Safer (12 page)

“Good boy,” I said, letting the dog lick my fingers. “Don’t tell Roger.”

Roger took one look at my cracked leather bag of clubs, most of them handed down to me by my grandfather, and said, “You two wait here.”

Already I felt like a dope. The only clubs I owned that didn’t belong in a museum were a duct- taped 5-wood I’d found
near a water hazard fifteen years ago and the junior- model sand wedge that had been confiscated by the Clark Falls Police Department in July.

“Tell me the truth,” I said to the dog. “How dumb do I look?”

Before Wes could weigh in, Roger returned carrying a big, black- and- gold bag that looked like it belonged to a PGA Tour pro. “Here. Had these specially made for you.”

I looked closer and understood the joke: they were Callaway brand clubs, a full set of them, probably worth more than my first car. The irons gleamed in the sunlight; the woods all had matching head covers with the Callaway logo stitched in white thread. My ancient persimmon driver had a gym sock with holes in it.

“Roger, I can’t use your golf clubs.”

“These? Hell, I gave up on these two seasons ago.”

“I wouldn’t even know what to do with all of them.”

“I’ve got three other sets in the garage,” he said. “Want to come pick out a different one?”

“No,” I said. “No, that’s not…I’m sure these work fine. Thank you.”

“Here.” He handed me two Partagas cigars, both sealed in screw- top tubes. “You’ll need these.”

Across the circle, Pete Seward’s garage door opened; Pete emerged around the back end of his SUV with his golf bag on his shoulder. As if choreographed, the same thing happened at Barry Firth’s place. Barry saw us and waved.

Roger waved back and took Wes into the house. In a moment he returned, twirling the keys to his own SUV, a GMC Yukon that could have carried my Honda hybrid on its luggage rack. “What do you say we go hit the hell out of some golf balls?”

“I hope you’ve got plenty.”

“Come on,” he said. “You can ride with me.”

•    •    •

We’d play a team scramble, it was decided on the practice green. This meant dividing into opposing twosomes and keeping a “best ball” score, meaning that the members of each team would choose the best shot between them and play the next shot from that spot. The losing team bought steaks at the clubhouse grill after the round.

Pete Seward had suggested the idea—in honor, he’d said, of my long hiatus from using a golf club for anything beyond home security. I knew that he’d done so more out of consideration of my last known handicap, the maximum recommended under USGA rules, but I appreciated the gesture anyway.

“Perfect,” Roger said.

“I’ll take Roger,” said Barry Firth.

Pete grinned and gave me a nod. “It’s a lock.”

On the first tee box, with new- guy honors, I looked down the lush green fairway of a short par four. Dogleg left, trees on both sides, sand traps at two hundred yards.

“Fore, please,” Roger said. “Paul Callaway now driving.”

“This won’t be pretty.” I pulled the cover from the number one wood. Compared with mine, the driver Roger had loaned me looked like a Volkswagen Beetle on the end of a stick.

“Just tee it high,” Roger said. “Nothing to it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here goes nothing.”

I used the ball to push the tee into the turf. When I straightened, the setup looked like a dimpled white lollipop growing out of the ground at a crooked angle.

Roger grinned. “Maybe not that high.” He stooped to correct the situation, then backed off and nodded. “That’s better. Let her rip.”

“Sprinkle some whoop- ass on it,” Barry said.

Pete: “Nice and smooth.”

I arranged my grip on the club, hunched my shoulders, and addressed the ball. “Somebody watch where this goes.”

Barry: “There is no ball.”

“Jesus,” Roger said. “Would you two let the man swing?”

Nice and smooth,
I thought. I remembered my father’s advice:
just give it seventy percent.
After a few tense moments, I took a breath, drew the club back nice and slow, thought of the bunkers way down there in the fairway, and gave it all I had.

The follow- through spun me off balance. Something pulled in the middle of my back. The vibration at impact rattled up the club and into my hands, numbing my fingers.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that I’d driven the tee straight into the ground like a nail. The ball dribbled five or six feet to the right and rolled to a stop. Everybody stood around for a moment.

Eventually, Pete pointed at the ball and said, “There it is.”

I nodded. “I’m guessing we won’t be using that one.”

“Hell,” Roger said. “With Pete you never know.”

Barry laughed.

Pete grinned, stepped up, and pounded a towering drive over the trees, cutting the dogleg and rolling his ball into the rough on the far side of the fairway, fifty yards from the green.

“Medium rare,” he told Barry. “That’s how I like my rib eye.”

“Guess you’d better learn how to putt, then.”

Roger chuckled and teed up, hanging a smooth little draw along the curve of the fairway, landing his ball softly in the middle of the short grass. Barry took half a dozen practice swings and pulled a screaming hook into the first fairway bunker.

“Damn,” he said. “I gotta get this thing regripped.”

Pete nodded. “That’s probably it.”

“Drive for show, jocko.” Barry stooped to pull his unbroken tee from the ground. “Putt for dough.”

As Pete and Barry headed for the gleaming, gas- powered, GPS- equipped carts parked on the path, Roger tossed me my duffed ball, a clean new Titleist, which he’d supplied in the first place. “Glad you could make it, Doc. This’ll be fun.”

Apparently, I already had a nickname. Doc? After thinking about it, I realized that I’d been named after my academic credentials. It hadn’t occurred to me before then that this was how my neighbors saw me. “Famous last words,” I told Roger.

He chuckled and clapped me on the shoulder. Off we went.

Growing up, golf with my parents had always occurred on the trampled public courses of Morristown, New Jersey, generally with a pocket full of scuffed secondhand balls from the rusted bucket my father kept in the garage.

In his retirement, with his investments and his pension from Honeywell, I imagine that he could have afforded to treat himself and my mother to at least a partial membership at one of the plush private clubs in the area. But he’d never done so.
You find the same assholes everywhere,
he once told me.
Why pay more?
In his view, you could learn everything you needed to know about a person by the way they played a friendly round of golf.

By the time we’d finished the first nine holes at Deer Creek CC, where the range balls were in better shape than the ones in my father’s rusty bucket back in Jersey, I’d learned the following things about my new neighbors in Clark Falls:

Pete Seward was the big hitter. He boomed the ball off the tee, sending it on a slow climb into the sun, and we’d find it either three hundred yards down the fairway or we’d never see it again. His short game was streaky, but he seemed secure with his skill level. He didn’t brag or bemoan. If he had a temper, so far I hadn’t seen it flare.

Barry Firth liked to talk. After nearly every shot, no matter how promising or poor, he’d send verbal instruction after his ball like commands to a spaniel:
Sit down. Turn over. Run. Bite.
After a good shot, I couldn’t help noticing the way he subtly checked for Roger’s approval. After a bad shot, he took a moment to repeat his swing in slow motion, eventually nodding to indicate that he’d identified the flaw.

Roger Mallory, who had ten years on all of us, was easily the most reliable ball striker in the group. Neither as spectacular as Pete nor as erratic as Barry, he played a quiet, conservative
game from tee to pin, hitting fairways and greens, avoiding trouble, and shaping the flight of the ball to produce the safest result.

“Dang, Rodge,” Barry said on the ninth green, after Roger lipped out a two- foot putt for par. I’d just rolled in a shocking, improbable twenty- footer to card a team birdie for Pete and me. “Haven’t seen you miss one of those all year.”

Roger shook his head and smiled. “Yanked it.” His tap- in for bogey took us into the turn all tied up.

On the way to the tenth tee, from my spot in the passenger seat of the cart, I turned to Pete and said, “He did that on purpose, didn’t he?”

“Who did what?”

“Roger,” I said. “That putt. In nine holes he made four or five same as that one like he was falling off a log.”

Pete manned the wheel and smiled a little.

I had my answer. “Why do you think he’d do that?”

“I’d only be guessing.”

“Let’s say you’re guessing, then.”

“I’d guess that Roger is working to promote a sense of solidarity amongst the troops.”

“Ah.”

“Or maybe he just yanked it.” Pete goosed the cart up the hill, clubs clattering behind us. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep his ass honest on the back side.”

“I DON’T KNOW,” Michael Sprague told me, the next night, while out on patrol. “Losing on purpose doesn’t sound like Roger.”

“Pete said he was trying to foster group unity.”

“Actually, that does sound like Roger. He’s big into the unity.”

“Sure,” I said. “Can’t have a community without the unity.”

“God, that’s terrible. I’m stealing it.”

We strolled through the playground at Washington Elementary, a ten- minute walk down the hill from our circle.

I’d grown to look forward to drawing Michael as a shift partner; the Ponca Heights Neighborhood Patrol, whose ranks had swelled in recent weeks, operated on the buddy system, and so far I’d mostly been paired with Roger, or sometimes Pete.

Roger maintained the rotation amongst the volunteers—about twenty men and about ten women—so that nobody had to go out more than once or twice per week. Michael and Sara had become fast friends, and though he visited our house often, I hadn’t really gotten to know him until our first spin around the neighborhood together, two weeks earlier.

Nothing shaking at the elementary school. No teenagers making out or smoking joints in the shadows beneath the log gym. No skateboarders out after dark, trying to land their decks on the hand railings. The playground swings hung limp and vacant in the still, muggy night air.

Michael keyed his walkie- talkie. “Peter, this is Paul and Mary. We’re all secure at Washington. Repeat, K through 6 is secure. Over.”

A crackle. A beep. Then Barry Firth’s voice: “Come on, guys. We’re supposed to keep the channel clear. Cut it out.”

“That’s a roger, Barry. Where’s Roger? Over.”

Crackle, beep. “Seriously. You promised.”

Michael laughed and clipped the radio back on his belt. “God, I love that guy. So what’s with Pete, do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Normally, Pete would have joined in with the juvenile nonsense on the radio, assuming he hadn’t started it himself. But he hadn’t seemed himself, at least to the extent that I knew him, since yesterday’s round of golf. “But I have a story.”

“Do you now?”

“A small one.”

“I’m all ears.”

I told him that we’d all walked off the eighteenth green around five the previous afternoon. We’d repaired to the clubhouse together, where we’d spent the next four hours eating steaks and drinking scotch and smoking cigars.

“As men will do,” Michael said.

“So I’m told,” I said. “Nine, nine- thirty, I head to the manly men’s room. I’m there awhile.”

At the time I’d been exhausted, sunburned, full of bloody
red meat, half full of eighteen- year- old Lagavulin, and thinking that I might like to throw up. I managed to hold down my stomach, but there had been a touch- and- go moment.

“When I come out I take a wrong turn, go through the wrong set of doors, and end up outside instead of back at the table.”

The accidental gulp of fresh air had seemed to clear my head, so I’d decided to take a short walk around the lodgepole-swank clubhouse before going back in and rejoining the others. On the far side of the building, with its decks and its tall windows overlooking Deer Creek Valley, I’d heard voices above me and looked up to see two fat cigar embers flaring in the dark.

Time to end it, Pete,
I’d heard Roger say, in his calm, unmistakable baritone. Stern, but not angry. Like a fatherly friend giving hard advice.

Or what, Roger?
Pete’s voice had an edge.
You’ll tell on me?

Just end it.

Michael said, “End what?”

“That’s what I wonder.”

Michael thought about it and sighed. “He’d better not be sleeping around on Melody.”

“That’s what I wonder.”

“What else did you hear?”

“That’s it,” I said. “I went back around the other way and pretended I hadn’t heard a thing. Pete hardly talked after he and Roger came back, but he ended up getting lousy drunk. Barry had to drive him home.”

“Pete.” Michael shook his head. “Pete Pete Pete.”

We walked along the empty sidewalks of Walnut Street, winding our way through its neighborhood in progress. With the nature preserve to the north, most of the new development occurred here, expanding Ponca Heights to the south.

We passed a row of new houses, all with the same rooflines, the same baby trees staked out front. We passed a row of nearly finished houses with the same weedy gaps between their sodless
dirt yards. At the corner of Walnut and Cedar, a framed two-story faux Colonial sat wrapped in Tyvek.

The farther south we walked, the more skeletal the neighborhood became, until Ponca Heights South finally petered out into a group of bare lots, sleeping bulldozers, and a sign that said,
Future Site of Spoonbill Circle.

“Do you figure these bulldozer guys ever stop and look around and think,
“You know, we’re tearing out
these
trees”
—I pointed at the grove of old- growth oaks and elms bordering the future site of Spoonbill Circle—” …
. so they can plant
those
trees?”
I pointed at a line of young Japanese maples tethered with wire, their wrist- sized trunks clad in protective plastic tubes. As soon as I said it, I wondered what Sycamore Court had looked like sixty years ago.