Well, they’d put that on hold, because in a time of crisis, a time like this, it was ill-advised to make rash decisions, everybody said that. So they did the little things that make up a life, anybody’s life, cooking, eating, running the dishwasher, sitting by the window with a book, knocking the mud from the soles of your boots, building a fire at night and staring into it with a cocktail clenched in your fist. Going to bed. Getting up. Watching the rain. Watching the sun. Watching the flies crawl up the windowpane.
She couldn’t go back to volunteering at the preserve, not after the way the Burnsides had turned on her, and he couldn’t very well go out patrolling timber company property anymore, for obvious reasons. He wouldn’t have wanted to, in any case. In fact, he looked up into those mountains from the back window and saw nothing there that was even remotely attractive to him, not anymore. If he hiked, he hiked the beach. And if he wanted exercise—and he did, because he wasn’t dead yet—he went out on the golf course. The golf course. He never thought he’d sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land. And what was golf but a way to fight off the desperation?
On this particular day, a day in the first week of April when the sun broke through early along the coast and Carolee was sleeping late, which was a mercy in itself, he tossed his clubs in the trunk and drove the two miles south to Little River and the course there, which was only nine holes, but nine holes were plenty as far as he was concerned. Until the past month, he hadn’t touched a club since he was a teenager and back then he’d never got much past the thrill of whacking the hell out of the ball, whether it was on the first tee or at a driving range. He remembered that, the driving range, how he and his buddies—R.J. Call, Rick Wiley, Mark Stowhouse—would down a couple of beers and compete to see who could send that little white sphere the farthest, over the nets even and into the field beyond. Hit it hard, that was all that mattered to them, and as far as the subtleties of strategy and making par, the irons, putting—playing the game to win—they could perfect all that later. When they were old.
Well, now he was old. Now he was an old white man with sunburned kneecaps lifting a golf bag out of the trunk of his car and trudging across the parking lot to the first tee, and if he didn’t have a partner it was because he didn’t want one. He didn’t need chatter, he didn’t need companionship, or not yet, anyway. What he needed was to get out of the house and that was what he was doing on this bright early morning when there was no one stirring but him and maybe the odd squirrel. The course looked out to sea, where the mouth of Little River opened up on the waves, and there were always seabirds here, pelicans gliding overhead as if they were being drawn on a string, gulls fixed to the roof of the Little River Inn like replicas or perched atop the flag at one hole or another and messing the green with the long trailing white stripes of their guano.
For a long while he sat on the bench behind the first hole, sipping the coffee he’d brought along in a thermos, crossing and uncrossing his legs, reaching back to adjust his hair in the grip of the rubber band he used to bind it up in back. The clubs, a cheap set they’d bought for Adam one Christmas when he was eleven or twelve, thinking to interest him in something beyond video games, sat propped against the bench. It was chilly, with a light breeze coming in off the water, something he’d have to account for when he was driving the ball. When he got to it. He turned up the collar of his jacket and stared out across the fairways and the greens that were so bright they seemed lit from within, all the way out to sea, where a pair of fishing boats stood like signposts at the place where sea and sky came together.
He was thinking about a day not too much different from this one, a week or so ago (he couldn’t really say because there wasn’t much to distinguish one day from another, light in the morning, dark at night, and whatever went on in between). Carolee had wanted to do some shopping up in Willits—or not shopping, really, but just cruising the various junk shops in the hope of finding treasure there, whether it be in the form of somebody’s dead grandmother’s crocheted doilies or salt and pepper shakers molded in the shape of Scottie dogs—and he’d agreed to come along just to do something and maybe take her out to lunch someplace.