Warren
dewy knee-high fog clung tentatively to the fairway. 6:45 AM. Cool,
still air. A hazy sun. New spikes piercing the ground with
disconcerting loudness. It rained during the night. Warren panted and
puffed through dimpled cheeks and his jacket rode up and exposed his
chubby, dimpled back every time he bent over to replace the dimpled ball
on the tee he stuck crookedly in the ground. He had an audience of
one-a teenager on a mowing machine, bent over the steering wheel waiting
to clip the tee. He pulled down is coat to cover his back and rumpled
shirt tail, and with a mighty swing drove the ball twenty yards through
the wet grass. The ball made a soggy hissing noise as it threw up a
rooster tail of mist before it stopped. One.
Warren had risen at 5:00 AM to shower and dress and drive forty-five minutes to the course so he could play nine holes before the staff scramble was to start-a yearly event he had habitually shied away from. He looked at his feet as he walked to his ball. Golfer's feet, he thought. The wheels of his cart and his in-turned feet left a crooked and unsure seam on the wet grass. His cuffs were wet. Green pants. Too much green, he worried. Green jacket. Green shirt. Tuck your pants into your socks if the grass is wet, his mother advised. No one counts the first shot unless it is a good one, his father told him. His second shot landed further up the fairway where his first one should have gone. One again.
The vice-president and his wife, Warren, and Julie from the mail room--that was to be the foursome. That was why he was going.
Julie was new at the office. Single, he overheard. Tissue bulged from the pockets of the sweaters she wore; a pink one and a blue one, with long sleeves and fuzz balls and white pearl-like buttons. Long sleeves to cover a large hairy birthmark on her forearm. He noticed it when she brought his mail to his desk, when her sleeve rode up her forearm, when he was trying not to make eye contact with her. Shot two in the rough. She pushed her heavy glasses up her nose after she bent over to get mail from her cart. Three across the fairway in the rough on the other side. She turned to find him watching her once. Four into the woods, under a small, dripping tree. He flushed. She flushed. A half-smile, he imagined. Five back on the fairway and water from the dripping tree down his neck. Every week he could feel himself coming closer to speech. Six in the bunker. Closer to conversation. Seven still in the bunker. A date, perhaps. Eight on the green. Intimacy. Four putts for a twelve.
Warren's mother had a key to his apartment. When he arrived home from work the day before the scramble, his mother was ironing green pants, and his father was putting balls into a tipped over Styrofoam cup. His mother had already washed the dishes and placed them in the rack by the sink to dry. She had hung a painting in the living room above the sofa. The painting had been left behind in the house Warren and his parents moved into when he was quite young. It had been moved from closet to closet, from shelf to shelf, but never thrown away or hung on a wall. A blue sky and puffy white clouds looked down on a savage river that traced the base of a mountain. A bear and its cub waited to swipe one of leaping fish.
"Your walls are too bare. I thought it would look nice. Your father brought his clubs for you," his mother said.
"Watch this," his father called from the hall as he putted a ball from in front of the bathroom door. It whizzed past the cup and thudded against the stereo. "I made one from the bedroom a while ago, didn't I, Agnes."
"I didn't see it, Henry," she answered. "I was doing the dishes."
"Sure you did. I said, Hey, look, and it went right in. All the way from the bedroom. You saw it."
"I heard it, Henry. It sounded like a great shot. He made one all the way from the bedroom," she said to Warren. "Try these on, will you, dear." She held up the green pants. Huge and green. His father hit the stereo again.
"I already know they fit," Warren told her.
"You'd better try them on," she said, and pulled at the snug waistband of the ones he was wearing. "You're getting as big as your father."
"I think your floor is crooked," his father called from down the hall, balls colliding around the cup and into furniture.
Warren took the pants to his room. His father was bent over a putt in the doorway. "The key is to keep your head down," and he stroked another ball at the cup. "See. Right there by the couch. The floor is crooked."
"Try that shirt on too," his mother called from the kitchen. A golf shirt lay on the bed, the price tag still in the sleeve. Green with one wide white stripe across the chest, and two Xs on the tag.
"How do they fit?" she called. Warren dressed quickly because he knew she wouldn't knock and would soon be in his room tugging at his clothes, examining and smoothing creases.
"It's too big," he answered, and instantly she appeared. "Keep your head down," his father said to no one. Thump.
"It looks great," she said. "The pants are a little tight," she pulled at the waist and tried to unpucker the pleats. "But the shirt is very nice. Come see, Henry."
"Yessss! Another one! Did you see that, Agnes?"
"I think the collar is too big," Warren told her, as he fidgeted in the mirror, trying to arrange the shirt so that not so much dark hair from his shoulders and from around the back of his neck showed above the collar.
By the third hole, the blanket of mist had burnt off, and the sun was crisp and round and concentrating on the back of Warren's neck. A breeze came up with just enough impetus to blow Warren's comb-over into his eyes. He removed his jacket and stuffed most of it into his golf bag. A sweat-painted V extended from his collar to between his shoulder blades. His shirt came untucked on every swing. No time to go home and change. Getting too warm for a blue sweater, or a pink one.
"Take a hat with you, dear," his mother told him.
"Use the yellow balls," his father said, "they are easier to see."
'Do you have sun screen?" his mother asked.
"Is that girl from the office going?" his father asked. "What's her name? Juliet?"
"Henry!"
"What? There's a girl from the office Warren's got his eye on. Janice or something."
"Julie," Warren mumbled.
"Just go and have fun, dear."
"Show her how to hold your putter...."
"Henry! Don't listen to your father, dear"
"What? I was only saying..."
"I know you. The way that mind works..."
The conversation spilled into the hallway and Warren shut the door. He could here them until the elevator took them away. The refrigerator hummed, his head throbbed, golf balls littered the carpet, the painted bears waited by the painted river.
On the next hole there was a small pond. Very small. And not at all close to the fairway. Warren hit one of his father's yellow, highly visible, easy-to-find balls in the pond. Not a deep pond. A few lily pads. A few frogs. But no yellow ball. Only his green reflection that disappeared in a swirl of muddy ripples when he fished along the edge with his club.
Two older men who started behind him played their balls up to a point on the fairway near to where Warren looked for his ball.
"Found the pond did ya?" one of them said.
"Yes," said Warren.
"You might as well hit another one from the fairway and play along with us. You'll never find that one."
"You go ahead of me," Warren insisted, and put is head down and continued to stir the pond. His pants crept toward his hips exposing the top of his boxer shorts. He tightened his belt to the next notch as the men played through. Warren watched them strike their balls with ease, casually talking as they swung. Before long they were out of sight.
Warren's next shot, one from the fairway with a new ball, veered deep into the woods. He bulled his way into the brush. His golf bag snagged on branches. Pitch from the fir trees matted to the hair on his arms. A limb sprang back and struck him across the bridge of his nose, making his eyes water. In a small opening, he thought he spotted his ball. Then another and another. All highly visible easy-to-find yellow balls. But as he strode closer he discovered the ground speckled with small apples. Golf ball size, greenish-yellow apples. Hundreds of them scattered under crooked and maimed trees.
A nearby tree shook fiercely, and more apples bounced to the ground. Warren walked dot the other side of the tree. He was met with a hoarse and panicked bleating of a bear cub. Warren and the cub ran in different directions.
The scramble started without Warren. It started without Julie. She canceled without explanation. The vice-president hit a ball into the woods and was the one to find him. Warren had four parallel gashes from his forehead to his chin; gashes that had removed one of his eyelids and part of his top lip. His forearms were mutilated, and his shirt was shredded and red. He had been bitten several times on the back of the neck and on the hands. Blood and pitch and rotting, yellow-green apples hardened like a paste to hair all over his bloating and gray body.
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