The Risk Pool

you wouldn’t have thought it would come into play on either hole, since each offered a wide fairway and every opportunity to go around the water, but I doubted it could have attracted more balls had it been twice as large and right in front of the green. The more people faced away from the water, stared off into the friendly fairway, the more surely their ball would be destined for the pond. One afternoon before it had occurred to me that I might retrieve the balls that were down there, I sat on my bike for three hours and charted in my mind where the tee shots dropped, growing more and more amazed at the dense concentration of shots that ended up in the small strip of water. It was enough to make you reconsider the wisdom of deciding, on the outset of any human endeavor, that there was this one thing you didn’t want to do.
    The country club raked the pond on Tuesday nights, reselling the dredged-up balls as “used” the following week, priced according to the size and ugliness of the sneers cut into their dimpled skins. Many were aerodynamically suspect, but perfectly acceptable as “water balls.” People stocked up on them at fifteen cents apiece and seemed almost happy to give them back to the pond. It was easy to bid farewell to a yellowed ball that smiled up at you from the tee.
    Since the club conducted its weekly salvage on Tuesdays, I did mine on Mondays, sneaking onto the course around sundown, my gym bag stuffed with mask, snorkel, and flippers, all borrowed from the sporting goods department at Klein’s. I also had a fishing net on a long pole, courtesy of Wussy, who’d jumped to the understandable conclusion that I’d be fishing for fish.
    Dusk was not the ideal time of day to snorkel for golf balls, the low slanting rays of the sun producing only vague, ghostly light in the murky pond. Few balls on the weedy bottom showed up until I was right on top of them. Often they would not look like golf balls at all, but rather like brown boils in the sand. They hit the bottom with the force of a small explosion, burrowing out for themselves a small cavity in the silt, which would rise, then filter back down, covering the ball with a thin brown skin. I actually observed the process one evening when an errant tee shot narrowly missed me. As a rule I wouldn’t ease myself into the pond until I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t be interrupted. Mondays were usually slow, and I never started work until the fading light made golf impractical. I always checked out the two preceding holes before stripping down to my trunks and donning my snorkel.
    On a good night I’d retrieve enough balls to fill Wussy’s net at least once, though I was careful not to overfish the pond. I always left enough for the club’s Tuesday night raking to avoid undue suspicion, though there must have been some anyway, especially when I set up shop just outside the club’s main gate on Saturday mornings, underselling the pro shop markedly. My most expensive balls—unblemished Top-Flites and Titleists—I sold for thirty-five cents. Others I took what I could get for, learning the fine art of haggling with the drivers of shiny new cars who would pull off to the side and inspect my carefully arranged assortment, often grumbling over the quality of my eight-for-a-dollar specials and intimating that they might report my activities to the club management if I didn’t throw in this or that sliced one as a gesture of goodwill, in as much as the buyer recognized it as his own to begin with, lost the previous week. I always gave in, often pretending that I was being cruelly taken advantage of, confident that come Monday evening the grinning Ben Hogan number 7 would be mine once more, and once again for sale.
    Within a few weeks I was doing so well with this new enterprise that I could afford to cut in an associate, though I wouldn’t havedone this had I not been scared into it. The bottom of the pond was spooky enough, even under normal circumstances. Skimming among the weeds, my mask mere inches from the inky bottom, my fins stirring up black muck behind me, I didn’t depend on sight that much because experience taught me where the balls congregated, the result of trajectory and the subtleties of underwater physics. A blind kid could have gathered them, which was good, because that was what I was in the parts of the pond nearest the bank where the grass grew tall and the long shadows of the trees bordering the fairways darkened the