Free Knuckleheads by Jeff Kass Page B

front of the green. It’s roughly thirty yards wide and if it swallows your ball, you will never find it among the brambles growing in its throat. It’s true my shot doesn’t matter and that I’ve already contributed enough to my team, still, most of the firm and all my bosses are watching from the clubhouse balcony. If I tank the ball into the brambles, on some level I’m still a loser. I don’t have to get the ball close to the hole, I just need to hit it solid enough to fly the hazard. I just have to be respectable. A respectable shot of a hundred-and-ten yards. I can do that.
    “You gonna come through for me?” Gordon asks me again. “Hold up your end?”
    “Shut up,” I tell him. “Your breath stinks.”
    I swing without paying much attention to what I’m doing. My arms are loose and flowing through contact and the click of club on ball is pure. It’s another perfect shot. Every eye on the balcony zeroes in on it. The ravine sighs in resignation as the ball floats toward the flag. For a second, it looks like it might bounce and roll into the hole again for a third eagle, but nobody’s that lucky. It scoots, then slows, and finally settles about four inches from the cup. A tap-in for birdie. The roar from the balcony is loud and long, the applause lasts for a minute at least.
    I doff my hat and bow.
     
    Natalie and I are in the basement of the clubhouse. In a small office that’s empty except for a wastebasket with a handful of cough-drop wrappers and a grayish table pushed up against one wall. It’s as if no one has decided yet what to use the office for. Natalie leans back against the table. I lean into her. Her golf shirt is on the floor and her bra is of a lace and smell that Nancy will never achieve in this lifetime. Gordon and Lisa disappeared an hour ago. “What would you do,” I ask, “if in the middle of a round somewhere, your caddy gets so pissed off at you he throws your clubs into a pond?”
    “That would never happen,” Natalie says. “I treat my caddies well.”
    Her breath has been overwhelmed by the scotch. It is sweet and leafy, a summer forest at night, a bacchanalia. It is lush and fertile and way beyond the out-of-bounds marker and I think my tongue tastes the same way. Nancy would understand why I’m doing this, which will only make it hurt more when she finds out. I will lie to her, but I will also want to brag. It will be up to her to decide if she still wants to settle for me, and my lawyer’s instincts tell me she will. It will not make her feel better when I tell her this is only a one-time deal, something special for me, kind of like a tip.
    Yes, a tip is what this is. I performed well on the course and now I am being tipped.
    I take Natalie’s nipple into my mouth. It is alive. I am alive. Her stomach is a steam of fresh-baked bread, warm and gold and rising toward my cheek, my fingers. “Twenty under par,” I say, as she unbuckles my belt.
    Her hand holds me and demonstrates the authority of her grip. “This is not something we’ll be telling the rest of the firm about,” she says.
    No, it isn’t.

UNDER DANNY ROTTEN
    UNDER THIS SHIRT IS SKIN, and under this skin is heart, and under this heart, is nachos, my own full plate with diced jalapeños and the six of us—my two brothers, my sister, my parents and me—heading out to dinner in Mamaroneck on Saturday nights.
    It was a twenty-minute drive, the inside of the station wagon warm, dark, fluid, a womb. We’d park for free on the street atop a hill a couple hundred yards from the restaurant, and walk down through a metered parking lot. Often, I held my mother’s hand, or my little sister’s thin fingers, but what burned was the anticipation of nachos. My own platter. And not a heaping mound of cheese-sauce and fake salsa slop, but a dozen individual chips, each with its own slather of freshly melted cheese, refried beans and a bold jalapeño in the center, juicy and staring, like an eyeball.
    The back of