As chairman of the golf commission at Seaview, all communication with the Quahog People fell to him. It was not the kind of thing he had bargained for when he had politicked for the position five years ago. What he had wanted was to keep the operations of the course professional, and he had thought of his only major adversary there as Sammy. Now these Indians were writing him letters and calling him up. They usually called him when he was at work on somebody’s books or with a client. He kept telling them that he, as chairman, had nothing to do with their claim of ownership; the course was run by the National Seashore, only leased to the town, and they would have to deal with the Seashore Commission. But every time one of them called or wrote, it was a different one. They seemed to have no leader, and he kept having to repeat himself. And then there was this Frank Bumpus person; for two years now he had hung around the course. He was not good for the professionalism of the place, and being an Indian, though he never mentioned or did a thing about it, he must have been connected with the Quahog People. The rest of the golf commission members were all too happy to let this business fall to the Chair, and since the Chair would not have trusted anyone else with it anyway, the hassle was all his.
He finished buffing his driver and reached for another club. He could hear his wife stirring upstairs. He put the club shaft in the vise, took another sip of coffee, and began to pick. Well, to hell with the Quahog People, the Chair thought. This is a more important day. It was the day of the first major Saturday tournament of the season. All the others had been tune-ups and haphazardly run by Sammy. The Chair favored these early, official tournaments, the ones that were for members only. The members rule kept most of the tourists out, and most of the players were locals. The Chair knew their ways and could keep things in line. More important, he was set this year to get Sammy, and he was going to start things off right this season by beating him. He kept buffing at the club heads until the luster came up the way he liked it.
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, CHIP WAS WELL INTO the swing of things. At nine, in the bathroom in the clubhouse, he had snorted a line of coke, using a clear plastic ball-point pen with the inkholder removed. That, on top of the joint he had smoked around seven-thirty, had done the job. Now he was rambling down the second fairway on the mower, aiming for the second green in the far corner of the golf course.
“Out of sight of them all, ha ha!” he said to himself in the mower’s hum. He stopped short of the green and turned the mower off. He could hear the dull grind of Earl on the fairway mower on the other side of the course. He got off his machine, took a look up the fairway behind him, then turned his attention to the task at hand.
The second hole at Seaview was a par-five, five-hundred-and-ten-yard hole, with a dog leg to the left. The tee was cut at the top of a hill, with a heavy rough in front of it running down about seventy-five yards to the beginning of the fairway. The fairway before the dog leg was wide open. There was a large trap to the left, on a knoll from which the ground ran down to an open area just at the dog-leg knee. The open space was where the average hitter aimed to drop his drive. From that point, the fairway turned and narrowed a little, with heavy rough running up a hill to the left and pine trees run-ning up a steeper hill on the right. At the end was the untrapped green, of average size, closely guarded in the back by low pine and scrub running up yet another, gradual hill and toward the cliff, high at the sea’s edge, about a hundred yards away.
From the tee one could see the edge of the green in the distance. A strong shot could leave the hitter under a hundred and eighty yards to the green. It was possible to get home in two. From the tee, looking up to the top of the hill that bordered the narrower part of the fairway to the right, were three massive radar domes. They looked very much like golf balls and were the property of the Seaview Air Force Station, a lookout command on the edge of the Atlantic down the coast from the lighthouse. Below the radar domes, about halfway up the hill, was a small, medieval-looking stone tower. It was called the Jenny Lind tower and had been given the name by the man who bought it when the old Fitchburg Depot in Boston had been demolished around the turn of the century. The story was that he had heard Jenny Lind sing from the tower, had fallen in love with her and had put the tower up on land he owned at the time as a tribute to his impossible dream.
The second was Chip’s favorite hole, and when he had made his “Special Seaview Map” it had gotten the most detail and attention. He liked riding the narrow fairway on his mower, the way the slopes on either side guarded it. In late July, he liked to climb up the hill and sit close to the tower, eating blueberries he had picked on the slope out of his hat, watching the golfers try for the green. The fairways at Seaview, all but the eighth, were hardpan and sand, with little grass, and he liked to watch the golfers duff their shots, yell down the cavern of the fairway, throw their clubs, and stomp their feet. They never knew he was there watching them. More than any of this, he liked the apron, the collar, and the green. He had worked hard, removing small stones and large ones, filling and level-ing with fresh soil, planting what he could get to grow, cutting things to just the right length.
Though he was buzzing a little from the drugs he had taken, he was in no way distracted, and seeing his work and its results brought things into an even clearer focus. He got down on his belly and sighted across to where the apron met the green, a blade of grass tickling his nose. “One little place,” he said aloud as he studied the slopes and contours leading into the manicured sur — face of shorter grass that was the collar and then onto the green itself. He reached into his pocket and took out a new golf ball, a Club Special, and placed it just in front of his nose, sighting along it to a small pine in the rough beyond the green. The spot in question lay on that line, and he marked it before he rose. He went to the mower and took a small trowel out of a canvas bag that hung from the seat. He returned to the golf ball, where it stood up, white and shining, and sighted down the line again. Then he crawled on his stomach along the line and to the questionable spot. When he got there he saw that some miscreant weeds had stuck their arrogant spiked heads up through the body of his work, and he shook a finger at them as he rose up to his knees. “This is it for you, little nasty fuckers,” he said, and began scratching and digging, moving bits of grass, weed, and dirt with his special little trowel.
FRANK BUMPUS KNEW THE TOURNAMENT WOULD BEGIN at twelve-thirty, and he wanted to be back at the clubhouse for it. That is, he wanted to be sure to be there when the men began to gather, wanted Chair Fredricks, especially, to see him. He had worked hard to appear as an annoyance that was both harmless and very visible, and he knew that today would be a good one in which to push the plan. When the time came, such P.R. considerations would be important. Public opinion and visibility, the way the press would pick him up as a somewhat colorful fellow, would give a kind of power of its own. He figured he could get some work done before the tournament, so when he finished his coffee he left his mug on the edge of the park bench next to Sammy, said good day, and set out across the eighth fairway toward his home.