• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 483 0

the word so loaded and fraught that it might have been a prayer. How, exactly, had he ended up here? And how was he going to get back home? Thoughts of his daughters half the world away made him want to weep, and then there was all the blown money he had to think about, all the people hurt and friendships wrecked, the chronic sloppiness with booze and food and sex and the obscene squandering of his God-given talent, the past chasing him from his bed like a swarm of killer bees so that the earliest violet-silver blush of dawn often found him out on the putting green in bare feet and boxers, practicing sixty-foot circus putts to clear his mind. This one for the British Open, he’d tell himself—clop. This one for the Masters. This for the PGA. As a kid he’d played this game on his mother’s good carpet, honing his skills for the glory that was sure to come, and now the fantasies came flooding back in spite of himself, filling the good clean space he was trying to make inside. Dear sweet Jesus, would he ever outgrow desire, that grasping inner child? Maybe you broke free only if you actually won—it was hard to imagine that Tiger Woods fantasized about winning the Masters, though maybe after you won you simply obsessed on it in reverse, replayed the triumph over and over in your head and inflated the moment to such orgasmic perfection that you drove yourself crazy from the other side.

God, it just seemed so hopeless sometimes. Sonny knew his mental apparatus was out of control, but he was becoming aware of a different way, in theory at least. Venturing out from the club on his days off he saw monks everywhere like a visual reproach, monks begging along the roads, milling around the shrines, chanting softly as they walked in single file, offering the world an object lesson in clarity. There was one group in particular, a pod of wispy, older monks who hung around Mahabandoola Park, across from the bank where Sonny wired money home. After his banking was done Sonny would spy on the monks as they went about their business, which did not, truth to tell, look like much. Some meditation, a little begging, the occasional catnap—life for them seemed to be a serene business, and Sonny watched them for clues as to how this was done. Desire, he knew, had ruined the first half of his life, and regret, its obverse, was going to ruin the second half unless he figured out their trick of serenity.

Show me! he wanted to scream at the monks. Tell me how! Where do I sign up? But something always held him back, some cultural cue bred deep in the bone: he was American, bad karma was his meat and potatoes. The golf course was where Sonny Grous belonged, out where businessmen plied their billion-dollar deals and dictators played their leisurely rounds, relaxing after a busy day of crushing the masses. And McClure—where did he fit in? He turned up at the club several times a week as the guest of one or another of the National’s seedier clique, the members said to be deep into drug-running or selling peasant girls to Thailand for the sex trade. The upper-echelon bottom-feeders, that was Kel’s crowd; Sonny assumed that McClure was CIA, though why that was he couldn’t exactly say. Late one afternoon he was finishing a lesson with General Tha’s son when McClure trudged up to the practice tee with a bucket of balls.

“Pro,” he wailed, “I’m suffering, man. Tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

“Let’s have a look,” Sonny said. McClure took out his 6-iron and crashed three straight duck-hooks into the trees.

“Your grip’s all wonky,” said Sonny. “Roll your palm a little bit to the right, there. And move the ball a little more forward in your stance.”

McClure’s next shot sailed straight and true. “Holy mother,” he sighed, “that’s better than a blow job. Grous, you’re a genius.”

“Hit some more. Lock it into your muscle memory.”

McClure hit a few shots. “So how you doing these days, Sonny?”

“Sneaking by. Roll that palm, you’re already backsliding on me.”

McClure smiled, adjusted his grip. “You seen Merrill lately?”

“He’s around. We played yesterday, as a matter