Harley once told me the scariest thing that had ever happened to him was when he and Darla were doing Bill and Bonnie Blessing. “It was a one-stop,” Harley had said, “in and out. Soul’s Light Missionary Church in Milwaukee, way up there in the boonies. I’ll never forget it.”
He and I were playing a round at a mini-putt course in Wichita, waiting for a guy with a cooler full of counterfeit twenties, when he told me about it. It was boiling hot and they had umbrellas up at the start of each hole. I could feel the sun grilling the back of my neck every time I bent over my ball. We were playing for Cokes. Harley always had to play for something. He putted past a Tweety Bird with spinning legs, then went on talking as he waited for me. “It was a bad vibe, you know? The pastor was this no-neck ten-by-ten who’d played defensive tackle or something for the Packers. Got Christian Soldier with a barbed wire halo tattooed on his arm. Biceps the size of your head.” He popped a gum bubble as I putted. “Sorry. Whoo, baby. How’d you end up over there?”
We walked down to the balls. “You want gum?” he asked as I lined up my shot. I shook my head, then missed. He sank his putt. We walked to the next umbrella. Harley went on with the story. There was no rush; we were the only people on the course, except for a maintenance guy pretending to rake gravel. “So, I start the usual little tussle with him about what the split’s gonna be on the take from the service. Usually you lie to each other about expenses, pretend to pray on it, then cut the deal. I’m away here.”
“Away” was a golf word Harley liked to use, as if he was a real golfer. It meant he got to go first. He rapped his ball off the side of a miniature windmill, missing the tunnel. He swore. Yess, I thought. I put my ball down on the rubber mat. “Be careful,” Harley said. “It’s trickier than it looks.”
I believed him and missed the tunnel. “See?” he said, before going on. “But that day I was way over the top, burned out. We’d been busy on the road a solid month. I’d been doing pills and a little blow to keep up, vodka to smooth things down. Bad combo, but those services were tough. Took a lot out of you, all that whoop-de-do—you remember. Anyway, Darla had warned me it was showing, and sure enough, the guy’s giving me the hairy eyeball, not budging on the percentages. He knows, you know, and if God tells him to, he can snap me like a matchstick. And I know he knows, so in the middle of this, I just snap myself. I think, Screw it, we’re outta here, and I’m flying so high I’m about to tell Mister Defensive End where he can stick his church”—Harley putted through the wind-mill—“when there’s a knock on the door. Secretary tells him Mrs. Hummel’s here for the laying on of hands.”
He stopped for my shot. I putted through the windmill. My ball stopped maybe an inch before the hole.
“Nice,” Harley said. He moved his own ball away from the backstop, closer to the hole. “Just so’s I can swing the club—or do you want to call this hole a draw?”
“Putt,” I said. He missed. I tapped in. He missed again before he holed the putt. I made sure to watch him mark the score. We walked to the next umbrella. “I can’t remember who’s away,” he said.
“I am,” I said. “But what happened?” I didn’t want to leave the shade yet.
“Right. So as Man Mountain Wisconsin starts to get up, I hear myself say, ‘Brother, let me.’ To this day I have zero idea what I thought I was going to do— strangle Mrs. Hummel, whoever she was, cop a feel, piss on the desk. I don’t know. But I zip out of the room and bammo, Mrs. Hummel is right in front of me, in a wheelchair. She makes the Green Bay Packer look like a little kid. She’s three-fifty if she’s an ounce. Cans like watermelons sagging to her knees. Her husband is the seventh dwarf in a feed cap, can barely push the chair. They tell me she’s got some kind of blockage, growth, I don’t know, in her throat and that the doctors say she has to have an operation. She can’t eat anymore.
“I’m still flying, so I say, ‘Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, but I am for sure, so let us pray for fatter times instead of lean. Get your cap off there, Sneezy.’ Then I muscle in behind the chair and grab her neck. It’s like a bag of warm chicken fat—my fingers just sink on in. Like to gag me out right there, you know? But I bow my head and spread my legs to brace myself, as if it’s third and one on the forty with a minute left to play, and I bellow out, ‘O LORD…’ and I open my mouth for the usual, but what’s running through my head is this nonsense speed rap, block that kick Green Bay Crapper before I wring this damn neck, Lord, and all the time I’m squeezing the chicken fat and what comes out is, ‘Unpack the block in the neck dam, Lord, in this green pray.’ Then I let go and raise my hands and do my standard ‘His blessings on you through me’—you remember.
“And that’s when I got scared. I looked over at the Green Bay Crapper, and from the look on his face, I figured he was going to tear me apart—except he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Big Mama in the wheelchair. And that’s when I got really scared, because when I looked, she was turning purple and shaking, and she started to cough and then she spewed out this greenblack slop. Stank like a skunk in a burning tire. Then she’s gasping, ‘I can…I can…I’m saved…’
“I’ve never been so freaked in my life. It was so perfect, I flashed for a second that they’d set me up, but they hadn’t.” Harley shook his head at the memory of it, staring off past the battered Wonderland castle that was the eighteenth hole. “Those cheeseheads flipped out, crying, ‘Praise the Lord,’ hugging me, and all I could do was stare at my hands. I hadn’t even felt anything.”
“So it was like a miracle?” I said.
“I dunno what the hell it was. There are no miracles. I mean, if there’s a God, he’s gonna deal you your crappy life and answer my bullshit fake prayer? You better hope there’s not a God like that.”
“But something good came out of it.” I put my ball on the mat. This hole had a drawbridge opening and closing.
“Anything good ever come outta your life? I’ll tell you what good came out of it,” Harley said, then: “You sure you got that lined up right?” I tried to ignore him. I was pissed with him talking about my life. “The good was, the Green Bay Crapper puts his arm around my shoulders and whispers, ‘Fifty-fifty.’ But you know what? I said, ‘Forget it, we gotta go.’ Darla was pissed. She said we could have raked it in after that, and she was right too. But I was so spooked I couldn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t know what was going on,” said Harley. “Everything was out of control.” I putted. The drawbridge opened. My ball went in the water. “Let me show you how it’s done,” Harley said.
I hadn’t known what he was talking about then. Now I did. In the middle of the night I got up and peered out the bedroom window, between the frame and the shade. A silver Camry was parked outside. Inside it, a red speck flared once and faded. It felt like a searchlight, pointed at me.