Nobody attacks my school, not unless you’ve paid your dues there. “I just graduated from Holy Redeemer.” I’m not used to talking about grade school in the past tense, and it feels strange, like a part of me has washed away like jellyfish drifting off in the ocean waves.
“A Hills kid?”
“Yeah.” His question triggers the thought of my brother—Billy the Hills Kid—and I know he wouldn’t put up with King’s bullshit for two nanoseconds.
“Why in the hell are you caddying?”
I ignore the question and fish a dollar out of my pocket, handing it over to him. Not every kid in the Hills is Richie Rich.
“You can only wear white pants. White overalls are okay, but no shorts. Now get lost, pleon.”
No problem. A-hole. King must think I’m officially a cadet in his green shirt brigade. Ten sorry minutes later, the headlamps of our Impala flood the dark, empty parking lot next to a row of empty guest golf-bag holders. The tires crash against the curb, and I know its Virginia. On second thought, maybe I will quit. Caddying is demeaning and demoralizing, like life in general. A glorified prison camp. I jump into the passenger seat and slam the door shut.
“Virginia. That was awful.”
As we turn onto Kensington Road, I know what’s coming. You’d think she’s programmed by NASA. Always the same launch protocol. I start the countdown as soon as we roll out of the dark country club parking lot after she flattens the edge of a tulip bed. T-minus three, two, one…
Engage car cigarette coil. Ignite Pall Mall. Roll down window.
Inhale. Exhale perfect Saturn booster O-ring.
Extol Mensa-Netics.
“Osmond P. Peabody would say, ‘You need an ambitious—’”
“For the love of God, Virginia,” I say, my eyeballs retreating into my forehead. “Not now, please.”
She has two hands pressed firmly on the steering wheel, and her nose straight ahead. “Tommy Bradley set a goal seven years ago. Now he’s an Eagle Scout, and he’s—”
“Applying to Yale. You’ve told me this a million times.”
Another O-ring orbits the sun visor before accelerating out the window. Two taps in the ashtray. Black, ashen moondust. A programmer turns a control knob in Houston.
“Winners establish good habits and a goal.”
I toss my sun visor in the back seat. “Mom, you’re preaching again. Save it for Sunday mass.”
Virginia believes she can do anything if she sets her mind to it. Any failure can be traced to poor self-image and bad habits. I’m sick of Virginia proselytizing Osmond P. Peabody and his self-help philosophy of Mensa-Netics.
On Dot Ave, the crew prepares for reentry to the Quinn atmosphere. Smoke fills the cabin. Warning alarms sound at Mission Control. The Impala touches down on our driveway. I cough and fall out of the car along with a pallet full of leaking Pall Mall dust debris. Mom gropes in the dark for two cartons of milk from the milk chute and pushes one into my chest.
“Ford, you’re getting that Evans scholarship.” I hear footsteps on the Clark side of the hedge, followed by a muffled snicker. Pauley? The Clarks remind me of my planned rendezvous with Cleo after her next therapy session. Virginia, I’m getting Cleopatra.
few days later, I wake from a deep-space nap after another caddy round, zombie-ramble down the stairs, and find Pop hunched over a land survey spread out on the dining room table.
Oh yeah, that stinking land map again. He punches numbers on a calculator and scribbles notes on Virginia’s stationery. A bathrobed Virginia leans against the wall, eyeing Pop with a mug of Sanka in her hand. I sit down at the table and order Cream of Wheat from Virginia, but she ignores my request.
“I can’t believe you blew the last of the family stock on robots, Howard.” She leans over and plucks a stock statement from the table and waves it in her hand. “That was my mother’s money. Have you lost your mind?”
“Robotics, not robots.”
She clenches her teeth. “That’s doesn’t make it any better.”
“I was swindled,” Pop says. “Stockbrokers should all be rounded up and thrown in jail. They’re street hustlers in three-piece suits. Don’t worry, though. I got a new idea.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She puts her mug down on the dining room table next to Pop’s map. “Now listen to me for once. Jim Walters may have an opening down at the funeral home selling caskets. A new walnut line is coming in from New York. Penny Walters tells me they’re gorgeous. You could make a nice commission selling those.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead working for Walters in that clip joint. Bury me in a pine box.” He expels a frustrated sigh. “Can’t you see I’m busy, Virginia?”
His head rises from the survey map, and he nods to himself. The light had finally dawned on Pop. Dirt’s gold in these Kensington Hills. Real estate developers are modern-day prospectors, and the classifieds are the modern-day gold mines. With a down payment from Grandpa Quinn, Pop had bought our beige-painted two-story colonial for fifty grand in 1960 from the local Lutheran church. Pop hadn’t realized he’d purchased the mother lode at the time. House prices rose and rose throughout the decades.
“No house in the neighborhood sits on two lots. Our house does.”
Our family room—a converted, screened-in porch—overlaps the second lot. Remove my TV room and there’s room to build another house on the vacant lot.
The die has been cast. Pop’s determined to sell off the lot, and a wrecking ball will level the room where I’ve spent the better part of my lifetime toasting my buns on the box heater behind the old brown couch during the winter months, watching endless episodes on Saturday morning of H.R. Pufnstuf and the Land of the Lost.
A dreadful thought occurs to me. “Where am I supposed to watch TV?”
He shoos me away with the back of his hand. Virginia peeks over Pop’s shoulder. “Howard, are you sure there’s room to build next door?”
“Don’t you worry, Virginia. It’s foolproof.”
“That’s what you said about factory robots.”
He slams two fists on the antique maple. “Robotics!”
Nosy Kate, who is standing in the foyer next to the dining room, pretending not to listen while waiting for a ride from one of her dopey Hills girlfriends (or maybe badass Theo Nichols), butts in on Pop’s master plan. “You are not murdering my elm trees!”
And just like that, Kate and I have become allies.
“Do you know how much it costs to cut one down each time one of them dies?” Pop replies. The Dutch elm disease had mercilessly invaded the Hills five years ago, slaughtering innocent elm after elm on Dorchester Road. Map in hand, he strides out, slamming the front door.
“He’s going to tear down our family room right now,” I shout.
“Don’t be silly, Ford,” Mom says.
We all rush to the window, pull back the curtain, and press our noses to the glass. Pop paces off the side lot with a devilish grin. The problem with Pop is that once he gets a money-making scheme in his head, he won’t give up short of a lobotomy. A few minutes later, he returns, winded. “Virginia, what’s the name of that real estate fellow who always advertises in the church paper?”
“Fitzgerald. Joe, I think.”
“Are we selling the house, Pop?” That’s a fear of mine, because if we move to the wrong side of town, I can forget admission into the Lund Gang.
“No, Ford, just the side lot.”
Just the side lot? “But what about the TV room?”
“It’ll have to go to make room for whoever builds a house next door. You can use the den,” Pop declares.
“You can’t even fit a couch in there … it’s the size of a shoebox.”
“We’ll buy you a bean bag.”
A horn blasts from outside, and Kate bursts out the front door. A view from the window scree
n reveals a red Firebird Trans Am humming in the street. Yep, the dopey boyfriend. “You Need Love” from Styx escapes from the windows. Kate hugs the driver, and they roar off down Dot Ave.
Figures you’d like that suck-wad band, Theo Nichols.
One thing I notice after my first week on the job is that the caddies at the club are, for the most part, radioactive nerds. You know in their real world they are the losers who are picked last for dodgeball at school. None of them would have had a chance at getting into Lund’s Gang at Holy Redeemer.
But at the country club, we’re all in the same gang, helping each other out. There’s always the exception, like Wally Mitchell, who’s always trying to start a towel-snap war, but even Wally isn’t too bad, and you know he gets royally picked on at his school because he has zits that are turning into pits on every centimeter of his face. The honor caddies are on top of the pile for sure, but they’re razed enough in their own life not to needle us plebes too much.
At the club, I don’t have to worry about a hair out of place or saying something stupid, ruining any chance of getting into the Lund Gang. I don’t have to laugh at dumb jokes to be cool. If a caddy says something stupid, I tell him it’s stupid. You could never say that to certain kids at school unless you want shaving cream in your locker.
There’s an invisible boundary line at the country club that loopers are forbidden to cross, in the form of a path of stone pavers that runs past the pro shop, bag room, and lead to the pool and tennis courts. The stone path turns into yellow brick just past the practice putting green. No caddies are allowed on Yellow Brick Road—that’s what we loopers call it. There’s no reason for a caddy to venture past the practice green unless he’s running an errand for a member to fetch cigars or miniature Jim Beam bottles from the locker room attendant. It’s strictly off limits to mingle with the country club elites. You don’t want Bogart all over your ass unless you wanted a guest hacker with a heavy bag.
That afternoon, I carry an insurance salesman’s bag with my hat pulled tight over my forehead and trespass onto the forbidden Yellow Brick Road, past a man in checkered polyester pants lining up three balls on the practice putting green. I round the fenced-in pool and put the bag down next to a brush pad for golfers to clean their spiked shoes at the men’s locker room entrance. I bide my time for a bagless plebe.
Ten minutes later, a kid with a green badge and bad posture comes down to fetch fresh towels from the locker room attendant. I gesture to my bag. “Can you carry this bag down to the bag room?”
“Piss off.”
I open my palm and flash him a Lincoln. “There’s five bucks in it for you.”
He quicksilver snatches the bill from my hand. “Why didn’t you say so?”
I continue down Yellow Brick Road searching for Rocket. He told me he was coming to the country club to try the chicken salad sandwich and to settle the score with King after giving me the late loop on Boss night. The pool area is vacant except for a lady in a golf skirt with her legs crossed, sipping a lemonade through an umbrella straw. I stroll back down Yellow Brick Road and freeze when I see him.
Bobby Walton puts a bag on the cart next to a girl’s. Rocket jumps into the front seat with her, and they ride over the bridge to the north course. He’s playing a round of golf with some member’s daughter. A red-faced King comes marching up from the other side of the club, where employees park their cars.
“Hey, Quinn,” King says. “What the hell do you think you’re doing in the member’s area?”
“Just runnin’ an errand for Bobby Walton,” I lie, trying to sneak past him, but he switches lanes to block my way.
“You happen to know who would have filled my car with whipped cream?” He leans up close to me like he’s sniffing my shirt. I take two steps backward. “Is that the errand you’re talking about?”
I back away from him another step, but he keeps pace. “No, why would someone want to do that?”
“The valet spotted a skinny kid with bright red hair runnin’ this way.” The rim of his hat covering his whalelike head touches my nose. “You seen anyone fittin’ that description, Quinn?”
“Can’t say that I know anyone like that ’cept Will Robinson.”
“He was nosing around the shack asking me if I liked Bruce Springsteen, and if I’ve ever seen him live in concert.” This has Rocket thumbprints all over it.
“Have you?” This time I step forward—an inch or two, but forward just the same.
“Springsteen blows,” he replies, stepping back. “Now go get some towels. You got some work to do.”
I give him a true character test. “Have you even heard of the song ‘Badlands’?”
“What?”
“That’s what I thought.”
My hatred for King has reached the boiling point, but Rocket got him good with the whipped-cream routine. Caddying is supposed to be a job. I feel like I’m a private in the army. Of course, I can leave anytime and just flip him the bird, but I have a bad habit of sticking things through to the bitter end. I don’t know if I’m trying to be the anti-Billy or suffer from a genetic disorder that skips a generation, but I’ll tell you this: King isn’t going to make me quit, and Virginia is right.
I sure as hell am getting that Chick Evans scholarship come hell or high water on the sixteenth hole.
ebbles fall in sheets on my head in a drowsy dream before I wake to a rainy June morning. My clock reads 9:08. I slept through my caddy alarm, but then I remember today’s not just any Friday; it’s Cleoday.
With hours to kill, I read my thick book on the Apollo missions, rereading for the umpteenth time how Apollo 13 ran low on rocket fuel and had to boomerang around the moon using its gravitational power to coast back to Earth (some so-called astrophysicists call it the “slingshot” effect, but that makes no Quinn-sense because slingshots go straight and never return.)
By noon, the sky clears, and I head out back to play with a boomerang I’d bought at Kresge’s to study the physics of the toy. The aerodynamics of a boomerang can be shown in a trajectory graph: After a thousand chucks toward the Clarks’, none of my throws come close to landing back in my hand. I would have quit after a few crummy tosses if it weren’t for Chimney’s fetch and returns.
After lunch, Cleo finds me in the backyard trying to spin a basketball on my finger like Meadowlark Lemon, but three lousy revolutions is all I can muster. A minute earlier I’d put Chimney in the house so she wouldn’t bother Cleo and had grabbed his-and-her pops—7 Up and Tab. Cleo wears flared jeans and a yellow Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band tour T-shirt cut into a midriff. God invented that trimmed T-shirt for me.
She picks up the boomerang and hurls it to no one. It curves around a majestic old elm before landing back in her hand. Wow! I grab the drinks off the patio table and give her the pop. I’m not sure what to do with her next. I try to avoid awkward silences lest she think I’m boring as all get-out. Virginia’s down at the Olivehammers’ for Friday bridge, Pop’s gone job hunting, and Kate’s wasting time down at the public swimming pool with Theo. Not even God wants to know where Billy might be.
We sit on the grass sipping our soda pops, not making much conversation because I have no clue how to talk to a girl. The silence slowly chokes me until Cleo breaks the silence. She mentions to me a few girls she knows from school are heading to cheerleading camp at Ferris State this week.
“How lame is that?” she asks, but I notice some sadness in her voice, like she kind of wished she’d gone, too. But that’s exactly what I like about Cleo; she isn’t the cheerleader type with her Egyptian bangs, pyramid-shaped earrings, and thick gold-colored wristband.
“I went to space camp once,” I admit like a blithering moron. A stuttering effort to recover. “In the fifth grade ... I mean … ages ago.”
She gets up on her knees, curling her legs underneath her. “Did you know that Nut was the Egyptian
Goddess of the sky, Giff?”
I raise an eyebrow at the word “nut” and can’t take it back.
She laughs. “I’m not a nutcase!” She pours half her Tab in the grass. “Too many calories.”
Doesn’t Tab have just one calorie?
She asks me about space camp, and I tell her that camp’s where I got completely hooked on space travel and astrophysics. The camp was at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and my dad’s brother, Uncle Mitt, and his family lived down the way in Cocoa Beach. Our family drove to the scorching hot Florida space-coast for a two-week summer vacation. I’d been within spitting distance of the first Apollo flight launches to the moon and rode in the same lunar modulator simulator used for training by Jim Lovell, Alan Shepard, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Neil and Buzz.
I share with Cleo a few space facts. Did she know in four billion years the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way Galaxy and form a giant elliptical galaxy? And she shares with me facts about Egyptian astronomy. The ancient Egyptians observed the movement of the stars to predict the annual flooding of the Nile, the southern airshaft of the Great Pyramid points to Orion’s Belt, the Sphinx’s eyes gaze directly at the constellation Leo. We both know Ptolemy was one of the most influential astronomers of all time, but who doesn’t know that?
“Hey,” she says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “You got a decent telescope?”
Time on my wrist stands still.
“Yeah. It’s in my room.” Rocket is my only friend in the world who knows I own a geeky telescope for stargazing, and now I’ve broken my vow to keep it that way.
Cleo springs to her feet. “Let’s check it out.” She grasps my hand, pulling me into my house and upstairs to my bedroom. On the bottom step, deadly panic sets in as I scan in my mind the juvie things in my room: an Estes Electric Launch Rocket Kit, a walkie-talkie (Rocket has the other), chemistry lab kit, electric football game, Star Wars Death Star Space Station (includes a trash compactor, laser cannon, elevator, escape hatch, trash monster), a mountain of baseball cards, toy soldier footlocker, loads and loads of books, and of course, my Gabriel 40 Power Observer Refractor telescope (a birthday gift from my late Uncle Fred). On the top of the last step, it dawns on me it’s daytime; we can’t see diddly-squat in the sky right now. I won’t get my chance to show off my expertise in astronomy.
Looper Page 7