“A brawl?…In a dive bar?…With a guy named Stump?” whispers Sarah breathily in my ear. “I had no idea you were such a badass.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
Although it’s almost midnight, I’m hustled from the foyer into the kitchen and seated at the head of the table. Noah hands me a glass of the best red on the premises, and Sarah takes a warm plate from the oven. Artfully arranged on top of it are the best parts of a roasted chicken, surrounded by potatoes simmered in its juices, and ringed by blackened Brussels sprouts.
“I made you your death row meal,” says Sarah, and I try not to wince at the unintended irony.
“Everything is absurdly delicious. I only wish I deserved it.”
“We think you do,” says Noah, pouring himself a bowl of Cheerios.
“You’ve won tournaments before, Travis. This was different.”
“Not in a good way. It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong about Peters.”
“You’ve always disliked him.”
“For no good reason. In our meeting with Finchem, he defended me like Clarence Darrow. Insisted the whole thing was his fault.”
“Maybe it was.”
“And I assume you haven’t forgotten the part about me being suspended for six months.”
“That’s unfortunate and unfair. But you’ll come back stronger than ever. We’re sure of it.”
“You too, pal?”
“No question,” says Noah, milk trickling down his chin.
Interjecting reality into this late-night celebration makes me feel like the killjoy I am. Instead, I hoist my Pinot and toast the room. “What a meal! What a wife! What a kid! What a dog!”
“That’s more like it,” says Sarah.
“By the way,” says Noah, “did I tell you that even Mr. Wilmot in gym is treating me better?”
“Big surprise there.”
After dinner, Noah trudges to bed and Sarah refuses to be talked out of washing the dishes, so I head to the couch with Louie. When he rests his head on my thigh, farts, sighs, and falls asleep, I’m grateful that at least one member of the household isn’t burdened with false illusions.
18
THE NEXT MORNING, I drop Noah at school, and Louie and I take a drive to the Creekview Country Club, which is as deserted as it should be on a Wednesday morning in mid-January. I park in the rear corner, and the two of us set out up the first fairway, following the cart tracks left from my grandfather’s funeral. Three weeks later, the ground is still frozen, but the temperature has soared into the high twenties, and the air is heavy with forecast snow.
On the first green, Louie and I find the spot where the first installment of my grandfather’s ashes were scattered, my fallible memory confirmed by Louie’s infallible nose. Whenever things get shaky, and sooner or later they always do, my first instinct is to go talk to Pop. It’s been that way since I learned to walk, let alone swing a 7-iron, and it’s not going to change now just because he’s dead. Gazing down at the green, I fill him in on what happened in Hawaii, from the last hole of regulation to the only hole of sudden death. Then I get him up to speed on my visit to the Ding Dong and Finchem’s office before Louie and I move on.
Over the years I’ve gotten almost as much comfort from this old golf course as I have from my grandfather. It’s not only where I learned to play, it’s where over the course of thousands of rounds, I literally grew up. Or tried to. Even here, however, I can’t escape the harsh glare of self-scrutiny, set off by Peters’s unexpected support. As Louie and I wander in the cold from hole to hole, I rewind as much of my first fifty-one years or so as I can stomach, searching for an occasion, or preferably more, when I behaved as generously.
Ten holes later, I haven’t come up with one. There is, however, no shortage of cringeworthy moments, incidents so damning I’m not going to share them now. Whenever I think I’ve unearthed something I can hold up in my defense—“Your Honor, I refer you to exhibit one A”—I soon see through it for what it was, a transparent attempt to impress a girl, or a friend or a college admissions staff. As far as I can tell, my only genuine acts of kindness have been directed at Sarah, Elizabeth, Simon, and Noah, and they’re simply an extension of myself and inadmissible as evidence.
Being back on home turf isn’t doing much for me, but Louie is having a blast. I know every blade of grass on these suburban sixty acres, but for Louie it’s all thrillingly new, and he is beside himself at having the run of such a vast, fascinating tract. Like a canine Columbus wading ashore in the New World, he races from tree to bush to rock, raising a leg and planting the flag of Louie.
On the 14th fairway, Louie picks up the scent of Simon and, barking maniacally, follows it to the portion of the green where my older son tipped Pop’s ashes. What, I wonder, did my grandfather see in me? If I were nothing more than a little sawed-off bag of shit, even he wouldn’t have loved me. Since he did, he must have detected a crumb of decency. Right? Or was it all just biology, a kindhearted old coot giving his flesh and blood the benefit of the doubt? Unfortunately, that sounds more like it.
As we hover over the fresh memory of Pop’s remains, Louie starts barking again, this time skyward, and when I tilt my head back, it looks as if an enormous old pillow has burst open. Like Louie last night on the couch, the sky is letting it all go. Still barking, Louie sprints out into the pouring snow, and after one last aside to Pop, I head after him.
19
IT SNOWS FOR TWENTY-FOUR hours, and when I look out the window Thursday morning, Winnetka has rarely looked better. All the tacky details and worst pretensions of suburban architecture have been whited out. What’s left is the snow-topped geometry of rooftops and telephone lines and the poetry of trees.
Just as lovely is the muffled quiet, and so in its own way the rattling and scraping of the first wave of municipal plows. Then the local citizenry wheel out and rev up their snow-moving toys. To escape the din, I grab my golf bag from the garage and haul it to the basement.
Downstairs, I pull out all the clubs and lean them against the wall of my workshop. It’s been almost a week since I’ve touched my sticks, and I miss them. What happened in Hawaii wasn’t their fault. At least, not entirely. Arrayed by height, from my homely Big Bertha to my lovely ancient bull’s-eye, they look like the multiple generations of a large, eccentric family gathered for a portrait.
I’d clean the clubs, but Johnny A took care of that before we packed up, and the shaft, grip, lie, and loft of every one have already been tweaked and fitted to within an inch of their lives. I consider adding a couple of degrees of loft to my 4-iron to close the gap between it and my 5-wood, but decide instead to replace the grips on my wedges, which is equally unnecessary but at least not destructive. I’ve got my gap wedge in the vise and the old grip half off when Louie starts imitating a watchdog.
Upstairs, I open the front door to a tall, pudgy teenager, about seventeen, whose face is scarred with acne. He holds a shovel and, despite the cold, wears only a sweater, scarf, and hat, all three of which are made of the same coarse green wool and are far too sturdy and singular to have been purchased at the local mall.
“Sorry to interrupt your pliering,” says the boy, referring to the pliers in my right hand. “I was hoping I could shovel your walks and driveway.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“Does twenty dollars seem fair?”
“Not to you,” I say. “There’s at least two feet of snow, and it’s wet and heavy.”
“Your points are all well taken,” responds the boy with a goofy grin that outshines his acne, and his European accent underlines the arcane diction.
“Let’s make it forty dollars.”
“Excellent,” says the kid, extending a large hand reddened by the cold. “We have a verbal contract and a handshake agreement.”
Then he turns his back and starts shoveling, and while he digs his way from the front door to the driveway, I return to my subterranean busy
work. In total, I manage to kill almost an hour. I replace the grips on all three wedges (twenty-five minutes), polish and clean my big white Mizuno bag (twenty minutes), then do the same to my golf shoes (ten minutes).
When I climb out of the basement, the sun is blinding and the smell of hot chocolate wafts from the kitchen. Outside, the kid has finished the walk and is attacking the driveway, and as I watch from the living room, Noah, with Louie trailing, emerges from the side of the house bearing two steaming mugs. After the shoveler accepts his, the pair chink cups and sip their warm drinks in the winter sun, chatting like old pals. Then the boy hands back the empty, makes a courtly bow, and returns to work.
“I like Jerzy,” says Noah, back in the kitchen. “He’s good people.”
“I like him, too.”
Jerzy shovels for three hours. When he returns to the front door, he holds the plastic bag containing a day-old paper. “An artifact excavated from the base of the driveway,” he says. “Perhaps it will be of some interest.” More conspicuous than his accent is his delight in his new language, as if every word and figure of speech is inherently amusing.
“Thanks, Jerzy. You did a hell of a job. I’m Travis.”
“I know who you are, Mr. McKinley. You’re Winnetka’s most notorious professional athlete.”
“I guess you heard about the suspension.”
“It struck me as rather draconian.”
“Ditto. You play?” I ask.
“Unfortunately not, but I spectate via television.”
I pull two twenties and a ten from my wallet and, as I hand them over, notice that the acne on his forehead camouflages a nasty gash.
“This is too much,” says Jerzy.
“Not at all. You earned it. What happened to your head?”
“Tripped on the ice. Unfortunately, both my feet are left ones.”
“Well, good luck getting back. And thanks again.”
20
I RIP THROUGH THE wet wrapper, and without so much as a glance at the world, local, business, and cultural news, apply myself directly to Sports. An unseemly amount of the first page is devoted to the exploits of Michael Jordan, who led the Bulls to victory last night in Texas, and there’s a photo of him throwing one down over San Antonio’s rookie center, Tim Duncan.
I’ll get back to that in a moment, but first I want to see how Earl is faring in Tampa. Among the box scores and standings, I find the leaderboard for the GTE Suncoast Classic, where order has been restored. Tied for the lead are Hale Irwin and Gil Morgan, and four strokes back is Earl Fielder. It looks like Earl is going to have to wait another week before getting that first w, but back-to-back 69s are nothing to sneeze at and almost certain to lead to his twenty-fifth top ten in a row. There’s no sign of Stump. Most likely, he took the week off to enjoy his victory and give his face a chance to look more presentable.
I sip my coffee and study the small type like a tax attorney searching for loopholes. From the box score, I learn that Jordan scored thirty-five points in thirty-three minutes, shooting eight for fifteen from the field, four for nine from three-point range, and seven for seven from the line, and Pippen was one assist and two rebounds short of a triple-double. My scrutiny shifts from the NBA standings to the Blackhawks box score to the college basketball results (Eastern Michigan 68, Northwestern 52) before alighting on “Transactions.” If the agate are the crumbs of the sports section, then “Transactions” are the crumbs of the crumbs. But where else would I learn that the Bears have agreed to a four-year contract with outside linebacker Boswell King and waived (football is even crueler than golf) defensive lineman Simon Briggs and placed Ted Keating on injured reserve? Or that Phil Jackson has been fined $10,000 for criticizing the officials after last week’s loss in Portland, which strikes me as rather draconian?
What, you may wonder, is so interesting about an endless succession of contrived contests staged day after day, night after night, in gyms, rinks, and arenas? For one thing, they’re easy to digest. Someone won. Someone lost. Someone, like yours truly, screwed up, and someone, like Hank Peters, didn’t. The rest of the paper is never that clear, and even if you learn what happened, you don’t know what it means. Maybe you’ll know in a week or a month. More likely, you never will.
I spend over an hour of the only life I’ll ever have poring over scores, standings, and minutiae, and just when I think I’ve extracted every last bit of infotainment from these four pages of newsprint, I stumble on half a dozen paragraph-sized morsels herded under “Briefs.” The headline for the golf item reads: CADDIES INJURED IN CRASH.
Two regular caddies on the Senior Tour were injured yesterday afternoon on Route 75 ten miles outside of Tampa, Florida, when their van swerved to avoid a deer. GW Cable of Sarasota, Florida, was treated for a concussion and held overnight and Brandon Fielder of Monroe, North Carolina, was treated for a broken arm and released.
The news that Earl is without a caddy jolts me upright. Suddenly restless, I get up and wash out the saucepan Noah used to make the hot chocolate and place it in the drying rack. Outside the kitchen window a black squirrel clings to the top of the bird feeder. Hanging upside down, he struggles to extract a couple of seeds, an athletic challenge with more at stake than any of those I read about.
As the bird feeder swings back and forth, I recall the fateful day when Earl and I were paired in the second round of Q-School, and how my immediate comfort with him helped me through the round. Then I think of our even more important meeting four days later, after I squeaked through and he fell just short, when he volunteered to carry my bag for my rookie season.
If the situation had been reversed, and he had gotten through and I had narrowly missed out, would I have even considered making him the same offer? I know the answer, but why not? Earl is single, with a pension and an impressive stock portfolio, so I would have needed a job more than him. Is it because I’m a snob who considers caddying beneath him? And is part of that snobbism based on race? More likely, it’s because I would have been sulking too much to think objectively.
What I would or might have done years ago is interesting, at least to me. The more pressing question is what am I going to do now? Before I have a chance to chicken out, I grab the phone and call Earl.
21
THREE DAYS LATER, WEARING a white bib with FIELDER pinned to the back, I’m standing like a statue behind the first tee of the Longboat Key Club & Resort, site of the Greater Sarasota Intellinet Challenge. Although my only immediate responsibility is to make sure Earl’s bag doesn’t topple over in the middle of his backswing, I’m more nervous than if I were the one teeing it up, and as Earl takes his practice swings, I thumb the corner of the index card in my back pocket like a security blanket.
Due to the blizzard, I couldn’t get a flight out of Chicago till this morning and didn’t screech into the parking lot till forty minutes ago. That was barely enough time to fill out that index card with the distances Earl hits all his clubs and grab a yardage book, and as Earl settles behind the ball, I tap them both again to make sure they’re still there. Then Earl pipes his drive down the center, and I hoist his bag over my right shoulder and hustle after him.
The lack of time to prepare certainly contributes to my agitation. A bigger factor is Earl’s reaction when I volunteered my services. Let’s just say he didn’t jump at the offer. After ten seconds of awkward silence, the best he could come up with was “You sure you want to do this? The bag’s pretty heavy.”
“I know,” I said. “I just carried mine down to the basement.”
“Imagine what it will feel like after six miles.”
“You didn’t have any trouble.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m not you.”
That night at dinner, Sarah and Noah were just as skeptical about my suitability for hard anonymous labor. An informal poll of best friend and family yielded the unflattering consensus that I was too much of a pussy and too much of a prima donna to happily hump a forty-pound bag with another man??
?s name on it.
I don’t say a word as I escort Earl down a tight fairway lined with modest houses and screened-in swimming pools. Pacing off yardages, pulling clubs, and reading greens will be enough of a challenge without engaging in small talk, and I want to make it clear from the outset that I’m not here to hang out but to work.
Despite my determination to exceed everyone’s low expectations, I narrowly avoid disaster, and it happens on the very first hole, after Earl follows his perfect drive with a crisp 7-iron that leaves him twenty-two feet below the hole. One of the great perks of being a professional golfer, right up there with not having to work for a living, is that eighteen times a round, you get to flaunt your good fortune by performing a simple ritual permissible only for pros—the mark and toss. Upon finding your ball on the green, you saunter up behind it, mark the spot, then toss the ball to your caddy, who wipes it clean with a damp towel.
Every pro performs this little sequence in his own inimitable fashion, but always with as much nonchalance as he can muster with a straight face. Some players release the ball without even a glance at their caddy, like a look-away pass in basketball. Others lob it like a baby hook. Earl’s signature is to put a bit of air under it, and when he flips it to me, perhaps as a joke or perhaps as a kind of initiation, he puts even more than usual, and the height of the toss gives me way too much time to consider the consequences of booting it.
Mainly, I’m thinking about the pond, directly behind me at the base of a closely mown slope, and the fact that the surface is coated with opaque green slime. If I yip the catch, not only will Earl’s ball end up in the soup, but there’ll be no way to find it, and based on my rereading on the flight down of that page-turner known as The Rules of Golf, I know that if Earl has to putt out with a different ball than the one he just threw to me, I’ll go down in looping lore as the rookie who cost his player two strokes on his first hole. As a result, I brace myself for this little pop-up as if it were a vicious line drive and, with two hands extended and Earl’s clubs bouncing around on my back, am barely able to corral it.