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Looper

Page 15

by Michael Conlon


  The dog-saving story spreads through town, and Chimney becomes the most famous hound in the Hills. Cleo enjoys a constant stream of visitors and new friends. And yet she won’t see me? I can take a hint. Kate tells me Cleo has gone from a weird loner to the most popular girl overnight. I like the girl I first met at Stoner’s Lake, not some popular Kensington Hills girl. I’ve been waiting a billion light-years but haven’t heard diddly-squat from Cleo.

  The Kensington Hills Observer runs Cleo’s story, and not long after, People gets wind of it, and the magazine plans a photo shoot. A week later, Chimney sits proudly with her shampooed coat on the front lawn next to the cancer-dog trainer I’d met outside Olga’s Kitchen. I don’t go to the photo shoot or the TV station in Detroit later that week, on account of getting a serious bout of the summer flu. Kate goes with Chimney instead, which is fitting, I suppose, since she’d picked her out. I sweat out a fever alone on the couch at home and watch Kate, Chimney, and Cleo on Good Morning America.

  I thought Cleo might at least say I’d saved her life, but she gives all the credit to Chimney and that stupid vest-wearing dog trainer. She doesn’t even mention my name, but I don’t really care. I just want to see her as soon as possible. I notice how brand new she looks now. She’s lost her Egyptian bangs—now parting her hair in the middle—and gained weight so her jeans are no longer falling off her hips. She reminds me of a young Linda Ronstadt, only much better looking, if that’s even possible.

  The following week, I recover from the flu and call Cleo to tell her I’m no longer contagious. She says she’ll call me in a few days if she has time to fit me into her “busy schedule.” Before she hangs up, she says something that blows me away.

  “That self-help book you gave me changed my way of thinking and my life.”

  Virginia’s Mensa-Netics? Huh? Maybe the hospital forced her mom’s pills down her throat, and she’s numb to the world and can’t think on her own.

  Before I know it, Friday has arrived and nary a word from Cleo. After I watch Fantasy Island and The Rockford Files for the zillionth time that summer, I put a cassette tape into a new Sony Walkman that Rocket’s dad brought back from a business trip to Japan. I listen to “Miss You” by the Stones over and over in bed with Chimney asleep on the floor next to me, hoping I never wake up.

  I have a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach that my Cleo days are numbered, if not over. She’s gone over to the cool-kid side of the line with a push from Mensa-Netics, while I teeter on the edge of obscurity. I still hold out a sliver of hope that I’ll penetrate the Lund Gang. With my dumb luck, Nick Lund will start bragging about getting a raspberry on his neck from Cleo. If that ever happens, it’ll confirm her psychotic diagnosis, and I’ll jump into Stoner’s Lake naked.

  On Saturday, I stuff a message in a bottle and fling it into the ocean, hoping it lands on Cleo’s shore sometime during my lifetime. On my way back from the corner mailbox, I notice a rare front-yard sighting across the street: Laney Carter. She’s sitting on the front porch with her bare legs crossed, furiously scribbling notes in a book like she’s trying to finish a school essay due this morning even though we’re on summer break. I kick one of Chimney’s foamy, drool-lathered tennis balls lying on the edge of our front sidewalk to vent some of my anger at losing Cleo, and the ball bounces down the middle of the shady street. Laney jerks her head up and quickly closes her book. Our eyes lock. She stands up in her short yellow sundress, lingering on the step for a moment like she wants to tell me something, before turning away and disappearing through a door to their screened-in porch.

  Don’t think I’ve spoken two syllables to her, even though we’ve lived across the street from each other our entire lives. Virginia once told me Laney’s mother referred to her daughter as an “introvert.” Mom said this as a nice way of saying she’s painfully shy. I’d corrected Mom.

  It just means you’re not into small talk or dumb chitchat.

  Dear Cleo – I’ve called your home a ton the past week, but I can’t get through to you. I know your mom doesn’t want me to see you. She told me not to ever call you again and that you don’t want to see me. I know that’s not true, of course (?). For awhile there, I thought you might be dying. Thank God for Chimney. I think she’d like to see you again. Me too. Maybe I’ll see you at the country club? I’m caddying almost every day and playing tons of golf. Do you play?

  Stop off at my house if you want! We’ll listen to some music. Have you ever heard of a band called The Talking Heads?

  —Fondly, Giff

  n late July, Bobby Walton calls me up from the caddy-shack bullpen while I’m busy hitting Farrah’s belt buckle with a pinball, even though my name’s near the bottom of the looper list because I overslept. I descend the bridge and see Owen hand a driver to Bobby. Next to him stands the caddy master. A vertical Bogart is as rare as a double eagle in golf. Something isn’t right.

  “You’re caddying today for Mr. Bogart,” Bobby says, “and we’re starting on the back nine.” Given I earned my captain’s badge weeks earlier, I’m not nervous about caddying for Bogart. By my last count I have sixty-seven loops; they add up quickly when you carry two rounds in one day.

  I drag Bogart’s black bag next to Owen’s. “Are we in the soup?”

  “A member must’ve complained ’bout our caddying.” Owen breaks out his knife and carves the sharp tip back and forth through the groove of a wedge, even though there’s not a speck of dirt on the club. “Jake told me if you ever caddy for Bogart it means you’re in deep shit, and he’ll give you a flunk test. If you flunk, you’re fired.”

  “Who do you think blabbed?” I can’t think of one member I’ve royally pissed off. All of my summer plans are coming to a dreadful, dreary end. Lost Cleo, about to lose the caddy scholarship.

  “It was probably Toad Fart. Remember him and his guest who couldn’t find the bloody dance floor if they tried to walk to it?” Golfers and caddies have their own language for everything—the dance floor, or carpet, means the putting green. “Or maybe Bogart’s just been on an all-day binger.”

  I shake my head, thinking of that round. “We shouldn’t have given his guest the wrong yardage on five.”

  Owen grins, showing the crooked teeth in his large mouth. “He musta plunked six balls in the creek.”

  Toad Fart is Mr. Toadrey. He suffers from a skin disease where pimples fester on his face. If you blow up a golf ball to the size of a pumpkin and paint it red, that’s Toad Fart’s face. Caddies consider him the worst loop at the club. His normal tip is $1.50 (average is $3, a decent tip is $4, $5 and above is ace), and he has a bad case of flatulence caused by the skin medicine he keeps in an orange vial in the front pocket of his golf bag. Jake Withers once stole a Toad pill, ground it up, and deposited the medicine into Chip’s chocolate milk on the tenth tee. Chip blew raspberry tarts (that’s what Owen and Jake call farts) at Jake the whole back nine. When caddying for Toad Fart, we’d throw grass in the air to test the direction of his wind.

  Caddies can wreak revenge on nasty members or guests, and they’ll never catch on. Giving wrong yardage over a water hazard is the easiest way. Say it takes a 3-iron to get over the creek on Number 5. You’d tell ’em to hit a 5-iron. Then you return after the round and fish the balls out of the creek. Chip told me Lou Ballantine collected over one hundred balls last year by underclubbing his golfers. He sells them on the black market for two bucks apiece.

  You can do other bogue things to golfers like reading the putt the wrong way or smearing Vaseline on the clubs, which causes the ball to shank off the face. Nothing pisses off caddies more than not stopping after the front nine for one of Myrtle’s dogs bathed in greasy butter. In that case, you push microscopic pin holes into their golf balls, dropping the compression from the normal ninety to about sixty-five—caddies call it giving them a flat tire.

  Owen and I figure we’ll be getting canned for sure. Why else woul
d we be caddying for Bogart and Walton?

  “Mum and Dad are going to strangle me,” Owen says, shaking his head. Caddying’s a Rooney family tradition, like floating on the high wire is to the Flying Wallendas. Owen’s mom’s a MacGregor. According to Rooney family lore, her grandfather caddied until he was eighty-seven at the famed Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, where they invented golf. Owen’ll be lucky if he makes it to age fifteen. Plus, he’ll miss out on working at the upcoming PGA Championship.

  Bogart pesters me with a slew of questions during the round, like every hole is a contestant on What’s My Line? Distance to the pin, 5 or 6-iron? 3-wood or driver? Read this putt.

  I reply, “All putts break toward Kensington Road … place her a foot outside the hole … give it a firm stroke.”

  A gold sun lowers below a row of tall pines in the left rough, casting a Roman legion of shadows on the eighteenth fairway. A gun fires to start a swim meet race. I run my fingers along my chest to check for bloody holes. Perhaps Bogart’s plan all along is to execute us with a firing squad. I imagine Bobby Walton burying us in the deep pot bunker in the middle of the eighteenth fairway. Human yardage markers.

  “It’s 235 to the middle of the carpet from Ford Quinn’s occipital bone.”

  The crowd claps, and a mother crows her kid to victory. The announcer barks the winners of the Thursday night 50-meter breaststroke relay: “Royal Surrey, first; East Devon Hunt Club, second; Kimblewick Lake, third; Kensington Hills, fourth.”

  The pool or tennis courts or root beer floats that the member kids enjoy inside the clubhouse don’t make me bitterly jealous. Public kids have access to all those things. It’s that swim meet sound—an excited, electric buzz vibrating from inside the exclusive pearly pool gates. The sound reminds me of everything I don’t have and everything I want—hanging with the Lund Gang, watching girls in Speedos and swim caps who’d consider dropping a raspberry on my neck, wearing a white Polo shirt with the collar popped up and sipping on a peach daiquiri poolside in my white-soled topsiders. Coming up on the last hole, Bogart asks me how far the middle fairway bunker is from the tee.

  “Two hundred and eighty-seven yards,” I spit back.

  After we finish up the round, Owen and I exchange frightful glances, thinking this is the last caddy show. Screw you, Kensington Hills Country Club.

  “Meet me inside my house,” he says. We follow Bogart as he limps his overweight stocky frame to his lair, and my stomach juices roll and froth like the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. It occurs to me that my last link to Cleo is the country club, and that’s about to end.

  “We’re toast,” I whisper to Owen.

  “Let’s hope he’s all piss and wind, and we didn’t cock up.”

  Inside the caddy master’s shack, I eye photographs of Gary Player and Ben Hogan, winners of major championships at Kensington Hills, hanging on the wall. Bogart turns his grim, fleshy, pock-marked face toward us, and I know the news won’t be good. He holds out his sweaty palm.

  “Hand over your badges, boys.”

  Owen’s eyes flood. I take the badge off my shirt, surrendering it to Bogart, the sheriff of this shire known as Kensington Hills Country Club. I think Owen might refuse, but he removes his, too, leaving two pin holes in his green shirt.

  I want to shout at Bogart, Why don’t you take the shirt off my back, too, so I can ride home half naked and humiliated? Bobby Walton doesn’t come to my aid, just stands expressionless. So much for my Hills connections. At some point I’ll have to tell Pop why I’m no longer caddying; perhaps I’ll tell him the bubonic plague has struck Kensington Hills, spread by an infected rat.

  While I’m thinking of other excuses, Bogart spins around in his chair and opens a desk drawer. Our blue badges clang along with the names of other fired plebes. I consider turning around to leave, thinking to hell with ’em all, but then the caddy master swings his chair back to face us.

  “Congratulations, boys!” He flashes two shiny red badges. “You’re both honor caddies now.” Tension drains from my pores and forms a lake on the concrete floor.

  Bogart holds out his right hand, and I give it a firm shake. The caddy master musters a proud smile. We pin our new honor badges on each other’s chests. At that moment, I think of all the poor plebes who hadn’t made it this far, running away scared from King’s antics or the hard labor of the bag, and suddenly I feel pretty goddamn proud of myself.

  “One more thing.” Bogart fixes his eyes on Owen.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Keep your hands out of Gigi’s pants.”

  Why in the hell does Bogart care about Gigi Arnold? I shrug it off.

  On my way home, I glide my Schwinn down Dot Ave, and I’m almost run over by a blue car. A girl ducks down in the front passenger seat.

  Who the hell was that? I head home to find the car’s parked and empty at the end of the driveway. It doesn’t dawn on me until after I grab two pints out of the milk chute that Billy’s test scores have arrived. They must’ve been totally ace. I rush into the back door and see the SAT envelope on the kitchen table. Virginia beams in front of Fluffy’s litter box. Pop’s jawing into the phone to Grandpa Quinn.

  “Yeah, the kid’s got your brains after all. I knew that boy was smart. Not book smart, but smart just the same.” Pop nods into the phone. “Engineer? Hell, with those scores he can do just about anything he wants. Maybe nuclear medicine. Those guys make a fortune.”

  Mom tacks Billy’s scores on the fridge with a magnet next to her daily self-help phrase from Osmond P. Peabody: “Flick the little No-Man off your shoulder. Say to yourself, yes—I’m going to do something positive today!” (You always know Virginia is in her do-something mode when she starts the day flicking imaginary little No-Man off her shoulder.)

  Billy scored off the charts in both math and verbal. 1529 out of a total of 1600. The odd thing is he scored the lowest on the spatial reasoning part of the exam—his strongest area based on his performance with Rubik’s Cube. I’m not about to question Billy’s winning moment. Besides, he’ll be my personal chauffeur for the rest of the summer. Things are looking up in the Quinn household. I’ve been promoted to honor caddy, it appears Billy’s going to college. Maybe Kate’ll make the varsity tennis team. Everyone knows good things happen in threes. Virginia can finally have something to brag about at bridge club. Well done, Billy.

  oul weather normally wastes a good summer day and forces me to spend the day in the basement, roller skating to records or watching Rocket light his farts on fire. But when you have to follow a pair of polyester pants around for hours on end while lugging a bag, rain sometimes proves a Godsend.

  As soon as Billy drops me off at the country club in his new SAT LeSabre, a rain blitz assaults the roof of the caddy shack. The Green Shirt brigade retreats to the tin bomb shelter. I decide to call Virginia to pick me up after realizing getting a loop is wonderfully hopeless with the lousy weather. Another caddy is on the payphone calling home for a ride, so I wait my turn behind three other loopers.

  King rings his bell and barks out an order: “No one’s leaving, the course will eventually reopen.” He comes through the door and disconnects the silver cord from the box.

  Lightning flashes outside, and I can hear the club’s warning siren sound, calling in the golfers from the closed course. With my plans to leave dashed, I squat outside while rainwater drips off the awning and soaks my head. Rain stops time when you’re a kid. I notice that King has posted guards with umbrellas at the foot of the bridge to block the escape route. In the middle of the bridge, Gandy wears a yellow rain slicker under his cowboy hat.

  A familiar face leans up against the building. Owen. He tosses into the air a purple rubber parachute man and shoots it down with his imaginary handgun. Owen notices me and shoves the kid toy into his pocket.

  “I guess we’re kind of screwed today,” he says. “I’ll never get a l
oop in, and I could sure use some Crosby.” Crosby equals cash in Owen’s old world.

  “I want to get the hell out of here.” Caddying is kind of like that for me; I’ll be eager to show up, but the minute I get there I want to hit the road.

  “We can play pinball.” I have the impression Owen doesn’t want to go home to his motel room. I’ve developed calluses on my fingertips from playing a ton of pinball this summer. Something rustles in the bushes by the fence. Smoke signals float to space from a makeshift teepee up the fence line.

  “Did you see that?” I ask Owen, who peers down the fence line.

  “Yeah. Something in the bushes over by the fence.”

  “Smoke.”

  We run through the raindrops about fifteen yards from the shack. Three older boys squat in the bushes under a blue shelter tarp, which Owen lifts up from the ground.

  “Get the hell out of here, dickweeds,” a caddy in white overalls says.

  “It’s cool. He’s a Rooney,” a caddy named Pimples says. “Jake’s little bro. Get in here fast.”

  We duck into the makeshift fort. Pimples holds a smoldering cigar in his hands. He offers us a toke, and I inhale a deep breath, letting out a loud cough of smoke.

  “Keep it down, Wookiee.”

  I learn later that Pimples is a Star Wars fanatic, and the country club is like his own little cosmos. I pass the cigar to Owen. We all crouch down like we’re surrounding a campfire, roasting marshmallows; it’s too wet to sit down without getting your pants wet.

  “Jesus, you two scared the hell out of us,” one of the boys says.

  “This is bullshit. Let’s get out of here,” another boy says.

  “We can’t leave.” Owen points at the bridge. “Commandant King’s got guards positioned all over the place.”

  Pimples makes an opening through the bushes with a smoldering stick for a better view. “Screw King, there’s a hole in the fence just past the bridge. You guys want to do a little bowling?”

 

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