“It burned down years ago.”
“It all burned?”
“The main house. Must have been bums or hippies living out there. Ain’t nobody been out there for years.”
“Show me how to get there.” After she said it, she realized she had said it. She had uttered not a question, not a statement, but a request. How long had it been since she had said to someone: Do this, do that? Perhaps the secret of talking was to have something to say.
“Take this trail.” The watch-glass nail glided, hesitated, then stopped like a Ouija in a white space. “It’s just the other side of the golf course.”
“How far is it from here?”
“Three, four miles.”
“Do you mind telling how old you are?” It would help if she knew whether he was forty-five or sixty-five. But he went on nodding and didn’t reply. Her question, she saw, was inappropriate, but he let it go.
Instead he looked at her and said: “Are you going to stay out there?”
“Yes. It’s my place.”
“Be careful, young lady.”
“Why?”
“Hippies and bums stay out there. Last summer a lady got — hurt. Just keep your eyes open.”
“All right.”
He rose.
“It’s a nice walk. Have a nice day.”
“What?” She was puzzled by the way he said it, in a perfunctory way like goodbye. But what a nice thing to say.
But he only repeated it—“Have a nice day”—and raised a finger to the place where the brim of his hat would have been. He returned to his street corner.
After marking the trail with her Scripto pencil and making an X in the blank space, she folded the map carefully with the marked trail on the outside and stuck it in the breast pocket of her shirt. Opposite the Gulf station she stopped and looked down at her boots. They felt stiff. She went into the rest room, tore three coarse tissues from the roll above the washbasin, put the toilet seat lid down, sat and took off her boots, removed the can of neat’s-foot oil from her knapsack and oiled her boots, using the entire can. Carefully she disposed of the oil-soaked paper and empty can. She washed and dried her hands.
In the street her boots felt better, light and strong yet pliable as suede. There was a small pleasure too in getting rid of the can. She meant to live with very few things.
Passing a drugstore window, she noticed a display of Timex wristwatches. Perhaps she should own a watch. Else how would one know when it was time to get up, eat meals, go to bed? Had there ever been a time in her life when she did not eat a meal when mealtime came? What if one did not? Who said one had to get up or eat meals at a certain time?
After a moment she shrugged and shouldered her NATO knapsack, this time using both straps, and walked on. The distributed weight felt good on her shoulders. For the first time in her life, she felt that it, her life, was beginning.
But maybe that was because she could not remember much about her old life.
III
UNDOUBTEDLY SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING to him. It began again the next day when he sliced out-of-bounds and was stooping through the barbed-wire fence to find his ball. For the first time in his life he knew that something of immense importance was going to happen to him and that he would soon find out what it was. Ed Cupp was holding the top strand high so he could crawl through, higher than he needed to, to make up for his, Ed Cupp’s, not following him into the woods to help him find the ball. To prove his good intentions, Ed Cupp pulled the wire so hard that it stretched as tight as a guitar string and creaked and popped against the fence posts.
As he stopped and in the instant of crossing the wire, head lowered, eyes slightly bulging and focused on the wet speckled leaves marinating and funky-smelling in the sunlight, he became aware that he was doing an odd thing with his three-iron. He was holding it in his left hand, fending against the undergrowth with his right and turning his body into the vines and briars which grew in the fence so that they snapped against his body. Then, even as he was climbing through, he had shifted his grip on the iron so that the club head was tucked high under his right arm, shaft resting on forearm, right hand holding the shaft steady — as one might carry a shotgun.
He did not at first know why he did this. Then he did know why.
Now he was standing perfectly still in a glade in a pine forest holding the three-iron, a good fifty feet out-of-bounds and not looking for the ball. It was only after standing so for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps two minutes, that he made the discovery. The discovery was that he did not care that he had sliced out-of-bounds.
A few minutes earlier he had cared. As his drive curved for the woods, the other players watched in silence. There was a mild perfunctory embarrassment, a clucking of tongues, a clearing of throats in a feigned but amiable sympathy.
Lewis Peckham, the pro, a grave and hopeful man, said: “It could have caught that limb and dropped fair.”
Jimmy Rogers, a man from Atlanta, who had joined the foursome to make it an unwieldy fivesome, said: “For a six-handicapper and a Wall Street lawyer, Billy is either nervous about his daughter’s wedding or else he’s taking it easy on his future-in-laws.”
He hit another ball and it too sliced out-of-bounds.
The other four golfers gazed at the dark woods in respectful silence and expectation as if they were waiting for some rule of propriety to prevail and to return the ball to the fairway.
As he leaned over to press the tee into the soft rain-soaked turf, he felt the blood rush to his face. Jimmy Rogers had gotten on his nerves. Was it because Jimmy Rogers had messed up the foursome or because Jimmy Rogers had called him Billy? How did Jimmy Rogers know his handicap?
After teeing up the third ball and as he measured the driver and felt his weight shift from one foot to the other, he was wondering absentmindedly: What if I slice out-of-bounds again, what then? Is a game so designed that there is always a chance that one can so badly transgress its limits and bounds, fall victim to its hazards, that disgrace is always possible, and that it is the public avoidance of disgrace that gives one a pleasant sense of license and justification?
He sliced again but not out-of-bounds, having allowed for the slice by aiming his stance toward the left rough.
He said: “I’m picking up. It’s the eighteenth anyhow. I’ll see you in the clubhouse.”
The slice, which had become worrisome lately, had gotten worse. He had come to see it as an emblem of his life, a small failure at living, a minor deceit, perhaps even a sin. One cringes past the ball, hands mushing through ahead of the club in a show of form, rather than snapping the club head through in an act of faith. Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one’s very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds. One is punished on the spot. When his third drive dropped fair, he was lying seven.
It had been bad enough to begin with that he couldn’t play with his regular foursome. For more than a week, his daughter’s future father-in-law, a seven-foot Californian, had taken the place of Slocum McKeon, a local attorney and excellent golfer, a taciturn unambitious intelligent man who knew how to be both distant and amiable. To make matters worse, who should show up today but his brother-in-law Bertie, a benumbed addled aging New Yorker with no feel for the game or its etiquette, the sort who will drive into other players and fuddle on his way like Mr. Magoo, noticing nothing. This meant he couldn’t play with Dr. Vance Battle, the happiest man he knew, a young husky competent G.P. who liked to get his hands on you, happy as a vet with his fist up a cow, mend bones, take hold of your liver from the front and back, stick a finger up your anus paying no attention to your groans, talking N.C. basketball all the while, pausing only to frown and shake his head at the state of one’s prostate: “It feels like an Idaho potato.”