@@CHAP@@ Prologue
It is neither virtue nor might that rules the world; it’s luck. Practice does not make perfect, and the stars are but flickering blowhards—they know nothing because they are, in fact, nothing but gargantuan globes of hot gas. If you look to the night skies or astrological charts to divine the promise of tomorrow, please take note: the stars are little more than hot air.
Also? The stars we see are likely dead. Long dead. We are viewing but their shimmering ghosts, light-years after they have imploded.
Now …
There are usually (but not always) 336 dimples on a golf ball, their presence giving the small sphere greater lift and allowing it to fly farther after impact. An engineer might compare them to an airplane’s wings. A golf ball usually weighs about 1.6 ounces. The cores vary, but the inside is likely to have some combination of rubber, plastic, titanium, tungsten, and chemical resins.
These are the sorts of recondite facts that matter.
Obviously, a golf ball is not a deadly weapon: it’s not a crossbow or dagger or assault rifle. Balls—all kinds of balls—rarely kill people. (Excluding, arguably, balls as testicles. History is awash in testicle-fueled carnage.) Only one baseball player has ever died from a baseball, and that was a ball thrown by a pitcher, not hit hard by a bat: what’s called these days the exit velocity, the baseball’s speed sometimes nearing 115 miles per hour. Spectators, of course, have been killed by foul balls, but even that is rare. (In 2024, Topps, the renowned baseball card company, issued 108 special cards in honor of Judy McLean, a Tigers fan who was hit just above the left eye by a foul ball traveling 108 miles per hour at a game in Detroit. The selfie she posted online of the mesmerizing goose egg on her forehead went viral.) And while football is a demonstrably violent sport, the football itself—which isn’t even a ball, technically—is responsible for literally zero deaths. Same with basketballs.
Now, marbles? Those are orbs, and they kill. Over the centuries, the number of children who’ve choked on them and died or had their insides dammed up by one they managed to swallow would likely fill a cruise ship.
So, it’s the small balls that kill. Not the big ones.
Which brings us to Kenneth Foster, called Kenny by his friends and family and even the people who barely knew him. Pretend there’s a drone—the sort that takes photos, not the kind that rains down hellfire on soldiers and civilians in war zones—hovering with vertiginous aplomb above a swank country club just fifteen miles north of New York City. Right now, it is recording the no-man’s-land near the club’s side entrance (not the front entrance with its wide white Doric columns reminiscent of a Southern plantation) and the first tee of the golf course. The club is at the edge of a particularly mannered suburb. The year is 1978: decades before there actually might have been a drone wafting over this small world.
Still …
Nearby is an expansive green where members can roll a few putts before teeing off, a petite practice net in lieu of a driving range where members can work on their swing, and a pergola where the caddies wait to be called by the caddy master for what they refer to as a loop: the chance to carry bags or putters for members playing a round. The other caddies intimidated Kenny, but they didn’t mean to: this was not torment by intent or harassment by design. They certainly didn’t bully him; in truth, they hardly thought about him. But Kenny was seventeen, too young to understand that the other caddies were largely oblivious to him. That most people are largely oblivious to most other people around them.
And, of course, he was embarrassed when he caddied, as sometimes he did, for the fathers—and sometimes the mothers—of kids in his school. Parents of classmates. He’d been in that school only a year, arriving there the previous August from South Florida. But the caddy master knew the golfers and sometimes thought he was doing everyone a favor by having Kenny carry the bags belonging to (for instance) Carolyn Eastburn’s dad.