|
BACK NINE
|
AWAY TO ZERO
|
“Away.”
“Away?”
Long pause. “Away?”
Sinfonia
Dugger stared at Paul B with a challenging, surprised look. “Yes.
Absolutely.”
Paul
B looked off the verandah toward the 9th green pensively. He
shrugged. “Balata.”
Sinfonia
thought for a minute, not quite satisfied, but offered, “Chip.”
“Dogleg.”
“Eagle.”
“Frog
hair.” Paul B smiled in triumph. “I love when there are those little
funny
poetic idioms. ‘Pushing up daisies.’ ‘Ambulance chaser.’ That sort of
thing. Frog hair is a good one.”
“Yes,
lovely. But it’s two words, not one. Doesn’t count.” Sinfonia grinned.
Paul
B glowered. “OK you want to play that game. Let’s go back to away for a second. The words are
supposed to be ones that have meanings unique to golf. I’m not sure
that’s true
for away.”
“Tell
me another usage where it means some object is further from something
than
other objects.”
He
sorted through the rubble in his brain. Wasn’t that sort of the whole
meaning
of the word? Away game? Won going away? Nothing quite seemed to
eliminate it,
but it still didn’t feel right. “OK, alright.”
“Well,
since we’re objecting,” Sinfonia said, “I have my doubts about balata. It was used as a rubber in
various manufacturing processes beside golf balls. And the ball wasn’t
called a
balata.”
Paul
B shrugged. He and Sinfonia seemed to shrug a lot when dealing with
each other.
“Baffie, then.”
Sinfonia
nodded approvingly. “Where are we?”
“I
had frog hair rejected. Fairway.”
“Green.”
“Hacker.”
Sinfonia
rose from her seat as if in a courtroom. “Objection. Hacker
can mean a person who screws up computers as well as golf.”
“One
screws things up; the other screws up things. A kingdom for my
preposition,”
Paul B spoke in grand tones.
“I
still contend it’s not unique.” Sinfonia paced the verandah as if bored
with his
slowness.
Paul
B took a manly pull on his Falstaff. “Hook.”
“Baseballs
hook around foul poles. Rejected.”
Paul
B seethed for a full minute, his anger clouding his ability to index
his brain.
Finally he spat out “Hosel.”
“Iron,”
she said before the l from hosel was
finished, relishing the
one-upsmanship.
Her
opponent quivered with rage, made worse by his being stuck with j, the first of those silly letters,
like q v, x, y, z. Sinfonia sensed she
shouldn’t push it. Paul B, like her, could be a powder keg. She offered
to
fetch another round of Falstaffs. Paul B held out his empty glass
without
looking up. Upon her return, Paul B was at the edge of the verandah,
apparently
contemplating whether the ten-foot drop to the cart path below was
enough to
attempt suicide.
“Paul
B, I have to admit I’ve been racking my brain and I can’t think of one
for j. I take it you haven’t either.”
“No,”
he morosed.
“Let’s
pass. You can have k, not that that’s
much of a favor, I suspect.”
He
whispered “OK,” refurrowing his brow. It smoothed with relief. “Knife.
The
one-iron.”
“Well
done. Lag.”
“Hmmm.
I guess a lag in billiards is different, so OK. Mashie.”
“Niblick.
A nice sequence. There was even a mashie niblick in days of yore.”
Paul
B began to re-experience the horror that he had just gone through with j, made worse by o being such a common
letter. He could only come up with multiple-word
terms—overlapping grip, over the top, on the screws. He paced the
verandah and
paused to stare out at the bits of the
“Eh?”
“’I
was out in 38.’ A sadly appropriate word, given that at this course we
can only
go out and never in.”
Sinfonia
studied the perplexing figure of Paul B. His unkempt looks betraying an
oddly
kempt mind. She almost said perplexing
as her next word, but instead said the humble “Putt.”
Oh,
damn, thought Paul B. If I had come up with something for j,
Sinfonia would be stuck with q.
“I guess Q school is two words, isn’t
it?” Paul B plowed the furrows of his brain to no avail. “Uncle,” he
said.
“Same
with me, so you get a second favor. R
is yours.”
For
a panicked moment, the same blankness appeared in his mind. He wondered
if
senile dementia were setting in. He chuckled at the irony when the fog
cleared.
“Relief.”
She
smiled, then really smiled. “Smile.”
Paul
B looked askance, then laughed. “Wow. It’s been so long since you could
actually put a smile on a golf ball that I hadn’t thought of that term
in
years. Nice one.” Paul B eyed Sinfonia out of the corner of said eye.
He wasn’t
quite sure why he didn’t have a terrible crush on her. He talked to her
with
more ease than any other woman he knew. They had played dozens of
compatible
rounds together. He had even walked down the 9th fairway
nude at midnight
with her when he helped her overcome her golf malaise. Was he holding
back?
Should he unleash the dogs of love? With infinite simplicity he said,
“Tee.”
“Uh
oh,” Sinfonia said.
“Doesn’t
count. Two words.”
“Bite
me,” Sinfonia said. There was a fraught pause as they both pictured
that. She
forced herself to u through her
cortex. Words beginning with under
blocked out everything, but none of them qualified—undergrowth,
under par, up and down. She looked down. “Up.” Paul B’s
skeptical reaction led to her explanation: “I was 2 up after the 3rd
hole.”
“Duh.
Of course. Sorry. Oh, crap. I get another junk letter.” He renewed
pacing. “I
got nothing.”
“Vardon
grip is all I got, and that doesn’t count,” she said. “So you get a
third
favor: w.”
“Did
you ever notice w is the only letter
that’s more than one syllable, and it’s three. I’ve always wanted to
start a
radio station—east of the
“Oh,
crap. It’s finally my turn with the junk. I don’t suppose X-out
referring to nonstandard golf balls counts, does it?”
“Hmm.
That’s sort of different than a normal hyphenated phrase, isn’t it? The
X
doesn’t stand for anything unlike Q
school, where the Q stands for qualifying.
X just means a reject. I can return your favors and give you that.”
“Thank
you, Paul B, but that gives you y.
Sorry.”
“Yoicks.
Give me a minute.” He drank and paced and stared and daydreamed. “Yay!
Yips.”
“Zero,”
Sinfonia immediately replied.
Paul
B pondered. “OK, you got me. I don’t get it.”
“It’s
the only score that’s impossible in golf.” ©
Red Wassenich January
2009
Back Nine
home page | Back Nine table of contents
| Next story
If you would like to be notified when a new story appears, send us an email at backninestories@gmail.com. Back Nine:
The Austin Golf Club Stories |