Black Light

Damn!

The buzz of the vibrator on his beeper.

“Scuse me, gents.”

He stepped off the green and took his folder from his caddie. He punched up the phone mail and heard Duane Peck’s breathless voice: “Call me. Fast.”

Red punched the number in.

“Mr. Bama?”

“Yes.”

“It’s working. I just dropped Preece off. The old man’s got ’em in there. I’m holding now at the fallback point, waiting for Preece to dust them. By God, it’s going to work! They’re here!”

Red’s heart filled with joy! He was so close and it would all be over: another threat to his empire and its little secrets defeated. Life, its own beautiful self, would go on and on and on: he’d put all his children through college and maybe, in a few years, when the Runner-up wore down, he’d gracefully retire her to some country mansion and get himself the actual thing he wanted more than anything: a true, authentic Miss Arkansas, young, hot and nubile. Wouldn’t that beat all!

“Duane, you call me the second it is over, do you understand?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

Red handed the folder back to the boy and remounted the green.

“Good news, Red?”

“The best.”

“Another million for Mr. Bama,” said Neil James, “and that means another twenty thousand in billing for me.”

“Boys,” said Red, “when the big dog’s happy, everdamnbody’s happy.”

He addressed the putt, filled to the eyeballs with blazing confidence.

“Jeff, you want to make that five grand, even up?”

“Hell, Red,” said Jeff, “I’se hoping you’d let me off the hook on the grand!”

Everybody laughed except Red, who bent into the putt and laid the considerable pressure of the Bama concentration against it, until he thought he’d explode. Then, almost reflexively, with a sharp rap, he struck the ball, wrists stiff, head down, shoulders loose, a perfect putt built on courage, iron determination and $100,000 in golf lessons over the years.

Like Xenophon’s lost Greeks, it wandered across the Persia of the green, this way and that, up mountains and down into lush green valleys, seeming to die at least twice but always getting over the next crest on the apparent delusion that the sea lay ahead. At last it descended, bouncing and gathering speed, and hit the cup, spun with a whiskery sound—and halted.

“Damn,” said Red.

“Five grand!” shouted Jeff.

“It may drop still,” said Neil.

Red stared at the ball, balanced on the very equipoise between hole and green, seemingly riding on nothing more than the sprig of loam fighting the ball’s weight and preventing Red from achieving yet another triumph.

“If a jet’d come along and a sonic boom would hit, maybe it would drop,” said Roger Deacon. “You could probably call the air force on your phone, Red.”

“Damn,” said Red.

“You could explode another car bomb,” said Jeff. “That might loosen it.”

But Neil had the best idea.

“Order it to drop,” he said. “It knows who you are.”

“Damn right,” said Red. “Everybody does.”

He squinted, assumed the position of an especially pugnacious bulldog and issued his command: “Ball! Drop!”

Damned if it didn’t.

Red sat around the nineteenth hole with his fellow Rich Boys, choosing a very expensive twelve-year-old George Dickel Tennessee bourbon as the night’s poison, finding himself in a boisterous mood. He said he’d let poor Jeff off the hook on his thousand if Jeff would just pick up the tab. Jeff agreed and Red set out to drink a thousand dollars’ worth of Dickel. He wasn’t celebrating too soon: he was trying to get a certain part of his brain disengaged from the drama that was surely playing out seventy miles to the south even now, in a forest battleground.

If he let himself think on it, he was sure he’d die. His heart would go into vapor lock; he’d pitch forward in rigor mortis and they’d have to cut him out of his golf shoes. He’d end a joke: the total golfer who died in a bright red (his favorite color) Polo shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow slacks.

“You okay, Red?”

“Yes I am. Tell that gal: another round.”

“Red, you are so generous with my money,” said Jeff, though not bitterly. “Damn, I have to give it to you. You always squiggle out. I got you on the goddamn hook and presto, you’re off it!” But it was said in something like respect.

“Many a man has thought he had me on the hook, only to find out the hook was in him,” said Red, as the girl deposited another Dickel straight up before him. He took a hit: blam. Hot, straight and tough, just the goddamn way he liked it.

“Hey, Red, got a question for you.”

“Shoot, son.”

“Have you heard the Holly Etheridge rumor?”

“Every goddamn one of ’em.”

“No, I mean the rumor.”

“Which one would that be?”

“It’s all over town. He’s your friend, you’d know.”

“He isn’t my friend. He went to Harvard. He ain’t hardly ever come back to the old stomping grounds. Hell, he went to prep school in Washington, D.C. St. Albans School, I think. He ain’t no Arkansawyer, I’ll tell you that. I know him some.”

“They say he cut a deal with old Mr. You Know Who, the front-runner. He’d drop out early and work behind the scenes … and that would get him the vice-presidential nomination.”

Roger Deacon pitched in with a comment. “We have been his local media buyers for eighteen years, and believe me, if Holly Etheridge were going on the national ticket, we’d know it by now. You have to buy into prime time early. It’s too late otherwise.”

“You ain’t thinking right, Rog,” said Red. “It ain’t a senatorial race. The buy would come from national party headquarters and not in his name. You check, and I’d bet you’ll see the parties already got money down on the time they need, through one of the big Little Rock shops.”

“So it is going to happen, huh, Red?”

“Neil, I ain’t heard diddly about old Holly. He’s too busy trying to fuck every living female between Maine and Southern California. I think he’s made it through Illinois and is just starting on Missouri.”

“I don’t think he’s given up his national ambitions,” said Jeff. “His daddy gave him an order, and one thing about Holly, he always obeyed his daddy. I think I ought to give him a call. He’ll probably end up looking for a good chief of staff. Maybe I’ll be moving up to Washington.”

“Shit, his team is set,” said Red. “I shot sporting clays with Judge Myers a few weeks back, and he’s the boy with the inside track. But he didn’t say nothing.”

“Holly may surprise us yet,” said Neil.

“We made a hell of a lot of money off that goddamn road he wanted to build for his daddy, though,” Red said.

“Hear, hear,” cheered the Rich Boys, for they too had made money, even at some remove, from the $90 million that the federal government had poured into Arkansas to build the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway down to Polk County.

It went on that way until eleven, when Red finally broke it up. Toward the end, as the booze wore off, he