I, Racki (Part II)

This is a continuation. To start from the beginning, click here.

Jailey was covering a shift at the Hasty Tasty Freeze until four o’clock, so I’d have plenty of time.

When I finally got my mouth around one of those pork fritters it was every bit as gratifying as I thought it would be, crispy and mouth-watering, so I wasn’t paying attention when some guy started tapping me on the shoulder like he knew me. He had a small chin and a big forehead, a nice Republican haircut, wire rim glasses and a mouth that looked like he had just recently been tutored on how to control his facial muscles, and it looked like he had been looking for me so I was making mental preparations to put down my sandwich and give him a tourist’s view of my fists.

He must have sensed that and said, “Relax.”

I gave him another once-over and decided that this country club type wasn’t worth disturbing my pork fritter over. I looked at him. I kept munching. He looked up at me and nodded when it sunk in I wasn’t going to talk.

We stood there on the sidewalk watching the go-karts whine by for a while and letting people walk around us. “You don’t remember me,” he said. “We played you guys this morning. I was paired up with Hannibal Baptist.”

I looked at him again, and then I chuckled.

“You’re the guy that lost it on seventeen?”

His face blistered red.

He couldn’t decide to look at me or look away. “There was a scout there today, did you know that?” Like everybody didn’t know that.

The sex on sandwich bread I had bought was gone now, and I looked up to see the twelve year-old I had beat up walking on the other side of the street, only he wasn’t so much walking as hobbling and he wasn’t so much a twelve year-old as a shattered youth who had looked into the abyss and had gotten his ass kicked.

“Hell of a day to self-destruct there, junior.”

I crumpled up the wrapper into a ball. He was wearing chinos, a white shirt, a sleeveless yellow sweater vest, and the same stupid expression he had on when he was trying to get out of that bunker on eight. I bet his arms were tired, too.

“I just had a bad day.” The guy watched Bal Thackeray’s go-kart spin out into the hay bales at the corner of Flag Street and Main. “Don’t laugh,” he added quickly. “I’m a damn good golfer. This was a totally new experience to me. I lost focus. He had a good game. That’s it. That’s the end of the story.”

This guy was so far off the mark it was comical. No lame excuse was going to change the fact that the great golfing god Hannibal Baptist had beat him like a mouthy prostitute so I decided to stare at him until he shut up.

But he kept going.

For the next installment, click here.