Walking with Jack (3 page)

“I know,” he said, still looking out his window. “He was thirty over par after the first two days. He left the course and cried in his mother’s arms.”

“You’re going to beat him today,” I said.

He nodded thoughtfully.

We pulled in to the parking lot, and when we stepped out of the Fiat, the wind nearly tore the doors off the car. The rain was just turning to sleet. Watching Jack pull his golf bag out of the backseat, I offered the lines of dialogue that he and I used to say to each other from the
Band of Brothers
series: one paratrooper from the 101st speaking to his buddy, the morning of the invasion of Normandy, when weather was threatening to cancel the drop again. “I think it’s clearing … Do you think it’s clearing? … I think it’s clearing.”

I asked him if he remembered. “Yeah,” he said, but he wasn’t listening. He was striding into his zone. His expression had turned stoic as he traded his jeans and hooded sweatshirt for a layer of Under Armour, black slacks, a long-sleeved turtleneck, and his black rain gear. I had packed my blue suit, the one-piece long johns that zipped from ankle to neck, my standard bottom layer in the days when I still played goalie with him. The last time I wore the suit was three winters ago, when one of his slap shots had struck me in the throat and I’d blacked out on the ice and sworn off ever being a goalie again.

It took me a while to put on my layers. “You should have some of these gloves,” I heard him yell to me over the wind.

“I’ll be fine!” I yelled. I stood up, grabbed my clubs, and slipped into the shoulder straps of my bag. He was walking away by then, his game face on, his mind already focusing on what he’d come this far from home to achieve.

“Jack!” I hollered. “Come here a minute!”

When he was just a few feet from me, I began to deliver the speech I’d been rehearsing in my imagination for months. “Can you hear me!”

“Yeah!”

“Okay! I just wanted to tell you that iPods aren’t real either!”

“iPods?”

“iPods aren’t real!” I yelled again. “Just like 401(k)s! Neither are cell phones, laptops, the Internet, user names, passwords, or PIN numbers! CNN isn’t
real
! This is real! The wind! Weather! The sea! This ground! Whenever you get lost in your life, remember that!”

His expression was priceless. “You’re so predictable!” he yelled to me.

I bowed at the waist. “I take that as a compliment!” I yelled back.

I hadn’t quite delivered the speech with the charisma I’d hoped for, no triumphant call to arms from a marbled arch; but still, I’d said pretty much what was on my mind. And with that, we proceeded to the starter’s shed at the Championship Course to play some golf from the back tees.

We startled the woman inside the starter’s shed. She told us that she hadn’t expected to see any golfers today. The instant she opened the sliding glass window so she could hear me, rain soaked her face like a wave breaking over the bow of a boat.

“We just flew in from America,” I yelled to her above the wind. “Just got off the plane!”

“You’re on holiday then,” she said, ducking her head out of the rain, which was coming down harder now from a low black sky. “Are you sure you want to go out in this?” You could hear a dull concussion
of waves pounding the beach in the distance and shells exploding on an artillery range along the shore.

“Do we have the course to ourselves?”

“You do indeed.”

I caught up to Jack. When I set down my golf bag, a gust of wind knocked it over and blew it off the tee box. The wind and rain were blowing sideways, left to right at about forty knots.

“You’re up,” Jack called to me as he put on his rain gloves.

In my eagerness I snap-hooked my drive and lost sight of the ball as it peeled off hard left over some lime-green dunes in the direction of the beach. I hit a second shot the same way, then managed to get my third ball into play.

A moment later I watched Jack marching up the 1st fairway after hitting his drive a mile straight through the wind and rain. His shoulders were back, and there was confidence and purpose in his stride.

“Look at us!” I yelled to him. “The whole place to ourselves! That’s why we had to come in the winter!”

As a last-minute precaution when we were heading out the door at home, Colleen had suggested we pack the neck gaiters that the girls used when they went snowboarding. All I could see of Jack’s face now was a narrow slit for his eyes and nose.

Unlike most of the world’s golf courses, which are laid out with parallel, out-and-back holes, Carnoustie plays all over the map. When we reached the tee for the 337-yard par-4 number 3, all the wind off the sea was immediately behind us. “If the green is out there somewhere straight, that ball is on it,” Jack said after he put all he had into his drive.

“You must always strike the ball with a downward glancing blow,” I said as I prepared to take my turn, mimicking the words of Bobby Jones from an old instructional movie I’d watched a dozen times on the Golf Channel.

“You’re not doing it,” Jack said. “You’re still sweeping the ball up in the air. That’s why they’re just blowing off the course.”

“I know,” I said.

“You can’t feel yourself coming
up
at impact?”

“Yeah, I can.”

“You have to tell yourself to swing
down
and
through
the ball,” he went on. “Not
up
at the bottom of the swing.”

I thanked him as I looked around and thought, I could sleep here. Just crawl behind the gorse bushes to block the wind, lay my head down, and sleep here for about twelve hours.

Then a train went by just across the fairway with the familiar blue and yellow markings of British Rail. “Passenger train,” I called out. “British Rail. The same train your mother and I took to Scotland when we eloped. We ended up in a little village called Pitlochry. That’s where we called home and told Nanny and Papa the news.”

“Let’s get going,” he said. “No more talking!”

His ball had traveled better than 337 yards from the tee and had rolled off the back of the green. He missed the putt from there for an eagle and then the birdie. “Good par,” I told him.

He snapped back at me. “When you hit a drive like that and only end up with par, it’s never good. If I’m going to get anywhere in this game, I have to make birdies.”

“Hey, you got to Scotland,” I said. I was feeling a little disoriented from the cold. I reached into my pocket for the list of things I planned to talk with Jack about. The wind whipped the slip of paper out of my hand and blew it into the dark sky.

I had lost three balls and was ten strokes over par by the time we reached the 6th tee. Ahead of us lay the famous hole named Hogan’s Alley. The legendary golfer only ever competed in one British Open Championship, and that was here at Carnoustie in 1953. Ben Hogan had heard so much about how difficult the course was that he arrived two weeks early and played practice rounds every day. I started reading the description of the hole to Jack. “Out of bounds all the way down the left side. Bunkers in the middle and rough on the right.” Then the little course guide blew away too.

“How far are those bunkers?” he asked as he walked up to his ball and glanced down the narrow fairway one last time.

“Maybe three hundred yards,” I said.

“You had the book,” he said.

“It blew away, Jack.”

He shook his head at me. “I’m going over them,” he said.

He did. Even into the teeth of the gale, he hit his drive far enough to fly over all the sand traps and land on safe ground.

“Not far, but straight,” I said after I’d hit my drive. I was hoping he would say something encouraging, but he was already walking out ahead of me.

I ran to catch up with him.

“Your hands are blue,” he said when we were nearing my ball, which had dropped seventy or eighty yards short of his and run off the fairway into the weeds down the right side.

Down and through the ball
, I said to myself as I planted my feet.
Swing down and through
, I told myself again as I took one practice swing.

“You lifted up again,” he said after I sprayed it to the right. “If this was summer and the rough was grown, you would have just lost your fourth ball of the day. Did you bring enough balls to last a week?”

“Why don’t you pull for me instead of against me,” I said.

“I’m just telling you what you’re doing wrong,” he said.

Another train went by. On the Night Rider from London, twenty-two years ago, his mother and I had chosen to sleep under a table because we could be closer to each other on the floor than in our seats.

I followed Jack down the fairway after finding my ball and hitting two more decent seven-irons to the edge of the green. He stuck a five-iron to five feet and captured an easy birdie. A moment later I made my first par of the day. “Maybe we could sit out of the wind for a while,” I said.

“Why do you want to do that?” he asked as he began walking to the next tee.

“So we can talk,” I called to him.

“I didn’t come here to talk,” he said. “I already told you. I came to play golf.”

I watched him walking away, his black rain jacket and pants snapping in the wind. Fair enough, I thought.

I named it Hysterical golf. House of Horrors golf. The wind howling in our ears and blowing us back half a step for every step forward. Hands blue. Feet numb. Our yardage book blown away into the sea and with it the only map we had of the course, so we were blind on almost every shot. Driver cover blown away into the thistle. Balls blown off the wooden tees. And me having to search for my ball every other shot and losing the feeling in my hands. It went on like that to the 18th hole, the famous home hole, a 444-yard par-4 with the Barry Burn winding through a narrow fairway bordered by horrible thistle bushes running down both sides, where you could spend the rest of your life searching for your ball and never find it.

As we climbed up to the tee, a man and a woman walking a black dog appeared in the rain, the first people we had seen in hours. “Teddy would love it here,” Jack said, referring to one of our golden retrievers who had been born in our living room four years earlier with eight brothers and sisters. Having a litter of pups was the fulfillment of a promise I’d made years earlier to Jack’s sister Cara. My idea all along was that we would sell all the pups, but we kept Teddy.

“When you leave home, Teddy’s going to have a broken heart,” I said as we both watched the black dog chasing seagulls.

“Yeah,” Jack said, nodding.

“The day you leave, he’s going to start spending the rest of his life waiting for you to come back.”

Jack nodded and teed up his ball. I watched the couple stop and turn toward us. It was another amazing drive, straight down the middle of the fairway and so far I couldn’t quite believe it.

“I think that cleared all three of the farthest bunkers,” I said.

“I’m probably in the last one,” he said.

“I think it’s over,” I said.

The wind carried my ball a long way as well, and straight for once. “Remember me teaching you to curse in wind like this?” I said as we walked on. “Sailing in our little boat?”

“I remember,” he said.

“Each time a wave soaked us.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

Halfway up the fairway I got such a violent cramp in my right leg that I had to stop for a few minutes. We lay against a bunker blocking the wind. I apologized and lit a cigarette. “Par this last hole and I’ll shoot 77,” Jack said as he went over our scorecard.

“Amazing in these conditions, and from the championship tees.”

He didn’t say anything.

I unzipped a pocket on my golf bag and took out my father’s army diary from boot camp that I’d found in his closet the last time I saw him almost two years earlier. I had decided at the last minute to bring it with me on this trip. I opened it and read aloud:

“What’s that?” Jack asked.

“My father’s diary that he kept in the army,” I said. “I found it when I was in Pennsylvania a few years ago.”

“Why’d you bring it here?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something told me to bring it with us.”

We were up and walking again when he asked, “Why’d he have to have all his teeth pulled?”

“He grew up during the Great Depression, and even after it was over for America, his family was still poor. They didn’t have any running water. All his teeth were rotted.”

I hit a low six-iron that flew the river in front of the green and rolled to a stop near the flag. “Best shot I’ve hit all day,” I exclaimed.

Jack’s tee shot had landed only eighty yards from the green. From there he hit a soft wedge, and his ball fell out of the dark sky right next to mine.

“Better,” Jack said to himself.

“Two putts for birdies on the final hole,” I said.

We marched the rest of the way to the green. Jack made his birdie putt; I missed mine. Back in the car I looked at my face in the rear-view mirror and said: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, behold the face of a 107-year-old golfer accused of swinging like an old woman.”

I turned to Jack. “There are things about growing old that no one tells you. For example, right here on the rims of my ears I started growing fur about a year ago. If that happens to you, don’t shave it off like I did. Now I’ve got little mustaches growing on both ears.”

I saw him smile at this. I can still make him smile, I thought.

“How old was he when he was in the army?” he asked.

“My father?”

“Yeah.”

“Your age,” I said. “He was exactly your age when he was writing in that diary.” I wondered if that fact was more startling to Jack than to me. “He and his buddies graduated from high school and went right into the army. They’d been waiting to get in since Pearl Harbor, three years earlier. They were being trained for the invasion of Japan.”

He began to untie his golf shoes, and I started the car.