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It was bad enough that my nose was broken and my face was covered in bandages, but when I came back from the emergency room and was sitting on the couch wondering how much a guy could get if he sold his child to the circus, Dannie came stomping out of the bedroom hotter than a nine-dollar Rolex.
“What the FUCK is this?” she screamed.
She was holding an opened rubber.
“I found it in OUR bed!”
And all I could think was “Hide and Seek.”
Hide and Seek is a very dastardly little game Two Down and I invented in high school. At that moment in my life, I dearly wished we hadn’t.
It started out, freshman year, Dorchester High, as a joke. Two put half a joint from the night before on my desk just as our teacher, Mr. Brown, was about to collect a biology quiz. We’d occasionally light one up out on the far-flung 5th hole during golf practice, but now it was on my desk and Mr. Brown was standing right over me with his hand open.
“Let’s have it,” he said.
And in one very smooth swoop, I picked up the quiz with my left hand, swept the joint off the desk with my paper into my right hand, and handed the quiz up to Mr. Brown.
“Thank you,” he said, moving on.
Two was grinning. I flipped him off with a scratch of my head, but now I had the joint. I had the power. I struck back three weeks later during his graduation party at his parents’ house. His mom was giving people tours of the home and I wandered up to Two Down, who was happily guzzling a Dr. Pepper, and said, “Wanna play Hide and Seek, Doobie Bro?”
He spat the Dr. Pepper all over the coffee table.
“You wouldn’t,” he said.
“I did,” I said.
“Today?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
He went sprinting to his room to find, to his utter horror, his mom, Principal Hoback, and the family doctor getting the grand tour of the room he shared with three of his brothers. Two was starting to sweat like a Bikram yogi. I watched from the door with a cantaloupe-slice smile on my face.
Two was looking madly around to see where I’d hidden the joint. Not on his desk. Not on his bookshelf. Not taped to the closet door.
He spun wildly and looked at me like the guy about to take a knife in a Hitchcock movie.
He mouthed: “I’m beg-ging you.”
“Sorr-ee,” I mouthed back.
“Leonard has won quite a few golf trophies,” his mom bragged. (He had—but they were all just “participation” trophies.) She was about to give his dresser the Carol Merrill Let’s-Make-A-Deal hand sweep when Two Down saw it—I’d taken out the little golf club from one of the little trophy guy’s hands and replaced it with the joint. The little guy was at the very top of his backswing, the first golfer ever to use an overlapping grip on a spliff.
Two dived for it, covering the dresser with his entire body.
“Leonard!” his mom cried. “What’s wrong with you?”
He was trying to look at her while reaching under his body to find the joint.
“Oh! Uh! Well, you know, Mom,” he stammered. “I’m kinda shy about, you know, bragging on my, uh, golf.”
“Nonsense! Let the principal see them.”
But Two was staying put. She was yanking back on his shoulders.
“Mommmmmm,” he whined desperately. “Don’t make me!”
“Aww, show them, Leonard,” I said, trying to be helpful.
He shot me a glance that could melt titanium.
“Yes, let us see, son,” said Principal Hoback, wiggling his Swiss-clockmaker eyebrows.
His mom and the principal began dragging him away from the dresser by his feet, Two Down holding on to the back with all his might. The trophies started springing free one by one. Soon all five were lying there, toppled and bent, as though they’d been through a war. But none of them had the joint.
His mom straightened them up. “Honestly, Leonard,” she griped. “Was that so hard?” The three of them nodded very nice, very nice and went on to the next room.
When they’d left the room, I was laughing so hard I was crying. Suddenly Two spun around and opened his mouth wide and stuck out his tongue. And there it was.
Since then, Hide and Seek, like Denny’s chili cheeseburger, has come up about once a year. There are only three rules: 1) You have to warn the other guy; 2) If you get caught, you can’t rat out the other guy, no matter how hateful your circumstances; and 3) You cannot go longer than a year without playing it. It could be anything. Didn’t have to be a joint. It could be any incriminating object. I think I last got him by sneaking a gay Butt Boys Monthly into his bag when he was playing somewhere swank. The caddy brought it out right in front of his boss and went, “Is this for tight lies?”
But where the hell was my warning this time? And now I had Dannie, about to turn eggplant purple, ready to rip off my dick and choke me with it.
“Babe, it’s not what you think,” I began. “It’s—”
“. . . that slut Kelly in the pro shop, isn’t it?!”
“No!”
“I’m sure it is! What game are you and her playin’, huh, Stick? Bronc and cowboy?” She barked a few more examples—warden and prisoner?—and then broke up sobbing.
Okay. Screw rules. I was going to be damned if I was going to take a .32-caliber bullet for Two Down’s skinny ass.
“Honey, there’s a simple explanation,” I said calmly. “It’s a game Two Down and I have played since high school called Hide and Seek.”
“Oh, just shut up, Ray!”
“No, we try to get the other guy in trouble by—”
“Out!” she said, coming at me with the fireplace shovel. “Get the hell out!”
Charlie happily picked up the fireplace tongs and started coming at me, too.
I got out.
So now I had a fractured nose and a flaming wife and when I got to Ponky, the big freeze from everybody there.
I walked in and nobody said a word about my nose, which was pulsing like a marching-band drum. Nothing. From anybody.
“Yeah, it hurts a shitload,” I said to nobody in particular.
“Yeah, my son did it. Funny how it happened.” Still nothing.
“You’re gonna laugh. You are. When I said I wished somebody would come and jump on my face, my son thought he meant anybody. Hilarious, no? And he came running up out of nowhere and jumped from about three feet onto my nose! Sure does suck. Damn straight. Thanks for your concern.”
Zero love. Even Blu Chao, the Cambodian cook, wouldn’t look up at me. I usually at least got an “Enjoy please, Mr. Stick?”
Two Down came up.
“You really want to see this place become a parking lot? After all the great times we’ve had here?”
“Why is this all up to me?” I said. “And thanks for the Hide and Seek warning, you Iraqi. I’ll be sleeping at your place for a month.”
His face fell. “You didn’t get my text message?”
“No, I didn’t get your fucking text message.”
He checked his phone. “Shit. I guess I didn’t send it. I’m terrible with this damn phone.”
“Oh, well, that makes me feel better.”
“You can sleep at my new place,” he said.
“What new place?”
“I moved into the Sunrise Assisted Living Home yesterday,” he said.
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes.”
“You really did? Really? ’Cause you are one sick puppy if you did.”
“Stick, they make your bed! Three squares a day! Movie every night! Why not? You don’t have to be sick or anything. Besides, my cousin runs it and gave me a great deal, ’cause they have too many empty rooms. Plus, I made fifty dollars off Mrs. Pilkrants playing cribbage last night. I coulda made twice that, but she kept falling asleep.”
“You’re thirty-eight years old!”
“So? There’s no age limit!”
“Yeah,” Dom said. “Great place to meet chicks.”
“You want me to call Dannie or not?” Two said.
“No, I want you to die in a pileup on I-95.”
“I’ll call her.”
“Right. Like she’d believe you. She’ll think I force-fed you a bullshit story to tell her.”
I took a deep breath and looked around the room. Nobody was looking at me. “Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Look, the thing is, about Froghair selling, we can find a way out of this. What’s Froghair want, anyway?”
“He’s asking for $2 million, but he’ll never get it,” Blind Bob said. “He might get $1.5.”
“Okay, so we could go in as a whole, all of us. What would the bank loan us if we ran Ponky? All of us?”
“Buncha guys driving ’82 K-cars?” Bob said. “They’d want 20 percent down, so that’s, what, $300,000?”
“Okay, so that’s a shitload. But maybe they’d give it to us for 15 percent down if we make a big stink about losing a valuable community asset and all that. So we’d need, what, $225,000? Okay, everybody, what do we all have saved up that we could put into this thing?”
Everybody was into it except Dom. “Look, I wanna help, but . . .”
“But what?” Two said. “Man, we all need to be part of this.”
“Well, I do have fifteen hundred, but I was saving it fah my Winnerbago.”
Everyone paused. Dom, the World’s Most Sexual Man, a guy who lived in a crappy apartment just so he could drive a used Porsche 911, was going to trade it in for a Winnebago?
“Yeah!” he said. “Check it out! I can bag more wool that way! Get a girl at 10:00, schtoink her, have her back in the club by midnight, get anothah at 1:00, plank her by 2:00, and kick her ass out by 2:30!”
We shamed him into it. So between the five of us—Dom, Cement (credit union account), me (Charlie’s college savings), Two (Christmas Club), and Bob (vacation fund)—we had a total of $12,300 ready to invest. And that included $100 in change we were sure we had in our golf bags and couch cushions. That might buy us a golf cart but not a golf course.
“We’re so hosed,” Dom said.
We mulled over the death of Ponky and how much we hated Froghair.
“Cheap sonofabitch,” Two said. “I shared a room with him on the road once. ’Member that little tournament we played in? That bastard would make me go down to the lobby and make calls from the twenty-five-cent pay phone instead of paying seventy-five cents from the room!”
“That’s nothin’,” said Dom. “Do you realize he unplugs all his appliances when he’s not using them, so he can save on electricity?”
“Hell, for a while he was separating the two-ply toilet paper into two rolls!” I said. “’Til he found out you can buy one-ply.”
A silent and deadly gloom descended upon the Chops for a good ten minutes.
Then Two Down’s eyebrows shot up as from a catapult. “I’ve got it! Let’s try Cow Chip Bingo again!”
One SPAMwich, a bag of corn nuts, and a handful of ice bouncing off his head later, Two Down retracted the statement. “Hey!” he said, rubbing his forehead. “It was just an idea.”
He’d had it about five years ago. We were trying to come up with money for a decent lawyer for Resource, who really and truly didn’t do it that time. He may have done it the other 999 times, but this time, honestly, he hadn’t done it. We know, because he was robbing somebody else at the time.
Two said he heard about Cow Chip Bingo once in Montana. The idea, he said, was to take a large field—say, as big as the Ponky driving range—and divide it into squares. The driving range was 300 yards long by 50 yards wide, so that was 15,000 square yards. We would divide the range into 10-by-10-yard squares, which means 150 squares.
“We sell each square for $100,” Two Down explained. “That’s what?”
“$15,000,” said Hoover.
“Right. $15,000! It’s like a Super Bowl–square pool. You buy your square and hope it wins!”
“Wins what?” Cement said. “The Super Bowl?”
“No, you hope one of the cows dumps on your square!”
Everybody stopped cold.
“What cows?”
“The four cows we release onto the range! We release one cow from each corner of the range. Then everybody waits to see where the cows take a dump first. Soon as a cow dumps, he’s done. He’s outta there.”
“She’s done,” Hoover interrupted.
“Right. She’s done. They take the cow off. That leaves three cows and the rest of the square owners. And it goes like that until all four cows have taken their dump on an eligible square and we’ve got four winners! We give away $1,500 to each winner. That’s what—uh—”
“$6,000,” said Hoover.
“Right. $6,000. And even if a guy gets lucky and wins two squares, then he gets $3,000, but we still give away only $6,000. And we pocket $9,000! Bam! Just like that! If it works, we go do it at other clubs!”
Again, we all froze and stared at each other.
“Two Down,” Dom said. “That’s . . .”
“. . . so . . .” Dannie said.
“. . . brilliant!” I said.
And so the first-ever golf course Cow Chip Bingo game was, uh, formed. Cementhead knew a farmer who would bring in the cows in exchange for four squares. It took two weeks to set it up. In the meantime, everybody had their cow strategies. Me, I was going to take one of the eleven shady squares in the corner. Dannie gauged the wind every day and decided she’d take the squares that were a little lower and more sheltered from it. Cementhead was going to take the squares the farthest from the burger joint across the street, figuring the cows would be offended.
When the big day came, we’d sold every square. And all those square-owners were lined up along the fences and chalk lines we’d laid out to watch the action. For the Chops, this was the most anticipated event at Ponky since the men in the yellow suits came to investigate the underground fissure burning in the parking lot.
But this promised to be even more of a gas. The farmer showed up in a truck and a trailer and led the cows out, one by one, tying each one to a post in each corner we’d planted. Naturally, there were all sorts of cries of conspiracy.
“That’s bullshit!” some Southie yelled. “The cow near my squah looks like it’s from freakin’ Afghanistan! A cow that skinny ain’t shittin’ shit!”
“Wait a second!” yelled a guy in a tracksuit and a cigar. “The land tilts away from my square! You didn’t tell me that, Two!”
“What?” Two said. “You don’t scout?”
On the count of three, the farmer in one corner, Froghair in another, me in another, and Cement in another untied the cows, slapped them one time on the butts, and let them roam. If any cow left the grounds, we were allowed to head it back toward the range, but other than that, no touching the cows.
Of course, that’s when all these mooks started with their incentives. One guy had a cowbell, thinking the cow might come toward him. Didn’t work. One woman had a bunch of hay, which she tried to entice the cow with. Didn’t work. One skinny guy went around with an air-horn to chase cows away from the sides he didn’t have a square near. Didn’t work. Besides, after about ten blows, Cementhead went over and grabbed it from him and threw it in the Dumpster.
And then a very weird thing happened. Three of the cows wandered toward one single square and stayed there. This happened to be Two Down’s square, near the far corner. “Yes!!!” Two Down screamed. “Yes, yes, yes!!! Oh, baby! Stay right there! Don’t move, you beautiful big bovines!”
And they didn’t. And five minutes into it, one took a dump right there.
“Ayyyeeeahhh!!” Two Down yelped. “Bingo! Bingo Bessie! Yeah, you gorgeous heifer, you!”
The farmer came out and led her off. Three minutes later, another one dumped on Two’s square.
“Yeeee-hawww!” Two Down yelped, doing 360s in the air. “Two times, baby! Two for two! Three large, Marge!”
But when the third dumped in his square seven minutes later, we had a revolt on our hands.
“What the hell?” a big guy in a Members Only jacket growled. “I never seen anything like this. Cows don’t all cram together like that. Somethin’ funny’s goin’ on.” He stalked out to the square to investigate. A few dozen others followed, including many Chops. One of them dragged Two by his arm.
“What?” Two Down crowed. “Jealous? You didn’t scout your cows, suckers! I know cows, baby! Do you have any idea how much milk I down?”
But the big guy was squatting down, digging under the grass, when he found something. “Salt!” he said, yanking out a piece. “There’s a buncha salt under here! Somebody buried salt here!”
Two looked like he’d just been caught with the microfiche. “Whaddya know?” he said. “There’s salt under that square? How lucky can I get? But I’ll bet there’s salt under a lot of this land!”
Everybody stared at him.
Two stuck his chin out. “Pay me my money, Froghair. I won fair and square. I just happened to pick the right square. I mean, what are the odds?”
And as he started to walk purposefully toward Froghair and his $4,500 payoff, a curious thing happened. The fourth cow followed behind him, nuzzled his butt, then tried to bite his pocket. Two Down screeched and ran like a schoolgirl. He ran and the cow ran after him.
Two guys on that sideline grabbed him.
“What’s in your pocket?” Mr. Members Only growled.
And when they turned it inside out they found—salt.
“Okay, so I like margaritas!” Two said.
Anyway, Cow Chip Bingo was definitely out this time. We were all scratching our heads when Dom leaped up like somebody had electricified his chair.
“Hey!” he yelped. “You remembah about two months ago? When those big-time gamblahs came here, looking for anybody that wanted to bet high? You remembah?”
“So?” Blind Bob said.
“Well, let’s take the $12,000 and put our boy Stick here up against their best guy, at Ponky! Anybody that hasn’t played Ponky is two shots a side down from the staht. You have to know how to play our volcano-shaped holes, right? And you have to know that on half the holes, the only decent lie you’re going to find is in the rough, right? And how many guys know how to hit a tee shot that has to go under a Globe billboard, like on 8, right?”
“No way,” I said. “I don’t want to lose people’s life savings.”
“See? You just don’t get it, Stick! You don’t realize you’re one of the best playahs in the state! But the beauty is, you’re such a weird fuck that you never hardly leave Ponky, so nobody knows it.”
“I like it,” said Two. “We tell ’em you’re a two, when really you’re a plus-two. That’s four shots right there, plus the four Ponky gives you. I’d bet my house on you beating those guys and I’ve never said that. I’ll start gerry-rigging the computer.”
“Two, you already bet your house against the Numerals from Mayflower, remember?” I said. “In the last stupid bet we got into. You, me, and Dannie? Remember? You nearly lost your house? Ring a bell?”
“Oh, yeah.”
But the idea was starting to grow on me. I was playing as well as I ever had.
“C’mon, Stick,” said Dom. “Dammit. All of us can see it in you. If you wanted to, I bet you could be out on tour right now. What’d you finish on the Hogan Tour that one year, eighth? And you left three-quartahs the way through to be with your brothah, right? I’m telling you, you’re good enough to play the big goddamn, courtesy-cah, free-hot-chicks PGA Tour right now, but you’re just too stubborn to admit it!”
“Okay, just supposing,” I began, “I do win and we run it to $24,000, then what? That only leaves us a paltry $200,000 short. You think the bank would take the rest in range balls?”
“We double up on them,” said Two. “Gamblers like these guys will double and double again until they get their money back. It can’t miss!”
We all sort of looked at each other, even Bob.
“Gentlemen,” said Cement. “Our backs are to the driver’s seat.”
We all looked at him.
“Backs to the wall,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You sure?”
Every day, eight hours a day, our poor pal Resource Jones worked on the Prison View nine-hole golf course at Bridgefield State Prison. The course was the brainchild of the warden, who was always looking for ways to keep the guards around the family quarters compound in case of a riot. That’s why the guard families had eighteen lighted tennis courts, four sweet softball fields, and a prison-family bowling alley. But the nine-hole course was the most popular of all. It was full nearly every day, not just of guards but of locals and even some out-of-towners wanting to say they’d played one of the most murderous prisons in the country. It even had big handcuffs that marked the tees, and prison-stripe flags.
It was getting so popular, the warden had to go to computerized lottery tee times, thus making Bridgefield the first prison in history you had to have a reservation to get in.
Seeing that he was an inmate, life wasn’t bad for Resource Jones. Outside all day on a golf course. Could chip and putt when things got slow. Could watch women waggle. But Resource Jones is a thinker and the more he worked the golf course, the more it tickled his criminal mind. He was doing ten-to-twenty and that’s no small homestand. Each day, he was bent on not doing another.
Guards watched the prison grounds crew, but there were only five for fifteen prisoners; and the five were lazier and fatter than many zoo pandas. They spent much of their time sitting in the shade of the lightning shelter, playing cards and throwing dice. Besides, where were the prisoners going to go? The course was surrounded on all sides by double twelve-foot-high barbed-wire fencing, meaning the only way in or out was by the main guard gate near the parking lot and pro shop. And in his bright orange jumpsuit, that was going to be a very tough exit.
And then one day an idea hit Resource. It thwacked his brain like a lemon meringue. He was watching the same boring twosome he watched every Tuesday, waiting for them to finish the hole so he could get back to work. The first man was a skinny Don Knotts type. The second was a blocky, fortyish black man with teardrop sunglasses and a big Panama hat. They were both dreadful players, but quick, bless their hearts—clunking and skulling and chili-dipping along together, hardly noticing what the other was doing until their balls finally followed each other into the hole. Resource was surprised they didn’t knock heads putting out. And then each of them would look up and announce, “That’s a nine.” Or “That’s triple.”
But that’s not what hit Resource Jones that day. What Resource Jones noticed most was that the black man was his exact same size and shape.
I had to spend only two nights on the Ponky couch. (All Chops had a complete set of Ponky keys thanks to Resource.) Dannie let me back home after that, but an arctic front seemed to have moved in. Last-place Iditarod mushers have received warmer receptions. All that week, every answer I got came in two letters.
“Hey, Babe, wanna play nine, loser has to wear the Yankees hat?”
No.
“Hey, Babe. Wanna take Charlie down to the dog park and watch him ride the Saint Bernards?”
No.
“Hey, Babe, wanna put on page six of Victoria’s Secret and have some indoor trampoline practice?”
“Yeeaahh!” Charlie screeched, doing a cartwheel across the coffee table. “We’re getting a trambomine!”
Dannie gave me a kind of DMV smile and went back to whatever book Oprah decreed she must read next. Seemed like lately it was always a weeper about mothers or daughters or mothers and daughters, all trying to find each other’s grooves or pants or ya-yas. I kept wanting to ask her who she was and what she had done with my wife.
At least Two Down was getting somewhere. He needed only that week to set up the game with the high rollers. Since divorcing and moving back to Dorchester, Two Down had trouble getting his old job back at Mass Bell and wound up in the bag room at Boston National Ladies Golf Club, the only women-only golf course in North America. It was started by some woman who got blackballed out of the Mayflower. Oh, men could play Boston Ladies, they just couldn’t belong. They had to be with a female member and they had to hit from the one set of tees—the ladies’ tees. Oh, and they had to park in the crappy gravel parking lot well back behind the maintenance shed. And if they wanted a beer afterward, they had to go to the tiny six-locker room in the basement behind the bag room, where they could give Two Down two dollars for a beer out of the cooler he kept hidden. They even had drug tests for employees, which was fine for Two Down. The only thing he ever tested positive for was balata.
Anyway, on his way to and from Boston Ladies, Two drove right by Newton Commonwealth Golf Course, which was known to one and all as a place where you couldn’t throw a bucket of balls and not hit at least one major golf gambler. He came by a few times, asked a few questions, bought a couple beers, and next thing you know he had set up a game.
The day he told us, we were coming in on 18, with bets and insults flying as usual, all of us savoring what could be our last weeks on the trash-heap links we’d somehow come to love. Hoover was trying his new discovery—putting while looking at the hole, not the ball. “You see,” he explained, “golf is target-centric, not ball-centric.” He’d already whiffed three putts in four holes and on the third, he went his usual double postal. “I cannot fucking play worse than this!” he screeched. “No goddamn way!”
We all tried to comfort him.
“Don’t say that, Hoov,” I said. “Of course you can play worse than this.”
“Absolutely, Hoover,” Blind Bob said. “We’ve seen you. You can play much worse than this!”
Poor Hoover. Once a scientist at MIT, he was a man with a 153 IQ who had helped with the human genome project. Yet golf remained an unsolvable mystery to him. It continuously heaved coconut pies in his face and yanked his pants down in front of the whole playground. So much so that he quit his job just to work on his game, day in and day out. He’d married a French’s mustard heir with lots of jing, so he could afford it. Only one time in his life had he broken 100 and that was at night during the famous Midnight Marauder adventure during the famous Mayflower bet. But whatever confidence he’d gained from it, it had all leaked into the ozone. If it was possible, he was actually worse than ever, assaulting Ponky with a cringe-making array of smother-toes, shanks, clanks, tops, toeballs, and double-fairway slices. If he had broken 110 in the last year, it could only be because he’d skipped two holes.
None of his gadgets, lessons, videos, books, magazine articles, long putters, spaceship putters, hook-face drivers, cut-face drivers, swing trainers, beepers, and knee and wrist stabilizers did any good. There was hardly a day when you wouldn’t see him on the range trying some new gadget, lesson, tool. Good thing he had money, because at the end the day, Hoover always wound up slumped in the puke-orange Naugahyde chair reserved for the day’s biggest loser. He was such a regular pigeon, Two often referred to him as Direct Deposit, as in the sentence, “Hey, can we get Direct Deposit to play? I’m behind on the alimony.”
Worse, Hoover’s wife was now on his case. She insisted he was “wasting his life” playing golf. That it was “useless” to play something and never get better at it. She was even grumbling about “withdrawing as his financial golf-enabler.” And since she was the only signer on the checking account, she could.
All this was on his mind as he prepared to tee off.
“Hoov,” I said, standing ten feet behind and ten feet to the right of him. “Am I safe back here?”
“May you someday enjoy a Velveeta enema,” Hoover replied.
He hit a boomerang that was headed directly for Waldeck Avenue. It would’ve been out-of-bounds at Yellowstone.
Me: “In-flight press.”
Hoover: “You would in-flight a man about to shoot a 119?”
Me: “I would in-flight a USAir pilot with one wing on fire.”
That’s about when Two Down came flying up in a golf cart looking like he might have an aneurism.
“Ponky is as good as ours!” he yelped.
We gathered around while he reached into the front pocket of the hideous skintight pants he had to wear with a fluffy shirt at Boston Ladies.
“Hey, Two Down?” said Dom. “Do you want us to kick his ass?”
“Who?” said Two.
“The guy who made you weah those pants.”
Two stiffened. “Hey, you fucks. I got the call this morning and I raced over here to give you the details. You want ’em or not?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And can we get tickets, too?”
“What tickets?” he said suspiciously.
“To the gay rodeo you’re in.”
“Fuck you fucks! I’m not giving any of you nothin’!”
“Oh, c’mon, Two,” Bob said. “Just dish already.”
“Okay,” Two said, reading off a napkin. “8:00 A.M. Tuesday. Here. Eighteen holes. Stick versus their guy, Dewey something. Gamblers’ rules. $12,000 match play. Press when pissed. Both are twos. No strokes, but since Stick knows the layout, he can’t play with his woods.”
“What?” I yelled.
“Stick, one of the guys knows who you are! You played with him in some tournament last year and won by four shots. And another guy heard about that 65 you shot once at Mayflower! I had to agree or it was no bet!”
“We’re fucked,” I said.
“Hell, no. You can get your 1-iron out of your trunk. I’ve seen you hit that thing on a string, 240 no problem. And you gotta admit, you know every weed, tin can, and bad cup yank-job on this course.”
“Why so quick?” I asked.
“I don’t know. That’s the day they picked. Maybe they’ve got Bible study.”
“What, exactly, are gamblers’ rules?” I asked.
“Christ, I don’t know,” Two said. “The guy said they’d explain them to us when they got here.”
“Oh, perfect,” I said. “And they’ll explain what account they want the $12,000 check made out to when they get here, too?”
“Do you need to borrow some Vagisil?”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“You’ll be great,” said Bob.
“You’ll kick their ass!” said Cement.
“You marks are gonna get taken like the last piece of bacon,” said The Voice.