"Ronnie, Harry's trying to tell a story," Thelma says.
"It hardly seems worth it," he says, enjoying now the prolonged focus on him, the comedy of delay. Sunshine on the mountain. The second gin is percolating through his system and elevating his spirits. He loves this crowd, his crowd, and the crowds at the other tables too, that are free to send delegates over and mingle with theirs, everybody knowing everybody else, and the kids in the pool, that somebody would save even if that caramel-colored lifeguard-girl popping bubble gum weren't on duty, and loves the fact that this is all on credit, the club not taking its bite until the tenth of every month.
Now they coax him. "Come on, Harry, don't be a prick," Buddy's girl says. She's using his name now, he has to find hers. Gretchen. Ginger. Maybe those aren't actually pimples on her thighs, just a rash from chocolate or poison oak. She looks allergic, that pushed-in face, like she'd have trouble breathing. Defects come in clumps.
"So this doctor," he concedes, "is hauled into court for killing a goose on the course with a golf club."
"What club?" Ronnie asks.
"I knew you'd ask that," Harry says. "If not you, some other jerk."
"I'd think a sand wedge," Buddy says, "right at the throat. It'd clip the head right off."
"Too short in the handle, you couldn't get close enough," Ronnie argues. He squints as if to judge a distance. "I'd say a five or even an easy four would be the right stick. Hey Harry, how about that five-iron I put within a gimme on the fifteenth from way out on the other side of the sand trap? In deep rough yet."
"You nudged it," Harry says.
"Heh?"
"I saw you nudge the ball up to give yourself a lie."
"Let's get this straight. You're saying I cheated."
"Something like that."
"Let's hear the story, Harry," Webb Murkett says, lighting another cigarette to dramatize his patience.
Ginger was in the ballpark. Thelma Harrison is staring at him with her big brown sunglasses and that is distracting too. "So the doctor's defense evidently was that he had hit the goose with a golf ball and injured it badly enough he had to put it out of its misery. Then this announcer said, it seemed cute at the time, she was a female announcer -"
"Wait a minute sweetie, I don't understand," Janice says. "You mean he threw a golf ball at this goose?"
"Oh my God," Rabbit says, "am I ever sorry I got started on this. Let's go home."
"No tell me," Janice says, looking panicked.
"He didn't throw the ball, the goose was on the fairway probably by some pond and the guy's drive or whatever it was -'
"Could have been his second shot and he shanked it," Buddy offers.
His nameless girlfriend looks around and in that fake little-girl voice asks, "Are geese allowed on golf courses? I mean, that may be stupid, Buddy's the first golfer I've gone out with -'
"You call that a golfer?" Ronnie interrupts.
Buddy tells them, "I've read somewhere about a course in Alaska where these caribou wander. Maybe it's Sweden."
"I've heard of moose on courses in Maine," Webb Murkett says. Lowering sun flames in his twisted eyebrows. He seems sad. Maybe he's feeling the liquor too, for he rambles on, "Wonder why you never hear of a Swedish golfer. You hear of Bjorn Borg, and this skier Stenmark."
Rabbit decides to ride it through. "So the announcer says, `A mercy killing, or murder most foul?"'
"Ouch," someone says.
Ronnie is pretending to ruminate, "Maybe you'd be better off with a four-wood, and play the goose off your left foot."
"Nobody heard the punch line," Harry protests.
"I heard it," Thelma Harrison says.
"We all heard it," Buddy says. "It's just very distressing to me," he goes on, and looks very severe in his steel-rimmed glasses, so the women at first take him seriously, "that nobody here, I mean nobody, has shown any sympathy for the goose."
"Somebody sympathized enough to bring the man to court," Webb Murkett points out.
"I discover myself," Buddy complains sternly, "in the midst of a crowd of people who while pretending to be liberal and tolerant are really anti-goose."
"Who, me?" Ronnie says, making his voice high as if goosed. Rabbit hates this kind of humor, but the others seem to enjoy it, including the women.
Cindy has returned glistening from her swim. Standing there with her bathing suit slightly awry, she tugs it straight and blushes in the face of their laughter. "Are you talking about me?" The little cross glints beneath the hollow of her throat. Her feet look pale on the poolside flagstones. Funny, how pale the tops of feet stay.
Webb gives his wife's wide hips a sideways hug. "No, honey. Harry was telling us a shaggy goose story."
"Tell me, Harry."
"Not now. Nobody liked it. Webb will tell you."
Sandra in her green and white uniform comes up to them. "Mrs. Angstrom."
The words shock Harry, as if his mother has been resurrected.
"Yes," Janice answers matter-of-factly.
"Your mother is on the phone."
"Oh Lordie, what now?" Janice stands, lurches slightly, composes herself. She takes her beach towel from the back of her chair and wraps it around her hips rather than walk in merely a bathing suit past dozens of people into the clubhouse. "What do you think it is?" she asks Harry.
He shrugs. "Maybe she wants to know what kind of baloney we're having tonight."
A dig in that, delivered openly. The awful girlfriend titters. Harry is ashamed of himself, thinking in contrast of Webb's sideways hug of Cindy's hips. This kind of crowd will do a marriage in if you let it. He doesn't want to get sloppy.
In defiance Janice asks, "Honey, could you order me another vod-and-ton while I'm gone?"
"No." He softens this to, "I'll think about it," but the chill has been put on the party.
The Murketts consult and conclude it may be time to go, they have a thirteen-year-old babysitter, a neighbor's child. The same sunlight that ignited Webb's eyebrows lights the halo of fine hairs standing up from the goosebumps on Cindy's thighs. Not bothering with any towel around her, she saunters to the ladies' locker room to change, her pale feet leaving wet prints on the gray flagstones. Wait, wait, the Sunday, the weekend cannot be by, a golden sip remains in the glass. On the transparent tabletop among the wire chairs drinks have left a ghostly clockwork of rings refracted into visibility by the declining light. What can Janice's mother want? She has called out to them from a darker older world he remembers but wants to stay buried, a world of constant clothing and airless front parlors, of coal bins and narrow houses with spitefully drawn shades, where the farmer's drudgery and the millworker's ruled land and city. Here, clean children shivering with their sudden emergence into the thinner element are handed towels by their mothers. Cindy's towel hangs on her empty chair. To be Cindy's towel and to be sat upon by her: the thought dries Rabbit's mouth. To stick your tongue in just as far as it would go while her pussy tickles your nose. No acne in that crotch. Heaven. He looks up and sees the shaggy mountain shouldering into the sun still, though the chairs are making long shadows, lozenge checkerboards. Buddy Inglefmger is saying to Webb Murkett in a low voice whose vehemence is not ironical, "Ask yourself sometime who benefits from inflation. The people in debt benefit, society's losers. The government benefits because it collects more in taxes without raising the rates. Who doesn't benefit? The man with money in his pocket, the man who's paid his bills. That's why" – Buddy's voice drops to a conspiratorial hiss – "that man is vanishing like the red Indian. Why should I work," he asks Webb, "when the money is taken right out of my pocket for the benefit of those who don't?"
Harry is thinking his way along the mountain ridge, where clouds are lifting like a form of steam. As if in driven motion Mt. Pemaquid cleaves the summer sky and sun, though poolside is in shadow now. Thelma is saying cheerfully to the girlfriend, "Astrology, paten-reading, psychiatry – I'm for all of it. Anything that helps get you through." Harry is thinking of his own parents. They should have belonged to a club. Living embattled, Mom feuding with the neighbors, Pop and his union hating the men who owned the printing plant where he worked his life away, both of them scorning the few kin that tried to keep in touch, the four of them, Pop and Mom and Hassy and Mim, against the world and a certain guilt attaching to any reaching up and outside for a friend. Don't trust anybody: Andy Mellon doesn't, and 1 don't. Dear Pop. He never got out from under. Rabbit basks above that old remembered world, rich, at rest.