Flashback (1988) (29 page)

Slowly, her eyes closed.

Perhaps she should get up and take something before she slipped off again. An aspirin or even some codeine. At least then, if the irritated nerve fired off again, the pain would be blunted.

No, she decided. As long as she knew what it was, there was nothing to be frightened about. It had only lasted ten or twelve seconds, anyhow. If it happened again, she could handle it.
For that short a time, she could handle almost anything. What she needed most was sleep.

Relax … Breathe deeply … Breathe deeply … Good … That’s it … That’s it …

Now, she thought, as she drifted off, just what was it she had been dreaming about …?

18

The White Pines Golf Club course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, was the pride, joy, and status symbol of its select shareholders. Sculpted along a narrow valley between two massive granite escarpments, the layout was short but exceedingly tight, and members still delighted in recalling the day in sixty-two when Sam Snead, playing an exhibition round from the championship tees, shot an eighty-six and lost two balls.

It was early Saturday afternoon, and for the first time in years, Zack was preparing to play a round of golf—his opponent: Judge Clayton Iverson.

Zack had originally planned to spend the morning meeting with Jason Mainwaring and Jack Pearl, and then the rest of the day not
between
the granite cliffs, but
on
them, climbing with a small group from the local mountaineering club. However, Mainwaring had signed out for, a week to Greg Ormesby, the only general surgeon remaining in Sterling, and Pearl, too, was away until Monday morning.

And in truth, as much as Zack had been looking forward to making a climb, he was pleased with the chance to spend a few hours alone with his father for the first time since his return to Sterling.

Typically, the Judges invitation to play had been couched in words that made refusal difficult. He had also intimated that there might be more on his mind than just golf. There would be, he had made it quite clear, just the two of them, although whether Frank was unable to come or had not been invited, he did not say.

Earlier in the day, after making rounds, thumbing once again through Toby Nelms’s chart, and trying to locate Mainwaring and Pearl, Zack had spent an hour on the practice range. It had been a pleasant surprise to find that some vestige of his swing, developed over dozens of childhood lessons, remained.

Like most sports that involve doing something with a ball,
golf had never held any great fascination for him. But the rolling fairways, perfectly manicured greens, and even the sprawling Tudor clubhouse with its shaded veranda and oriental rugs, had always brought him a certain serenity, especially on warm, cloudless, summer afternoons.

“So, Zachary,” Clayton Iverson said as they approached the first tee, “just how interesting should we make it?”

He was dressed in white slacks, a gold LaCoste shirt, and his trademark—brown and white saddle golf shoes. Although he could hardly be said to be in shape, he carried his husky bulk with the easy grace of a natural athlete. Set off by a gnarled thicket of pure silver hair, his tanned, weathered face exuded confidence and authority.

“That depends on how badly you need money, Judge,” Zack said, knowing that it was both fruitless and in bad form to argue with his father against a wager of some sort.

“Well, then, suppose we make it, say, a dollar a hole with carryovers? I’ll give you a stroke on the par fives and the two long par fours.”

“Lets see …” Zack made the pretext of counting on his fingers. “Eighteen dollars. I guess I can handle that. Okay, sir, a dollar a hole it is. I assume you’ll take it easy on me, as always.”

The Judge set his ball on the tee and looked up at his son with a predatory smile.

“Of course,” he said. “Just like always.”

It was the most basic truth of the mans relationship with his sons, and almost a standing joke among them over the years, that he had never given them even the slightest quarter in anything competitive, whether gin rummy, at which he was a vicious profiteer, golf, or even business. Victories were to be earned, or not to be had; loans of even the smallest amounts of money were invariably accompanied by IOUs and were to be paid back in full, and always with some interest.

Zack knew that on this day, as always, not one punch would be pulled, not one edge given away.

The Judges drive, to the genteel applause of a dozen or so onlookers, split the fairway and rolled to a stop well past the discreet two-hundred-yard marker.

Aware that he often felt less tension operating on a brain tumor than he did at that moment, Zack shanked his drive into the goldfish pond.

“I hope you don’t have any pressing engagements, Judge,” he said, teeing up another ball. “We could be here for a while.”

“Slow your backswing and drop your left shoulder a bit,” his father said.

Zack did as was suggested and hit a bullet that bounced almost on top of the Judges ball and then rolled several yards beyond.

“Thanks for the help,” he whispered, tipping an imaginary cap in response to the applause from the small gallery.

“Enjoy it,” the Judge said as they walked off the tee. “At a buck a hole, that’s all you get.”

By the end of the front nine, Zachary was seven dollars behind and was getting blisters on the sides of both heels from his decade-old golf shoes. Still, the afternoon was warm and relaxing, and he was enjoying a seldom-experienced sense of connection to his father, born largely, it seemed, of casual snippets of conversation and brief flashes to afternoons, long past, like this one.

Clayton Iverson had asked about his new practice and shared a few anecdotes from the courtroom, but otherwise had given no real indication that there were any items on the afternoons agenda other than golf.

Following a brief stop in the clubhouse for a beer, the Judge dropped off the motorized cart he had used on the front nine and arrived at the tenth tee pulling his clubs on a two-wheeled aluminum caddy.

“I need the exercise,” he explained. “And besides, with me riding and you walking and chasing those shots of yours all over hell and gone, it didn’t seem like we had much chance to talk out there.”

“Very witty, Judge,” Zachary said. “Well, just watch thee out. To quote the words of General Custer at the Little Big Horn, ‘We have not yet begun to fight.’ ”

He led off the tenth hole with a decent drive, but his father’s shot, sliced badly, flew far to the right and disappeared into a bank of tall rough. While they were scuffing through the heavy grass looking for the ball, the Judge waved the foursome behind them to play through.

“If we don’t find it by the time those four have putted out, I’ll drop one.”

“Fair enough.”

Zack wondered briefly about the amicable concession, which was out of character for the man.

“Zachary, tell me something,” the Judge went on, still searching through the rough. “Have you encountered any problems with Ultramed since you started working at the hospital?”

“Problems?”

“Hey, you know what I’ll bet? I’ll bet my shot went a little farther right than we thought. Lets try looking over that way.”

“Judge?”

“Yes?”

“What sort of problems are you talking about?”

Clayton Iverson hesitated for a time, apparently uncertain whether or not to continue the conversation.

“Guy Beaulieu came to see me a few days before he died,” he said finally.

“oh?”

“It was the second time he had been by in just two or three weeks.”

“He was very angry and upset.”

“He certainly was,” the Judge said, now leaning on his club and making no attempt to look for his ball. “He was also quite determined to prove that Ultramed and Frank had railroaded him out of practice as a means of setting up their own man, this Mainwaring, in his place. He claimed to have evidence that such underhanded dealings are typical of the company.”

“I know what he claimed. What I don’t know is why on earth he kept coming to you when you made it clear to him how strongly you supported Frank and the excellent job he’s done at the hospital.”

They watched in silence as each of the passing foursome hit his approach shot. Three of the balls landed neatly on the green, and the fourth, hit by a grizzled old man whom Zack placed somewhere in his mid-eighties, landed in a sand trap. As he invariably did when around very old people, Zack found himself praying that the mans coronary and cerebral circulations were, at least at that moment, functioning as nature intended.

“The answer to your question, Zachary,” the Judge said after the old man had hit, “is that Guy was convinced that Frank or no Frank, I would not want to see him go under for acts he never committed. Remember, he and I went back a hell of a long way. I can’t count the number of committees and projects we worked on together over the past thirty years, struggling to pull Sterling up from the dying little mill town it once was. As
often as not we were on opposite sides of the fence on an issue, but that never mattered. We both fought like hell, but we fought within the rules.”

“I understand.”

“So, I guess he believed that based on the way we handled our differences, and on my record as a judge, I would champion any cause I felt was just.”

“And was he right?”

The Judge took a new ball from his bag and dropped it backward, over his shoulder.

“Of course he was right,” he said. “You should know that as well as anyone.”

“Sorry.”

“Beaulieu’s dead, but the issues he was fighting against, if, in fact, they are issues at all, remain very much unresolved—at least until the deadline to repurchase the hospital passes. After that we are all, quite literally, at Ultramed’s mercy.”

The buyback
. Zack suddenly understood why Frank had been excluded from the afternoon. Silently, he cautioned himself against expressing any opinions until the Judge’s position had become quite a bit clearer. Where Clayton Iverson and his scion were concerned, interactions and reactions had seldom, if ever, been simple and straight- forward.

While Zack’s schoolboy years, especially after his accident, had passed by quietly and, by comparison, virtually unnoticed, the relationship between the Judge and Frank had been a turbulent, volatile affair. The man had soaked in his older son’s accomplishments like an insaturable sponge, and inevitably, when Frank’s heroics were slow in coming, or worse, when he did anything outside of the persona the Judge had created for him, there was friction.

Thinking back, Zack wondered if either of the two ever truly appreciated the dynamics of those clashes.

If being Judge Clayton Iverson’s second son had engendered certain problems for him, being his first had proven something of a curse for Frank.

He recalled the day when Frank, then a freshman or sophomore in high school, had received an A on a history paper. The teacher, in her comments, had noted that the writing style and content of the report were far beyond anything he had ever done before.

Suspicious of the sudden improvement, the Judge had
confronted Frank in what he liked to call an eyeball-to-eyeball showdown. It was a technique that had seldom failed to uncover a lie from either of his sons, and on that occasion Frank was beaten decisively. After an hour of confrontation, he shuffled to his room and produced the seniors paper from which he had plagiarized.

The look in his eyes at that moment, a frightening olio of fear, hatred, humiliation, and anger, was one Zack would never forget.

The result of that showdown had been a zero on the report from the teacher and a four-game suspension from basketball by the Judge, although he subsequently rescinded his punishment after the coach pleaded that the team would suffer more from it than Frank.

That confrontation, and its aftermath, said much of both father and son. The Judge, feeling he had made his point regarding dishonesty in any form, never again brought up the incident.

For his part, Frank
was
, in fact, discouraged from further academic shortcuts, but only temporarily. Instead of responding to their fathers leniency with change, he reacted with defiance. And one boastful day, not long after, he disclosed to his younger brother that he had dedicated himself to learning how to win in an eyeball-to-eyeball showdown. At first, he literally practiced before a mirror. Next came a series of what he called “test fibs.” With time, even in the most critical situations he was able impassively to meet the mans piercing gaze and to hold it.