Song and Dance

by Darrell Spencer

Boomtown Tonopah, Nevada, ended its isolation from the world on July 4, 1903, when Tosker L. Oddie banged and jolted a Ford sixty miles over the one washboard road ore-filled wagons had pounded into the desert from the railroad spur at Sodaville to the three tents and one frame house that made up the mining site. One day this Republican attorney Tosker L. Oddie would be filthy rich and governor of the Silver State.

How I ended up in Tonopah eighty-five years later spending my mornings knocking lopsided golf balls into the mesquite and sagebrush south of town and my afternoons at a twenty-one table in the Mizpah Hotel, Chinese exercise balls in one hand rotating and chiming up and over each other, while my other hand flicks hit me and hold, how I wind up here begins in Las Vegas, Nevada, the day I unshoetree my Aldens and buff them crisp as beetles, then ride an elevator the nine floors to Uncle Beaner's office in the Circus Circus, where I take my best shot at Beaner, which I'll learn later, he calls a song and dance, a floor show.

I wag my tie at Mona, Uncle Beaner's niece, his secretary.

"Flashy," she says.

I've made an appointment. It's businesslike.

"Go in," she says.

Frederick J. Bean's got this Boston lawyer's office floating above the neon of Vegas. The scene I expect is him jumping up and coming around his nine-yard-deep cherrywood desk and saying, "Jay, my boy." What I am hoping for is a clap on the back one man to another and the repositioning of a soft chair for me. What I get is him, head down, one hand held up and flat out, saying Sit down. Don't talk.

My plan is simple. He loans me two hundred thousand dollars, and I go to Hawaii where I play golf ten hours a day for one year. Then I hit the Q-School, qualify for the pro tour, and pay him back plus interest.

I've brought along what the newspapers say about me. The Las Vegas Sun says, "Learn how to spell this young man's name." I'd just won the Silver State Amateur. I tore up Northgate in Reno, going seven under the last day. The Review Journal named me Nevada's athlete of the year. I've jotted down names of pros Beaner can call. They're willing to talk. They're happy to talk.

I can sit over drinks with the best and b.s. about the music of the great courses, and I'm willing to put on coveralls and labor in a machine shop to grind the bounce out of my wedge. The golf swing is a series of slides in my head. Clubhead speed matters, but it's time of contact, it's the longer the ball's on the face of the club, that adds up to yards down the middle. What did particle physics do for the golf ball? Ask me. How many dimples on a Titleist? I'll tell you. Three hundred and eighty-four. I'm no flake. Long grass? The rough? I not only understand its nastiness, I applaud it. I'd vote to make it worse. I can open up the club face on a four iron, drop it onto a ball that's sat down in six inches of junk, and pop it out two hundred yards if I have to.

Once I get Uncle Beaner's attention I don't lie. I don't hold back. There was the nine iron I cold-shanked when I was fifteen. I've not let one fly since, but the feel of it's not gone, and it stinks in the palm of my hands. It's a woodpecker in my head. Even now, I stand over nine irons, and my balls tighten up. There's a crawling like something's gotten in my shorts. My answer is I knock most nine irons in low and soft as ducks and let them run at the pin. Also, my two iron tails.

What I need is one year. That's all I'm asking for.

"Give me facts," Beaner says. The top of his head's bumpy and more pointed than round and is stitched by tiny sprigs of black hair. The skin's vaguely blue.

I hold out the newspaper clippings. They verify I've not lost an event I've entered since the day I turned fourteen and destroyed everybody in the Western State Juniors.

He bats at them and says, "Talk to me."

I say, "I can't get a game for money from even the local pros." I point out the phone numbers of the big names I have. "Telephone," I say.

He says, "What are the odds?"

"No odds," I say, "This is not gambling. No one would cover a bet on this. I'm a shoo-in." I thumb through the articles he's tossed aside, and I again read off the names of the pros who'll talk for me. I say, "At the Qualifying School I shoot fifteen under par. The next Monday you pick up the sports page and the headline says, ROOKIE WINS GREATER GREENSBORO. I've broken Nicklaus's record. Before you can flap the envelope that contains seventy thousand dollars, your fifty percent of what I won. Week after, same story. Monday morning, Federal Express is a regular at your front door. You get to know the delivery people. You call them by first names. In two months I've paid you what you loaned me plus interest, and you look like a man who sees a winner when you see one."

I talk, and his muscley pent-up arms ride his desk. His watch is closer to his elbow than to his wrist. He's about to fry me.

"Your own brother," I say, "my father, took no lessons and qualified for The Open, where he posted a seventy-one and a seventy-three before he got a wild hair up his ass and loop in his swing."

"Rule number one," Beaner says, and gets up. Behind him are photos of him and Yogi Berra, of him and Frank Sinatra, of him and Siegfried and Roy, the lion tamers. There's a king of the beasts on its back in front of them. Beaner says, "No such thing as a shoo-in." He's coming around the desk. He's a rhino, a galoot.

I say "On a bet, I shot eighty blindfolded. I broke my ankle and turned into a sixty-seven at the Dunes."

He covers his mouth, then tugs at his chin. He's in his stocking feet and is wiggling his toes.

I untuck my shirt, pull it up, and whack myself in the stomach. "Brick hard," I say. I tell him how much I run and show him my calves.

He says, "Why two hundred thousand?"

I've checked out the cost of Hawaii. I did my homework. Like the businessman I am, I lay it out for Beaner.

"Why Hawaii?" he says.

I say, "Arizona? Maybe Southern Cal, San Diego."

Uncle Beaner's taken my arm and is helping me up. I'm a foot taller and thirty years younger and I'm aware he could put me through a wall.

He says, "Nice tie," and flips it. "And shoes."

My crisp shoes embarrass me.

"I'll see," he says. "My decision will come from here." He lays a finger across his heart. "Not from here." He pokes his head. The sideways look he gives me is the one you save for the lunatic on the bus who's obviously lost touch with how things are.

He's got me outside his office and is gone before I can say, "I could win at Augusta. I can smell the honeysuckle." Mona sends me a baby's cute little bye-bye wave and says, "Come back soon."

What I can't do is hide the fact that I'm a college dropout who somehow ran through the twenty thousand dollars his father gives his kids when they graduate from high school. the idea is we can do what we want, but it's clear he's rooting for college. I went to UNLV and almost made two years, then sold my textbooks for half of cost and fled. So when my dad asks me to come by his office I know Beaner's called him.

My father doesn't say, Jay, my boy. Come in. Please, sit. Coffee? No. What he says is, "Uncle Beaner tells me you're doing some song and dance about Hawaii and the pro tour and forty percent of two hundred thousand dollars."

I tell him it's a business proposition.

"It's a floor show," he says. he tells me Beaner's gotten me a job at Juvenile Hall.

"He pulled strings," my father says. "You're not really old enough."

I say, "Wonderful."

"You've got other possibilities?" he says. "You have irons in some red hot fire? Adventures up your sleeves? Better more convincing songs to sing?"

I'm not twenty-one, and I am a flunk-out, a runner from the important stuff. Besides, I'm broke. I say, "When do I start?"

He says, "You train tomorrow, and you work nights." He folds up a check he's already written out and slips it into my shirt pocket. He says, "Find an apartment."

The check's message is it's the last leaf of the money tree.

The job at JuVee is in booking, and Julio Guia is the guy who trains me. Good boy that I am. I come in early. Julio looks me over like he's going to buy me. He's wearing a beret that has rows of buttons pinned along one side. Mostly they're of rock singers. One's of Stalin. Julio's got a greedy face, and he's wearing a yellow singlet. He says, "A new man, huh?"

We start on a computer. "It walks you through it," Julio says to me. The desk we're behind is one you'd see in a library where they check books out. We're high up.

Julio gives me a name, and I tap it in. The computer says, "Par:d/n."

"That kid comes in," Julio says, "and you call his parole officer day or night." He points to the d and the n, then shows me how to access the parole officer's name and phone number. He says, "No one gets that info. No one. For no reason. No matter what they say. If they say, 'He's my son. I'm dying,' you say, 'This is sad. Hope it's not painful. I'll reach him for you.' You get a number, and you call the parole officer with it."

I feed names into the computer, and Julio reads a paperback he has. I'm being led through practice bookings. There's a lot of what if this happens? and what if that happens?

Julio finishes a page of his book and tears it out. Pages are stacked loosely on the counter.

I get us Cokes.

Julio says to me, "You read?"

I say, "I can."

"You read this," he says, "and it'll make you angry." He rips out a page. The book's Johnny Got His Gun. He says, "It's about war."

I tell him I'll read it.

"It's yours," he says. "When I'm done." He shuffles pages together and puts a rubberband around them. they hump up.

Two highway patrolmen buzz the outside door, and Julio pushes the button that unlocks it. To me he says, "Always look." From where we sit, we can see who's at the door through the thick glass windows on each side of it. Julio says, "If they're not where you can see them, tell everyone to stand where you can." He shows me how to work the intercom. The highway patrolmen bring in a boy who's handcuffed. The kid could do TV ads. He's got cherry red lips, and his hair sweeps across his forehead like a sand dune.

"Hey," Julio says to the cops.

They rattle around and pull at their clothes. They can't settle in one spot. One pats his shoulder. They get up on their toes, rock back and forth, and their shoes squeak. It's like they're doing a cop skit. One says, "Kid's a transfer."

"All yours," Julio says to me.

I say, "Name?" I'm looking down on the boy.

His voice is a girl's, and he's not old enough to have a chin yet. I run a record check. None. I get his age, which is eleven. I type in his address, his school, and ask for his parents' names, mother first.

"Irene," he says.

I feed it in and say, "Father?"

He says, "Dead."

I move the cursor over and type deceased, then take it back and say, "What was his name?"

The boy says, "Adam."

I type it.

He says, "He's not my real father. My last name's not his." I put down stepfather.

One of the highway patrolmen says, "Smith. Adam Smith. We don't think he married the mother."

I say to him, "Charge?"

He says, "Murder."

There is something in his voice. He's not angry. That's not it. He doesn't care. This is his duty. Maybe what it is is malice. Maybe it's boredom. Or stupidity. Whatever it is he's set it loose, and it's gone to the corner of the room where it begins to grow.

When I finish the booking sheet, I phone detention and escort the boy over to the door. One of the highway patrolmen comes with us. Julio is talking to the other one. The supervisor from detention opens up, and he and the cop say hello. They seem to be buddies. Behind us, Julio and the other cop slap hands. The one who is with me unlocks the handcuffs, then swings them around, and drops them in a pouch on his belt.

I let the highway patrolmen out the front door. You have to do that. You unlock the door, then shut it after they've gone. You have to push on the door until you hear its lock click.

I say to Julio, "What was that?"

He taps his cheek with his book.

"With the cop," I say.

"His thanks and my gratitude," Julio says. "I'm giving him facts for Rodriguez."

"Like a movie," I say.

"Info," he says. "Facts. I sell facts."

"A snitch?"

"An informant," he says.

"What?" I say. "Drugs. Buying and selling?"

"Jesus," he says. "I sell info facts. I'm an informant." He turns around and says, "See? Eyes in the back of my head. I give dates and names. And Rodriguez, he buys." Julio spins on his stool and lifts out his legs. His pants are peach, and they're pin-striped. He says, "Check it out." He stands up. The pants are pleated and flappy as a flag. He holds them away from his legs. they fit tight around his ankles. He says, "The feet. One-hundred-dollar running shoes. Rodriguez looks good. I look good. You know, do unto others." The shoes are a little like house slippers. They glitter.

I say, "Nice."

"Facts," he says.

Later, when I ask, Julio tells me the kid I booked in shot his stepfather. The mother coaxed him into it. She said, "Honey, listen to me. He hurts me." She showed the boy. She unbuttoned her blouse, hiked up her skirt. There were cuts and bruises. She loaded the rifle -- a 30.06, Julio says -- and talked to the guy so the kid could sneak up behind him. After the boy shot the stepfather, the mother went out and got some fried chicken, and she and the boy were sitting at the kitchen table, the dead man under their feet, his head in a towel, when neighbor looked in, saw the body, and called the police.

Training lasts four hours, then I go to the Desert Inn's driving range. I hit nothing but two irons. I'm buck-and-winging it. I'm hot. My body's sizzling. It's singing, Turn the shoulders against the hips. Rocket the right side through. For an hour I don't miss sweet dead center. I tug a bucket of balls ten feet six inches to the right. I lace half a dozen right at it. Then one tails. Golf is more mind than body. I run pictures of my swing through my head. Problem is I'm wagging the clubhead at the top. I think, Ball-striking is brain not body, and I adjust the film. In my mind the clubhead's steady. But the next shot tails. I strap three more right at the target, then grieve when they fall off. They miss the path I've set for them like bad dogs.

I pack up and head for the apartment I found. It's quiet and can be made dark as night during the day. It's what I'll need to sleep. The check my father gave me was for five thousand dollars.

My first night shift at JuVee is mostly kids who are out after curfew. Only the ones who bad-mouth the cops end up here. The others get citations. Then they keep doing what they're doing. I book the ones the cops bring in and call their parents.

Julio's left me Johnny Got His Gun, the pages held together by a rubberband. Inside the cover, he's written, This will piss you off. It's full of hippie thoughts, of shit the world would rather forget. I don't want to hear it. About three, the outside door buzzes, and I see two Metro cops. They've got a girl with them who looks twenty-five. She's melt-your-socks gorgeous. Her clothes are military, Civil War-looking, all brass buttoned and gold embroidered. She's got on leggings and heavy let-me-stomp-on-you boots. Around her neck is a black leather choker crisscrossed in the front. It's got spikes on it. Her hair is orange and all frizzed up.

I ask her name, and she says, "Ta-mar-a."

Her file comes up. She's fifteen. I punch keys, and the computer fills in most of the booking sheet. I say, "Tonight's charge."

She says, "Trolling."

One of the cops says, "Soliciting."

I type it in.

"Trick or treating," she says.

I finish up and phone detention. A woman comes out stands with her back against the door to keep it from shutting. Someone yells inside. The woman's head is turned away from me. Someone calls someone else a butt-face. I walk Tamara over, and the woman says, "Thank you. We've got a kid gone more than a little crazy in here." Glass breaks down the hallway.

The woman takes Tamara's arm and says to me, "I'm Alison." Her eyes are green, and her face is Snow White's. She's reaching across her body to shake my hand.

I say, "Jay."

I let the cops out and lock up behind them, and I'm reading a magazine when Alison comes in. She says, "Drink?" and unscrews the cap from a bottle of Bacardi.

"Here?" I say.

She fills a cup for herself. Her forearm is ringed from her wrist to her elbow with silver bracelets that slide together a clang when she drinks.

She says, "I'm the boss." Her hair jumps straight up from one spot near the top of her head and then falls in shingles. It's black, so black it's a deep purple in streaks. Above each eye is a fan of green.

"This is a test, isn't it?" I say. "It's like being a cop on duty, and you're giving a pop quiz to the new kid in town."

She pours rum into a second cup, hands it to me, and says, "To the new kid in town."

We touch cups.

I drink, then I say, "That girl?"

Alison says, "You can't afford her?"

"How much?" I say.

"Call her service. You've got her number." She points at the booking sheet I've printed up. She says, "You old enough to drink?"

I say, "Soon."

We drink Bacardi and talk until two highway patrolmen drag in a black kid who is doing a nightclub routine from the time I open the door until I get him booked in. He's dressed for the stage. He's got on tuxedo pants and tap shoes. He sees Alison and says, "Hey, Al."

She says, "Hey, Breeze."

The only name he'll give me is Cool Breeze. I plug it in and cross-reference for aliases. His name is Stanford Tucker. Everybody knows him. I call his parole officer, and he tells me to hold him for a hearing. At the door to detention, Cool Breeze raises his hands as if to say no tricks up my sleeve. he rolls his eyes, then claps my shoulders. He reaches out and leads me through some kind of double-jointed screwy handshake, and I'm left holding a joint. It's like he's tipped me.

Alison takes off. I pick through some pages of Johnny Got His Gun but can't finish even one paragraph. It's more talk than action, and Julio's not put the pages in order.

At five, Alison brings me a small box of cereal, Froot Loops, and a carton of milk. She pulls up a stool. She brought Frosted Flakes for herself.

She is sitting beside me, and I say, "Just like fifth grade."

"Not something I do for just anyone," she says.

We light Cool Breeze's joint. She goes first, then I take it. It sickens the Froot Loops I've eaten. She opens her Bacardi.

I say, "Cool Breeze, what's his story?"

"Everyone knows Cool Breeze," she says and hands me the rum. She dumps her cereal and mine in a trash can.

I say, "He's a thief."

"A lot," she says.

I say, "Are you really the boss?"

"At night, I am. I have a Ph.D.," she says. "I'm twenty-eight, and I have a little girl. I could be your mother. Right now, this is what I do."

I say, "Golf is what I do."

"Little white balls and clubs?"

"I'm good."

She says, "What does that make you?"

"I could be a pro," I say.

She says, "How old?"

"Soon to be twenty-one," I say.

She wets her fingers, sizzles out the joint, and puts it in her pocket. She waves her arms in the air. She says, "Time to grow up?"

I'm drinking her rum.

She says, "Will you come to dinner?"

"Tonight?"

"Sometime. To my place?"

"Of course."

"Me and my little girl. She's seven."

I tell her I have sisters. I rag out the mouth of the rum and give it to her.

She drinks, then says, "This is shit work. I go to college, and I didn't do it to do this." She's picked up some pages of Johnny Got His Gun. She reads Julio's note, This will piss you off. She says, "What doesn't piss us off?"

I say, "It's about war."

"You read?" she says.

I tell her I went to college.

She says, "Not everyone reads."

I say, "You're hogging the rum."

She gets up and slaps the bottle into my hand, "Take it out of here when you go." She's wearing blue jeans and saggy brown boots. Her bracelets collect at her wrists. Halfway through the door to detention, she turns around and says to me, "Only in your dreams."

It's light outside when I get off, but the sun isn't up over Sunrise Mountain yet. In the parking lot, Bobbi, a woman who works with Alison, is standing by her car. She's holding a flower.

I stop and say, "Great day."

She says to me, "Third time this week."

I say, "The flowers?"

"On the seat. On my side, where I drive. Three times now."

Alison has come out and she says, "Another lily?"

Bobbi nods.

"Your husband?" I say.

"Not my husband," she says. "I tell him and all he gets is mad."

Alison says, "Be careful," and walks on by.

I back out and come up behind Alison. At the stop sign before pulling onto Bonanza, I spot Bobbi in my rearview mirror. She hasn't gotten into her car. She's in a bright pink suit, and she is holding the lily. I slip into the traffic, then look over. She smells the lily, then, her face lifted toward the sun, she turns completely around one time.

For three weeks, I do my job at JuVee and play golf when I get off. My game's solid. I sleep when I can, which isn't often. Sleep is hard in the daytime. It comes, but it's full of noise.

Cool Breeze is brought in two or three times a week. Once he is barefoot and wearing a straw cowboy hat big enough for the thirty-foot Vegas Vic down on Fremont Street. Sometimes Breeze is cut up. His eyes might be swollen. You can see that how he acts has irked the cop. Still, Breeze always has a story to tell. He acts like he's got a mike and says, You got to hear this. So, I'm at the Food Mart and . . . The thing about Cool Breeze is that being in a room with him is like being part of a juggling act. He's tossing you bowling pins faster and faster, and you've got to keep up.

If I don't book him, he calls.

Like tonight, I answer and I hear, "This the great white golfer?" He offers me any set of clubs I want for twenty-percent off what I'd pay at a pro shop. He guarantees two-week delivery. And golf balls? I name my brand. Titleist? Of course. Pro Trajectory or Pinnacle? He's got in stock and for cost whatever ball I play.

I say, "Breeze."

He says, "Listen."

I can tell he's holding the phone out. I don't hear anything.

"Can you believe it?" he says.

"What?" I say.

He says, "Hear it? Listen."

I do, but can't hear what he wants me to.

"Snoring like a bear," Cool Breeze says. "Like a fat smelly bear."

I say, "What are you doing?"

"I'm in this white man's house."

I say, "Breeze."

He says, "Can you hear how this man sleeps?"

I say, "Breeze, get out of there."

"I'm petting his Doberman," he says. "I'm loving up the dog's ears."

I say, "Don't tell me."

"This is not a problem," he says. "I'm in, I'm out. The snoring white bear don't miss what he don't miss."

Breeze always has something for me when I book him. He's given me a fourteen-karat gold tee and a trick ball marker. His plan is to be rich before he's certified as an adult. From eighteen on, he's clean. He's a whistle, he says. They toss his record. They'll expunge him. "I'll be clean, waxed, polished, pure," he says. "Not a mark on my adult record. I'll marry and produce kids, and they'll be your kids' doctors."

The outside buzzer cuts us off. I say, "Breeze, get out of there."

"The only way," he says.

I check the window and see what looks like a busload of cops and kids. It takes me two hours to book them. There's been a fight, and most of the kids have possession added on. They all have parole officers.

I don't see Alison all night, but we walk out together when our shift's over. We stop at the back of her car. She says, "Dinner next week?"

"That's good," I say.

We're facing the corner of the parking lot where Bobbi's husband is sitting in a truck. The truck's black and wrapped up in a lot of chrome. He's been out here for a week now, and there have been no lilies. He's huge, fills up the cab of his truck. Bobbi had him come in and talk to all of us so we'd know him and not call the cops.

"Next week for sure," Alison says.

I say, "Count me in. I'll bring the rum."

I get breakfast at the DI and hook up with Beaner and my father for eighteen holes. They ask for three shots a side, and I still take them for five hundred dollars. Beaner can score, but he swings like a giraffe walks. Every time he steps out of his cart, he sticks on an ugly sawed-off straw hat. He wears black socks and Hawaiian-print shorts. His legs are white as paper. For his eyes only, I strap a two iron across the lake at eighteen. It comes in screaming, then lifts like it's hit a pillow of air and drops pin-high five feet to the right of the cup. You'd think I had something going with the devil. I swagger up to the ball and backhand my putt home.

We eat lunch, and Beaner says, "The five hundred you took us for plus another five hundred says your old man can beat you left-handed. One hole, and he'll use only his putter."

"I pick the hole," I say.

My dad agrees.

I choose a par five.

Dad says, "I'll add five hundred to Bean's."

Okay, I'm not stupid. I know. Don't play another man's game. But I can't pass on this one. I take my father's hand, then Beaner's. While he's got me, Beaner says, "A tie's his," and he nods at my father.

I say, "A tie's his. Fair's fair."

The par five is an easy reach in two, but my two iron approach tails, and the shot drifts into stiff rough. My dad's down the middle a hundred and twenty-five yards a shot, and he's left himself in a front bunker in four. He's got his trouble. I've got mine.

He says, "Let's freshen the bet. Another five hundred, and I get to use a wedge from here."

Suppose he flips the sand shot in and shoots five. I still get down in two and walk away with fifteen hundred. We shake on the bet.

I'm away, and I flop my wedge in tight, but it doesn't hold. It kicks then rolls twenty feet past. My dad pops his out, and the ball finds the hole like it's on a string. He's home in five. My four lips the edge of the cup. The tie's his. I walk up and slam the ball into the water hazard.

Thanks is what they say to my checks.

I go home and don't sleep. Two months' rent is gone. An hour before I leave for JuVee, my dad phones. He's too big a man to gloat. "Nice game," he says. "You can play."

"No shit," I say.

He says, "Does that make you something? I've stood by the best. The ball they hit is different. They have something you don't."

I say, "I know. I'm good, and I'm also not stupid."

He says, "Beaner tells me JuVee pays well. The parole officers, the directors -- they make decent money and benefits help."

I tell him I'm looking forward to moving up the ranks.

He says, "Anyone can be a smart ass."

I agree.

Two days later I'm nine hundred dollars up on a club member when he presses me on eighteen and my two iron tails. I'm left with a chip I shank. It squirts into a bunker and leaves a smooth trail. You'd think a snake had gotten into the sand.

When Alison says golf it comes out like an egg she's swallowed as part of a trick. She says, "Do you wear checked pants and sweaters that button over your belly?"

I reach for her Bacardi.

She unscrews the lid, drinks, then passes me the bottle. Tonight's jewelry is plastic, seven hoops up one forearm and one on the opposite bicep, plus a hoop on her left ear. Her hair curls along her cheeks.

I wipe out the mouth of the bottle.

She says, "Shoes with flaps over the top?"

I drink her rum.

"Are you twenty-one yet?" she says.

I say, "Soon."

Right now, we both know one thing. I'm not good enough to be a pro. If I was, would I be sitting here drinking rum?

She says, "The sky's the limit."

I hand her her bottle.

She says, "This is shit work."

One night, we went into one of the offices and got after each other. She works out, and I could see it. I do love women's bodies. Her muscles talked about themselves, and there was that line down the center of her stomach. We were half into it when the outside buzzer cut us off. I had to book three black girls. They were all about four feet tall. Two detectives picked them up running down the street carrying shotguns. Alison took them to detention and didn't come back out. For three days, she stayed away. Bobbie came out to get the girls I booked in.

The result is now Alison and I only talk. If I touch her, she says, "I could be your mother."

Tonight I say, "I ought to stop drinking before I'm old enough to begin."

"Probably," she says.

I go to parties and wake up in rooms I didn't enter. Music is on and maybe a TV with no sound. All day people tell me what I did, and they say, "God, were you out of it." One night, I'm lying on a floor, carpet under me, my eyes wide open, and I'm talking to some guy, but I can't see him. He's asking questions, and I'm answering. I know him from when we went to high school. I make sense, I think. But I'm blind. I don't mean it's like the light's off or it's night. My eyes are open and it's black. There is his voice, and no body, no head, no form. His voice is saying things, and I'm saying things.

I tell Alison all this, and she says, "Don't drink. You can't."

I reach for the Bacardi and say, "One last swig. The last taste of my rummy life."

She watches me, then shuts her eyes.

I say, "Save me," and hand her the bottle.

"Being mother to one child is enough for me," she says.

She dials Bobbi's house because Bobbi didn't come in. I called earlier, and we're not getting an answer. Alison says, "Try in a half an hour, will you?" Then she heads for detention.

I never reach Bobbi. In the morning, on the way home, I stop at the DI and hit nine irons. They rise and fall and fill the air like sprinkler water. It's the weekend.

When I get back to work I hear Bobbi is dead. For a week we listen to stories. TVs are on at work, people hoping for any news. They say it's murder. Everyone at JuVee has a detail to add. She was run off the road and strangled. They found flesh under her fingernails. She was raped. There was a lily on her lap.

Her husband's interviewed on the late news. He offers a reward and he cries. He shakes like a building.

Alison says, "This ain't worth it."

"You worried?" I say.

She says, "Name a place where people don't kill people."

"Idaho," I say. "It's too cold. They only kill animals. They use bows and arrows, something you could dodge."

She says, "Nazis."

"Nazis."

"In Idaho," she says. "You told me you read. Idaho's full of Nazis. Read a newspaper once a year. The hills of Idaho are full of skinheads and Nazis. And dead cows in the fields. Nuts cut them up because god has told them to."

"Montana," I say.

She says, "God, do you even watch TV, the news? They found some religion smuggling in machine guns, tanks, jets. Building bomb shelters big as cities."

I shrug and drink her rum.

She says, "Golf. You come here. You drink my rum. You go play golf, and then you come back here."

I say, "Mommy."

She says, "I'm packing up, and my little girl and me, we're going."

I say, "Utah."

"Utah," she says.

I say, "Me, too," and I offer her the Bacardi. "But not Utah. My golf game's shit. I'm stinking up the courses. I can't find the hole, and the sixteen-year-olds are beating me."

She says, "And you're getting a belly."

I say, "Tonopah."

She says, "Up the road?"

I say, "Up the road. They're building a golf course to get tourists. They'll need a pro, and no one who can play worth crap is going to want to be a pro in Tonopah, Nevada. I'll take along my clippings and show them what I've got. Think they've heard of me?"

In the morning I let Alison out, and I'm typing up a booking sheet when the door buzzes. It's her. She's come right back, and she is banging on the door. She comes in yelling. "Jesus," she says. "No no no. I can't. Shit. Shit. Shit." She's holding a lily.

"Your car?" I say.

"On the seat, where I drive."

I pick up the phone to call the police.

"I quit," she says. "Now. This minute. Not one more minute."

She rings the boys' side of detention, and when the supervisor comes out she throws her keys at him. She says, "I'm gone. You don't know me. Tell them I'll call about how to get my check."

On the phone, I'm explaining what's happened to some cop, and I show the supervisor the lily.

He says, "Alison."

She says, "No." To me she says, "Open the door."

I point at the phone.

She screams. She says, "Out. The door. Shit."

I buzz it open, then get off the phone. I catch her at her car. We're both looking around like we're in the bad part of a big city. She gets in and locks her doors. She opens the window and says, "Here." She's gotten into her glove box and is giving me two hollow chrome balls. She rotates them in her hand, and they chime. The sound is beyond anything I've ever heard. It's the desert at night. It's concrete proof of life on other planets. She says, "Try it."

I do, and they sing for me.

"The Chinese," she says. "Calm." She asks me to lean in, and she kisses me, quick, light. She's a moth on my lips. She says, "We should have finished what we started."

All I can say is, "Yes."

She says, "I'm unglued here."

I can see she is. Over in the corner is the place where Bobbi's husband parked night after night. I say, "We never had dinner."

"Maybe we will," she says. She pulls hair on my arm. She says, "Don't let them think I'm not gone. I am. I quit. Tell them."

I want to say something that will last a lifetime, but what can do that? What do I know? Shit -- shit is what I know. At least that's what Uncle Beaner's told me in so many words. I'm a drop-out booking officer, a rum-bellied golfer who's not yet twenty-one and whose two iron tails, who can't just step up, test the breeze, and catch all of any shot anymore.

She backs out and weaves through the parking lot. Her brake lights come up at the stop sign, then she's on the street hurrying away. I hope she finds a place where people don't kill people.

Alison is gone, and Cool Breeze is dead. I hear about it two weeks after it happened, and I think it's a rumor until I call Julio one day when he's working. He has the facts. Breeze was driving a van full of stereos, VCRs, TVs. He was shot. How is one fact Julio doesn't have.

I work, and I read, and I learn fifty ways to play solitaire on the computer. Every day Julio's put a note in my box. They say fact one, fact two, and so on. Fact one is Cool Breeze ran. I don't buy it. Breeze was not stupid. He'd have had his hands behind his head before he stepped out of the van, he'd lean up against it on his own, spread his legs before he was told, and he'd be talking the whole time, saying, You see, officers, I am down on Fremont and a guy says . . . Fact two is they say he had a gun. Not true. I know. Julio's facts are not telling me what happened.

I do sit-ups and I don't drink. My stomach's on its way back. I sharpen my game.

I turn twenty-one.

Another woman parole officer is run off the road and murdered. Again, Julio fills me in. Fact one is she drove her kids to a playground on a Saturday and didn't come home. Fact two is she'd been getting lilies in the mail.

It's a Sunday night when the phone rings at JuVee, and I'm thinking some parent is calling to see if we've got their kid. A man says, "Hey, brother, is Alison in?"

I say, "Alison quit."

"Alison, man," he says.

I say, "Long gone. She doesn't work here."

"The head lady in lock-up," he says. "She works nights. Bobbi's friend."

I say, "Is this Bobbi's husband?"

"No, man. Not Bobbi's husband."

I say, "Who is this?"

"I met Bobbi," he says. "Alison is gone?"

"From here and the state."

"Too bad," he says.

I say, "Do you want to talk to a supervisor?"

He says, "You got you a Lily working there?"

"No Lily," I say, and I'm dialing detention on another phone, trying to get someone in here.

"No Lily. That is sad. You need you a Lily."

The supervisor has picked up the phone and is saying, "Hello, hello?" I'm hoping he'll look in here. I say to the man, "I can get you a parole officer."

He says, "No Alison. No Lily. No Bobbi."

The supervisor has come to the small window in the door that leads to detention, and I wave him in. I mouth killer and point to the phone. To the man I say, "You're right. No Alison. No Lily and no Bobbi."

He says, "Only talk to Lily," and hangs up.

I tell the supervisor what he said, and we call the police. They say they'll send someone over, but I don't see anyone by quitting time, so I leave.

On the first tee at the DI, I hit a soft hook that takes the dogleg and leaves me half a seven iron to the green. You give me a seven iron and you might as well let me set the ball wherever I want. In my hands a seven iron's at least a birdie. The flag's at the back of the two-tiered green, and I go right at it. I start the round birdie birdie birdie and shoot a sixty-five.

The police come by my apartment in the afternoon. Anything about the voice? they say. Young? Old? White? Black?

"On something," I say.

"Drugs?"

"Something."

One of them says, "Definitely a man?"

"No question."

He says, "What did he say, exactly?"

I tell them he asked for Alison, and he said he'd met Bobbi.

"Met?" the cop says.

"He said, 'I met Bobbi.'"

The second cop says, "What else?"

"He asked if we had a Lily," I say. "He said we need a Lily, and he'd talk only to Lily."

The first cop says, "Did he threaten you?"

I say, "He said, 'No Alison. No Lily. No Bobbi.'"

"Did he say he'd hurt them?"

I say, "Only Alison is real."

"Real?"

"Bobbi is dead. There is no Lily."

We finish up, and they drive off. It's like I'm watching them pull away from the curb in a TV program. They think I'm a flake.

I didn't help. I want to help. I'd like to save a life. If I had to go to court and could, I'd look the guy in the eye and accuse him, if I'd seen him. He was cheerful. His voice had a lift to it as if he was smiling all the time.

He said to me, "No Alison. No Lily. No Bobbi."

I'd talked to a man who had murdered two women.

At three I call in and quit. the director tells me I can't. I owe them notice. I say, "Keep my check."

By midnight I'm in Tonopah, and I find a place to stay in the morning.

I can't locate anyone who has anything to do with the golf course they're supposed to be building here, and I don't see anyplace where they're putting one in. No heavy equipment, no dump trucks or bulldozers. When I do find someone, I'll show them the shots in my bag. I won't even hide my two iron. What will be between us is me knowing and them knowing that Tonopah, Nevada, will never get itself a real pro.

I went to Uncle Beaner with my song and dance because one, he's a filthy rich as Tosker L. Oddie was, and two, He's got a finger in every pie baked in the Silver State. Three is the real reason. My Uncle Beaner has kept alive his one daughter who is now my age and whose body doesn't feel pain. She bites pieces off her tongue, and only when her mouth fills with blood does she know it. Before Beaner learned to test her hot drinks, her lips were always blistered. Beaner or someone he's hired always has one eye on her. They tell her to shift her weight when she's standing, and they roll her when she sleeps. It was Beaner himself who one night threw her in his Caddi and drove eighty to Sunrise Hospital, and said, "Appendicitis." He swears he saw her stomach twitch under her blouse. They did the tests and operated. My point is he didn't abandon her on some hillside and hope for coyotes.

So, I took my best shot at Uncle Beaner. I gave him a floor show. I said, What's that? Can I sing? Can I sing. And I sang for him.

Tonopah is hot in the day and cold at night. In the morning I hit range balls into the desert, and I play twenty-one all afternoon. I rotate the Chinese exercise balls. They touch every finger, and I win more than I lose.

I am not a clown.

Uncle Beaner and my father, they'll come. As I said, Beaner has a finger in every pie, a snitch in every town and city and casino. They'll take the dips in the old highway and make the turn at what used to be the railroad spur at Sodaville. All the way they'll be cooking up one more bet I won't have the balls or smarts to turn down.

*****

Wired for Books home page