Looper

by Michael Conlon

  It doesn’t matter now. How can I go back to Virginia and tell her the caddy scholarship is lost? Pop will think I’m a fired loser, just like Billy. I steal a golf cart and drive back across the bridge, motoring through the parking lot to avoid the first tee.

  The happy sounds of country-club life echo around my ears: splashing swimmers, giddy golfers, boozy members on the patio. I drive past the pool of lost opportunity. How things could be different now if I hadn’t ridden off to steal that beer. I picture me and Cleo reunited in the pool that night and then making mixtapes together for the rest of our lives.

  I pull up next to the golf range and notice a girl hitting booming, dead-straight tee shots. Cleo. Where’d she learn how to swing a golf club like that? Wow! I didn’t even know she played golf. She wears red-and-black checkered Capri pants she probably borrowed from her reclaimed best friend, Pippa, and socks with little cotton balls on the heel above her golf shoes. She swings again. Thwack. Her ponytail shakes cutely. The ball sails out of sight.

  I abandon the cart and sneak along a fence that separates the tennis courts from the golf range. A crowd of boys wearing red Bjorn Borg headbands files out of the clubhouse in their white tennis shorts and Tretorn shoes. Cleo finishes her practice swings and skips happily past the fence. I duck down below some manicured box shrubs and think of what I should say to her. Some lame explanation as to why I didn’t come back to the country club party, like I fell into quicksand. She strolls right past me and up Yellow Brick Road. The mood ring she took from me at the falls early this summer glows deep blue on her ring finger. I’m about to shout her name when a boy approaches her. She hugs him and gives him a peck on the lips. The boy places his arm around her shoulder. My eyeballs bulge; my stomach turns.

  Jack Lott.

  The Human Torch.

  I’ve been burned.

  Cleo transforms into the Invisible Girl to me as they disappear down Yellow Brick Road toward the land of Ozzie and Harriet. I jump back into the golf cart before they can see me, thinking Doctor Doom-revenge thoughts. Pushing hard on the pedal, I Starsky & Hutch down Yellow Brick Road, drive past Bogart’s hovel, past Pimples’s pimply head hanging out of the bag room, past a row of stunned caddies on the green bench, and past Bobby Walton at his starter’s lectern.

  Cleo and Jack are nowhere in sight. They must have ducked into the pro shop to buy new gear or gone into the club for a romantic lunch. I hear the rumble of a cart driven by Bobby Walton, and I suddenly realize he’s chasing me. I take a U-turn and roar past the tee box on eleven and down the long slope that leads to the twelfth fairway before cutting over to the fifteenth rough and toward sixteen.

  Bobby’s gaining on me. “Quinn. What do you think you’re doing?”

  A pair of yellow polyester pants appears five feet in front of me. I turn the wheel hard to the left; the golfer nosedives out of the way, and the pond on Number 16 opens up wide in front of me. A sharp turn of the wheel.

  “Shhhiiit!” CRASH! The cart remains on dry land, but I’m thrown helter-skelter out of the cab into the deep, wet abyss. I sink to the bottom. Lonely white golf balls dot the bottomlands, the drowned remains of failed shots at the sixteenth green.

  Two large hands pull me by my armpits, up out of the water, and sends me crash-landing to the ground. I struggle to rise. A hand presses me to the sod and says, “Stay down and relax.”

  I knock his hand aside and rise to my feet, but he holds me down. The hands finally release their grip. Rat, again. “Quinn, you’re going to get canned for this.” Too late for that, Rat.

  As I sit on the ground, I see Mr. Valentine approaching from the tee toward his second shot on sixteen. One hundred seventy-five yards to the green. All carry. A firm 4-iron would do. You are better off long and sandy than short and wet. Chip lumbers up with Mr. Valentine’s bag; Jake Rooney shoulders Father Steve’s. The priest gets to me first because he sliced his drive. I fear Father Steve will give me my last rites—well deserved if he does. Mr. Valentine follows with a 5-iron in hand. Chip must have told him to go for the left front of the green and not the pin—a safer shot with less water hazard to carry.

  Mr. Valentine eyes me like a bad lie in the rough. “Are you okay, son?”

  I’m scared to raise my sorry, soaked head, so I stand up. “Yes, sir.”

  Father Steve turns and whispers in Jake’s ear. Jake jumps in the cart and drives toward the clubhouse. Mr. Valentine and Chip walk off toward the shady, undulating green. Father Steve waves the other players along to go ahead of us. Mr. Valentine fades around the bend of the artificial lake toward the green.

  Bobby Walton rides up in his cart, steps out, removes his hat, and rubs his curly hair. He radios someone at the first tee, but I can’t make out the words. “Come with me, Ford.”

  Father Steve comes to my rescue. “I’ll take him from here, Bobby.” Bobby drives off in his cart back toward the first tee. “You can carry my bag, Ford.” I pick up his bag from the ground and expect a sermon. “Who do you think got you that round in the PGA?” Father asks.

  Not certain why he’s asking me that now. “I’m not sure.”

  “Mr. Valentine.” It doesn’t register in my mind why he’d do that. I reply with a blank stare. “Swear to God.” A warm smile appears on Father’s sunburned lips. “He owed you one, Ford.”

  As far as I know, he’s paid me in full for every round I’ve carried for him, plus a healthy tip to boot. “How so, Father?”

  “You helped his daughter.”

  Thor summons a lightning bolt to strike me on my head. Cleo’s his stepdaughter. I never made the connection because they don’t share the same last name, but then I recall the pharaoh-shaped name tag and King Tut towel hanging from his bag. No bigger clues than that, Sherlock. No wonder Cleo knows how to hit a golf ball. “I guess I messed up.”

  He tosses me a towel to dry my hair. “How about carrying two more holes for an old priest?”

  “If you say so, Father, but it’ll be my last.”

  “Why is that, son?”

  I pause and sigh deep. “Bogart fired me for some reason.” Yeah. Gigi, I’m guessing, but who knows or cares now?

  “Why might that be?” He wants details, and I figure I owe him as much for being mighty kind to me this summer. “I’d normally only hear a confessional in church, but I consider this God’s sacred pasture.”

  I confess to stealing the beer, blowing off Gigi, and losing the Evans scholarship.

  Father performs the sign of the cross. “Three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. That’s your penance, son.”

  “Yes, Father.” I lower my chin to my chest, start murmuring my amends while we make our way over to the Number 17 tee box, a long uphill par-three. He gives me time to finish. I perform the sign of the cross and hand him his 3-wood. Father Steve places his ball on a tee and swings. The ball sails over the front bunkers and disappears onto the distant green. We trudge up the hill.

  A shadow grows over our feet on the green, and the pin bends horizontally from a sudden northern gust. Father Steve braces himself against the wind by digging his spikes into the turf, holds his hand over his golf hat before taking it off and pressing it between his knees.

  “You’re free from the bag now, Ford.” He lags his putt short of the hole for a gimme, returns his hat to his head, and hands me his putter.

  “But, Father—”

  “You can put down that cross you’ve been carrying.”

  “But—”

  “It’s not your burden. Let caddying go.” I follow him down a slope toward the last hole. “Just be a kid. You have four years before you grow up and go to college. Enjoy yourself. I did.”

  “You did?” Of course he did. Priests don’t grow from the womb.

  “I didn’t go from altar boy to priest.” He rests the shaft of the club under the crook of his elbow and fixes his eyes on some distant me
mory. “I was young once, too.”

  A few days later, I fill my backpack with things I need for my trip: bathing suit, Neil Armstrong biography, That Was Then, This Is Now, a family photo of all five of us at Niagara Falls, my new mixtape, Cleo’s mixtape, and my expandable telescope. The timing for getting the hell out of Dodge is actually good, because this weekend the movers are coming to the house. Most of our stuff can’t fit in the new apartment, so it’s either been sold or put into storage, like my late grandmother’s claw-foot antique dining room table that would have taken up most of the living room in our new apartment.

  I clean out my closet and throw out all the dopey stuff I’ve collected over the years—my model airplanes, walkie-talkie (what good is it now that Rocket’s Down Under?), jackpot bank, comic books (I’ll be bringing my baseball card collection, though—never let those go), metal race cars, skin-diver calendar watch, and toy soldiers. In the back of my mind, I don’t think my folks are ever going to buy a new house again. For a split second, I think about going next door to talk to Dr. Clark for life advice, but I nix that idea. You have to learn to do things on your own, just like Uncle Fred once told me. I want a new start in life—a place to start over where no one knows me from Adam West.

  A lady at the Greyhound Bus counter hands me a one-way ticket to Cocoa Beach to see my cousin Mitty and Cape Canaveral again. She tells me I have to transfer to a different bus in Atlanta, Georgia. My parents can wait until I get to Florida to find out I’ve been fired. I leave a note that I’ll be sleeping over with Owen at the Palms Motel for a few days. They don’t know he hates my guts.

  I fall asleep before jolting awake from a nightmare just past the Kentucky border. I dreamt I was at a funeral. I sat down in a pew. Bogart and Commandant King were there, along with Gigi and Gigi’s mom, who I’ve never even met, but somehow I knew it was her. Fellow green shirts showed up, including Rat, Chip, Owen, and Pimples. Rocket sat next to me in the pew in his Australian school uniform: shorts and long gray socks pulled up to his freckled knees. Father Steve stood at the altar ready to give the sermon, dressed in golf knickers and spikes. He had a ball on a tee for some reason, and it kept falling off, and he’d put it back on, and it would fall off again, and he’d put it back on. This kept going and going until I woke up.

  The next day, I arrive in Georgia to the blinding noon sun. A kid with a red balloon steps off the bus with his mother in front of me and into the waiting arms of a wrinkled old man.

  “Grampy,” the boy says as he jumps into his grandfather’s arms.

  I stand frozen on the last step of the bus from the street. The bus driver says, “Kid, this is the last stop. Get off the bus, okay?”

  After pacing back and forth for an hour in downtown Atlanta, I lose my nerve and miss the transfer bus to Cocoa Beach. In the late afternoon, a park bench gives me refuge from the unrelenting sun as I watch pigeons circling a statute of a woman being lifted from a fire by a large-winged bird. A plaque reads: “Phoenix Rising from the Ashes.” I’ve never been this far from home alone. Everywhere I turn I witness families meandering about the streets hand in hand together, and I think of Virginia and Pop and even Billy and Kate.

  But it’s Chimney that I miss most of all. I’ve left my dog behind. Dog’s worst friend. She always waits for me at the bottom of the stairs till I get home at night, and then we go up together to sleep in my room after a quick peek at the night sky. I picture a lonesome, sitting Chimney at the foot of the stairs, forever waiting with her tongue hanging out for me to return home.

  After wandering the streets of Atlanta, I’m dead tired and rest on a bench across from a post office. Sweat pours down my face. I recall Virginia harping from time to time about confronting your troubles, not running away. Perhaps she’s right for once. Early in the evening, I buy a slice of pizza and a Coke, lie down on a park bench, and start reading That Was Then, This Is Now before falling asleep.

  The next morning, I wake to pecking pigeons, sleepwalk to the train station, and hop on a bus headed for home, mostly because I miss Chimney. Two cramped legs later, I crack open a window and slip Cleo’s farewell mixtape onto the I-75 highway, imagining it crushed by rubber wheels into a million tiny bits.

  At some point during this bus trip, I realize I don’t want the new Cleo; she’s not the one I fell in love with in my bedroom playing Nerf, in Rocket’s tent listening to Pillow Talk, in the hospital psycho ward inventing souls. She’s just like the rest of the Hills girls now. Gigi’s the one I’m missing all of a sudden, but her punk, bad-ass spirit matches Owen’s to a tee. I put in a new mixtape I’d made just before I left, kickstarted with old-school Bruce—“Growin’ Up”—and tell myself high school will be a new start at life in the fall. New friends, no history.

  he new apartment isn’t too bad, although I can’t find a single kid my age in the building. There’s a middle-aged couple on the first floor with no kids and a pet ferret. A young divorcée lives above us and blares Gordon Lightfoot and Chicago all day long. Kate reunites with her long-lost pal from the second grade, Candy Montgomery, who lives on the third floor with her mom and stepdad. (Kate could meet old friends in Siberia.) Because our apartment has only two bedrooms, I let my sister have the extra one, because teenage girls need their privacy. I sleep on the old TV-room couch in the new “living room.” Chimney pants on the floor at my feet on a worn green shag carpet that Virginia vows to replace.

  Both Kate and I get regular jobs at Olga’s Kitchen carving a spigot of lamb-beef and making pita sandwiches and Greek salads for the Hills people. Olga herself shows me how to carve the meat into papery-thin slivers. With Billy having worked there, Olga’s becomes a Quinn family tradition.

  One Saturday morning, I’m dribbling a basketball between cars in the parking lot when I hear Virginia scream. I sprint up the steps into the apartment after she’s just hung up the phone and see her sobbing. My first thought is a dead relative. “That was Mrs. Olivehammer.”

  My jaw drops to Earth’s inner core. “Don’t tell me something’s happened to Rocket?”

  She holds her head in her hands, then comes up for oxygen. “No. Those bastards are bulldozing our house.”

  It turns out the man who bought our house had no intention of living on our street after all; he works for a real estate development company. His wife never dipped one toe into Dot Ave water, let alone set two eyes on the house. And for good reason. They are destroying my childhood house so they can make way for two brand-new houses, narrow enough to fit within the zoning footprint of the two lots. Pop’s been bitten once again by a Kensington real estate shark.

  I try to renew Virginia’s spirit with some Osmond P. Peabody slogans, but all she says is “I loved that house … I loved that house ... I loved that house.”

  The more I consider the demolition of our house, the more I know it’s absolutely the right thing to happen. No one else should be living in the Quinn house, sleeping in my room, playing in my basement, eating prime rib in our dining room, watching “rain” in my TV room, reading newspapers in Pop’s den, smoking cigarettes in Virginia’s kitchen, or sitting on top of our garage roof with my view of the sky and the stars and the moon and the sun. It’s better this way, I tell Virginia. It isn’t right for any outsiders to create new memories in Quinn-space, so be damned with ’em all, as Uncle Fred was fond of saying.

  A week later, I come home after bumming around uptown, and Virginia tells me Chimney hasn’t been seen all day, which isn’t like my dog. I holler at Kate for letting her wander outside all alone in a strange new place. Losing Chimney would be like losing my left testicle. Normally, Virginia’s high-pitched wolf whistle will cajole my dog home, but it only attracts complaints from our new neighbors. It’s weird living with strangers under the same roof, but there’s walls and ceilings, and I suppose I’ll get used to it.

  Three days drag by, and we all hunt for Chimney, shouting her name around town. They say the
chances of a dog coming home diminish by ten percent each day they’re gone. We’re now at thirty percent. Kate and I put up posters all over town with Chimney’s picture from the People magazine shoot, along with a reward of thirty dollars, the last of my caddy earnings. I cry myself to sleep for three days straight.

  After work on day four, I’m wandering lonely around town, nailing up more lost-dog posters for Chimney, when the cancer-dog trainer walks out of Peabody’s with a mustard stain on his shirt. He reads the poster I’ve just tacked up on a telephone pole and frowns at me.

  “Dogs are really smart, and they eventually find their way home,” he says. “I knew a dog once who got lost on vacation and then somehow turned up at home two months later. He’d traveled over two hundred miles.”

  I shake my head in despair. “Chimney’s been gone for almost a week now.”

  “Don’t worry; she’ll come home.”

  The cancer-dog trainer’s last word hit home to me—literally. Home. The apartment isn’t home to Chimney; our old house is home to her. I drop my armful of posters and sprint as fast I can toward Dot Ave.

  “Hey,” he yells after me. “You forgot your posters!”

  A thousand exhausting breaths later, I reach the rubble of my old house and wade through the debris. A man in an orange hard hat leans against a dump truck, eating a baloney-and-cheese sandwich. There’s nothing but the first-floor flooring left, and wood has been piled up where the garage once stood. I step onto the linoleum kitchen floor and can see scuff marks from the years of Quinn wear and tear. A remorseful jolt hits me in the chest, but I shrug it off. I have to find my dog.

  The hard-hat man storms up to me. “Hey kid, this is a construction site. Beat it.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the house I grew up in!” I stand on old brand-new-looking linoleum floor in the footprint of our old stove. Fallen noodles crunch under my feet.