Got Game?

by Stephanie Doyle

  “They’ll know you’re straight,” he teased.

  “They’ll think I’m a girly girl,” she hissed.

  He moved an inch closer but she held her ground. “Reilly, I’ve got news for you. You are a girly girl. Don’t let anyone try to take that away.”

  “Fine, but even if I were going to let you kiss me, which I’m not, I wouldn’t allow it here.”

  Luke dropped his hand. “All right. No kissing on the course. After all, it’s bad enough you’re desecrating…what was that you were desecrating again?”

  “Sacred ground.”

  “Right, sacred ground. How about we put this sacred ground to the test and take her out for a spin? Change out of your suit and we’ll go play a round of skins.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? You didn’t bring a change of clothes?”

  “I mean Birdie Smithfield has not authorized me to play on this course prior to the event. Unless I can get a member to invite me, I’m not allowed to put a painted toe on this sacred ground.”

  Luke scowled. “That’s crap. I’ll invite you.”

  “You’re not a member.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Like a stone.”

  “Bastards. All of them. It’s like we’ve stepped back in time. I feel like I should be wearing a fedora, looking for the nearest speakeasy and calling you my dame.”

  “Forget it. Even if I could get on the course I wouldn’t want to give him the satisfaction. I’ll find another way. In the meantime…” Reilly eyed Luke’s bag of clubs. She walked up to Tom, who she knew from when she would watch Luke play, and smiled. “Tom, I’ll take the driver and a ball if you don’t mind.”

  Tom didn’t flinch but handed her the driver, a ball and a tee.

  “What are you planning on doing with that?”

  Reilly grinned mischievously as she tossed the ball in her right hand while her left hand twirled his club. “I’m planning on walking three hundred yards away and then hitting this ball through Birdie Smithfield’s window.”

  “Good plan,” Luke agreed.

  CHAPTER 23

  “Odie this is crazy. You’ve destroyed this putting green.” Reilly stared down at the nearly brown putting surface and grimaced. “Pete is not going to be happy with you.”

  “Pete has seen you practicing for the last few weeks and knows he’s about to watch history. He won’t mind me sacrif-ficing a green. We want to get this puppy as high on the stint meter as it will go. Drop one, Kenny.”

  Kenny stood on the side of the green and let the ball between his fingers drop. The green was slanted down and to the left, the most challenging undulating green on the course. Odie made it faster by not letting Pete water it for days. All the while he was cutting it shorter.

  The ball sped down the sloping hill, veering right toward the pond that was snuggled up to the back of the green. It tried to hold on to the fringe before it took one more roll and dropped into the dark water.

  “Perfect. Maybe not a nine, but at least an eight. Reilly take your irons. We’ll go from eighty yards away, to a hundred, to a hundred and fifty. Then we’ll do chips and bunker shots.”

  Reilly selected her lob wedge first and started walking the exaggerated steps she needed to do to mark off yardage. She stopped at around eighty yards and switched on the walkie-talkie that was clipped to her pants.

  “All right. Now swing with your normal motion,” Odie crackled.

  She took a ball out of her pocket and dropped it on the short grass of the fairway. She brought her club back and used a three-quarter swing to pop the ball into the air in the hopes that it would settle just on the surface of the green and track down to the hole.

  It did in fact pop up on the air. It did hit the surface of the green just as she’d commanded it to. It was what it did after that was the problem. The ball hit the green, bounced and started rolling like a snowball on top of Mt. Everest, picking up speed as it traveled over the short grass past the hole and into the pond.

  “Oops.” She approached the hole just in time to see her ball descend into the murky depths.

  “Oops, she says. Oops. You hear that, Kenny?”

  “I did. Oops, what a ridiculous thing to say. You just hit it into the water.”

  “I would like to see you do better.”

  “I’m not the one playing in the American. What good is hitting the ball a mile if you can’t get it close to the hole on your second shot?”

  Reilly grumbled all the way back to the eighty-yard spot she’d previously hit from. “All right,” she gritted into the toy. “What do you want me to do?”

  “The key is height. As high as it will go. The higher, the better.”

  Reilly listened to Odie, but she had concerns. “What if it’s windy? Wind makes a ball unpredictable. If I hit it up into the atmosphere it becomes more susceptible to movement I can’t control.”

  “The American isn’t known for being a wind tunnel. You need to trust me, lil’ gurl. You hit it high and let it drop close to the hole. Take off some of the energy the ball is carrying when it hits the green and it won’t roll into the water. Now, you can do this. We’ve already practiced this. Full swing.”

  Reilly dropped the walkie-talkie in the grass next to her and checked the hole location. The yellow flag was clear from this distance and wasn’t moving at all. There was a slight breeze coming from the west. She knew enough about the nature of wind having been its student for over ten years, that what she felt on the ground and what was happening a hundred feet in the air could be two different things.

  Bringing her wedge back, she used the swing she’d learned to incorporate into her arsenal. She heard the difference before she saw the ball climbing higher than she was accustomed to watching. The pop indicated good solid contact and the ball soared up and rolled over in the air until it hit the green four feet away from the target and trickled to a stop just beyond the flag.

  Birdie opportunity. Nice.

  Reilly heard the crackle from the walkie-talkie and knew Odie was getting ready to brag. She switched it off and walked back to the green figuring she would let him gloat in person.

  “I am a golf-fing gen-nius,” he declared.

  There was nothing to do but tolerate the Texan twang that always seemed to get more pronounced the prouder he was of himself. Reilly made Kenny pull the flag and lined up her short, two-foot putt. She tapped it and watched it move faster than she predicted until it rolled over the hole and stopped on the other side.

  Birdie opportunity lost. Shit.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Odie declared.

  “Don’t worry about it?” Kenny charged. “She just missed the putt. We’ve only got two weeks left. How the hell is she going to master high iron shots and putting? ”

  “Relax,” Odie ordered. “The putting will come. Reilly’s the best-known green reader in the free world. Once she gets accust-tomed to the speed she’ll be fine. I was more concerned with holding the green after the iron shot. Say what you want. You can hit the ball as far as you need with your driver, but there will be doglegs where you’ll have to go to your three wood, and other times maybe a low iron. You’ll be hitting from behind and you need to make sure you can still get your ball on the green and make it stay there.”

  She nodded, but Kenny was biting his lower lip. She hadn’t seen him do that since he was seven. “Kenny, you can’t freak out on me.”

  “I’m not. I’m not,” he said, although by repeating it, he made himself a liar. “It’s getting so close.”

  “Two weeks,” she stated.

  “Two weeks,” Odie repeated. “You’ll be ready.”

  “Hello, there!”

  The threesome turned at the sound of a friendly voice coming towards them on golf cart. Pete was wearing a cap on his head and spikes on his feet. The man it seemed was a perpetual golfer.

  He stopped the cart and walked over, noting the condition of his precious green. He
whistled low and long. “My, my, my, will you look at that.”

  “I made it a little faster,” Odie hedged. “Water and time will take care of it in a few days.”

  “I should say so. This looks like it’s faster than a jackrabbit on speed.” Pete took a ball out of his pocket and dropped it at the top of the green and watched it roll all the way to the water. He chuckled when he turned to Odie. “Although it could be fun to watch a few fellows try to hole this one come Saturday.”

  “Pete! You criminal. Who knew you had such a dark side?”

  He shrugged. “I’m an old man, Miss Carr, and we must have our entertainment. How are you getting along?”

  “Fine.”

  “My wife, Georgia, and I will be watching you. We’ve got tickets to the event. Hardest ticket in all of sports, but we got them some years back and haven’t let go of them.”

  “Good for you. I hope I provide some excitement.”

  Pete smiled. “Oh, I don’t doubt that. I’ve been watching you all week. I was a Doubting Thomas at first but I have put my hands on the wounds and have been converted. You are a fine golfer. It doesn’t shock me at all people have come to our little island to watch you play. Might be the only chance they’ll have to see you in person.”

  “What do you mean?” Kenny glanced around the course and saw nothing but short grass lined with clusters of oak trees, palm trees and azalea bushes. “No one’s here.”

  “Why sure there was,” Pete countered. “For weeks now. Maybe the one fellow is too shy, or thinks he has to sneak around, I don’t know, but there’s been some one off in the woods between holes 2 and 3 where you’ve been working.”

  Reilly followed Pete’s crooked finger to where the oaks and azaleas clumped together to form a wide dense thicket. She saw nothing but nature for a second and then…

  “What the hell was that?” Kenny shouted.

  “Looks like light hitting off glass,” Pete told them. “Not surprising. The man I saw was carrying binoculars.”

  Kenny didn’t stop to listen to the rest. He grabbed a club and started running full speed for the thicket.

  “Stop it, Kenny! It could just be a photographer taking a picture!”

  “A photographer wouldn’t need to hide in the woods!” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  “What if he has a gun?”

  Several paces in front of her, his long legs eating up the ground, Kenny didn’t stop in his pursuit. Reilly dug harder, but running in spikes on grass was like trying to swim in water with two weights attached to her ankles.

  “More important, what if you ruin my driver!?”

  Kenny pulled up for a second to assess the situation and heard before he saw the rustle of someone running from him. The person was bolting out of the thicket and sprinting across the fairway to another cluster of trees. He pushed himself harder and managed to make out a short figure in what appeared all black with dark hair just as he was lost in the trees. On the other side of the thicket, Kenny knew there was a fence that marked the out-of-bounds line. Beyond the fence was a parking lot.

  There was no way he was going to catch him in time. Not if he had a car.

  Just as the thought occurred to him, an engine roared to life. Kenny didn’t believe the creep had been that far ahead of him that he could have jumped the fence, gotten to his car, and drove off, but that’s what happened. He had to reevaluate his commitment to no exercise.

  Bending over, he sucked in air and listened to the peal of tires taking the stalker well out of his reach.

  He heard Reilly puffing behind him. “I lost him.”

  “I heard the car.”

  “He must be a track star,” Kenny said between puffs.

  “Sure, Kenny. You weren’t too slow, he just happens to be a track star.”

  “Maybe since I charged to your rescue you could not mock me.” He tossed back the driver to her and she caught the shaft in midair.

  “What rescue? He was running away”

  “Yes, but I scared him.”

  She rubbed his arm. “You did. You’re my hero. But can I just say I’m glad you’re allergic to exercise. The last thing I wanted you to do was catch him. You don’t know what kind of nut he is. He could have been dangerous.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Not against a gun you can’t.”

  “If he had a gun he would have used it when he broke in. He had cans of paint. This guy’s a coward. I know it. If I could get my hands on him, I could end this once and for all.

  They walked back to the spot where they decided he must have been watching her from. It wasn’t that hard to find.

  “Jesus,” Kenny breathed as he knelt down among the debris littered at his feet within a huddle of trees. It was trash that had been accumulated over weeks not days. As if the person had been making a camp out of the same spot each day. There were dried-up apple cores, black banana peels, tissues, candy wrappers and golf balls. Lots and lots of golf balls.

  Reilly crouched next to him and studied the trash with a sick feeling in her stomach. “That’s the wrapper from the protein bar I ate yesterday. I recognize the brand. And I had a banana three days ago. Those are all my balls, too. God knows how he found so many of them among the mass of balls lost on this course. He must have picked up every one to see if it had my mark. This is scary, Kenny. Almost as scary as the ball mark.”

  Kenny looked at his sister and watched her face as she found a ponytail holder that must have fallen out of her pocket as she walked the course. There were still a few hairs attached to it from the last time she’d worn it. He saw her shudder and it rocked him.

  For as long as he’d known her she’d never backed away from any challenge in her life. He remembered her always following at his heels, ready to do whatever he did despite being almost eight years younger.

  If he was watching a scary movie then she wanted to watch it, too. If he could ride the roller coaster at the fair then she could, too. It didn’t matter if she was scared or the ride made her sick, what mattered was proving herself to him.

  Kenny was sure there was some shrink who would diagnose her need to keep up as a result of losing parents she never knew. Something deep inside of her needed to hang on to him even when he was growing up and pulling away. At the same time she needed to prove she was worthy to tag along so he wouldn’t leave her behind.

  It was why she had started playing golf with him and Pop. Her big brother was going somewhere and she wouldn’t tolerate staying back at the house without him. It had just been fate, or good genes, or something else that made her so much more talented at the game than he was.

  All of that led to this and now she was biting her lip as she picked through trash some psycho had collected. He hadn’t seen her do that since she was a kid.

  “Maybe you should pull out.”

  Her body jerked.

  “I’m serious. This isn’t worth your life. He’s not going away liked we hope.”

  “All he was doing was watching me, Kenny. Watching me and gathering this stuff like some kind of squirrel.”

  “And you said you were scared.”

  “In creepy way, yes. Not because I think my life is jeopardy.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t know what he would have done if you hadn’t woken up. You don’t know what he’s thinking. Agent Leonard said a stalker’s actions can escalate. Breaking in, following you out there. That’s an escalation.”

  “Yes, but he also said that he thinks this is just a first timer whose fanaticism has turned into obsession.”

  “A first timer who followed you to Little Creek, then followed you to Savannah.”

  Reilly shook her head. “Or not. That reporter who wrote the story about Birdie’s window noted I was staying in Savannah. Everyone in town has seen me. Heck, this could be a whole new stalker. Maybe there’s a bunch of people who get off on watching me play golf. I know I do.”

  Kenny caught her attempt at levity and tried to s
mile, but his chest was tight and he realized that if anything happened to her it would be his fault. “I pushed you to do this.”

  “No. You wanted me to do this. I made my own decision.”

  “I thought it would be cool. I thought it would be fun to walk around and play a few rounds with the big guys. Now you’re getting hate mail and creepy mail. Golfers are going on television and calling you unworthy. Jay Leno is making jokes. And I’m standing here in a pile of trash you left behind that some sicko has probably jerked off to a million times. I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore. Do you still think it’s worth it?”

  She rubbed her hands on her cotton pants. “Ew, you don’t really think he … you know.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Kenny snapped. “You don’t need this. You’re the best woman golfer ever to play the game. That’s what they’re going to say about you. Years from now when you can’t hold a club in your arthritic hands and Luke is chasing you around the kitchen in a walker, they’ll show lists of your records that still haven’t been broken. You don’t need to do this. To risk your life. It’s just a game.”

  Reilly inhaled. “Bite your tongue. If Pop heard you… this is more than a game to us Kenny. This is our way of life. Our family’s passion. This game is who we are. At least it’s who I am. I have to tell you a couple of months ago I wasn’t all that crazy about me. I wasn’t… having fun anymore. I was tired of playing and tired of winning and I didn’t know what the hell to do because being a golfer is the only thing I’ve ever known how to be. Not a wife or even a just a friend. But now everything is different. I know the next step to take. I’m not sure what’s going to happen on the other side of this tournament. I can’t see that far. But I’m not pulling out. Not because of what anyone says or does. Am I scared? Yes. Am I stopping because of this twerp? No.”

  He guessed he hadn’t expected anything different, but he also hadn’t expected to be so worried about what could happen to her.

  “Did you ever think it was a little crazy we define ourselves by a game?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was too much. Maybe we should have been exposed to more. Maybe Grams should have taken me to dance lessons and Pop should have put a football in your hand at least once. But Grams was busy making the transition from grandmother back to mother and Pop had to figure out how to be a father in a different time. It’s how he related to us. It worked. We were two pretty happy orphans.”