Dead Low Tide (2 page)

It’s a big event for Unc, even though it happens every Thursday night ten to two, Thanksgiving included. A weekly opportunity for Unc and thirty or forty of his closest chums to win and/or lose up to five grand a night, if they so desire. It’s also an evening in which, because I don’t want to leave Unc alone in case he taps out early but generally because I don’t want to be at home alone with Mom, I end up sitting in the Range Rover out on the street with the other thirty or forty cars and playing solitaire on my iPhone, or feeding locations into the Maps app to see how I’d get from here to Fargo or Los Alamos or Palo Alto. Or I’ll end up just sitting there and thinking about how empty the all of this life is, and how much I am queasily enjoying it.

Oh. And I’ll ponder, some of the time, on a girl involved with this whole maudlin malaise thing I have working. Her name’s Tabitha. She’s on a postdoc at Stanford.

I don’t think I deserve this Huger moniker, finally, because ever since I gave up, it’s seemed a good life to do nothing other than fart my way through a day. Or a night.

Case in point: this excursion.

Because the truth of the whole thing, the absolute and pathetic and sorry stupid reason we were out here at the head of a finger creek backed up to a cottage in the first place, the reason for all this intrigue and mystery and worries over an old man at a window toting a shotgun or a Guatemalan nurse hot on the phone to Hanahan’s finest for the dumb metal
donk!
of a cinder block dropped—the truth of the whole dense and gratuitous and embarrassing thing is that we were here because Unc wanted to golf.

Golf.

And as I leaned over the gunwale, made to put these pluff mud stubs into the water to wash them off, I couldn’t help but think on my name—Huger Dillard—and how, for the life of me, I ought not to care how the hell anybody’d pronounce it.

Here was yet another moment in the crowded long line of them—a line more crowded and longer every day—when the me I am sneaks up on me, taps me on the shoulder, then sucker punches me when I turn around, and I realize I am, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, smack in the middle of wasting my life, living the way I do.

This was what I had come to: sneaking Unc out to golf at two-thirty in the morning because he was too damned proud to be caught doing so in daylight.

None of this was my idea. But here I was.

I looked down at that water, and in the last instant before I put my hands in to start at washing off this detritus, this organic material breaking down—this shit that might as well have been me—I caught Unc’s reflection in the water.

He stood behind me and to my left, his silhouette showing up clear and sharp for this still water at dead low tide. I could see that pole off to the side and in the water, and the bill on his ball cap, him turned from me again and looking back. I could even make out the thin wash of stars behind him. All of this in the water, and in an instant.

I heard him take in a small breath, then whisper low, “Now what in the hell was that?” the words no louder than a breath back out, meant for nobody but himself.

I put my hands into the water, troubled it big for how hard it was to get off this mud.

Unc swung the club, and here came the quick whip through air, then the strike, two separate sounds that seemed even louder out here than that block on the hull. The ball made a sharp slice, the bright green dot through the night-vision goggles I had on a kind of missile peeling off to the right into the trees. No way would I be going after that one. No way.

Night-vision goggles: AN/PVS-7D Generation 4 with an infrared illuminator. You couldn’t get these unless you were military or law. Unc knew people in both.

“Sliced it,” I whispered. “Big.” I took in a breath, let it out in a hard sigh. “That one’s gone.”

I sat on the fold-up camp chair we always brought with us, Unc in the tee box ten feet to my left, me facing straight ahead down the fairway so I could watch where the ball went. Like always, I felt like some Borged-up cyclops with these things on, the gear strapped onto
an old yellow hard hat I picked up a year or so ago from the work site out to Hungry Neck after they’d halted building.

It’d only taken a couple minutes to get out here once I’d gotten my hands cleaned up enough: first I’d tossed that idiot block out into the marsh grass, then’d pulled from the bottom of the jon boat the eight-foot plank we keep in there, slid it out over the bow onto solid ground. I’d picked up the camp chair in its long skinny nylon bag, and my old book bag stuffed with the paraphernalia we needed—six or seven balls and a few tees, the night goggles and hard hat, an old thermos of instant coffee, two beat-up travel mugs we’d bought one night years ago at the Hess station on our way out to Hungry Neck.

Usually when we were out on the jon boat—in fact, wherever we went, boat or truck—there’d be Unc’s walking stick to bring along, too. The one I’d found for him when I was seven out on the land at Hungry Neck, Unc in bed in the single-wide we lived in back then and healing after what happened to make him blind. A stick so straight it seemed the old hickory it was off of had dropped it just for him, and that he’d used every day since. But right now it was in the kitchen back home, in the corner where the breakfast table sits, precisely where he leaves it and where he knows it’ll be when we make to head out.

Tonight it was a golf club to grab instead, the Callaway three wood with its grip resting on the center seat. The only club Unc ever brought with us, though he had a whole set out in the garage at home, a bag of clubs cost him three grand, but this was the only one he ever used. Further evidence of the stupidity of his pride.

Because there’s plenty of blind golfers out there. Really. There’s even a United States Blind Golf Association, and an annual world tournament—last year’s was in Dublin, Ireland, next year’s in Palm Springs. The whole thing involves a coach who’s there with you to help set up the shot, tell you where you are and distance to the hole and all else. You take the swing, wait to hear from that coach how you’d done, where it went.

So a blind golfer’s no joke. The joke, though, is that in order to accommodate Unc and his fear of someone seeing him take crappy shots—the same crappy shots every golfer makes at every course in the world, blind or not—well, this fear of his has called for these special-ops escapades.

The camp chair under one arm, the book bag over my shoulder, I’d leaned over, picked up the club from where it lay, stood back up. I thought to say something to him—
Here we go
, or
Be careful
, or some such rot—but I only looked at him standing at the transom.

And now that I was standing, I’d been able to see behind him the whole of the marsh, the uneven spread of blacks and grays and silvers out here. Across it all, a good half mile away, lay a low jagged tree line, what always looked to me no matter what marsh I was on like a long line of men on horseback, watching and waiting. That was Naval Weapons Station land over there, the giant tract of woods that buffered the world against the dozens of ammo dumps they keep bunkered in there, a tract no one even dared think to sneak in on. To the left and a couple hundred yards off stood the trestle across the marsh and Goose Creek, a hulking structure that since I was a kid seemed the black backbone of some monster ready to rise up out of the water and tear us all to bits. I loved this place, loved being out here on water whether night or day, loved sometimes even the smell of that pluff mud.

But Unc could golf in daylight if he wanted. He could man up and get himself a coach, and quit this cat burglar crap, if he really wanted to.

I didn’t say a word to him, only turned, stepped out onto that plank, and crossed on over.

Two steps onto hard ground, and here he’d been behind me, his moves as quick and easy as—maybe even easier than—mine along the length of the boat, then onto and across that plank. He’d taken hold of my belt, cinched onto it for me to lead, and given the smallest push to go.

I’d glanced at that light in the window at the Dupont house and whatever it might or might not mean, and started the hundred yards or so along the brick fence up from the creek along the property, then out onto the gravel drive. A few strides later we’d been into the grass, before us the wide spread of what in the dark always looked like only a meadow bordered by trees. But there, twenty yards in front of us, lay a little raised flat of grass: the tee box.

Now here we were, me in my camp chair, Unc swinging away. Though the night-vision goggles gave only a forty-degree line of sight, I could see everything in this dark: the live oak and pine along the fairway on the right, the bright white kidney of a bunker in front of the green 280 yards away—this was the thirteenth, a short par four—and to the left the two cottages on this hole. All of it green, corralled inside a round porthole of sight. One big rifle scope.

The farther house was red brick and slate-roofed, an outdoor fireplace and stone flower boxes beneath a white-columned pergola trying too hard to look like the Parthenon. Closer in, maybe halfway down the fairway, sat a huge Spanish-style thing, U-shaped with the courtyard facing the fairway. Red-tile roof, stucco, a rim of painted tiles beneath the eaves I could make out even from here.

Patio furniture sat out at both houses, nice stuff that cost more than the furniture Mom and I used to have inside our house over on Marie Street, back before we moved out of the old neighborhood. Over there, if you put a piece of furniture out in the yard or on a porch, even one of those thin white plastic chairs you can pick up at Wal-Mart for five bucks, you’d better chain it to the ground or it’d be gone the next day. But here they were safe and sound, all this fancy furniture sitting in the dark and smug for it, too: testimony to how secure people figured they were, given their money and how long they’d all had it. And our old neighborhood not even a mile from here.

I let myself look at that Spanish one a second longer than I should,
a mistake I made every time we came out here: the umbrella and wrought-iron table and chairs, two sofas and a chaise lounge parked there in the courtyard. The low brick fire ring built out closer to the fairway, the row of five palmettos spaced evenly along this back line of the property. All that painted tile, and the arched windows, and that stucco.

I looked at it every time, of course, because the Spanish of it, that stucco and red tile, made it feel too much like what you’ll see in Palo Alto. Specifically, on the campus at Stanford.

I’d been there once.

Unc whacked the next ball, and my eyes caught the bright green streak of it blast out even sharper to the right, even deeper into the trees.

“Jeez, Unc,” I whispered, “what you been drinking?” and turned in the camp chair to face him full-on. “You never slice it,” I whispered.

Here he was: big and green and filling that porthole of sight. He stood centered at the tee, already had the next ball teed up, the club head down and settled at it, him about to swing back for hit number three.

He had on his old windbreaker for the cool out here, on the right breast the bright block letters
MtPPD
, the jacket a prized possession from back when he was on the Mount Pleasant Police Department. He had on his same old khakis, and that Braves cap, the scripty white
A
sharp above the bill. And there was his face, the sunglasses he always wore, all of him green. He dipped his chin, leaned his head to the left a little, geared up to swing.

But he stopped, took in a small breath, and looked at me.

I saw my reflection in his sunglasses then, two white shocks of light the size of marbles: the IR illuminator on my goggles. Infrared light, reflected right back at me.

For a second it scared me, like it did every time since we’d gotten this new set. It looked like he could see me, like he was just wearing a
pair of regular glasses, but his eyes behind them these white fires trying to burn into me something I didn’t know and couldn’t yet figure out.

The first set of goggles we’d gotten didn’t have the IR illuminator built in. Those were the old Gen 1 things somewhere in the garage right now, buried under the pile of military and security gadgets Unc loves getting hold of for whatever reason he has. He’d won this new set one poker night a couple months ago off a Navy commander pal who’d tapped out early and’d been so convinced of his luck—no matter he’d lost what he’d brought with him—that he’d scrambled outside and gotten the goggles from his truck, then promptly lost the hand. Unc took him with three tens to his two pair.

“You should have seen him,” Unc’d told me on the way home from poker the night he won them. “I could hear in the way he was breathing when it come to his bet how much he was sweating, all his money gone and him thinking about getting these Gen 4s out of his truck. The dimwit commander says, ‘You want a set of night-vision goggles you can’t get anywhere on any market? Guaranteed nobody anywhere’s going to have these for another three years,’ and I says, ‘Like I could see with them.’ I could still hear him sweating, and I let him twist there for a minute or so more before I nodded I’d take them, and he was gone. Ninety seconds later he plops them on the table, lets out a breath I can hear is some kind of smile for him thinking he’s won the hand. And all he’s got is his piddly two pair.” He’d let out a laugh then, though I remember it wasn’t for any kind of happiness. He shook his head, then’d whispered like it was some punch line only he knew the joke for, “I just wanted to beat the son of a bitch is all.”