The Risk Pool

the first person I tapped to act as sentinel, though he didn’t work out. For one thing, he was easily abstracted, and for another he was extremely stupid. Once I disappeared beneath the surface of the water, he forgot about me as completely as if I had never existed. While I was under, he amused himself by stoning jays that screamed obscenities down at us from the innermost branches of the dark fairway trees. Sometimes when I surfaced I’d see him tearing ass down the cart path throwing stones up into the dark limbs as fast as he could pick them up. He took all feathered insults with vicious good cheer, like a taunt from a friend on the other side of the schoolyard fence, and bore down on the offending chatterers with murderous, though wildly inaccurate, intent. The other obvious problem with Willie Heinz as a lookout was that he couldn’t swim, which meant that if I managed to get myself in trouble I was still on my own.
    His uselessness notwithstanding, I’d have been happy enough for his vague, distant company if he’d done no worse than stone jays. In the end though, we couldn’t agree on how to run the business. Willie Heinz was of the opinion that swimming in muck after lost golf balls was foolish when there were so many perfectly good ones right out there in the middle of the fairway. They sat right up in the dry grass and the people they belonged to were often two hundred yards away. Willie advocated allowing a foursome to hit, then collecting their drives while the players were still bagging their drivers and ribbing each other on the tee. There were several holes with doglegs and hills that provided excellent cover. You could dash out in the middle of the fairway, collect all four balls, and be back in the trees before a single pale blue golf hat appeared on the horizon. It was astonishing how long people would search up and down a wide open fairway, how willing they were to believe that all four shots had simply disappeared.
    I tried my best to reason with him, to explain that this outright theft was ultimately bad for business, that the men in the shiny cars who pulled over to buy water balls from us on Saturdaymornings would not hesitate to turn us in if they ever suspected that they were buying fairway balls hit straight and true, but I could never get him to see it. What it came down to was my personal belief that the men in the pale blue hats should pay for their failures, whereas Willie Heinz perversely expected them to pay for their successes, a more radical philosophical position, the ramifications of which were scary to anybody who hadn’t entirely given up on the possibility of the odd success in life.
    So, much as I hated to, I had to let Willie go. And just in time, as it turned out. He was in business for himself only a few days when he fell victim to a classic error in judgment. Spying a party on the distant tee, he had positioned himself on the far side of a hill that all the players had to drive past and awaited their offerings. The first three hitters whistled shots out into the middle of the fairway within thirty or forty yards of each other. Patiently, Willie awaited the fourth crack of the driver, his signal to gather. When it didn’t come immediately, he did not alarm himself. The worst player in any foursome would be hitting last and often these took forever addressing the ball. He should have taken alarm though, because the party on the tee had just become a threesome after one of their number had proven too drunk to continue after a long lunch in the clubhouse at the end of the front nine. The remaining members of the foursome came over the hill not on foot but in two carts, both barreling flat-out in a race. When they cleared the rim of the hill the driver of the lead cart saw Willie Heinz in time to swerve, but the second, in the wake of the first and a tad slower for carrying two men, ran right over the boy as he struggled to his feet. The impact propelled one rider out of the cart. He inscribed a clean perfect arc and landed unhurt on his haunches in the fairway. The driver of the second cart was also pitched clear, leaving Willie alone with the vehicle, or rather pinioned underneath it. The paper bag he’d been using to collect balls had ruptured on impact and they now lay fanned out over the hill. “Motherfucker!” Willie Heinz bellowed from beneath the golf cart. “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker!”
    Claude wasn’t much of an improvement, though he was