8
Every morning, I watch my neighbor, an old woman tending her grandson, take a walk. She carries a bucket in the hand not holding the hand of the child who toddles beside her. She looks for lost balls in the rough and in the lawns of the houses adjacent to the golf course. She finds them in the piles of pine straw left curbside for the city to pick up on Mondays with the other yard debris. On the weekend she sits on the curb across the road from the ninth tee with the bucket of scrounged balls she has washed and polished and sells them to the golfers as they play through. The golfers have had a few beers by then, and they have lost a few balls that my neighbor will find tomorrow or the day after. So even though it is frowned on by the club, they buy a couple or three back from her. I see them groggily examine the balls' branding and check for the nicks and deep smiles cut in the dimpled surface before they flip their choices in the air as if to test the aerodynamics. Then they reach into their pockets.
9
On Mondays, the club is closed. There are signs tacked on the pine tree trunks bordering the course saying that what you are looking at is private property and that there is no trespassing. Black kids from the neighborhoods next to our strip of genteel cottages ignore the signs, and each Monday morning, in foursomes themselves, lugging tackle, bait buckets, lunch baskets, and plastic pails they use as creels, they wander out onto the course. They fish the water hazards and the runoff ditches and then work their way over to the river, catching catfish mostly. At night returning, they stop to show me that day's string of fish, and tell me the story again about the alligators that once lived on the course and might live there still.
10
When I first moved to Alabama, I was asked if I played golf. Little did I know then I would find a house next to the country club. No, I told them, I don't play. That's a shame, they said, since you can play here nine months out of the year. They laughed and continued. Just not in June, July, or August. In the summer the green of the grass of the fairways is leeched away by the sun. Action on the course all but disappears. Young boys in big hats who carry, on their rounded backs, big awkward bags of jangling clubs, trudge over the bleached hills. Lessons and league play. They hit skimming shots that skip along the placid seared surface of the grass and steaming cart paths, ricocheting like stones on the mirage ponds generated by the heat. I have fled indoors. My motel chair is chilled by the air conditioning. I read a book in the living room, look up from time to time through the glaring picture window. The course shimmers through the trees.
11
Very early each morning the greenskeeper's men start their work grooming the course, changing the pin positions on the greens, raking pine straw from the bunkers. A parade of Dr. Seuss vehicles streams out from the compound of metal buildings down the road. Converted electric carts stuffed with hand tools where golfers would stow their clubs putter about. Other carts haul wagons heaped with sugar-fine sand to replenish the hazards or fill up the divots on the tees. There are sousaphone-shaped machines used to blow the leaves and bark from the fairways. There are mowers of all types, their gangly gang of twisted blades daintily suspended by means of wires and pulleys for running at full speed on the public road to get to the part of the course where yesterday they left off cutting. Later, I'll see the half-sized tractors creeping along, trailed by a train of fidgety reels V-ed behind the hitch. My favorite contraptions are the donkey motors, big engines with handle bars and their mowing decks thrust out ahead like a cow catcher. Their drivers, steering, stand behind on a tiny, almost invisible platform like the musher on a dog sled. I love the illusion of this levitation, the careless, effortlessly floating men, slaloming between the neat rows of long-leafed pine. Men, on foot nearer by, sweep the borders of the rough and the underbrush with hand implements angled like golf clubs. They swing the weed wackers, motorized scythes, as fluidly as the golfers practicing approach shots, pitches, chips. Back and forth, back and forth. The puny engines making an insect sawing. The men work their ways back to the clubhouse, the various pitches of their small engines sputtering out, the course groomed, before the first tee time.
12
The realtor showing me this house asked if I was going to join the country club. "It's very reasonable," she said. She thought its proximity was a real selling point. "I don't golf," I said. That wasn't the only thing happening at the club, she continued. She mentioned the tennis courts and the pool. "There's a new chef in the dining room, and a whole mess of folks just belong for the food." And then she wistfully recalled the dances on the terrace in the summers. And later that summer, after I moved in, I did hear the old band music drifting over from the verandas and patios. The club, she told me, was here long before the houses were built. They built the houses after the war. It was a new idea then. It was glorious. Those dances are reported in Stars Fell on Alabama, a book I read that first year while sitting in the driveway. Sitting in my metal chair beneath the stars, I hear the bubbles of old dance melodies down at the club. I do hear, on breezy summer weekend nights, the murmur of the dancers, the occasional guffaw, and the suggestion of chiming glass. A kind of lullaby.
13
If the weather is right, the smell of cracked oil and vulcanized rubber creeps up the valley along the river from the factories beyond the golf course. Some days it seems to have bonded chemically with the humidity, locked into the still air, and the reek lingers, impossible to get used to, a kind of aromatic film. Other days there is a just a hint, a few long strands of molecules, carbon cooking, dispersed within a breath of breeze as it freshens. Friends visiting those days stop midsentence, nostrils flaring. "Someone," they say, "must be tarring a roof somewhere." Our roofs are never tight enough. Osmosis. The smells saturate the house. Something has been left on the stove. The stove has been left on. Something is burning.
14
Sirens go off over at the club. There is sheet lightning in the distance. The golf course is crowded with players who, interrupted by the warning, reluctantly make their ways back to the clubhouse to get out of the rain. Bolts of lightning have been known to travel miles looking for the conductive synapse of a golfer, clad in metal spikes and gripping a 5 iron, to enter the ground. The rain now begins to sheet and the low ground fills immediately with the gray layers of runoff. I can see the lightning walking up the river, the green carts scurrying beneath the lowering clouds and the tendrils of sparks. A train, lit up and sounding its horn, wades through the course against the stream of carts flowing back to the club. Heaven spoiled by heaven.
15
A neighbor has told me that when George Wallace built the new courthouse downtown the rubble from the old Beaux Arts one was hauled out here and dumped into the ravine behind my house. Scattered on the floor of the gorge, covered with vines, are the remnants of capitals carved with acanthus leaves, fluted column drums, defaced faces of justice and Law, rusting escutcheons and cracked hinges from the old wooden doors. Melting marble steps. Drifts of fragmented letters and words. Gargoyles sunk in the mud. I can't get up the nerve to work my way down into there, though I think about it often. Perhaps my neighbor is fooling with me. Through the links of my chain-link fence I peer into the jungle canopy that roils up out of the ravine. Nothing and everything.