Like Xenophon’s lost Greeks, it wandered across the Persia of the green, this way and that, up mountains and down into lush green valleys, seeming to die at least twice but always getting over the next crest on the apparent delusion that the sea lay ahead. At last it descended, bouncing and gathering speed, and hit the cup, spun with a whiskery sound—and halted.
“Damn,” said Red.
“Five grand!” shouted Jeff.
“It may drop still,” said Neil.
Red stared at the ball, balanced on the very equipoise between hole and green, seemingly riding on nothing more than the sprig of loam fighting the ball’s weight and preventing Red from achieving yet another triumph.
“If a jet’d come along and a sonic boom would hit, maybe it would drop,” said Roger Deacon. “You could probably call the air force on your phone, Red.”
“Damn,” said Red.
“You could explode another car bomb,” said Jeff. “That might loosen it.”
But Neil had the best idea.
“Order it to drop,” he said. “It knows who you are.”
“Damn right,” said Red. “Everybody does.”
He squinted, assumed the position of an especially pugnacious bulldog and issued his command: “Ball! Drop!”
Damned if it didn’t.
Red sat around the nineteenth hole with his fellow Rich Boys, choosing a very expensive twelve-year-old George Dickel Tennessee bourbon as the night’s poison, finding himself in a boisterous mood. He said he’d let poor Jeff off the hook on his thousand if Jeff would just pick up the tab. Jeff agreed and Red set out to drink a thousand dollars’ worth of Dickel. He wasn’t celebrating too soon: he was trying to get a certain part of his brain disengaged from the drama that was surely playing out seventy miles to the south even now, in a forest battleground.
If he let himself think on it, he was sure he’d die. His heart would go into vapor lock; he’d pitch forward in rigor mortis and they’d have to cut him out of his golf shoes. He’d end a joke: the total golfer who died in a bright red (his favorite color) Polo shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow slacks.
“You okay, Red?”
“Yes I am. Tell that gaclass="underline" another round.”
“Red, you are so generous with my money,” said Jeff, though not bitterly. “Damn, I have to give it to you. You always squiggle out. I got you on the goddamn hook and presto, you’re off it!” But it was said in something like respect.
“Many a man has thought he had me on the hook, only to find out the hook was in him,” said Red, as the girl deposited another Dickel straight up before him. He took a hit: blam. Hot, straight and tough, just the goddamn way he liked it.
“Hey, Red, got a question for you.”
“Shoot, son.”
“Have you heard the Holly Etheridge rumor?”
“Every goddamn one of ’em.”
“No, I mean the rumor.”
“Which one would that be?”
“It’s all over town. He’s your friend, you’d know.”
“He isn’t my friend. He went to Harvard. He ain’t hardly ever come back to the old stomping grounds. Hell, he went to prep school in Washington, D.C. St. Albans School, I think. He ain’t no Arkansawyer, I’ll tell you that. I know him some.”
“They say he cut a deal with old Mr. You Know Who, the front-runner. He’d drop out early and work behind the scenes … and that would get him the vice-presidential nomination.”
Roger Deacon pitched in with a comment. “We have been his local media buyers for eighteen years, and believe me, if Holly Etheridge were going on the national ticket, we’d know it by now. You have to buy into prime time early. It’s too late otherwise.”
“You ain’t thinking right, Rog,” said Red. “It ain’t a senatorial race. The buy would come from national party headquarters and not in his name. You check, and I’d bet you’ll see the parties already got money down on the time they need, through one of the big Little Rock shops.”
“So it is going to happen, huh, Red?”
“Neil, I ain’t heard diddly about old Holly. He’s too busy trying to fuck every living female between Maine and Southern California. I think he’s made it through Illinois and is just starting on Missouri.”
“I don’t think he’s given up his national ambitions,” said Jeff. “His daddy gave him an order, and one thing about Holly, he always obeyed his daddy. I think I ought to give him a call. He’ll probably end up looking for a good chief of staff. Maybe I’ll be moving up to Washington.”
“Shit, his team is set,” said Red. “I shot sporting clays with Judge Myers a few weeks back, and he’s the boy with the inside track. But he didn’t say nothing.”
“Holly may surprise us yet,” said Neil.
“We made a hell of a lot of money off that goddamn road he wanted to build for his daddy, though,” Red said.
“Hear, hear,” cheered the Rich Boys, for they too had made money, even at some remove, from the $90 million that the federal government had poured into Arkansas to build the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway down to Polk County.
It went on that way until eleven, when Red finally broke it up. Toward the end, as the booze wore off, he found himself becoming morose and mean-spirited. The vibrator on his beeper had not gone off.
What did it mean? What was going on? It was so goddamned perfect.
He pushed aside his fears and went to the car, but for the first time in years, his two obedient, discreet bodyguards irritated him, though they were so steely efficient there was no cause for the annoyance. They just bugged him tonight.
He said, “I’m going to the lounge, not home.”
“Yes sir,” came the reply, untainted by human emotion.
He climbed into the big S-class and turned right, down Cliff Drive and back toward the city, instead of left toward his big white house overlooking the airport. At the halfway point, he called the Runner-up.
“Hello?”
“Beth, honey, something has come up. I’ve got to nurse one through the night.”
“Sweetie, are you all right?”
“I am fine. And soon, I’ll be finer.”
“Are you sure?”
Dammit, even she was irritating him tonight.
“Yes! Yes, everything is fine. You know what I want you to do? Plan a vacation. A nice one, the whole family, both families, Hawaii, we’ll rent out a goddamned island to ourselves. Your mother, even. All right?”
“Yes, Red, honey.”
“Your brother. He can come too. That’s my babe.”
He hung up, crossing Rogers, turning in toward town, took his next right and followed the progressively seedier Midland Boulevard until at last he came to Nancy’s. His parking place was wide open, as usual, and he pulled into it. As he leaped out, his two bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere and took up position next to him.
He threw open the door and about six dreary drunks and four dreary pool players looked over at, his magnificence and withered in it; he blasted through, telling Fred the night barkeep just one word: “Coffee.”
In his lair, he felt a bit more relaxed. Here at last was a world small enough and known enough to be completely dominated. He sat at his father’s old desk. He felt comfortable. He set his folder on the green blotter before him and willed it to ring: Phone! Ring! But unlike the golf ball of late afternoon, it did not obey him. What adventures could it be concealing? What extraordinary battle, what act of profane violence, what deliverance or destruction?
He tried to shut it out by concocting a plan to implement if he were to fail utterly.