the fourteenth hole, I am drenched in sweat, my back hunched forward. I try to recall if I’ve been through anything worse than caddying and can only recall the enema I’d endured during a bout of pneumonia in the seventh grade and the three funerals I’ve attended.
At the end of the next hole, we stop at the supply line in the form of a small shack.
Thank you, God. A fox in a tight white Polo shirt pours each of us chocolate milk in tall Styrofoam cups—an icy-cold blood transfusion for my weary muscles. There’d be no stopping; everyone keeps moving with cups in hand.
Mr. Sipe and I limp toward home as the sun starts its slow decline, casting a dark shadow on the fairway. On the eighteenth hole—not sure why, but in golf-tongue, Chip calls the shape of the hole a “dog-leg right”—we hunt for his ball in the trees at the sharp turn in the fairway. We find it underneath a pine tree. He drops his ball and searches for an opening. His second swing yields more turf than ball, and it skids toward another pine tree. I drag my dead ass toward the ball.
“Forget it, son. She’s buried deep. Just git me another ball if we got any left.” Mr. Sipe uses his putter as a cane as we trek down the fairway. “Ya might be wonderin’ why I play this game.”
“Nope.” I’m too tired to talk or care about why he plays the silly game of torture. I swear I see a lizard in the sand trap, but I keep going, too tired to care, even if Bo Derek streaked by.
“It’s one of the few sports where ya can play the same game as the pros and on the same field and not just rubberneck on the tube.” The golfer’s voice rises three octaves. “Damn if Ben Hogan hasn’t crossed this path we’re takin’ now and made par on this hole to win the U.S. Open Championship. I can’t go out and play football or basketball without keelin’ myself.”
I start to take a shining to Mr. Sipe, who tells me he’s a traveling salesman. After the round, the group gathers around a small table to fill out the caddy pay cards. The members write in a tip for each caddy, and we part ways.
The redheaded caddy grabs the card from my hands. “Two fifty. Ha! You got screwed. We all got four bucks.”
Wow, now you can go buy yourself a new red hankie, Howdy Doody.
“I got a nice bonus on top of my tips,” Chip says, pulling a wad of bills from his front pocket. Each player tipped Chip separately for all his help today. “Fifteen bucks. I’ve done worse.”
Showoff. If you tally Chip’s total tips and flat fee for the round, he got $29 for the round compared to my paltry $7.50. Howdy is right; I got scammed. I want to suggest we just all throw the tips on the table and split them evenly but figure it’ll only get a big laugh.
I wave my caddy stub in the air. “What I do with this?”
Chip folds his cash and places it in a pouch he carries on his waist. “You cash it across the bridge at the caddy shack.”
As we hike over the bridge that connects the north and south courses, an older kid with long blond hair screams obscenities over the railing while riding in a golf cart. I peer between the suspension cables over the metal edge and see two boys in green-mesh caddy shirts and white towels, sprinting along the dirt shoulder of Kensington Road.
“Who’s that guy?” I ask Chip.
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