Something Is Out There (13 page)

“You’re sitting three,” I said.

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. “Okay,” he said.

I kept my five iron and walked down to my ball and skulled it into the tangled wild grasses on the right. I never wanted a mulligan more in my whole life.

“You’re hitting three, buddy,” he said, rolling away in the cart.

I found my ball in the tall grass and tried again, and it went somewhere toward the marker. When I got there I saw it had sailed over the green, and that Daryl’s was fifteen feet from the hole. He stood there waiting for me to chip, and I fluffed it, chunking it all of four feet. I started to pick it up, but that would’ve been more of a statement than I wanted to make. So I swiped at it again, knocking it to the fringe on the other side. I was seething, and still away.

“Should I holler for them to go ahead and hit?”

“Yeah,” I said. I could barely look at him.

Over the crest of the hill, I saw Jimmy take a club from his bag, then he moved out of sight to the tee. I heard him hit, and his ball came sailing in high, right at the pin. Daryl was watching it, too. “Looking good,” he yelled.

It hit, bounced once, and began to roll, missing the pin by an inch, but it was going to roll all the way over, and since I was already standing there, I just stopped it with my shoe—you know, lifted my foot at the toe, let it come in, and then clamped down on it. Stopped it dead. Hardly even thinking about it, I used my putter to edge the ball along to the hole. Daryl just gaped at me, which played into things because it was like he was watching Jimmy’s shot. I pushed the ball to the lip of the cup and in, then yelled, jumped, and ran over to where Daryl was just staring at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d go through with this. “Wave and yell,” I muttered, “you son of a bitch.”

He turned and held his hands up and walked to where they could see him clearly from the tee, acting like a man who couldn’t believe what he’d just seen—which must have been pretty easy for him, since that was indeed the situation. I kept waving and yelling, glancing over to make sure he wasn’t going to blow it. Now his face seemed frozen:
These are your cards, so play them
. In those few seconds I really hated him.

There was a lot of celebrating back on the tee, and finally the other two hit—Anthony’s ball only twenty or so feet from the hole, Harry’s a good deal farther away, on the left fringe. Waiting for them to come up, I picked up again and Daryl marked his ball.

“Take a four and pick it up,” I told him. “Or so help me I’ll tell him.”

“You’ll tell him what?” he said.

And there we were, both in a Mexican standoff of guilty knowledge.

“Pick it up,” I said.

“You know what you can do with it,” he said.

We saw Jimmy come over the rise, those sad eyes wide with wonder. He was like a little boy. He hurried over to the hole and looked in.

“Man,” he said. “Oh, man. I don’t believe it. I don’t
believe
it.”

Daryl was staring at me, and I gave it right back.

He bent down, picked up his ball, then looked at me again. Everybody else was yelling and clapping Jimmy on the back.

“God almighty,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.

“You should’ve seen it,” Daryl said. And given his expression, you would’ve sworn he believed it, too.

I hadn’t even known I would do it. There was nothing at all premeditated about it. And I felt suddenly very strange—guilt way down, but mixed with happiness, or something more like
exhilaration. Daryl kept congratulating Jimmy and he was really getting into it, talking to him about the flight of the ball, how it hit and rolled toward the cup, like the most delicate putt.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“How far did it roll?” Anthony wanted to know.

“Thirty feet?” Daryl said, looking at me.

“At least,” I got out.

From the look on Jimmy’s face, you could almost believe it had happened exactly like he was imagining it.

“Jimmy,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“You deserve this,” I told him. “Congratulations, man.”

Later that afternoon, Daryl and I went out to buy some good wine, since we meant to celebrate the ace in style. We got to the liquor store without speaking a single word. I bought five bottles of Brunello, at forty-nine bucks a pop, and wouldn’t let Daryl put in a dime. As we drove back, he said, “She’s just a young kid who wasn’t ready for the kind of trouble Jimmy’s been in.”

“You can tell yourself that,” I said. “Don’t tell it to me.”

I carried the wine into the clubhouse, where other players had gathered round, and Chris was taking down the details for the plaque they’d make. The wine was wonderful and we all sat around feeling glad. In the middle of this I caught Jimmy staring off. It was only for a couple of seconds, but he was deep in thought, and knowing everything I knew, I felt that strange stirring of guilt again. Maybe no one should have even that small portion of the power of fate. I glanced in Daryl’s direction, but he was drunk already and telling somebody I didn’t
recognize about how he’d thrown his clubs in the pond on fifteen. By this time, I guess I was a little drunk myself.

As we were all leaving, Jimmy took my arm above the elbow and said, “You know about Elaine leaving and all that, but now they’re pulling the floor plan on me. I’m gonna have to sell the dealership. It’s something I’ve been dreading for months. But I feel good anyway. It’s almost like defiance. This thing today’s going to change my luck around somehow. I can feel it.”

He hadn’t had more than a couple glasses of wine.

I said, “Me, too,” but it wouldn’t come out, quite. I choked on the words.

That was twelve years ago. I left Virginia before the summer was out; my wife got a really good job offer in New Orleans, and we took it. After all, the dealership was gone, and a guy can sell cars anywhere, right? Except that now we live in Oxford, Mississippi, and I’m selling mortgages. Before that I taught school for a couple years—English, or Anguish, as I liked to call it.

I never saw or heard anything about Daryl again, but I hope he’s being cuckolded somewhere. Harry and Anthony, as far as I know, are still fixing cars. Jimmy’s in his sixties now and has two houses, the one I saw in Virginia, and another in Florida, plus a hunting cabin in Montana where he and his third wife spend some time. Every year or so I hear from him. And it’s true that he dates his life’s turnaround from that hole in one. The plaque Chris made for him sits on his mantel, right next to the ball itself, which Jimmy had gold-plated, for his own trophy.

Maybe something like that can change everything, I don’t know. But I do believe Jimmy’s the type who can survive and come out all right no matter what he has to go through.

Still, it
is
so if you
think
it is so, right? And he does.

Last Christmas, I got a card with a picture of the two of them, Jimmy and the wife. She’s not as young as Elaine was, but nice-looking, with soft, kindly eyes. I liked her right away, and still do, though I saw her only that one time. Jimmy? Well, the truth is, no amount of success can change those particular features, that particular face. Happy and smiling from the heart of well-being, he still looks like he’s carrying the weight of the world.

By the time they got back to the house, the snow had started, coming fast in the swirling wind over the mountains to the west. Paula drove, with her elder son, Luke, in the front seat, and the younger one, Virgil, with Aunt Dora in the back. Aunt Dora spoke about the roads, how fast they became impassible in this part of Virginia, worrying aloud about her stepson Christopher’s journey down the valley from Winchester, where he had been in college. No one answered her. After what they had been through today, she would of course be worrying about Christopher. But Christopher might even beat the full force of the storm, and even if he didn’t, he was driving a Jeep, and he had driven in snow before. He would pull in, safe, and Aunt Dora would fall apart, telling him about the harrowing hours of the afternoon.

At the house, Luke got out, hooked up the hose, and washed away the blood on the ground at the far end of the porch. The snow was already covering it. When that was done, he and Virgil got a shovel and broom from the shed and commenced clearing a path on the sidewalk. The snow was sticking. The boys worked well together, but a little frantically. They were such good boys, and Paula knew it would be some time before they could be truly careless again.

Aunt Dora sat in the front seat of the car and watched them, refusing, for the moment, to come inside. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m still terrified.”

Paula nearly lost patience with her. After all, it was Paula’s husband who had been shot, and who lay in the hospital with a bullet wound in his leg and a badly bruised lower back from the fall off the roof of the house. An hour of surgery, but Kent was all right; Kent would be fine. The doctors said so. Kent would be good as new in a few days. The bullet could easily have severed an artery, but it hadn’t, and Brice Collins was in custody, after an afternoon of evading the state troopers. But they had him now, and it was over.

“Please, Dora.”

“I know.”

Paula turned and made her way along the path her sons had cleared, and stepped up onto the porch. There were pine boughs arranged on the railing, and Christmas lights drooping from the eves of the roof. Brice had driven up, stopped, got out, aimed the pistol, and fired, and then driven off. Kent had fallen from the far end of the porch, onto the stones of the little garden. He lay there with open eyes, and Paula knew that as long as she lived, she would remember the look in them as she approached—the desperate, almost childlike searching for some clue in her face as to how bad it all was.

He had found that he couldn’t move. The leg wound bled profusely.

At the hospital, Kent got sick and thought he might die. It had been a long and terrible afternoon. He kept telling them how Brice Collins had done it. Pulled up, got out, walked over, leveled the pistol at him, and fired. He cried like a little boy, telling it. Kent and Brice had been friends since high school, and had been in business together, but there had been bad
blood about the split of payments for an addition they had built onto a house in the upper valley. Kent had decided almost a year ago that he wanted to find a way out of any kind of association with Brice, because Brice had begun selling dope. Finally, the only way was to fire him, though it was a partnership. Kent had kept back enough money from the payment on the last job to cover the extra expenses of time lost while Brice drove up to Washington and made shady new friends and associations, and peddled his goods out of the trunk of the car. Brice took the firing badly but nobody dreamed he would go this far.

“Christopher, too,” Kent said, and seemed to want to say more. But when she pressed him he just kept crying, coughing and trying to catch his breath, looking at her with those eyes that sought her assurance; and finally the eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.

The doctor told her this was normal, to be expected. He had been given something to help him rest. All his signs were good; he was a very lucky man, and never mind the bullet wound in the leg, a twenty-two slug passing through. He was very fortunate to have survived such a fall.

In the house, Dora went straight to her room and lay down. Paula cleared the table and washed the dinner dishes. The two boys stood on the porch watching the snow cover the place they had washed. The snow was coming down hard. You couldn’t see out to the road for the close swirling of the flakes. Night had fallen in this white roiling, a tremendous quiet. There had been very little wind at first, but now it was picking up.

Paula watched them start working on the sidewalk again. They were two years apart, at a stage where they were more like friends than brothers. At thirteen, Virgil could make the older boy laugh. It was a communication the two of them had.
With others, both were quiet and polite, calling men “sir” and women “ma’am,” as their father had taught them. She and Kent were very proud of them both. Now the boys worked quietly, clearing the snow. It was just to have something to do with their hands, she knew, and her heart went out to them. She opened the door and spoke to Luke in as normal a voice as she could muster. “Sweetie, come right in and tell us when Christopher gets here, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She closed the door and went down the hall to the entrance of Dora’s room. Dora lay on her back, with one hand over her eyes.

“What,” she said.

“He’s fine,” said Paula. “And Christopher will be here any minute. It’s all okay now.”

“It was so awful, to see him lying there on those rocks. I knew what had happened immediately. I heard the shot and I knew.”

“Well, it’s all right, now. It’s over now.”

“I can’t help it, honey.”

“Well—would you like a glass of brandy or something?”

“No, thank you.”

In fact, Paula felt the same chill, the trembling along the length of her spine. She wanted the little details of the evening, of any evening. Dinner and television and talk and sleep. Kent was all right. “Are you going to sleep?” she asked Dora.

“No.”

“Dora, please stop lying there looking at it all. It turned out okay. Kent can come home in three days, if we’re not snowed in.”

“How bad is the snow?”

“It’s a storm. But we’ve had storms.”

Dora said nothing.

“Chris will be here in a bit, and we’ll all have some Christmas cheer. It could’ve been so much worse, Dora. Think about it. A man like Brice. They’ve got him. It’s over.”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Dora said. “So you stop talking about it.”

“Come help me wrap presents.”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“Come on out and talk to me,” Paula said. “I’ll make hot chocolate or something.”

“I’m really so tired.”

“We haven’t done anything all day.”

Dora took her hand away and raised her head. “You’re kidding, right?”