The Golfer's Carol Read online

  But the ghost of Ben Hogan was gone. I climbed to my feet, wiping the grass and dirt off my backside. Through the dim rays of the setting sun, I saw that I was back on the driving range at Shoal Creek. Shady Oaks was gone. Hogan was gone.

  I took in a deep breath and slowly exhaled. My chest ached from the fall I had taken, and I could still hear Hogan’s voice chiming in my ears. Is that what you want?

  “You okay, Mr. Clark?”

  I pivoted at the sound of the voice and saw the kid who had guided me to the locker room a few hours earlier, who had told me a man named Ben was waiting for me out by the range.

  “Is your friend gone?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He scratched his head. “We’re about to shut things down. Want me to have your car brought around?”

  I peered behind me at the expanse of the driving range and then the undulating terrain of Shoal Creek, which was such a contrast to the flat fairways of Shady Oaks. “Yeah,” I managed. “That would be good.”

  “You sure you’re okay, Mr. Clark? Your face is white as a sheet.”

  Wincing as I took in another breath, I smiled at him. “I’m fine, kid. Just bring the car. Thanks.”

  He gave me a salute and ran off down the cart path that led to the clubhouse. I followed after him, my legs rubbery. I was exhausted. I glanced at my watch. It was almost seven o’clock, and I had a two-hour drive in front of me.

  When I reached the clubhouse, I looked over my shoulder at the driving range. Darkness had now made its final descent, and I could barely see anything other than the shadows of the tree limbs. Then my heart caught in my throat as the silhouette of a person slowly came into view. He had to be leaning against a tree, though all I could make out was the shadow of the man and his Ben Hogan cap.

  I saw a spark of light and knew that he had lit another cigarette.

  Is that what you want? Despite the almost three hundred yards between us, it was as if he were whispering from a foot away. Then, just like that, the light from his match flickered out and there was only darkness.

  Third Round

  24

  I woke up the next morning sluggish and thirsty. I had arrived home the previous night at nine thirty and slept on the couch in the den, since Mary Alice was still under the weather. Before attempting to sleep, I had watched the Masters highlights on CBS. Seve Ballesteros from Spain, a two-time Masters champion and probably the best player in the world, had vaulted to the lead with a second-round sixty-eight. That didn’t bother me, because I liked Ballesteros and his bold brand of play. Jack had played better, firing a seventy-one, and was now one over for the tourney. He had made the cut, so he’d be around for the weekend. But he was still six shots behind Ballesteros, and based on the highlights, it was hard to imagine Seve faltering.

  I barely slept a wink all night, haunted by the silhouetted image of Ben Hogan leaning against the tree and lighting his cigarette, whispering over and over again, Is that what you want? Is that what you want?

  I poured myself a tall glass of ice water and drained it in one gulp. I had driven home from Shoal Creek in a daze and had forgotten to eat or drink anything.

  After downing a second glass of water, I noticed an open box of Cap’n Crunch that Davis must have left on the counter after coming home late. I normally ate Raisin Bran, but what the heck? I fixed myself a bowl of the sweetened corn concoction and splashed a little milk on top.

  “Breakfast of champions, I see?”

  I looked up to see my wife dressed in her white bathrobe with the initials MADC embroidered in red across the front.

  “Mary Alice Davis Clark,” I said, winking at her. “Aren’t you a sight?”

  Her hair was a tousled mess and her skin was pale, but her tired smile and soft touch on my shoulder sent a tingle of warmth through my body. “How was Charlotte?” she asked, sitting down next to me.

  After another spoonful of cereal, I said, “She’s holding up okay. I think she’s more angry than sad.”

  “The stages of grief,” Mary Alice said, shaking her head. “Want me to make you some coffee? My stomach is too weak, but—”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll make some in a minute. Here, sit down. Why don’t you let me fix you something?”

  She sat heavily in the seat next to mine and began to rub her knuckles over her temples.

  “You might be dehydrated,” I said. “Do we have any Gatorade?”

  She shook her head and winced. “No, but I think there’s a Sprite in the fridge.”

  I grabbed the last remaining Sprite from a six-pack in the refrigerator and poured it over ice in a glass. Then I took the box of Cap’n Crunch and emptied out a few pieces of the cereal into a bowl, forgoing any milk. “Here, why don’t you try to eat a little of this? Should be pretty bland without the milk.”

  She smiled up at me and picked up one of the small, square morsels between her fingers, hesitated for a moment, and then stuck it into her mouth. She chewed slowly and took a tiny sip of her drink. “Well, it’s official. I’m never eating my mother’s cooking again.”

  I laughed, and it felt good to laugh. Here we were, a woman whose mother had almost killed her with meat loaf and a man contemplating suicide who’d just buried his best friend, sharing a breakfast of Cap’n Crunch. It wasn’t necessarily a Hallmark card, but it felt good. The best I’d felt in a long time.

  “I think I’d like to go see Graham today,” she said. Her voice was hoarse from all the vomiting, but there was also the ever-present despair that I heard every time she mentioned our son’s name.

  The stages of grief, I thought, echoing my wife’s words from a moment ago. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. The last one, at least for my wife and me, seemed beyond all reach.

  Any good vibes that had begun to sprout died. “Okay,” I whispered. “When?”

  “After I take a shower,” she said.

  “Do you want me to go with you?” I felt obligated to ask. In the first few months after Graham’s death, we had always visited his grave site together. We both would cry and hold each other. Mary Alice was inconsolable in those days, and it was all I could do to get her to leave. She would plant kisses on the marker and get down on her knees and give it a hug. Over time, I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. Eventually, Mary Alice started visiting the cemetery alone.

  “No,” she said. “Unless you want to.”

  The words hung in the air for several seconds. Finally, I rose from the table and stuck my empty cereal bowl in the sink. “I should probably swing by the office. No telling what was dumped on my desk yesterday while I was gone.”

  She nodded and lifted another piece of Cap’n Crunch to her mouth. I saw a lone teardrop slide down her cheek, which she made no move to wipe away.

  I washed out the bowl with soap and water and turned to leave. I kissed her cheek where the tear had now dried. “I hope you feel better.”

  As I walked away, her hoarse voice called from behind me. “Randy.”

  She was looking up at me with a question in her brown eyes. She was beautiful in the morning light that was now cascading in from the window above the kitchen sink.

  “What?” I asked.

  After a second’s hesitation, the question in her gaze dissipated. “Nothing.”

  25

  I haven’t been to my son’s grave in over a year.

  Even as I have contemplated ending my own life, I have not been able to bring myself to go back there. Does this make me feel guilty? Yes. Do I feel like I’m less of a man? Less of a human being because I can’t endure the despair that his place in the cemetery brings? Yes, across the board.

  But yet I don’t go and won’t go. I prefer to watch the old videos I have of us as a family, though I rarely even do that anymore. All these glimpses of my boy onscreen do is bring more pain. His smiling face, in
mid-laugh at something his sister has said and done, is like sharp nails raking down the chalkboard of my heart.

  I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take the anguish in my wife’s voice and face. I can’t take the fact that there is nothing I can do to ease her pain and despair. I can’t take the sense that I have no control over what has happened to me.

  I can’t bring Graham back. I can’t pay his hospital bills. I can’t provide a future for Mary Alice or Davis.

  All I can do is jump . . .

  * * *

  —

  After slipping on a pair of khaki pants, golf shirt, and sweater, I headed out the door with my briefcase in hand. I paused in the doorway and said good-bye to my wife, and she yelled a “be careful” as the door closed behind me. For as long as I’ve known her, Mary Alice has told me to “be careful” every time I go anywhere. It’s one of those endearing motherly things that Davis rolls her eyes at, but that I know also brings her comfort. If Mary Alice Clark didn’t tell me to “be careful” before I walked out the door, I would think I was in some alternate universe.

  As I walked to my car, I saw no sign of Davis’s Jeep. “Goose Pond,” I said out loud, feeling a flutter in my stomach. Davis and the Huntsville High women’s golf team were in Scottsboro playing in a regional invitational. It was the biggest event of the season so far.

  And I forgot our ritual . . .

  Before every tournament, Davis and I always went over her plan for the round. Each tee shot. The side of the fairway she wanted to be on. The type of greens and how they would putt. I had played Goose Pond numerous times and could have helped her. Usually, we had this discussion over dinner the night before the tourney. When she was younger, I would drive her to tournaments and caddy for her. In those days, our planning sessions were fun and exciting and would sometimes carry over to the course. But since her brother’s death, Davis and I both seemed to merely be going through the motions for the sake of tradition.

  Sometimes if I had to work late the evening before an event, she would wake me up the next morning to review her plan.

  But not today . . .

  This was the first time we failed to even attempt the ritual. She left without a peep, and I wasn’t even able to wish her luck.

  As I climbed into my car, a dagger of remorse cut through me. I’m failing her, I thought. Just like I’m failing her mother.

  “Please God, let her play well,” I whispered, as I turned the key. I almost laughed at the absurdity of me praying for my daughter to shoot a good score on the golf course while I was still seriously considering ending my own life. For that matter, praying at all seemed a bit hypocritical given my lack of faith in the Almighty these days.

  I sighed as I backed out of the driveway. I glanced at the briefcase that I had flung onto the floorboard, wondering if there was any point in going into the office. What the heck? I thought. Where else am I gonna go? I didn’t want to go to the club. The last two times I had been to a golf course, I’d suffered through hallucinations that had taken me to East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1920s and Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, circa 1960. For a second, I pondered whether to again try to drive to Decatur and finish things once and for all with a plunge off the Tennessee River Bridge. But after tossing and turning all night with the ghost of Ben Hogan in my ear, jumping to my doom didn’t sound right.

  Was I having doubts? I guess I was.

  “The office it is,” I said out loud.

  26

  The firm was a dark and lonely place on Saturday morning. As I trudged down the empty hallway to my office, I was struck by the stark quiet that surrounded me. It was like visiting the fairgrounds the day after the carnival had left town. The constant ringing of telephones and rapid clicking of keys was gone. As was the chatter by the coffeepot and the muffled sounds of talking behind closed conference room doors. I avoided working at the office on the weekends, preferring to bring a few files home if I absolutely had to work. But sometimes, especially if I was getting ready for a trial, it was necessary to come in. Normally, I would turn on a few lights, but I didn’t feel like it today. I stepped into my office and sat down in the high-backed burgundy chair that the firm had given me as a gift when I’d started thirteen years earlier. At the time, I’d been proud of the large power chair where I would take phone calls and prepare for trials. Now, as I sat down, I only felt silly. This squeaky artifact of the golden age of law was uncomfortable and ridiculous. I sank down in it and gazed around the dark room. The only light came from my window that looked out over Spragins Street below. It cast a glow over the portrait of the thirteenth green at Augusta National that hung on the far wall.

  I stared at the painting, thinking back to a couple nights earlier, when the ghost of Darby Hays and I had both hit shots into that green.

  What is happening to me? I wondered, thinking through everything that had transpired since I turned forty on Wednesday. Ben Hogan’s words rang in my ears.

  You aren’t going to hurt your father by jumping off that bridge. He’s dead. The only folks that get hurt are your wife and daughter, and anyone else you might have helped with your God-given talents. Is that what you want?

  “I don’t know,” I said out loud. I felt my heartbeat beginning to race and I stood up from the chair, bracing my hands on my desk. “I don’t know!” I screamed the words and had a vision of my wife kneeling by my son’s grave, caressing the concrete and kissing the words written on it. Robert Graham Clark II.

  We had named him after my father. It had been Mary Alice’s idea, since we had used her maiden name for Davis.

  The two people who had hurt me the most in life shared the same name. Dad had a million chances to change things but hadn’t.

  And Graham had been given no chance at all. There was no explanation from some higher power as to why my son was taken. He just was.

  I felt hot tears streaking down my cheek. I glanced up at the portrait of Augusta and wanted to throw something at it. I wanted to break everything in the office. I wanted to pull all of my hair out and beat my face with my fists until I couldn’t feel anything anymore.

  I want to jump.

  “I want to jump.” I repeated the words out loud, but they didn’t sound strong. How did the son of Robert Clark become such a whiner?

  Hogan again. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head and pushed, trying to rid my brain of that arctic, unsympathetic voice. As I focused my eyes in the dark, I now heard more voices.

  You’re fighting awful hard to stay on this bridge for someone planning to jump.

  You need to toughen up, Clark . . . all people experience pain in this cruel world . . .

  Your daddy is stronger than all of us . . .

  I groaned and shook my head against the sounds. I’m losing my mind.

  I staggered away from the desk and saw a Post-it note lying on the floor. I snatched it up and read the words out loud, trying to force out the other voices. Ellie Timberlake called. Wants to have lunch next week to discuss something. Wouldn’t say what it was about.

  I blinked at the words scribbled on the note. Eleanor Timberlake was a sixty-two-year-old solo practitioner. She specialized in personal-injury plaintiff’s cases and had obtained the largest verdict in Madison County history by a female attorney a decade earlier. I had tangled with Ellie, as she liked to be called, or “Ms. Ellie,” as everyone in the bar referred to her, in at least ten depositions and they had all been knock-down, drag-out affairs. Ellie Timberlake was ruthless and as warm and fuzzy as a box of nails. The only somewhat nice moment I’d ever had with her was when she agreed to a continuance of a trial because of Graham’s death.

  Ellie was the sole female plaintiff’s lawyer in Huntsville. I had been both flattered and afraid when she’d asked me four years ago to become her law partner. I had taken only one plaintiff’s case in my ten-year career up to t
hat point, and I’d worried about it nonstop. Whether I had pleaded the proper claims, whether I had the correct names of the defendants listed, whether the type of service of process was sufficient, and so on. Even when I finally settled the case for a nice payday for my client and the firm, I was stricken by whether the confidentiality agreement I’d advised my client to sign was sound and whether the release was too broad. In summary, I didn’t think plaintiff’s work was for me.

  I mentioned all these things during my meeting with Ellie, and she brushed them off as “defense lawyer fears.” “My line of work is a volume business, Randy. You can’t just have one case. You’ll worry it to death, and let’s face it, we plaintiff’s lawyers are like batters in baseball. Even the good ones”—she had smiled—“like me are lucky to hit over three hundred in front of a jury. We’re gonna lose some cases, but you have to be willing to go the distance and lose in order to have any chance at a big settlement. That takes time, and I’ve paid my dues. What I need now is a partner. How does Timberlake and Clark sound?”

  I must have appeared shocked by her request, because she had laughed out loud. “Think about it, Randy. If you don’t jump off the insurance-defense treadmill at some point, you’re gonna wake up and be my age and never realize your full potential as a lawyer.”

  “Do you have to be a plaintiff’s lawyer to fulfill your potential?” I had asked, my voice incredulous.

  “Not at all. But you’re trapped in your current gig. Every defense lawyer I know is fussing about how the insurance companies are cutting their time and hampering their trial strategies.”

  I had bitten my lip and not responded, but I knew she was right. Still, the insurers I worked for were reliable clients who paid their bills. I wasn’t going to get rich working for them, but I would be able to eat.