Chapter 19

DAVID’S FATHER NEVER KNOCKED. He just walked in as if it were perfectly 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?”

“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.”

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?”

David didn’t dare admit that he’d seen his father horrifying barba-

rism. “Of course,” David said. “He’s my English teacher. You’ve seen him 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 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. 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 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 eas-

ily 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, 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.”