The Range

Our backs were hot from the heat of the sun, our clothes sticking annoyingly to our slimy skin. We walked in a horizontal three feet apart; five of us holding screwdrivers and shovels and tramping through the hot, stinking mud. It was the Fourth of July, and we could hear the carnival music from next door. We could smell the funnel cakes and the hot dogs and could see the lights on the top of the Ferris wheel glinting in the sun.

“Why the hell do we keep putting up with this shit every year?” Ralph muttered over his full lip. He spat a black stream of tobacco juice onto the ground and shuffled in his pocket for his tin. “We don’t get paid shit, no benefits, no overtime, nothing.”

“We’re sixteen, what do you expect?” Henry asked. His skin had turned to caramel brown in the sun.

“Maybe a little respect,” Ralph replied, spitting again onto the hot ground.

The golf range surrounded us on all sides, a huge expanse of green grass and cratered earth. Every holiday it was the employees’ job to go out on the range after closing time and pick up all the balls that the tractor hadn’t gotten. We’d go out with screwdrivers and shovels, digging up the earth to try to find the hundreds of golf balls leftover. If it was a rainy year, things were even worse. The range turned into a muddy mosh pit heated by the sun, generating an odor almost indistinguishable from shit. The balls would be buried into those depths. Most years, we’d be out until the moon came out, still tramping through the mud, buckets of golf balls swinging in our hands. Tom, our red-faced boss who owned the place, wouldn’t let us out until we got all of them.

This particular year had been a very wet season.

The earth seemed to sink into our sneakers with each step. There were various holes about the place that were worse than all the others, round little concaves into the earth full of orange clay.

“Timmy’s the youngest one here – not even twelve yet,” Henry said. “You don’t hear him complaining.”

“That’s gotta be some kind of age violation,” Craig said from the end of the line.

“He’s quiet because he’s scared shitless,” Ralph said. “He’s heard the story.”

           “Here we go,” Craig groaned. 

There were always stories like this, circulating around the range in various styles and formats. They always entertained me, and I was often the heart of the audience for Ralph. He’d been here the longest, even longer than Henry, so he’d heard some shit.

“Ten years ago, to this day,” Ralph said. “Kids just like us walking out here. It’d been the hardest rainfall in fifty years, and the place was a mess of muddy holes like this -” he spat viciously into one, twisted his jaw in disgust. “Except deeper. Well, one of the kids thought he saw something. A ball – a real old one – powder blue stripes, you know, one of the ancient ones that Tom would love. So, he crept in there.”

We all walked in pace, surveying the ground as he spoke, looking for balls. I peered over at Timmy and saw his eyes darting over to Ralph.

“And disappeared,” Ralph finished.

“For fuck’s sakes -” Craig cut in.

“He did,” Ralph answered defiantly. “It was a fucking sinkhole. He fell right in and disappeared. They looked in the hole and they couldn’t find him. The orange shit just sunk over the place where he’d been. Like it just went and swallowed him up.”

“Is that true?” Timmy’s voice squeaked.

Ralph looked over at him in frustration. “Of course it’s true, kid,” he said. “Why the fuck would I make something like that up.”

“Sounds fake,” Timmy said innocently.

We all knew it was the wrong thing to say. But he was only twelve, what did he know? It didn’t matter. If you said something that got on someone’s nerves, you were going to pay for it.

Ralph instantly dropped his bucket, the golf balls jumping and some of them spilling out onto the ground. He turned and walked his way down the line to Timmy, leaned down and spat down at his shoes. The whole line stopped, something almost sinful on the range.

“Listen, you little shit,” Ralph told the kid, “you’ve only been here a week. You don’t know the start of what’s fucking real and what’s fake, understand? So how about you keep your mouth shut and keep walking.” He went back to his spot. Timmy looked like he was about to cry.

A roar expectedly came up from the stalls at the front of the range.

“STOP MESSING AROUND!” Tom yelled. We could see his beating red face even from here. He was notorious for his ruthless chewing out sessions, especially among the new people. He wasted no hesitation in trying to end a kid’s career at the range. Even the veterans like Ralph and Henry weren’t guarded from an attack.

 We got back into our step, quiet for several minutes. None of us even glanced over at the carnival. It was enough to hear the laughter of other kids just on the other side of that big net. We didn’t need to turn our heads and see it. The night was wearing on and we weren’t even close to being done.

“It’s not fake,” Henry finally said. There was a different tone in his voice, something deeper. “The story, it’s true.”

We all looked at him quickly, trying to read him. His face was like a stone. He was always good at not letting anyone see how he really felt. Maybe it was a curse.

“How do you know?” Timmy asked. He too could feel the graveness in the air; his voice had fallen to a near inaudible whisper.

“The kid who fell in the hole,” Henry said. “It was my brother.”

We continued to step along with each other in unison. No one said anything. The carnival music leaked in; we could hear its wavering tune from beyond the net.

           “I didn’t even know you had a brother,” Craig murmured.

           “It happened before any of you guys got here,” Henry replied.

           “Henry,” Ralph started apologetically, “I had no idea - ”

           “It’s alright, Ralph, you didn’t know.”

           I vaguely wondered where Ralph had heard the story from. Henry was usually good at keeping what he wanted locked away. But something as deep as this couldn’t be buried.

           “My father worked here too,” Henry said.

           We all knew the story about his father. Chris Delong, the father of Henry Delong. He’d worked here his whole life; a seemingly staple part of the range. There were rumors that originally Chris was supposed to be partnered with Tom, but Tom held the reigns of the place and never let Chris up through the ranks. Chris stayed a laborer his whole life, doing the shit we did on a daily basis. Tom overworked him, and Chris’s back gave out. He was hospitalized, and within days he was dead. Some blamed the cigarettes, others blamed Tom. Henry rarely spoke on the subject, but when he did, he blamed the place itself. He seemed to view the range as a living, breathing organism, something that had taken his father, broken his back, and sucked the life out of him.

           It wasn’t until now that we realized Henry’s whole family had been taken from him, and it had all happened right here.

           “Do me a favor, Timmy,” Henry said. “Don’t do what I did. Don’t stay here because it’s what you know. Don’t stay here because you think you’re trapped. If you can, fly. Fly as far as you can.”

           He stopped walking. We stopped in pace with him, staring. Henry never stopped. He was the one that kept us afloat, the one that was the anchor of the entire range. Without him, I envisioned the entire place crumbling. The sky had started to turn, and the light was fading. A dusky purple glow seemed to envelop the whole place, and lights from the carnival became brighter, the sounds of people louder. The smell of popcorn floated towards us. From the front of the range came Tom’s voice again, reaching into the twilight.

           “MOVE YOUR ASSES!”

           We all turned back to our leader.

           “Henry,” Ralph said, and Henry seemed to snap out of some trance.

           “Boys,” he said, and placed his bucket of balls neatly on the ground. He looked each of us in the eye. “My time here is done.” And with that he walked away. We watched him duck under the net and then disappear into the ambiance of the carnival. Tom’s roars could only reach so far.

           “Badass,” Craig whispered. He picked up Henry’s bucket of balls, and we broke back into step.