The last time his foursome played, he fell down. Vance grabbed him and squinted at him. “You better come in, Will. I want to take a look at you.”
As if this weren’t bad enough, Bertie shows up with Jimmy Rogers, an old con man from the campus, an unwelcome wraith from the past, a classmate who had got blackballed even by the Betas. Who, what brought this pair together?
Maybe Vance was right. Something was happening to him.
A few minutes earlier, on number-sixteen green, he had suffered another little spell and had fallen down in the deep trap behind number-sixteen green. But he had gotten up quickly and no one had noticed. His brother-in-law was lining up a putt, crouched over his putter with its gimmicky semicircular head, elbows sticking out, right foot drawn back daintily. Though the sun shone brightly, the green seemed suddenly to grow dark as if the daylight had drained down the hole. The other players, waiting in silence for the putt, grew taller. After the putt Jimmy Rogers took his arm and drew close and said Hail Caesar and he said Hail Caesar? and Jimmy Rogers said You really did it, didn’t you? and he said Did what? And Jimmy said You picked up all the marbles, that’s all. You married one of them and beat them at their own game in their own ball park. Them? Who’s them? Yankees? What game? Practicing law? Making money?
But then Jimmy drew close and looked solemn.
“I’m so sorry, old buddy.”
“Sorry about what?”
“Your wife’s passing.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
“What a wonderful person she must have been.”
“Yes, she was.”
Jimmy Rogers began to tell him a joke about a Jew and a German and a black on an airplane with a single parachute. A high-pitched keening filled the sky. Am I going crazy? he wondered curiously. Earlier he had seen a bird, undoubtedly some kind of a hawk, fly across the fairway straight as an arrow and with astonishing swiftness, across a ridge covered by scarlet and gold trees, then fold its wings and drop like a stone into the woods. It reminded him of something but before he could think what it was, sparks flew forward at the corner of his eye. He decided with interest that something was happening to him, perhaps a breakdown, perhaps a stroke. When his turn came to putt and he stooped over the ball, he looked at the hole some twenty feet away and at Lewis Peckham, who was tending the pin and who was looking not at him or the hole but in a small exquisite courtesy allowing his eyes to go unfocused and gaze at a middle distance. The green broke to the right. He did not know whether he was going to hit the ball five feet or fifty feet. It was as if the game had fallen away from him and he was trying to play it from a great height. He felt like a clown on stilts. Lewis Peckham cleared his throat and now Lewis was looking at him and his eyes were veiled and ironic (as if he not only knew that something was happening to him but even knew what it was!) and he putted. The ball curved in a smooth flat parabola and sank with a plop.
It was a good putt. His muscles remembered. When the putt sank, the golfers nodded briefly, signifying approval and a kind of relief that he was back on his game. Or was it a relief that they could play a game at all, obey its rules, observe its etiquette and the small rites of settling in for a drive and lining up a putt? He was of two minds, playing golf and at the same time wondering with no more than a moderate curiosity what was happening to him. Were they of two minds also? Was there an unspoken understanding between all of them that what they were doing, knocking little balls around a mountain meadow while the fitful wind bustled about high above them, was after all preposterous but that they had all assented to it and were doing it nevertheless and because, after all, why not? One might as well do one thing as another.
But the hawk was not of two minds. Single-mindedly it darted through the mountain air and dove into the woods. Its change of direction from level flight to drop was fabled. That is, it made him think of times when people told him fabulous things and he believed them. Perhaps a Negro had told him once that this kind of hawk is the only bird in the world that can — can what? He remembered. He remembered everything today. The hawk, the Negro said, could fly full speed and straight into the hole of a hollow tree and brake to a stop inside. He, the Negro, had seen one do it. It was possible to believe that the hawk could do just such a fabled single-minded thing.
Lewis Peckham did not offer to help him find his ball. He knew why. Because Lewis had helped him on the last hole, seventeen, where he had also sliced out-of-bounds and to do so now would be unseemly. In a show of indifference Lewis permitted him the freedom to look or not to look for the ball, to drop or pick up. It was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.
It was not his regular foursome. It was not an ordinary golf game.
The first time he had sliced out-of-bounds, Lewis had gone through the fence with him and shown him something odd. At the base of a low ridge, they were halfheartedly poking at weeds, hoping to turn the new Spalding Pro Flite, when Lewis stopped and stood still.
“You notice anything unusual about that tree?” asked Lewis, nodding toward a flaming sassafras, not a tree really but a large shrub. The red three-fingered leaves caught a ray of sunlight and turned fluorescent in the somber laurels.
“No.”
“Put your face next to it.”
He did, expecting to smell something, perhaps licorice. Smelling nothing, he plucked a leaf for sucking, tasted the licorice stem. Lewis held a branch aside as if it were a drape at a window.
“Now?”
“Now what?”
“You still don’t notice anything?”
“No.”
“Come closer.”
There was nothing to come closer to except a shallow recess in the rock of the ridge.
“Now?”
Something stirred against his cheek, a breath of air from the rock itself, then as he leaned closer a steady current blew in his face and open mouth, not like the hot summer breeze of the fairway, but a cool wet exhalation smelling of rocks and roots. His mouth tasted minerals.
“Where does that come from, a cave? I don’t see an opening.
“Yeah. My cave.”
“Your cave?”
“Lost Cove.”
“Lost Cove cave? But that’s down below.”
“I know, but it’s the same cave.”
“Sure I remember. I remember every detail, the room where you found the saber-tooth tiger, the Confederate powder works. Where does the air come from?”
“It’s a phenomenon around here. Like Blowing Rock. Warm summer air blowing up the gorge into the big entrance below, percolating up through the mountain, and coming out cracks like this, cool in the summer, warm in the winter.”
“It’s strange, but I remember every detail. I could go straight to the tiger’s lair.”
“Let me show you something.”
A thousand feet below the sunny golf links the tiger had crawled into the cave thirty-two thousand years ago, lain down in darkness, and died so long ago that slender stalagmites and stalactites had grown together over the opening and zoo-caged him, him a bone, a skull and curve of tooth fused with the floor as if he were shaped from rock. For a while Lewis Peckham had charged admission, shown the Confederate powder works and the tiger until the state claimed him, broke into the stone cage, and hauled him off to Raleigh.