Fore! is said or only heard. A white shot shrieks through the sky: a whining whiz, this dimpled ionomer incoming, a golfball to hit Him on the head, lay Him out sprawled — His head on the green again, a rising welt to hazard the forehead, His feet chipped in the direction of the penultimate hole, arms strewn to fingers pointing to far groves withered around water frozen at the longest drives of horizon. Ben comes to, then, to hooting, scraping from the treestand that shades the neighboring rough; a riled noise coming closer, the strangling shake of bare boughs, white, and the swinging scurry of fur. Another weather begins, a hail of golfballs bearing down on Him as He stands yet again and staggers dazedly from the flag and its hole to where par three should be, should’ve been if ever landed and ended. He’s dodging this plague of balls like fallingstars or planets, dropped, getting hit in the face, breast, and crotch; stumbling midfairway toward a precipitous rise in the greened snow and there, the protrusion of a coontailed antenna, bent by the wind; to kneel atop that very hunch, prostrate upon the unlandscaped to dig out amid the pelt a golfcart buried, to turn it upright with all His strength, to kick at tires, knock icicles from hood, then rev — to head, is the thought lazy, tired, nauseous, necrotic but also fuzzily numbed in a personal hoar, this private ice of mucoid scaly fungus, across the countryclub restricted no longer, puttering quickly toward the 19th Hole Greenhouse He espies for the refreshment of safety.
Goddamnit no stalling, balls boinking, boinging, every cartoony sound from the roof of His ride. Ben putts ahead at fullspeed, whatever He’ll make if He floors it, He does as if His foot’s accelerating strata down through the ground, a deep dig into earth cleated with skulls still with their caps on. His skin’s on fire, despite a fervorless fear in His veins. All around Him, the astrotruf ’s peeling its planet: ailing, occupied with shedding itself, with shedding the sheds, in an affliction that’s merged a mess into a unified albescence upturned and shot through with green, an alien mold spored out from under the valleyed snow and the sand of the sandtraps and from around the perfectly elliptical extremes of the ponds, left for the disease that shatters ice in removes, their own sheered removals, both epigenous and dermal and further below, the course entire a fluctuant surge: mounds falling from mounds, rises and dips and verges pocked, sopping a sort of freeform verdural, in a scarification fungally frozen, tongued sick with a fever, blown hot and cold; the soured fairways say, Aahhh…despite being a golfcourse, can you believe, there’s not a single physician around.
And so any diagnosis must be a consultation made brief with belief, an experiment of the etiologically theological, what we’re talking is a matter of faith. If, as it’s been said, God is everything, both a maker and a ruler, a judge and a king, then He must be a dermatologist, too, accredited by His own infinite wisdom, insured by His own illimitable might — after all, Who can know the world and its skin and the creatures that infest it as us better than the One Who created them all, only to wrong us with sickness, punish with disease. Mycobacterium leprae might be the verdict, then, Ben’s suspicion confirmed: endemic to this desert, an ailment of the links sinned entire — but if so then leprosy of a divine diagnosis, a leprosy of a Scriptural strength. Metastasized, exteriorized, a blight out of body — retributively, the disease of Miriam, the sister to Moses, the illness that’d pillowed her outside the encampment, delirious under the sun, lately absent.
Ben reaches the Greenhouse if it still has enough walls and enough of a roof to be called or considered any kind of a house, though greener than ever from the slurry of turf: it’s fallen, a skeletal stress of twisted trophies and signage tangles, the remnant of banquet facilities with legless chairs up on splintered tables, locker modules ripped from the setting of their rooms then arranged in the showers, as if metallic megaliths and trilithons intended for the worship of pagans. Inside, which is now its outside, the same, everything’s in a feverish splotch, made lesion, numbly ashen, and flaky. Pusssoaked shammies. Pinkgray flesh flayed loose on clubs and barbarous spikes. Ben parks the cart and wades in in search of food and drink. And the more He stands gleaning through the rubble for any perishables that might’ve preserved, even the alcohol, a light Kiddush from the bar forever closed, the hackedup cherrywood with its bacillarylike rows of bottles not cellared — how He burns more and more, a skinpeel, it’s unbearable, maculamade, that and a flow of blood from the nose, epistaxis the name; inflammation from nodule to plaque, His nostrils impassable, the same with His sinuses, His throat a stack puffing, a blowsy chimney on fire itself.
A crackling barbed rustle, then a prickle of shrubs, a mustering sound…as over a slicking hump He’d driven around once the concrete barrier of the parkinglot fronting the lazaretlike, leprosariumal Greenhouse and all in a tizzy tripping and falling over fallen and tripped parts of themselves, deforming in a partiform peel — the feral caddies klutz in on Him, pariahs in a panicked charge; they’re hurling golfballs at the misered glass the edifice has left as windows, as walls, sharding into stings, to embed amid the loosening of limbs; they the frontline, they’re tearing under their armpits with grownout nails and fisted tees wedged to nest between the knuckles remaining; caddies devolved, grown apelike, primalputsched, silverfurry with the molder of fervent, feverous illness, they’re sharp of tooth and eyed in wild suppuration, overworked yet underpaid, never tipped enough to stave off their eventual, inevitable revenge: some weak ones hanging by the stumps of near trees, wrapping their wounds one by one in the club’s insignified linen napkins so as to be prepared at a moment or signal, for a last assault, a final attempt — to swing for the groin or the throat; others scramble up trees shaggy with snow, drooptrunked, for a better position from which to sling their pocketed balls, smashing even the heads of their fellows, the stronger ones having hopped the lot’s perimeter hedge to swarm through the remains of and tumular over this Greenhouse fallen, its sharp edges of metalmade detritus: counters’, chairs’, tables’, slicing them flanking Him at all ruin’s routes, fall’s momentary escapes, with exits left unilluminated; they’re wielding gripless sand wedges, drivers and irons numbering high into the sixthousands, woods and putters, their bags’ umbrellas, poisonously ferruled, ribs spooked out to corner Him to carcass, to whip Him into submission with gratis towels knotted from the laundrybins of the lockerroom showers, soiled and un, wetted hard then rolled, and then there in the last stall with its spillsticky floor and its soapdish bitten to muffle to punch and kick at Ben, as if to infect their own form, sustaining toward what if not death…their knuckling tees, their fingers and toes only missing, not missed.
Ben makes for an exit, from them and His fear, the scabrous heat piling piteously through the scaly, hairy rubble, the caddies assailing from the rear: His momentum knocking them to impalement on unframed window mullions, lepromatically ferruginous supports, squamous stang and transom, upended foundations studded with infecting nails of just rust, crushed by blocks in cinders; heads through what’d been the club’s kitchen and its service entrance in a vaulting slide over the meridian counter, banging Himself on the hanging pans and pots and skillets, on His way grabbing at the handles and knobs of bins and cabinets and pantries abandoned, looted empty of goods canned, preservativebalmed in case of Apocalypse or Sunday shortage, then out the door to flee the course entire; lunging over the fence at the rough’s rough edge, there falling into a neighboring yard, getting mired in a swimmingpool dry though filled with the pasttime of personal days — innumerable faked sick leaves’ worth of golfballs lost, fouled globes.