“That’s King. He runs the caddy shack.”
Howdy Doody butts in with his two cents. “Guy thinks he owns the joint.”
“You’ll pay for this!” King yells before turning his attention to us as we pass by.
“Chip,” he says, holding out his hand like a parking arm gate. “You want to get one more loop in today?”
Chip gives him a “Hell yes!” nod and toothy smile. “I’ve done thirty-six holes, but they were both singles. Can I carry double?”
“Suit yourself.” King jumps into the driver’s seat of his golf cart. “Hop in and I’ll take you back.”
“He’s going again?” I ask in disbelief. That’s like running back-to-back marathons. By my estimate, if you walk eighteen holes in a straight line that’s around four miles. So crisscrossing back and forth from rough to rough like I just did must have added another two, easy. Chip will be logging a good ten miles today.
“He set a club record: three hundred and ten loops last year,” Howdy Doody says, watching the cart drive off.
“What’s a double?” More golf lingo to learn.
“You carry two bags at once.” He hunches up both of his shoulders. “It’s more money.”
I see Chip jump out of the cart, and Bobby Walton places two bags on his shoulder. “Does he ever carry a third bag around on that hunchback of his?”
“Funny, asshole. He’s got scoliosis.”
I shake my head. Two bags for eighteen holes? With a double loop, you wouldn’t have any chance to rest a weary shoulder.
“We better run and get our checks cashed.”
I follow Howdy, our towels slapping at the rails of the bridge, and ask him why we’re running. “I wanna get out of here before King gets back and wants us to go out again. Duh.”
Over the bridge, I step into a mostly empty caddy shack, a one-story aluminum building full of pinball machines and ping-pong tables. Damn. No Space Invaders. No Asteroids. Just the new arcade game called Pac-Man. I cash my caddy card, buy a 7 Up and a 3 Musketeers bar, phone Pop to pick me up, and plod back over the bridge to search for Rocket.
After a long wait for two groups to finish on eighteen, there’s no sign of him. I wander through the parking lot and around the other side of the clubhouse to the tennis courts, fearful I’ll run into Jason Sanders, who’s a member at the club. He’d ask me why I’m a caddy. Hills kids from Dot Ave aren’t supposed to be caddies. A girl hits a serve on one of the six freshly painted green-and-red tennis courts while a coach looks on, saying, “Throw the ball higher over your head.”
Still no sign of Rocket anywhere. I pass a fence surrounding the swimming pool and finally see him sitting on the edge, his freckled back facing me. He’s sipping a drink from an umbrella straw, his feet dangling in the blue water. I holler over the fence at him. “Rocket! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He turns around and waves at me before getting up to grab a towel to dry his wet head like he owns the place.
I meet him at the entrance to the pool. “I could get used to this gig,” he says.
“Dream on.”
We walk back through the parking lot to wait for Pop’s car, and I ask him what happened to caddying.
“I got hot and tired around the first hole.” He wraps the country club towel around his waist, and I figure it’s Rocket Olivehammer’s property now. “I spotted the pool from a bad lie in a fairway bunker on the fourth hole and decided it was time for a swim.”
I ask him how he could leave his player high and dry.
“I left him a note that said ‘abducted by aliens—help me, please.’ The pool’s great, but the club sandwiches are lame-o.”
Rocket’s got some nads. “You ordered food, too?”
He tries an idiot slap to my head but misses. “You just give them your club number.”
“But you’re not a member, Rocket.” I swing back, but he bobs and weaves. “You don’t have a club number.”
“Christ alive, Ford.” Rocket smirks and lands a slap to the side of my head. I fake a dive and pull his spastic neck into a Hercules headlock. “You don’t think I can swipe a club number from one of these little country-club punks?” he mumbles under my elbow. I loosen my grip on his windpipe. “I told this ten-year-old spoiled brat that my club number was better than his, and he asked me why. I told him if you add up all the numbers, my club number is higher than his.” He wiggles free from my arm.
“Then what?”
“Gave him some random numbers, and we compared scores. I asked the kid his last name. Larson. 3699.” Rocket smacks me in the jaw and runs for his life, stumbling to catch his towel, which falls around his knobby ankles.
A country club valet shouts, “Hey, no running.”
We take off in a mad race to the first-tee side of the parking lot where Pop had dropped us off, which seems ages ago now, before the both of us collapse on the ground in two heaps of belly-aching laughter.
I gather my breath and lean against an ornamental fence. “It was harder than I thought it would be out there.”
A comfortable silver roadster with brown leather seats gurgles past with a license plate reading FITZ 683, and I imagine myself in the driver’s seat with that girl I met at the falls, pulling up to the valet service. Everything is perfect here, I notice—from the clipped shrubs to the freshly painted white Roman columns to the green shutters.
Rocket interrupts my daydreaming. “You’re not wasting your whole summer here, are you?”
I turn toward Rocket, thinking I won’t be buying any silver convertible in my future if I don’t go to college. “I want that caddy scholarship.”
“Forget about it.” A quick punch in the gut. “You’ll be dead before you get a chance to use it.”
I’m too tired to play games with Rocket. I wish I could get as lucky as Reagan, and maybe caddy for the director of Happy Days, who’ll cast me as the bastard child of the Fonze and Pinky Tuscadero. But we live in the northern suburbs of Detroit, a million miles from Hollywood. No way that could happen twice.
Pop finally shows. I see King and his big blond head riding up in his cart as I step into the car. He stops, his eyes following our car. I duck down in the front seat and shudder.
After spending the evening at Rocket’s house, where his mom made us Orville Redenbacher’s gourmet popcorn, I come home to Pop berating Billy over his report card from last semester, which Pop found under the seat cushion of his den chair. A 2.2 GPA. A big D in gym class.
“Explain to me how you flunked gym class?” Pop waves Billy’s report card in his face. “How is that even possible?”
“So my team lost tug-of-war. At least I didn’t fail.” He grabs the report card from Pop’s hand and writes something on the card. “See? D stands for decent.”
No, Billy, that’d be D for “doctored.” Half the time I want to punch Billy in his sarcastic mouth. Doesn’t he give a rip about his future?
“This isn’t funny, Billy,” Pop says. “No college is going to want you with these grades now.”
“He can go to a trade school,” I suggest, trying to be helpful.
“Zip it, Fordo.” Billy runs his pinched thumb and index finger across his lips. “I graduated from high school, so what’s the big deal?”
Pop paces around the room, blowing baby Godzilla flames. “The big deal is that your mother and I have high hopes for you kids. Your grandfather worked at a tool and die shop for years before he became an engineer.” His worn black dress shoes stop at my feet. “You have to study hard and get a college degree.”
“Pop, you could go to trade school,” Billy says, egging him on. That isn’t such a bad idea. Except for sales, Pop has no real expertise in anything, except conjuring get-rich schemes.
“Don’t worry about me. I have something in the works.”
Not again. Please, please,
please.
“What, Pop? Tell us.” This is just Billy’s attempt to distract Pop from his report card.
“Just don’t blab it to your mother,” he says with a whisper and a wink. Pop can go from mad to manic in an instant if the topic turns to one of his schemes.
“We won’t. I promise,” I say, moving from my slumped posture to upright, caught in his upbeat tone.
“Okay, then. It’s robotics,” he says with a bright smile, like we should be jumping up and down in jubilation.
I don’t quite understand what he said. “Robots, Pop?”
“Someone already invented that, Fordo,” Billy says. “They’re called Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.”
I can hear Virginia banging pots in the kitchen, getting dinner ready.
“This is no toy, boys.” Pop shuts the two doors to the den and sits down. This is getting serious, and I think just maybe he’s on to something really good, and I think back to that silver convertible in the country club parking lot, which I imagine is now in my driveway. “Listen up. I got the inside track from my contacts in the auto industry. Robotic technology. Modernization of the work force. Machines will replace factory workers. They don’t go on strike like those union bums or take long lunch breaks.”
“Pop, you can barely untangle the water hose, let alone build a robot,” Billy says, trying to unnerve him.
“Ro-bo-tics, Billy. I’m investing some seed money into a new company called Technology Now.”
Billy the skeptic frowns. “Where’s the money coming from?”
My brother’s going to ruin the moment, I can feel it.
“I’m selling the shares,” he lowers his voice another octave, “that we have left in Ohio Savings Bank.”
I shake my head in disbelief, knowing it’s the last of Mom’s family money. Mom had been conceived from banking stock. Her math-whiz father presided over the Ohio Savings Bank in Columbus despite never having graduating from high school.
“This’ll be the big one. Can’t miss. At any rate, Billy, you better get these grades up,” he says as he picks up the Kensington Observer and makes an attempt to shake the print out of the newspaper. “College is just around the corner for you!”
Pop expects all three of us kids to go to college. He never finished himself after getting plucked from chasing coeds at Michigan State and sent to cold-test tanks in Alaska during the Korean War. And he isn’t about to let his kids go down the same narrow path. I don’t see any options in Billy’s future, and now Dad’s going to spend the last of Virginia’s inheritance. That money could come in handy for college, or at least a new stereo and speakers. I pray Pop hits it big for once.
Just for freaking once.
’m minding my own business in the TV room, eating a Swanson TV dinner and watching a rerun of James at 15—only now it’s called James at 16 because now James is sixteen—when I hear Chimney yelp outside. This is unusual. She rarely barks, but she frequently sniffs people like she’s a K9 drug dog at an airport.
Chimney normally won’t let me out of her sight, and I never feel alone with my dog around, even though I’m pretty lonely half the time, always waiting for Jason Sanders or Jack Lott or someone from school to call me up on the phone. I can’t spend my whole life with only one human friend (Rocket). The phone rings a ton in the Quinn house, but it’s usually followed by Mom saying “Kate, it’s for you” if she doesn’t answer it first. Kate’s got a slew of friends.
“Ford, get the dog,” Mom screams from the living room, where she’s polishing her silverware set just in case Queen Elizabeth stops by for a visit.
I exhale a thousand sighs. “Ask Kate!” Technically, Chimney is Kate’s dog because she rescued her from somewhere, but she never takes care of her for one second on account of how lazy she is, so she’s become my dog.
“She’s playing tennis at the park.” Chimney barks again. “Fooord.”
“What?” I hope she doesn’t blow her whistle. It can blow lids off coffins.
“She’s scaring some girl at the Clarks’.”
I slam the door behind me, pissed as hell for having to move my legs, which are still sore from caddying, and that was two days ago. My pupils grow wide as charcoal as I see Chimney circling, sniffing, and barking gently at the girl I’d met at the falls last week with Rocket.
God bless you, Chimney. She must have a sixth sense that I wanted to talk to her again. A dog’s intuition is so keen they can practically read their master’s mind, according to National Geographic.
I must be in a dream. I blink hard, raise my head, and she hasn’t disappeared. At the end of Chimney’s wet, groveling nose is that girl.
I hold my dog’s collar. “Chimney! Knock it off, will ya?”
“Hey, it’s you, Ford.”
I notice she’s holding a record in her hand and is wearing a red tube top and black painted toenails underneath her flip-flops.
“Cleo?” I ask, pretending to be unsure and too cool, although I can feel my pulse exploding in my wrist.
“You remembered my name.”
I’ve only said her name in my mind a million times since I last saw her and rhymed it in my spiral poetry notebook. Cleo, you’re so real that I feel you could be the real deal.
“I live over on Foxbury,” she says, “the house with the turret.”
I know their Gothic home because it sits kitty-corner from a red-brick mansion with a trampoline in the backyard. Rocket and I used to trespass on all the trampolines in the neighborhood until his parents broke down and installed an in-ground one in his backyard. The rubber on his trampoline is worn white from all our jumping—if you totaled the height of our jumps, it would equal the distance to Pluto.
I hear an upstairs window open at my neighbors, and the hairs on my neck quiver like someone’s watching us. A ruby-throated hummingbird hovers and sips from a trumpet vine snaking up a telephone pole at the front corner of our lot and zips away.
I wonder why on earth she’s next door at the Clarks’ house. Mrs. Clark runs some kind of a psychology racket out of her home. I rarely see Old Man Clark, maybe once in a blue moon as he rides off on his motorcycle with his long white beard flapping in the wind like he’s a member of Hell’s Angels. They have two older kids, Pauley and Jenny.
Cleo bends down and rubs underneath Chimney’s chin. “Goood girl.”
My dog licks her toes, and I smell the faint flowery scent of her shampooed hair and think of that “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” ad where the high school sweethearts are whispering to each other in the library.
“I was at Dr. Clark’s for a therapy session.”
“Oh, so your mom’s meeting with her?”
That made sense, because Pop constantly complains about therapy-patient cars parked in front of our two houses all day long.
“Nope.” Cleo twists her lips like she’s itching to tell me something. “Can I trust you with a secret?” She rubs her hands together nervously, and I see my mood ring, still crystal clear.
I nod once, but I mean a thousand times yes. Cleo steps forward two steps and whispers in my ear. “I just had a therapy session with Dr. Clark.”
I’ve never known any kids who’d seen a shrink, but what the hell did I know, anyway? Chimney keeps circling and sniffing at her.
“Sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into her. She never even barks at other dogs or even squirrels.” I hold her collar, but she fights me tooth and hair. “If we ever got robbed, she’d open the safe for them.”
She has one hand on her hip and the other in the air like a waitress with a heavy tray. Her eyes narrow with incredulity. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m seeing Dr. Clark?”
I give her a blank stare, not knowing how I should answer.
“I know it’s killing you to know,” she says.
Actually, I don’t care if she sees a shrink o
r a fortune teller or Bigfoot’s palm-reading sister. “It’s none of my beeswax.” Okay, maybe I’m a bit curious why she’s seeing the psychotherapist next door. All right, curious as hell.
She sits down on a huge boulder on the corner of our front lawn. “Dr. Clark tells me I shouldn’t be embarrassed. Seeing a therapist is practically the in thing these days.”
Don’t tell that to Virginia, I say to myself. She thinks her self-help philosophy can cure all psychological ills.
Cleo crosses her leg, placing her elbow on her knee and a fist under her chin like the sculpture I saw on a school field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts last year. Chimney lies down next to her. My dog doesn’t normally cozy up to strangers unless they’re carrying treats.
“Do you have dog biscuits in your pocket?”
She ignores my question, looking lost in her own thoughts. I recall the name of that sculpture just now: The Thinker.
“No one at my school would understand,” she says. “My mom thinks I have bulimia. I don’t feel well, and I’ve been throwing up a ton.” She pinches a millimeter of skin. Bulimia is the preferred dieting method among teenage girls in the Hills. Rib-revealing girls get called away from class and counseled on the dangers of the new diet fad by our school nurse, Sister Godden.
Chimney sniffs Cleo’s left hip. I grab her collar. “Maybe she smells a dog or a cat on you.”
A loud sneeze. She wipes her lovely, petite nose with the back of her hand. “I’m allergic to dogs and cats. We have a cockatoo my mom lets fly wild in our garden room.”
Chimney propeller-scratches her ear, then noses Cleo in the leg. “She’s gone nuts.” Why in the world did you say that word, you dimwit? “Maybe I should take her inside.”
Cleo stands up suddenly from the rock and shakes her finger at me. “Dr. Clark told me I’m not nuts, and I don’t have bulimia if that’s what you’re thinking.” She turns her back to me. “You sound like my stupid mom.”
A long pause, and the hummingbird returns, hovers, then nosedives into the tubular orange flower hanging over our asphalt driveway. Don’t know what I really said to piss her off, but tell myself, You might want to say something now if you don’t want to lose this girl.
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