Suitcase City by Sterling Watson Page A

him, did not look at the tip, and said, “Going to hit some now, Mr. Teach? It’s a gorgeous day out there.”
    Teach smiled. “Maybe I will get a bucket.”
    In the parking lot, he was stowing his golf shoes in the trunk of the Buick when he saw Bama Boyd walking from the pro shop to her old Alfa Romeo. Jesus . Teach had completely forgotten. He was supposed to play this morning with Bama and two guys from the St. Pete club where Bama was an assistant pro.
    Hiding behind the raised trunk, Teach glanced at his watch, tried to remember when they’d agreed to meet. It was eleven twenty now. His memory wouldn’t give up the needed detail. Tall, willowy, grave in the way that all great golfers are, and, yes, masculine, Bama put her golf bag into the trunk of the ancient Alfa and quietly closed it. He watched her look back at the pro shop, her still-beautiful face a little leathery from years on golf courses. She looked like a tall house about to fall down. She opened the car door with a hand Teach knew well, because he had held it, kissed it in their long-ago youth. She got into the car without even removing her golf shoes.
    Teach imagined the scene inside the pro shop. Bama and her two friends presenting themselves at the counter. The assistant pro, an arrogant kid named Neally, explaining to them that they could only play as guests with a member. Bama asking, one professional to another, for an exception. After all, Mr. Teach had meant to be here, would probably arrive a little after their tee time. Would probably catch up with them on the third or fourth hole. Bama using that Alabama charm, and maybe a little of the reputation she’d had as a college golfer, to get the kid to bend the rules. But Teach knew the kid wouldn’t bend. He imagined Bama, the all-American, the college girl he had dated ardently and publicly, standing there pissed and belittled in front of two guys from her club. How could he have forgotten this date with her? Christ, who would have remembered anything after Marlie Turkel?
    Teach peeked over the lid of the trunk. The two guys were nowhere in sight. Probably already gone after a long drive from St. Pete and an ego-spanking from a twenty-three-year-old assistant pro with a scratch handicap and an attitude. A guy too young, maybe, to remember the golden exploits of Bama Boyd. Teach saw the dark blue smoke blow from Bama’s exhaust pipe, knew he should come out of hiding and hurry down the parking lot, stop her. Apologize. At least invite her in for a beer. But he couldn’t. Not now. Not this morning. This morning too many things had happened and there was more to come. So much to come that he could not summon even common decency. Teach hid, hoping Bama would take the far exit, would not drive past the spot where he crouched over an open trunk.
    They hadn’t seen each other for a long time. This morning was to have been a reunion. The excuses and last-minute cancellations had all been Teach’s. There was the long drive across the bay, Bama’s perpetual marginal employment, the way it got difficult for him to answer her questions about his own success, the way the old stories got harder to tell about how Bama had been the Lady Gator long-drive queen, the next Nancy Lopez to his king of Gator football. The world had belonged to them for a while, and for a while it looked as though they would make a life together. And then one night in the backseat of Teach’s car, Bama had confessed her secret. She liked women. She loved them, in fact. And Teach was, she had explained to him, a beard.
    A what?
    It meant, she had told him, a woman who married a gay man to conceal his nature. “But I’m not a woman,” Teach had said, still holding Bama Boyd in his arms.
    “And I’m not a man,” she had replied, “but the arrangement we have . . . is the same.”
    Teach moved away from her then. “I wasn’t aware we had . . . an arrangement. I thought we loved each other.”
    “We do,” she said, starting