Rift (9 page)

“We were just inviting these fellows to play through,” Tom explains.

“No can do,” the marshal says, and spits something brown into the nearby grass. “You four boys are going to play together from here on out. I can't have you slowin' down everyone behind you.”

Then he looks at the other two men and adds, “You two could stand to watch a couple of real golfers, anyhow. I seen you hit back there and it wasn't pretty.”

Golfers can be a cliquish bunch, especially old men who play the game, so this insult is not much of a shock to me. Goatee man doesn't seem to take it very well, however. He wants to shoot something back at the marshal, but his partner speaks first and is surprisingly cordial.

“We'll go ahead and play with them,” he says. “We don't want to impede play.”

“Good choice,” the old man agrees. Already he is driving away. “And I'd hurry if I was you. There's a storm coming.”

We are left standing together with these two men, and it is awkward to say the least.

“We should get started,” I say. “Maybe we can at least finish the front nine before it rains.”

Tom agrees. We grab our clubs and step onto the tee. The two men follow suit, and soon we are all standing there together. Tom will hit first.

“I'm Tom,” he says. “This is Cameron.”

Goatee man introduces himself as Ivan and his blond buddy as Ed.

“So what do you guys do?” Tom asks, and the slight waver in his voice tells me just how uncomfortable he is. “What line of work are you in?”

Ivan says, “Security. How about you?”

“I sell cars. He works in accounting.”

And then Tom hits. His ball flies nearly three hundred yards down the right side of the fairway.

It's my turn next, and my hand shakes slightly as I tee the ball. If these men were sent to watch me after all, I have just given them a front-row seat. And so I become nervous, tournament-nervous, because now it seems obvious to me that everyone here is watching to see if I can still hit the ball. To see if the transmission has altered me in some way. And I don't know what I'm going to do if that is indeed true.

I try to calm myself and use all the stress-management techniques I've learned over the years to keep my golf game in control, but something fundamental is slipping away. No longer can I picture what it's like to make contact with the ball. When I think about the backswing, the rotation of my shoulders and my grip on the club, it comes across as an unseemly system that has no chance for success. Still, I address the ball the same way I have for the past twenty years and focus all my concentration on this shot. I have done it successfully thousands of times. Surely, I can do so again.

I pull back, swing forward, but somewhere along the way the signal gets scrambled. I am distraught even as the club makes contact with the ball because I know this shot is going to be a poor one. The ball flies into the air, barely ten feet off the ground, and heads to the right, flying along the cart path. It hits the concrete at maybe one hundred yards out and rolls along for another thirty or forty, finally coming to rest near the backyard of someone's house.

“Tough shot,” Ivan says as he walks forward. He's up next.

I step away to give him room and trip as I walk backwards. Tom catches me with his hand before I fall to the ground, but Ivan sees this out of the corner of his eye—I know he does—and Ed does, too.

My body thrums with fear. Not just because these men are here to witness my coordination breakdown, but because I am beginning to believe that something is significantly wrong with me.

My mind reels further as I watch Ivan address his tee shot. This man is no golfer. He hunches over the ball like a football lineman, and his swing is something painful to watch. Ed is only marginally better. His shot disappears into the left rough about 120 yards away.

“We're all over the place,” Tom says. He laughs nervously.

A droplet of moisture streaks across my face as we head for our cart. Ivan steers left, in search of Ed's ball. I insert the key into the ignition, and we begin toward ours as well.

“Can you feel it?” Tom asks me. “Can you feel what's wrong?”

A difficult question to answer. Consciously, no. But something beneath thought, something more fundamental, signals me. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I feel different somehow, changed. Like I'm not the same person I was, at least not physically.

“I feel something. I don't know what it is.”

“We have to get you out of here. And then, well, at some point I guess you should see a doctor.”

“But what in the world would a doctor look for? And if he found something, how would he fix it?”

“Those guys aren't playing golf,” Tom points out. “Ed pretended to hit, but then he just picked up his ball. At least one of them is always watching us.”

“So what do we do?”

“I still think we should try to get away from them,” Tom says. “I don't like it at all that they're so close. But to have a chance to get away, we'll need to put some distance between them and us, so for now we should continue to play like normal.”

“Why are you so worried about them following me? Don't you think it makes sense that Batista would have me followed?”

“Just hit, Cameron. Give me a chance to think.”

My ball sits just where the rough ends and someone's lawn begins. The house is a stucco mansion. A large glass door opens to a backyard concrete porch, and standing inside this door is a young child, perhaps five years old. He waves as I get out of the cart. When I wave back, he smiles.

My ball is half-buried in the grass, and I know it will not be easy to make solid contact. I use my six-iron and attempt to punch it out into the fairway again. Instead, I miss the ball completely, whiffing like a batter going after a breaking ball. I look up at the kid. He is dressed in Superman pajamas. He's giggling at me.

“Keep your head down, Cam,” Tom says, signaling the precipitous drop my golf skills have undergone today.
Keep your head down
is a tip normally reserved for beginners.

I try again, and this time my ball flies about fifty yards away in the center of the fairway, still far behind Tom's first shot. He starts to say something to me as I climb back into the cart, but just then Ivan and Ed drive up.

“Having fun?” Ed asks.

“Of course,” I answer.

Tom drives up a little and then walks out to the ball with me. He recites a few bogus instructions about my swing and moves his hands around as if he's a real golf instructor.

“Next time they're far away from us,” he says, lower now, still pretending to swing, “we're going to drive away. Wherever they are, we're going in the opposite direction. And if we can't get far enough away, we'll hide behind a rock.”

“Hide on a golf course in the desert?”

“There are hundreds of rock formations on this course. Big ones. Those two guys can't check them all. Besides, the marshal will chase them off the course when he realizes they're not playing golf.”

“And then what? They could just go wait at your car.”

“In the parking lot, other people will be around. Witnesses.”

“Tom, we have no idea what they want or why they're here. I'm a whole lot more worried about what's wrong with me than I am about those two goons.”

We've been standing here too long, so I hit the ball and this time land in a sand trap beside the green.

“That was better,” Ed says as we drive back to the cart path. “Just a little off target.”

“Thanks.”

When I look at Ivan, I begin to share some of Tom's concern. He hasn't said a word since our tee shots, and doesn't look like a guy who wants to ask questions about the nuances of my post-transmission behavior. Besides, when you think about it, if all NeuroStor wanted was to observe me, they probably wouldn't have sent a couple of thugs.

Tom and I don't talk as we drive toward his ball. He gets out of the cart, uses only seconds to prepare his stance, and then hits a spectacular shot. The ball travels nearly two hundred yards and stops ten feet in front of the hole.

“I think you
are
ready for the U.S. Open,” I say, and Tom smiles. This is as much pressure as any golf tournament, and he's still hitting like a pro.

Things are tense on the green. Neither of the men are talking to us now, and Tom and I make only short, vain attempts at conversation. Surely they must know we've figured them out, but we move on to the next tee—hole number five—without incident. Tom's shot flies straight down the middle again, and the rest of us spray errant shots around, but not on, the fairway. It begins to rain. Sprinkles first, and then more steadily.

Soon we find ourselves a hundred yards or so away from Ivan and Ed. They are parked on the cart path. Tom and I drive into the left rough, at the top of a hill. My ball is buried here, and Tom's sits beyond the hill, another hundred yards ahead and to our right. I am about to get out of the cart when Tom grabs my arm.

“Your ball isn't here,” he says. “It rolled farther, beyond the hill.”

“No, it—”

“Yes, it did.” He drives over the hill until we can no longer see Ivan and Ed.

“Let's get out here,” Tom says.

He runs toward the rocks that border the left rough, motioning for me to follow. In just a few moments, we have moved beyond the rocks and are jogging beside them.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“These rocks run all the way to the green and even go behind it. We might get to the next hole without them seeing us.”

“But won't they naturally go in that direction? That's right where the cart path will take them.”

“Yeah, but we'll have a head start. Depending on what they do, maybe we can double back. Look, I'm making this up as we go along.”

The rain intensifies as we make our way toward the green. It splatters around our feet, turning desert dust into mud. It smacks against the rocks on our right. Several times I slip and once almost slide into a thick, saguaro cactus.

Tom watches the fairway as we run, hoping to catch a glimpse of Ivan and Ed. If he sees them, he doesn't say so. Finally we come to a stop just beyond the green, behind a round boulder that is perhaps fifteen feet across.

My heart is hammering. Sweat and rain moisten my clothes. I struggle to speak between heavy breaths. “Now we wait?”

“We wait,” Tom gasps. We are no longer the young fellows of our college days.

Around us, the storm deepens. For the first time, I hear the distant bass signature of thunder. Wind angles the pounding rain, which grows stronger still.

“This is silly,” I say, raising my voice so Tom can hear me. “We're not going anywhere out here.”

“Then neither are they.”

“But what next? Even if we get off this course without them, what's to stop them from finding me again? What if they know where you live?”

“At least that would be on my property. I could deal with these assholes on my own property.”

I still am not clear on why we are attempting to get away from these guys. Besides Ivan's threatening demeanor, there is no clear evidence to suggest that they want anything more than to observe me. And no matter what happens today, a bigger problem lies ahead: my entire post-transmission existence. Am I not the man who entered the departing portal back in Houston? My declining dexterity suggests that something indeed went wrong between Texas and Arizona, and it makes me sick to think what exactly the error might have been. Is something permanently wrong with me? And what the hell is it?

I turn to Tom just as his eyes widen, and then see what has surprised him: Ivan. He is walking toward us, but instead of coming from the putting green, he has been slinking around the rocks on our right. It seems as though the one place we forgot to watch is the exact direction from which we came.

Tom grabs my arm. “I knew it! He's got a gun. Come on!”

We scamper between the rocks, onto the green, feet slipping on the wet grass. Our present course would take us across the cart path toward a row of houses, but Ed has foreseen this predictable response and stands directly in our path. Through the driving rain I see a gun held chest high and pointed directly at us. We come to a stop just as lightning stabs out of the sky, branching in several directions as it blazes toward the ground. Thunder booms from nowhere. Rivers of rain pour off the bill of my cap.

I turn around again, looking for Ivan, and find him walking toward us. His gun is now trained on us as well.

“What the hell do we do now?” I ask Tom.

About forty yards separates each of the men from us. If we're going to do anything other than surrender, it better be now.

“I'm telling you, Cameron. We can't let these guys catch us.”

“What do you—”

“Just come on!”

Tom takes off, back across the green again, splitting the distance between the two men. I don't know what else to do, so I follow him. We are no longer headed toward the houses, but instead run perpendicular to our former course. They could shoot us now—from behind, shoot us in our backs—but something tells me this is not going to happen. Why would they kill us? What have we done? So I run behind Tom, my legs raw now, feet sloshing inside wet shoes, until we reach the cart path. A small stucco structure stands just ahead. Perhaps a snack bar or bathrooms. The path will also take us back to the clubhouse if we follow it long enough.

The sky is dark now, the color of a bruise. Clouds are lower, rolling near the ground, even obscuring a nearby butte. The rain pelts our backs and the ground without mercy. I can't believe this is happening in southern Arizona. We're supposed to be in a desert.

And then, as if from nowhere, another man leaps into view. Another! There are three of them! Tom veers to his left, his feet slip, and he spills toward the ground in a heap. The man jumps on him at once. Beneath them, the muddy ground slopes away from the cart path—apparently paved at the crest of a small hill—and they slide down perhaps twenty feet.