Frick hit and watched the ball. I drifted back remembering SaBe crouched next to the shelf looking for this last one. Her eyes luminous, alive, curious, unresolved. She ran one finger down the books on the lowest shelf and breathed the words: Big Sur. Then we sat on the bed together and she read me Kerouac’s words: Something good will come out of all things yet—And it will be golden and eternal just like that. There’s no need to say another word.
Frick’s ball settled to the left fringe. “Remarkable,” he said, still listening but not watching as I fetched another beer and inserted a lime, as I sparked a reefer and sat puffing and sipping and continuing the tale: books to cards to roofs to quotes. A mad daisy chain. Onwards through Ellison and Nabokov, until SaBe and I had to quit. Until we had to sleep. Until we lost the will to figure it out. Until it was just a pattern that defied nature. All the while, both of us knowing where it had to end, spiralling through all of its turns until it reached the top drawer of Grieg-son’s desk. The book he had been reading, or re-reading, at the very end. We might not have traced it that far. We might both have had to quit due to fatigue. But we knew that right there on the final pages of Underworld it ended with the single-word sentence: Peace.
Frick stroked a shot better than the others. I could see it the moment of contact, the soft sound of transference, all that club energy passed in a micrometre and a microsecond through the dimpled polyurethane surface and on into the ionomers and proprietary low-compression rubber composites of the ball’s core, passing inwards and inwards as the ball soared, as it arced, as it scraped infinity.
Frick’s ball landed three feet past the pin and bounced up, almost vertical in its hard backspin, seeming to quiver in place before falling, before hitting and rolling sharply back towards the flag, then dropping into the centre of the hole, the black heart of the game, the absolute zero of golf’s obsession.
“Swe-eet,” Frick said. Then he started laughing.
I grabbed a cart out front of the range and drove across Sunshine City to the security centre. Frick shouted after me when I left. But I just kept on stumping up the tier and was gone down into the lobby area before he could pack his clubs and follow. I heard him call out behind me: Ah come on, Hoss, there’s nothing in it.Patterns aren’t meanings.
Now I was swerving through traffic. Two-wheels into the planter getting around carts stopped for room service. Tearing up grass in front of the caddie shack.
I was thinking: so Frick’s short game beat his approach play. So when he holed that final shot, after that entire story about Griegson’s books had been played out, he turned to me and started laughing. That wasn’t so unusual in itself: Frick finding humour in the moment. He had always been able to afford that luxury. What caught my attention this time was how sincere his amusement seemed to be.
He said: “Let me tell you something about Sunshine City.”
I didn’t want to hear. I was stoned again. I was bloated from two fast beers. I’d just decided that moment I was through with this place, really done and gone. I was leaving the same afternoon. Going to pack up my bag, my van, take some water, forget the money, just let me go. But here Frick was blustering on through some final detail. How they all liked to mess with each other. Head games were part of the leaderboard culture. A little gentle fucking with, Frick called it. So someone was messing with Griegson, undoubtedly. Everyone knew he liked to read. It was his weakness, this romantic business. Books. Frick rolled his eyes at me. So you hire some kid to paint signs on rooftops. Hack his mail-order account and get the cards inserted between strategic pages. It was a complicated trick, not impossible.
“But we don’t shoot at each other, Hoss. Look around yourself for God’s sake,” Frick was leaned towards me now, breath smelling of toothpaste and breakfast cereal. Over his shoulder I could see flecks of pastel across the links green. The air tinkled with ice and idle conversation, cell phones twiddling and low whine of golf carts. “These people aren’t shooters,” Frick continued, voice low and urgent. “We don’t think about taking lives. We don’t think about life at all here, Hoss. That’s one of the chief benefits of the place. We don’t think life. We don’t talk life. We just live it and talk about something else. Bad for stroke play, talking about life, Hoss. And don’t feel sorry for the members either. They’re not trapped here. They earned their way in. These people earned their right to be golfers.”
I stormed off. I climbed down off the tier and into the lobby where there was a big picture of a new refreshments building planned for the end of the 9th hole on the second 18. The Grieg-son Turn it was going to be called, and by some fancy architect if my eye could be trusted, all sheets of glass and cantilevered timbers. There was a picture of the dead man up there in the corner of the poster. He was holding the trophy above his head, in his left hand. Huge-occasion smile stretched across his television features.
I stood staring at this for a long time, registering and not registering what was wrong. It was Griegson, no doubt, but with something skewed in the portrait. It took me a long time to get it. Then it came. They’d flipped the image. Griegson shot right, so he wore his glove on his left hand. I knew that intimately, having peeled the glove off his dead fingers to find the phone number that now, like everything else in the story, appeared to mean nothing. But here he was hoisting the trophy over his head in an ungloved left hand, or so it appeared. His gloved hand, which looked to be his right, hanging down by his belt.
“Sir?”
He was sixteen or seventeen years old. Range ball kid. He still had on the kneepads from the samurai suit.
“Yeah?” I slurred. Feeling the worst I could remember feeling in many years. Feeling the Rough in my skin, in my hair. Feeling the Rough in my internal tracks and approaches. In all my hidden traps and waterways. And realizing, just then, that the kid recognized it in me, being from the Rough himself.
“Just wondering if you’re all right, sir,” the kid whispered.
I stared at him. Red hair, scrawny. Underfed. A certain determination in the eyes. Angling and figuring. I said: “Where do you live out there?”
“Southeast,” he said. “In the hills.”
“You come in every day.”
He nodded.
“You like it here.”
He nodded again. There were people moving by, ignoring us. Members and caddies. Girls from the bar up top of the hill. I thought I could read a few things about my range kid here. He wanted to be one of them. He was probably in caddy training already. I wanted to tell him to flee, to get out before the place burns. Leave before the bullets start pouring in, or out, or both ways. It was surely coming and you look like a survivor, I wanted to tell him. You look like someone who won’t desiccate and blow away in the heat of the outside air. Get outside. Stay outside. Leave the compound and don’t come back.
But I didn’t say any of that. I pointed at the picture instead, knowing well that I sounded blown. Hosed and ripped and bent. Fried. I said: “Just noticing the picture’s backwards. This man shoots right, I happen to know it.”
The kid grinned and nodded, inside on a detail I obviously didn’t have. He said: “Well yeah. That’s what makes Griegson so awesome. They guy shoots right, but he didn’t always.”
I heard myself say: sorry?
“Didn’t always,” the kid said, eyes bright with the wonder of it. “Griegson was a natural southpaw. Shot left all his entire life. Wrote left. Did everything left. Then sometime last year he got the yips and his score exploded. Griegson was scratch. Then suddenly he was shooting 72. Then 90, 92. It was bad. Some members take pills to break the yips. Some use meditation or therapy. Nobody has ever done what Griegson did. He switched over, bought new clubs. He started shooting right.”
I was staring at the kid, struggling to process this information.
The kid just kept on nodding. “I know,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. Switched right and a year later he’s number three on the leaderboard. Natural southpaw. The man is a god.”
Hoss careering across Sunshine City, lurching to a stop in front of the security centre, stumping inside. Where of course I had no clearance and would not be permitted to review anything. Unless I phoned Frick, that is. Who, to his credit, just told me to put him on speakerphone, then commanded the air in the way only he could. Frick communicating entitlement and authority for all the dudes from Therman Winkler and Huston Armed Response. Frick’s voice barked out of my phone: Show this man anything he needs to look at. Do it now.
I needed just two minutes of security camera footage. Yes, yes. I could have done this before. But it seemed too obvious. Now I clutched at the obvious. I needed the obvious. So: the 14th green, Thursday morning, before and after the power cycle. And here the images came, spooling up from some hidden vault below, images sharp but with an auto-archival quality, aged the moment they were recorded, belonging in the instant to deep memory, to times forgotten, or soon to be forgotten, to the part of us that fades and fades inexorably, heading for zero.
Griegson’s long back and wide shoulders, bent to the task. He steps up to the ball. Then he steps away. He dangles the putter briefly in a plumb line. Then he looks off-green, almost directly towards the camera. Or over the camera and into the hills. And in the seconds before the screen goes blank, I see that his shoulders are heaving, that his face is crumpled, eyes shining with tears. He’s holding a phone. He’s dialling and listening without hope. Weeping. Now turning back to address the ball. Dead already.
The screen cut to black, a counter rolling, ticking off the five minutes of maintenance while I waited for the world to return as Griegson had left it. The world that might somehow reveal to me how a natural southpaw came to have a phone number written on his own left palm.
Sky still high and blue, ocean still flecked and agile in the distance. Dotted with sailboards from resorts farther down the coast that catered to that kind of thing. And here came my answer: Griegson in the trap, face-down in black sand. Wes at his side, feeling his pulse. Looking up past the camera into the hills. First anxious, then firming with resolve as he takes Grieg-son’s left hand in his own, as he removes Griegson’s glove. As the caddy takes a pen from his shirt pocket and begins to write on Griegson’s hand. Wes committing some numeric detail from ink to skin, from skin to me. The one waiting in the future who will shake the dead man’s hand and know the truth.
I’d never wanted much. Even in the best of the good years. It was always about some comfort, a measure of friendship. I was unlucky in love, they said. One fortune teller. I swore I’d never go to another. One person announces a deficit of luck, which is something that doesn’t exist in the first place, and people around me changed their tune. They said: you have bad luck in love. And hearing that, a person’s life cramps around the notion, like a hand closed over a high voltage wire.
Of course there were always those moments of stepped-up yearning. Again, I’m just average on this score. Muddled in with the great mound of experience at the centre of the bell curve: I had my moments of wanting to punch out of the ordered life, the endless cause and effect of being an organism. I had my moments of wanting to see and touch something greater than the numbers that was yet possibly the source of all numbers too. Infinity, sure. The word. The idea. The elusive article of faith. And I knew only too well that admitting this kind of thing— scotched up at an office party, having a good time, a big case just complete—can lead to trouble, can get you on shit lists, can turn your career from a gentle draw to a parabolic hook, heading hard for the weeds. Saying something like: “But what about a number beyond the numbers, though. A moment of real understanding. Not the stats, right? Not the event probability or the compound risks. I’m taking about . . . a master key. An insight. I’m talking about a moment of seeing it all, the internal pattern. Infinity?”
I never said this: Because aren’t we all trying to bring that into existence, somehow? Infinity. Longing for it, aching for it, crying for it in our private places?
But everybody still stared back at me in the low light of a bar on the thirty-seventh floor of a hotel where the IAF jocks used to gather to drink, to be the quantum lords that we knew we were. As if my face had been transformed by that one drunken spree of words.
Their expression said it all. Hoss has the yips, the deadliest virus known.
In Sunshine City, when it was all over, I sat in the van waiting for the red-and-white-striped steel poles at the main security gate to drop into their recesses in the roadway. I was facing east, into the rising sun. Frick nodded from the doorway of the guard hut. I gave him a half-smirk and waved my hands around, indicating the van. Two thumbs up. Nice ride. Brazilian made. Four-wheel drive. Huge front seats as if for the pilot of an inner-space shuttle. Dials and gauges all around. Club quality sound system. Plus these drink holders that would hold a two-litre cup of cola, just like back in the old days.
Frick hugged me hard in the garage after unveiling the thing. Cobalt grey, black leather. Water tanks in the back, full. Money in a slim executive briefcase on the passenger seat. Enough cash for me to drive wherever I wanted and to drift through as many days as I cared to imagine. Of course I tried to refuse it. And I was glad when Frick said no way, not a chance, you take it.
“I read your report,” Frick said. “You ran the numbers. You rolled the reality bones, fair and square.”
“Sorry about the sniper,” I said. “A sniper would have been nice and clean.”
“Well,” Frick said, “You did say 92% probability the bullet came from Hill 231 where the casing was found.”
Sure. But in the document this bullet was not sourced to a “sniper” but to an “accomplice.” 78% likelihood 9 times out of 10 with an error margin of 4%: death is a category-4 suicide, under subsection 4.4Assisted Suicides, under subsubsection 4.4.2 Assisted Suicide with Firearm, Projectile or Ballistic Device.
I had to dial the number on Griegson’s palm a final time to reach my conclusion that he had, in fact, killed himself. Sitting in the security centre, watching Wes write on Griegson’s hand. Watching Wes’s face, that stone-cold look. I realized he was writing in anger. Wes was blowing somebody’s cover. He was pointing me in a particular direction, one where I might not have looked otherwise. I thought about that. My own blind spots, the places I might not look. I thought about the people Wes might hate and why. I thought about dialling the mystery number myself that one time. Familiar birdsong, that light breath. So close. So very close.
What did she remember, watching from the window? A puff of smoke. A lick of flame. A thump or a crack. And then, odd detail this one: a phone ringing. Somewhere, she said.
I dialled the number again. No answer. But this time I followed the forming hunch, the innumerate gut call. I climbed slowly to my one foot, put weight down on the peg, pivoted and blew past the hovering, suspicious guards and out to the cart. I drove to SaBe’s cabana at a slow and deliberate pace. Parked out front and straightened my hopeless hair, wiped sweat out of my eyes. She was in the kitchen, watching a kettle boiling for tea. She didn’t look up or frown when I walked in without knocking. She said hello without raising her head and I could see all that was secret about her to all of those members who hungered for her, hunted her in their minds, lined her up in their sights, imagined her spatchcocked like a trophy skin carpet in front of their fireplaces to lounge on, to stroke and soil. SaBe, who must surely have considered options during the days since her husband Scott was last around. In all these long days of her captivity. Perhaps even sampled here and there. But who ultimately wouldn’t have any of them. Not Frick. Not Griegson. Not if you were number one on the leaderboard or number fifteen and hard rising. Rigid with potential. She pulled back from them. These people who lived life but chose to talk about other things. And now I had the proof of it, and the reason too.
The meaning.
The walls of SaBe’s cabana were hung with photographs. Framed and matted. The viewings of an achingly pure eye. The long-absent Scott’s work, almost surely. High skies and thin horizons. Desert landscapes and lonely highways. Outposts leaning under tarps and sticks. Photographs of dusty children and hungry dogs. Random portraits, faces lined with bitter knowledge and faint hope. A dead water pump. A fortune teller’s caravan, draped with corporate logos as was the style of the roving seer in our era. And she had collected these, held them, wished to be in them. Waiting for her chance, which did not come.
“You’ve looked better,” SaBe said to me: “Would you like some tea?”
“Did he phone you?” I asked her. “Griegson. Thursday morning, very early.”
She lifted the tea bag from the pot. She said: “I don’t like my tea too strong. Do you mind if it’s weak?”
“They all love you, don’t they?”
She took honey from the cupboard, a silver spoon from a drawer.
“The old guys. The middle-aged guys. The crook caddies and security goons. Even the range kids in from their shacks in the Rough. You give them all a whiff of something, don’t you?”
She turned to the fridge for the glass bottle of milk and held it quivering over the cups. “Do you like milk?” she said. “I have cream too.”
“And what a burden that is,” I said. “To give people a whiff of the freedom you’re too bored, too spoiled, too lazy to take for yourself.”
She poured milk into both cups, her hand shaking.
“But Wes didn’t love you,” I continued. “Wes hated you hard for something you did.”
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