I’m Tom Teagle. This is Shitwad.
Shitwad’s real name is Freddie. He’s my little brother, little murderer. Thirty-one birds, nine raccoons, a turtle, two tom turkeys: he’s the golden boy with a twenty-two. He’ll shoot anything, season in or season out. We’ve both got licenses but who the hell checks: nobody. Shitwad has nothing against the animals he kills. So he insists. Except the birds. He hates them. I hate them. Dirty taunters, peckerheads, they give you fancy dreams of flight. But not Shitwad. He’s trigger happy. He’d probably shoot me if I wasn’t always behind him, whispering Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu.
Squirrels, birds, turtles, snakes, a brown bear eight-feet tall. The story was one Great Uncle Lucky Jim had told us: the bear screwed trees. It would latch onto a trunk and drive its hips in and out, bringing down slow cascades of leaves all over its fur while it did its fucking. And the bear, our uncle told us, would bang us like border-town whores if it ever found us in the woods. Great Uncle Lucky Jim—my grandfather’s youngest brother—is dead now. He smoked, he drank, he died of anger when his wife died first: cancer, slow and irresistible. He had a lot of land; our family was his only heir. If the bear was on the land, we inherited it too. But we’ve never seen the bear. We aim instead at everything else.
Jim left my parents the huge plot of land, it was over on Turkey Knob, nearly one hundred acres worth, with trees so thick it took a few seconds to walk a circle around them. Mom and Dad talked it over, I suppose it kept them up a night or two after the reading of the will, oh dear, oh honey, oh gosh—and sold the plot to a developer. His name was Carl something, and Carl had a dream, not a bird dream, but a land dream: he wanted to put in a golf course. His talk then filled my parents’ heads with fantasies, images of traveler’s checks and yellow highlighted miles running like piss rivers across Rand McNally maps. “Wouldn’t it be nice to see the country?” Mom would say. And Dad: “Wouldn’t it be a hoot to see the world?”
A hoot: they were due for a hoot. They put the money aside so that they could retire early, buy a top-of-the-line motor home, and cruise across country, taking snapshots of each other in front of tourist traps, cacti, casinos, men in mouse suits.
But Shitwad and I knew they’d never do it. People reach a certain age beyond which they don’t have the gonads to follow through on their dreams; there are issues of comfort at stake. What if they don’t have Lebanon bologna, what if they don’t carry our brand of pretzels?
The golf folks paraded in, the bulldozers bulldozed, the soil was chemically enhanced, six kinds of grass planted. They put in traps—hazards—sand, and water, a little pond with a concrete base. The project took two years. There was a pro shop, which we called the porn shop, and a pro, who we called Doctor Dickface. The town began to shimmer with chrome, graphite shafts, dentures, jewels. Sometimes first-timers got lost and had to ask for directions. Once somebody asked Shitwad. “What y’ins do is,” he explained, “you get back on the highway, it saves time, and take it south for about eight miles. When you see the first exit, take it, then U-turn at the light and pull into the lot on your right.”
They drove away, waving, congratulating themselves for successfully pulling off a run-in with the locals. We laughed. Shitwad had directed them to a strip bar named Grady’s. We’d never been there. We wouldn’t be old enough for another year or two.
Fair enough: the new golf course brought jobs. The money was circulated, it trickled down, people wrote unbelievable checks, kids caddied, me and Shitwad got hired as landscapers. We manicured the fairways, the greens, the lawns outside the clubhouse and parking lot, we bought expensive sunglasses, we stopped wearing shirts. We lied in our interviews, said we had operated riding mowers, big green ones that look like dinosaurs.
“The mowers are dangerous,” the head groundskeeper told us. It seemed less a warning than a challenge. Shitwad wasn’t scared. I was scared. I didn’t tell him. Still, he knew. Still, he didn’t say anything. He put himself in charge of mowing the trickier areas, the steep graded slopes beside the parking lot. I lazed atop my mower along the endless fairways, cotton in my ears, a half gallon of iced tea between my legs, and came home smelling like fuel and six kinds of grass.
It was a hot good long summer of baked potatoes, stolen bases, fireworks, graffiti under the bridge. Me and Shitwad would find lost golf balls in the woods off the fairways and sell them for a quarter apiece to the pro shop. We were almost nineteen, almost twenty that year, cutting grass, switching sprinklers on and off, looking for lost balls. We got tans. Our paychecks went right into our parents’ bank account; they’d loaned us money to buy a truck, and we were on their insurance, which was high—we’d totaled two cars. But me and Shitwad promised ourselves that all the money we made selling golf balls would go toward getting the stripper.
The stripper was for our birthdays, which were only four days apart. Her name was Izelda. For fifty bucks she’d give us the full treatment. She worked at Grady’s.
Grady’s, she said, had a whole new clientele now, and they tipped big, twenties and fifties.
As much as Shitwad and me hated all the golfers, we would have liked to see Great Uncle Lucky Jim out there with them, let them stare at his prosthetic leg, his glass eye, the purple, golf-ball-sized lump on the back of his neck. We’d dare them to shake his hand, it was a gentleman’s grip, it was unconditional. When he died he was eighty-nine years old, which is a good run for a man, a good run for a woman, maybe too long, it depends on so many things, things we don’t know about yet.
He used to say he lost his leg in the Revolutionary War, his eye in the Civil War, and his virginity in World War One, but the fact was that he’d lost all those things before the age of fifteen. He lost his leg at the railroad shops, lost his eye in a bar fight. We don’t know the details about how he lost his virginity. In sick moments, in troubled moments, we wondered if he ever fucked his wife—Aunt Lucy—during the slow process of her demise. Sex: we needed to know. Sex: we could only imagine. We knew our parents had sex, sometimes we heard them, Mom going, Oh Frank, so quiet we had to hold our breath to hear. We were grateful. They’d made us, after all, Shitwad and me existed thanks to our parents’ doing it, and Grandpa and Grandma doing it, and on and on and on, our generations went back to countries with castles, Germany, Lithuania, Italy. We wondered where the next generation would end up, if ever it came to exist: Shitwad and me were virgins; between us we’d had just a few dry fucks. And two hand jobs—one for each of us, they occurred simultaneously. Girls would only go so far with me and my brother. We didn’t know why. Maybe because they could rarely get one of us alone.
We called the puppy Bugs, we brought him to work with us, taught him to look for balls. He started strutting around the course, snatching balls from holes, from tees, he’d stick his snout into people’s golf bags and come to us, tail wagging, with three balls in his mouth. He got bigger, he got better at finding balls, with the larger mouth he could carry more. Once he came to us with seven of them, and Doctor Dickface in the Porn Shop told us that Bugs would have to stay home. We lied, we said the dog wasn’t really ours. It seemed true enough: at the end of the day we couldn’t get him to come with us. We’d call and call for him, we’d hear him bark, but he wouldn’t come.
We were in the woods that border the sixth fairway and came across a golfer picking around in the leaves with a six-iron. He looked at Shitwad’s oily-brimmed ball cap, my jeans with the holes in both knees. We were filthy, we smelled like oil. The old man looked at us like we were grave diggers come to take his measurements.
“You looking for a titty list?” Shitwad asked him.
The guy said, “Titty list?”
“What kind of balls do you use? I think I found yours,” my brother said. He threw the old guy a ball we’d just picked up. It was an underhand toss, a horseshoe pitch—the old guy let it hit him square in the chest, which started him coughing and hacking.
We gave him a minute to get through it. Finally he leaned down to pick up the ball.
“Well,” he said, “this is a Titleist. It’s pronounced Title-ist.” Then he tossed the ball back to Shitwad. It dropped six feet in front of him. “Sorry.”
Shitwad walked up to the ball and picked it up. “Not yours?” he asked. “What kind do you hit?”
“I use Titleists,” the old guy said, “but that one’s not mine. Mine are monogrammed, they say TNT on them.”
“Wow,” Shitwad said. “Super.” He looked at me. I was biting my sunburnt lips trying not to laugh: we’d found about six TNT balls the weekend before. This guy was top-notch, king of hooks, slices, or maybe his clubs were fucked up: we found one of his balls at least a hundred yards into the woods when we were taking a shortcut home.
“Good luck,” I said to TNT.
“Same to you,” he said. “Let me know if you find any titty lists.”
“Try Grady’s,” Shitwad told him. We gave him directions. He put his glasses on, wrote the directions on his scorecard, then read them back to us.
We were able to steal the first golf cart easily. Actually we didn’t really steal it; we borrowed it and brought it back.
The next time we drove it all the way to Muleshoe Bridge and threw it over the rail into the back of an empty railcar. It bounced around, clinking and rumbling like a sneaker in a washing machine.
We peed in the eighteenth hole, long white beer pees, we made fires at night on the fairways, cooked hot dogs and marshmallows, made mountain pies. We heard Bugs barking, we knew it was him, we knew he wouldn’t come home, even with the temptation of food.
There were complaints of vandalism, of theft, of an abominable disregard for the facility, and me and Shitwad got a lot of overtime pay to clean up the messes we had made. Management hired a nighttime security guard. His name was Joey Peete. He liked to party with us. He was about thirty-five, thirty-eight, extremely intelligent, he had a GRE study guide with him all the time. It was his idea to steal another golf cart. We helped him. We loaded it into the back of his pickup. He took the cart home and drove it around inside his house. He had double doors out back and no furniture except a mattress and seven folding chairs. It was a huge four bedroom place. Joey got fired after two weeks. But he still came out to the fairways at night to drink with us.
Handsome, clumsy, determined TNT: we found his golf balls everywhere. My little cousin Kayla caddied for him once and he gave her thirty bucks just for the front nine. She told us what he told her, that he was a retired pilot, he had fourteen grandchildren but had seen only three of them, he liked girls for caddies because he thought women had a better instinct for curvatures, for arcs and hooks and parabolas, whereas men, he said, could only think about the hole.
Our parents had a great interest in trinkets. The house was full of ashtrays and shot glasses and key rings and plastic visors from all over: gifts from friends and relatives who had taken trips. Dad managed McTigue’s Grocery; Mom ran the delicatessen there. She wore a green smock at work. It had two little pockets in front and when she came home the pockets would be filled with shreds of meat and cheese chunks, shrapnel from the slicers. Sometimes she’d swipe some headcheese for Dad. It’s a loaf of meat scraps held together by vinegary gel. “Look what I found in the parking lot of the store,” she said once. She held out a Titleist golf ball with the initials TNT on it.
Technically, Shitwad and I still lived at home. We shared a room that Dad had built for us over the garage. We had our own entrance and could come and go as we pleased. Sometimes we went for days without seeing our parents. We had an older sister, Lisa, who had moved to Pittsburgh and then never wrote. We hadn’t heard much from her in three years, except on the occasions when Mom would call and catch her at home, and Lisa would seem so surprised that she would ask if she could call back in a few minutes. Mom would put the receiver down and wait, minutes, an hour, two hours. Then she’d call back and leave a message on Lisa’s machine.
Pittsburgh: we’d been there for Pirates’ games. It’s a city of dark air and dark rivers, underpasses, bridges, tunnels. The houses lean forward over cliffs, casting shadows on the gritty avenues. The factory buildings rise like tired mourners. Downtown the glass reflects the sun and the rest of the city. It’s Iron City. They have their own beer, they have the Steelers, the Penguins, the Pirates. They have Lisa. We miss her.
Gettysburg, the Liberty Bell, Amish Country, the Zippo Factory in Bradford, Hollidaysburg (birthplace of the Slinky), Indian Caverns, Nittany Caverns, our parents have taken us to the sights. We’ve met the Amish, petted their horses, we’ve been to Hershey Park, the Johnstown Flood Museum. A guy from Lancaster told us the Amish, at night, plow their fields with gas-powered tractors, that they wear Air Jordans, that they have electric lights in their homes, record players, karaoke machines, mirror balls.
We were out hunting for golf balls; our birthdays were in September, the course would be getting ready to close by then, and we still needed about ten dollars worth of balls in order to pay the stripper.
In the woods we found beer cans, newspapers, scorecards, empty cigarette packs. The golfers were dumping their junk at the edges of the fairways. It pissed us off, but we didn’t pick anything up.
We came upon a pile of bear shit, huge and pulpy, and we could see, buried partially inside, a golf ball, like an egg in some sloppy overturned nest. I found a tree branch, used it to pick the ball out of the pile.
It was a TNT ball. The bear: the bear had eaten it, and the ball had passed through its system almost unharmed. It was about to become magical, that golf ball with two distinct tooth marks among the thousand girlish dimples. We imagined the ball going down the bear’s throat, traveling all those feet from the stomach through the intestines and then finally, perhaps with a confused grunt, the bear must have hammered it out like a stone. Ouch. I rubbed it on some leaves, cleaning the shit off, and put it in my pocket.
“Think that was the tree humping bear?” Shitwad asked me.
Twigs snapped. The weight that broke them seemed immense. We ran back to the pro shop. On our way there we saw Bugs on the eighteenth green, his leg raised nonchalantly, peeing into the cup. We called for him, he lowered his head and ran.
After Joey Peete got fired from the golf course he got another job as night security for the Muleshoe Bridge Railroad Museum. He’d let us in for free and we’d creep through the cars, with streaks of moonlight spreading like swords through the windows. The cars had not been well restored, not restored at all, and the cracks in the seats and the stains everywhere betrayed the one thing the historians should have been trying to conceal, that the trains, the emblems of our heritage, were deteriorating shit boxes, and had been left here to rot because it would be impossible to do anything with them but let them rot.
We took more stuff to the bridge and threw it down into the open flatcar we’d dumped the golf cart in. Two bicycles we’d stolen from around the neighborhood, a sofa, about ninety beer bottles, and a stack of porno magazines our neighbor had left outside late at night for the garbagemen to pick up. They were filled with grotesque, out-of-focus images of people doing things to themselves and each other with bottles, candles, belts, and gags. Our neighbor’s name was Larry Prichard. He had a daughter named Belinda that Shitwad and me had always loved. She used to give us her desserts from lunch and let us copy her tests. She worked at a frame shop and still lived at home with her parents. The night we found her old man’s porno magazines we threw a dozen eggs at their house. We went into their carport and stole three lawn chairs and a set of jumper cables. We were angry that her father had had those magazines and it was the only way to keep from getting depressed. We threw that stuff into the railcar, all of it.
Still, we were depressed.
Shitwad and I sometimes pass for twins. We have the same tubby build, the same inconsistencies in our smiles, the same eyes, green like the artificial turf on the driving range. But our talents are different. Shitwad’s a dead-eye and a good singer but he can’t spell at all. I can spell but can’t shoot. I lack concentration. I can dance a little too, but I never do, except break dancing, once in a while, to make Shitwad laugh so hard he has to stop singing. Shitwad and me would fight over small things, like laundry, radio stations, but we were good brothers, close in a way that I think is more natural for sisters. And we always thought that any girl that was with one of us would actually have to be in love with both of us.
We fought about the golf ball I’d found in the bear shit. I didn’t want to sell it back to the pro shop. “A quarter’s a quarter,” Shitwad said, and I said, “Exactly.” I took a quarter out of my pocket and threw it at him. We started wrestling, right there on the fairway, the fourth hole. I pushed Shitwad into a sand trap and kicked sand in his face. I called him a dirty pissant little assfuck, I told him he was a tampon-sniffing faggot and a bucket of fag diarrhea. I really let him have it. Not only was I good at spelling, but I was better with insults. The best Shitwad could do was call me a turd.
“You’re such a fucking turd,” he said.
I started bawling him out and then a golf ball hit me on the back of the neck and I fell into the sand trap with Shitwad. Now he was laughing like a maniac, and so was I.
Izelda was going out of town at the end of August. With all the money she’d been earning in tips she was able to plan a vacation to Disney World. But Shitwad and I had saved only twenty-five dollars by the end of July. “If you want me,” she said, “it’ll have to be in the next few weeks.”
We thought about borrowing a little money from our parents. We hated to ask. But then they had all that cash: we didn’t even know how much. What the hell, we thought: just don’t tell them what it’s for. We waited for them to come home.
That evening they parked a motor home in the driveway.
We went down from our garage apartment and Dad gave us the tour. “I’m just test-driving it,” he said. “Lloyd down at the lot said we could have it for the afternoon. What do you think? We’re going to see Montana, boys. We’re going to see Tennessee.”
I thought “we” meant he and Mom; Shitwad thought it meant all four of us. We fought about it. I called him a leaky dick licker; he liked shoehorns up his ass, I told him, he drank from clogged toilets.
“If they mean that we can go with them,” he said, “I’m going to go. I’m sick of this shit.”
Before sunset, which came sooner and sooner, we took Shitwad’s twenty-two into the woods. It was my idea. I wanted to show him why he should never leave. We hiked up a hill, walking along a path bordered with mountain laurels. We came to the top of a ridge where an abandoned cornfield lay in swirls like the top of a frosted cake. The bottom edge of the sun sunk behind the faraway hills, the treed and familiar slopes and ridges.
“This isn’t the center of the world, “ he said. “You know it isn’t.”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“What is the point, then?”
Then we saw the bear. It was on the other side of the field, upright, hugging a maple tree, humping it. The tree’s leaves shook, the last evening sunlight flashed on their white undersides. It was a young tree, its trunk we guessed no thicker than one of our legs, and the bear was fucking it silly. Shitwad raised his rifle.
“No,” I said. “Best you can do is piss him off with that thing.”
I gave the magic golf ball to TNT. He was about to tee off at the fourteenth hole, which was a par three, around a hundred-seventy yards. The ball had passed through a bear’s intestines, I told him. The ball had been in the humping bear.
TNT took the ball, put it on the tee, and said to himself Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu. He backswung, came down, that savory pucking sound, perfect follow through, the ball towered into the white sun. I shielded my eyes and watched it hover, descend, touch down just short of the green, bounce, roll, roll, roll.
It rolled into the cup: a hole-in-one. “Imagine that,” TNT said, looking at the club face. “Imagine that.” I rode with him in the cart. He hooted all the way to the green. When he got there he reached into the cup, got the ball, and handed it back to me.
“You keep it,” I said. “It’s yours.”
TNT put the ball on the tee at fifteen, pulled out his three wood, he swung, shanked the ball off the fairway. “Shit,” he said, “there goes our souvenir.” He looked longingly into the dark woods; it was as if he’d shanked his own firstborn deep into the trees.
“You forgot to say it this time,” I said. “That thing you always repeat. What is it?”
“I did forget. It’s meditative. You repeat a word and visualize exactly what you want to happen.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He smiled: “I learned it from Doctor Dickface.” Then he went into the forest to look for the ball.
I stole some balls from his bag then and sold them at the pro shop. With that money and a few bucks in tips I lifted from the bar in the clubhouse, we had enough money for the stripper.
Weekday evenings, things were slower, the grass grew slow, we decided to borrow some equipment and play a few holes. I went first. I was older. I wanted to show Shitwad how it was done, what one could learn from the power of visualization. I saw it in my head, the perfect swing, the perfect summer, the perfect pair of breasts. I swung and hit the ball into the trees, then trickled the next one into the water hazard down the hill from where we were. I threw the club onto the fairway.
Shitwad’s turn. He put the ball on the tee, spit on it, and swung: trees, trees, trees, until finally we had only one ball left.
He was pissed off, we both were pissed off. He reared back this time and swung so hard that he lost his balance, fell, and rolled down the hill. He tried to jump up and see the ball before it landed, got the club caught in his legs, and fell again: into the water.
“Jesus,” I said, when he ran back up the hill. “You hit the shit out of it.”
“Where did it land?”
“I lost it in the sun,” I answered. “Let’s go find it.”
I let him look. We went all over the fairway, even up to the green. He ran straight to the cup. It was empty. He checked it three times.
We went back to get the clubs. “The ball’s right there,” I said, pointing to the tee. “You missed it completely, douche bag.”
I fell down laughing. He threw the clubs into the pond.
Izelda brought a guy with her to me and Shitwad’s place. “My manager,” she explained, and we gave him the money. He looked familiar. It was one of the Mueller boys. We guessed he was some kind of bodyguard. We were disappointed; Izelda didn’t trust us even though we’d gone to school with two of her cousins.
She brought a portable radio with her and put on some disco remix music. Her hair was long and red and filled the room with the smell of green apples, with the intoxicating smell of hope, flesh. Shitwad and I were sitting side by side on the couch. The manager stood with his arms crossed by the door. I wondered if he was also her boyfriend.
There wasn’t much of a striptease because she hadn’t been wearing much to begin with, a half T-shirt and satin shorts and high heeled shoes, which she kept on once the shirt and shorts had been flung into our laps. She raised her arms and turned and circled; she leaned forward and put her breasts near our faces. Every time she looked at her manager he smiled. She put one leg up on the windowsill, gyrated and pumped. And then she looked at her watch: I saw her. She was bored. We were all bored. It was the most boring experience I’d had in a while. Shitwad was bored too. He picked up the sports page and started reading it. I turned on the TV. Then Izelda got pissed off, grabbed her stuff, and left. Her manager told us we were buttholes.
That night Shitwad and I stole whatever we could find and threw it off the bridge into the railcar. Two skateboards, a full toolbox, cans of paint. We lived in a trusting town. We walked into open garages, into sheds, into carports and screened-in back porches, and took whatever we could get. Potted plants, a dog collar, an electrical switch plate, six tires. We stole clothes from backyard lines. We threw it all over the bridge.
An upstairs light came on as we were carrying a granite birdbath from our pervert neighbor’s backyard. We saw his daughter’s face in the window. She ran her hand through her hair and waved. As she was standing at the window, with one hand in her hair and one pressed against the glass, the light went out. Shitwad and I lifted the birdbath again and put it in our truck. We drove out to the bridge once more. We had the windows down. My hands were wet on the steering wheel. My armpits were dripping down my sides, my T-shirt was stuck to my back. I guessed it must have been the hottest summer night we’d had in a while, but I’d only just then noticed it.
We pulled the birdbath out of the truck bed, hoisted it up the ledge of the bridge, and let it drop. It crashed and cracked into two pieces; the noise echoed against the railcar walls, between the hills, back and forth.
What we were angry about: everything. Me and Shitwad loved life, as if it were possible not to, but in fact, few people did. Our parents were busybodies, the neighbors were freaks and perverts, the only truly good and healthy people in town were people like my brother, and people like Joey Peete, who did whatever he could to make people feel welcome when their world somehow, if only for a moment, overlapped with his. That guy TNT was alright too. Great Uncle Lucky Jim was the best person we’d ever met. The neighbor girl: all night long we’d not been saying that we loved her, though both of us did, both of us always would. And that light had gone mysteriously off. The old man. That’s what we thought. So big deal: we stole his birdbath.
I was on the back nine, running hose for the sprinklers on the fairways. Barry, a locker-room attendant in the clubhouse, ran over to me. He looked scared. We hadn’t seen the bear in weeks.
“It’s Freddie,” he said.
“Not the fucking bear.”
“No. His mower. Hurry.”
Shitwad’s riding mower had tipped, Barry told me, he was trapped under it. They needed two or three guys to lift it off. I ran with Barry to the grassy hill on the west side of the parking lot. There was a golfer leaning down near Shitwad, talking to him. The mower was a medium-size one with no cage, no roll bar.
It was heavier than it looked, or maybe I was not as strong as I thought I was, not as strong as I thought I’d be in that situation. You see these TV shows about disasters, adrenaline, babies lifting fucking Steinways off their mothers. Not me. I couldn’t do it. Freddie was saying it didn’t hurt, he was just stuck, I didn’t know whether to believe him. He wanted us to hurry.
A few more guys came to help. We counted three and got it tipped up some.
“Move,” I yelled to Shitwad.
“Christ,” he said. “Don’t put it down. I’m fucking stuck.”
His face was wet and cut grass was stuck all over it. I looked around the parking lot; we needed one more man to drag Shitwad out while the four of us held the mower up. There was nobody else around. My hands were sweaty. I took a deep breath, moved one hand away from my grip on the seat, and reached under the mower, grabbing blindly for Shitwad’s leg. My arm brushed the blade. It was hot. The mower was slipping. I got a grip on the cuff of his jeans and ripped it free. He moved his leg. I lost my grip on the seat, the mower fell, clearing Shitwad’s leg by an inch, maybe two, maybe half, I couldn’t see with all the sweat pouring into my eyes.
He stood up. He looked at his legs. He tested them out. There was a damp spot on his jeans, he’d pissed his pants. “Shake it off,” I said. It’s what our dad had said to us when as kids we’d fallen or tripped and had been more embarrassed than injured. “Shake it off,” he’d say when he knew we were about to cry. I said it again to Shitwad. “You okay?” I asked him.
“No,” he said.
I told him: “You’re fine.”
He eyes welled up. He was pissed off at himself for having been so scared.
“Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. The other men turned, walked away, turned back to look again. Shitwad took off one of his shoes and threw it at them. “What the fuck are you looking at?” he screamed. His face was red. He took off his other shoe, his pants, his underwear, and walked totally naked into the clubhouse, the locker room. I stripped too, I followed him in. Our butts were white as marshmallows.
You could follow a path to a creek from the sixth fairway. That night Shitwad and I stole the riding mower and drove it along that path and dumped it in the water. It was too heavy to throw off the bridge.
The next morning when we went to work there were two cop cars and a game-warden’s truck parked in the lot at the golf course.
We headed toward the back of the pro shop, where our equipment was in a shed. It was six A.M. and we hadn’t slept much. We yawned, we were casual, we pretended not even to notice the missing mower.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the park ranger was saying, “I’ve seen it happen.”
“Seen what happen?” Shitwad asked.
“The bear,” he said. “It got a hold of somebody, ripped the old fart to shreds.”
They were talking about TNT; the day before the bear had mauled him, killed him, the body had just been found. The golf course was closed for the day; even me and Shitwad were told to go home.
“One more thing,” the game warden added, “Y’ins guys have permission to shoot that bear.”
“We’re putting money on its head,” Doctor Dickface said. “It’s going to scare people away. We’ll pay whoever kills it a thousand bucks.”
We went home, watched TV, thought about the old man and all that money.
Our neighbor Belinda. The summer was mostly about her. Her hair was brown and thick, her eyes were a damp gray, almost like silver, like mercury. I’d kissed her once at a baseball game. We were sitting next to each other watching Shitwad bat. I’d been kicked off the team for skipping practice. It was spring. We were playing Bootjack, Windfall High’s greatest rival. Shitwad stepped up to the plate, spit right on it, and hit the first pitch over the left-field fence, winning the game. We watched him go around the bases, confident but not taunting, and when he reached home plate he stood on it and looked straight up at the sky.
The fans were still on their feet, all of us were, then Belinda put her hand on my shoulder, sat me down with her, and we kissed for ten seconds, twenty maybe. We kissed while the crowd all around us was standing and hooting and waving their arms. I looked into her silver eyes. Then we stood up and started clapping again, louder than anybody else. It was the first game we’d won all season.
Shitwad kissed Belinda about half a year after I did. Our parents signed us up for an SAT prep course on a Saturday morning, and we were surprised to see Belinda there too. Shitwad and I slept through the class, but Belinda took notes, she answered questions. She wanted to go to college. Shitwad and I never took the test. After that Saturday prep course, she was so keyed up on taking the test and going away to school that when Shitwad asked if he could kiss her just once, a good luck kiss, she said yes.
One morning near the end of that summer we saw a police car in front of Belinda’s house. Her father was escorted out later, with a jacket draped over his cuffed wrists.
Belinda had great brown moles all over the undersides of her forearms. She smoked menthol cigarettes and when she kissed you it was like a green milk shake.
“Did y’ins guys steal my mom’s birdbath?” she asked when we went over to her place that night.
Shitwad laughed. “You want to know where it is?”
We drove, with Belinda sitting between us in the front seat. It was about ten P.M. We parked and walked over to the edge of the bridge. Up ahead we could see some lights in one of the old rail shops. The mysterious work conducted in there was done irregularly, it seemed, and at odd hours, sometimes late at night.
Belinda looked down. “Holy shit,” she said. “Is that a golf cart in there?”
I told her it was. I moved to put my arm around her, but saw that Shitwad already had his arm around her waist. I went back to the truck and watched them. They told secrets and kissed.
When we went home the Winnebago was in the driveway again, the dealer’s plates and stickers gone. My parents had bought it. It was ugly.
Inside they were pouring over atlases, travel guides, books filled with tourist coupons.
“You boys can come,” Dad told us.
“Cool,” Shitwad said.
I smacked him. “What about Belinda?” I asked.
“She was accepted at Penn State,” he said. “She’s leaving.”
“Leaving,” I said.
The bear killed TNT; Shitwad’s going to kill the bear.
Mom and Dad are gone. Shitwad’s promised to stay until we get the bear, eat it, put its head on the wall, make coats from its hide. Then he’ll join my parents, they said they’d fly both of us to wherever they were. But I don’t want to go. It’s not that I’m scared, or that I think Windfall is the best place in the world. I have this feeling that something important is going to happen to me here, something that can’t happen anywhere else.
Mom and Dad phoned us once from Pittsburgh, our sister wasn’t at the address she’d given them, there was no way to reach her. My mother said with some concern, “A black man came to the door when we knocked.” They called the cops, filed a report, both of them probably fearing that she’s at the bottom of one of Pittsburgh’s rivers—they have three of them. They also have Lebanon bologna, thank God, and Benzel’s pretzels, and headcheese, and Yeungling beer.
Shitwad and I have the house to ourselves, the golf course is closed for the season, and we’re working at McTigue’s, stocking shelves from midnight to seven. Shitwad’s anxious to go meet up with Mom and Dad. He looks for the bear every morning after work.
There he is. We see him. Pawing at a tree. Up on his hind legs now, the bear fucks without seduction.
Shitwad smiles. He’s using a shotgun now. We could use the thousand dollars, we could use a little more summer. He clicks the safety off. A breeze moves his hair so it flaps against his eyebrows. In a few months he will tell me that he’s a faggot, and that he knows faggots aren’t welcome here. Then he’ll go.
As he looks through the sights I say, “Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu, Kaahumanu.” He tells me to shut up; I visualize an imperfect shot. Miss, I say to myself. Miss.