The Caretaker

A metallic ping sliced through the prevailing sound of the pacific surf upon the jagged California cliffside. The sound caught my ear, and a wave of emotions came with it. Surprise, fear, excitement, nostalgia. It had been seven years since I’d seen another person. Seven whole years thinking I might be the last man on Earth. I looked out the window of the lodge to see two golfers perched atop the sixth tee. Who were these people? From my vantage, I could only make out two dark silhouettes contrasting against the golden morning sun reflecting from the sea. The second golfer approached his ball as I watched from afar. Followed by a move of gracious tempo and supple body movement, another metallic ping interrupted the crash of the waves. The two men dropped their clubs before embracing each other and clasping hands.

I felt like I knew exactly how they felt. It had probably been seven years since either of these men had teed off on a golf course. They had probably been like I was before I adopted my new role as caretaker of these three magnificent holes. In the years after everyone I knew succumbing to the great flu, survival was not too difficult. The remains of civilization held enough bounty to last the very few survivors for decades. Endless pantries full of canned food, freshwater reservoirs untapped for months, and plenty of gasoline left in the wasteland lots of parked cars. The real enemy in those years after the great flu was boredom. The only other survivor in my hometown fell victim to boredom just one year after everyone else had passed away. He lived on the other side of the town and largely kept to himself. It was just him and his old dog, both sleeping the days away doing the minimum effort required for survival. One gray February morning, I was on his side of town searching a new stretch of houses that were still untouched when I saw him for the last time.

He had hanged himself from a tree in his back yard. There, his stiff corpse swung in the wind above the shallow grave where he had buried his beloved dog. I thought about cutting him down and maybe laying him to rest with his best friend, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. That day, I vowed to never return to that side of town again and to kill that insipid nemesis of boredom by returning to the great game of golf.

For the first year, I played golf wherever I could think of. The courses were all overgrown, but it was easy to break into a driving range and leave with enough balls to last for weeks and to lose in any interesting way I could think of. I hit golf balls off the wings of jetliners onto the runway at the airport. I practiced stingers into the lot of the Mercedes dealership, causing thousands of dollars in damage if there had been anyone else to care. Anywhere I could lay down a piece of turf and find a target, preferably made of glass, I hit golf balls with an addictive level of obsession. The morbid silence of my hometown was pierced every day by the swift strikes of my steel blades against hard rubber and the occasional satisfying smash of a pane of glass being shattered.

Now, here they were, the first people I’d seen in seven years, playing on the most breathtaking venue in golf thanks to me. They were probably clueless as to how it was still in playable condition, but clearly satisfied and relieved that their game was still up to par, and they could enjoy the fruits of their good play without the frustrations of a too-rusty swing. I continued to watch silently as the pair walked onto the fairway with their clubs strapped across their backs. One of the men stretched his arms out wide, palms up, and went into a lazy ballerina-like spin with his face turned upwards toward the sun. His partner laughed and shook his head as his friend continued this way, soaking up the verdant splendor of this stretch of manicured California coastline. The pair were only a couple hundred yards from the lodge now, and I began to make out the broad gestures of their appearance. The laughing man had a shock of blonde hair that rippled in the wind as it blew, and the dancing golfer was a black gentleman with thick glasses and a broad, contagious smile. I wanted to get closer to maybe hear what these two good friends were saying to each other. It would be so good to hear another voice. I stopped myself, though. These were the first people to other than me to play Pebble Beach since the great flu, and I would let them enjoy it in peace.

The pair ascended as wayfarers up the sweeping grassy clifftop fairway that rose like a gigantic ancient set of stairs to the elevated sixth green. There they stood like monuments against the morning sky as they watched each other putt with the patience of two men with all the time in the world.

Next, they would play the hole that probably called them from wherever the once called home to make the pilgrimage to this place. Perhaps the most famous hole in all the game of golf, the seventh hole at Pebble Beach is a tiny downhill par three with just over a hundred yards from the tee to the pin. A golfer can require anything from a lob wedge to a five iron on their first shot, depending on the prevailing wind on that day. Deep bunkers and thick rough defend the green stoutly from the front, and a shot over the other three flanks will find itself dead in jagged rocks washed in whitewater ocean waves. These natural hazards, along with winds that can challenge any golfer, make this the most interesting shot on the course.

This unique combination of breathtaking, iconic scenery and the skill required for a good first shot is what drove me to travel to this place and become its caretaker. I was bored of hitting golf balls and slowly destroying every piece of glass in my hometown. I needed a greater calling. I thought long about maybe restoring one of my local country clubs, but I didn’t know the first thing about green keeping or agronomy. I broke into the nearest library and started my research. The craft had as much depth of knowledge as the game itself it seemed, and I went in headfirst. The most important thing, I learned, was that to maintain a golf course without the pleasures of pre-flu infrastructure I would have to find a location where the natural terrain was not to far from a golf course. The first courses in golf were found in Scotland and Ireland, not made. God was the sole architect of these earliest places where game was played. Hole seven at Pebble Beach came to my mind as a viable option to be my first hole to restore. At just over a hundred yards, the hole required a minimal about of turf to be manicured, and the drop in elevation meant that irrigation would be easy to install. I could start with the seventh hole and learn my craft until I was ready to tackle the par four that follows it.

When the pair of unnamed golfers disappeared behind the elevated sixth green, the loneliness I had felt for the last seven years suddenly returned over me. I couldn’t restrain myself from following them to the next tee. I had to hear their voices. I had to see their smiles up close. I had to play golf with another person finally after all these long years of isolation and hard work. I grabbed my bag which held my favorite clubs I had painstakingly chosen from the many sets left abandoned by pre-flu golfers. The clubs were top of the line, and their hauler was still the same old leather bag I had used since my twenties. Its grain was stained from where my dirt-specked hands had touched it thousands of times, and the side was worn from riding on my hip for so many miles of walking with it. I was proud of my equipment, but I looked into the mirror and saw a man who looked unlike any gentleman golfer. My beard and my hair were wild and unkempt, bleached and fried from the many hours of working along the salty coastline in the California sun. I put on my favorite Titleist hat and pushed my hair behind my ears. I looked like a homeless man who’d snuck in between tee times as I made my way towards the seventh tee to try to catch up to the dancing golfer and his laughing friend.

I was making the bend around the grassy hillside to see the pair attempting to judge the wind, when the black golfer spotted me first.

“Hey, Ty! There’s another dude walking up!” He called to his friend across the squared-off tee box.

“What?” His friend asked as he turned around.

“Another dude! He’s got clubs on his back!”

“Holy shit!” Ty yelled as he saw me. “Is this your place?”

I shrugged as a walked closer to them, “I just take care of it, you guys can keep on playing! Please!” The words felt funny as they came out of my mouth. I hadn’t spoken to anyone else in so long I was surprised I could still string together a sentence.

“Well, I’m Ty.” He smiled as he shook my hand.

“And I’m Ritchie.” He took off his hat to reveal a bald black dome that reflected the morning sun before shaking my hand as well. “You brought the course back all by yourself?”

“Well, not the whole course. Just six, seven, and eight for right now is all the work I can manage and still have time to scavenge out a living here. My name is Al, by the way.”

“Still Al, that’s pretty damn impressive!”

“Believe it or not, me and Ritchie came out here with same idea! We used to work together at Dodger stadium before the flu. We both always wanted to play golf here, and we wanted to make it our project to restore this place to its former glory to make it possible. It seems like you’ve gotten it looking just as good as I remember seeing it on TV.”

“It’s not quite in the shape it was when the pros used to play, but I’ve done my best.”

Ritchie said, “We sure as hell both appreciate it, man. Now, Ty! It’s your turn to hit!”

“Alright! Al, you got a distance for me?”

I pulled a tuft of short grass from the tee box and closely examined how it reacted to the wind as it dropped from the tips of my fingers. “Try to hit it eighty-five yards. Middle of the green.”

“My lob wedge is my ninety club. I’m just gonna slap one right at the flagstick.” Ty declared with confidence from behind his ball as he stared towards the rocky sea foamed coast that threatened to devour a missed shot.

“Go for it.”

Ty addressed his ball with a swagger and waggled his lob wedge before taking a final look towards his target and then bringing his eyes back to the ground with cool determination. His body stood at complete rest for a split moment before triggering into a supple and timeless swing that brought his club parallel to the horizon and then back to the earth in an effortless and swift motion. The thwack of the club against the ball shattered the silence of the moment and his body was frozen in the pose of his follow through as his ball soared high across the hundred yards of turf that separated us from the small green. The sound of the ball impacting the firm turf was carried by the ocean breeze. His shot landed six feet past the flag and after one bounce, retreated towards the hole with the backspin it had been imbued with by the grooves of Ty’s lob wedge. The tiny white ball disappeared into the cup just as Ty was about to command it.

“Go in . . . Yes! Oh my god! Yes!!!” He dropped to both knees and dropped his club as he buried his face in his hands. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it! My first hole in one ever! After seven years of not playing! I can’t believe it!”

Ritchie and I helped Ty up before all three of us hugged each other on that sacred piece of California coastline. We considered going back to the lodge and drinking a bottle of champagne right away, but the day was early and there was golf to be played. I don’t remember anything else about our scores that day besides Ty’s hole in one, but what I do remember is how quickly I came to consider Ritchie and Ty my friends. We all loved the game of golf, the kinds of people who came together to play it, and the hard work required to keep a place as unique as Pebble Beach in good playing condition.

That night, over many celebratory drinks and toasts to each other, we made plans on how to restore more of the holes of the course. We figured that with three greenskeepers, with enough hard work we would be able to restore the entire front nine of Pebble Beach over the next few years. The primary concern was not using to much of our precious gasoline to maintain the shortgrass fairways, but Ritchie had a brilliant solution. On the way to Pebble Beach, they had spotted a large herd of sheep grazing in field not too many miles away. We could maintain the fairways like the Scots used to so mane years ago in the early days of the game. The sheep would graze the fairways and keep the grass short for us, their droppings would act as a great fertilizer, and they could do this work for us all while serving as a sustainable food source.

It took five days and nights for Ritchie and Ty to make the journey to the sheep and herd them all the way back to Pebble Beach. When they returned, work started immediately to start setting up new irrigation for the rest of the course. The pre-flu water system was too reliant on electricity and required too much maintenance for the three of us. We adopted a more ancient system, diverting water through shallow canals and underground aqueducts that could keep the grass healthy without the use of gasoline powered pumps or electric timers. Once this was complete, much of the work was spent using the pre-flu machinery to trim the greens to their original shape and spreading sand to encourage healthy grass growth.

This process altogether took three years to complete. It was hard labor, with our clothes sweated through by the end of nearly every day, and every morning accompanied with bodies of sore muscles. We only kept score once a week when we played golf, and we used this match to determine who would do the worst of the hard work, like raking the huge white sand bunkers which could be done by hand and always resulted in feeling like a sugar cookie by the end with sand stuck on every inch of your sweaty skin. The winner usually chose to spend that week in the silent and peaceful company tending to our sheep herd. We were like Eastern monks reviving some ancient temple. Every square foot of the holes we restored was poured over with love and meticulous attention to detail. By the end of the three years of hard work, we had finally restored our personal golf Mecca. We fed the grass with water, the grass fed the sheep with sustenance, and the sheep fed our bodies with their milk and their flesh. It was a perfect closed ecosystem and we found ourselves living in a Californian utopia there on the scenic coastline of Pebble Beach. All was good for a while.

Months passed without incident after our restoration of the first nine holes was complete. During that time, the three of us had our quarrels about the way the work around the course should be done. Ty always wanted to do things the easy way; shrinking the fairways to make them easier to cut, using chemicals instead of pulling weeds by hand, and skipping maintenance on our priceless mowers. It came to a head one day when Ty forgot to check the hydraulics on one of the gigantic Japanese mowers before he brought it to the sixth hole. The moment he dropped the blade, a hydraulic line split and left a foot-wide snail trail of boiling hot hydraulic fluid down the center of the fairway, scorching it instantly. He didn’t notice until Ritchie started screaming at him from the green where he was spreading sand. A screaming match ensued in the middle of a greenside bunker, and I think Ritche was about to take a rake to Ty’s head before I stepped in. Ritchie took more pride in the course than either of us, and that bleached scar that ran down the center of the fairway was a personal affront to all the hard work he put in every day. I helped Ty replace the destroyed strip of grass the next day, and before we were halfway done, Ritchie stepped in to help as well.

“I can’t leave this line here for you motherfuckers to aim at.” He said as he cut out a rectangle of dead turf with a knife.

“I’m really sorry, Ritchie. You know how quick stuff like that can happen.” Ty looked scared that he might encourage another outburst from his friend.

“Well, at least it’s not a problem for you. That slap hook you hit off the tee never finds the middle of this fairway anyway.”

“Ya, well fuck you, you bald black piece of coal.”

“Fuck you, pretty boy. I think I saw a surfboard in the lodge if you wanna go tangle with the rocks on the seventh hole after you’re done raking the bunkers.”

They both laughed, and by the next day the fairway of the sixth hole looked better than ever. By the next time we played a round together, we were back to being the same old friends. Things were good for a while again.

Then, the survivors from the East arrived. Their leader was a man called Shane. He had a brutal face and slicked back black hair. He wore cowboy boots and walked with a confident swagger like he thought he was John Wayne. He always had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth that he held in place with a smile of golden teeth. He brought fifty survivors with him from Texas. He claimed that their group had been twice as large until a group of bandits forced them to flee from their old farmstead. They had lost even more people on the long trek through the desert to reach California from heatstroke, famine, and lack of water. In their group of fifty, only one woman had survived the pillage of their old home and the death march across the Mojave.

Her name was Rosetta, but everyone called her “Mom.” It was a sort of sick joke that, even though she wasn’t pregnant, she would inevitably be the next Eve of humanity. It may have been because she was the first female I’d seen in almost ten years, but Jesus, she was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen. She had black, raven hair and striking green eyes that sat above a pair of strong cheekbones clad in pale. If it wasn’t for the wide curves of her strong body, I would’ve guessed she could have been a super model before the flu or the trophy wide of some millionaire. Her beauty made it hard to tell exactly how old she was. Her face was absent of wrinkles, but the way she carried herself made it seem like she could have been anywhere from her mid-twenties to almost forty. Her most prevalent feature of all were her wide hips which served as a commanding reminder that she was the only person in the world we knew who could bear children.

Shane protected Mom like a prized piece of livestock, making sure she didn’t get too close to other men. She never showed any affection towards him as far as I saw. It was like she had cast an ancient fertility spell over her war chief, and he was protecting her just for the sliver of a chance that he might have the opportunity to lay with her.

Soon, the survivors began to take their toll on the lodge and the golf course. First it began with the hunting of the herds of deer that lived on the overgrown holes of the back nine, then it was the diverting of our aqueducts to feed larger and larger gardens and plots of crops. One drunken night, a group of survivors raided the wine cellar under the lodge and drank a priceless bottle of wine that Ritchie had been saving for his fiftieth birthday next year. It wasn’t long before the presence of strangers started to have its effect on our weekly game, too. Classless fools started heckling our golf shots, saying “nice one!” if a ball was swallowed by the ocean and hooting and hollering from behind trees when one of us was trying to focus on making a long putt. They were just juvenile games to these strangers, but to us it was an affront to our sacred game which we had spent so much work trying to play in peace.

Then, I was a woken in the middle of the night by Ritchie and Ty. The blue light of the full moon reflected on their grave faces in vertical lines from between the curtains of my lodge window. I rubbed my tired eyes, and I could make out Mom cloaked in the shadows sitting silently in the corner of the room. She looked scared and was staring at the pointed toes of her black leather boots as she twisted them in little semicircles against the carpet.

“Al, wake up.” Ritche whispered.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“We’re getting rid of Shane and all the rest of them.” Ty said in a low voice.

“What? What does he mean Ritchie?”

He raised a large red diesel can. “We’re burning down the lodge along with all these mother fuckers inside.”

“No, Ritchie, Ty. Please! They don’t deserve to be murdered.”

“Tell him what you told us, Rosetta.” Ty put his hand on her back and helped her over towards where I was laying on my bed.

As she began to speak, I could tell by her wavering voice that she was on the edge of crying. “There were never any bandits in Texas, Al. Shane isn’t even from Texas. He started banding together his men in Tennessee and raided across the plains of America sacking homesteads and searching for a woman. Something about the flu made it so no women, almost no women, were immune to its effects. I was the only living female they ever found in their years of banditry and pillaging.”

“Dear god.” I was shocked. What had this woman been through?

“They killed my father and my neighbor. We were doing the best we could to keep our old farm running in Kansas before they found us. Shane kidnapped me as his trophy bride and promised he would make me a into a mother once we found somewhere to call home. Your golf course was the first place we’ve been where there was any sense of peace. Last night, he tried to lay with me, and I bit his cheek and ran out on him before he could beat me, or worse. I can still feel that chunk of his beard stuck between my teeth.” She was far from crying now, and her voice sounded distant.

“So, you’re going to kill all of them?” I asked.

“It’s the only clean way to end this.” Richie uttered with grim finality.

“You know he’s right, Al.” Ty agreed.

“Jesus Christ have mercy on our souls.” I prayed.

“Sure. And let all those fucking pigs burn in hell with Shane.” Rosetta’s green eyes shone with lust for revenge in the cold light of the midnight moon.

“Grab anything you want to save, Al. We already moved as much food and supplies as we could out of the lodge without waking anyone up. Anything else you want to keep is up to you. When you walk out the front door, we’ll board it up behind you and torch this place for good. Try to act fast and be a quiet as possible. We’re starting now.” Ritchie handed diesel cans to both Rosetta and Ty and they walked out of the room with cool murderous confidence into the hallway.

The quiet sound of the diesel spilling onto carpet echoed as I grabbed my favorite set of clubs and my old leather golf bag. There wasn’t much else I wanted to keep. Material goods were plentiful in the world that was left behind for us, and most things could be easily replaced. I kneeled at the corner of my bed and prayed for the souls of everyone in the lodge before making my way out the front door.

There the three conspirators stood waiting for me. Ty held a plank against the front door as Ritche hammered it in with a handful of long nails. When they stepped away, Rosetta threw a whole pack of matches emblazoned with the Pebble Beach logo into a pool of diesel that trailed out of the lodge. Black smoke rose in billowing clouds as the pool came alight. The flames spread into the lodge and within a minute the entire building was an inferno.

Screams of panic echoed from the windows and quickly turned into cries of anguish. I covered my ears to try to drown out the noises of the victims’ pain, and I turned to see Rosetta’s face alight in the yellow glow of the flames wearing a wide grin. She started to laugh wildly under the full moon, reveling in the sounds of the slow death of her captors.

“Finally, we can golf in peace again!” Ritchie’s smile was wider than ever, and he began to spin in circles and dance like the first day I’d met him.

His celebration was interrupted by a shattering of glass from the third story of the lodge. Shane came tumbling from his window, bootless and covered in flames. There was an audible snap of his fibula shattering as he crashed onto the well-manicured grass. His face was half charred blister as he rolled on the ground to extinguish himself. He screamed madly as his burnt hand raised a nickel-plated revolver.

A white flash and a crack of thunder came from the muzzle as he leveled it at Ty from there where he was laying. Again, a flash and a crack five more times, every shot leveled at Ty as he stood there in shock.

Ritche grabbed his friend and brought him to the ground as the volley of fire ceased. “Ty! No! You son of bitch! Don’t die on me!” He pleaded.

“Ritchie! Relax, man! He missed!”

“What?”

“Dumbass hick piece of shit missed every shot! Get off me, man.”

Ritchie helped his friend back to his feet and stood back as Ty grabbed the lob wedge from my golf bag. We watched silently as he walked towards Shane, twirling the shaft of the wedge in fingers before taking the grip with both hands. He brought the club rearward into a full backswing before bringing it back down towards the scorched and screaming maw of Shane’s golden teeth, ceasing his mad howling.

Yellow and metallic fangs were sent flying into the glow of the burning lodge, reflecting like sparks in the night. Ty swung again, this time the wedge sticking into Shane’s skull like the side of a wet sand bunker. He left it there, halfway in the man’s brain, shaft bent.

We walked from the inferno towards the first tee and played nine holes in the earliest hours of the morning, our white balls kept visible in the night by the orange sky that emanated from the great burning of Shane and his company. Our herd of sheep grazed peacefully as we played through them in the fairway, their bleating interrupted by the occasional sound of a falling charred timber and the echoing thwack of our irons against our balls.