Green Ice by Gerald A Browne Page B

led him up over the hill to the golf course.
    He told her, “I don’t golf.”
    “What a sin.” She ran ahead and then turned and walked backward. “Do you know what a snooger is?”
    “A what?”
    “I thought not.” She laughed.
    Wiley couldn’t remember ever having heard a prettier sound. He caught up to her, put an arm around. Side against side they went across a fairway and on through some rough. She stopped them at a level spot where the ground was practically bare, composed of a pale clay packed by weather and baked by sun. Only a few scrubby plants grew there. She pulled them out by their roots, telling Wiley to help. They cleared an area about fifteen feet square. She kneeled, put her face close to the ground, examined the surface, from one angle and then another. Like a golfer studying a green. Then she used her feet to tamp where they’d pulled the plants up, making it level. Wiley did the same without being told. He felt foolish. He asked what the hell they were doing, but she was intent on digging into her net bag for something.
    Two nails and some string.
    Ordinary three-inch carpentry nails and regular wrapping string.
    “Five feet … anyway, just about,” she said, referring to the length of the string. “I measured it from my toes to my nose.”
    The nails were knotted to the string, one on each end. In the center of the cleared area she pressed one of the nails into the ground. Wiley was to make sure it stayed in place. She stretched the string taut and, using the other nail, moved with it to make a line on the ground all the way round. A near-perfect circle, ten feet in diameter. At the center she marked a cross. “Now what shall we play for?” she asked.
    “Play what for?”
    “You still don’t know?”
    He had to admit he didn’t.
    “This is going to be murder.” She grinned her lopsided grin. “But when it comes to competition, I’m without conscience.”
    From her net bag she brought out a leather drawstring pouch, the same one she’d had tied to her belt yesterday. She opened it. He recognized the clicking sound of its contents a split second before she poured them out.
    Marbles.
    Aggies, alleys, migs, immies and glassies, including just about every color in swirls and patches, veins and ribbons, slivers and bubbles, some milky opaque, others watery clear.
    Wiley didn’t try to conceal his delight. He got right into it, held several of the marbles in his hand, felt their shape and weight, reexperiencing.
    Lillian was anxious to get started. Again she wanted to know what the stakes would be.
    Wiley suggested a dollar a marble.
    “Not money. Let’s play for something important.”
    “How about for the fun of it?”
    “That’s okay, but I’d like to make it a little more exciting. For instance, we could play for time.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Loser has to do whatever the winner wants for a certain length of time.”
    “Sounds like slavery.”
    “Just temporary.”
    “Is that what you normally play for?”
    “Not since I was ten.”
    He believed her.
    “Or what we could do,” she said, “is play for something more precise.”
    “Such as?”
    “Kisses.” She read his eyes and added, “Above-the-waist kisses.”
    She could have limited it to above the neck, he thought. Better start play before she made any less rewarding suggestions.
    She placed thirteen marbles in the center of the ring.
    “You can use my best shooter,” she said, as though that was a supreme gesture. She tossed him a black-and-white aggie about twice as large as the other marbles. “I paid a kid from the Bronx fifty dollars for it. Chip it, and I’ll chip you.”
    According to the rules, they would shoot from outside the ring to try to knock any of the thirteen marbles (“hoodles”) out beyond the perimeter. The first player to knock seven hoodies out was the winner.
    “No cunny thumbs,” she said.
    “No cunny thumbs.”
    “From you that sounds dirty.” It meant, when making a shot, at