Deep Rough

by A. J. Stewart

“That so.”

  “Yeah. I could become an investigator.”

  “That would be cool.”

  “They don’t normally take applicants who don’t have extensive local investigations experience.”

  I said nothing.

  “But he said the commissioner was on a drive to recruit more women. And he said I had gotten a good reference from the FBI field office in Miami.”

  “Nice timing.”

  “I don’t like getting something I didn’t earn.”

  “It’s always better to be lucky than smart.”

  “Still.”

  “You ever think you’ve had to work harder than a man to get where you are now?”

  “Every day.”

  “So you paid your dues in a different way.”

  “You think I should do this?”

  “You should do what you want to do.”

  “I could stay in Florida.”

  “Good.”

  “But I might end up anywhere. Tallahassee for a while, then maybe Miami.”

  I said nothing. Danielle looked at me and the little crease between her eyes appeared. For a moment I feared she was going to ask me what I wanted her to do, but she didn’t.

  “What would you do?” she asked.

  I took an unnecessary pause. I knew what I would do. No question, no debate.

  “I wouldn’t do it.”

  She pushed back from me a little so she could actually focus on my face. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why? It could be a great job.”

  “It is a great job.”

  “So?”

  “So it isn’t here. Everything and everyone I love is here. Longboard’s is here. Ron’s here, Sal’s here. You’re here. Miami’s a hoot, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want to be two hours from the life that I love. I want to be right in the middle of it.”

  She nodded and rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. There was a lot going on in there. I hoped I hadn’t said too much. The fact was, it was a great move for Danielle. She had been courted by the FBI field office in Miami before, but she didn’t want to go to Virginia and then be posted who-knew-where in the country. But the FDLE was a state law enforcement body. She would stay in Florida. The farthest she would be posted would probably be the capital, Tallahassee, which was six hours away. After the academy, chances were she would be posted to the biggest office, in Miami, only one and a half hours away with light traffic. It wasn’t far. I had driven it many times before, and would do it many times in the future, one way or the other.

  I got up and showered and dressed, ready for a day’s golf. Danielle followed me into the bathroom and I made smoothies while she did her thing. I used the last of the pineapple. I looked at the crown, all spikes like a dinosaur plant. I had heard you could plant the heads and they would grow into pineapple plants. I resolved to try it sometime. But not today.

  Danielle drove her patrol car into the club. She asked if I had thought about a new car and I said I hadn’t. I asked what sort of car she thought I should get and she threw the question right back at me and asked what I wanted to get. I told her not a Porsche. She nodded.

  I left her to meet up with her colleagues and wandered into the clubhouse. I texted Heath McAllen, to make sure he was awake. He texted back to say he was in the gym, and would be on course a couple hours before tee off. Since I had nothing to do I went out the back toward the eighteenth green. Diego the greenskeeper was finishing up relocating the hole position. Each day he used a tool like a large apple corer to dig out a new hole where the course steward told him, and then he removed the cup from the old hole and put the grass and soil from the fresh hole into the old hole. It was more or less the same process he had used to repair the vandalized first green. He waved and then drove away in his little electric truck. I turned and looked up at the leader board. Heath’s name was up there in big letters, still third from the top. Equal second. The other guy on second was the Kiwi who carried his own bags into town. He didn’t do that in PGA Tour events because the rules required the use of a caddy. The leader at the halfway point was an Australian dude with a killer swing and a similar temper. I had heard he had once finished a round with only eight clubs, having destroyed the other six in tantrums on the course.

  “Hope your guy doesn’t win.”

  I looked down from the board to see Dig Maddox approaching. He wore a jacket and trousers and looked strange in them. He looked like I felt in similar attire. We were both shorts and shirts guys. That was about all we had in common.

  “Appreciate the sentiment,” I said.

  “I got some cash on that Aussie. If he holds it together.”

  “Isn’t betting against the rules?”

  “I’m not playing in the damn thing. ’Sides, a little cash makes it interesting.”

  That wasn’t my experience. I played ball with guys who liked to bet. Most stuck to the ponies, but a few bet on the major leagues. A handful bet on their own games. They all claimed to only bet on their own team winning. Apparently Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose meant nothing to some guys. I also found that if a sport was interesting already it didn’t get more so with a wager, and if it wasn’t of interest to begin with then nothing could save it.

  “Good-looking grass,” I said in a swift and artful segue.

  Dig shook his head. “Overseeded. I got a new strain of Bermuda in the works that won’t go dormant. You won’t need all this damn ryegrass in the winter.”

  “I thought St. Augustine was your thing.”

  “You know a lot about grass all of a sudden.”

  “It’s been an educational week.”

  “Yeah? Sure, I do a lot of St. Augustine. For residential and commercial applications. It thatches too much for golf. Like hitting off rattan.”

  “You do Capricorn Lakes?”

  I watched to see his reaction. He wasn’t such a good poker player.

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “It’s on their website.”

  He shook his head. “Freakin’ internet. Damn spies in the sky looking down on everything we do and plastering it on the freakin’ internet.”

  I recalled my visit to Capricorn Lakes. I had spent some time while there looking on my phone at the very satellite maps Dig resented.

  “Not a lot of grass there,” I said.

  “Course not.”

  “You don’t get paid to lay sod?”

  “Yeah, I do. And when I don’t get paid, I don’t lay sod. You got it?”

  It seemed I was annoying him, and that made me smile.

  “What you grinning at?” he spat.

  “Just another beautiful Florida day.”

  “Could use some rain.” Only a grass guy would say that.

  “What do you make of what’s going on? The gator, the threats?”

  “That knucklehead got eaten by a gator because he was a moron. I told Barry as much. The idiot couldn’t stack chairs properly. I mean, how hard is that? You know he once accused me of cheating on the course? Moron. Accused me of kicking my ball out of the rough. Tried to get me to give him a fifty to keep quiet.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Of course I didn’t. Moron. He had no proof. His word against mine.”

  What I noted was that Dig had not protested his innocence. He hadn’t claimed he didn’t use his foot. There was a warped sense of honor in that. Besides, he wasn’t the only one. When I had played more golf, back in my baseball days, it was referred to as the fifteenth club, or the Adidas nine iron. Got a bad lie? Wait until your playing partner wasn’t looking and give the ball a good kick. Some guys subtly lifted their ball up in the rough grass to get a better lie, and other guys went all the way and just kicked a foul ball back into the middle of the fairway. It was cheating to be sure, but Dig wasn’t the only one who was guilty of it.

  I said, “Ernesto didn’t make a threat against a player. He was dead.”

  “Drama. Probably cooke
d up by the tour.”

  “The tour? You don’t think it might harm the club?”

  “Don’t see how.”

  “Bad PR might drive the tournament away.”

  “Nah. You were right about that, a rogue gator’s gonna bring the galleries in, not turn ’em away.” He shrugged and took a step like the conversation was done. “I don’t care one way or the other. Damn tournament eats into my golfing time. We can’t use the course for three weeks before. But do I get a rebate on my membership dues? ’Course not.”

  He stomped off without another word.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Heath teed off the first with tendrils of cloud reaching across the sky to add depth to the scene. He was in good spirits and I was taking all the credit for that, despite the fact that I had never seen him in any other mood. His playing partner was a guy from South Carolina who chewed gum like it was tobacco and spoke in a drawl so relaxed it took minutes to say hello.

  After two rounds, or thirty-six holes, the field was chopped in half. Those who failed to make the cut were once known as trunk-slammers. They’d take their clubs and put them in the trunk of their car and drive away. Now they just slinked off to their jets and cursed their wicked luck. A smaller field and groups of two players rather than three meant it was easier for the television network people to focus on the players of interest, and Heath was one of those. A cameraman and a sound guy and a whispering commentator followed our every move. I was reminded of Alfie’s advice to not tell bawdy jokes near a camera, but I found their presence reassuring. It would be a bold individual who tried to harm a golfer under the gaze of a national television audience. I discounted all the nut jobs who would love the free airtime. This was not the work of someone who wanted to publicly claim responsibility.

  Both golfers went head-to-head on the first nine. Seven pars and two birdies, leaving Heath locked in second place and his partner one shot behind. The Aussie in the lead teed off in the group behind us, and stayed one shot up most of the afternoon.

  Ask anyone who has ever played the game at any level and they will tell you that golf is a cruel mistress. One shot, one bad bounce off a sprinkler head or a plugged lie in a sand trap could be the difference between winning and not. Or even making the cut and playing for the cash or going home without a check. For some guys it was the difference between making the tour the next year or being relegated to becoming the friendly neighborhood pro at their local muni course.

  All the guys had played a stretch where nothing went right, even when just prior they had been hitting the ball perfectly. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It could happen at any time and to anyone, and it had happened at one time or another to every guy in the field. They called it throwing up on themselves, which was a horribly prescient image given the events that had unfolded at the club. But whatever it was, it happened that afternoon.

  We heard the roar from the green. The group behind was on the tee of the same hole and had hit their first shots. Only one of the balls had sailed wide and ugly and taken a dip in the water. The gallery following the final group was silent. It was the scream of the hotheaded Aussie we heard. He cursed his ball’s flight before it even hit the small water hazard. The penalty shot for hitting into a water hazard was one shot, so the Aussie took a drop and hit his third from behind the water hazard, and when he shanked his shot and that too went in the water the language got positively blue.

  Heath sunk his putt for par, and smiled at me as he picked his ball from the hole.

  “He’s gonna cop a fine for that.”

  “You think?”

  “You don’t get to say bad words on television. That’s rule number two.”

  “What’s rule number one?”

  “If you win you better remember to thank your mother.”

  We walked to the next tee and I looked back to see the gallery rushing down the outside edges of the fairway. The Aussie had hit his fifth shot into a sand trap just short of the green. Patrons were letting us walk away and were staying put around the green. Word of a meltdown traveled fast, and the only thing fans loved to see more than great golf was horrific golf.

  “I don’t know how you do it,” I said, wiping Heath’s putter down.

  “Do it?”

  “Live in the fishbowl. You’ve always got eyes on you. Every move you make. You’re a young guy. Young guys make mistakes. I made plenty. But yours end up on the sports pages of the newspaper.”

  “They still have newspapers?”

  I had nothing to say to that. “Or on television.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “I don’t think I could.”

  “And you’re probably right. Lots of guys play good golf. But tour golf is different. It’s more of a mental challenge. If you can block it all out, the TV, the galleries, all of it, you can win. If you can’t, well you can’t.”

  “I still don’t know how you do it.”

  “Yes, you do. You played baseball.”

  “It wasn’t the microscope that this is.”

  “But there were crowds, distractions. How did you focus?”

  I thought for a second. “I took a deep breath and closed my eyes and when I opened them I could see nothing but the batter and the catcher. Some nights I couldn’t even see the home plate umpire, right behind them.”

  “There you go.”

  “So you just focus on the ball and nothing else.”

  “For me, it’s a little different. I like the crowd. I like the noise. I don’t pretend that they’re not there. I pretend I’m not there.”

  “You’re not there?”

  “Yeah. Like I’m invisible. So all these people are around, the cameras and everything. But they can’t see me. I’m invisible. If I hit a bad shot they won’t see it, so it takes the pressure off. If I hit a great shot, I reappear and soak it in. You’d be amazed at what you can do when you’re invisible to the world around you.”

  I nodded. There were a lot of psychologists hanging around the tour. A lot of guys were fragile that way. I could see why. But Heath was something else. He was number one, and he was only twenty-four. But he seemed to have lived another life already and brought that wisdom forward with him. I envied him. And then I thought about his life on tour, and how if he didn’t have a sponsor’s dinner he went back to his hotel room alone, and I reassessed my position on it.

  By the time we walked off the eighteenth green the die was cast. Heath had shot three under on the back nine, and the South Carolinian had shot two under. But the group behind had been a mixed bag. It was a Down Under pairing and the Kiwi who preferred to carry his own bags had kept pace with Heath to be co-leader as they came up the eighteenth fairway. The Aussie had shot two more bogies on thirteen and fifteen to drop a couple more shots back, and then hit the now famous Alligator Alley on seventeen and plonked his ball into the out-of-bounds crime scene. He shot a nine on that hole, and killed any chance he had of winning, while also committing assault and battery on his four hybrid and his seven iron. He putted the eighteenth green with a fairway wood after smashing his putter against a palm tree near the seventeenth green.

  Despite playing well and being co-leader after fifty-four holes, Heath still wanted to work on his short game some more so we hit the practice range. After a half hour the shadows were growing long, and I told Heath I needed to do something. I was watching him hit but I couldn’t get something he said off my mind. Something about being invisible. I got a security guy to come stand nearby and watch for anything, but I was growing increasingly certain that he was in no danger.

  I wandered back to the clubhouse and up to the bar. It was busy with players and VIPs. I didn’t see any caddies. Perhaps they drank elsewhere. I was still in my coveralls but I didn’t stop to be assessed for correct clubhouse attire. I made for the window. I found the person I was looking for in the corner, taking in the scene.

  Jackie Treloar had an empty glass in front of him. My arrival pulled him from the scene and he smi
led at me and offered me a seat. I asked him if I could get him another drink and he deferred, saying the access bus would be by any time to take him home.

  “Your boy is doing well,” he said.

  “He is. He’s a good player. He’s a good kid.”

  “He sure hits it long. Those clubs now, and the gym time, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty fit. And dedicated.”

  “If you’re gonna do something, do it right.”

  I nodded to that.

  “Can I asked you something, Jackie?”

  “Sure, son.”

  “How often do you come here? To the club?”

  He nodded gently. “Most days. In the week. Not so much on the weekend. Sometimes the kids come over on the weekend.”

  “But most days during the week?”

  “Yes, most days. I think my wife likes the alone time, you know?”

  I nodded. I knew.

  “Do you play much?”

  “Like I think I told you, not so much. I get in a round once a week maybe, but just on the executive course, you understand. My old bones don’t make it round eighteen anymore.”

  “You play last week?”

  He shook his head. “No, son. The course was closed for tournament preparation.”

  Which was exactly what Dig Maddox had told me.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I did what I always do. I sit here for a couple hours and watch the world go by. Sometimes I talk with Chip up at the bar. If it ain’t busy he comes over to visit with me for a while. Most other folks don’t pay me no mind.”

  “You’re invisible.”

  Jackie frowned. “When I was young I was a black man playing a white man’s game. I wished I could have been invisible. Now I’m just an old man. None of these guys pay me no mind. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame them. They’re wound up in their own lives. Just like I was. Just like you were. So I don’t mind being invisible most the time.”

  It was his invisibility that had meant I, along with everyone else, had failed to talk to him about events before. And it was his invisibility that I was counting on now.

  “Were you here last Friday? Before the wedding?”