Slide - Kyle Beachy [98]
“Man on range! Man on range!”
I reached the approximate area I thought the club had landed and began to circle. This was a land of palpable neglect, un-trimmed and lumpy, the antilawn. There was no telling how fast the club had been going, what kind of bounce it had taken. I was standing in a plot of grass that had been deemed RECEPTACLE. The kid in the cart continued screaming, and I thought about grass as its own kind of medium, a venue for such varied goodness in the world. Now I looked from clumpy green driving range to fat smooth seamless sky. I spun to the tees and saw a wall of people moving toward me, everyone converging from their partitioned bits of turf. Three football players and the couple to their right and a horde of single men in shorts and belts.
“Turn around,” I told them. “There is no problem. It's here somewhere and I'm going to find it. Seriously, leave me alone.”
But still they came, moving in a scattered line toward where I was standing. Behind them I saw Ian standing next to my father on the small square of turf, watching as the crowd of would-be golfers formed a giant circle around me and tried to help.
The buggy found it. The club's head had churned through the ball-retrieval system and came out chopped and dented to shit. My father stood by his car, holding the headless shaft between two fingers. In a few hours he was boarding a flight to Baltimore to examine their waterfront urban-reclamation project. His eyes looked like ashtrays and I knew: he had seen the photographs and they had reminded him of his own erstwhile desires and the restraint he had exercised without fail, every single time. The plot had spread itself outward and was implicating those around me. This man of virtue who shook Ian's hand and told him to keep swinging, then shook my own hand quickly before driving away.
Standing in the parking lot, we were so very close to the batting cages. They were right there and yet could have been somewhere in the Dakotas, so removed were we from their effect. The kid leaned against a Buick and ran one shoe across the top of the other.
“Let me see the letter, Ian.”
“No.”
“I can help.”
“It doesn't even say anything! She doesn't say when she's coming back. It's so stupid! Everyone always runs away but nobody explains why. Or, or if they do say why the reason is always so dumb there's no way it's the real reason.”
“It can be hard, sometimes, for people to find the words to fit the reason. Even when it feels obvious, things get jumbled between your head and mouth. It's language. Sometimes language is insufficient.”
“Like what happened to your girlfriend? Why did she go away?”
“For that there are branches and lists, diagrams. It's. It's a big complicated issue.”
“What's her name?”
“Audrey” I said, and it was the first taste of the word on my lips all summer. “Audrey Audrey needed evidence that I still loved her.”
“But that's so easy!” the boy said. “Even when my parents would throw things at each other, I could tell my dad wasn't throwing as hard as he could. That's how come I knew he loved her.”
I had to sit down for a minute.
“What are you doing?”
“You should give me the letter, Ian.”
“Get up!”
I turned my head and saw the grille of a Chevy Cavalier staring me down, turn signal going, and I knew I had sat down in the middle of the lot. But still the car did not honk, oh no, no, not in