TPQ OnLine
fiction by Tony Thomas

In the early 1950s, when I was a small child, I saw my father whip, and whip badly, big name golf pros, for a fifth of I.W. Harper or a ten-dollar bill. My father couldn't be a golf pro on the tour or at a local golf course because he was Black. He caddied for pros who came to Hartford.

Good money came into our house from this. We even had a black 1949 Ford coupe. On summer Sunday afternoons, my father would drive us out into the country to picnic by some old stream he called the Hog River. When we'd start back, my mother would nestle close to my father in the front seat, light one of his Pall Malls and take a drag. She'd even try to drive the car. My father seemed a hero to me and our life together seemed soaked with possibilities.

By March 1957, when I was twelve, my father no longer caddied for pros or good money. He had fallen out of that and much else good in his life. He drank more and a starved silence had frozen the space between him and my mother.

My father tried to caddie at private golf clubs around Hartford. The managers, the pros, the club house porters remained his friends. They bought him bottles when he was broke, drove him home when it rained. They listened when he talked golf.

Yet, at Tunxis the manager caught him playing though they only allowed him to caddie. At Wethersfield, the pro chased my father away when they found him charging ten bucks for lessons. At Tumblebrook they barred him because he suckered members' teenage sons to bet. He could only work the Avon Country Club.

My father stopped taking me to watch him. He never showed me how to hold the clubs. Yet, on the few rainy Saturday afternoons he was home he watched "Inside Golf" with me. He would talk about the players and the golf courses as if he knew them all personally.

At Sunday dinner my father kept boasting about how he'd beaten Winthrop Godwin, a guy he'd caddied for, in a big match.

"Sandbagged him the front nine, then whipped his butt the back nine," he said.

Even at twelve, I'd heard of the Godwins, the Godwin Mills, the Godwin School, the town of Godwin. My father bragged about Godwin's houses and boats, Godwin's horses and limousines as if they were his.

My mother winced as she set the meat loaf on the table. She glanced at me, then at him, and sat down without picking up her silverware or saying a word.

"Was that up at Avon," I asked?

On Mondays the Avon Country Club let caddies, greens keeping staff, and their kids over twelve, use the course. The next day was the first Monday of the season. I was twelve and I wanted to go. If I got him talking about Avon, maybe I could get up the courage to ask him. "Won two hundred bucks off him," he replied. A smile swept his face and he said, "Real money." "Last year," my mother broke in. "Avon opens tomorrow," he said. "You need to ask that man for a real job," my mother said.

My mother and father glared at each other, hard and hungry as if they could stare the money she wanted and the golf he needed out of the air between them. Then each searched my face for something that put me on their side.

I gobbled my mashed potatoes, the food I hated the most. I was full, but I felt hot and dry and empty.

My father tried to smile. I knew he expected my mother would open her tight frown and clenched lips to him as she usually did. She looked down at her plate, her head in her hands, her fingers twisting the fine straight black strands of her hair into nappy bolls. She frowned at me, not at my father, and then she said, "Mark, go to your room."

In my bedroom, my ear against the door, I tried to listen to what they said. They turned on the kitchen radio to keep me from hearing.

Through the door I heard my mother say, "Sell those damned golf sticks and give that stuff up."

"Golf's work," my father said. "My clubs are tools."

"That's a white folk's game," my mother answered.

My father started, "But I . . . " but my mother broke in, "Get a real job . . . "

My father tried to continue, "I've got to . . ."

She interrupted again in a low voice I could barely hear ". . . or leave."

I thought I heard his hand slap down hard on the table. The radio skipped to static. The back door slammed. My father's footsteps stomped across our creaky back porch.

On my bed, I pulled the sheet over my head, trying to dream: My father would return, take me with him to Avon, beat Godwin, and give my mother a stack of money like they gave away on "Inside Golf."

Out my window the wind rattled our old rusty screen door, stray dogs barked in the woods, and our neighbor's old dented DeSoto coughed as it backed into their driveway. When the air horn from the Montreal train blew and I knew it was past midnight, I heard my father creep back across that porch and up the stairs to the room he and my mother shared.

Monday afternoon, I ran out of school, past the other kids. I did not stop until the school was a block behind me. I did not want my white school friends to see me hitchhiking to Avon on a day when the chill wind wouldn't let me forget that snow had just left, a day when anyone with sense or money was inside a house or a car.

The damp grass of the Avon Golf Club stained my chino pants and made my shoes feel wet and cold, but I kept slogging through the Avon Golf Club until I found my father on the fourteenth green in his faded khaki Ike jacket, his golf bag strapped tight to his shoulder like a soldier's rifle.

A white boy about seventeen with sandy blond hair, in a white v-necked sweater, tan slacks and brown and white golf shoes, waved his arms in my father's face. A small muscle in that boy's cheek stiffened and twitched. My father shouted something about a "double sawbuck." The boy handed my father a wad of bills.

Across the green, my father shook his fist and shouted to me, "What you doing here?"

"I want to see you play," I answered.

"You best go home," he shouted, but I stayed there.

A stray, cold drizzle broke out of the sky. That blond boy opened a striped umbrella. My father huddled under the umbrella and yelled, "Boy, come out the rain."

When I came under that umbrella, my father said, "This is Bobby Godwin, Winthrop Godwin's son."

My father told Bobby, "Can't play in this rain."

"Just the fifteenth," Bobby said. "It's only a par three."

My father shook his head, brushed the boy aside, and said, "I'm going." Then he led me away into the rain.

"Play for me, Daddy," I asked.

"I want to, but . . . " he said.

"If that kid loses more money," he said, "his dad will complain."

"So," I said

"They'll kick my ass out of here."

Bobby Godwin came up behind us so quickly the tip of his umbrella poked my head.

Hoarse, gasping for air, Bobby shouted, "If you don't play, I'll tell father you hustled me."

"I don't hustle, I play golf," my father said. He kept on walking.

I kicked the ground, knocking loose a piece of turf. My father bent down to smooth the turf back in place. He grimaced. Then he turned around and shouted "Let's play" to Bobby Godwin.

He told Bobby Godwin, "You win, you don't owe me nothing. I win, you owe a hundred. Just the fifteenth."

Bobby nodded and said, "Let your son make some bucks out of this deal. I' ll give him five bills."

Back then a Coke was a dime, a hamburger a quarter, and one hundred bucks a week, good pay. I never had five dollars except as a birthday present from my grand uncle to be deposited in the bank right away.

My father's face twisted into a scowl. "One buck is plenty," he said.

I blurted out, "I can use five."

He grabbed Bobby's golf bag, and shoved it onto my right shoulder, wrenching me to the side. I wobbled down the course behind my father and Bobby Godwin.

At the tee, Bobby shot first. I took the biggest wood I could find from his bag. When I handed him the wood, Bobby threw it in his bag and took out a smaller wood.

Bobby teed up his ball. His whole body aimed at the hole, Bobby whacked the ball. It burned through rain and wind straight toward the pin. The ball didn't hook, curl, or flutter, didn't swerve around the hole's dog leg or sit in the middle of the fairway, tired, but proud of its work. It broke into the rough. Mulch and leaves should have slowed it, but didn't.

I reached for the club in Bobby Godwin's hand. Bobby ripped it away from me

My father teed up. His body a dark arch over the little white ball, he looked off into the rain and the wind toward that small white flag so far away. He tugged a club out of his bag and gently removed its cloth cover. As he practiced his swing, that club swirled a silver arch over the tee while the fat brown wooden head teased the ball.

He was still and ready to hit the ball when the rain threw a sputtering cough into my throat. My father checked his swing, and glared at me. He focused back on the ball until he seemed lost to me.

When he hit the bal., it curved into the air, a round, plump, delicate celebration of flight. Where it could have brashly rushed on, the ball plopped down to bounce around the dog leg in the fairway, and eased onto the green, resting five feet from the hole.

My father smiled a hidden smile I'd figured out when I was eight. His lower lip pressed down straight and serious, trying to hide the soft bend in his upper lip.

Bobby Godwin slapped his club hard against his palm. That club still in his hand, he left for the clubhouse across the fairway.

I told my father we should go after Bobby Godwin to get our money, to bring his clubs.

He shook his head and said, "I'm playing the course, not that boy."

My father marched around the green like the high priest of the fifteenth hole. He knelt to examine the grass, stood to study the wind, and then he lined up his shot with his putter. After his soft tap, the ball poured across the grass into the hole.

Then he led me off to the club house. I had to struggle to keep up.

At the door of the fake-Tudor club house, my father changed to his tennis shoes. He made me wipe my feet.

The club house seemed so quiet. Its thick carpet swallowed our footsteps. Old white men in suits, lounging in stuffed chairs, halted their conversations and glared at us. We were wet and tired and Black.

At a varnished oak door with a sign that said, "Members Only," I stopped, but my father barged through the door.

In a white-tiled room, pure white towels hung from ebony rings above enormous cedar lockers. White men and boys dressed and dried themselves on polished oak benches.

A ginger brown man in a stained, open, ivory jacket with "Avon Country Club" embroidered on his breast pocket, handed a yellow robe to a beer-gutted man with a blond crew cut. I didn't know Mr. Wilkers worked there.

When my grandfather lived, Mr. Wilkers came for dinner the last Sunday of each month. He dressed like a banker, his only flash a diamond stick pin and manicured nails. He carved tiny morsels of food like a surgeon, then ate as if it were his last meal. He took tea, never coffee, drank wine, never beer, sipped brandy never whisky. Yet, he'd cut into rip-roaring laughter when my grandfather brought out the cigars and the talk turned to the first World War, New Haven Railroad excursions to Harlem in the 1920s, names I did not know like James P. Johnson, Willie the Lion, Ethel Waters.

He was old fashioned, but I thought he was a wise man, a rich man, a man of the world.

When Mr. Wilkers noticed us, he said to my father, "Herman, you know you're not allowed in here."

"I want that Bobby Godwin," my father shouted, his words echoing off the tiled walls and floor.

Cupping his hands over his lips, Mr. Wilkers said in a low voice, "He's in the shower."

When my father started for the showers, Mr. Wilkers grabbed my father's shoulder and said, "I don't need trouble. This is my money."

"Bobby got my money," my father answered.

Mr. Wilkers shook his head and raised his hands to push my father away. My father pressed against him, but he released and walked away. Mr. Wilkers reached out his hand and stopped my father.

"Wait in the lobby," Mr. Wilkers said softly, covering his lips with his manicured hand.

When Bobby Godwin came out of the locker room, his hair was wet and he'd changed to a dark-brown turtle neck, corduroy pants, saddle shoes.

I tried to hand Bobby his golf bag, but his eyes were on my father. The bag almost fell to the floor before he caught it.

Bobby Godwin shoved a fist full of bills at my father.

When he'd flipped through the wad of bills, my father said, "Fifty-three dollars!"

"My father can write you a check for the rest tonight," Bobby interrupted.

"I don't want him to have no part of this," my father said.

"I have this old bag of clubs," Bobby said. "Doesn't your kid need some clubs?"

"I need my hundred bucks," my father shouted.

A gray-haired man in a Harris Tweed suit across the room put down his Hartford Times, rose from his chair, and asked, "Robert, do you need assistance?"

"No, it's all right," my father said, trying not to shout.

Bobby's fragile smile sent that man back under his paper, but he kept lowering that paper and peeking at us.

My father told Bobby Godwin, "Give us those damned clubs."

I hated the hand-me-downs he brought me: lace-up boots and knickerbockers last worn when he was young, sweaters, shirts, and pants too small, too big, too fancy, too plain. I didn't want some rich kid's old rusty golf clubs.

Bobby disappeared into the locker room. He brought out a leather golf bag, stuffed with leather handled irons and polished woods, like my father's, but smaller. I hoisted it on my shoulder.

After he took a few steps back toward the locker room Godwin stopped. He yanked a rumpled five dollar bill out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

"I forgot," he said in a low voice, and, then he left.

The man in the tweed suit stopped Bobby Godwin, at the locker room door. He poked his finger at Bobby's chest. Bobby nodded to him and then, shamefaced, he looked back at us.

"Look!" I said to my father.

My father turned away from them to a trophy case across the lobby. My eyes stayed on Bobby and that man. The man scrawled something in a small black notebook and then he led Bobby Godwin through a door marked "MANAGER."

My father said we had to wait for the rain to end. He marched me over to a trophy case. The names and dates on the gold plaques and cups seemed to overflow with meaning for him.

A warm hand patted me on the back. It was Mr. Wilkers. He'd changed into an immaculate black Avon Country Club tuxedo jacket, pressed trousers, and black patent leather shoes.

"Herman, they don't want you at this club no more," Mr. Wilkers said, "caddying or nothing else."

I slapped my hand on my mouth when I realized I'd started to shout, "No." Those old white men in those soft chairs glared at me anyway. My father said we were going, but I did not move until he yanked my arm hard and tugged me away. He told me to hurry, because he didn't want to stop to hitchhike until we left the Avon Country Club. When he brushed by Wilkers at the front door, my father stopped and shook his hand.

Each with our golf bags, my father and I walked down the road that led from the golf course. As we went on my bag weighed me down. I couldn't keep pace. Ignoring me as if he was thinking about something very hard, my father marched ahead into the slow misting drizzle.

The rain swirled up and drove us off the road and into the trees. Under the boughs of a gnarled old maple, my father waited for me.

I told him I was glad he won.

"Should have lost," he said? "Wouldn't 've had no trouble."

My father embraced me. A warm, moist calm swept over me. He had not held me since I was five.

"All I got," he said, "is a way to make that ball fly where I want."

My father let me go. Then he said, "Guess I couldn't louse that up for no Bobby Godwin."

That old secret smile came to his face, though he tried to look tight and serious. He glanced away at a big black Lincoln burning up the road, and said, "Hell, I'm finished in Hartford, anyway, got to move on."

My father pulled me into his embrace and said, "Mark, I'm not leaving you. I just have to keep what I really got."

I slipped out of his arms, aching to run high up Avon Mountain where tall trees would block the rain, where darkness would cover me, to escape to a place where my father could be a hero in golf and at home. Rain poured down my face, a tangle of branches and briars blocked me. There was no place to run. My father waved at me to join him. So I followed him down the road to Hartford.

At our house, my father shoved a wad of bills into my hand and said, "Give this to your mother."

He said he was going to the First National Store, but I knew he would go to Ryan's Grill and drink. I added Bobby Godwin's five to my father's roll of tens and twenties and gave it all to my mother.

In the middle of that night, I heard my father's tennis shoes pad down the stairs, heard him ease out of the back door. Through the blinds I saw my father peek into my bedroom window from the porch then he turned away into the night. It was twenty years before I saw him again.

In the morning, my mother who usually left me Cheerios before she went to work, fixed me pancakes and fresh coffee, usually reserved to rouse me up for high mass on special sundays.

My mother said I didn't have to go to school. She'd never said that before. Her voice was bright, and light, like on a birthday, a holiday, but a weary tug in her eyes begged to say different things.

When she left, I ran up the stairs to the closet where my father kept his golf clubs. I found six yellow pockmarked golf balls and the clubs my father won for me. Then I hitch hiked to Kinney Park, the city golf course.

I hit those balls far. Each ball a hole-in-one, I thought. They didn't go where I wanted them to or where I could find them. I scoured the fairway, raked leaves and twigs in the rough, wandered in the woods, but I lost every one.

Tony Thomas lives in lives in Miami , Florida where he is currently completing work for an MFA in creative writing at Florida International University. He is employed by the Dade County Transit Administration as a diesel parts man. In the 1960s and 1970s Tony published hundreds of articles of political journalism on issues of the Black Liberation movement, the politics of the Middle East, Southwest Asia, France, the West Indies, and Canada in publications such as The Black Scholar, and the socialist press. Send your regards to tonythomas@aol.com.

Lost Golf Balls has won prizes for the best short story written in FIU's writing program in both its undergraduate and graduate versions. A print version of this story appears in the Summer, 1998 issue of The Pittsburgh Quarterly.

Images courtesy of Barry's Clip Art Server.