"Initiatives," I think they're called now.
"Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences turns out to apply to private good ideas just like public ones. Full fucking force and effect. This humanitarian idea had something nasty in it nobody noticed. The franchise people were making these retards into targets for the predators. Someone's going to tell them if they're smart enough to do this donkey work and get four or five bucks an hour plus the benefits our nice franchise people also throw in, then it stands to reason they can also swindle people.
"Because that's the kind of company they start to keep, not meaning to, of course, as soon as they start getting actual paychecks. They may be small, but those paychecks represent money, and money draws serpents.
First to see if they can get those checks away from those hardworking people who aren't terribly bright, and then see if they can't think up some way to use them, manipulate them, get even larger sums of money from other people. Some other innocent person who'd be on his guard against a crook, but who'd never suspect a poor retard.
"This case the predator snared first another lady who's also not stunningly bright and who also happens to work out on the pike at the Burger Quik with the lady who's now under my supervision. The plan was to cheat an old lady in Canterbury out of her savings account. The old con game; what Miss Iscariot did to make a living before she got distracted and found herself pregnant with Judas. The drill was that the two retarded ladies pretend that they found a bag of money which would be a flash-wad, couple fives and some ones and a wad of newspapers cut up the same size. They'd show the wad to the lady that the snake selected as the sucker. She was then supposed to agree to demonstrate that they could trust her to take the bag of money to the bank which they're afraid to do themselves because they're not very bright and the banker might cheat them, and that's why they need her.
But she has to prove they can trust her. This she's supposed to do by going to the bank and withdrawing all her money from it and then giving it to them to hold while she takes the paper bag to the bank and opens a new account in all their names, and deposits what's in the bag into that account. Which all of them will then share.
"While they of course in fact will be running like hell to join up with the boss crook who, you can bank on it, has got no intention of splitting the take with them at all.
"Except that this time the Fagin picked the wrong old lady. She knows which end is up and her ass from third base. Instead of doing what they told her to do she tells the bank manager what's going on. He calls the cops.
"The cops grab the three of 'em, the two retarded ladies and the crook.
Judge Cavanaugh does the right thing and tells the crook, who happens to be a broad herself, that she wont have to worry about board and room for the next five years 'cause the State's gonna take care of that for her. Both of the retarded ladies lose their jobs, though, since one of the job rules is you have to behave yourself.
"Still and all, it didn't seem to me or the judge it wouldn't do any good to send the retarded ladies to jail. So the one of the ladies who isn't my lady got sent back to her relative in Palmer who's her next friend, but since the one I've got doesn't have a relative like that, someone Lennie can appoint to act as her legal guardian, I win Miss Janet LeClerc.
"Now, all of this's all right. I know my role in this production. I know what Janet's role is. I'm the gruff but kindly public servant who's trying to do the right thing for the person who can't take proper care of herself. I also know what my part is in what's going on right here. You and I as gentlemen of very modest wealth but very considerable taste are going to play some golf and enjoy the rewards of long life in agreeable company, as is truly meet and just. These things I have got figured out.
"What I haven't figured out is the larger purpose Julian serves. As many years as I've known the kid and liked his daddy, better on some days'n others, I have never understood what Julian's function is in the cosmic scheme of things. I see that he defies the law of gravity, and most likely several others I'd rather not know about. Existing as he does without visible means of support sufficient means of support, anyway and I'm suitably impressed. But why is he on this planet? What the hell is he for?"
TEN
Julian's second student shanked his drive badly, high-hopping it off the turf into the grove of young maples down near the bend in the Wolf River to the right. Hilliard said he hit them intentionally because he enjoyed 'nature walks' along the riverbanks. Further down the river flowed placidly under a stone bridge set in the middle of the third fairway, just about a slightly duffed one-hundred-sixty-yard splasher from the tee. From there it proceeded through the maple groves left standing to separate the front nine from the back and out the other side, running along the fourteenth and fifteenth fairways and making a deep hazard behind the twelfth green. South Brook also meandered through the course, penalizing inaccurate irons on the eighteenth and sixteenth holes. Under Grey Hills proprietorship the streams that Jesse Grey and his friends had fished so avidly principally functioned as cold wet storage for slightly used two-dollar golf balls hit by players well-enough-off to call them lost and hit new ones for their mulligans rather than get their feet wet.
In the summer every two or three weeks, shortly after sunrise, teenagers from Hampton Pond and Cumberland sneaked onto the course and snorkeled the deeper pools where the currents deposited the lost balls, surfacing with thick-gauge wire baskets streaming water and brimming with a couple dozen Titlists, Pinnacles, Max-His, Staffs and Spalding Dots; those uncut were unharmed by immersion. Then the kids pulled on their jeans and sneakers and disappeared into the woods.
The near-pristine balls they sold in furtive haste for six bucks a dozen, cash, to frugal and unprincipled golfers emerging from their cars in the parking lots or cursing hooks and slices while thrashing five and seven irons through the bushes along the fairways of public courses in Chicopee, Springfield and Holyoke. That phase of the trade was also clandestine; municipal course rules gave their pro-shop managers the same full-retail-price monopolies on sales of golf merchandise that Bolo Cormier enjoyed at Grey Hills. The public-course pros jealously guarded those rights, posting threatening signs condemning the ball-hawkers as trespassers and forbidding patronage of them the kids often had to run from the cops.
Somewhat-nicked or badly grass-stained but still-usable balls went five-for-a-buck to the manager of the Maple Knoll Driving Range on Route 47 in Hampton Falls. It was his idea to retrieve the balls, knowing the practice to be illegal but confident that he could get away with it. He had provided the buckets the kids used in the expectation he would get all the balls retrieved, paying a quarter each for the unblemished ones and reselling them to his customers for the same price the kids charged for them at the public links. He was aware of their direct service of that thriving market, angered by their treachery, and powerless to do anything about it.
Some Grey Hills members fished the river and the brook early in the cold of April each year. By the end of May weekday traffic on the course, still moderate enough to permit play by twosomes and threesomes who could walk the course if they wished, towing their clubs, became nearly constant, and, afraid they would be hit by stray balls, few came to fish. On holidays and weekends in high season when the sign-up sheet filled early, club rules specified all must play in foursomes.