He looked back up the fairway now to keep the fat man from seeing what he was thinking. Not that he would necessarily know exactly what it was, but they were all quick to notice cheek in their caddies.
The fat man, though, was still staring at the spot where the ball gone into the trees, like he was offering it one last chance to give itself up and come out, and then without any warning he wheeled around and sent the club in there too, a sound vomiting up out of him that wasn’t in any
Reader’s Digest,
or any dictionary, that didn’t have letters to spell it, a sound as old as the ancient game of golf itself. He grunted with the effort and the shaft winked in the sun as it crossed the morning sky.
“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again. He lifted his shirt to look at the line of mud that had splashed up, and Train saw a patch of wild red hair on the hanging underside of his belly, and the skin beneath it was faintly blue with veins. “It’s getting worst than the public courses,” he said, “the way History keeps this thing.” And then, glancing at his stomach, as if something there reminded him of it, he said, “Maybe he got his pecker stuck in Helen Sears’ storm drain last night. . . .”
The man he was playing with started to laugh at that, got about halfway home. He didn’t make no laughing sound, just the motion, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking. He was a guest, though, not a member, so he didn’t know who Helen Sears was, didn’t know nothing about the situation. Just walked around so far looking like something out here might amused him. What it was, Train couldn’t say. The name tag on his golf bag was from Hillcrest, said Mr. Miller Packard, but Train named him “the Mile Away Man” on the first tee, on account it seemed like in all that amusedment, the man was someplace else half the time, like not everything was getting through. It was an old habit, naming his totes; there was five or six he called “the Living Dead.” Not out loud, of course, only to himself, behind his expressionless face.
Train, whose name was Lionel Walk, Jr., kept to himself and always had. The other caddies laughed at their totes back in the shed, imitated what they said and how they limped, but then they picked up the bag and it was “Yessir” and “No sir” and “Thank you, sir,” all the way around. The boy did not have the looseness for that, but expected that someday he would. From what he seen, the world conducted its business by who was there when you was talking.
Even the members themself watched what they said, he noticed, at least around each other. Or until they started to playing bad. Around the working people, of course, they didn’t care. For instance, they been calling the greens superintendent “History” all year, sometimes right to his face. As in “He’s history.” Not that it bothered the superintendent any. He started calling himself that lately, in fact, seemed pleased with the idea he had them wanting to fire him.
It was the custom at Brookline when you got mad enough to throw your sticks, the first thing you did when you come back to your senses was to blame it on History, but these days it was more connected to his romance with Helen Sears than his habit of sitting around on his ass all day reading books while the course went to hell. She was even driving him to work now. Bud Sears was dead since Halloween, but that wasn’t the point. The point— at least the way History explained it— was that you die and then the
greenskeeper
just walks in the front door and heads to the liquor cabinet, probably wearing your shoes. It was everything wrong with being old and rich, the core of the apple: scavengers was everywhere.
It tickled History to death.
Sometimes in the morning when there was extra work out on the course, History called down to the caddy shed for Train and paid him three dollars for the day to run the mowers or fill divots or punch the greens or whatever it was had to be done. He used Train because he was strong— stronger than the rest of the grounds crew could believe, looking at him— and a fast learner, and never complained that he had too much to do. When Train was finished, History was usually back in the storage barn, sitting around on his ass drinking a martini and reading
The Great Gatsby.
He’d been inside that same book ever since he started up with Helen Sears, seemed like he couldn’t get enough of the story. Sometimes he read parts of it out loud. He kept gin, vermouth, and a bottle of olives on the same shelf with the motor oil, and one afternoon he showed Train how to make a dry martini, and told him that anything further he needed to know about the country club set he would find in the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The fat man was drinking gin since the second hole. Train recognized the aroma from his afternoon in the barn with History and F. Scott. The fat man, of course, didn’t appreciate it the way History did. Sniffing and twirling and all that. History become so satisfied with the flossy life at Mrs. Sears’ house and how he looked with a martini in his hand, that he enjoyed to play with a drink these days as much as he did drinking it.
The fat man took it straight from the thermos and closed his eyes and shook like a dog that run through the sprinkler and said, “Ah, breakfast.” He said that same joke every hole, again and again, the way golfers did. The drinking hadn’t untied him yet, though, where he could just step over the ball and hit it without all that quivering around and waiting.
Earlier, he’d offered the thermos once to Mr. Packard, who was lost in his thoughts at the time and jumped back like somebody showed him a snake, and then said no, no thank you, it was still a little early in the day for him.
The fat man had another shooter and returned the thermos to Train, did this in the same fashion he handed back his clubs, or held out his hand for a ball, without admitting the boy was there, but it didn’t matter to Train if he looked at him or not, any more than it mattered if he fell in the pond and drown. He knew Sweet wouldn’t have give him the tote in the first place if he was a tipper. The kind of totes Train got lately were the kind that won two dollars and handed their caddy a quarter, and went home thinking everybody had a wonderful time. And none of them— not even the old ones who had turned kind and sweet when their balls dried up— nobody ever talked to Train like he could do nothing but carry a golf bag, except to be a fireman or a policeman, the sort of thing they thought of themself back when they were children.
So Train guessed he got on Sweet’s bad side; he didn’t know how. There was always somebody on it, though, and whoever that was stayed there usually till somebody else took their place. He guessed maybe it was just his turn.
The other caddy— the one carrying Mr. Packard’s sticks— was called Florida. From what the old-timers said, Florida come to Los Angeles before there was sunshine, and all the time since he’d been walking this same course in Brentwood, and all that time it was “Lawdy, Lawdy” whenever a ball went into the water or the trees, like it was the first time he’d seen white people treated so cruelly, always laying a “sir” in there somewhere, as if the act of carrying the man’s golf clubs wasn’t enough to prove he had the right intentions. His favorite word, though, was
eviscerate.
The tote hit a good shot, he said something like, “Well, Florida, I believe I got both cheeks into that one,” and Florida would wipe at his eye and shake his head and say, “Indeed, sir. You done
eviscerate
that one.” And if they was winning, that would make them smile; some of them even walked around the course saying “You done eviscerate that one” to each other.
Other things made them smile when they lost. Bitter things, and when Florida saw that coming, he knew how to disappear. He still be there holding the bag, but somehow the tote didn’t see him anymore. Florida had an eye that leaked, and the tips of his fingers were whiter than any white man’s skin, and Sweet always give him good totes, every time out. Sweet took care of him, no one knew why. Train heard that once he’d got a fifty-dollar tip, just put it in his pocket and went back to the wooden, tin-roofed shed where they all waited for their jobs, and never said a word. He had no interest in anybody down there, especially Sweet, and saved his socializing and smiling for the golf course. He was like Mr. Boyd the golf pro— good-natured for professional reasons only.
Train stopped now near the trees where the fat man’s ball disappeared after it hit the cart path. Brookline had more trees than any country club in Los Angeles County— somebody actually counted the damn trees— and the members were oddly proud of that, like they grown them themself.
“You see where it went in, Miller?” the fat man said.
Mr. Packard looked back up the tree line. “The ball or the club?” he said.
The fat man crashed off into the trees and a different kind of laugh played at the corners of Mr. Packard’s mouth. He was easygoing in some way that was the opposite of what you expected. It caught you by surprise. Still, it was clear to Train there was a bad side there and you didn’t want no part of it.
Train adjusted the bag across his shoulder and followed the fat man in, picking up the three wood that he thrown and wiping off the dirt. There was nineteen clubs in the bag and he had to lift them up like you do flowers in a vase, shake them loose at the botton to get this one in too. He counted them again to make sure: nineteen. The heaviest bag he carried all spring.
The fat man was out of sight about a minute, and by the time Train caught up, he was standing over a perfect, white, unmarked Spalding Dot golf ball, a ball that never hit any cart path. And it was laying there in a perfect opening in the trees, maybe eight feet across and about that high, wide open to the green. Train stopped and took the bag off his shoulder and felt embarrassed in some way, like he caught him picking his nose. The fat man looked at him, letting him know he didn’t care what he saw, or what he thought. Train glanced away, keeping himself out of it. Just like Florida.
“Three iron,” the fat man said, and held out his hand. It was the wrong iron— he needed to get the ball up in the air— but then, when your game recalled Custer’s last stand, most of the time there wasn’t no right iron in the bag anyway. Golf was like that, as cruel as a clubfoot.
Mr. Packard’s voice came to them from the other side of the foliage. “You find it, Pink?”
“Yeah,” the fat man said, “I got it over here.”
He looked once again at Train and then stepped back over the ball. He took a practice swing, his stomach rolling beneath his shirt, the head of the club scraping the overhead leaves. He stepped back and took another swing, ripping into the branches this time, and then another. Train thought of a saying he heard recently: Rules are made to be broken. Which was not necessarily a golf saying, he knew, but the golf course is where he heard it. There was always a philosopher in a foursome, and some days Train played their sayings back in his head to pass the time, found the right situation to use one on every hole. Some of the sayings were comical and some of them were resentful, but either way, they all came down to the same thing, which was disappointment. Disappointment was the only thing about the game that lasted. You could try not to get your hopes up, but you might as well tell the cat not to kill the birds. Things work the way they work.
There were other things they said, too. There were jokes; sometimes Train heard the same one three or four times a round. The old golfers forgot which ones they’d already told, and which ones they already heard, and walked around all day laughing, wondering why life never seemed this sweet to them when they were young and could enjoy it. One day when the wind blew in so dry and hot there was nobody to tote, Train spent an afternoon in the shed with a scorecard and a pencil, writing down all the jokes he heard about players that killed their wives accidentally and had to take an unplayable lie to remove the ball. Or the wife got hit by lightning, or bit by a snake, which all came to the same thing. There was twenty-six jokes about dead wives that he could remember. Train had never caddied for women— they didn’t let them play at Brookline, except a nine-hole scramble on Halloween night— and wondered if they told jokes about their husbands too. He thought about Bud Sears then, and his wife Helen fucking the ears off old History, and thought they probably did.
