Free Train by Pete Dexter Page B

man would think something like that. “The catch ?” he said. “There isn’t any catch. Yesterday you asked Lionel Walk, Jr., here what he would hit from this spot, and he said a nine iron. So we’ll hand him a nine iron and see if he can do it.”
     
     
The two other men looked at each other, didn’t seem to understand.
     
     
“And if he can, he can,” Mr. Packard said, “and if he can’t, he can’t.”
     
     
“One try, from where you’re standing.”
     
     
“It’s your big day, fat man,” he said, “the world’s a hundred-dollar blow job.” There was more of the taste of the bad side in his voice all the time, although you had to be paying attention to hear it. He grinned at the golfers Pink had brought along, the proof of what was going on. “I’m just giving you a chance to make it twice as good.”
     
     
Pink began to nod. “All right,” he said.
     
     
Then he turned to his partner and said, “What the fuck, right?”
     
     
The man looked around and shrugged.
     
     
Train stood where he was, wondering what he was supposed to do now. “This all right with you?” Mr. Packard said. “You don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.”
     
     
“Wait a minute, I thought we had a bet.”
     
     
“We got a bet, Pink,” he said, sounded like he was talking to a slow child. “Now I’m finding out if Mr. Walk wants to participate in it.” He waited. Train’s mouth tasted like he’d been licking stamps.
     
     
Mr. Packard took his bag off Train’s shoulder and dropped it on the ground. The caddies never dropped clubs like that; the members was always checking them for dings and scratches, but Mr. Packard didn’t care how his clubs looked, didn’t seem to care about nothing but a good time was had by all. Taking something away from Pink. He bent down, looking through the irons, and pulled one out.
     
     
“That’s the nine?” Pink said.
     
     
“You know,” Mr. Packard said, looking at the other two men, “all these questions might make a person wonder if everything here’s on the square.”
     
     
Pink stared at the ground and kept his mouth shut.
     
     
Mr. Packard handed Train the nine iron, dropped a ball on the grass, and stepped out of the way. Train moved the club up and down in the air, feeling it. It was heavier at the bottom than his club, less flex in the shaft. The grip was soft and he could hold on to it without squeezing. He felt the men waiting and stepped up to the ball, had a quick look at the green and let it go. Without looking, he knew where it was.
     
     
They walked down the fairway, Mr. Packard toting the bag, would not let Train touch it. “No sir,” he said, “not on your life. You’re the stick, I just carry the bag.” Having a big time with Pink now.
     
     
Pink was up ahead. He never said a word when Train hit his shot; he never looked at him again all day, and he tried not to even look at the green, where Train’s ball was laying almost in the dent it made when it hit, five feet from the pin.
     
     
And then Mr. Packard took a drop at the far edge of the pond and chipped it in for par, and Pink didn’t seem to see that neither. He got to the point by now that he didn’t care about the niceties of the game or how he looked in front of his friends, which in the game of golf was as bad as you could be beat.
     
     

Everything changed.
     
     
Pink saw he couldn’t get his money back from yesterday, and everything that was easy before, he had to think about it now. And then Mr. Packard stopped his partner before he hit his driver off the tee, and said, “Edgar, your name is Edgar, right? Is there a club in your bag somewhere that you hit better than that?” Might have been the first time he spoke directly to him all day.
     
     
The man named Edgar turned around, not happily to be interrupted.
     
     
“Something you hit straight?”
     
     
“Straight?”
     
     
“You know, afterwards you can find the ball?”
     
     
Edgar