We had just finished rechecking the last measurement—I was recording it all in a notepad—when Cack suddenly ran some thirty yards along the back of the property. The height of the weeds prevented me from seeing anything below his shoulders.
“Cack . . .?” I called into my radio. “What’s the matter?”
For a long moment there was silence. Then, “Boss man, we got a problem with this land.”
“Can’t be,” I said. “It’s ideal.”
“Nope, we gotta problem.”
“What now?”
“Gators. There’s a swamp behind this property, and I see a nest of ’em just slitherin’ in the muck. I can’t be retrieving golf balls if there’s gators and muck.”
I thought through this problem quickly, much like the folks at Augusta National did when they discovered the pros could hit balls over their range fence and onto Washington Road. “After we get a fence up, we’ll install an eighty-foot-tall net across the back of the range . . . no one will clear that.”
I expected to hear him say, “Ten-four.” Instead he paused a moment before blurting, “Mercy . . . he ate it.”
I could not figure out why he said what he did. I pressed my talk button. “What’d you say, Cack?”
From across the weeds I saw him pointing with one hand, holding his walkie-talkie to his mouth with the other. “I left my Mountain Dew can back there on the bank, and a gator just ran up and ate the can.”
“You’d better walk on back here to the road, Cackster.”
He trudged back through the weeds and met me at the FOR LEASE sign. After fifteen minutes of weighing pros, cons, and what ifs, we agreed that this property qualified as one of our top three candidates, that indeed this land held strong possibilities.
Traffic was good here, sure, and the ground looked like it would support grass well—and Cack was raring to go, having already purchased a new high-powered bullhorn. But I could not commit yet, not until I searched the county to see if something even better had sprouted. I definitely wanted to avoid any land with a wooded area near where I’d locate the golf shop. Less timber meant less stuff could burn.
Though I was moving past my dance with disaster, my groundskeeper reminded me that such progress was not without scars.
Molly called late that night, just after I’d cleaned the red dirt off my shoes and tossed my soiled clothes into the washer.
“I’ve decided that twelve kids is a nice number,” I said to her, intentionally vague.
Long, wary pause. “You would put a woman through . . . wait a sec, I’m adding this up. One hundred and eight months of pregnancy?!”
“No. Molly, I mean twelve kids per class. After-school and summer golf classes. That’s the new thrust of my business.”
“Oh.” She sighed as if relieved. “Thank you for clearing that up.”
She told me about her day—more mudslinging at a DC debate—and I updated her on the insurance settlement, which was okay but not great. I felt tired tonight, though, and wanted to discuss a serious topic before I offended her with frequent yawning. “Mol, I think we need to talk about the long distance thing.”
“What about it? Are you now getting cold golfer feet, Chris Hackett?”
“No. We just need to talk. You see, I really love my job.”
“All the time?”
“I love it most of the time. What about your own?”
“I love my job . . . sometimes.”
“Most or some?”
“Somewhere between most and some.”
“Okay, we’ll call this a draw for now.”
She laughed as if the subject intrigued her. “Isn’t ‘draw’ a golf term that you once used in my lesson?”
“Yep, that’s a shot that curves left. But then, I’m sure you have ‘draws’ in the political world.”
“Especially after a debate, when the pundits can’t decide who’ll win, and then a news show takes a poll and it comes in fifty percent to fifty percent.”
“If all else fails, at least we have that word in common.”
“You’re very chatty tonight.”
“I’m in a better mood. Today Cack and I found a cool piece of land, and past the boundary fence is a wetlands. We might even conduct wildlife tours whenever he gets his new cart built.”
“I’m glad you want to work with kids.”
The last thing I told her before we ended our talk was that I wanted us both to pray about the pace with which we’d get to know one another. “I’ll be glad to,” she said.
We agreed that it was best to simply date when we could, talk frequently on the phone, and not rely on that easily misinterpreted beast, e-mail.
For the next three days, sunup to sundown, I searched other parcels of land. I walked flat country land in North Charleston, moist, marsh-front land on the Cooper River, tilled farm land much too far from the city to attract business, and a twenty-acre plot wedged between a park and a graveyard. This land I walked alone at midday, only my shadow to keep me company. Somewhere land and golf and entrepreneurship would meet and coagulate. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the gator acreage.
I returned to that property the next day, noted the heavy traffic on the frontage road, the fast-food places just a quarter mile away, an elementary school a half mile past that. Somewhere in my head, coagulation occurred.
Once again, I stood in front of a huge real estate sign and dialed the phone number painted on its front, only this time the sign was By Owner. The lady owner wanted twenty-two hundred per month to lease her property, a reasonable sum—and she wasn’t just any lady, certainly no stranger to either myself or to Cack. The owner of the land was Mrs. Dupree, who had purchased the property three years earlier, and for a far different purpose.
“My original plan was to raise dogs there, Chris,” she explained over the phone. “Little one-brick dogs. Lots of them. But then I discovered—”
“That swamp full of gators?”
“The Department of Natural Resources said I couldn’t remove them or shoot them, that they were protected. And you know how gators love a dog, especially little appetizer dogs.”
“Yes, ma’am, I understand.”
While I paced the edge of her property one more time, envisioning the next ten years of my life spent here—giving lessons, watching Cack insult the customers, possibly raising my own kids, and calling the Wildlife Department to come and remove yet another reptile from my driving range—I told Mrs. Dupree to draw up the lease papers, that I’d take it. Somehow I pictured having her as my landlord a far cry from Mr. Vignatti.
This new real estate, along with a thousand pounds of grass seed and nature’s pledge of photosynthesis, was a very good thing.
27
LESSON FOR TODAY
Airline fares may seem expensive, but they are a bargain compared to the cost of loneliness.
Whatever it takes.
Those were my words, and they became more and more applicable as the days rolled toward the elections. First I made a day trip to DC. It was October 26, and Molly took me on a tour of the aviation wing of the Smithsonian. This museum was built as one enormous hangar not far from Dulles airport, and it made for a great date. We even flirted beneath a 1935 crop duster:
“Would you have buzzed my farm in that thing if we’d met in rural Kentucky in 1935?” she asked, loud enough to embarrass a group of field-tripping junior high kids gathered nearby.
“I’d have dusted the Cusack farm ten times a day,” I replied, also too loud.
She led me into the military section of the hangar, where I noted the nose of an F-series fighter plane pointing at the nose of a Russian MIG. We waited for the junior high kids to gather again. “Molly,” I asked, “if I had been a Russian pilot, would you have intercepted me in midair?”
She shook her head. “Not on the first date, but I’m sure our radars would have beeped in unison.”
Behind us came giggles, whispers, and more giggles.
A h
alf hour later we wandered into the space program exhibit. An entire Space Shuttle sat on display in there, as well as several Apollo-era capsules and space suits. By now we had lost the youth, and other than the museum’s staff we had the exhibit all to ourselves.
Molly touched the glass of a capsule, which was smaller than I remembered from seeing them on TV. “Would you have bounded across moon craters to come visit me?” she asked, obviously not ready to end our silly banter.
“Hmmm. Low-gravity dating could be interesting, especially when traveling by foot.”
And then, as we strolled out of the space program and made a right past the jetted history of Boeing, we found ourselves standing below something mammoth and silver. I had no idea that this was its resting place. Sixty-odd years after her day of infamy over Japan, the Enola Gay sat high above us, shiny and fully restored, perched there in all her glory.
Molly stared upward at the belly of the plane and whispered, “This one feels too important for flirtatious comments, Chris.”
I moved beside her and craned my neck. “Agreed.”
The sense of history was palpable; the plane renders one emotional simply from staring at it. It made me realize, in the same moment, both the consequences of defending freedom and the fragile nature of life. Molly seemed emotional as well, especially after I told her that my father, long deceased, had served in the Air Force. There are likely not many women who have planted a kiss on their boyfriend in the shadow of the Enola Gay, but Molly is one of them.
That night I accompanied her to a TV studio, where she was to be interviewed on a cable show, this just two weeks before elections. There sat Molly on a studio set, wearing the same flattering blue outfit she’d worn in Charleston. She readied herself between two cohosts, who alternately asked for her opinions on the state’s congressional battles, as well the nation as a whole.
Molly locked eyes with the camera. “The battles are as heated as always,” she said between very white teeth. “But an interesting phenomenon is occurring in New York: it’s become popular in some circles to try to trash opponents’ outdoor pep rallies by engaging in drive-by water balloonings.”
“Did you say ‘water ballooning’?” asked the cohost, serving up a softball of a question.
Molly grinned once, nodded twice. “Yes. In fact, just last week in the Bronx, I met a single man, a conservative who led a group of water balloon tossers in throwing balloons at a large gathering of protesting liberals. And this morning in Queens, the liberals fired back, tossing blue water balloons at a campaign rally for the mayoral candidate. There in the Big Apple, they’re calling it ‘water wars.’ ”
She had taken her act to New York, where apparently the politically minded citizens preferred balloons to golf balls. When Molly departed the set after the interview, I took her by the hand and told her that I was proud to be dating a professional pot stirrer.
Three weeks later she visited me in Charleston. She timed her visit well—we caught a warm weekend in mid-November, and I think I surprised her when I pulled up outside her hotel with the johnboat hitched to my truck. She knew it was an “outdoor” kind of date, though I had left out the particulars.
Something else I appreciated about her was how she refused to be a wait-on-the-dock-and-let-the-guy-do-everything kind of woman. At the launch ramp she helped push the boat off the trailer and never complained when her sneakers got wet. Then she jumped into my truck and parked it while I started the outboard engine.
Cape Romain’s marshlands had faded along with most of the land foliage, and yet the low humidity seemed to energize the wildlife; some type of silvery fish kept jumping near the banks, and various shore birds rummaged for food along every sandbar we passed.
In the widest section of the inlet I set us to drift, and it was then that Molly turned from the front bench seat. We sat facing each other, only a small breeze rustling over the bow, just enough to unsettle the water.
“You like it out here, don’t you?” she asked.
“It’s peaceful. And the scenery is great . . . the brunette scenery, I mean.”
She kept gazing at me, as if searching for something. Blank faced, she glanced at the sky for a moment, then back to me.
“What?” I asked, fighting the urge to hand her a paddle and ruin what felt like a serious moment.
She said, “I was just thinking about when we first met.”
“Oh, when I almost scared you off?”
“You didn’t scare me,” she said, her voice unusually soft. “Not really. I’m glad you can talk freely about wanting to be a father.”
At that I reached for the paddle and steered us into the next bend. “I’m glad that you’re glad.”
That was all we said for a long while. It seemed that we had reached the point in our relationship where bits of depth and seriousness freely intertwined with bouts of spontaneous fun. Around the bend, as she turned to look where we were headed, I spied a distant sandbar and decided that it was time for some of the latter.
“Molly?” She spun in her seat to face forward again.
“Yes?”
“Remember how, when I asked you last night what kind of outdoor activity you’d prefer today, you said, ‘Maybe a walk, perhaps a game of putt-putt’?”
“I remember. But this little boat cruise was a great idea too.”
I used the paddle to point to the tarp rolled up in the bow. “Well, ma’am, here at Hackett Outdoor Entertainment, we can do all of that.”
She pulled the tarp out into the middle of the boat, and we unrolled it and pulled out the contents: two putters, four colored golf balls, five empty coffee cans, and a gardening spade.
Molly laughed and reached for the spade. “We’re going to build our own course?”
“Without bulldozers or even any grass.”
The sandbar we beached the boat upon was long and nearly oval in shape, and in less than twenty minutes we had constructed our course. Out in the estuaries, the sand gets packed hard by the weight of the water, and it makes for quite the smooth surface on which to putt. Trouble is, the advancing and receding tides allow a “course” to be open for only a few hours per day. I had always wanted to do this, no matter the temporal nature of it, and I felt elated that she greeted the idea with such enthusiasm.
We got a bit carried away building the last two holes—we made each of them more than two hundred feet in length and added a sand ramp that would launch a well-stuck ball over a pile of driftwood.
“It’s like Evel Knievel golf,” she said and swatted the first orange ball across damp sand.
I let her win the first match. But I did it with subtlety—such as on the third hole, when I hit my ball a bit too hard and watched it roll past the buried can and off the sandbar and down into the shallow waters.
“That’s a penalty stroke, right?” she asked. Molly too had a certain competitive nature, one that served her well in her vocation.
After we had played the course several times, we noticed a gathering of spectators. They had either drifted in or flown in while we weren’t looking. But now the pelicans and the gulls waddled up the far bank, eyeing our game as if they viewed our golf balls as rolling morsels, perhaps odd-shaped clams with a peculiar ability to rotate.
At a distance they followed us around the course until we arrived back at the boat. There Molly fed them the crust from a sandwich while I went and dug up the coffee cans and stowed them away in the tarp.
I was leaned over the johnboat with my back turned when she said with surprise, “Chris, they’re so . . . fat!”
“Yep. Noticed that once before.”
It was not the most earth-shattering date, nor was it over-the-top romantic. It was the kind of date where you realize how comfortable you are with the other person and how willingly each of you fits into the other’s world.
Back at the boat ramp we fastened the straps from stern to trailer, and it was there that I asked her if she’d enjoyed herself.
“Coming after t
he election turmoil, you have no idea.” She stuffed her life jacket under the bow and said, “This is so outside the Beltway. Not a single thing, not us, not the birds nor the jumping fish told a single lie about anyone else.”
I pulled the drain plug and let the last bit of water run out the back of the boat. “Refreshing?”
“Very.” She went around my truck, climbed into the passenger seat, and waited for me to scoot behind the steering wheel. “I’d really like to see the new site for your range. Especially since I sorta helped force the relocation.”
Cack and I had already installed ten of the hitting mats, plus we’d erected the net on the far side of the range. Though the ground remained crude and uncarpeted with grass, and though we weren’t even open for business yet, our younger clients didn’t seem to care, particularly on a warm afternoon in November. When Molly and I arrived, Cack and six kids occupied the mats. They’d brought their own bags of used golf balls, and they all swatted away, balls flying high, low, and sideways.
I showed Molly the concrete foundation for the new shop—it had just been poured the previous day. Seconds later Cack spotted us, and we exchanged waves from across the construction site. I felt blessed to have his loyalty, as he could have so easily taken a full-time job elsewhere and left me without my most valuable employee.
Molly’s third Carolina visit concluded just after we downloaded the same ring tone to our cell phones—the opening riff to an eighties song called “Burning Down the House.”
It was her idea; she thought the song was funny and ironic. I acknowledged that it was at least ironic.
After I’d driven her to the airport and kissed her good-bye, I walked alone back across the lower level of a parking deck. It was there in that cool shade where I replayed the ring tone and finally laughed out loud—partly because I accepted my fiery furnace for what it was and partly because I was sure I’d met the woman I would marry, but mostly because I realized yet again that God could engineer something good out of what originally seemed disastrous.
Par for the Course Page 19
