dollars to go around. I thought I’d have gone a little further by now. Thought I’d had a little more talent.”
Lyle watched Ken drive the ball down the fairway. The backswing did not stretch as far as before, did not wind as much power as on the first several holes. The mechanics appeared hurried. Lyle watched the ball slice to the right and land several feet into the thick rough. It remained a competent swing, but Lyle recognize how an uncertainty invaded the technique. Lyle tugged deeper at his first beer and thanked Brett for handing him a second.
“It’ll play,” Lyle comforted Ken.
Lyle’s luck improved on the fourth hole. His drive gained extra yardage when it took two bounces off of the cart path. Though he topped his iron, the ball skimmed through a bunker while the hazard’s lip redirected his shot’s flight to land softly on the green’s far-side fringe. His chip earned him a chance at par, and Lyle was happy that a short putt earned him a bogey.
Ken did not offer his usual encouragement. He became silent by the end of the hole. Ken was too deeply absorbed in the challenges facing his game. He fretted over the slope that made his par putt difficult. He paced from one side of the green to the other. He did not trust himself to gauge the break of the roll as confidently as he had at the round’s start.
Lyle sipped at his beer and felt a chill on his spine as he watched Ken worry over the putt. Ken’s body looked more old than young on the green to that hole.
“You thinking the putt falls to the left, Lyle?”
Lyle looked at the slope from behind Ken’s shoulder. “At the very end, but it looks like it might break right earlier in the roll.”
“Good eyes. I just can’t decide how much pace I need.”
“A tricky putt no matter how you look at it.”
“Well, I can’t wish it done or hope it done,” Ken winked as he stepped to the putt.
Ken’s putter wavered as it moved through its stroke, and the ball skipped a few beats before settling into a steadier roll. The ball followed the slope too late in its progress and failed to track towards the hole. Ken’s pace sent the ball well past the cup. But Ken purely struck the remaining putt and the sound of the ball falling to the bottom satisfied both golfers.
“What did you shoot, Lyle?”
“Bogie.”
Ken smirked. “Mark me for a bogie too. Hope the next hole treats us kinder.”
The sun warmed on the back of Lyle’s neck as he climbed the steps to the fifth tee.
“My heart’s sick, Lyle,” Ken sighed to his friend, “I know I’ve let Alec down.”
A very different Ken stood waiting for Lyle between the tee markers. An additional fifty pounds now clung to Ken’s frame, much of it in the wide stomach that pulled Ken’s shoulders into a perpetual slouch. His cheeks were fuller and rounder. Patches of gray gathered in Ken’s thinning hair. The tanned skin to the forearms of the younger Ken who Lyle had met on the first hole appeared to have mottled and dried. Strangers would no longer be able to guess at the lithe, athletic body Ken once possessed. Only Ken was no stranger to Lyle, and Lyle would not underestimate the ability remaining in Ken’s swings, nor the competitive fire that still smoldered in his friend’s eyes.
“It crushed him.”
Lyle opened his second can of beer to help him through the round’s later holes.
“Times are rough for everyone, Ken. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Ken sighed. “But Alec owns a talent I never dreamed of. He’s got a head for numbers like no one I’ve ever known. His mind just churns through all the equations and problems the school can find for him. He had his heart set on that campus. They offered him a good deal because of his academics are so strong. But I still can’t scrounge enough to help him. I just can’t find the hours. I would put these clubs down right now and run to a shift if only I could find one.”
“There are lots of other options. State schools. Community colleges.”
“Maybe,” Ken peered down the fairway and tossed the ball up and down in his thick hand. “But none of those options are the ones he dreams of. Remember what it was like to have a dream? Hell, I could only dream of strikeouts and touchdowns, but they were still dreams. Maybe I should’ve had better ones, and maybe I can’t help Alec more because I chased foolish dreams too passionately. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt me any less to see Alec fall short of his.”
Lyle kept any advice to himself as Ken grabbed his bag’s most appropriate iron for the hole’s par three. Lyle had lost his chance to give his friend real advice many years ago, and he could no longer change the trajectory of the following days. He played with memories and ghosts, and nostalgia’s course might be enjoyed, but could never be altered.
“You going with the eight iron instead of the seven?”
Ken twirled the club. “Got the wind at my back, and we’re on an elevated tee.”
“But the yardage suggests a seven,” Lyle replied.
Ken chuckled. “You and your yardage. Trust your instincts more. I’m getting old, but I still have enough to hit an eight instead of a seven.”
The mechanics of Ken’s swings were shorter than those of his youth. Some of the power may have left him, but Ken’s skill still struck the ball true. It lifted from the tee in a high arc towards the green. None of the hazards – not the pond between the golfers and the flag nor the bunkers waiting on both of the green’s sides – threatened the shot. Though the green was firm for the heated season, Ken’s ball landed softly and spun towards the flag. Ken and Lyle held their breath as the ball came to a stop only a few inches from the hole. The smallest change in the breeze might have kept it out of the cup’s bottom, or may have guided it home.
“Unbelievable,” Lyle smiled from ear to ear. “I’ve watched that shot so many times, and I still have no idea how you ever put so much spin on the golf ball.”
“Magic,” and both golfers laughed as they approached the green, no matter that Lyle put two shots into the pond.
Holes five and six were not next to one another, and the length of the shaded stone path to the next tee gave the golfers time to calculate their scores and consider the meaning of numbers. Lyle kept quiet. No matter how many Tuesday and Thursday mornings remained to him, that stretch of path was always dark. The most grueling and bitter holes of the course waited for the pairing.
“Cheer up, Lyle. You’re not the first to give golf balls to that pond,” Ken slung an arm around his friend’s shoulder. “Old Addison will drain the pond come winter and recycle what he finds as range balls. Then, we’ll all have plenty balls to hit for practice.”
Lyle grumbled. “It’s a cruel cycle.”
“It’s only golf,” Ken winked.
Hole six challenged the golfers with the course’s longest par five, with separate water hazards in the fairway to claim drives and approaches. The narrow green’s elevation denied attempts to land the ball short and roll towards the cup, directing many balls into the deep bunkers of soft sand hemming all the green’s sides.
Ken limped to the tee box, and Lyle cast his eyes upon the ground.
“Sorry I’m so slow,” Ken sighed. “Haven’t been feeling well. Tired all the time. It’s difficult to go to the bathroom. Always light-headed, and some mornings it seems all I can do just to get out of bed.”
“Have you seen a doctor about the pain?”
Ken grimaced. Lyle saw his partner’s hand shake as it pressed the tee into the ground. “He couldn’t say, one way or the other. So I saw a specialist. Got some tests done. Went through the screenings.”
“Did they tell you anything?”
It never went any easier for Lyle no matter that he received the same answer each Tuesday and Thursday morning during his golf season. Ken always hesitated to give it, instead always twisting, slowly, at the waist, trying to loosen the muscles of his swing that by the sixth tee had become stiff and painful.
“I’m still waiting to hear from them.”
Lyle doubted Ken had told him the truth
the first time he had heard that reply so many years before. Looking back, hindsight made him sure of it. Ken knew much more then of the pain that hampered his swing.
“How long have you been waiting to hear from them?”
Ken ignored the question and instead addressed the waiting ball.
Lyle often felt like screaming at that moment each Tuesday and Thursday morning. Sometimes, he did. But shades seldom provide answers to those left behind to wait.
Sickness ruined Ken’s swing on that sixth tee box. The swing no longer belonged to the youth with whom Lyle had shared the earlier holes. It no longer belonged to the skilled golfer who shared tips and advice to an older man who lacked much talent or grace. Instead, the swing now belonged to an aging golfer in pain, to a player filled with anxieties and fears his youth never dreamed of learning. The swing belonged to a man filled with an awful hurt, a pain that spread through his bones to pervert the technique that used to hurtle tee shots through the air in graceful arcs that paid homage to the grasses and the skies.
Lyle had at first closed his eyes to that awful swing that appeared on sixth hole’s tee. Now, he watched Ken’s