Look what can happen in a strange bar! I wrote this little thing at a golf course bar because my TV stopped working during a World Series. Found it the other day. Remember, it’s copyrighted…

Giants vs. Cubs

It is a cloudy day. In the bar at The Nineteenth Hole a tipsy woman watches men drink. She sits at a table; they overflow barstools with their knees splayed, half a dozen balding men bunched in groups of two and three. They play liar dice for the tab. Outside are their vehicles; Cougars, Mustangs, Rams. A stuffed boar snarls above the television set. On-screen, a man strides across an emerald outfield and plucks a ball from the sky. Second out, fifth inning.

One of the men is new to the group at the bar, not yet permitted to pay. A man tells him, “He’ll take care of the ticket for you. Be in pretty soon; he’s teeing off right now on the ninth.”

There is an attentive pause for the game. The pitcher fans the batter back, does it again, and pitches him out. End of inning; the commercials begin.

The new man isn’t comfortable: “You sure? I feel funny asking ’cause we just met.”

“Don’t sweat it,” he’s told.

The subject is closed. The men trade looks and smiles, sip whiskey. The new man turns on his stool, reassured. “He plays that good?” he asks, “Birdies every hole?”

A man nods. “Almost.” Others nod, too.

“He should,” the first man says, “He plays every day.”

Newboy is impressed. “And he won’t mind my asking? Because, I mean, this thing’ll kill me. It’s my third.”

“You’ll scratch his back for him.”

“From time to time,” another says. “We all do.”

More looks are traded. More nods. On-screen, a dark man appears in the murky shadow of a city wall. He pummels a steel-colored punching bag with padded fists while a gravelled voice-over touts watery beer. Everything in the picture is clean. The televised men are warriors; the drinking men are their acolytes. They pretend they are athletes rendered in the hypercolor on the screen. Stevie Wonder’s voice pipes lyrics of love. The stuffed boar is poised to charge.

The woman watching the men considers archetypes and the gap between perception and reality. The men, too soft to play baseball or box or even, on this blustery day, golf, seek numerical accuracy but stretch the truth. “He hit that sucker a good seventy-five yards, and …”

“Seventy-four,” the man is corrected.

“Right; seventy-four yards, and it lit like a feather not three feet from the pin.”

”That‘s right.”

“Amazing.”

“Does it any time he wants.”

“Then this silly suit comes walking right onto the green in his brogans,” the first man continues, “taking things in, smiling. Then says he has a right to walk wherever he wants to.”

“Drunk?”

“Sober. Just stupid. That’s how it started, though.”

The woman thinks, “Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder. Maybe reality only begins at the edge of your personal space. To cross the line is disingenuous, or rash. Or reality changes with each observation, like a boson. Or a quark.”

She is prolix; it is a habit with her after a second drink. The men watch the commercial. They finger the penile knives in their pockets.

The wall at the end of the bar is glass. A glass door in it opens directly onto the green. There, across the improbable lawns beneath titanic redwoods, a brute with a huge, solid belly stands in a black windbreaker. His legs are hidden behind a knoll, but even from a distance the woman sees hair rise from his back and curl above his neckline.

“That him?” the newbe asks. “I wouldn’t want to be that suit.”

The golfer wears a black cap with a deep bill. The bill shades his eyes and, if you don’t know him, his identity. He prepares to tee off.

“There comes the silly bastard we were talking about,” someone says.

A man in a Burberry appears so far across the course that his militant, arm-swinging progress is obscured by an occasional tree. He marches directly across the greens. He is tiny under the redwoods; insignificant. “Look at that.” The bartender swears and bends to signal the clubhouse.

”Can‘t say he wasn‘t warned.”

“Maybe he didn’t see the signs.”

“He saw ‘em.”

The man enters the swale beyond the brute. His body disappears until only his forehead can be seen, then his face, as he climbs out. The brute swings. The forehead crumples. The corpse disappears into the swale and the brute, stepping wide to accommodate his scrotum, tees and strolls toward the flag. His golf club rests on his shoulder.

“Perhaps it’s a mashie,” the drunk woman thinks, slow to take it in.

The men at the bar turn away from the windows and face her. They rise. She becomes confused. The sixth inning begins as they surround her table.

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