tell you where you are and distance to the hole and all else. You take the swing, wait to hear from that coach how you’d done, where it went.
So a blind golfer’s no joke. The joke, though, is that in order to accommodate Unc and his fear of someone seeing him take crappy shots—the same crappy shots every golfer makes at every course in the world, blind or not—well, this fear of his has called for these special-ops escapades.
The camp chair under one arm, the book bag over my shoulder, I’d leaned over, picked up the club from where it lay, stood back up. I thought to say something to him—
Here we go
, or
Be careful
, or some such rot—but I only looked at him standing at the transom.
And now that I was standing, I’d been able to see behind him the whole of the marsh, the uneven spread of blacks and grays and silvers out here. Across it all, a good half mile away, lay a low jagged tree line, what always looked to me no matter what marsh I was on like a long line of men on horseback, watching and waiting. That was Naval Weapons Station land over there, the giant tract of woods that buffered the world against the dozens of ammo dumps they keep bunkered in there, a tract no one even dared think to sneak in on. To the left and a couple hundred yards off stood the trestle across the marsh and Goose Creek, a hulking structure that since I was a kid seemed the black backbone of some monster ready to rise up out of the water and tear us all to bits. I loved this place, loved being out here on water whether night or day, loved sometimes even the smell of that pluff mud.
But Unc could golf in daylight if he wanted. He could man up and get himself a coach, and quit this cat burglar crap, if he really wanted to.
I didn’t say a word to him, only turned, stepped out onto that plank, and crossed on over.
Two steps onto hard ground, and here he’d been behind me, his moves as quick and easy as—maybe even easier than—mine along the length of the boat, then onto and across that plank. He’d taken hold of my belt, cinched onto it for me to lead, and given the smallest push to go.
I’d glanced at that light in the window at the Dupont house and whatever it might or might not mean, and started the hundred yards or so along the brick fence up from the creek along the property, then out onto the gravel drive. A few strides later we’d been into the grass, before us the wide spread of what in the dark always looked like only a meadow bordered by trees. But there, twenty yards in front of us, lay a little raised flat of grass: the tee box.
Now here we were, me in my camp chair, Unc swinging away. Though the night-vision goggles gave only a forty-degree line of sight, I could see everything in this dark: the live oak and pine along the fairway on the right, the bright white kidney of a bunker in front of the green 280 yards away—this was the thirteenth, a short par four—and to the left the two cottages on this hole. All of it green, corralled inside a round porthole of sight. One big rifle scope.
The farther house was red brick and slate-roofed, an outdoor fireplace and stone flower boxes beneath a white-columned pergola trying too hard to look like the Parthenon. Closer in, maybe halfway down the fairway, sat a huge Spanish-style thing, U-shaped with the courtyard facing the fairway. Red-tile roof, stucco, a rim of painted tiles beneath the eaves I could make out even from here.
Patio furniture sat out at both houses, nice stuff that cost more than the furniture Mom and I used to have inside our house over on Marie Street, back before we moved out of the old neighborhood. Over there, if you put a piece of furniture out in the yard or on a porch, even one of those thin white plastic chairs you can pick up at Wal-Mart for five bucks, you’d better chain it to the ground or it’d be gone the next day. But here they were safe and sound, all this fancy furniture sitting in the dark and smug for it, too: testimony to