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"Golf," Mike said, lining up his putter, "is a gentleman's game." Dexter watched with impotent dismay as the ball skimmed the edge of the hole and rolled back down the green toward the wooden pirate ship from which they had just escaped. It looked as though it were about to rain -- or worse, to sleet --and the tips of Dexter's fingers were cold inside his gloves. He hunched his shoulders against the wind. At this rate, they would be here all morning. Mike seemed unconcerned. "Yesiree. It's no wonder I'm so bad at it," he remarked cheerfully.
There were any number of things to be said, Dexter reflected, about the tired working-class chip on the young ex-journalist's shoulder, but they were the kind of things best left unmentioned when one was sober, and Dexter had been sober for going on three years, now.
"Putt-putt," he pointed out instead, "is not a gentleman's game,"
"Are you sure? You're so good at it."
"Is that a compliment?" Dexter asked.
"I thought you knew me better than that," said Mike, loping back to the pirate ship to retrieve his ball. Devised along the lines of a child's hobby horse, the ship was constructed clumsily of wooden boards and situated lengthwise at the narrowest point of the tiny, rubber-bordered green. Dexter, who had once designed yachts and therefore believed he was entitled to a professional opinion, didn't think much of it from an aesthetic standpoint, but it served its purpose as a hazard admirably. When the ball came very near, as Mike's had done, one had to fish underneath its heaving keel with one's club in a highly frustrating way. "Are you getting chilled, Haven?" Mike called. "I'm awfully sorry. I bet there are club houses to warm up in at the type of golf course to which you're more accustomed."
"There's a club house here," said Dexter, pointing with his short driver. The structure, which appeared to be a converted garden shed painted salmon pink, was over the hill where they'd left the car. "But I doubt I could fit inside. Would you mind picking up the pace?"
"Sure thing, Dext." He squared his shoulders comically and tapped the ball. It rolled three feet from the ship and stopped, still a distance from the cup. "Damn it."
Dexter looked up again at the threatening sky. "You know, you're not supposed to have more than six at any hole."
Mike squinted down at the card. "Really? I thought par was three."
"Yes, but after you fail to sink the ball in double that, you're meant to take six and move on."
"Well, I'm on twelve."
"I know. Don't you think you'd better give the people waiting a chance to play?" He gestured toward the empty tee behind them.
"Very funny," said Mike.
It was one week before Christmas, and they were the only ones out. Tracy, who always seemed somewhat uncomfortable around Mike, had decided not to come. There had been no one manning the garden shed when they arrived, in fact, and Dexter had been obliged to ring the doorbell at the house that adjoined the course, which was painted the same pink as the shed, and give his money to a twelve year old girl. After crossing to the club house, undoing the padlock for them, and handing them a putter and driver each, she had sensibly retreated back to the house, leaving Dexter alone with Macaulay Connor on the windswept miniature highlands of the putt-putt course.
"Look," Dexter said. "The next hole is an elephant."
Mike bent, picking up his ball and stuffing it in his trouser pocket. "All right. I'll throw in the towel on this one." He pinned both of his clubs under his arm, took out the scorecard, and licked the tip of his pencil theatrically. "Lucky thirteen for me."
"Six," corrected Dexter firmly, and strode off across the turf.
The elephant was also made of wood and was, for the most part, two-dimensional. It crouched above the hole, its trunk hanging down by a pivot. Dexter though he recognized the shade of pink paint that had been used for the insides of its ears.
"I like him," said Mike.
"It's far more interesting than a sand trap, I'll give you that."
"You can tee off first."
"No thanks, Connor. I prefer to make it last longer."
"I want a handicap. What do you say we make every three of my strikes -- or hits, or whatever they're called -- count for one of yours, in order to compensate for my inferior early training?"
Dexter shrugged, refusing to take the bait. He wondered, for the first time, if Mike's griping came from simple embarrassment at his lack of facility with a golf club. Dexter didn't find the "gentleman's game" theory very compelling. While he couldn't honestly say that he knew any men of his own social class who played as poorly as Mike, he certainly knew gardeners and auto mechanics who were better.
Mike set the ball down on the protruding piece of piping that served as a permanent tee. "Here goes." He raised his driver to shoulder-level and swung down at the ball, connecting with an ungolflike crack. It fired across the green, bouncing off the elephant's flank.
Dexter stepped to the tee and addressed the ball. The hole had a gentle incline, but it looked fairly straightforward. He hit conservatively, with not quite the force needed to propel the ball to the hole, but with enough power to keep it from rolling back to him.
Mike trotted after his rogue ball.
"Not too hard," Dexter advised, crossing over to him as he readied himself. "Hold it -- stop, stop! You're swinging cack-handed."
"What does that mean?"
"Here," said Dexter, standing behind Mike to demonstrate with his own driver. "You have your wrists crossed. Your right hand is supposed to be below your left."
"Have I been doing that all along?" He swung. The ball glided to a stop about four feet from the cup. "There. I'm not such a rotten shot."
Dexter bent slightly and took a polite swing that sent his ball next to Mike's. "If you get called up, will you go to war?"
"Oh, I imagine so," said Mike. "Nothing I do on the home front could be misconstrued as essential. Although I've sometimes fantasied recently about getting a job as a coal miner. It could be great material for a book."
"Our friend George Kittredge might be able to set you up."
"Do you think he knows how to play golf?"
"Who, old George? Not if your theory holds -- he's a self-made man, remember?"
"Sure. He seems like the type who might try to learn, though." Mike walked over to his ball and tapped it. It paused just on the edge of the cup, with the dangling snout of the elephant preventing it from falling home. "This lousy thing is impossible!"
"I think the trunk is supposed to swing back and forth."
"So, what? We wait for the wind to pick up?"
"They must not have turned it on today," Dexter said. "Cheer up -- that counts for three. It seems you got your par."
"Thanks. Allow me." He moved the wooden pendulum to one side, holding it out of the way for Dexter as he finished the hole. "Does Tracy play?"
"Beautifully."
"I suspected as much. Now ask me if Liz does, Haven -- I dare you."
"How is Liz?" Dexter asked.
"Oh, she's all right," Mike said unconcernedly.
Liz Imbrie, according to Dexter's informed source -- to whom he happened to be married -- was several months pregnant. Dexter knew that Mike must know that he knew, but as of yet, the other man hadn't mentioned it, and Dexter himself wasn't sure of a way to inquire after her without making himself offensive. He wished Mike would simply tell him the good news so that he could congratulate the man, but then, Dexter thought, they weren't that kind of friends.
He remembered Tracy once saying that people like Macaulay Connor hadn't any friends, or something along those lines. He wondered if that was true.
"When are you two getting married, Mike?" he asked, keeping his tone light.
"Not until after she starts showing, I hope," Mike said. He seemed to observe Dexter over the scorecard he was marking for signs of surprise, but none were forthcoming.
"Why's that?"
Mike tucked the card into the breast pocket of his overcoat with studied casualness. Dexter remembered what it was to make a remark one hoped would have an effect. With his gangly limbs and soft features, Mike looked much younger and more guileless than Dexter knew him to be, but he certainly did have growing up to do. "I've taken her this far, why should I back down now from irredeemable tarnishment?" he said.
If he were another kind of man, Dexter reflected, he might tell Mike in a shocked tone of voice that he couldn't possibly mean that.
Liz was pure gold, but luckily, Dexter suspected that Mike already knew it. "Are you happy?" he asked instead.
"Yes. We are."
"I"m glad."
The men walked together to the next green. The wind had died down a bit, but the heavy clouds were the smudgy color of the smoke from a trashfire. Dexter wrapped his muffler more tightly around his neck.
"How are things on the wagon?" Mike asked with his customary directness. Dexter always wondered if this was a reporterly habit, or if Mike's prying came naturally.
"It's hard, sometimes," Dexter answered honestly, "like anything worth doing."
"Is that so."
"Are you going to quit drinking?"
"I don't, much, but I'm thinking of it. It seems only fair, since Liz has."
The obstacle facing them at the last hole appeared to be a witch, with a green-painted face and red lips parted to admit a ball.
Dexter set up his shot. "You're a saint."
"Don't mock my noble intentions."
"I'm sorry. I meant to be sincere." Dexter laughed humorlessly. "It's hard, like I said." His shot popped the ball onto the green, close to the witch's open mouth. "Personally, I thought I'd become a seminary student, if it came to that."
"If it came to what?" Mike asked.
"If I were to be drafted. Seminarians are exempt."
"Would you?"
"No, Mike, not really."
Mike set his ball on the tee. "Is it true that women have odd food cravings when they're in the family way?"
"Not in my experience."
"Good, I can't keep my mind off the henpecked husband in Rapunzell, who had to steal cucumber from the witch's garden. Or was it cauliflower?"
"Search me." Dexter wanted to be able to tell Mike that it wouldn't be like that, that marriage was the best thing that had ever happened to him and Tracy, but their record spoke for itself. They had only worked things out after fate allowed them a mulligan. "You have to try to be good to each other, you know," he said. "There's no such thing as a match made in heaven, believe me. You have to try for it to work properly."
"Maybe being with someone -- I mean really being with them -- takes practice," Mike said, not meeting Dexter's eyes. He swung and the ball skidded over the barrier onto the adjacent hole. "Damn."
Dexter shrugged, squinting into the cold rain that had finally started. "Maybe it's something certain people have a knack for."
"How would you know?" Mike asked. "If you did or not."
Dexter popped his ball into the witch's maw. He didn't think he needed to answer.
fin.