Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  Marco takes another backswing. He’s still trying to figure it out for me. I’m sorry I snapped at him—glad that I didn’t say more. He’s still talking, teaching me to salvation, but I don’t really hear him. Dan and Buster come back, both chewing on something. Dan tees up and hits quickly. The rest follow suit. They almost walk off, but then remember me. I get out Marco’s old driver, take a half swing, and dink the ball out in the fairway just beyond theirs.

  The course opens up, becomes links play—rolling fairways, more wind. Even though Buster’s keeping score, he doesn’t say anything to me when I win the tenth. And I keep dinking the ball out there, punching out into the fairway, letting it roll onto the greens—ugly, near arcless shots with very little carry, but they go straight and they go far enough. No mantras, no internal instruction—two holes and then three. And because of my little streak, Dan seems to have regained his interest in me. It seems to rattle him a bit. He misses short putts on thirteen and fourteen, which would have won them both.

  I win the fourteenth, but the black kid beats me to my bag and shoulders it. I wave for him to give it back. He offers me his hand instead.

  “Houston.”

  “Good to meet you,” I say in a paternal mumble. I point at the bag. “I’ll take that.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  Dan and I push the next two holes. White kid keeps his smirk and his distance from us, but Houston stays close to me, almost forgetting that he has another bag to carry. I can’t help but be somewhat moved by his attention. And as we walk off the sixteenth green, I find myself striding toward the next tee. The kid keeps with me.

  “This hole’s made for you,” he says covertly.

  “How so?”

  “It’s long. If you hit a full driver—swing like you did on the first hole, it’s yours.”

  I slow down and eye him warily from behind. He doesn’t turn, but he feels it.

  “Trust me.”

  Dan takes an iron from White kid, points ahead, looks at the ground but addresses me. “Number seventeen. Par five—five hundred sixty yards. Into the wind.” He looks over to me and then points to the tee box. Marco slides up to me.

  “No one gets on in two. Especially on a day like this. Play irons—get on in three, but just make sure you get on.”

  I look at Dan, then Houston. He sneers at Marco behind his back—his first open display of contempt.

  “Tell you what,” says Dan. “Five hundred if you carry the water.”

  Houston studies the scorecard and speaks directly to me. “Two-eighty to carry. Short you’re in the water. Left you’re in the water. Right you’re in the marsh. Not much room to hit a monster drive in.” He looks out to the small landing area of fairway. “Too long and you’re in the woods.”

  “He’s never going to reach the woods,” snaps Dan, reminding the kid of his place. Houston ignores him. He shuts up, but it doesn’t stop him from glaring at the trio of white men. They all look away.

  “How much on this hole?” I ask. No one answers. They pretend not to hear, as though I’m pushing on some line of civility and they don’t feel comfortable reprimanding me—or the silence is the reprimand.

  I spread my arms. “How much?”

  “Twelve,” snaps Dan. Then grins. “Twelve-five for you.”

  I turn to Houston. “May I have the driver, please?”

  He beams. “Yes, sir!” he answers like a Pullman porter. I wince at the association, but I have to shake it off.

  At address I wait for the wind to stop. It’s been blowing in gusts—both hard and soft. Dan won’t look at me, only down the fairway and to whatever he sees beyond. I dismiss him. That little fuckin’ weasel’s gonna owe me a ton of dough. Buster and Marco stand together, Buster smiling, not malevolently, but with a kind of boyish wonder—like he’s suddenly, beside the tee box, found some express route to his childhood. I can see it flicker in his face. He’s happy, home. And Marco, mouth agape, is perplexed by the shapelessness of my plan—the recklessness. But Marco has never had nothing to lose, nor would he ever put himself in a position to lose everything. The sky is blue with creamy clouds, robin’s egg at their soft edges. I put my head down and swing. The ball rips across the inlet and the rocks and marsh and the fairway and into the trees beyond. Nobody says a thing. I can’t imagine that they know what to say.

  “Too much,” mumbles Houston while staring at Dan, his face bright with wet light from sweat and sun.

  Everyone else lays up. After they hit, I wander blankly down the slope to find my ball. When I make the fairway, I get rolled by an icy wave of sleep and I come out of it with a shudder—awake. The grass seems to buzz a brighter green, as though someone turned up a color dial. I look back up the hill to the others. Buster cracks a joke, and everyone except for the black kid laughs. And then I realize that I just blew it, and I can’t understand how or why. I look up and try to recreate my ball’s flight, but that doesn’t do it, neither does my jog to the edge of the wood, where I stop and ask myself, “Why did you do that?” Nothing comes, so I keep looking from the tee to the wood. Another wave hits, not sleep though, it’s smaller, more like a swell than anything else, but it seems to suggest by the way it goes back out—the quiet left behind, that all the water has been sucked out of the bay and is gathering somewhere out of sight.

  I scan the trees. I don’t want to go in there. And they’re not really woods, more like a long, narrow pine grove just before the rocky shore. It’s fortified by thick, twisted lengths of honeysuckle and bittersweet. Inside are ferns, dead needles, moss, and the dappled light of the high sun broken up by the boughs. I hear the scurry of creatures through the soft underbrush, black flies, and the gentle slap of the hidden tide. I step in anyway. It’s cooler inside the trees. I shudder in the middle of a yawn, and my jaw trembles and locks open. I hear something behind me and I startle but don’t turn. A group of gnats gathers and twists in my face. I look through them. There’s a big black wasp flying low, a dog tick waiting on a fern blade. I hear myself sigh but don’t believe it’s really me. I try to dispel the feeling that someone’s behind me. The wind sweeps over the water with a hiss, through the trees with a groan. I say it out loud—“That’s nothing”—but I start to panic a little nonetheless. Then I tell myself that I’m hungry and overtired, but that doesn’t stop me from crying again. Then I remember my lost ball and almost turn my head to look for it, but I don’t think I should move at all. I say it out loud, “You’re just tired.” I don’t believe that. “Not now,” I whine and mouth a quick and empty prayer that even I can’t comprehend. Then it comes.

  When I heard the door open, I thought nothing of it—except That must be somebody—that silly little thought. So I didn’t turn—planting the seed for questions later—what if? I always like to believe that up to that day I had been a happy boy—so full of light—but I know that’s not true. Whether I was already wounded, had already been bleeding all that light slowly, I don’t know. I had already been questioning myself, my value, my capacity to hold light, but in the way a small boy does—feeling it in my guts—What’s wrong with me? I could trace some of it to my skin, to my parents, and later to alcohol—the completeness it brought me when I drank, which spoke to the fact, magnified when sober, that there was something missing. Perhaps what I’d felt as a boy were the things that would be coming—premonitions in the child guts, mute but still calling—a silent wail of dread and bile.

  So when he smashed my head—one, two, three—against the tile wall, it felt right. I remember seeing my blood up there as he dragged me back—up there on the wall like a smear in a cave, the abandoned gesture of an ancient mind and hand. He punched me. He kicked. He was enormous, reassuring—a confirmation of evil. No more wondering about specters and boogeymen and the devil. I had proof—empirical. He stank like the old food on dental floss, the pop released with the decaying meat between molars. Like long-dried sweat. Like the grave—body, moss, and soil. I tore inside, so deep that I could taste it. And
it was so strange, the things that flashed in my mind: why my father left; why my mother wanted me dead. And I wished that they had told me, but how could they have? Everything you ever were will gush from you through a breach, and everything you would have been will be gone. The tear in your anus a symbol denoting the eternal, fathomless gap. No one has ever reached that. I know no one ever will. The scarred brow, stigmata to remind you and them that you will never be whole. And I know it’s so feeble, but I wish it would all go away—but it is me: the line of Ham, the line of Brown, the crooked soul finger, the jagged keloid scar that everyone eventually points to. I wish I would go away, but I shoot through everything—the tree, the dappling on the log, the voices that seem to rise up out of the bay. Everything begs for meaning, for origin, for redemption, and I can’t do it. I know that I’m too damaged. I’ve seen signs and confirmations—evil, chaos. Never good. Never a sign of pure, lasting, invulnerable good.

  I don’t startle when Houston crashes through the honeysuckle, looking up, as though he was following the trail of the ball to this spot. He sees me standing there, shoots a curious look over, then continues tracking his line. He points at the ground as though he’s found some secret tunnel out of a place where we’ve been lost a long time.

  “I’ve got it!”

  I shuffle toward him like a zombie. He’s straddling a log. What a handsome kid, especially since he’s free with me here in the bush—all the tension needed to hold the mask in place is gone. His face has opened. He takes off his cap, revealing the loose naps that have been pressed into the first two layers of a ziggurat. He looks at me quizzically, wondering, perhaps, why I’m not rushing to him. Then he looks back down and shakes his head.

  “Terrible lie.”

  It’s buried under twigs and leaves, with the log between it and the fairway. Only the top sticks out. There’s no way to play it.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  I close my eyes, spread my arms weakly, and list back and forth. He looks at me harder, questioning again, but this time reversing the roles, as though he’s asking if there’s something I don’t understand. He looks down at the ball, feels the balls in his apron pouch, then turns to the fairway, to the clearing he’s come through.

  “If this log wasn’t here, you could punch right through that hole and have a chance at par, maybe birdie—if this log wasn’t here.” He taps at it gently with his foot and stoops. He turns his eyes back up to meet mine, and he’s a boy again, in the kitchen with the cookie box, waiting for the nod from me because his mother, in the next room, has already told him no.

  “What do you think?” He turns, ducks to peer under the branches. He whispers, “Are they down here yet?” He takes one more look at me and then walks away—mutters, “It’s cool.” He stands in the opening and gives me his back.

  “Yo!” yells someone on the other side of the leaf wall. We both spin nervously to the voice. It’s Buster, peering through the foliage. “What are you guys doing in there—huh? Private party?”

  “His ball’s in there,” barks Houston, a bit too stridently for the both of them. Buster waits for him to lower his head, then turns to me and the log.

  “That’s not your ball.” He thumbs over his shoulder. “Your ball’s out here.”

  I squat to examine it, and when I do, I feel something tear inside. I pick up the ball. It’s not mine, but I can’t get up. I think I’m bleeding.

  “Come on, we’ve already hit.”

  I don’t stand. I dab at the back of my shorts, but I don’t feel anything there. Houston has already left the woods, marching almost, with my bag, in the direction Buster had pointed.

  “You all right?”

  I start crying again, so I cover my face, rub my temples with my thumbs. I stand slowly, trying to find a voice for him.

  “I’m just a bit dizzy. It’s gone.”

  “You’re hungry,” he states surely. “You should have let me get you something back at the turn.”

  With that point made, he leaves me in the woods. I sit down on the log and close my eyes. I feel sleep coming. I want to stay on the log, in the woods, in the dappling, slowly bleeding, and have the underbrush, the ferns, the buzzing, the moss and mushrooms cover me. These are good woods. They need a good haunt. And the golfers, the members, gambling, could tell their guests, their sons about the spook who disappeared. From the seventeenth tee, pointing down below—When the wind is right, you can hear him—above the gulls, the yellowjackets, the sway and rustle of the branches. When the sun is right, you can see him sitting, waiting—there, that mushroom patch on the log. They say he had the hands of a giant, hands that could swallow you whole.

  Buster comes back. He looks angry. I wipe my eyes with my baggy shirt and square up, fists clenched at the hip. He sees them and stops two strides away. His face relaxes, then reforms into the expression he wore in the car this morning; he knows me.

  “Here.” He holds out a candy bar. I stare at it. “Allergic to nuts?”

  “No.” I keep staring at his hand.

  “Sorry, it’s all I had in the bag.” He looks closer, into my face, like it’s some curious symbol he doesn’t understand.

  “Your eyes are on fire, man.” I cover them with my hands, absent-mindedly rub at them.

  “You’re making it worse.” He pushes the candy at me. “Here.”

  I have to take it. I open it and offer him some. He refuses. “I just had one.” He nods for me to eat. I do. It’s not candy. It tastes like dried mud. I try to swallow, but I’m spitless. He keeps watching me, some bizarre nursemaid with me in the forest primeval.

  “That’ll take care of one problem,” he says. “Come on, everyone thinks you’re lost.”

  I pick up the ball and pocket it. Buster waves me out of the woods. Marco looks both worried and embarrassed when he sees me. They’re gathered around my ball, and they look to Buster to explain it all with his face. He doesn’t. He looks up the fairway at the flag.

  “You got lucky,” says Marco nervously. “You must have hit a tree or something.” I can’t tell if he’s nervous for me or himself.

  Houston hands me a club. I don’t check it. I can’t feel the grip anyway because my hands have gone numb. The sport bar residue hangs in my throat. He whispers to me.

  “Just straight.”

  I walk up to the ball and swing. It starts out straight but begins hooking—short and left.

  “That’ll play,” mumbles Houston. He’s regained his stance, uncaring about allegiance to me, but I can hear the disappointment in his voice. “You can still make birdie from there and take this hole.” And his saying this, based on what he’s seen so far, is a lie. He knows I can’t chip or putt, and he knows Dan can. What he doesn’t know is that nothing has changed since the woods. I still can hear the grunts and curses echoing off the bathroom tiles. I can still see the sign of blood. It’s right there, on the wall, the smear and drip marks. Houston is further disappointed by my errant chip shot, my eyeless putt. And I would like to tell him that it’s a difficult thing to do—concentrate on your short game while wondering when, if ever, you’re finally going to bleed to death.

  Marco blows his chance to halve the hole. Buster stands over his putt while I tally my losses—my possessions: the money in my pocket, guitar, books. I can work out a payment plan or I can plead ignorance—“Thousand? I thought you meant hundred. I don’t have that kind of money.” We didn’t shake. Or just No. Fuck you. Foul. Just no. Setup. No. Try and take it. No.

  Buster sinks his putt and clenches his fist. He starts to pump it and then looks at Dan, who’s staring at the hole in quiet disbelief, and stops. Dan turns to the eighteenth. Houston sighs, and the white kid loses his smirk and shakes his head ever so slightly. Marco looks lost. Houston sighs again and waves to me to follow him. I do. Buster comes up from behind and slaps my back.

  “Pulled that one out of my ass.” He leaves his hand there. “Trying to keep you going.” He moves his hand to my shoulder and squeezes.
“Next hole—what do you say? Beat that guy.”

  I try to regain my hands—bending at the elbow and shaking them down. Wringing my forearms, massaging my wrists—covertly. But Dan is watching. He strides over—too cocky for such a shrimp. He reaches me just as the pulse returns to my fingers. I feel strong again, as though the instant nutrition has kicked in.

  “You’re not getting nervous now?”

  He smiles wickedly. Houston shakes his head. The others pretend not to hear. Marco shuffles through his clubs, and Buster looks back down into the void. Houston gives me a club and stands behind me.

  “Two hundred to the front. Two thirty-seven to the flag.” He looks at me sharply and mumbles, “Stay out of the woods.”

  I look at the club—a four iron.

  “Can you hit a draw?”

  “No.”

  “Take extra club. Put your left foot a little closer to the ball.”

  I do it.

  “Okay, closed stance. Swing straight ahead. Just let the club head fly straight.”

  “Little late for a lesson?”

  “It’s cool. You can do it.”

  “No.” I step back and give him the club. “Give me the six.”

  He doesn’t. He gives me an exasperated look, instead.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need more loft.” I point at the woods. “I’m going over the top.”

  I know it’s a good one as soon as I hit it. It gets high in a hurry and disappears over the trees.

  “That’s the shot,” says Buster calmly.

  “Nice one,” says Dan coolly. Houston claps his hands together sharply and gives a little low whistle.

  I get to the green well ahead of everyone, and I don’t see my ball. My stomach drops and I feel the bloody leaking in my pants again. “Stay out of the woods,” the boy said. I look up and try to recreate my ball’s flight. It must be in the woods. I sway back and forth about four feet from the hole. I hear them now—just off the fringe.