Walking with Jack (2 page)

Jack sat beside me on that flight. He was still wetting his bed then, and sometime during the night he’d awakened to discover that he had soaked his seat on the 747. He woke me, crying softly. I told
him it was nothing to worry about. I opened the half-empty bottle of Chardonnay from dinner and poured a healthy splash onto the seat while his eyes widened. “The pilots will think somebody spilled their wine, that’s all,” I told him. He smiled at me, crawled into my lap, and fell peacefully back to sleep in my arms.

We are going to be crossing the ocean again together in a few weeks to play golf in Scotland at a place called Carnoustie, on the Championship Course, because to play that track in the dead of winter is the toughest challenge in all of golf. It is the Mount Everest of the game, and I want us to do something hard together—to try to give Jack something to believe in again now that he no longer believes in himself. Something that will mark the long arc of our lives in such a way that as I grow into an old man, whenever he comes to see me from wherever he has ventured in this world, I will ask him as he steps through the door, “Well, Jack, have you met anyone yet who ever played the Championship Course at Carnoustie in the dead of winter?” And he will always say, “Nobody but us, Daddy.”

As I write this, it is seven below zero here in Maine. A balmy twenty-nine in Carnoustie, according to the Internet. Ever since I bought the plane tickets, I’ve been afraid Jack was going to tell me that he was too busy to make the trip.

KLM flight 1279 out of Boston’s Logan Airport. Five hours ago we took off from a sleeted runway for Amsterdam, where we will catch a flight to Edinburgh tomorrow morning. Everyone is asleep around
me, including Jack, and I am thinking about history. I consider reading, but I’d rather think. When was the last time I’d read to Jack? It must have been
Curious George
. How many years ago? Twelve, fourteen? In a small room with a painted red floor, under the eaves in a beach house we were renting, I read to him in the room where I put him to bed with his Batman figures. I always stopped in the threshold each morning to watch him sleep, on my way back from the kitchen with my first cup of coffee at 4:00. On one of those mornings while he was sleeping, I strung fishing line across the ceiling from the corners of the room, then glued a paper clip to Batman’s arm so he was hanging in the air above Jack when he awoke.

His eyes are closed now as the plane sails toward the morning light of a new day. He has the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up and his iPod plugged into his ears. I can’t see even a trace of the little boy I recall, and in his absence I wonder why I stopped reading to him at night, sending him off into his sleep with a story. I had once known his bedtime patterns so well. The way he rubbed his eyes to try to stay awake. Then the last deep breath he took just before he conked out, as if he were going underwater until morning. I had delighted in learning his routines. There was a stretch of time when he would awaken in the night and come looking for me, wobbling like a little drunk as he weaved his way down the hallway to my room, dragging his blue blanket behind him. There were nights when I let him climb into bed and sleep between Colleen and me. I guess those nights ended after his younger sister, Cara, arrived. He must have known then that his time had passed and that he was on his own. I never thought of this before, but now as I close my eyes, I can picture him at the side of my bed, his eyes pleading for the chance to climb in beside me. How could I have ever disappointed him when all he wanted was to be closer? How do we do this as parents, how do we pull away? I’d probably been standing on some principle that seemed important then: How can my son go on to conquer the world if he can’t learn to sleep through a night in his own bed? Now that seems ridiculous. It is all just guesswork anyway, isn’t it, being a parent?
And why wasn’t I prescient enough to realize then that a time was coming when I would have given away all my earthly possessions to open my eyes in the night and find my son standing there beside me, wanting to be close?

And let me write this here so I can read it again someday to remind myself: if you get to live in this world and have the privilege of a little boy wanting nothing more than to be close to you, you have no right to ask for anything more ever again. Or, to put it a different way: if you have been loved by a girl who pours her desire upon you and then places one stunning baby after another in your arms, then you have shared the sacred time and been granted immortality.

The Edinburgh Airport … By the time I discovered that I was in the wrong line for the car I’d rented on the Internet, I had forgotten what I was waiting in line for.

The man behind the counter seemed to sympathize with Jack when he said he couldn’t believe I’d neglected to write down the name of the rental company.

“Well, it says Auto Europe right here,” I said, showing the man the printout.

“That’s not the name of the rental agency,” he remarked.

“Yeah,” Jack chimed in, “that’s just the company that booked it.”

How does he know these things? I wondered miserably as we went from desk to desk inquiring if anyone had a car reserved under our last name, Snyder. Sometime during that aimless walk, I sent Jack to buy us something to drink so I could take the morning stomach pill I’d been taking for seven years that never failed to dilute the
heartburn that was presently spreading through my chest. By the time he returned, I had found our place, and the woman working on my forms was asking me for the second time if I was sure I didn’t want the additional insurance at £20 a day. I’d booked the car from America in U.S. dollars, $220 for the week. Twenty pounds insurance a day, with the pound equaling $2.22, would mean that the insurance would end up costing more than the car. It seemed like a racket to me.

“No insurance,” I said again. Then, with what I intended to be humor, “The insurance companies in this world are making fools of all of us.”

She raised her eyebrows at Jack with an expression that said, Not the wisest father for a lad to be stuck with, as she said, “Okay, then. If you have an accident, you’ll be required to pay the full value of the automobile.”

“I understand,” I said. “We’re just going to Carnoustie. It’s not too far from here, is it?”

“Where’s that?” she asked. And her colleague beside her had never heard of the place either.

Jack gave me an exasperated look.

“There’s a famous golf course there,” I said, “and you must have someone here who can tell us how to get there. And where’s the rental car from here?”

“You’ll have to take a bus,” she said.

“A bus to the car?”

“That’s right.”

Just before a young man from the back room began giving us directions to Carnoustie, I realized that I had mistakenly swallowed not my morning stomach pill but the pill I had to take every night to put me to sleep. I’d consolidated them for the trip into one container.

“You take a bus from outside to lot number [
number what?
]. Then you’ll go out the [
what?
] exit. Take the [
oh God …
] northbound to the [
are you kidding me?!
] motorway, which will take you to the [
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
] across the [
we’re screwed
] Bridge.”

I was watching his lips move as he talked, but his words weren’t reaching me. I turned to Jack. “Did you get all that?” I asked.

You know that feeling when someone gives you a photograph he’s taken of you recently, maybe at a party, and you look at it and think, This is how I really appear to the world? It’s the cold proof that each of us lacks the ability to see ourselves the way others see us. At the wheel of the little Fiat that Jack began calling “the Death Machine,” I wanted to look cool, debonair, even a little defiant as I drove on the left side of the road for the first time in my life and used a stick shift for the first time in twenty years. But my last decade of life spent cruising suburbia in the living room of a minivan had emasculated me to the point where I could sing castrato in a musical about Mario Andretti.

And I had wanted this to be my big moment, my chance to lift the value of my stock in my son’s eyes. Golf cap on backward, cigarette clenched between my teeth, hands pounding the steering wheel to the drumbeat of a blaring radio, cup of black coffee steaming beside me, power shifting through the corners. Instead, I was hunched over the wheel like Nanny before the state took her license away.

“At that last turn,” Jack said somberly, whipping his head around from where he’d just surveyed the damage out our rear window, “you almost killed two people.”

“I did not,” I protested. But I knew it had been close. Blame it on a lost night’s sleep, bad food, not enough food, too much food, nothing to drink, and the damned sleeping pill, whatever; I was not adapting to this new driving experience. “I need you to get into my golf bag,” I said to him. “Find me a pill for my stomach.”

It was funny and it wasn’t funny. I could usher Jack through the Elysian fields of golf here in Scotland, but if I failed to deliver him back home safely into his mother’s arms, all bets were off.

“I’ve got really bad heartburn,” I said as he crawled over the seat for me.

“You should have put me down as a driver,” he complained.

“Cost too much.”

“I thought we weren’t going to worry about money.”

“I don’t want to argue about it,” I said. “I’ve got to pull off and get some coffee. My eyes are
closing
!” This wasn’t my finest moment.

The sign said there were services up ahead, three miles. I had plenty of time to prepare for the turnoff, but when I entered the parking area outside the gas station, I kept getting beeped at. It was like something out of an old Peter Sellers movie. “You’re going the
wrong way
!” Jack screamed at me.

That was it. I floored it and sped back out onto the highway, where driving like a madman was acceptable.

“Jesus,” he mumbled.

“How could I have been going the wrong way?”

“Okay,” I heard him say calmly. “From now on I’m going to shift for you so you stop trying to shift with the door handle.”

I looked down at his hand on the shifter. “Now,” I said as the engine ramped up. He shifted into fourth.

At each roundabout he turned in his seat and surveyed the oncoming traffic, until he started calling, “Not yet … Not yet … Not yet … 
Now!
”—then I would goose it.

Soon I was enjoying myself, driving forty miles per hour over the speed limit like everyone else.

“Carnoustie,” I said just above a whisper as we pulled in to town and made our way along High Street, passing the two-story stone flats joined together at the shoulders, the modest storefronts and pubs drowsing under a low black sky. It was 11:30 in the morning on January 15 and almost impossible to imagine that in July a hundred million golfers around the world would be tuned in to the British Open taking place here. Today the streets, blackened by rain, were empty. Windswept waves off the North Sea pounded the shore in a thunderous concussion. It was dark and desolate everywhere you looked. There was nothing—no bright splash of paint or color—to relieve this darkness and the feeling that we had wandered into an abandoned
town or some ancient film set that no one had taken the time to disassemble and cart away. Even the open fields slanting away from the village center were pale and featureless, just as they must have been in the early eleventh century, when this land was part of the Kingdom of Alba and most of England had been overtaken by Danes who were attempting to conquer the rest of the country. Here in this dark, foreboding place they ran into formidable opposition when warriors from nearby territories led by Malcolm II, king of Scots, got into the fight. It was brutal, and rumor has it that the river that winds through the center of town and pours into the sea at the railway station was red with blood for three days. The name given to this place, Carnoustie, means resting place of heroes. It is also attributed to “Crow’s Nestle” because of a plague of crows that once infested the area.

This morning there were no crows and no heroes in sight. I watched Jack scowling at the empty streets as we crossed the black river. You could see the hardness of people’s lives in the stone cottages stained by age and weather. Nothing could be pretended in a place like this. It was what it was, and as the golf course first appeared to us, a treeless, windswept plain standing beside an angry, boiling sea, I fell in love with its unwelcoming style, its cold shoulder. It was just a barren stretch of ground with a few flags waving and giant craters filled with sand. Throw in some rotting corpses and you’d have a perfect battlefield.

“Look at this place,” I said. “Isn’t it spectacular? A true public relations nightmare. Can you imagine the suffering here? Can you picture the fat-cat businessman from Texas who arrives here with his big cigars and his cell phone and all the latest golf technology only to get the piss beaten out of him in such a forlorn outpost?”

It was just as I had imagined it and I was excited.

“Calm down,” Jack said.

Maybe I took this the wrong way. “Nobody in this place ever heard of a 401(k),” I said. “I heard you and your buddies talking about them once when you were playing poker in our basement. You’re not
even out of school, for Christ’s sake. There’s a real barbarity to the cosseted life everybody in America desires so badly. You should run in the opposite direction of a 401 (k).”

He just shook his head at me. “We’re here to play golf. Golf? Plaid pants. Knickers. Country clubs. Lives of privilege. It’s all the same. Golf is part of the world you’re always ranting against.”

Smart-ass, I said under my breath. “Hotel first, or the golf course?”I asked as I picked up speed.

“Golf course,” he answered.

I turned and watched him taking it all in. “Sergio García just turned pro when he came to play in the Open here in 1999,” I told him.