CHAPTER |
|
Lying one foot from the hole for birdie, with a two-shot lead in the playoff, my $250,000 locked up, Ponky secured—that was fine as far as it went, I guess.
But there was one little itch I had to scratch yet before I could feel holed—Commodore Worstenheim. I could not take my eye off him and his potbellied pigs, the blue-jacketed, blue-haired members of the Royal and Ancient. I could see him up there, pointing at me, tsk-tsking back and forth, his jowls swaying in the air conditioning. Something about that guy just gave me the serious postals. It was not enough to qualify; I wanted to give that six-foot turd something to remember me by.
“What’r you wai’in for?” Sponge said, taking his last glug of Macallan. “Kno’ i’ in and le’s give our livers a swim.”
“Driver,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Wha’?”
“Driver.”
He looked at me like I was asking for a bowl of baby toes.
“Ohh, I ge’ i’,” Sponge said. “Hail, why no’? Pu’ wi’ yer driver! You could three-pu’ this wee bastar’ and still win!”
“Something like that,” I said.
Sponge walked back and got my driver, presenting it to me like a knight presenting Excalibur, whipping the headcover off at the last minute with a flourish, and bowing deeply.
“Thank you, knave.”
A murmur went through the crowd. I faced the bay window and Worstenheim and his cronies. I held the driver up over my head with both hands. They looked down on me like I’d just head-butted the queen.
I set up over that one-footer, took a wide stance, waggled once or twice, looked up at Worsty, smiled, and then let it rip with a full swing. I smoked it flush, making sure not to take anything out of the green, giving it all to the ball, low and hard, driver off the deck. I hit that thing so hard I swear it changed colors.
You should’ve seen that bastard’s eyes as that RPG came boring in right at him. He dived like Greg Louganis. They all did. It smashed the window dead center, shattering the glass with a glorious din. The ball bounced off the back wall and went ricocheting off the mahogany and Waterford and Chippendale.
“Eleven o’clock news,” I said to nobody in particular.
There were no longer any faces to see up there, only occasional glass pieces falling randomly. By then, they were all on the floor. There was openmouthed silent screaming from everybody—the window, the room, and the gallery—until at last Worsty himself peeked up, like a man coming out of a cave at the end of World War II. On his head, a toupee sat cockeyed, like a napping ferret.
That did it. Desmond collapsed in a heap on the green he was laughing so hard. Sponge was in shock. I was simply staring eyeball-to-eyeball at Commodore Worstenheim, smiling like a man who’d just married Bill Gates’s daughter.
“Guess I hit that one OB, Sponge. Another ball please. And my putter.”
Sponge’s mouth still hung open like a drawbridge, but he fetched me another ball and my putter. I held the ball out parallel to the green and dropped it in approximately the same place I’d hit the driver.
“Four,” I said.
Then I took the putter and buried the 12-incher.
“Five.”
By now Worstenheim realized what I’d done, as did the entire gallery, as did Sponge. Some were booing, some were applauding, and most were roaring.
Sponge grinned.
“I love you, Brian Piccolo,” he said in his best Gale Sayers, hugging me and picking me up eight inches off the grass. “Ya daft shite, ya!”
By now Worstenheim was screaming, “I’ll disqualify you for this! You’ll never play another round in England!”
“Under wha’ rule?” Sponge was yelling. “He took the two-sho’ penal’y, y’arse!”
Dez came up and grabbed my hand like a paint-shaker.
“Well done, Ray!” he said, still laughing. “Well bloody done! Finally, somebody stood up to those self-important wankers!”
“Don’t go anywhere, Dez,” I said. Then I turned to Sponge and said, “Figure out the damages and tell them I’ll send them a check.”
I quickly signed my card and went to find a pay phone. I had some people to call.
To the side of the green, looking like a man who’d missed his bus, Bob was saying to anybody who would listen, “Will somebody please tell me what the hell just happened?”
Mrs. Opel Hickenlooper was a very forgetful eighty-seven-year-old widow, some days first-stage Alzheimer’s, some days not. She usually recognized friends and family, no problem, but she’d often forget small facts like Yes, I have already eaten lunch and No, I never served under Ike.
And so it was not a large problem when, a few days after Big Al stole the Lincoln that Two had stolen, she said to Two Down: “I believe I’d like to go for a ride in my Lincoln. Will you take me?”
This was during a game of fifty-dollar mah-jongg and it stopped Two Down cold. He swallowed uneasily, stared into Opel Hickenlooper’s glassy eyes, and regained that composure he’s so famous for.
“Oh, Opel,” he said, patting her hand. “You sold that car two years ago, dear. Remember? To the nice collector man from New York. He put it in a museum. He lets kids sit in it for free now.”
“Oh?” Opel said, considering this. “I did?”
“Yes, ma’am. You got $27,500 for it.”
“I did?”
“Yes you did. That’s woo.”
And that seemed to be the happy ending of the matter until the next afternoon, when there was a knock on Opel’s door while Two Down happened to be inside, playing a little ship-captain-crew dice with her at five dollars a throw. A man in khakis and a white mock turtle entered. In a bit of bad luck Two Down had suddenly become known for, this man just happened to be the catheter-wearing unfortunate that Two and Cement had mistakenly pantsed outside Go Nuts Donuts in the catastrophic Laird Fredericks incident.
“There’s my boy!” Opel said to the man. “This is my friend Two Down. He got the name for his love of crossword puzzles. Isn’t that nice?”
From the cold-steel expression on his face, the man did not think it was very nice at all.
“So you’re the tool that plays cards with my mom?” he said.
“Yes. Isn’t she just a wonderful woman—”
The man pushed the door completely open and held it against the wall with his huge mitt.
“Where’s her goddamn car?” he said, regarding Two’s skinny body like it might be a javelin he could throw.
“Is this the Lincoln she keeps talking about?”
“Yeah, a 1964 Lincoln Continental.”
“She told me she sold it two years ago,” Two said, a small trickle of sweat rolling down his temple. “She told me that many times. It’s just lately the poor thing seems to have forgotten and keeps talking about wanting to take a ride in it!”
“That’s funny,” the coach said, taking a menacing step toward him. “Then what the FUCK was I driving in the Fourth of July parade last week?”
Nervous, overcologned, and shaved almost hairless, Dom, the World’s Most Sexual Man, took the 41 bus to Don’s Mixed Drinks. He was there by 8:00 P.M. and spent the next two hours sitting in the White Castle across the street, anxiously pestering a Coke and waiting for his true and unrequited love, Kelly van Edible, to show up at the bar. This was going to work or he was going to ball himself up in a Tibetan monastery until death.
He reconfirmed the time, the address, and the instructions with Freddy. “You point the gun at me and the brunette. I’ll be sitting right next to her. When we’re done, you escape out the back, got it?”
“Christ!” Freddy complained. “I did get my GED, bra!”
By 10:15, Dom was too nervous to wait anymore and wandered in, trying to appear casual. It was a slow night at Don’s Mixed Drinks, where the décor was nearly as imaginative as the establishment’s name. It was your kind of place if you liked red Naugahyde booths with Ponderosa-style wood trim, teacher’s-lounge-style tables with silver-legged chairs and red-buttoned upholstered seats, not a lamp or chandelier in sight that wasn’t a gift of a beer, liquor, or smokeless tobacco company, an Asteroids game that had not moved in thirty years and not worked in fifteen, a shuffleboard table that long ago lost its last piece of sawdust, a jukebox featuring the latest hits from 1989, a pool table where the last precious pieces of green felt were clinging on for dear life, four wooden backless benches surrounding it, and a bar with ten aluminum stools with black seat cushions, almost all of them fighting losing battles to hold in their foam.
It was on one of these stools that Dom took a seat and checked his Fauxlex. The karaoke was in full painful form, with a longhaired man in a Boston Bruins jersey belting out his weekly favorite, Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times?”—and the crowd asking themselves the same question.
Having been here perhaps half a dozen times the same night as Kelly, Dom had a working knowledge of her karaoke m.o. She would usually come in with another luscious named Amber and they would sit at one of the four-chair tables, facing the karaoke machine. Seeing as Amber could also make a bulldog break his chain, the third and fourth chairs would be snapped up within ten minutes by some swinging dick or other. There were three empty four-tops open now. Dom knew that if he took a seat at one of the tables, they’d take one of the other two. That’s why his plan was to sit at the bar and be ready to pounce on the chair next to Kelly the minute they sat.
What he hadn’t counted on was the Human Stain, who rode in on his godforsaken scooter at 10:40, parked it in the corner, and took the bar stool next to his.
“Greetings, Dom,” he said, picking a zit on his arm. “Any foxes in here tonight?”
“Foxes?” Dom said, trying not to look at him.
“Certainly,” he said. “Babes. Beauties. Looks a little thin to me so far. But then, I’m a little more discerning than yourself.”
If it’s possible for a man’s eyes to roll clean out of their sockets, Dom’s would’ve. He took a large pull on his adult beverage and said, “Yeah, well, some guys got it and some don’t.”
“Ahhh,” Stain said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, mon ami. You’ve just got to get over Kelly and move on. Babes are like streetcars, my friend. There’ll be another one along in five minutes.”
And another woman did come along just then, in fact, though hardly a babe—Blu Chao. She walked in warily, wearing some kind of Aunt Bea-hive hairdo, large pearls, Wal-Mart’s best paisley frock, black stockings with a cheesy seam, too-high heels, and a handbag you could’ve smuggled a small farm animal in. It was the first time either man had ever seen her without her cooking apron, to say nothing of out from behind the Ponky counter. She spied them sitting on the stools and slunk over.
“I sit?” she said to Dom, pointing to the empty stool next to him.
“Uh, shah,” Dom said.
She was a squat woman whose form most resembled that of an Algerian wrestler, maybe five-foot-even and 200 pounds, so it was no small achievement for her to scale the stool, what with the steamer trunk of a purse and the heels and all.
Stain looked over and said, “Blu Chao, we are honored. I wonder, as long as we are in such an informal setting, if I might, before the night is out, trouble you for the recipe for that divine chicken cordon bleu you make, with the gorgonzola sauce, the stuffed parmesan-crusted squash, and the sun-dried tomato risotto? I simply must have it.”
Blu Chao looked at him quizzically.
“Screwdrive,” she said.
“Absolutely!” Stain said, then turned to the bartender. “A screwdriver for the duchess, please.”
It was 10:48 when the night’s central character walked in, Kelly van Edible, looking twelve city blocks past hot. She wore a red leather miniskirt, a painted-on about-to-burst white T-shirt that read I SEE YOU’VE MET THE TWINS, a double-chained belt, long, tan legs you would happily be strangled by, and black pumps she must have borrowed off a dominatrix. She immediately caught sight of the threesome at the bar and came eagerly to Stain, taking the stool next to him.
What the hell? thought Dom.
“Thanks again for coming!” she said to Stain. “I brought my eight-by-ten.” She dug it out of her purse. “Do you think your brother at Vogue really has some gigs?”
Dom spat out his beer.
“Oh, absolutely,” Stain said with just slightly more grease in his voice than that required by a 1979 Jeep Wagoneer. “Of course, you and I should get together and decide—”
Suddenly at 10:50, the door of Don’s Mixed Drinks slammed open and a single gunman barged through it, pointing not one but two guns everywhere at once and bellowing, “Nobody move! Everybody get their hands over their head, godammit! Hands over your fuckin’ heads! Now!”
It was not Freddy. It was I-Rod. He wore a ski mask, black jacket, tight black jeans, black German army boots, and a DKNY backpack. He felt the door behind him and locked it. He had his iPod phones in his ears.
“Oh, shit,” thought Dom as loudly as a man can think a thought. He began to sneak off his stool so that he could scurry over and sit next to Kelly.
I-Rod pointed the Glock straight at Dom. “Nobody fuckin’ move, I said!”
“But I—”
“Shut up! Every fuckin’ one of you, throw me your cellphones. Every one of you!”
The fifteen or twenty customers did so, to the unaccompanied karaoke instrumental of Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue.”
I-Rod worked his way behind the bar, yanked the phone out of the wall, opened the cash register, and put all the money in the backpack. He yanked the watch and wallet off the bartender and the bar-back, emptied three more purses from a promising-looking table to his left, and then decided it was time to move on with the proceedings.
“All right, people!” he screamed. “I want to see some sex! Right now, in front of me!”
He pointed the gun at Dom and Blu Chao.
Dom was horror-struck.
“You two. Start fuckin’! Right on the bar. Hurry up!”
Dom was stammering now. He rose, irate. “No! You got this all wrong! This is a terrible mistake! You’ve—”
“Oh, I know what I’m doin’, baby!”
He fired a shot at Dom’s feet that launched him three feet in the air. “Get busy! Get her clothes off, let’s go!”
Then he pointed at the next couple at the bar—which happened to be the Stain and Kelly van Edible.
“You two! I want to see sex. Get busy, right now!”
Kelly began whimpering. Dom was frisbee-eyed. “Dude, you got this all—”
Another shot from the Glock, this time into the Hamm’s mirror behind the bar.
“Everybody! Start screwing! Find the person next to you! I don’t wanna hear talking! I just wanna hear humping! Let’s go, people! And don’t gimme a bunch a foreplay! This ain’t Blind Date!”
He pointed to a couple near the pool table. “You two! Do it on the table!”
There seemed to be nothing left to do but begin conjugal relations. A couple on their first date turned to each other and shrugged. A married couple began their routine on a bench. Two strangers near the karaoke machine began to fumble nervously with buttons. A teenage couple with fake IDs was already half done. A grandmother looked longingly at a grandfather, who kept her at arm’s length while watching the teenagers.
For Dom, it was hell incarnate. For the Human Stain, it was the chocolatiest moment of his vanilla life. For Kelly, the most hideous. For Blu Chao, the most confused. Why was the man from the golf course suddenly feeling her up and yet weeping at the same time?
And that’s when Freddy came through the back.
“Everything all right in here?” Freddy said.
I-Rod nodded proudly. He seemed eminently pleased with himself.
Dom pretended to make out with Blu Chao so passionately that he had her on her back on the bar, right next to where Freddy was standing. He turned his head and whispered angrily up to Freddy: “This idiot’s got me with the wrong gahl!”
“What?” whispered Freddy. “You said you’d be sitting next to a brunette.”
“Not this one!” Dom whispered. “The hottie! And why the fuck is he so goddamn ehly? And whah was my damn one-ring call?”
“He was in a hurry. He wanted to get back in time for Oprah.”
And that’s when six Boston cops busted down the front door and four more came barreling through the back.
It took them three minutes to pry Stain off Kelly.
First thing I did after my smash finish at St. Haggith’s 18th was to find a red phone booth and Touch-Tone my life right again.
As usual I couldn’t get Dannie, so I tried Ponky, collect. Hoover answered and accepted the charges. What did he care?
“Hoov, it’s Ray. Is my wife there?”
“No. Cementhead’s here. Are you fluent in Cement?”
“Hoov, this is life-or-death: You’ve got to get a message to Dannie. Tell her I qualified.”
“You, uh, you did?” Hoover said, a little oddly I thought.
“Yeah! I qualified! Tell the Chops, too. Tell Froghair I’m buying Ponky.”
“Oh, uh, sure, I’ll get right on that.”
“But the most important thing is, you’ve got to tell my wife that nobody means anything to me except her. Okay? You’ve got to tell her: Tell her: okay? Not Maddy. Not Kelly. Nobody. Tell her I’ve just made us a bunch of money and I’m going to keep working hard. I want to support her and Charlie forever. Tell her all of it, okay, Hoov?”
“Uh, Stick?”
That sounded ominous.
“What?”
“There’s something you should know.”
“What?”
“I just drove by your house this morning. There was a U-Haul in front.”
“Funny, Hoov.”
“No, Stick, this is true. One of those U-Haul trucks people rent. Kind of medium-sized.”
That stuck in my gut like a hot fondue fork.
“God-DAMMIT!” I said, slamming the phone on the change slot.
I took a deep breath.
“Hoov?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m coming back there. Today. Find Dannie and tell her I’m coming back on the next flight and not to do anything until I get back.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“Okay.”
“And Stick?”
“What?”
“Congrats. On qualifying. Way to go.”
He sounded almost regretful about it.
“Thanks, I think.”
I hung up and sprinted back to the course to find Dez, who was lying down, his head resting against his bag, looking blankly at the sky, possibly thinking jump, hose, or rope?
I ran up to him and said, “You got plans for next week?”
He laughed bitterly. “Oh, most certainly. I’m addressing Parliament all week.”
“Too bad. I thought you might want to play in the Open.”
“Sure, love to, cracking good,” he said. “The West Linksbury Open or the Upper Slaughter Open?”
“The British Open. In my place.”
He looked at me like I had a third eye.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m withdrawing. I’ve got to get back to the States and save my marriage. I never wanted to play anyway. I just wanted to prove I could qualify.”
“You’re mad! You can’t pass up a chance like this!”
“I can and I am,” I said. “I don’t want to play competitive golf. I hate competitive golf. I just want to go home and play for fun. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. All this shit has been everybody else’s dream for me, not my dream. My dream is to write and laugh and be with my wife and my kid and have a few beers and get laid now and again. And if I don’t get back right now, I’ll never be able to do that again. So take my place, please?”
“Well, I suppose if you’re not going to win it, I might as well inherit the task,” he said.
“Great. Beautiful. Go win the thing and take the trophy and the medal and Tiger’s nanny and everything, cool?”
“Cool,” he said, and he held out his hand. “Mate, thank you so much. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, anything, you just let me know, anytime, ever.”
“Okay, how about right now?” I said. “I need you to follow me and Bob to the airport and buy my plane ticket home. My Visa’s toast. I’ll pay you as soon as I get home.”
“Let’s be off then!” he said, grinning madly.
When I found them, Sponge and Blind Bob were jawing with some blue blazer about something or other.
“Bob, we gotta go, right now,” I said. I turned to my caddy. “Sponge, I love you, man. You changed my life.”
“Save your fookin’ speech for Sain’ Androos,” he said, “afta you’ve won.”
“I’m not going, Sponge. I gotta get home and win something better—my wife and kid back.”
Sponge was dumbstruck, no small feat for a guy like him.
“Fook your marriage!” he said. “I’ll ge’ ya laid a dozen times in Sain’ Androos. You canny pass up the Open! You cou’ make stoopid money thair!”
“Sorry, buddy,” I said, hugging the big beanpole around his chestbone. “You’re the best. You saved my ass. I can never repay you, but I’ll send you that $3,000 as soon as I land.”
“For fook’s sakes!” he wailed.
When we got to the Edinburgh airport, Dez bought Bob and me a ticket to Gatwick, and then a ticket for us from Gatwick to Boston. Good lad.
We still had a half hour to kill at the gate when I heard over the loudspeaker, “Paging, Mr. Hart. Paging, Mr. Raymond Hart.”
It was Maddy.
“Stick?” she said.
“Miss Earhart?”
“I just wanted to thank you for what you did for Dez and me.”
“Hell, I was going home anyway. He was the one who played himself into the right spot.”
“No, you know what you did. And I just want to thank you so much.”
“Ahh.”
“And I want to thank you for last night, too.”
“Thank me?”
“Yeah, for keeping me from doing something stupid. It’s just that, you were right. I know I love Dez and I know we can work this out. So thanks, I owe you one.”
“Did you say ‘doing something stupid’ or ‘doing someone stupid’?”
“Either way.”
Bob whacked me on the shin with his cane.
“We gotta either go now,” he said. “Or find that kid from Cambridge again.”
I rubbed my leg.
“Maddy, I gotta go, but can I tell you something?”
“What?”
“It killed me to stop last night.”
“Yeah. But you were right to. Besides, you were always against those.”
“What?”
“Mulligans.”