4:30 on a Monday morning and the bucket next to the tee box on the 14th hole was catching the attention of an array of insects flying in the mist.
Colby cast a confident glare down the fairway blocking all of the vomit emanating from his brother’s mouth.
“I’m just sayin’ dude, all the water that is used on this course could help a lot of people, and not only that, we would get so much tail… so much tail, chicks love that sensitive, Earth shit” Marley licked his lips holding a very used 3 wood over his head letting it bounce softly off his hair.
Colby wouldn’t give Marley the satisfaction of breaking his concentration, he was dialed in, watching mist rise off the short grass like it did in Scotland when the new world was new, and lack of water wasn’t an issue.
Marley pouted his fat face and scrunched his eyes strumming the 3 wood like a guitar, screaming “Smoke on the Water”. He sang it over and over and over until it became a mantra for Colby to ride on. Marley turned around humping his 3 wood in the direction of an invisible, adoring crowd.
Colby reached in his pocket and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves throwing the larger pair at Marley and snapping his in place, he did the same with paper masks. Marley stopped the humping and reluctantly grabbed the protection, clearly annoyed.
“What the fuck Colby….You always get so weird when we do this….What is the point of guerilla warfare when we look so ridiculous. We’re terrorists and we look like extras in a hospital drama”.
Colby didn’t care, he didn’t want rabies. The idea was to paint the landscape the color it should be, give it a once-over and call it even. The thought of how they looked when they did it wasn’t the point.
Without saying a word, Colby walked over to the 5-gallon bucket, swatted at the insect cloud, picked out a nice fat one and went back to the tee box. Colby said a prayer to the golf gods and lined up the head in the same direction of the mist. He took a heavy, deep breath and released it hard, blowing two identical streams of air likening a mythical creature.
Colby swung it like a hammer, he swung at his father and the shine on the buckle of his belt if he dropped ketchup on the carpet, eating a hot dog at the clubhouse…after Marley peed in the bunker cause he couldn’t’t hold it any longer…after they had found a deer carcass in the woods and took turns making maggot mashed potatoes in the internal organs with their father’s pitching wedge…after the two brothers considered using zip-ties to bind father’s hands, cutting off all circulation, stealing the family car, and discussing the tingling sounds of amputation as they coasted towards the border.
His father’s hands were the one thing that Colby studied when he was with his dad, the large knuckles that pounded a sledge all day and then came home to pound his family. Those same hands held a putter so delicately to finesse the little white ball…the same way he held his beer, but never his wife’s hand.
Colby looked at his own hands; this particular rodent had soft eyes. Colby wondered whether it had soft hands.
“Hey asshole…you gonna paint or what?…We don’t have all morning” Colby broke out of his trance to see the sun peeking out over the maple trees. Marley shouting with his hands up in the air. The bloated dead animal silently laughing over the thunder of the flies rolling around its head.
With a swoosh and a wet burp, the animal was split in two by Colby’s swing. A number of bile- tinted colors went sailing onto the grass in front of where he stood. Drops of liver and blood contrasted with the wise yellow of the sunrise. The head went about 25 yards.
“Well shit….I do believe that’s a new record.” Marley held no couth about himself. When father hit Marley, his hands bounced.
After an hour of splitting carcasses, the fairway turned the color of a diminished rainbow fanning out on the grass to reveal pieces of wet bone and organs that glistened in the light. For a second they were diamonds on a Pollack piece. For a minute they were mirrors on the Nile. For an hour they were Van Gogh cutting off his ear. Colby and Marley examined their artwork, the 11th in their collection, with pride and a sense of accomplishment. According to their shrink, painting was part of the path to healing.
Their first collaboration was aided by their mother and father…
Marley turned his back to the fairway and breathed deep the breath of a free man, biting his lip in the way a 6-year-old asks for more ice cream he said, “Do you ever think about him?” This was a first for Marley, it was a rule to never bring him into the therapy. He still bounced the golf club off his head, even with the mouse blood drying to the club face, speckling off flakes attaching to his sweaty, fat forehead. His expression never changed, but the bouncing got faster.
Colby felt the mist lift through his skin, holding him as his mother did before her brain died. Before his father drove his fist once more into her eye, breaking her nose, until her cheekbones were ash, those big fucking knuckles the disease that killed her. Colby spoke without looking up,
“Ya….I do…” He drew a coy smile, the acid reflux, dense-anvil, rage packing up under his chin pushing… constantly pushing.
“…member when we put Drano in his coffee?”
Marley drew a smile similar to his brothers. “That was one of the last times I saw mom smile.”
Colby threw his head up and to the right, “Ya, and the smile was natural, no drugs.”
The flakes of dried blood from the club head Marley was holding covered his forehead in small pock-like blisters giving him a sickly look that reminded Colby of their mother.
Both parents were gone within the same month with a hefty sum paid out to the brothers. Both parents had cancer….one knew, one didn’t.
Marley grabbed the last of the pile out of the bucket. A small brown mole caked with its own pancake batter blood as well as blood and bile filtered down from the 37 other animals in the container. He rolled the carcass between his thumb and forefinger. It was soft and moist, and if he closed his eyes tight enough, it was sweat and skin, it was long hair and undressing and anxiety from getting caught in the garage with Melanie Strepell, it was the first time he had a real orgasm and how he couldn’t control it and how it got all in Melanie’s hair and on the driver’s side door of the family car and how it sat there and dried and how they drove around with it on display for all the world to see for an entire week. Marley smiled.
Colby stood back and silently prayed as Marley took his swing…he could hear the golf carts whirring, the ranger coming to chase them off with a wave of his old, gnarly, arthritic hands. Colby had no worries; this painting was by far the best in their series. He quickly turned the bucket over, stood on top with shaky legs and snapped a picture of their masterpiece.
Their first painting required so much work, had to cut off heads and saw bodies into meatballs so they could fit on the tee. It was such a pain. Marley laughed through the entire process. Dr. Messier, still in his nighttime attire, fit comfortably in the corner forced to watch the brothers take his advice. He didn’t even say a word until he saw their parents, heads set apart from their bodies in the basement of his house, although he kept his cool…
“Gentlemen, this is not what I meant when I said you should take up painting”
Colby cut his father’s fingers off one by one, sucking the blood out of the stems as if they were oysters at an exclusive, 5-star restaurant.
“Doc is going to love this one” Colby turned the camera over in his hands. Marley was still standing in his backswing…motionless.
The whirr got louder and presented itself hovering above the tree line, the rush of air spreading the bone and bile all over Colby and Marley painting them the colors they loved. Small, black figures ran parallel along the woods, letters emblazoned on their shirts. The brothers both heard them all cock their guns at the same time.