The entrance of a new element, one that did a lot for Allen’s spirits, occurred with the first two hits. Steve automatically took the honors, and Lou followed him. Steve was smiling faintly as he teed up at the blues. He took a practice swing and then looked back at the three of them, still smiling, before he hit.
His drive was the longest he had hit that day. He had a deeper backswing, and he clicked through the ball with force.
The drive must have been at least two hundred yards on the fly. It dropped on the far side of the pond, coming to rest about twenty yards beyond it. Lou was next. His ball was a little higher than Steve’s, but it was longer. It had a very slight tail on it, and it carried a good two hundred and fifty yards, stopping a couple of feet from where it hit. It finished well beyond Steve’s ball, in the middle of the fairway, in clear and unobscured sight of the green. Frankie seemed a little nervous, and he took his time getting set. He lined up a little to the left, and he hit his ball where he aimed it, playing for the far left of the fairway. The ball wound up short of the trap, with a very long but fairly open shot to the green. Then it was Allen’s turn.
He knew now that they were hustling him. This did a lot for him. It cut him free of his concern for Lou; it allowed him to begin to dislike Steve in a very comfortable and unambivalent way. The fact that they were as good as they were helped also. It would be difficult to beat them, and that warmed him. He felt that he had two very distinct advantages over them now. The first was that it had been they who had abandoned golf as a sport of individual skill. They were going to try to play him as a team. That would hurt them in two ways. It would hurt them, simply, because golf is not a team sport, and he knew that the diffusion of attention that came from such thinking would take an edge off. It would also hurt them because it would introduce more material from their relationship into the game. A lot would be dragged in, and some of it would have to get in their way.
The second advantage he had, had to do with money.
For them, for Steve at least, the money was no more than a kind of whip or a term of humiliation. He was sure Steve did not care about the money, but he was also sure that what the money represented was a very serious thing having to do with self-esteem, which was much harder to lose and much harder to win also. For him, on the other hand, the money was very important. If he won it, he would be pleased to have it. He needed it; it would buy things that he needed. But if he lost it, and he certainly did not want to lose it, it would be no more than the money he was losing. He could imagine himself going back without it; he would be sad about it, but that was all.
“That was a wonderful shot,” he spoke softly to Lou, who stood a few feet from him. Steve was sitting in the cart, ready to go, while Frankie was getting ready to hit.
“You think so?” Lou said, a new coldness in his voice. Allen ignored the tone and pressed it a little, as a start.
“A really wonderful shot!” He kept his tone warm and open, his eyes clear.
“Right. Thanks,” Lou said. He was uncertain about how to take the statement. He would think about that a little. Allen was not sure yet how he might work on Steve, if it became necessary. He thought he would give it some time.
When he got up to hit, he was feeling very loose and good. He knew that after a while he would lock into the game in the way he liked, and the anticipation was very nice. He also liked very much to play a golf course for the first time. Whenever he played a new course, he was careful not to study the upcoming holes too carefully, check the map out too much. There were things he might have articulated to himself about this, but they were so close to the bone that there were no good words for them. Very practically, in this case especially, ignoring the map and the distances spelled out would help him to concentrate not on pictures and symbols but on the tangibles.
When he drove, he pushed his follow-through a little, enough to make it look as if he had tried to power the ball, and he stepped back a little with his left foot as he finished, a little off balance. He sliced the ball slightly, but he had started it off to the left, and it came back and hit close to Frankie’s ball, rolling about twenty feet to the right of it, but too far in that direction to have any clear shot to the green.
“I guess that’s a little right,” he said, looking up the fairway.
“I guess it is,” Steve said as he started the cart up. Allen got in the cart with Frankie, and when they reached their balls, Steve and Lou were sitting behind them, waiting. They had parked well back of his ball, a little to the right, but just close enough so that he might see them out of the corner of his eye as he hit.
Frankie hit a really quite beautiful second shot. He used a fourwood, but he hooded it, took a three-quarter backswing, and punched the ball just enough as he came through it. It was low and straight and long. It pulled up about forty yards from the green, right in front of it. He could see from where he had parked the cart that the pin was cut in toward the back of the green, behind the trap on the right. Frankie would have to fly the edge of the trap, and he thought he would have to stop the ball pretty quickly, but he was not sure about that. He could not read the slope of the green from where he was.
He decided not to go for the green. To do that, to be sure to hit it, he would have to play for the left of it, and since he could not tell what kind of putt that would give him — it might be a very difficult one, and he might not hold the green anyway on that side-he chose to play for the trap. He figured if there was enough space between the trees and the trap, he might come up short of it, in good position for a chip. If he hit the trap, that was okay; he had been in traps three times on the front nine. They had been well raked, the lips had been reasonable, and he had liked the texture of the sand. He used a four-iron, a little more than he needed, but they were close and would see his club selection. He decided not to toy with the fact that they were closer to him than was appropriate. That kind of thing could wait until he might need it. He caught the ball slightly fat, carried the trees, and though he couldn’t see it hit, he suspected he had reached the trap.
Steve hit his shot stiff at the pin, but he had a slightly fluffy lie, the ball flew on him, and he did not get enough bite into it. The ball stopped about ten feet above the flagstick, and from where Allen was he thought he would have a very tricky downhill putt. Lou made it known, by considering his shot and then switching clubs, that he was close enough for an eight-iron. He hit the ball crisply, straight and very high; it sat down about twenty feet away to the left and a little above the pin.
Frankie pitched up with a wedge. He bladed it slightly, and it hit the lip of the trap and stopped there, in the bit of fringe between the trap and the green. He was the closest to the hole, only seven feet away, but the fringe he was in was thick, and the shot he would have was downhill and would run away quickly to the right.
When Allen got to the trap, he saw that he was well back in it, with a good lie, and that from his angle it would be possible to get the ball to sit down on the green. He checked the other three, figuring what they might do. Frankie’s shot was close to impossible, he was lying three and would take, at best, a five. Both Lou and Steve had chances for birds, but he doubted that either of them could make their putts. He figured them for pars. He knew that they would not play it that way though. If they tied, nobody would win money on the hole. If he hit up and was away, he would have to putt first, and that would help them make an easier decision. If he got too close the decision would also be too easy for them. He decided to try to play the shot fat, catch the down slope to the left of where Frankie’s ball was, hoping to stop it before he got outside of Lou. He dug his feet into the sand and played the shot. He lifted a thick fan of sand onto the green, and the ball hit close to the lip in the fringe and rolled down and to the left, stopping about fifteen feet out. Lou was away.