skull grunted as if I had punched him beneath his pacemaker. I writhed; I thought of shaking soundly snoring Gloria awake; my eyes cursed the blank ceiling while my teeth suppressed a scream; I wondered what the point of human life was at all, if such dreadful things could happen under the sky.
Next morning, Memorial Monday, while saluting rifles rang out in unison in the town cemetery and television commentators put on their solemnest faces to chat for a minute about the millions who had given their lives pro patria in the recent war, Gloria told me I was taking golf too seriously. She wondered why I didn’t give it up, especially since she could use all the help I could give in the garden, now that warm weather was at last here.
Give up golf? I love those men. They alone forgive me for my warts and stiffnesses, my tainted breath and protruding nostril-hairs, my tremors and white-capped skin cancers. My golf companions too are descending into deterioration, and trying to put a good face on it—joking, under the striped tent the club has erected, with a cold Beck’s in one hand and an oily clutch of salted peanuts in the cupped other, over their own losses and lapses, life being a mess and a scramble at the best, men put here on Earth with hungers they must satisfy or they will die, and then they die anyway, men, men and women too, because for this ceremony of distributing prizes (Ben and Fred, Bradford Flight runners-up, clapclapclap) women, the wives and girlfriends and daughters and granddaughters of the players, have come to the club and are helping fill the tent with human talk and laughter, the chink of glasses and chomp of finger-food, the women in their perky summer skirts and knit polo shirts, women trim and lean and sun-weathered like the woman I saw outside the convenience store, women with their bright soprano voices gilding the brave baritone babble while unseen beyond the tent top the sad moons of transcendent witnessing and hollow endeavor lose and refind their pale shapes among the leisurely, operatic scurry of the fat clouds. Even Gloria came, stealing time from her garden, out of loyalty, wearing that straw hat we had bought years ago on St. Croix. I was touched, and gave her cheek a kiss in the cool shade of the sunny old hat, souvenir of our chummier days.
Going down to the barn to retrieve our two Havaheart traps—deer aren’t our only marauding pests; Gloria claims the woodchucks are just waiting in their endless burrows for her flower garden to ripen—I discovered a human body propped against the barn doors, in a sitting position on the plank ramp. I don’t come down to the barn every day, and the smell of decay was ripe, much stronger than AgRepel. There is musty, which is what the AgRepel seemed, and fetid, which is what I catch when I inadvertently bend down over a toilet bowl whose under-edge has long evaded the scrub brush, and stinking, which is what a skunk, not entirely unpleasantly, does. Then there are putrid, nidorous, and mephitic—blasts from the rotting heart of nature, where Satan with his foul breath writhes encased up to the waist in God’s implacable ice. We turn our faces away, ashamed for Creation.
The body was Spin’s, I could tell by the mustache, and the natty combination of blue pin-striped button-down shirt and yellow paisley necktie with matching pocket handkerchief. His putty-colored summer-weight suit had been weathered out of press by wet nights and the bloating of the body within. The face, round and unformed now as a child’s, was a mottled set of cheesy colors. A toothpick had been thrust into one open eyeball, like a martini olive—a childish cruelty in that—and the bludgeon or rocks that had been used on the top and back of his head had also been forcefully applied to his mouth, perhaps to loosen teeth thought to be gold. The corpse had attracted a cloud of buzzy supplicants, and the hands, rigid and hammer-fingered because of the pooling of blood in the tips, were crawling with small brown ants.
Even as I gagged, choking down regurgitation’s burning acid, something in me soared free above this slumped puddle of deactivated molecules, soupily breaking down en route to their next combination. On the golf course one often passed the litter of a dove or rabbit torn apart by a hawk or fox or owl: a