"Let's see Zack made the pretext of counting on his fingers. "Eighteen dollars. I guess I can handle that. Okay, sir, a dollar a hole it is. I assume you'll take it easy on me, as always."
The Judge set his ball on the tee and looked up at his son with a predatory smile. "Of course, " he said. "Just like always."
It was the most basic truth of the man's relationship with his sons, and almost a standing joke among them over the years, that he had never given them even the slightest quarter in anything competitive, whether gin rummy, at which he was a vicious profiteer, golf, or even business.
Victories were to be earned, or not to be had, loans of even the smallest amounts of money were invariably accompanied by IOUS and were to be paid back in full, and always with some interest. Zack knew that on this day, as always, not one punch would be pulled, not one edge given away. T'he Judge's drive, to the genteel applause of a dozen or so onlookers, split the fairway and rolled to a stop well past the discreet two-hundred-yard marker. Aware that he often felt less tension operating on a brain tumor than he did at that moment, Zack shanked his drive into the goldfish pond. "I hope you don't have any pressing engagements, Judge, " he said, teeing up another ball. "We could be here for a while."
"Slow your backswing and drop your left shoulder a bit," his father said. Zack did as was suggested and hit a bullet that bounced almost on top of the Judge's ball and then rolled several yards beyond. "Thanks for the help, " he whispered, tipping an imaginary cap in response to the applause from the small gallery. "Enjoy it, " the Judge said as they walked off the tee. "At a buck a hole, that's all you get."
By the end of the front nine, Zachary was seven dollars behind and was ettiniz blisters on the sides of both heels from his decade-old golf shoes. Still, the afternoon was warm and relaxing, and he was enjoying a seldom-experienced sense of connection to his father, born largely, it seemed, of casual snippets of conversation and brief flashes to afternoons, long past, like this one. Clayton Iverson had asked about his new practice and shared a few anecdotes from the courtroom, but otherwise had given no real indication that there were any items on the afternoon's agenda other than golf. Following a brief stop in the clubhouse for a beer, the Judge dropped off the motorized cart he had used on the front nine and arrived at the tenth tee pulling his clubs on a two-wheeled aluminum caddy. "I need the exercise, " he explained. "And besides, with me riding and you walking and chasing those shots of yours all over hell and gone, it didn't seem like we had much chance to talk out there."
"Very witty, Judge, " Zachary said. "Well, just watch the out. To quote the words of General Custer at the Little Big Horn, We have not yet begun to fight."
He led off the tenth hole with a decent drive, but his father's shot, sliced badly, flew far to the right and disappeared into a bank of tall rough. While they were scuffling through the heavy grass looking for the ball, the Judge waved the foursome behind them to play through. "If we don't find it by the time those four have putted out, I'll drop one."
"Fair enough."
Zack wondered briefly about the amicable concession, which was out of character for the man. "Zachary, tell me something, " the Judge went on, still searching through the rough. "Have you encountered any problems with Ultramed since you started working at the hospital?"
"Problems?"
"Hey, you know what I'll bet? I'll bet my shot went a little farther right than we thought. Let's try looking over that way."
"Judge?"
"Yes?"
"What sort of problems are you talking about?"
Clayton Iverson hesitated for a time, apparently uncertain whether or not to continue the conversation. "Guy Beaulieu came to see me a few days before he died, " he said finally. "Oh?"
"It was the second time he had been by in just two or three weeks.", He was very angry and upset.", He certainly was, " the Judge said, now leaning on his club and making no attempt to look for his ball. "He was also quite determined to prove that Ultramed and Frank had railroaded him out of practice as a means of setting up their own man, this Mainwaring, in his place. He claimed to have evidence that such underhanded dealings are typical of the company."
"I know what he claimed. What I don't know is why on earth he kept coming to you when you made it clear to him how strongly you supported Frank and the excellent job he's done at the hospital."
They watched in silence as each of the passing foursome hit his approach shot. Three of the balls landed neatly on the green, and the fourth, hit by a grizzled old man whom Zack placed somewhere in his mid-eighties, landed in a sand trap. As he invariably did when around very old people, Zack found himself praying that the man's coronary and cerebral circulations were, at least at that moment, functioning as nature intended. "The answer to your question, Zachary, " the Judge said after the old man had hit, "is that Guy was convinced that Frank or no Frank, I would not want to see him go under for acts he never committed.
Remember, he and I went back a hell of a long way. I can't count the number of committees and projects we worked on together over the past thirty years, struggling to pull Sterling up from the dying little mill town it once was. As often as not we were on opposite sides of the fence on an issue, but that never mattered. We both fought like hell, but we fought within the rules."
"I understand."
"So, I guess he believed that based on the way we handled our differences, and on my record as a judge, I would champion any cause I felt was just."
"And was he right?"
The Judge took a new ball from his bag and dropped it backward, over his shoulder. "Of course he was right, " he said. "You should know that as well as anyone."
"Sorry."
"Beaulieu's dead, but the issues he was fighting against, if, in fact, they are issues at all, remain very much unresolved-at least until the deadline to repurchase the hospital passes. After that we are all, quite literally, at Ultramed's mercy."
The buy back. Zack suddenly understood why Frank had been excluded from the afternoon. Silently, he cautioned himself against expressing any opinions until the Judge's position had become quite a bit clearer.
Where Clayton Iverson and his scion were concerned, interactions and reactions had seldom, if ever, been simple and straightforward. While Zack's schoolboy years, especially after his accident, had passed by quietly and, by comparison, virtually unnoticed, the relationship between the Judge and Frank had been a turbulent, volatile affair. The man had soaked in his older son's accomplishments like an insaturable sponge, and inevitably, when Frank's heroics were slow in coming, or worse, when he did anything outside of the persona the Judge had created for him, there was friction. Thinking back, Zack wondered if either of the two ever truly appreciated the dynamics of those clashes. If being Judge Clayton Iverson's second son had engendered certain problems for him, being his first had proven something of a curse for Frank. He recalled the day when Frank, then a freshman or sophomore in high school, had received an A on a history paper. The teacher, in her comments, had noted that the writing style and content of the report were far beyond anything he had ever done before. Suspicious of the sudden improvement, the Judge had confronted Frank in what he liked to call an eyeball-to-eyeball showdown. It was a technique that had seldom failed to uncover a lie from either of his sons, and on that occasion Frank was beaten decisively. After an hour of confrontation, he shuffled to his room and produced the senior's paper from which he had plagiarized. The look in his eyes at that moment, a frightening olio of fear, hatred, humiliation, and anger, was one Zack would never forget.