“I didn’t freak out,” he said. “Those old men are why people hate golf.”
“You were kind of stupid.”
“Look. Can we play this game or what?”
“Sure,” I said. “But can we go back and apologize tomorrow?”
“Wow,” Karinger said. “Are you serious?”
“You messed up their grass pretty bad. It’s not easy to grow grass out here, you know.”
That last part was true. In the desert, it takes a certain knowledge and work ethic to keep a lawn green. One skill my dad taught me was how to maintain a desert lawn, how to keep the mower’s blade high. Too short and you can burn the grass at the roots. I never told Karinger any of that. I felt guilty talking about my dad when I was with Karinger, so when I was, I pretended our dads abandoned the Antelope Valley together.
Karinger paused the game and looked at me. The random yellow hairs on his face had multiplied since the morning. “You’re going to leave, too,” he said. “I can see it in your face. One by one, I’m going to watch everyone leave this place, aren’t I?”
“You can leave, too,” I said. “Don’t you want to?”
And as soon as I asked, I knew the answer was no.
* * *
“Let’s go make that apology,” Karinger said. He stood over me, backlit by the lamp in the ceiling.
“What time is it?” I asked. Outside, the sky was still dark.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “There’s no wrong time for an apology.”
“Robert,” I started, but I didn’t really have anything to say. I didn’t want to walk over to the golf course in the middle of the night.
“The groundskeepers will be around,” he said. “They’re the ones who have to fix the holes in the grass we made, right? They’re there all night, and we’ll apologize to them directly.”
“Your mom—”
“Sleeps through everything. Besides, you were right last night.”
“I was?”
“Yeah. I feel really bad about the grass thing. I can’t sleep until we go out there and say sorry.”
I got up and put on a sweater. I was about to leave the room when I noticed Karinger had his 3-wood and his grocery bag in his hands. I asked him why he was bringing his equipment.
He said, “After we say sorry, we’ll be able to hit balls while no one else is out there. We’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”
I thought of Crocodile Dundee yelling at us for retrieving bad hits. I had to admit it would be fun to be out there alone, with an infinite number of chances to hit a good shot.
“Don’t forget your stuff,” he said, and I didn’t.
* * *
Under the stars, the gate looked like the entrance to an old zoo. It was locked. Karinger tapped his club between the gate’s metal bars. He was thinking. I suggested coming back in the morning. He wasn’t listening to me. He was listening to the rhythm he was making with his club against the gate. Finally he slid the 3-wood between the bars and did the same with his plastic grocery bag. “Here,” he told me, and he took my club and bag and put them through the gate, too. He went to the KNICKERBOCKER boulder. He knocked at the rock with his knuckles and listened to the sound. “Guess I was wrong,” he said. “It is real.” He pitched himself up onto it. The baggy shirt made his stealth a surprise, and I watched the secret muscles in his forearms press against his skin. Karinger latched on to the top of the gate and heaved himself up over it. He landed on the other side with a thud that sounded painful. Immediately, though, he said, “Your turn.”
“I can’t,” I said. What I had meant to say was: What’s the point? There was nobody there. No groundskeepers, no Crocodile Dundee.
“Your turn,” he repeated.
I climbed onto the rock and up to the top of the gate. Falling from there to the cement on the other side was the hardest part. Karinger reached up and I reached down. He helped pull me to the pavement. When I landed, I still held on to him. My feet rang like my hands sometimes did when I hit a ball in a weird place on the club’s face. It stung a bit. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would.
Some of the smaller lights were still on, but the large stadium lights down the field were all shut off. Huge sprinklers showered the grass two hundred yards out.
“No one’s out here,” I said. “Let’s just go find someone. And if we can’t, let’s go home.”
“We’ll go hit a few balls,” he said. “Someone is bound to come find us. Then we’ll apologize, and all will be right with the world.”
“I’m going to leave now,” I said.
“Don’t,” Karinger said. I thought he was going to continue. I thought he was going to try to bully me into staying. I thought he was going to call me weak or lame or gay. But he didn’t. He just said, “Don’t,” and stopped there.
We found the giant muddy divots he’d carved out of the ground earlier. In them was a sandy mixture of seeds and dirt one of the groundskeepers must have planted. Karinger put down his grocery bag and took slow practice swings with his 3-wood. I did the same with my club.
“Let me have a ball,” he said, and I tossed him one from my bag. I didn’t even ask why he didn’t use one of his own.
He put his club behind the ball and took a quick swing. The impact sounded solid. The ball shot off into the dark, disappearing among the stars before we could see it land.
“Wow,” I said. “Great shot.”
Karinger was still holding his stance, the club over his shoulders.
“Really,” I said. “That was awesome.” I shivered even though I was wearing a sweater. Karinger stood there in a T-shirt like a trophy.
Then he pulled his club over his head and hammered away at the grass again with everything he had.
“Robert!” I said. I whispered it as if there were people around to hear us. “What is wrong with you?”
Karinger threw his club away into the field past the safety line and fell to his knees. He started clawing at the mud and grass with his bare hands.
“Stop,” I said. I looked to see if anyone was around. “Robert, please.”
He stretched his arm out to snag his plastic grocery bag. He started to dump its contents into the hole he’d made. Whatever was in that bag, he planned to bury. I thought, Kallie could fit in a bag like that.
With both hands, I lifted the 2-iron over my head. For a second I believed I might actually bring it down on Karinger’s skull.
But he emptied the bag, and what fell out — all the good white balls we’d collected — toppled into the hole, one on top of the other.
“Oh,” I said, dropping my 2-iron.
Karinger gathered the strips of mud and grass he’d unplugged from the ground. He placed them over the golf balls in the hole. He pressed with both hands and all his weight.
“Help me,” he said. He was crying — the first and last time I’d ever see that. I put my hands over his and we pushed the mud down together. For some reason I started crying, too, and the shame of that only made it worse. No matter what we did or told ourselves for the rest of our lives, this moment revealed the truth: We were not tough boys.
When the ground was as flat as we could make it, Karinger got up and walked over to pick up his wooden club, which he broke over his knee. Out of the broken shaft he made a cross and laid it over the mound. He said, “This is the last I’ll ever mention him,” though that wouldn’t, of course, turn out to be true. Then Karinger spoke to his father under his breath, and I couldn’t make out the words.
The sprinklers came on and we dashed out from the grass toward the gate. It didn’t take long for us to realize that without the boulder, we wouldn’t be able to hop over the fence and make our escape. The night was cool, cold because we were both dripping wet. Maybe we could have laughed, but we didn’t. Karinger stood with his head down and his eyes closed. I stared at him. In his baggy shirt, which was even bigger now that it was soaked, he looked like a kind of monk. We were quiet for some time. Then the east lit up, and we waited for men to open the gate.