Walking with Jack (29 page)

“Really?” he said sarcastically.

“Really.”

That’s enough for today.

The grudge match never materialized. Instead, it was a knock-down, drag-out shouting match in his truck that began with me telling myself not to say anything that I would later regret and then saying a lot that I regretted almost as soon as I said it about how I was down here in Texas trying to help him get back what he’d lost when he was kicked off his university golf team and the least he could do was act a little grateful out on the golf course instead of behaving like a bad apple. “When the Scottish caddies are stuck out on a golf course with a wanker,” I yelled, “they don’t put up with his bullshit.”

At some point I stopped long enough to hear Jack yell back at me, “Why does it always have to be about you! This isn’t about you, man!”

I was shaving the next morning and thinking that I would give almost anything to get back the days when Jack used to climb up onto the bathroom vanity with his make-believe razor made from Legos to shave beside me.

———

It took me another day to finally see that he was right. He was hitting wedges onto the practice green while it all went through my mind. We were here together on this journey, but we had different objectives. I was happy just to be here with him, walking through the fulfillment of an old dream we had shared. That is what mattered most to me. For him, this was the chance to see how good he could be. In all likelihood this would be his best chance, and his last chance, to find out. One of the things he had yelled at me during our shouting match was this: “I hit the middle of every fairway for two rounds, and the best I could do was twelve strokes over par. You don’t get it! That’s pathetic. I start off with a stupid double bogey, and while I’m trying to fight my way back into the match, I’ve got to worry about what you think of me?”

As parents, I think we cross a line where we start needing our kids more than they need us. While I watched him practice, I began to see what he meant. He didn’t need a father to be worrying about out on the golf course. If he was going to play this game better than he had ever played it before and move up the leaderboard as the tour progressed through the winter, he needed me to be a caddie who lived up to the caddies’ code to show up, keep up, and shut up.

I didn’t admit to him that I was wrong until he was driving me to the airport for me to catch my plane to Maine for the Thanksgiving break. We stopped for gas and were waiting in line when a truck loaded with Christmas trees pulled in to the station. “It’s coming on Christmas,” I said.

“It’s ninety degrees,” he said.

I asked him if he remembered the Christmas when he gave money to the old man on the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” he said.

And I saw him smile. We had a tradition in our family when the kids were little. No matter how poor we were, we always drove into Portland on Christmas Eve just before putting the kids to bed and gave a $100 bill to someone walking the streets who looked down on his luck. Jack had watched his older sisters get out of our car each year, and then, finally, it was his turn. There was an old man sitting on the sidewalk leaning against the corner of a building with his back to us. When Jack tapped him on the shoulder, he turned around, and we saw that he had a full white beard. Jack’s hands flew up into the air. “Look, Daddy!” he exclaimed. “It’s Santa Claus!”

When we pulled up to the Southwest terminal, I said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me, and I think you’re right. This isn’t about me. It’s about you playing the best golf you can. So from here on out, you don’t have to be my son on the golf course. You just play golf and I’ll just be your caddie.”

He nodded and said, “Okay, man.”

We shook hands. “I’ll see you in two weeks,” I said. “Have a good Thanksgiving.”

“You too,” he said. “No snow in Toledo. I’ll be playing at Inverness every day.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good. And thanks for bringing me along on this journey. I mean it.”

“You bet,” he said.

Cypresswood is a handsome track, cut out of a thick forest. With no houses, cars, or strip malls, it has the feel of Maine. It is as quiet as a cathedral, and it’s a big course of over 7,200 yards with muscular 464-yard par-4s like the ones Jack is used to at Inverness. It suits his game very well, and he waltzed through our first practice round without adversity except for a couple of tee shots that have me a little worried. Most of the holes are big swinging doglegs, and Jack is determined to take aggressive lines, trying to shave all the corners rather than settling for the middle of the fairways. Twice we nicked trees, and the balls ricocheted so deep into the woods that we didn’t even bother looking for them. I am of the opinion that we forget about shaving the corners and take dead aim at the middle of the fairways; so what if we’re left taking six- or seven-irons to the greens instead of wedges. But I must be careful not to do or say anything that might cause Jack to doubt himself. We have three events coming up in the next eleven days, the toughest stretch of the tour, and he is going to need to preserve all the self-confidence he earned in the last two events before our Thanksgiving break. I didn’t express my opinion in our practice round yesterday, but one lost ball in the woods on Thursday, when it matters, and I will be trying to rein Jack in.

He spent the break in Toledo with Jenna. I returned to Maine, where I felt like an astronaut who had returned from Mars. Houston is a strange place, but we’re both settling in again in Gunpoint, which isn’t as bad as the name implies, though a couple of nights before we left for break, we woke up to the sound of glass breaking. Out our window looking over the parking lot, we watched two guys with baseball bats breaking the windows in every parked car, working
their way methodically down the row while alarms went off. We keep Jack’s truck in the front lot, right beside the entrance to the place, and so far we haven’t had any problems.

We were talking about this as we played our way through a practice round today, talking about America, starting with the African American families in our hotel who are refugees from Hurricane Katrina. We’ve seen them walking the hallways with plates of fried chicken and sauce pans of gravy. The young mothers have their children polished and shined for school at six in the morning, when they walk them to the city bus. You can tell they are trying hard to build some kind of life here without a house to live in or a car to drive. “Not unlike your great-grandmother when she came to America from Ireland,” I said at one point. “We’ve got a new wave of refugees here.”

“Americans as refugees in their own country,” Jack said just before he nailed a four-iron through the wind and watched it land softly on the green about 235 yards away. “That’s a new concept, I guess.”

I asked him if he remembered the time we were watching the news on TV and there was a story about immigrants coming to America. “I think you were twelve years old. Some politician was arguing that the new immigrants from Somalia should be sent home, and you said, ‘Who are we to tell anyone they can’t live here, Daddy? We stole all the land from the Indians.’ Do you remember that?”

He did.

“You were quite a little philosopher,” I said.

I’ve been careful not to bore him with stories from my seasons caddying in Scotland and to remember Colleen’s admonition not to speak negatively about America, but while we played this afternoon, I told him about the round I caddied for two brothers who were grandsons of one of the wealthiest families in America. We were the last people out on the course as darkness fell, and I used the lit screen of one of their iPhones to line up the putts on the 18th green. When we were finished, they took me to a local pub for a late supper
and a few pints. I walked almost two thousand miles as a caddie in St. Andrews, and I never accepted an invitation from a golfer except this one time because they were such great guys and I was hungry and it was late. We talked about America, the nation in ruins, that I had left behind. “Here is essentially what they said to me, a kid who grew up stupid and poor in a depressing city in Maine,” I told Jack. “They said they were pretty sure that I had believed all my life that America is a meritocracy where if you work your ass off, you might get somewhere. ‘Your father and grandfathers probably taught you that,’ they said. ‘Nothing is further from the truth, though we are thrilled to have you believe that shit. Get this, and tell all your friends about it: Rich people in America today are no longer content to have just their own wealth—much of which they simply inherited, like the two of us, and never earned themselves. We know that there is a worldwide economic apocalypse coming, and so now we want
all the money
. We want the welfare mother’s fifty bucks a week. We want the retired teacher’s $400-a-week pension. Give us more tax breaks and we won’t create new jobs. We’ll keep putting the money into our pockets. Trust me. And we don’t even believe that guys like you are entitled to any dignity. You can starve to death for all we care.’ ”

Jack asked me if I believed that.

“No,” I told him. “I still believe it’s a meritocracy. Maybe I’m just a dummy from Maine, but I believe hard work can get you anywhere you want to go in America. But I do think we’re headed for a civil war in this country. A class war between the people who belong to private golf clubs and the guys with dirt on their faces who carry their bags.”

“The rich and the poor,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s coming. Once the average workingman looks in the mirror shaving in the morning and realizes that he no longer has a fighting chance, there will be a real war. Take a look at your great-grandfathers. They both worked forty hours a week at hard labor for the minimum wage, and they were able to own houses, their wives didn’t have to go out and work, they had a new Ford in the driveway
every three years. Today they would be beggars in America. So, yeah, there’s a war coming. I probably won’t live to see it, but you will. And you’ll have to decide which side you’re on. For now, though, look at us, chasing a dream. This is a country where you can still chase a dream, Jack.”

“I guess so,” he said.

We played a few more holes in relative silence before he said, “At least golf is a meritocracy. You work hard, you play well, you don’t cheat, and you win.”

“Perfect,” I told him.

“Did you notice that all my irons were flying ten or fifteen yards farther in the clear air today?” Jack said. “All my distances were off.”

“I know,” I said. “Usually the air is thick and dead here. We’ll have to take that into account.”

“Maybe you should write it in your notebook.”

I assured him that I would do that.

Outside our door one of the Katrina mothers was crying. I had heard someone crying the night before as well.

“Can you imagine trying to raise a family in this place?” Jack said.

I told him that I believed it was going to be these people, the people at the bottom, who would one day return America to its greatness. “I mean the people who are not spoiled. The people who don’t have too much. The teachers in the ghettos, and nurses’ aides who take care of the elderly.” I told Jack that the driver of my shuttle the other night was one of them. He was working the graveyard shift, and he had his two little boys with him, a four-year-old and a five-year-old sleeping on the floor of the van because his wife worked at night cleaning offices, and together they didn’t earn enough money to pay for a babysitter. Their beautiful little sons were spending the night sleeping on the floor of the van beneath their blankets. I almost stepped on one of them when I climbed into the middle seat. It was one in the morning, and America was sailing past me—the Bible seminaries and the “XTC” sex parlors, and gun shops and shopping malls—and every so often the highway lights would illuminate the
boys’ faces. I wanted to take them home with me. No, I wanted to persuade the father that he could leave this place and go to Scotland with his wife and their boys, and he could work as a caddie there, walking lovely ground every day, and they could live with a little dignity. “I didn’t say anything,” I told Jack. “But, you know, this man was filled with hope and enthusiasm. He talked on and on with me about the new planet that astronomers just discovered that resembles Earth. He was filled with wonder. I wish you could have met him.”

Jack turned out the light and swung the TV in the direction of his bed so he could watch some college hoops while I fell asleep.

I closed my eyes and was soon sailing back across the years again, to the days when he was little and we would camp out in the family room watching sports for hours and hours, just the two of us lying on the couch together with Teddy sprawled across us, napping, and the girls wandering through from time to time with their dolls or hula hoops. I didn’t know then that there would ever be things I would keep from my son. Fears, I mean. Fathers hide their fears from their sons. When you are a sixty-year-old caddie in St. Andrews, management keeps an eye on you to make sure you are not slowing things down, and I went to work there every day with the fear that I might be let go—“sent down the road,” as they say when referring to a caddie who has been released. My first season after the recession hit us, when suddenly there wasn’t enough work to go around and it became every man for himself, I was afraid each day that I might not be able to make my pay to send home. I never told Jack about those fears, or the new fear of mine back at home during the Thanksgiving break—the grinding motor of the heating-oil truck as it passed through our neighborhood. If it stopped at our house now, it was a mortgage payment to fill the tank. Enough to make me shudder.

My second morning home I shot a big fat Canadian goose that would serve as our Thanksgiving dinner. I’d never shot anything before. It was a single goose, flying alone, maybe seventy feet above my head, and it fell out of the sky and into the cove with a lovely little pirouette like a ballerina falling off her stage. Unfortunately, as
soon as the gun went off, Teddy hightailed it straight home, scared to death. And with the tide exceptionally high, the bird was at least a football field from me across the open water. I decided to walk home and return after the tide had receded. Two hours later when I rounded the corner of the marsh and stepped out of the tree line, I saw a flock of crows tearing my Christmas goose apart. I lost that battle, but the next morning I rowed a dinghy out in the high tide and dragged it across the marsh to the shore, where I tied it to a tree so I would never again be caught without a way to retrieve a bird. Dragging the dinghy was difficult. Shocked at the strength I have lost since I turned sixty, I could make it only in ten-yard stretches before my legs burned and buckled and I had to rest. My heart felt as if it were scraping against my rib cage. I pretended each ten yards was another first down as I worked my way through the thick marsh grass, and the whole time I was seventeen years old again playing football for the chance to go to college instead of Vietnam. I had loved everything about football. I loved the sweat from the hard work. I loved getting knocked down and getting up again. I loved the way all the noise in the world fell off to a marvelous ground of silence so I could actually hear the ball spinning in its spiral the moment I took it out of the sky into my hands. And even though it had become a game of millionaires since then, played across a disillusioned and broken nation, it was still a meritocracy and I was grateful that my son loved the game.