Previous post in the series A Brownsville Story: Tricked.

continuing from previous post: As I was standing outside looking at the ducks, a golf cart zoomed by. I looked at the driver, who was wearing sunglasses and was deep in thought.

I didn’t even have a chance to think about something else when yet another golf cart whooshed by. Golf carts weren’t very unusual in a country club, but there were five people on a two-seating golf cart.

Apparently this family pushed things to the limit. What they were doing was highly dangerous. But what really caught my eye was the fact that a boy was driving.

This boy was not older than I was, and perhaps even younger.

I went back home to where Jenny was sitting near the computer, grinning at Derik’s new photographs.

“Am I allowed to drive a golf-cart?”

“Yes,” Jenny said.

“Yes,” Derik said, “but you have to wait until after 5 in the afternoon, when the police go home. Then we can sneak out in the night.”

I looked at Derik. He grinned, and when he couldn’t hold it any longer, began chuckling.

A few hours later, Derik asked me if I wanted to go out on the golf cart. He joked that if I crashed the golf cart, I’d better go home and start looking in my piggy bank, because I would be needing to pay.

What was even more funny was that the moment we were on the golf cart, there were no jokes or smiles; he was all business when his own life was on the line.

“Turn here,” he told me importantly, as if a sailor was declaring to leave ship.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and jokingly turned early so it looked as if we would crash into the curb, but went back onto the original course after a second or so.

“You don’t joke when I’m sitting next to you,” he said officially.

A half hour later, I had drove around the same little cul-de-sac five times and it was getting dark. I pulled it onto the driveway and was about to park it when he told me to get off. He wanted to park the golf cart in the garage himself.

“You might knock over the house,” he said, finally beginning to joke around and be his old self. The moment I got off the cart.

He vroomed it into the garage, grabbed the keys, and got a long snake-like object and plugged it into the golf cart. It was a power cable.

As the wailing garage door slowly closed, I smiled.

I would be a lot more familiar with that thing the next day.

- – - -

Derik was looking at me through the window of his truck, his cowboy hat on.

We were at the main gate of the country club. He had just drove in when he noticed that there was a golf cart remarkably similar to the one they had at home.

On second thought, it was the one they had at home. And guess who was driving?

Me. I grinned.