“What’s the bet, exactly?” he said.
Mr. Packard shrugged. “Just what I said. Double or nothing, whatever it is at the end. Mr. Walk hits a nine iron from right here and it’s inside your ball.”
Pink looked at Train again, then back at the green and grinned. “How many tries?” he said.
“One swing, just like we were playing golf.”
It was quiet a minute while Pink thought it over. The other two men seemed like they would prefer to be somewhere else, and looked off in other directions.
“One try, from right where you’re standing, inside my ball,” Pink said.
Mr. Packard was starting to looked bored.
“Double or nothing, the whole day.”
Train stood still, trying to figure out how he got into this, how he was going to get out. Strangely, though, there was something working the other direction too, that wanted to be part of it. He felt Pink sizing him up.
“What’s the catch?” Pink said.
Mr. Packard gave him that soft grin he had, and when he answered, he sounded surprised the fat man would think something like that. “The
catch
?” he said. “There isn’t any catch. Yesterday you asked Lionel Walk, Jr., here what he would hit from this spot, and he said a nine iron. So we’ll hand him a nine iron and see if he can do it.”
The two other men looked at each other, didn’t seem to understand.
“And if he can, he can,” Mr. Packard said, “and if he can’t, he can’t.”
“One try, from where you’re standing.”
“It’s your big day, fat man,” he said, “the world’s a hundred-dollar blow job.” There was more of the taste of the bad side in his voice all the time, although you had to be paying attention to hear it. He grinned at the golfers Pink had brought along, the proof of what was going on. “I’m just giving you a chance to make it twice as good.”
Pink began to nod. “All right,” he said.
Then he turned to his partner and said, “What the fuck, right?”
The man looked around and shrugged.
Train stood where he was, wondering what he was supposed to do now. “This all right with you?” Mr. Packard said. “You don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.”
“Wait a minute, I thought we had a bet.”
“We got a bet, Pink,” he said, sounded like he was talking to a slow child. “Now I’m finding out if Mr. Walk wants to participate in it.” He waited. Train’s mouth tasted like he’d been licking stamps.
Mr. Packard took his bag off Train’s shoulder and dropped it on the ground. The caddies never dropped clubs like that; the members was always checking them for dings and scratches, but Mr. Packard didn’t care how his clubs looked, didn’t seem to care about nothing but a good time was had by all. Taking something away from Pink. He bent down, looking through the irons, and pulled one out.
“That’s the nine?” Pink said.
“You know,” Mr. Packard said, looking at the other two men, “all these questions might make a person wonder if everything here’s on the square.”
Pink stared at the ground and kept his mouth shut.
Mr. Packard handed Train the nine iron, dropped a ball on the grass, and stepped out of the way. Train moved the club up and down in the air, feeling it. It was heavier at the bottom than his club, less flex in the shaft. The grip was soft and he could hold on to it without squeezing. He felt the men waiting and stepped up to the ball, had a quick look at the green and let it go. Without looking, he knew where it was.
They walked down the fairway, Mr. Packard toting the bag, would not let Train touch it. “No sir,” he said, “not on your life. You’re the stick, I just carry the bag.” Having a big time with Pink now.
Pink was up ahead. He never said a word when Train hit his shot; he never looked at him again all day, and he tried not to even look at the green, where Train’s ball was laying almost in the dent it made when it hit, five feet from the pin.
And then Mr. Packard took a drop at the far edge of the pond and chipped it in for par, and Pink didn’t seem to see that neither. He got to the point by now that he didn’t care about the niceties of the game or how he looked in front of his friends, which in the game of golf was as bad as you could be beat.
Everything changed.
Pink saw he couldn’t get his money back from yesterday, and everything that was easy before, he had to think about it now. And then Mr. Packard stopped his partner before he hit his driver off the tee, and said, “Edgar, your name is Edgar, right? Is there a club in your bag somewhere that you hit better than that?” Might have been the first time he spoke directly to him all day.
The man named Edgar turned around, not happily to be interrupted.
“Something you hit straight?”
“Straight?”
“You know, afterwards you can find the ball?”
Edgar took this expression on his face like somebody just tried to explain algebra, then looked over at Pink, not knowing what to do. Pink turned away. Whatever they worked out before they started, it floated to the top now and wouldn’t flush.
“I like my mashie,” Edgar said.
“Then why don’t you hit your mashie?” Mr. Packard said.
Edgar looked off into the distance. “I can’t get there with an iron,” he said.
Mr. Packard almost whispered. “Then hit it twice,” he said.
Edgar took the mashie instead of the driver and hit it a little ways up the fairway.
“There you go,” Mr. Packard said. “You’ve still got the ball; you just saved yourself fifty cents.”
After that, Edgar hit the mashie all the time, sometimes in the direction Mr. Packard pointed him, and pretty soon the match came back to even, and a hole after that, him and Mr. Packard was ahead, and all the presses had moved over to the other side. All of it double or nothing. Pink went to the parking lot between nines and refilled his flask; him and his partner was no longer speaking.
Train watched all this happen, but he still couldn’t say afterwards how much of it Mr. Packard did and how much of it Pink did to himself. He knew Pink and the other two had got together before it started, but Mr. Packard was winning all the money again anyway, and seeing it all turning around like that, the fat man lost what little swing he had and was even worst than he was the day before, couldn’t pull the trigger on nothing, and it didn’t any of it, as far as Train could see, have a thing to do with golf.
They were walking up the fifteenth fairway into a hot breeze that had come up from the east, when Mr. Packard fell in next to him again, matching him step for step. He lit a cigarette as they walked, cupping his hand to keep the match going, and then glanced again at Train’s head.
“So, what are you going to do for that?” he said. Train didn’t understand him at first. “Your head . . .”
“Ice,” he said. “It won’t look so bad when it’s iced.”
“I mean what are you going to do?”
Train kept walking. He was afraid that the other three caddies might hear it if Mr. Packard said anything else, get him in more trouble with Sweet than he already was. In two years, this was the first time anybody ever come down to the shed to pick out somebody to tote his bag. The first time somebody told Sweet what to do in his own office.
Train shook his head. “He’s the boss,” he said.
Mr. Packard nodded, almost like he was agreeing with him. “I know what you mean,” he said.
It stopped Train in his tracks, to think somebody like that knew what he meant. And then he suddenly remembered how happy it felt, walking up the fairway with Mr. Packard carrying the bag, biting his cheek to keep from smiling. He never had a day before when everything went so wrong and right all at the same time.
When they stopped again, Pink reached into his bag for his liquor, threw his head back to drink, and seemed to stagger under the weight of the flask.
At the end of the round, Pink went back into his pocket for the roll of bills. Mr. Packard watched him count it out— two thousand at least— seemed to satisfy him more to watch it counted out than the money did itself when he handed it over. The other man, the one who had come over to make sure of the bets as they walked up the first fairway, made a show of paying Edgar his money too, counting out the hundreds slow so Mr. Packard would see.
Right in front of all three of them, Mr. Packard turned to Train and shook his head in that easygoing way he had and said, “As soon as they’re in the parking lot, he’ll get it back.”
“Yessir,” Train said quietly.
“You saw that too?”
The other three men were looking, but suddenly Train didn’t care. He had a feeling, in fact, that he was under Mr. Packard’s protection. Like the man might adopt him. Which, of course, didn’t made no more sense than anything else did today.
“Yessir.”
The men looked at each other and decided to ignore that, like they suddenly gone deaf. Which half of the members at Brookline was anyway.
“Well, I guess if you’re going to do something,” Mr. Packard said, “you got to go ahead and do it.” And then he gave Train fifty dollars for the tote.
Train took his money and walked out to the dirt road without going back down to the caddy shed. He didn’t want to see Sweet again, be reminded of what happened earlier.
About a hundred yards from the street, Mr. Packard came by in the dark Caddy. He pulled over and stopped, and Train heard the whine of the window motor and watched his face appear. He still couldn’t tell if the car was blue or black.
“Mr. Walk,” he said.
Train nodded politely. “Yessir . . .”
“You need a lift?”
He looked back down the road, afraid of the man suddenly, and afraid someone would see them talking. “No sir,” he said, “I’ll just take the bus.”
Mr. Packard nodded and rolled the window up and was on his way.
Train walked up the road into the Cadillac’s exhaust. He had a lump behind his ear, fifty-two dollars in his pocket, and a slow headache. His shirt was wrinkled from where he washed out the blood. He was thirsty and tired, and he hadn’t eaten since five that morning. Hadn’t felt like food once and still didn’t.
He let himself think then about how it would be riding home in the Cadillac, getting out in front of the house with fifty dollars in his pocket.
He stumbled then, light-headed and excited. He been hurt, though, and remembered the last time he bled out like this his mother took him to the butcher to drink cow blood to put back what he lost. Thinking of that, he dry-heaved up right there on the side of the road, again and again and again, heaved until his stomach felt like something in there wrung it out.
3
NORAH
The Georgia Peach, Newport Beach Marina
T
HEY’D COME OVER THE SIDE EARLY IN THE morning, an hour before sunrise, rowing out in the dark from the marina in a stolen wooden dinghy, neither of them able to swim.
