Plan B for the Middle Class (12 page)

III

I
'm sitting in a lawn chair in the shade of our house, spraying the kids as they run across the front lawn. We've clothespinned an old bedspread and a tarp over the swing set, and the kids run from this tent to their playhouse as I try to strafe them. I am drinking real strong coffee which I made ten minutes ago as part of my save-the-afternoon mode, but I haven't typed a single job letter.

The kids dart into their tent and dry themselves by rolling on an old padded U-Haul blanket, and then they jump up and peek back out at me. Calvin is fearless and skips back and forth in the yard, relishing the flashes of chilly water. Janey is playing it safe. She's excited, hopping up and down every time Calvin runs back to dry off, but she has only ventured out once or twice.

I am quite divided. One part directs the hose to douse my youngsters and the other seems to float above the scene and watch. This is what I get. This is the extent of my new life, watering the tender children in my own yard, a golf pro sitting in a green chair, drinking coffee strong enough to chatter his molars, while his wife builds her world around the only Russian in the region to own a chain of pizza parlors. I smile. It's what you do with rue, don't you know: you smile. I smile at Janey's secret face peering through the seams of the tent. I smile at Calvin's bold grin, his body glistening in the sunlight. At two, he is already a good runner. Janey is as self conscious as I am, poor creature, and she has words for things. “Oh my god! Oh my god!” she cries every time Calvin returns. And then she tries a variation from TV: “Thank god you're here!” It's all quite dramatic. She pokes her pretty face out and sees her father again. “Oh my god!” she says, her voice suffused with a nurse's concern, a sister's love.

After a long era of being on hold, a period during which we waited for the next thing to happen in our household, things have begun to shift. Everybody in my family is shaking out. Calvin starts: he has three emergencies a week. He falls off the kitchen counter, having left no evidence of how he achieved the weird height. He is now a tough kid to watch—I mean, he disappears. You'll have him underfoot and turn to pour a cup of coffee: he's gone. You'll find him beneath the bathroom sink checking out the Drano or sitting cross-legged beside the milk in the fridge, the door about to close. Janey has become a smart aleck and says “Sick!” to anything her mother or I say. We were worried about her fitting in and now she's somehow become the leader of the pack at school and is busy not letting other kids fit in. And Tina. My wife has changed wardrobes. She goes to lunch twice a week with friends and talks it over. She may be sorry she married a golfer. She may be through with motherhood. I watch her when I can.

My work has run its course, though I don't talk about it. I went in with Mitch, Tina's brother, on a sad nine-hole course at the edge of town, and now it's closed. As Mitch said the day he carted the TV out of the clubhouse: “How much golf can there be? There can only be so much golf.” But that wasn't exactly it. The Golf Center at Ten-Acres was trouble from the start. We got a deal on the property, at least Mitch told me it was a deal. He knew I had the last of my prize money in the bank, and I think now he knew what we were getting into. But I should have seen it. I should have been alerted simply by the weird yellow color of the fairways and the cloying stench that rose from every bunker. The course was riddled with bumps, and of course later I was able to witness the garbage emerging: the tires, the home appliances. But for a long while I thought it might be all right. We tried. I'm not a good pro and Mitch is no host, but we tried. I knew we were finished when one day on the fourth green, waiting for three dentists to putt out, the small pond beside the fairway caught fire. The next day I just stayed home and mowed the lawn and edged and raked. That was that. Some days now I water the kids.

Roger Alguire is our eighty-year-old neighbor. He was the first television weatherman in this city. He began weather reporting in 1953 and then was the regular weatherman from 1955 until a few years ago. Roger is a tall, handsome man with resplendent wavy white hair who is no longer recognized in Fry's or Safeway as the weatherman. He is recognized as the tall man who spends his evenings in the local parks with his metal detector, scanning the ground for lost coins. He used to be seen every night with his wife, Gretchen, who was also tall, and who also had a metal detector she swung over the sandy ground. They made an exotic couple in the park, darkness about to fall, moving rhythmically along the paths and through the playground, their postures somehow noble and aloof like rare animals feeding in the twilight. From time to time, Roger would kneel and fork something from the soil and drop it into the large pockets of his trousers.

One night Roger and Gretchen showed us their treasures. After dinner, Tina left our front door open and we went across the street. This was just before Tina started dressing for her lunches. In an empty bedroom, Roger and Gretchen displayed their findings on a wall of bookshelves. The money was in mason jars: bottles of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, half ajar of fifty-cent pieces, and stacks of silver dollars. There was a shelf of tools, pliers and screwdrivers, and a shelf of nuts and bolts in peanut butter jars. On one shelf were seven pistols, cleaned and polished, and beside them twenty knives of every sort. On a velvet drape hundreds of gold and silver rings, many with stones. Beside the rings were four feet of pins and brooches. Four directional compasses, a dozen watches, and a shelf of unidentifiable
parts
of things, little springs and levers. On one side were the one-of-a-kind items: an alarm clock, a tall silver trophy with a motorcycle on top, a silver cup inscribed with the name “Brian,” a folding shovel, a toy locomotive, and a shiny brass whistle. There was more. Everything had been cleaned and laid out beautifully.

“We've found just over a thousand dollars, U.S. money,” Roger said. They had a ledger. “Money isn't very hard to find.”

“A thousand dollars,” Tina said.

“People don't respect their change anymore,” Gretchen said. “They throw it on the street.”

“It's not the money,” Roger said. “It's the
finding.
” He waved his long arm at the shelves of bright objects. “These things would be lost. We found them. That's the excitement.”

Gretchen smiled. She was a steady friend to him and shared all this. “And it gets us out of the house every night.”

When Gretchen died, about a year ago, we lost touch with Roger for a while. He wasn't in the parks and we didn't see him much. Things were different for us then, we were busy with a toddler and getting Janey settled in school and I was still going out to the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. Our golf carts were always getting flats—nails, screws, metal slivers—and I spent a lot of time repairing them. Tina hadn't started having her lunches. We were just a family. I went over to Roger's house a week after the funeral and asked if I could give him a hand with anything, and he shucked me off civilly, just as I would have done to him in the same spot. It was all “How you doing?” and blustery goodwill, and in five minutes I was on the porch shaking hands and backing off.

Then a few weeks later, I started seeing him when I'd take Janey over to the big swings in the park some nights. He wandered alone, head down, listening for the whine of metal and watching the dial on his apparatus: green light for good metal, red for junk. He'd be there when we left. Some nights if I was out in the car I saw him along the canal in the dark, and once taking the sitter home after Tina and I had been to a movie, I saw him working his way across a vacant lot by the railroad tracks. It was midnight.

Roger Alguire called me one day, this was six months or so after he'd buried his wife, Gretchen. The kitchen was still his wife's kitchen; it had the feel of a woman. I've been in bachelor's places and they don't have the towels, the ceramics, the sense this is a room in which things have been cooked and cleaned for years and years. A bachelor's kitchen is not about the stove; it is about the fridge.

“Something's going on,” he said. “And I need to talk to you.” He sat me down and poured the coffee. “There's no surprise in this really,” he told me, pushing the ceramic creamer to me. “We were married fifty-two years. Multiply it out, all those days. We knew each other. We …” Here Roger stopped and reset himself, lifting both hands from the table. “We could tell what each other was thinking.”

I must have been nodding, because he said, “No, I don't think you understand. We could read each other's minds. These last few years we barely needed to speak. There were times …” Roger rose and poured us both another drop of coffee. My cup was still full. “There is going to be a message. She's going to be in touch.”

Before I could react, he went into the garage and brought back three ancient golf clubs. They were wooden shafts, a wedge, a putter, and an eight iron, the heads deeply rusted. “I found these in the park, on the same path we used to walk. A foot deep. They weren't there before.” He handed them to me. “Will you let me look around your golf course?”

It was a nice kitchen, really, a sunny room in the back of the house. There were a lot of ceramics on the windowsill, squirrels and rabbits, and there were two red roosters on the wall. I didn't know what to say to Roger Alguire. The four or five times it has mattered in my life, I have not known what to say. There isn't a quick comeback or the right word in me. I told him I'd help him. I told him of course he could dig around on the Golf Center at Ten-Acres.

On a windy day, I drive Roger Alguire out to the Golf Center at Ten-Acres. I haven't been out in a while, and more things are missing. Mitch has taken all the carts, of course, and the tools from the repair shed are gone. They weren't his. The clubhouse is still intact—that's my lock. I can still see Mitch in there when we first opened. The foursomes would stagger off the ninth, choking and nauseous from a day of Ten-Acre fumes, and there would be Mitch in the clubhouse, his hand on the beer tap, grinning like a buffoon. Well, they all hurried by the window to their cars. He didn't sell two kegs of beer the whole year we were in business.

Today the breeze helps and we only catch periodic whiffs of the putrid chemical smell, an aroma like something dead and treated. Both ponds are dry and I see the rear end of what looks like a Studebaker emerging from the center of the small one. There is a lot more junk climbing out of the ground on every fairway and the greens are riddled with new mounds. The Golf Center at Ten-Acres. Roger Alguire ignores all this and simply adjusts the dials on his metal detector and starts off the first tee. The grass is still a vibrant eerie yellow-green, feeding on some rare fuel.

I remember when things started to go bad, I stopped one day at the hardware in Casa Mirage for painting masks we could sell in the clubhouse. I asked the clerk there what he knew about the golf course and he told me it was built on the old Ocotillo landfill. “It was bad,” he said. “Golf won't save that property.”

Roger calls to me from the middle of the fairway and I hustle down there with a shovel. It seems ridiculous and useful at once. He's got something on the meter, a small shape. Off to one side some huge bald thing is rising through the turf; it looks like the top of a bus. After a minute with the spade, I've uncovered, along with a wicked mess of thin copper wire, a metal tackle box. We kneel on the lawn and Roger opens it.