Bump and Run
JOE BOHLINGER
We communicate in golf swings. A year’s worth of videos sent back and forth. If there’s text, it’s about the swing: See how my elbow is staying straight? Are my hips holding back through contact? Keep your head down.
I wake up one Saturday to a video that’s still processing. When it downloads, it’s four hours long. He’s paid a caddy to film his whole round. The caddy, unseen, offers advice—hand placement, elbow angle, grip. By the sixth, there are no tips left, and the two start talking about the caddy’s life—how he learned, who he learned from, max drive, longest putt. Dad laughs. Dad asks. Dad talks.
At the seventh, Pops is in the rough. The caddy pans from Dad’s practice swings, describing the dogleg. When my dad stripes it, the ball boomerangs perfect around the bend, the caddy whoops, the camera blurs—they’re hugging, I think—then two beers pop in frame as they walk to the green.
The kid’s name, I learn on eight, is Grant.
Dad: “What do you see, Grant?”
“Two-sixty, uphill. I’d lay-up with the seven.”
“I’m in the fairway. Could hit wood?”
“You can carry it that far?”
I don’t think he remembers the camera. He looks right into it. “Watch.”
By ten, they’re drunk. Grant: “Don’t tell my boss.”
Dad: “Or my wife.”
At twelve, they’re backed up. Dad complains about the old ladies in the group ahead while Grant sets the phone on the cart’s dash so I can see them both. Grant looks a lot like I used to.
A notification dings and the video pauses. Mom. Have you spoken to your father today?
How do I answer? Is this, the video, speech?
I haven’t heard from him since last night.
I tap back to the video. “My dad,” Grant says. “Eighteen twice a weekend. Range every day after school.”
Pops mentions something about his own father.
“Do your kids play?”
Dad shakes his head. Beer dribbles down his chin while he describes art class, guitar lessons, debate tournaments.
I watch thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Dad’s having the round of his life. “I don’t want to jinx it, but I think—”
“You can break eighty.”
Dad offers gloved knuckles. Grant’s hand slithers into frame, makes contact.
Another text from Mom comes in while they walk the fairway at sixteen. The speakers muffle sound, and Grant steps toward Dad, bent over his shot. I watch the kid’s arm stretch out to mark the putt path for Pops. Then Grant disappears, the camera lifts, and Dad sinks the twenty-footer and fist pumps at my face.
The video pauses when they’re crossing a bridge that leads to the seventeenth tee. A call. “Mom?”
“He’s never done this. Not once, in thirty years.”
“And he hasn’t texted?”
“Nothing.”
I tell her I’ll get ahold of him. He’ll answer me. I hang up and hover over his name—but I tap back to the video instead.
Rain drips from the screen. Dad passes a joint across the cart’s seats.
“Thanks,” Grant says—taking a pull.
“You know,” my dad says. “There’s supposed to be a course, about two hours up the 5, a little hidden gem.”
“I know it.” Grant explains that he gained entry to the club that owns the secret course after a recent tournament win. He’s a lifetime member. “You want to play it?”
Dad says that he’d hardly be able to play it. “Survive it, maybe.”
“You could handle it.”
“You think it’s raining up there? That far north?”
Grant slips his phone from his pocket. “Looks like clear skies.”
The camera shakes, the screen goes black, I hear the golf cart putter and the tires blast over wet grass. No images accompany the new sounds—spikes on asphalt, rattling clubs dropped into a trunk, a real car starting. Music on the radio. Dad’s.
I leave the video running—Pops singing, Grant joining in—and bring up Reddit on my laptop. It takes a while, but I think I uncover the mysterious course, the town where it’s located. I text Mom: I think he’s here. When she doesn’t respond, I call. Voicemail.
The video on my phone is still going. I realize I’ve been searching for an hour when the camera cuts from black, reveals Pops walking with his bag to the first tee. Behind him, a fairway glistens in a wide sun, towering pine trees line the fringe, and no other golfers clog up the course. When he stripes a drive that Grant loses in the camera’s eye—ball sent further than any human could launch it—Pops takes off running after the shot. You can hear Grant scramble for Dad’s bag, the camera catches Grant’s shoes, the grass flattening beneath his spikes, and then you can hear him, narrating between heaved breaths.
“Wait!” he yells. “Don’t!”
The last image: Dad disappearing around a dogleg, dropping his driver, shedding clothes—hat slapped off, shirt lifted, belt unlooped.
Some years later, I’m on my own eighteenth hole. I need a bird for seventy-nine. A bump and run up the hill. It’s almost dark, and there are no groups left behind me. The course marshal watches from the cart path. I ask if he’ll film.
When I send the video to his phone number, I get no indication that it’s been delivered. It’s trapped in perpetual transit. I watch it back sometimes.
I chunk the chip, turf flies into frame. You can hear me curse as the marshal moves the camera to track the scuff—the ball soars over the flag, past the green. The marshal has a good eye. He tracks it through the night, into the sky. It doesn’t come down.
JOE BOHLINGER is a Los Angeles–born writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has appeared in Hobart, Blood Pudding, Necessary Fiction, and Icarus Magazine.
