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“A compelling saga of golf obsession and redemption.”

—JOHN PAUL NEWPORT

A NOVEL

A NOVEL

The Professional is a work of historical fiction.

Apart from the well-known actual people, events and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Classics of Golf 50 Gedney Street Nyack, New York 10960 classicsofgolf.com 845-765-605 Copyright Š 2020 by Evan Mandery.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

2020 Classics of Golf First Edition ISBN 978-0-940889-33-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

For contact or ordering information write: info@classicsofgolf.com Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedication To Jack, Arnie, Gary, Tom, and all the faithful custodians of this sacred game.

CONTENTS ***

Chapter 1 —

1

Chapter 13 — 135

— 11

Chapter 14 — 145

Chapter 3 — 25

Chapter 15 — 155

Chapter 4 — 39

Chapter 16 — 167

Chapter 5 — 47

Chapter 17 — 179

Chapter 6 — 63

Chapter 18 — 193

Chapter 7 — 73

Chapter 19 — 203

Chapter 8 — 83

Chapter 20 — 211

Chapter 9 — 95

Chapter 21 — 223

Chapter 10 — 103

Chapter 22 — 233

Chapter 11 — 111

Chapter 23 — 243

Chapter 12 — 123

Chapter 24 — 253

Chapter 2

5

Chapter 1 ***

A

SOLITARY FIGURE stood at the end of the driving range, launching

missiles into the gathering dusk. They rocketed off his club as if in anger, but after rising higher than seemed possible, each hung in

the sky, nestled against the red afternoon sun and gently tumbled back to earth, tapping the ground three times before coming to rest. The blows, which began so savagely, in the end most resembled a baby returning after a wandering off or a stumble into the caressing arms of its loving mother. These were the strokes of a man with feeling.

They repeated like clockwork. He rocked his hips, waggled his club and looked toward his target. Then he swung, an instant of controlled aggression, his arms and legs twisting in a synchronized ballet to produce another soaring shot. He watched these from start to finish—gathering information. When there was nothing more to be learned, he pulled another ball into place with a flick of the wrist and began the process again.

Though these were manly strikes, it wasn’t a man holding the club.

The hands upon the shaft were long and slender, and he was sinewy in the way only a teenager can be. His power came from the suppleness and flexibility of his muscles, not their mass. Without a doubt, he would grow into a man. His cheeks and belly would swell, his chest and arms would 1

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thicken, and his bountiful brown hair, which couldn’t be contained by his cap, would thin. Lines would etch themselves upon his face. If you looked closely you could see the man inside—or, rather, the man that would be superscribed about him. But now there was just a boy, a boy with green eyes, a scar under his chin from when he fell across the handlebars of his bicycle when he was six and some redness under his nose because he had allergies—a boy named David. To be precise, his name was David Michael Howard, which gave him three first names—four, if you counted his communion name, Gabriel—which he wouldn’t tell you if you paid him.

David Michael Howard was displeased. He’d been battling his right side for the entire afternoon. He was releasing his hands too soon, a bit ahead of his hips, which was causing his shots to sail too high. An amateur would only see a golf ball propelled with superhuman force, but David knew better. Professionals hit low, penetrating shots. Nicklaus hit it high, of course, but one couldn’t realistically expect to grow up and be Jack Nicklaus. David swung again, swiveling his hips in an exaggerated sidearm motion. Still, the ball ballooned. This would take some work.

He was near the end of his routine: one hundred pitching wedges, one hundred five-irons and one hundred drivers—three hundred shots in all, one every thirty seconds—two and a half hours from start to finish, but David barely noticed the passage of time. The club’s motion had a hypnotic effect on him. Sometimes, after an hour or two, he’d slip outside his body and watch himself practice from the perspective of an imagined gallery of spectators, as he’d watched the consummate professional Al Geiberger practice his rhythmic swing for hours before an exhibition at Fox Chapel. Often, David forgot who and where he was. Because of this as much as anything else, David loved to practice.

The amateur scorned the driving range. In the morning hours, he 2

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might pound a few drivers before playing a round, but otherwise he stayed away. He stayed away after he played, when the practice might have ingrained something he’d done well or unlearned something he’d done poorly. He stayed away in the spring and autumn, when it was too cool, and in the summer, when it was too hot. No point in hitting balls in the cold or the dark, he would say to himself. Better to start fresh the next day or week or season when the memories of the shanks and pulls had been washed from his mind, and the glow of the good shots—the memories of the little miracles that kept him coming back—had been fully restored.

David understood that the range was where the game was really won and lost. Play on the course merely reflected what had been developed there. Good and bad rounds all fell within a spectrum established in practice. Amateurs saw luck in the game, but in truth, fortune wasn’t much of a factor, at least not in the long term. Accepting this truth, though, meant abandoning excuses and accepting responsibility for one’s play. Perhaps for this reason more than any other, the amateur scorned the range.

David was thus startled when someone said hello and shocked that this someone wasn’t a course pro or a top local player, but rather his high school English teacher, Ron Hendrickson. He was dressed in corduroys, a thick sweater and the sort of wool hat worn only by muggers, longshoremen and golfers competing in the British Open.

“You’re hittin’ ’em nice.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hendrickson.”

David couldn’t imagine hitting balls bundled like that—he was in short sleeves himself—but Hendrickson must have been hitting a few, or at least chipping around, because he was wearing a golf glove and holding a pitching wedge. This image disoriented David. He’d once spoken about golf with Hendrickson, when he wore one of his Titleist shirts to 3

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school, but the conversation made no impression on him. To a sixteenyear-old, teachers are mystical assemblages of particles that dissolve into the ether at the end of the school day, exist in stasis overnight, and reassemble the following morning. They cannot be envisioned possessing mortgages, mistresses, hobbies, or any of the sorts of things ordinary people have. To David, Ron Hendrickson, 32-year veteran of the Arnold Palmer High School English Department, was still a mystical collection of particles. So David didn’t mind the teacher watching him boom drives into the spring air. In fact, he barely noticed him at all. There was only the routine: waggle, wave, turn—98, 99, 100.

When he finished, David covered his driver and smiled thinly to his teacher.

“That’s mighty impressive.”

“Fightin’ it a little today.”

“All the same.”

They stared at each other for an awkward moment: Hendrickson bundled up like a golfing Eskimo; lean and lanky David in his mockpro get-up, arms dangling from his side, dumbstruck. Even in natural circumstances, David wouldn’t have known what to say to his teacher.

“So what do you do next when you practice?”

“Usually I go to the practice green.”

“That’s where I was heading myself.”

David was eager for this encounter to end but shunning his teacher would have made too strong a statement. So, though they reached no verbal agreement to do so, they walked together along the gravel path from the driving range to the white-shingled clubhouse that overlooked the practice green. For a moment, they had a common purpose and an excuse not to talk, for which David was grateful.

When they arrived at the putting green, David looked to his teacher 4

E VA N M A N D E R Y

for a signal what to do, but none came, so David put down his bag, pulled out three fresh balls, and began his practice routine of one hundred five-footers, one hundred ten-footers and one hundred twenty-footers.

From the corner of his eye, David noticed Hendrickson pull three gnarly balls from the pockets of his corduroys, crouch over his ancient putter, and begin rolling his mangled orbs in an easterly direction.

They putted in silence. In the summer, people would take drinks on the veranda and watch players putt and hit their opening shots from the nearby first tee, but that was months off. Now it was just David and his English teacher, rolling balls on a quiet spring evening. Soon David returned to his trance and was again startled when Hendrickson spoke.

“Want to putt for quarters?”

David looked up. “Sorry?”

“Do you want to putt for quarters? You know, to keep it interesting.

We can play skins. Low score on the hole wins a quarter, fifty cents if you sink it first go.”

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t think I can keep up with you?” Hendrickson had walked closer. “It’s okay, I’ve got five bucks to burn.” He jingled some change in his pocket and smiled. “Or are you worried that an old man might have some tricks up his sleeve?”

David smiled. For the first time, he began to see his teacher as human, but he shook his head. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’m supposed to use this time to practice.”

“Well, competitive practice is important too, right? Your rival may have arthritic knees, but it’s still competition.”

The chance to impress his teacher tempted David. Even his father couldn’t argue with the importance of practicing with pressure, but David still felt wary.

5

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“The only money I have is some dimes in my bag that I use for markers.” David had no thought of losing, but he couldn’t come up with any other legitimate excuse.

“It’s okay. Your credit’s good with me.” Hendrickson smiled. “I know where you go to school, after all.”

David’s reply surprised himself. It was as if he was listening to someone else speak. “Okay, your honor.”

And so the game was on. Hendrickson picked a twenty-footer that bent left to right and made a nice pass at it, leaving it on the lip. David told his teacher to take it away and then knocked his in the center of the hole.

Then he made three more.

“Two bucks just like that! Have some mercy on an old man.”

But the English teacher played surprisingly well. On the fifth hole, he made a twenty-footer of his own. After that, he picked an outrageous putt from all the way across the green. It spanned two separate ridges and totaled at least eighty feet in all—and he nearly knocked that one in, too.

Hendrickson hit out of an exaggerated crouch, with his shoulders slumped forward and his rear sticking out. He looked exceedingly uncomfortable—a bit like a hunchback with cramps, and he stared at the hole interminably before drawing back his blade. This might have been a nod to Nicklaus, who never putted before he was ready, but really was because the old man couldn’t see very well. Nevertheless, Hendrickson had a keen sense of pace and wonderful hands, which David now noticed had calluses in the golfer places. He hit the ball with a bit of wrist and a noticeable pop. No one had been taught to putt this way in twenty years, but he made it work well. Gradually, he fought his way back into the match, and after nine holes, the two-dollar lead had been cut to fifty cents.

When they took a water break at the fountain near the clubhouse 6

E VA N M A N D E R Y

that tasted faintly of rust, Hendrickson said, “I read your story. It was really good.”

This was even further out of context, and David again felt disoriented. As a term project, Hendrickson had assigned the class to write a short story about bees, but David didn’t feel that his was anything special and certainly not worth discussing outside school. He briefly wondered whether Hendrickson might be trying to distract him from their contest, but his teacher didn’t seem the sort to engage in gamesmanship.

“Thanks,” David said.

“Did you write the story yourself? I mean did anyone help you— your mother or father perhaps?”

David laughed at the thought of his father helping him with a writing assignment. “No,” he said. “I wrote it myself.”

“I see,” said Hendrickson. They returned to the green, where the teacher dropped his ball and called a thirty-footer, which he promptly holed. When David missed his own try, his lead had been cut to a single hole.

“Starting to hear footsteps?” Hendrickson asked. “You know, the feet making those steps have gout.”

David never would have imagined it, but he was enjoying the match.

Hendrickson was an amusing character with an obvious love for the game. He chattered constantly, Trevino-style, but with creative literary references. When David hit a thirty-foot putt fifteen feet short, Hendrickson gleefully chided, “Almost there, Zeno.” Later when he pounded a putt eight feet past the hole and knocked in the comebacker Hendrickson said, “Nice putt, Odysseus.”

“At least it didn’t take twenty years for me to get the ball in the hole,” David replied. Hendrickson smiled. They’d just read Homer in class. It pleased the teacher that David got the reference, and it pleased David that it pleased the teacher. He imagined the gallery saying, “Oh, David is 7

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enjoying the game. His English teacher is quite nice.”

They had played even since the tenth hole. Hendrickson had picked up another quarter at twelve, but David won it right back with a curling 25-footer on thirteen and they’d halved each of the holes since. David held the honor for the last. After some thought, he plopped down his ball near the fringe and pointed to a hole that had been cut into a mound all the way across the green—the most difficult and longest possible putt in the practice area.

The challenge could be approached in two manners. The safe choice would be to aim left and run the ball to the base of the knoll, leaving a difficult but manageable uphill second putt. This route had its perils: more than five yards of break and an abrupt fall-off that made speed hard to judge. But it was better than the alternative: aiming at the top of the severe mound and letting the ball fall down to the hole. The risk was, if the ball didn’t hit the hole, then it would go at least thirty feet past it.

David took the sensible route and hit a fine putt, leaving his ball at the base of the mound, six feet under the hole, a two-putt all but assured.

His effort would be tough to beat, and as Hendrickson dropped his ball, David felt plucky.

“Scylla or Charybdis, Mr. Hendrickson?”

Hendrickson studied the green carefully. He squinted so tightly that David wondered whether he could really see anything. He examined the grain of the grass, the setting sun, and then after he had studied these variables to his satisfaction, the hole itself.

“Charybdis,” he muttered.

“She was the ugly one, you know.”

The teacher smiled and lowered into his Nicklausian crouch.

The ball came off the face of the putter with the familiar pop, but David felt certain it must have been mishit. It headed nearly ten yards to 8

E VA N M A N D E R Y

the right of the hole. David felt guilty for having selected a target that his poor teacher couldn’t see. Then he realized that Hendrickson had intentionally hit the ball into the fringe to take off some of the speed. It hung there for a moment, looking as if it might not dislodge itself, but it did.

The taller grass acted as a cushion, sapping the ball’s momentum so that when it finally began tumbling down the hill it was barely moving. But the mound was steep, and soon the ball began moving steadily downward until David could see that Hendrickson had gotten the speed just right and there was a chance—a good chance—that the ball would land inside of his. He felt elated because he liked the teacher and, win or lose, the match had been well played. He looked over to Hendrickson, who was still watching the putt intently, his eyes squinted, nearly shut, and then looked back to the ball, just in time to see it disappear into the hole.

“Yes!” cried David.

He high-fived his teacher, who in turn gave him a little hug, and they walked together, virtually arm in arm, across the green. David picked Hendrickson’s ball out of the hole; Hendrickson lifted David’s from the ground. They exchanged balls and warm handshakes, and David said, “Well played, Mr. Hendrickson.”

“Well played, indeed. That was a true pleasure.”

They shook hands again and hugged and patted each other on the back, almost giddily, basking in the afterglow of a well-played match, when David noticed the time on the clock presiding over the practice green and jolted back to reality. Reflexively, he looked east and saw his father’s brown Oldsmobile Cutlass idling in the parking lot.

David wondered how long he had been there and how much he had seen. His blood pressure rose and his hand trembled.

“Sorry, Mr. Hendrickson,” David said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “I need to run.

9

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“See you tomorrow,” the teacher replied, confused. He wanted to understand what was happening, but by the time a question formed on his lips, David was running to the parking lot, in obvious distress.

Through squinted eyes, Ron Hendrickson saw David throw his clubs in the trunk, open the door to the Cutlass, and the outline of man—almost certainly David’s father—slap the young boy hard across his face.

10

Chapter 2 ***

W

HEN THE DOUBTS SURFACED, David was in the middle of a round

that no one would remember, not years from then, not even the following week—a round that would affect only his paycheck,

and not by very much. David didn’t know the name of the tournament he was playing. It used to be the Georgia Classic, but had been renamed for a company that made aspirin or aspirin substitute; he couldn’t be sure. He was reasonably certain he was in a suburb of Atlanta, but which one he, again, couldn’t say. He was confident only that it was a Sunday morning and that he was more than twenty shots behind the leaders.

The saving grace of playing mediocre professional golf was that you got to play early and quickly. The also-rans with morning tee times didn’t care much whether they finished seventieth or seventy-first, and they had planes to catch, so they got on with it. The boys at the top of the leaderboard would sweat for their pay later. Atlanta got Africa-hot in the summer, but at this hour, golf was almost tolerable.

The other advantage of being lousy was that you got to play in anonymity, which David also appreciated. As he walked down the seventh fairway, having just hit his drive, he passed only a dozen people outside the ropes, most of whom were on their way to a pretzel stand behind the tee box. The only ones interested in him were a father and son, who 11

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paused to watch him hit his approach shot. In a whisper, the father explained that David had almost won the U.S. Open. People often saw him as a novelty act, especially years ago when the debacle was still recent history, but David detected no derision here. When the boy marveled at the length of David’s drive, the father said that David could really play.

The exchange might have heartened another golfer, but David was grousing. What’d the kid know anyway? He’d hit his drive okay, not great—a little bit off the toe, a problem he’d been battling all morning. It sent the ball too far right, which was why he could eavesdrop on the kid’s conversation with his father in the first place. From this position he had a sub-optimal angle into the green. To make matters worse, the ball had settled into a divot, which ordinarily wouldn’t have been a problem, but this one had been repaired amateurishly with a few disintegrated blades of grass. This meant the ball would come out with a mind of its own, and wasn’t that just great?

David pulled a five-iron and played the ball back in his stance, reminding himself to pick the ball clean so that it wouldn’t squirt, though the way the day was going it was sure to squirt plenty. Then he began his routine: a waggle of the hips, wave of the club, and a turn of the head to the target.

Then the question, which had been festering for some time like an undetected cancerous growth, burst into the forefront of his consciousness.

“What am I doing?”

His own voice surprised David. He hadn’t intended to say anything, but the thought had a mind of its own and demanded to be verbalized.

David’s caddie, Rabbit, had backed off to let his man hit his shot, but now he stepped back in.

“What’s that?”

David stared at his ball and the mangled divot and reflexively repeated, “What am I doing?”

12

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“You’re hitting a five iron—you’ve got 185 to carry the bunker, 192 to the pin.”

David looked up at Rabbit. “I mean what am I doing? I’m hitting a ball into a hole in the grass. Is that a meaningful life?” David looked at Rabbit as if he could answer the question, but of course no one could answer it, not even a Tibetan monk, and certainly not Rabbit Lidner.

“Heckuva time to be asking a question like that,” Rabbit said, drawing his lips back in the grotesque smile that he’d developed to keep people from seeing his sideways-growing incisor. “It’s payday, you know.”

That made about as much sense to David as anything else.

“Suppose you’re right,” he said, and reflexively asked, “What’s the yardage again?” As soon as he realized what he’d done, he tried to pull the question back out of the air, but he could no more do this than Rabbit could stop what came next.

From his bib, Rabbit pulled out a yardage book and a mimeographed sheet of pin positions, which the players got before each round. Then he paced to the nearest sprinkler head with a long reaching stride that equaled exactly a yard, then walked to the ball, then back to the sprinkler, then the ball, the sprinkler, and again the ball. When he’d satisfied himself of the distance to the sprinkler head, he pulled a pencil from behind his ear and began scribbling calculations on the back of the pin sheet. He added the yardage to the sprinkler head to the yardage to the center of the green then subtracted distance to the pin—three times each.

Rabbit muttered the calculations to himself. “One-eighty plus eighteen minus six. One-eighty plus eighteen minus six. One-eighty plus eighteen minus six.”

In fifteen years caddying for David, Rabbit had never once made a mistake in his initial calculation, and he’d also never once failed to repeat it three times. When they’d first started working together, Rabbit 13

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would sometimes try to announce the yardage after the first calculation.

The numbers would form on his lips, waiting to be blown through, but then he’d shake his head and run through the numbers twice more, to quiet the insatiable beast inside him. It had been years since David had witnessed Rabbit’s show in its entirety. If anything, it had gotten worse.

Seeing it somehow helped momentarily soothe David’s angst.

Over the years, David had developed habits that spared him watching Rabbit’s ritual. After hitting a shot, he’d take a practice swing or two, so Rabbit could get a head start. Then, because fans and fellow competitors held slow play in contempt, David walked diagonals rather than straight lines, thereby adding enough distance to his journey to allow himself to walk with apparent purpose and yet arrive at his ball after Rabbit had finished his calculations. If Rabbit were delayed for whatever reason, David would pause to stretch even though he didn’t have a bad back.

“One hundred eighty-five yards to carry the bunker,” Rabbit said finally. “One hundred ninety-two to the pin. Smart play is to the left. We don’t need a hero today. We need a paycheck.”

“Right.”

David could have attacked the pin by hitting a hard six, but that would have brought the bunker into play and the possibility of making a bogey, which David hated worse than cauliflower. So he hit an easy five to the center of the green, not near the pin, but not near the bunker either, and assured himself a par.

“Good ball,” Rabbit said.

*** David tried to put the doubts from his mind for the remainder of the round, but they kept resurfacing, Whack-a-Mole style, at inconvenient times. Over his drive at the twelfth, he tried to remember whatever had 14

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interested him about golf in the first place. As he searched for a ball in the rough on thirteen, he questioned whether he had anything meaningful to show for his countless hours of practice. On a given day, he could hole his ball eighteen times in seventy shots, a couple fewer with luck and good putting. Good amateurs could break eighty, and they didn’t spend their lives at driving ranges and putting greens. They had careers and hobbies and got to read stories to their children at bedtime. Some people broke 100 on their first try at the game. Could beating someone who’d never played the game by thirty shots justify a lifetime of work? At the sixteenth hole, he obsessed about the fact that despite his lifetime of devotion to golf, at least fifty men did it better than he could ever hope to, and probably a few dozen more if he were being completely honest.

“It’s a craft,” he imagined someone saying as he prepared to hit a tricky pitch shot over a sand trap. “There’s value in doing anything well.

Great potters and carpenters are honored, not impugned, for laboring with their hands.” But David didn’t buy it. Potters and carpenters had something tangible to show for their work—an urn or a nice armchair.

He created nothing lasting. His work product flew in the air for a few moments and was then forgotten for all time. “I have nothing on the potter,” he thought to himself as he holed his final putt, a two-footer, by sheer force of habit. “A meaningless putt in a meaningless game in a meaningless life,” he thought as he extracted the ball from the hole.

“Way to bring it in,” Rabbit said, but this was one of those things caddies say to their players, and David wondered whether Rabbit understood that what had happened in the seventh fairway was a moment of metaphysical angst, not light-headedness caused by the Georgia sun. No one else appeared to have noticed anything unusual, though. Life went on. David shook hands with his playing partners and their caddies and the old lady with the eyeglasses that Phyllis Diller would’ve rejected as 15

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too large, who’d charted their shots all day. He tried to duck the man who’d toted the standard with their names and scores because he could tell he wanted to chat, but it couldn’t be avoided, and he listened as the man explained how his great-great-grandfather had fought in the Civil War on the good side. Small talk was such a minefield. David had no idea which side the man thought was good. He replied that his own father had fought in Korea on the good side. Somehow this satisfied the man who said, “Well done,” though David didn’t know whether he was complimenting him on his passable play or his father’s service.

David retired to a tent where the players signed their scorecards and then exchanged congratulatory “good jobs.” It didn’t seem like a good job to David and it was too much anyway. The handshakes had been enough.

David emerged from the tent and wordlessly accepted from Rabbit his watch, wallet and phone, which was ringing when he turned it on. It was Kristin, his wife.

“Hi.” “When’d you finish?”

“Just got off.”

“What’d you shoot?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Okay. What’s that worth?”

“Six thousand, give or take.”

She paused for a moment. “That’s good.”

It wasn’t, and he knew she knew it. That season he was on track to earn about a quarter million dollars, which sounded like a lot until you took out Rabbit’s six-percent share, entry fees, taxes and travel expenses, which mounted up if you didn’t want to sleep in an RV or motels, which weren’t really an option anyway if you were over thirty. The last time David slept in an Econo Lodge, he had to play the following day’s round 16

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with a seven-iron because he couldn’t stand up straight.

As David’s swing grew shorter and his competitors younger, he’d been making less and less on tour. He was diminishing in full view of the world. The only reason he got by was because purses were growing, but he was earning an ever-decreasing slice of the increasing pie. The Howards wouldn’t starve, but he’d do better as a club pro. Laurel Valley had just offered him the job and thrown in the cart concession, which was worth a small fortune. If he taught some lessons, he’d clear more than he did on tour, and he wouldn’t need to spend thirty weeks a year on the road. Kristin had been pushing for him to take the position. He knew she’d just run through how much $6,000 less expenses compared to a week at the country club. Not well, he expected.

“It’ll pay the bills,” he said.

“Worked out that fade?”

“Still fightin’ it.” He knew some optimism might’ve been useful, but when it came to his golf game, he was brutally honest.

“You’ll figure it out. What time’s your flight?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“That won’t get you in ’til after one.”

“No, it’s just an hour to Birmingham from Atlanta.”

Even from a thousand miles away, David felt the air chill.

“I thought you were coming home,” Kristin said. “Alabama’s not on your schedule.”

“I added it in May, right after the Memorial. We discussed it.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, we did.”

“Why can’t you take the week off?”

“I need to work on my swing, and, besides, I need the money to keep my card.”

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“There’re lots of tournaments left.”

“How will you feel if I miss the top 125 by a few bucks because I didn’t play Alabama?”

Kristin fell quiet for a moment. “The kids would really like to see you.”

“They’ll see me in two weeks.”

“It’s already been four.”

“What do you want me to say? This is how I make my living.”

“Laurel Valley’s still on the table.”

“I can still play.”

“I’m not saying you can’t. But you won’t be able to play forever and they’re not going to hold the job for you indefinitely.”

“What happened to believing in me no matter what I choose to do?”

“I do believe in you.”

“Then let me play.”

One great advantage of married life is that couples have had every conversation so many times they don’t ever need to have them again. It’s just a question of whether acting out a particular set piece satisfies one partner or the other. David felt relieved when Kristin passed on re-running this drama.

“All right,” she said, exhaling, “but you need to speak with Scott.”

“What’s the matter?”

“He won’t go to piano.”

Before Scott was born, the piano lessons had been one of a host of opportunities father and mother resolved to make available to their son: music, foreign language, swimming, tennis and horseback riding, if he showed any interest. Kristin felt strongly about this because she’d been given so little; David because he wanted his son to be exposed to everything other than golf. But this resolve to deluge their child with opportunity was the exuberance of anticipation. When they were in it—when 18

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sitting the kid with a Spanish tutor meant half an hour of howling about how the other kids didn’t have to do it, as if it were some kind of torture, about how the parents didn’t love him because they never let him do anything he wanted, lamenting that he hadn’t been born to less intrusive, more understanding people—then giving your kid every opportunity became an entirely different matter.

One by one they’d been abandoned: first the Spanish lessons, then the swimming and tennis. He never showed any interest in horses other than the mechanical pony outside Vinnie’s Pizzeria, so riding went out the window, followed shortly thereafter by chess. As a child, Kristin had dreamed of being a gymnast and she’d hope to pass this along to Scott, but he protested so vociferously—from the moment it was first mentioned to a twenty-minute screaming fit on the way to the sample introductory lesson—that she turned the car around before delivering the boy for the first class.

When their daughter, Amy, a surprise, came along years later, they abandoned the charade and just let her do what she wanted. Once they’d loosened the reins on one child, they couldn’t very well pull them tight on the other. The only vestige of their former resolve was the piano lessons, a line in the sand, drawn to show he had to do something because they said so, or the ceaseless battle for control between parent and child would be lost for all time. It was a shame, because Scott had natural talent. He’d even liked the lessons at first, before they became the theater of battle in his fight for independence.

The mere thought of this conversation exhausted David. “I gotta get back to the hotel, pack, and catch a plane.”

“No, you’re not going to run away from this. You’re not going to hop off to some tournament in Montgomery. . .” “…Birmingham…”

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“. . . and leave this in my lap. Your son needs his father.”

“I just don’t see the point in forcing him if he doesn’t want to do it.”

“You’re not forcing him. You’re educating him about the consequences of a bad choice.”

“He won’t care what I have to say. I’m a nothing.”

“Those are your issues getting in the way, David. He doesn’t think you’re a nothing. He thinks you’re everything. You’re his father, and right now you need to do your job.”

Though 500 miles separated them, David could see the resolve in Kristin’s face. When she pursed her lips and scrunched her eyebrows in that way, he knew it was pointless to resist.

“All right,” he said, “put Scott on the phone.”

In the background, David heard muttering. He presumed it was the boy offering resistance, which was overcome by the same pursing and scrunching that had coerced David into compliance.

“Hi, Dad.” “Hey, Sport.”

“What’d you shoot?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Good job.”

The boy meant the round, not the occupation. “Should’ve been better.”

“It’ll come.”

This somehow soothed David’s angst; the kid had a way.

“Mom said you don’t want to go for piano lessons.”

No response.

“You know we want you to go because it’s good for you.”

Again, no response.

“Your teacher says you’re doing great.”

Still no response.

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“All right, I gotta catch a plane. If you feel like talking, give me a call.”

Then it all spilled out. The other kids didn’t have to take piano lessons. Neither David nor Kristin had any musical talent, so they couldn’t pretend it was important somehow. And playing piano was humiliating.

He lied and told his friends he had chores to do rather than admit that he had to practice his instrument. Other kids spent their afternoons playing soccer or basketball, and what was wrong with that? David spent his entire life playing a sport. Even when he had a week off from the tour, David would head to the range for five or six hours to practice. Why couldn’t he do the same? Why couldn’t he put the time he put into piano into practicing basketball or baseball or even golf?

David understood what Kristin would have wanted him to say— what he should have said. But, though reasonable distinctions could have been drawn between playing golf and piano—how one opened the mind and the other limited it—all David heard was a young boy pleading with his father to release him from the tedium of interminable practice, to grant him the freedom to be a child, and so what he said was, “I’ll talk to your mother about it.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Scott said, and asked, “Do you want to talk to mom again?”

The set piece that would ensue also had been over-rehearsed. Kristin would say (angrily, given the context) that they had an obligation to cultivate Scott’s talent. David would reply that years later Scott wouldn’t remember how to play the piano; he’d just remember that his parents forced him to do something he hated. Sometimes parents have to force their children to do things, she’d say. That’s part of the job. You think he’s going to think of you like you think of your own father, and so you act like his friend rather than a parent. From there, they’d improvise.

All in all, it seemed like a conversation they could skip.

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“Tell mom I gotta run. I’ll catch up with her later.”

“Okay. Bye, Dad.” Almost instantly the phone began to ring again, but David turned it off. Rabbit, patiently waiting to be paid, stood silently. The best caddies knew what not to say. David peeled off four hundred-dollar bills from his billfold and handed them over.

“Leave the clubs with me,” David said. “Go back to the hotel, get directions for us from the airport to the hotel and to the golf course for tomorrow, then get some rest. We have an early tee time tomorrow.”

“How you gonna get back?”

“I’ll take the courtesy van.”

“All right then.”

Rabbit trundled off, ostensibly to the hotel, but David knew that he’d first stop by the caddie shed to see if there was any action. If he found any, he’d stand outside for a while, picking his thumbs, agonizing, knowing he needed to stay away at all costs, but ultimately he’d succumb and shoot dice until the game broke up or he lost his take for the week. Ordinarily, David wouldn’t have left Rabbit alone, but it was Sunday. Most of the caddies would either be on the course or on the road to the next tournament, and, besides, David needed to find some solace. For that, he needed to be alone.

David slung the bag over his shoulder and hauled his clubs to the driving range, which was deserted. The fans were on the course watching the tournament’s climax. Finding a pro practicing on a Sunday afternoon was like spotting a rare, white elk. Like the caddies, they were either on their way home or on the road to the next tournament. This suited David well. He took a spot at the far-left side of the range so that he could work on his draw.

Quickly he fell into his routine: three waggles, swing, replace the 22

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ball, three waggles, swing, replace the ball. The rhythm of the practice soothed him, and he hoped that it would help him forget his shortcomings as a player and a father. He hit one hundred pitching wedges, one hundred five-irons, one hundred drivers, and then, because the reprieve still hadn’t come, he hit some more. He hit balls until his hands ached, but still relief eluded him, as it almost always did now, as if he’d become immune to the nepenthe of practice. Over and over he hit, launching drives into the now setting sun, but still he felt no consolation, only déjà vu. It could have been from this or any of the thousands of driving ranges, where he’d struck millions of shots into fading light. As he waggled and swung, the thought repeated in his mind like a metronome: you’re a failure, you’re a failure, you’re a failure.

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Chapter 3 ***

U

NDER THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES of Floridian Restaurants Catering

to Old People, to which the Sunrise Diner in Plantation generally adhered, if you arrive before five o’clock and order one of the spe-

cials (that evening: meatloaf, fried chicken, or liver and onions), you get your choice of soup (specifically, matzo ball or cream of tomato), salad (Russian dressing or French), dinner rolls, coffee and a two-dollar dessert (thereby excluding all pies but including Danish and cookies), for the price of the à la carte entrée ($6.95). If you get there before four o’clock, you get all of that, plus an appetizer (shrimp cocktail—two dollars extra) and choice of any dessert (meaning the pies are fair game).

David got there after four, but before five. He ordered the liver, salad with Russian dressing on the side, cream of tomato (he couldn’t handle the salt in the matzo ball), chocolate Babka and Sanka. The salad and soup arrived without incident, but the rolls were nowhere to be seen.

They shouldn’t have required discussion because everyone got bread, even if you came in at eight.

The girl was new, which wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d just come back to check on everything, but she never did. She took the order and disappeared to God knew where. Some Mexican kid brought over the soup and salad; communicating with him about the rolls would have 25

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been pointless. So David sat there, reading his free copy of the Broward Times, stewing. Then he saw that Spitfire would be performing at the Broward Arts Center in a few months, and wasn’t that just great? The liver arrived, but still no sign of the waitress.

She returned, finally, when he’d reduced the Babka to crumbs and drank the Sanka down to the granules at the bottom of the cup and asked, with a vapid smile on her face, “How is everything?” Not “how was everything?”—“How is everything?” He’d been obsessing about the rolls for the entire meal, but this tweak, ignoring that she’d disappeared for an hour, put him near the breaking point.

“Do you think you could bring me my rolls?”

“Sorry, honey,” she said, “Your dinner doesn’t come with rolls.”

David felt his blood pressure rising. “What do you mean it doesn’t come with rolls?”

“You ordered the Early Bird, not the Early Early Bird. Only the Early Early Bird comes with dinner rolls.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I can bring you rolls if you want, honey. It’s only fifty cents extra.”

This he could not abide. He got up from the seat, straightened his stiff right leg, and faced the waitress who, on top of the other indignities she’d foisted upon him, was chewing pineapple-scented gum.

Pineapple gum should not be a thing.

“Let me talk to the owner, dear.”

She rolled her eyes, walked behind the deli counter, and returned with a mustachioed, paunchy man, whom David had seen many times behind the meat slicer but had never thought of twice. The man had giant bags under his eyes, and seemed weary of the world, but also somehow impossibly unbothered by the nauseous, citrus mephitis emanating from his employee’s smacking lips.

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“Can I help you?”

“I never got my rolls.”

“Ellie says you came in after four.”

“So?” “No free rolls after four.”

“Since when?”

“Since a month ago. Now the rolls cost fifty cents.”

“Did you announce the change?”

“Well,” the deli owner replied, “it’s not exactly the sort of thing you advertise in the Broward Pennysaver.”

“That’s fucking outrageous!” David shouted, more loudly than he intended.

The owner winced. “Please keep your voice down, sir.”

“No, I won’t keep my voice down.” A line had to be drawn in the sand. “You can’t just treat people like garbage because they’re old!” David exclaimed. “Old isn’t the same as stupid!”

The other diners dropped their sandwiches and stared at the owner, who looked like he might explode. David could see that the dinner roll thing had put him at the edge of snapping, of screaming that he’d had it with seedless rolls, lean pastrami and Alpine Lace cheese. “If you’re so worried about fat, don’t eat in a delicatessen!” he’d scream.

After a lifetime spent on the golf course, David had a keen sense of when people had reached their breaking point. But the owner didn’t crack. He probably had a wife and a kid who helped him hold it together, though David knew from experience that family pressure sometimes could cut the other way. Instead, the owner said, “Tell you what—how ’bout we give you a basket of rolls on the house. Because you weren’t aware of the change in policy.”

“That’d be fine,” David replied, and a few seconds later the waitress 27

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produced a brown paper bag, which upon examination David found contained two rolls.

“You used to give three.”

The waitress turned to the owner, who nodded. She returned to the bread bin, dramatically dropped a third roll into the bag, then handed it to David, sarcastically adding, “Enjoy your rolls.”

“Oh, I can’t eat them,” he replied, which he might have said out of spite or a sense of irony, but in fact was true. Diverticulitis ranked high among the many indignities of his old age. The mere thought of the sesame seeds made his stomach hurt.

He had other uses for the bread.

*** Traffic on Oakland Park Boulevard was moving slowly, even by the standard of old Floridians, who in the best of circumstances move at funeral procession speed. The glare from the late afternoon sun didn’t agree with their glaucomas and so things ground to a near standstill. To make matters worse, David’s air conditioner compressor had blown, he didn’t have the money to replace it, and it was hot, despite what the old people said to the contrary. David tapped on the wheel impatiently. He wanted to get home before sunset.

His mind drifted. Why had the girl cared about the rolls? She obviously didn’t care about her job. She could have slipped him a couple pieces of bread, and no one would have been the wiser. Would there now be a run on rolls? Maybe the old coots who saw what happened would demand their own free rolls. The owner would have no choice but to turn them over, word would spread, and before he knew it, he’d be out of bread and out of business. In another universe this might not be so bad— the owner looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world—but, 28

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of course, he had a wife and kids and what would he do now?

David could write the story of someone’s life in a second. He had noticed the calluses on the owner’s hand—giant hard yellow corns on his thumb and forefinger. He imagined the butcher’s wife soaking the skin in the evening, massaging her husband’s neck and hands, as he sobbed quietly, wondering how his life had turned out the way it had. There had been dreams of an accounting degree or maybe even law school, but it was so hard to get out of the meat game and now even that had fallen apart. Even after all those years David still took everything in. One didn’t unlearn such a fundamental instinct.

At last, David entered Plantation Estates and the traffic eased. He drove through Phase One and then Phase Two, which looked pretty much like Phase One, and then through Phase Three, which was more of the same, except the houses were painted yellow instead of pink. It was a veritable sea of condominiums.

Each building was two stories high and ten units wide. Each was guarded by a row of shrubs and a pair of sand live oaks trimmed to four feet, and each had a parking lot too big by double. Even if every residence had two cars and a guest visiting with a third, they still couldn’t fill up the lot. And they didn’t all have cars—not by a longshot. Everyone had poor eyesight. Some even had the good sense not to drive. The residents of Plantation Estates enjoyed a cornucopia of parking, and yet bitter fights regularly erupted over preferred spots, line encroachments and alarms that beeped too loudly. David had had more than his share of these.

At the sign for Building 87, he turned in and parked his car. Millie’s Cadillac was parked in the adjacent guest spot, and David wondered what was up. They had no plans to get together. Through the front window, he saw her in the kitchen, apron on, preparing an elaborate feast.

He had the gnawing sense that he’d forgotten something important, but 29

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he couldn’t recall what. He thought of ducking into the car and driving away, but Millie had already noticed him. She stood outside the open front door, waving with an enthusiasm that David felt certain must have been for someone else.

“Hi, sweetie!”

“Hi.” She kissed him, warmly. This didn’t feel deserved, either.

“How was your day?”

David couldn’t imagine a more pointless question. Why did they all maintain the charade that their lives continued to have meaning?

“My day was okay,” he said. “What about yours?”

“Great! Just great! It looks like the City of Hope benefit is going to happen after all. We got the hall for free. I’ll tell you all about it over dinner. Now I better get back to cooking.” David shook his head; he must have missed the line where they doled out the optimism she drew upon.

David followed Millie into the kitchen, where she had pots on various burners and a wooden ladle in her hands, which she used to stir pasta, a sauce and some kind of bisque. On the counter, she’d set a large bowl of tossed salad and a cooling desert, perhaps crème brûlée. It smelled wonderful, but the production bewildered him.

“What’s all this for?”

“Our special day, of course.”

David had no idea. “What day is that?”

Millie dropped the ladle and faced him.

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“Remember what?”

She unfastened her apron, folded it, and walked out of the kitchen.

David followed her as she put on her vinyl overcoat and began fastening the snaps.

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“I don’t understand. What did I forget?”

She looked at him with hurt, puppy dog eyes. The wrinkles on her face were deeply drawn, canals carved by a lifetime of worry and sorrow.

She’d made herself up for the evening—lined her eyes with mascara and painted her face. From the right angles, she still looked beautiful, but make-up struck David as beneath people of their age. When her crying caused her mascara to run and her rouge to turn purple, her efforts seemed absurd.

“It’s our anniversary,” she sobbed.

David still didn’t get it. They weren’t married. In fact, Millie was married to someone else—granted, someone with late-stage Alzheimer’s, but married all the same.

David and Millie just helped one another fill the vast expanses of time that needed to be filled in old age.

Medicaid provided Mille’s husband, Shelly, ten hours a week of home care. That’s when she’d been coming, twice a week for three years since they’d met in the frozen-food aisle at Publix. Sometimes they’d play canasta or Scrabble or kiss a bit, if David felt in the mood. Mostly, though, they’d just sit in his screen porch, passing time. She’d clip coupons, he’d nap.

How could that be something deserving of celebration? Should they toast that they’d found a way to wind down their lives together or the pennies she’d saved clipping circulars or the episodes of Shark Tank that they’d watched?

Millie didn’t see it so dispassionately. She pounded his chest, prompting him to firmly grab her fists, pull them away from his body, and ask, “What about Shelly?”

He asked this solely in a technical sense. How could they have an “anniversary” when she was married to someone else? Even still, he 31

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regretted the question. He simply should have said that he’d gotten the day wrong.

The calmness of Millie’s reaction betrayed her true feelings. Millie shook her hands free from David’s grip, stopped crying and pulled her face into a tight, grim smile.

“The soup will be ready in fifteen minutes,” she said, quietly. “You should stir it once or twice.”

David understood that he’d hurt her deeply and that he should say something comforting, but all that came to mind was, “I’ve already eaten.”

As she fastened the snaps on her coat, Millie nodded and said, “You could be nicer.” Then she walked out the door.

The moment called for a grand gesture, but David knew she’d be back. If Millie were ever going to leave anyone, she’d have left Shelly after he let her down in such a major way, but even then she didn’t leave him.

For better or for worse, Millie would return. She was a stayer by nature, and people didn’t change their fundamental tendencies.

Slicers always sliced. Hookers always hooked.

David understood this better than anyone.

*** Alone, David returned to the kitchen. Millie had prepared a feast: summer squash bisque, steamed escarole, a sweet sauce for a rack of lamb roasting in the oven. David turned off the stove and the burners. He covered the pots, wrapped the lamb in tin foil and put the whole lot in the refrigerator. Then he checked the kitchen clock: six o’clock.

The problem with eating dinner at four was that it left an eternity between supper and bed. He still had the ducks to feed, but one could only do that for so long. After that, there’d be nothing to do but wait to get drowsy. Even then, the waiting wouldn’t end. He’d sleep about three 32

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hours, before he’d wake up needing to pee, even if he drank nothing after dinner. He’d fight it for a while but inevitably succumb, go to the bathroom and crawl back into bed. Then he’d be right back where he started, staring at the ceiling. David wasn’t one of those lucky people who could fall right back asleep. He’d just lie in the darkness, thick as oil, with the palpable, contradictory sense of dread that it all had been for nothing and would be over too soon.

When people talked about growing old, they inevitably focused on the aches and pains and forgetfulness. These were real, and no bargain to be sure, but to David they were nothing compared to the waiting: interminable periods of emptiness, hours after hours, gaping chasms with nothing ahead and nothing behind. Coping with this was the great challenge of old age.

Six o’clock. Five hours to kill before bed.

David crossed the living room, opened the glass slider and exited to the pond behind the condo. The focal point of his life, sadly, wasn’t much to look at. It was quite obviously an artificial pond. In fact, no effort had been made to make it appear natural.

Along the edges, weeds poked through the concrete base. The maintenance crew had never bothered to repair the blown fuse on the electric pump that circulated the water. Were it not for the ducks, the little pond would have been overwhelmed by algae.

The pond sat between the eighteenth tee and eighteenth green of the Plantation Course. The architect had probably been shooting for something like the eighteenth at Bay Hill or Doral, a risk-reward type deal, but the course was in such disrepair that the murky pond didn’t look all that penal by comparison. The rough consisted mostly of weeds, and the fairways, which the management deigned to cut only every other week, were littered with goose dung. It was a dump—a piece of shit pond on 33

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a piece of shit golf course in a piece of shit development. At the end of a lifetime in golf, this was all David could afford.

He remembered the day he’d hung up his spikes, once and for all, and took stock of his resources. On the floor of a hotel room at Disney Village, where they let him live for free in exchange for a few exhibitions, he spread out his bankbooks, credit card bills and mutual fund statements and added everything up. It came to $80,000, give or take.

He also had a pension from the tour, though it didn’t amount to much since they based it on a percentage of your best year’s earnings and he’d peaked when making $100,000 in a season was good money. Moreover, Kristin was entitled to half of the pension. All David had to show for 33 years on tour, approximately 300,000 shots in competition and a couple million more in practice was $80,000 and a half share of a $600 per month pension.

The money might have gone further somewhere else. In West Latrobe, $80,000 could have bought him a two-bedroom split level. But Pennsylvania belonged to Kristin; she was entitled to that at least. So he got what he could afford in the Sunshine State: a one-bedroom condo on a shabby golf course in the middle of what’d once been swamp, and that’s where he’d been since. It was twenty years ago, but it might as well have been a century. Time had no meaning to him—just one sunny day after another.

The ducks knew to come when they saw him. Some people could tease, but David never disappointed. They started swimming across the algae as soon as he opened his back door, slowly at first, then more quickly when he reached into his pocket. He unwrapped the rolls, which were stale. David wondered whether they were all stale or whether the truculent waitress had extracted them from a special stash reserved for troublemakers and bad tippers. He kneaded one of the rolls with his 34

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thumb and forefinger to soften the bread. He left the other roll intact and tossed it to the center of the gaggle.

All but four of the ducks converged upon the bread in a feeding frenzy. The quartet held back because they were too slow or too small and wouldn’t fare well in the struggle for bread and survival. David favored these pariahs above the others. While the larger group tore at the hunk of bread, David held out his hand and offered crumbs to the stragglers.

They got the picture and waddled over as quickly as they could, quacking firmly but politely that they wanted him to turn over the goods. One by one they fed from his hand, furtively, before the bigger ones could make sense of what was going on, which they soon did. A dinner roll could only last so long. They hastened over and began petulantly quacking, but it was too late; the whole deal had gone down in a matter of seconds. The ugly ducklings began quacking too, probably because they wanted more food, but David liked to imagine that they were boasting. Together, they had struck a blow for underducks everywhere.

The cry of “fore!” startled David, and he thought initially that a security guard was rousting him. The management discouraged residents from feeding the ducks, which could become aggressive and were regarded as a nuisance. Every so often they sent around a Rent-A-Cop to keep things under control. His first instinct was to run and hope the lookout wouldn’t be able to identify him, but could he make a clean getaway? David feared the worst—that he’d be banned from the pond. Grief washed over him. He felt a real kinship to the little ducks and wondered whether they’d remember him and be able to care for themselves without his assistance.

It took a moment before he realized that the cry was coming not from a policeman or maintenance worker, but a golfer, who repeated the shriek of alarm. “Fore!” Finally, David’s better judgment kicked in. He turned 35

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toward the condos, covered his head, and made himself as small as possible. The ball whistled by, missing his butt by inches. It plopped down not more than a yard from where he stood and embedded itself in the wet turf. Bewildered, David turned to see who had hit the ball. The geezers liked to get out by six, get their nine holes in, and head home for a nap before it got too hot. Hardly anyone played the course this time of day.

Dusk was gathering. At first, David didn’t see anyone, but soon, he made out a solitary figure running down the eighteenth fairway, waving his arms, half in greeting, half in surrender. David doubted this could have been the person who struck the wayward blow. Only a colossal drive could have reached here—colossally long and colossally bad. This side of the pond shouldn’t have been in play at all. The eighteenth doglegged to the right, and the pond stretched from the dogleg’s elbow to the front of the green. Any rational person would play the hole with an iron off the tee and a wedge to the green, avoiding the pond. Only someone trying to reach the green with his drive could’ve hit it here. This required aiming the ball over the left edge of the condominiums, hitting it with a fade, and carrying it over three hundred yards—a one-in-a-million shot even for a professional.

And this, clearly, was no professional.

It was a boy, not more than fifteen years old, sixteen at most, with gangly arms, runaway hair and a complexion that would’ve unsettled even the most jaded dermatologist. He was wearing a t-shirt, baggy shorts with pockets in impractical places and leather sandals. A visor crowned his head—a ratty thing that looked as if it had sat in someone’s closet for twenty years, which it probably had. It said: U.S. Open, Pebble Beach Golf Links, 1992.

By the time he reached David, the kid was out of breath. He finally stopped waving his arms and sunk down to his knees to catch his wind.

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“I’m sorry, mister,” he panted. “I tried yelling, but you didn’t hear me. I never thought I’d hit it anywhere near you. I’m really, really sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” David said.

They stood there for a while—the kid wheezing, David watching the sunset over the concrete pond. David nodded at the ball.

“This your tee shot?

“Yeah.”

“What’s it to clear the pond? 280? 290?”

“About 305.”

“You can carry that?”

The kid smiled. “When I hit it straight.”

David nodded. “You should be laying up, you know. For every eagle, you’ll make fifty bogies.”

“But laying up’s no fun,” the kid said.

As David considered these words, he wondered how the boy had come to be playing golf at a decrepit course in a senior citizen community not to mention talking to an old man with crumbs falling from his pockets. Bad luck, maybe—same as had brought David to this place himself.

“You play, mister?”

The instinct to say “yes” was so strong that David almost blurted it out, but he caught himself, remembered all the suffering it had caused him and shook his head grimly.

“No,” David said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

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Chapter 4 ***

A

S DAVID STOOD IN THE FRONT of his eleventh grade English class at

Palmer High, waiting to read his story aloud, his right knee trembled uncontrollably. He’d had first tee jitters before, but nothing

like this. He tried deep breathing, clearing his mind and all the tricks he’d learned to overcome nerves, but none of it worked. He didn’t like speaking in public, and he felt particularly uncomfortable about reading his own work, which he believed had no special merit. Seeing his nervousness, Mr. Hendrickson offered a reassuring smile and, as a way to ease into things, invited David to explain the subject of his narrative.

“Well, as you know, the assignment was to write a story about bees,” David said sheepishly. “Mine’s about how a family of bees settled in one of Bobby Jones’ Eustachian tubes.”

“Can you explain to the class who Bobby Jones is?” the teacher asked.

“He was the greatest golfer who ever lived, until Jack Nicklaus came along. Jones won the Grand Slam in 1930.”

One of David’s classmates called out, “Why don’t you explain what a Eustachian tube is, too?” Everyone laughed and this eased the tension enough that when Mr. Hendrickson suggested that he read an excerpt from his story, David began without further hesitation.

“Now, of course, I know what you’re wondering: ‘Wouldn’t Bobby 39

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Jones have noticed all the commotion in his ear and sought help from an otolaryngologist, of which there were several good ones in the Atlanta area where Jones lived?’ The answer is that he might have—had he not coincidentally been struck in the head by a golf shot the same weekend the bees settled in his ear. Jones consulted a neurologist, who diagnosed him with tinnitus and prescribed Epsom salts and Carter’s Little Pills.

That was their answer to everything from polio to cancer then: Epsom salts and Carter’s Little Pills. Neurology was still in its infancy.

“Jones accepted the diagnosis, even though the salts and pills did nothing. Instead of seeking further treatment, he adapted to the ringing. He ate, slept and played golf with it—and pretty well, too. Soon he barely noticed the bees buzzing in his head. This left the bee, the bee’s wife and their bee babies to live in peace. Bee babies grow up fast and before their parents knew it they were off to Bee U to become doctor-bees who fought beeseases, and lawyer-bees, though there were too many of these, and actorbees who waited tables in Apple-bee’s while hoping for their big break.

Soon the bee kids got married and started to have ba-bees of their own.

“The ear became crowded and the young bees thought about where to raise their children. They rejected the cities, which were too noisy and smelly and filled with homeless bees, who ambushed you at stoplights and wiped your wings with a filthy rag that only made them dirtier. And they couldn’t afford the suburbs, which had terrific schools but unaffordable taxes. Furthermore, they wanted to be near their parents. So they did the only sensible thing and moved further into the ear, which was quieter and darker than the outer ear and suited them well. Soon the father bee joined them. He’d enough of his wife, who’d turned out to be Queen of the Har-bees.

“Having bees in his inner ear exacerbated the condition of Mr. Jones, who began to lose limb function. He returned to the neurologist who 40

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diagnosed him with a degenerative disorder known as syringomyelia and said nothing could be done. Not once did the doctor look inside Bobby Jones’s ear. This was mostly good news for the bees. Jones began to deteriorate and would someday die, but not for thirty years, which to bees is a very long time. The mother bee lived alone, which was sad, but the younger bees and grandbees visited her on holidays, and everybody said the parents were happier apart than they’d been together. Life went on for everyone, including the great golfer, who grew accustomed to the cacophony. He continued playing golf, as he always had, until he couldn’t play anymore.

“And that’s the story of how Bobby Jones got bees on his brain.”

The room briefly fell silent after David finished, but then Mr. Hendrickson began to clap, and the other students followed with apparent enthusiasm. “Any comments before the bell rings?” Susie Murray raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Murray?”

“I like the alliteration,” she said.

“I liked the puns,” said another.

“Excellent observations,” Hendrickson affirmed. “The alliteration was especially effective given that the story assignment might have been interpreted as an invitation to write about a letter. For my part, I liked that David turned a boring topic into a story about something he loved.

That passion really came through—of that you can bee sure.”

The bell rang and Hendrickson gestured for the students to leave. As they did, a few patted David on the back, and he felt a kind of satisfaction he’d never experienced before. In that moment, Mr. Hendrickson’s room transformed. Tacked to the wall was a reply to a letter that an earlier class had received from J.D. Salinger; a copy of “How to Write With Style,” written as an ad for the International Paper Company and signed 41

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by Kurt Vonnegut; and at the front of the room, framed works of journalism, poetry and fiction that his former students had published, each signed with a note of appreciation. Before these had seemed like papers.

Now, David saw them as the symbols of the rare teacher who cared.

Mr. Hendrickson cared. He cared about him.

Indeed, after years of being underpaid and overworked, Ron Hendrickson had every right not to care. In the teacher’s lounge, his contemporaries alternated between counting down the days to retirement, complaining about the shiftlessness of the current generation and commenting on Katy Wilson’s figure, even though Katy Wilson looked at them all like they belonged in an assisted living facility. Furthermore, after having marked 125 stories about bees, he could’ve been forgiven for failing to notice the diamond in the rough. But somehow, 35 years after he graduated from Penn State with his honors degree in literature, good writing and changing lives still excited him. He wore a jacket and tie to class, addressed students by their last names to create an atmosphere of respect, and gave lots of take-home writing assignments because, as he often said, the only way to become a better writer was to write, edit and re-write, over and over.

Suddenly, David recognized all this and coveted his teacher’s approval.

“What do you think?”

“I told you the other day that I liked it.”

“But you didn’t say anything specific,” David said. “I want to know how I can make it better. I want to know how I can be a better writer.”

Hendrickson brightened.

“You have a lot of talent, David. I told you that at the club. This is something you could really pursue if you wanted to. Does writing interest you?”

“I write all the time.”

“What kind of things?”

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“I keep a journal. I write stories, sometimes poems. Things like that.”

Hendrickson nodded.

“Okay. I’ll be straight with you. It’s difficult to write a compelling story about bees. But no matter what the subject is, characters can always be interesting. The reason people stick with a book or a TV show is because they care about the characters. There’s nothing inherently interesting about family life in the nineteenth century American West. People tune into Little House on the Prairie because they care about the Ingalls.

“In your story, I didn’t care much one way or the other about the bees. That’s simply a function of the assignment. On the other hand, Bobby Jones intrigued me. The fact that he kept playing through his illness is compelling. He has great potential as a character. If you fleshed him out, it would enrich the story greatly. I don’t know whether you want to invest the time, but if you did revise this, it might be publishable in a college journal.”

“Wow.” David could hardly believe his ears.

“Grammar can be taught, but an instinct for interesting characters is something you either have or don’t,” Hendrickson said. “You have a fertile imagination, David, and your use of language is mature beyond your years. You have a real gift.”

“Thanks.”

Hendrickson paused for a moment. “I’m curious about the vocabulary. You used the words ‘cacophony’ and ‘shiftless’ and you’re the only high schooler I’ve ever met who knows ear anatomy. How do you know these words?”

“I read a lot.”

“You say that like you’re ashamed of it.”

David shrugged.

“What do you read?”

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“I don’t know. Everything. Fiction, non-fiction. I really like poetry.”

“Really? Which poets do you like?”

“I like Stevens and Dickinson. Robert Frost is my favorite.”

“And which novelists do you like?”

“Lots of them—Fitzgerald, Orwell, Roth.”

“You read Philip Roth?”

“He’s my favorite.”

“How do you even know who he is?”

“My mother has lots of books at home.”

“Is she a teacher?”

“No.” “Does she write?”

David took a beat before answering, “She used to.”

“I’m sorry, David. I didn’t realize.”

“No, it’s not like that. She’s not dead.” The boy thought about his words.

“She just doesn’t write anymore. I’m not sure how much she reads either.”

Ron Hendrickson knew better than to probe further. He knew not to ask why David’s mother had once read Portnoy’s Complaint but now allowed her books to collect dust, just as he knew not to ask why David’s putting for quarters had so angered his father. Asking these questions required a level of trust that hadn’t yet been established between them.

But the teacher also couldn’t resist trying to aid a boy who could write and who was in obvious pain.

“You know, David,” he said. “There’s a writing program for high school students at Penn State over the summer. You get to live on campus for two months. You spend four weeks working on non-fiction and journalism and the other four weeks working on creative writing. I’ve sent a number of students there over the years, many of whom have gone onto careers as writers. Whether you want to become a writer or not, I 44

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think you’d really love the experience. I know the program director, and I’m sure he’d be excited to have you. I could give him a call.”

David’s face brightened, awash in hope and wild possibilities. This wasn’t mere daydreaming, but rather a young’s person sudden belief in a future without limits. Ron basked in the warmth of its glow. But the look of contentment vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared, replaced by the same pallor that David had displayed when he’d realized his father had been watching him on the putting green. Suddenly, David seemed to feel guilty for having even entertained the idea of the Penn State summer program.

“I don’t think it would work,” he said, as he tucked his books under his arms and turned to leave the room.

After 35 years in the classroom, very little shocked Ron Hendrickson. Though he spent his days around boys and girls, he saw the babies they’d been and the men and women they would become. He saw the potential for greatness in everyone, and he also saw the baggage that kept them from pursuing the path to enlightenment down which he pointed them. Great teachers, like great writers, are careful observers.

Thus, Ron was hardly surprised by David’s reaction. In fact, it struck him as eminently predictable. Education was largely a myth—an elaborate illusion of improvability. Schools said that anyone could be anything, but that didn’t make it true. For most students, the die had been cast long before they showed up in his classroom. Some lacked the intellectual capacity to become a doctor or a lawyer. More significantly, few of even the most talented children could rise above their fears and family dramas.

The ones who did kept Ron going, but he understood that many more teenagers thought themselves incapable of doing something they could do than thought themselves capable of doing something they couldn’t. Ron had seen many students turn away from the path. Few ever turned back.

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But even the most lopsided matches need to be played out to the end, for it’s only in these moments that miracles can occur. Ron watched carefully as David Howard, hurt child, confused teenager, defeated old man, left the room, stood in the hallway for a moment and considered the possibility of his life taking a different path. Then, the boy turned around, walked back into the classroom and, without a word, placed a quarter on his desk.

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Chapter 5 ***

D

AVID DIDN’ T GO TO AL ABAMA for any of the reasons that professional

golfers go anywhere. Generally, pros go to a tournament to work on their swing or because their swing is grooved. They go to return

to a familiar course or to try a new one. They go because they are making lots of money or because they haven’t made enough.

David went for the chance to play with Jack Nicklaus.

In West Latrobe, David had grown up just five miles from Arnold Palmer’s home, within the warmth of his brilliant corona. Arnie’s name was on everything: car washes, dry cleaners, schools. There were synergies: you could get a free car wash with twenty dollars in dry cleaning or, conversely, a free suit cleaning with ten car washes. Everyone in the area had an Arnold Palmer story—he’d bought fishing tackle from this one and a vacuum cleaner from that one. He’d shaken their hand, told them a joke and made them feel, as only he could, as if they were the most important person in the world. David had his own Arnold Palmer story, and a good one too. He loved Arnie.

He revered Jack.

During his twenty years on tour, David had played with almost all of the greats: Watson, Floyd, Irwin, Player, Norman, Miller and Trevino. He’d played an exhibition with Sam Snead, chipped and putted with 47

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Byron Nelson, and even had a quick nine holes with Ben Hogan before Hogan got sick. He’d played with everyone—except for Nicklaus.

There’d been close calls. Once, back when he was at the top of his game, David had a short par putt to play with Nicklaus in the final round of the Canadian Open. Jack was in his late-forties then, winding it down, but he still gave it a go at the Canadian because he’d built the course but never won the tournament—one tiny gap in his incomparable, impeccable record. Jack was in at six-under-par; he’d play in the third-to-last group on Sunday. David, who also was at six-under, needed only to hole a four-footer to play a meaningful round with his idol.

The putt never touched the hole. That was the most nervous he’d ever been in his golfing life. People always thought it was the other one— the one they were afraid even to ask about—but that was nothing compared to this. The one at the Open had been a good stroke—not perfect, but good enough to squeak in the side door nine times out of ten. The one to play with Nicklaus had been a total choke.

The next day David wistfully looked back up the first fairway as Jack teed off, wondering if there’d ever be another chance. There wouldn’t.

Jack played less. David played worse. He had an outside chance to make the Ryder Cup team when Nicklaus captained in 1987, but he choked it away again with a poor August.

So when an old josser named DeForest Fleckman invited him to his Birmingham charity tournament for the benefit of a local hospital and the First Tee junior golf program, promising him that Nicklaus would be playing, David ignored the trouble it would cause with Kristin. Any chance to play with the Golden Bear needed to be seized. The morning after the Georgia Classic, David and Rabbit loaded their rented Land Cruiser, headed north from Montgomery on I-65 and sped toward a date with destiny.

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And now they were lost.

*** “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Rabbit strained his head trying to make out the street signs.

“I thought you knew where you were going.”

“I do. I did. It should be here.”

But no golf course was in sight. They’d drifted into a sketchy residential neighborhood—a trailer park, basically. Laundry aired on hanging lines, children played ball in the dusty streets. They were light years from the Robert Trent Jones Country Club.

“We’re never going to make it,” David said.

“I’m going to ask directions.”

“You can’t pull over here!”

“Why not?

“Who’re you gonna ask?” David screamed this, gesturing at the desolated neighborhood, but Rabbit had made up his mind. He stopped the car by a vacant lot where a group of teenagers were playing soccer with a beaten-up volleyball. They paused as Rabbit parked the car and stared menacingly in their direction. A young girl with pigtails, who’d been watching the action from her bicycle, walked over as Rabbit rolled down the window.

“You don’ wanna be here,” she said.

Rabbit started to roll it up, but it was too late. The three biggest kids had surrounded the car. Even if they could somehow make a break, they were totally lost—they might drive in a circle and end up right back here.

Rabbit removed his shaking hand from the window control.

The kids drew in tighter. The biggest of the three, who was bigger than a football lineman, stuck his face in the window. He gave David’s 49

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Aureus shirt and cotton-poly pants a long once-over. He examined Rabbit’s spiked hair and his John Lennon-glasses, which were too small for his bulging eyes. Then he folded his arms.

Rabbit stared back—it seemed like the thing to do. He met the teenager’s gaze with his own bug-eyed stare, but David could tell he wouldn’t last. A trickle of sweat had pooled at the bridge of his nose and his hands were shaking. David knew it was all he could do to keep from tugging on his earlobes three times each, and what would their burly friend think about that? Rabbit was a simmering volcano, but the kid stood there impassively, arms folded.

Finally, Rabbit gave.

“First Tee!” he cried. “We’re with the First Tee!” Identifying themselves with the USGA’s junior golf program was about as helpful as saying they were in town with the opera.

“That’s good,” David whispered to Rabbit. “Tell him you’re the president of the USGA and that I’m Ed Fiori. Kids these days really love Ed Fiori. That’ll establish our bona fides.”

Rabbit wasn’t in any mood for jokes. He became sullen and quiet, so David leaned across the seat and said to the kid, “We’re kind of lost. Do you think you could get us back to Main Street?”

“Suppose so. You a golfer?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. I like golf. Y’know, there’s an exhibition here in Birmingham today and a tournament over in Montgomery later in the week.”

“I’m playing in them.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. How ’bout I leave you tickets for the Montgomery tournament?”

The boy’s face brightened. “That’d be fine.”

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“What’s your name?”

“Morris Bernley.”

David handed Morris Bernley a card. “Give this to will call. There’ll be two weeklong passes waiting for you.”

“Thanks a lot,” Morris said, but he seemed distracted by David, as if he were trying to place him. David knew this expression well.

“How ’bout those directions?”

“Yeah, sure, no problem. Go back the way you came. Make your first left, then a right on Main Street. The course is about two miles down on the right.”

“Thanks.” David gestured to Rabbit to start driving, but as he did, Morris placed his face. He pointed and said, “You’re the guy who missed the putt for the Open.”

Even after nine years, David didn’t know what to say.

“That’s me.”

“That was too bad.”

“Yup.” This was usually enough to put David in a bad mood, but not on the day he’d finally be playing with Jack. David nodded to Rabbit again.

This time they got going in the right direction. A left, a right, and soon enough, they saw a sign for the Fleckman Charity Challenge. They weren’t as far off as they’d thought. They’d just made one wrong turn, but sometimes one wrong turn can do you in.

*** Events like the Fleckman Charity Challenge abounded on the tour, though they were “charitable” only in a peculiar sense of the word. The Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the First Tee would get money, but so would the pros. They’d play some sort of team competition—a 51

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scramble or best-ball, and the winners would share $50,000 or so. The also-rans would pocket less, depending where they finished. One could arguably call this charity since the pros could otherwise play in a Monday corporate outing, for which they were handsomely paid.

David didn’t call it charity, and he would never describe Fleckman as charitable. In fact, he loathed Fleckman. He’d be hard pressed to come up with another pro he liked playing with less. Fleckman would joke with the gallery and his competitors so much and so relentlessly that he made the golf seem like an afterthought. On a personal level, he was even more dislikeable.

Fleckman had only grudgingly entered the world of philanthropy.

Early in his career, Fleckman had been the barnstorming type—he drank hard and had a woman in every town. The thought of giving to others never crossed his mind; the only cause he deemed worthy was himself.

At made-for-TV events, most pros would give half their money to a good cause. When the announcers asked him what he was playing for, he’d reply, “The Fleckman Foundation.” It sounded like a joke, because he was known as a kidder and because he’d say it with a laugh and a slap on the back. But everyone on tour knew this guy would sooner have teeth pulled than surrender a penny of his money.

Things changed after the 1990 PGA Championship at Shoal Creek, an exclusive Montgomery country club, which had neither African-American nor women members nor intention of admitting any. The club’s policies became news. Reporters pressed the players. Would they boycott? Would they publicly condemn the club?

They would not. They wouldn’t because this was how they earned their living and because they’d been trained their entire lives to think about the small picture: the shot they immediately faced, the hole they were playing, the here and now. These instincts couldn’t easily be turned 52

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off. Mostly, though, they wouldn’t object because to do so would be to condemn the entire institution of golf. The media’s interest in racism at Shoal Creek was so selective as to border on the absurd.

Golf was white. Shoal Creek excluded women and African-Americans, but so did Colonial Country Club and Baltusrol and Augusta National. And the pros didn’t visit Augusta sporadically, as they did Shoal Creek; they visited it each year to contest the Masters, golf ’s most coveted prize. The players regarded Augusta’s fairways as sacred ground, and yet the only black faces there were the caddies and busboys.

The Masters tournament committee didn’t extend an invitation to a black man until 1975—nearly thirty years after Jackie Robinson shattered the color barrier in professional sports. They passed over Ted Rhodes and Bill Spiller in favor of lesser players. They declined to invite Charlie Sifford, even after he won two professional tournaments. Only when Lee Elder won the Monsanto Open and satisfied every qualifying criterion did they hold their noses and invite him to play.

The tour’s history was little better. Until 1961, the PGA’s bylaws barred non-white golfers from membership. At the 1990 PGA Championship, 152 players teed off, including approximately 100 full tour members. Precisely one was black: 48-year-old Calvin Peete, a Floridian with a crooked arm and a limp, who’d learned to play the game at the age of 23 and honed his skills at public courses while he made a living peddling tchotchkes. This was the face of black professional golf.

The legal barriers had since been lifted. A black man could graduate from qualifying school with the same privileges as everyone else and earn his way to the Masters if he played well enough. But nothing had been done to change the sport’s inherent elitism. Nothing had been done to make country clubs more accessible, or golf clubs more affordable, or to make a ten-year-old believe he could play the game if his father didn’t 53

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drive a Lexus. Many clubs didn’t allow women to play in the morning (if they allowed them to play at all), most shunned people of color, but every single one discriminated on the basis of wealth—not just against the poor, but against the lower-middle class and the upper-middle class and the lower-upper class. They discriminated against everyone except the one person in a thousand who could afford to pay $100,000 per year (not including monthly charges for lemonade and tuna fish sandwiches) to chase a little white ball across the lawn.

Because Shoal Creek was just the tip of the iceberg, reporters largely excused the golfers for uttering platitudes about freedom of association and the incremental nature of change. The public did too, because people understood the hypocrisy of asking golfers to condemn a particular club as anti-egalitarian even though the entire sport—and, for that matter, the entire nation—was anti-egalitarian. The only tangible result of Shoal Creek was a toothless rule requiring that host courses be non-discriminatory. A course could satisfy this standardless policy by admitting a single African-American. It led only to tokenism at a handful of courses—a list which, notably, did not include Shoal Creek.

DeForest Fleckman didn’t get off so easy, though. In substance he said the same thing that many other players had said. He’d later emphasize this point over many a beer in many a clubhouse, including Shoal Creek’s. His lamentations would generally be met with sympathy and condemnation of the unfair manner in which he’d been singled out.

How could the Birmingham Sun reporter have taken him seriously when he asked Fleckman for his reactions to the controversy and Fleckman replied, with a slap on the reporter’s back, “Let the niggers have their courses and let us white boys have our own.”

When the maelstrom followed, Fleckman didn’t get it. He told people that he’d been joking, or taken out of context, or that he hadn’t 54

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said it at all. He wouldn’t apologize. But soon his equipment company invoked a morals clause and voided his contract, and American Hardware dropped him as its spokesperson, though he’d hawked their hammers and wrenches for years, the company’s name emblazoned across his shirt where the miniature tiger or polo player should have been. He even stopped getting free clothes and clubs.

He suffered indignities no professional should have to endure.

Before a round in Tucson, he realized he had no balls. He went to the manufacturer reps and asked if they could spare a sleeve. Each rep, black and white alike, said he was out, even though any could have built a pyramid of golf balls. So Fleckman waited in line in the pro shop behind a fan who wouldn’t let him pass, though he was buying everything in the store. When he explained who he was and that he had a tee time in ten minutes, the fan added a divot repair tool and yardage book to his order.

Fleckman had to run to the first tee to avoid disqualification.

After a few Cambodian-lean years of skulking around discount pro shops to buy Titleists, and wearing plain Old Navy polo shirts and a Clemson Tigers baseball cap, DeForest Fleckman lost a little bit of his pig-headedness, forked over a hundred grand to a Madison Avenue public relations firm, and set about rehabilitating his image.

Part of the strategy was the Fleckman Challenge, two jovial days of televised golf where fans could connect with golf ’s biggest names while raising money for a pair of great causes. The players wore mikes, and the behind-the-scenes banter reminded people why they’d loved Fleckman.

Not everyone would forgive him, of course, but it worked well enough that most people stopped cheering when his ball landed in a bunker or when he missed a three-footer. He landed an endorsement deal—not for the $3 million per year American Hardware had paid him—but for $200,000 a year with a mattress delivery service. It felt good to have 55

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something on his shirt again. He even got a ball contract—for Top-Flites, which putted like rocks, but still beat waiting in line at Nevada Bob’s.

So every May, Fleckman stalked the tour’s locker rooms recruiting pros to play in Birmingham. He’d start with big names—the major winners and long drivers, and then work down the ladder. He pitched them hard. To the socially conscious, he emphasized the tournament’s charitable contributions and importance to the Birmingham community. To the younger ones, he promised a trip to the Diamond Cabaret (Totally Nude!), complete with stake of funny money—as much a part of the Challenge as the trick shot exhibition and the traditional exploding ball on the first tee.

Some players—the alcoholics, mostly—embraced the tournament.

Most avoided the locker room when Fleckman was around. Others feigned an excuse. A few simply laughed in his face. Sometimes Fleckman couldn’t fill the field until the week before the tournament. Fleckman had caught David changing his spikes after the third round of the Houston Open.

“We’d love to have you this year.”

“Me? You’re kidding.”

“I may be an old kidder, but I ain’t kiddin’ today.”

“How many people did you ask before me? Fifty? One hundred?”

“Not at all. You were right at the top of my list. Lot of people still fascinated by the way you handled yourself at the Open. Made a real positive impression.”

“I doubt that.”

“Whaddya say? Y’know, the Challenge raised more than two million dollars for the children’s hospital last year. How’re the kids anyway?”

David wouldn’t be duped. “Sorry, can’t do it. Promised Kristin I’d go home.”

Then Fleckman said the magic words: “Jack’ll be there.”

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*** So, David, having spiked up in the car, was now running across the parking lot to the registration tent, terrified that he’d miss his tee time. He checked the pairings sheet and his heart leapt. Next to his own name, he saw “NIC.” Then his heart sank.

He wasn’t playing with Jack Nicklaus. He was playing with Jock Nichols. Jack Nicklaus had the best record in golf history. Jock Nichols had made his career off one tournament, the Bob Hope Desert Classic, where he’d staggered to a one-stroke victory. The fans marveled not at the quality of his play, but that someone so fat could walk ninety holes in the desert heat. It seemed so incongruous, this leviathan in polyester side-by-side on the screen with Hope, Joe Pesci and former President Ford, that he’d earned a permanent place in golf trivia upon which he’d been living ever since. His golf didn’t hold up. No one could carry that much weight around for long. Jock made a living playing exhibitions and fringe tournaments where they were happy to have any kind of name.

DeForest Fleckman was happy to have any kind of name—especially one that would show up. The fact that the fans would have the opportunity to gawk at Jock’s prodigious girth was a bonus.

David had half a mind to go home. Fleckman had tricked him— either as a practical joke or out of desperation for players. But the professional doesn’t throw temper tantrums. He did take his time walking to the first tee, though. For Jack Nicklaus, he’d run; Jock Nichols could wait a minute or two.

Standing on the tee box were Nichols, Fleckman and two people David didn’t recognize. A handful of spectators had gathered to watch the opening drives. When David arrived, Fleckman threw an arm around his shoulder and slapped him on the back as if they were old friends.

“Thought we were going to have to start without you.”

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“Had a bit of trouble with the directions.”

“Well, you’re here now.” Fleckman slapped David again—now two times too many.

“You know Jock.”

“Sure.” They shook. Jock had meaty hands.

“And these are your amateur playing partners.”

“Amateur playing partners?” There’d been no mention of this.

“Helps raise a few extra bucks for charity.”

“Translation: a few extra bucks for you,” David said softly, but Fleckman ignored the barb. He’d heard far worse.

One of the amateurs stepped forward to introduce himself. He was wearing yellow pants, a pastel blue shirt and dark blue shoes. It seemed as if he was extending his hand from a watercolor.

“Charlie Price—insurance.”

David shook his hand firmly—the way that Arnie had taught him the professional shakes hands.

“Nice to meet you, Charlie.”

Charlie Price’s partner was a small man with hair everywhere—in his ears and nose and poking through his shirt collar—except the top of his head, which was barren, but for three shocks of stringy fur, one at each of his temples and another smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

“Dr. Walter Knotts,” he said, stepping forward.

“Nice to meet you, doctor,” David said, with another firm shake.

“The specialty’s proctology—proctology and golf. Just love lookin’ in holes.”

Walter Knotts guffawed and slapped David on the back. Charlie Price and Fleckman laughed too. David smiled, but said nothing because what do you say to that?

Charlie Price gestured toward the tee box and said, “Show us the way.”

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Rabbit unsheathed the driver from its distinctive head cover and handed the club to David, who swung it in the air a few times to loosen up. He teed a ball, picked out his target line, and took his stance. He waggled the club, once, twice, then drew it back and let it fall into the back of the ball. It rose the tee, tumbling from right to left, a gentle draw. He’d caught it a bit on the heel, but though he hadn’t struck it to his satisfaction, it was long and split the fairway—a professional shot.

“Nice ball.”

“Good drive.”

David tipped his cap.

Jock Nichols went next and hit it okay. It was down the middle too, but twenty yards short of David and with a little tail that didn’t look so bad aesthetically but tasted like poison to a professional. Jock had been fighting it for years. He’d tried everything to fix it, even lost a few pounds, but when his golf failed to improve, he put all the weight back and more.

The little fade was all he had to go with now. The fans clapped for Jock’s shot, too, and he tipped his cap, in a polite but apologetic manner. Jock knew he didn’t belong anymore.

Charlie Price hit from the white tees, his yellow pants gleaming in the sun. He took a pair of deliberate, smooth practice swings that had no relation to his actual swing, which was four times quicker, and sent a low liner into the right rough. David had seen better; he’d also seen worse.

Walter Knotts, though, was like nothing David had ever seen, and David had seen plenty. His practice swing was simple enough. It was a bit short and jerky, but functional. When he stepped up to the ball, though, it was another story. It was as if he was gripped by a sudden paralysis. He stood in his stance for almost a minute. Isolated swing thoughts ran through his mind. You could tell because he muttered them all to himself: “head down,” “straight back,” “high finish,” “elbow in.” When 59

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he finally took the club back, his self-admonitions resulted in a series of contortions that bore no resemblance to a golf swing. It had the components of a swing—a takeaway, a set, a backswing—but he paused after each step, as if to reconsider his position, and the motion consequently lacked any fluidity.

Somehow, his downswing was even less athletic. It began only after he’d paused at the top to reflect on his elbow position. Finally, he lurched forward, throwing his entire mass behind the club and hit the ground two inches behind the ball. Ordinarily, the ball wouldn’t have moved, but the club struck the ground with such force that it projected forward a wedge of sod, which in turn propelled the ball seventy yards or so down the fairway, where it landed, blanketed in mud.

Walter collected his tee and smiled. “Won’t be the first time I’ve brought up the rear.”

Charlie Price howled and slapped Walter on the back. David smiled but said nothing. He didn’t want to encourage this further, but they’d only gotten started.

On the third hole, after narrowly missing a squirrel with a low hard hook, Walter cried, “I’m going to be the butt of everyone’s joke!”

On the fifth hole, after stubbing a chip into the ground: “That’s what I call a regular rump and run.”

On the seventh hole, after Charlie holed one out from the bunker he cried: “What an asshole!” Then aside to David he said: “My kind of guy.”

At the turn, Charlie realized he’d lost his scoring pencil. Walter said this reminded him of a story. “So this proctologist goes to the bank to deposit a check. Teller says he needs to endorse it. The proctologist pulls a thermometer from his shirt pocket. Doctor says to the teller, ‘Shit, some asshole has my pen.’”

The awful jokes and bad play continued. Walter hit every imagin60

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able type of bad shot—pop-ups, hooks, slices, yips, whiffs—but he never got down. His optimism appeared to be boundless. After a miraculous straight shot, he sidled up to David and said, “So this man goes to the proctologist. When he gets into the examination room, he notices three items on a stand next to the doctor’s desk: a K-Y tube, a rubber glove and a beer. When the doctor comes in, the man says, ‘Doc, I know what the K-Y and the glove are for, but what’s with the beer?’ The doctor storms out of the room and screams down the hall: ‘Damn it, nurse, I said a butt light!’”

David smiled and said nothing.

On the sixteenth hole, a tight par-four, Walter hit his ball into trees on the left while Price hit his into the right-hand rough. David helped Charlie find his ball and then wandered back into the fairway. He didn’t give a thought to Walter, who’d hit it so far left David figured it’d be lost.

But somehow Walter did find it, and though there were trees on every side of him, and though he couldn’t see the fairway, he had room to make a full swing. He didn’t yell a warning because hitting the ball in the fairway would’ve been a miracle even for a pro. He just took a fast and loose swing and expected the worst.

Freed of the million swing thoughts that normally ran through his mind, Walter made his best contact of the day. He kept expecting to hear the sound of ball against wood, but it never came. It missed the dozen or so trees it might have hit—would have hit if he’d thought about the shot for a moment—and hurtled toward David, who was standing in the fairway watching Charlie take his fourth try at advancing his ball from the rough. At this point, Walter yelled, “Fore!” But no one could hear him through the trees, and it was too late, besides.

David, who had his back turned, never saw Walter’s shot of a lifetime screech from the woods. The others did, though. Walter saw it from between the trees, Jock from between bites of a cheeseburger, and 61

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Charlie as he picked grass from his teeth. Each thought the same thing: it could never happen. The universe was too enormous. The ball could have gone anywhere, anytime—the chance of it colliding with David was too remote to even consider. But damned if that ball didn’t hit David right in the ass.

And that’s when the trouble really started.

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Chapter 6 ***

O

NE AUGUST EVENING, Millicent Rosenblatt, née Friedlander, known

to childhood friends as Fillmore (after the oft-forgotten napfavoring thirteenth President), but to NYU classmates and every-

one she met thereafter as simply Millie, had retired to bed with her husband just before eight o’clock. They’d turned in early because they’d gotten up at five and because he didn’t do well at night. His rare moments of lucidity came early. By evening, the accumulated plaque on his neurons reduced him to a doddering simpleton. The doctors called it “sundowning.” The Alzheimer’s diagnosis had been made official just two months earlier, though it’d been obvious to the entire Phase Three community for months. Millie had suspected for years.

Shelly had his reading glasses on and a pen in hand, ostensibly working at the TV Guide crossword, though the clues perplexed him, even “Star ____”—a four-letter word beginning with “T.” He couldn’t even recall the puzzle’s object; he just remembered it as something he did while Millie got ready for bed.

Looking back on the events years later, Millie remembered that she had been reading a James Patterson novel, although she couldn’t recall which one. They all seemed pretty much the same. She also remembered wondering whether she should make Shelly go to bathroom. Though 63

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he’d peed just ten minutes earlier, he was clutching, and Millie regretted having allowed him a glass of grape juice with dinner.

When she heard the sound of glass shattering in the living room, Millie’s body clenched. She held her breath and waited, hoping it had just been an accident, but glass objects generally don’t fall on their own. Most likely, Shelly had left open the back door and a squirrel or raccoon had gotten in. The matter would require investigation.

In an ideal world, the responsibility would have fallen to Shelly. He’d have roused himself, put on his bathrobe and grabbed a five-iron. Then, after giving the condo a once-over, he’d have crawled back into bed, gathered Millie in his arms and told her that everything was okay. In the real world, this was as impractical as expecting Shelly to remember their phone number or a grocery list. He knew something was wrong— Shelly’s senses hadn’t deserted him entirely, but he had no idea what to do. He clenched the TV Guide and stared across the bedroom like a deer caught in headlights, though the deer would have had the advantage. He had an erection. They came at the strangest times.

Millie rubbed his shoulders.

“I’m going to go into the living room and see what’s going on.”

Shelly stared at her, bug-eyed.

“If anything happens, I want you to call the police.”

She lifted the phone from its base and placed it in his hands.

“You need to call nine-one-one. Will you remember that? Nineone-one.”

Shelly nodded and said, “Nine. One. One.” Millie tried to gauge his awareness. She knew his limitations, of course, but she thought that under the circumstances he could rise above himself and function, if not as a man, then at least as a fraction of a man. She kissed him on the head, put on her pink fuzzy slippers and steeled herself.

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As she opened the bedroom door, she ran through the possibilities, none of which were good. It could have been her mother’s vase or one of her Russian figurines or the candy dish Helen Rubinstein had given her last Hanukkah. She poked her head around the corner and saw that the candy dish was indeed the victim. This gave her some measure of relief, both because the dish had been situated somewhat precariously— making it possible it had dropped on its own—and because if she’d been forced to choose among her few glass possessions, she’d have sacrificed the dish, which she’d never wanted in the first place.

Helen had given the dish to Millie in an effort to curry favor during her campaign for Women’s Club president. They’d never before exchanged gifts. They weren’t even friends in any meaningful sense.

They’d just played Mah-Jongg together a couple of times. When Helen rang her doorbell one December evening, carrying the box wrapped in garish silver foil, the ploy felt pathetically obvious. And the dish was cheap, to boot. The glass was so thin Millie doubted it could bear the weight of a hard sucker. She’d probably purchased it at the Dollar General. Surely Helen Rubinstein didn’t think she could buy the election with tchotchkes! But Helen had the last laugh. After she upset Dorothea Trudeau, more than one voter said the gift had been a nice gesture and hadn’t hurt Helen’s chances one bit.

Millie felt compelled to display the dish—filled with coffee-flavored Nips—because Helen had a vindictive streak and, now, power. If word got to her through a mutual friend that Millie didn’t have the candy dish displayed prominently there’d be consequences for sure. This act of God or animal had done for Millie something she’d never have had the courage to do for herself. When she bent to clean the mess, her back sore from an afternoon at the canasta table, she felt satisfied, almost elated.

As Millie began to collect the spilled Nips and shattered remnants of 65

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Helen’s pathetic bowl, she felt the calloused hand of a laborer close over her mouth. The man’s palm abrased her lip and chin as she squirmed to free herself, but it was no use. She abandoned the effort even before he said, “I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. If you even say a word, I’ll kill you. Understand?”

Millie nodded, and the intruder removed his hand. He pushed her face down into the plush carpeting, which had kept her from hearing the perpetrator’s footsteps. Millie reflected on the irony. She’d chosen the carpet painstakingly, over the course of multiple visits to the Carpet King, and over the protestations of the owner who’d wanted to put her in a thinner pile, as part of the store’s Berber Blowout. Millie thought the thick rug brought life to the condo. Now, she lifted her eyes and saw her living room from a new perspective. The couch had started to sag. It looked fine from above, but from this angle there could be no mistaking the wear. Loose change had fallen under the couch, too—$1.50, maybe more, plus an old magazine, a sucking candy and more shards of glass.

She dusted every week, religiously, but she could see now that she was missing many places including the legs of the cocktail table and the bottom of the armoire. The rug also was showing signs of wear, which she realized with regret, might not have been so visible if it were less plush.

After carpeting, Millie thought about Shelly. The coarse man seemed to have forgotten that someone else might be in the apartment. If Shelly had dialed 911, the police would be on the way. They had a stationhouse on Sunrise Boulevard, two miles away. They’d be there in three minutes—four tops—rush through the door with guns drawn and apprehend her assailant. Nothing could make up for this indignity, of course, but it would be some consolation to know this criminal would never do this again. Millie listened anxiously for the sound of approaching sirens.

None came.

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When the man finished, he collected his bag and darted out the back door. Millie lied on the floor, staring at the room. No one teaches you how to recommence your life after something like this. Millie Rosenblatt started by cleaning up. She collected the loose change and candy from under the couch and set them down on the cocktail table. Then she pressed her palms into the floor and pushed herself up. Her knees hurt.

She and Shelly didn’t have much tangible to show for 44 years together.

The only things of great value were a pair of Tiffany candlesticks that had been a wedding gift from her parents. Millie checked the armoire drawer, but she knew they were gone before she opened it. The thief had been surprisingly neat, almost surgical, in extracting them. He left undisturbed some reasonably nice stainless-steel silverware and napkin holders resting in adjacent compartments. He’d carefully cased the joint, Mille realized, and this somehow made things orders of magnitude worse.

Millie got a dustpan and swept the glass off the table. Then she fixed her housedress and returned to the bedroom. Shelly had fallen asleep.

He was sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, TV Guide in one hand, telephone receiver in the other. His chin had fallen to his chest and his erection had softened. Otherwise, he looked just as she’d left him. He stirred as she entered and looked at the phone and puzzle in terror.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine,” Millie said quietly. She took the crossword from his hands and replaced the receiver.

“You should go to the bathroom.”

“Okay.”

Shelly peed dutifully and returned to bed. He rolled to his side, clutched a pillow in his arms, like a stuffed animal, and fell back asleep almost instantly. Millie stared at the ceiling and waited as Shelly’s snoring, to which she’d been listening for more than forty years, gathered steam.

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*** When Millie first told him the story, David asked, “Did you think about killing him?” It would have been easy to do. She could have overdosed Shelly with Advil and told the police he swallowed it without her knowledge. It might even have been merciful—better than drifting through the rest of his life in a thickening fog. Certainly no one could have blamed her for murdering him after he’d failed her so profoundly.

Millie replied that she felt angry and even considered putting him in a home. But actions speak louder than words, and what did it say that she hadn’t even thought to call the cops? The next morning, she got up at five and made Shelly breakfast (microwaved Grape Nuts and wheat toast), laid out matching clothes and sat with him while he went through the motions of reading the Broward Times.

Millie went on living with Shelly as she’d lived before, with the exception of taking company with a thin, athletic man with gray hair parted on the side and sad brown eyes whom she met at Publix. She went over to his place two or three times a week, cooked for him and, once a month or so, had sex with him. On these occasions she’d lie in his arms and tell him intimate stories, including the tale of how her husband fell asleep while she was violated in the living room, and how’d she’d considered institutionalizing him but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

As Millie explained the motivations behind her actions—or inactions, David held her and nodded. The disease was beyond Shelly’s control, she said; it wouldn’t have been fair to punish him for it. No one could have challenged the validity of this point, but David recognized it as a rationalization. She wouldn’t have left Shelly under any circumstances. She didn’t have it in her.

When Millie insisted that she’d changed since meeting David, he nodded again. She viewed their relationship as proof that she’d bro68

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ken free of her conscience. All her life, she’d been taught to suppress her desire—first by her withholding parents and later, while he still possessed his faculties, by her controlling husband, who’d refused to give her children, though she’d wanted nothing more. By—goodness—taking up with another man she’d finally asserted her self-worth.

David understood that in taking up with him, she’d created continuity, not change. She’d struck up another co-dependent relationship with a damaged man who may have lacked the capacity to love. He certainly didn’t love her as she loved him. After all, David had done worse than forget a contrived anniversary. But, inevitably, Mille would return after a quarrel. She might disappear for a day or two and wonder whether David treated her as she deserved to be treated, but each time, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, she’d conclude that things would get better. Millie was a stayer. She might not know it, but David did. The professional understood that people didn’t change. One just needed to watch them long enough to find the patterns.

David thus wasn’t surprised to see Millie at his apartment the day after their spat. Nor was he surprised to see the pots on the stove and a conciliatory roast in the oven. She’d made herself up again, subtly this time, with just a hint of color on the cheeks and lips—the way David liked it most. She had a sundress on, open at the shoulders, easy to remove, and David knew what she had on her mind.

For similar reasons, it didn’t surprise him either to see the boy again.

The kid hit the ball into the backyard almost every day now—a mammoth tailing slice off the eighteenth tee. Since he’d failed to reach the green every time, there must have been moments when he thought better of attempting the shot. He’d probably once hit it 275 yards straight on the range and convinced himself that he could hit it just a little farther on the course and reach the green.

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David understood that players never exceeded their practice capacity. They didn’t max out their seven-iron at 150 yards on the range and suddenly hit it 180 on the course. Furthermore, practice and playing under pressure had little relationship to one another. A guy could hit balls left to right on the range all day long. It was an entirely different matter to stand on a tee box, such as the eighteenth at Augusta, which demanded a cut, and force oneself to hit a fade if it didn’t come naturally. Furthermore, if the chips were down—if, say, you needed a birdie to win—well, David could count on one hand the number of players who could execute a shot with which they weren’t comfortable. Jack could do it back when. These days, Tiger could too. They were pretty much it.

It was no sin to have limits. Hale Irwin played the entire 1991 Ryder Cup and won the decisive half-point over Bernhard Langer, hitting only a little two-yard cut off the tee. The professional managed his limitations by being realistic about them. Jack, Tiger and Bobby Jones were gods because they could hit whatever shot they wanted under any circumstances. But plenty of mortals had become great by going exclusively with what they knew. The kid could have done the same thing. He could’ve hit an iron down the middle of the fairway and pitched it up to the green for an easy par or maybe even a birdie.

But people weren’t built to rise above themselves. In twenty years on tour, David had learned this, if nothing else. The ability to be realistic about one’s own strengths and weaknesses and adjust strategy accordingly didn’t come naturally. Professionals honed it through relentless practice, and they were tested on the accuracy of their self-evaluations each and every day on the course.

Even the greats could lose their way. Palmer blew the Open at Olympic by trying not to lose, instead of trying to win. Tom Watson lost Winged Foot in ’74 by trying to keep it out of the rough, instead of hit70

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ting in the fairway. The essence of their greatness was that they learned from these failures. Most amateurs would never have such clarity about their essential self. It thus did not surprise David at all, as he sat down to read the newspaper in the California room, to find the boy searching for his ball in the backyard.

It did surprise him, though, when Millie emerged from the kitchen with a pitcher of fresh lemonade in her hands. She offered a glass to the boy, who greedily drank it, and accepted her invitation to sit down on one of the chaise lounges. As he did, she maternally dabbed at his forehead with a cool towel, and it became that two had already established a familiarity with one another that went beyond searching for a lost ball.

“David, this is Billy.”

“Hey.” “He likes to play golf.”

“I see that.”

“I’ve invited him to join us for dinner.”

Everyone was trying something new, and David, whose instincts had been honed to sense such things, knew that nothing good could come from this.

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Chapter 7 ***

A

S HE INSERTED THE KE Y INTO THE LOCK , David held the door han-

dle to keep it from making noise. The handle was worn, its gold veneer dulled by thousands of scratches. He propped the screen

door open with his behind, and pushed against the door with his right shoulder while simultaneously pulling on the knob to keep the hinge from squeaking. When he’d nudged the door open, he stepped into the frame and gently closed the screen behind him. Then he quietly shut the main door, making sure the latch was in the unlocked position so it wouldn’t click when he replaced it.

Once inside, the smell of his house washed over him. Every home had an odor. Some smelled good, some smelled bad. Some smelled like cashew nuts, some like motor oil, others stank of skunked beer. Richie Tristano’s place smelled as if tomatoes and onions had been pressed into the wallpaper, as in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Veruca Salt denies the existence of snozberries. Kristin’s house smelled like freshly cut roses and tulips—the fragrance lifted you up, just as Kristin did when she walked into a room. She carried the smell of her home with her, an aroma of kindness and decency. Her lips and face and body were all beautiful, but the first thing David thought of when he thought about her was her sweet smell. He’d be happy to sit all day next to her with his 73

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eyes closed and breathe her in.

His own house smelled, well, clean. David could detect the different scouring products that his mother used—Pine Sol for the floors, Windex for the windows and Scrubbing Bubbles on the toilets. His father expected her to keep the place spic and span. This was incongruous because their home wasn’t fancy and, in many places, had fallen into disrepair. Mal could be tolerant of his own negligence, but he was relentless and exacting in his demands of others.

Once inside, David took off his shoes. Mal didn’t like scuff marks on the floor. David then tiptoed upstairs, making sure to place his feet along the edges since the centers sagged and creaked, and he refrained from holding the shaky bannister, which should have been replaced long ago, like many things in the house. He’d almost made it to the top of the staircase when he heard, “Hello, David.”

His mother’s voice startled him. It shouldn’t have. She was simply sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine. But David had no vision of what his mother, Adina, did during the day. He knew she cleaned and cooked dinner. Otherwise, he had no idea. He hadn’t been home in the afternoon for longer than he could remember.

“Hi, Mom.” “What are you doing here?”

“I decided to come home early.” He tried to change the subject. “Is that Centennial? I didn’t know you liked Michener.”

“Why wouldn’t I like Michener?”

“No reason. The Source is the number one preferred door jamb by 7-Eleven owners.”

She didn’t smile. “Why aren’t you practicing?”

“I didn’t feel like it today.”

“Are you sick?”

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“No, I feel fine. I have an assignment for school that I need to work on. I’m supposed to revise a short story I wrote.”

“Couldn’t you do that tonight? You always do your homework at night.”

“I wanted to get an early start on it.”

This seemed like an acceptable explanation for a high school student, and, since it also happened to be an honest one, David hoped it would be the end of the conversation. He turned left, walked to his bedroom and put away his school things on his bookshelf. As he did, he paused to look at a photo that he’d clipped from the newspaper and Scotch taped to his wall the previous spring, when Jack won his fifth green jacket.

In the picture, Nicklaus, having just holed an improbable forty-foot birdie putt on the par-three sixteenth hole, is leaping off the ground in celebration. His long blond hair is flying in the wind and his left arm is thrusting his putter skyward. David liked to imagine that Nicklaus was driving his putter into the heart of Tom Weiskopf, a prodigiously gifted sweet swinger, who was standing on the tee watching.

It was Weiskopf ’s story, not Nicklaus’s, that most fascinated David.

Weiskopf had finished second in the tournament three times. What was he thinking about as Nicklaus delivered him his deathblow? Would he ever win? Would Nicklaus’s appetite for majors ever be sated? If not—if he was limited to nibbling on Jack’s leftovers, had the years he invested in the game been worth it? Mostly, David wondered whether Weiskopf felt anger toward Nicklaus or admiration.

David felt his mother’s glare on his back. She’d followed him to his room and now stood in the doorway.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Nope, everything’s fine.”

“I don’t understand what you’re doing home.”

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“I told you, I need to work on my short story. I read my first draft in class today. My teacher really liked it. He told me he thought that if I made some revisions, he might be able to get it published.”

“But you have to practice.”

“I think I can take one day off to work on a story.”

“But why can’t you work on the story tonight?”

David took a step in his mother’s direction and shouted, “Will you get the fuck out of my room and leave me alone!”

Immediately, David regretted the outburst. There would be consequences. He’d learned that it never paid to exhibit emotion—not on the golf course, not at school, and certainly not in his house. Mal would never tolerate such a display.

*** David could have offered hundreds of examples of Mal’s temper, but the one that most stood out in his memory was when his father caddied for him at his first Pennsylvania State Junior Championship.

They held the tournament that year at Olde Stonewall, a brutal track about forty miles northwest of Pittsburgh. David was twelve at the time and the course was more than he could really handle. Nevertheless, he’d managed to hold it together through the first round, and he was only one shot behind the lead in the final round when he came to the fifteenth hole, a merciless 240-yard uphill par-three. He’d made a par the previous day by hitting a five-wood, but for the second round they’d moved the pin to the back of the green, which sloped severely from back to front.

The wind had turned against them, so the same club was out of the question. David reached for his three-wood, but Mal took his hand off the club and handed him the driver.

“I think it’s the three-wood,” David said.

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“It’s not enough,” Mal insisted.

They went back and forth several times, but, needless to say, Mal prevailed. David proceeded to hit his drive into a bunker behind the green, which was dead. His bunker shot rolled off the green. He then pitched back into the bunker, blasted another shot off the green, flubbed a chip, and three-putted for an eight.

“Nice club,” David muttered as he flung his putter in his father’s direction. Mal yanked David off the course by his ear. The car ride home was the most painful experience of David’s life. An hour of thick silence followed at home by a savage beating that David had mostly blocked out.

Mal demanded unquestioning respect. If Adina told Mal that David had yelled and cursed, the punishment would be severe. David doubted his mother would rat him out both because she wouldn’t want David to endure what would follow and because over the years, she’d learned her own lessons about confronting anger.

*** Indeed, as David asserted himself, Adina backed up a step and shrunk. Seeing her reaction made David feel even worse. He sounded like his father.

The thought that he had this capacity made him shudder in revulsion.

“I’m sorry,” he said, softly. “Please don’t tell, Dad.” His mother didn’t reply. This would require a more emotional appeal.

“You used to write stories,” he said.

She had, once upon a time. David had found them in the basement under a stack of photo albums and some golf trophies that Mal had won before he got hurt in the war. Several years earlier, David had spent a rainy Sunday afternoon reading them while crouched on the damp floor.

The early ones were beautiful stories, with a playful sense of humor. In one, a man is having lunch at a diner when he’s visited by a future ver77

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sion of himself, who has come to warn him about mistakes he’s going to make. They end up bickering about the check and the older self storms off in anger. In another, a man invents a teleportation device, but it can only take him to Gene Shalit. Over time, Adina’s fiction grew darker. In one later story, a billionaire buys the rights to a band’s music and allows them to play only for him. Then, the stories stopped altogether.

“How do you know about that?” his mother asked.

“I found them in the basement.”

“You shouldn’t be looking through my things.”

“I didn’t mean any harm. I didn’t even know what they were at first.

I just started reading.”

“Well, I don’t write anymore.”

“You should. Your stories are good.”

David momentarily saw in his mother’s eye the spark of joy of a writer whose work has been read and appreciated, but it disappeared almost as quickly as had David’s look of satisfaction after his putting match with Mr. Hendrickson.

“That’s a long time ago, David.”

“Why don’t you start again? You could try submitting a story to a magazine, like Ladies’ Home Journal or maybe even The Saturday Evening Post. Someone would publish your stuff for sure.”

“I have to take care of the house and make dinner. That takes a lot of time. You just take that for granted.”

“So write during your free time, then. You could write in the mornings for an hour or two after Dad leaves and before you start the chores.”

“You can’t make money writing silly short stories. One has to be practical, David.”

David didn’t want to be practical. “I think I want to be a writer,” he said.

“What are you talking about? You’re going to be a golfer.”

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“My teacher says that I have talent. He’s recommending me for a summer writing program at Penn State.”

“That’s great, but you’re talented at golf, too. And what about all the time you’ve put in? You’re not going to just throw away years of practice, are you? You love golf.”

“I don’t love golf. It’s just something I do that I’m good at. Maybe I used to like it. I don’t remember. Now it seems kind of pointless. Writing, on the other hand, I love.”

“This is just a whim.”

“I’ve been keeping a journal for six years.”

“Anybody can keep a journal.”

“Mine’s over 500 pages. I write in it all the time.”

“I had no idea.”

“You’ve never asked. I’d like you to read some of my work and tell me what you think. I respect your opinion.”

Again, he saw a spark of joy—this time as both a writer and parent whose opinion mattered. Again, it disappeared almost immediately. She shook her head. “David, you know what your father is going to say about this. Writing’s a lark.”

“It’s not a lark, it’s a passion. I want to do something where I use my mind. I don’t know whether I want to be a journalist or a fiction writer, but I know that I want to think about what makes people tick.”

David pointed to the picture of Nicklaus. “When I look at that photo, do you know what I think about? Not Nicklaus or his caddie jumping at the air in glee. I’m thinking about what it must have felt like for the guy who lost, who’s standing back on the tee, watching a guy who has won more than anybody ever has, win some more. How bitter and devastated must he have been?

“I want to think about life. You understand me. I can tell from your 79

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stories that you do.”

She might have understood him at one time, but that person had lost the courage of her convictions. Adina shook her head again and said, “Right now, we need to call your father and tell him that you’re not at practice. We’ll tell him that you’re sick. You’ll go to your lesson tomorrow like usual. Everything will be fine. But if he shows up at the course and has to wait or doesn’t find you, there’ll be hell to pay.”

David thought, why should his mother care for a second if his father wasted a trip to the course—or one hundred trips to the course, for that matter? What had Mal ever done to deserve her concern? Furthermore, the course was on his way home from work. He’d stop, look for David, see he wasn’t there and drive home. It would cost him ten minutes at most.

“I think he’ll be okay,” David said.

“He’ll wonder where you are.”

“He’ll figure it out.”

“He’ll be upset with us for not calling.”

“He’ll be upset one way or another.”

“He’s already upset with you about the other day.”

“Why?” “Because of what happened at the course.”

“What happened at the course?

“He said you were wasting time.”

“I had a putting contest with my English teacher. Does that sound like a waste of time?”

Adina considered what he said, and for a moment David thought that reason would prevail. He should have known that fear always trumps reason. “You need to obey your father, David,” his mother said, finally. “He’s very mad right now. We’ll call him, tell him that you’re sick and then you’ll go to your lesson tomorrow, like usual.”

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“What’s the point of calling if he’s mad anyway?”

“Otherwise, he’ll think that we’re irresponsible.”

“I don’t care what he thinks.”

Mal would have punished his insolence harshly, but his mother didn’t have this in her. She just turned to leave the room. David knew that she was going to call Mal and explain exactly what had happened.

He knew her better than she knew herself. He knew that no matter how reasonable she regarded David’s argument, she just didn’t have an act of rebellion in her and failing to call Mal would have been an act of rebellion, at least in his eyes. How could it be that someone who had suffered so much at the hands of another could still care for his opinion? It was so pathetic it made David want to cry.

“You don’t mean that,” his mother said.

As she left the room, David replied, just loudly enough for her to hear, “Yes, I do. I really do.”

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Chapter 8 ***

A

RMS WAVING WILDLY, Walter Knotts ran across the fairway crying,

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” David said, as he rubbed his behind, more in shock

than in pain. During his years on tour, he’d hit more than his share of fans in the gallery (always rewarding them with a ball and a signed glove), but he’d never before been hit.

“Let me take a look at you,” Walter said, solicitously.

“That’s okay.”

“Come on,” Walter insisted. “You’ve seen one asshole, you’ve seen ’em all.”

“Okay,” David replied, reluctantly. He didn’t feel like he had much of a choice.

A volunteer drove them in a cart to the fitness trailer that followed the tour from city to city. Inside one of the changing rooms, David pulled down his trousers so Walter could probe and rummage. When the doctor surfaced, he proclaimed that David had merely suffered a bruise. He also reported that David had a hemorrhoid, for which he offered to prescribe a suppository. Then he invited David to dinner.

“It’s the least I can do given what happened and, besides, you’ll have a wonderful time. The Prices will be there and we’re having a steak dinner.”

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Walter smiled as he delivered the punchline. “A big, thick butt steak.”

When you’re on the road forty weeks a year, you don’t lightly turn down a home-cooked meal—even from a clumsy, overbearing proctologist with a propensity for punning.

In the evening, David put on his Sunday best—a white golf shirt, khakis and the only touch of fashion he could muster from his exclusively golf-oriented wardrobe: a blue cardigan that he always carried just in case, even though the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty degrees on tour in two months. The sweater had been sitting in his suitcase for so long that even an hour with the hotel iron couldn’t save it.

When he checked himself in the mirror, David thought he looked worn and shabby—and the clothes didn’t look too good either.

The Knottses lived on Huntsville Road in Magnolia Heights, in one of the white sandstone mansions that guarded the streets like sentinels. David parked his rental car along the curb and shuffled to the front door, which was framed by a pair of marble pillars. Apparently, proctologists did all right in Alabama.

Filled with apprehension, David dawdled. He walked zigzag across the front lawn, gazed at the flowers and checked his cell phone. Kristin had left another message. Superficially, it concerned Scott’s piano lessons, but, of course, the subtext went deeper.

David figured another conversation about his failings as a father could wait until the morning. He turned off the phone, collected himself and knocked on the front door. As David waited, he stared at the porch floor and his shabby sneakers. The only nice footwear he owned were golf shoes.

David couldn’t imagine that the Knottses would appreciate spike marks across their floor, so he’d chosen the sneakers. Now he felt ashamed.

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and polished, patent leather shoes answered the door. With an air of resignation, he gestured for David to enter the massive, brilliant foyer.

Ornate moldings adorned the walls and a giant chandelier beamed more white light into the room than it could handle. The effect was blinding.

The entire experience seemed calculatedly impractical, designed only to portend enormity.

David and the black man in the tuxedo faced one another awkwardly, as if they were in a decontamination chamber. The butler had closely cropped hair flecked with gray and nodules of dark skin under his tired eyes. David found him difficult to read. Usually, he could find hope or desperation or rage in someone’s face. In the butler’s eyes he found nothing.

“Take your coat, sir?”

David had only a rain jacket that he’d found in the bottom of his golf bag. He preferred to keep it on. The windbreaker was badly wrinkled— it hadn’t rained on tour in longer than anyone could remember—but Gore-Tex bounced back way better than wool. Still, he didn’t want to be the only one wearing a jacket at dinner, especially one with a Top-Flite logo. As David laid it across the extended arm, he felt further shame. To his credit, the butler displayed no evidence of condescension. He simply said, “thank you, sir,” and gestured for David to enter the house.

The living room was awash in color. It was everywhere: in hanging portraits of landscapes, old southerners and bowls of fruit, and in real bowls of fruit. It was in the women guests, who’d painted their faces and wore dresses of bright green, red and yellow. Even the walls seemed to glow.

David only knew Walter Knotts and Charlie Price, of course, and neither was anywhere to be seen, so he stood there awkwardly, admiring the fruit portraits and the brilliant costumes, and waited. Finally, he was greeted by an appealing woman wearing espadrilles and a floral sundress, 85

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just short enough to tempt. She had orange hair, worn up, and milky-white skin that glowed in the flickering light of the fireplace and was either resilient or well-preserved or, perhaps, both. Her face was marred neither but laugh lines nor crow’s feet, but David could tell that she wasn’t young. She had yearning eyes. David could read them clear as day.

“You must be the professional,” she said. Her words stirred him.

He’d been announced so many times on the first tees of tournaments that introductions had long ago ceased to have any effect on him, but this greeting gave him a little charge. It was true, he was a professional—the professional tonight—and for a moment, he felt a tinge of pride.

“Yes,” he said.

She offered him her hand.

“Dawn.”

“David Howard.”

She took his hand, and he felt an even stronger charge.

“So you’re the person Walter hit in the ass.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Did it hurt?”

“Not too badly.”

“Can’t imagine he could hit it hard enough to cause any pain.”

“He hits it okay.”

“You’re nice to say that.”

They fell silent, but the surrounding air felt electric, as if a cloud of fireflies were swirling about them. David’s skin tingled. He noticed her soft, moist lips.

“What’s it like?”

“How do you mean?”

“Playing professionally.”

“It has its moments.”

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“It must be very satisfying chasing that little ball around for a living.”

He checked her eyes. She was playing with him.

“It’s like anything else in life. You start in one place, end up in another. It’s just a question how long it takes you to get there.”

“That come to you after you got hit in the rear end?”

“Isn’t that when most epiphanies occur?”

“I see our professional is quite the philosopher.”

David felt plucky. “A man gets lots of time to think on the golf course,” he said, mischievously. “That’s where the Buddha did his best work, you know. He used to play all the time with his disciple Ananda, who had a nasty slice. He took lessons for years, tried meditating—nothing worked.

One time he shanked one and hit the Buddha right in the butt.”

“What happened?”

“He didn’t even notice.” David paused for dramatic effect. “Have you ever seen the Buddha? He had a giant ass.”

Dawn laughed. This pleased David more than he expected.

“Do you like golf?” he asked.

“Not so much.”

“I suppose you find it pointless.”

“No, not for that reason.” She spoke compellingly in a slow, Southern drawl. “If you look at it from a certain level of abstraction, life is pointless. I’ve just never been comfortable with the dimpled ball. It’s aesthetically displeasing. They should really smooth them out.”

“The ball wouldn’t go anywhere. A round would take forever.”

“The journey’s the point, is it not?

“You’re quite the philosopher yourself.”

“No.” She batted her eyelashes. “Just a Southern belle.”

David hadn’t played like this in many years. It felt like using

fireworks—you don’t forget how, but it doesn’t feel any less dangerous.

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“I doubt that’s all you are,” David said, thoughtfully. The air between them had become thick and syrupy. “I can see that you’re an adventuresome woman. I’m sure you have a vibrant life, full of all kinds of excitement.”

She paused and met his gaze. “You mean other than bantering about the Buddha’s derrière with professional golfers?”

“Right, other than that.”

“None that I can think of.”

“I don’t believe it for a second,” David said. “What do you do?”

“What do I do?” She inhaled as she repeated the question. Her body swelled as the oxygen found all the right places. Gentlemen didn’t stare, but as Dawn considered his question, she stared so intently at a portrait of a halved Casaba melon dripping with juice, David couldn’t help but conclude that she wanted him to look. So he did, until she finally exhaled and offered her answer.

“I like to look around,” she replied. “Just kind of keep my eyes open.”

Her words danced like sparks. David wondered whether the air between them might explode in a conflagration of libidinal energy.

Suddenly, a burst of putrid air extinguished the smoldering fire.

Walter, drenched in foul-smelling cologne and trailed by Charlie, slapped David on the back, threw an arm around his shoulder and said, “Listen to this one.” David felt a knot in his stomach.

“This medical resident is studying to be a proctologist. To get ahead of the game, he goes down to the morgue one night to practice. He uncovers the first guy and, what do you know, there’s a cork in his butt. The med student thinks it’s strange, so he pulls the cork and music starts to play.

It’s country music.” Walter began to croon in a talentless Willie Nelson impression: ‘On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again.’

“The student freaks out. He runs to get the chief resident and drags 88

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him down to the morgue in the middle of the night. The med student pulls the cork out again. ‘On the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again.’

“The doctor’s totally unimpressed. The student is shocked by his boss’s reaction. ‘Isn’t that incredible?’ the resident asks the chief. ‘Isn’t that the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?’” “‘Nah,’ says the chief resident, ‘Any asshole can sing country music.’”

Charlie Price howled and with bonhomie slapped Walter, who was keeling over, unable to breathe, the wind knocked out of him by the sheer force of his own humor. David smiled politely because what does one say to that? He was a bit worried that he inadvertently and rudely might have grimaced during the telling of the joke. But he was more interested in Dawn’s reaction to the proctologist’s performance. She wouldn’t allow herself to be read. She wore her own thin smile and kept her eyes glued to the floor, where they’d been throughout the telling of the joke. They remained there as Walter expounded upon his own genius.

“It’s funny because it plays on the stereotype that country musicians are stupid.” He clearly wanted more approval from the group. More specifically, he wanted approval from Dawn. With her eyes still pinned to the floor, Dawn said, “That’s a good one, honey.”

Blood rushed to David’s head as Walter placed an arm around Dawn’s left shoulder. “Have you met my better half?” he asked.

David nodded. He thought he might faint on Walter and Dawn’s marble floor. Desperately, he searched for something to say—anything that would shift the focus from the notion that Dawn was married to this dolt.

“You know, the Casaba is Jack Nicklaus’s favorite,” David said. “It doesn’t keep as long as other melons, but it’s more flavorful.”

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*** Dinner presented new cascades of color—turkey and brown gravy, mounds of bright orange sweet potatoes, yellow corn bread, green beans, blackened okra, red and white wine. The food and drink flowed past David as quickly as the conversation. Walter told more horrible jokes.

They talked about the market, which was either going up or down; the heat wave, which might never end; and how Bill Clinton and his uppity wife might just destroy the country if they got their communist health care plan through Congress. He’d attended a few of these dinners before.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to golf. When he was at the table, people couldn’t resist.

Jefferson Wells, an orthodontist from Dunbarton Oaks with giant teeth that had been filed and bleached and wrenched across his mouth like stones through a henge, asked everyone at the table what they liked best about golf. Brad Gillette, who owned Cadillac dealerships in English Village and Vulcan City, and who’d offered to put David in a Seville for a good price, said, “I love pulling the driver from its cover.”

Answering his own question, Dr. Wells said, “I like getting dressed for golf on a cold day when you can put on a turtleneck and a sweater.”

“To cold days,” said a faceless voice to cheers of “hear, hear.”

“I love flipping the club to the caddie after a good shot,” said Walter.

“So you’ve flipped a club to a caddie precisely zero times,” said Charlie.

When the laughter subsided, another guest said, “I love putting on my shoes, pulling the laces tight and hearing the sound of the spikes against the concrete.”

“I love grinding my shoes into the sand before a bunker shot,” said someone else.

“I love playing in the wind.”

“Or the rain.”

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“Man against the elements.”

“I love the beer after the round.”

“I love it all.”

“To the greatest game in the world.”

“Hear, hear.”

David understood that the subject of golf had been approached in this contrived fashion as a roundabout way of broaching The Question.

It’s all any golfer ever really wanted to ask him. His dinner companions were simply too practiced in Southern hospitality to engage him directly.

Walter was a different story. He had far less tact.

“What’s the answer for you, David? What do you love about golf?”

Through years of experience, David had learned the dangers of desire. If they’d had the courage to ask him directly what had happened at the Open, David would have told them, honestly, that he’d lost because he played with desire. Only a Zen master could win a major. To put in the type of practice required to win a major, one needed to want to win more than anything. But in the heat of competition, one paradoxically needed to play with disregard for the outcome. From his failure, David had learned to stop wanting.

But in that moment, at that iridescent Birmingham dinner table, David again felt the corrupting hunger of desire. He wanted the conversation that they’d now be having if he’d held it together and won the Open. Instead of treating him with kid gloves, they’d be asking him how he dealt with pressure and fame and what it was like to play with the greats. He would get to be great in front of Dawn. This he wanted desperately. He wanted her. He wanted to peel her sundress from her shoulders as she undid his buckle and take her on the table, in front of her cuckolded husband and his guests and let them see a champion at play.

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no answer, of course. “Assumes facts not in evidence,” David would have said in a court of law. He didn’t love anything about golf. He couldn’t think of anything he even liked about golf. He had a vague memory that, as a kid, he’d liked playing in the rain. But if this were true—and he couldn’t definitively say that it was—it likely had ceased being fun in the middle of a round played in the middle of nowhere in front of no one, with men with whom he had nothing in common other than an occupation and a poor tournament placing—a round that he grinded out in the mud so that he might pocket an extra few hundred dollars and so that his wife would relent (temporarily) from pressuring him to retire.

There had been many of these rounds.

David resented the question. For them, it was a game. For him, it was life. No one asked Charlie Price what he loved about insurance or Jefferson Wells, the orthodontist with faultless, gleaming horse teeth, what he loved about tightening braces. He found effrontrous the idea that they thought a comparison could be made between their feelings about a weekend pastime and his own feelings about his life’s work.

Nevertheless, he understood that he should have replied with a platitude. He should have said he liked the game’s camaraderie or its honor or how it pitted man against the elements. In all likelihood, he’d never see Walter Knotts again. There’d be no more dinners at his home and no more flirts with his wife. Chances were good that David would never see Birmingham again. He might manage to keep his tour card with a few good showings the rest of the season, but he might not. Next time this year, he was as likely to be giving lessons to old ladies as he was to be playing in the Southern Open, and if the end didn’t come this year, it would come soon enough. Whenever the end finally came, how much better would it be to accept it with dignity than to go kicking and screaming?

But there was more at work here. The human spirit won’t submit so 92

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quietly—rage against the dying of the light and all. Instead of responding with a bromide, David smiled and asked, “What do you love most about your job, the asses or the assholes?”

His response surprised David as much as anyone, but once the words were out, they couldn’t be taken back. He looked around the table at Walter and the guests, whose mouths were agape, and he felt uncomfortable enough to consider excusing himself—until he stole a glance at Dawn. She was still holding her husband’s hand. She still had the blank look that she’d had throughout the conversation. But David could see that Dawn wasn’t staring at the table out of discomfort like the others.

David could see she was doing it to stifle a grin.

Inside himself, he felt something stir that had laid dormant for a very long time.

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Chapter 9 ***

E

ACH AF TERNOON, AROUND FOUR O’CLOCK , Millie walked around the

Great Plantation Lake, carrying a one-pound dumbbell in each arm. She wore a nylon running suit, a leopard-print headband and

a blue Velcro belt. The exercise belt held a water bottle and, though a Starbucks was never more than a quarter mile away, basic first aid, including salt tablets, Advil, adhesive bandages and a small tube of Neosporin.

Backpackers carried less.

Every able-bodied woman at the complex walked the path—some clockwise, some counter-clockwise. A few had their husbands grudgingly in tow. Periodically, the women would stop and gossip with their friends. The talks lasted longer than the walks. In fact, most didn’t even complete the two-mile path. The most doting husband picked their wives up along the way. Others took the shuttle bus back to their condo or simply doubled back. No one walked fast enough to raise their heart rate.

David hated the scene like poison, but he went along that afternoon as a gesture to Millie. When they’d first taken up together, she had been nervous about people seeing them together, but those reservations had long since passed. She liked being seen with David and, besides, more funny business went on at Plantation Estates than in any college dorm.

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As they passed the third tee, Millie said, “I think it’d be nice if you spent some time with Billy.”

“Who’s Billy?”

“The boy from the other day?”

“You mean the kid who keeps hitting his ball into my backyard?”

“Yes.” David had hoped the lemonade would be the last he’d see of the kid.

“Why would I want to spend time with him?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I just thought it would be nice.”

“Why would he want to spend time with me?”

“He expressed an interest.”

David looked at Millie skeptically. “I find that unlikely,” he said.

Arthur and Roz Lipschutz approached them from the clockwise direction. In his day, Arthur had been a moderately successful lyricist.

His masterwork was the Gilligan’s Island theme song—not the intro about the three-hour tour, but the bit at the end about joining us here each week. Because he’d dismissed the show’s concept as stupid, Arthur had sold his rights for $5,000—decent money in those days, but nothing compared to what Bob Denver and Alan Hale earned from the syndication pie, even though neither could act his way out of a paper bag. Years later, Arthur to get the corporate executives to reconsider the deal, but they wouldn’t budge. David could sense the bitterness in his step.

“Good morning, Arthur. Good morning, Roz,” said Millie.

“Good morning, Millie,” they chimed in reply David and Arthur exchanged polite nods. Funny thing, David thought—if they walked in opposite directions, they’d see each other again in half a lap around the lake, but if they’d walked in the same direction, they might never have crossed paths in the first place. David thought that if he looked hard enough, he could find a life metaphor in that observation.

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“Why do Arthur and Roz walk clockwise?” David asked Millie.

“Lots of people do. What’s wrong with that?”

“In America, the traditional direction is counter-clockwise. That’s how the Kentucky Derby is run” “This way you can see people,” Millie said.

“Only if some people continue to walk counter-clockwise. If everyone walked clockwise, you wouldn’t see anyone, unless they walked especially fast or slow.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“How do people know which direction to walk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are there some people who only walk clockwise?”

“Yes.” “And some people who only walk counter-clockwise?”

“Yes.” “Does anybody ever change directions?”

“Sometimes.”

“Hmm.” David had no interest in how the system sorted itself out, but anything was better than discussing the kid.

Sal Castiglione and Helen Tennenbaum approached from the east.

Sal had been rich once. He’d made a fortune selling brushes with handles made from elk antlers, obtained from the National Elk Preserve in Jackson, Wyoming, pursuant to a questionable agreement with the National Wildlife Service Regional Director, negotiated over grappa and mascarpone cheese at the Hyatt Regency in Maui. Sal collected the antlers for free, but sold the toothbrushes for two bucks a pop and the hairbrushes for four. Sal made millions, but he lost most of it to three ex-wives, and squandered the rest on an investment in magnetic bracelets that were supposed to relieve joint pain, but instead yellowed wrists. He lived in 97

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Plantation Estates by the good graces of Helen Tannenbaum, a dowdy dowager, whom Sal met at the Krispy Kreme and courted over soups and puddings. When Sal made an honest woman out of Helen under a canopy of dandelions at the Phase Three Clubhouse, he completed his descent into the middle class. Nevertheless, he maintained a regal air that David found arrogant.

“Good morning, Sal. Good morning, Helen,” said Millie.

“Good morning, Millie,” they responded in chorus.

Sal and David exchanged polite nods.

“So what do you think?” Millie asked.

“About what?”

“About spending time with Billy.”

He’d hoped she’d forgotten, but this wasn’t going away.

“Why does he keep hitting his ball into my yard?” David asked.

“Have you asked him that? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s more than three hundred yards to carry the water. I bet the kid hasn’t made it once.”

“I don’t know about that, but I know he likes golf very much.”

“There has to be something wrong with him,” David continued, shaking his head. “It’s one thing to try something a couple of times and fail, but he plays the course every day. Is he like retarded?”

“He seems quite intelligent,” Millie replied.

“Well, that’s the first thing I’d ask him. That and what he’s doing here.” David turned to face Millie. “What is he doing here, anyway?

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“This is no place for a boy,” David said, emphatically. “This is a place for old people to walk around in circles while they wait to die.”

*** They walked in silence for a while. David had said negative things about 98

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Florida life before, and he understood that these statements hurt Millie.

She took the implication to be that he wasn’t satisfied with her. David just didn’t want to talk about that boy. But he could tell that this subject wouldn’t easily be put to ped.

As they passed the third green, where the pin had been set at the base of a Biarritz green (rendering it effectively a miniature golf hole), Millie philosophically said, “In golf, you start by the clubhouse at the first tee and end up by the eighteenth green back at the same clubhouse. Isn’t that just walking in a giant circle under trees waiting to die?”

“Yeah, and how much golf do you see me playing?”

“You might feel differently about things if you got more involved.”

“In what?” David asked. “Should I join the Phase Three Brotherhood and help plan the trips to the greyhound track? Or should I play canasta and pinochle? In what exactly should I get involved?”

“In life.”

*** They passed a woman who neither of them recognized. She was bouncing to music from what appeared, improbably, to be a Sony Walkman. It looked like she’d stepped out of a Jane Fonda workout tape.

“Maybe you could get back involved in golf,” Millie said. “You could play a little with Billy and perhaps give him some lessons. It would be good for you.”

“So that what’s going on here,” David said, accusatorily. “You offered him free lessons.”

“I didn’t offer him anything. Billy told me he liked golf. I told him that you used to be a professional. He said it would be fun to play with you sometime.”

“I haven’t touched a club in nine years. I haven’t even thought about 99

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golf since I stopped playing.”

“Just spend some time with him then. Tell him old stories. He’d appreciate spending time with you, and I think you’d get a lot of it in return. He’s a very nice young man.”

As they turned to acknowledge Pincus Blatt, who’d spent his life in kosher meats, David could see the sincerity in Millie’s eyes.

“Optimism can be destructive,” he said. “The secret of life isn’t trying to make things better. It’s to figure out precisely how things are and then make the best of them. Did you ever think that maybe there’s no silver lining? Maybe the kid plays golf by himself because he likes to play golf by himself. Maybe he has no friends because he doesn’t want any friends.

Maybe I’m a miserable old man because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Being miserable is a choice, David. I don’t need you to tell me that bad things happen. But you missed something if the lesson you’ve taken from life is that we have no alternative but to accept things the way they are. We can always choose to be hopeful.”

“You just have to make things better, don’t you?” David asked with a smile.

“It’s who I am,” Millie replied.

“Well, it’s nice,” he said. Millie smiled and slipped her arm inside his.

They slowed from a power walk to a stroll and, for the moment, felt like a real couple.

*** “Have I ever told you about this guy I played with named Chip Hearn?”

“You’ve never told me anything about your golf career.”

“I went through qualifying school with Chip. Nice guy, good player, but he didn’t hit it far enough to make it on tour. You can learn shots 100

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around the green, but you either have enough pop or not. Chip missed getting his card by twenty shots. After the last round, I shook his hand and said something consoling. He was totally optimistic. He said he’d get his card next year.

David paused to watch the hackers going off the fifth tee. One sliced it over the netting that guarded the condos to the right. He teed up another ball and hit a grounder up the middle that was rewarded with fist bumps from his playing partners.

“Ten years later, I ran into Chip down here in Florida,” David continued. “I was playing an exhibition and he was on the range. I remembered him and asked how things were going. He told me that he’d tried to qualify every year since we’d played together. The closest he’d come was sixteen shots. But he was practicing really hard, and he was convinced that this time he’d get his card.”

“Did he get it?”

“Nah, he missed by thirty shots.”

They approached Sol and Viv Brenner. Sol spent his days reading old New Yorker magazines that he’d saved over the years with the idea of getting to them when he had more time. He was reading them chronologically, from oldest to most recent. While he could say very little about the issues of the day, he could have a spirited conversation about the Iraqi hostage crisis or Terry Bradshaw and the Steelers.

Millie said, “Good morning, Sol. Good morning, Viv” “Good morning, Millie,” they replied.

“Fine day, isn’t it?”

“A bit warm,” Sol replied. “Reminds me of that terrible heat wave in ’77. I was just reading the coverage of the New York City mayoral election. That Abzug lady has a lot of spunk.”

Sol and David exchanged polite nods.

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“I don’t know whether you did something terrible or someone did something terrible to you,” Millie said after Sol and Viv had receded.

“Maybe it was both. Whatever happened, you can always choose to forgive and you can always choose to have hope.”

They continued walking in silence past the clubhouse, where the old men played pinochle and the women canasta, then past the tennis courts where they lobbed balls back and forth in games of low-speed doubles.

They continued past the forgotten shuffleboard courts and the badminton net, which hadn’t been used even once and had fallen into disrepair.

They walked past people finishing their exercise and others just getting started. They walked past old men and women, with memories, dreams and regret.

Life came and went.

Soon David and Millie would complete the circle. They would return to his condo and to the backyard, where the boy would soon again hit his ball, if he hadn’t already. He was coming as sure as Sol Brenner and Arthur Lipschutz would be charging at him from a clockwise direction.

After a lifetime in golf, David had learned that when a ball comes flying at you, it’s pointless to try and avoid it completely—the best you can do is turn your back, stoop down and hope it catches you on a fleshy part of your body.

“All right,” David said to Millie. “One lesson. But that’s it.”

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Chapter 10 ***

W

ITH A SPRING CHILL IN THE AIR and the sun rising in the distance,

David clipped five-irons off the morning dew under Herschel Pickard’s watchful eye. Herschel had laid a club parallel to

David’s feet for proper alignment and a shaft in the ground in front of him. The set-up served as the foundation for a routine they called the ’Round-the-Clock Drill. It required David to hit a low draw, a medium-height draw, a high draw, a high fade, a medium-height fade and a low cut around the shaft in repeating sequences. David could perform this drill in his sleep, but he became distracted by a host of chirping sparrows and lost track of his place in the rotation.

David didn’t want to admit that he’d lost his place. After so many years together, Herschel often knew something was bothering David before David became aware of it himself. If David asked for a cue, Herschel would know for sure, and the last thing David wanted to do was talk about what was really on his mind. But when he hit a low draw instead of a high fade, the jig was up.

“Seems like you’re fighting it a bit today,” Herschel said.

This was about as much as Herschel ever said. David had been taking lessons with Herschel since he was four. In those twelve years, he could count on one hand the number of times he’d heard his teacher 103

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utter a complete paragraph. Mostly, his teaching consisted of isolated thoughts such as “the ball only knows the club head” or “always have a target” that required substantial decoding. They’d had many lessons during which Herschel said nothing at all.

Herschel’s reticence didn’t help his business any. In David’s experience, Herschel’s nuggets often proved to be pearls, but their wisdom could be extracted only by digging it out of the dirt, as Hogan would say. Duffers wanted a quick fix, not a therapy session with the Delphic Oracle. But this restraint was a large part of why Mal had entrusted Herschel with David’s swing, an act of faith that seemed almost transcendental given that Mal wouldn’t allow anyone else to even speak with David about golf mechanics. Mal loathed conversation.

Mal also knew that Herschel had played high-level professional golf.

In fact, he’d played well enough to defeat Gene Sarazen in the quarterfinals of the 1940 PGA Championship, shortly before leaving to serve World War II. A severe leg injury at Anzio ended his playing career and restricted him—one might say sentenced him—to a lifetime of working with twenty-handicappers. Mal Howard didn’t have patience for most people, but he respected good golf and he honored national service.

David could have viewed Herschel’s presence as another act of control on Mal’s part, but over the years he’d grown to love his teacher. His feelings had only grown more intense as Herschel became increasingly confined to a wheelchair because his leg would throb if he stood on it for too long, David viewed Herschel as a gift—perhaps the only one that Mal had ever given him—and someone that he wanted to please.

“Sorry,” David said. “I was thinking about Jack Nicklaus’s putt at the sixteenth hole at last year’s Masters.” This was literally true, though of course it didn’t get at the underlying causal question of why David had this matter on his mind in the first place. Still, it was safer territory than 104

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talking about Mal, so David leaned into the subject. “Do you think Jack ever thought about how it made Tom Weiskopf feel?” he asked.

Herschel gave all questions serious consideration, no matter whether someone asked him something mundane, such as whether it would rain the following day, or something seemingly profound, such as the key to the golf swing. Surely no one had ever asked Herschel this question before, so it hardly surprised David that Herschel thought for several minutes before he shook his head and responded in his raspy baritone voice, “No.”

*** David resumed the drill—low draw, waist-high draw, high draw, high cut, waist-high cut, and the low cut, which was pretty much good only for hitting around trees. He tried to lose himself in his practice, but the intrusive thoughts wouldn’t recede. After a couple of rotations, David backed off the tee and stepped toward Herschel’s chair.

“I don’t understand how Jack could have helped but think about Weiskopf. Weiskopf had finished second in the Masters three times. The tournament meant everything to him. Jack had already won four green jackets. He has more majors than anyone in history, including his idol Bobby Jones, and he still has a long career ahead of him. Surely Nicklaus must have thought about how much more the win would have meant to Weiskopf.”

Herschel didn’t say anything. Upon reflection, David realized that he hadn’t actually posed a question. Herschel never volunteered information. David resumed hitting balls, but almost immediately he became distracted again and stepped back once more from the practice tee.

“I know what you’re going to say—or what you would say if I’d asked you a direct question. You’d say that thoughts like that are poisonous.

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For Nicklaus to be Nicklaus, he needs to have complete conviction in the importance of what he’s doing. That’s right isn’t it.”

After a while, Herschel replied, “Stalin had great conviction.”

“Right,” David said. “Let me ask you this: Why is golf important? It’s a game. How could someone convince himself that a game is important?”

Herschel thought for a while and said, “These are quite different questions.”

“Then stick with the first question: Why is golf important?”

“Important to whom?”

“Do you know that it’s frustrating talking with you?”

“I know that the key to learning is asking the right questions.”

David momentarily returned to the five-irons before he turned around once more and asked, “Why is golf satisfying?”

“That’s an improved question,” Herschel said, “but satisfying to whom?”

“Okay, why is golf satisfying to you?

Herschel smiled. “That’s a question that I can answer,” he said. Herschel thought for a while and replied, “I find satisfaction in the purity of a well-struck shot.”

“Why golf? Why not pursue chess or photography?”

“I could imagine finding satisfaction in an elegant chess move or a beautifully framed photograph similar to the pure golf shot,” Herschel said.

“Do you still find satisfaction in a well-struck shot even after seventy-five years of playing golf?

“Yes.” David found this difficult to absorb. “How far could you hit a fiveiron in your prime?”

“On the day that I was fortunate enough to defeat Mr. Sarazen at the PGA, I aced a 193-yard par-three with a mashie.”

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“And how far can you hit a five-iron today?”

“Let’s find out.”

Herschel hauled himself out of his chair, hobbled toward David and gestured in the direction of David’s club.

“May I?” “Of course,” David answered, as he handed his teacher the five-iron.

Herschel was close to ninety years old. Each of his hips had degenerated, cataracts had so clouded his eyesight that he could barely see the ball let alone a target and arthritis had deformed his hands so that they shook when he placed them around the club. But these frailties disappeared the moment he drew back the club. It created a graceful, fluid arc that was unmistakably the swing of a professional.

Herschel struck the ball with a descending blow that made a quiet thump and a tiny divot. He squinted his eyes to follow the path of the ball. It landed approximately eighty-five yards from the tee and rolled out another fifteen yards, coming to rest just beyond the 100-yard sign.

Herschel returned the club to David and said, “One hundred yards.”

“Does that bother you?”

“What?”

“That you could hit it almost two hundred yards with a hickory-shafted club and a wound ball and today, with modern equipment, you can barely hit it half as far. Doesn’t that make you angry or regretful?”

“No.” “Don’t you wish that you could hit it like you used to?”

“No.” “Don’t you wonder how far you’ll be able to hit it in a few years— whether you’ll even be able to still play golf?”

“No.” “How do you not think about things?”

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Herschel thought about this for an unusually long time, even by his standards, until he said finally, “I exist only in the moment.”

“I don’t understand,” David said. “To me, everything is interconnected. Games make no sense without context. Nicklaus’s putt at the sixteenth hole is only remarkable in the context of the competition. How could he only be thinking about the putt, when the putt only has significance because of the pain it causes to Weiskopf and Miller? Without context, the moment has no meaning.”

Herschel thought again and said, “No, only the moment has meaning. Past and future are human inventions. The sequential ordering of time is an illusion. There is only the moment.”

“I don’t get it,” David said.

Herschel put a warm, reassuring arm around David’s shoulder. It was one of the few times that David could remember Herschel touching him.

“Let me tell you a story,” Herschel said. David couldn’t remember Herschel ever having told him another one.

“A woman is being chased through the forest by a streak of hungry tigers,” Herschel says. “She runs for her life until she reaches a cliff, where her only means of escape is a thin vine. As the tigers are still behind her, she begins to climb down the vine. Shortly, she is able to see into the valley below and realizes that an ambush of tigers is waiting for her on the jungle floor. To make matters worse, a mischief of mice has begun gnawing at the vine, sealing her fate. At precisely this moment, the woman notices a bunch of strawberries growing from the vine. She looks at the tigers above, the tigers below, and the mice gnawing at her lifeline, then picks one of the strawberries and places it in her mouth. The strawberry is succulent and she enjoys it thoroughly.”

David listened carefully, but when Herschel finished, he presumed— correctly as it would turn out—that this would be one of those stories 108

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that he’d spend a lifetime trying to appreciate. He considered asking another clarifying question or two but knew that it would be pointless, and so instead smiled warmly at Herschel, who gestured for him to resume the drill.

David still didn’t have his heart in practice, but as often seemed to be the case in his life, his only good option was continuing to hit golf balls.

Without so much as a glance down the range, David took his stance, waggled, and drilled a scorching low draw around the post. He felt something—not relief certainly, but something—and so he reloaded and hit another screaming line drive—then another and another and another.

He continued hitting them faster and faster, pouring every ounce of his energy into each one, pounding the club into the ground with such force that it shook and sprayed divots fifty yards down the fairway, until his biceps throbbed and his back began to ache. He welcomed the pain— embraced it, and swung even harder and faster, as if he could expel his grief and frustration into the ground, but the weight wouldn’t transfer, and he finally became exhausted, dropped his club and began to sob.

Herschel didn’t understand, but he waddled forward, put an arm around David’s shoulder and said, “It’s okay, son.”

Despite his love for Herschel, David didn’t believe it.

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Chapter 11 ***

T

HE PUT TING GREEN IS A MIRROR FOR THE SOUL . Those who are pure of

heart, present in the moment and sure of their place in the universe can pour the little white globe into the void from any distance and

angle. To these charmed souls, this aspect of the game presents no obstacle. For mere mortals, the challenge is more formidable.

A casual observer would regard rolling a ball into a hole with a flat stick as a simple task. The professional knows better. Putting exposes even the subtlest imperfection in a player’s physical motion or weakness in their psyche. This aspect of the game is merciless. The best one can hope for is to fail less often than his competitor.

Putting is so arbitrary that Ben Hogan proposed eliminating it from the game. An unrepaired spike mark or an imperfectly cut hole could undo all of a player’s hard work, and the proportion of its relative significance made no sense. At the 1960 Masters, Hogan, then 47 years old, hit more greens in regulation than anyone else. He also took more putts.

Hogan finished tied for sixth.

In the first round of the Southern Open, David shot 74—two over par. He covered the 7,230 yards from tee to green in 35 shots and the remaining 200 feet in 39 more. He missed eight putts of less than six feet, including three from inside three feet and one from ten inches.

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On good days, David putted intuitively. His eyes automatically collected information—the slope of the green, its speed and the grass’s lean toward the rising or setting sun. During the first round in Montgomery, David operated the opposite of intuitively. He noticed everything. He noticed the wind sweeping through the southern pines. They sounded restless, as if they wanted to be somewhere else, a feeling with which David empathized. He noticed the outlines of old cups on the green, the work of a lazy greenskeeper. He noticed the old lady selling bottled water in the sizzling heat. He noticed the component parts of his putting stroke—the forward press, the rocking of the shoulders, the hit. It all felt mechanical and awkward.

As he warmed up for the second round, David could no better quiet his mind. He noticed the sign above the putting green announcing the tournament’s name, and he wondered how Southern Guaranty’s executives and the Southern Open’s founders failed to agree on a less cumbersome title. He noticed, guarding the putting green, a tournament volunteer wearing an enormous straw hat emblazoned with the tournament’s awkward label and, beneath it, a grand toupee that threatened to sail off if the wind blew too hard. He noticed the way his putts drifted to the left of his target.

Then he noticed a man waving his arms wildly. Upon reflection, it was a boy—an African-American boy—an island of black in a sea of white faces, pastel-colored shirts, red hot dogs, green grass and yellow flags. The boy called his name.

“David, David!”

Surely, he wasn’t yelling at him, David thought. He looked around the practice green, but he could find no one with the same name.

“David, David!” he cried again.

David walked over to the boy, putter in hand. He recognized the face 112

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now. It was the kid who’d given them directions in Birmingham.

“Morris, right?”

“Yes, sir. Morris Bernley.”

“Glad you could make it out.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“No school today?”

“Yeah, but it’s all right. We’re doing trigonometry in math. That stuff is for kids.”

“Golfers use trigonometry all the time.”

“I don’t mean it’s unimportant. I mean it’s easy. I could do sines and cosines when I was eight. I know the tables by heart.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

David wasn’t much of a conversationalist before a round. “I have to go now, Morris. I tee off in a few minutes,” David said. “It was nice to see you. Thanks again for the directions. Maybe I’ll see you out on the course.”

David turned and walked toward the first tee.

“David, wait a second!”

David turned back. Morris had jogged along the perimeter of the ropes to keep up with him.

“The problem is your left shoulder,” Morris said, out of breath.

“How’s that?”

“The problem is with your set-up. You’re dropping your left shoulder.” Morris caught his wind. “That’s why you keep pulling the putts left.

I’ve been watching you on the green. I know you think it’s your stroke, but it’s really just a simple thing in your posture. Just pull your right side back a little bit and you’ll be fine. Like you used to do when you almost won the U.S. Open.”

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David almost had no words. “How do you know about that? That was ten years ago.”

“I saw it on the classic sports channel. That’s why you missed the putt on eighteen at Hazeltine, you know. You opened your left shoulder. You used to do it when you’d get nervous. Now it’s a habit.”

The boy smiled. He seemed to have lots of teeth.

“Go roll a few. You’ll start draining them for sure.”

David would have, if he’d had the time, because golfers are suckers that way. They’ll try anything. They’ll try putting with their eyes closed or with one foot off the ground or with a thin strip of aluminum foil tied around their head to stimulate the vision of their inner eye. They’ll try even the craziest gimmick at least once, and this was no gimmick.

It made some sense. But Rabbit walked over and said, “three minutes.”

“Sorry, Morris, I need to run. It’s almost my tee time.”

“Give it a try on the course,” the boy said. “I think you’ll be happy with the results.”

It wasn’t in David’s nature to try out new things in competition, but it also wasn’t in his nature to be rude. “Thanks for the tip,” he said. “And thanks again for coming out.”

Morris smiled and watched David walk to the first tee.

*** The demeanor of the professional can only be acquired through experience. The tour has a class for new pros that encourages some basic courtesies such as smiling and waving to the gallery after a good shot.

They teach you how to sign an autograph without smudging (arch the wrist), and how to press your pants or—if you’re unwilling to iron even if you’re playing in the final group on Masters Sunday—to buy cotton-poly blends. The single most valuable thing they did was try to pair every top 114

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young player with Arnie at least once during his rookie season. Whenever David was in doubt about how to act, he simply asked himself what his hero would do. But even Arnie couldn’t teach someone the professional’s unmistakable look. The glazed eyes, mechanical wave of the hand and peculiar combination of obliviousness and total awareness had to be earned.

For David, adopting this mien had become reflexive. As he strode toward the first tee, David said “nice to see you” to passers-by, gave more than a few thumbs-ups and bumped any offered fist. As the sea parted and the gallery welcomed him to the first tee, David waved his hand in appreciation. When they introduced him—“from West Latrobe, Pennsylvania, David Howard”—he waved again. David took his line behind the ball, stepped up to it, waggled once, twice, then sent a soaring 280yard drive down the fairway, moving gently from left to right. David tipped his cap to acknowledge the gallery’s polite applause, handed his club to Rabbit and strode purposefully down the fairway. This was the veneer of the professional.

Inside, though, he was churning. He worried about his putting and the yard off the tee he lost every year. He worried about the woman at home in whose eyes he once could do no wrong, but who now saw him as a fraud—a rickety old machine held together with rubber bands and duct tape that, truth be told, had never been finely tuned in the first place. He thought about how he’d let his family down by not putting his toys away once and for all.

He noticed too much. He saw a man outside the ropes toss a cigarette butt into the rough. He heard a pair of old-timers talk about him— how he’d blown his one chance at fame and now was just hanging on, taking the place of a younger golfer who might make something of the opportunity.

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Mostly, though, David noticed his playing partner, Aaron Richardson, and reflected on life’s unfairness. Twenty-two years earlier, David and Aaron had gone through qualifying school together with Chip Hearn. Incredibly, David and Aaron shot the same score in each of their six rounds. Each finished with an aggregate total of six-under par, a number which might be good for a single round in these days of hightech drivers and lively golf balls, but was good enough then, with two shots to spare, to earn them their tour cards. The experience bonded them, and they’d remained close since. Life on the tour didn’t lend itself to easy friendship. The man you had dinner with one night could hole a forty-footer and take your rent money the next day. But David considered Aaron a true friend.

Aaron had attended Duke, where he was a better student than golfer.

He finished with a 3.8 GPA while majoring in history, and he scored well on his LSAT. On the other hand, he was the fourth seed on the golf team, with no realistic prospects of winning anything beyond a club championship. But while even his stronger teammates took a realistic approach and accepted positions as investment bankers and consultants, Aaron went south, practiced day and night, and played mini-tours until he had the game to make it through qualifying school. By sheer dint of will he made himself a professional golfer.

The vestiges of his academic background remained. He read books and watched the news. Most golf pros could would only talk about golf, sports and cars. (With Tom Kite, it was strictly golf.) Aaron, by contrast, had an interest in the real world. Early in their careers, David and Aaron traveled together. They shared rental cars and motel rooms until they each found enough success to fly and stay in nice hotel rooms. Their wives were friends, and their kids had played together at summer tournaments when they were little.

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That now seemed like a lifetime ago. Aaron’s body had been devastated by a pernicious, untreatable variety of leukemia, which stripped the body’s white blood cells. He had another two years left at most. Aaron had kept it quiet at first—he didn’t want the other players to treat him with pity or anything like that, but he was a shell of his former self.

As the disease progressed, Aaron’s play deteriorated and he lost his exempt status. Aaron wrote a few sponsors and asked them if they might give him an exemption, so he could play one last time. Most agreed because Aaron was a great guy, which still meant something to sponsors, and because having a dying man play in your tournament made for a good story.

Indeed, the word had gotten out. The fans had come to watch a dying man play golf. The gallery following David and Aaron was bigger than it ordinarily would’ve been for a couple of journeymen. David didn’t understand their interest. “We’re all dying,” he thought to himself.

But Aaron was something to see, like Niagara Falls or Epcot Center. As a bonus, they could take a peek at David in case he missed a short putt.

After that, they’d follow a pro at the top of his game, one without cancer or shot nerves. Then they’d have a hot dog, maybe two, and a Diet Coke with lemon, which the concession stands served in tiny plastic containers that previously had been reserved for ketchup and mayonnaise. Then they’d return to their desk jobs and Sunday morning foursomes and never give Aaron another thought.

Unlike the fans, though, Aaron commanded David’s entire attention. David watched closely as Aaron approached his ball in the fairway.

His friend walked more slowly than he used to, but he still possessed the unmistakable stride of a professional. For his approach shot, Aaron had 180 yards remaining to the green. This had been a seven-iron once, then had become a six, and now was a five—probably a four really, but Aaron 117

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was too proud to hit that much club, so he muscled up on the nickel.

Aaron’s hands shook uncontrollably as he gripped the club. David could see terror in Aaron’s eyes—fear that he’d lose control of the club or shank the shot like an amateur or, still worse, hit it solidly in an unforeseen direction. David didn’t understand why Aaron would put himself through this. He didn’t need the stress. Aaron had money and a family.

He could be living out his remaining days in peace.

But when Aaron took the club back, the trembling stopped. David recalled how Herschel Pickard had been able to overcome his Parkinson’s to hit a solid golf shot. As soon as Aaron began his swing with a tiny press—an almost imperceptible forward shift of the hands and right hip, everything changed. Where there had been fear in Aaron’s eyes, David now saw only confidence and determination. His hands had a firm grip on the club, as his hips and shoulders steadily turned in concert. An instant later he launched a low, boring missile into the afternoon breeze, drawing slightly toward the pin, which had been set in the back left of the green. The ball landed in the middle of the green, bounced once, then checked.

Aaron aggressively thrust his hand to the crowd with the palm fully extended, in the fashion of Dave Stockton, his favorite golfer. Aaron favored Stockton over more conventional choices, like Palmer and Nicklaus, because Stockton could putt lights out and think his way around the course. These were also the greatest strengths of Aaron’s game.

The gallery applauded politely and marveled that a dying man could hit such a fine shot. David also clapped—not because a dying man had struck the shot, but rather in admiration of the inherent quality of the strike and the appropriateness of the play to the situation. Then he hit his own ball onto the green—a little off the toe, but he’d half expected to hit it thin and so had taken an extra club. A bit luckily it landed just inside 118

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Aaron’s ball. David tipped his cap and trailed his friend to the green.

Aaron was away. As he crouched behind his ball to survey the line, his knees shook. David could see that Aaron was in pain, but when he began his stroke everything again changed. He retained the flowing motion that David had envied in qualifying school. Aaron’s body might fail him, but those hands would never forget how to putt. The ball died at the hole, tumbling in on its last turn.

David nodded and smiled at Aaron before turning his attention to his own twenty-foot birdie putt. He surveyed the situation mechanically, collecting data by rote: the wind, slope and grain of the green. His mind wandered as he worked. Were the qualities that led Aaron to try to become a pro against the odds related to his determination to play through cancer? David was playing entirely by habit. His hands would take the two practice strokes, his feet would step up to the ball and his shoulders would align the putt. He only needed to let the pendulum swing and watch where the ball landed—maybe in the cup, maybe not.

Suddenly, David thought of Morris Bernley. When he looked back on the round, as he would many times over the ensuing years, he sometimes thought he might have seen Morris out of the corner of his eye, but he couldn’t be sure. Whatever the cause, he thought of what Morris had said, and what it had felt like to putt when he was twenty-five, when he could make anything from anywhere, and when the prospect of realizing dreams still existed—someone’s dreams, if not his.

David pulled his right shoulder back. Then he stroked the ball and watched it spill into the center of the cup.

It felt good.

At the second hole, a par five, David reached the front of the green with his second shot, a low three-wood that cut under the wind, bounced over a mound that guarded the front of the green and came to rest about 119

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thirty feet from the hole. When he stood over the putt, David again pulled back his right shoulder, and damned if the thing didn’t drop in for eagle.

On the third green, he drilled a sixty-footer into the center of the hole.

It spiraled upward from there. As his putting confidence soared, his confidence in other aspects of his game grew. He worried less about his chipping because he knew he’d make the following putt. Because he knew he could get his ball up and down from anywhere, he worried less about being fine with his irons. He fired at flagsticks—even the sucker pins with sand traps and rough lurking just a few feet from the pin to ensnare errant shots and make saving par impractical. David ignored the risks because he believed in the power of his putter. For the first time in years, his swing relaxed. He didn’t worry about Kristin or Scott or Aaron’s cancer. He just existed and played golf. All he heard was the sound of Rabbit’s voice, calling out yardages.

“One sixty-five to the front, one seventy to the pin.”

“Plus one club for the wind?”

“At least one.”

“What do you think about a solid six?”

“I like that club.”

Rabbit handed him the six-iron and said, “Bring it home.”

David had already stepped up to the ball when his brain processed the words. He backed off the shot.

“This is the eighteenth hole?”

Rabbit nodded. He didn’t seem surprised by the question. Rabbit understood David had been playing in a reverie.

David looked around. On the first hole, there’d been a couple hundred people following their pairing. Now a gallery of thousands lined the fairway from tee to green. A young man stood a few paces behind 120

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the players holding a standard with their scores. It had a red eight next to “Richardson,” meaning Aaron was eight under par for the round. Next to the name Howard was a red twelve. He was twelve under par. Par would give him a round of 60, a birdie would give him 59. In the history of professional golf, only two players had ever shot 59 in competition. No one had done better.

David took in the gallery, the fresh air and the glow of that magical board covered in red. He looked at Aaron and smiled. Aaron smiled back and folded his arms as if to say, “This is why I do it.” David’s thoughts didn’t return to Aaron’s cancer; he just gave thanks for the day and the game and that he could share this special round with a friend.

Aaron had already hit to the green. It was David’s turn now. Despite the throng, David felt entirely at peace. Rabbit brought over the bag to make the crowd think that David was considering changing clubs in this swirling wind, but really it was to give his man another opportunity to enjoy the moment.

“Nice day, huh?”

“It’s a moment of grace,” David told Rabbit. “Most people don’t ever get one in their lifetime. The question is what you do with it.”

“You’re gonna stiff a six-iron.”

And David did. He flushed the sonofabitch to five feet and then, with twenty thousand people watching live and millions more on television, he pulled back his right shoulder and drained the putt.

After high-fives and handshakes, a hug with Rabbit, and a longer hug with Aaron, the two players walked together to the scorer’s tent with a sense of purpose. A card with a 63 and a 59 is one you want to sign right away. They had to fight their way through the crowd a little bit.

David enjoyed it all the more because it had been so long. He even broke the veneer and gave a few real hugs and smiled. He liked it when he was 121

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grabbed on the arm by a woman—and not just a woman, a beautiful woman. It was Dawn Knotts. She slipped a piece of paper into his hands and kissed him on the cheek.

“Nice round,” she said, before she disappeared into the crowd.

David opened the paper. It was on Montgomery Hyatt stationery, with a date, time and room number scrawled in red. David, who’d been calm throughout the entire round, and who, with the whole world watching, drained his putt for 59 without so much as a doubt, felt his hands tremble and his knees shake because, boy oh boy, what was he going to do about this?

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Chapter 12 ***

“D

ID YOU EVER PL AY WITH TIGER?”

“No. I was finishing just as he was getting started.”

“Who was your favorite golfer, Nicklaus or Palmer?”

“Nicklaus.”

“You ever play with him?”

“No, I never had the chance.”

“Ever play with Arnie?”

“Lots of times.”

Billy rehearsed a pitch shot. He was supposed to be working through

a drill, but this had become more conversation than practice.

“I thought everyone liked Palmer better.”

“They did.” David though short answers might discourage the kid, but he had an endless reservoir of questions.

“Aren’t you from Latrobe?”

“West Latrobe.”

“Are they near one another?”

“Next town over.”

“Wasn’t Palmer from Latrobe?”

“He was.”

“Then why didn’t you like him?”

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“You asked me who my favorite golfer was, not my favorite person.

I loved Arnie.”

“Why’d you like Jack better as a golfer?”

David sighed. “That’s like asking someone why they like chocolate better than vanilla,” he said. “Jack and Arnie were totally different players—like yin and yang. Arnie was a thrill seeker, a gambler, a man’s man. He loved the challenge of doing something no one else could do.

He’d rather wrap a three-wood around his neck than lay up on a parfive. Anyone could lay up. Not everyone could carry it over 250 yards of water and land it soft enough to hold the green. He might only pull it off one time in five, but that didn’t matter to him. Arnie was after glory. He wanted to go to the clubhouse after the round, have a beer and tell the guys how he’d reached the thirteenth in two.

“Jack was an entirely different entity. He only cared about winning.

If laying up maximized the percentages, he’d lay up. If he had to hit his one-iron off the tee, he’d hit his one-iron off the tee. Unlike Arnie, he could suppress his ego. Jack would let inferior players drive it past him if he thought it was the right play. All he cared about was that he got the ball in the hole quicker than they did. And he had complete understanding of his game. If he took out his driver, he knew how much farther he could hit it than his three-wood and he knew exactly how much more often he’d hit it into the rough. Before each shot, he calculated the costs and benefits of every possible course of action. He was always thinking.”

“I thought you said that it’s bad for a golfer to think too much.”

“That’s true when you’re hitting a shot, but the preparation requires intense thought. What made Jack special was that once he decided upon his course of action, his mind turned off. He had a million things going on in his life—golf, family, business—but once he started his routine, the outside world disappeared. He never doubted himself before a shot and 124

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he never second-guessed himself after. And the thing is, his swing was this violent, atavistic blow. He’d plot his way around the course, but when it came time to hit, he unleashed this brutish force. Then it was over and he was himself again—reserved and in control.”

“So you tried to imitate him?”

“You mean emulate him.”

“I guess.”

“Sure, but I could never turn my mind off. I could think like him, I just couldn’t stop thinking like him. Outside stuff always filtered in. I don’t know how he did it.”

“So Nicklaus was your hero growing up?”

David shook his head. “Jack was the golfer I most admired, but I wouldn’t say he was my hero.”

“Who then?”

“No one. I never really wanted to be a golfer.”

Billy hit another pitch. The drill required him to lob balls toward a six-foot wide circle that David had spray-painted around one of the cups on the practice green. This helped to ingrain the feel of pitch shots from different distances and allowed David to get a sense of Billy’s short game.

More importantly, it helped David assess whether Billy was willing to accept direction.

Billy was a respectful, but easily distracted student. All he really wanted to do was get out on the course and play—that and ask questions.

“Did you have a caddie?”

“I did.”

“One person or a lot of different people?”

“I had a bunch of different guys toward the end of my career, but for the first twenty-five years it was a guy named Rabbit.”

“His parents named him Rabbit?” Billy asked incredulously.

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“It was a nickname. He had OCD, so he used to do everything three times. He’d keep running back and forth to do the same thing over and over. One of the caddies said he looked like a rabbit. It stuck. I don’t think I even knew his real name.”

“The OCD stuff must have been annoying.”

“I got used to it.”

“You must have been good friends.”

“He was my best friend.”

“Where is he now?”

“I’m not sure. I think I heard that he isn’t doing well.”

“You think? You don’t know?”

“We fell out of touch,” David replied.

“How come?”

“You ask more questions than my ex-wife.”

“How come?” Billy asked again, undeterred.

“I disappointed him, and we had a fight.”

“You didn’t play well or something?”

“No, I played great the day we had the fight.”

“What then?”

David thought for a while before answering. “He thought I was more than I really was.”

The kid was a royal pain in the ass. He’d chip a few balls, then his concentration would wane, and he’d ask David another inappropriately personal question about his life or career. David would answer patiently, then suggest with his eyes that Billy should get back to the drills. Billy would take the hint and grind it out for a few balls, his resolve renewed, until his mind again would wander and he’d ask David another question.

This routine wouldn’t work long term. The drills were designed to implant the feel of shots in the subconscious. Talking undermined the 126

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effect. Moreover, the conversation drained David. He’d lived a near-monastic existence for the past twenty years. It was one thing to be back around the game—teaching it no less—and quite another to have to talk about it. They’d have to address this, if they were to have a relationship as teacher and pupil, but for now David endured it as he determined whether the boy had what it took.

“Let’s go play,” David said. Billy reacted as if he’d been sprung from prison. He collected his balls and sprinted for the first tee.

“Play with me,” Billy said. “We’ll have fun.”

“Fun can wait,” David replied. “I need to see what you do, and I’ll be able to focus better if I don’t have to worry about my own game.”

“Someday soon, though?” Billy smiled and pleaded with his eyes.

David had to admit that the kid had a way about him.

“Someday soon,” David said.

It was three o’clock, and David and Billy had the course to themselves. The men of Plantation played their golf ungodly early, starting by six o’clock or even five, if sunrise permitted, so they could avoid the heat of the day. By ten o’clock the only ones teeing off were old ladies out for a yenta session, and they always packed it in after nine holes. By noon, the course was deserted.

Billy attacked the course without delay and without so much as a single practice swing to limber up. He placed a tee in the ground and pegged his drive 280 yards down the middle. From there, he knocked a pitching wedge to eight feet. Then he jammed in a birdie putt that would have gone twenty feet past the hole if it hadn’t fallen in. Billy grinned and David couldn’t help but smile.

As during practice, Billy would concentrate for a shot or two, maybe even an entire hole, but then his mind would wander and he’d ask yet another question.

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“What was the strongest part of your game?”

“Course management.”

“What about your physical game?”

“Putting.”

“You were a great putter?”

“I had my moments.”

“How far could you drive it?”

“Two eighty, maybe two eighty-five. That was before they had the new clubs and balls.”

“How far could you hit a five-iron?”

“It doesn’t matter how far you hit a five-iron so long as you know how far you hit your five-iron.”

“But how far could you hit it?”

“No wind, level lie, I could carry it 185.”

“Did you win any tournaments?”

“Yes, three.”

“Ever win a major?”

“No.” “Ever come close?”

From anyone else, this question would have constituted fighting words, but David understood that in this case it came from innocence.

“Yes,” replied patiently. “I came close once.”

“What happened?”

“I missed a two-foot putt to win the U.S. Open.”

“Two feet?”

“Thirty inches to be exact.”

“Why’d you miss?” Billy asked.

“My mind wandered.”

“What were you thinking about when you missed?”

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“Lots of things.” They need to get off this subject. David nodded at Billy’s ball on the green and said, “You’re away.”

Billy took the hint. He missed a twenty-footer by almost twenty feet and then missed the comebacker. The problem was that he tried to make everything. David would have groused after three-putting, but Billy hardly seemed bothered. As they walked to the next tee, he resumed questioning David.

“You said before that you didn’t really want to be a golfer.”

“I didn’t.”

“How come you became a professional then?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. I was good at golf. I didn’t have too many other options. At least not any that would make me that kind of money.”

“You made a lot?”

“I got by.”

“How did your parents feel about you becoming a golfer?”

“My mother didn’t care. My father always wanted me to be a pro.”

“They must be proud of you.”

“They both died when I was in my early twenties.”

“They must have been proud of you.”

“I’m not really sure.”

Billy nodded and grew quiet for a few seconds. This answer seemed to have struck a nerve.

As they reached the next tee, box, Billy pulled out his driver—always his driver—and asked, “Do you and Mrs. Friedlander have any children?”

“Millie isn’t my wife. We’re just friends.”

“Well, do you have a family of your own?”

“I have a son and daughter.”

“Where are they?

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school English teacher.”

David signaled with his eyes that Billy should hit his drive. Billy complied, piped it down the middle, slung his bag over his shoulder and walked down the fairway. The three-putt had momentarily solidified his resolve to focus on golf.

David watched everything.

He needed to know whether the kid had the concentration to hold it together for five hours, day after day. That quality was indispensable. He didn’t need to have it today, at the start of the process, but the potential needed to be there. Whether he possessed it or not was the only open question, though. The kid could definitely play.

To be sure, he made plenty of mistakes. For one thing, he never thought ahead. On the fifth hole, a dogleg right, he cut the corner with his driver—carried it three hundred yards if a foot. But while he was a hundred yards beyond where the old men drove it, Billy had a harder approach. From the left side of the fairway, the old men could bump it up to the green. From the right side, Billy had to contend with two deep bunkers that protected the front right of the green. To attack the pin, which had been placed no more than ten paces behind the sand, Billy had to hit it high and stop it on a dime. The shot would have challenged even the most accomplished professional, but Billy never considered a more conservative choice.

Still, he almost pulled it off. He attacked the flag with a soaring, spinning nine-iron. It hung in the sky for a moment, tumbling over itself, and appeared destined for the green until a breath of wind came up—nothing fierce, but enough to take something off the ball, something Billy hadn’t accounted for. Instead of landing on the front of the green, the ball plugged into the second of the twin bunkers in a nefarious position, just a few inches behind its lip. Billy lacked the tools for this predicament. He 130

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hacked at the ball three times before he dislodged it and, when he did, his furious and frustrated swing propelled the ball forty yards past the pin.

Before he knew it, he’d made an eight.

More problematically, Billy showed little evidence of learning from his errors. He often left himself on the wrong side of the fairway, and he continued to attack sucker pins. He never considered the consequence of a mistake.

But there were also extraordinary successes. The eighth hole, a parfive, illustrated his day. He drove it down the right side of the fairway, long, but leaving himself a poor angle into the green. Billy went for it anyway, and almost hit a hard-cutting four-iron into the hole from 210 yards. It struck the bottom of the flagstick, bounced to the right and rolled down a steep bank, leaving him short-sided, with a near-impossible pitch up the side of the hill. He opened his wedge, took a full, fearless swing, and lobbed an exquisite shot into the fringe. For a moment it looked like it might pitch forward toward the hole, but he had no margin for error and the ball rolled back to his feet. He hit the same shot—one foot shorter—and had to take a step backwards to play his next. Then he pitched his third try in the hole. Billy thrust his arms in the air in triumph, celebrating the miraculous par. The past failures were irrelevant to him—only the glory mattered.

Billy hit many spectacular shots and displayed instincts that couldn’t be taught. At the eleventh hole, another par-five, he hit a titanic threeiron from 230 yards. The wind had come up again, blowing from Billy’s right to his left. He faded the ball, working it into the breeze so it would land softer, which it did. It landed just ten feet from the hole and didn’t bounce more than an inch. The ensuing left-to-right downhill putt was so fast that it would have turned most golfers’ knees to jelly, but Billy never considered how far past it would go if he missed it. He struck it firmly, 131

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taking out the break, and poured it into the hole without a thought.

On the eighteenth, he stood on the tee and fearlessly aimed at the flag, as always. This time, though, he didn’t find the water behind David’s condo. He instead hit a pull hook, which struck a tree, shot straight down, and landed in the middle of a thicket of trees no more than 180 yards from the tee.

Billy picked up his tee.

“I hope Mrs. Friedlander didn’t see that one,” he said.

David smiled.

When they arrived at the ball, David saw no path through the trees.

In his view, Billy had no choice but to chip out into the fairway. Even if he did have a clear route to the green, which he didn’t, he had more than two hundred yards to the hole, which was in the back left of the green, and 190 yards to carry the lake. But Billy never looked to the side. He shut the face of his five-iron, played the ball off his back foot, and swung as hard as he could. He sawed off his follow-through after impact—displaying enormous strength in so doing—and the ball screeched off the club.

David saw the opening now—a gap between two trees no more than ten feet wide, which Billy’s ball split in half. He and David knelt to watch its progress. The ball never got more than a foot off the ground and appeared destined for the water, until it made a sudden and abrupt left turn. Even still, it seemed like it might find the back part of the lake, but Billy had hit it perfectly. It landed on the green’s front edge, and the ball’s momentum carried it all the way across the green, until it settled just three feet from the hole.

David said, “Golf shot.”

Billy smiled.

They walked to the green together basking in the afterglow. Billy poured the putt in the hole for a 77—a 77 with six bogeys and an eight.

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The boy had passed every test but one. The raw talent he’d displayed— the suppleness of his shoulders and the quickness of his hand—couldn’t be taught. He had all the makings of a professional. But could he learn restraint?

As they walked together toward the clubhouse, Billy looked at David for approval. It would have been appropriate for David to put an arm around the boy in a fatherly or avuncular way, but David couldn’t connect to this emotional capacity, if he indeed still possessed it. He gave the most that he had to give and said, “You played nicely.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you think about the lake before you hit the shot on eighteen?”

“Nah. I just tried to get it to the pin.”

David tried to remember whether he’d ever had the capacity to look at life and see only the possible successes, not the certain failures. If he had, he couldn’t recollect when and how this mechanism might have worked. How could people believe things would work out for the best after repeated failures? How could they believe they’d knock down a flagstick when nothing suggested they could? Was it naiveté? Self-delusion?

Whatever it was, Billy had it and David didn’t.

The boy had asked so many questions. David had one. He needed to know if the boy had the desire.

“Tell me, Billy, do you ever think about what you want to be when you grow up?”

“Sure.”

“What is it?”

The boy smiled. He had such an easy way.

“I want to be a dad.”

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Chapter 13 ***

O

N SATURDAY NIGHTS, David usually took Kristin to the golf course to

make out. Sometimes they’d sit on the bench by the lake on the sixteenth hole. Sometimes they’d lay a blanket on one of the greens and

watch the stars—or say they were going to watch the stars. If it were chilly, they might go into the office of Joe Hutcherson, the caddiemaster, who’d let David know with a wink that he often forgot to lock his door at the end of the day. On colder nights, they sneaked into one of the locker rooms.

West Latrobe Country Club seemed more like home to David than his actual home. He had the run of the place. Everyone knew him and liked him. The men envied what he could do with a golf club. The women liked the way he looked and appreciated his modesty and gentle manner.

The members would smile and tip their cap at him when he passed. People gave him things for no reason. The girls who worked the snack bar offered him free Cokes and grilled cheese sandwiches. The maintenance guys handed him golf balls they dug out of the pond on sixteen and the odd abandoned windbreaker.

They did these things because they saw a future in David that they didn’t have. Though David didn’t see this future in himself, either because he couldn’t or didn’t want to, their kindness warmed him. He felt big at the club—bigger than he felt in his own home, for sure, but bigger than 135

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he felt anywhere else in the world. This was his domain. There were good memories everywhere—memories of Kristin, memories of well-struck shots, competitive matches, trophies, accolades.

Some of David’s best memories were associated with the women’s locker room. Its waiting area had a television and plush carpet that had made for some very pleasant evenings. It was on that floor that David got under Kristin’s shirt for the first time. They’d been going out for six months then. The subject never had been explicitly discussed, but there were unspoken understandings about what was acceptable. Open-handabove-the-shirt caressing had been tolerated, even embraced, but second base was off limits. Kristin had responded to any effort to slide his hand under her outer garment with considerable emotional sophistication, by squeezing his hand and intensifying her kissing, thus conveying concern only with the timing, rather than categorical disapproval of the notion.

After a while, David stopped trying. He liked what they did, just as he’d liked what they were doing that night in the locker room when Kristin took his hand and slid it up her stomach.

“Someone might come,” he said.

“They might.”

This was a side of Kristin Shaughnessy—cheerleader, class secretary and president of the school’s Future Business Leaders of America chapter—that David had never suspected. Sometimes people surprised you like that, though.

David accepted the invitation, of course. He reached around, unhooked and probed. They were warmer and softer than he’d imagined, and they responded to him, which was also unexpected. Chemicals flooded his body—testosterone, estradiol, pimple medication—all sorts of crap surged through his system and reduced him to his most basic, animalistic self. He thus never took a moment to stop and fully 136

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appreciate Kristin’s beauty. Years later, he’d look back on this omission with regret, because sixteen-year-old bodies don’t last, and it would have been nice to have a clearer mental picture of her to look back upon. He did remember, though, that when they left the locker room, he felt more alive than he ever had and completely, irrevocably in love.

Most weekend nights, David brought Kristin to the club. They’d eat dinner at Friendly’s (or Red Lobster, if he’d pocketed a few bucks caddying), and then spend a couple of hours alone in the locker room or wherever. After dinner that Saturday night, though, David drove to the minimall on Main Street and parked behind the Mr. Donut and the Arnold Palmer Dry Cleaners, between two steaming Chevy’s, each heated by a necking couple. One couple David didn’t know, but the other appeared to be Billy Schaffer and Lorraine Maltese, going at it pretty heavy. This was problematic because Billy dated Donna Goldklank, a nice girl who happened to be Kristin’s best friend. If Kristin noticed, she’d have to choose between telling Donna and keeping Billy’s secret. Either way, she’d hurt Donna. David remembered why he avoided the donut shop parking lot.

It was a cauldron.

Kristin was confused. “How come you stopped here?” she asked. “I thought you hated this place.”

David lied. “It’s all right,” he said.

“The last time we came here you said it reminded you of a sewer.”

“A nice sewer. I wouldn’t want it every night, but once in a while, it’s okay.”

Kristin looked at him suspiciously.

“Is everything okay?”

Even at sixteen, she could see right through him—always could. She instantly noticed all changes in his state of being—a haircut, a mood shift, a bad grade on a test. She saw it all. He’d cracked a tooth once play137

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ing touch football with friends—a small chip to one of his lower incisors.

His parents never picked up on it, but she noticed the same night before he even opened his mouth.

He leaned over to kiss her. In those days, it was a highly effective way of ending a conversation. They were so aroused by one another that a warm touch in the right place could send them off exploring for hours.

Gently, Kristin pushed him away. She could tell this was big.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“First you take me here. Then you’re halfway around the world while you’re kissing me.”

“I wasn’t halfway around the world.”

“Why didn’t you take me to the club tonight?”

“I thought it would be nice to come here for a change of pace.”

He tried to look away from her, but he found the entirety of her irresistible—her soft skin, her long blond hair and, most of all, her giant blue eyes. They demanded truth.

“I don’t want to be around the golf course,” he admitted.

Kristin recognized that he was in pain. She took his hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “Everyone needs a break once in a while. This is fine. I’m just happy to be with you.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What is it then?”

David took a breath and said, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

David had never verbalized this before. He hadn’t even fully formed the thought. As soon as he uttered the confession, it felt as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

Kristin moved in closer and touched his cheek. “David, sweetheart, what’s going on?”

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“I don’t want to play golf anymore.”

Kristin stiffened. David wasn’t the dramatic sort. He’d rarely, if ever, discussed his feelings with her. This was serious.

“Did something happen?” she asked.

“No.” “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

“Then what is it? You love golf.”

David pushed Kristin’s hand away. “When have I ever said that I love golf?” he asked. “I’m good at golf, so everyone thinks that I do. Being good at something and loving it are totally different things.”

“But you had all these dreams of being a professional. You told me that you were going to win the U.S. Open someday.”

“Sure, I said that. But I’m sixteen years old. Am I supposed to have my entire life mapped out? Am I allowed to experiment with other things or maybe even change my mind?”

“Of course you are,” Kristin said. She’d grown up with supportive, sane parents, so she even believed it, too. “What is it you think you want to do?”

David shrugged his shoulders. The truth seemed too absurd to verbalize, but he wanted to test how it sounded. “Maybe I’ll be a writer,” he said. “Mr. Hendrickson thinks I have talent.”

“He’s right. You’re a great writer.”

“He wants me to go to a writing program at Penn State for eight weeks this summer.”

“That’s great, David. I’m behind you one hundred percent. University Park’s only a two-hour drive. I can drive to visit you on weekends and you can read me your stories. I’ve always wanted to date a writer.”

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and said, “I love you.” He leaned in and they made out for a while, David skillfully steering Kristin so that she wouldn’t notice Lorraine Maltese, but David could sense Kristin’s distraction.

“Have you told your father yet?” she asked. The question felt like a giant, wet blanket.

“No,” David answered.

“I take it he won’t approve of the idea.”

“You think?”

“What will he do?”

“I don’t know. I suppose he won’t ever talk to me again.”

“Do you care?”

David found it interesting that Kristin had this insight. They hadn’t ever spoken in any depth about Mal. She’d met him, so she had a sense of the man, but David’s feelings had never been made explicit.

“Not really,” David said. “He hasn’t spoken to me in three days.”

“Why?” “He’s still mad about the putting contest with Mr. Hendrickson.”

“Seriously? Why does that bother him so much?”

“He says I’m not taking my practice seriously enough. I’m supposed to do drills, not play games.”

“How do you know that if he isn’t talking to you?”

“He told my mother.”

Kristin thought for a moment. “When you’re having a putting contest, aren’t you practicing putting?”

“Why don’t you make that argument to him?”

She smiled. “I’ll pass on that.”

“I figured.” David smiled back and thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what he’d say. He’d say that I have a very specific practice program that I need to follow if I want to become a top player.”

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“So because you deviated from it briefly, he hasn’t spoken to you for three days?”

“Not a word.”

“What happens? I mean you live in the same house. You must run into each other in the bathroom or the kitchen. Isn’t it awkward?”

“I don’t see him too much. He leaves for work before I get up in the morning, and after he picks me up at the course, he usually goes out drinking.”

“But when you do see him, what happens?”

“He acts as if I don’t exist.”

“This happens regularly?”

David felt uncomfortable and ashamed. He’d never discussed his family dynamics with anyone. He knew that he could trust Kristin, but speaking these truths still felt painful.

“It happens all the time,” David admitted. “Sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s my mother. Sometimes it’s both of us.”

“He does the same thing with her?”

“Worse.”

Kristin intuited that this area was too tender to be further probed.

“The funny thing is I think with me it’s calculated. He’s angry with my mother, but with me I think it’s a ‘tough love’ thing.”

“He thinks it’s good for you?”

“I guess.”

“Why would he think that?”

“I’m not entirely sure. It may be his army training. He definitely thinks coddling makes people soft. But I think it’s really because of Arnold Palmer.”

“Arnold Palmer?”

“Arnie’s father was really tough on him. Deacon used to hit him and 141

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stuff and was really strict about his golf. I know Deacon pulled Arnie off the course one time when he threw a club. My dad did the same thing to me when I talked back to him once. I think he thinks that the way you’re supposed to raise a kid—or at least one who’s supposed to grow up to be a great golfer.”

“Really?”

“He doesn’t make any secret about what he thinks about Arnie. He thinks the guy is god. They played together once, when they were both teenagers. My dad was a pretty good golfer before he got hurt in the war. When he was a kid, he played for West Latrobe. Arnie was one year ahead of him at Latrobe High. During Arnie’s senior season, my dad halved his match with him. He birdied seventeen and eighteen to come back from two down. Arnie put his arm around him and said it was pure guts. My dad has the scorecard framed in his study, attested by Arnold Palmer. It’s the only thing on his office wall. He doesn’t even have a picture of my mother or me.”

“So he wants you to grow up to be Arnold Palmer.”

“You’d have to ask him, but my guess is he’d be okay with that.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Like it’s not enough that everything in a fifty-mile radius is named after the guy, people have to raise their kids to be like him, too,” David said. “You know, he owns lots of dry cleaners. How come my dad doesn’t want me to grow up and own dry cleaners?”

“You should say that to your father.”

“Yeah, that would go over big.”

Kristin smiled. She was being kind, but David felt pitied.

“So what’s he going to say when you tell him you don’t want to be a golfer?” Kristin asked.

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gave him confidence in himself. “You know what,” he said. “I don’t care what he thinks. I’ve lived my whole life under his shadow. Everything that goes on in my house is done to meet his approval or to keep him from getting angry. Is dinner ready for him what he gets home? Will he like it? Is it warm enough in the house so he can sit and watch television and be comfortable?

“Did you know that my mother used to want to be a writer?” David asked, rhetorically. “She used to write incredible short stories. I read them. They’re full of life. Now she sits at the kitchen table reading books, worrying what he’s going to find fault with when he comes home.

“I’m not going to let him ruin my life. I don’t care whether he approves of me being a writer. I’m going to tell him and that’ll be that.”

Though David had no evidence to suggest he could successfully stand up to Mal, in that moment he believed it to be possible, and because he believed this, Kristin believed this too.

“That’s great,” she said. “It’s great that you have things in perspective.

And no matter what you decide, I’m behind you and I believe in you. If you become a golfer, you’ll be as good as Arnold Palmer, better even. If you become a writer, you’ll be better than Hemingway.”

“I’m not the biggest Hemingway fan. How about Vonnegut?”

“Vonnegut it is. You’ll be better than Vonnegut. Better than the best.

The point is that whatever you decide, however it turns out, you have my complete, undying support.”

He saw the sincerity and devotion in her eyes. He leaned across the seat. She leaned in. He kissed her, then kissed her again, then fondled and fumbled, groped, grabbed, unhooked, touched, rubbed, licked, nibbled. They sat in his mother’s beaten-up Pontiac, between Billy Schaffer and Lorraine Maltese and the unknown couple, and came together.

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thoroughly. With such support, he thought, there was no limit to what he might accomplish.

He would stand up to Mal, once and for all.

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Chapter 14 ***

R

ABBIT BECKONED TO THE WAITRESS, who glided over.

“What can I do for you, honey?”

“I asked for three strips of bacon,” he said, pointing to his plate.

“You gave me four.”

“That’s what the special comes with—four strips of bacon.”

“But I asked for three.”

“If you don’t want the fourth strip, just don’t eat it, sweetheart.”

“Do you have any specials that come with three bacon slices?”

She smiled the southern grin of hospitality and said, “We sure don’t!”

“Well then,” Rabbit said, lifting his plate. “Would you mind bringing this back to me with only three strips?”

It’s difficult to faze a Waffle House waitress. After years of serving drunks, taking special orders and pocketing 25-cent tips, not much gets through. Moreover, David could tell this waitress had been wearing the blue uniform longer than anyone should. A net covered her stringy red hair, a thin sheen of grease covered her skin and shoes. A pallor of apathy covered the rest. Somehow, though, Rabbit had agitated her. She was bristling. She wanted to call out this odd-looking, bug-eyed creep for being irrational. One doesn’t turn down free bacon—especially in Alabama.

But she was a professional. She looked at Rabbit, took hold of his 145

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plate in the manner of a supplicant and sweetly said, “No problem, honey.” Then she picked one of the bacon strips off his plate, folded it into her mouth and walked away.

“Shithole,” Rabbit said.

“Sure is.”

David watched as Rabbit cut each of the bacon slices into thirds, then cut the thirds into thirds. He cut all the food on his plate into ninths— the waffle, hash browns, even the eggs, and separated them so no food touched another. He’d finish all of one food before starting another, proceeding in alphabetical order. David had seen this show a million times.

Through a mouthful of bacon, Rabbit asked, “Are you going to have Kristin and the kids fly out for the weekend?

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“She used to come all the time. Remember that? Even if you were ten strokes back, she’d take a Friday night flight to wherever you were.”

“That was a long time ago when I had a chance to win.”

“You can still win. You proved that yesterday.”

David didn’t reply. Rabbit moved on to the eggs.

“Everything okay at home?”

“Fine, I guess. I don’t know.”

“You didn’t call home yesterday?”

“No.” David looked up from his plate. They very rarely spoke this much at breakfast.

“You shot a 59 and you didn’t call home?”

“I didn’t feel like it.”

“Did Kristin call you?”

“Yes, she left a message. She said she was proud of me.”

“And you didn’t call back?”

“I had a lot on my mind,” David said. “I have a lot on my mind.”

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“So much on your mind that you couldn’t find time to call back your wife?”

Rabbit had always liked Kristin—really liked Kristin. This had never been articulated between them. It was one of the very few things between them that hadn’t been talked to death. All the same, David could tell. In Rabbit’s defense, there was plenty to like about Kristin. She was smart and funny, and even in her early forties, she still had a nice enough figure to turn heads. And she’d treated Rabbit warmly from the first week he caddied for David. Over time, she adopted him as family and made sure he never spent holidays alone. Rabbit had spent many Christmases with the Howards; Scott and Amy marveled at the spectacle of Rabbit attempting to unwrap a present without tearing the paper. On the rare occasions when a conversation turned to the Howards’ home life, Rabbit inevitably took Kristin’s side. David knew better than to tell Rabbit what he really had on his mind.

“It’s not really that I didn’t have time,” David said, shaking his head.

“It’s just that we would have gotten into it again.”

“What would you have gotten into? Her message said she was proud.”

“Sure, but before you know it, we’d have been talking about the piano lessons and what a terrible father I am.”

“You’re a good father.”

“Yeah? Tell her that.”

“She said otherwise?”

“She doesn’t need to say it. I know what she thinks.”

“I don’t think that’s what she thinks.”

“Well, you don’t know.”

Rabbit began eating his waffle ninths. Because of its alphabetical position, Rabbit had never experienced a warm waffle. David reflected on how enriched Rabbit’s life would be if apples and waffles exchanged designations.

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“I don’t understand where you’re getting this nefarious subtext from,” Rabbit said between mouthfuls. “Sometimes people who say they’re proud are really proud.”

“Even if you’re right, when I shoot a 73 later, it’ll be the same thing again. ‘Why are you flying all over the country when you could be making more money giving lessons and actually see your kids grow up?’”

“Has she ever said you need to make more money?”

“No, but I know what she thinks,” David said. “Do you know what it’s like to have something like that hanging over your head on a golf course? To know that if you don’t pull your weight, everyone will question all your life choices? They’ll say he gave everything up for a stupid game, put his wife and his family second, and still he’s a failure.”

“I don’t think anyone thinks that.”

“Well, you don’t know.” David looked up from his food. “Where do you get off talking about nefarious subtexts anyway?”

“I’ve been reading Freud.”

“Thought it might help us on the course?”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

David smiled. They knew enough to sit quietly at this point in the conversation. In David’s view, his relationship with Rabbit had succeeded because they understood, like the most successful married couples, when not to talk, and because they could endure silence without going insane.

During their twenty years together, they’d endured lots of silence on the road—driving from Tucson to El Paso or wherever with nothing on the radio but static. The advent of books on tapes had improved the situation somewhat, but one could listen to only so much Grisham.

Rabbit had an itch in his ear, scratched it three times, gave it a good going over, seemed like he was finished, then went at again three more times. David played with his eggs.

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“You’re playing with Aaron again today and Bobby Rancourt,” Rabbit said.

“Right, one of the Young Guns.”

Rabbit smiled. That’s the way the tour advertised its next generation of players—and no player meant more to the Tour’s future than Rancourt. “First time playing with him, right?”

“Yup. Seen him on television, though.”

“This is pretty special,” Rabbit said. “The final pairing on a weekend.”

“It’s Saturday, not Sunday.”

“Still pretty special. When’s the last time we were in the final group on a weekend?”

“Five years ago at the Tucson, I think.”

“This isn’t the Tucson.”

“It isn’t the Open either.”

“You don’t ever let up on yourself, do you?”

“Just stating the facts.”

Another silence ensued. A sugar packet fell from the dispenser. Rabbit replaced it, arranged it with care, appeared satisfied, shifted it slightly to make it more perpendicular, appeared satisfied again, then rearranged it once more. David continued playing with his eggs, for which he had no appetite. He was tired; he’d hardly slept.

“Aaron played pretty great yesterday,” Rabbit said. He was talking more than he normally did because they had more time to kill than they normally did. “I mean not just given his condition, Rabbit said. “He played great for anyone. Had it under control the entire round—hit sixteen greens and kept it under every hole.”

“He’s always been a good player.”

“It was beautiful to see. I really admire him.”

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ing well was that late tee times left a lot of time to talk and, worse still, think. In David’s experience, both caused nothing but trouble.

“I don’t get it,” David said. “I don’t understand why he’s still playing.”

“What else should he do?”

“I don’t know. Go to the Mayo Clinic? Travel? Read books? He could sit on the couch all day watching TV and no one would say anything.

He’s dying. He can do anything he wants. He has complete license.”

“It’s his choice, isn’t it?”

“Sure. It just seems like an odd choice.”

“Maybe he likes playing golf.”

“I find that hard to believe. I used to play golf against him in junior tournaments. He’s been playing competitively since he was eight years old. You’re telling me golf is still getting him out of bed in the morning?”

“What else could it be?” Rabbit asked. “It’s not like he’s doing it for money. He finished like two hundredth on the money list last year. He had to solicit exemptions from tournament sponsors. That takes a lot of effort. Why would he do it if he didn’t like to play?”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Maybe he likes proving to people that he still can do something hard. Or maybe it makes him feel alive.”

“Maybe.”

Rabbit scraped up the last of his eggs with his remaining ninth of toast. “I take it you wouldn’t spend your last days on Earth playing tournament golf.”

“No, Sam-I-Am. I would not play tournament golf. I would not play golf of any kind. It’s too cruel. Every mistake is exposed. You’re naked on the course.”

“So why do you play? No one’s forcing you. You don’t have to play golf.”

“Right,” David said, sarcastically, “I don’t have to play golf.”

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“You don’t have to play. You could take the club pro job.”

“As if teaching people a game that’s made me miserable ninety-nine percent of the time would be any better. I’d rather teach people to do something useful like knit or floss properly. I don’t have any real choices.

It’s not like I could get a job tomorrow as an investment banker or writing for a travel magazine. Golf is all I have. At least if I play, I’m treated with dignity.”

“I didn’t realize you felt this way,” Rabbit said, softly. He seemed genuinely surprised and saddened. David marveled that after so much time they still had the capacity to surprise, and hurt, one another.

“Isn’t it the same for you?” David asked. “Let’s be honest, lugging a bag on your shoulders all day is no picnic. Tell me the golf course doesn’t feel like a trap closing in around you. Tell me that when you’re sweating your balls off in the Alabama swamp, you aren’t wondering how it came to this. How’d you end up devoting your life to a guy who can barely get it around, all to clear a few hundred bucks on a good week? Tell me you don’t walk the fairways, watch my ass, and think to yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’ Little balls, metal clubs and pro-ams aren’t a life. You and I both know it.”

Rabbit rarely showed emotion, even when they talked about politics and family, but he put down his fork, stared David straight in the eye, and said, “That’s the problem with people like you.”

“What kind of person is that?”

“You know, spoiled brats.”

Rabbit immediately understood that he’d crossed a line, albeit a line he couldn’t have known existed. Somehow, in all their years in cars, diners and golf courses, they’d never spoken of their childhoods. David purposefully had never asked about Rabbit’s because he didn’t want to be asked about his own. He’d simply presumed that Rabbit had suffered.

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Apparently, Rabbit had inferred that David had been coddled. David felt his blood boil.

“I was not spoiled,” David said curtly.

“I mean emotionally spoiled. People who think life is supposed to give them things. You know, people who think they’re supposed to lead a fulfilling life.” He said these words with derision. “You know what I pray for? I pray that I’ll be able to tie my shoes in the morning in less than an hour. I pray that I’ll be able to walk out the front door of my apartment without having to go back fifty times to check whether I’ve locked the door. I pray that I’ll be able to resist the temptation to bet every penny I have on a greyhound. If I can do those things, my life is fulfilling.

“That’s what I most admire about Aaron Richardson. He appreciates that he has a wife and children. He knows that someday he’s going to be dead, but he’s living and breathing today and is still great at a game most people would kill to be just good at, and that he gets to play it on beautiful courses with people watching and if he does really well he might get paid some money for it. That’s who he is.”

David nodded. “But that’s not who I am,” David said.

Rabbit didn’t answer. He knew his man well enough to understand that he couldn’t push any further. Many player-caddie relationships had broken up over far less. Besides, they still had a round to play. They thus returned to sitting in silence. The surly waitress filled their cups with coffee, again and again, wondering whether they’d stiff her on the tip.

Time stretched out before them like an endless road—the destination unknown, the starting point unseen and unremembered. This, to David, more than anything else, represented the life of the professional: time, oodles of time. Time to waste, time to burn, time to kill.

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life consisted of continual action. Real life, of course, was about filling the massive gaps between the occasional moments of romance, ecstasy and despair. The true challenge of professional golf wasn’t hitting the tournament-clinching three-iron over water in front of TV cameras. It was surviving the nights. It was getting back to the hotel room, taking a halfhour shower to sooth an aching back, watching a pay-per-view movie and another after that, then realizing it was only ten o’clock and you still had fourteen hours until your tee time. It was trying to sleep, but instead staring at the ceiling and worrying about your family and whether you’d perform under pressure, even worrying about sleep itself. Were the other players sleeping well? Did Jack Nicklaus have nights like this?

David and Rabbit had literally killed years together. In the early days, they’d shared an RV, which they drove from stop to stop. When the money got better, they took planes and got their own rooms, but it was still just the two of them. They had routines. They got to the golf course three hours before David’s tee time and did an excessive warm-up: ten balls with every club in the bag, forty minutes of chipping, forty minutes in the bunker, forty minutes of putting and ten more shots with whatever club David would be hitting off the first tee. They stayed at the course after the round, through dusk, punishing whatever club had most failed during the round by hitting endless shots. They’d talked about books, politics, the other players, the other caddies, and all of their wives— everything except their childhoods. They’d talked it all to death. Now, for the first time in five years, they’d be teeing off at three o’clock instead of ten or eleven in the morning, and suddenly they had four more hours to kill and nothing to say. The time just sat there like a couch that had to be moved up the stairs. No one wanted even to acknowledge it. They just sat at the Waffle House booth, drinking cup after cup of coffee until Rabbit mindlessly, imprudently broke the silence.

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“Who was that woman who came up to you after the round yesterday?”

“That’s Knotts’s wife. The asshole proctologist from the pro-am.”

“Nice of her to show up.”

“Yeah.”

“Pretty woman.”

“Not bad.”

“What’d she want?”

“Nothing,” David said, as he gestured for more coffee. “Nothing at all.”

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Chapter 15 ***

I

N THE 1940S, the Army Corps of Engineers literally lifted Florida from

the center of the Earth. Back then, the Corps took on huge projects.

Their engineers carved the St. Lawrence Seaway, constructed mam-

moth dams along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and even built an atomic bomb, but none of these projects were so ambitious as dredging the periphery of the Everglades with a series of drains and pipes. It was a mammoth undertaking that took thirty years from start to finish and cost more than one hundred lives.

David had often wondered how strange it would have struck the Corpsmen that the land they’d created would be filled with Waffle Houses and Wal-Marts and populated almost entirely by old people who could no longer tolerate the cold of Maine or New York or even Northern Florida, and so gathered in this haven to live out their remaining days under the sun, in air-conditioned clubhouses and diners. How stranger still that amidst the endless sea of condominiums and parking lots, there should be a fifteen-year-old boy living out his childhood.

The Conways lived in Plantation Estates Phase Two. One might imagine the various phases would be the same, but Phase Two had been built during 1970s stagflation. To keep costs down, compromises had been made in the selection of building materials. The walls were made 155

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of thinner sheet rock and coated with cheaper paint. The roof shingles leaked during hurricane season. Even the lawn seed was an inferior type of crabgrass (a weed, really) that required less water and care.

Few people from the outside world would have noticed these deficiencies, but in the halls of the elite—the clubhouses of Phases One, Three and Four—the residents obsessed about these matters. The privileged aristocracy turned their noses at the Phase Two proletariat. When traveling acting troupes visited on weekends, performing classics such as the Yiddish Mikado for the bargain price of $10 a head, they would skip Phase Two, which lacked a theatre. The other phases wouldn’t deign to invite the ugly ducklings to share in their good fortune of watching the Izzy Perlstein Players in action. They banned their fellow Floridians from canasta and mah-jongg games and turned them away at the tennis courts. They would’ve excluded them from golf too, if the Phase Two deeds hadn’t contained a covenant entitling the owners to course access in perpetuity. But for this, they’d have been playing at Chi Chi Rodriguez’s Pitch-and-Putt on Nob Hill Road.

David thought the snobbery nonsense, but as he walked through Building 133, he noticed the signs of disrepair—chipped paint, carpet along the walkway worn to the nub, a roof leak that had gone unrepaired for so long a canal had been carved into the concrete foundation where the water ran down. David noticed everything. He wished he didn’t.

He stopped in front of apartment 108, which was distinguishable from the dreary lot only by a plastic license plate that hung over the doorway, suspended my magnets. It said: CONWAY PAD 108 As David rang the bell, he looked at his quaking hands and hoped it was nerves, not Parkinson’s.

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A woman answered the door in an apron and plain housedress. The lines around her face suggested she was quite old, perhaps even in her eighties, but she moved lightly on her feet and her eyes had life in them.

She greeted David with a warm, wide smile. David thought he detected a hint of Irish in her eyes.

“Come in, come in,” she said, gesturing. “We’ve been expecting you.”

When David stepped in, the apartment’s smell immediately washed over him—tomato soup, ancient and cold, which had blended with carpet cleaner and Freon that must have been leaking from the air conditioner. The mélange had nuzzled its way into the paint and burrowed into the linoleum. David closed his eyes and breathed in, deeply. As the aroma filled his lungs, it sent his mind racing to his youth.

A man stepped forward and offered his hand. He was older than the woman and moved more gingerly, but he had warmth in his eyes too.

“Fran Conway,” he said. “This is my wife, Pauline.”

David took the hand.

“David Howard.”

“Billy has told us so much about you. We’re so pleased that you could visit.”

“I’m happy to be here.”

“So please sit down,” Pauline said. “I’ve made some ham sandwiches.

Would you like an iced tea or some lemonade? I have fresh of both.”

“How about half and half of each?”

Pauline smiled. “In these parts we call that an Arnold Palmer.”

“My parts, too.”

“You’re smiling at that, Mr. Howard.”

“David, please.”

“You’re smiling at that, David.”

“It’s just that Mr. Palmer had claim to lots of things where I grew up.

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Funny to me that he’s got his name on iced tea and lemonade, too.”

Fran Conway said, “Not a bad thing to have your name on.”

“No,” David said. “It can be very refreshing.”

“You’re from Pennsylvania, then?”

“Yes. Just west of Latrobe.”

“That’s the heart of Palmer country.”

“Sure is.”

“Get back often?”

“Not in many years.”

Pauline returned with a tray of sandwiches and three tall Arnold Palmers with ice. David took a long drink.

Pauline smoothed her apron as she sat down. “Billy tells us you live in Phase Three. How long have you been there?”

“Just over ten years. It’s hard to believe.”

“We’re working on twenty-five years. We’ll be married sixty next June.”

“Talk about hard to believe,” Fran said, and squeezed Pauline’s hand.

She squeezed back and gave him a warm, loving smile.

“That’s wonderful,” David said.

“So how do you like it down here in Plantation?”

“It’s all right, I guess. A bit slow.”

“I hear that,” Fran said.

“My husband has just about had it with gin rummy and canasta,” Pauline said with a smile. “Of course, we’ve had Billy for the past several years, which keeps us on our toes.”

“He’s a fine boy,” David said.

“About all we can handle,” Fran responded.

“We love him to death,” Pauline explained. “But I’m seventy-nine and Francis is eighty-three. We’re not up to it physically and this isn’t the right environment for a boy. It’s certainly not what his parents had in 158

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mind. We just do the best we can.”

“Well, from what I can see, you’ve done a wonderful job.”

“You’re kind to say,” said Pauline.

Fran extended the tray of sandwiches to David, who took a bite from one. It was an uncommonly good ham sandwich.

“Must say,” Fran said, as he set the tray back down, “the boy has taken quite a shine to you.”

“We’re very grateful for the time you’ve spent with him,” Pauline added. “There are no boys around here for Billy to play with. He hardly ever brings home friends from school. I think he’s embarrassed to be living with his grandparents. We try to do what we can, but neither of us is able to run around very much and we don’t know anything golf. He seems to have so much fun with it. He hasn’t stopped talking about you since the two of you met. He says you used to be a professional.”

“That’s a long time ago.”

“Well, he’s quite taken with you. Meeting you has made him the happiest he’s been in a very long time.”

David quivered at the notion of someone’s happiness depending on him.

“You flatter me,” he said, as he took another bite of the sandwich.

“This is delicious. Thank you.”

“You know he took the game up by himself,” Pauline said.

“You don’t say.”

“Sure did. We had a set of his dad’s clubs lying around and he got to swinging them one day and before you knew it, he was out on the course every evening whacking the ball around.”

“You never showed him anything, Fran? Like how to grip the club or how to stand?”

“No. I don’t know the first thing about the game.”

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“What about his father? You said you had his dad’s clubs around.”

“He couldn’t have showed him much. Billy’s parents died when he was six.”

David had suspected this, but his heart sank anyway. In his own way, he understood the pain of losing a child. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Kind of you to say.”

If David closed his eyes, he couldn’t tell whether the voice belonged to the husband or the wife. They spoke for one another.

“Does Billy get upset about it?”

“Of course he gets sad when he thinks about it,” Fran said.

“Does he ever blame himself? I know kids do that sometime. They think that things are their fault even when they’re not.”

“I don’t think so. He’s a strong person. He really tries to find the good in things, and he forgives himself for his mistakes.”

“I’ve never been very good at that,” David said.

“I’ve learned a thing or two myself from the young man,” Fran agreed.

It was impossible not to like the Conways. It was equally impossible not to notice how much more their condo felt like a home than David’s.

They even had artwork. In ten years, David hadn’t hung a single thing from his walls.

“Say,” said Pauline. “Is he any good at the game? Fran and I wouldn’t have any way of knowing.”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Billy said you had something you wanted to discuss with us.”

David nodded his head. He’d asked for this visit after his fifth session with Billy. The boy had made an impression in many ways.

“Billy’s good,” David explained. “His swing’s a bit loose and his short game is unrefined, but that’s to be expected from a fifteen-year old. In any event, these things can be taught. The reason I wanted to speak with 160

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you is that he has some talents that can’t be taught.”

David gestured and said, “Anybody can be a good player, you see.

You don’t need any physical gifts to play scratch golf. It’s just a matter of practice. Being a great player is a different story. Not everyone can do that. This is more art than science, but we look for certain qualities.

Good hand-eye coordination, supple wrists and certain types of double-jointedness are useful. Jack Nicklaus can bend his thumbs back almost ninety degrees. This extra flexibility gives a player an edge. Billy has speed, and lots of it.

The dedication has to be there, of course, and there’s a lot to learn to play elite golf. But Billy’s physical talents give him a chance to be more than good—just a chance, mind you, but it’s one that most people don’t have.”

The grandparents were beaming.

“That’s great,” Fran said. “That’s really great.”

“It’s so kind of you to come over here and share this with us,” Pauline said.

“I want to be clear. It’s too soon to say anything conclusively. I need to watch him play more. All I’m saying is that he has a lot of raw talent.”

“We understand there are no guarantees with something like this.”

“It’s wonderful news,” Fran said, “and very kind of you to share with us. We trust your judgment.”

David bristled at the notion of someone trusting his judgment.

“There’s more to it,” David said. “If I’m right and he does have this kind of potential, some decisions need to be made. If Billy’s going to think about playing professionally, he needs to start training now. He has to tighten his swing so it will repeat under pressure. He needs to refine his short game. This can take years. And he needs to experience competitive pressure. Playing tournaments is an entirely different game than hitting it around by yourself after school. There’s a junior circuit here in Florida.

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We’d start him slowly at first, but he needs to have this experience.”

“This all sounds fine,” Fran said.

“Is the concern money?” Pauline asked. “Fran and I don’t have a lot, but we have enough to pay for entry fees and to compensate you for your time.”

“No. I’m confident that I can teach him what he needs to know, and it’d be my pleasure to tutor him. I’m not looking to be paid.”

“So it’s settled then.”

“I just don’t think it’s that easy.”

Fran and Pauline seemed confused.

“What is it then?” she asked.

“Is Billy good in school?”

“Yes. He’s a serious student.”

“That makes this more difficult. These decisions will affect his entire childhood. If he’s going to be a professional, he needs to dedicate his life to the game. He’ll miss out on playing touch football and baseball with his friends. I’m not sure I’d want that for anyone, especially not an intelligent young man who has the prospect of doing something engaging and productive with his life.”

“Unfortunately, Billy doesn’t get to play much touch football living here.”

“I understand, but I want you both to understand the kind of commitment I’m talking about. When I say refining a short game will take a few years, I mean a few years practicing six hours a day, seven days a week. From the moment school ends until sunset, he’s got to be out there every day putting in the time. There’s no in-between with this. If he wants to succeed, he needs to dedicate his life to golf.”

Fran and Pauline listened carefully to every word he said, nodding their heads from time to time. When he’d finished, they sat quietly for a moment, digesting.

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Fran spoke next. “We appreciate your laying it out for us like this. It’s real obvious that you’ve been honest with us and that you’ve given this a great deal of thought.”

“We appreciate it very much,” echoed Pauline.

“Ultimately, the decision has to be Billy’s,” Fran said. “It’s his life. He has to decide what do with it.”

Pauline nodded her head in agreement. This seemed like a fine example of modern parenting, but it gave David pause all the same.

“Do you think Billy can make a meaningful choice?” David asked.

“He’s only fifteen, after all. I’m not sure any fifteen-year old could understand the consequences of a decision like this.”

“That’s where you come in,” Fran said. “He won’t be making these decisions without guidance. You can tell him what it was like playing golf as a junior, making a living at the game, and being on the road. We know you’ll give him a balanced picture.”

David winced. “I’m not equipped to handle that responsibility, Fran.

I’m an old man myself, and I don’t know the first thing about kids.”

“If you ask me, you know a great deal about kids,” Fran said with a smile. “And you’re not old by any stretch if you don’t mind my saying.”

“You must really like children,” Pauline added. “Not everybody would help a stranger in this way.”

David hardly recognized himself in the portrait that the Conways had pained of him.

“When I was young, I had a teacher who tried to make a difference in my life. I still remember him fondly.”

“Is it because of him that you became a golfer?”

“No. It’s because of him that I almost didn’t become a golfer.”

As Pauline collected David’s empty plate, she touched on the shoulder. It felt as if she understood. “We trust you completely,” she said. “And 163

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we thank you for your interest in our grandson.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all we could ever ask,” said Fran.

It felt like a weighty moment, but Pauline bounced from her chair.

“Before you fret too much about how important golf should be in Billy’s life, I think you need to see something. I think it’ll help you understand Billy.”

She walked to the cabinet and opened a drawer filled with stacks of photographs and videotapes. Pauline selected one and inserted it in the VCR. “This is a tape of Billy’s sixth birthday party,” she said as she pressed play.

It could have been any six-year-old’s party. There were Happy Meals from McDonald’s, streamers, hats, doting parents, a magician, apples, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and a piñata. The birthday boy with the toothy grin and the three-sizes-too-big Atlanta Braves hat could’ve been anyone, but David recognized Billy immediately. His earnestness and warmth couldn’t be mistaken.

David smiled as he watched the young Billy tear open his presents—a car racing set, a video game, shoes (which no six-year old could want to matter how nice they might be, though Billy expressed thanks to an aunt), and finally the last and best present. The video camera panned to a man and a woman, Billy’s parents, dead now but alive then. They wore their own Cheshire cat grins and held a large, ungainly package wrapped untidily in strips of paper. Billy checked out the gift, then mischievously looked at his parents as if they were co-conspirators. They handed him the present and smiled as he tore into it. Just as Billy suspected, it was a set of clubs cut down to his size. Hugs and kisses and proclamations of love ensued.

At this point the tape cut off and resumed, apparently later the same day, in the family’s backyard, as Billy and his father put the new clubs to use.

They did almost everything imaginable with the clubs. They played hockey.

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Billy hit slap shots with a seven-iron, which his dad fended off by using a driver as a goalie stick. They fenced with the clubs—maybe epee style, maybe foil. Billy even took a couple of swings at a golf wiffle ball, though this somehow led to a wrestling match. Father and son were soon rolling in the grass, spreading mud on one another’s faces and laughing in glee.

Here the tape ended and did not resume.

“That was our son,” Pauline said. “He and his wife—Billy’s mom— died in a car accident two days after Christmas that year. That was their last birthday together. You see how happy Billy was there.”

David saw it. Anyone could have recognized the joy in that scene. In fact, the joy in the video was so abundant that most people wouldn’t have noticed anything else. Though David wished that he could have focused exclusively on the love between father and son, one didn’t simply turn off instincts that had been honed over decades. What David fixated on, in spite of himself, was that six-year-old Billy, who clearly loved his father more than anything in the world, had a fundamentally solid golf swing.

“If golf can help make Billy happy in some way to help him get out of here, we’d be grateful to you,” Pauline concluded.

David stood up. “All right, I’ll talk to Billy. I’ll explain everything to him.”

Fran extended his hand. “Thank you for everything, David. My wife and I trust you completely.”

David again wondered to himself what he’d done in his life to merit that trust, but one couldn’t very well articulate such a thought at a moment when people were placing their faith in you. David shook Fran’s hand and said simply, “I’ll do my best,” and hoped that his best would be better than it had ever been before.

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Chapter 16 ***

T

HE DAY AF TER DAVID AND KRISTIN’S DATE at the Mr. Donut parking lot,

Ron Hendrickson rang the Howards’ doorbell around one o’clock, stirring the house from its Sunday afternoon stupor. Other than the

occasional Jehovah’s Witness and young Beth Willard, who came around each February to sell Girl Scout cookies, the Howards didn’t get many visitors. Adina had once had friends, but they’d disappeared over the years— some through normal attrition, the rest because Mal found fault with them or perceived that they’d slighted him in some way. Mal never explicitly demanded that Adina end a friendship, but she understood that failing to do so would be perceived as disloyal. Disloyalty had repercussions.

Mal had no friends per se. He had drinking buddies, and perhaps an illicit relation or two, but he kept these segregated from his home life. David had heard an occasional story about Frank and Joe from the bar, but they seemed like apocryphal characters from a novel. David had friends, but he’d never thought of bringing any of them by. Even Kristin had only been to the house a couple of times.

When the ball rang, Adina was busy doing laundry, so she called for Mal to answer the door. On any day other than Sunday, Mal would, in turn, have summoned David. On Sundays, Mal allowed David to suspend his rigid practice routine and play with friends or the club pros.

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David generally looked forward to spending Sundays at the course, but he hadn’t cared to play that morning, as he hadn’t cared to play the day before that, and didn’t expect to want to play tomorrow. He preferred to remain in his room and read and write.

For a variety of reasons, Mal didn’t know any of this. Adina had been doing her best to conceal David’s protest from Mal. On the first day he came home early, Adina dropped Centennial and called Mal at work to say that David was sick and that she’d picked him up at the course.

It didn’t help Mal’s powers of observation that he’d gone out drinking the night before and slept in until noon. Mal groggily answered the door himself.

The doorbell piqued David’s curiosity. Neither the Witnesses nor the Girl Scouts came by on Sundays. David peeked out from behind the curtains of his bedroom window. When he saw that it was Mr. Hendrickson, David quietly slipped out his room, slid along the floor and poked his head around the wall of his parents’ bedroom. Through the iron railing that guarded the second-floor landing, David could see down to the foyer and living room below.

As Mal answered the door, the teacher extended his hand and said, “I’m Ron Hendrickson, David’s English teacher at Palmer High.”

Mal always shook firmly to test manhood, but he had a suspicious look about him. He knew that he recognized Hendrickson, but he hadn’t yet pieced together from where. Mal was sizing him up when Adina entered the scene, ironing her housedress with her hands and pushed her husband aside.

“Come in, come in. David has told us so much about you.”

“Thank you.”

Adina led Hendrickson to the living room and gestured for him to sit. Mal followed and sat in his preferred recliner, the site of many week168

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end naps, including one that Hendrickson had just interrupted.

“Would you like something to eat?” Adina asked.

“No, thanks.”

“A cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you very much. I’m fine, really.”

“Well, if you change your mind just say so.”

“I shall.”

As Mr. Hendrickson gave the Howard’s house a once-over, David could tell that Mal finally had placed his face. If the teacher didn’t already regret coming to his house, he would soon.

“You have a lovely home,” he said.

“Thank you,” Adina replied and smiled, too widely. It had been a long time since anyone had paid her any kind of compliment, even if it were for her house and not really true. Suddenly, she caught Mal’s stare and shrank.

“So what did David do?”

“Nothing, Mr. Howard,” Hendrickson said, surprised. “Nothing bad, that’s for sure.”

“Then why are you here?”

David could tell, as anyone could have, that Hendrickson had been on the course that morning. Though he’d taken it off before entering the house, his cap had mussed his hair, and he had sweat stains under his arms. He wore a white polo, a thin blue vest and khakis. The golf outfit no doubt made Mal even more mistrustful. Mal believed people should know their place. Mal wasn’t the kind of parent who attended open school night, and if he did, he wouldn’t show up with a volume of War and Peace tucked under his arm. The teacher should have exercised similar forbearance regarding golf, a domain that belonged to Mal. “If my son didn’t do something wrong, what are you doing here on 169

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a Sunday?” Mal asked. “Shouldn’t you be at the course giving putting lessons?”

If David’s teacher hadn’t yet figured out that he’d entered enemy territory, he got it now. Mal had entered attack mode. Hendrickson tried to deflect. “I’m here because your son has a gift.”

“My son doesn’t have a gift,” Mal said, cutting him off. “My son is a good golfer because he works at it continually, and perhaps, if people don’t distract him, he’ll be good enough to make a living at it someday.”

“I’m not talking about golf.”

Even from his imperfect vantage point, David could see the signs of Mal nearing the end of his short rope. His mother had obviously seen it, too, and she put her limited powers to work. She placed a warm hand on Mal’s knee and said, “Please tell us what you came to say,” “Your son is a gifted writer,” Mr. Hendrickson said, smiling. “An extremely gifted writer.”

Rationally, David knew that this couldn’t end well, but his heart leapt. It was one thing to get an A on a paper and quite another for a teacher to visit a student’s home. Surely that didn’t happen every day.

Even Mal could recognize this. Perhaps he could be persuaded.

“I’ve been teaching for thirty years,” Mr. Hendrickson continued, “and I’ve seen only a handful of students with talent like David’s. He’s young, of course. His grammar has room for improvement and some of his structuring is immature, but these things can be learned. On the other hand, his creative spark is something that can’t be taught. His writing is uncommonly sophisticated for a sixteen-year-old. He has beautiful command of the language, and he writes with humor and insight into human nature. He has a writer’s eye and ear, there’s no question about that. That’s what we really look for.”

For the first time that David could remember, his mother swelled.

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“You think he could write novels?” she asked.

“I know he could,” Mr. Hendrickson replied. “He’s got the imagination and, just as importantly, perseverance. That’s another quality you can’t teach. I’m absolutely convinced he has a novel in him—probably more like nine or ten. The only question is whether he dedicates himself to writing. Now, I want to be completely candid with you—whether he makes money at this is another matter. Writing can be an arbitrary business. Lots of hacks get books published and plenty of brilliant writers never get read. But I’m sure you understand that, Mrs. Howard. You’ve turned your son onto some very powerful books. You clearly know this universe. I understand from David that you’re a writer yourself.”

Adina, still inflated, reflexively started to speak. How long had it been since she’d been treated as a peer, or even with respect? She caught herself just in time. The trapped air squeaked in her throat. She looked at her husband and shrunk back down.

“No,” she smiled. “I like to read. That’s about it.”

Hendrickson’s attention seemed to shift momentarily to Adina’s plight, but Mal sensed the shift and nipped it in the bud.

“So what do you want from us?” he asked, in an accusatory tone.

“I don’t want anything from you,” the teacher replied. “I came to extend an opportunity to your son. There’s a summer workshop for gifted young writers at Penn State. It’s an incredible program. They bring in all sorts of writers—poets, journalists, novelists. The students write an original project—a short story, a novel, whatever—and they workshop it with their fellow students and the professionals. They leave with a polished, finished product. The program has had great success. Dozens of graduates have gone on to professional writing careers. The director is a friend of mine from way back. I’m sure that with a call and a sample of his work, I can get David in.”

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The English teacher had the right to expect thanks and adulation for his generosity, but instead received only silence. David’s mother stared at the ground.

“David has tournaments this summer,” Mal said.

“I know he’s a wonderful golfer and that he has tournaments scheduled this summer. He’ll still be able to play in some of them—many of them, in fact. The program is eight weeks long, but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind letting David sneak out every now and then to play some golf.”

Mal snarled. “Sneak out every now and then?”

“This program is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Winning the Pennsylvania Open as a junior is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Getting an exemption to the U.S. Amateur is a once-in-alifetime opportunity. David isn’t going to win the state open by sneaking out on weekends. Golf is a full-time commitment. During the summer, it’s twenty-four, seven.”

“Writing’s a full-time commitment, too, and it’s such an extraordinary thing to do.” Hendrickson said boldly. The teacher had more to say, but he noticed Adina shrink further into her chair and knew that he’d gone too far.

Mal leaned forward. “So golf is ordinary?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did, you just didn’t have the courage to say it explicitly. Why don’t you go ahead and say it now? ‘Golf isn’t respectable.’ That’s what you’re really here to say, right? The intellectuals at Penn State won’t regard golf as a worthwhile career. Well, I suppose if you don’t think golf is good enough, you won’t look too favorably on the steel mill that I’ve worked at for the past twenty-seven years. Do you look down on that too?”

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talent. He has options. He has choices to make.”

“Options? Choices?” Mal spit the words. “Do you know what choices I had when I was a teenager, Mr. Hendrickson? My choices were to go to work in a coal mine, join the Army, or starve. That’s a real-world choice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I could’ve gone to Penn State too, you know. I wasn’t stupid. I had a good average in high school. I applied and got in. But my father got sick and my family needed an income, so I joined the Army. I could’ve played golf, too. But I answered the call to duty. I did what was right for my family and for my country.

“David has more than I ever dreamed of. What you’re talking about is self-indulgence. We’ve given our son a good life. Playing golf is an honest way to make a living. I wish that I’d been given the opportunity to see what kind of player I could have been. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being a professional. Golf is a proud game.”

Mal took a breath. “I would think that you’d understand that,” he continued. “You say you play. You teach at a school named after Mr. Palmer. Seems to me you should have respect for the game that made him the great man he is.”

“I have the greatest respect for golf,” Hendrickson said, extending his palms in a gesture of supplication. “You’re missing my point. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with golf, Mr. Howard. I love the game. I just want to make sure David does whatever will make him happiest. If it’s golf, fine. But it’s my job as a teacher to help him understand his full potential. David has the chance to make his living with his mind.”

“And golfers don’t use their minds?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You ever hear of a little man from Texas named Hogan?”

“I know Ben Hogan.”

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“You tell me he doesn’t use his mind. You tell me he doesn’t think his way around the course.”

“He does. He’s a brilliant player.”

“What’s your point, then, Mr. Hendrickson?” He said the teacher’s name with derision.

“Ben Hogan uses his mind. All great golfers do. But they don’t use them in the same way as writers or doctors or lawyers. They don’t use their minds to make lives better. They play a game.”

“So golf ’s just a game.”

“Not just a game—a great game, but a game.”

“And writing’s not just a game?”

“I suppose there’s some element to it that’s like a game. It’s competitive, there’s an output. But it’s different. It’s art.”

“And golf isn’t art?”

“I don’t know,” Hendrickson stammered. Mal was wearing him down. David had been on the other end of this treatment many times.

David imagined it felt like a witness being beaten up on cross-examination or interrogated by the CIA. “There’s certainly some aspect to golf that’s artistic,” the teacher continued, desperately, “but it’s different. A graceful golf swing is beautiful to watch, but it’s fleeting. It’s over in a second. Books last. Books make people think. They change lives.”

“And golf doesn’t change lives?”

Hendrickson was getting tired. That’s when mistakes happened.

“Look, I don’t really know how to make these distinctions, and my point isn’t to denigrate golf or to debate you about what’s meritorious and what isn’t. That’s not what this is supposed to be about. This is really about choices, about David getting to be the person he wants to be.”

Mal nodded his head, apparently calmly, but David, who’d seen this act many times before, knew that his father’s pot was simmering.

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“So you think our son is a good writer.”

“Better than a good writer.”

“Can you promise him that these novels he’s destined to write will ever get published?”

“No, I said that before.”

“And what about a job? Can you promise him a job?”

“No.” “What can you promise him then? Food? Money? A place to live?”

“I can’t promise him anything.”

As Mal grew more agitated, he talked faster. “So what good is your offer? Maybe my son is smart enough to be a writer? I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I do know. He hits a golf ball well enough to make a living at it.

If he practices hard every day, without distraction, he can have a career as a professional. He might make $100,000 a year. More if he’s good.

That’s real money. That’s reality. You’re talking about fiction.”

Hendrickson drew a deep breath. “Childhood isn’t just about preparing yourself to get a good job, Mr. Howard. I mean that’s important, but there’s more to it than that. It’s about opening the mind and cultivating interests. You can’t really say with certainty that David is going to be a professional. And even if you could, it would still be worthwhile for him to attend this program. I’m not saying that he should give up golf.

I’m just saying that he should explore other things. At the Penn State program, he’ll learn so much and meet so many interesting people. It’s a great opportunity for him. You have to be open-minded.”

Mal’s jaw clenched.

“So I’m closed minded.”

“I’m not saying that you’re closed . . .”

“You know better than everyone else.”

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fense. As Mal moved toward him, the English teacher backed his way to the front door. David’s heart sank. He’d seen his mother retreat in this manner before, as he had himself, and he knew the terror his teacher must be experiencing.

“You think that because you’re a teacher that you can tell everyone how to live their lives,” Mal said accusatorily. “Here’s my guess. You wanted to be a writer yourself and now you go around sticking your mind into other people’s business because it makes you feel better about your own failed ambitions. If you have your way, he’ll end up with three novels on his shelf like my wife and teaching high school English in a steel town.”

Ron Hendrickson held his hands out in front of his face.

“You have me all wrong.”

“Get out of my house!”

Mr. Hendrickson did. He got out of the house straight away, tripping over the doorframe as he did, falling to the concrete walkway that led to 113 Spruce Lane. For a moment, David though Mal might strike him while he lied prone on the floor. The teacher clearly did, too, because, as he lied on his back, he held his hands in front of his face. With Mal, one often had the sense of imminent violence. Even if he didn’t act it out, it seemed always to be just under the surface, a little bit closer after a beer or two. David gave thanks for it being Sunday.

When Hendrickson finally accepted that he wouldn’t be attacked, he began to crawl away from the house, then finally righted himself and made for his Pontiac, never daring to turn his back to Mal. After having arrived with noble intentions, Ron Hendrickson made his retreat from the Howard home in this pathetic manner. Mal had worked his special magic.

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far as his father knew, David was playing golf, and for everyone’s sake, it had to remain that way.

David was trapped, with no obvious possibility of escape.

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Chapter 17 ***

W

HEN HE TEED OFF ON SATURDAY, David had regained conscious-

ness. He noticed things again: a chubby volunteer hoisting a “Quiet” sign and urging silence in a voice louder than any of

the fans; a yellow warbler perched in a spruce near the first tee; a man eating a hamburger while his son crouched between his legs and watched the action with an unnoticed dollop of mustard on his head.

He noticed Bobby Rancourt’s lean body, a sinewy coil of muscle.

Rancourt arrived last, just moments before tee time, striding through the parted crowd with the practiced indifference of royalty. He acknowledged the applause and the schoolgirl giggles of swooning women of all ages with only a subtle nod, a condescending gesture that seemed to say they couldn’t appreciate his greatness and, thus, shouldn’t have the right to watch him play, but he would tolerate their presence so long as they afforded him the proper respect.

David offered Rancourt his hand warmly, in the manner one would to an old friend. Though they’d never met before and they were competitors, the tradition of the game, as David had been taught, was that one offered a greeting before embarking on a shared round of golf. “Nice to meet you, Bobby,” he said.

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limply, released, and said, “Play your best, old man.”

Aaron extended his hand to Bobby and said, “Have a good round.”

Bobby looked at the hand as if it were infectious and replied, “Try not to slow us up too much.”

Gamesmanship occurred routinely on the tour, but when Rancourt turned away, David noticed Aaron tremble.

The announcer introduced David. For having the previous day’s low score, he owned the “honor”—the right to hit first. As he began his preshot routine, everything felt off. Yesterday, he’d played intuitively. Today, he couldn’t quiet his mind. As he practiced his swing, he became aware of a pull in his sleeve and obsessed about his decision to wear the new shirt that his equipment representative had handed him that morning.

The unspoken but clearly articulated message had been that since signing him following his Open near miss, the company had gotten nothing out of their deal, and the least David could do for his first TV appearance in five years was to wear the shirt. Everything about it was wrong. David favored cotton shirts and muted tones. This one was loud and made of polyester, which looked better on television but felt terrible. David complied because he had to admit, though it was hardly the most lucrative endorsement deal, the company had been patient with him. Now, as he felt the shirt pull, he regretted the decision. It seemed poetically just when he pulled his tee shot into the left-hand rough.

Rancourt hit next. Where David did everything from gripping the club to assuming his stance deliberately, Rancourt did it all without apparent thought. He pranced behind the ball for a moment, stepped up to it and coiled. It was all over in an instant—a punitive, atavistic blow. The shot soared as high as a nine-iron but with the momentum of a driver. It landed some twenty yards past where David’s ball finished in the rough, then bounded forward, and finally came to rest in the center 180

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of the fairway, more than fifty yards past David’s shot.

“Nice ball,” said Aaron.

“Beauty,” said David. He’d resolved not to say anything since Rancourt had been such a jerk, but an effort like that demanded to be acknowledged. Rancourt responded with another perfunctory nod of his head, the unspoken message to his competitors being the same as it had been to the gallery: they didn’t belong on the course with him.

Aaron stepped forward and placed his tee in the ground. From behind the ball, he took a single practice swing, then stepped forward and addressed the ball. David could see Aaron’s hands shaking far worse than yesterday—nerves perhaps, or the disease, or both. Aaron masked the trembling by repeatedly re-gripping his club. To the crowd, it appeared only that he couldn’t get comfortable, but David could tell that the problem went far deeper. It appeared that Aaron lacked any feeling in his hands, and David wondered whether he’d be able to draw back the club back. Somehow, Aaron steadied himself, pressed his right knee forward, and made a passable but shaky swing. His ball faded and landed in the right-hand rough about 25 yards behind David’s drive.

Rancourt quit the tee box without delay and strode purposefully down the fairway. David waited for Aaron.

“You okay?”

“Okay’s the word.”

“A little nervous?”

“You noticed the hands?”

“Couldn’t help but.”

“I wish it were nerves. One of the medications messes with my bloodstream. I don’t know which is worse, the disease or the medicine.

Sometimes it feels like all my limbs are asleep. There are good days and bad days. Today’s a bad day.”

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“You knew that on the range?”

“I knew that when I got out of bed this morning.”

“Why didn’t you pull out?”

“It’s golf. You go with what you got.”

“But if you’re not feeling well, what’s to prove? This is just golf.”

“No, man, this is golf.” Aaron said the word with zeal. “I get to play golf today. How lucky is that?”

It didn’t seem lucky to David. Aaron was walking more slowly than usual. David matched his pace in solidarity.

“Rancourt sure hits it a long way.”

“You can play with him,” Aaron said. “Remember, you can’t put it in the hole with the big stick. Just play within yourself and stay in the moment.”

They started to veer off then—David to the left and Aaron to the right.

“You can play with him, too.”

“Not today.” Aaron smiled, looked at the cloudless blue sky and added, “But that’s okay.”

Aaron thinned his approach. It hustled to the green but stayed on the bottom of two tiers, leaving a long, curving putt. David gouged a seven-iron from the rough and got more of it than he had any right to expect. It landed on the slope between the two levels and seemed to have enough momentum to continue forward, but then it rolled down to the lower tier, ten feet closer to the hole than Aaron’s ball, on roughly the same line. Rancourt had only a pitching wedge left, which he landed on the top level, approximately fifteen feet from the hole.

Aaron putted first and David could see that this truly wouldn’t be his day. His hands trembled as persistently as they had on the tee, but putting relied exclusively on fine movements and small muscles, and the shaking didn’t subside when he began his stroke. His putter wobbled at 182

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impact and he missed the putt by ten feet to the left.

Though David had almost fifty feet to cover, including a hill that needed to be handled delicately, David felt confident. Errant thought it was, Aaron’s putt had given David valuable information. It confirmed his hypotheses regarding the green’s slope and grain. He thought of Morris Bernley, retracted his right hip, and broke his wrists slightly to give the putt extra pop. David judged it perfectly. With its last ounce of energy, the ball fell over the hill’s apex, and then tumbled downward, finishing six inches from the cup. As the gallery applauded, David tapped in for his par.

Rancourt putted the same way he hit his full shots, quickly and aggressively. He seemed to think nothing of it when he muscled his ball three feet past the hole. Rancourt was blessed with the ignorance of youth. David knew the statistics: even pros missed these putts seven percent of the time, but Rancourt had no such data cluttering his brain. He approached the three-footer as if it were a tap-in, taking his turn ahead of Aaron’s, and knocked it squarely in the back of the hole. Aaron looked as shaky as Rancourt had looked confident. Pros with steady hands were only fifty-fifty from ten feet, and Aaron didn’t have steady hands. He pulled his putt and tapped in for a bogey.

At the tee boxes, Rancourt appeared to be on a mission to emasculate his competitors. On the second hole, he outdrove David by sixty yards and Aaron by eighty. On the third, a dogleg-left par-five, he caught a downslope with his drive, which David had thought out of reach even with a heavy tailwind. The slope accelerated his ball and by the time it came to rest he’d outhit them both by a football field; on a 540-yard hole, he hit only a pitching wedge for his second shot.

David had never been the longest hitter and his swing had only gotten shorter over the years, but he’d never seen anything like this.

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pler-shifting whoosh, as different from the sound of David’s swing as David’s was from an amateur’s. It was tempting to swing harder—David had an extra twenty yards in the bag, but he’d learned in his career that he could never win playing someone else’s game. He might not win playing his own, but he’d certainly never win playing anyone else’s. So he stayed within himself, knocked it out there 280 yards or so, and countenanced the gallery’s smirks. So it went. On the uphill fourth hole, Bobby flew it seventy-five yards past them. On the fifth, a 220-yard par-three into a stiff breeze, Aaron hit a five-wood, David a three-iron and Rancourt a seven.

Around the greens, though, Bobby Rancourt was only ordinary by professional standards. He moved his lower body on chips and his course management skills hadn’t matured. At the third hole, where he’d driven his ball almost 350 yards, he left his wedge shot above the hole.

He missed the ten-foot putt and the subsequent ten-footer back up the hill. At the fifth, he attacked the pin, even though it had been set on the narrowest part of the green, just ten paces behind a huge sand trap. It captured his pitch, and his ensuing bunker shot caught the lip. Meanwhile, David hit the center of the green and two-putted for par. Through five holes, Rancourt had made three birdies but was tied with David, who’d parred every hole.

David’s putting was the equalizer. As he settled into the round, he increasingly believed that he could be competitive—not for the long haul, of course; in a few years, Rancourt would be giving David two strokes a side, but for today at least, and perhaps tomorrow, David could play with him.

Still, the kid was a sight to see. As David and Aaron walked down the sixth fairway together, David said, “He’s something, isn’t he?”

Aaron replied, “He’s rough around the edges. The chipping could be better and he doesn’t manage his game well, but that swing is something else.”

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“Do you think he has it?”

Aaron understood the question. The pros didn’t have a name for whatever quality separated Nicklaus, Palmer and Hogan from mortals, but they all recognized it when they saw it.

“He’s got a big game—long off the tee, works the ball both ways, hits high irons that bite, like Jack.”

“Lots of guys hit long irons.”

Aaron stole a look at Rancourt, prowling the fairway and said, “He might have it. He’s definitely one of those guys who can block everything out. He doesn’t seem to have any fear of bad consequences. He hits every shot as if it’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Where does that come from?”

“I read that some young players start seeing sports psychologists when they’re eight or nine years old. Maybe a shrink taught him to be fierce.”

“I don’t think any sports psychologist can teach that,” David said.

“Perhaps it was his parents, then. Maybe you can train a kid to believe that golf ’s the most important thing in the world.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“So you’re saying you’re either born with it or not.”

“I think it’s probably a bit nature and a bit nurture. You need some things and they have to be cultivated during childhood.”

Aaron nodded. “That sounds right. Let me be the first to subscribe to the David Howard Synthesis Theory of Golf Greatness.”

“That’s why I love you, Aaron. Who else out here talks about synthesis theories?”

“I’ve heard Rabbit say a pretty smart thing or two. You have your share of thinkers out here.”

“How many of them are winning majors?”

“You’re saying you can’t cerebrally play at the highest level?”

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“No, Jack, Arnie and Hogan are geniuses. But each had the capacity to make himself believe, at least in the moment, that golf was the only thing that mattered. Everyone else is probably thinking their way out of success.”

“Is that a corollary or a separate new theory?”

“Not sure.” David smiled. “The whole thing’s poignant to me, though.”

“Why? Because Rancourt’s so young or because he has that look in his eye we used to have?”

“I never had that look.”

“Well, you can be sad if you want, but I wouldn’t switch places with that guy for all the money in the world.”

“Really?”

“That kid thinks golf ’s the only thing that matters. I wouldn’t trade anything about my life for his.” Aaron smiled. “Except for his blood—I’d make an exception for that.”

They parted ways to walk to their balls and Rabbit said, “Way to feel sorry for yourself and have the guy with cancer cheer you up.”

“That’s not what I was doing.”

“You pitied yourself and the guy who hits it a hundred yards past you, but not the guy with leukemia.”

“That wasn’t the point.”

“Sure seemed it.”

David tightened his chin, and testily said, “He knew what I meant.”

Rabbit planted the bag to the right of David’s ball and said, “Let’s play golf.”

At the ninth hole, David holed a twenty-footer for birdie. He made the turn at one-under par for the day and twelve-under for the tournament, one shot behind Rancourt who went out in three-under, and five ahead of Aaron. Rancourt continued to outdrive David by miles, but David could sense a growing frustration in his young rival.

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At the par-five eleventh hole, Rancourt hit a daring second shot, a spectacular four-iron over water, which landed fifteen feet past the hole.

Playing conservatively, David hit a three-wood off the tee, laid up one hundred yards behind the water, smoothed a wedge to twenty feet and holed the putt for birdie. After Rancourt ran his eagle putt past the hole, he missed the comebacker for birdie and flung his putter against his golf bag. As he stormed off the green, glowering with anger, David perceived an opportunity; he’d seen young players crack in similar situations many times before.

By the time they reached the next tee, Rancourt’s irritation had been bottled up and replaced by grim determination. He withdrew further into himself. Whatever minimal interaction he’d had with the world ended. He thereafter showed no signs of awareness of his competitors, the crowd, or anything other than his ball.

On the fourteenth hole, Aaron drove his ball into the rough. He swung as hard as he could, trying to dislodge the ball, and drove his club into an unseen root. As he fell to the ground, the gallery groaned. They’d already seen Aaron shank two shots, skull a chip, and miss five putts shorter than three feet. They’d already watched a man unravel in full display, and now he was writhing on the ground in pain.

The marshals moved forward. David ran over from across the fairway, but Aaron waved off all offers of help, saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” A tour official asked if he wanted to see a trainer or a doctor, but Aaron said, “No. Let’s play golf. I just want to play golf.”

All the while, Bobby Rancourt stood motionless in the fairway, arms folded, as if Aaron’s fall were an inconvenience The instant the commotion ended, Bobby hit his shot to the green and strode ahead.

At the 605-yard fifteenth hole, he reached the green with a driver and a punished five-iron. At the sixteenth, a dogleg-left par-four, he cut 187

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the corner over the trees and reached the green with his tee shot—a drive of nearly 350 yards. He attacked the 210-yard par-three seventeenth hole with a high-arcing eight-iron that defied gravity, landed twenty yards behind the hole, then spun backwards as if on a string.

Only his putter held him back. Rancourt three-putted both the fifteenth and the sixteenth, drawing no blood from the holes despite his colossal blows. His magnificent approach to the seventeenth hole finished eight feet beneath the hole, leaving the easiest imaginable putt. He left it on the lip of the hole. After hitting a ball 210 yards with a club many amateurs couldn’t hit half as far, he had to use another full shot to hit the ball half an inch.

Rancourt had dominated David tee to green, but as they stood on the eighteenth tee, they were tied. At the home hole, all three men drove their balls in the fairway. Rancourt raced to hit his next shot with malice aforethought. David waited for Aaron, who seemed to be wilting in the heat. The back nine had gone worse than the front. He’d managed to par only the tenth, twelfth and fourteenth holes. The rest had been bogeys except the fifteenth, where he’d shanked his lay-up, left a shot in the greenside bunker, and made a seven. He was twelve-over par for the day. He’d go from having played in the last group today to the first group tomorrow.

“You okay?” David asked.

“I’m doing great,” Aaron said.

David looked at him skeptically.

“From the first time I picked up a club, I loved this game, and I love it just as much today,” Aaron said. “I love everything about it—being outside, its honor, playing with friends. That feeling when you hit the ball on the screws makes my soul sing. I don’t care about my score. I just try my hardest every time and hope that I’ll hit one more perfect shot. I live for 188

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that. I’ll play until I can’t get out of bed anymore. We’re so blessed, David.”

David nodded as if he understood, but he didn’t.

He watched as Aaron walked to his ball with his head held high and a smile on his face. When he arrived, Aaron approached his shot with determination. He found his line from behind the ball, took his stance, and steadied his trembling body long enough to hit a professional fouriron into the heart of the green. Aaron threw up his left arm and tipped his cap. The gallery applauded. David acknowledged the shot with a thumbs-up, then turned his attention to his own situation.

The pin had been placed on the left, narrower half of the green, between a sharply sloped bunker in the back and a deep sandy bunker in the front. The pin could be attacked, but the required angle left a narrow margin for error and a mistake would mean an almost-certain bogey.

The right side of the green was far deeper, almost sixty yards from front to back. Hitting to that side reduced the chance of birdie, but maximized the chance of par.

David’s mind spun unconnected thoughts: The kid needs to be put in his place. Tournaments aren’t won on Saturdays. Aaron has cancer.

Tomorrow will be another day. Soon Aaron will be dead, and it won’t make any difference to him if you’re twelve-under par or thirteen. A birdie and you beat Rancourt by one shot. Soon you’ll be dead. Maintain the flex in your right knee.

“What do you think?”

“You could get it back there,” Rabbit said. “A hard five or easy four, turn it over a little right to left. Be nice to have the lead over this punk.”

“But what do you think?”

Rabbit closed the yardage book.

“Been a long day. I think you should get your par and have a beer with Aaron.”

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David nodded, took the five-iron and played a safe shot to the right side of the green. He walked forward to watch Rancourt, who’d mishit his drive off the neck and so was only a few paces ahead of David, instead of the usual seventy yards. He confronted the same situation as David had, but Rancourt saw no dilemma.

David carefully watched the young man. The shot meant nothing, really, certainly not in the scheme of life (a birdie wouldn’t save Aaron), but not even in the golf world. It’d mean that he’d have the honor tomorrow and that he’d have beaten two players twenty-five years older than he was, one of whom had cancer. If he were to make a birdie, he’d be slightly more likely to win on Sunday, but he’d probably win whether he made birdie or not, and he’d win many other times for sure.

David carefully watched the crowd. The shot literally meant nothing to them. Their lives would be no better if Bobby Rancourt made birdie and no worse if he made bogey. Surely the act of impelling a golf ball with exceptional momentum could not be of great interest or consequence.

But the fans appeared rapt, as they had throughout the afternoon, as if everything this exceptionally handsome and strong young man did mattered very much, including, most importantly, this next shot. Rancourt’s look of steely determination suggested it meant everything. His eyes had glazed over, as if there were nothing else in the world—no observers, no competitors, no man with cancer—just a club and a ball that needed to be beaten to the Stone Age. David’s thoughts turned to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” a poem he’d read as a teenager. The poem’s speaker meets with his neighbor each spring to repair a stone wall on their common border. The wall serves no purpose, as neither owner has cattle or crops, but the neighbor insists on maintaining the barrier because it’s all he’s ever known. As he replaces fallen stones, the speaker silently wonders what could impel a man to a futile exercise: 190

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He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

David saw the same darkness in Rancourt. It was one thing to take the game seriously because it paid the bills or to play because it quieted the demons inside you. But to think for a second that it really mattered, that where that little white ball ended up made one bit of difference, to think that the outcome of a golf match had any meaningful consequence? This required either exquisite self-deception or obliviousness.

Perhaps this was the intangible quality that could be nourished but not implanted—the ineffable quality essential to greatness.

Bobby Rancourt took a seven-iron and hit the ball straight at the flag. It cleared the front bunker by no more than a foot and bounded forward, finishing three inches from the cup.

The crowd cheered.

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Chapter 18 ***

A

T THE FAR-LEF T END of the Planation Estates driving range, David

jerry-rigged an instrument of torture. Along the ground, he set pair of clubs, pointed in parallel to the Phase Three clubhouse in

the distance. About a yard in front of the clubs, he twisted an upright broken shaft into the ground. For the pièce de résistance, he clipped a five-iron to a nylon strap that attached to a blue Kevlar vest. David gestured for Billy to duck his head so that he could place this macabre “training aid” around Billy’s neck.

The range was deserted. Seniors didn’t care much for practice. Nevertheless, he looked up and down the practice area self-consciously. The boy was understandably reluctant to don a device that could only have been designed by a sadist.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“What does it do?”

“It connects the club to your chest so that you’re forced to hit the ball with your body instead of your hands.”

“How can I hit a ball without my hands?”

“You promised to trust me completely. That was the deal.”

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a couple of weeks earlier, but David hadn’t put him through anything like this. Billy bent down and reluctantly allowed David to slide the vest over his head. Armored knights had greater freedom of movement. He walked Frankenstein-style to the spot where David had teed up a ball, checked out the set-up, shook his head and asked, “Okay, what now?”

“Try and hit the shaft with your shot.”

“I can barely move my hands. How am I going to hit the ball?”

“Use your body.”

Billy shook his head incredulously and gamely gave it a try. He waggled, generating the force from his chest and made a comically awkward movement that vaguely resembled a swing. His club hit the ground approximately six inches behind the tee, bounced upwards and grazed the top of the ball. It landed approximately two feet to the right of where he stood. Billy looked at the ball and said, “Sweet.”

David replaced it on the tee. “Again,” he said.

Billy kept at it. After a few repetitions, he managed to hit a low, liner 75 yards or so down the middle.

“Pured it.”

“Okay,” David said. “Now I want you to start the ball to the right of the shaft and hit a draw.”

“I just hit my five-iron seventy-five yards. How can I hit a draw when I can’t use my hands and I have an iron maiden around me?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Billy rehearsed for a while, taking practice swings in which he bumped his hips forward and dropped his right shoulder to the ground so that he would hit the inside part of the ball. When he was satisfied that he could make a decent go of it, he addressed the ball and swung.

Though he propelled it only forty yards or so, the ball started to the right of the shaft and turned ever so slightly to the left of its initial target line.

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“Excellent,” David said.

“I just hit it forty yards.”

“When you practice with me, I define success. Now hit another draw.”

Billy sighed. Again, he went through the elaborate preparations.

Again, he produced a shot that looked one hit by a five-year-old. This constituted progress only based on David’s long-term understanding of the process required to produce repeatable golf shots.

“Again,” David said.

“How many do I have to hit of these?”

“One hundred.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“One hundred. Then one hundred fades. After you get better at this, we’ll make you hit high and low shots until you can work it around the clock hitting it with your body. It’ll be six hundred shots in total.”

“Six hundred…” Billy cried in protest.

“Unless you think you’re not up to it.”

The challenge silenced Billy. He redoubled his efforts. He desperately wanted to please Billy, but he never had the concentration to stay with a drill for very long. After a few shots, he stepped back, drifted in David’s direction, and asked, “How many majors do you think Tiger would have won if he hadn’t driven his Cadillac into the fire hydrant?”

“I know how many you’ll win if you don’t practice.”

Billy hit a few more, then wandered back again and asked, “Who do you think lost the most sleep—Van de Velde thinking about Carnoustie, Arnie thinking about Olympic or Mickelson over Winged Foot?”

“Van de Velde, but Watson has them all beat.”

This time he only hit two more practice shots before returning.

“If Tom Watson had held on at Turnberry, where would that have ranked in all-time greatest golf achievements?”

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“It would have been the greatest with nothing a close second.” He put an arm around Billy’s shoulder and added, “But professionals generally don’t talk during practice. It’s considered a distraction.”

Billy looked at him quizzically. “So you never spoke with your teacher during lessons?”

“He was a man of very few words.”

“How did you learn?”

“I think the question is how one can learn without silence.”

Billy took the hint and yet again returned to the routine with a new resolve. This lasted approximately ten shots. David could see that Billy was fighting to keep himself from bursting. Several times he almost spoke, but caught himself and kept himself in check by contorting his body into the rehearsal position, and taking a practice swing or two, which required great concentration and precluded conversation, but after a particularly feeble shot, which traveled approximately twelve feet, instinct took over, and he wandered back to David and blurted, “You know what this reminds me of? Did you ever read The Da Vinci Code?”

“Yes.” “It’s like those Catholic priests who hit themselves. They had a funny word for it.”

“Flagellation.”

“That’s right. Self-flagellation. The only other time I’ve ever heard that word was to describe something a bacterium uses for locomotion.

You know, like a spirochete.” He emphasized this word for comic effect.

“Somehow, this Christian sect has adapted the bacterial motor to sadomasochism. What were they called again?”

“Opus Dei.” “Right, Opus Dei. They would whip themselves until they bled. Was that a real thing or made up?”

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“Real.”

“Did they ever explain in the book why the priests did it?”

“I think it’s supposed to be a way of showing remorse for sin.”

“Don’t the priests take a vow of poverty and abstinence?”

“Yes.” “So what was their sin?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, anyway, it kind of feels like that.”

Billy smiled, tottered back to the tee and, mustering up his remaining determination, resumed practice. He became increasingly frustrated. Soon, he began to regress. He whiffed a couple of times and then, improbably, hit a ball backwards as he recoiled in frustration.

David put an arm around on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Come on, let’s go get some lunch.”

Billy said, “Great,” even though it was barely half past eleven o’clock.

David had the sense that he could have gotten the same reaction by suggesting that they go to the dentist together. Billy removed the vest and threw it to the ground as if it were a slain boa constrictor.

*** In the clubhouse, David and Billy ordered a couple of Arnold Palmers.

“Two half and half ’s coming up,” the waitress replied.

“It’s not the same thing,” David muttered, after she left. “Arnie would always get upset. It’s supposed to be mostly iced tea with a splash of lemonade. If the tea didn’t dominate, he didn’t think it tasted right.”

“Do you think it was weird for Arnold Palmer to order an Arnold Palmer?”

“He didn’t like it at first, but he got used to it.”

“It’s like how Achilles’s Achilles heel was his Achilles heel. I mean, 197

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what are the chances of that?”

David smiled as the waitress returned with the drinks. “Here you go boys—two Arnold Palmers.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

They took long sips.

“Too much lemonade,” David groused, but Billy didn’t seem to mind, and he gulped his down. When he finished, he pulled an envelope from his pocket, handed it to David across the table and said, “I got you something.”

David looked at the envelope and Billy with confusion and asked, “Why?” “To thank you for what you’ve done for me these couple of weeks and for what you’re going to do for me this summer. Besides, today’s your birthday, isn’t it?”

David frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Mrs. Friedlander told me. It’s the big six-five, right?”

“Remind me to have a chat with Millie about privacy.”

Billy smiled and nodded at the envelope. “Go ahead, open it.”

David didn’t want a gift for what he’d done for Billy and he definitely didn’t want to acknowledge his birthday. Furthermore, he had a foreboding sense that he didn’t want the contents of the envelope even before he tore it open and found a ticket to that evening’s Spitfire concert.

“How do you know about this?”

“You told me that was the name of Scott’s band.”

“How do you know my son’s name is Scott?”

“You told me.”

“You really need to stop listening so carefully to what I say.”

“I don’t think so,” Billy said, smiling.

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presence in southern Florida. More stemmed from the fact that Billy had put so much thought into the gift. It had been a very long time since anyone had touched David in this way. He held up the ticket and said, “Well, rock concerts aren’t really my thing, but thank you very much.”

The waitress arrived with the food: a tuna sandwich for David, fries and a grilled cheese for Billy. “How about a refill on those half and halfs?” she asked.

“No thanks,” David replied.

“Sure,” said Billy.

“I’ll be right back with that.”

When she left, Billy said, “Can I ask you something?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t, but that hasn’t stopped you before.”

Billy smiled again and asked, “Why don’t you speak with your kids?”

David wouldn’t have tolerated the question from anyone else. Somehow he didn’t mind it coming from Billy.

“How do you know that I never speak with my kids?”

“Um, we discussed it during one of our practice sessions?”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Billy sheepishly stared into his grilled cheese and admitted, “Mrs. Friedlander told me.”

“Is there anything she doesn’t tell you?”

“Nope,” he replied, and flashed his winning smile.

“Well, I’m really going to have a chat with her.”

“Did you say rock concerts aren’t your thing because you don’t want to see your son?”

“Geez, where does this directness come from? In my family, we learned to conceal our feelings. Haven’t your grandparents taught you anything?” David hoped the joke would deflect the question, but he could see that Billy still expected an answer. “It’s not that I don’t want to see my son,” 199

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David said. “It’s more that I think he wouldn’t want to see me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Billy said. “I’m sure he’d want to see you very much.”

“How can you be so certain?”

Billy looked down at this plate and for a moment his persistently optimistic countenance faded. “I know I’d like to see my dad.”

The wave of sympathy rushed through David’s head, lodged briefly in his throat and settled finally in the pit of his stomach. He felt things for this boy that he hadn’t felt for anyone in years. Softly, David said, “This is different, son.”

“I don’t think so. I can’t think of any circumstance under which I wouldn’t want to see my father.”

“Imagine that he abandoned you or that he abused you.”

“Is that what you did?”

“No.” “So why should I imagine it then?”

“Okay, suppose that he let you down in some way?”

“Doesn’t everyone let someone down in some way?”

“But your father? Wouldn’t you be angry?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. If I were, I wouldn’t stay mad forever.”

David nodded and said, “You’re a better man than I am.” Even though David had only known Billy for a few weeks, he genuinely believed this to be true. After the waitress collected the empty plates, David paid the check and said, “Let’s go putt.”

As they walked from the clubhouse, Billy shifted the conversation to lighter matters. “Best golf swing you ever saw?”

“Ben Hogan,” David answered without hesitation. I got to play nine holes with him once. He was in his early seventies and had lost his dis200

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tance, but it was still the best swing I ever saw. If you’re asking about golfers I saw in their prime, the answer is Trevino. I never saw anyone hit it like him. And, by the way, Watson winning the Open at Turnberry would have been the greatest sports victory of all time, not just the greatest golf victory.”

“What are we going to do now?” Billy asked as they arrived at the putting green. “Maybe you’ll glue my hands together, cover my eyes and make me hit putts until I can channel the Force.”

“I was thinking we’d start with left-handed ten-footers, then right-handed ten-footers and then—yeah—this drill where you putt three-footers with your eyes closed.”

“Maybe about two, three hundred of each?”

“I was thinking I’d take it easy on you—how about only fifty of each?”

Billy dropped a ball at the edge of the putting green and said, “Tell you what: if I miss this putt, I’ll do as many drills as you like, today and for the rest of the summer. But if I make it, we end practice early this afternoon, you get cleaned up and go to the Spitfire concert tonight.”

David checked out the putt Billy had selected, a double-breaker of more than sixty feet. David doubted Billy could three-putt it, let alone hole it. “So you’re saying if you miss this putt, you’ll follow whatever practice routine I lay out for the rest of the summer?”

“For the rest of forever.”

“And if you make it, you’ll still practice, just not today.”

“I’ll even practice today—we just cut off early.”

David would have agreed even if Billy’s condition had been that he’d never practice again; he couldn’t make this putt one time in a thousand tries, but it was a nice sweetener. “All right, deal.”

If it’d been David attempting this putt in any type of competitive situation, he’d have surveyed it from every angle, checked the grain of the 201

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green, plumb-bobbed, taken three rehearsal strokes behind the ball and two more standing beside the ball before he took his try. Billy dropped a ball on the green, checked the hole once and whacked it. He hit it so hard that it should have landed in the rough by the first tee box. Instead it hit the hole, bounced straight up and back down into the cup.

Billy grinned, walked off the putting green and said, “Enjoy the concert.�

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Chapter 19 ***

D

AVID’S FATHER NEVER KNOCKED. He just walked in as if it were per-

fectly natural to barge in on a teenager who’d closed his door, without consideration to what his son might be doing. As it happened,

David was lost in thought, writing. He didn’t look up.

“How’d you hit ’em today?”

Apparently, Mal hadn’t noticed that David hadn’t left the house all day. Some days, he observed more than a gumshoe, even things you couldn’t fathom how he suspected, like the time David dropped a raspberry Pop-Tart on the floor. David vacuumed up every crumb, but somehow Mal figured it out when he returned home after work. Other days he noticed nothing, not even obvious things you couldn’t fathom he could miss. He noticed so much on the good days that David sometimes presumed him to be purposefully oblivious on the bad days. Or maybe it was the beer.

“I hit ’em fine,” David replied.

“That’s what I like to hear.”

David still didn’t look up.

“How’s the cross-handed putting working out?”

“Fine.”

“You feeling comfortable with it?”

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“Comfortable enough.”

“Well, stick with it. It’s good for shoulder alignment, and it keeps the left wrist from breaking down. It’ll come in handy when you’re putting to win the Open.”

“All right.”

“I heard Mr. Palmer say that if he could change one thing about his golf training, he’d have learned to putt cross-handed.”

David looked up. “You’ve mentioned that.” He refrained from adding “about two hundred times.”

David looked back down at his pages. The silence hung in the air between them. Father and son had endured many such moments. Other than golf, they had little to discuss. Mal took interest neither in David’s schoolwork nor his personal life. He had never once asked about Kristin. In fact, Mal didn’t know David had a girlfriend, even though David had been dating Kristin for almost two years. Other than golf, Mal knew nothing of his son’s pursuits. On the rare occasions when they played golf together, they spoke only of the game. Mal would ask why David had hit a certain shot or criticize some aspect of his form. They shared none of the pleasant conversation golfers usually enjoyed, and they spoke more on the course than anywhere else.

David went on writing. He wouldn’t have been surprised if his father walked out without saying another word, but Mal obviously had an agenda.

“What are you working on?”

“I’m writing a story.”

“That for school?”

“No. I’m just writing for fun.”

“Not exactly my idea of fun.”

“No, I wouldn’t suppose it is.”

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Mal ignored the barb. He was in what for him passed as a good mood.

“You do that a lot?”

“All the time when I’m not practicing golf.”

“What’s the story about?”

David looked up. This was unprecedented.

“It’s about this man that lives in paradise,” he explained. “It’s a forest filled with old trees and beautiful rivers. The man lives there in peace with a thousand other men and women. They have everything they need—food, water, shelter. It’s perfect. The only problem is that every so often someone disappears without a trace—no body, nothing.

“The others presume that the gods have claimed the victims as sacrifices. But the hero isn’t satisfied with this explanation and investigates.

He finds out that the whole thing is a cage of sorts, maintained by aliens who are eating the humans. He tries to tell the others, but no one believes him. Then he disappears himself. The others believe the gods have taken him in anger.

“It’s an allegory, of course, for the Garden of Eden and that sort of thing. It’s got lots of religious imagery. The symbolism is pretty obvious when you read it.”

David met his father’s eyes and searched for a hint of understanding.

He found none.

“I didn’t realize you liked to write so much.”

“You never asked.”

“Must take a lot of time.”

“Some.”

Mal nodded. “Man named Hendrickson stopped by earlier. You know him?”

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at the course before. Pretty fair golfer.”

“He says you’re not an entirely bad writer.”

“That’s generous of him.”

David wondered for a moment whether Mal might be testing him.

Perhaps he suspected that David had been sitting in his room all day.

Maybe Adina had spilled the beans, and Mal was here to see whether David would confess voluntarily or compound his sins further. More likely, Mal was here to put an end to David’s summer plans. He’d say that the teacher had mentioned some nonsense about a summer writing program at Penn State, laugh and dismiss the idea as crazy what with the Open coming up.

David had been rehearsing his reply for days. He would tell his father that he didn’t give a damn about the Pennsylvania Open or the automatic entry into the U.S. Amateur. He didn’t care about golf very much at all, for that matter. He’d spend his summer, as he wished, at Penn State learning how to write with the kind of people he hoped one day himself to become.

While he was at it, he’d tell his father everything. He’d tell him that a professional golf career had always been his father’s dream, not his. Mal had failed in the most basic way as a parent. He’d never once asked his son what he wanted out of life. He cared only about himself. Mal hadn’t been able to play professionally, so he’d decided that his son would, whether he liked it or not. Mal couldn’t be Arnold Palmer, so he’d be Deacon, and that was all there was to it. No one would stand in the way.

Everyone else was an instrument to serve his master plan. If they didn’t suit his needs, he’d mold them, and if they couldn’t be molded, they’d be banished to the fringes of his life, as his mother had been.

David would call Mal out as a detestable, mean-spirited, abusive person who did no good for anyone and left only ruin in his wake. He’d 206

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turned his mother into a shell, and now he aimed to do the same with him. Enough is enough, David would say. He didn’t need or care for his father’s approval. It was his life to do with as he pleased. He was sixteen, old enough to know and do what he wanted. He’d paid his dues, lived under the iron fist long enough, endured more than his share of despair and destruction. It would end, here and now.

But Mal didn’t criticize David or dismiss his writing. He said not a word about Ron Hendrickson or the folly of writing novels, and he didn’t mention Penn State at all. He said, “I guess I’ve been pretty hard on you lately.”

The tone caught David off guard. He’d heard it once or twice before.

After a particularly harsh Christmas, when Mal evicted Adina’s mother from the house for having the audacity to gift David a video game (which would have distracted him from golf), Mal seemed to recognize that he’d gone too far. But David knew it was just a ruse, and he felt no weakening of his resolve. He thought, “If ‘lately’ means sixteen years. If ‘you’ means everyone who crosses your path.”

“I’ve only been tough on you because I want the best for you,” Mal continued. “I didn’t have any of these opportunities when I was a kid. I wish my parents had given me access to a country club and lessons. I grew up on public courses, but I was pretty good before I got hurt, you know— really good if you consider how I got started. I might have been able to play professionally if I’d been given the right start. That’s what I’ve tried to do for you—give you the right start. You understand that, don’t you?”

David didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything about his father.

“The day you were born, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to make sure my son has all the opportunities that I never had.’ That’s why I’ve sacrificed so much to make this life for you and your mother. I wanted you to have a good home and for her not have to work so she could take care of you.

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And I wanted you to have all the best things. I don’t really like working in a steel mill, you know. I do it because I want what’s best for the family.

You understand that too, right?”

“I guess so,” David replied. It took temerity for Mal to claim that he’d done anything with Adina’s best interest in mind, but he did it with a straight enough face that David considered whether it might be in earnest.

David had always wondered whether somewhere deep down his father understood the pain he caused his family, that he did what he did in spite of himself and silently regretted it later. To claim that he’d done it all as part of some master plan was maddening, but that’s where he was going.

“I wish I’d had the same opportunities as you,” Mal continued. “I wish my father had done for me what I’ve done for you. My dad was inflexible. He was totally by the book. It was ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘no, sir,’ and ‘what grade did you make at school today?’ He worked in a coal mine.

When I was fourteen, I started working there during the summers. That’s where I’d have ended up if I hadn’t entered the service. Fortunately, the army opened my eyes and I saw that wanting a little more out of life didn’t make you a bad person. Of course, I got injured, so there was a limit on what I could achieve. You have no such limits.”

David thought, “But woe unto me if I desire to excel at something other than what you want.” Could his father possibly believe any of this drivel? Could a human being so utterly lack self-awareness? Could Mal believe for a second that he was doing anything for David and not himself. Did he not see that he was constricting his horizons, not expanding them? Was he oblivious to the extent to which his demand of endless practices had isolated David from his peers?

A third party might have bought this tale of self-sacrifice. David could imagine one of Mal’s drinking buddies buying it. They’d nurse a beer and empathize with Mal over the sacrifices that parents make for 208

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their children. It was plausible unless one knew the facts, as David did.

Looking at his father with contempt, David seethed as he prepared to unleash the tirade that Mal deserved.

His father continued, “I have to say that I’m impressed by you. Your teacher had some nice things to say. I don’t know anything about English, but it’s quite impressive to write so well while practicing four hours a day.

I admire the effort. It’s clear you’re a young man of many talents.”

David decompressed somewhat. This was new. A new kind of manipulation, perhaps? The carrot instead of the stick? Had his father read the hatred in his eyes and realized that his son had reached his breaking point? Was he playing him now? Talking him down from the cliff? David couldn’t process it all quickly enough. All he could think to say was, “Thanks.”

Mal wasn’t done. He said, “I think you’ve been making a lot of progress with your golf, too. The swing changes are starting to produce some consistent results. You have a solid, piercing flight.”

Then he said, “The putting’s also coming around. Your set-up is better. You’re making more of the eight footers.”

Then he said, “I think we’re going to see some great results over the next few months. The schedule’s good for you. Having the Open nearby at Latrobe should make you comfortable, and your game is ready. The hard work is paying off. You should be very proud of yourself.”

David’s head spun. This was what he’d always wanted to hear. All right, not exactly what he’d wanted to hear, but Mal had come closer than he’d ever come before, perhaps even close enough. Sure, it would have been nice for him to have praised David as a person instead of his shoulder turn, set-up and course management, but kindness didn’t come easily to Mal and one had to be realistic about his expectations. It was easy enough for David to imagine that, now that the dam had been broken, 209

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more and more satisfying compliments would follow. After all, it would only require a short step from praising David’s golf to saying what he’d never said before—that he loved him and was proud of him.

So what if Mal had said that David should be proud of himself instead of that he was proud of him? So what if he’d said that he admired David’s effort, not David? What of it? The words were there: “impressed,” “proud,” “admire.”

For now, this felt good enough. As David let the praise wash over him, he felt euphoric. Soon, he was out of his own body, looking down on his father and himself from above. He watched himself absorb the compliments with a beatific look on his face that remained when Mal shifted the conversation and asked the question to which he’d been building all along.

From above, it was obvious that Mal had been playing David the entire time. No application of the carrot and stick had ever been more ham-fisted. There would be no further compliments, no gradual acclimation to the emotional needs of his son. Mal would get what he wanted and move on. Up above, the jig was up. Down below, the boy was taken in by the ruse. He’d been prepared to become a man, to sacrifice golf and family for the Penn State writing program. Now, only a wide-eyed teenager remained, eager to please his father.

“So, are you excited about the State Open this summer?” Mal asked.

To which David heard himself reply, “Yes, dad. Yes I am.”

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Chapter 20 ***

T

HE BIRMINGHAM HILTON served green apple martinis in giant glasses

with a Maraschino cherry and a slice of fresh apple. Even by Dixie standards it was a sweet cocktail, but they filled the glass halfway

with gin (or, if you preferred, vodka), so no one asked any questions.

David sat at the bar, nursed his drink and tried to distract himself by watching SportsCenter.

A portly man collapsed onto the barstool with a heavy sigh. A shiny shirt squeezed his neck and his necktie had been tied so short that its tail extended well below its blade. Though the hotel had the air conditioner on full blast, the man in the too-tight clothing sweated profusely.

David imagined him to be in town for some convention. He’d peddled his wares all day—ball bearings or titanium steak knives, perhaps—and now wanted to take a load off and have a cold one. The man motioned to the waiter to bring him the same as David, offering a well-worn but honest smile to David as he did. Even before he extended his hand, David could tell that his new friend wanted to talk.

“Patterson’s the name. Art Patterson, from Montgomery.”

David’s handshake caused the pens in Art Patterson’s pocket protector to jiggle.

“David Howard.”

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“Nice to meet you, David. What brings you to Alabama?”

In the past, David had experimented with lying in these situations.

This had spared him some conversations, but whatever short-term gains he achieved were outweighed by the unforeseeable negative consequences, like running into someone at the course the next day and forgetting the phony name that he’d given them. These days, he stuck to the truth.

“I’m a professional golfer,” David said. “I’m here playing a tournament this week.”

“Don’t say. I’m on the road so much I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Hardly have time for the paper. How you hittin’ ’em?”

“Okay. Could be better. Could be worse.”

“That’s the game, right? Does golf have you on the road a lot?”

“More than I’d like. Let’s just say I’m very well liked in Buffalo.”

Art smiled and surprised David with his reply. “I got nothing planted myself. Not a thing in the ground. I’m on the road two hundred days a year. Oil filters are my game. Got all of Alabama and Mississippi for my territory. Used to have Louisiana too, but the company’s just getting too damn big and the competition’s tougher than ever. I try to see each of my vendors once a month—take them out for a beer and a lap dance. You know how it is. It’s the old way, but it’s the only way. Afraid I’ve seen more than my share of hotel rooms.”

The bartender set down a fresh martini. Art took a long drag.

“You have a car?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Mind my asking what kind?”

“Not at all. It’s a Chrysler LeBaron.”

“Mighty fine car.”

“Got it for a hole in one.”

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“Don’t say? I got one of those myself. Catch this: I’m on a 150-yard par-three, hittin’ a five-iron off the tee. I pull the shit out of that sonofabitch. Thing goes fifty yards left of the hole, hits the trunk of a tree square, ricochets onto the green, and damned if the thing doesn’t go right in the hole. The other three guys in my foursome didn’t believe it. But there it was in the middle of the hole.”

“Still a ‘one’ on the scorecard,” David said with a smile.

“Damn straight,” Art said. “Crazy game.”

“You can say that again.”

“Greatest game in the world, though.”

David nodded absently. The clock above the bar said nine thirty.

Dawn would have been waiting for just about half an hour now. He figured she’d probably wait a little bit longer, but not much. His right hand reached into his pocket and rubbed the scrap of paper she’d given him. It had become slippery from being fingered so often. During the sleepless night after his round of 59, he committed every aspect of it to memory, from her swooping “T” to the tiny smiley face in the first zero in “o’clock.” It seemed odd that such a simple message could signal such a momentous fork in the road: Hilton Saturday 9:00 Room 631 David’s thoughts drifted to his clothes. There’d been no major shopping spree since he and Dawn had met at dinner. She’d doubtlessly be wearing an evening dress or something provocative from Victoria’s Secret. He still only had golf clothes. He wondered again what it said about a man to be 42 years old and not own a decent article of clothing without a corporate logo.

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“Seems like you sure got a lot on your mind.”

“What’s that?” David had forgotten about his friend.

“I was asking if you had kids.”

“Sorry. I was looking at the clock.”

“Got somewhere to be?”

“Maybe. I’m supposed to be meet someone in a little bit. Nor sure whether I’m going.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you.”

“Not at all. I’d like to finish my drink.” For Art Patterson’s sake he added, “And our conversation.”

Art appreciated this. It was quite a thing to be well liked in Birmingham.

“So do you have any kids?” he asked.

“Yeah, I have two.”

“I’ve got three myself. I’ll tell you, they’re the only things that keep me sane on the road. I’ve logged eighty thousand miles so far this year.

You could go insane spending that much time by yourself, but a man has to do what he has to do. I’ve got this little photo of the three of them taped to my windshield. My wife took it. It’s a picture of them hugging me after getting home from one of my trips. It’s from a long time ago, but some days it’s the only thing that keeps me going. My kids are seventeen, thirteen and nine. How old are yours?

“Twelve and six.”

Art nodded. “They grow up in the blink of an eye. My oldest girl just got her acceptance letter from Mississippi State. Seems like just yesterday she was in diapers.”

“You must be very proud.”

“I sure am. I’ve been putting aside $100 a month for college since she was a baby, but even still, I’m worried about paying. Are your kids with you here in Alabama?”

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“No. They’re home in Pennsylvania.”

“I always see those professionals on TV hugging their wives and kids after they win a tournament.”

“That’s only the big guys. Even Tiger and Phil only have their families with them when they’re in contention. The rest of us can’t afford to have the whole crew on the road with us every week. Gets awfully expensive.”

“I imagine it does. Does the wife get on your case about being on the road so much?”

“Sometimes,” David said.

Art nodded. “The little woman gets on me sometimes, too, but I always say that I ain’t gonna put bread on the table sittin’ home on my ass watching television. A man has to pay the bills, right?”

“Right,” David said. Art didn’t need to know about the job opportunity at Laurel Valley. David took a sip of his martini and checked the wall: 9:35.

On SportsCenter, Keith Olbermann narrated highlights from the day’s action at the Southern Southern Open, including Bobby Rancourt driving the green at the sixteenth hole, his eight-iron-on-a-string at seventeen, and David’s curling twenty-footer at eleven. David felt no connection to the man on the screen lifting his putter and fist to the sky.

Then, because Olbermann was Olbermann, he showed David holing out for par at eighteen, followed by footage of him missing the tap-in to win the Open. Olbermann punctuated the clip by shouting, “Noonan!”

Unfortunately, Art saw the clip. He snapped his fingers.

“Holy mackerel, that’s you! You’re leading the tournament!”

“Unfortunately, they don’t hand out trophies on Saturday.”

“Say, mind if I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

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“You probably get this all the time.”

David knew that it would be The Question. After all this time, he could see it formulating in people’s minds before they even became conscious of their desire to ask it.

He’d heard every possible permutation of The Question, in every conceivable setting, with every imaginable tone. He’d been asked The Question by strangers, friends, friends of friends, family members, cab drivers, supermarket clerks, dry cleaners, pizza delivery boys, bank tellers, airline check-in agents, airline pilots, taxi drivers, toll collectors, meter maids, other parents, teachers, crossing guards, pro-am partners, tournament volunteers, corporate representatives, every reporter with whom he’d ever interacted, tour officials, caddies and even fellow pros.

He’d been asked before rounds, after rounds and during rounds.

He’d been asked at putting greens, driving ranges, car rental agencies, hotel desks, hotel lobbies, barbecue stores, Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, beaches and bathrooms. Once, he’d been asked by a man in an adjacent toilet stall. This had seemed to be the theoretical maximum of intrusiveness until, during a family celebration of Scott’s tenth birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s, a man pulled a chair up to their table—as they were eating cake, no less—and asked, “How’d you miss that? Even I could have made it.” Fans were uniformly convinced that, confronted with the same situation, they’d have made the putt.

Some people built up to The Question by making chit-chat. Others acted if they had a right to the information simply because David played golf on TV. The nice ones, like Art Patterson, asked permission before they asked.

David smiled and said, “Go ahead. I’m an open book.”

“Mind you, I’m not much of a golfer myself,” Art said, “but that putt 216

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you missed at the Open. I guess it’s about ten years ago now. It couldn’t have been more than two feet. Even I can make those. What happened?”

Over the years, David had responded to The Question in almost every imaginable way. Early on, he tried avoiding the question by pretending he hadn’t heard it. Surprisingly, this often prolonged the interaction. A surprising proportion of fans felt entitled to an answer. If he failed to respond, many berated him for being an arrogant celebrity.

Later, he tried a joke—“the wind took it”—but humor wasn’t really his thing. He experimented with turning the question back on the questioner, in a Socratic way, as in “Have you ever failed at your job?” Occasionally he responded with anger, as he did with the Chuck E. Cheese interloper. This approach inevitably ended badly. He finally settled on saying “I pulled it.” This was literally true, although it avoided the more interesting issue of underlying causation. For some reason—maybe it was the green apple martinis—David felt that Art Patterson deserved a more expansive answer.

“The irony is that what really did me in was the shot before,” David began. “It was an eighty-foot blind chip over a ridge and the green, which was smooth as glass, was running away from me. I needed to land it in the fringe to take the heat off the ball and let it trickle down to the hole.

If I landed it too short, it would stay in the tall grass. Even a whisker too hard and it would run past the hole, maybe off the green. I’d never seen greens that fast in my life, not even at Augusta” Art listened raptly.

“There were thousands of people surrounding the green and millions more at home,” David continued, “but I didn’t notice any of it. I just saw the shot. I had complete focus—a state of grace, the zone, whatever you want to call it. I opened up my sand wedge and pitched into the green’s sideburn. The gallery thought it might stay there for a second, but 217

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I knew it had enough momentum, and sure enough, it bounded forward and crested the ridge. I couldn’t see the hole, but I figured it’d finish close.

Then the crowd cheered, and I knew for sure. You don’t remember the pitch, do you?”

“No,” Art said. “Just the putt.”

“Right,” David said. No one ever remembered the pitch. “If you watch the footage,” David elaborated, “you’ll see me lift my hand to acknowledge the applause, but the truth is I didn’t hear it, or if I heard it, I didn’t notice it. The waving’s instinctual. Sometimes I even do it when I’m by myself on the range. It’s almost like it’s part of my follow-thru. For the entire round, the only noise I hear was my caddie telling me yardages, which he’d repeat three times each because he’s OCD. “Even as I started walking up to the green, I still didn’t know where the ball had finished. I remember removing my hat and wiping my head with a towel, because it was hot as hell in Tulsa that summer. Then I put my hat back on, crested the hill and saw that the ball was about two feet from the hole. It’d have been better if I had a ten-footer left. I’d have kept grinding. Instead, I relaxed.”

David paused. “Are you a big sports fan, Art?” “The biggest,” he answered. “I played defensive line in high school.”

“So you know how people say, ‘you need to be in the moment.’ In my twenty-two years as a professional, I’ve learned that’s one hundred percent true. But those are simply words. What do they mean exactly and, whatever that magical state is, how do you achieve it? That’s the tricky question.

“I’m not a particularly religious man, but I read a lot and I think the Buddha explained it best. The Buddha identified three poisons that are the root of all suffering: ignorance, attachment and aversion. I’m pretty sure the Buddha must have been a golfer, because I’ve seen time and 218

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again that the instant desire filters in and a player loses focus on the shot in front of him, he’s sunk. The game is merciless.”

“Like when you start dreaming about a promotion that you’re up for.”

“Right, Art. You get it,” David said. “During those last few moments before I missed the putt, I played with all three poisons. When I saw how close my ball was to the hole, I felt as if the round were over—which, of course, is ignorance. And my thoughts began to drift to what the win would produce for me. I wondered what it would be like to have enough money to assure my kids’ college education and to give my wife some measure of luxury. I fantasized about finally being a first-class pro—able to choose the tournaments I wanted to play and to have automatic entries to the majors. Did you know you get a five-year exemption to the Masters?”

Art shook his head no.

“I dreamed what it would be like to stand on a first tee and hear the words ‘U.S. Open Champion David Howard.’ That’s attachment, of course.”

David smiled. “Mostly, though, I obsessed about my father. He was old and sick and I knew there wouldn’t be many more opportunities to win while he was alive. I kept thinking back to this round I played when I was a kid with Arnold Palmer at the Pennsylvania Open. My father was a tough asshole who never had a kind word. I don’t know why, but when I finished that day, I thought my father would put his arm around me and tell me he was proud of me for holding my own.”

“I take it he didn’t?”

“No. In retrospect, it seems pretty stupid that I thought he would. By the time I almost won the open at Oakland Hills, I understood that my father wouldn’t be putting his arm around me if I won the tournament. I wanted to hole that two-footer to spite him. I always tell people I pulled it, but the truth is I played with anger. The next day in the playoff, I had no chance.”

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Art had listened carefully. He thought for a while before speaking.

“It’s just like life. You think you’ve got it all figured out, have everything under control, and then something slams you. Thing is, everyone has their breaking point. I’ve seen skaters trip over their feet at the Olympics.

A guy I bowl with once threw a gutter ball when he needed five pins to win. Heck, my boss forgot the word ‘petroleum’ during a major presentation, and he runs an oil filter company. The limit’s always there—the only question is where it is.”

Art Patterson seemed to have a generous spirit, and it was a nice thing he’d said. David detected no undercurrent of the mocking derision he so often encountered. Nor did he seem to think that he’d have made the putt if he’d been given the opportunity. Art’s sole concern seemed to be making David feel better about himself.

But the analogy he’d offered was flawed. Art’s boss hadn’t dedicated his life to excellence in oil filters. He didn’t spend ten hours a day practicing the word “petroleum.” The level of sacrifice didn’t compare. David hadn’t treated golf as a job. He’d been on a quest for perfection. He could have spent three hours a day on the range instead of practicing until his hands bled. He could have played adequate professional golf and made it to parent-teacher conferences and Little League games. And the magnitude of his failure didn’t compare to the skater, who no doubt had tripped while executing a Triple Lutz or another uncommonly difficult jump. The analogy would have been apt if she’d lost a medal because she couldn’t tie her skates or if David had lost the Open because he’d dunked a four-iron in the water from 220 yards out to a tucked back-right pin.

Art’s analogy missed the exquisite humiliation of having sacrificed so much for one’s art and having failed so spectacularly. Throwing a gutter ball in the bowling league championship was one thing. It was another to have climbed the tallest mountain and, when one step from the sum220

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mit, to have faltered in plain view of the world. It was better to wonder about one’s own capacity to perform under pressure than to know that when the chips were down, a little voice inside your head would say that you weren’t worthy of winning and, worse still, to know that everyone around you knew this about you. To be transparently flawed was more than any man could bear.

David checked the clock, once more fingered the note in his pocket, and pushed back his stool. “You’re right, Art, everyone does have a breaking point,” he said, as he slapped a twenty on the counter. “It was nice chatting with you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an early tee time.”

“Good luck tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” David said, “but let’s deal with tomorrow tomorrow.”

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Chapter 21 ***

A

RMS FOLDED, a beefy sentry guarded the Broward Performing Arts

Center backstage entrance. Across a barrier, a throng of screaming teenagers held “We Love Spitfire” signs that they hoped to have

signed by the band. They expelled so much youthful heat they made the thick Florida night air feel like soup. Through this sea of adolescents, an old man in checkered pants and a threadbare Titleist shirt attempted to wade his way to the velvet rope, earning dirty looks and more than a few elbows. Just who did he think he was, anyway? He timidly approached the brute, who spoke before the old man could even say a word.

“You got the wrong night, pal. The Englebert Humperdink show is tomorrow.”

The goon turned to his companion, an oleaginous-looking man of thirty or so, and continued speaking as if David weren’t there, or if he were, as if he weren’t human. “You know we get all kinds here. When Wayne Newton is here, the old biddies scream for him like he’s Elvis or something.”

The comment received no reply. The guard’s colleague had all the trappings of someone who either was important or wanted to create the appearance of being important. He was dressed entirely in black and wore tortoise-shell glasses that were so obviously designed to age him up, one couldn’t help but doubt whether they contained lenses. He car223

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ried a clipboard and periodically whispered into a wireless microphone that he’d clipped inside the lapel of his black sports jacket, as if he were with the Secret Service. David pegged him as the band’s manager.

“I saw a woman give her number in lipstick to Vic Damone once,” the gorilla continued. “She wrote it on a pair of panties and slipped it right into his lapel. She must have been eighty.”

“You don’t say.” The manager seemed more bothered than entertained by the guard’s banter. Perceiving an opportunity, David tapped the manager on his shoulder and said, “Excuse me.”

The bouncer immediately intervened. “You still here, old man? I told you to come back on Tuesday. Bring flowers. Steve and Eydie really like flowers.”

“I want to see Spider.”

“So does everyone else here, pal.”

“You don’t understand. I’m his father.”

The security guard raised an eyebrow. “You’re Mr. Spider?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What’s your name?”

“David Howard.”

The security guard borrowed the clipboard from the manager and twice leafed through several sheets of paper. “Sorry, your name isn’t on the guest list. You’re going to have to wait with everyone else.”

“I don’t think you understand. I’m his father.”

“I heard you the first time. I don’t care if you’re the Pope. If you’re not on the list, you wait outside the ropes like everyone else.”

“Do you really think he was born with the name ‘Spider’? His real name is Scott Howard.”

This didn’t impress the guard, but it caught the attention of the manager, who stepped toward David and asked the guard, “What’s going on?”

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“This guy says he’s Spider’s father.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“David Howard.”

The manager reclaimed his clipboard, quickly scanned the list and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Howard. I’ve never heard Spider mention his father, and I don’t have your name down on my list for passes. We have very strict rules against disturbing the band. We can only let people backstage who are on this list. You’re going to have to wait in line for an autograph with everyone else.”

“I don’t want an autograph and I wouldn’t be on your list. He doesn’t know I’m coming. It’s a surprise.”

“Well, you’re still going to have to wait in line.”

“Tell Scott that his father—David—would like to see him.”

Sensing that David had made some progress with the manager, the guard said, “Anyone with a computer can look up his real name on the Internet.”

The manager seemed to doubt whether this old guy in the golf get-up would engage in cyber-stalking, but the point couldn’t be denied.

“Okay,” David said. “Tell Scott that the man who paid for his piano lessons with Mrs. Singer would like to see him.”

The specificity of the comment persuaded the manager to investigate further. He turned away, whispered into his microphone and, after a couple of minutes that seemed like an eternity, told the guard, “Let him pass.” The guard seemed incredulous, but he complied with the order by unhooking the rope and pressing back the crowd so David could slip past. A group of girls with dyed hair and various piercings protested vociferously. One hit David in the head with a joint, making his sense of relief all the greater when he finally escaped the mob and re-entered the air-conditioned arena.

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*** After a career spent inside the ropes, David understood as well as anyone how disappointing things could be behind the scenes. Golf fans often wondered what players talked about on the course or what went on in tournament clubhouses, but they’d have been underwhelmed by the reality. People tended to forget that for the pros, golf was work, not play, and the people with whom they shared their rounds were trying to pick one another’s pockets. Most of the time, golfers chatted less than accountants. People also tended to forget that golfers didn’t all tee off at the same time. Except for rain delays, clubhouses were mostly deserted; the sight of a solitary pro changing shirts or shoes wasn’t exactly the stuff of childhood dreams. David had seen enough to intuit that even the family quarters in the White House probably weren’t all that remarkable. There’d still be toothpaste in the sink and underwear on the floor. They might belong to the leader of the free world, but underwear was underwear.

Even when judged against these low expectations, the backstage area at the Broward Performing Arts Center underwhelmed. The hallway smelled vaguely of feet. Its harsh concrete walls were decorated only by the occasional poster: Journey with the Filipino guy who replaced the guy who replaced the guy who replaced Steve Perry, Jerry Vale and Friends, and the Steve Miller Band Summer ’20 Tour, which was probably about forty years too late for anyone to care.

Being backstage at a rock concert made the quiet seem particularly incongruous. The contrast to the commotion outside couldn’t have been starker. David saw precisely one human being: a cleaning person wheeling away a hardly-touched cart of chips and guacamole from the dressing room that temporarily belonged to the bass player, Beetle, and the lead singer, Mantis. A teenager would have swooned at seeing these iconic names scrawled in magic marker, but David felt nothing.

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When he saw the name Spider, though, he felt a bit light-headed. In his imagination he’d lived this moment many times. In these dreams (or nightmares), the encounter almost always ended with something being thrown at him. It seemed poetically just, in a way he couldn’t precisely define, that this substance would likely prove to be avocado.

David steeled himself and knocked. In a moment he heard a voice— Scott’s—say “come in,” and he opened the dressing room door.

Though it had been almost twenty years, he’d have recognized his son anywhere. He was bigger, of course, and softer, but there was the scar near his eye from when he’d gotten hit by a hockey stick, and the cowlick that would never fall into place. His almond eyes, which warmed when he smiled to welcome David, hadn’t changed at all. Scott hugged him more warmly than David either had expected or felt he deserved.

“I didn’t believe them when they said it. I knew you lived around here, but it’s been so long. Way to come up with Mrs. Singer’s name, by the way.”

“Yeah, I definitely pulled that out of my butt.”

“You should have called. You didn’t need to wait outside with the yearning masses.”

“I kind of decided at the last minute. This boy I’m teaching golf got me a ticket as a present.”

“That’s nice of him.”

David nodded. “He’s a very nice boy. A lot like you.”

Scott nodded. “Did you watch the show?”

“Yeah. It was great.”

Scott looked at him skeptically. “Come on.”

David should have known better. He’d never been able to deceive his son. He searched for something honest but polite, finally settling on, “It was loud.”

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Scott laughed. “I don’t like it either.”

“So why do you play it then?”

“I’d rather play jazz, but unfortunately, you can’t make any real money doing that. It’s okay, though. I still get to play music for a living.

Not everyone gets to do exactly what he wants to.”

“I understand that.”

Scott nodded. He knew that was true.

“Would you like a drink or something?”

“No, I’m fine.”

Scott gestured for him to sit. As they sized each other up, David wondered how he looked to his son. David had never cared much about his own appearance, but at that moment he wanted to look better for Scott’s sake. His son had suffered enough. He shouldn’t also have to endure the sight of his pitiful excuse for a father grown decrepit and frail.

But Scott seemed unbothered by David’s physical appearance. For that matter, he seemed oddly at peace with the entirety of his presence. His smile seemed warm and genuine. Only David seemed uncomfortable with the situation. He made what felt like a pathetic effort to break the ice by saying, “I’d imagined there’d be groupies.”

“Nah, we’ve been touring for more than ten years,” Scott said, responding quite naturally. “We all got that stuff out of our system a long time ago. Most of the guys are pretty cerebral, anyway. The drummer was reading Faulkner before the show. You’d like him a lot. He reads more than anyone I know.”

“That’s cool.”

“Besides, everyone in the band has a family. I’ve been married for more than five years. My wife and I have a two-year-old son.” Scott let these words sink in for a moment, then pulled a phone from his pocket, swiped, and handed it over. As David saw his grandson for the first 228

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time, he felt the full weight of lost time crushing down on his chest. He returned the phone to Scott and asked, “How’s Amy?” “She’s good. She teaches high school English in Pittsburgh. She’s married to an anthropology professor at Carnegie Mellon. He’s a good man. They’re trying to have a child.”

David nodded. “How’s mom?”

Scott looked down at the ground and David immediately understood that Kristin had died. Somehow David hadn’t considered this possibility. He’d been disconnected from his family for so long that he wouldn’t have imagined that any news about them could have impacted him much, but he felt as much emotion now as he had a minute earlier when he’d learned of and seen his grandchild for the first time—a full measure of grief for the woman that had been his first and only love, and regret for the poor choices he’d made. David wanted to cry, but he thought that would be indulgent.

“I had no idea. When?”

“Four years ago. We would have called you, but no one had your number.”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

Scott collected himself quickly. He was a Howard, after all.

“How have you been?”

“For a long time, really bad, but better recently.”

Scott nodded. “I’m glad to hear that.” After a beat, he asked, “Are you still playing?”

“I haven’t touched a club in more than ten years.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Not at all.”

Scott nodded his head “Yeah, you never seemed to like it all that much. Always seemed more like obsession than passion.”

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“That’s perceptive of you,” David said. It had been a long time since he’d felt understood.

They sat in silence for a while, and David thought that it was enough to simply sit quietly with his son in a room. He lamented how many such simple moments he’d missed over the years. Later, they chatted amiably about Scott’s career and his marriage and how magical it was to have a two-year-old. Scott explained how conflicted he felt about being on the road, and how even a single day apart seemed intensely significant. David understood, of course, and said comforting things about the importance of a parent maintaining his or her identity and the virtue of artistic pursuits, though if he were being honest, he wished he’d taken that club pro job at Laurel Valley Country Club all those years ago. Scott said comforting things of his own about pursuing one’s dreams. He asked how things were going for David, who couldn’t think of anything interesting to say other than to tell Scott a little bit about Billy and how the boy had reconnected him to golf. Scott seemed to be pleased that David had found someone to mentor. When the conversation drifted toward its natural end, they exchanged numbers and agreed to try and build a relationship and for David to meet his grandchild as soon as Scott’s tour ended. They hugged, and somehow, impossibly, it still felt like his son. The experience so far exceeded David’s expectations that it left him breathless.

As he turned to leave, David said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t seem angry.”

“I’m not.”

“How can that be?”

“Well, at first I just missed you. Then, when it became clear you weren’t coming home, I did become angry. That probably lasted a long time, but eventually I saw that it didn’t accomplish anything positive. I 230

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remember that story you told me your golf teacher told you about the woman and the strawberries.”

“You remember that,” David asked, incredulously.

“Yeah. I think music really helps with staying in the moment. It sensitizes you to the energy in people and universe. I can’t play good music angry. So it went away. And then after mom died and Maggie was born, I just missed you.”

“I always figured you’d never want to see me again.”

“Why would you think that?”

“For all the obvious reasons. Because of what happened in the Birmingham hotel.”

“People make mistakes.”

“Because I was such a failure as a golfer and a father.”

Scott smiled and sniggled.

“What’s funny?”

“I always thought you were the best father and golfer in the world.”

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Chapter 22 ***

A

F TER MAL MANIPUL ATED DAVID into scrapping his dream of attend-

ing the Penn State summer writing program, David’s interest in golf transformed from dispassionate and technical to obsessive

and fervid. Once recess started, he began arriving at dawn at the driving range where he’d continue hitting balls until the sun set or his hands bled, whichever came first, as if he could beat his demons into submission with a five-iron.

Rage can’t carry you to the summit of golf, but it can get you pretty close. David had enough pent-up anger that summer to strangle many a man-sized course into submission. In July, he won a local amateur tournament, finished second in two others, and shot a course-record 63 in the West Penn Amateur at Seth Raynor’s brutal Fox Chapel. The entire summer built up toward the State Open. By the time it came around in early August, David had every reason to believe he could win.

He entered Latrobe Country Club, the sister course to his own stomping ground, with confidence and purpose. He’d win the damned trophy and tell his father—who hadn’t made any further overtures in the direction of building their relationship—where he could stick it. David stood on the first tee, driver in hand, overflowing with a potent mixture of determination and hatred. He heard a voice say, “Good morning.” It 233

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was his playing partner, an irrelevancy). David would crush the course and anyone who happened to be in the way. He turned around, grousing and extended his hand without enthusiasm.

The man engulfed David’s hand with a grip so mammoth and strong that David thought his life might be squeezed out through his fingers. He looked up and swallowed.

“Good morning, Mr. Palmer,” he said. The words barely came up.

“Call me Arnie.”

“Good morning, Mr. Arnie.”

Arnie took a tee from his pocket and tossed in the air. It landed pointing at David.

“Your honor,” he said.

David heard the words and understood what he was expected to do, but he couldn’t move. His brain sent a signal to his feet, but it had no effect; the neurons wouldn’t fire. He felt embarrassed beyond words.

David could only stand still and stare at Palmer. Arnie understood; it had happened many times before. He smiled and said, “Let’s tear it up today.”

That helped just enough. David regained control of his feet, walked to the tee box and placed a peg in the ground. He took a practice swing, then another, trying as best as he could to run through his normal routine, but he could neither feel the grip in his hands nor the weight of the club. He couldn’t feel anything at all. In fact, he could barely breathe. He simply swung and hoped for the best.

When the ball flew off the club, David was amazed. He’d prepared himself to whiff. It was a poor shot: a push into the rough, with a fading ball flight that David hadn’t seen once on the range that summer, despite having hit thousands of practice balls. Still, he’d never before experienced such a profound sense of relief. All he had to do now was watch his playing partner, the man with four green jackets, drive his ball over 234

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the ditch. That he could handle.

Arnie took a half swing to the side of the ball, cracked the muscles in his neck, looked down the fairway twice and coiled. The swing was over in an instant—an animalistic blow so ferocious that it caused the ball to make a serpentine hissing sound that David had never before heard on a golf course. Arnie tilted his head to the right in his familiar manner and watched. The ball drew a bit too much from right to left and landed in the left rough.

“Dang it,” he said to himself. Then he smiled and said to David, “See you at the green.”

David relaxed then. Arnie wasn’t perfect. He was just a man like anyone else. His gift was his willingness to let everyone around him know that. Feeling more comfortable, David said, “Right before I roll my birdie in on top of yours.”

Arnie smiled and said, “That’s what I like to hear.” And it was true— Arnie just wanted to be one of the guys.

Amazingly, David lived up to his word. He stiffed his approach and poured his putt in right on top of the King’s.

“Game on,” said Arnie.

“Game on,” said David.

Arnie slashed his way through Latrobe, like Sherman through Atlanta, attacking each shot as if it would be the last one he ever hit.

His tee shots went everywhere—three hundred yards down the fairway (though no one hit it three hundred yards back then), whistling around a dogleg, into the rough, behind trees. He’d played the course a million times, but still managed to find new places. Palmer seemed to relish the obstacles, as if playing the game in the conventional manner didn’t pose an adequate challenge. He wielded his irons like machetes, almost daring the ball to defy him, but it rarely did. Through the first nine holes, Arnie 235

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found only two fairways, but made seven birdies.

In between shots, he talked to David like an old friend about golf and girls and life. He told David about losing the U.S. Open in 1966 and how, even a decade later, he sometimes awoke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat having relived the back nine at Cherry Hills. He told David how the British cheered for him even when he couldn’t break 75, how hard his Pap had been on him and how it had made him the man he was. He told him that at Wake Forest he’d been one down in a match to someone not nearly his equal, playing the round of his life, when his opponent called a penalty stroke on himself for something Arnie hadn’t seen and never would have suspected, and that was why golf was the greatest game in the world.

Palmer explained that he was playing that day because the game meant everything to him. It was a privilege for his beloved Latrobe to host the state open, which had been won by Jerry Barber, Tommy Armour and the great Lloyd Mangrum. If Palmer could win, he explained that it would mean as much to him as many of his professional victories. But, regardless of the outcome, to tee it up in competition with men of honor was a privilege no matter the stakes. David felt Palmer’s passion for the game.

Arnie continued to play with reckless abandon. He birdied the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth holes, triple bogeyed the difficult thirteenth after he hit in a bunker above the hole, and then birdied the next three.

On the sixteenth fairway, Arnie told David that he’d followed David’s career at West Latrobe High. Though they called it Palmer High, Arnie used the old name. Palmer said he saw a lot of young players and felt that David had what it took to make it on tour. He needed to chip better and suggested that David move his hands forward in his setup, but if David grinded at it, Palmer said he’d make it for sure. More importantly, Palmer said he liked the way David conducted himself. Future tour star or not, 236

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he comported himself like a gentleman with whom it was a pleasure to play. Arnie invited David to have a beer after the round, or a ginger ale if he preferred, and he pledged his friendship to David and his help in building his career.

Arnie lived up to those promises. When David applied for membership in the PGA of America, his required character reference came from Palmer. When he won his first professional tournament, it was Arnie who wired the first words of congratulations. When Kristin gave birth to Scott, it seemed only natural to name Arnie as his godfather. David and Arnie played hundreds of times after that round in the Pennsylvania Open—first at Latrobe, then at Bay Hill after David and his family followed Arnie to Florida for better weather and practice facilities. They played in tournaments and exhibitions, for fun and for money. When Arnie played his last round in the U.S. Open, the tournament that meant more to him than any other—the tournament where he had his most stunning success and experienced his most bitter defeat—the threesome included David. He and Rocco Mediate shared the privilege of accompanying Arnie on that final tour of Oakmont, where Palmer had wanted to win more than anywhere else—expected to win—until Jack stuck a dagger in his heart. At the eighteenth hole, David watched from fifty yards behind as Arnie approached the final green, doffed his straw hat to the crowd and hoped that no one would notice him crying in the fairway.

Of course, that was all in the future. In that moment, David had only an assurance and the knowledge that he’d played with a legend and not embarrassed himself. More than not embarrassed himself, he’d played well. It was a great day. On the eighteenth, Arnie hit his approach to the elevated, triple-tiered green to thirty feet. David hit his ball just inside.

As they walked uphill to the green together, shoulder to shoulder, David felt as proud as a young man could feel. David spotted Mal standing off 237

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to the side of the green. He’d come straight from work to watch the end of the round, still dressed in his overalls.

“That your dad?” Arnie asked, “Yes.” “What do you say we give him a show?”

Arnie went directly to his ball, stood over his putt and said, “Don’t need to read this one.” Palmer knew Latrobe so well he often thought of the course as an extension of his own body. He popped his putt in the hole for a 65.

“Not bad for an old man,” David said.

“Not bad for a man with two bogeys and a triple,” Palmer replied, smiling. Then he nodded in Mal’s direction and said, “Now you knock yours in for your dad.”

David did. He holed the putt for a 67, four shots better than anyone in the field, except Palmer.

*** As the tournament leaders, the pair played again on Saturday, a windy day favoring Palmer’s low, penetrating ball flight. He shot 68, three strokes higher than his first-round score, but, in David’s view, far more impressive. Despite the challenging conditions, Palmer hit thirteen greens in regulation and managed the course masterfully. David held his own against the King and shot a 72—the only player in the field other than Palmer who managed to break 75. Though David had shot lower scores in his life, he’d never been prouder of his play. He could have fallen apart when a gust of wind deposited his second shot at the par-five third hole into a lake guarding the front of the green, but he dropped well back in the fairway, hit a solid pitch and holed the putt for his par. David felt himself learning the deportment of a professional from Palmer by osmosis.

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When the duo teed off Sunday, a small gallery gathered to follow them. For the first time in his life, David played in front of a substantial audience. Playing golf in front of people is a different sport than playing golf alone or with your weekend foursome. One deals with all kinds of unfamiliar tension and many insidious, demonic thoughts like whether it’s possible to shank a driver and how much a skulled wedge would hurt someone who took it in the head. For David, the round became an exercise in self-mastery. He considered each fairway and green hit an accomplishment.

Arnie, on the other hand, elevated. He was like a virtuoso singer or actor who drew energy from an audience and became emboldened in his performance. Whereas David shrunk ever so slightly in front of the gallery, Arnie grew to larger-than-life proportions. David had never seen anyone play like this. Arnie birdied the par-four opener, holed a wedge for an ace at the second and nearly dropped a four-iron for a double eagle at the third. Through three holes, he was five-under par. At the fourth, another par-three, Arnie got unlucky when he hit the flagstick with his tee shot. His ball ricocheted into a bunker, from which he nearly holed out. He drove the green at five for a two-putt birdie, and he followed that with birdies at six and seven. He parred eight, the toughest hole on the course, and nearly drove the green on the ninth, which David wouldn’t have thought humanly possible. Arnie got up and down for his birdie—and a 27 on the front side.

When they stood on the tenth tee box, Arnie was fourteen shots clear of David. David, in turn, was eleven shots clear of the third-place golfer, who’d played quite well in his own right. On this day, there would be no collapse, and David had no interest in performing the role of Billy Casper. Arnie could have played Latrobe left-handed, putted with a croquet mallet and still won. But as they warmed up after a couple of quick 239

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lemonades at the turn, Arnie grabbed his shirt and reported feeling a pull in his back.

“I think that’s it for me,” he said.

“What do you mean?” David asked. “It’s your tournament. Why don’t you bunt it around with a seven-iron?”

“I don’t want to take any chances with the PGA coming up.”

After that, Arnie announced to the officials that he’d be withdrawing. His excuse seemed plausible. The PGA Championship was his Holy Grail—the one leg of the Grand Slam that he’d failed to capture, and the one he said he valued the most, given his father’s place in the game. And the tournament was scheduled to begin in a week at Tanglewood Park, a Robert Trent Jones design in North Carolina that would have suited Palmer’s game well. But David knew better. Players didn’t shoot 27’s with balky backs. Palmer had withdrawn so that David could win, earn a spot in the U.S. Amateur and get his career going in the right direction. It was the most magnanimous act David had ever witnessed. It stood forever in his mind as the best example of the heights that golfers could achieve.

Arnie walked the back nine with David. He hit a couple of pitch shots and putts, talked with David about life as a professional and gave him the grand tour of the course he’d grown up on. After David holed out on eighteen, Arnie put his arm around him and told him that it had been a great weekend. They walked off the green together, arm in arm.

Later, Arnie presented the winner’s trophy to David on behalf of the Pennsylvania PGA. After the ceremony, Arnie caught Mal’s eye, nodded approvingly in his direction, then disappeared into the clubhouse, leaving David alone with his father.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that David felt happy, but the rage with which he’d begun the tournament had dissipated and the desire to impale Mal on the winner’s trophy had been supplanted by a sense of 240

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satisfaction in the work he’d put in over the summer. Playing that tournament with Palmer would always count among David’s best experiences in golf. Even at the age of seventeen, he understood that something special had happened.

David might even have allowed his father the satisfaction of an I-told-you-so. Mal could’ve said, “This is what I’ve been pushing you toward all these years.” David wouldn’t have embraced the comment— nothing could make up for Mal having been such an asshole for so many years, but he’d at least have understood it. In the glow of victory, David even might have interpreted it as a loving act. But Mal said nothing. Not “I told you so.” Not “See? This has been the plan all along.” Nothing. He opened the trunk so David could deposit his golf clubs, started the car and drove off without a word.

As Mal guided the Cutlass west on Pleasant Unity Road, past the farms and fields and Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, the silence felt increasingly weighty to David. Despite his resolve not to act conciliatorily with Mal, he impulsively initiated conversation, if only to break the tension.

“Playing with Palmer was great.”

“I’ll bet.”

They returned to the awkward silence. David stared out the window at Sewickley Creek. The quiet gradually transformed from uncomfortable to oppressive. Did Mal feel vindicated? Would he reconsider his harsh parenting techniques given David’s success? Would he offer a word of praise? By the time they passed Trauger Lake and crossed into West Latrobe, David couldn’t take it anymore.

“So I won the Pennsylvania Open. What do you think about that?”

Mal never took his eyes from the road as he responded. “You didn’t win the Pennsylvania Open,” he said. “You were given the title as an act of 241

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charity by a truly great man, and the fact that you fail to understand that only confirms the weakness of your character and competitive spirit. No one with the discipline and drive to be a great champion like Mr. Palmer could have processed your experience as anything other than a failure.”

David suddenly became aware that they hadn’t been riding in silence the entire time. The engine of the Cutlass (which Mal had characterized as a family Christmas present in 1969, though he’d never allowed Adina or David to drive it, even after he’d come of age), was making a rumbling noise so faint that David’s brain had filtered it out as background noise.

The noise became noticeable now. It must have been audible to Mal, who tended to the car obsessively. The ping seemed to grow louder, louder, louder—like the Telltale Heart—such that David felt he must scream or die, until he finally said, quietly, “I think there’s something wrong with the car.” This would be, more or less, the last substantial sentence ever spoken between him and Mal.

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Chapter 23 ***

D

AWN ANSWERED THE DOOR IN A LOOSE, suggestive black evening dress,

ending whatever modest doubts could have remained regarding her intentions. The smell of her perfume washed over David. He’d

gotten a whiff of it at her house, but it was stronger now and more alluring. She’d added some color to her cheeks and lips, though they didn’t require any. Given her husband’s status and the age of their children, David judged her to be in her early forties, but she easily could have passed for thirty-five, and perhaps even thirty were she not betrayed by the weariness in her eyes. Her lustrous, strawberry blonde hair fell onto her open shoulders. Though it hung loosely, David had the clear sense that it was a practiced casualness and that she’d spent several hours getting ready for the evening.

Her coiffed appearance made David wonder whether Dawn had done this before. Did she stash the black dress in the back of a closet, a dirty secret from Walter that she returned to in moments of weakness, when she felt desperate for something to fill the void in her life? Did she feel fulfilled for a moment and then hate herself for having betrayed her husband for so fleeting a satisfaction? After each time, did swear off it forever, only to find herself craving the thrill again and repeating the pattern? Or had Dawn invested so much time getting ready because she 243

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felt as nervous and conflicted as David did?

She held open the door with her left hand; the right rested on her hip.

“You look beautiful,” David said.

“As good as you remembered?”

“Better, and I remember it quite fondly.”

“I thought I might have caught your fancy,” she said playfully.

“You could say that.”

Dawn gestured for him to enter. David felt a momentary sense of relief. Whatever might be said of the enterprise, taking it out of the hallway had to be a positive step. As Dawn closed the door, her neck brushed against David’s face. He felt weak in his knees. She took his hand, sat him on the bed and kissed him on the lips with just enough familiarity to eliminate whatever barrier might have remained between them.

“I was starting to wonder if you would come.”

“I was late getting off the course.”

“I watched on TV. You played well.”

“I did my best. I didn’t really have it today.”

“Come on, you’re being modest. You just shot a 59.”

“That was Friday. You’d be amazed at how little one day has to do with the next.”

She sat down on the bed, well inside his personal space. Her knee grazed against his thigh. David marveled that such a narrow point of friction could produce such heat.

“What’s it like playing with Bobby Rancourt?” she asked.

Even people who couldn’t tell a three-wood from a three-iron were interested in Rancourt. His celebrity transcended golf. Still, David felt grateful. At least it wasn’t The Question.

“Nothing special,” he replied. “It’s just golf.”

“Everybody talks so much about him. What he’s like?

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“I have no idea.”

“Oh, come on, you played an entire round of golf together. What did you talk about?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, you must have talked about your families.”

“Nope.”

“What about hobbies?”

“So far as I know, he doesn’t have any.”

“What about golf? You must have discussed your balls or the shafts on your drivers or whatever it is golfers talk about.”

David smiled. “Afraid not. Like I said, we didn’t speak at all.”

“Isn’t it weird to spend an entire day with someone and not speak?”

“Not really. It’s just like any other job.”

“Most people have conversation at work.”

“Maybe, but lots of people also don’t speak at work. I don’t think gardeners do or construction workers or most kinds of artists. I can’t imagine painters and writers speak all that much. They’re probably inside their own heads. Golf is like that.”

She nodded. “But aren’t you curious? I always look at someone successful like that and wonder what got them there. You know, what was his childhood like, what kind of parents did he have?”

David sighed. He wanted this to end. “I don’t know,” he said. “I imagine his parents put a lot of pressure on him. He probably felt they wouldn’t love him unless he played well.”

“Really? Wouldn’t that kind of pressure be crippling? Imagine if you thought that your parents would stop loving you if you hit a bad shot.

You’d be paralyzed. No one motivated by fear can perform their best.”

“Playing professional golf is no different than being a virtuoso violinist or a sculptor. It takes thousands of hours to cultivate the skills and 245

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countless more to keep those skills sharp. A kid’s not going to put in that kind of time unless he’s afraid of displeasing his parents. That pressure transforms something trivial into some meaningful. Whatever you play, to become truly great you have to believe that what you’re doing is the only thing in the world that matters.”

“Do you think golf ’s the only thing that matters?”

“No. That’s why I’m not Bobby Rancourt.”

It would have been only natural for Dawn to have probed this issue further and to have asked about David’s own childhood. If she did so, David thought he would flee. The last thing in the world he needed was her to psychoanalyze him. But the look on Dawn’s face transformed from serious to seductive. She either sensed that she’d touched upon a sensitive area or her interest in Bobby Rancourt and How-to-Build-a-Great-Golfer had been merely a whim. Whatever the reason, she transitioned from the subject by touching him on the knee, pressing her lips against his ear and asking, “What say we make you forget about the office for a spell?”

David felt another charge surge through his body. “That sounds just fine,” he said.

She bounced off the bed and moved toward the courtesy phone.

“How about some champagne?

“That sounds nice.”

“Not too much, of course. The man has a golf tournament to win tomorrow.”

“It’s okay. I don’t tee off until three.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” she said as she kissed him on the cheek.

“I could get used to late tee times.”

Dawn smiled and dialed room service. “Hi, this is Mrs. David Howard.

I’d like to order a bottle of champagne and a bucket of ice.” She listened for a moment, hung up and sat back down on the bed.

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“They said it’ll be about half an hour.”

“You put the room in my name?”

“I couldn’t very well put it in the name of Charlie Price, the most famous proctologist in Alabama, now could I?” “I suppose not.”

“Is this a problem?”

“No, it’s just funny, that’s all.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m staying in this hotel, but I have my room under an alias.”

Dawn laughed.

“You use an alias?”

“You’d be surprised at what fans will do to get close to the players— even second-rate players like me.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all.” Dawn smiled and extended her hand.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she said in the voice of a Southern belle. “Dawn Price.”

He shook. “The name’s Morris. Tom Morris.”

“You golf a fine ball, Mr. Morris. Afraid we don’t get to see that kind of play too often in these parts.”

“Thank you kindly,” he responded, playing along.

“I imagine a big strong man like yourself gets mighty sore after a hard day.”

“Reckon I do.”

Dawn crawled behind David and began kneading his shoulders.

They crossed boundaries so quickly they could only be seen receding into the distance, as if from a speeding train. It seemed only natural when her hands moved from his shoulders to his chest, and normal again—daresay obligatory—for him to reciprocate her massage. Removing clothes helped, and once one article had been discarded, dispensing 247

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with the next seemed only trivially more consequential.

People spoke of crossing lines as if they were black and white. Really, the difference between a flirtation and a consummated affair was one of degree, not kind. Only the first step down the slippery slope mattered.

From that first stolen glance across the Knotts dinner table, it was only a matter of baby steps to the point where Dawn was whispering things in David’s ear that would have hurt Alabama’s most famous proctologist far more than his wife’s physical transgressions.

David had wondered whether he’d feel guilty, but in the moment, he felt peculiarly tolerant of himself. This deed seemed somehow inevitable. He’d lived so long under the disapproving scrutiny of others, could any more be expected of him? He was just a man after all, and what man didn’t crave unquestioning and complete affirmation? It had been so long since he had had this.

But his tolerance of himself didn’t equate with ecstasy. She was under him, screaming his name, but he felt no elation. It felt rather like having a bunion removed. There was relief, and a perversely pleasurable feeling in having something toxic excised from one’s body, but no euphoria.

Had it ever felt differently with Kristin? He couldn’t remember.

When he’d finished, she nuzzled his neck and praised him, but his desire evaporated and nothing filled the vacuum. No one offered a photograph or snow globe to remind you of your first affair. David felt nothing— not an afterglow, not shame, not confusion, nothing. As Dawn stroked his hair, he stared at the ceiling, wondering if this was all there was.

The bell rang.

“The champagne,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” he replied and put on his boxer shorts.

“Thanks, I need to go to the bathroom.” Suddenly modest, she gathered a sheet around her and walked out of the room. David took tip 248

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money from his wallet, opened the door and mindlessly said, “You can just leave it on the table.”

It wasn’t room service. It was Kristin, with Scott in tow.

“I was about to give up,” she said, fluttering with excitement. “I checked all of your aliases that I could remember—Bobby Jones, Francis Ouimet, Gene Sarazen, but none of them worked. I was going to give up and call you, which would have ruined the surprise, and then I thought I’d give your real name a shot and there it was, David Howard. So here we are. Surprise!”

David said nothing. Kristin moved forward and gave him a warm, enthusiastic hug, which he did not reciprocate. Over his wife’s shoulder he looked at Scott, who remained in place, trepidatious, as if he sensed something were wrong.

Kristin finished squeezing and stepped back. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “It’s a lot of money to spend on last-minute tickets and a rental car, but I was able to get a good deal and my mother is able to watch Amy and I just figured, why not? We used to have so much fun together on the weekends, and the family hasn’t been able to spend as much time together as we should, and how many times does someone shoot a 59? We should celebrate. If you win tomorrow, Scott will get to see his father win a professional golf tournament. And even if not, he’ll get to see you in contention. One way or the other, this is the sort of moment he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”

As she finished her explanation, Kristin tussled Scott’s hair, but David could see that Scott didn’t share his mother’s enthusiasm for their plan. His right hand had drifted down his pant leg and he’d turned his foot slightly in, vestiges of infantile behavior to which he unconsciously returned when he felt uncomfortable or sensed trouble. Though he couldn’t have articulated why, Scott sensed something wrong.

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David understood that his son had inherited his own keen observational skills and intuitive sense of people. In that instant, he felt as proud of and attached to Scott as ever had before. He smiled at Scott, who returned a confused smile of his own, still clutching his pant leg.

From behind the bathroom door came the sound of Dawn’s voice calling, “Is that the champagne, sugar?”

David watched his family assess the situation. Though he didn’t know what to make of the information, Scott had already noticed the twenty-dollar bill in his hand and the fact that his boxers were on inside out. Kristin now processed the entirety of the data and her eyes, filled with hurt and terror, turned to David and asked for assurances that he could not offer. He stood at the door impassively, as he had since he’d opened it.

Dawn, still unseen, called again, “Did they bring extra ice? I asked them to bring extra ice.” She emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped about her suggestively, showing ample cleavage, which brushed against David as she stepped into view. Dawn looked cursorily at Kristin and Scott, somehow intuited nothing, and said, “Oh, it’s not the champagne.” As she retreated to the bed and let her towel drop, Kristin covered her son’s eyes and began leading him down the hall. At the same time, the bellhop emerged from around the corner, champagne and extra ice in tow. As Kristin and Scott passed his cart, Scott turned around to look at his father, who’d remained in the doorway watching the hallway traffic.

In moments that are immediately identifiable as life changing, one is flooded by possible responses. Indeed, all the obvious courses of action occurred to David: to run after his wife and son, to offer explanations, to say it meant nothing, to say they meant everything, to tell the truth, to lie. He knew that offering any excuse, no matter how feeble, would have been evidence of contrition and would have allowed for the possibility 250

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of healing with time. David felt a powerful urge to do something. A situation like this impelled one to action.

But seeing Scott froze him. He recognized the look in his son’s eyes.

He’d seen it before—in the eyes of his father, Kristin and the men and women who lined the fairways of golf tournaments: the look of abject disappointment. David had failed again, just as his father had predicted he would fail at everything he did. In a way, he’d fulfilled his destiny. So instead of chasing after his family, David handed the bellhop the twenty, took the champagne and closed the door. He slid off his boxers and slipped into the plush, satin sheets of the hotel bed and Dawn’s open arms.

“Who was that woman?” she asked, as she poured him a glass of champagne.

“Just someone who wanted an autograph for her son.”

Dawn nodded, stroked his head, and for a moment—just a moment—it soothed.

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Chapter 24 ***

F

ROM THE TIME THE Y ME T, Billy persistently pleaded with David to

join him for a real round of golf. David employed every imaginable excuse to avoid the match. They only had a few hours to practice

after school and they needed to make the most of the time, he’d say, or that the course would be too crowded, or that he couldn’t play in the cold. When the Broward County schools let out in June, David couldn’t put Billy off any longer. Summer afternoons were hot, the courses were deserted and they had more time on their hands than any sixteen or 67-year-old could fill. He had no choice but to play.

On the morning of the appointed day, David descended to the condominium basement, where he’d stored his clubs on the day he’d moved in nine years earlier, and where they’d remained, untouched, ever since.

He found them under a pile of empty boxes, a 400-watt hair dryer and a microwave oven with a dial knob, all of which had been stored because David lacked a compelling reason to throw them away. The clubs had been retained under more or less the same reasoning. As David tossed aside the ancient cartons to liberate the tools of his former trade, he thought how unusual it must be for an abandoned item to be reclaimed.

Metaphorically, the basement resembled Florida: a place from which the banished never returned.

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A spider had made a home in his irons. David wiped them clean.

Touching the clubs loosed a flood of memories, and when David slung the bag over his shoulder he couldn’t help but think about his last round with Rabbit at the Southern Open. The morning after his affair, David confessed everything to Rabbit at the Waffle House. His caddie listened to the entire story without saying a word. That afternoon, he carried David’s bag en route to a final round 67 that would have been good enough to win almost any other Sunday, but seemed puny compared Bobby Rancourt’s 63. Rancourt never looked back that day, or that season—when he went on to win two majors—or ever. After the round, Rabbit took his check for $13,500 (six percent of David’s second-place earnings), tore it up, tossed it at David’s feet and left David standing by himself in the parking lot. David respected Rabbit all the more for doing so.

David went on playing. He had no choice after that—not that he’d ever had any meaningful choice, but even the illusion of freedom disappeared. His golf became an “asset,” as the judge termed it, and he obliged David to exploit its full value. So he played in every tournament that would have him: first on the PGA Tour, then the developmental circuit after he lost his card, and finally the senior tour, where he slid further down the money list each year. Ultimately, he qualified only for the remotest tournaments, in the suburbs of Boise and Binghamton, until finally his children finished college and relieved him of the obligation of playing golf once and for all.

Sitting in the dark basement, David recalled the loneliness of those years—traveling alone from one unfamiliar city to another, beating his ball around for a few hours and holing up at a cheap motel. The terms of his divorce decree permitted him no luxury. In the evening, he’d sit in a tub for hours and soak his aching back, with nothing to keep him company but regrets.

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He saw Rabbit once after that, at a developmental tour stop outside of Evansville, Indiana. Rabbit had hooked up with a young player on his way up. David, of course, was on his way down. Both Rabbit’s man and David played well that week and were paired together for the final round.

The night before, David didn’t sleep. Instead, he spent it wondering whether it would be awkward seeing his old friend. When the morning arrived, Rabbit acted like a pro, but he didn’t need words to get his message through. While Rabbit’s man won and ascended to the tour, David hacked his way around the course and slid further into golf oblivion.

David spent the first birthday without his family alone at a Denny’s in Orlando. He spent the following Christmas alone at Olive Garden, making for the single most depressing evening of his life. He hoped to receive a peace offering, but one occasion after another passed without word. He heard nothing when Scott graduated from the Berklee College of Music, even though he’d financed his son’s education with countless hours of coiling and uncoiling. He again heard nothing when Amy graduated from Emory several years later. David played his final tournament round that day at a senior event in Lutz, Florida, where he shot 76, good for 69th place and $830. He drove home, toasted his daughter’s success with a beer and celebrated his retirement by exiling his clubs to the basement, where they’d remained since.

David shook himself out of it. These memories deserved to remain in the basement with the ancient dehumidifiers. He put some elbow into his clubs, made them gleam and carried them up to the apartment, where he found Millie in the kitchen making sandwiches.

“I thought you and Billy might like something to eat for your rounds today,” she said.

David kissed her on the cheek.

“What did I do to deserve that?”

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“You were just being yourself.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

David smiled and said, “I’m seeing things a bit differently than I used to.”

“I keep thinking I’m going to pinch myself, wake up and find the real David has returned.”

“I like to think this is the real me.”

Millie kissed him on the cheek and returned to the sandwiches.

“So when was the last time you played?”

“Nine years ago.”

“That’s a long while.”

“A lifetime.”

“Are you looking forward to it?”

“Yes and no.”

“You’re worried about how you’ll play?”

“Nope, I’m not worried about that.”

“What then?”

“Fran and Pauline asked me to give Billy my honest assessment about his talent. I’ve been putting it off, but I don’t think it’ll keep past today. Summer’s here. We have to start making plans. At the very least, Billy is going to ask me and I’m going to have to give him an answer.”

“But you told me you thought he has the talent to be a professional.”

“He does.”

They heard a loud knock on the kitchen windowpane. It was Billy, clubs slung over his shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. Millie opened the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Friedlander.” Then, catching sight of David, he added, “Ready for an old-fashioned butt kicking, Mr. Howard?”

“Billy, I’m surprised you’d use language like that,” Millie said.

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“It’s all right,” David said. “Let him chirp now while he still has his self-respect.” To Billy, he added, “Bring it on, punk.”

Millie held open the door.

“Take it easy on Mr. Howard, Billy. He’s an old man.”

“I will, Mrs. Friedlander. I’m going to give him three strokes a side, seeing as he hasn’t played since they stopped stuffing golf balls with feathers.”

“I’ll be cold in the ground before I’ll take strokes from you, kid.”

Millie handed David and Billy a brown paper bag each.

“I thought you might get hungry, so I packed you these lunches.

Make sure you have the right ones. The one with the shortbread cookies is yours, Billy. Cookies give Mr. Howard terrible gas.”

Billy smiled at David.

“Right, Mrs. Friedlander.”

“Now have fun boys,” she said.

“We will, Mrs. Friedlander.”

David turned and smiled. “We will, Mrs. Friedlander.”

After Millie fell out of earshot, Billy said, “Does golf give you gas too, Mr. Howard? I’d hate for you to be uncomfortable on the course.”

“Get it all out now, kid. In a few hours you’ll be crying crocodile tears.”

*** In single file, they walked across the parking lot, clubs in tow, golf shoes clanking against the sidewalk. The noise reminded David of sounds of the game that he’d once liked—quiet locker room chatter, the lacing of shoes, the way players fell into a steady cadence as they marched down a fairway. Golf had a rhythm, which good players could feel and great players, like Snead, channeled directly. Billy walked just right.

They warmed up on the range. David felt the rhythm again, the 257

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steady pace of practice, one ball after another, one club then the next. He felt sore at first. His body hadn’t expected to be inconvenienced with this torqueing nonsense again in this lifetime, but the summer heat lubricated his ancient joints. By the time he reached his driver, he felt limber and strong. He nodded to Billy. They checked in with the starter and walked to the first tee.

The prospect of playing golf again made David nostalgic. As he stood on the tee box, he recalled the first time he played with his father, when he was ten years old. They’d hit balls together before and putted on the practice green but had never played a real round, until one summer evening his father said at dinner, “Be ready at five thirty tomorrow morning.” David hardly slept that night. In the morning, he practically bounced to the first tee. He always remembered what his father said as they waited to tee off: “This is an examination. A round of golf tests the quality of your practice. You may be able to sneak by for a hole or two, but you cannot fool the game over the course of a round. Your strengths and weaknesses will be exposed. The feedback you get identifies what needs to be improved and dictates future practice.”

An examination. With Mal, there was no joy—not then, or ever.

“So what do you say, Mr. Howard?”

“Sorry?” David hadn’t realized Billy was speaking.

“I said how ’bout we play a match? A dollar a side and two more for the match.”

“You sure you can afford that?” David asked. “That’s four dollars you’re going to lose. You won’t be able to take your squeeze out for root beers this weekend.”

“You sure you can afford that, Mr. Howard? I know Social Security doesn’t go as far as it used to. And, just so you know, no one’s said ‘squeeze’ in fifty years.”

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David smiled. He liked that Billy had remembered every bet he’d taught him. “All right, two dollars each way—fifty cents a side and a dollar for the match. Any presses?”

“No presses.”

David extended his hand. “Bet.” Billy shook then gestured toward the tee.

“Your honor.”

“Age before beauty, right?”

“I wasn’t going to say it.”

The Plantation Course started off easy, with a short, straight par-five on which even some hackers could reach in two. Billy routinely got home with a short iron. Wayward drives might cost the kid at other points in the round, but David knew he needed to make a birdie here. He pulled out his driver, swung it gently a few times, letting the weight of the club guide his arms. The heat had worked its full magic. He felt lithe and energized. David placed a tee in the ground and went through his preshot routine.

“You can have a mulligan if you want, Mr. Howard. That driver’s older than I am.”

“Don’t need a mulligan,” David said, and launched his ball. It took off down the right side, turned ever so slightly to the left, and came to rest in the center of the fairway—the unmistakable handiwork of a professional.

“My name’s David,” he said, smiling. “Mr. Howard was my father.”

Billy put his tee in the ground and blistered one down the middle.

“Game on, Billy.”

“Game on, David.”

They each birdied the first hole and the one after that. David swung freely and his putting stroke flowed. At the third, he poured in a thir259

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ty-footer to halve the hole.

“Not bad for an old man.”

David smiled.

Even more than usual, the conversation flowed. As they chased their drives down the fourth fairway, Billy said, “Can I ask you a question?”

David dreaded that it would be The Question. This would have been natural since Billy was the only person David knew who hadn’t asked it of him. In fact, it was the only question he hadn’t asked.

“Shoot,” David said.

“If you could play a round of golf with any three people, who would it be?”

David had been asked the dream foursome question before, as every pro had, by magazine writers, talk show hosts and amateur partners.

Years ago, he’d always given the same answer: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and his father. This answer satisfied everyone except for David.

“Are we talking pure fantasy here? Can I pick anyone I want, regardless of circumstances?”

“Anyone at all.”

They paused together at David’s ball, which had split the fairway.

David pulled out a six-iron and said, “Before I answer, how about you answer one for me? Tell me, at some level, deep down, aren’t you angry?

At your father, your mother, someone—that your parents aren’t around and that you’re living here in this condo community for senior citizens?”

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “I feel bad sometimes and I guess I’ve been mad once in a while, but what’s the point? It won’t change anything. I just try to deal with reality. You know, what’s in front of me.”

David nodded. It was the answer he expected. It wasn’t the answer David would have offered himself or even one he fully understood, but he’d come to expect the extraordinary from Billy.

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David said, “My dream foursome would be my son, my daughter— and you.”

He could see the words warmed Billy, who asked, “If it’s not too nosy, how come you stopped speaking with your kids?”

“Because of choices I made.” He corrected himself. “Because of choices we all made. And since when have you ever cared about nosy?”

“Do you blame yourself?”

“I used to.”

“When’d you stop?”

“Just now.”

David hit his approach into a deep sand trap guarding the right side of the green.

“Nice shot,” Billy said. “Right on the beach.”

David smiled. Showing the kid Caddyshack might have been the best thing he’d ever done. He sheathed his six-iron and ambled down the fairway. The golf, the summer heat and Billy’s companionship induced a reverie. When David found his ball plugged in the face of the bunker, his thoughts drifted to a similar shot that he’d hit years earlier, under his father’s eye, shortly before Mal died.

*** After that initial round, David and Mal played once a year. These annual examinations continued past the point when they had anything to talk about, even after the char on Mal’s lungs restricted him to riding in a cart and watching David play. As a young professional, David looked forward to those rounds—not for the opportunity to spend time with his father, but instead for the chance to impress him. He imagined hitting a great shot and his father praising him for his dedication and apologizing for how hard he’d been on him as a child. Of course, that day never came.

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When they met for the last time, nine months before Mal succumbed to lung cancer, David was in the midst of his best year on tour, having already won twice. He arrived on a hot summer day, shortly before the start of the U.S. Open, brimming with confidence. From his cart, Mal watched David scorch West Latrobe. He played the front nine in seven-under par, equaling the course record. At the tenth, his approach shot plugged in a greenside bunker; only a small fraction of the ball peeked out above the sand. Most pros would have been happy to hit it anywhere on the green, but David executed a shot that he’d learned from Chi Chi Rodriguez. He shut the face of a pitching wedge, hit straight down on the ball, and damned if the thing didn’t pop straight up and land three feet from the hole. David grinned at his father, waiting for adulation. Most pros could hit this shot one hundred times and not hit one as well as David just had. Instead, his father hoisted himself out of the cart, staggered to the side of the bunker, and threw a pair of balls in overhand so that they plugged even farther down than the one he’d already hit. With his hand, Mal gestured that David should have a go at these two.

David looked at his father in disbelief that after all this time, and his success at golf ’s highest level, he should still have to prove himself.

But Mal didn’t relent. He sat in his cart and waited impassively. David felt old feelings resurface. Tension seized his body. He began to strangle the club in his hands; he’d show the old man once and for all. He swung at the first ball, hit its belly, and skulled it over the green. David looked at Mal, whose expression did not change, further infuriating David. He tightened his grip, lashed at the second ball, and barely moved it an inch.

“Maybe soon you’ll be able to hit that shot more than one time in three,” Mal said. “You should consider relaxing your grip pressure.”

David considered killing him then and there. He’d thought of it many times before, even as a child. Back then, his father had been a strong man 262

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with thick, meaty hands. Now he couldn’t walk down the street without towing an oxygen tank. He sat in the golf cart, defenseless, his hands hanging limply at his side, shaking. It would have taken nothing to end his life with a five-iron.

David squeezed the golf club even tighter than when he had skulled the bunker shots and met his father’s eyes. He could feel his father read his mind and, like a super-villain, repel the murderous urge swelling inside David. Father and son’s wills met in the air. As Mal turned his steely blue eyes to David’s right hand, David felt his grip on the club loosen. Mal returned his eyes to David. “You don’t have the nerve,” he said without words. “You’re a failure even at this.” Then the old man drove off to the green.

*** “Good luck getting out of that one.”

“What’s that?” David hadn’t realized Billy was talking.

“I said, ‘good luck getting out of that one.’”

“Piss on luck.” David. He made a mental note to show the kid Dead Solid Perfect. Then he shut the face of his wedge, relaxed his grip and hit it to three feet.

“Golf shot,” Billy said.

They holed their respective par putts and hit their drives at the next hole down the middle. As they walked down the cutout that led to the fifth fairway, Billy asked, “Did you always want to be a golfer?”

“No. I never wanted to be a golfer.”

“What did you want to be?”

“A writer.”

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that I even wanted to be a writer. A few months ago, I thought I didn’t become one because my father was an angry, abusive asshole who tried to control my life, but I’d never have said this aloud out of fear that my father might hear and punish me from beyond the grave. Today, I’d say it’s because I never accepted responsibility for my own life.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do,” David said, “I think you understand very well.”

David hit his approach shot tight and watched as Billy hit his own shot inside of that. They each birdied the hole and the eighth, and made the turn all square, each having shot six under par.

Billy had absorbed many of David’s lessons. He hit a high fade on command at the seventh and a low snapping draw when needed at the twelfth. He held his head steadier, as they’d practiced at the range, and he maintained a flatter plane on his downswing, which produced more consistent, penetrating shots. Seeing Billy’s improvement gratified David.

Billy routinely drove it fifty yards or more past David, but David overcame Billy’s advantage by managing his game better. David played holes backwards in his mind, driving the ball to the side of the fairway that would leave the easiest approach in to the green. He managed the risk of bad shots, making sure always to leave his ball under the hole.

Most importantly, David made sure never to leave it on the short side of the green, so that he always preserved the possibility of getting up and down for par. Billy didn’t think quite so far ahead. An ordinary golfer could get by without thinking strategically for a hole or two. An exceptional golfer like Billy could get by longer. But David knew that bad decisions always caught up with you in the long run. The game was relentless.

Inevitably, Billy paid for his mental errors. On the tenth hole, he hit his pitching wedge within ten feet of the pin, but above the hole. Though he only missed his birdie putt by a hair, he had a fifteen-footer coming 264

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back and made a bogey when anything higher than par should have been out of the question. On the twelfth hole, Billy came within thirty yards of reaching the 600-yard par-five with his second shot, but he left himself an almost impossible pitch over a deep bunker without any green to work with. Without hesitation, Billy pulled out his wedge and attempted the flop shot that David had taught him a few weeks earlier. David also had taught Billy that the flopper left little margin for error and should only be used in extraordinary circumstances, but this part of the lesson hadn’t been absorbed. Billy took a long, flowing swing. Though he hit it almost perfectly, it came up slightly short, landed on the front face of the bunker. Billy took two to get out and made double bogey when even par should have been a disappointment.

What most disturbed David—or, more accurately what David could least relate to—was that Billy seemed unbothered by his errors. He accepted bogeys with good cheer and seemed to enjoy even his mistakes.

He came to the eighteenth hole tied with David when by rights he should have had a two- or three-hole lead. David watched with dismay as Billy, with the honor, took the driver from his bag and aimed over the edge of David’s condominium. An airplane could safely land in the eighteenth fairway; even a mediocre drive would have left Billy an easy approach shot, a likely birdie and, at worst, a split of the match. But he insisted on trying the one-in-a-million shot over the roof, which if hit hard enough and with just enough left-to-right movement might catch the edge of the green and leave an eagle putt, but would more likely, as proved by abundant evidence, find water or break a window. To make matters worse, they had the wind against them, as David noticed from observing the treetops.

Billy paid no heed to any of this, wherein lied the problem. To be a professional, David would have to teach Billy to be ever conscious of his environment and the consequences of his actions. The swing could 265

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be taught, the short game and putting refined, but the philosophy was another matter. Billy would need to learn a different way of looking at the world. He’d need to be constantly mindful of costs and benefits. This could take years, and there’d be no guarantee of eradicating the bad habit that he’d formed over a lifetime. Billy could be good continuing to play in the manner he did, but not a professional.

Billy hit it on the screws—his best shot of the day, and he’d hit many fine ones. As the drive took off, it looked like it might clear the condos. It seemed to have enough power and height, but just as it looked safe, the ball caught the top of a chimney pipe, ricocheted left and landed in the water behind David’s back door.

“Dang it,” Billy said, frowning. He understood that he’d at best make a five now. David would hit an iron down the middle of the fairway, make a par and steal the four dollars Billy might otherwise have spent on root beer floats. In a moment, though, Billy’s smile reappeared and he said, “I thought I made it that time. Great day, though. Great match.”

David put his hand on his three-iron, began his pre-shot routine, but he couldn’t shake a question from his head. He backed off the shot, turned to Billy, and asked, “Why’d you try that shot? You’ve never made it before, and you didn’t need to try it today.”

“Because it’s fun,” Billy said without hesitation. “And besides, it’s only golf.”

David listened and, finally, he heard. He put back the three-iron, extracted the driver from its giant strawberry head cover and said, “I think I’ll have a go at it.”

He waggled once, twice, and sent the ball into the gathering dusk, soaring.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Evan Mandery is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of six books including three novels. Both A Wild Justice (about a pair of seminal Supreme Court cases on the death penalty) and his novel, Q, were New York Times editors’ picks. In 2018, he won an Emmy and Peabody Award for his TV series, Artificial.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Classics of Golf, an exclusive collection of the world’s best reading golf books, was created by the legendary Hebert Warren Wind for those who cherish the history and the game. The collection includes titles by Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Bernard Darwen, and many other of the most revered names in golf. In addition to the Library, Classics of Golf publishes select new books.

“Mandery masterfully captures the raw emotion, struggles, joys, despair, failure, and redemption of a golf professional.”

—BOB DENNEY, PGA Historian Emeritus “The Professional is a terrific tale of redemption with a great cast of characters.

Not only does Mandery capture the life of a journeyman tour pro to a tee, but his non-linear storytelling technique keeps the reader riveted.”

—TOM CUNNEFF, National Golf Writer “Engrossing...an intense assessment of how this game can upset a life or provide it with satisfaction and meaning... Mandery offers a conclusion equal to ‘hitting it pure.’ ” —LES SCHUPAK, The Met Golfer

ABOUT THE PROFESSIONAL A golf novel for all time, The Professional tells the life story of pro golfer David Michael Howard over three transformative weeks at different points his life.

As a 16-year-old, David is told by his West Latrobe High School English teacher that he is a gifted writer, and should attend a summer workshop, but David’s controlling, abusive father demands that he spend the summer preparing for the Pennsylvania State Open, forcing David to decide whether to live his father’s dream or his own.

Later, as a forty-something journeyman pro, David experiences a mid-life crisis during the final round of a tournament, causing him to question the meaning of golf and how he has spent his life. Long-brewing feelings of failure surface, and David is tempted towards a potentially catastrophic affair with a beautiful Alabama housewife.

Finally, as an old man, golf presents David with an opportunity for redemption in the form of Billy Conway, an immensely talented but raw young player, who turns to David for help and offers him a path to redemption.

The Professional’s life intersects with the greats of the game—Nicklaus, Watson and Palmer (in whose shadow David is raised) and the novel asks the questions that everyone who loves golf has asked. What are the conditions that produce virtuosity? Does a single-minded devotion to a skill preclude the possibility of a happy life?

Told with humor, charm, and a devotion to the history of the game, The Professional is truly a golf novel for the ages.

NEED ISBN BAR CODE NYACK, NEW YORK 10960

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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