The three of us were riding along in Greg's new Saturn SL2, its trunk and back seat filled with our clubs. "If you quit your job, Carl, you'll be able to join us like this all the time," said Quinn from the passenger seat.

"I'm not ready to stop sucking the corporate tit just yet, maybe when I get my swimming pool paid off I'll let you talk me into consulting."

"It's not as risky as you might think. I have at least three customers that I could send you to this very afternoon. Here." He held up his cellular phone. "Call Stanley and tell him you're not coming back."

"I thought you'd at least let me get on the first tee before turning the screws."

"I can have an office for you Carl. I'll even hire you a secretary. Brunette. Petite."

"I just can't now."

"You know, it's getting hard to always be polite and not ask, so I'll ask. Why? Why can't you?"

"I don't know if I should get into it now. We're almost to Arnold's house?"

"What does he have to do with it?"

"It's just not a good time. Don't say anything to him, but I've kind of been covering for him at work. Something's wrong and he won't talk about it. I'm afraid that if I bail, he won't be able to catch up in time. Maybe you should take us both."

Quinn was silent for a moment. I knew what he was thinking. Arnold just didn't seem to be altogether some times. He could be unsteady and unreliable. I could never tell if he was lazy, or just not smart enough. It had been getting worse, and this year, especially, was tough. Even his golf game went to hell. Quinn finally answered, "Maybe, but he just doesn't have your coverage of experience."

"Well, then there it is, I guess."

We pulled into his driveway and I ran up to ring the bell. I had expected him to be waiting on the porch like he always did on our league night, but this time not only was he not here, he didn't even answer the door.

"Is he home?" Quinn called out from the car.

I shrugged and turned and rang the bell again. A flash of yellow caught my eye. Taped to the door was a note, written on yellow legal pad paper. I opened the screen door and pulled gently on the tape. I unfolded it and read:

Carl, I'm sorry. You have been so good to me, but I can't live this lie anymore. It's all over. Good-bye. I know this makes me a weak bastard, but I just don't care anymore. Tell Quinn he can have my Big Bertha driver if he still wants it.

My hand began to shake and I felt cold and numb. Somewhere through the fog that veiled this reality from the one just seconds before I heard the car door open. I handed the paper to Quinn and ran around to the back of the house.

"Arnold!" I called.

He wasn't in the back. I didn't see any signs of anything drastic. I ran on around the other side and saw Greg and Quinn looking in the windows. I dropped to the ground and started looking into the basement window. He was sitting at the old worn recliner in the corner of his workshop, a half bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his putter in the other.

I ran around to the front door and tried it. It was locked.

"He's in the basement. He's still here."

I kicked at the door but it held fast. I kept at it, watching it rebound as hard as I pushed. We needed to get in and I knew that I had to wear down that damn dead bolt before it wore me down. The tinkle of broken glass disrupted my hysterical frenzy and I ran over to the others. Greg gouged his car key into the screen and managed to rip enough of a hole that he could pull the screen out of its track. He reached around and slid the window open and climbed carefully up onto the counter and over the sink. He brushed the bigger pieces of glass away with a towel and quickly helped the two of us in.

I sprinted to the basement door and thundered down the stairs. I stopped when he looked up to me, a broken man, exhausted, desperate. The others stood behind me. We were frozen by this. How could he consider something as awful and wrong as this.

He raised up his pitiful, heavy head, and as if begging with his last thread of forced dignity, he said, "I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"Don't make me?" he pleaded. "I can't. Not anymore. Get a sub."

"There is no sub, you drunken idiot. This isn't league night. We've got a ten thirty tee time and we either show up as a foursome, or we don't show up."

"Then don't show up."

"You selfish baby! You're going to just check out and leave me with the rest of the season playing with strangers and ..."

"Carl, take it easy," Greg said as he pushed me gently aside and stepped around in front of me.

"Look, my friend. It can't be that bad. Whatever is bothering you, pressing you down, it can't be worse than just being on the course. Do you want to just caddie? We'll talk about it while we play."

Quinn stepped up and said, "Hey, buddy. We've all been there. We've had the hard times. You get through them."

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "No. No. I've tried so hard. It won't go away. I can't. I just can't. Leave me alone." He took another drink.

Upstairs, I heard his wife come in, gasp as she saw the window, and then scream as she read the note.

She came running down the stairs still carrying her keys and a plastic grocery bag.

She looked around the room at us with a fierce, rabid gaze. "What did you do to him?"

"Us?" I asked perplexed.

She held up the paper, crumpled it and threw it at me. She ran over to him, took the whisky away from him and then yanked the putter from him and threw it violently against the wall. She hopped onto his lap and pulled him to her.

"Don't, honey. Oh God! Don't even think of that."

"Get away from me," he begged with a weak, shaky voice.

She turned around suddenly and screamed to all of us. "Look what you've done to him. Get out. Just get out." She turned back around and cried into his shoulder, "No. No! I won't let you die. I won't let you."

"Die?" I said confused.

"Die?" echoed Greg and Quinn behind me.

"Angie, he's not going to die, for crying out loud."

Quinn bowed his head and said, just above a whisper, "It's worse than that." He turned to Greg who put a hand on his shoulder, giving him a little bit of his own weary strength.

Arnold's voice was low and scraped against the horrible scene, as if from the mouth of the devil himself. "I'm giving up golf."

I leapt forward and yelled, "Don't say that! Take it back, damn it."

Angie turned her tear streaked face to me, and then back to her husband. "What?"

"Don't say it," I warned him. Angie turned and shot me with one of those look of such deadly force that only an angry woman can summon. I backed up a bit under its serious, unspoken intent. Then she turned that look, that awful, powerful look at her husband. He cast his eyes down and pouted while she said again, "What was that?"

"I'm not going to play golf anymore."

His words struck me like a cold ice pick in my stomach.

"That's all?"

The torture in his voice ripped into the three of us. We felt his agony, not the least of which was the pain that comes from even considering such an empty, useless life. "Isn't that enough," he cried out, on the verge of tears.

Angie climbed down off of her husband's lap, looked at all of us and said, "Oh, for God's sake!" She slapped him on the arm and said, "You really scared me."

"You don't understand," he pleaded. "I just can't face another penalty stroke on seven. Those damned cat tails. I can't."

"Oh, for God's sake," she repeated. Then she said, "Somebody's paying for that window."

"I'll take care of the window," I said quietly.

"You sure as Hell will. Look what you've done to him, all of you. You and that damned game. I'm glad he's quitting. It's for the better, I think."

"He's not quitting, "I said.

She gave me that look again. Then she reached her hand down to her husband, pulled him up from the chair, and said, "I think you should all leave now."

They were walking past us. It was all happening too fast. Luckily one of us was able to pull something through the sickness that had flooded into the basement. Greg said, "Why don't we all just go out to lunch. We don't have to play. It really is a nice day."

They stopped. My heart began pounding. Why couldn't I find any words. Angie looked around to each of us, testing us with her measuring eye.

"Where?" she asked as her eye stopped in my direction.

"Burger King."

She held us at bay for a moment with her piercing eyes, then turned to her husband and said, "Do you want to have lunch, or should I make them go away?"

He looked at the floor, shuffled his feet, and said, "Lunch, I s'pose"

"I'll make us some sandwiches," Angie said.

"NO!" came the three way echo.

"Burger King," I said again.

"Yeah, that's all."

"Right."

"Whatever," she said. She picked up her groceries and went up the stairs. Half way up the stairs, she turned to her Arnold and said, "Tonight, we need to have a talk about golf."

We waited for her to clear the top of the stairs and then we circled around Arnold.

"Get him out to the car, quick."

As they rushed him up the stairs, I ran over and picked up his putter, then grabbed his bag and followed them out. They practically carried him out the front door and across the front lawn as they ran toward the car. I started to follow them but Angie saw me with his clubs. I faked left, ran right and almost knocked her down. She chased me out to the car saying over and over, "Oh no you don't! Oh no you don't.!"

Greg pulled away and I ran along side him until Quinn reached back and pushed open the door so I could jump in. I looked back and saw Angela in the middle of the street and I heard her cry with exaggerated exasperation, "Oh, for God's sake."

* * *

I sat with Arnold's and my clubs between my legs while he sat trying not to go into a fit of hysterics. "I'm not playing," he insisted.

"Oh, shut up," I told him. "You're playing."

"I wanna go to Burger King." He cried.

Greg turned around and asked him, "Good God, man. Why didn't you say something? We could have taken you to the range, given you some pointers."

"I've been to the range."

"Did you try changing your grip like I showed you?" asked Quinn.

"Forget all that," I told them. "This is beyond the grip. He's lost the soul of the game." I looked down and saw the calluses and blisters on his hands, the extra dirt and grass stains on his clubs, the dozens of old score cards and short pencils in his open pouch.

"That's where you've been these past month's, dodging work, hitting the courses and the range?"

He nodded slowly.

"And all this time, you've been getting worse and worse, instead of better?"

He closed his eyes, turned his head away, and nodded again.

"Arnold," I said gently, "You can't get better by doing all the wrong things harder, not while you're running away, slave to the shaft. You don't play golf with your hands, you play it with your head, with your soul, and Arnold, you've been playing soulless golf, and it's been Hell. You don't even like to play, do you?"

He turned his head back to me and breathed a sigh that lifted years of bottled up fear and deception from his shoulders. "Oh God, I hate it. I've always hated it, but I can't let you down. You love it so much. If I try harder, maybe I'll see what you see."

I reached out my hand and placed it on his shoulder. "Arnold, you have sinned. You have played dishonestly, and for that you have paid your penance. If you can not or will not be her master, Golf will make of you her slave, teasing you, taunting and haunting your days and your nights, mocking your pitiful trials."

"Stop. Please."

"It's not too late."

* * *

Arnold stood in front of the Pro Shop cash register, holding the new $150 bag and his Visa card. He was beginning to sober up so I knew I had to keep him from changing his mind.

"Why do I have to do this? Angie will kill me."

"You have to make a sacrifice to Almighty Golf, to let her know that your heart is pure and your intentions are genuine. But you can't buy yourself a good game. She'll see right through that."

Then we took him out to the 9th hole water hazard and had him wash off all his clubs with the pond water.

"You see, your clubs are filled with negative energy. When you hit the ball, it picks that energy off of our club and is drawn to the water as the course tries to dispel the evil. When your clubs are cleansed in the Holy Hazard, your drives will fly right over it."

"Now you're just being silly."

"Perhaps, but perhaps not."

We cleaned up his clubs, put them in his new bag, and left his old bag outside the pro shop.

"Aren't we going to get a cart?" He asked.

"Oh no!" Quinn said, "Have you been using a cart all this time?"

"Yeah, why?"

He bowed his head and walked away.

"What?"

"A cart is okay once in a while," I explained. "But it separates you from the course. It lets you bring in all the noise of the world, and that disturbs the Gods of Golf."

"Oh. I didn't know that."

"We'll be on the first tee. If you want to understand the joy of golf, you can join us there."

We waited for a while. There was another foursome waiting for us to tee off, so we swapped with them and waited for Arnold to join us. He sat on a bench by the putting green for a while, looking at his new bag, looking down at his hands. Finally he stood, adjusted his hat, spit on the grass, and picked up his new bag and his clean clubs and approached us with the look of a man approaching the gallows.

"I'm ready," he said.

"Ready for what?" I asked.

"I'm gonna try hard. I'm gonna do really good."

I shook my head, smiled and told him, "No you're not. You're probably going to play really shitty. Between the three of us, we've got a total of twenty two balls, and you're welcome to loose every one of those. Here's what you're gonna do. Hit the ball. Then, if you don't like where it landed, pick it up and drop it anywhere you like, or just hit another one. No score, no rules, just you, your clubs, the ball, and the grass."

"And us," Greg reminded me.

He wanted to tee off first. He duffed it way off to the right. It sizzled the grass and stopped about thirty feet away.

"Boy, that really sucked," I told him. "Greg, go out a ways. Try your four iron. Now, just use a little bit of wrist and try to pop it out for Greg to catch. Not a full swing, just a little pop."

He took the club head back about fifteen inches and popped the ball straight and high right over Greg's head. He looked at me, laughed, then looked down at his four iron and laughed even harder.

"What?" I asked him as we all became infected by his silly, giggling laughs.

"I forgot to put the damn holy water on my driver."

After we teed off, he picked up his two balls and dropped one of them next to mine. His second shot was not too bad and after a third, he was within chipping range. His chip was clean and straight, but went clear over the green by quite a piece. He took out another ball and threw it underhand onto the green, and almost put it in the cup. By the fourth hole, the short par three, we were all engaged in such antics as taking full swings with putters from the fairway, putting left handed, taking two or three attempts for our putts, and sometimes skipping the tee shot altogether only to drop onto the perfect fairway lie. On the back nine, we settled down a bit. Arnold started hitting more of his own shots instead of moving them, and his shots were getting better. Quinn even began soliciting us again to quit our jobs and come work for him.

It was remarkable to see the difference in Arnold. Every Wednesday evening for the whole Summer, he would fume and curse under his breath, hacking his way from a nineteen handicap up to the high twenties. That afternoon he played his first real game of golf all summer.

When we walked into the club house, giddy from the silliness and the beautiful day, we saw Angie sitting at one of the snack bar tables. Arnold walked over to her, ignoring the stern firm features of her frozen face and kissed her like a frustrated prom stud.

"Oh, Arnold," she whispered out heavily. "Are you actually smiling? After golf?"

He took her hands, pulled her up and hugged her close. After another long, soft kiss, he looked into her eyes and said, "I quit my job. So did Carl. Isn't that great? We called Stanley on the fourteenth green."

"You what?! Oh, for God's sake."

"No, Angie. For my sake. I did it for me. From now on, I'm going to drop the ball where I want it."

He picked up his bag, took his confused wife by the hand, and led her back to her car.

"Well that was close," said Quinn, "Do you want to play another round and let me tell you about your new job."

"Tell you what. Let's go choke down some double Whoppers and then go play that new course on the North side."

"You know that one costs eighty five dollars a round, don't you?"

"What's your point?"

:^D