And the ball feels it too, the ball he hits after a little advice from Eccles. It sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin that makes it fall from flight as dumpily as a blob of clay.
Eccles laughs. "That's the best first drive I ever saw."
"It's not a first drive. I used to hit the ball around when I was a caddy. I should do better than that."
"You expect too much of yourself. Watch me, that'll make you feel better."
Rabbit stands back and is surprised to see Eccles, who has a certain spring in his unconscious movements, swing with a quaint fifty—year—old stiffness. As if he has a pot to keep out of the way. He punches the ball with a cramped backswing. It goes straight, though high and weak, and he seems delighted with it. He fairly prances into the fairway. Harry trails after him heavily. The soggy turf, raw and wet from recently thawing, sinks beneath his big suede shoes. They're on a seesaw; Eccles goes up, he comes down.
Down in the pagan groves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed. A brainless gaiety animates him. He laughs and swings and clucks and calls. Harry stops hating him, he himself is so awful. Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease; he is grateful to Eccles for not fleeing from him. Often Eccles, fifty yards further on – he has an excited gleeful habit of running ahead – comes all the way back to find a ball Harry has lost. Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. His eyes can't keep with where it did go. "Here it is," Eccles says. "Behind a root. You're having terrible luck."
"This must be a nightmare for you."
"Not at all. You're extremely promising. You never play and yet you haven't once missed the ball completely."
This does it; Harry sets himself and in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the ball completely.
"Your only mistake is trying too hard," Eccles says. "You have a beautiful natural swing." Rabbit whacks again and the ball flops out and wobbles a few yards.
"Bend to the ball," Eccles says. "Imagine you're about to sit down."
"I'm about to lie down," Harry says. He feels sick, giddily sick, sucked deeper into a vortex whose upper rim is marked by the tranquil tips of the leafing trees. He seems to remember having been up there once. He skids into puddles, is swallowed by trees, infallibly sinks into the mangy scruff at the sides of the fairways.
Nightmare is the word. In waking life only animate things slither and jerk for him this way. His unreal hacking dazes his brain; half—hypnotized, it plays tricks whose strangeness dawns on him slowly. In his head he is talking to the clubs as if they're women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands; are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here wego, easy. When the slotted club face gouges the dirt behind the ball and the shock jolts up his arms to his shoulders, his thought is that Janice has struck him. So dumb, really dumb. Screw her. Just screw her. Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can't be burned away. She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth dirt stubs fat: with the woods the "she" is Ruth. Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass—stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K. if you're so smart and clenches and swirls. Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk at this! The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush. And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like skirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there white and Number 1 in the center of everything. As the seven iron chops down please Janice just once awkwardness spiders at his elbows and the ball as he stares bending one way bends the other way into more sad scruff further on, the khaki color of Texas. Oh you moron go home. Home is the hole, and above, in the scheme of the unhappy vision that frets his conscious attention with an almost optical overlay of presences, the mild gray rain sky is his grandfather waiting upstairs so that young Harry will not be a Fosnacht.
And, now at the corners, now at the center of this striving golf dream, Eccles flits in his grubby shirt like a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.
The greens, still dead from the winter, are salted with a dry dirt: fertilizer? The ball slips along making bits of grit jump. "Don't stab your putts," Eccles says. "A little easy swing, arms stiff. Distance is more important than aim on the first putt. Try again." He kicks the ball back. It took Harry about twelve to get up here on the fourth green, but this arrogant assumption that his strokes are past counting irritates him. Come on, sweet, he pleads as if with his wife, there's the hole, big as a bucket. Everything will be all right.
But no, she has to stab in a feeble, panicked way; what was she afraid of? The ball is maybe six feet short. Walking toward Eccles, he says, "You never did tell me how Janice is."
"Janice?" Eccles with an effort drags his attention up from the game. He is absolutely in love with winning; he is eating me up, Harry thinks. "She seemed in good spirits on Monday. She was out in the back yard with this other woman, and they were both giggling when I came. You must realize that for a little while, now that she's adjusted somewhat, she'll probably enjoy being back with her parents. It's her own version of your irresponsibility."
"Actually," Harry says gratingly, squatting to line up the putt, the way they do it on television, "she can't stand her parents any more than I can. She probably wouldn't've married me if she hadn't been in such a hurry to get away from 'em." His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet. Fuck.
Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in. The minister looks up with the light of triumph in his eyes. "Harry," he asks, sweetly yet boldly, "why have you left her? You're obviously deeply involved with her."
"I told ja. There was this thing that wasn't there."
"What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?"
Harry's four—foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with furious fingers. "Well ifyou're not sure it exists don't ask me. It's right up your alley. If you don't know nobody does."
"No," Eccles cries in the same strained voice in which he told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. "Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God."
They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them.
Eccles goes on, explanatorily, "This was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church."
"I tell you, I know what it is."
"What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?"
It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I—know—more—about—it—than—you heresies—of—the—early—Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he's not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it's not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder.