Walking with Jack (15 page)

Then I read him the e-mail. When I finished, I said, “I don’t know what to tell him. Why do we chase our dreams? What’s the answer to that question?”

He never turned his head to acknowledge me, but his eyes narrowed and he drew his shoulders back as if I’d just kicked him in the chest. He never looked at me when he answered. “Tell him we chase our dreams
because we can
. Because we’re not in some hospital, dying of cancer.”

With this, he stood up and went to look for some privacy, I suppose. But before he could leave, I got to my feet and thanked him. “I’m going to tell him that,” I said.

For caddies in most of the world, the term “double” means you carry two bags, one on each shoulder, caddying for two golfers and dividing your time between them. Here in Scotland the term “double” means you do two loops in one day. And in most cases each golfer has his own caddie. The reasoning for this makes perfect sense: in Scotland the majority of golfers have traveled here from somewhere and are unfamiliar with the ground and need careful supervision in order to avoid disaster. One caddie attempting to provide sufficient attention
to two golfers at the same time would be perilous and rather like one man attempting to romance two women simultaneously, with the result being that neither woman felt sufficiently looked after.

I did the back half of a double today with Paul, a retired policeman from Glasgow with a gleaming shaved head and the rugged build of a lumberjack. All summer I have observed a mounting anxiety in all the caddies, even the seasoned vets, as their time to go out approaches. It was a blind date for all of us; one never knew what to expect, and secretly we all feared the same thing—being stuck for five hours with an irredeemable asshole. Paul was the only caddie among us whose calm demeanor didn’t change as he made his way to the starter’s hut. “Once more into the breach,” he said to me as we walked side by side.

“Ah, Shakespeare,” I said.

“
Henry the Fifth
. I said the same thing before each shift on the police force.” He gave me a handshake and said, “It will be nice to be out here today with someone who knows his Shakespeare.”

Paul had the best greeting lines I’d heard so far. On the 1st tee he said, “Gentlemen,” then waited for all four golfers to turn to face him. “Just remember. You’re not here to have fun today. You’re here to play golf.”

All four gentlemen smiled and laughed, and we were off on what promised to be an enjoyable loop with four heart surgeons from Los Angeles. But the trouble started on the 1st green when Paul’s man glared at him after he missed a three-foot putt for bogey. It was just a glance but enough for Paul to know that a storm was brewing. On the way to the next tee he said to me, “I’ve got a real wanker on my hands here.”

He was right. Over the course of the next three holes the surgeon made a series of horrible shots and found a way to blame Paul for each of them. I watched closely as Paul bided his time and kept his distance, giving the man the line for each shot and the read for each putt without expression before promptly walking away from the man as if he might be carrying an infectious disease. After each shot, Paul
reached for the doctor’s club, then marched out ahead as he shoved it back into the bag. The whole time I had the feeling Paul was going to walk off the course and leave the doctor to his misery.

And then we came to the 8th hole, and the poor fellow’s ball landed in a footprint in a bunker. He looked down at the lie, opened his arms to appeal to the heavens, and cried out, “That’s not fair!” By now all of us had gathered around to have a look at the injustice for ourselves. “That’s not fair!” he cried out again.

Paul casually handed him his wedge and said, “Life isn’t fair, Doctor. And it’s a good thing it isn’t, or we’d all be in Africa right now starving alongside those poor bastards instead of playing golf in Scotland.” A great hush fell over us as Paul stood the man’s golf bag on its legs and leaned over it with his head resting on the driver as if he intended to take a nice nap now that he had delivered his sermon. His golfer took three swings to send the ball out of the bunker, then climbed out himself, handed Paul his wedge, and said very calmly, “You’re right.”

The effect on the doctor was nothing less than stunning. At once he began behaving like a grown-up instead of a child. And within the next hour he and Paul were walking side by side and chatting each other up. At the clubhouse when we finished, he had one of his pals snap a photograph of the two of them with their arms around each other.

Walking back to the caddie shed, I told Paul that I had never seen such a transformation. He smiled and held out his hand to show me what the doctor had paid him. One hundred and sixty pounds.

Paul made more in one round than I made in my double. “That’s because you taught him something about life,” I said.

“Sometimes we have to,” he said. “It’s in the job description. In the fine print.” He gave me a grin, and we walked on.

It has been raining for so many days and I have been walking in wet shoes for so long that the tips of my toes have turned black with some kind of fungus. Big Gary tells me that I should soak them in boiling alcohol while drinking single-malt whiskey. “The only cure,” he says.

Today, a few hundred yards down the 1st fairway my shoes were filled with rainwater again. Even the Gore-Tex waterproofs couldn’t stop the rain, and by the time we reached the 1st green, I was soaked through to my skin and shivering with cold. Rainwater sloshing around in my crotch. Each step is a small agony in this kind of condition. You can feel your bones grinding in their sockets when you climb up the hills. And no matter how you try, rain keeps running down the back of your neck, like a cold spark. It was just survival out there for almost five hours.

When it was over, I walked the half mile to the bus stop in rain so heavy that it had strange properties of light and color, almost like spilled milk, pouring down over my head. The bus driver told me that I had to take a seat. “I can’t,” I told him. “I’m too cold.”

So I stood beside him. The bus lurched forward, and I finally allowed myself to imagine stripping off my wet clothes and stepping into the hot shower. We rolled maybe a hundred yards, just coming upon the gates to Kingsbarns, where one of the boys from the pro shop sat in a buggy waving the bus to a stop with both hands. I asked the driver what time it was. Three thirty, he said. I knew the buggy was for me and that a golfer must have shown up wanting a caddie. By eight thirty tonight I will be finished, I told myself. In five hours I will be back on the bus, heading home. In six hours I will have a hot
shower, my bowl of pea soup, and two hard rolls with butter. And then I will sleep in a bed under warm blankets.

Today is my fifty-eighth birthday, and all I have to say is this: a good, hardworking caddie doesn’t complain if his golfer is an ungrateful asshole or if he’s not properly paid or if it is pissing rain for five straight hours or if the wind is at gale force and knocks him back a half step for every step forward or if he spends hours in the rough searching for balls or marching up and down hills to the
wrong
fairways or if his bag is too heavy or if he’s hot and thirsty and his back is aching or if he has finished eighteen holes and just rolled a cigarette to relax for a few minutes when he is summoned to the 1st tee to begin another five hours with cold rainwater running down the back of his neck or if at the end of a ten-hour day he misses his bus home by three minutes and has to wait an hour in the pouring rain for the next one. It is a point of honor never to complain and in a 180-day season never to call in sick: this is how one earns the respect of his fellow caddies. And in the end, respect is all that matters to a good, hardworking caddie.

I want to earn Jack’s respect out there someday when I caddie for him. His golf team is back at practice again. The start of his fall sophomore season. I hope he has a breakthrough this season and can make the travel squad. He hasn’t written to me more than a few sentences in e-mails all summer. He’s busy, I know. There is a young girl in town here who reminds me of my Cara at home, and I can’t look at her anymore, because it makes me too sad. And the
same is true about the golden retriever at the corner who reminds me of Teddy asleep at my side of the bed waiting for me to come back. I’ve been gone five months now, and I miss Colleen terribly. Maybe this is why I have not had a single putt drop for me in the last week. Not one. And I can’t blame it all on the golfers, even though most of them are probably lousy putters. I’m not seeing the lines anymore. I was out with old John the workhorse yesterday, and when I told him that I felt like a blind man and asked him what he
sees
, he said, “I don’t see anything. I feel it with my feet.” That explains why he walks the length of the putt on each green. He feels the break with his feet.

So last night I fell asleep in my clothes again and then woke at 2:00 in the morning with the room filled with light from the moon right outside my window. I walked across the street to one of the greens on the little public course, which was lit up in moonlight bright enough for me to putt. I dropped balls all over the green, then walked the lines and tried to feel the humps and slopes with my feet. I set my BlackBerry at the hole with its lit dial for my target. I missed every putt by a mile until the moon slipped behind clouds and it was then so dark that I had to rely only on what I could feel with my feet. I began doing better. Much better. And at work today I had my confidence back, and the putts started falling again, right from the 1st hole. I was out with an old World War II vet from Illinois whose left hand was shaking badly when he putted, so I told him to rest his left elbow against his body. It worked like a charm for him. We were sitting on the stone wall at the 10th, waiting for the group in front, when he told me that he had built his little manufacturing company from the ground up. For years he had employed 280 people working three shifts. His son took over the company, and two years ago he moved the operation somewhere in Asia where he could pay workers almost nothing. This enabled the son to earn an extra 11 percent profit a year. “For 11 percent more profit, he put those good American workers out into the street, my boy did,” the old man told me. “I don’t blame him for being greedy; we all have our share of greed in us. What I blame him for is being unpatriotic.”

I’m going to remember him telling me this. When we finished and were shaking hands, I said to him, “Thank you for what you did for America.”

I now own the reputation for the biggest caddie fuckup in the brief but elegant eight-year history of the Kingsbarns Golf Links. I am the guy who has lived on a monk’s budget all season so that I could send all my money home. Seventeen pounds a week for my food, not a dime more. Which means eating soup and hard rolls six nights a week and splurging the seventh with a hamburger, which they call mince here. Watching every penny. Never going out with the guys to drink at night. I have my BlackBerry with me all the time. It is in my vest pocket on vibrate so that each time it hums, while I’m working, I have the pleasant thought that Colleen or one of the kids is writing me an e-mail. But I cannot use it as a telephone under any circumstances, because the fee would be way beyond my budget.

So today I was out with the nicest group of guys from Oklahoma. They were down to their final day in St. Andrews and had not been able to get on the Old Course. I told them the local secret, that if they showed up just before the last tee time, the starter might let them follow behind the final group and play what they call the Dark Hours. Then I offered to make a call to the one starter I knew there to see how it looked for today. I made the call standing on the 10th tee and got an answering machine. So I left a message, and we played on.

It wasn’t until an hour ago, just after nine o’clock tonight, that I realized I had somehow failed to hang up the phone. I had left a
five-hour-and-twenty-three-minute message. When I called AT&T, they told me it cost $889.45. The math. I am averaging £63 per loop, which means I will have to do eighty-three loops to earn that money back. Impossible.

“I was never much of a church person,” old Burton in his threadbare plaid trousers whispered to me on the 16th green. “My church was always on a golf course.” There were eight of us—four golfers and four caddies—all in hushed silence while one fellow prepared to putt. There is a churchlike nature to the structures and rituals of golf. Kneeling down to line up a putt. Heads bowed over each shot. The searching. The arms opened, eyes turned to the heavens exhorting the gods for some explanation of why we keep thinning our long irons. The dreadful and penitent march to where your ball disappeared hopelessly into the rough, praying for salvation—that you’ll be able to get a club on it, or at least find it. All of these transactions conducted in a peaceful quiet that sometimes seems to enter you.

Today I carried my golfer’s medication in the inside pocket of my vest. A small plastic box like the kind fishermen keep their flies in. He handed this to me on the 1st tee. “Dynamite,” he said. “Nitroglycerin for my angina. Not enough blood flowing to the heart.”

He was stooped at the shoulders and he walked with a limp, but he had wonderful, restless blue eyes and a great story. He was stuck in a nursing home by his children somewhere in Missouri where everyone was sitting around waiting to die, and he was just dying to get out and play golf while he still could. “I’d never used a computer in my life,” he told me. “And I didn’t know the Internet from the
interstate, but one of the nurses showed me the ropes.” He spent most of a year doing Google searches and Facebook searches, trying to find out if he had any old friends left in the real world. Finally one turned up. “That man right there,” he told me, pointing to his pal Nigel. “We were at Stanford together doing graduate work in the 1950s. I hadn’t spoken to him in thirty years. But he sprung me from the nursing home. Just drove up in his Lincoln and took me the hell out of there one night. And here we are now.” All Burton brought with him were his golf clothes. He was so paranoid his kids would find out and come after him that when they made the reservations for this trip, he used a false name.