Written by Stephen F. Moloney
“THACKETT?!! THACKETT, WHERE ARE YOU?!!”
An exasperated sigh escaped Ray’s lips as he heard Mr. Denby’s voice echoing around the lofty interior of the machinery workshop.
“Back here!” answered Ray, wearily peeling the baseball cap off his head and tossing it into his battered, metal locker.
Mr. Denby was the head golf professional at Crescent Creek Golf Club, had been since 1990. And of that thirty year reign, Ray figured that, at best, he’d probably spent the first decade actually caring about his job, but as soon as 2000 hit, he made the executive decision to just throw in the towel and coast to retirement – a milestone he was still, unfortunately, a good five years from actually reaching.
“Ah, so it’s back here you’re hiding.” sneered Mr. Denby after finally rounding the corner that separated the caddies’ area from the rest of the workshop floor.
“Not hiding, Mr. Denby.” replied Ray without turning around to look at him. “Just getting ready to go home is all.”
“Hmm, I’m sure.” grumbled Mr. Denby, his tone inexplicably suspicious sounding. “Well, before you go, I just need you to do a quick job for me.”
Having been a caddie at Crescent Creek for eight years (and Caddymaster for the last five of those eight) Ray was more than well aware that any time Mr. Denby characterised a job as ‘quick’ it was usually the exact opposite.
“Is that so?” said Ray disinterestedly, pulling his arms out through the sleeves of his white overalls.
“Yes.” answered Mr. Denby, his agitated tone clearly denoting that he wasn’t all that happy with having this particular conversation with Ray’s sweat-drenched back. “It’s the range – I need it cut.”
“Now?!” snapped Ray, whipping around from his locker and laying his eyes on Mr. Denby for the first time since they’d started speaking.
He was wearing his usual garb of loafers paired with beige slacks and a golf shirt that looked about one size too small for his short, though rotund frame. His wispy black hair was, as always, oh-so-carefully combed into place to give the illusion that it wasn’t thinning to such a severe degree it looked liable to be blown away if caught by a stiff enough breeze. And, of course, having spent the afternoon – like he did every afternoon – drinking wine in the clubhouse dining room under the pretence of “doing the pro-shop’s books”, his plump, perennially sweaty face was flushed redder than a baboon’s behind.
“Yes! Now!” barked Mr. Denby, his face getting even redder at Ray’s response.
“But it’s nearly eight o’clock.” argued Ray, gesturing towards the increasingly darkening sky visible through the small window above the lockers. “I mean, can’t it wait until the morning? You know, when the people whose job it actually is to cut it will be here?”
“Well not that I, your boss, need to explain to you, my employee, why I need a job done,” sniped Mr. Denby. “But, if you must know, Truman Ballas called me just now saying that he wants to play here tomorrow, and given he’s teeing off at nine, I need the range cut tonight so that he can warm up in peace without Duggart speeding around on a mower.”
“And since when does Truman Ballas just randomly turn up here for a round?” asked Ray, now taking his turn to sound suspicious.
“Since he lost in the final of last year’s Memorial and had to pay Skip Devereaux twenty grand as a result.” replied Mr. Denby flatly. “A scenario he would very much like to avoid repeating at this year’s Memorial; hence why he wants to play the course ahead of next month and why I need the range cut – so hop to it.”
“Bu-…”
Before Ray could fire his next counterpoint as to why he shouldn’t have to cut the range, Mr.Denby turned on his heels and began to walk away from him.
“No more discussion.” he called dismissively over his shoulder. “Just get it done.”
Knowing their conversation had been brought to an abrupt end, a frustrated Ray turned back around to face his locker as the sound of Mr. Denby’s squeaking loafers got gradually fainter with each passing footstep.
“Oh you better hope I never become your boss, man …” he muttered angrily to himself as he reached inside his locker, grabbed his hat and slipped it back onto his head.
As he felt the rather unpleasantly damp brim grip into his cleanly shaved head, Ray grabbed the door of his locker and slammed it shut.
“As if that’s ever going to happen, though …” he sighed dejectedly before turning around and trudging off across the workshop.
*
“Sorry, if I can just interrupt for a second.” interjected Maggie, leaning forward on the sofa and adjusting her cellphone slightly so that the microphone for the recorder was facing Ray a little more directly. “You mentioned a ‘Memorial’ there – that this ‘Truman Ballas’ somehow lost twenty grand in – what exactly was that?”
“Oh yeah, that was the Memorial Matchplay” said Ray, his tone more matter-of-fact sounding than nostalgic. “It was this big, invite-only tournament held every year over two days of the Memorial Day weekend.”
“And was it for professionals or …?”
“Naw, no tour pros” answered Ray, his mind awash with memories of the various Memorials he’d caddied for. “It was just for amateurs; though, that being said, really good amateurs – as in, if you weren’t scratch or better? Not only were you not getting a tee-time that weekend, but you weren’t getting on the property.”
“Wow …” mused Maggie, her interest growing about the Memorial with each snippet of information divulged to her. “So to get an invite you just had to be a really good golfer?”
“Oh God, no!” scoffed Ray, near laughing at the idea. “I mean, yeah, you had to be good, but at its core the Memorial was about one thing and one thing only – money. And all the guys who played in it? The one thing they all most certainly had in common was cash – and lots of it.”
“So it was like a big money game then?” probed Maggie.
“Biggest in Louisiana.” confirmed Ray with a nod of his head. “Each man invited to play put up ten grand that would go into an overall pot that the eventual winner would get.”
“Are you serious?!” exclaimed Maggie, a look of disbelief plastered across her face. “And how many players would there be?!”
“Well, when it first started back in the 80’s ….” pondered Ray aloud, looking up towards the ceiling as if the answer he was looking for was hidden somewhere up there. “I think it was just the two LaFleur Brothers, Beau and Henri – their family owned Crescent Creek going way back before I took over – who used to have a big money match every Memorial Day weekend.”
“And by the time you were working here?”
“By the time I was working here …” repeated Ray, eyes still glued on the ceiling. “I think the most that was allowed was sixteen; that way they could have two rounds on the first day – one in the morning, one in the afternoon – to get it down to four. Then on the Sunday they’d have the semis in the morning, and then the final two would duke it out in the afternoon.”
“With the winner of that then getting a hundred and fifty grand?” asked Maggie, still sounding as if she didn’t fully believe what she was saying even though she knew she had the math right.
“Yep.” clarified Ray. “Plus their own ten back, remember, so come Sunday evening someone was leaving here with a hundred and sixty grand – in cash.”
“That is insane.” said Maggie, quietly shaking her head. “But if it was only ten grand to enter, how did Truman Ballas end up losing twenty when he lost the final he was in?”
“Oh well that was just down to a lost bet with Skip.” answered Ray, grimacing slightly.
“What?!” said Maggie, a large smile spreading across her face at the sheer absurdity of what she was hearing. “So, wait a minute, you’re telling me that the ten grand he would’ve had to have paid to enter wasn’t enough of a gamble?! So he went and bet this Skip – Devereaux, did you say?”
“Yeah.”
“This Skip Devereaux guy …” continued Maggie, after momentarily halting her train of thought to verify Mr. Devereaux’s surname. “Twenty grand that he’d beat him in the final?!”
“Crazy, right?” smiled Ray. “So you can see why he might have been a tad ‘sore’ when Skip then whooped him 4&3 in the final.”
“Yeah, I can imagine how that might hurt.” winced Maggie, as the idea of losing twenty dollars in a bet was enough to make her break out in a cold sweat, nevermind twenty thousand. “But take me back to that night – after you’d spoken to Mr. Denby. What happened then?”
“Well …” began Ray, casting his mind back once again. “After Denby left, given I couldn’t exactly afford to be unemployed back then, I left the workshop and walked up here to the range to go about cutting it …”
*
The metal rungs running horizontally across the gate creaked and groaned in protest as Ray clambered up over it and jumped down onto the other side.
The night had begun to creep in even further in the near ten minutes it had taken him to walk from the workshop to the range, with Ray figuring he had about thirty minutes before dusk eventually succumbed to the darkness. As inconvenient as the rapidly decreasing light may have been, however, being up at the range at this time of the evening certainly had its advantages. It was a lot cooler, for one, than what it would have been even an hour or so earlier. The gnats, which descended on the course every day at five and became every much a hazard to contend with as the countless bunkers on the property, were just starting to dissipate and retreat to the surrounding bayou from where they’d commuted. And, of course, there was probably the most obvious benefit in that, with no one on the range to warm-up, you didn’t run the risk of being blindsided by an errant Titleist haphazardly dispatched by one of the club members.
This particular evening, though, as he exited the short, narrow corridor of trees which separated the gate from the actual range itself, Ray quickly realised that all of those aforementioned advantages were going to be pipped to first place by something else. Because at the far end of the range, directly over the trees, the sky was awash in a sea of colours as the sun put on one final show before diving below the horizon for the night in an impressive blaze of oranges, reds and purples.
With it not being a sight he got to see all that often, Ray came to a stop and just drank in the view. He took a deep breath in and exchanged it for a satisfied sigh. As annoyed as he’d been with Mr. Denby for sticking him with the job of cutting the range after spending the entire day caddying for a combined total of seventy-two holes, now that he was here, between the sunset, the smell of the undergrowth in the treeline behind him beginning to burst into life ahead of the rapidly approaching summer and the blissful silence being intermittently broken by a pair of duetting cardinals, Ray couldn’t help but feel that irritation slipping away with each passing sec-…
BRRRRRNNNGGGGG!!!!
Having heard the sound of a golf ball clattering into one of the metal distance markers dotted around the range enough times to recognise it anywhere, a perplexed Ray immediately turned his attention down the length of the range to see who could possibly be hitting balls this late in the evening. As he peered through the gloom, however, all he could see was that every one of the designated bays for hitting out of were completely empty.
Just as Ray began to cycle through his memory to see if he could remember noticing any cars parked back down by the clubhouse when he was passing it, the sound of a golf ball crashing into yet another distance marker reverberated loudly around the range.
BRRRRRNNNGGGGG!!!!
Taking solace in the fact that there must be someone hitting balls and that he therefore wasn’t hallucinating out of sheer exhaustion after his long day, Ray focused his gaze on the only remaining part of the range where the mystery ball-striker could be hiding.
Near the end of the range, beyond where the hitting bays were laid out and just a short distance in from the opposite treeline, was a large, wooden workshed that housed the mower used for cutting the range. It was one of those structures that had been at Crescent Creek long before Ray started working there and, he guessed, probably anyone else working there as well. And whilst its structural integrity was, at this stage, akin to that of nothing more than a precariously put together house of cards and therefore fit for nothing else bar the half-broken mower it was sheltering, it did serve as a perfect blindspot for anyone neatly positioned on the far side of it. In other words, Ray knew where his next port-of-call was.
As he moved, however, Ray began to grow more and more intrigued with each step that brought him closer to the workshed, as every few seconds he heard the sound of a golf ball striking a distance marker out on the range with the repetitiveness of a metronome.
Step, step, step, step, BRRRRRNNNGGGGG!!!!
Step, step, step, step, BRRRRRNNNGGGGG!!!!
Step, step, step, step, BRRRRRNNNGGGGG!!!!
In fact, so reliable was this seemingly ‘clockwork-like’ display of ball-striking, that by the time Ray actually arrived at the workshed and began to creep slowly around the back of it, he’d counted twelve consecutive hits – meaning whoever was doing it was either cartoonishly bad or an absolute sniper of a ball-striker. As he heard the metallic clank of yet another golf ball smashing into a distance marker – to bring the grand total to an impressive thirteen confirmed hits in a row – Ray reached the back left corner of the workshed and peered around it. When he saw who was on the other side of it, however, he was left completely stunned.
Standing a few paces away from the front-left corner of the workshed, with a small heap of range balls at his completely bare feet and wearing just a pair of basketball shorts and a baggy hoodie otherwise, was this kid who Ray figured, though relatively tall looking, couldn’t have been any older than fourteen. He wasn’t one of the junior members, Ray knew that for certain, but from the way the kid was working through his collection of golf balls, he had no doubt whatsoever that he was infinitely better than every single last one of them as he was putting on, what could only be described as, an absolute stripe show.
Low, piercing stingers that were getting no higher than four feet off the ground, yet travelling well over 170 in the air. Mid-flighted, sawed-off fairway finders he was both fading and drawing at will with varying degrees of curve. And full-bore, towering iron shots that belied his wiry build by not only climbing so high into the air that they became perfectly silhouetted against the blood orange sky above the treeline at the far end of the range, but by the time they came crashing back down to earth they were doing so 185 yards away.
What Ray found most astonishing about this impromptu ball-striking clinic, however, was that this kid was conducting it with a butter knife of a blade that, by the length of it, looked to be nothing shorter than a five iron. In all the time he’d been caddying since leaving the army, Ray had guided some really good players around Crescent Creek. Low single digit golfers, scratch golfers, golfers on plus three and four, he’d seen them all. But none of them, not a single one, came close to hitting a ball like this kid did. Not with a five iron – and most certainly not with a blade that, from what Ray could see, had been forged no later than the 80’s.
After effortlessly puring another ball right out of the middle of the clubface and sending it sailing off down the range with just the slightest touch of draw on it, the kid finally took a break from melting balls and leaned his club up against his leg as he went about pulling off his hoodie. Sensing now was as good a time as any to try and find out who he was and where he’d come from, Ray moved out from behind the workshed and spoke just as the kid’s head popped out from the bottom of his hoodie.
“Well, there’s no denyin’ it, kid,” said Ray, trying to sound as non-threatening as possible. “You know how to hit a golf ball, I’ll give ya that.”
Hearing this, the kid turned sharply around like he’d just heard the low, guttural rumbling of a hungry alligator and from the way his eyes widened in fear upon seeing Ray, it was as though he found the sight of him every bit as terrifying as if he were, indeed, a gator – a look that wasn’t lost on Ray.
“Hey, it’s alright, man …” he said quietly, lifting his two hands up in front of his chest and taking the smallest of steps forward. “You ain’t in troub-…”
Before he could even finish his sentence, however, the kid, obviously spooked by Ray moving slightly closer to him, turned and set off running for the trees about fifty yards off to the side of where they were standing.
“YOU AIN’T IN TROUBLE, MAN!!” shouted Ray in a last ditch effort to get through to the kid, but it was no use.
After covering the ground between the workshed and the treeline with the speed of a wide-receiver hunting down a football, the kid slipped through a gap in the trees and disappeared from sight. Realising there was no point even considering trying to give chase, Ray just let his hands drop wearily down to his sides and let out a sigh as he looked off at the trees – that interaction hadn’t exactly gone to plan.
Once he’d made a quick mental note of the specific gap in the treeline where the kid had fled through, Ray turned his attention onto where he’d been hitting balls from. Lying on the ground next to the few remaining golf balls he’d obviously gathered himself and the impeccably neat, continuous lines of divots he’d made, was his golf club. Though still feeling bad that he’d made the kid run off like he had, Ray had to admit that he was more than a little intrigued to get a closer look at the wand he’d been using to produce such magical shots with. He walked the few steps over to where the club was lying on the grass, which was now getting quite wet from the evening dew, and picked it up.
The first thing he noticed was how worn the grip was, as in it was completely smooth, which, given the kid wasn’t wearing a glove, made what he was managing to do with it all the more impressive. From the weight of it and how it had begun to rust in spots, Ray could tell the club was steel shafted, with the manufacturer’s sticker divulging that it was specifically a Charger shaft from True Temper. Where it got particularly mind-blowing, however, was when Ray examined the head of the club. It was indeed a butter knife of a five iron, just like he’d thought it was, and as it turned out his estimation of it being forged no later than in the 1980’s was also correct. What he wasn’t expecting, though, was to see that it had actually been forged nearly two decades even before that again.
*
“He was using a blade from the sixties?!” said Maggie, sitting forward with such velocity it was like someone had suddenly rear-ended the couch. “No way!”
“A 1964 Arnold Palmer Tru-Matic.” replied Ray flatly, lifting his right hand up as if he was swearing an oath. “No word of a lie.”
“And he was hitting that 180 plus at fourteen?” questioned Maggie, the faintest hint of disbelief still colouring her tone.
“180, 185, yeah.” smiled Ray, replaying the sound of those purest of strikes in his mind like a favourite song. “And you should have seen him hit it when he was a little older. I mean, I had him hit that sucker when he was like seventeen or eighteen, and his average carry? 198. And if he really cranked it? He could get it 201, 202.”
“That is crazy long!” replied Maggie, struggling to fathom a level of ball-striking so pure with a club that old. “But where did Mustang get a club that old to begin with?”
“Funnily enough I wondered the same thing as I was standin’ there lookin’ at it for the first time.” answered Ray. “So I decided to go and find out.”
“You were able to find him in the trees?”
“I was in the army with your dad, remember?” said Ray confidently. “Tracking down people who didn’t wanna be found kinda came with the territory.”
“Oh yeah, sorry – stupid question.” replied Maggie, feeling the slightest hint of embarrassment flushing the back of her neck. “So where did you end up finding him?”
Out of nowhere, and without uttering a word, Ray suddenly pushed himself up out of his armchair and began to make for the front door of the cabin.
“Is something wrong?” asked Maggie, her voice both equal parts confused and worried sounding.
“You want to know where I found him, right?” answered Ray, pulling open the door and allowing a flood of warm sunshine to pour into the cabin.
“Yeah …”
“Well then …” said Ray, grabbing a baseball cap from off a hook set into the wall alongside the door before turning and looking over at Maggie. “Let’s go.”