Golf Among Us

They Just Want to Play the Game

Howdy, friends. I hope you’re doing well, or as well as can be considering the way things are going, where you find yourself in the wide world out there. If you’ve got a little time to pass, I’ve got a little story for ya. Fill your glass, if you like. I’ll wait.

Now, back in 2016, Darren Ridgley and Adam Petrash put out a call for short fiction for an anthology they were compiling of “Manitoba speculative fiction.” At the time, I had been toiling away at a novel (still as yet unpublished), but had hit the point where I needed to try something different during my “free” writing time. I figured, if nothing else, the call would provide a prompt to start writing a story that had been kicking around in my head for quite some time.

So I got to work on a story about aliens who wanted to golf so bad they couldn’t stand it no more.

Now, let me tell you, I was fired up when the story was accepted. Big time. It was the first piece of fiction I’d had published in over a decade. It lit a fire in me to write the kind of stories that I wanted to write, in whatever voice felt most natural to me. The weird, left-of-the-dial provincial tales of madness that don’t seem to really fit in with CanLit mags, but aren’t deep genre dives either. Since then, that’s what I’ve endeavoured to do each time I get a little free time to punch out some words. Make ‘em count, right?

The anthology itself was was picked up and published by Enfield & Wizenty, an imprint of Great Plains Publications. On October 11, 2018, Darren and Adam launched Parallel Prairies: Stories of Manitoba Speculative Fiction with a reading at McNally Robinson here in Winnipeg. I couldn’t make it, though, because my wife and I were at St. Boniface Hospital, where our daughter Stella was born early on the morning of October 12. I’m told the launch was well attended and an all around good time, though. I hope to make it to the next one, whenever that may be.

Parallel Prairies features 19 great stories from a wide variety of Manitoba writers, with a little something for all tastes that skew to the weird. I would recommend anyone to pick the book up for themselves. Heck, why not order from McNally? You can get it delivered, or pick it up at the shop for no extra charge if you’re in Winnipeg. At the time of broadcast here, they’ll even arrange for curb-side pickup for ya. Pretty neat. (For the record: I don’t see a cut of any sales, but I’m sure the store and publisher would be pleased to get your support.)

My only regret with my piece, and the only thing I’ve changed here, is the title “They Only Want to Play the Game.” I should have stuck with the working title, but I was worried that the Misfits/old sci-fi title reference was a bit of a much. Oh well. You live and you learn, or aim to anyhow. So here you have it, Golf Among Us, a tale of aliens, golf, and friendship. Hope you dig.

Golf Among Us

by Sheldon Birnie

Originally published as “They Just Want to Play the Game” in Parallel Prairies: Stories of Manitoba Speculative Fiction (Enfield & Wizenty, 2018).

When Jake Shipley up and disappeared the weekend before the annual Manawaka Golf Tournament, word around town was he’d done a nose dive right off the wagon. Course, nobody’d say as much to his face when he turned up on Monday, sober as ever and without a hint of hangover. Still, everyone kept on talking behind his back like Jake had run a bender. It’s a small town. What do you expect.

Me, though, I wasn’t so sure. I’ve known Jake nearly ten years now, and I don’t believe he’s had a drop in all that time. I just don’t believe it. There had to be something else to his disappearing act. Sure, it wasn’t like him to make himself scarce, to miss work without notice. Heck, it’s not like him to miss work, period, much less at the busiest time of year. So I figured it had to be something serious.

But when he told me he’d spent the night of August 21 aboard an alien spacecraft, I thought, “well, I guess old Jake’s done lost it”, traded in all his marbles and bought the banana farm, after all. I thought, “he’s gone plum crazy”. Now I’m not so sure. 

As we worked our way around the eighteen holes of the Manawaka Golf & Country Club on the crisp, clear morning of August 27 - the morning before the tourney got going for real - he filled me in on what he said happened that night. 

“Wasn’t like in the movies,” he said after I’d chipped a shot out of the rough up towards the third green. 

Jake’s ball was already sitting pretty after only his second shot. He’d sink her for a birdie, while that chip in had been my fourth, and I’d finish off the hole with a double bogey. “Wasn’t like the movies at all.”

Me, I didn’t say nothing. Hadn’t said much all morning. When Jake first got going on this alien business I thought he was just pulling my leg. I didn’t know what to say so I just grunted, and kept moving on down the course. 

“Weren’t no bright lights to be seen,” Jake continued. “It was dim, warm. Kinda like a fancy Italian restaurant or something. A massage parlour, maybe.”

“You don’t say, Jake,” was all I could muster as I put my nine iron away, pulled out my putter, and gave my lie a good, long once over. 

I’d never been in a massage parlour, but I had been to a couple hoity-toity restaurants in my day. I found myself picturing it, this spaceship of his, as we walked up to the edge of the green. 

###

Around here, the Manawaka Golf Tournament is just about the biggest deal going. The tourney draws golfers from across Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and northwestern Ontario. Might be a few folks coming up from the Dakotas, even. For weeks leading up to it the course is swarming with duffers looking to get the lay of the land before the qualifying scramble. While he don’t really need the practice - he’s been the tourney champ four of the last ten years and always in the top ten - it just ain’t like Jake to up and take off a couple days before the whole thing gets going. 

For starters, he’s the club pro and has his hours to put in, and those are doubled come tourney time. Besides, if he’d had some other place he had to be, he’d have just about bent over backwards trying to get out of whatever it was he’d got himself into rather than leave the club high and dry. 

Even if he did run off for a couple days to soak up the sauce and run wild in the mean streets of Winnipeg, the Wheat City, or Grand Forks, it ain’t like they’d ever fire him. The dang course has been in the Shipley family since near day one.

###

“That there’s right where I was standing when it happened,” Jake said, pointing with his five-iron to a slight rise in the fairway of the sixth hole, just off to our right and up about twenty yards. 

I looked at the spot, raised my eyebrows, and waited for Jake to hammer his ball down the stretch towards the pin. Instead, he shook his head, staring at the nondescript patch of grass with a look of wonder on his tanned, lined face. After a moment, he looked back my way with a shrug. 

“I was trying to sneak a quick nine in before dark. That’s as far as I got.”

Jake lined up his shoulders, glanced up the fairway, and took his swing. Sure enough, the ball sailed through the air a dozen feet above fading ever so slightly at the end to drop, bouncing, just shy of the green. 

Dang. 

I whistled, shaking my head. Jake, he didn’t even seem to notice his near perfect shot.

“Weirdest feeling I ever experienced,” he said. “Bar none, Roy. One second, there I am, gauging the wind and squinting through the dusk, the next, I’m lying flat on my back, frozen in place in a goddamn spaceship a mile above the clouds.”

Again, I didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the words he was saying. It’s just - how’s a man supposed to respond to such a thing?  

Instead I picked up my pace, angling hard towards my grass stained Calloway. That’s pretty much how she went as we made our way through the front nine. Jake kept on with his tale between strokes, and I just mumbled and nodded, hoping he’d change the subject. 

“You tell anyone else about this?” I asked him after a while. 

Jake just shook his head.

“Nah,” he said, looking sadly over the rise in the fairway at the flag hanging off the pin. “Better the town believe I had a little dance with the demon rum than think I’ve lost the plot, eh? Remember what happened to that guy over Rivers way who said he’d been abducted by aliens? Oh boy. No, thank you.”

“So why you telling me?” 

“Heck, Roy,” he said, breaking into a smile. “We’re pals, ain’t we?”

I liked to think we were, so I just let him talk on. And talk on he did.

“Dangedest thing is why they told me they done it,” Jake said at one point. “Why they chose me, of all people, to beam up.”

“And why’s that, Jake?” I said with a sigh. 

He’d already explained how these aliens of his didn’t really speak so much as transmit their thoughts straight into his brain. I was lost on the particulars of just how they pulled that trick, but it didn’t seem no wilder than the rest of Jake’s tall tale. Besides, if these guys could fly across the universe, I reckoned they’d have a lock on making their parlez vous a ding dong understood by a good old boy from the backwoods. Otherwise, what was the point of the trip? 

“Dangedest thing, Roy,” Jake repeated. 

Off in the bush, a magpie set to squawking up a storm. I squared up to take my shot, waiting on him to finish. 

“Said they wanted a crack at winning the Manawaka Golf Tournament. Said, more than anything, they just want to play the game. Ain’t that something?”

Once again, I didn’t say nothing, but as I swung my driver back to take my shot I caught myself thinking that was just about the first sensible thing Jake had said all morning.

###

By the time we wrapped up the round danged if Jake didn’t have me thinking he might not be so far off his rocker after all. Now, it’s not that I believed he really got himself beamed up into an UFO and roped into an intergalactic mission to win the Manawaka Golf Tournament. That’s just crazy talk, but I didn’t fully disbelieve him, neither. Not completely, anyhow.

According to Jake these extraterrestrial buddies of his wanted in on the thrill of a hard fought golf championship on a heritage course. Only their bodies don’t hold up under Earth’s gravity, Jake explained, so they couldn’t beam themselves down and hit the links. They might have eight arms and giant brains, but their bones turned to rubber under our atmospheric pressure.

“Plus,” he added. “Our air’s like poison to ‘em. Pure poison.”

That, Jake said, is why they had to install some sorta radio-transmitter doohickey into his spine that allowed the green guys to tap straight into his skull and, as he put it, “come along for the ride”. 

Heck, Jake even showed me the mark the installation left behind his right ear.

“That ain’t nothing but a mosquito bite, Jake,” I told him, though I had to admit that it was awful inflamed. “Quit itching on her, and she’ll be gone day after tomorrow.”

“They can’t quite control what I’m up to,” he continued, ignoring me. “But they get to feel it, see? It’s like I’m locked into them, and they’re locked into me. Kinda like, half virtual reality, half like those dang video games, see?”

I didn’t have a clue as to what either of those things was, not outside of the movies, anyhow. I’m an old man, and my boys never got into such things, thank goodness. I just nodded, let him go on with his tale, though I couldn’t help but ask a couple questions now and then. 

“Why here? Why Manawaka?” I asked. “Why not Augusta, or the old Links at St. Andrews? Why not Pebble goldang Beach, Jake?”

“Can’t just abandon their post, can they Roy?” Jake said without missing a beat. “They got orders from the home planet not to leave the zone until the mission’s accomplished.”

“What’s the mission?” 

“Never did tell me that,” Jake said with a shrug. “Must be classified.”

“What about Falcon Lake?” I wondered. “Ain’t that in their ‘zone’?”

“Dangit, Roy, Manawaka’s a fine course,” Jake bristled, familial pride firing him up enough to nearly flub his putt. “Dang fine. Besides, they tried Falcon Lake once. Didn’t work out for ‘em.” 

We dropped it, and then finished up the eighteenth hole. When we arrived back at the clubhouse, Jake headed for the pro-shop while I sidled over to where my old Lincoln was parked.

“Hey Roy,” Jake called out as I dumped my clubs in the trunk. “See you tomorrow?”

“You bet,” I nodded. “I’ll be here.”

“Right on,” Jake said with a grin. “We’re gonna give these spacemen a ride they won’t soon forget.”

###

Me, I haven’t put my name into the Manawaka Golf Tournament for years now. I was only ever a weekend duffer until I retired. The couple times I did enter, in a fugue state of vanity I’ll admit, I never made it past the first round, but I do enjoy the hustle and bustle of the course when competition’s in full swing. The past couple years I’ve caddied for Jake. It gets me right in on the action. Even though I ain’t been with him when he’s won one, it’s a treat to watch a pro like Jake on top of his game. I guess, in that way, I ain’t much different than Jake’s little green buddies, hitching along for the ride.

The first nine holes here in Manawaka were built back in the Depression by guys who were on government relief. A make work project, but she was designed by the famous Stanley Thompson and she’s about the best between the Rockies and southern Ontario, though the courses at Falcon and Clear Lake might give her a decent run for her money. 

The Shipleys, they’ve owned the course since Frankie Carlson, the fellow who commissioned Thompson to design the course and rooked the government into paying for her, up and died rather suddenly before the back-nine were much more than cleared. Heart problems, some say. Others add that the boozing and the whoring on top ofa bad heart might have had more to do with it. Anyhow, the Shipleys scooped it up at a bargain before Carlson was even cold in the ground. In time, they finished up the back-nine to be near as nice as the front. They’ve been at the helm ever since. 

It was Jake’s granddad that done that deal, John Shipley Sr. He had himself two sons and a daughter, all of whom were quickly roped into various aspects of course and club upkeep and management. John Jr., the eldest, he eventually took over managing the books, while Jake’s father, Al, got the run of the grounds. The daughter, Sarah, she kind of got squeezed out of the deal, moved out West years back, though I hear she still owns a third of the place, which must put some walking around money in her purse every year, no doubt. 

John Jr. still runs the place. Jake’s father died more than a few years back. John Jr didn’t have him any sons, but his middle daughter, Jane, she runs the grounds crew now if you can believe that. An only child, Jake seems happy enough running the pro shop and beating the pants off just about all who come to any of the corporate and charity tournaments the club hosts each year. But it’s when the annual Manawaka Golf Tournament rolls around that Jake really shines. 

If there really are spacemen stationed above these empty prairies with a hankering to hit the links, I guess they done their homework when they honed in on the Manawaka Golf & Country Club and beamed up Jake Shipley. I’ll give ‘em that much.

###

The first day of the Manawaka Golf Tournament was crisp and clear, not even a touch of wind. You could taste autumn in the air. Jake was golfing in the opening flight, a 6:45 a.m. tee time. I arrived at the course at quarter after six, but Jake was already there itching to get at it. 

“Great day for some golf, Roy,” he said.

“Sure is, Jake,” I told him true. 

I was relieved that Jake never said nothing about the aliens, but of course, that didn’t last long.

We set off in due course, paired with some blowhard from Melita by the name of Johnson. This fellow Johnson wasn’t a half bad golfer, but he wasn’t no Jake Shipley. Still, Jake fell a couple strokes behind, and didn’t look near as in control as he usually did, flubbing a couple putts he’d put down a thousand times with no trouble at all and duffing a couple into the rough. After the sixth hole I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What’s up, Jake?” I asked him. 

“Nothing to worry about,” Jake said, eyeing up his next shot and giving his five-iron a practice swing. “Guess I’m getting used to these green guys being so up in my business.”

“Dang it, I’m serious,” I said, nearly losing my temper. 

“So am I, Roy,” Jake said. “So am I.”

Sure enough, as we wrapped up the front nine, Jake’s game started to come together. He missed another long putt he would have normally sunk, and his drives weren’t quite as on the money as they ought to have been, but by the time Jake and Johnson teed off on the ten, they were even, but Jake just kept getting better as they worked through the back nine, finishing a modest two under while Johnson choked, ending up four over.

“Told you not to sweat it, Roy,” Jake said as we made our way to the clubhouse to grab a lemonade and see how the rest of the competition was shaking out. “Just had to get used to being synched up to the mothership, was all.”

When the field had come in early that afternoon, Jake was sitting just shy of the top five. 

“Right where we want ‘em,” he said, rubbing his brown, sun baked paws together. 

Two of the top five were local guys, decent golfers who’d had good opening rounds, but would no doubt fall off as the weekend wore on. Jake was familiar with two of the others, a fellow from Wawanesa by the name of Patches Boyd and another from Hartney way, Benny Blood. Both boys regularly finished top ten at the Manawaka each year. Neither had ever won the dang thing though, and their best years were behind them. The man currently holding the lead was unknown to us, a young man out of Regina by the name of Kyle Esterhazy.

“Could be a dark horse?” I said. 

Jake just shrugged, unworried.

###

See, Jake gave up drinking when his wife, Lois, left him. He’d been a big boozer, a real hard living, good timing man, up until the day he crashed his Pontiac Parisienne on his way home from the Manawaka Golf & Country Club. He must have driven that route drunk a hundred times or more, but this time he took the corner a quarter mile north of town just a little too fast. He hit the ditch before parking the Parisienne partway through a farmer’s fence and upside down. Nobody got hurt, but that was the last straw for Lois. Once the divorce papers were signed she left town and that was that. Last I heard she was living out in Cheyenne, Wyoming, or someplace like that. That was ten years ago, nearly to the day, actually, now that I come to think of it.

The way Jake tells it, getting sober wasn’t a way to try and win Lois back.

“I was in a dark place,” he’s said time and time again. “It was the only thing I could think of doing that would save my life. I don’t know where I’d be if I’d kept drinking. Dang sure I wouldn’t be here, living the dream, anyhow.”

In the years I’ve known him Jake’s weathered plenty of tough times without hitting the bottle. When the Little Saskatchewan flooded out his basement and he wasn’t insured for it Jake never took to drinking. When his father died of cancer and then a stroke took his mother the next year Jake dealt with his grief sober as a judge. 

That’s why I say it just don’t make no sense for a man who’s kept to the straight and narrow ten solid years to slip up over nothing. I just don’t believe it. 

###

Jake kept at it through Friday and Saturday, and by the final round on Sunday, he was sitting in second place. He was two back of Esterhazy and three ahead of our buddy from Wawanesa. He hadn’t let up on the space talk, neither. 

Sure, he was driving them balls the distance, setting his shots right where he wanted ‘em and sinking those long putts like the Jake Shipley from Manawaka we all knew, but if I whistled, or complemented a particularly sweet shot, Jake would just grin and say something like, “Who knew Martians could golf so good?”, but in between shots, or sitting at the clubhouse over afternoon Arnold Palmers, he would get reflective.

“Of course, they ain’t really Martians,” he said at one point, staring out across the fairway and up at the blue sky above. “We’d call ‘em Glieseans, after the star their home planet spins around, which is Gliese 832, see. Course, they got their own name for it. Couldn’t pronounce it if I tried, though.”

“Is that so?” I said, watching the leaves on the aspen trees that lined the eighteenth hole dance in the breeze, gauging what speed the air was moving at. “You don’t say.”

###

Of course I knew Jake Shipley by reputation before I ever got to really know him personally. That’s just the way it goes in a small town like Manawaka. 

I’ve been here most of my life with the exception of a couple years over in Yorkton and down Medicine Hat way. Me and the wife, Shirley, we never really took to any of those places so we moved back home just before our first-born, James, came around. It’s a good place to raise a family, Manawaka. A decent one, at least, and decent’s always been good enough for me.

James grew up, and so did Frank, our second, and they went onto university down in Winnipeg. James is still there. Frank’s out in Calgary. Shirley, well, she passed away too soon. Cancer, a dozen years back now. Since then, I’ve just kept going, I suppose. A few years ago I retired and I’ve been spending my summers on the golf course ever since. 

I never did squirrel enough away to head south come winter, else I’d be a snowbird, golfing twelve months of the year. Those dark winter hours can get lonesome, sure, but I tinker away in my basement workshop, keep up with the curling on the TV and down at the club most Friday nights. Time, she passes quickly nowadays anyways, and before I know it the crocuses are out and the course is open again. 

I never was much of a drinker and I guess that’s how I got to know Jake. Not drinking in a town full of lushes, that is. I’ve got nearly twenty years on him, but we get along well enough. Better than most, truth be told. Jake, he’s never been one to string me along before. Even though I can’t wrap my head around the idea aliens from across the galaxy wanting to play a round or two at the Manawaka Golf & Country Club, I figure there must be something to Jake’s story about the Glieseans. Why would he tell it to me if there wasn’t? For a laugh? No, sir. Not Jake Shipley.

###

Sunday morning dawned gray and cold. There would be no short pants or sleeves out on the course for the final round. Rain was on the way. 

Jake didn’t seem to mind a bit, though. He was just a grinning, raring to make his run for the cup. He still had to overtake Esterhazy, but Jake didn’t seem bothered by that, neither.

“Any day she’s not snowing is a decent day for golf,” he said, well-worn Manawaka Golf & Country Club windbreaker zipped right up beneath his chin. “Besides, them Glieseans are hot to trot. They can feel the win, Roy. Can you?”

“Sure,” I said, and I did. That’s a fact. 

Jake’s game had only been improving since his little disappearing act, and I didn’t see no reason why he couldn’t catch this Esterhazy. Unless he choked, or the transmitter stuck in Jake’s neck went haywire on him. “You got this.”

“No,” Jake said with a tip of his Manawaka Mohawks ball cap. “We got this, Roy.”

The two of us lit out for the first tee when the rain started coming down. Not hard, just enough to get the grounds nice and wet. Esterhazy, dressed in a brand new Titleist rain slicker, joined us. He was accompanied by an older caddy, a surly looking guy about my age hauling a set of golf clubs that liked to have cost more than my car did off the lot.

“Howdy, boys,” Esterhazy said, with a curt nod as we approached the tee, waiting for the round to begin. 

“Beauty of a morning for a round eh?” Jake joked. 

“Goddamn delightful,” Esterhazy’s caddy grunted, and then spat on the wet ground.

“Good luck to ya,” Esterhazy said, ignoring both the caddy and Jake’s jape. “You’ll need it.”

“Mighty sportsmanlike,” I coughed.  

“Got a good feeling about this, Roy,” Jake muttered as I handed him his driver, just loud enough so I could hear. “We’re gonna show these Queen City sons of bitches just what we’re made of here in Manawaka, Manitoba.”

True to his word, Jake Shipley done just that. He drove with power and accuracy, while Esterhazy seemed to lean heavy on the power, but his balls never seemed to drop where he wanted them to. By the time we’d finished the front nine Jake was two up on Esterhazy. The Queen City Kid was starting to lose his temper, but Jake, he just kept on grinning. He hit par on the tenth and eleventh, and birdied twelve while Esterhazy played a dang fine birdie on ten, but bogied eleven and only made par with a heck of a putt on the twelfth; cussing a blue streak under his breath the whole way.

“Dang, Jake, you’re on fire,” I told him, grinning myself after he chipped in and sank her off the pin on the thirteenth green. 

“Don’t it feel good?” Jake said, pointing his putter up to the sky. “The spacemen are eating it up!”

Jake had a little trouble on the fourteenth hole; a long narrow fairway that takes a hard dogleg to the left after 200 yards. He knocked the ball about 150 yards down, but sliced it off to into the rough. It was the first time he really slipped up all round. 

“Feels like we might get a bit of an electrical show here later,” Jake said, looking up at the dark clouds and rubbing the red mark on the back of his neck. “Signal’s getting some interference or something.”

With a powerful stroke out of the long grass Jake finished the hole one over par. For a change, Esterhazy was on his game, smacking his shot straight and true for nearly 200 yards before she started peeling off to the left; setting himself up for a straight shot at the green. The Saskatchewanian nailed that one, too, sinking a long putt to birdie. On the fifteen Jake shot fine, earning the par three, but Esterhazy pulled out some of the fine work that must have got him to the final in the first place. He got to the bottom of the hole in three swings himself with an amazing chip in from twenty yards out.

“Mighty fine shooting,” Jake told him. 

Esterhazy just grunted, shoving his nine-iron at his caddy and huffing off to the next tee. 

By then the sky was dark, clouds that had been grey had acquired a nasty, blackish hue. Far off, you could hear what could only be thunder. The rain had died down, though, while the wind whipped at the flag 180 yards away. 

“Storm’s coming,” Jake said, rubbing at the red mark on his neck. 

Meanwhile, the course marshals were on their radios checking with the clubhouse and Environment Canada on just what the heck they should do.

“Think they’ll pull us off the course?” I wondered aloud, figuring it wasn’t looking good.

“Nah,” Jake shrugged. “She’ll keep away. Long enough to wrap this puppy up, anyways.”

Sure enough, the marshals said just about the same thing, waving Jake and Esterhazy up to the sixteenth tee. Using a five-iron, Esterhazy smacked his ball up and over the little creek that cut across the middle of the fairway, settling just on the edge of the rough with a clean shot at the pin. Jake wasn’t so lucky, depositing his ball straight into the drink. 

“Dang interference,” he cursed. “Keep losing the signal.”

Down a stroke and on the wrong side of the creek to boot, Jake lined up a decent shot just shy of the green, while Esterhazy plunked his ball a gimme from the hole. Jake chipped in beautifully, coming within a hair of sinking it himself, having to settle two over for the first time all round. Still, Jake held onto the lead with only two holes to go. 

Thunder rolled over the prairie as Jake and Esterhazy teed up on number seventeen, a 420 yard, liver shaped monster, and the flag just visible behind a copse of aspen off to the right. Jake took a couple practice swings, stepped back and rubbed his neck again, all the while staring up at the sky. He took a couple more swings, gazed out across the fairway, then stepped up to the tee and whacked that ball like a son of a gun. She sailed through the air, whizzing like a spaceship herself, curving with the course. She come to rest not far from the green; an easy chip on for a straightforward putt and the birdie.

“Dang, Jake,” I said. “We got this.”

“You said it, Roy,” Jake said, looking up again at the clouds and whatever was hovering up beyond them. “Heck, yes, we do.”

To give him credit, Esterhazy also blasted a mean drive off the tee, but she did not hold as true nor fly as far as Jake’s. He got on in three, and sunk a long putt for par. Jake, as predicted, sunk his putt on the third shot. He walked into the final hole up four with a smile on his face and never looked back.

###

Not five minutes after Jake drained his final putt to win his fifth Manawaka Golf Tournament, the skies all around Manawaka lit up with a late summer lightning display that nobody who seen it will soon forget. Once the electric show had passed through, the clouds dumped rain for days. It was something, alright. 

When all of the hullabaloo around the presentation of the trophy, cash prizes and the like was all done and dealt with everyone retreated to the club lounge. I stood there in the lobby waiting in vain for a break in the rain to make a dash to my car. Jake was standing with me staring out at the sheets of water that were just pouring from the clouds. We hadn’t talked much since Jake was hustled off the course and into the winner’s circle; me at his heels carrying his clubs. 

“We did it, Roy,” he said finally, so quietly I could barely hear him over the roar of the rain splashing down in the gravel parking lot. “We showed ‘em, just like we said we would. Showed ‘em good.”

“Sure, Jake,” I said, smiling. 

Down the hall behind us the roar of golfers getting drunk issued from the lounge. Grown men yelled lies at each other about how well they’d played over the past four days, but here I was, standing quietly in the hallway with the winner, the man who’d just won the whole dang thing. He’d just said we’d done it together as though I had anything to do with the magic out there on the course. As though my hauling his clubs around and nodding my head when he worked out a shot had contributed to Jake’s mastery of the links in some mysterious way; if I were anything more than a hanger-on, there for the ride, only to get a taste of the thrill of it all. 

“Sure we did,” I said.

We stood there, Jake and me, silent for a moment, the lightning still flashing up in the black sky to the east. Jake grinned, and gave me a quick pat on the shoulder.

“Wait till they hear about this back on Gliese,” he said, as the thunder rumbled in over the empty prairie. “That’ll give them spacemen something to talk about eh?”

“One for the books, Jake, One for the books.”