Missing links, p.4
Missing Links, page 4
Dannie was a natural jock, but she got into golf because she loved how classy it all seemed—she always pointed out that it was the only game in which you called the penalty on yourself. She was one helluva good player, maybe good enough to try the LPGA tour, but that isn’t what she wanted. She dreamed of a job at a swank country club where the people were polite and all the neat country-club kids called her Daniella.
That might’ve been where she ended up, except she hit a speed bump about five years ago when she got a little baby by a no-good lowlife who skipped town when he heard the good news. She was so embarrassed that she moved home, had it, gave it up for adoption and practically had to start over again.
None of this soft side ever leaked out of Dannie around Ponky, though. She acted like somebody that would eat dignity’s butt with a nice baked potato and a Chianti. She was the cousin of three brothers at Ponky, as bawdy and rowdy as any of us. She could out-raunch any of us.
She used to come back from dates and we’d say, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“How was he?”
And she’d say, with a wry grin, “Let’s just say his new nickname is Hebrew National.” Or “About a thirteen on the Stimpmeter, if you boys know what I’m saying.” And you never knew if anything really happened at all.
What Dannie saw looking through the hole at the Mayflower was not what I saw, which was a lot of old men in miracle fibers and possibly Depends. She saw men of class and breeding. And she was dreaming about that life the day she saw, coming over the emerald-green hill, a man straight out of a J. Crew catalogue—crushingly handsome, all tan and teeth, curly golden hair, a 20th Century Fox chin, white linen pants, a gorgeous off-white Polo, just the right belt and a Duke of Windsor sort of walk.
“That’s him!” she whispered.
“Who?” I said.
“The guy who helped me push my car!” she said. “That’s him! Oh, God! He’s sooooo nice!”
I took a gander.
“He’s pretty,” I said. “Got his number?”
Dannie grabbed me hard around the collar until my face was sort of flush up against the hedge.
“He’s class,” she growled. “Don’t you start on him with all your smart talk.”
I said OK already and I looked at Two Down and he looked at me and we both knew something was serious here.
“He’s just purdier than a first-place belt buckle,” she said.
And then Mr. Goodgolf chipped in and some blue blood on the other side of the hedge said, “Browning Sumner, you are the luckiest son of a gun in the club!”
From then on, Dannie was enrolled at the University of Browning.
I still think everybody would have gone back to our cozy little vinyl and nitrate world if it hadn’t been for Two Down missing that putt.
Two Down was the best friend I had in the world who didn’t occasionally tie me to the bedpost and lick me like a Creamsicle.
Two Down was kind of a living Picasso painting. He had this XL schnozz that just jumped off his face like one of those kids’ pop-up books. He had one eyebrow that was mostly black and another that was mostly gray and the black one stopped halfway through and then started again, having been cleaved in half by a hockey puck when he was a twelve-year-old goalkeeper. For this reason, some guys called him Red Light.
He was the only golfer I ever knew who had a “We Accept Visa and MasterCard” tag on his bag. If gambling were suddenly to vanish from this earth, Two Down would melt into a little pile of chits and blow away in the wind.
He would bet you ten zops you couldn’t eat six Saltines a minute (you can’t). He’d bet you how many minutes it was going to take Blu Chao to make a two-minute egg (he had one the day before: nine). He’d bet whether the guy at the next table was going to go around his ear of corn in a circle or side to side (he’s a plant: circle).
He was quite sure he was going to strike it big somehow, some way, and whenever we’d drive somewhere, he’d take little detours to show us this mansion he was going to own or that mansion and always add something like “Of course, those shutters will have to go,” or “I’ll put the chopper pad on that side of the house.” He was serious. No bet, no game, no challenge ever really came off until Two Down walked in about two-thirty every day, ripped off his New England Bell uniform shirt and gave the day’s game his blessing, which was not so much a word from him as much as it was that crazy gleam in his eyes.
What’s funny is he wasn’t even much good. He was a goofy-looking 17 handicap with legs as white and skinny as OB stakes and wiry 110-volt hair that stood straight up and made him look mostly like a barbecue cleaning brush. He was about 145 pounds of bravado and schemes and vodka sodas.
The day he missed the putt, the sun had pretty much clocked out and we were playing by the porch lights on the Ponky clubhouse. Of course, nobody went in, on account of a pretty nice stack of zops still lying around in the balance on the 9th green.
What it came down to was me hoping to gag in a 7-foot birdie snake and then crossing my fingers. Because even if I did, Two Down could still make a 5-footer for a birdie to win about $160 total from me and Charlie. If he missed, he’d lose about that much, which made it about a $300 putt, which is about as big as anybody had ever putted for or ever wanted to at a dump like Ponky.
I was about to put my sweetest little brush stroke on mine when …
“You know what’s funny?” blurted out Crowbar, jammed into his cart, the steering wheel protruding five inches into his gut.
“Guys getting murdered and dumped in the Charles River for talking while a guy is putting?” I said, backing off the putt.
“No,” he said, unfazed. “It’s that everything you really needed to know about golf you learned when you were two years old!”
“Crowbar,” Charlie tried to interject.
“No, lissen,” Crowbar went on. “What people yell on the golf course is the same thing you’ve been hearing since you were a baby. You know, like ‘Sit! Run! Stop! Stop right now!’ ”
“Grow teeth!” Two Down added. “Hurry! Bite!”
“Get up!” Charlie said. “Get down!”
“Not in the sand!” Crowbar said.
“In the hole!” Dannie yelled.
“That’s a snowman!” Thud said.
Everybody was having just a wonderful time, except me.
“You finished, Professor Fulghum?”
Despite the sudden Crowbargram, my happy little putt went in like it was afraid of porch light. Now it was Two Down’s turn. This time, oddly, Crowbar stayed silent.
Two Down started giving the putt the full Tiger pace, checking the line from every possible angle, talking to his ancient Wilson putter, Arnie, the whole time. Two Down always talked to Arnie over a big putt, for they had been together eighteen years and made more money together than the Hunt brothers.
Arnie was not just a golf club. Arnie was a person. When Two Down was done with his round, he would not just leave Arnie in the bag. No, he’d take it with him, wherever he went, always saying stuff like “Get your sleep now, Arnie. We got a big match with these fish tomorrow.” It was just an old flange putter, but he put it in a long black cashmere cover with the name embroidered on it. He’d go down to Kmart and pull his other clubs out of the barrel half the time, but he treated Arnie like solid platinum.
“Why does he talk to his putter?” asked Hoover.
“I don’t know,” said Charlie. “Two Down, why do you talk to your putter?”
“Two Down, it’s an inanimate object,” Hoover said. “It is a collection of inert molecules. It is NOT real!”
“Seriously, Two Down,” Charlie offered. “You should consider tripling your therapy.”
But Two Down just continued conversing with Arnie. “Don’t listen to ’em, Arnie. They’re sick, sick people. Now, do the six-inch dunk, just like we learned in obedience school, and I’ll buy you a whole new bottle of Armor All.”
At last, Two Down settled in over the putt. He drew it back.
“Snake juice!” yelled Cementhead.
“Double snake juice!” yelled yours truly.
The well-behaved spheroid did not listen. It merely rolled true and perfect toward the cup, a sure jar if there ever was one.
Except the ball didn’t drop into the little tin hole. For this jar was a Froghair special, which is a hole he jerks out the wrong way, leaving an inch-high lip all the way around the hole, which means you have to charge your putt to get it over the first lip, but not so much that it flies over. Two Down hit a very good putt, except that it ran up the front lip and didn’t quite have enough juice to climb that small hill. Exhausted, it rolled backward toward Two Down.
“Un-fucking-believable,” said Chunkin’ Charlie.
“Oh, man. That’s one of them South American putts,” said Dannie. “One more revolution.”
“Man, that could only happen at Ponky,” I offered.
“That’s true, Two Down,” said Dannie, kicking the ball back to him. “Anywhere else that putt goes right in.”
“Seriously, Two,” said Chunk, “if you’re putting on the other side of the hedge, that putt is in the damn jar for a straight-up birdie.”
Two Down was still standing frozen as a parking meter on the green, so two of us picked him up, stiff as a board, stuck him in the cart, and Crowbar drove him back to the clubhouse.
It was Sunday night, which meant it was Cotillion Night at Ponky, which meant bringing out a bit of the old Robitussin, as Dannie liked to call it, over ice if we could get it, smoking some very bad Swisher Sweet cigars, trying to teach Blu Chao “Fuck them in the neck” and taking guesses as to exactly what position they were in on the scrambled porno channel. As to that last activity, I thought I had a pretty good guess: “It’s kind of like really good golf. It’s not fun until both people are trying to get on top.”
I stole a glance at Dannie, but she was staring a hole in her swizzle stick.
Two Down had not yet left his hard-won seat on the puke-orange Naugahyde La-Z-Boy and was, in fact, still brooding. He was not able to get over that putt, the way he’d been Donkeyed out of 300 zops, the unfairness of losing that many simoleons because he misread a volcano.
He sat there silent for at least two hours until I noticed his expression slowly start to change. I could see it in his eyebrows. The bigger the idea Two Down got, the higher his eyebrows would go. This time, they went from deeply furrowed to three-quarters of the way up his forehead in the span of about five minutes.
At about eleven-thirty, the eyebrows had reached their apex. He leaped out of the La-Z-Boy, flipped off the set, jumped up on the beat-up piano bench Froghair tried to tell us was a coffee table and called for our attention.
“This better be good,” said Charlie, who was not fond of interruptions in Cotillion Night.
“This is better than good,” said Two Down. “This is the best wager in the long and colorful history of Chopdom.”
“I’m not playing Chip or Strip,” insisted Dannie.
“No, this is ten times better. Here it is: Everybody puts up a thousand dollars. Cash. First Chop to play the Mayflower keeps it all.”
Everybody just stared at him.
“Son,” said Dannie. “Anybody ever told you you’re one sandwich short of a picnic?”
“You can’t get on the Mayflower,” I mentioned. “The Mayflower lets nobody on. I heard last year they wouldn’t let Dan Quayle on. They’re gonna let us just walk on? Hi! We’re here to play the course?”
“Signed scorecards with two witnesses,” continued Two Down.
“Fgt it,” said Thud (the Almost Human), gnawing on a microwave burrito. “We gt no fkng chance.”
“One month time limit,” Two Down continued. “The bet ends October 1. After that time, the window closes. No bank will be paid.”
“Two Down, let’s all hold hands and contact the living,” said Dannie.
Two Down quieted the crowd, holding his bony arms out full.
“Don’t you see?” said Two Down passionately. “This is the bet we’ve been waiting for our whole lives! Most of us have spent our entire golfing lives playing this patch of scorched earth we call a golf course. We deserve to play the Mayflower Club once in our lives. Just because we didn’t get to dive into the gene pool and come out with Mumsy and Dadsy and wallpaper made of zero-coupon bonds doesn’t mean we don’t deserve to play a great golf course, does it? This is really a no-lose bet. If only one of us makes it, it will be like all of us making it, won’t it? If one of us gets through the gates of that blue-nosed, blue-haired Bastille, then it will be like all of us did!”
Chunkin’ Charlie was the first to no bank. “Count me out,” he said, looking more gaunt and tired than I’d ever seen him. He picked up the remote and flipped the set back on.
“I’m ot, too,” said Thud, working on a Hostess Snowball.
“But, Thud,” said Two Down. “Think of the meal you will have in the Mayflower clubhouse afterward. My God! I understand most days there is a buffet line of succulent carved prime rib, hillocks of mashed potatoes, veritable bathtubs of brown gravy.”
“Wrte me a fkng pstcrd,” said Thud.
Cementhead said no, too.
“Great bet, Two,” said Crowbar. “Next week, let’s see who can be the first inside Biosphere 2.”
But Two Down was not to be denied. “Hoov?” said Two Down.
Hoover looked seriously at Two Down, thought a while and then said, “Golf is not a physical game. Golf is a state of mind. If your intentions are pure and your thoughts are positive and you swing from your innermost point, then it doesn’t matter where you are. You are not bound to any golf course, nor even to the land itself.”
“Jesus,” said Cementhead.
“In or out?” said Two Down.
“Out,” said Hoover.
“A man’s gotta know his limitations,” said Crowbar, with his best Clint Eastwood squint.
“Lawrence of Arabia?” asked Cementhead.
“Magnum Force.”
“Damn.”
Which left Dannie and me.
“Danielle Patricia Higgins?” said Two Down. “Carpe diem?”
For the first time in three weeks, since she’d first seen the glorious visage of Browning Sumner, there was light in Dannie’s sea-green eyes. A thousand zops was some serious scratch to a girl earning $375 a week selling handfuls of tees. On the other hand, the lure was irresistible. This was Fantasy Boy we were talking about, Barbie and Ken get married and a big wedding on the club veranda with real-crystal toasts.
Of course, there was always the chance that Two Down had something mysterious up his sleeve and would remove three weeks’ salary from her, not to mention her dreams.
She bit her fingernails. She rubbed her freckled face. She smoothed back her strawberry hair a few dozen times.
“Bank,” she said, falling backward on the couch.
The Chops oohed and whooped and bellowed and then stilled as all eyes turned to me.
“Stick?” said Two Down.
My first reaction was sinister. Nobody else knew my father was over there, and if I thought I could somehow swallow a few gallons of pride and ask him for a game, I could pick up a fast two Large. My second reaction was wanting to choke the air out of myself for having my first reaction. My third reaction was that $1,000 was exactly $318 more than I had in the bank. My fourth reaction was that if I had to punch out of one more divot after puring a 290-yard drive down nothing but the goddamn defunct watering-system line of a Ponky fairway I was going to scream. My fifth reaction was how much it chapped my butt that my father never had to. And my last reaction was to think about the day he screwed me out of my golf career, about how nice it would be to play there without his help, how it would just grind his gizzard to see me playing in front of him, bump into him in the locker room and say something like “This dump’s overrated.”
“Stick?” said Two Down.
I looked him and Dannie in the eyes, twice each. They did not blink.
“Bank,” I said.
I never dreamed how all this would affect us.
The Pit of Despair went triple ballistic.
And Blu Chao yelped, “Fuck your neck them.”
THAT NEXT MORNING, as we were going over the rules of the bet, I could already feel things starting to change.
All of a sudden three best friends were looking at each other like one of us might be wearing Khrushchev’s shoe. We were counterespionage agents now. We would be working separately, without help from the other. Come to think of it, we would probably be doing everything we could to sabotage each other’s best efforts. For three nobodies like us, $1,000 was serious jing.
It was agreed that Thud would hold the money since he was the most trustworthy Chop and also because Chunkin’ Charlie refused to.
OK, so that sounds a little strange to say about a guy like Thud, who had just done a three-month fellowship at Bridgewater State Penitentiary, but with golf, and with friends, that’s just the way he was. Thud might jack a Toot n’ Moo now and again or ransack a few nice houses out in Newton, but he’d sooner have doughnuts with cops than tamp down a spike mark. He once called a 2-stroke penalty on himself for accidentally breaking a branch as he was setting up over a chip out on No. 11, which is something most of us wouldn’t have done if Ken Venturi himself had shown it coast to coast on CBS.
How he got sent to Bridgewater was stupid anyway. It was just a simple little dry cleaners job, except that Mr. Manelli had only $29.73 in the cash register and it just disappointed Thud so much that he tied Manelli up in the back room and started working the drive-thru. He’d give people their garments very politely and sold a whole lot of Mr. Manelli’s stock right off the rack. “Hey, you look like about a 41 Long. Tell you what. Here’s an Armani, gorgeous, $75.” All that worked very nicely until he refused to give some lady change from her $100. She didn’t think Thud’s service was so wonderful that it deserved that big a tip and mentioned it to the police two blocks down. End of clearance sale.
