He went toward the bigger glow of the city, across the bridge with the shimmering dirty river running below him. Everything looked as it always had. It was awfully itself. The city, with its high crime rate and its dangerous, run-down neighborhoods. There were people out walking, and a jogger came by in the opposite direction. Lyndhurst kept going, half-running, looking behind him, and then trying merely to walk quickly, to seem casual, fighting for breath. The image of Grant sitting against the tree kept coming to him. He was near the apartment building, where all the lights seemed to be on, and everyone was out. There were people on the balconies, drinking beer and celebrating.
The boy had seen him. The boy would tell the police about it.
In the apartment were Grant’s things—a baseball cap, a pair of sandals, a beer glass in the sink. Lyndhurst got rid of his works, put it all in a plastic bag and threw it into the dumpster outside. He leaned on the iron door, in the sound of the celebrations, and fought to keep from being sick again.
When she pulled up, he tried to move to the other side of the dumpster, but she had seen him. She got out of the car and walked over, head tilted slightly, as if she wasn’t sure it was Lyndhurst.
“Hey?” she said.
“He’s—he’s not home.”
“Where is he? He said to meet him here.”
“He’s not here,” Lyndhurst nearly choked on the words. “Go home, Ramona. Please.”
“What’s wrong? Something’s wrong.”
“Go home.”
“Are you sick?”
“Yeah—sick.”
“Poor Lyndhurst.” She waited. “Hey, the power’s back on.” She seemed to want to celebrate.
“I don’t know where he is, okay?” He had nearly shouted at her.
She stood there with her head tilted in that way, regarding him, and then she seemed to sink into herself. “Oh,” she said, turning. “No.” She walked a few steps away, and turned to look at him again. “He was going to do something with you—you were both going somewhere. He told me that. Something’s happened. He got arrested. Tell me.”
“I’ve been here the whole night,” he said. “Goddamn. What do you want from me? I’ve been here the whole night. I didn’t go anywhere.”
“I was here earlier.” Her eyes had narrowed, and she took a step toward him again. “I rode back out to get some beer. No one was here. You’re shaking.”
“I went for a walk. I went for a walk.” He held his hands out as if to show his helplessness to explain anything. “I went for a walk, goddamn it.”
“You don’t have to shout.” She stepped closer, and touched his shoulder. “Tell me.”
He said, “I’m sorry. I got sick. I’m sick. Go home. Don’t come here anymore.”
For what seemed a long time, she stood and looked at him. His breathing was coming with a rasp. He couldn’t get enough of the hot night air to make a single exhalation. He thought he might keel over.
“We could go inside and, like, wait for him?” There was something pleading in her voice.
“Don’t you get what I’m telling you?” Lyndhurst said. “Get!” He straightened, and felt himself begin to gag. “Go home. Go back to your life.”
“Oh, no,” she said again. “No.” Then she turned and walked slowly up the lighted walk to the building, and around the corner of it, out of sight. Her motions were those of a person expecting any moment to be set upon by something bad. He waited a moment, bending, with his hands on his knees, trying to gather himself. Finally he started down the street, hurrying, glancing over his shoulder to be certain that she wasn’t following him. He thought of what was ahead of her this night, and was afraid she would remember him as he was now. He felt sorry for her, and yet he wanted never to see her, or hear her name, or know of her, ever again.
Not quite an hour later, he was on the street in front of his parents’ house, the president’s house, standing with hands on his knees again, choking for air, the muscles of his legs and arms jumping. He stood under the streetlamp, and then realized that he was in light, and moved to the shadow of the spruce tree at the edge of the lawn. The house was dark, save for one light upstairs—the one his parents had on a timer whenever they were going to be gone for longer than one night. Of course they had gone to the Eastern Shore when the power failure continued. He heard voices from the neighboring house—people who had moved in since he left home. He crossed to the side door, the one into the sunroom, where he knew a key was hidden under the mat. It was there. He went in, closed and locked the door. The quiet and the dark made him feel slightly calmer, but the air was stifling, and the memory of Grant’s still shape in the clearing, with the little perfect black circle in his forehead, kept returning to him. He began to cry softly, moving through the house, up the stairs, no one home, everything turned off, all the lamps unplugged. He reached for a wall switch, flicked it, was bathed in dreadful bright light, cried out, and turned it off again immediately.
It had all begun as a lark, going for a ride in the sporty convertible, something to do. Killing the routine.
Here was the doorway to his room. It seemed that the sirens never let up; they were still sounding across the night. But it was the silence of the clearing that remained with him, the vastness of that quiet, the hugeness of it—the not-breath, not-seeing of the shape there, sitting against the base of the tree. On the table by his bed, the digital clock had not been unplugged. The little red light showing the wrong time to the minute changed, and then changed again, and still again while he watched. The night would pass slowly. One little increment at a time. His father would want to come home before morning. He never really liked being away from the house. They were probably already on their way. He had a picture of them, sitting in the car, not speaking, the silence between them heavy with all the old discontents and resentments, the radio on, the night gliding by the windows, and the lights of the city restored. They would want to be home.
He got down on his knees and crawled under the bed.
TROPHY
Today I got a letter from an old friend inviting me to come back to Virginia to help him celebrate a new opening in his chain of hot-dog stands. I might actually go. This is the ninth such invitation he’s extended in the last eleven years. I always liked Jimmy, and in fact did go when he opened the first one, back in ′94. I met his new wife, saw his new house, and we had a happy couple of days. We even played golf once, like we used to back when I sold cars for a living and he owned the dealership. We haven’t been in very consistent touch since then, so it really would be something if I did show up again now.
Hell, I probably won’t. Life’s so busy anymore. But getting the invitation made me think about him, and about something that happened, on a golf course, all those years ago.
You don’t know anybody I knew then, so the names won’t matter, but I’ll make them up anyway. And I won’t tell you exactly where it happened, either. There are several public courses up and down the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Say it was one of those—far, far away.
One foggy Sunday morning, five of us were going to play eighteen holes. Although we knew one another and had played together in different combinations before, this was one of the few times we were all together at the same time. The others were Daryl, Harry, Anthony, and, of course, Jimmy.
We’d gone to work for him at X Motors back in the earliest part of the Clinton boom, before the bottom fell out and Jimmy’s tax troubles came to light and he had to sell the lot. None of us was thinking much then about whether we would stick to this line of work. That aspect of things hadn’t become quite real to us, was only a shadow on the distant horizon. We’d cooked up this day of golf essentially just to lighten Jimmy’s heart, although none of us spoke about that directly.
We decided to split up this way: Daryl and I would go ahead and tee off, while Harry and Jimmy would wait for Anthony, because together Anthony and Harry could always make Jimmy laugh, and they were better golfers, too.
I didn�
�t know this yet, but that week the corporate people, putting on the finishing touch, had told Jimmy they’d been forced by the IRS to pull his floor plan, so the IRS could collect on inventory. What this meant, if you ran a car dealership, was that you couldn’t sell that company’s cars anymore. The government would sell them against your tax debt.
Like I say, that was only the finishing touch. For Jimmy, things had been going from bad to worse for the last couple of years.
We had all benefited from his generosity, and we talked about him like a father or an older brother, admiring his ability to be lighthearted and to make fun of himself in his sea of troubles: business failing, payments mounting up, wife living elsewhere—a recent development—and his daughter from the first marriage not speaking to him anymore, having sided with her mother.
The major reason for the new wife trouble, really, was that the dealership consumed so much of his time—in the boom years because business was good, and in the bust years because it was bad. In fact, there wasn’t much time at home for any of us then, but especially not for Jimmy. And so the wife, let’s call her Elaine, twenty years younger than he was anyway, started feeling neglected and lonely. The rest of that story hardly needs telling: she’d moved out three weeks before.
My own wife was having trouble understanding the hours, but she managed all right; she’s still with me. We’re in pretty solid shape, too. But this isn’t about me.
Jimmy was our friend, and in a way our mentor, too—we were in our thirties and he was fifty. He’d taken each of us in at various points as salesmen (me, Daryl) or mechanics (Harry, Anthony), and we’d spent some really magnificent, deep-laughing hours over whiskey or wine or beer, almost always at the nineteenth hole at one course or another, mostly on Sundays. Elaine also played now and then; at least that gave them a little time together. They both knew Chris, the owner of the course we were playing the day I’m remembering. Chris, apparently believing that Jimmy knew everything, told him how sad he was about the situation with Elaine, who’d played eighteen holes on Friday and confessed she was going out with somebody from her Asian cooking night class. To me, it seemed pretty harsh for her to do that, knowing Chris would talk and it would get back to us. When Chris saw that Jimmy didn’t know, he tried to take it back. “I don’t know, though, could be just talk.”
“Probably not,” Jimmy said.
“Have you talked to her?”
“Everything she says to me is straight out of Fuck You Central.”
“I never heard that one,” Daryl said, and laughed a little.
Jimmy said, “Well, there’s nothing much I can do about it,” and thanked Chris for his concern. But it hurt him; I could see it in his eyes. He smiled and took a club from his bag and made a little loosening-up swing. “Thanks,” he said again, in case Chris had missed the first expression of gratitude. Then he looked down at the club head and waggled it a little, concentrating.
Jimmy was six-five and heavy boned, with great green eyes under thick brows that seemed always knitted, even when he smiled. He’d concentrate on what you were saying and remember little details about what was going on in your life, and you felt like you were important to him. He had large intelligence, and he could be very funny. And even so, all his troubles were in that face—that long, gaunt, grief-stricken, disconsolate face. Not just the recent trouble, but a pretty steady stream of bad luck: his brother killed in Vietnam; a younger sister gone off to some cult and never heard from since, probably as a direct result of losing the brother; both parents dead, evidently of heartbreak. He had a long-established habit of expecting the worst, and this assumption informed everything he said, though he’d express this as calmly as someone making observations about the news. Really, you never had the sense that he was complaining and yet no misfortune was the slightest surprise to him. He’d already imagined all of it. His life was just going that way—hard passages, failed ventures, people leaving, sorrow after sorrow.
And through it all he was interested in how you were doing.
None of us was very good on the links. Handicaps, we used to joke, weren’t really comforting, since they’d all be so unreasonably high. Anthony was the best player in the group, though often enough he’d get up into the low nineties. Harry hadn’t broken a hundred more than a half dozen times in his whole life. Jimmy could sometimes beat Anthony but was usually closer to the century mark himself. Still, when he flushed one—his swing looked so good and he was so tall and powerful that you’d swear he was a hustler. You’d hear that purely amazing smack of the club head meeting the ball, and think, God almighty, it might go into orbit. Well, you know what I’m talking about if you’ve spent warm Sundays treading the green paradise of possibility, as Jimmy liked to put it.
Daryl and I—well, the less said about our game the better. On a bad day, it could look like field hockey. Lots of unexpected divots, some of them traveling farther than the ball itself. And occasionally with my first swing, the ball didn’t move at all.
But we always had fun. There was the talk and the comradeship of difficulty, again to use Jimmy’s words. He was naturally expressive, and he liked me because I read books and he could talk to me about them, getting the gist, since for periods of time he could rarely read more than the newspapers. He used to call me truth-seeker, a term he said he liked better than philosopher, and I liked it better, too. More than once he suggested I might someday be able to find a meaning in all the bad luck he’d had. That’s how he talked then. I swear, what he was going through, I don’t think anybody else would’ve been able to stand it. More often than not he’d have this mild little grin, telling you about something that, if it was happening to you, would finish you off within the week.
On this day our tee time was seven o’clock. Anthony was late, so we went to the practice green and did some putting and chipping, without saying much at first. It was, as I said, foggy. Damp and humid. It looked like the weather might lift, but you never can tell for sure in that part of Virginia; up in those mountains, they’ve got little reflectors in the center line of the road that can glow all day long. You could look at the thick folds of fog and believe a sunny day was somewhere out there on the other side; you might even expect it to break through.
We talked some, skirting the real subject—this news about Jimmy’s wife and her new friend. One of his favorite topics on the links was the peculiar psychology of the sport itself, and its players. He knew the jokes, of course, like everybody else, but he also made observations about it, and these actually had as much to do with human nature, stuff that you and I would never think of. And he thought of me as a philosopher. Today was no different. You remember when that plane crash-landed on the airport runway in Iowa, and they caught it on film? A lot of people died but plenty lived, too, thanks to the pilots who brought that crippled bird in. Well, NPR reported that the pro at some club next to the airport said, quote: “About half of our golfers went home, after that.” Jimmy said, “Imagine how it was for the other half, the ones who stayed.” And he did a little dramatic bit, lining up an imaginary putt and then stopping, peering off in the distance. “What the hell is that? Oh, my God!” He feigned witnessing the horror of a plane bursting into flame on the runway, and his lips drew tight, his teeth showed. “My God! What a terrible thing.” Then he straightened up, adjusted his belt, looked at me and said, deadpan as hell, “Who’s away?”
A joke from a face as forlorn as Jimmy’s, believe me, it’s funnier than if a clown tells it.
In any case, it got a big laugh from us, even knowing the sadness behind it.
“Golf,” I said. “It’s just the nature of it. So damn punishing, so steadily humiliating that you never want to give up while there’s still a chance.”
“That’s what we keep you around for,” Jimmy said, smiling at me and loosening up with his driver. “Our own Plato, leading us into the heart of things.”
Harry said he’d probably have stayed to finish the round. “Couldn’t do anything to help
, right?”
“Well,” Jimmy said, “at least you’re honest.”
We shook our heads at all the bad luck in life.
A few minutes later, Anthony hurried over from the clubhouse, apologizing for holding us up, and Jimmy turned to Daryl. “What’re you waiting for?” he said.
For a second, Daryl looked like he’d just taken a blow to his head. I thought he must be thinking about the airplane crash. “What?” he said.
“Hit away, man.”
Now he looked relieved.
“Hey, Daryl,” Harry said. “You nervous? Gotta fly somewhere?”
“He had too much coffee this morning,” Jimmy said.
We all laughed, since Daryl drank about twenty cups a day. He set his ball on the tee and after his usual intricate preparations and waggles, made the first shot of the day. We watched it go straight up into the fog and disappear, then drop in the middle of the fairway like something falling out of blank heaven, not more than a hundred yards away.
“A pop-up,” Jimmy said. “Better than a grounder.”
I walked over and got set to hit. They were all waiting, watching, and I lucked out, hit it straight and low, farther than my usual dying slice. Daryl and I rode in the cart down to his ball, and that’s when he told me they were going to pull Jimmy’s floor plan.
I looked back to the tee, where Jimmy stood with the others, waiting for us to hit. He was talking, and I felt very odd to hear about this new trouble in his life. “Did he tell you that?”
Daryl shook his head. “I know, okay? It’s a fact. It’s happened.”
“My God,” I said.
Daryl wasn’t even listening to me. He hit his second, using a three wood, and skipped it about eighty yards along.
Something Is Out There Page 9
