Drive Like Hell: A Novel Page 9

  “You don’t think we—”

  Nick swatted the air with his cigarette. “Don’t even say it.”

  “But that was a makeable putt he missed on seventeen. Even Pat Summerall said it.”

  “Pat Summerall was a fucking football player. Hell, he doesn’t know golf. Those greens down there are like fucking ice. Jack gave it a good ride, man. He’s just getting older, is all.”

  We sat there for a moment in the silence.

  “Well, at least I didn’t run him over with the van.”

  Nick gave a sharp, affirmative nod. “There you go. That’s looking at the bright side. You can’t let one little scrape with the law make you think everything’s your fault.”

  He stood up, walked back to the bedroom, and fetched his golf bag. He set it down on the living room floor and started rummaging through the zippered pockets, taking inventory of the company warehouse. Weed. Cash. Golf balls. Shoes. Costa Rican cigars in case of a hole in one. And a brand-new Daisy .22 air pistol to replace the old shooting wedge I’d stolen.

  “You did what you had to do,” Nick said. “Took those two assholes at the hotel out of play, got me and Bev out of a situation, and then swooped in to make sure Carlton was all right. If you ask me, it takes a real man to pull off that kind of shit.”

  I caught myself staring at the blank TV screen. I was wondering if watching a blank screen was worse than watching a test pattern. And then I had an actual thought.

  “A real man eats pussy and drives a stick shift.”

  Nick burst out laughing. He was holding his head, groaning and laughing. “I know where you heard that one. I know exactly where you got that pearl. Lyndell Fulmer, the king of wisdom.”

  “Did he tell you the same thing?”

  “No, but I used to hear him say it to his buddies down at the garage.”

  I settled back on the scratchy sofa and stretched out my legs. It had already become my favorite spot in the house, my private little cove—good sunlight from the window, perfect angle on the TV, telephone within reach, TV tray nearby for snacks and drinks. It was where I slept at night, too, always with the TV flickering, sometimes with Dewey sitting in the recliner, strumming his acoustic, or Nick and Bev going at it, one way or another, back in his bedroom. I’d drift off smelling the sweet aroma of beer and tobacco in the cushions.

  Nick asked if Claudia had told me about Lyndell’s unexpected rise to respectability.

  “Yeah, she told me. I think it shook her up.”

  Nick was squatting on the floor, rolling up bags of pot and sliding them into a pocket of his golf bag. “What do you think?”

  “No offense to Claudia, or anything, but I’m glad it all turned out okay for him. I just can’t imagine Lyndell being sober and going to work every day.”

  Nick smiled. “It’s a helluva thing to try to picture.”

  He zipped up the warehouse, and then he asked if Lyndell had ever told me any C.W. stories.

  “Oh, yeah. I think I’ve heard them all.”

  Nick whistled. “He used to tell a story, that’s for sure. If he talked for longer than thirty seconds, you knew it was bullshit.”

  He narrowed his eyes and looked to the front door as though someone were standing there. “I bet that’s probably the best thing about being a father, though. You don’t have to be perfect, or even be around all that much, to make a big impression.”

  The afternoon light shone through the window, pale and tired. Its angle changed just a little, and I suddenly caught my reflection in the TV screen. I was merely an outline of a person.

  “Are you and Bev ever gonna have kids?”

  Nick laughed a little. “I doubt it. Hell, I think Bev doubles the dosage on her birth control pills just to be safe. She won’t even talk about kids.”

  “Well, what about the radio thing? The Georgia School of Broadcasting?”

  Nick looked away like I’d embarrassed him. “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like a good idea. Sometimes it seems stupid as hell.”

  “You should do it,” I said. “Outside of Claudia, you know more about music than just about anybody.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But I’d have to go to school for two years. And then, who knows what kind of job I’d get. Carlton says he could get me on at the Pond, but he’ll have gotten his ass canned by then. Besides, it doesn’t sound all that great. You know, they don’t even let him choose his own songs, except once an hour. They got all the music programmed on these tapes. Everything comes in from this Florida company that owns the station: Whitlaw Broadcasting. Hell, Carlton’s just a monkey in there pushing the buttons.”

  Poor Carlton. First, Dewey wanted to hire a monkey to play the bass, and now this.

  “Why would you wanna go legit, anyway?” I asked. “It’s like Bev said, you’ve got a pretty good setup right now.”

  Nick leaned his golf bag against the wall and stood up. He took a long drag off his cigarette, considering me all the while.

  “Have you been selling?”

  “Selling what?”

  He made a face. “Don’t fuck with me. You know what I’m talking about.”

  I shrugged. “A little.”

  “You’ve been stealing that shit from me.” Nick pulled out his seven-iron and waggled it a little, staring down the shaft. “I thought you were just smoking with your friends. But you were going into business for yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Well, I smoked a good bit of it, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Nick leaned on his club like it was a walking cane. “Why the hell would you wanna go into business after all the shit you’ve seen me go through?”

  “I don’t know. I was just testing the job market. I wanted to see what it was like, maybe make a little money toward buying a car.”

  Nick shook his head. “And what’d you end up making?”

  “About a hundred bucks. I smoked a little more than I meant to.”

  “Do you know what that hundred bucks could have cost you?”

  “You don’t have to start acting like a judge,” I said. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’m starting work at the Holiday Inn next week. I’m gonna be a good citizen of the world. And I’m sure as hell not gonna give Dot Knox an excuse to send my ass to Alto.”

  Nick frowned and slipped his seven-iron back in the bag.

  “It’s a goddamn impossible way of life,” he said. “Bev talks it up, but there’s a lot of stuff that she leaves out.”

  “That’s what Dewey was saying. He was telling me about the cops, the competition, all that shit.”

  “It’s more than that, even,” Nick said. “It goes right on down to telling you who your friends are. They gotta be people in the business, or else your buyers. If I meet a girl out somewhere, say I’m at the grocery store or something—shit, I can’t tell her what I do. I either have to lie or act all cagey about it. And that might be okay for a few days, maybe enough to get in her pants. But what if I fall in love? Shit, I’m screwed. The whole thing’s a lie. If I tell her, it blows right up in my face.”

  “So where does Bev fit into all this grocery store talk?”

  “Well, this is all speculation,” he said. “I love Bev. I mean, she and I are looking at things long-term, but you never know when shit’s gonna get thrown at you.”

  I was starting to feel like a real shit ass for stealing his pot and his BB pistol. I’d never considered Nick’s life to be anything but great, at least when he wasn’t in jail. And even then, it’s not like he ever made prison sound terrible. All I ever heard him mention of it were the golf books he read in there and how he’d played all these famous courses in his head while he was doing his time.

  “You’re lucky ol’ Sport Coat Charlie got you that job at the Holiday Inn,” Nick said. “Times are fucking tough right now. We’re in a goddamn recession. A lot of my customers are out of work, coming to me wanting to buy on credit or stealing shit so they can buy. Hell, that kind of behavior leads the cops right up to th
e door.”

  7

  Nick set up shop in his usual stall at the far end of the range. He dropped his bag and started banging drives out at the two-hundred-yard flag. Needless to say, he didn’t believe in working the irons first. “I can’t reel in all my impulses,” he said.

  I’d been to the range a few times but hadn’t exactly taken to the sport like a young Sam Snead. My biggest handicap, as I could see it, was being left-handed. That meant I couldn’t use Nick’s shiny Hogans. Instead, I’d adopted a rusty left-handed one-iron that we’d found sticking out of the range’s trash can. It was like hitting with a shovel.

  I bent over the red-striped sphere and prepared myself to take a swat at it, determined not to do all of that waggling shit like the pros on TV. I addressed the ball—” Hello, motherfucker”—and went right into my backswing, taking a big one, nearly wrapping the club all the way around me, not wanting to cheat myself in case I really got hold of one. Of course, I then proceeded to slice the shit out of the ball. It was a low, hard liner that skittered across the dirt and the browning clumps of crabgrass.

  “That’s a double, down the line,” Nick said. “In the corner for extra bases.”

  He might have been laughing. But what came over me as I watched the ball mark its stray path was a sudden, and frightening, wave of fury, the kind that makes people pull guns at the dinner table and kill their relatives. Nothing outside of golf had ever had such an effect on me. I spiked my club into the faded patch of AstroTurf and glared at it.

  Nick calmly reached into his golf bag, pulled out the shooting wedge, and offered it to me.

  “You wanna finish it off?” he asked.

  “You wanna eat me?” I replied.

  I flipped him off, picked up my still half-filled bucket of balls, and set it down in his stall.

  “That’s it, I’m retiring,” I announced. “This game is total fucking horseshit.”

  Nick just stood there laughing, leaning against his driver like he was Bob Hope. His hair was pulled straight back into a ponytail, and his left hand was sheathed in a black glove with a small golden bear stitched to the back of it. The glove matched his black golf shoes and black T-shirt. He was the only person I’d ever seen who could look cool while playing golf. He looked like a cross between a golfer and a hit man.

  I sat down on the bench behind the stalls and took a swig from my can of Coke. I watched Nick hit for a while. The sun looked like a fiery Titleist teed up on the tree line at the far end of the range.

  Pretty soon, a vehicle crunched the gravel in the parking lot behind us. Nick turned and raised his eyes in recognition. He smiled and waved in the direction of the engine’s hum. It had the sturdy timbre of an American pickup truck. Music was trickling from the windows, the Stylistics singing “Betcha By Golly, Wow.”

  The truck was a white Ford, its driver a tall black man with a red-and-black Titleist bag slung over his shoulder. He was wearing a Philadelphia Phillies ball cap, jeans, and a white Izod.

  “Cash Bishop,” Nick said, “I got somebody I want you to meet.”

  Cash set his bag down in the stall beside Nick’s, pulled out his pitching wedge, then walked over and shook hands with me. He smiled as if we were all preparing to play a round together.

  “Cash, here, is a bail bondsman,” Nick said. “He’s a walking ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”

  “Yeah, and your brother’s my best customer,” Cash said. “His next one’s on the house.”

  Nick laughed. “He’s full of shit. He only bailed me out once.” He wagged a finger at Cash. “I have acted as a referral service, though.”

  Cash frowned. “Yeah, you sent me some fine customers. Most of them ran off in the middle of the night.”

  We were all standing there with our sticks in our hands. Cash was looking at my one-iron. “You play?”

  “No. I just quit.”

  Cash sighed. “You don’t have your brother’s hook, do you? I keep telling him to open his hips a little, but he don’t wanna listen. He thinks he’s Lee Trevino playing that damn thing.”

  “I’ve got a slice,” I told him.

  Cash took my one-iron and held it up to the pale evening light. He looked at Nick and shook his head. “Damn, why don’t you buy the man some decent sticks.”

  Nick grabbed the club and gave it back to me. “It’s fine for him. He’s just learning.”

  Cash smiled like he’d been let in on a secret. “Forget golf,” he said. “I hear you’re a pretty good wheel man.”

  “Well, I’m sort of between licenses at the moment.”

  “Cash owns a race car,” Nick explained. “Runs it over at the mixing bowl on Saturday nights.”

  My ears perked up. “What kind of car?”

  “I got a sixty-nine Cougar.”

  “Eliminator package?”

  “Hell, no. I got the 428 Cobra Jet. Pure pussy.”

  “You need it with that thing. It’s a heavy car.”

  “Damn right.”

  I asked Cash if he’d won any races.

  He made a face and shook his head. “Not yet. I finished sixth in hobby stock last season. Too many motherfuckers in there don’t know how to drive. I gotta give up spots to save my ride.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Lyndell used to say. Of course, he’d take a tire iron to anybody who wrecked him.”

  “Cash’s old man used to race out at the speedway, too,” Nick said. “Back in the sixties, if you can believe that shit.”

  “In Green Lake?” I asked. From what I’d heard, the town had not exactly been a hotbed of civil liberties in those days.

  “Oh, yeah,” Cash said. “He knew most of the white boys from running whiskey with them. They didn’t mind racing him—as long as he didn’t beat them.”

  “So, did he ever win?”

  Cash frowned. “You ever heard of Wendell Scott?”

  I shook my head.

  “Only black man to win a big-time Grand National race. That was back about the same time Pop used to run. When Wendell won his race, they disqualified him because they didn’t want him kissing a white girl on the winner’s stand. They finally got around to sending him a trophy in the mail, but it wasn’t even the real one. It was about the size of a pissant, like a Little League trophy.”

  Cash was looking down the shaft of his wedge, waggling it a little.

  “So, yeah, Pop won a feature race one night. It was small-time shit, but they still disqualified him, said he made an illegal pass.”

  Nick shook his head. “Auto racing is a hillbilly sport. You start combining all that inbreeding with exhaust fumes, and people just don’t act right.” He held up his driver and smiled. “Now golf, on the other hand, is a gentleman’s game.”

  Cash just laughed. “Yeah, let’s call some of those gents down in Augusta and see if they’ll give us a nine-thirty tee time tomorrow morning.”

  Nick laid his hand on my shoulder and gestured toward Cash. “My bail-bonding friend here was telling me he needs some help at the track this season, and I told him you’d be the perfect guy.”

  I looked at Cash. “What kind of help?”

  “Just shit work. Unloading the car off my hauler, loading it back up after the races. Checking stuff out beforehand. And I can’t pay you nothing.”

  “I don’t mind. As long as I get to see the races.”

  Nick was smiling. “Oh, you’ll have plenty of time to watch the races. Cash never makes it out of the qualifying heats, anyway, so you’ll be finished working pretty early.”

  Cash shook his head. “You just keep hooking that damn ball, Lee. And I’ll keep taking all your fucking money.”

  About that time, another car pulled up, a white BMW.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Nick said, “I’ve got some business to do.”

  He walked over to his bag and started unzipping pockets, preparing to make a transaction. Cash and I stood there watching him.

  Cash shook his head and whistled. “Damn, your brother sells
some good weed.”

  Somehow Cash lured me back into the hitting stall. He claimed he could straighten out my slice, even though I was far past the point of caring.

  I started off by whacking five bad ones. The slice on those shots was almost geometrically impossible.

  Cash tapped my legs with his wedge, opening my stance a little. “All right,” he said, “keep that elbow in and just relax. Slow everything down. Pretend that you’re water and the moon is making you do all this shit. It’s pulling you, and pushing you. You’re not even yourself. You ain’t got a mind, or nothing. You must become empty in order to gain totality.”

  I looked up from the ball. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about simplifying.”

  “Simplifying. I can’t even remember half of what you just said.”

  Cash shrugged. “Man, ain’t you ever watched any Bruce Lee? Just pretend you’re water and let that motherfucking club flow.”

  I gazed down at the ball again and thought of the lake. I could feel myself turning watery, could hear the murmurs of the deep in my ears. Time slowed to a trickle. And then…

  THWACK.

  The ball was shrinking, streaking off toward the two-hundred-yard flag, no more than ten feet off the ground. It was a helluva stroke. Even Nick and his customer turned to watch the ball fly.

  “Jesus Christ,” Nick said. “What the hell got into you?”

  I hadn’t even been aware of making contact. It felt like I’d awakened after the ball was in flight. I was already thinking of hitting another one. I lifted my scarred one-iron and lovingly wiped a smudge of dirt from its blade.

  Cash was smiling, looking all wise. “Grasshopper,” he said, “it is time for you to leave.”

  8

  I picked up my first Holiday Inn paycheck near the end of April, feeling awfully proud of what I’d earned—a grand total of $80.57, after taxes. I ached when it came time to deposit the check in Mrs. Dee’s Maverick repair fund. Even after Nick had kept his promise and reimbursed me for half the proceeds, I still had a hard time bringing myself to spend the money on anything. Nothing seemed worthy of my noble efforts.