Chris Adrian - The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

If Lucy let it all out, held nothing back at all, and was hitting on a flat surface without wind, she could drive one of her Titleists three hundred yards, and maybe a yard or two more — not to say that she knew exactly where it would go under those conditions. Backing off a little, she could average 272 yards and keep the ball in the fairway.

Good enough for the Tour.

But the Tour didn’t pay for long drives; the Tour paid for low scores. So though she hit her three buckets of balls each morning and evening, she’d devoted most of her practice in the last year to the short game — and specifically, the game within thirty to sixty yards of the pin. Anytime you were standing in that gap, one of two things happened: you screwed up, or you were a little off, or a little short, on your second shot to a par 5.

So the next shot would either make par, if you’d screwed up, and therefore keep you in the game; or give you a birdie on the par 5. Both of those things were critical if you wanted to win on the Tour, and in the calendar in the back of her list book, she’d blocked out two months of thirty-six practice, two-and-a-half-hour sessions on Rattlesnake’s par 3, twice a day. Get up and down every time from thirty to sixty, she thought, and you rule the Tour.

As she walked out to the par 3, she let her mind drift to the coach at the University of Florida. He’d come up to see her, and they’d played a couple of rounds at Bear Path, over in the Cities. At the end of the second round, he’d given her a notebook and said, “Write this down.”

“A list?”

“A list,” he said. He was a tough-looking nut, brown from the sun with pale blue eyes and an eye-matching blue Izod golf shirt buttoned to the top. “This is what I want you to do.”

Over a Leinenkugel for him and a Diet Coke for her, and cheeseburgers with strips of bacon, he’d given her thirty putting drills and thirty more short-game drills.

“How long?”

“At least two hours a day,” he said.

“I do six now,” she said.

He looked at her, saw she was serious and said, “Then don’t quit, if you can stand it.”

“If it’d put me on the Tour, I’d do ten,” she said.

“We’re gonna get along just fine, Lucy,” he said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. “You do two hours a day, I’ll put you on the Tour. You do six hours and I’ll put you on the leader board in the Open. Whether you win or not... that depends on what you were born with.”

She looked flat back at him: “I been playing” — she didn’t say for money, but rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the money sign — “since I was twelve,” she said. “You give me a six-foot putt for two hundred dollars with forty-three dollars in the bank, and I’ll make it every time.”

He leaned back in his chair and smiled at her: “You’re giving me wet panties,” he said.

She’d decided on this day to work on the ninth green on the par 3. The ninth was slightly raised all around, a platform, with steep banks climbing six feet up to the green. The pin was near the back, and she walked around behind the green so she’d be coming in from the short side; and she’d use nothing but the 7-, 8- and 9-irons, punching short shots into the bank, letting the bank and the rough slow the ball down, so it’d trickle over the top and down to the pin. This was not a common approach. Most people would try to flop the ball up to the pin, as she would, most of the time. But sometimes you couldn’t do that — like if there was a tree nearby — and then you needed something different.

She was hard at it, punching an 8-iron into a spot two and a half feet down from the top of the platform, trying to control the ball hop, when she realized somebody was coming up behind her. She turned and saw Mitchell Drury.

Mitchell. He must’ve been forty, she thought. But you sort of thought about him anyway, looked him over, even if you were seventeen. That weathered cowboy thing, with the shoulders and the small butt.

“Lucy,” he said. His face was serious; usually he’d do a movie-star grin when he was talking to her — he knew women liked him. Not this time. “Gotta talk to you.”

“Sure thing. About Stevie?” She sat back on the bank next to the green and he plopped down beside her.

“Yeah... um. You know, I mean, everybody knows, he was seeing your mom.”

“C’mon, Mitch. That was over two months ago.”

“Over for your mom?” His eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, over. It ain’t the first time she’s had a romance out here — Christ, she’s only thirty-eight. I’m surprised you ain’t been knocking on the door.”

“Hmm,” Mitch said, his eyes cutting away.

Lucy thought, Holy cow. “Mitchell,” she said.

“Don’t ask,” he said. “But besides that ... you’re sure. About Stevie.”

“I’m real sure,” she said. “That motherfucker dropped her like a hot rock and she cried for four straight days. She’s crying right now. But she never would have done anything about it.” She looked up the hill toward the bunker. “Nothing like that.”

“All right... She been out playing lately?”

Lucy shook her head. “Not much. Didn’t want to run into Stevie, I think. Take the chance.”

“All right,” he said. He stood up. “I gotta talk to her, though.”

“How was... umm, I mean, was he shot? Stabbed? What?”

He shrugged. “I’ll tell you, it’s gonna be in the paper anyway... but I’d be a little happier if you didn’t pass it around.”

“Sure.”

He looked both ways, as though somebody might be sneaking up on them, then said, “His skull was crushed.”

“Crushed?” She shook her head. “Like with a car crusher? Like squashed?”

“No, no. Like somebody hit him in the temple with a driver.”

She sat back. “Oh.”

“What, Oh ?”

“Nothing. I was just trying to think who I’d seen him playing with. But when I think about it, I ain’t seen him playing with nobody, much. Mary Dietz a couple times, John Wilson last week.”

“He have something going with Mary?”

Lucy shrugged: “I don’t know. Might of just been playing lessons.”

“Somebody else mentioned... I thought Mary was seeing Willie Franklin.”

“Don’t know about that, either,” Lucy said. “Tell you the truth, Mitchell, I been a little out of it, ever since that letter come in from Florida. Gettin’ ready.”

Drury nodded. “Good luck on that, Luce,” he said. Now he gave her the grin. “You’re the best to ever come out of here. I think you’ll go the whole way.”

“That kinda talk’ll get you a free lesson,” Lucy said, grinning back.

Drury laughed and said, “May take you up on that.”

Lucy stood up, brushed the grass off the seat of her pants and said, “Mom didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Mitchell. Not a fuckin’ thing. She’s too kindhearted. I think you probably know that.”

He might have blushed and he said, “Well, yeah, that’s sorta what I think. See you later, Luce. Don’t worry too much about your mom.”

Lucy went back to hitting balls at the embankment. The first four or five hit too hard and trickled past, and she observed herself for a moment. Adrenaline. She had this feeling, this much adrenaline. Had to remember it: this much would get you nine feet past the pin...

Her mind drifted away from golf, just for a second or two. She’d made a lot of grammatical and usage errors when she spoke to Mitchell.

And that was good.

She thought about going back home. Mom probably could use some diversion. But she tarried at the putting green, trying again to make a hundred six-foot putts in a row. The drill was simple enough — you putted all the balls from the same spot, and after five or six, you could see a little pathway developing in the turf. If you could keep the balls in the pathway, you had a chance. But as the number went up, the stress built...