Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“Goddamn,” snorts Dan — almost hushed. Buster says nothing. Both caddies grin stupidly. The black one snaps out of it and reaches for my club. I wave him off because I can tell I’m about to cry.

I stuff the five back in my bag and shoulder it. Marco steps to me and offers a high five. I shake his hand instead. He points to the bag and then to the boys.

“It’s okay,” I squeak. I wish I had sunglasses. He looks at my eyes.

“Pollen,” I whisper. “Something out here.” He nods his head — relieved.

“Great shot.”

“Thanks.”

I know it’s rude, but I turn my back on him and start out on the fairway. My clubs rattle on my back like pans in a nation sack. He’s right on my hip. The tears start to come. I wipe the first wave away.

“What was that you hit — a three? You don’t have a two iron, do you?”

“Five.”

“A five — fuck!”

The next wave comes — harder. He reaches in his pocket and produces a pack of tissues.

“Thanks,” I snuffle. I take one and hand them back.

“Keep them.” He reexamines my eyes. “You look miserable.” He slaps his pockets. “Damn! Wait — no!” He turns back to the rest. “I think I have Benadryl in my bag. Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Does it make you sleepy or jumpy?”

“Jumpy — anxious.”

“Me, too. Gave me palpitations once.”

“Is that yours?” I point to the next fairway, on the first cut. I don’t really see his ball, but it must be in that area.

“It must be.” I don’t know what he sees, but he starts for it. Then he stops. “Hey, man,” he says, secretively.

“Yes.”

“These guys — you won’t get anything out of them unless you back off a bit.”

I look at him for an instant because I don’t understand. And when I do, I keep looking into his dark brown eyes, and I want to keep crying. I want to tell him why— “My people were on that ball.” He takes off his glasses, cleans them on his shirt.

“Capiche?”

I wipe my eyes again, take another tissue, and pretend to blow my nose.

“Capiche.”

“Bene.” He puts his glasses back on. He looks at me, then widens his eyes as if to refocus them. He looks out over the ridge and points. My ball is about ninety yards from the green. He shakes his head. “Nice shot.” He turns and goes.

I stop crying so I can make my next shot— Hit the ball right. Or, as Marco has coached — don’t. I try to fuck it up, but since I don’t have any semblance of a short game and am clueless as to what to do. I don’t know what not to do. Golf, some people have told me, is unnatural. The movements are counterintuitive. But of course, many others have advised against thinking. All I know is that it’s far easier to sandbag than it is to fake being good. I set up and take an awkward whack at the ball. It skips onto the green and settles about ten feet from the hole. Even Buster nods his approval.

“Not bad for first hole,” says Marco as we walk to the second. Dan, who I realize hasn’t acknowledged Marco since the stoop, finally addresses him directly.

“What’ll we play?” he asks. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, looking almost as innocent and stupid as the boys. “Stroke? Match?”

“What about both?” asks Marco.

Dan nods slowly. “Okay. Okay.” He keeps nodding but speeds up a bit — hands still pocketed. He keeps looking at Marco, but I sense that he’s looking at me. He stops nodding, drags his hands out, and claps softly. He’s made some evaluation. He’s not worried about the other two, and now he’s realized that because I have no short game, he can beat me. He’s been taking stock — my bag, my clubs, my sneakers, my skin. He knows the only time I spent on a golf course as a kid was at night sitting with Gavin on some green-side hill, practicing at becoming a hobo.

“Match and stroke. Two a hole. No validation. How much for low score?”

Marco and Buster shrug. Dan looks to me. I don’t respond. I pretend to be considering the yardage for this next hole. I don’t want to admit to myself that I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“We all seem even,” says Buster. “It always ends up as a wash anyway.”

“What do you think — five? Everyone kicks in one and a quarter for the pot?” He puts his hands back in his pockets and looks directly at me. “Can you handle that?”

Instead of saying fuck you, I nod earnestly while trying to do the calculation. So the upside is a few grand. I can bow out if I lose my stake. We don’t shake, just all nod vaguely.

“Anyone beat a par?” asks Dan rhetorically as he holds his hand out for a club. The white kid starts to hand him the driver, but Dan shakes it off and points to an iron.

It doesn’t go well. At first the other three comment and question my poor swings as though they’re aberrations. By the fifth hole, though, they seem to believe they’re the norm. The white kid seems quietly amused by my plight, but I can’t tell if he’s smirking or squinting under his low visor. He doesn’t talk to me — hardly looks my way. He’s a little prick. A face you’d like to punch in, but not like Gavin’s. There’s nothing going on behind this kid’s eyes.

Each hole the black kid gravitates toward my bag, but I always pick it up first and walk away by myself up the fairway. Dan saw something in my long swing. So much can go wrong — some little hitch can throw it all to shit. There’s too much room for error. And Dan keeps dink-slicing his way to the hole. By the turn — after the eighth hole — I’ve lost track of the numbers because I’m out so much. And no one, not even the black kid, seems to notice I’m there at all.

Dan rolls in a putt on the ninth and quietly applauds himself. It fills me with a sleepy, impotent rage. I would like to believe that there was once a time when there weren’t any rules. When barbarians flooded endlessly over the embankments of the civilized. Dan sets up to sink another putt, to pocket more of my nonexistent capital, and I know that the image is all wrong. I retreat to the old boxing adage— “A good big man always beats a good little man.” And I assume that the queen’s rules were made for the big man — but it doesn’t make sense. I should, by decree of a much older rule, one people like Dan, like Marco, followed, be able to pick Dan up, spin him around, and shake him empty, take everything that drops from his pockets onto the green — cash, photos, memberships, the promissory notes to deep streams of capital — and call it my own. I should take everything, even the bald spot, the little paunch, which, because of his hatless head, his tightly tucked shirt, he seems proud of. I outweigh him by fifty pounds — so whose failing is it that I’m tyrannized by his credit cards and his titles? And by extension, it doesn’t seem like a crime to raise my ancient putter and drive it into the red patch of his skull. I’d take his fancy clubs, too. But somebody, some martyr wannabe, raised me right, or wrong, and I’m stuck with my gut and my own head rebelling, in chorus, the refrain: Broke-ass chump.

Buster asks if I want anything from the clubhouse. I’m hungry, but I figure I’m going to need everything I have to pay off my debt. He looks perplexed. “You need to eat something,” he says — almost maternally — and stands waiting for a moment. I say no thanks again. Dan, comfortable with his lead, throws a soft salute my way — trying to convince me that he’s the mild guy he was earlier.

“What’s up, man?” asks Marco.

“What do you mean?” I say irritated by his concern. It seems phony. Either he doesn’t get it or he doesn’t care. His facade offends me — the sad eyes and the Roman nose are almost cruel in their mocking of both me and him.