And On The Eighth Day, God Created... - Patrick Sean Lee (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

did a fairdemeddling job of mastering the fundamentals, I thought. Until we came to hole number nine. It was a par 4, and there was a gigantic lake right in the middle of it.

“Crap! Why’d they put a lake out there?” I asked.

“Just play to the left of it. Don’t try to get across it in one swing,” Jim advised me. Of course he had blasted his ball all the way over it, and it was somewhere pretty close to the green, or the whatever that place was that had the pole and little flag stuck in the cup. Mike took his advice and placed his shot perfectly. It landed, they told me, about ten feet to the left of the lake, in a great position for his next swing.

I teed up. “Fore!”

“You don’t have to say that,” Mike said. “There’s no one out there.”

“There might be someone over in those bushes,” I corrected him. I grabbed my big wood, the Number 3 one, and started to wiggle my hips a little, adjusting my grip on the club so that the flat part of the head with the metal on it was facing the ball, and not the last tee we’d come from. I failed to do that on a few previous holes, and wound up shanking the ball so badly that it hit Jim in the shin one of those times. On this hole he came running up from the far back of the tee place, calling out for me to stop.

“Don’t use the 3. Go get your 5 iron. If you hit the ball with the 3 you’ll only manage to drive it into the lake. Go get the 5.”

“I’m no good with those all-metal clubs.”

“You ain’t no good with any of ‘em!” Mike said laughing.

He was right. I was already weary of this stupid game, and I figured rightly that he and Jim were probably wearying of trying to teach me how to play it. I thought briefly about football as I walked back to where my bag of clubs lay on the grass; about how easy that game was. All I had to do was run like hell and dodge the slower guys trying to tackle me. I could always hear Kathy screaming, “Go. Go. Go!” I was glad she wasn’t here today, and I began thinking again about what Jim had said about fingers.

I dug through the clubs and found all of them except the 5 iron. I had lost all but one really ratty ball, but couldn’t imagine having lost a club.

“It isn’t here. You must not have packed it.”

Jim came storming over, cussing again. “Ah bullshit! That’s a full set. Always has been. It’s in there...move over.” He began to sort through the clubs, but I was right.

“See, I told ya.”

The clubs rattled as he banged them around looking for 5. I was right, it wasn’t packed. He finally stood up and walked over to me.

“That club was in there, Paddy. I don’t know how or where you lost it, but I want you to go back and find it. Mike and I will play through nine. It’s too late now to try to get through eighteen holes. We’ll take your clubs with us. When you find the 5, hustle on over to the clubhouse. We’ll meet you in the bar. You can have a Shirley Temple.” He said that in a very flat tone of voice, not at all like the nice one Father Stone used in the confessional after I unloaded all my sins on him.

“Okay.”

I turned and began walking back down the tee place, squinting. After a few steps I heard Jim say to Mike, “Golf isn’t his game. Maybe we can teach him how to waterski. Whatdya’ think?”

“I dunno’. Do you suppose he could get himself tangled up in the tow line and drown?”

I couldn’t hear Jim’s response.

Water skiing. Now that I was positive I could do. How hard could it be to sit on the edge of a dock and wait until the boat took all the slack out of the tow rope? Just stand up and let the boat do all the work! And back there on the dock would sit Kathy in a very skimpy bathing suit, cheering me on each time I flew by her, waving the fingers that someday…

Imprint

Text: (c) Patrick Sean Lee, 2011
Publication Date: 03-21-2011

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
To all of you who love waterskiing.