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• RICHARD TERRILL
  Found Poems

• LYNNE TILLMAN
  The Unconscious is Also Ridiculous

• RAJ BAHADUR
  Bambino Calls His Shot

• BRAD SCHREIBER
  George Blanda Ate My Homework

• NINA REVOYR
  Charlie and Me

  Charlie and Me—

  by NINA REVOYR

  During the fall of 1974, time seemed to move both faster and more

  slowly than usual, with each event brightened and magnified like the leaves on the maple trees. I remember

  it vividly, the particular tensions in the air, the way all of us faced the morning with heightened awareness, as if we were preparing ourselves for whatever the day might bring. The uneasiness in town was sharpened by events in the larger world — the resignation of the president, long lines at gas stations, the kidnapped heiress who still was missing though her captors had been killed or arrested, the busing crisis in Boston. Everyone seemed to be on edge, and at nine years of age I felt suddenly old, as if I knew that what I was then witnessing would propel me into an early adulthood.

  But there was more to those weeks than tension and difficulty. Some good days were mixed in, too. And as those days grew increasingly rare, I held on to them more tightly.

  One Saturday, my grandfather Charlie and I loaded the car up with several bats, two gloves, about three dozen baseballs, and headed out into the country. My grandparents’ car was a lime-green ‘64 Pontiac LeMans, so big it could have fit eight people in its long bench seats, one short of a starting lineup for a baseball team. The car had clocked 22,000 miles in the ten years they’d owned it, just slightly more than I rack up now in a single year in California, and it’s a measure of my grandfather’s view of the world, of his essential satisfaction, that he never saw reason to drive more than fifty miles from Deerfield, and then, really, only to hunt.

  That day he sat with his right arm thrown across the back of the seat and his knees spread wide, so relaxed he might have been sitting in his living room. His left hand rested lightly on the bottom curve of the wheel, even as we hurtled along at eighty miles an hour down a two-lane country road. I wasn’t scared because everything about the way he held himself made clear that he had this powerful machine completely in his control. Besides, I was eager to reach our destination, an old ballpark about ten miles into the country. It used to be the home of the Deerfield Bombers until the new stadium was built close to town, and now it served mostly as a practice field for the boys who still lived out on the few remaining farms. It was at the far end of a pasture that backed up to the woods, and deer would wander into the outfield at dusk. Charlie drove me out there sometimes when we knew the place would be empty to work on my batting and fielding. We always brought his English Springer Spaniel, Brett, with us, and as we approached the field that morning Brett raised his head to feel the rushing air against his face, the wind lifting his black ears like sails.

  As we pulled off the road onto the gravel parking area he began to circle and whine, as eager as Charlie and me to be outside.

  Is there any place more perfect than a baseball field in autumn? Anything better than the smell of the grass; or the crisp, cool air; or the red and yellow leaves against the clear blue sky, which was paler now than it had been in the summer? I didn’t think so, and this field was my favorite. Because it wasn’t used as much as the fields in town, there weren’t any worn spots in the grass, and the infield was perfectly level. The backstop was 23 simple — about fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide — not one of the huge, imposing structures they had put on the newer fields. The dugouts were just benches behind a six-foot fence, and the bleachers along the baselines were made of wood. The outfield wall, which was painted a fading Brewer blue, had a few old ads from businesses in town — Dieter Tires, Ronnie’s Bar and Grill, the Deerfield Herald News. Past the third base line was a wide, unbroken view of the countryside — the slightly rolling hills spotted here and there by stands of wood, a few red barns in sharp relief against the green of the fields. It was quiet there, so quiet you could hear the individual songs and conversations of the birds, the approach of a car on the distant highway. Any home run ball was hit into the woods beyond the outfield, where it became part of the landscape with the rocks and fallen leaves, maybe scaring a deer or two as it landed.

  There was something about stepping out onto a baseball field that always gave me a thrill, as if some energy source, some element in the grass, entered my feet and moved up through my body and set off an extra charge in my heart. I knew that my grandfather felt it, too. He was grinning as we unloaded the gear and carried it to a spot along the first base line. And seeing his worn Brewers cap and the muscles that still lined his arms, I could imagine him at eighteen or nineteen years old, driving out to the country with a duffel bag and a glove, just looking for the next field, the next game.

  We played catch for a few minutes to warm up. Brett followed the flight of the ball through the air and ran back and forth, barking, between us. Then my grandfather sent me out to the shortstop position. He stood at home plate and threw the balls up for himself, hitting them as they fell.

  He sent ground balls, line drives, and pop-ups across the field, moving me left and right, making me charge or take balls on a hop or run backwards to keep them from flying over my head. I was a fairly good fielder for a nine- year-old — proficient at judging hops and even backhanding grounders — although I still flinched at very hard-struck balls that whirred straight at my head. Brett waited patiently through this barrage, sitting between first and second at the second basemen’s spot so he could watch but not be in the line of fire. He knew not to chase balls that were intended for me. But if I couldn’t handle a scorching grounder or a high line drive and the ball went past me into the outfield, he’d chase after it, sprinting full speed, as if he planned to pick the ball up, turn, throw it back toward the infield, and cut the baserunner down at home plate. Once he actually retrieved the ball the urgency was gone; he’d trot casually outside the third base line, lifting his head as he readjusted his grip, supremely proud of himself, and drop the ball at my grandfather’s feet. Then he’d run back out to second base and wait for my next miss.

  After thirty minutes or so of fielding I took up my bat and Charlie went out to the pitcher’s mound. At first he just threw the ball straight across the plate until I could hit it consistently. Sometimes he yelled out instructions — move up in the batter’s box, don’t let your shoulders fly open, take your step toward the pitch a bit sooner. Batting is about muscle memory and repetitive motion, and you have to get to the point where you’re moving perfectly and acting without thought. If you think too much about any part of the swing — the position of your hands on the bat, the timing of your step, the relative movement of your hips and shoulders — you can break the rhythm and throw everything off. When players, even professionals, get into a hitting slump, it’s often because they’re thinking too much, breaking down the various parts of their swing until it becomes a series of separate, fallible mechanical actions instead of a unified expression of grace. At nine years old I already knew this. Sometimes I could hit beautifully, as if the ball sought out my bat. And other times I couldn’t hit a thing.

  But that day I was able to connect. After my grandfather was sure I was swinging smoothly and consistently, he started mixing up his pitches a bit, moving them inside and outside, higher and lower, offering curveballs and change-ups to test my eyes and my timing, even throwing the occasional splitter. He’d been a pitcher as well as a third baseman, so he could make all those pitches, and sometimes, on my more futile batting days, I’d believe he was trying a little too hard to get them past me. I wasn’t as good with these more difficult pitches, swinging way out in front of the change-ups and on top of the splitters that looked like strikes but then dropped precipitously just before they reached the plate. But when I did connect, when the ball hit the barrel of the bat and flew out into the field, I felt a sense of joy and freedom as powerful and true as anything I’ve ever experienced. If you have never felt the resistance and connection of a bat hitting a baseball; if you have not heard the crack of the bat split an autumn afternoon; if you have not watched that ball sail through the open air and settle into the fresh cut grass, you have missed one of life’s purest feelings of achievement. Hitting a ball is like catching a piece of the sky and sending it back up to itself. It’s like creating your own crack of thunder. And stopping a ball — especially a grounder you have to reach for, or a line drive that should have flown past your glove — is like catching a bolt of lightning.

  We were out on the field practicing hard, both covered in a sheen of sweat. By now, my grandfather had stripped off his short-sleeve shirt and was pitching in his undershirt. (It’s funny how even the simplest things can change with time and context. Those shirts — which then were simply part of the working man’s unglamorous uniform — have now taken on a hip, modern masculinity, as well as the more descriptive name of “wifebeater.” This, even though the men I knew who wore them — my grandfather and Uncle Pete — were as likely to hit their wives as they were to give up beer or hunting.) But for all of our exertion, our efforts didn’t feel a bit like work. For Charlie, there wasn’t a real distinction between work and play, anyway, or at least there shouldn’t have been. In his mind, if something wasn’t enjoyable, it wasn’t worth doing, and this held true even for the things he did to make a living. He’d taken pleasure, he said, in cutting out perfect pieces of leather for shoes; in watching freshly-plucked chickens move down the assembly line. And there was no mistaking the pleasure on his face when he played baseball with me, or when he was walking through the woods at dawn with his shotgun in hand. All work should feel like play, he said, and all play should involve hard work. This was a lesson I learned well, and still adhere to. The things I do for fun, I do with effort and dedication, and the things I do for work must always involve some pleasure. I can’t stay focused at my job unless I’m enjoying myself. And as I sit here at my desk I’m wearing a wool Dodgers hat because of something else that Charlie told me, which is that all serious work should be done in a baseball cap.

   

• DENNIS DANZIGER
  Hoop Schemes

• CAROLYN KELLOGG
  Stroke

• OSCAR VILLALON
  The Roar

• LOU MATHEWS
  Racing in the Streets

• SAMANTHA DUNN
  The Tortilla Construction Handbook

• ELOISE KLEIN HEALY
  The Season

• CHRIS LOWRY
  Cricket’s Crashing Continents

• ANNE-MARIE KINNEY
  Zizou Président

  Zizou Président—

  by ANNE-MARIE KINNEY

  I remember playing in another place, at another time, when something amazing happened. Someone passed the ball to me, and before even touching it, I knew exactly what was going to happen.

  —Zinedine Zidane

  June 1998.  The masses pouring into Paris sit sweating, hugging their overstuffed luggage in their laps. With most of Air France on strike, there’s no one to wheel the airstairs to the planes.  They sit, trapped in their seats, with nothing to do but wait for this nightmare to sort itself out somehow, to grind their teeth, to stare out the little windows in private unfocused panic, longing to unfold their legs.  Time is the only way out, and there’s no sign of it anywhere.

  In the city too, time seems to have slowed to an unbearable crawl. It seems for a while that the day will never come.  The Scotsmen picnicking along the Trocadero look weary, their jerseys wrinkled, the boomboxes plunked beside them in the grass playing Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story” for the tenth time today. As the sun sits swollen in the sky, as the shadows of the four crouching giants loom across the city, their lifeless heads hanging over the treetops, the early summer breeze seems to whisper

  ole, ole ole ole, O-le, O-o-le

  like a half-forgotten prayer. Day and night people crowd around the sleeping giants, watching for any sign of movement, but it isn’t time yet. There is only the watching and waiting, the shallow breath and pulsing nerves.

  In his own corner of the city a young Algerian-Frenchman, a rising star, waits too.

  In a few weeks he’ll be the most beloved man in France, the apparent fulfillment of a nation’s dream of itself. On the Champs-Elysées the Algerian flag will wave alongside the French one, and the chant Zizou Président will reach beyond the city to the outer banlieues where little kids crowded around rabbit-eared TV sets watch the celebration, parents hanging back in awe. But first the giants have to wake up. Separately, simultaneously, the tin men with their pupil-less eyes and closed mouths come alive, mechanical necks creaking, diesel-engine nervous systems whirring as the men rise up and begin their slow lumbering journey to meet one another, to signal — to the bodies below pressed against each other, rib cages squeezed against metal railings, collective hot breath filling metro station stairwells, hair pasted to the backs of their necks — that something is happening, will happen, has happened, has been happening all along.

  The young Zidane, dubbed Zizou by a former coach, won’t be playing tonight, not yet. But already he hears the sounds of the stadium; he pictures himself on the pitch, the vibrant green of the field. He closes his eyes and listens to the wave of noise that hovers all around, that forms a barrier between the match and anything that’s not the match, the noise that drowned out all voices save the one inside that drives him. He looks to his teammates, proudly called “Black, Blanc et Beur” from Guadeloupe, from Senegal, from the banlieues — the team the far right leader Le Pen sniffed at, saying they didn’t really represent France, in whom he said French society would never recognize itself — each in his own space, deep in thought or blocking out all thought, silent and primed. He thinks back to the narrow strip of concrete in the quartier difficile of La Castellane, the only place to kick the ball in private, where he would bide his time until supper, when he and his brothers and sister would eat in shifts at the cramped kitchen table. It’s been so long since he’s returned to La Castellane. It seems impossible he’s been away so long. His jaw tightens and he calls up the wave of noise again.

  The four giants, representing the four corners of the earth brought together in this place at this time, chug on toward the Place de la Concorde, their faces laboriously turning from side to side, blank eyes surveying the falling night. The streets are cleared for them, the barriers guarded by riot police, helmeted and gloved. What the people below don’t know yet is that the start of things — the meeting of the giants, Scotland and Brazil in the Stade de France, the triumphant return of the World Cup to its birthplace — won’t bring an end to the rising tension in the air. It will keep rising after it breaks.

  When the opening ceremony is over, when the giants are driven behind a wall to be disassembled and carted away to a warehouse, the people below don’t feel anything has changed. They still can’t move, jammed in tight corners, whispering to each other. The games are about to begin but no one here, in the street, in the stairwells, on balconies, in bars, can see it. Soon the need to move grows more urgent, as girls try to wriggle away from drunk men who tell them their eyes are like pearls of the sea, who tell them, their mouths slack against the girls’ necks, that they should go dancing, that they must be beautiful dancers, as boys try to extract their skulls from the crooks of strangers’ armpits, as glasses are squeezed out of sweaty hands to shatter at neighbors’ feet, splattering beer on bare ankles. Soon there are defectors, bodies breaking out of the tangled mass, sending cool air shooting into the crowd. Soon glasses are being thrown and the riot police are gaining, their plastic visors down and batons gripped tight; the crowd breaks up as people run down alleys, averting their eyes from the ones who’ve been caught and beaten, holding up their arms to protect their faces from flying debris, stopping only when they realize they’ve reached some pocket of quiet far from home. On this night the city doesn’t sleep.  It hides and waits, white-knuckled, for morning.

  When the young midfielder who plays for France — because he has dual citizenship and, they say, an Algerian coach thought he was too slow—enters the stadium, he already has a feeling, something the air is telling him. The air parts for him as he walks, so there’s no sound, and no direction but the one he’s heading down. It’s curious more than unsettling, this weight that seems to be bearing on him. When the game begins, his focus narrows down to the ball and the space around the ball, the pathways that illuminate themselves for him, which he follows without hesitation, sliding in at the necessary angle, at the exact moment when he’s needed, manipulating the ball like he is its rightful owner. But mostly he watches, eyes darting across the field, frowning, consumed. The stands that surround the field, tall and brightly lit, wall him in, a towering impassable glow. As far as his perception goes, the match could be going on for days. It will go on as long as it goes on, because time doesn’t have meaning here. There is no real time, only this, only now, on and on.

  His focus is broken only when a taunting voice flits past. His head jerks in the voice’s direction, as he watches the Saudi Arabian player, Amin, jog away. For the next few minutes he tries to keep his attention on the ball and the space around it, but keeps flashing back to the voice. He sees Amin hovering nearby, mouthing things to him; he can’t be sure what’s being said but he fl ashes back to all the times he’s had to defend himself and his people since leaving La Castellane for a life in football, his first weeks playing for Cannes spent on cleaning duty after he punched an opponent for mocking his immigrant neighborhood, the whispers from detractors of his father being a harki — a traitor to Algeria — whispers he’s never entirely sure he’s heard in the moment but that stay with him, needle him, never leave his thoughts. The more he watches Amin, the less the words matter. Soon the ball is secondary, and his focus is entirely on Amin’s back, his flapping jersey running away, and all grows quiet inside as he resolves to follow, and the next thing he knows he’s standing over the writhing Saudi Arabian, a red card flapping above his head, the wall of spectators looking down. As he leaves the field — his teammates yelling at the referee, everyone yelling — the pressure in the air lifts momentarily and what lies ahead is a thin fog with no weight to it at all.

  On the day of the final between France and Brazil, the mood in Paris is tentative. Though Brazil seems unstoppable, and the chances of beating them are slim to none, the French somehow have made it this far, to this dizzying and unfamiliar height. Zizou is back after a two-game suspension and the country’s hopes rest on his shoulders alone. He knows this but is unsure if the pressure is coming from outside or if it’s pushing to the surface from some place inside him where the voice that drives him resides, his enforced hiatus giving it the time and space to build.

  But soon he’s in the match space again, where the white noise of the crowd hushes his nerves and time holds steady, opening pathways for him, pointing him toward a breach where he tunnels in like a rush of wind between bodies, hitting the ball with his prematurely balding head with such force that it confounds Brazil’s goalie, who never sees it coming. Zizou tumbles to the ground then rolls back up, always watching, heavy brow furrowed. After that it’s as though a seal has been broken. His course lights up before him brighter than before, the field opening up its promise one weaving path at a time, and he’s the only one who can see it.

  By the time Zizou’s done it a second time, a miraculous, almost identical hit that leaves Brazil reeling, the streets begin to vibrate with the energy of the crowds huddled around TVs mounted high on café walls, champagne bottles at the ready in cupboards, under counters, just in case; and outside Paris too, on the outskirts and farther, in the quartiers difficiles there’s a lifting sensation in veins, under fingernails, in hair follicles, but it’s too soon, too soon….

  …and as he always does, amid the quaking stadium air and the crowd noise that periodically collapses into its components, chairs creaking and the individual shouts of Allez, allez! Zizou watches the field for his next move, following the light to set up shots for his teammates, following the driving force that builds within him. He’s not thinking of the towering golden trophy that sits just outside his peripheral vision, and he’s not thinking what it will mean or what people will say it means if they win. There’s only this place, this time and no other. When his teammate Petit scores the goal that will seal their fate if they can just beat the clock, he’s still so deeply involved in the field, the space, the ball, the light, the path, that it hits the streets before it hits him, that they’re winning, that it’s won, and the bodies come flying out of doors.

  Then he’s being thrust into the air by a knot of intertwining arms, and the noise crescendos higher and higher. The golden trophy rises up from somewhere into his hands, and he closes his eyes as he brings it to his lips. He runs his hands over and over it, just to feel its dimensions, its glorious weight, and he clicks his teeth against its surface as he goes in for another clumsy kiss, and the constant flashing of cameras bathes him in white light. As the stadium erupts, as word travels through the cities, suburbs and villages, sending more and more people flying from their TV sets and out into the streets, these moments come flashing through his consciousness, too quickly for him to fully process: There are posters of him rolling off the presses, of him running head first toward the camera, ball hovering between his feet, the posters stacked up, rolled up, shoved in boxes and shipped around the world along with jerseys emblazoned with his name, not the name his family calls him, Yaz, but publicly, yes, his name. There he is playing for Real Madrid, a film crew of seventeen cameras following him for a documentary he’s agreed to for some reason, that’s supposed to unlock the secret of his mystic talent, there he is being named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by Jacques Chirac, there is headline after headline, Zidane as harbinger of a new racially united France, as role model to Arab youth, as proof positive that fraternité has finally arrived.

  The tension of the last few weeks unravels through the streets of Paris, the running bodies creating rushes of wind where there were none on this hot summer day, just two days before Bastille Day, but this is bigger. Before long there are so many bodies in the street running, jumping, shouting, fists pumping, flags waving, that the spaces close up. Elbows jut into collar bones, heels jump and land hard on neighboring toes, but no one feels the pain until later, after they lose their voices from singing, after they grow nauseated from lack of air.

  In the banlieues, on the outskirts of the city and farther out in Marseille and beyond, little ones jump and dance for the hero they can claim as one of their own, their fathers breaking away from the festivities to get ready for work, working in factories or working department-store security, like Zizou’s own father had, or any work they can get. They stuff their aching feet into thin-soled shoes and watch their children — the purity of the hope, of the pride swelling in their small chests as they rush into the alley for re-enactments, scaled down into the tight space between crumbling buildings. Their breaking point is still a ways off.

  Still hoisted on a knot of bodies, he has let the trophy float through other teammates’ hands now, his brothers, Les Bleus, still beset by a flutter of camera fl ashes. He blinks his eyes and sees orange spots floating before him and feels the mildest headache coming on from the force of collision.  Then he hears another voice, that taunting voice, but it isn’t Amin this time — where is it coming from? What is it saying now? He can feel heat rise up through him, so hot it will have to go somewhere, sometime soon; then he hears the voice inside him, the one that says quietly, insistently now.  He squints his eyes hard to silence these thoughts run wild, and when he opens them again, another camera flash sends a wash of whiteness over his field of vision, and the voices vanish. Then there is only this moment. And this moment, he knows for certain, is beautiful.

   

• ROBERT EISELE
  Catch and Release

• LISA TEASLEY
  Beach Volleyball is Church

• KATY PETTY
  Fathom

• JOHN HARLOW
  Will the People

• KARA LINDSTROM
  My Own Private Ashtanga

• ALAN ZAREMBO
  Going Fast

• RICHARD RAYNER
  Shoot the Ref

• DANTE ZÜNIGA-WEST
  This Is Not a Sport

• COLIN FLEMING
  Dare Me to Breathe

• JONATHAN LETHEM + CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO
  Poem by Harris Conklin / Reply by Ivan Felt

• KENNETH DEIFIK
  The Horse Finds His Own Way Home, Even Without Clues

• TOD GOLDBERG
  Welcome to Thousand Palms

  Welcome to Thousand Palms—

  by TOD GOLDBERG

  Kip Lewin figures he’s wasted maybe two-thirds of his life giving people good advice that’s been completely ignored. Used to be he gave a shit about this, but now it’s just one of those things he recognizes as one of his personal burdens, like gout or hemorrhoids or the lien the IRS put on his house last year or that other thing he’d rather not talk about, that issue that died yesterday, certainly that dead issue which died yesterday, and which, thankfully, will not be returning. At some point you just decide those are the things in your life you can’t control without extra-special effort and, really, who wants to exert extra-special effort? No, Kip thinks, standing in front of his third bucket of balls at Terra De La Paz’s driving range, there’s just no sense in worrying about other people’s stupidity. Why diagnose problems for other people when they clearly are content living in the stupor of their blindness?

  Take the gardeners, for instance. It’s 6:30 in the morning and they’re wearing those absurd coal miner’s headlamps while they tend the greens and hazards at Terra De La Paz. For the last thirty minutes, as Kip has hit drive after drive into the darkness, the gardeners have been raking the sand traps, running weed cutters along the edges of the fairway and puttering around on lawn mowers equipped with headlights. In another five minutes the sun will be up completely and they’ll realize, as they do every morning at 6:35, that they’ve butchered significant parts of the golf course and they’ll spend the next three hours trying to rectify their mistakes. This used to infuriate Kip. Why not just start work at 6:35 and not bother with the whole headlamp thing? Why not just do your job right the first time? Why was this hard to understand? A few years ago he even hazarded to ask Javier, the head greens keeper, why he didn’t see what was so clearly a waste in man-hours (never mind the damage this was doing to the course itself) and Javier said, “My guys come in at six, so that’s when the day begins.”

  Kip told him that with that logic his guys could come in at noon and the day would begin then, too, but when Javier just looked at him like he had a head growing out of his ass, Kip realized it was fruitless to argue with people so clearly set in their own demoralizing spin cycle of dumb-fuckery. How do you tell someone when day begins? How do you advise someone about time? So instead Kip said, “Oh, wait, sure, sure, I get what you mean,” and went on about his life. He was just the club’s pro, after all. Without me, Kip thought then, none of you fuckers would even have a job. Me or someone like me, anyway.

  Maybe that’s the root of his burdens, Kip thinks now. How many versions of me are there? In Thousand Palms alone there are three courses and Thousand Palms is the crystal meth capital and general butthole of the Coachella Valley, but there you go. Within five miles of where he was standing, Kip could count at least two other guys just like him. Move up the freeway to Desert Hot Springs, another six miles, maybe seven, except for that asshole Brigance who actually qualified for the Open in, what, ’94? And then if he looked south and east to Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, even fucking Indio and Coachella, there were just too many to count. Hundreds. All of them wearing Nike golf vests and red Nike sweat- wicking polo shirts and Nike visors and anything else they’ve seen Tiger wear.

  It would be silly to assume each version of himself was offering good advice, but Kip knows that if even half of his doppelgangers are as dedicated to helping people as he is, well, that’s a lot of advice being ignored in favor of faith or obstinacy or simple avoidance. A shame, really.

  Kip removes his three wood and examines it in the dark for a moment. His girlfriend Joanna bought it for him last Christmas, which initially pissed him off. He wanted this pillow he saw on an infomercial that would reduce his snoring and help him lose weight and have more self-confidence. He even gave her the phone number to call to get two for just $99, but she was convinced a new three wood, purchased with her own money and with her own good luck (versus Kip’s apparent bad luck, though that went unsaid) would help solve whatever problems Kip was having on the course. The club sat in the trunk of his car for six months, until this morning.

  “Just close your eyes and feel the club,” Kip says aloud. It’s a piece of solid advice he’s been giving people for years, though he’s not sure now he even knows what it means. It doesn’t matter, really. He rears back and fires towards the ball, feels the approximately fifteen degrees of loft the three wood is about to give him, feels the smoothness of his swing…right until the point where he feels an infinitesimal twitch near his thumb. It’s tiny. Maybe not even a twitch at all. Probably nothing, really.

  A piece of advice he’d give someone thinking this? You’re thinking too much. Just follow through. He thwacks the ball, 119 but keeps his eyes closed. There you go. Just be your swing.

  What a terrible piece of advice that is. Be your swing. Who wants to be a goddamned golf swing? That’s a piece of advice to be avoided, for sure. Kip is certain that much of his avoided advice comes as a direct result of his present setting at Terra De La Paz. When it was being built back in 1999 on an old land fill project that had been abandoned a dozen years prior, the Desert Sun, the local newspaper, said it was going to be the centerpiece of a revitalized Thousand Palms, which even at the time struck Kip as preposterous. How do you revitalize a piece of land that was never vital in the first place? The golf course itself was going to be beautiful: thirty-six holes, spread over two courses, were to be dug into the base of the San Jacinto Mountains with the idea that the north course would be for the locals and the south course would be for big tournaments. There was talk back then that Terra De La Paz would become part of the annual Thanksgiving Skins Game rotation; that eventually Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus would stand beside each other in the shadow of the San Jacintos, the lush greens of Terra De La Paz at their feet, discussing their next million dollar putt and then thousands of others would pay millions just for the right to stand in the same location to take shots of far less significance.

  Even despite his misgivings about the location, Kip was sold. He envisioned himself and his wife Ginger in the VIP tent during the Skins sipping Arnold Palmers with Arnold Palmer. He wasn’t married and didn’t know anyone named Ginger, but that was just a small hoop. He’d find a girl and nickname her Ginger if he had to.

  And maybe they would marry and maybe they wouldn’t, but goddamn it, she was going to drink an Arnold Palmer next to Arnold Palmer. The old master would appreciate the irony of it, as Kip was certain guys like Arnold Palmer respected guys like Kip Lewin. They both loved the game and Kip was actually taking a proactive role in teaching it to the next generation of people who would buy whatever Arnold Palmer was pitching. Kip wasn’t sure Tiger respected guys like himself, since Tiger was more like a robot than a golfer, not unlike that kid Todd Marinovich who was supposedly bio-engineered by his dad to be a quarterback, except that Tiger was Tiger and Marinovich was doing time for drugs or beating up a drifter or something.

  The problem, however, was that some fucking environmentalists tinkering around the proposed north course discovered an endangered weed, along with unnatural levels of barium in the soil, and the Skins Game disappeared. A month later, a developer planning on building two hundred homes abruptly stopped

  120 construction after fifty and then shortly thereafter feature stories began appearing in the Desert Sun detailing how Terra De La Paz was yet another failed attempt to turn unincorporated Thousand Palms into an actual city, except that this failure had the added incentive of possibly causing cancer.

  Kip replaces his three wood and takes out his seven iron. “Middle and true,” he says and swings away. Middle and true. He hits another and another and another and they all fly middle and true into the darkness. He’s pretty sure his balls have gone middle and true all morning long, sure that when the sun comes up in another two minutes he won’t see that his hour of hitting has yet again produced a ragged V of balls.

  The Yips are gone. For sure.

  Kip’s first lesson isn’t until nine, so he spends two hours in the pro-shop office tidying things up on his computer.

  It’s not that he’s the kind of guy prone to worry and paranoia, but it’s a good general practice to pick up after yourself, make sure no one trips over your crap. So every morning Kip erases all of the previous day’s emails, cleans out his web browsing history, deletes the cache file, runs a full Norton scan and then defragments his hard drive. He’s not entirely certain what the defragmenting actually does, but the mere idea of little bits of information on his

  computer without a place makes Kip nervous. Besides, it’s good to have a ritual and what better ritual than starting every day at absolute zero? The last thing Kip wants is to be beholden to some virtual memory bank. If everyone in the world started their days at absolute zero the mental health profession would cease. Another problem solved.

  “Hey there, Kipper.”

  Kip looks up from his computer and sees his assistant Gavin in the doorway. He’s got a bottle of blue Gatorade in one hand and a putter in the other and he’s wearing a pink polo shirt with a huge white Nike swoosh on the left breast pocket and has on a pair of yellow linen shorts slung far too low on his hips. “You look like an Easter Peep,” Kip says.

  “It’s going to be a thousand degrees out there today,” Gavin says. “I could die from heat stroke.”

  “And this is how you want to be remembered?” “Point is, Kipper,” Gavin says, “you either look cool or

  you be cool.” If there’s one thing Kip hates, it’s to be called Kipper.

  If there’s another thing, it’s to be called Kipper by Gavin, a person practically young enough to be his son from a one night stand in college. As it stands, Gavin will likely end up being the person who takes his job, most likely some time in the next year if the economy stays in the toilet. And then what? It isn’t a thought Kip particularly wants to entertain, so instead he stares back at his computer screen where the defragmenting program displays a series of colored blips and blurbs slowly moving into order. Out of his peripheral vision, however, Kip can still see Gavin lingering in the doorway.

  “Isn’t there somewhere you need to be?” Kip says. “Not really,” Gavin says. “All I’ve got is Mrs. Reller

  at noon.” “Anyone walks in today,” Kip says, “they’re all

  yours.” “I appreciate that,” Gavin says. The sad thing is that

  Gavin probably does appreciate the opportunity to give lessons to the fucking walk-ins, which usually amounts to some lost Japanese tourist who thinks Thousand Palms must be nicer than Palm Springs since there’s, you know, a thousand palms versus just one. Part of Kip admires Gavin’s drive and ambition and for coming to work three hours early in the middle of summer. Another part of Kip wishes the kid would choke on something. Not choke to death. Kip doesn’t want that. But just choke enough that maybe he’d run into Kip’s office needing the Heimlich and Kip would do it and Gavin would thank him and realize he’s been living the wrong life and that what he really wanted to be wasn’t a club pro at all. Gavin would tell Kip that his near death experience had confirmed in him a great desire to work

  in Antarctica with the polar bears or the seals or the glaciers or whatever else they had in the Antarctica. “I actually came in to ask you a question,” Gavin says, “and I want you to know first that I mean no disrespect to you or to Terra De La Paz.”

  “Of course,” Kip says because he realizes he’s been staring silently at the kid for maybe a full minute, the whole scenario of near death, salvation and epiphany playing out over and over again in his mind with several different iterations of calamity, including a lightning strike, a rattlesnake bite and an attack by a pack of rabid coyotes. And also because he has no idea what Gavin might need to ask him and because he’s worried about whatever that whole disrespect issue might entail in light of, well, his dead issue. Nevertheless, what he can’t figure out is why people have to preface their every action and every expected reaction. When did it become necessary to foreshadow everything? An entire breed of humans have been created who always expect a teaser or commercial for what’s about to happen next. Someday Gavin would realize that not every decision he made in life came with scenes for the next week’s very special episode.

  “I’m not sure how to say this,” Gavin says.

  Shit, Kip thinks. He saw the range. Or one of those fucking gardeners with the miner hats told him. Or maybe he got on the computer yesterday and went through the Google searches. What had he Googled yesterday?

  The Yips for sure. He’d done that everyday now for, what, a year? What day was yesterday? Tuesday. Tuesday is personal-stories day. That’s right. He read about Rick Ankiel, the pitcher with the Yips who had to become an outfielder since he couldn’t stop hitting batters or throwing the ball into the stands and then ended up getting caught with a syringe of HGH in his ass or some such thing. He found some loser’s blog about getting the Yips on his honeymoon at the TPC course in Maui and it turning into a sexual thing, too, which is now threatening his marriage. And there was a woman with the Yips on another blog who said now she couldn’t even iron a crease correctly anymore. And then he read about some study going on in Denmark where a golfer with the

  Yips named Magnus Der Magnus was studied for three goddamned years and was finally diagnosed with focal dystonia which, it turned out, was just a clinical way of saying he had the Yips. No cure. Just a name. Those people? They had problems. Kip just had a burden. And now this fucking Brutus, with his pink shirt and yellow shorts and blue Gatorade was going to make it a problem. It’s not like Kip hadn’t been anticipating this day. You can only not play golf for so long when you’re a golf pro.

  “Could you write a letter of recommendation on my

  behalf for a new job?” Gavin says. “What?”

  “See, I knew this would piss you off,” Gavin says. “Never mind.”

  “No, no,” Kip says. “I’m not pissed off. I just didn’t think you were looking for a new job. You took me by surprise, that’s all. Hell. You know. In this economy and all, I thought, you know, you were entrenched here. Part of the team and all that.”

  “I am,” Gavin says, “I am. Totally. But to be honest I feel like I’m ready to make my move up and I know that’s not going to happen here. I mean, you’re Kip Lewin.”

  “It’s not like that,” Kip says.

  “You know it is,” Gavin says, “and that’s totally cool. I understood that when I got the job. Everyone told me, ‘Kip Lewin will be there forever,’ and I was like, no, no, he’ll end up at one of the big resorts and they were like,

  ‘No, no, Kip Lewin is the King of Thousand Palms,’ and maybe at first I didn’t think it was true, but now, man, I see it.”

  Behind Gavin, Kip can make out Mr. Tucker, his nine o’clock, wandering around the shop. Mr. Tucker wasn’t a bad guy, really, but he was the kind who would tell you about every leak and dribble that was happening in his body, to the point that Kip didn’t feel comfortable shaking his hand anymore but had to, because that’s 121 part of the job. A good handshake with the members sometimes included a fifty. But now he saw Mr. Tucker touching a rack of shirts and the only thing he could think was that he’d need to get one of those blue lights that detected fecal matter and body fluids before someone ended up catching diphtheria from a polo shirt.

  But the thing about Mr. Tucker was that even though he was a terrible golfer, and maybe carried around infectious diseases, he knew he wasn’t an athlete. He wasn’t playing golf because he’d been endowed with ability. He was playing golf because he wanted to, irrespective of his lack of actual physical talent. Mr. Tucker would never get the Yips because he didn’t have anything to get Yippie about. It’s a realization that suddenly fills Kip with a feeling of intense envy: to not be good. To play just to play. What an idea.

  “Where you applying?” Kip asks.

  “It’s really just a formality at this point,” Gavin says and Kip sees the kid exhale, watches as his shoulders loosen, notices that he’s let his putter slide out of his hand so that it now rests easily between the door frame and his thigh. He was actually nervous about coming to me, Kip thinks. Every day, a new surprise. “There’s a course opening up about fifteen minutes outside Davis? In Northern California? You know, by the college?”

  “I played Juniors up there,” Kip says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Kip says, but the truth is he missed the cut at the Juniors tournament there during his freshman year in high school, and then for the next three years, whenever he even saw the last name Davis, he’d get a taste in his mouth like moldy popcorn. “It’s a cow town, right?”

  “Something like that,” Gavin says. “Anyway, my wife? Her sister’s husband, he’s some asshole land- developer and he’s pretty much the guy in charge and he said he’d take care of me if I applied for the job.”

  “That sounds great,” Kip says, though he didn’t even know Gavin was married. But right there on his hand is a ring and everything. “How long have you been married again?”

  “Five years,” Gavin says.

  “That’s good,” Kip says. “Right? That’s considered good these days?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Gavin says. “My parents have been married forty years.”

  “How old are you again?” “Thirty-five,” he says. “No,” Kip says, “that’s not true, is it?” “Why would I lie about how old I am?” “Because I’m forty, so there’s no way you could be

  thirty-five. That doesn’t add up.” “Add up to what?”

  A dialog box opens up on Kip’s computer screen letting him know that his hard drive is now completely defragmented. Just like that. A fresh start.

  Kip stands behind his desk and extends his hand toward Gavin. “Well, that’s great, Gavin. I’m really proud of you.” Gavin’s grip is so strong that Kip feels a pain shoot from his wrist all the way into his groin. Could it be that for the last five years he’s never shaken the kid’s hand? Maybe when he hired him. He must have shook his hand then. There must have been some other occasion along the line, but Kip can’t think of one. When they finally stop shaking — and it’s never easy for Kip to tell when that should happen, that point at which it’s OK to stop touching another person for the purposes of being merely polite but not personal — Kip can’t figure out what to do with his now throbbing hand, so he does what he thinks Arnold Palmer would do in this situation and pats Gavin on the shoulder and gives him a kindly squeeze. Palmer would say something, too, wouldn’t he? “I’m real proud of you, son,” is what he’d say, so Kip says that too and gives Gavin another squeeze, except squeezing Gavin is like squeezing a brick, so he ends up essentially pinching him. Whatever happened to golfers having a little life on their bones?

  “Thanks, Kipper,” Gavin says. “You’ll have to cut that shit out when you get up

  there,” Kip says. Gavin cocks his head in a way that looks painful.

  “Excuse me?” he says. “That nickname shit,” Kip says. He tries to smile but he can’t get his mouth to work quite right and instead he ends up curling his upper lip over his teeth until he looks like a decomposing corpse skull.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All that Kipper bullshit. My name isn’t short for Kipper.”

  “It’s not?” “No, of course not.” “Then what is Kip short for?” Gavin asks. “Nothing,” Kip says. “Kip is short for Absolute Zero. Some things just are, my name being one of those things. You’ll learn that, my friend.”

  Myfriend. Whendidhestartcallingpeoplemyfriend? And did he call Gavin “son” a moment ago, too? Well, it didn’t matter. He was at the beginning of the day— who knew what exciting development might come next? Maybe he’d break ritual and spend all afternoon Googling places in Davis where you can get a discreet hand job and then email his results to Gavin for the inevitable moment, five or ten years down the line, when he realizes it’s time to start paying for sex.

  “I thought I was being respectful,” Gavin says. “I’m sorry if you took it some other way.”

  “I’m over it,” Kip says and actually means it, because suddenly it feels so petty in light of everything else in the world. Iraq and the Yips and his snoring and that IRS bullshit and wherever people were starving these days. “Really. I just wanted to make you aware now that you’re going to be the big man in Davis. Can’t be indiscriminately pissing people off.”

  “OK, then,” Gavin says and starts to make for the door, but something makes Kip grab his arm and squeeze it again. Solid. Five years younger than him and solid. No discernible weakness at all.

  “I want to give you another piece of advice,” Kip says. He’s trying to smile again but isn’t sure he knows how anymore, isn’t sure he can fake anything more than he has for the last year of his life.

  “Whatever,” Gavin says.

  “You ever hear of something called focal dystonia?” Gavin stares at him blankly so Kip continues. “Golfers get it.”

  “Is that some kind of blood disease?” Gavin says.

  “No,” Kip says. “It’s this thing that happens to your muscles. They contract on their own.”

  “Like Tourette’s?”

  “No,” Kip says, though he has no idea if that’s correct or not. Maybe it is. Shit. Maybe he has Tourette’s. Maybe that’s what this whole outburst can be attributed

  to later on down the line. Thursdays are his medical investigation days on Google, so he’ll need to wait until tomorrow for a definitive answer. “Totally different.” Kip isn’t quite sure why he’s telling Gavin all this, especially with Mr. Tucker lingering only ten feet away in the shop and likely taking assiduous notes so that he can share the experience back at the nineteenth hole with the rest of the fucking club. “No, see, it’s this disease that’s, well, it’s not a disease, it’s more of a condition, so it’s this thing, this burden, really, that you can get and I just want you to be aware of it, since you’re moving on. In case, really, you should find yourself concerned because of your time here that maybe, you know, you’ve been infected by me.”

  “What are you telling me? Is this from the barium? Christ, is it from the barium?” A patch of sweat has formed under Gavin’s left armpit and is spreading east across his chest. It’s the damndest thing Kip’s seen all year. The boy genius breaks a sweat. “Is that what you’re telling me?” There’s another migration happening on the other side of Gavin’s body and it occurs to Kip that maybe those sweat wicking shirts don’t really work when you’re sweating out the possible end of your life.

  “No,” Kip says, but then he stops himself, reconsiders. “Maybe. Yes. Maybe. You never know. And you know what? Why don’t you take today off. I’m happy to do Mrs. Reller today. OK? And I’d be happy to write that letter, OK? Take the week if you want. Spend some

  time with your wife, you know, in case.”

  Part of being a finely tuned athlete, Kip understands, is that occasionally your body ends up betraying you. If you play football, maybe you blow out a knee or a shoulder or some obscure tendon ruptures and, next thing you know, you’re one of those guys on the sideline holding a clipboard. Or Kip’s always reading about these massive hulks in the NBA who end up retiring because of some tiny insignificant ligament in their ankle or foot that just won’t heal. Seven feet of bones and muscles and all of it comes undone by an inch of connective tissue. You train your entire life to do one thing well and then one day you wake up and your body has decided that it would prefer to sit idly by, happy to find a point of stasis.

  It’s just after seven in the evening and Kip is watering his backyard lawn with the hose, a daily activity since he’s never managed to get sprinklers installed. Yet another reminder of things he’s put on the back burner in pursuit of becoming whatever it was he thought he was becoming; an absolute that Kip has never been able to pinpoint with any real accuracy. For a long time he wanted to be a professional golfer. Then, when it became clear he wasn’t good enough for the Tour, he decided that being a golf pro would be the next best thing. But now, forty years old, living in a house that abuts the seventh fairway of Terra De La Paz, one of the only homes that actually got built before the developers had to start including that barium disclosure rider, Kip can’t recall what it was that he wanted to do other than hit a ball straight. His entire life boiled down to that singular desire: to find a consistent straight line.

  How stupid, really. Devote your entire adult life to a ball and a stick and an ability to read which direction grass was growing. A career in golf seemed like a good idea when he was fifteen, even seemed like a good idea when he was thirty and maybe when he was thirty-five.

  And, weirdly, it seemed like a good idea for someone like Gavin. Kip kept replaying their conversation from this morning in his head, trying to figure out at what point it seemed smart to start losing his mind in front of the kid. Here Gavin was excited to give him the news about his job and then it all got kooky. Maybe it was that King of Thousand Palms bit that pushed him over the edge, though it seemed to Kip that he’d been over the edge for so long that he was spending his entire life looking up for something he’d never be able to find.

  Seemed. It’s a word Kip has grown to hate. Everything seemed one way in his life and actually ended up being some still-born version of the ideal. He seemed to be an excellent golfer, but in reality he was just the best on his college team, or his high school team, or the under- fifteen team that he was on at Boundary Oak Country Club, back when he was a kid living in Walnut Creek, long before he ever ended up in the desert. (Even where he had lived was a big seemed: Walnut Creek contained neither walnuts or creeks by the time he was old enough to notice such things. Thousand Palms contained not even a hundred palms, really.) That everything he had and everything he didn’t have were a direct result of hitting a dimpled white ball every day had become crushing in its insignificance.

  “So this is life,” Kip says.

  “What’s that?” Joanne says. Kip forgot she was sitting beneath the misters on their little porch drinking a glass of wine and flipping through some listing papers. For the last six months Joanne had been selling foreclosures at a pretty brisk rate and Kip had the sense that she was planning to make her own move shortly. They weren’t in love — neither of them had ever even pretended to be — but they did like the same movies and restaurants and could make each other laugh and these days there was value in that. There also was a tenderness between them that Kip couldn’t quantify. She wasn’t Ginger. She’d never met Arnold Palmer and, most likely, if Tiger Woods wanted her to be mistress number 190,000 she’d hop at the opportunity, but it wouldn’t be personal. Just a chance at a better life and Kip couldn’t deny her that.

  Maybe that’s what caring for someone ultimately meant. “I hate golf,” Kip says. “No you don’t,” Joanne says. Kip walks over to the spigot and turns off the hose and watches the last bits of water drain out onto grass. For a long time he made a point of putting fertilizer on the lawn and didn’t allow Joanne to walk on it, but after a while it just got to be silly, this idea of keeping the grass green and then not being able to enjoy it. Not long after that it started to turn the perpetual shade of brown it was this evening. He plops down across from Joanne and stares at her for a moment. She’s pretty in the way meteorologists on the local news often are — not pretty enough to be a model but pretty enough that people often ask Kip how he got so lucky, as if he won Joanne in a tournament. Luck. That was another of those words that plagued Kip. Good luck.

  Bad luck. Lucky shot. Lucky to have a woman like Joanne. Luck was the sort of thing that made Kip start looking for excuses, exceptions to rules. Like: Joanne wears too much perfume for Kip’s taste but he understands she’s playing a role for the people who sit in her car for hours on end while they drive by foreclosure after foreclosure, someone else’s crushed hopes and dreams now a pretty good bargain if you’ve got a bit of liquid. Lucky for them. Kip takes a sip of Joanne’s wine. It’s warm and tastes like her lipstick. “We should get married,” Kip says.

  “To each other?” Joanne says and Kip actually laughs. She reaches over and takes his hand in hers and, for the first time all day, Kip feels better. “You don’t want to marry me, Kip.”

  “What are we doing here?” Kip asks. “Right now or are you speaking generally?” she says. “Right now.” “You’re having some kind of breakdown and I’m calculating my millions,” she says. “I don’t know how to hit a golf ball anymore.” “I know,” she says. “And this doesn’t concern you?” “Do you want the truth?” “Today Gavin told me he was taking a new job,” Kip says.

  “That’s good then, right? You can stop worrying about him taking your job.”

  “He said I was the King of Thousand Palms,” he says. “Can you believe that?”

  “Look around,” Joanne says, “do you see anyone else here?”

  It was true, of course. He’d settled into a life of passivity and somehow along the way that had defined him. The King of Nowhere. He hadn’t lucked into that. He hadn’t even tried. Now here he was, sitting across from a beautiful woman, looking out onto the abundant landscape of the golf course at Terra De La Paz, the long shadows of dusk hiding the poor job the gardeners had done over the duration of the last decade, and the jagged lines of the San Jacinto Mountains.

  As a kid in the Boy Scouts, he’d been taught that straight lines were unnatural, that if he was ever lost in the woods or the mountains he should look for straight lines as that meant something had been made by man and that meant civilization, or at least rudimentary shelter, was nearby. That was a good piece of advice, a piece of advice he’s forgotten for so long that when he finally recalls it now, it fills him with a sense of longing so acute that he feels both sick and giddy at once.

  A distinct advantage of being the golf pro at Terra De La Paz was that whenever he wanted to, Kip Lewin could turn on the tournament lights at the course and play a round in the middle of the night. And sure, maybe a few of his neighbors might complain the next day about it being lit up like Dodger Stadium all night long — which is why he didn’t extend the courtesy to the gardeners on a daily basis — but so what? It was silly that Terra De La Paz even had tournament lights as it was an extravagance not even real courses like Pebble Beach or Augusta had. Real golf courses and real tournaments simply stopped play when the sun went down. And it was not as if Terra De La Paz even stayed open for night golf since most people were afraid to venture into Thousand Palms after dark except to go to the In-N- Out Burger off I-10, since even gangsters, crooks and tweakers respected the sanctity of In-N-Out Burger.

  This morning, however, none of those things are pinging around Kip’s head as he makes his way across the faux Scottish bridge to the eighteenth hole. It’s just after 3:00 a.m. and though it’s taken Kip almost seven hours to get to this place on the course — or, roughly, about five hours longer than it should have taken — he feels surprisingly alert. He’s spent the night and early morning spraying balls all over the fairway and then putting somewhere between six and twelve times around each hole, moving inch to inch until finally the ball finds the cup. The only audience he’s had to this display of utter imperfection are the tiny nocturnal kit foxes that live in the dense underbrush surrounding the course and, briefly, Joanne, who stood silently on the lawn as he shanked his way down the seventh fairway. Kip isn’t entirely sure what either the foxes or Joanne made of the display, though both looked slightly frightened initially and then merely curious and now have left him alone.

  The eighteenth hole at Terra De La Paz sits on a postage stamp in the middle of a water hazard. It was designed to test the mettle of the best golfers in the

  world and even in his prime — or what amounted to his prime — Kip was constantly undone by the hole, splashing his approach shots into the water time and time again. It wasn’t even ego that forced him into this exercise; it was just easier to take the penalty than to actually make it onto the green with a spectacular shot. In his new condition, however, where the tiny twitching muscles in his hand don’t allow even an increment of control, he’s managed to drop his ball directly onto the putting green without issue, just feet from the pin.

  A lucky shot, Kip thinks. A perfect, lucky shot.

  He pulls his putter from his bag and stands over the ball. Two feet with a break left to right. A shot he’s made a thousand times. Maybe a million. Arnold Palmer could make this shot after being embalmed. It’s that most unusual shot that requires not merely a straight shot but also the ability to make a straight shot turn at the end, the kind of shot that people watching golf on their high-definition televisions imagine only professionals know how to make. A water cooler shot.

  Kip takes a practice cut and then another, and another, and then closes his eyes, levels his putter and hits the ball.

   

• MONICA CARTER
  The Retirement Plan

• DAVID L. ULIN
  Member of the Tribe

• RICHARD PEABODY
  Shirts and Skinjobs

• PAUL CULLUM
  Why I Hate Sports

• KATHERINE DUNN
  Listening

• MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
  Poem for Jim Zorn