Walking with Jack (22 page)

Of all things, my friend Charlie Woodworth invited me to play golf at the Country Club today. It was a summer day in Brookline. We had spoken for a couple of years about meeting up there, but one thing or another had always derailed our plans. He’d called me almost every day since I told him about Buddy’s death, and I knew that he had reserved this round of golf in his busy schedule to try to lift my spirits.

I don’t remember the drive down at all. I just kept thinking that a week had already passed since the wake, when I’d held Cara at the casket.

On the practice range we met the two fellows whom we would compete against in match play. John, from England, and Rob, from Houston, who couldn’t have been more welcoming. Charlie had told Rob that Jack and I would be there all winter on the tour, and he didn’t hesitate to offer up the names of some people in the city who might help us. I didn’t hear the names. I just stood there nodding like an idiot and thanking him.

Then I was alone with my clubs, which I had used twice in the past year. I took out my pitching wedge and dropped two balls at my feet. As I went through a few swings to loosen up, I glanced past the starter’s hut, across the lawn, to the caddie shed, painted that dark green of summer cottages, where a few boys drowsed in the warm sunlight, their morning newspapers in their laps, like well-heeled pensioners rather than refugees from the economy that had most certainly left them behind long ago. The thought ran through my mind that I would give almost anything to be caddying this morning instead of playing.

I stepped up to the first ball, locked the wedge across the palm of my left hand, took aim at the hundred-yard flag, and swung. The ball sailed high, then dropped out of the sky, hitting the stick squarely on the way down with a dull clank. A few of the other golfers to my right looked up. My second shot sailed off on an identical flight path, landed about five feet in front of the pin, then rattled it solidly on one bounce, with roughly the same clank. It was enough to make me think that Charlie was right, a round of golf was just what I needed.

But it was not meant to be of course. I played like an orphaned dog, struggling to find my way right from the first hooked tee shot. Characteristic of most people who play when their heart is not in the game, I missed all the easy shots and then somehow pulled off a couple of miraculous ones.

Charlie was standing beside me on the 11th tee, an endless par-5 carved like a dream through a valley of towering shade trees and rock outcroppings. I was trying to remember something that had transpired since those two wedge shots on the range, but all I could think of was Cara and her Buddy. “It could have been my son, or yours, Charlie,” I whispered to him.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

On the 16th tee, he pointed through the trees to where Francis Ouimet lived on Clyde Street and reminded me that in his nearly flawless second round of the U.S. Open in 1913, Francis had seen his father through the trees from this tee box—a man who plagued his young life—and took a double bogey on the course’s only easy hole. I asked him if he thought I was right about encouraging Jack to play the tour to try to help him believe in himself again. “Absolutely,” Charlie said. “That’s our job. Whenever they start doubting themselves, we need to step in.” I thanked him before I pushed my nine-iron just enough to miss the green and catch the fringe, the first mistake in a series of three that squandered another par.

Almost every round of golf gives you something to remember. What I will take with me from today is the sight of Charlie walking the fairways with a jug of grass seed in his right hand, filling
divots all the way around. It’s been part of his daily walk for years, an expression of his affection for the land. He fills about a hundred divots per round, going through two or three jugs of seed, and still manages to finish eighteen holes in two and a half hours if he’s first off the tee with fleet Marlon on his bag and the greenkeepers let him play through. After all the misery and slaughter I’ve seen on golf courses, particularly at the Castle Course, where so often the golfers resembled mourners in search of the funeral procession to the cemetery, I am going to hold on to the picture in my mind of Charlie at the Country Club, merrily shooting another round just off par while seeding the Brookline fairways of his boyhood like a farmer tending his fields.

The evening stars were bright outside the bedroom window, and Colleen was falling asleep while I sat on our bed booking a room for Jack and me at the Studio Plus hotel, in a part of Houston called Greenspoint. I leaned over and whispered, “It’s got cable TV for Jack. A queen bed for him. A pullout couch for me. Caddies have slept on much worse. A full kitchen so we can save money on food. Both of us in one room. We’ll be together there. We’ll be okay.”

“You told me in Scotland that you were never going to leave me again,” she said. I kissed her and tried to say I was sorry.

“How will he do?” she asked.

“He hasn’t played in competition in almost three years. We’ll get our asses hauled for a while, I suppose.”

“You have to promise me that you’ll bring him home for Christmas,” she said. And so I did.

I boarded the 6:00 a.m. bus to Boston in darkness, remembering how this journey in golf began five years ago when Jack and I rode this bus to Logan Airport to fly to Carnoustie. There was no way I ever could have known then that I would return to Scotland to work as a caddie. That I would work one season there because of an old dream of one day caddying for Jack, and then return for a second season to show him that I had not given up on that dream. How could I ever have known that he and I would one day be heading to Texas? It all feels like scenes from a dream. Except for the things that I am worried about. First, I am not going to say anything about my right knee or the injection I had to try to relieve some of the pain. I won’t let on that I’m really scared his old truck might break down somewhere along the highway between Toledo and Houston. Thirteen hundred miles. But really I am worried about his truck. I wanted to lease us a new car for four months, but the cost was prohibitive. I don’t want to trouble him with my worries about money either. He has raised $8,100 from friends of our family and members at Inverness. And I have $6,000 left from my second season caddying in Scotland. We should make it if we are careful.

In Chicago, at gate B1 everyone was gathered around a computer monitor watching a massive snowstorm move up the East Coast. I got the last flight out of Boston before the storm moved in. A good sign, I think.

———

Motel 6, outside Cincinnati. Jack greeted me outside the Southwest terminal in Cleveland with a quick bear hug and these words: “Are you ready, man?”

A caddie must show no fear, only absolute confidence, and so I replied: “You bet I am. Let’s hit the road.”

We drove until eight, then stopped at this Motel 6 just south of Cincinnati to watch the Stanford football game. First we ate a steak dinner at a mom-and-pop restaurant that was staffed by four young women who were all overweight by at least seventy pounds. We both noticed. “They live in this town, I’m betting,” I said. “They have dreams.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “Whenever I’m just passing through some place, I realize that some people live their whole lives there. Amazing, really. Maybe working at this place their whole lives. What do you think they dream about becoming?”

“Our waitress? Maybe she dreamed of being a ballerina before she got so heavy. That changed the dream.”

“Maybe not. Maybe she dreams of losing all that fat and becoming a ballerina after all.”

“Good thought,” I said.

She served us beer in these immense glasses. Must have been thirty ounces, which took me forever to finish, and while we sat there, we talked for the first time in my life about my own dream, which was to become a big-league baseball player. Over the years, I’d told Jack a few things, but never the real version. Tonight he pushed me for the facts. “You never told me why you walked away,” he said.

So I laid it out as accurately as I could recall. “I was at the end of my sophomore season in college. Nineteen years old. I led the ECAC in batting all season long. I was playing a doubleheader at Boston College. After the game a scout for the Pirates walked up to me with my coach. I’d had scouts at most of my games. I remember this man saying, ‘That catch you made in the third inning. I only know three center fielders who could have run that down. All of them are in the
big leagues.’ It didn’t even faze me. I was really cocky then. I knew I was going to make it to the majors. I’d never doubted it since I was a kid. My grandmother used to listen to the Phillies games with me on her little radio, and she’d tell me over and over, ‘Someday, Donnie, I’m going to be listening to you play.’

“Anyway, when the bus got back to campus from Boston, there was a group of students protesting on the football field. A big group. A couple hundred of them. This was May 1970. I got off the bus and wandered over with one of my teammates, and someone told us that students had just been shot at Kent State. I’d never paid any attention to politics of any kind before. I was just a jock, period, struggling through an English lit major and barely holding on. But this really got to me. I remember feeling like there was a whole world out there that I knew nothing about and that I had to start educating myself. Our season ended when the student strikes began. I never played baseball again. I started writing poetry instead. Lousy poetry. I remember my father calling me at college one night and telling me that if I walked away from baseball, I would regret it the rest of my life.”

I stopped there and said, “I’m never going to finish this beer.”

“Was Granddad right?” Jack asked.

“You mean, did I regret it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes. All my life,” I said.

Before I fell asleep halfway through the second quarter, missing a Stanford victory in triple overtime, we talked about the tour. Jack brought all the clothes he owns in two big duffel bags. “Thirty-two golf shirts,” he said.

“That should be plenty,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll do well and head straight to another tour from Houston,” he said.

His optimism encouraged me. “Yeah,” I said immediately. “That sounds like a great plan.”

We crawled out of the Motel 6 at dawn like fugitives, scraped the ice off the windshield of the truck, and hit the highway. I was up an hour earlier trying to walk the stiffness out of my knee in the dark parking lot, remembering when I stepped into the hole just below the bunker up the right side of the 12th fairway at the Castle Course almost eighteen months ago. A million miles from Little Rock, Arkansas, where we are now so we can watch the Eagles tonight. The truck is running well. Jack won’t let me drive, but that’s okay. I’m the old guy along for the ride, I guess.

We have only 440 miles to go, and I am finally more relaxed about the drive. We talked about maybe stopping here on our way back in late February to see a University of Arkansas basketball game. Then we’ll drive the second day to Louisville and watch another game there. At the end of February, just before March Madness begins. I suggested this because I need to think of us on the other end of this journey. I don’t know why. Maybe I just don’t like being so far from Colleen and Teddy anymore. I am a little homesick. When you drive instead of fly, you watch a strange landscape sailing past you for twenty hours, and you know in your soul that you have ventured far from home.

Ten hours today hammering through Kentucky, Tennessee, and into Arkansas, we passed an unrelenting procession of tractor-trailer trucks blasting exhaust into the air in order to deliver all the stuff we’re buying on the Internet. And so many people moving everything they own in beat-up trucks. Like the Joad family in
The Grapes
of Wrath
. At the steering wheel the same man with a face as beat-up as his truck. Father. Husband. Maybe heading somewhere to look for work. Chasing a new dream perhaps.

Houston, Texas. We crossed into Texas at 11:00 a.m. with another three hundred miles to go to Houston. This part of the state is brown from a long, punishing drought, which means the rough on the golf courses will not be thick. U2 was blasting from Jack’s iPhone through the radio speakers as we rolled past boarded-up businesses and rusting mobile homes and shotgun shacks and car wrecks that need to be hauled away, and Walmarts that stay open twenty-four hours a day, and sheet-metal churches that offer the only hope, with buzzards circling the big sky overhead. I kept thinking, Thank God I never had to move my family here.

The Studio Plus, our new home until the end of February, will be fine, I think. Jack said, “Cool, this will work,” as we entered the room for the first time. One room about thirty by thirty, divided into a kitchen and bath and sitting area, where the couch pulls out into my bed, just across from Jack’s double bed. The first thing Jack did was check the water pressure in the shower, recalling how bad it was in our B&B in Carnoustie, where we stood, frozen after each round, under a weary trickle. I walked outside to see if there was any grass, and I found a nice patch of Bermuda rough at the far end of the parking lot where Jack can practice his wedges.

———

We put our stuff in the drawers and closet and then found our way to Walmart, where we bought two weeks of groceries for $184 and loaded everything into the back of the truck except for the beer and eggs, which I held on my lap.

I am up at 4:00 a.m. writing in this diary while Jack sleeps across the room. He looks comfortable. We sat up watching the Monday night game until around eleven. Before last night I had not watched a single sporting event on television from start to finish in maybe six years. I had fallen asleep during every World Series game this fall. Living in Scotland with no TV for so long, I lost my appetite for it, but now the TV is the center of our room here, and when we are not out on the golf course, we will be watching sports. And that is comforting to me because it reminds me of all the happy hours Jack and I spent watching sports on TV when he was little. Just listening to him breathe in his sleep feels like a privilege to me. The same kind of privilege I used to feel as the last caddie out on the Old Course at the end of a day. It has something to do with time, and history, but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s just the feeling you get when you realize you are standing in a moment that you are always going to remember.