Reston's Rat

The sun was a smudge in the fog. The clubhouse was fogged in. Crows pecked grass seed off the practice green. I watched a crow tug a worm until the worm, a gray wire, snapped.

Reston, waiting at the first tee, grunted when he saw me. "Welcome, snot," he said. "Tell me. How long can you swim?"

"Good morning," I said.

Reston lit a smoke. "If your life depended, I mean," he growled. Reston smoked unfiltered cigarettes; over the years they had tarred his voice. "On the one hand, life. On the other, the deep," he said, aiming his cigarette at the bay.

"Is this one of your quizzes, Jack?"

"It's a simple question. How long can you swim?"

"Do I still get to play if I answer wrong?"

"No." He yanked the one-iron from his golf bag and took a practice swing. Reston swings hard, even on practice swings, ruddy hands snapping past his shoulder to the back of his neck. He wore red cleats, black pants and a black sweater with a golden bear over his heart. "Swim or sink. Sink and croak," he said. "Drowning is a slow death, snot. The brain dies last, you know. What thoughts a drowning man may have I do not know, but I bet they ain't ... fun. Sink and you slip to the mud, snot. You're food for fish and sea lice."

"A mile," I said.

"What? What?"

"I think I could swim a mile."

Reston shook his head like I was hopeless. "Duration. Duration, not distance," he said. "If I wanted distance, snot, I'd ask Diana Nyad. How long can you swim?" He italicized with a clenched fist.

"An hour, then. I can swim an hour."

"You go under. You suck salt and it scares you. Crap leaks out of your butt, that's how bad it scares you. Up you come and you're slapping that surf now."

"Nothing leaks out of my butt," I said. "I never eat before I swim."

"Slapping that surf. But for how long?"

"I really don't know, Jack. Suppose you tell me the answer and we play golf."

He planted a ball and hit a long, low one-iron at the first fairway. I whistled. I said it wasn't bad for an old man. Reston said my head was like a Top-Flite: dimpled on the outside, hard and featureless inside. "A rat can swim for seven days," he said.

"A rat."

"Damn right a rat."

I hit my Top-Flite past his ball. "You're senile," I said, but Reston wasn't finished. He wanted more than an insult, he wanted shock. Half the things he says—learn this in a hurry if you want to play golf with him—prove something. Every nugget will change your life if you grok its importance. One morning Reston told me that women who live together synchronize their menstrual cycles; when I failed to fall over in awe, he shook his head and said, as slowly as a dog trainer, that it proved they're in league against us.

"A rat in a trap will eat his own legs off," Reston said. "He'll chew a hole in a hog's gut and get his dinner that way if that's what it takes. To win. A rat is smart. Stick him in the middle of the ocean, where he knows he can't possibly win, and he drowns in an hour. Give him a chance, though—in a flooded culvert with the water level sinking a little every hour—and he swims for seven days."

"I hope he doesn't eat his legs before he swims. He'll get a cramp," I said.

Reston shouldered his golf bag and started for the green. "Why do I play with you?"

"Jack?"

"Yes, snot?"

"Shouldn't we wait for Lotte?"

"What time is it?"

"I don't know. Five after?"

"Fuck her. She's late."

We played Tuesdays and Thursdays at dawn at Monarch Bay; Reston, Lotte and me. We never phoned one another to confirm our tee time. It was understood, be there or be excommunicated. Reston was always early. I was usually on time. Lotte was usually late.

I often tried to talk Reston into waiting for her, but Reston did not wait. If you were late, you could catch up to him on the second hole, but don't expect credit for your putt on the first. Reston would not accept your score unless he witnessed every shot, and if you were putting for par on the first green, he would shut his eyes. You got an X on the first hole and started the day five dollars down.

He and I matched fives on the first hole that day. Lotte came clattering to the second tee, dragging her pull cart.

Reston waved a scorecard. "What on the first hole, Lotto?"

"Three," Lotte lied.

Reston marked the card. "Looks like an X here, darlin'."

"Fuck you so much," Lotte said. She was small, maybe five foot two, with wide hips she balanced on piano legs. Lotte wore white cleats, a red skirt and a white sweater, her golf uniform. She wore a visor with a doughnut on the bill. Her red hair was going gray. Her skin was browned by too much sun and, like me, she smelled faintly of powdered sugar. Reston pointed at her cart. "Training wheels again," he said.

"You know that I have a bad back," she said.

"I ignore mine," Reston said. Hitting his second drive of the day at a fairway trap, he said, "Do you know what makes my back worse, Lotto? Looking at you and that cart. If you can't lug your sticks like a man, don't play."

"Are there men in this group?" she asked.

Reston, shaking his head at his tee shot, said, "Not so's you'd notice."

"So there." Lotte teed a ball. She took two smooth practice swings that bore no resemblance to her true swing. She wrapped her driver around her neck, aimed her chin at the sky and jabbed the ball out of bounds. "Quiet. Say nothing," she said.

"The shot," Reston said, "she speaks for herself."

" 'Fuck you' is what she says." Lotte bounced a penalty ball off the ladies' tee. She and Reston had forgotten me. I hit my ball, grabbed my bag and left them squabbling at the tee. I heard Lotte say Reston had no idea of golf etiquette.

"Etiquette," he said. "That's a French word, I think. The language of losers. The lingua franca of pussies."

"Fuck toi," she said.

We crisscrossed the links at Monarch Bay as the sun turned white; the butcher, the baker and the snot. I was the snot because I was less than half their ages.

Lotte, the baker, was Reston's ex-wife. He called her Lotto because, as he put it, "I bet on her in the lottery of life and I lost. Ten years I lost. Ten years of marriage. We'll say, liberally, ten good nights in her bed. No tots, though, no heir for old Jack. No, she was as barren as the rocks by the ninth green. Ten years and a life of court-ordered checks, my ransom." Sometimes, in keeping with his lottery theme, fingering a scar on his cheek, he called her the Scratcher.

Reston and Lotte's divorce settlement had financed her business, which is where I came in.

She owned a 20-store chain of doughnut shops, Dippity Donuts, with outlets in Irvine, Huntington Beach, Seal Beach and Long Beach. Lotte was locally famous for her late-night TV ads in which she and a dozen cowboys did the Texas two-step on a map of California. They sang "Dippity Donuts, Dippity yay, my, oh my, what a wonderful day." I managed one of Lotte's Irvine shops. I was a lean, starving business student at UC-Irvine night school. I wore jeans and a visor with a doughnut on the bill and had fantasies of seeing Lotte tumble off the ninth green into the bay, leaving me in charge.

Reston owned J&R Meats, a firm that supplied nearly 200 groceries, delis and carnicerías in Orange County. He was, in his words, the county's butcher di tutti butchers. According to him, he had dropped out of UCLA med school "back in the Mesozoic" on the day he realized that the meat that doctors tended was no different from the chorizos his old dad sold to the Mexes in Santa Ana. In fact, Reston said, sick people were worse than meat. They were meat with relatives. He had left the human meat to his classmates, "little bookworms with unjustified God complexes." He took over the family business in 1958, quintupled its grosses in five years and settled into a life of "business glory and wedded blitz." Still, Reston said, he never forgot the most vital lesson students learn at med school: Keep your head down and swing through the ball.

I knew why Reston played golf with Lotte. He always won. He loved taking $20 or $30 from her twice a week. He always said, "Ten thousand years of this and I'll be even."

I never decided why Lotte played with him. Maybe she enjoyed paying her golf debts with portions of her (continued on page 164)Reston's Rat(continued from page 80) monthly checks, his money. Or maybe she loved him. Old people are strange, I think. They hang on to people from their pasts, as if the past mattered.

It was fine by me that Lotte played with us. I liked her. She paid double overtime and gave her shop managers medical and dental plans because, as she never tired of telling us, it's a dog-eat-doughnut world. Lotte did good by her boys, she said, because she wanted to earn our loyalty. She wanted us to think of her when it was time to cash out—when a manager could keep a twenty for himself if he shorted the register or hid the sugar and charged up a new sack. Each of her managers was an entrepreneur, Lotte said, but she hoped we knew the difference between an entrepreneur and a cheat.

"Entrepreneur. That's French," Reston said. "Entre for poon, preneur, I think, means tang. Liquid pussy. Mix them up, snot, and you're pussy-whipped."

I told Lotte she should be proud. Her managers loved her, I said. We admired her, too. She was the boss. She was what we wanted to be, she'd made something of herself.

"Lotto never made shit out of herself," Reston said. "She makes things out of flour. This isn't Henry Ford we're talking about, snot. The woman makes crullers."

I said I didn't care what she made. She made money. She cared about her people, too. A lot of managers don't get medical and dental at Dunkin', I said.

"I think I'll call you Afro Pinocchio," Reston said. "Your nose is all brown."

"Just hit the ball, Jack."

"Let Lotto hit next. You can step and fetch it."

"I love you, too," I said.

"Snot! You're a homo? Hug me."

Reston lit his 17th Lucky of the day at the 17th tee. By then he had Lotte down $40. He and I were still even. "Crunch time," he said through blue smoke. "Double the bet?"

"I can afford it," Lotte said.

Seventeen at Monarch Bay is a par three, traps in front and water in back. Reston hit his tee shot near the flag. I matched him. Lotte hit a grounder that skipped through the green to the drink. "You're dead. Drowned," Reston said. Lotte, trudging to the drop zone behind the green, said she could still make four. Reston and I could three-putt, she could make four and tie us.

"Either the wallpaper goes or I go," he said.

"What?"

"Famous last words. Those were Oscar Wilde's. Good writer, but a homo. Interior decor, that's what he loved."

Lotte dropped a ball. "You are so morbid. How many last words do you know?"

" 'Blub, blub,' " Reston said. "Houdini."

"I can do it."

"Want to bet?"

"Double it again," Lotte said.

"Twenty a hole?"

"Too rich for you?"

"Not at all. Su entierro," Reston said.

"What?"

"As Santa Anna said to Davy Crockett. The Alamo, 1836. Su entierro—'Your funeral.' "

"You made that up."

"Yes, but it's so apropos."

Lotte made six. She kicked her cart. It tottered and fell, spilling her clubs.

"Right on, doll," Reston said. "That cart ain't hit a good shot all day."

The 18th hole is a par five that veers to the bay. You can reach the green in two shots by risking the rocks to the left, or play safe to the right. I aimed left and swung hard. Reston talked to my drive. "Hit a whale," he told it. The ball hooked as it climbed. We watched it splash.

"This is a good experience for you, snot. One day you'll thank that drive," Reston said. "One day you'll look back on your dullard youth and say, 'Goddamn, old Jack was right. It really is a brain game. You can be a long-driving snot, young and strong, and still lose every time, every significant time, to an older, sadder, but far wiser man.' " He hit a one-iron safely to the right.

I called him a girl. I called him the pussy di tutti pussies. "I don't play safe. I hit a driver. You always hit an iron, Jack. Why is that?"

"Blub, blub," Reston said.

"Meow, meow."

"This is no mere iron, snot. This is a one. This is Excalibur," he said, showing me the blade. "You know what Trevino says, don't you? 'In a thunderstorm, get out your one-iron and hold it over your head because even God can't hit a one-iron.' "

"Trevino got hit by lightning."

"Einstein died. Does that make him wrong?"

"You probably know his last words."

Reston grinned. "No. True story: Einstein croaks in Princeton, New Jersey. Twists on his deathbed, whispers his final words to his nurse, the last words of the best mind of a century, in his native tongue. Nurse doesn't know German."

"That's awful," Lotte said.

"Life sucks," Reston said. "That's why we play golf."

After three perfect practice swings, Lotte hit a hook at the bay. She pointed her driver at Reston. He blew her a kiss.

Lotte and I spent ten minutes raking pampas grass with our spikes. She was the optimist in the group, always last to give up on a bad shot and drop a new ball. "You never know. It could have hit a rock," she said. "It could have hit a rock and bounced to the green."

"That one didn't," I said.

"I happen to believe in God."

"Me, too. I don't know if He fixes hooks, though."

"She," Lotte said.

"Don't be silly. If God were a She, would She let Jack win?"

Still, I raked the grass, my nose getting browner by the minute. Finally, Lotte dropped a pink Lady Eagle. It rolled toward the bay. Grumbling that it was her last pink one, she kicked it. She bent over the ball, took a long, smooth practice swing, yanked her three-wood pinkward and missed the ball. She dropped the club. "I can't hit."

Sometimes you had to coax her to the green. After two or three or ten bent shots, Lotte began to see conspiracies at work: weather, water, terrain, bad luck and bad lies. I told her it was a hard game, a dippy, dumb game. You have to think all the time in this game, I said, but you can think too much, too. Your brain can block your swing. There comes a time to wipe the slate clean, to drop a ball, step up, hate the ball and hit it. Hurt it, then forget it.

She looked at me like I was dense. "No," she said. "That's not why I can't hit. You don't know, do you?"

I pointed at her ball. Whatever the reason, I said, it was still sitting there. "I'm in the bay, Lotte. I'm wet, you'll be lucky to make eight and Jack's out there safe. We are playing for second place. Hit the ball."

She looked for him. Reston was 100 yards away, watching us with his hands on his hips. "Jack's dead," Lotte said.

"Dead?"

"He's dead. They got him. The health people."

"What do you mean, dead?"

"Ask him. You ask him," she said. "Ask him about rats."

"Rats?"

"Rats," Lotte said, dragging her cart uphill. "He used rats in the meat. He told me. They caught him."

I crossed the fairway to watch Reston hit his second shot. The ball climbed, carried a trap and rolled to the green. "What stick?" I said. He winked, showing me his middle finger. "One-iron."

"You're lucky," I said.

"Women and snots believe in luck. I believe in Jack."

Lotte and I surrendered. After a third tall hook, I was lying five somewhere between here and Catalina. Finishing alone, Reston made his putt for an eagle. "Wallets, please," he said.

Lotte paid up. "Don't drool, dear," she said. "It makes you look even older." Reston kissed her money, then her hand. Lotte waved and said she'd see me in the morning. She was in a hurry, she said. She had a meeting with her ad agency up in Burbank. They were building big doughnuts, the biggest ever, for the cowboys to ride. "You boys have fun. Have a drink on me." Then, patting my butt, she said, "Don't listen to Jack. He'll want you to cheat on me. I told him you're too smart to." Lotte hopped into her doughnut-brown Jaguar. Shooting us the bird, she backed out of the parking lot to the Pacific Coast Highway and Jagged north.

Reston chucked his cleats and clubs into the trunk of his red Lincoln. Lacing up his wingtips, he said, "Follow me, snot. Let us celebrate my win."

The bar at Monarch Bay is a redwood hut with golf scenes on the walls. There are posters of Pebble Beach, Harbour Town, Sawgrass, Augusta and PGA West, a Neiman print—Palmer, Player, Snead, Nicklaus and Trevino caught midswing in pastel blasts—and brown photos of old men crouched over putts at Saint Andrews. Reston described his eagle on his way to the bar. He reran his "perfect three" from the first one-iron to the sound his putt made in the cup: "Plink. Plink. The best sound a man my age ever hears." Reading the bartender's nametag, calling the bartender "Miguel, my man," he said he wanted tequila with a beer chaser, plus a Coke. He said he also wanted his score laminated and hung on the wall between Saint Arnie and Saint fucking Andrews. "What do you think, snot?"

"About what?"

"What else? My genius. Tell Miguel how many threes you have seen on eighteen."

"Just the one," I said.

"I rest my genius."

He slid my Coke across a redwood table and launched a new description of his three. "I knew you'd play dumb. You always play dumb at eighteen. You always get wet. The thinking man's play is to the right."

"The pussy play," I said.

"The play. The right play. A man can make eight on the left. He can make six, five, four or, assuming genius, three on the right."

"This is boring, Jack. Tell me about rats."

He blinked. I liked that. Reston seldom showed surprise. He lit a smoke and leaned back in his chair, studying his drink. "Lotto blabbed," he said.

I lied. "She told me everything."

"Then you know." He downed his tequila, slapped the shot glass to the table. "I like you, snot," he said. "Do you know that? I like you."

"Why?"

"You're a shit. You have the entrepreneurial spirit."

"Sounds French," I said.

"Not all things French are bad. There are sex things I could mention."

"Don't. You're old. It's disgusting."

"You'll go far, snot. You don't drink. You drink Cokes. You drink Cokes because you think you've got a brain, a mental edge you don't want to lose. You'll go far."

"Right now I work in a doughnut shop."

"You're ten years old."

"Twenty-three."

"You're a snot and a shit. Snot shits go far," he said. "Ergo, you will either sell a shitload of doughnuts for the Scratcher or find something better to sell."

"Tell me about rat meat."

He went to the bar and returned with two tequilas. No chasers; he hadn't touched his beer. "Why not?" he said, sitting with a thump that rocked the table. "It's funny. It really is funny, the way things——"

"Is it?"

"Happen." Turning a shot glass in his hand, Reston said, "Pork goes up. There is trichinosis upstate, that's what the man says. Overdressed fuck from the co-op. Young like you. He has on a nice Italian suit and wingtips, white wingtips. 'Trichinosis upstate,' he says. 'We didn't expect it, we tried to prevent it, but there it is.' He wants sixty more per."

"Per what?" I said.

"So I say, 'Fuck you. I don't pay sixty more.' Wingtips says, 'No, fuck you.' This is how it starts. I look for another supplier and, fuck me, Wingtips was right, there is trichinosis. The next guy wants eighty cents more and I can't go back to Wingtips, not without crawling, so I pay. But this guy is not quite, shall we say, kosher. There are rat parts in his meat. Not a lot, not enough to taste, but enough to detect; the county could quibble. He admits this, tells me up front, so I can say, 'Fuck you,' but then I would have four hundred pork orders and no pork. So I deal. J&R Meats gets a discount."

"Little kids eat that," I said.

"Ever eat Vietnamese, snot? Eat in Ho Chi Minh City, what do you get? Rice, pea pods, water chestnuts. You get rat, too. They call it pork, but it's rat. It's good protein. Builds strong bodies twelve ways. So sue me. I'm a butcher, I provide protein."

"Lotte said you were dead."

"Here's the funny part. Sales go up."

"But you're dead now."

He shrugged. "Dead, son, is real relative. True, they want to shut me down. Wingtips from the co-op wonders where I got this new meat. Sics the health department on me. Now I got another kid in wingtips in my office; there is a confederacy of wingtips."

"You wear wingtips," I said.

"Since nineteen fucking fifty-eight. They stole my look."

"Oh."

"So Wingtips Two subjects my chorizos to spectroscopy—whatever the hell he does in his lab—and he finds five hundred sixty rat parts. And I will tell you, snot, much as I admire the rat, I didn't know that he had five hundred sixty parts."

"So you're dead. They got you."

Reston must have heard the pleasure in my voice. He laughed his big laugh, the one he saved for the times when he had you down two holes with one to play, or knew something that you didn't. "Yes. The baby wingtips wants to clip Jack's wings. He's the man who sold rata chorizos to bambinos. Which means what?"

"You're evil?"

"I'm shut down. I can be shut for three months unless I get help."

"Help?" I said.

"A partner. A pal. Someone with a clean record and a Social Security number. There are loopholes in the law, snot. That's what makes America great. Life, liberty, loopholes."

"Are you dead or not?"

Reston squinted at Palmer, Player, Snead, Nicklaus and Trevino. He sipped his beer. "Do you want a good job?"

"Maybe," I said.

"You play decent golf. Not genius golf. Almost good enough to keep up."

"Do you know what G. B. Shaw said about golfers?" I said.

"G. B. who?" he said, playing dumb.

"He said that we represent a whole class, the rich who screw everyone else. 'These well-groomed Algys and Bobbys, to whom age brings gold instead of wisdom.' "

"Smart fuck, Shaw," Reston said, "but a Commie. He represented a whole class, too. Commie fucks who got proved wrong. I'm shocked you can quote him."

"I ain't stupid," I said.

"You ain't rich, either. You make doughnuts."

"I manage doughnuts."

He laughed. "A loser in the lotto of life. That's you, snot."

"Maybe. For now."

He nodded. I was thinking that I liked Lotte. Still, she was no Reston when it came to wrestling city hall. She made her managers work all night when the health man was due, and she slept in her Monarch Bay condo while I swept bugs out of her shop. She thanked the health man when he finished his inspection, batting her eyelashes like a schoolgirl, even when he checked bad boxes on the pink form on his clipboard. She always promised to clean up her act, but I was the one who kept her promises, and the fact remained that she drove a Jag while I rode a bicycle. Another fact remained: Lotte thought I loved her because she paid on time and gave medical and dental, but I only liked her. Love costs more.

"So," Reston said. "Do you want to move up?"

"Yes."

"What about Lotto?"

"She'll be all right," I said. "She can get the guy from the Dunkin' on Main."

"Exactly. Good."

"There weren't any rats, were there, Jack?"

Reston grinned. "I said there were."

"This was a job interview."

"Good for you, snot."

"You knew she'd tell me. You figured that if I could get past the rats, the...."

"Ethics?"

"The ethics."

"Of my rat tale, yes," he said.

"Then you'd want me."

"Ethics." Reston spat on the floor. "A word of French derivation, I think."

I finished his tequila for him. "That was a nasty thing to do to Lotte," I said. "She's worried about you."

"No. She's delighted."

"So. When do I start?"

Reston lit a smoke. "I like you, snot."

"I'm a shit, Jack."

"We'll get along," he said.