Clandestine

I groaned again. Wacky was a horror-movie fanatic, and "Constituency of the Dead" was his attempt to capture Hollywood's monster madness in prose. In his poem, there was a world of the dead, existing concurrent with the real world, but invisible to us. The inhabitants of this world were all wonder addicts, because they had all been murdered. I considered it one of his poorer efforts.

Wacky waggled his eyebrows at me. "One thing, partner," he said, "one thing I promise."

"What's that?"

"When I'm a big-time Hollywood screenwriter I'll never highhat you."

I laughed: "Watch out, Wack. Hollywood producers are notorious shit-heels. Go for the daughter instead. Maybe you can marry into the family." Wacky laughed, and trotted away, while I returned to the blessed solitude of golf.

I was at it for over an hour, savoring the mystical union that takes place when you know that you're a gifted practitioner of something much greater than yourself. I was crunching three-hundred-yard drives with fluid regularity when I gradually became aware of eyes boring into my back. I stopped in mid-swing and turned around to face my intruder. It was Big Sid Weinberg. He was lumbering toward me almost feverishly, right hand extended. Taken aback, I extended mine reflexively, and we exchanged names in a mutual bone-crusher. "Sid Weinberg," he said.

"Fred Underhill," I said.

Still grasping my hand, Weinberg eyed me up and down like a choice piece of meat. "You're a six, but you can't putt, right?"

"Wrong."

"Okay, you're a four, and you can hit the shit out of the ball, but your short game stinks. Right?"

"Wrong."

Weinberg dropped my hand. "So you're—"

I interrupted: "I'm a hard scratch, I can drive three hundred yards, I've got a demon short game, I can putt better than Ben Hogan and I'm handsome, charming, and intelligent. What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?"

Weinberg looked surprised when I mentioned his name. "So that lunatic was right," he said.

"You mean my partner?"

"Yeah. He told me you two guys were cops together, then he tells me some lunatic story about a city of stiffs. How the hell did he ever make the force?"

"We've got lots of crazy guys, only most of them hold it better."

"Jesus. He's reading his stuff to my daughter now. They're soul mates; she's as crazy as he is."

"What do you want, Mr. Weinberg?"

"How much do you make with the cops?"

"Two hundred ninety-two a month."

Weinberg snorted. "Spinach. Peanuts. Worse than that, popcorn. The ducks in the lake at Echo Park make more moolah than that."

"I'm not in it for the money."

"No? But you like money?"

"Yeah, I like it."

"Good, it ain't a crime. You wanna walk across the street to Hillcrest and play a class-A kosher course? Scramble? The two of us versus these two ganefs I know? We'll slaughter 'em. C-note Nassau? What do you say?"

"I say you put up the money, and my partner comes with us to read our greens. He gets twenty percent of our action. What do you say, Mr. Weinberg?"

"I say you musta been Jewish in a previous life."

"Maybe in this one."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"I never knew my parents."

Big Sid raised his head and roared: "Ha-ha-ha! That's par for the course, kid. I got two daughters and I don't know them from a hill of beans. You got yourself a deal."

We shook hands on it, sealing the last carefree alliance of my youth.

Hillcrest was only a block away geographically, but it was lightyears away from Rancho in every other respect: lush, manicured fairways, well-tended, strategically placed bunkers and sloping greens that ran like lightning. There were eight of us in the group: Big Sid and I, our opponents, two caddies, and our giggling, moonstruck gallery—Wacky and Big Sid's gargantuan daughter, Siddell. Those two seemed to be rapidly falling into lust, swaying into each other as they trudged fairway and rough, holding hands surreptitiously when Big Sid had his back to them.

And Sid was right; it was a slaughter. Our opponents—a Hollywood agent and a young doctor—were pitifully mismatched; shanking, hooking, slicing into the trees and blowing their only decent approach shots. Big Sid and I played steadily, conservatively, and sank putts. We were well-aided by Wacky's superb green reads and the club selections and yardage calls of our short-dog-sucking wino caddy, "Dirt Road" Dave.

"Hey, hey, shit, shit," Dave would say. "Play a soft seven and knock it down short of the green. It breaks left to right off the mound. Hey, hey, shit, shit."

Dave fascinated me: he was both sullen and colloquial, dirty and proud, with an air of supreme nonchalance undercut by terrified blue eyes. Somehow, I wanted his knowledge.

The match ended on the fourteenth hole, Big Sid and I closing our opponents out 5-4. Nine hundred dollars changed hands, four hundred and fifty for Big Sid, four hundred and fifty for me. I felt rich and effusive.

Big Sid clapped me on the back. "It's just the beginning, doll! You stick with Big Sid and the sky's the limit! Va-va-va-voom!"

"Thanks, Sid. I appreciate it."

"Va-va-va-voom, kiddo!"