“I could see it was long,” Hedrick said, “the moment I looked up. What did you use, a three iron?”
“A four,” Nicholson said.
“Oh? Then you must have had your heart in it. I always use a four here myself, but I never carry the green.”
“I should have got more loft,” Nicholson said. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll be quiet while you putt out, and I’ll be careful not to hit into you again.”
“Prefer to play alone, do you?”
“The only thing I prefer it to,” said Nicholson, “is not playing at all. Fellow I was supposed to play with couldn’t make it. Ben Weymouth. Don’t suppose you know him?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“He canceled at the last minute. I’d been hoping I’d run into somebody at the first tee, but no such luck, and I couldn’t afford to wait on the off chance someone would turn up. And Jimmy said I’d just missed a fellow who’d been looking for somebody to play with.”
“That would have been me,” Hedrick said. “I got tired of waiting, but it looks as though we found each other after all. It’s your shot.”
“Oh,” Nicholson said, seemingly taken aback. “But I couldn’t possibly horn in, not after the way I almost crowned you there.”
“No harm done. So why not finish the round together? Unless you really don’t want company.”
“Company’s exactly what I do want. If you’re sure...”
“I’m sure,” Hedrick said. “And you’re away, and the lie you’ve got in the trap is the reason God invented the sand wedge.”
He got a good shot from the trap and two-putted for a bogey four. Hedrick’s putt lipped the cup, hesitated for a long moment, then dropped for a birdie. Nicholson complimented him on the putt and Hedrick turned it aside, saying it was the result of having so much time to think about it.
“Anyway,” he said, “you’ve brought me luck. If I’d hit that putt straight off, it never would have dropped.”
“Good luck for both of us,” Nicholson replied.
On the next hole they both hit good drives, but to opposite sides of the broad fairway. They met on the green, each reaching it in three, each two-putting for a bogey.
On number seven, Hedrick hooked his drive into the tall grass to the left of the fairway. “Hell,” he said.
“Shouldn’t hurt you much,” Nicholson told him. He teed up his own ball and sent it down the left edge of the fairway.
“Birds of a feather,” he said, retrieving his tee, returning his club to the bag. His forefinger stroked the silvery head of the big driver before he hoisted his bag and stepped away from the tee. “Hit the ball, drag Fred,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“I love golf jokes,” Nicholson said, as they headed down the fairway together. “Not as much as I love golf, but I do get a kick out of them. Of course they’re all the same joke.”
“All the same joke?”
“The point of every golf joke I ever heard,” said Nicholson, “is the obsessive nature of the game. That’s what they’re all about, and that’s what makes them funny. Like the funeral passing by.”
“I must have missed a couple of strokes there,” Hedrick said. “What’s so funny about a funeral?”
“Two fellows are playing golf,” Nicholson said. “And as they approach the tee for the seventh hole there’s a long string of cars passing by.”
“In the middle of a golf course?”
“There’s a road edging the course,” Nicholson said patiently, “and from the seventh tee, they’re within chipping distance of the road. And there are all these cars passing at slow speed, and the first one’s a hearse and the next two are black limousines, and they’ve all of them got their lights on, so you can tell it’s a funeral cortege.”
“On their way to the cemetery,” Hedrick said.
“Evidently. So the one golfer, he immediately shoves his driver back into his bag, whips off his cap, and stands in reverent silence until the very last car has passed them and disappeared into the distance.”
“Why?”
“Just what his partner was wondering. ‘What a respectful thing to do!’ he says. ‘All the times we’ve played together, and it turns out there’s a spiritual side to you I never saw before.’
“The first golfer shrugs and puts his cap back on. ‘I figure it’s the least I can do,’ he says. ‘After all, she was a good wife to me for twenty-seven years.’ ”
Hedrick found his ball, took his second shot, made a good recovery. Nicholson took his own second shot, and they finished the hole in silence. Coming off the green, Hedrick said, “She was his wife.”
“Right.”
“In the hearse. His wife died, and she was being buried, and he was out on the golf course instead of showing up for her funeral.”
“Well, it’s not as though it actually happened,” Nicholson said. “It’s just a joke.”
“Oh, I realize that. I’m just looking at it as a joke. She was his wife and it was a successful marriage, but because golf is the way it is and because golfers are the way they are—”
“The way we are,” Nicholson put in.
“Well, yes. Because of these factors, his idea of showing respect is standing for a couple of minutes with his cap off.”
“When you explain it that way,” Nicholson said, “it’s not terribly funny, is it?”
“Oh, it’s funny,” Hedrick said. “I’m just sort of, oh, deconstructing it, you might say. And I think you said all golf jokes are essentially the same, all based on the same element of humor.”
“I’d say so,” Nicholson said. “Can you think of one that isn’t?”
Hedrick couldn’t, and they played on in relative silence, their conversation limited to compliments on one another’s shots as they played the next two holes. Both men bogeyed the par-three eighth hole. Hedrick scored par on nine, while Nicholson, whose second shot stopped within six feet of the pin, read the green, set himself, and sank the putt for a birdie.
It was, he realized, the first hole he’d won outright.
Approaching the next green, Hedrick said, “But I’m afraid I don’t see where Fred comes into it.”
Nicholson looked at him.
“ ‘Hit the ball, drag Fred.’ Isn’t that what you said? If Fred’s anywhere in the joke about the wife’s funeral, he must have been hiding behind a tree. I have to say I didn’t spot him.”
“It’s another joke,” Nicholson told him, “but in a sense it’s the same joke. Man goes to play a round of golf with his best friend and business partner.”
“Fred, I suppose.”
“Right, Fred. And his wife’s waiting dinner for him, and he’s more than two hours late by the time he walks in the door, and the guy looks terrible. ‘Honey,’ she says, ‘are you all right? Did you have a good afternoon?’
“ ‘I’m not all right,’ he says. ‘And I just had the worst afternoon of my life. I met Fred and we went out together, and everything was fine, it was a beautiful afternoon, and we were both hitting the ball well. And then Fred’s playing his second shot on the sixth hole, he’s set up nicely just to the right of the long fairway bunker, and he goes into his backswing and collapses. He drops dead, right there in the middle of the fairway.’
“ ‘Oh, my God,’ says the wife. ‘Honey, that’s horrible! How awful for poor Fred, and it must have been perfectly terrible for you, too.’
“ ‘I’ll say,’ he says. ‘That was the sixth hole, the long par five. So for twelve more holes it was hit the ball, drag Fred, hit the ball, drag Fred.’ ”
Hedrick didn’t say anything at first. Then he said, “I see what you mean. It’s the same joke. It’s different, but it’s the same.”