Deep Rough

by A. J. Stewart

  He smiled. “I missed the cut.”

  Ron returned with a lemonade for McAllen and a club soda for Danielle. I was sure after being in the heat all day she would be keen for something harder, but that would have to wait. She had a thing about not drinking in uniform. She was like that. Me, I’d quit any job that required a uniform if that was the rule.

  “You a local?” McAllen asked me.

  “More or less. Originally from New England. Local now.”

  “I thought I heard a little bit of accent. You like it here?”

  “I do. It’s home.”

  McAllen nodded and sipped his drink.

  “How about you?” I asked. “You got a home? I mean, you guys seem to travel a lot.”

  “We do that. But no, in the US I don’t have a home. I have a place in Edinburgh, and one in London. But I was thinking about getting something in America. Maybe down here.” He looked at Danielle. “What do you think, Danielle? Think you could find room for a Scotsman around here?”

  “There are plenty of golf courses, that’s for sure,” she said.

  Ron added, “I know a few players have homes around PGA National.”

  “I’d like to be near the beach.”

  “Try Jupiter,” I said. “Plenty of beaches, plenty of private homes and compounds.”

  “Jupiter?” he said. “I’d live there just to be able to say I lived on Jupiter.” He grinned again. He was an engaging guy. He didn’t seem to carry the ego I would have associated with the world’s number one player. Not to say he wasn’t confident. He was certainly sure of himself. He was young, and he was fit and he wasn’t a bad-looking kid. I remembered feeling like that. I don’t know where it went. Or when.

  I said, “Tiger’s got a place there, so I understand.”

  “That so? I’ll have to check it out. Listen, thanks for the drink. I gotta get back to the hotel. Put in a bit of gym time before bed. It was nice meeting you all. Hope we can chat again.”

  “We’re here all week,” I said. It didn’t even sound funny to me, but the kid nodded and winked, like he had when he had walked by me on arrival earlier that day.

  He strode away around the outside of the clubhouse. I figured he knew the inside would take ten times longer to pass through. Such was the burden of celebrity.

  “Nice guy,” said Danielle.

  “He’s not what you think he’s going to be, is he?” said Ron.

  “You guys wandering around in the dark together?” I asked Danielle.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

  “Only of the swing.”

  “He was walking the course. I don’t even know what that means. But I found him wandering around the first green with a flashlight. I thought he might be some kind of trouble.”

  “A flashlight?”

  “He said he likes to get a feel for the greens. He was actually down on his haunches, literally feeling the grass.”

  “That’s dedicated,” said Ron.

  I had to agree. You didn’t get into any pro sport without talent. But you didn’t get to the top without a good old-fashioned work ethic.

  I asked Danielle, “You done?”

  “I most certainly am. How about a ride home? There’s a bottle of sav blanc in the fridge.”

  “Done deal. Ron?”

  “I’ll walk out with you. Cassandra will be home, and I’ve got to be back early tomorrow.”

  “You get paid to be here?” I asked as we followed McAllen’s lead and wandered around the side of the clubhouse.

  “No,” said Ron. “A lot of members volunteer their time. It doesn’t matter. The club’s paying you.”

  I shrugged. All questions of solvency aside, I hoped I would get paid. But first I hoped I’d figure out what exactly was going on.

  We wandered around to the parking lot and I told Danielle I had parked at the back. She had been on her feet all day, and I felt bad about it. She didn’t seem put out, but Ron said his car was in the one of the reserved spaces at the front and he’d drop us off. We wandered along the sidewalk at the front of the clubhouse to Ron’s Camry.

  It was an old beat-up model that he’d had for years, and despite living in Palm Beach he seemed to show no inclination to get rid of it. To her credit his lady, Cassandra, had never suggested that he get rid of it either. But right now it wasn’t going anywhere. A big lump of a man in white coveralls was sitting on the hood, holding a can of beer. Two similarly dressed guys with beers were on the sidewalk near him. I noted they weren’t Jiffy Lube coveralls at all. They had a lot more pockets. They were like full-body utility belts.

  “Help you?” I said.

  He looked at me through a heavy brow. “What?”

  “You’re sitting on my friend’s car.”

  He looked down as if that news were a surprise to him. “This piece of crap.”

  I noted his accent. East end of London was my guess. I waited for him to call me guv’ner.

  “Yes,” I said. “That piece of crap. You might want to get off so you don’t get dumped off when we leave.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  I was right. It was like a frat party.

  “Your call. You can do it now, or you can do it at sixty-five on the freeway. No difference to me.”

  “You Yanks really think you’re something.” He slipped off Ron’s car and stood before me. He was a big unit. And he sure as hell wasn’t a golfer. He was an inch taller than me but a good six inches wider at the shoulders. And I have pitcher’s shoulders.

  “You got something to say to me, mate?”

  I shook my head and Danielle stepped into his line of sight.

  “Sir, perhaps you’ve had enough to drink.”

  The guy looked Danielle up and down. Then he did it a second time. That wasn’t surprising. The first look was to confirm the uniform. The second look was to confirm who was wearing the uniform. It was the third look that annoyed me.

  “You get the girls to fight your battles. Typical.”

  I said nothing. Ron moved to open his car and leave the loudmouth to his business, whatever that was. Drinking apparently. Which I had no conceptual issue with. I don’t mind a drink. I don’t mind if another guy has one. I don’t even mind if he chooses to drink to excess. It’s mean drunks that I can’t stand. I could tell you some bitter story about my dad being an angry drunk, but that wouldn’t be true. He certainly hit the bottle hard after my mother died, but he never hit anyone else. He never so much as raised his voice. He was a quiet drunk, the kind that keeps it to himself, and then gets in a car and drives and kills himself and the person he smashes into. He was that kind of a drunk.

  But this guy was just plain unsociable. Danielle decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and stepped off the sidewalk and opened the door. The big Englishman stood looking at me. And I at him. I probably should have followed Danielle’s lead. I should probably always follow Danielle’s lead. But the guy took a step toward me. He faked a head butt that didn’t get within a nine iron of me, so I didn’t flinch. He didn’t like that much. He turned his beer can upside down and poured the contents all over my shoes. Like I say, unsociable. Then he crushed the can, and threw it at my forehead. Then he stood there with a silly smirk on his face.

  So I punched him in the throat.

  I don’t care how big you are. If you can’t breathe, you’re done. He doubled over and then dropped to his knees, gasping and making choking noises. I stood there long enough to confirm that he wasn’t in fact choking, and when the wheezing breaths starting popping out of him I stepped over to Ron’s car and got in the backseat.

  Ron drove us to the rear of the lot and dropped us at my car, and then took off for the island. I opened up and slipped down into the driver’s seat. Danielle got in next to me. She was quiet. I wondered if I had stepped over a line. Not my line. I was well and truly still within my boundaries. But Danielle was a deputy, and she believed in the process and the rule of law. She liked the fact
that there were checks and balances, although she wasn’t ignorant of the fact that no system was perfect. I didn’t care about that guy. He’d get over it. His buddies would pick him up and dust him off and then they would all go grab another beer and rant about me, and about Americans in general, apparently. What I did care about was disappointing Danielle. I could live with most things, but that was hard to swallow.

  So I felt sheepish and I sat for moment in the uncomfortable silence of the car. Then I took my licks and I looked at her.

  And she winked at me.

  I started the car and I pulled out and set sail for Singer Island, thinking to myself: Miami Jones, you really are the luckiest guy on the face of the whole damn planet.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Trouble.”

  It’s one hell of a way to wake up. Danielle had flopped on the bed and slapped my side and said that word. Trouble. You can take it to the bank that it wasn’t a broken fingernail when it came from the mouth of a deputy. They have a different barometer from the rest of us. It yanked me from my slumber and for a moment I was dizzy. I was that deep under. I was having the sleep of the dead. Danielle’s wink in the car the previous night didn’t move more than an inch either side of smack center in my mind on the drive home, and I was in one feisty mood when I threw the front door open. But sometimes the heavens are in sync, and she laid a hard, wet kiss on me and the rest was the stuff of legend, but not the kind I’m going to tell. I raised my head from the pillow and saw her naked form bouncing toward the bathroom. I gave more than serious consideration to following her in, but then that word popped in my mind again.

  Trouble.

  There were several sheriff’s vehicles in the lot when we got to the club. I don’t know what it is about law enforcement types, but they do love to park haphazardly. Three cars took enough space for a half dozen trucks. I parked at the back of the lot and we walked in. Danielle’s hair was tied back and under a PBSO ball cap. It surprised me when I realized how rarely I saw the deputies wearing headwear in such a sun-drenched part of the world. We went in through the front door and out the back through the dining room and broke left across the seventeenth tee.

  Trouble wasn’t hard to find. The sheriff’s crew had left a trail like army ants. And they had attracted a crowd. Players, caddies, one guy who had arms like a Swedish masseur. The crowd parted for Danielle’s uniform and then she held up the yellow police tape and we moved in closer. Closer, but not close.

  A ring of deputies stood hands on hips, facing the large water hazard that Ron had called the Pacific. Nearby someone had draped a nylon sheet on the grass, clearly to cover something. We joined the ring and looked at the water. It was flat and peaceful, like its namesake ocean. And like the ocean, that didn’t tell the whole story. But I couldn’t see what the story was. Nothing was happening. Eventually I got bored.

  “So did someone find something, or what?” I asked.

  I shrugged at Danielle and she shook her head. Another deputy looked past her at me. I recalled his name was Prosser.

  “Greenskeeper saw a hand in the water when he was passing by at dawn. He called it in. We got here and pulled that out.” He nodded toward the sheet on the ground.

  “That doesn’t look like a person,” I said. “Not a full-size one, anyway.”

  “It’s not. It’s an arm. Shoulder down.”

  “Grim.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. It’s been pulled off like a chicken wing.”

  “Eew,” I said. Danielle frowned at me. Perhaps eew was not a particularly macho response, but Prosser didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Oh, I know what happened,” he said. “Nearly scared the breakfast burrito out of me.”

  “What?”

  He nodded back to the water. It was a decent expanse of blue-gray and looked from our vantage point across to the third fairway. There were reeds on our side. Not many. Enough to give the scene color. A ring of reddish-brown mulch was laid around the water line. It could have been a postcard. But I didn’t see anything scary.

  And then I did. You look hard enough you always do. They don’t carry scuba flags to warn people. Low in the water, not even a ripple. Two holes—nostrils, and a long snout. And a set of unblinking reptilian eyes.

  A gator.

  The famous Florida alligator. It was not an unusual occurrence to find a gator in a lake in Florida. There were plenty of gators and even more small lakes. Every housing development plan started by digging a hole in the ground to fill with water and create a “lake” so they could sell water views. And sometimes gators happened into those lakes. Many bodies of fresh water in Florida had signs warning that there could be alligators down below. And it wasn’t all that strange that someone got eaten. It happened. Not as regularly as lightning, but more often than presidential elections. Every summer or two some knucklehead would go swimming despite the signs, and they wouldn’t come back. But what was odd was that this had happened on a golf course. People don’t generally go for a dip in a golf course lake.

  “You seen one of these before?” I asked Prosser.

  He nodded. “Sure. Had one the year before last. College guy. There was video. His buddies put it on YouTube.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Got that right. Worst of it was, the guy is standing right next to the do not swim sign. He slaps the sign, a picture of a gator right there, and he yells screw you gators. Those are his last words. Screw you gators. Then he jumps in. Was like a frog in a blender.” Prosser shook his head but broke into a smile. Law enforcement types have pretty warped senses of humor. It’s a way to cope with what they see, day in, day out. I raised my eyebrows to Danielle and gave her the furrows.

  “You had to ask,” she whispered. It was true—I did have to.

  “So what now?”

  “First we gotta get that damn gator outta there. Then we’ll get some divers in and see how many parts we can find.”

  “Who’s going to get the gator out?”

  Prosper smiled wide. “Not me, brother.”

  I decided with that to keep my trap shut, lest I volunteer myself for something.

  We waited a half hour, and then a guy from animal control turned up. He looked prepared for a picnic, but far from ready to wrangle a gator. He carried a pole in one hand and a cooler in the other. That was it. I took more equipment on a butterfly hunt. He held a little powwow with Prosser and another deputy, and then stepped toward the water. Prosser came back over to us.

  “He thinks it might be challenging.”

  “Challenging?” I said. “That’s what he thinks?”

  “He says the gator might be full. He might not take the bait.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t take the bait?”

  “They go in after him.”

  I’d never seen anyone try to catch an alligator before. I recall seeing that crazy crocodile hunter guy on television once, but he mounted them like a jockey. That didn’t seem the appropriate tactic. And it wasn’t. What I learned was, it is incredibly easy to catch a gator. It’s incredibly dangerous too, don’t get me wrong. But the animal control guy wandered up to the water’s edge and put his cooler down and his pole down and stood for a moment, looking at the gator like he was surveying a fishing hole. Then he opened the cooler and removed a massive chunk of meat. It was like a pot roast for an army battalion. The meat had a thick rope tied around it, and the animal control guy straightened out the rope and coiled it on the ground, and then he wound up like he was tossing a horseshoe and swung the meat around and around and then flung it out into the water.

  The gator wasn’t in any hurry. But he was like a cat, and curiosity got the better of him. I knew the feeling. The big beast drifted toward the meat that was sinking into the lake. Even in movement the gator made barely a ripple. Then he got serious. He thrashed his tail and leaped forward and snapped down hard on the meat with an audible crunch. Everyone in th
e crowd winced at the sound, and most of us cast a glance at the sheet on the ground.

  Next the animal control guy pulled the rope in. That was it. That was the secret. No hooks or barbs or traps. He pulled the gator to the bank, and with a lot more effort pulled it up onto land. At any point the gator could have just let go. Just opened his mouth and hasta la vista to the whole damned thing. But he didn’t. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution gave me the impression that alligators were incredibly intelligent. The dinosaurs, the dodo, even the Tasmanian tiger were extinct, but the alligator remained. But it was all just PR. The fact was the alligator was just lucky. Dumb and lucky. The day the meteor hit and the dinosaurs went bye-bye? The gators must have been underwater that day.

  The big reptile was stubborn as all hell. He got pulled out of the water, onto the deep rough that lined the lake by a rope he could have let go of, and he wasn’t even hungry. He left an entire arm as evidence of that fact. And it didn’t get better for him. The animal control guy dropped his rope and collected his pole and walked around the back of the beast, and, standing just out of reach of the gator’s tail, he held the pole forward. It was then I noticed the wire loop on the end of the pole. The gator didn’t see it. I don’t even know if he was bothering to look. The animal control guy put the loop around the closed jaws of the gator and pulled the loop closed.

  The gator couldn’t open his mouth. I’d heard somewhere that their downward jaw pressure could break concrete but the muscles used to open their mouths couldn’t lift a baby’s rattle. Seemed it was so. The animal control guy casually walked up and sat on the gator, just behind its head, and pulled out some black electrical tape. He wound it round and round the snout. When he was done he got up and brushed his hands off, and then removed the pole. The meat was still inside the gator’s mouth somewhere.

  I was thoroughly disappointed. The gator is a sacred emblem in Florida. Tourists are terrified of them. The mascot versions of them are fearsome. But the reality was anything but, if you knew what you were doing. I made a note to call up every person I knew who had attended the University of Florida and tell them that their mascot was as dumb as a box of rocks.