Of Time and Memory (32 page)

JANUARY 15, 2007

The Edinburgh Airport … By the time I discovered that I was in the wrong line for the car I'd rented on the Internet, I had forgotten what I was waiting in line for.

The man behind the counter seemed to sympathize with Jack when he said he couldn't believe I'd neglected to write down the name of the rental company.

“Well, it says Auto Europe right here,” I said, showing the man the printout.

“That's not the name of the rental agency,” he remarked.

“Yeah,” Jack chimed in, “that's just the company that booked it.”

How does he know these things? I wondered miserably as we went from desk to desk inquiring if anyone had a car reserved under our last name, Snyder. Sometime during that aimless walk, I sent Jack to buy us something to drink so I could take the morning stomach pill I'd been taking for seven years that never failed to dilute the heartburn that was presently spreading through my chest. By the time he returned, I had found our place, and the woman working on my forms was asking me for the second time if I was sure I didn't want the additional insurance at £20 a day. I'd booked the car from America in U.S. dollars, $220 for the week. Twenty pounds insurance a day, with the pound equaling $2.22, would mean that the insurance would end up costing more than the car. It seemed like a racket to me.

“No insurance,” I said again. Then, with what I intended to be humor, “The insurance companies in this world are making fools of all of us.”

She raised her eyebrows at Jack with an expression that said, Not the wisest father for a lad to be stuck with, as she said, “Okay, then. If you have an accident, you'll be required to pay the full value of the automobile.”

“I understand,” I said. “We're just going to Carnoustie. It's not too far from here, is it?”

“Where's that?” she asked. And her colleague beside her had never heard of the place either.

Jack gave me an exasperated look.

“There's a famous golf course there,” I said, “and you must have someone here who can tell us how to get there. And where's the rental car from here?”

“You'll have to take a bus,” she said.

“A bus to the car?”

“That's right.”

Just before a young man from the back room began giving us directions to Carnoustie, I realized that I had mistakenly swallowed not my morning stomach pill but the pill I had to take every night to put me to sleep. I'd consolidated them for the trip into one container.

“You take a bus from outside to lot number [
number what?
]. Then you'll go out the [
what?
] exit. Take the [
oh God …
] northbound to the [
are you kidding me?!
] motorway, which will take you to the [
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
] across the [
we're screwed
] Bridge.”

I was watching his lips move as he talked, but his words weren't reaching me. I turned to Jack. “Did you get all that?” I asked.

You know that feeling when someone gives you a photograph he's taken of you recently, maybe at a party, and you look at it and think, This is how I really appear to the world? It's the cold proof that each of us lacks the ability to see ourselves the way others see us. At the wheel of the little Fiat that Jack began calling “the Death Machine,” I wanted to look cool, debonair, even a little defiant as I drove on the left side of the road for the first time in my life and used a stick shift for the first time in twenty years. But my last decade of life spent cruising suburbia in the living room of a minivan had emasculated me to the point where I could sing castrato in a musical about Mario Andretti.

And I had wanted this to be my big moment, my chance to lift the value of my stock in my son's eyes. Golf cap on backward, cigarette clenched between my teeth, hands pounding the steering wheel to the drumbeat of a blaring radio, cup of black coffee steaming beside me, power shifting through the corners. Instead, I was hunched over the wheel like Nanny before the state took her license away.

“At that last turn,” Jack said somberly, whipping his head around from where he'd just surveyed the damage out our rear window, “you almost killed two people.”

“I did not,” I protested. But I knew it had been close. Blame it on a lost night's sleep, bad food, not enough food, too much food, nothing to drink, and the damned sleeping pill, whatever; I was not adapting to this new driving experience. “I need you to get into my golf bag,” I said to him. “Find me a pill for my stomach.”

It was funny and it wasn't funny. I could usher Jack through the Elysian fields of golf here in Scotland, but if I failed to deliver him back home safely into his mother's arms, all bets were off.

“I've got really bad heartburn,” I said as he crawled over the seat for me.

“You should have put me down as a driver,” he complained.

“Cost too much.”

“I thought we weren't going to worry about money.”

“I don't want to argue about it,” I said. “I've got to pull off and get some coffee. My eyes are
closing
.” This wasn't my finest moment.

The sign said there were services up ahead, three miles. I had plenty of time to prepare for the turnoff, but when I entered the parking area outside the gas station, I kept getting beeped at. It was like something out of an old Peter Sellers movie. “You're going the
wrong way
!” Jack screamed at me.

That was it. I floored it and sped back out onto the highway, where driving like a madman was acceptable.

“Jesus,” he mumbled.

“How could I have been going the wrong way?”

“Okay,” I heard him say calmly. “From now on I'm going to shift for you so you stop trying to shift with the door handle.”

I looked down at his hand on the shifter. “Now,” I said as the engine ramped up. He shifted into fourth.

At each roundabout he turned in his seat and surveyed the oncoming traffic, until he started calling, “Not yet … Not yet … Not yet … 
Now!
”–then I would goose it.

Soon I was enjoying myself, driving forty miles per hour over the speed limit like everyone else.

“Carnoustie,” I said just above a whisper as we pulled in to town and made our way along High Street, passing the two-story stone flats joined together at the shoulders, the modest storefronts and pubs drowsing under a low black sky. It was 11:30 in the morning on January 15 and almost impossible to imagine that in July a hundred million golfers around the world would be tuned in to the British Open taking place here. Today the streets, blackened by rain, were empty. Windswept waves off the North Sea pounded the shore in a thunderous concussion. It was dark and desolate everywhere you looked. There was nothing—no bright splash of paint or color—to relieve this darkness and the feeling that we had wandered into an abandoned town or some ancient film set that no one had taken the time to disassemble and cart away. Even the open fields slanting away from the village center were pale and featureless, just as they must have been in the early eleventh century, when this land was part of the Kingdom of Alba and most of England had been overtaken by Danes who were attempting to conquer the rest of the country. Here in this dark, foreboding place they ran into formidable opposition when warriors from nearby territories led by Malcolm II, king of Scots, got into the fight. It was brutal, and rumor has it that the river that winds through the center of town and pours into the sea at the railway station was red with blood for three days. The name given to this place, Carnoustie, means resting place of heroes. It is also attributed to “Crow's Nestle” because of a plague of crows that once infested the area.

This morning there were no crows and no heroes in sight. I watched Jack scowling at the empty streets as we crossed the black river. You could see the hardness of people's lives in the stone cottages stained by age and weather. Nothing could be pretended in a place like this. It was what it was, and as the golf course first appeared to us, a treeless, windswept plain standing beside an angry, boiling sea, I fell in love with its unwelcoming style, its cold shoulder. It was just a barren stretch of ground with a few flags waving and giant craters filled with sand. Throw in some rotting corpses and you'd have a perfect battlefield.

“Look at this place,” I said. “Isn't it spectacular? A true public relations nightmare. Can you imagine the suffering here? Can you picture the fat-cat businessman from Texas who arrives here with his big cigars and his cell phone and all the latest golf technology only to get the piss beaten out of him in such a forlorn outpost?”

It was just as I had imagined it and I was excited.

“Calm down,” Jack said.

Maybe I took this the wrong way. “Nobody in this place ever heard of a 401(k),” I said. “I heard you and your buddies talking about them once when you were playing poker in our basement. You're not even out of school, for Christ's sake. There's a real barbarity to the cosseted life everybody in America desires so badly. You should run in the opposite direction of a 401(k).”

He just shook his head at me. “We're here to play golf. Golf? Plaid pants. Knickers. Country clubs. Lives of privilege. It's all the same. Golf is part of the world you're always ranting against.”

Smart-ass, I said under my breath. “Hotel first, or the golf course?” I asked as I picked up speed.

“Golf course,” he answered.

I turned and watched him taking it all in. “Sergio García just turned pro when he came to play in the Open here in 1999,” I told him.

“I know,” he said, still looking out his window. “He was thirty over par after the first two days. He left the course and cried in his mother's arms.”

“You're going to beat him today,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully.

We pulled in to the parking lot, and when we stepped out of the Fiat, the wind nearly tore the doors off the car. The rain was just turning to sleet. Watching Jack pull his golf bag out of the backseat, I offered the lines of dialogue that he and I used to say to each other from the
Band of Brothers
series: one paratrooper from the 101st speaking to his buddy, the morning of the invasion of Normandy, when weather was threatening to cancel the drop again. “I think it's clearing … Do you think it's clearing?… I think it's clearing.”

I asked him if he remembered. “Yeah,” he said, but he wasn't listening. He was striding into his zone. His expression had turned stoic as he traded his jeans and hooded sweatshirt for a layer of Under Armour, black slacks, a long-sleeved turtleneck, and his black rain gear. I had packed my blue suit, the one-piece long johns that zipped from ankle to neck, my standard bottom layer in the days when I still played goalie with him. The last time I wore the suit was three winters ago, when one of his slap shots had struck me in the throat and I'd blacked out on the ice and sworn off ever being a goalie again.

It took me a while to put on my layers. “You should have some of these gloves,” I heard him yell to me over the wind.

“I'll be fine!” I yelled. I stood up, grabbed my clubs, and slipped into the shoulder straps of my bag. He was walking away by then, his game face on, his mind already focusing on what he'd come this far from home to achieve.

“Jack!” I hollered. “Come here a minute!”

When he was just a few feet from me, I began to deliver the speech I'd been rehearsing in my imagination for months. “Can you hear me!”

“Yeah!”

“Okay! I just wanted to tell you that iPods aren't real either!”

“iPods?”

“iPods aren't real!” I yelled again. “Just like 401(k)s! Neither are cell phones, laptops, the Internet, user names, passwords, or PIN numbers! CNN isn't
real
! This is real! The wind! Weather! The sea! This ground! Whenever you get lost in your life, remember that!”

His expression was priceless. “You're so predictable!” he yelled to me.

I bowed at the waist. “I take that as a compliment!” I yelled back.

I hadn't quite delivered the speech with the charisma I'd hoped for, no triumphant call to arms from a marbled arch; but still, I'd said pretty much what was on my mind. And with that, we proceeded to the starter's shed at the Championship Course to play some golf from the back tees.

We startled the woman inside the starter's shed. She told us that she hadn't expected to see any golfers today. The instant she opened the sliding glass window so she could hear me, rain soaked her face like a wave breaking over the bow of a boat.

“We just flew in from America,” I yelled to her above the wind. “Just got off the plane!”

“You're on holiday then,” she said, ducking her head out of the rain, which was coming down harder now from a low black sky. “Are you sure you want to go out in this?” You could hear a dull concussion of waves pounding the beach in the distance and shells exploding on an artillery range along the shore.