I stood and gripped the edge of his table. “But Mr. V, I never showed bias toward any group. Sure, I vote conservative and pro-business, but the range stuff was all in the name of fun. I let liberals bash conservatives and the conservatives bash the liberals . . . and the atheists bashed religious folks. There was never any bias toward anyone.”
He put a finger to his mustache and stroked the outer hairs. “Did you encourage religious folks to bash atheists too?”
I sat again, figuring a less aggressive posture would serve me well. “They refused on the grounds that it was a bad witness to whack golf balls at pagans . . . but I did make the offer.”
Mr. V shook his Italian head with great disdain. “I am sorry, Chris, but I must protect the Vignatti name. If you are to continue in the golf business, you’ll have to find other land to lease.”
I slumped in my chair but never broke his gaze. “You cannot do this to me.”
He rose from his chair, tucked his files under his left arm. “I’m sorry.”
17
LESSON FOR TODAY
Sometimes we just need to be alone for a while.
Marsh grass brushed against my johnboat, faded clusters bending against the port side and releasing off the stern. One more push with the paddle and the little boat and I resumed our drift, at the mercy of an outbound tide pulling us through the inlets of the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.
I had to get away—from everything. If only for a day, or perhaps half a day, I sought uncrowded and undeveloped space in which to think and consider. And now, thirty miles northeast of Charleston, armed with a coastal map borrowed from Cack, I’d found such a place. I had been near these waters before—as a passenger, though, never as captain. As soon as I’d cut my outboard engine and set to drift, the salt air and rippling water confirmed that this was the spot.
The tidal creek wound left and then right, a true serpentine of discovery. No one out here but me. In the front of the boat lay an extra life jacket, one I would have offered to Molly except for the fact that she would not arrive until Friday.
What I was looking for was some peace. That, and perhaps a few native birds. Earlier in the morning, before I’d hitched the johnboat to my truck, I read God’s boast about how he does such a good job of feeding and caring for birds that I shouldn’t worry about my own life.
I was plenty worried.
So, while I paddled along in pursuit of peace, I figured I might as well use the opportunity to check up on God’s dependability: If he really cared for Chris Hackett more than birds, I wanted a basis for comparison—and not from a bunch of city-park pigeons. Seemed to me that city birds had it easy—plenty of feeders and sidewalks and seafood processing plants from which to scrounge up the daily meal. But I sought evidence from the wilder side, from birds that lived in the marsh and subsisted apart from man. Birds that were, like myself, entrepreneurs.
I steered the johnboat into the stronger currents and drifted left around another bend. Out of nowhere a pair of sandpipers zipped past, so fast that I had no time to tell if they were well-fed or malnourished.
“Well, does he?!” I shouted after them. “Does he really take care of you even when the hurricanes blow your habitat to smithereens?”
I drifted on, feeling silly for shouting at sandpipers. Around the next bend, however, much larger and slower specimens appeared in the inlet. Ahead in the glare, they fell from the sky with folded wings and bucket beaks, diving into a school of minnows and bobbing in the aftermath. Over and over they did this, as if they could not quite figure out if this was playtime or feeding hour. The closer I drifted, the more they appeared to smile. Oddly, they seemed not to mind a stranger invading their feast. A fishy smell arose, and beside my boat half-eaten minnows floated in the ripples, so many I could not count them. Their predators were not normal-sized pelicans but fat, overstuffed pelicans, three of them airborne again, eight more waddling on the shore and lumbering into flight, bellies dragging the water until their wings reached full throttle and lifted them skyward.
I watched them come and go, watched them dive and eat and waddle on the shore until the tide slowly changed its mind and covered the sandbar. The feast continued despite the water’s reversal, and soon the sight of it all made me hungry.
I pulled my PB and J sandwich from my cooler, unwrapped it, and ate right along with them, swayed toward the opinion that God’s boast did indeed apply here in the Carolina low country.
My paddle lay across my lap, and in seconds the tide turned the johnboat northward, back the way I’d come. I’d only been out of the city for a few hours, and yet the break from chaos lent a certain confidence that Hack’s could be rebuilt, somewhere, regardless of whether the criminal was caught. Sure, I wanted to catch the guy, but not today. This refuge was too serene, too anticatastrophe.
I allowed the currents to push me for long minutes before I started the outboard and cruised back to the landing. It was there, while pulling the boat up on my trailer, that I saw the first fellow human of the day, a man backing his boat down the adjoining ramp. He was an older fellow, obviously a fishing guide, what with the patches on his sleeves and Low Country Expeditions painted on the side of his flatsboat. Yet another entrepreneur.
He backed his boat from his trailer and—since I already had my own secured—I volunteered to hold his tie rope while he went and parked his truck. He smiled, threw the rope to me, and drove up the ramp, twin trails of water dripping off his trailer. Seconds later he jogged back to his boat and thanked me for the assist.
After I tossed him his rope I pointed across the wetlands. “You guide out there?”
“Yep. Four days a week.”
“Nice office.”
He cranked his very large outboard, turned his cap backward, and took off across the inlet. Over the hum of his engine he shouted, “Beats a gray cubicle any day!”
I could relate. My office of green grass was both a rarity and a blessing—even if I did have to relocate the sod. Still, on the drive back to Charleston I couldn’t help but consider all the other ways I could start over. I pondered moves, partnerships, and mergers. I even considered caddying for a college buddy who played on the minitours, the minor leagues of golf.
For a while my thoughts even turned international. I could open up a Hack’s of Australia, teach Aussies the finer points of the game. I’d sponsor a summer tournament called the Aboriginal Open, to be played in the outback on all that red dirt. Contestants would use bright yellow golf balls so as not to lose sight of them in the desert, and the holes would be longer than any the golf world had ever seen: each one two miles in length, each a par 12. It would take a player five days to complete the course. You’d tee off on Monday morning and not return until Friday night. This would be half survival test, half golf tournament. Each player would tote a backpack with five liters of water and a pack of granola bars. Winner got ten thousand dollars and a kiss from Miss Australia. Cack, of course, would heckle the players all week from atop a camel.
Ahead on Highway 17 the sun set over the Charleston peninsula. Everything turned orange, and a mile short of the Cooper River bridge I pulled over to the shoulder—not to watch the sunset but to change into a clean shirt. Best I stayed on this side of the city, since only a half hour remained till tonight’s meeting with Golfers of the Roundtable.
Tonight the subject was women, and it was Pauly Three Seeds’ turn to lead discussion.
18
LESSON FOR TODAY
A critical skill in golf and relationships is knowing when to ask for help.
Benny reclaimed his spot on Pauly’s sofa and sprawled his massive right arm across its back. “Hack, tonight we’re here to cheer you up. Plus I have advice on how to keep your life on track.”
It was hard to take Benny seriously while he sat there sporting a T-shirt that read: “Superman Wears Heavy T Underwear.”
“The track is very vague right now, Benny,” I muttered. “I just need to settle my insurance an
d find new land.”
Pauly, in business casual, pulled a kitchen chair into the den and sat silent for a moment, contemplative as ever. He held a plate of snacks in his lap and nibbled a grape, then a Dorito, followed by another grape. “Chris,” he said, “would you mind if I asked you three questions?”
I set my paper plate at my feet and nodded. “As long as they’re brief questions. My mind isn’t working so great right now.”
He shrugged as if he paid no attention to length, only to content. “Okay, first question: Who knows best, and I mean really knows best, how to run your golf business?”
I stared at his floor, a light hardwood with a sprinkling of crumbs. “I do.”
I’m glad that was a short question.
“And whose idea was it to allow your range to be used as a political outlet?”
“That would be Molly.” This question too was quite easy and acceptably brief.
Pauly ate a few more grapes and nodded after each swallow, as if thinking hard on his next question. “Now that it appears some politically sensitive person or persons have torched your business, who suffers the consequences?”
“I do . . . and Cack.” Three easy answers. Good.
“What about Molly?” Benny asked.
I knew they’d have a fourth question, probably even a forty-fourth.
The mention of Molly’s name riled me to defend her, and I sat up on the edge of my chair. “She made the suggestion, yes. But I ran with the idea, and it’s my fault for not considering the possibility of ticking people off. Leave her out of it.”
Benny smirked as if he expected my answer. “She just breezes into your life, you let her steer your business, and—”
Frustrated with both of them, I raised a finger of protest. “Excuse me, guys, but she didn’t steer my business. She made a suggestion.”
Pauly placed his hands behind his neck and interlocked his fingers, the confident pose of an interrogator. “Well . . . why’d you accept her suggestion?”
“Because it was good for business.”
“The fact that Molly is pretty and personable and single had nothing to do with it?”
I sat back in my chair, crossed my legs. “Maybe a little.”
Pauly suppressed a laugh at my admittance. “Well, at least you can see where you went wrong. Which is more than we can say of Adam.”
“Which Adam?” I asked, shocked at how a compartmentalized thinker like Pauly could change subjects so fast. “The passive one in the garden? With Eve?”
Pauly nodded. “Yes, that one. Do you remember what God said to him right off the bat?”
“Of course I know . . . he told Adam to not eat the fruit.”
Here they came, more rapid-fire questions, zooming across his den. “And what did Adam do with this information?”
“I reckon he shared it with Eve . . . who didn’t listen very well.”
“So, what did God do then?”
Benny raised his hand. “From what I remember, he came looking for Adam, who was busy inventing the first pair of fig-leaf boxers.”
Pauly almost laughed out loud. But before he could summon his next question, I cut him off. “Pauly, if you’re trying to create a scenario where you compare me to Adam, it won’t work, mainly because I didn’t point the finger at Eve, who is really Molly, and cast blame on her. And I didn’t stand there while some—”
“Talking snake slithered onto your range?”
No, not talking snakes again! Last time I heard an adult mention that snake, I ended up losing a golf match to a feminist.
Benny thumped his plastic cup. “Are you still with us, Chris? You seemed to have zoned out.”
“I did. Sort of.”
“Do you need to be somewhere else?”
I shook my head no. “Nah, but DC might be nice after the elections.”
Regardless of my distracted thoughts and comments, their inevitable conclusion was that I had failed to weigh the true costs of trying to impress Miss Molly Cusack. According to Benny and Pauly, following her advice had drained me of more money than all of my prior business mistakes, plus all the cash I’d spent on dinner dates in the past ten years combined—and they knew I was not a cheapskate when it came to dinner. “Teach well, eat well” was the motto that had hung in my office at Hack’s. I had etched those words into a thin piece of oak, using a wood-burning tool I’d owned since high school. But that motto, too, perished in the blaze.
Before our meeting broke up, Pauly turned an empty paper plate upside down and plucked a pen from his shirt pocket. “Chris, try to follow this for a sec.”
He didn’t bother to ask me if I wanted to follow whatever it was he was drawing; he just barged ahead. Tonight he was on a roll.
“See this square?” With his pen Pauly drew a blue square, about two inches in width.
“I see it.”
“You alone have to decide what is allowed inside your square. I look at my square like this: God owns the entire thing, but the square still has four corners. One corner is for me, one is for my wife, one is for my three little girls, and one is for my career.”
Benny leaned forward to check out the drawing. “If you ever put another child in that third corner, we’ll have to give you a new nickname.”
“Be serious, Benny,” Pauly said. “How ’bout your own square?”
Benny tugged at his sock, paused, tugged his other sock. Then he sat back on the sofa. “Well, since we don’t have kids yet, I s’pose one corner is my wife, one is career, and the other two corners are both for me . . . since I’m big like that.”
Their attention turned to me, and I muttered something about my square being half melted, what with the fire and all, but I could acknowledge that one corner was for me and one for my career.
Pauly pointed at me with a Dorito. “Does Molly belong in your square?”
I nearly came out of my seat. “We’ve only been on a few dates, man! I’m not ready for serious stuff like offering her part of my square.”
“Offer her a square of dark chocolate then,” Benny said. “Women love that stuff.”
Benny resembled an overgrown class clown, and I wondered if he was ever serious about anything. I didn’t bother to laugh at his comment, probably because I was too focused on myself. I knew it wasn’t like me to be uptight around these guys. Then again, I’d never lost in the same week a golf shop, a land lease, and a large chunk of pride.
After comparing the manly view of squares to the women’s view—Benny said they don’t view life in squares; it’s more like one of those giant swirled lollipops where everything runs together—the three of us got up and went into the kitchen for refills and a change of topic. While pouring orange juice over crushed ice, I told them I still had no idea who had set the fire.
“It was that feminist who you played golf against,” Benny offered and tore open a second bag of Doritos.
I shook my head. “Nope, don’t think so. We sorta made our peace the other day.”
Pauly turned from the sink and said, “What about that guy who owns the nursery next to you?”
I shook my head again. “Wrong again, Pauly. Too generous a guy.”
We stayed in the kitchen for the rest of the meeting. I kept the topic centered on the arsonist and told them Molly would be here on Friday and the two of us were going to try to figure out who did it.
After Benny expressed his doubts about my crime-solving abilities, he excused himself, saying he had a movie date with his wife and could not be late. I hung around the front steps of Pauly’s house because Pauly said he had something to say to me in private.
“You seem so obsessed with this arsonist, Chris,” he said in a low, don’t-wake-the-kids voice. “Why don’t you get away for a couple days? Take a trip somewhere.”
I stepped off the bricks onto his sidewalk and offered a negatory head shake. “I can’t travel, man. I just lost my business. I have to find some new land and rebuild.”
Pauly sighed. “This may so
und out of left field, but it might be good to get your mind off things by finding a part-time job, something light and menial.”
I told him I’d think about it, and that in the meantime I was working on an idea for how to identify the guilty party. He opened his front door to go inside but turned and said, “One other thing, Chris. You sorta smell like fish tonight. What’s up with that?”
I remembered tossing a few minnows to the pelicans, but had not detected the scent on my clothes. “Took my johnboat out. To Cape Romain.”
Pauly nodded. “Trying to find some peace?”
I waved good night and turned for my truck. “Yep.”
He called out, “So, did ya?”
“For an hour or so.”
19
LESSON FOR TODAY
Missing your job is sorta like missing your sweetheart—the evidence tends to show up in everything you do.
Why not?
My attempt to forget my circumstances for a day led me to the lobby of an independent job placement service. They had accepted my resume via fax and concluded quickly that I was not looking for a long-term position.
An assistant manager, no more than twenty-five years of age, asked me to wait in the lobby. I had never visited a temporary employment agency before. But I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was here only to find part-time work, something for next week after Molly left, when I’d likely need to distract myself until the insurance settlement.
Next to the black vinyl sofa I picked up a People magazine and read celebrity opinions on the upcoming elections. The page was dominated by caustic insults from the Hollywood elite. It seemed silly, these self-serving members of the A-list trying to tell me, via that fount of wisdom known as People, how our elected leaders—who are others–serving—should govern the country. That one column made me want to puke almost as bad as seeing my golf shop burn. But not quite.
Par for the Course Page 14
