“What?” He cocked the club for a short chip shot and hung fire.
“Are you still climbing on your anger?”
“What?”
When he swung around, she was closer, her eyes full on him, large gray eyes set far apart in her pale (Yes, that was part of the oddness, not the thinness of her face but its pallor. Her skin was as white as a camellia petal yet not unhealthy) face. Her gaze was steady and unfocused. Either she was not seeing him (Was she blind? No, or she’d have never found the Hogan let alone the Spalding Pro Flite) or else she was seeing all of him because all at once he became aware of himself as she saw him, of his golf clothes, beltless slacks, blue nylon shirt with the club crest, gold cap with club crest, two-tone golf shoes with the fringed forward-falling tongues, and suddenly it was he not she who was odd in this silent forest, he with his little iron club and nifty fingerless glove.
Where had he seen her before? For one odd moment she was as familiar to him as he himself. He who remembered everything remembered those fond hazed eyes from Alabama twenty years ago. But maybe she wasn’t born then.
Oh well. She was on something and couldn’t focus her eyes.
He gave her the book. My God, what a nutty world, she zonked out on something, reading Rafael Sabatini and holed up alone in a ruined greenhouse, while grown middle-aged men socked little balls around a mountain meadow and hummed along in electric carts telling jokes about Jews and Germans and niggers. Atlanta and Carolina invaded by Arabs. No wonder my father wanted out.
“Angry? No, I’m not angry. What did you mean by still angry?”
“I mean over there.” She pointed to the chestnut fall. “Where you were standing.”
She had been watching him.
“Why did you think I was angry?”
“You were holding your golf stick in the thicket. I wanted to give you back your little golf balls but I was instigated by fear. I thought you were going to hit someone. Or shoot.”
“You were watching me.”
“Yes.”
He looked down at his hands gripping the club. He became aware that he was nodding.
“You look angry again.”
“I didn’t know anyone was watching me.”
“Why did that make you angry? I wasn’t spying or denying. I was afraid.”
Again the slow scanning speech. He looked at her. Yes, she was on something.
Maybe they’re better off, after all. At least they are unburdened by the past. They don’t remember anything because there is nothing to remember. They crawl under the nearest bush when they’re tired, they eat seeds when they’re hungry, they pop a pill when they feel bad. Maybe it does come down to chemistry after all. But if it does, then he was right. He wouldn’t have it, the way they are, and though I wouldn’t have him, I won’t have it either.
Already walking out of the woods, he had forgotten her but only after remembering that there was something familiar about the way her upper lip had a little down and was shortened, pulled up in a gentle arc just clear of the lower in a pert familiar way out of keeping with her soft dazed eyes. Passing through the glade he swung the three-iron at the skunk cabbages, clipping the fat little purple pods as neatly as he had hit the Pro Flite with the two-iron.
Strange: he was slicing his drives from a proper tee with a proper fairway before him and hitting his irons like Hogan, from the rough, in the woods, behind trees. He shot better in a fen than in a fairway.
As he climbed through the fence and walked toward the clubhouse, it occurred to him that for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, he knew exactly what was what and what he intended to do. He remembered everything. He fell down again but not seriously, springing up immediately and hardly missing a step. Had the girl seen him fall?
It did not end quite as I expected, he thought, with a smile, as the poker dice rattled in the leather cup. His good friends greeted him in the fragrant and cheerful little locker-room bar. Towering above them in a great photomural, Jack Nicklaus blasted out of a sand trap, his good Ohio face as grim as a crusader, each airborne grain of sand sparkling like a jewel in the sunlight.
It did not end quite as I expected but it did end and I did find out how it would end, he thought as a yellow eye gleamed at him. Jimmy Rogers took him by the flank and drew him close as a lover. Jimmy wanted to tell him a joke. I know what I must do.
He listened calmly and even attentively. He remembered everything, even the joke which Jimmy had told him twenty years before. He even remembered the future. His entire life lay before him, beginning, middle and end, as plain as the mural of Jack Nicklaus blasting out of the sand trap. He remembered everything.
IV
SHE REMEMBERED NOTHING. It does not matter that I do not remember the past, she thought. What matters is finding shelter, a safe warm place in these great cool dripping rhododendrons. Water tinkled down the rocks of the ridge and made a little stream.
The safest place, she decided, was the little room at the end of the greenhouse. The greenhouse backed up against the ridge. Why did they build it like that? A stranger would hardly know the room was there, grown up as it was with weeds and laurel from the ridge; the laurel hiding the small door and holding it shut. If you tried to open it from the inside it was like pushing against a child who was trying to keep you in. But you could get out.
It was possible to enter the room by way of the greenhouse, pick one’s way through the jungle to an intervening door which could be bolted. Though many of the windows were broken, as soon as one entered, there it was in the nostrils, a trace of the closeted hot leaf-damp of greenhouses.
The small room must have been a potting shed. There were flanged tables and shards everywhere. Yet the roof was glazed. Why? Had they used it like a cold frame to grow seedlings?
One bench she cleared for her possessions. Another she pushed into the corner. The greenhouse was built under the ridge on an east-west axis, leaving one corner of the potting room, the southeast, sunny. After spreading her sleeping bag on the table, she stuffed the empty knapsack with black moss (peat? sphagnum? Spanish?) and made a pillow.
Try it. The bed wasn’t bad. If it got too hard, she could make a moss mattress. The corner was a good place for sitting propped up in the sun. A lookout was necessary but the glass was so dirty it looked frosted and she could see nothing but bright dusty sunlight. By calculating angles and declinations and wetting her handkerchief in the rivulet and rubbing glass inside and out, she cleared two saucer-size spots through which she could see in two directions, one with no trouble at all, beyond the little waterfall and up the path which she had taken from the hiking trail; the other by turning her head and looking over her shoulder, a little vista through a clearing made by huge dead mostly fallen chestnut trees. A few yards farther, she calculated from her map, the golf course must begin. Though she could see neither trail nor golf course, now and then she could hear the shouts of the golfers. The path ascended the ridge so steeply to the trail that when hikers passed, only the upper half of their bodies was visible. If anyone approached from the direction of the trail or the golf course, she would see them. If anyone came into the greenhouse, she would hear them.
How dangerous was it to live in this world?
The sun was still high and warm. Too warm. Something was wrong. Two windows in the upper tier directly above her bunk were broken out. Only splinters of glass remained in the steel frames. The sun shone directly through. It felt good on her face. Her new clothes grew warm and gave off a pleasant dry-goods smell. But what if it rained? What if it got cold? What manner of creature might fall in her lap in the dark? Dark? When would it get dark? She remembered the candles she bought in town.