The Stories of Richard Bausch (87 page)

“Language,” Barnes says, with exaggerated piety.

Hopewell emerges from the dense woods. “Couldn’t find it,” he says. “Sorry.” He takes off his cap and runs his hand through his hair, then adjusts the cap.

Barnes says, “You ever played golf before, Eugene?”

Hopewell straightens. “It
has
been a while.”

“More than a couple weeks, huh?”

“A while, Jerry. Okay?”

“You realize you lost a ball off the green? The
practice
green?”

Hopewell says nothing.

“Why don’t you trade those fucking shoes in on some lessons?”

“Hey,” says Hopewell, not smiling. “I’d appreciate it if you’d watch the language.”

“I don’t think I’m up for a game today,” McPherson tells them all. He has an almost spooky feeling of menace now. It’s as though they’ll all be shouting soon. It strikes him that he feels rankled by Hopewell’s history, as if it’s something the other is merely dramatizing, more of the once-boy’s corny
love of the high moment: his great story; his alcoholic missing years. McPherson experiences a rush of antipathy toward the other man and his pretty, young, sour wife.

“Maybe they’ll let us tee off at the tenth,” says Barnes. Obviously, he wants to get this day over, too. “You realize there aren’t any other men here? Where the fu—where’d they all go?”

Darlene says, “We can’t do anything until my mother arrives.”

Again, they’re all quiet for a time. They watch the few older women putting, and talking in murmurs, waiting their turn. Occasionally, there’s a response from the crowd around the tee, someone getting off a good hit.

Darlene sits down on the edge of the green, and clasps her hands around her knees, watching. Barnes putts, sinks the ball, then retrieves it. He looks at Hopewell. “You got any kids, Eugene?”

The other man seems to come out of a reverie. “Four boys. None of them’ll speak to me.” He shakes his head. “I made their mother miserable. They know their stepfather better than they know me.”

“Eugene actually got a small part in a movie, once,” Darlene says, looking off toward the parking lot.

“Honey,” Hopewell says. “You
promised
you wouldn’t start this. We
agreed.”

She ignores him. “Next time you rent
Dead Watch II
you can see him. He’s one of the guards standing by the gates of hell. The one on the left. He even had a line. Eugene, give them your line.”

“Aw, hell, sweetie. You said we wouldn’t—”

“You were
so
proud of it last night, Eugene.” She turns her dark eyes on McPherson.
“Most
of the time Eugene feels like it’s some sort of
breach of privacy
for people to know he was in a Hollywood movie.
Dead Watch II.
You can rent it at any video store.”

“I never saw that,” says McPherson, feigning interest. “I’ll have to get it.”

“Low-budget horror,” Hopewell mutters. “Not much good. Not worth mentioning.”

“They made
five
of them,” Darlene says. Her tone is nearly argumentative. “As you kept pointing out, darling. You felt different about it last night.”

“Sweetie, where’s your mother?”

“She’ll
be
here.” Darlene’s pulling at the grass. Her voice still has that tone. “Say the line, for your
pals.
It’s just a line.”

Hopewell does nothing for an awkwardly long space.

Almost pleasantly now, Darlene says, “I don’t see what the big deal about it is.” She looks at Barnes, and her smile is artificial, as if she means it as irony; yet it’s rather petulantly adolescent. “Have
you
ever been in a Hollywood movie?”

“Sweetie, please,” Hopewell says.

She points at McPherson. “This—
friend,
as you call him, is so interested in
accuracy.
He’ll appreciate how
accurately
you get the whole thing. The whole—what is it called?—
emotion
of the moment. Eugene thinks he’s a failure because he got one line in a movie. How many people ever get a line in a movie? How about you, Mr.
Animal Torture.
You ever been in a movie?”

“I
made
a movie,” Barnes says. “It’s called
Animal Torture.
I’m amazed that you know about it.”

“Now,
look,”
Hopewell says. “Come on—everybody.”

“I’m sure no one means to offend,” says McPherson.

“Oh, yes they most certainly do,” Darlene mutters.

Hopewell says, “Sweetie, these—these’re pals of mine from high school, and I’m sure everything’s gonna be fine.” He looks at the other two men.

“I’m going right out and rent the movie,” McPherson puts in.

Darlene stands, then starts walking toward the clubhouse, hands on her hips, the attitude of someone tired and bored.

Barnes murmurs, “She’s not playing all eighteen holes with us, right?”

Hopewell follows his wife. As they cross the expanse of grass between the parking lot and the clubhouse, a gray Cadillac pulls in, and Darlene alters her course, heading toward the car, which hums to a stop in the nearest open space.

“Jesus Christ,” Barnes says. “Help us all.”

Out of the Cadillac steps a thin, short, scarily pale woman with a head of hair that seems to dwarf her face; it seems in fact to dwarf her whole body.

“God almighty,” Barnes says. “She looks like Louis the XIV.”

The two women head down to the practice green, followed by Hopewell, who seems more hangdog every second. Darlene is a full head taller than her mother, but her mother’s outlandish hairdo makes the older woman seem somehow bigger. “Mother, these’re a couple of Eugene’s friends from back when he was in high school. This is my mother—Luanne. Not Tex-Mex Mary—though as I said, she owns Tex-Mex Mary’s.”

McPherson steps forward and offers his hand. “Hello,” he says.

Luanne nods slightly, gives him a firm grip, then drops his hand and turns to Barnes. “This makes a fivesome,” she says. “We can’t get away with that. We’ll have to divide up.”

“I’m not playing,” says Darlene. “I’m just tagging along, remember? I hate this stupid game. I don’t see why we can’t all go around together. I thought we discussed it already this morning. This
rotten
morning.”

“Now, Darlene.” Luanne appears to want to say more. Instead she shakes her head.

Darlene gestures at Barnes. “Well, this guy’s been making
jokes
about torturing poor helpless animals.”

“I think I might’ve indicated that I wasn’t actually quite joking,” says Barnes, with a wide grin.

“Listen to
that,”
Darlene says.

“Sweetie,” says Hopewell, “nobody means any harm. Really.”

“I’m not going around this stupid course.”

Barnes leans toward her, and says, “Actually, you know it might’ve
been
a woman that invented golf. I think it was, in fact. I think her name was Eleanor. Eleanor Golf.”

Darlene puts her hands to her face. McPherson is astonished to see that she’s fighting tears.

“Hey,” says Barnes. “Okay, I’m just messing around, here, teasing. I’m just teasing.”

Hopewell steps close to Darlene, speaking in a low, placating murmur. “Come on, sweetie. Everything’s fine. We always made stupid jokes like that. He’s just being cute, like we always were. We played baseball every day growing up and Jerry was always getting after people. He doesn’t mean anything by it.” He glances over at Barnes. “Right, Jerry?”

“I was teasing,” Barnes says. “I admit it was a little rough.”

“My daughter’s high-strung,” Luanne says to McPherson from the prodigious tangle of dark hair. She walks over and takes Darlene by the arm and says, “You come with me now. Come help me get my clubs out of the car.” They move away along the sunny lawn, in the direction not of the parking lot, but of the clubhouse. They go in, and the door closes on them.

“Anybody want to tell me what the fuck this is all about?” Barnes says.

Hopewell looks down. “She—you went too far.” He shakes his head.
“As long as we’re being
accurate,
Jerry—the
accurate
part of this mess is that I had a few beers last night. Okay? I got drunk. I was so excited about seeing you guys. I thought—one beer, you know? So I had one beer, and then I had a few others and I was saying my goddamn movie line. You understand me, Jerry? You see what’s happening here? I bought all this shit because I thought we’d go around and have one of the old times together. I got overconfident. She’s not like this normally….”

The ranks of the tournament golfers on the tee have thinned out. Several of those who have been practice putting are walking over there. McPherson watches them, and tries to think of something to say. He wants to find some polite way to excuse himself, and go home. But home is hundreds of miles south, in Carolina.

Hopewell seems to regain something of his earlier animation. “Look, it’s good to see you guys again, really. And we
are
happy—this is just a little—you know. A mess. I slipped a little, and she doesn’t really like golf. She’s a wonderful kid, really. She literally saved me.”

Barnes says, “I got a daughter I don’t know what to do with.” It’s as if he’s not even listening to himself. He watches the thinning crowd of women on the tee. “Past thirty, no job, no hope of a job. I think she hates her mother and me, though I don’t know what we did. Hell, I can’t get through to her. Three hundred twelve pounds of sullen quiet in my basement. Thirty-two years old.”

They’re silent a moment. A gust of warm wind comes from the far end of the eighteenth fairway, and rustles the leaves in the trees. McPherson thinks of the yellow dust of a playground, boys in summer sun playing a game they believe is important. “We don’t have any kids,” he says to Hopewell. “We probably shouldn’t have, either. Regina drinks too much, and runs me down. All we do is wrangle about everything lately. Christ’s sake.”

The other two stare at him for an interval, then turn their attention elsewhere.

Barnes says. “I’m sorry if I offended anybody.”

For what seems a long while, they say nothing. Darlene and her mother come out of the clubhouse and walk over to the Cadillac. Luanne lifts her bag of clubs, like a body, out of the back of the car. She opens the legs of the metal cart it is attached to. She sits on the frame of the open trunk and puts on golf shoes. Then she stands, closes the trunk, turns, and puts one hand to
her daughter’s face, talking. Presently she takes hold of the cart handle and starts toward the practice green, laboring along, still talking, her little white face moving under the leonine folds of dark hair. She’s explaining something with nodding patient insistence to Darlene, who strolls, arms folded, beside her, and seems glumly preoccupied, only half-aware of the words, not even quite aware, in fact, of the earth or sky, which, beyond them, is blue and clear, so bright it hurts the eyes.

One sunny morning
in April, less than a week after he has been falsely accused of sexual harassment, Coleman finds a yellow jacket lazily circling and colliding with the surfaces in the spare room down in his basement. He kills it with a folded newspaper—striking it several times—then wads it in a paper towel and flushes it down the toilet, feeling a measure of disgust that surprises him. Just outside the door, he finds another walking up the wall, at eye level, and he kills that one, too, then checks the window that looks out on the uneven ground under the back porch, the sliding door to its right. No sign of entry. Back in the spare room, he parts the curtains over that window, and here are four others, dead, lying on the sill. Looking down, he sees several on the carpet at the base of the wall. He disposes of them with another paper towel.

Upstairs in the kitchen his wife, Peg, sits drinking black coffee and gazing out at the sunny yard. When he enters she looks at him, then looks away. He says, “I think there’s a yellow jackets’ nest somewhere around the window in the spare room.”

She doesn’t respond for a beat, still staring off. Then: “I killed one in the downstairs hall yesterday.”

“I hope they’re not in the wall of that room.”

She waves this away. “A few dead bees. They get in.”

“If they are in the wall, it’s better to know about it early rather than late. I don’t want to find out by getting stung. Right?”

She says nothing.

“Right?” It’s as if he’s needling her, and he doesn’t mean it that way. The gray in her hair has begun to show more lately, and it occurs to him that now they are no longer talking only about the bees. She’s slightly stooped in the chair, her legs crossed at the knee, the cup of coffee on the saucer before her. A moment later, she lifts a hand to her face and rubs her eyes.

“Did you sleep at all?” he asks.

“Who can sleep? Maybe I dozed a little.”

He did sleep, but kept waking in fright, unable to recall what he had dreamed. And for a long time, just before dawn, the two of them lay awake, aware of each other being awake and not speaking.

There isn’t really much else to say.

The two women who lodged the charges against him are former employees of his in the sheriff’s office. He had fired one of them for cause (the alcohol smell was all over her in the mornings, mingled with a too-heavy fragrance of peppermint), and the other, her close friend, quit in anger. After an interval of several weeks, the two of them retaliated: Coleman, they said, had consistently made threats, demanding sexual favors. They’ve hired a lawyer and the charges are official. It’s been in the newspapers. He’s going to have to answer for it, this lie. There has never been anything but a little lighthearted kidding, and in fact the two women did most of that. Nothing of their carefully coordinated story contains a shred of truth, yet Coleman has lain awake in the slow hours of night with a feeling of having trespassed, of having gone over some line. He has repeatedly searched his memory for any small thing that might tend to incriminate him, and there’s nothing, and he still feels like a criminal.