Two men walked by them on the cart path, sipping coconuts and reading their Cocoa Beach travel guide. They strolled past the waterfall, the pink elephant and the airplane crashed into the side of a plastic mountain on the thirteenth hole. They crossed the Japanese footbridge over the lagoon that separated “Goony Golf” from the driving range. The lagoon was actually a retention pond, and the pair looked over the bridge’s railing at the bubbles in the water and the submerged scuba diver with a sack of golf balls.
Sleigh bells jingled as Paul and Jethro opened the door to the driving range office. The man behind the counter scooped balls into wire baskets and plopped them on the counter.
Paul pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket.
“We don’t take hundreds.”
“I’m sorry,” said Paul. “What if I let you keep the change?”
“Then we have a new policy.” The man plucked the bill from Paul’s hand, stuck it in his back pocket and pushed two baskets of balls across the counter. Paul and Jethro went to select clubs from a large oak barrel of bent irons and woods.
“We close in a half hour,” said the man. “You can still play, but you’ll be in the dark.”
“Ah, such is the challenge of life itself,” said Jethro.
“No problem,” added Paul. “Anything you say.”
“And replace your divots,” said the man. “This ain’t a sod farm.”
Actually, it was a sod farm, at least on documents at the zoning office. The state was under drought restrictions, which meant only sod farms could water, and the driving range wanted to keep its sprinklers going.
“Right. Replace divots,” said Paul. “Sure thing.”
“I remember it well,” said Jethro. “Grand traditions of Scotland, the noble but curious land of plaid…”
“And stop talking like that. Both of you. It’s getting on my nerves.”
“You got it,” said Paul. “No problem-o.”
The pair left the office and headed to the last tee, number twenty-two.
Jethro spilled his bucket on the ground and used the head of a four iron to rake a few red-banded balls over to his feet. “DiMaggio would have been a formidable golfer. You could see it in his dark Italian eyes, etched with the scars of life.” Jethro swung hard and hit the ball with the toe of his club, slicing right, scampering through traffic on A1A and ricocheting off the manager’s door at the Orbit Motel. An old Honduran opened the door, looked around, closed it.
Paul lined up his own shot. He looked out at the range signs, marking distance in fifty-yard increments. In between were small greens with flagsticks.
“What’s the objective here?” asked Paul. “Hit it as far as you can or get it close to the flags?”
“Neither, my worthy companion. It is but to hit the range cart.”
“The what?”
“You do not understand now, but you will in time.”
Paul and Jethro swung through their ration of balls, which took off at random adventures in geometry. They were accompanied by a score of other golfers whose graceful swings resembled the chopping of firewood, and a spray of balls curved, sliced, bounced and whizzed across the range, some hooking high over the safety netting and into the retention pond, where a scuba diver trespassed with a mesh gunnysack full of balls in one hand and a twelve-gauge bang-stick for alligators in the other.
One of the golfers noticed something. Out near the left hundred-yard marker, a small tractor started moving across the range. The driver’s seat was enclosed in a protective wire cage, the tractor pulling a wide scooping device that sucked up balls and squirted them into the collection bin.
The golfer on tee number three sounded the alarm.
The customers began hitting balls as fast as they could, a rapid series of twenty-one-gun salutes. Most were wildly off target, but through sheer volume the range cart began taking heavy fire. The driver was used to it by now, a community college student reading
Paul topped another drive fifty yards. “How does anybody play this game?”
Jethro addressed his ball with a three wood. “Think of it as bullfighting and you will see the truth in it.” He knocked a TopFlite into the Checkers drive-through.
Johnny choked on some saliva and grabbed the railing for balance.
“You all right?”
He nodded. They continued walking, coming to a fence and meeting a third party in the dark. Johnny paid the man in twenties. The couple began wiggling into position behind a control panel.
