Past Due

Chapter 53

A FEW YEARS back, for the first time, they played golf’s U.S. Open at a municipal course, picking a track out on Long Island, Bethpage Black. It’s safe to say that D.W. Field Golf Course, the Brockton, Massachusetts, municipal course, Dee Dubs to the locals, is not next on the list. A flat nondescript layout with an old brown clubhouse and hot dog grill, Dee Dubs sat across from a mini mall sporting a pizza parlor and a kick-boxing joint. To most golfers it might look like a scraggly pasture with some flags stuck in the ground to let the cows know where to pee, but to its denizens it was as good as Pebble Beach, only better, because it was built without Pebble Beach’s large and unsightly water hazard and the greens fees were about four bills cheaper.

I stood on the far side of the eighteenth green, just in front of the clubhouse, and watched the foursomes make their way up the fairway. I was looking for a man in a blue windbreaker, yanking his clubs along in a hand cart, most likely somewhere in the rough by the trees on the right side of the fairway. The way the old men on the practice green put it, Buck Greeley was so conservative he only played the right side of the course. I understood that to mean that Buck Greeley was such a stubborn old man that he refused to admit he had a slice.

I spotted him climbing up the right side, bent, without a hat, jerking the cart angrily behind him as he walked away from his playing partners and made his way toward the trees where his banana tee shot had landed. He grabbed an iron from his bag, looked up, glared at a couple of kids lugging their bags from the parking lot to the clubhouse, along a path that cut smack across the eighteenth fairway.

“Get the hell out of our way,” he called out.

The kids maintained their placid pace. “We see you,” one called back.

“You might see us but you’re still lallygagging like a bunch of Nancies.”

“You reach us, old man, and we’ll scatter.”

Greeley grunted, took a vicious swipe with his iron, watched as the ball emerged from the turf a low flash of white before smacking straight into the branches of a small maple and falling like a shot bird, forty yards short of the path.

The kids laughed and high fived.

Greeley replaced his iron, dragged his cart forward, until he was in position to take another angry swipe, and sent the ball smartly into a sand trap.

Two slashes later he was on the green. Two stabs with his putter left him three feet from the pin, a putt which he conceded to himself. A quadruple bogey, eight by my count, although who was counting, certainly not Greeley. I couldn’t hear the conversation off the green but I could imagine it.

“What did you get there, Buck?”

“Five.”

Men work their entire lives, salting away what they can in their IRAs, all the time dreaming of retirement so they can spend their sunset years on the links. They might as well just save up for dental surgery.

“Mr. Greeley? Do you have a minute?”

He was leaning over, lugging his cart behind him, his scalp, beneath his wispy white hair, red with exertion and sun. A surprisingly short man, heavy in the legs and chest. He lifted his face, a flat pug face, and took in my suit, my tie, my black shoes. “What do you want?” he barked.

“I’d like to talk.”

“About what?”

“About your son, Tommy.”

“Oh my God,” he said, the hostility suddenly melting into something else. “Did they find him?”

I stared into his now wide eyes and was taken aback by what I saw, the pain, the fear, the loss, the hope, the hope. Whatever wound the disappearance of his son had burned into him, it had not yet healed, not yet completely covered over with scab and scar. I felt, just then, like I had stepped inside a stranger’s house, pushed open the bedroom door, trespassed upon a scene of utter privacy.

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry, no.”

His face closed again, just that quickly. “Then what the hell do you want?”

“I just want to talk. About your son. If you have the time.”

“Of course I have the time. What the hell else do I have but time? But I need to eat first. Eighteen holes, taking as many whacks as I do, burns everything I got these days.”

We took a table in the back corner of the clubhouse grill, a small dark room with white plastic chairs and green oilcloth covering the tables. The room was filled with old men, playing cards or staring at the Golf Channel on the television bracketed above the front door. The old men gave me the eye as I passed through, not many suits in the Dee Dubs clubhouse, I suppose. At the grill I bought two hot dogs and two Cokes.

“What do you like on your dog?” I asked him.

“Lobster,” he said, “and hold the wiener. But if they don’t have lobster, then onions and mustard.”

I put both hot dogs in front of him. He tore into one with his big false teeth, devoured it, took up the next. The whole time he was looking at me from under his brow without saying anything, sizing me up. Halfway through his second dog, he nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

I told him I was a lawyer, which drew a wince, told him I had received information about the disappearance of his son from a client and was trying to figure out exactly what had happened. I said I had some leads and thought I had a chance to solve it once and for all.

“Why?” he said. “What’s it matter now?”

“If it mattered then,” I said, “it matters now.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Just tell me about him. Who were his friends? What did you know of his life at Penn?”

“Nothing,” said Greeley.

I stared at him for a moment, during which he failed to elaborate, and then I said softly, “He was your son.”

“What does that matter?” he said. “We didn’t talk. All this talk about talk. Everything’s a talk show now. Look at that, on the Golf Channel even. Talk talk talk. Has any society talked more and said less. We didn’t talk, Tommy and me. The thing I respected most about him was he didn’t tell me anything. A man’s got to take care of his own damn business. A son shouldn’t have to listen to his father talk about old girlfriends, about struggling to make a living, how everything turns to shit because he’s white and Irish and didn’t go to Harvard and the liberals say he’s not deserving enough. A son shouldn’t be burdened with that. And a father shouldn’t be burdened with his son’s struggle to pass algebra or get between some girl’s legs or a prank gone bad. That’s nothing a father should know about. We kept our own damn business. We didn’t talk.”

“What was he like?”

“Tommy? Cocksure, arrogant. Like me when I was younger. He had his own things going on and sometimes they blew up in his face. But he was always one for slipping out of trouble. And in those days I was around to bail him out, wasn’t I? Though he was doing all right for himself in the end. Ivy League college and then a top-ten law school. Pretty damn all right. I thought things might be working out for him after everything.”

“Everything?”

“Nothing. What do you want from me?”

“Your wife said you went down to Philadelphia looking for him when he came up missing.”

“The police down there said there was nothing they could do. What the hell does that mean? A boy is missing and there is nothing they can do? They didn’t give a damn. But he was my son. So I went down, asked questions. Fat good that did me. What was there to see? Nothing. And the rest were lies, all lies.”

“What kind of lies?”

“About his business. Lies from people who were jealous that he was making money, making something of himself.”

“About the drugs.”

“Shut your yap.” He looked around, lowered his voice. “You don’t need to bring those lies up here.”

“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing really to say, is there? He was here and then he wasn’t. Pfft. That’s the way it is with things. Money. Love. Youth. It’s here and then it’s gone. Look at me. But you don’t think it will be that way with a son.”

It was there again, that same thing I had glimpsed before, that private pain, which made me feel cheap as I spied it. What the hell was I doing, ripping open wounds I thought I was trying to salve?

“You never heard from him after the disappearance?”

“Course not. But that didn’t stop that queer little FBI Nancy from coming up here every other month or so asking his questions.”

“Telushkin?”

“Smoking his pipe, checking our mail. But there was nothing to find and eventually he disappeared too. That’s the one thing right in the world. You wait long enough everyone disappears. Except my wife. But you met her, didn’t you?”

“Yes I did.”

Henry Greeley laughed, stuck the rest of the second dog into his mouth, and stood. I stood with him.

“I’m going to practice,” he said. “I was making like a lawn mower on those greens. Putt, putt, putt, putt. Golf. Thing is, I never much liked golf. I played just to join that fancy club and when that went to crap I quit. Always seemed stupid to me. But what else am I going to do now, stay all day in that house? With her? Are you insane?”

“How’s your game?”

“Shit. I thought I’d be better by now. But that’s the lie that everyone believes. They go through life getting worse at everything but they think golf is different. They think, play more, score lower. But after ten years of retirement I still slice like a butcher.”

I walked out of the grill room with him, shook his hand, watched as he wheeled his pull cart around the clubhouse toward the flat practice green between the clubhouse and the street. I tried to see in him the massive and stern Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story, but all I saw was an old man crushed small by the disappointments of his life. Except something didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on it just yet, but something didn’t seem quite right.

I crossed my arms, leaned against the side of the clubhouse, watched as Mr. Greeley sent his practice balls skittering across the green with derisive swats of his putter. He was always one for slipping out of trouble he had said of his son. He was here and then he wasn’t. Pfft. And there was that strange greeting when I first mentioned Tommy Greeley’s name. Did they find him? Him. Not his body, not his bones – him.

Maybe I was overreaching, maybe I was trying to force fit what I was seeing to the new possibility that had opened in my consciousness the night before while I sat beside my dying father, but still, these things Mr. Greeley said seemed to add up to something.

And then there were those bottles of gin in Mrs. Greeley’s china hutch. Something about them was simply wrong. She was a drinker, Eddie Dean had said she was and Jimmy Sullivan had said she was, pickled was the term he used, and I could see it in her face. But then what was it with those bottles? I remember the bottles I found scattered in the drawers of my mother’s sewing table, the table she never sewed upon. Open the drawer and there they were, bottles and bottles, empty bottles, until she got it together enough to throw them out, and start collecting the empty bottles once again. And that was it right there. When I found my mother’s bottles they were always empty. She could never keep them full for long. So how was it that Mrs. Greeley had all those bottles still untouched. Apparently of differing ages, some there for years, decades even, and all of them full. As if kept for some reason other than the alcohol.

It wouldn’t have come to me, it couldn’t have come to me except that I had been feeling strangely connected to the doomed Tommy Greeley. He had been a poor kid fighting to make good, a tall lanky irreverent kid trying to charm and wile his way to success, the only child of alcohol and bitterness seeking to transcend the limitations of his parents’ failures, and with all of that I could identify. And Chelsea had said we were so alike. And then there was the way Mrs. Greeley made my scalp itch, like only my mother could.

I never understood the first thing about my mother. Bear with me here, this has relevance here. I never understood the roots of my mother’s toxic bitterness, never understood how she ended up married to my father, how she found herself in the sad fading suburb of Hollywood, Pennsylvania, with a husband she didn’t love and a son who wouldn’t stop crying. I never understood what my mother was trying so desperately to drown with her drinking. In fact, the only thing about her life that I could possibly understand was that she left it. I couldn’t help but believe that my failure to understand my mother constituted a sucking wound, a whirlpool of ignorance that devoured much of the possibility from my life. How could I not trace my financial and romantic failures, both of them legion, to this primal failure? And how could I not therefore turn the bitterness I contracted from my mother like a disease back at her with a horrifying intensity?

I was engaged once for a short time until my fiancée ended it just before the wedding – not much to say, there was a urologist involved, which pretty much says it all – and for the longest time thereafter I drifted through life as if a spineless jellyfish adrift in a sea of bitterness. It was coming upon my mother’s birthday. I was shopping for a suitable present. The usual places. Strawbridge’s. Wanamaker’s. The State Store on Chestnut Street. I found myself holding a bottle of vodka, my mother’s spirit of choice. Nothing fancy. White Tower Vodka, I think it was, a house brand if ever there was one. And I weighed it in my hand with all its awful implications. It was what she always wanted, it was the only thing she really needed, it meant more to her than I ever could. White Tower Vodka. And I couldn’t deny the pleasure I felt as I pictured her face when she opened the gift, part greedy delight, part horror. Yes, Mom, that much I do understand about you. Drink up.

But whatever level of bitterness I had fallen into, even in that bleak year, it hadn’t been deep enough. I sent a scarf that year, nothing the next: better silence than what I had been considering. Yet I had held the bottle in my hand, I had felt its weight, I had thought it would make a jimmy of a gift. I was close.

I watched Mr. Greeley chase the chimera of a holed putt across the flat practice green at Dee Dubs for a long time as I tried to put it together, tried to figure it out. Then I pushed myself off the wall and headed toward him to ask one question more.

A line of cars was stopped at a traffic light close to the green. A kid in one of the cars yelled out “Fore.” Someone on the practice green yelled back “Five.” Mr. Greeley shook his head before standing up straight and watching me approach. He eyes narrowed when he saw my face.

“I thought we were done,” he barked.

“Just one more question.”

“I’m putting here.”

“Is that what you call it? Just tell me this, Mr. Greeley. When do they come? I’m talking of the bottles of gin, the ones your wife keeps in the china hutch. Her birthday? Her anniversary? When?”

He stared at me and then stared over my shoulder and then glanced around as if he was under an intense surveillance.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said lowly.

“Twenty years worth of gifts, twenty bottles of gin. When do they come?”

“What do you know about anything, you little bastard?”

“I know enough to stir things up. I know enough to ask everyone here if they knew what your successful son was up to before he disappeared. I could ask the neighbors too. I could spend days and days asking questions.”

“This is none of your damn business.”

“When do they come, Mr. Greeley?”

He stared at me for a long moment and I could see just then, beneath the old man’s veneer, the ferocious Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story. He would have scared me then, thirty years ago, but it wasn’t thirty years ago and he didn’t scare me a whit and, when he saw that, something went out of him.

“Christmas, all right?” he said, softly.

“Okay,” I said.

He glanced around once more. “Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone.”

I felt bad about the whole thing, about the wound I had opened, so I did as he said and started walking away, and then I thought of something else. I stopped and turned around.

“Mr. Greeley,” I said. The old man stared at me with a fierce hatred. “Was your son allergic to peanuts?”

“No,” he said, a glint of triumph in his eye.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Check the records. He wasn’t allergic to nothing.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing but fish.”

It was a warm day, the sun was shining, yet as I walked away from the putting green and then across the eighteenth fairway toward the parking lot, I couldn’t suppress a shiver. It wasn’t proof, there was nothing substantial I could take to Slocum or McDeiss, but, son of a bitch, just then I felt for a moment as if I were in the middle an old George Romero movie, where the dead had come ravenously to life.

It scared the hell out of me, all of it, yes it did, and that was still a few hours before the big silver gun was pointed straight at my chest.