Man Gone Down (50 page)

“Goddamn,” snorts Dan—almost hushed. Buster says nothing. Both caddies grin stupidly. The black one snaps out of it and reaches for my club. I wave him off because I can tell I'm about to cry.

I stuff the five back in my bag and shoulder it. Marco steps to me and offers a high five. I shake his hand instead. He points to the bag and then to the boys.

“It's okay,” I squeak. I wish I had sunglasses. He looks at my eyes.

“Pollen,” I whisper. “Something out here.” He nods his head—relieved.

“Great shot.”

“Thanks.”

I know it's rude, but I turn my back on him and start out on the fairway. My clubs rattle on my back like pans in a nation sack. He's right on my hip. The tears start to come. I wipe the first wave away.

“What was that you hit—a three? You don't have a two iron, do you?”

“Five.”

“A five—fuck!”

The next wave comes—harder. He reaches in his pocket and produces a pack of tissues.

“Thanks,” I snuffle. I take one and hand them back.

“Keep them.” He reexamines my eyes. “You look miserable.” He slaps his pockets. “Damn! Wait—no!” He turns back to the rest. “I think I have Benadryl in my bag. Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Does it make you sleepy or jumpy?”

“Jumpy—anxious.”

“Me, too. Gave me palpitations once.”

“Is that yours?” I point to the next fairway, on the first cut. I don't really see his ball, but it must be in that area.

“It must be.” I don't know what he sees, but he starts for it. Then he stops. “Hey, man,” he says, secretively.

“Yes.”

“These guys—you won't get anything out of them unless you back off a bit.”

I look at him for an instant because I don't understand. And when I do, I keep looking into his dark brown eyes, and I want to keep crying. I want to tell him why—
“My people were on that ball.”
He takes off his glasses, cleans them on his shirt.

“Capiche?”

I wipe my eyes again, take another tissue, and pretend to blow my nose.

“Capiche.”

“Bene.”
He puts his glasses back on. He looks at me, then widens his eyes as if to refocus them. He looks out over the ridge and points. My ball is about ninety yards from the green. He shakes his head. “Nice shot.” He turns and goes.

I stop crying so I can make my next shot—
Hit the ball right.
Or, as Marco has coached—don't. I try to fuck it up, but since I don't
have any semblance of a short game and am clueless as to what to do. I don't know what not to do. Golf, some people have told me, is unnatural. The movements are counterintuitive. But of course, many others have advised against thinking. All I know is that it's far easier to sandbag than it is to fake being good. I set up and take an awkward whack at the ball. It skips onto the green and settles about ten feet from the hole. Even Buster nods his approval.

“Not bad for first hole,” says Marco as we walk to the second. Dan, who I realize hasn't acknowledged Marco since the stoop, finally addresses him directly.

“What'll we play?” he asks. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, looking almost as innocent and stupid as the boys. “Stroke? Match?”

“What about both?” asks Marco.

Dan nods slowly. “Okay. Okay.” He keeps nodding but speeds up a bit—hands still pocketed. He keeps looking at Marco, but I sense that he's looking at me. He stops nodding, drags his hands out, and claps softly. He's made some evaluation. He's not worried about the other two, and now he's realized that because I have no short game, he can beat me. He's been taking stock—my bag, my clubs, my sneakers, my skin. He knows the only time I spent on a golf course as a kid was at night sitting with Gavin on some green-side hill, practicing at becoming a hobo.

“Match and stroke. Two a hole. No validation. How much for low score?”

Marco and Buster shrug. Dan looks to me. I don't respond. I pretend to be considering the yardage for this next hole. I don't want to admit to myself that I don't know what he's talking about.

“We all seem even,” says Buster. “It always ends up as a wash anyway.”

“What do you think—five? Everyone kicks in one and a quarter for the pot?” He puts his hands back in his pockets and looks directly at me. “Can you handle that?”

Instead of saying fuck you, I nod earnestly while trying to do the
calculation. So the upside is a few grand. I can bow out if I lose my stake. We don't shake, just all nod vaguely.

“Anyone beat a par?” asks Dan rhetorically as he holds his hand out for a club. The white kid starts to hand him the driver, but Dan shakes it off and points to an iron.

It doesn't go well. At first the other three comment and question my poor swings as though they're aberrations. By the fifth hole, though, they seem to believe they're the norm. The white kid seems quietly amused by my plight, but I can't tell if he's smirking or squinting under his low visor. He doesn't talk to me—hardly looks my way. He's a little prick. A face you'd like to punch in, but not like Gavin's. There's nothing going on behind this kid's eyes.

Each hole the black kid gravitates toward my bag, but I always pick it up first and walk away by myself up the fairway. Dan saw something in my long swing. So much can go wrong—some little hitch can throw it all to shit. There's too much room for error. And Dan keeps dink-slicing his way to the hole. By the turn—after the eighth hole—I've lost track of the numbers because I'm out so much. And no one, not even the black kid, seems to notice I'm there at all.

Dan rolls in a putt on the ninth and quietly applauds himself. It fills me with a sleepy, impotent rage. I would like to believe that there was once a time when there weren't any rules. When barbarians flooded endlessly over the embankments of the civilized. Dan sets up to sink another putt, to pocket more of my nonexistent capital, and I know that the image is all wrong. I retreat to the old boxing adage—
“A good big man always beats a good little man.”
And I assume that the queen's rules were made for the big man—but it doesn't make sense. I should, by decree of a much older rule, one people like Dan, like Marco, followed, be able to pick Dan up, spin him around, and shake him empty, take everything that drops from his pockets onto the green—cash, photos, memberships, the promissory notes to deep streams of capital—and call
it my own. I should take everything, even the bald spot, the little paunch, which, because of his hatless head, his tightly tucked shirt, he seems proud of. I outweigh him by fifty pounds—so whose failing is it that I'm tyrannized by his credit cards and his titles? And by extension, it doesn't seem like a crime to raise my ancient putter and drive it into the red patch of his skull. I'd take his fancy clubs, too. But somebody, some martyr wannabe, raised me right, or wrong, and I'm stuck with my gut and my own head rebelling, in chorus, the refrain:
Broke-ass chump.

Buster asks if I want anything from the clubhouse. I'm hungry, but I figure I'm going to need everything I have to pay off my debt. He looks perplexed. “You need to eat something,” he says—almost maternally—and stands waiting for a moment. I say no thanks again. Dan, comfortable with his lead, throws a soft salute my way—trying to convince me that he's the mild guy he was earlier.

“What's up, man?” asks Marco.

“What do you mean?” I say irritated by his concern. It seems phony. Either he doesn't get it or he doesn't care. His facade offends me—the sad eyes and the Roman nose are almost cruel in their mocking of both me and him.

“I don't know. You started off great, but you seem to be having a hard time controlling your shots.”

I stare at him, but he doesn't acknowledge. He's looking inside, trying to figure out my swing.

“It's not like you're doing one thing. One hole you're hooking it. One you're pushing it—like you're overcompensating for the last. I don't know.” He does a slow-motion backswing—holding at the top. “You're good here.” He starts down. His swing looks nothing like mine. It's closer to his own. He brings it up again, swings half speed, and watches his imaginary ball's flight. I follow it, too—the sky, the trees, and then the promise of the bay. The marsh, the sea grass and seabirds. The beach. The swells and the beach break seem flat—without power—one roll of water and then another. And the colors are green, blue, gold,
but without texture or heft, past or promise. They threaten nothing. They promise nothing and speak of no other time. And I, too, seem forgotten, a fleshy marker on the green. A scarred hand on the old club and the sunlight on it, then on my face as I turn away. And it's just warm. It stops there.

Marco takes another backswing. He's still trying to figure it out for me. I'm sorry I snapped at him—glad that I didn't say more. He's still talking, teaching me to salvation, but I don't really hear him. Dan and Buster come back, both chewing on something. Dan tees up and hits quickly. The rest follow suit. They almost walk off, but then remember me. I get out Marco's old driver, take a half swing, and dink the ball out in the fairway just beyond theirs.

The course opens up, becomes links play—rolling fairways, more wind. Even though Buster's keeping score, he doesn't say anything to me when I win the tenth. And I keep dinking the ball out there, punching out into the fairway, letting it roll onto the greens—ugly, near arcless shots with very little carry, but they go straight and they go far enough. No mantras, no internal instruction—two holes and then three. And because of my little streak, Dan seems to have regained his interest in me. It seems to rattle him a bit. He misses short putts on thirteen and fourteen, which would have won them both.

I win the fourteenth, but the black kid beats me to my bag and shoulders it. I wave for him to give it back. He offers me his hand instead.

“Houston.”

“Good to meet you,” I say in a paternal mumble. I point at the bag. “I'll take that.”

“I've got it.”

Dan and I push the next two holes. White kid keeps his smirk and his distance from us, but Houston stays close to me, almost forgetting that he has another bag to carry. I can't help but be somewhat moved by his attention. And as we walk off the sixteenth green, I find myself striding toward the next tee. The kid keeps with me.

“This hole's made for you,” he says covertly.

“How so?”

“It's long. If you hit a full driver—swing like you did on the first hole, it's yours.”

I slow down and eye him warily from behind. He doesn't turn, but he feels it.

“Trust me.”

Dan takes an iron from White kid, points ahead, looks at the ground but addresses me. “Number seventeen. Par five—five hundred sixty yards. Into the wind.” He looks over to me and then points to the tee box. Marco slides up to me.

“No one gets on in two. Especially on a day like this. Play irons—get on in three, but just make sure you get on.”

I look at Dan, then Houston. He sneers at Marco behind his back—his first open display of contempt.

“Tell you what,” says Dan. “Five hundred if you carry the water.”

Houston studies the scorecard and speaks directly to me. “Two-eighty to carry. Short you're in the water. Left you're in the water. Right you're in the marsh. Not much room to hit a monster drive in.” He looks out to the small landing area of fairway. “Too long and you're in the woods.”

“He's never going to reach the woods,” snaps Dan, reminding the kid of his place. Houston ignores him. He shuts up, but it doesn't stop him from glaring at the trio of white men. They all look away.

“How much on this hole?” I ask. No one answers. They pretend not to hear, as though I'm pushing on some line of civility and they don't feel comfortable reprimanding me—or the silence is the reprimand.

I spread my arms. “How much?”

“Twelve,” snaps Dan. Then grins. “Twelve-five for you.”

I turn to Houston. “May I have the driver, please?”

He beams. “Yes, sir!” he answers like a Pullman porter. I wince at the association, but I have to shake it off.

At address I wait for the wind to stop. It's been blowing in gusts—both hard and soft. Dan won't look at me, only down the fairway and to whatever he sees beyond. I dismiss him.
That little fuckin'
weasel's gonna owe me a ton of dough.
Buster and Marco stand together, Buster smiling, not malevolently, but with a kind of boyish wonder—like he's suddenly, beside the tee box, found some express route to his childhood. I can see it flicker in his face. He's happy, home. And Marco, mouth agape, is perplexed by the shapelessness of my plan—the recklessness. But Marco has never had nothing to lose, nor would he ever put himself in a position to lose everything. The sky is blue with creamy clouds, robin's egg at their soft edges. I put my head down and swing. The ball rips across the inlet and the rocks and marsh and the fairway and into the trees beyond. Nobody says a thing. I can't imagine that they know what to say.

“Too much,” mumbles Houston while staring at Dan, his face bright with wet light from sweat and sun.

Everyone else lays up. After they hit, I wander blankly down the slope to find my ball. When I make the fairway, I get rolled by an icy wave of sleep and I come out of it with a shudder—awake. The grass seems to buzz a brighter green, as though someone turned up a color dial. I look back up the hill to the others. Buster cracks a joke, and everyone except for the black kid laughs. And then I realize that I just blew it, and I can't understand how or why. I look up and try to recreate my ball's flight, but that doesn't do it, neither does my jog to the edge of the wood, where I stop and ask myself,
“Why did you do that?”
Nothing comes, so I keep looking from the tee to the wood. Another wave hits, not sleep though, it's smaller, more like a swell than anything else, but it seems to suggest by the way it goes back out—the quiet left behind, that all the water has been sucked out of the bay and is gathering somewhere out of sight.