Stephen Hunter - Black Light

The other irony was that this whole thing even now, as it had for so long, completely delighted him. It was … remarkably fun. Such a clever plot, so astutely calibrated, based on such an intense analysis of Bob’s character. Really, truly a masterpiece.

“Red, you’re away.”

That was Jeff Seward, first operating vice-president of Fort Smith Federal. The others in the foursome were Neil James, of Bristow, Freed, Bartholomew and Jeffers, Attorneys-at-Law, and Roger Deacon, of McCone-Carruthers Advertising Agency. It was the weekly golf foursome of the Fort Smith Rich Boys Club, at Hardscrabble Country Club off Cliff Drive.

And Red was indeed out and Jeff was indeed delighted.

His ball lay a long fifty-three feet from the pin. Between it and the hole was a wilderness of elevations, switchbacks, slopes and bare spots. It was the eighteenth hole: Red had shot low, standing at a 71, but damned Jeff, who had never beaten him, was standing at a 72 and had hit an uncharacteristically nice approach shot that had deposited him a few feet from the pin. His one-putt would put him out at 73; Red’s two-putt would leave him at 73 also— damn! —and if he three-putted, a distinct possibility, he’d lose. The image of Jeff’s smirk filled him with dark rage, which he enjoyed because it cut through the mesh of anxieties that he otherwise had suffered.

Jeff was an old friend and enemy; he’d played on the same Razorback football team with Red in the early sixties, and had at least kept up with him in the wife department, trading in an older model on a newer one every fifteen years, though he’d never reached—and never would—the beauty pageant level as had Red. They’d been in and out of business deals a dozen times and made at least four or five million off of each other’s friendship and connection. But … golf was thicker than blood. Red did not want to lose.

He approached the ball and knelt to read the green. Around him the vivid beauty of the course expressed itself in full vertiginous glory, the most agreeable golf course in West Arkansas and better than all of the courses but one in Little Rock.

So Red looked across the ball into a treacherous maze of possibilities. He glanced at his watch. It was late. Suddenly, he felt a strange thing, a collapse of will. It was as if his warrior’s spirit, which had sustained him these many years, had suddenly vanished. He didn’t want to putt out. He wanted to lie down.

I am getting old, he thought.

He read the putt as a left-to-right crosser and knew it demanded courage above all else. It would seem to die a half dozen times, seem to quit and sputter or slide off into irrelevancy, would live a whole odyssey of adventures before it even got in the neighborhood of the cup. You had to hit it hard. You had to believe. You could not shirk or flinch or whine: go at it like a man and live or die, like a man.

“That would be a hell of a putt, Red,” said Jeff.

“You wouldn’t want a side bet, would you, Jeff?”

“Hmmmmm,” considered Jeff. “Something in the neighborhood of—oh, a grand?”

“A grand it is, bubba,” said Red, smiling wolfishly and setting himself up. “Did I ever tell you boys about the time I took three grand off Clinton? That’s why he won’t play with me no more!”

Damn!

The buzz of the vibrator on his beeper.

“Scuse me, gents.”

He stepped off the green and took his folder from his caddie. He punched up the phone mail and heard Duane Peck’s breathless voice: “Call me. Fast.”

Red punched the number in.

“Mr. Bama?”

“Yes.”

“It’s working. I just dropped Preece off. The old man’s got ’em in there. I’m holding now at the fallback point, waiting for Preece to dust them. By God, it’s going to work! They’re here!”

Red’s heart filled with joy! He was so close and it would all be over: another threat to his empire and its little secrets defeated. Life, its own beautiful self, would go on and on and on: he’d put all his children through college and maybe, in a few years, when the Runner-up wore down, he’d gracefully retire her to some country mansion and get himself the actual thing he wanted more than anything: a true, authentic Miss Arkansas, young, hot and nubile. Wouldn’t that beat all!

“Duane, you call me the second it is over, do you understand?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

Red handed the folder back to the boy and remounted the green.

“Good news, Red?”

“The best.”

“Another million for Mr. Bama,” said Neil James, “and that means another twenty thousand in billing for me.”

“Boys,” said Red, “when the big dog’s happy, everdamnbody’s happy.”

He addressed the putt, filled to the eyeballs with blazing confidence.

“Jeff, you want to make that five grand, even up?”

“Hell, Red,” said Jeff, “I’se hoping you’d let me off the hook on the grand!”

Everybody laughed except Red, who bent into the putt and laid the considerable pressure of the Bama concentration against it, until he thought he’d explode. Then, almost reflexively, with a sharp rap, he struck the ball, wrists stiff, head down, shoulders loose, a perfect putt built on courage, iron determination and $100,000 in golf lessons over the years.

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 gal: 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.