Wednesday he went to the gun club, Thursday to the gym again, this time to lift weights. And Friday found him at the driving range at Chelsea Piers.
He hadn’t yet replaced his Big Bertha. It would be easy enough to do, one Big Bertha was essentially indistinguishable from the next, but he hadn’t yet had the heart for it. He hit his drives with his 2-wood, as he’d done on the course, hit a dozen balls with it, then continued to work his way through his bag of clubs and through two buckets of balls.
It wasn’t the same.
Memories of the previous Saturday kept getting in the way. “The wonderful thing about golf,” Bellerman had assured him, “is the way memory improves it. You remember the good shots and forget the bad. I suppose that’s one of the things that keeps us coming back.”
Wrong, dead wrong. He’d already forgotten the handful of good shots he’d managed to achieve, while the awful ones crowded his memory and got in the way of his practice today. He couldn’t take a club from his bag without recalling just how horribly he’d topped or sliced or shanked a shot with it. His mashie, which he’d hit solidly on Twelve, only to send the ball thirty yards past the damned green. His 3-iron, which he’d used from the rough, visualizing a perfect shot to the green between a pair of towering trees. And of course the ball had struck one tree dead center, rebounding so that it left him further from the hole than he’d started, but with the same shot through the trees. Second time around, he’d hit the other tree...
“Want to go out tomorrow?”
Bellerman, damn him. He drew a breath, forced himself to be civil. “No,” he said. “Thanks, but I can’t make it tomorrow.”
“You should, you know. Kid gets thrown from a horse, best thing he can do is get right back on him.”
And get thrown again?
“You obviously love the game, Kramer. Otherwise you wouldn’t be over here after a day like the one you had Saturday. But don’t try to make this take the place of the real thing. You’ve had a taste of golf and you want to keep at it, you know? Say, did you find somebody to put a new shaft on that putter?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you will. Are you sure you can’t make it tomorrow? Well then, maybe next week.”
The weekend passed. Monday he ran on the treadmill, and afterward he went online and ordered a new Big Bertha driver. Tuesday he had a good session at the batting cage, and that afternoon he took his putter to an elderly German gentleman somewhere on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, who repaired old golf clubs and fishing rods in his basement workshop. The price was high, more than he’d originally paid for the club, but it was worth it and more if it could erase the evidence of his bad temper.
Wednesday he went to the gun club. He fired the deer rifle and the .22 at his usual targets, then took a break and sipped a cup of coffee. The weight machines tomorrow, he thought, and then the driving range on Friday, and Bellerman would show up, dammit, and what was he going to do about that, anyway?
The real world. There were, he supposed, fellow members of the gun club who hunted. Had country places in Jersey or Pennsylvania, say, and tried to get a buck in deer season, or a brace of pheasant at the appropriate time. But the majority of members, he was sure, just came to practice marksmanship. They didn’t think of their activity as a pale substitute for the real thing, and neither did anybody else.
He went back to practice with the magnum, selected his usual paper target. Then something made him switch to a target he’d seen used by other members — law enforcement personnel, for the most part. The target was a male silhouette, gun in hand.
It was strange at first. He’d always aimed at a bull’s-eye target, and now he was aiming at a human outline. It too had a series of concentric circles, centered upon the figure’s heart, so you could see just how close you came. And it wasn’t a person at all, it was just a piece of paper, but it still took a little getting used to.
And an odd thing happened. Welcome to the real world, said a voice in his head, and it was recognizable, that voice. It was Bellerman’s voice, and he steadied the big handgun and squeezed off a shot, and the gun bucked satisfyingly in his hand, and the bullet found its mark in the silhouette.
He kept hearing Bellerman’s voice in his head, and the two-dimensional generic silhouette began assuming three-dimensional form in his mind, and the face began wearing Bellerman’s features.
He spent a longer time than usual at the range, and his hand and forearm ached by the time he was done. The real world, he thought. The real world indeed.
He returned the rifle and the target pistol to his locker. No one noticed that he walked out with the magnum tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and the remainder of a box of shells in his pocket.
Would Bellerman show up again at the driving range Friday?
Perhaps not. Perhaps the man would have gotten the message by then and would leave him alone, having done what he could to ruin Kramer’s life.
But somehow Kramer doubted it. Bellerman was no quitter. He’d be there again, with the same abrasive drawl, the same smile that was never far from a sneer. The same invitation to a round of Saturday golf, which this time Kramer would accept.
Only this time there’d be something new in his bag. And, on one of the more remote holes at Bellerman’s club, Kramer would bring out not his brassie or his mashie or his niblick, not his sand wedge, not his (and God’s) 1-iron, but a .357 magnum revolver, cleaned and loaded and ready.
Welcome to the real world, Bellerman!
Who Knows Where It Goes
When the waitress brought him his coffee, Colliard managed a nod and a smile. He added milk but no sugar, stirred, looked out the window at the entrance to the four-story commercial building across the street. He didn’t really want the coffee, he’d had enough coffee today, and this cup wouldn’t make him any more alert than he already was. Its only discernible effect would come hours from now, when he’d want to sleep and it wouldn’t let him.
Of course that might be difficult anyway.
Maybe he should have ordered decaf. He never did, he never even thought of it until he already had a cup of regular coffee in front of him. He’d never been able to see the point of decaf. Why drink the stuff at all if not for the caffeine? It never tasted as good as you hoped it would. Sometimes, if it was particularly good coffee, the smell was wonderful. But then you took a sip, and all you got was disappointment. And caffeine.
He picked up the spoon, stirred the coffee some more, put the spoon down. And left the cup in its saucer. It wasn’t as though he had to drink it. He’d had to order it, so that he could have this table by the window, but now that she’d brought it to him he could sit here until closing time. It wasn’t as though they needed the table for another customer. The diner was mostly empty, and would likely remain that way, like every place else in town. Like every other town in the country.
Hard times. Sometimes it was tough not to take it personally, to see the entire break in the economy as having been aimed specifically at him. When he got that way he forced himself to take a good look around. And it was pretty easy to see that it wasn’t just him. Everywhere he looked, businesses were failing and men and women were out of work. Corporations, absolute household names that had been around as long as he could remember, were going out of business. Banks were imploding. Retailers, from the big box chains to the hardware store on the corner, were turning off the lights and locking the doors. As an economy move, someone had quipped, the light at the end of the tunnel had been turned off.