Looper

by Michael Conlon

  “I’ll try,” I volunteer.

  “Do, or do not. There is no—”

  We bolt out of the tall bushes behind Pimples and up along the fence line. I can see Gandy’s umbrella near the middle of the bridge, hanging low over the east side, not the west side toward the Thunder Bowl. We reach the opening in the fence.

  Pimples whispers loudly, “May the farce be with you.” One after another, we slither through the fence. I hesitate for a second before slipping through the opening, following Owen into the outside world. A feeling of freedom wells up inside of me like it’s the last day of school before summer vacation. I follow four green shirts hauling ass up Kensington Road, kicking up mud from their heels.

  At the Thunder Bowl, I notice we aren’t the only ones to make a brave escape. Each alley is filled with flashing white pants and caddy-issued shirts. The man at the counter hands me a pair of red-and-black bowling shoes. I pull off my wet socks, and along with my shoes, set them to dry on top of a hand blower on the empty lane next to ours. Besides golf, Pop excels at bowling, always bragging about the near-perfect score he’d thrown during his Korean army days in Alaska. After a long day of testing tanks in the bitter cold, he’d drawn a crowd before admittedly choking in the last frame. Bowling isn’t too bad—at least you’re trying to knock something down.

  I roll and bounce three full-throttle games of gutter ball that afternoon. During the fourth game, I bring my hands together as if in prayer and aim for a makeable spare, but Owen interrupts my laser focus.

  “C’mon,” he says, tugging on my arm.

  I fend him off. “Get lost.”

  “Gandy’s comin’, Gandy’s comin’,” Owen announces in his loudest Paul Revere. “It’s a raid. We gotta get the hell out of here.”

  I turn around to see Gandy clutching a frightened looper by his shirt and yelling, “You little shit traitor.” The shocked kid drops his brown bag of popcorn, which explodes on the floor. Gandy shifts his gaze toward my lane. I hurry off behind Owen and Pimples toward the back exit of the building.

  As soon as we hit the outside air, I realize the reason for the panic. The sun blazes pot-pie hot on the steaming parking lot pavement above a scattered blue-and-white sky. Bogart will soon need a new bumper crop of caddies for the players huddled in the pro shop, dying for a round on the links. We scurry like scared rodents back down Kensington Road and slip through the gate. One of the older boys doesn’t go back, instead turning left on Swan Lake Road for home. The smart caddies park their bikes outside the club fence just for this type of an emergency.

  Owen and I sit inside the shack, motionless, holding our towels between our knees. Only a handful of kids mill around the shack as Gandy returns and shouts off a new round of names to cross the bridge. Owen checks the list, and our names haven’t been called yet. We’re safe. A few minutes later, King rings his bell behind the counter. Gandy steps out and raises the tip of his cowboy hat above his eyes.

  “All loopers report to the back of the shack.”

  “That’s us,” Owen whispers. “We’re dead meat.”

  “I don’t think he saw us.” I felt like knocking Gandy’s cowboy hat off his head and tossing it on the roof of the shack. Where’s Rocket when you need him? Ten of us stand in the tall weeds behind the caddy shack, littered with junk golf carts and old tires. A group of players and their solemn-faced caddies march toward the first hole on the north course. Gandy tells us to line up in two rows. After we’re in place, he flashes a wide grin at us, showing a missing front tooth.

  “What’s the deal?” one looper says.

  “This is bullshit,” another says.

  “Shut up. No talking.” Gandy steps forward in his cowboy boots. If I had a lasso I’d hog-tie him and throw him off the bridge.

  “Eat me,” escapes from the back row.

  Gandy realizes he could soon face a rebellion. “Don’t any of you move an inch. I’ll be right back.” A minute later, Gandy returns with his grin and King, who takes long, loping strides. His large head tilts to one side like it’s too heavy for his neck to keep upright.

  “Okay, boys, I know it was raining,” King says calmly, “but you’re gonna need to tell me who left the club.” He fixes his gaze on me. “I know who you are, so don’t dare lie.”

  “Step forward!” Gandy yells. Five boys are dumb enough to obey. Owen and I don’t flinch. King patrols up and down between the rows of boys, staring into their faces. He stops in front of me and looks down toward the ground. “Now, Quinn you wouldn’t have tried to leave and risk getting demoted to captain, would ya?”

  “No.”

  “No, sir, you mean?”

  “No, sir.” I say no because it’d be a disgrace to get demoted right after earning my honor badge. If that happens, I might as well just throw in the caddy towel and join the Mix-Fare Federation.

  King drops his chin toward my feet. “You always wear bowling shoes to caddy in?” A couple of boys chuckle. My red-and-black bowling shoes stare back at me. Damn. I’ve forgotten. King’s eyes bulge.

  “No.”

  “You just thought you’d wear them today, did you?”

  I mumble something.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You picked the wrong person to mess with, Quinn.”

  King dismisses all the other boys, including Owen, except for me and the five boys who had stepped forward. He herds us into one line. “Okay, you guys want to disobey my orders? You’re all going to wish you were dead, plebes.”

  The six of us shake, like his voice is a train rattling the windows of a nearby house.

  “Now, drop and give me thirty push-ups.”

  One boy with a crew cut drops first and starts his push-ups. Like dominoes, we all fall. Gandy counts for us. One, two, three … The ground is swampy, and my hands sink into the mud. Push-ups aren’t too hard for me because our gym teacher at Holy Redeemer made us do them all class long while he sat in the bleachers eating roasted pork rinds. A skinny boy with large curls can’t go any further than fifteen. Gandy gets in his face and screams, but the boy can’t move, his chest flat in the mud, his arms quivering like flagpoles in a hurricane. King steps on his back with his large duck boot, and the boy’s entire body sinks into the mud. For a second I think he might disappear. The boy starts whimpering.

  “Get up now, plebe, and go cry to your momma.”

  “What?” the boy says, his face peering up from the mud.

  “I don’t want to see your face anymore, now go home and cry to your mommy. They take babies like you over at the Roddenville Country Club. Go cry over there, baby.”

  The kid sprints away, leaving his green-striped towel behind in the mud next to his body print. I can see what King is up to now. He’s going to force us to quit.

  Isn’t the caddy master the only person with authority to fire a caddy? I should bolt right now, but I don’t want to give King the satisfaction, so I grab my towel and wipe the mud off my face and hands.

  “Gandy, get their towels.” Gandy rips the towel from my dirty hands and gathers up all the other towels. He throws them against an old abandoned golf cart.

  “Fifty more,” King yells into our ears.

  We drop again. The boy next to me is a whopper of a kid and appears strong, but he has trouble getting past the first five. I whisper encouragement to him. “You can do it. Don’t let him beat you.”

  The boy falls into the swampy mess. King picks him up by the armpits and drops him back down. Another caddy at the far end of the line quits at twenty. King pounces on him.

  “You big piece of crap. You’re pathetic. What makes you think you can caddy at this club? You’re an embarrassment to all loopers, pleon. Now get out of here. I don’t want to see your pathetic fat face at this club again, do you hear me?”

  The kid picks himself o
ff the ground and slinks away. King’s snowshoe-size feet clump back toward me. I’ve nothing left in my arms, which have become useless wet noodles.

  “You got ten left. If you can’t manage that, you don’t deserve to wear the Kensington Hills Country Club crest.”

  “I think we’ve done enough,” I say.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you? What was that, Quinn?”

  Something shifts deep down inside of me. I’m sick of King bullying weaker kids because he’s on top of the nerd-pile hierarchy. Teachers, parents, and invading armies can keep you prisoner, not some caddy-shack oaf. I refuse to let King make me quit. Besides, I enjoy rubbing elbows with members like Mr. Valentine and meeting new friends from all around the county like Owen and Chip. Hell, I’m an honor caddy now, breathing rarefied caddy air, not some plebe or pleon. King gnaws on some raw bone in my central nervous system. I recall missing Springsteen because of King, and a beast rises from my trembling veins.

  I crawl to my knees, eyes trained on King’s shinbones. My back arches, much like a threatened cat’s. King raises his duck boot into the air to press my back down into the swampy mud. I lurch forward, grab and twist his boot while at the same time driving my shoulder up and through King’s left knee. Caught off balance, King collapses onto his back, and I drive him into the mud. I flail my fists at King’s face, and blood gushes from his nose. He lands a lame punch on my mouth.

  “Stop,” a voice says from behind me. Two arms pull me off King. My body goes limp. I give up, falling back into the mud. King rises but makes no attempt to come after me. With the madness over, I see the boy who pulled me off King. He isn’t a boy at all, but a thick pint-sized man with a beard and handlebar mustache below a bald head.

  “I don’t need your help, Rat.”

  Rat throws King a towel to wipe the blood and dirt from his face. “Yeah, I can see everything is under control here. Bogart sent me over here, says no one’s answering his calls at the shack. I guess the rain scared most of them off. I need to recruit two loopers to join me. If you don’t find me two, you’re going to have to carry, King.”

  “Hell if I’m going to caddy.” King points at the crew-cut kid and me.

  “But I have to get my shoes.”

  Rat looks at my bowling shoes and shakes his head. “No chance, kid. The players are on the first tee. You guys look like crap. Bogart’s gonna be pissed as hell.”

  “Wash your dirty faces out in the faucet,” King says, wiping his nose.

  “Screw off,” the crew-cut boy says.

  “You heard him,” Rat retorts.

  King wipes his bloody face with the back of his hand. My lower lip’s got a slight bruise. After finding our towels, we follow Rat across the bridge in our soaked shirts and dirty white pants. I figure King will rat me out to Bogart, and I’ll be fired for sure. Crossing the bridge, I wonder again how I’ll tell Virginia that I lost her Chick Evans Pipe-Dream Scholarship.

  Rat puts on a denim blue jean patchwork flat cap over his bronze dome. “You got Father Steve.”

  “A priest?” How can they afford it here? “They can play golf here?”

  “Yeah, they’re people, too, you know.” He pulls his cap down tight. “Plus, he’s a pretty good tipper as long as you’re not a Jew.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m just kidding, kid. Relax.” He reshuffles the irons in his bag so they’re in numerical order and in the correct slots: woods and putter in front, low to middle irons in the center, 7 through SW in the back.

  I do the same to show him I’m on top of my caddy game, not just some punk looking for a fight. I’ve had a few scrapes along the way, but that one with King was my first real fight. “I’m Catholic anyway.”

  He clenches his fist in “right-on” style. “Then you have something in common.”

  Father Steve appears in white collar and black golf pants and shakes my hand. “Forgot to take my collar off again. It’s a bad habit, but don’t tell Sister Margaret.” His shoulders shake with laughter. The collar goes in the bag. He pulls out his driver, removes the cover, and tosses me the head of Pope John Paul II. “Time to let the Big Dog eat.”

  He runs his fingers through his thin black hair and waddles like a penguin toward his ball on the first tee. A sign of the cross before a swing of the club. God plays no favorites in this game; his tee shot slices into the right rough.

  “Wind took that one. Grab my windbreaker out the bag, please.”

  On the fairway, the priest doesn’t ask me a thing about Catholicism, only commenting briefly on how as a young priest he had first started out at Holy Redeemer before being transferred to Shrine Academy, Holy Redeemer’s hated league rival. I don’t tell him we despise Shrine’s holy guts. “You look like you got in a fight with a pig and lost,” Father says, looking over my filthy trousers and mangled hair.

  “It was nothing.” I hand him his wedge as he waddles down into a sand trap on Number 2.

  “That means it was something.” He throws me a rake from the trap. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” He settles his feet into the sand and swings. The ball pops up on the dance floor along with a showering hail of sand, like he’s baptized the hole. I can’t refuse to answer a question from a priest. I might as well have been sitting in the confessional box in my blue shirt and navy clip-on tie waiting to answer Father O’Brien’s question: “Tell me, son, how have you sinned this year?”

  Sinful thoughts ’bout Gigi, accessory to a grocery store robbery, the desire to murder my sister for stealing my poetry notebook.

  Father Steve waits for my answer.

  “It was nothing, really.”

  “Then why does your fellow caddy over there have the same dirty markings?”

  Realizing he figures the crew-cut boy and I have been in a wrestling match, I have to confess to this collarless priest in golf spikes and a yellow windbreaker the complete story about the daring prison escape and the ordeal with Commandant King. He listens as we trek up to the green, Rat having already grabbed the pin. I ready for the sermon. The wind whips my hair atop the carpet perched on a hill.

  “Violence never solves a thing, Ford. Jesus did turn over those tables in the temple, but that was because he considered it a sacred place. I feel the same way about this golf course. Mend fences with King, if you can. Now, help me read this putt, will you?” Father Steve sinks one of his few putts of the day. Smiling, he hands me his putter and says, “What did I tell you?”

  The golfing priest never mentions the incident again, and I trust he won’t say anything to Bogart, but he’s right in a way. King had to report to Bogart about how he had no caddies left in the shack. I figure Bogart reamed King a new one.

  Since the second hole, the hard leather of the bowling shoes has been scraping at the back of my heels. The shoes narrow at the tips; my toes turn inward, causing my toenail to dig into the flesh of my middle toe. By the eighth hole, I walk on my heels to take the pressure off. During a break on the tee, I take off my shoes. My heels are chapped and red, the middle toe on my left foot oozes drops of blood. I turn over my hands to see my palms, thinking God has led me to this point; perhaps Father Steve’s my John the Baptist, Rat my Lazarus, and King my Pontius Pilate. Or I’m enduring the ultimate sacrifice for all those tortured loopers who’ve been cursed by the ghost of Chick Evans, roaming the grassy knolls of Kensington Hills Country Club.

  At the turn, one of the golfers utters the words that makes every caddy cringe more than the sound of Bogart’s voice: “Let’s not stop at the turn. It looks like it might rain again.”

  I’d planned to skip my usual hotdog at the shack from Myrtle and run to the bowling alley to get my high-tops and socks because I’ll never make it another nine holes in these bloody bowling shoes.

  Father Steve holds his chin up to the sky like I imagine he does daily during the Eucharist. “The hell we’r
e stopping. I need a drink after that lousy nine.”

  God bless you, Father.

  At the end of the round, I decide to test my fate with Commandant King. I’d sooner be fired than be seen as a coward and a quitter, and I figure at worst I’ll get shithouse detail for the rest of the summer. I trudge into the caddy shack and hand solemn-faced King my pay stub. He slides the cash under the plastic chute. I take the money and turn to leave.

  “Hey.” I turn back around to King and see an embarrassed look on his face. “What happened earlier is between you and me. Got it?”

  I try to remember that word my history teacher used to describe our relations with the Soviets. Oh yeah, détente. “Got it.”

  A bone-tired limp back over the bridge. This has been the longest day of my life. The sun emerges from the clouds, casting a Tang-orange glow across the clearing sky as it begins to set behind the tall pines that border the course. I descend the bridge with the cars rumbling beneath my feet along Kensington Road when a caddy shirt brushes past my shoulder.

  Gigi Arnold.

  “Where are you’re going?” She says this like she wants to tag along.

  “Home.”

  “Where do you live?” I tell her. “Oh yeah. The Hills.” She writes down my address on a caddy pay stub.

  I turn around and watch her skip across the bridge, her white towel dragging behind her like a tail on a doe. Why’s Gigi so curious about where I live?

  ne lonesome Friday, no one’s around to hang out with tonight. Rocket’s gone to his cousins’ cottage in Marquette for the weekend, and Owen’s missing in action. Playful voices from the neighborhood echo through the window screens of my house, and I feel like everyone’s having the time of their life this summer but me. This feeling works up the nerve in me to call Jack Lott and ask him if he wants to ride our bikes to the Kensington Royal Knights’ minor-league baseball game. Jack’s uncle, Leon Lott, played catcher for the Royal Knights ages ago.