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“You're sellin' out your God-given talent,” Skeet insisted stubbornly.
Dallie whipped around to glower at him. “You're a damn hypocrite, is what you are. For as long as I can remember, you've been pushing Hollywood talent agents down my throat and trying to get me to pose for pinup pictures wearing nothing but my jockstrap, but now that I have an offer with a little dignity attached to it, you're getting all indignant.”
“Those other offers didn't interfere with your golf. Dammit, Dallie, you wouldn't have missed a single tournament if you'd done a guest shot on ‘The Love Boat’ during the off season, but we're talking about something entirely different here. We're talking about you sitting up in an announcer's booth making wise-ass remarks about Greg Norman's pink shirts while Norman's out there making golf history. We're talking about the end of your professional career! I didn't hear those network honchos say anything about you coming up into the announcers' booth only on the days you don't make the cut, the way Nicklaus does, and some of the other big boys. They're talkin' about having you there full-time. In the announcers' booth, Dallie—not out on the golf course.”
It was one of the longest speeches Dallie had ever heard Skeet make, and the sheer volume of words held him momentarily in check. But then Skeet muttered something under his breath, aggravating Dallie almost past the point of endurance. He managed to keep a rein on his temper only because he knew that these past few golf seasons had just about broken Skeet Cooper's heart.
It had all started a few years back when he'd been driving home from a Wichita Falls bar and had almost killed a teenage kid riding a ten-speed bike. He'd given up taking illegal pharmaceuticals in the late seventies, but he'd continued his friendship with the beer bottle right up until that night. The boy ended up with nothing more serious than a broken rib, and the cops had gone a lot easier on Dallie than he'd deserved, but he'd been so badly shaken that he'd given up booze right after. It hadn't been easy, which told him just how much he'd been kidding himself about his drinking. He might never survive the cut at the Masters or finish in the money at the U.S. Classic, but he would be damned if he'd kill a kid because he drank too goddamn much.
To his surprise, going on the wagon had immediately improved his game, and the next mon
th he'd taken a third in the Bob Hope, right in front of the television cameras. Skeet was so happy he almost cried. That night Dallie had overheard him talking to Holly Grace on the telephone. “I knew he could do it,” Skeet had crowed. “You just watch. This is it, Holly Grace. He's going to be one of the greats. It's all going to come together for our boy now.”
But it hadn't, not quite. And that's what was pretty much breaking Skeet's heart. Once or twice each season Dallie took a second or third in one of the majors, but it had become pretty obvious to everyone that, at thirty-seven, his best years were just about gone and the big championships would never be his.
“You got the skill,” Skeet said, staring out the murky window of the cab. “You got the skill and you got the talent, but something inside you is keeping you from being a real champion. I just wish I knew what it was.”
Dallie knew, but he wasn't saying. “Now you listen to me, Skeet Cooper. Everybody understands that watching golf on television is about as interesting as watching somebody sleep. Those network honchos are getting ready to pay me some semi-spectacular money to liven up their broadcasts, and I don't see any need to throw their generosity back in their faces.”
“Those network honchos wear fancy cologne,” Skeet grumbled, as if that said it all. “And since when did you get so all-fired concerned about money?”
“Since I looked at the calendar and saw that I was thirty-seven years old, that's when.” Dallie leaned forward and abruptly rapped on the glass separating him from the driver. “Hey, you! Let me out at the next corner.”
“Just where do you think you're going?”
“I'm going to see Holly Grace, that's where. And I'm going by myself.”
“It won't do you any good. She'll just say the same thing I been sayin'.”
Dallie pushed open the door anyway and jumped out in front of Cartier. The cab pulled away, and he stepped directly into a pile of dog shit. It served him right, he thought, for eating a lunch that cost more than the yearly budget of most Third World nations.
Oblivious to the attention he was attracting from several female passersby, he began scraping the sole of his shoe on the curb. It was then that the Bear came up behind him, right there in the middle of Midtown. You'd better sign while they still want you, the Bear said. How much longer are you going to kid yourself?
I'm not kidding myself. Dallie started back up Fifth Avenue, heading toward Holly Grace's apartment.
The Bear stayed right with him, shaking his big blond head in disgust. You thought giving up booze was going to guarantee you'd make those eagle putts, didn't you, boy? You thought it was going to be that simple. Why don't you tell old Skeet what's really holding you back? Why don't you just come right out and tell him you don't have the guts to be a champion?
Dallie quickened his pace, doing his best to lose the Bear in the crowd. But the Bear was tenacious. He'd stuck around for a long time, and he wasn't going anyplace now.
Holly Grace lived in the Museum Tower, the luxury condominiums built above the Museum of Modern Art, which made her fond of announcing that she slept on top of some of the greatest painters in the world. The doorman recognized Dallie and let him into Holly Grace's apartment to wait for her. Dallie hadn't seen Holly Grace for several months, but they talked on the telephone frequently and not much happened in either life that didn't get discussed between them.
The apartment wasn't Dallie's style at all—too much white furniture, with free-form chairs that didn't fit his lanky body, and some abstract art that reminded him of pond scum. He shucked off his coat and tie, then stuck a tape of Born in the U.S.A. into a cassette player he found in a cabinet that looked as if it was designed to hold dental equipment. He fast-forwarded the tape to “Darlington County,” which, in his opinion, was one of the ten greatest American songs ever written. While the Boss sang about his adventures with Wayne, Dallie wandered about the spacious living room, finally coming to a stop in front of Holly Grace's piano. Since he'd last been in the apartment, she'd added a group of photographs in silver frames to the collection of glass paperweights that had always occupied the top of the piano. He noted several pictures of Holly Grace and her mother, a couple of photos of himself, some snapshots of the two of them together, and a photograph of Danny they'd had taken at Sears in 1969.
Dallie's fingers tightened around the edge of the frame as he picked it up. Danny's round face looked back at him, wide-eyed and laughing, a tiny bubble of drool frozen forever on the inside of his bottom lip. If Danny had lived, he would have been eighteen years old now. Dallie couldn't imagine it. He couldn't picture Danny at eighteen, as tall as himself, blond and lithe, as good-looking as his mother. In his mind, Danny would always be a toddler running toward his twenty-year-old father with a loaded diaper sagging down around his knees and his chubby arms extended in perfect trust.
Dallie replaced the photograph and looked away. After all these years, the ache was still there—not as acute, maybe, but still there. He distracted himself by studying a photograph of Francesca wearing bright red shorts and laughing mischievously into the camera. She was perched on a big rock, pushing her hair away from her face with one hand and propping a chubby baby between her legs with the other. He smiled. She looked happy in the picture. That time with Francesca had been a good time in his life, sort of like living inside a private joke. Still, maybe the laugh was on him now.
Who would have ever thought Miss Fancy Pants would turn out to be such a success? She'd done it on her own, too—he knew that from Holly Grace. She'd raised a baby without anyone to help her and made a career for herself. Of course, there'd been something special about her even ten years before—a feistiness, a way she had of charging at life straight on and going after what she wanted without any thought of the consequences. For a fraction of a moment it flashed through his mind that Francesca had taken life on at a full run while he was still hanging out at the fringes.
The idea didn't please him, and he rewound the Springsteen tape to distract himself. He then went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, bypassing Holly Grace's Miller Lite for a Dr Pepper. He'd always appreciated the fact that Francesca had been honest with Holly Grace about that baby of hers. It had been natural for him to wonder if the baby might not be his, and Francesca could certainly have pinned old Nicky's kid on him without too much trouble. But she hadn't done it, and he admired her for it.
Popping the lid on the Dr Pepper, he walked back to the piano and looked around for another picture of Francesca's son, but found only the one. He got a kick out of the fact that whenever the child was mentioned in an article about Francesca, he was always identified as the product of an unhappy early marriage—so unhappy that Francesca had refused to give the child his father's last name. As far as Dallie knew, he, Holly Grace, and Skeet were the only people who knew the marriage had never existed, but all of them had enough respect for what Francesca had done with herself to keep their mouths shut.
The unexpected friendship that had developed between Holly Grace and Francesca seemed to Dallie one of life's more interesting relationships, and he'd mentioned to Holly Grace more than once that he would like to drop in some time when the two of them were together to see how they got along. “I just can't picture it,” he'd once said. “All I can see is you going on and on about the last Cowboys game while Francie talks about her Gucci shoes and admires herself in the mirror.”
“She's not like that, Dallie,” Holly Grace replied. “I mean, she does talk about her shoes, but that's not all.”
“It just seems ironic,” he answered, “that somebody like her should be raising a male child. I'll bet you anything he grows up strange.”
