by Karen Rivers
Blam,
Blam,
Blam.
But on the course? I don’t know. I get bored. My mind wanders. Poor Deer. I’m going to break her heart, and what has she done to deserve that?
Ka-pow.
Ka-pow.
I get scared that I’m not good enough.
Ka-pow.
I’m a jerk.
Ka-bang. I swing the club hard and miss the ball by a mile, whacking the ground at least six inches before the tee. The twang goes all the way down my spine and for a second I feel like I’m paralyzed. I hold my breath, count to ten. Like a little kid would. No one is looking at me so no one can see how for a second tears sting my eyes. From the jarring of it, that’s all.
I can hear my own breath, like it’s too loud for the space. I stretch with a club behind my back, pulling my shoulders taut. The pain is there, but it’s okay. I can take it. It’s not so bad.
I like this empty time. An endless supply of balls. Nothing else in particular I have to be doing. My mind inside all hollowed out and white and smooth. Hitting dozens and dozens of balls without stopping to think. Well, I do think. You can’t stop, can you?
It’s quiet, except for the balls being hit. A handful of us in a row, staring down the field. People don’t talk. They just do their own thing, everyone swinging and huffing and muttering under their breath. There’s a girl – a woman, she’s probably 35, old – I see here every Thursday. Fuck, she says. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She always has bright coloured nails, and lips to match. I like her. She seems tough, but not tough, you know?
Hey Tiger, my boss says, coming up behind me.
I can smell him before I turn to look at him. Sweat and old whiskey and stale coffee and some kind of cheap tinny-smelling cologne. I finish my swing, the ball sailing clean and pure. It’s a darkening blue day, sky open, flat and glassy, like the surface of a frozen lake. Getting colder through and through, ice freckling the grass, air biting my lungs like insects.
Tiger, he says again.
Yeah, I say. What. I hate myself for answering to that. But I told you, I answer to everything. I’m like a dog. You know, how they’ll come when you call them no matter what you say if you pitch your voice just right.
Nice swing, kid, he says, and claps me on the back. You’re getting better. You’re gonna be the star of the tour. You gonna remember us when you’re rich and famous?
Yeah, I say. Sure thing, Bob.
Bob’s a guy who didn’t make it. You know the ones I mean. Guys like that’ll break your fucking heart. Looking at Bob makes me want to run away. I don’t know where. I just want to get into a car and drive and drive. Not that I know how to drive, but I’m sure I could figure it out. (Deer says I can’t get my license until I get a car, and I can’t afford a car.) Bob makes me want out of here. Guys like him, they make me furious. The guys who work the golf courses and give advice to the old ladies who clutch their clubs so tightly that their whole bodies careen into the shot, the balls rolling four feet down the slope. The guys with the broken dreams helping the fools who have forgotten what theirs were in the first place.
You teachin’ today? he says.
I shake my head. A couple of times a week, I teach some kids how to swing. Make a little extra money, but not much. I’m not a pro. I’m just an assistant. Nothing people want to pay for, that’s for sure. Only the parents who see me and think that because I’m black, I must be good.
Yeah, well, don’t forget to pick up the buckets, says Bob. We don’t pay you all this cash to show off, you know.
But then he winks. He thinks he’s kidding. I think he’s sad. I want to grab him by the shoulders and say, Don’t wish this on me. Is this what you want me to be? I don’t want to be you, Bob. Not you.
I want to wear suits and be respected. I want to buy Deer a real house that doesn’t get walloped with sliced shots every couple of hours. Get Mutt to a real school with other kids so he can figure out how to be one before he drives everyone else crazy. I want to go to Europe. I want to work in a bank or a hospital. I want to wear a lab coat and be interviewed on CNN. Or maybe I want to just get married and have two kids and work at the local car lot. I don’t know what I fucking want. How could I know? Seems like choices we make right now are forever. It’s too hard to think about it, it’s too much.
I concentrate on the shrinking pyramid of balls in front of me.
Ka-pow.
Ka-pow.
Ka-pow.
My nose is running now, dripping steady. It’s raw and sore, I hate that. It’s dinnertime and I should go, but Deer will keep it warm, not that it’ll make it taste good or anything. She’s probably putting it in the toaster oven right now, imagining one of those Golf channel guys interviewing her. Imagining saying, X was always at the range. I always had to keep his dinner warm for him in the oven.
Everyone has dreams. I just wish her dream was about her, and not about me.
Ka-pow.
I dream of buying a car that hangs low over the ground so I can prowl the streets like a night cat, all eyes on me. Eyes on my wheels. I dream of moving out of this podunk town and going somewhere where people drink martinis and own sailboats. You know what I mean. A shiny magazine kind of place. A clean place. I dream of all kinds of crap like that. Sometimes I dream about you.
Ka-pow.
That scares you, huh. It sounds creepy and I don’t want you to think I’m creepy so I’ll probably never tell you, I sure won’t show you this. This is just rambling.
This is just junk.
Besides, you wouldn’t want to be my girl, I know it. I get it. You’re just some girl who sits in front of me in English class. Beside me in History. Three rows back in Algebra. At the end of the row in Comp Sci.
Not that I notice.
I’m all run out by Cat anyway. Emptied, you know what I mean? She’s great. You know Cat. She’s a lot of person all crumpled up into such a tiny girl. She and you, well, you’re different, that’s all. Not in a bad way. You would never go out with an asshole like me. You are the smart girl, the girl who’s going places. Beautiful, but you don’t know it. I can see that in your round shoulders. You can’t see yourself. You’re too smart to look at me twice, too smart to notice me: six-foot-three, swaggering down the hall with my friends, laughing and acting like fucking hyenas. I’m invisible to you, I bet. Like it’s snowing, and I’m a ghost. I slide past you like… I don’t know. Like a polar bear on the ice cap. You know that polar bears fur isn’t white? It’s not. It’s transparent. They just blend in to wherever they are, which is almost always snow.
The stupid truth is that I’m only visible to girls like Cat. The girls who like to shock their parents by taking black guys home for dinner. That kind of crap still shocks people in this white-bread town. Girls like Cat who have barbells through their eye-brows, eyes that glitter like knives. Girls who crack their gum like gunshots. Girls with no boundaries and a death-wish, who like to climb up high on things and stand too close to the edge and dare other people to tell them to stop.
Not like you.
Ruby.
If I was going to describe you, I’d say, Ruby is like an animal in a zoo, I can see her pacing around inside herself. When I see you, I feel dizzy. End over end.
Nah, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t talk like that, not for real, only in my head. I’d honestly probably just say, Yeah, she’s hot. She’s okay.
You read an essay in class a while ago that choked me up. I wanted to go grab you and carry you out of there. But at the end, you looked like you were going to laugh. Like you were laughing at us. At me. Like we were too stupid to know what you meant when you wrote it. It was a weird freaking essay, sure. I didn’t get all of it. But guess what? I don’t think you did either. When you were reading it, you sounded surprised, like you didn’t remember that it said that.
When I see you, I want to lie down on the floor in the hallway of the school and let the waxed lino hold me up and keep me from falling through the earth. Hav
e you ever felt like that? Have you?
Crazy. It’s crazy.
But if you haven’t, you’ve never lived.
I’m just starting to live now, I think.
Ka-pow.
I know I’m an asshole. I come off like a jerk, I know I do. I somehow can’t help it. That’s what you’re thinking. To be writing this to you and not to Cat, and, well, I don’t know. You know how I am with Cat. How I’m using her up. All the while thinking about you with your white blonde hair and brown eyes so dark they look black, they make you look possessed like aliens on TV with the liquid eyes. There’s a word for you: Incomprehensible. I’m studying for my SAT’s. I know my big words. I know you, even if you don’t know that I do. I know Cat. There’s a word for Cat, too. One that won’t be on the SAT’s. It starts with an S and ends with an L-U-T. She can’t help it. She needs people to like her too much. It’s all wrong, but it’s true. She throws herself at me so hard it’s like she wants to hurt me, it’s all physical. It’s so physical. That’s supposed to be good, right? Everyone’s supposed to want that. But the way she does it makes me wonder what happened to her that makes her give away herself away so ferociously. It’s like being attacked. It makes me an even bigger jerk than before to say all that, but I’m honest at least, huh.
Hey, if it makes you feel better, I don’t much like myself sometimes either. But that doesn’t explain why you don’t like me. I’ve seen your lip curl under when you look at me, like you can’t stand it. Which should make me hate you, but it doesn’t.
It makes me want to prove you wrong.
I hope it’s not because I’m black. Or because I’m poor. I wouldn’t peg you as like a bigot, racist, but I guess you never know. Maybe it’s something less than that. Maybe it’s easier. Maybe it’s just because you think you know something about me.
Maybe you do know something about me. I get the feeling that you do, that you see other stuff about me, stuff beyond the jerky outer parts. That maybe you can see that somewhere deep down inside, I’m some kind of hero. Or I could be.
Even though I know I’m not. Really. For example, the other night, late, I was walking. Downtown. I don’t know why. I guess Mutty had a cold and was coughing and crying and the coughing made him puke and I just had to get away. Not because I was mad at him, more because I could hear his hurting and I couldn’t help. Deer was getting flustered, rocking him, her hair in disarray, you could just smell the sick-smell of a kid, face red and blotchy with a fever. You could see her uncertainty, like she was at a loss for what to do, she’d run out of whatever Mum-stuff she needed. I hated it. I couldn’t take it. I wanted to get right out of my skin, so I did the next best thing: I walked out the door.
I walked all the way downtown. Went into a 7-Eleven for a cherry Coke Slurpee. I spilled it on the floor, already a sticky mess, didn’t clean it up, but that’s not the bad part. The sidewalk was slippery from some new ice, I could see the streetlights reflecting in patches. It was pretty.
Then I heard something. Coming from a parking lot, some kind of screaming.
Bad screaming.
And I should have run in there, found out what was going on. I should have rushed to the rescue. But I didn’t.
Some kind of hero I am, huh. I kept walking. I kept drinking my drink, so cold on my teeth it sent a spear of pain through my forehead like a Slurpee lobotomy. Knife-sharp. The screaming hurt my ears. I don’t know. It was probably just a fight, right? Some pissed off or drunk couple screaming at each other. I checked the paper for the next few days, it wasn’t like there was a murder or something, and if there was, what could I have done? Even if I’d run in and looked, even then, what would I do?
Maybe it was just a car stereo too loud. Kids fooling around. A joke. You don’t know. I sure don’t.
I don’t know what I mean when I tell you that. I wanted you to see I was more than just a jerk, but then I guess I proved myself wrong. Great.
Still, your own life is probably full of stuff you hate, too. Everyone’s is. Secrets that wake you up at night, sitting straight up feeling like you’re choking and then you remember that it’s just because you’re an asshole. That’s life, right? That’s what people do. You see it all the time on the street. Women biting their lips and glowering at their husbands, fat with rage and pain and unhappy endings. You can see that they are with the wrong ones. You can see that they picked the wrong life.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not settling with Cat. Cat’s great. She’s Cat. She’s …. well, she’s amazing. She’s like a string pulled taut on a guitar, all twang and song. I’m seventeen. Fuck “settled”. She’s my best friend. I like her and I don’t like her, but so what? Isn’t that what friends are like?
I don’t love her and if she says she loves me, she’s lying.
To herself. To me. To everyone else. She and I are the same in a lot of ways. We’re both running away by staying right here. We both know nothing will ever change except us.
I slice a ball wide and hard and watch it sail towards home. Literally. I imagine it smashing the glass window above the little rust-stained sink. Picture the glass shattering. Why? I’m not even mad. I just think that I could do that. That could be a sign, if you’re looking for signs, like Deer usually is.
I pack my clubs into the back office and shut off the lights, the darkness draping down into the cold like paint spilling over me. The shadows move. I’m always the last to leave. The last to quit. It’s my job, after all. You don’t get $10/hour for nothing. I get it for this. Going up and down the rows, picking up the empty baskets, staring out at the darkness, sweeping up the cigarette butts. Throwing empty pop cans into the recycling bin. Straightening the fake grass mats.
All the while thinking, What the fuck am I doing here? Is this what it’s about for me?
I don’t know what to think. I want to stop thinking. But I can’t because when I stop for ten seconds, someone else asks me, “What’s next? What are you going to do with your life? What are you going to do? What are you going to DO? What are YOU going to do?” I don’t know, I want to scream. I have no fucking clue! Leave me alone. I don’t want to make these decisions. College, or no college. Cat or no Cat. You, like you’re a choice. I know you’re not, okay? I’m just saying.
Where to live. Where to go. Choices that do matter, that will make a difference. Deer says I should start applying for golf scholarships at big colleges. Florida. Texas. California. North Carolina. Places with golf teams that have spat out famous guys like Duval and Mickelson and Davis Love III. I don’t belong in a world where people have numbers in their names, you know? As much as Deer thinks that I do. But for a few minutes, I think, yeah, I could do that. Then I remember that they aren’t going to recruit the kid that comes last every other time he plays because he can’t really be bothered.
Deer thinks they will. She’s kidding herself.
Sometimes I think I’m going to be here in this hole forever. Literally here. Collecting the baskets. Shutting off the lights. Cutting across the field to get to Deer’s house where Mutt will climb onto my lap and say, Eggs is home. Eggs is late for dinner.
And Deer will say, That’s okay, little Mutty Mutt, we kept it warm for him, didn’t we? We kept dinner warm for X.
Eggs, Mutt will say. You want Mack and Ronny?
He’s still stuffed up from that old cold, still sounds sniffy, green crust around his nostrils.
Eggs, Deer will say and she’ll pick Mutt up and kiss him like she can’t stop, boogers or no boogers, his long blonde curls spilling over her face like feathers. Eggs is always hungry for macaroni.
Get a haircut, Mutt, I’ll say, shovelling the Kraft Dinner into my mouth and tasting nothing. You look like a girl.
I am a girl, Mutt will say in his baby voice.
Well, you are pretty, I’ll say. Pretty pretty pretty … ugly.
And Deer will say, No, no, never. We’ll never cut his beautiful, beautiful hair.
Mutt will giggle – his laugh sounds like a
rusty gate – and I’ll roll my eyes, and it will be like this forever, like we’re an old vinyl record, stuck in a groove in this field and destined to be this way repeating and repeating and repeating like whacking endless golf balls into the blur.
Ka-pow.
Ka-pow.
Ka-pow.
Cat
Chapter 5
Cat swings back on the cracked rubber-tire swing so far that her newly partially-shorn hair – shaved in patches, raw, long and stringy in others – brushes the gravelly, ice-clotted dirt. Meow, she says, her cigarette dropping out of her mouth and nearly landing in her own eye. She laughs.
Careful, says Mira automatically.
Always, says Cat, winking. She twists around to retrieve her cigarette and put it back in her mouth. It feels so familiar there, it’s getting so she only feels like herself with a cig. The other day, she noticed that cigarettes and crayons are almost the exact same size and weight. She seriously suspects that this was on purpose, that the crayon companies are in with the smoke companies to make the shape seem like home. She thinks about mentioning this to Mira but Mira already thinks she’s full of conspiracy theories and she can’t stand for Mira to correct her. Not right now.
Mira swings slowly next to her, out of sync. She’s still wearing her school uniform, green plaid skirt, white shirt, red tie, with a big yellow parka over the top that makes her look like Big Bird. Mira goes to a different school – one of those decisions their parents made early, that the twins would be somehow better off to have some separation. Well, it worked. Mira has different friends. Different interests. Different tastes. A whole different life. Cat’s both jealous and not jealous. She feels sorry for Mira and wishes she could be more like her and also she hates her.
So what’s new, she says, straightening up. The chains on the swing are cold against her bare arms.
Aren’t you cold? says Mira.
No, says Cat.
Huh, says Mira. I’m freezing. Where’s X?
Working, says Cat. He’s always working. He’s such a bore.