the khaki color of Texas. Oh you moron go home. Home is the hole, and above, in the scheme of the unhappy vision that frets his conscious attention with an almost optical overlay of presences, the mild gray rain sky is his grandfather waiting upstairs so that Harry will not be a Fosnacht.
And, now at the corners, now at the center of this striving dream, Eccles flits in his grubby shirt like a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.
The greens, still dead from the winter, are salted with a dry dirt; fertilizer? The ball slips along making bits of grit jump. “Don’t stab your putts,” Eccles says. “A little easy swing, arms stiff. Distance is more important than aim on the first putt. Try again.” He kicks the ball back. It took Harry about twelve to get up here on the fourth green, but this smug assumption that his strokes are past counting irritates him. Come on, sweet, he pleads with his wife, there’s the hole, big as a bucket. Everything is all right.
But no, she has to stab in a panicked way; what was she afraid of? Too much, the ball goes maybe five feet past. Walking toward Eccles, he says, “You never did tell me how Janice is.”
“Janice?” Eccles with an effort drags his attention up from the game. He is absolutely in love with winning; he is eating me up, Harry thinks. “She seemed in good spirits on Monday. She was out in the back yard with this other woman, and they were both giggling when I came. You must realize that for a little while, now that she’s adjusted somewhat, she’ll probably enjoy being back with her parents. It’s her own version of your irresponsibility.”
“Actually,” Harry says gratingly, squatting to line up the putt, the way they do it on television, “she can’t stand her parents any more than I can. She probably wouldn’t’ve married me if she hadn’t been in such a hurry to get away from um.” His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet.
Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in. The minister looks up with the light of triumph in his eyes. “Harry,” he asks, sweetly yet boldly, “why have you left her? You’re obviously deeply involved with her.”
“I told ja. There was this thing that wasn’t there.”
“What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?”
Harry’s two-foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with trembling fingers. “Well if you’re not sure it exists don’t ask me. It’s right up your alley. If you don’t know nobody does.”
“No,” Eccles cries in the same strained voice in which he told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. “Christianity isn’t looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we’d pass out opium at services. We’re trying to serve God, not be God.”
They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them.
Eccles goes on, explanatorily, “This was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church.”
“I tell you, I know what it is.”
“What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?”
It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you-heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this frigging game, you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws his shoulder.
“The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice agonized by embarrassment, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.”
They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut pale buds. “I better go first,” Rabbit says. “Till you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this mess. He wishes it would rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of