Rabbit at rest (9 page)

"What interests me about Sanders and kids like that," Rabbit
says, as Ben-lie speeds along down the sun-baked
fairway, dodging fallen brown fronds and coconuts, "is I had a
little taste of it once. Athletics. Everybody cheering, loving you.
Wanting a piece."

"Sure you did. It sticks out all over. Just the way you waggle
the club. 'Fraid you made the palm tree, though. You're stymied, my
friend." Bernie stops the cart, a little close to the ball for
Harry's comfort.

"I think I can hook it around."

"Don't try it. Chip it out. You know what Tommy Armour says:
take your stroke in a situation like this, and go for the green on
the next one. Don't attempt a miracle."

"Well, you're already up there for a sure bogey. Let me try to
bend it on." The palm tree is one of those whose trunk looks like a
giant braid. It breathes on him, with its faint rustle, its dim
smell like that of a friendly attic full of dried-out old
school papers and love letters. There's a lot of death in Florida,
if you look. The palms grow by the lower branches dying and
dropping off. The hot sun hurries the life cycles along. Harry
takes his stance with his hip almost touching the jagged rough
trunk, hoods the fiveiron, and imagines the curving arc of the
miracle shot and Bernie's glad cry of congratulation.

But in fact the closeness of the tree and maybe of Bernie in the
cart inhibits his swing and he pulls the ball with the hooded club,
so it hits the top of the next palm along the fairway and drops
straight down into the short rough. The rough, though, in Florida
isn't like the rough up north; it's just spongy pale grass a
half-inch longer than fairway. They tailor these courses for
the elderly and lame. They baby you down here.

Bernie sighs. "Stubborn," he says as Harry gets back in. "You
guys think the world will melt if you whistle." Harry knows that
"guys" is polite for "goys." The thought that he might be wrong,
that obstacles won't melt if he whistles, renews that dull internal
ache of doom he felt in the airport. As he stands up to his third
shot with an eight-iron, Bernie's disapproval weighs on his
arms and causes him to hit a bit fat, enough to take the click out
of the ball and leave it ten yards short.

"Sorry, Bernie. Chip up close and get your par." But Bernie
fluffs the chip -all wrists again, and too quick - and
they both get sixes, losing the hole to Ed Silberstein's routine
bogey. Ed is a wiry retired accountant from Toledo, with dark
upright hair and a slender thrusting jaw that makes him look as if
he's about to smile all the time; he never seems to get the ball
more than ten feet off the ground, but he keeps it moving toward
the hole.

"You guys looked like Dukakis on that one," he crows. "Blowing
it."

"Don't knock the Duke," Joe says. "He gave us honest government
for a change. The Boston pols can't forgive him for it." Joe Gold
owns a couple of liquor stores in some city in Massachusetts called
Framingham. He is stocky and sandy and wears glasses so thick they
make his eyes look like they're trying to escape from two little
fishbowls, jumping from side to side. He and his wife, Beu, Ben for
Beulah, are very quiet condo neighbors next door; you wonder what
they do all the time in there, that never makes any noise.

Ed says, "He wimped out when it counted. He should have stood up
and said, `Sure, I'm a liberal, and damn proud of it."'

"Yeah, how would that have played in the South and the
Midwest?"Joe asks. "In California and Florida for that matter with
all these old farts who all they want to hear is `No more
taxes'?"

"Lousy," Ed admits. "But he wasn't going to get their votes
anyway. His only hope was to get the poor excited. Knock away that
three-footer, Angstrom. I've already written down your
six."

"I need the practice," Harry says, and strokes it, and watches
it rim out on the left edge. Not his day. Will he ever have a day
again? Fifty-five and fading. His own son can't stand to be
in the same room with him. Ruth once called him Mr. Death.

"He was going for those Reagan Democrats," Joe continues
explaining. "Except there aren't any Reagan Democrats, there're
just cut-and-dried rednecks. Now that I'm down south
here, I understand better what it's all about. It's all about
blacks. One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, the Republicans
have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any
Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with, barring a massive
depression or a boo-boo the size of Watergate. Ollie North
doesn't do it. Reagan being an airhead didn't do it. Face it: the
bulk of this country is scared to death of the blacks. That's the
one gut issue we've got."

After that episode with Skeeter twenty years ago Rabbit has had
mixed feelings about blacks and whenever the subject comes up he
tends to hold his tongue lest he betray himself one way or another.
"Bernie, what do you think?" Harry asks while they're watching the
two others hit from the second tee, a 136-yard parthree over
that same scummy pond. He finds Bernie the wisest of the three, the
most phlegmatic and slowest to speak. He never came back totally
from some open-heart surgery he had a few years ago. He moves
cumbersomely, has emphysema and a bit of a hump back and the slack
look of a plump man who lost weight because his doctor told him to.
His color isn't good, his lower lip in profile looks loose.

"I think," he says, "Dukakis tried to talk intelligently to the
American people and we aren't ready for it. Bush talked to us like
we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the
Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips -can you imagine such crap
in this day and age? Ailes and those others, they made him into a
beer commercial - head for the mountains." Bernie sang this
last phrase, his voice quavery but touchingly true. Rabbit is
impressed by this ability Jews seem to have, to sing and to dance,
to give themselves to the moment. They sing at seder, he knows,
because Bernie and Fern had them to a seder one April just before
heading north. Passover. The angel of death passed over. Harry had
never understood the word before. Let this cup pass from me. Bernie
concludes, "To my mind there are two possibilities about Bush
- he believed what he was saying, or he didn't. I don't know
which is more terrifying. He's what we call a
pisher."

"Dukakis always looked like he was sore about something," Rabbit
offers. This is as close as he can bring himself to admit that,
alone in this foursome, he voted for Bush.

Bernie maybe guesses it. He says, "After eight years of Reagan I
would have thought more people would have been sore than were.
Ifyou could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have
socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the
capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you
think you ought to be."

Rabbit Eked Reagan. He liked the foggy voice, the smile, the big
shoulders, the way his head kept wagging during the long pauses,
the way he floated above the facts, knowing there was more to
government than facts, and the way he could change direction while
saying he was going straight ahead, pulling out of Beirut, getting
cozy with Gorby, running up the national debt. The strange thing
was, except for the hopeless down-and-outers, the world
became a better place under him. The Communists fell apart, except
for in Nicaragua, and even there he put them on the defensive. The
guy had a magic touch. He was a dream man. Harry dares say, "Under
Reagan, you know, it was like anesthesia."

"Ever had an operation? A real operation."

"Not really. Tonsils when I was a kid. Appendix when I was in
the Army. They took it out in case I was sent to Korea. Then I was
never sent."

"I had a quadruple bypass three years ago."

"I know, Bern. I remember your telling me. But you look great
now."

"When you come out of anesthesia, it hurts like hell. You can't
believe you can live with such pain. To get at your heart, they
split your whole rib cage open. They crack you open like a coconut.
And they pull the best veins they can find out of your upper leg.
So when you come out of it your groin's killing you as well as your
chest."

"Wow." Harry inappropriately laughs, since while Bernie is
talking to him on the cart, Ed, with that pompous fussy setup he
has, laying his hands on the club finger by finger like he's doing
flower arrangement, and then peeking toward the hole five or six
times before swinging, as if he's trying to shake loose cobwebs or
a tick in his collar, looked up during the swing so the topped ball
scuttered into the water, skipping three times before sinking,
leaving three expanding, interlocking sets of rings on the water.
Alligator food.

"Six hours I was on the table," Bernie is urging into his ear.
"I woke up and I couldn't move. I couldn't even open my eyelids.
They
freeze you, so
your blood flow is down to almost
nothing. I was like locked into a black coffin. No. It's like I was
the coffin. And then out of this blackness I hear this weird voice,
with a thick Indian accent, the Pakistani anesthetist."

Joe Gold, with his partner's ball in the water, tries to hit it
too quick, to get a ball in play, jerking the club back in two
stages like he does and then roundhousing with that flat swing
stocky guys tend to have. He pushes the shot off so he catches the
pot bunker on the right.

Bernie is doing a high, spacy, Pakistani voice. "
'Ber-nie, Bernie,' this voice says, so honest to God I think
maybe it's the voice of God, `oper-ation a suc-cess!'
"

Harry has heard the story before but laughs anyway. It's a good,
scary story about the edge of death.

" 'Ber-nie, Ber-nie,' " Bernie repeats, "like it
came out of the clouds to Abraham, to go cut Isaac's throat."

Harry asks, "Shall we keep the same order?" He feels he
disgraced himself on the previous hole.

"You go first, Angstrom. I think it shakes you up too much to
hit last. Go for it. Show these nudniks how it's done."

This is what Rabbit hoped to hear. He takes a seven-iron
and tries to think of five things: keeping his head down, keeping
his backswing from being too long, moving his hip while the club is
still at the top, keeping his downswing smooth, and keeping the
clubface square on the ball, at that point on the sphere where a
clockface says 3:15. From the whistly magic way the ball vanishes
from the center of his held-down vision he knows the hit is
sweet; they all together watch the dark dot rise, hover that little
ghostly extra bit that gives the distance, and then drop straight
down on the green, a hair to the left but what looks pin high, the
ball bouncing right with the slant of the bowl-shaped
green.

"Beauty," Ed has to admit.

"How about a mulligan?" Joe asks. "We'll give you one this
time."

Bernie asks, pushing himself out of the cart, "What iron was
that?"

"Seven."

"Gonna hit 'em like that, my friend, you should use an
eight."

"Think I'm past the hole?"

"Way past. You're on the back edge."

Some partner. There's no satisfying him. Like Marty Tothero
nearly forty years ago. Get twenty-five points a game, Marty
wanted thirty-five and would talk about a missed layup. The
soldier in Harry, the masochistic Christian, respects men like
this. It's total uncritical love, such as women provide, that makes
you soft and does you in.

"For me, I think a choked-up six," Bernie says.

But in trying to take something off the shot he takes off too
much and leaves it short, over the water but on the bank where it's
hard to take a stance. "Tough chip from there," Harry says, unable
to resist a gentle needle. He still blames Bernie for parking the
cart so close on that attempted deliberate hook.

Bernie accepts the needle. "Especially after that last shitty
chip of mine, huh?" he says, pushing his cut-up, deflated,
humpbacked old body into the cart, Harry having slid over into the
driver's seat. The guy who's on the green has earned the right to
drive. Harry feels momentum building, they're going to cream these
oafs. He glides over the water on an arched wooden bridge with red
rubber treads laid over the planks. "From where you are," Bernie
tells him as they get out, "the green slopes down. Hit your putt
too hard, you'll slide miles beyond."

Ed with a ball in the water is out of it. Bernie's stance on the
steep bank is so awkward he whiffs the ball once, shanks it
sideways on his next swing, and picks up. But sandy Joe Gold, in
his element, waggles his feet to plant himself and manages a good
blast shot out of the pot bunker. With Bernie's advice preying on
his mind, interfering with his own instincts, Harry strokes his
long approach putt tentatively and leaves it four feet short. He
marks it with a Valhalla Village marker while Joe two-putts
for his bogey. Joe takes his time and gives Harry too long to study
his four-footer. He sees a break, then doesn't see it. In
trying to avoid upping out on the left like he did on the last
hole, he loses his par putt, very makable, an inch to the right.
"Son of a son of a
bitch,"
he says, frustration pressing
from behind his eyes so hard he thinks he might burst into tears.
"On in one, and a fucking three-putt."

"It happens," Ed says, writing down the 4 with his trained
accountant's primness. "Tie hole."

"Sorry, Bern," Harry says, climbing back into the cart, on the
passenger side.

"I screwed you up," his partner says. "Should have kept my yap
shut about the green being downhill." He unwraps another cigar and,
pushing the pedal, leans back into a long day.

Not Harry's day. The Florida sun seems not so much a single
thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere
with an even white illumination. Even directly under palm trees and
right up against the twelve-foot pine fences that separate
the Village from the rest of the world, the sun fords you,
reddening the tip of Rabbit's nose and baking his forearms and the
back of his non-gloved hand, which is already dotted with
little white bumps of keratosis. He carries a tube of
number-15 sunscreen in his golf bag and is always dabbing it
on but the ultraviolet gets through anyway, cooking his squamous
cells into skin cancer. The three men he plays with never use
anything and just get a comfortable tan, even the bald top of
Bernie's head, as smooth as an ostrich egg with only a few small
specks on it as he bends over his shots with that awful
reverse-shift, squeezed-feet stance of his. Harry feels
Bernie's steady, mechanically repeating ineptitude short shots,
chunked chips - a burden today, since he can't quite carry
him, and wonders why somebody who exudes suffering wisdom the way
Bernie does never learns a thing about golf or even seems to try.
To him, Harry supposes, it's just a game, a way of killing time in
the sun at this stage of his life. Bernie was a boy once and then a
man making money and children (a carpet business in Queens; two
daughters who married nice solid guys and a son who went to
Princeton and the Wharton School in Philadelphia and became a
hostile-takeover specialist on Wall Street) and now he's at
the other end of life's rainbow, and this is what you do: Bernie
endures retirement fun in Florida the way he's endured his entire
life, sucking that same acrid wet-cigar taste out of it. He
doesn't see what Harry sees in the game infinity, an opportunity
for infinite improvement. Rabbit doesn't see it himself today.
Around the eleventh hole - a dogleg parfive that he butchers,
slicing his second shot, a four-wood, so wildly it winds up
in a condo's side yard, between some plastic trash cans and a
concrete slab with some rusting steel clothesline poles sunk in it
(a German shepherd chained to the clothesline barks at him, lunging
toward him so the taut wire sings, and Gold and Silberstein loafing
in their cart cackle, and Bernie chomps deeper and looks morose),
taking the out-of-bounds drop for a four while the dog
keeps barking and barking, trying to hit a three-iron so hard
he digs six inches behind and sprays sand all over his shoes and
into the tops of his socks, pulling the next iron to the left into
a bed of parched and shedding azaleas beside the twelfth tee,
taking a drop for another stroke, skulling the chip clear across
over the green (all three playing partners keeping a ghastly
silence now, shocked, mourning for him, or is it holding in their
glee?), plunking the next sand shot against the trap lip so it
dribbles back, and picking up in disgust, and even hitting himself
on the knee when after raking he flips the sand rake to one side
- after this hole, the game and day begin to eat him into a
state of depression. The grass looks greasy and unreal, every other
palm tree is dying from the drought and dropping stiff brown
fronds, the condos line every fairway like tall stucco outhouses,
and even the sky, where your eyes can usually find relief, is
dirtied by jet trails that spread and wander until they are
indistinguishable from God's pure clouds.