The Golfers

            Tracey Mulcahy’s party celebrating her parents finally trusting her to stay the weekend by herself was great until the golfers came. Everyone knew about the attacks: six men in black ski masks, each carrying a driver or sand wedge, dressed in golf attire—pink or white polo shirts, awful plaid pants, white shoes that crunched on the concrete and asphalt—were appearing around town and bashing in the windows of houses where parties were being thrown. Tracey had kept hers hush-hush, invitation-only, and even then we took turns standing on her front porch in twos, one person looking down the street each way. We insisted that Tracey, as hostess, didn’t have to stand watch, but she insisted just as much that she did. Afterward, no one was surprised that it was Tracey who saw them, Tracey who screamed and threw open the door, Tracey who told us all to leave through the back, to scramble through yards to our own houses as quietly as twenty terrified teenagers could, Tracey who turned off the stereo and threw plastic cups in the garbage, Tracey who was the only one standing in her foyer when the first club pierced the dining room bay window, Tracey who sobbed and asked them why they were doing this, Tracey who ran up to the closest one, the tallest one, Tracey who was the first person the golfers put in the hospital from blows to her arms, her legs, her back.

            The cops finally started to believe us then, that perhaps we weren’t just a bunch of idiot kids trying to hide our indiscretions, trying to lie to our parents about the destruction our parties were causing with an implausible story. They still weren’t convinced that we might not have a hand in it, that a group of high school junior or senior boys weren’t just psychopaths whose destructive needs were escalating from vandalism to violence, but we took what we could get: at least the police were looking into it. But no one was happy that it took Tracey getting a broken femur and a herniated disc in her spine—not to mention the deep bruises and the concussion from falling and hitting her head on her front door—to make them look.

            We had already been looking. Jennifer Cooke, the smartest girl in school and also the most popular, star of the volleyball team and probable prom queen, started taking names down at parties after the first attack, keeping track of who was where and when in a small pink notebook she never let out of her sight (she even took it into the bathroom when she showered, she said; she couldn’t even trust that her younger brother—or one of her parents, for that matter—wasn’t involved), and by the day of Tracey’s party, she’d cleared every high school student in town.

            “Assuming,” she said as she slid the spreadsheet she’d printed out toward Will Chillicothe, the police chief, “you’re still convinced they’re high school students.”

            “There’s no college in town,” Chillicothe said, rubbing his chin and staring at her work. He was getting old, needed to be ousted in the next election, but the adults in town clung to tradition like gold.

            “There are college-aged students. And plenty of adults.”

            He shook his head, shoved Jennifer’s spreadsheet into a folder, and thanked her for her time.

            “What are you going to do about it?” Jennifer said, standing and crossing her arms.

            “We’re going to find them, sweetheart. I promise.”

            She scoffed, told him not to call her sweetheart, wished him luck in his upcoming reelection campaign, and left, slamming his office door so the blinds rocked and smacked against the glass.

            A handful of football players tried to trick the golfers. They announced a party at a guy’s house, an almost-farm with a few acres of trees and long grass on a road with no streetlamps. Everyone in school knew that it was a set-up. The football players laid in wait, armed with ropes and baseball bats and handcuffs one of them had snaked from his police officer dad’s uniform, ready to grab the golfers in the act. We all waited at our homes, in small clusters in our friends’ basements and bedrooms, hovering over our cell phones, waiting for word to spread about catching the golfers and finally unmasking them like the gang did on Scooby-Doo. But the golfers never showed, despite the loud music pumping from the empty house. One of the football players, the quarterback, even convinced his deadbeat older brother to buy some cheap liquor from the grocery store and leave it on the kitchen counter. A week later, the police tried something similar, but the golfers, again, knew to stay away. When the football players decided to sit around in the house where they’d tried to con the golfers and drink the booze—“Why let it go to waste?” one of the seniors said with a chuckle—they heard the windows throughout the house being shattered, and by the time they ran outside, the golfers had disappeared into the trees.

            The golfers busted out all of the windows at the vice principal’s house. Mrs. Ybarra, beloved, young, smart Mrs. Ybarra, who had managed to convince some of the worst truant teens in town to at least think about coming to class and was known to look the other way when certain kids snuck out to smoke so long as they snuck back in, was having a dinner party—a black dress and sport coats with ties affair, red wine and champagne, soft piano music playing in the background, a guest list short enough to warrant only her long, oak dining table for seating—and the golfers showed up right as she was portioning out dessert—strawberry shortcake and vanilla gelato she’d made from scratch—announcing their presence by smashing in the window above the kitchen sink. Two of the male guests ran outside with pokers from the fireplace and managed to bust one of the golfers in the knee, and they were fast enough to save Mrs. Ybarra’s living room windows, because once the one golfer went down, the others stopped and hoisted him away. The party-goers called the cops and tried to follow the golfers, but they snuck into a neighbor’s dark yard and vanished before three cop cars came roaring down the road, lights twinkling and drawing the attention of everyone in a three block radius.

            Not that anyone needed to go poking toward Mrs. Ybarra’s house to know what the commotion was. The golfers’ vandalism and assaults had effectively stopped all other crime worth mentioning. No robberies, no killings, not even any drunk driving arrests or shoplifting:. It was as if they’d cast a spell over the entire town, bewitching the criminally inclined into suppressing their vices and desire to do no good. It made some people wonder if what the golfers were doing didn’t make sense in a way. By drawing attention to themselves, the golfers had somehow made people forget to indulge in their own indiscretions. A store owner who had been robbed at gunpoint a few months before, the perpetrators never caught, told the newspaper he thought the drop in other crime more than made up for a few vandals.

            “If only,” some joked, “they would club whoever it is that sells pot to our kids.” This elicited nervous laughter sometimes, and weight shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot all of the time.

            For a while, parties stopped. No dinner get-togethers, not even eating out in large groups. Thanksgivings were small, or people went out of town to visit relatives whose homes were far away and often too tiny to support four or five more people at the table. When Christmas rolled around—Chillicothe was reelected, but it was the closest election in town history, the newspaper claimed—parties that families had thrown for years were cancelled after the high school teachers’ annual get-together after the last day of finals was marred by the secretary walking out to the parking lot and finding the windows of every faculty member’s car smashed in, shards swept across the seats and floor mats. It was the first time a public place had been attacked, and that same night the only three bars anyone patronized with any frequency, having Christmas-themed nights—peppermint schnapps shots and Christmas ales on special, discounts for those in tacky sweaters, “Deck the Halls” and “Jingle Bells” coursing through the sound systems—had their own front windows and the neon signs hung therein destroyed as well. Company Christmas parties suffered the same devastation. The newspaper declared that the golfers’ reign of terror was only growing, and would continue to grow, until they were caught. There were whispers that there were multiple gangs of golfers, copy-cats using the opportunity to vent their hatreds, angers, and frustrations. New Year’s Eve passed with hushed countdowns and couples clinking glasses of champagne alone in fear and quiet, hoping that such shows of celebration wouldn’t draw the golfers to their doors. They were a no-show, and midnight passed in somber darkness.

            Birthdays all but disappeared, especially when a young couple, relatively new to town, decided to have a party for their newly-four-years-old son, renting a bouncy castle, a magician, a cotton candy machine, hanging a piñata from the large oak tree in their back yard. While the father was meting out punch to the few families brave enough to bring their similarly aged children, he heard a crashing noise and caught the golfers in the act, glass flying everywhere, not just the house’s windows but his car’s and those of his guests all being smashed in. The closest golfer, seeing him, swung and hit him in the head, smashing his skull and killing him almost instantly. They tore down the castle, sending children crying and mothers and fathers running and screaming, gathering up their sons and daughters, dashing to their vans and sedans, ignoring the glass everywhere, barely taking time to brush it away from child seats. The golfers smashed open the piñata, candy still strewn about the yard when ambulances and police arrived. No one could describe the golfers any better than they had before, couldn’t confirm that there were, in fact, exactly six of them. They seemed everywhere, terrified witnesses said, an endless sea of them. The young widow sobbed in her living room, sitting on a dining room chair because her couch was covered in broken glass. It was the first time the golfers had appeared during the day.

            Now that they had killed someone, the feds came to town. Kids didn’t dare have sleepovers out of fear of the golfers. When a small cadre of parents decided to arm themselves and have a party to draw the golfers out so they could exact vigilante justice, there was no sign of them. It was as if the golfers had a sixth sense about such traps, as if they could read everyone’s minds. Everyone became paranoid, avoiding one another on the street, whispering their suspicions of who was a golfer and who wasn’t. Lists were made of those who had been victims of the golfers’ rage, attempts to exonerate some while at the same time creating a pool of suspects to interrogate. Everyone was questioned, taking their turns explaining their whereabouts during each and every party, every attack. We were called out of our classes in small groups to be interviewed in the principal’s office, Mrs. Ybarra hovering by the door. Fights broke out in the hallways when kids would accuse one another’s parents of being involved somehow. School was cancelled more than once because of the violence, and so many suspensions were doled out that the halls started to grow empty.

            People started having parties simply to make the golfers show up so they could clear their names, but the golfers stayed away from these, too. They knew. They knew: it sent chills down our spines.

            The night of high school graduation, we demanded that the annual lock-in happen, and armed men patrolled the building throughout the night. Jennifer Cooke stood in a corner and shook her head, complaining that the police—even the FBI—were idiots. The quarterback of the football team puffed out his chest and threatened that he would beat in the face of the first golfer he got his hands on. His teammates nodded and grunted in agreement, pounding their fists against their palms. Somehow the golfers managed to strike the school, busting out single windows and disappearing into the darkness. When the first pane shattered, the authorities descended on the scene, guns at the ready, but there was no one to be found, and then the sound of breaking glass rang out elsewhere along the building, but once again, all that was found was the jagged sprinkling of glass. It twinkled in the beams of the sweeping flashlights looking for signs of movement, a hundred mocking winks. But those lights found nothing. The golfers had disappeared again.

            People started talking about the golfers like they were a curse, super villains, ghosts. Other-worldly. Everyone wondered if it was safe to swim in their backyard pools with the neighbors: would the golfers come and attack them, too? The park was empty all summer, parents worried that if two of their kids were seen swinging together, a playdate might incur the golfers’ wrath. We wondered if we could walk to and from the Dairy Queen in groups. Fear became abject terror, a cold blanket that chilled the humid days. People stayed indoors; little league baseball games were sparsely attended, and the bowling alley, usually such a popular hang-out for us during the warm months, was all but abandoned.

            With the town shut down and families sequestered, the golfers seemed to disappear. The feds left, sliding their business cards to Will Chillicothe and telling him to call if they got any leads, which never came up. Every few months, though, after weeks of nothing, someone would dare to invite people over, a small thing, whispered and hushed like Tracey Mulcahy’s party or Mrs. Ybarra’s dinner, and the golfers would appear again, and it would start all over. The police would arrive, the chief calling up whichever agent’s card he could find first amidst the mess of his desk, and men and women in sharp suits and dark sunglasses would show up once again. And again the golfers would fade away like morning mist.

            The story of the golfers had spread and kept spreading, online, in magazines like Time and Newsweek and People. An FBI profiler went on 60 Minutes and said it was one of the most bizarre cases he’d ever seen. When asked why, he said that all the evidence, all of the crimes the golfers were committing, indicated an increase in sophistication, organization, and unity, unusual in a group dynamic, particularly this large.

            “Normally,” he said, “one would expect them to get messier, their need to create havoc and fear getting stronger and more difficult to satisfy. They’d get wilder and more disorganized for the sake of their gratification. There would be infighting. They would fall apart, eventually.”

            But they didn’t fall apart. They were smart and got smarter, were willing to vanish until the time was right to attack again.

            Before the golfers, such a story—coverage of anything in our tiny town making national news—would have meant people gathering in large groups to watch at the home of whoever owned the biggest TV, would be on everyone’s lips at their lockers and in their classrooms. But the golfers’ spell had long settled over us like a heavy, toxic dust, a smear of asbestos, a hungry bear we were convinced that, if it couldn’t see us or we didn’t upset it, would leave us alone. So we didn’t gather. Many didn’t even watch the news stories, shaking heads, clenching fists in anger, spitting onto sidewalks in effigy of the mysterious golfers. Those who did catch the story had their televisions’ volumes set down low, the story on in the background while they ate quiet dinners, forks tinkling against their plates.

            People finally started moving away when someone decided the golfers would always be there waiting, and after that first family hauled their belongings into a moving truck, it was as if something clicked in everyone’s brains and house after house was emptied of possessions, the lights turned off. Families sacrificed their savings, their happiness, their new cars, traded in their monthly clothes shopping at the mall for parsing the racks at Salvation Army or Goodwill all so they could cover the mortgages on their abandoned homes along with the monthly rents on tiny apartments in new cities. Grass grew long and tangled and sallow in the dry heat. Bitter kids would throw rocks through abandoned windows, flipping houses the middle finger as though the departed owners were just as responsible as the golfers for the bilious haze the town fell under. Businesses downtown started closing, one after another, windows gathering dust and the dark haze of empty storefronts echoing across the street. It started with local shops, the hardware store, the diner, a used bookstore. The movie theater shut down, the plastic letters on the marquee slowly falling off one at a time in a reverse game of hangman until no one could remember what had been playing when the doors were locked for the last time. The Walmart on the edge of town stuck around because it could afford to, despite the fact that there was hardly anyone left shopping there.

            We knew the end of the town was approaching when the last of us kids had to be shipped an hour south every day for school because there weren’t enough teachers left to keep the high school or the elementary school open. They’d all managed to find other jobs, or, in the case of at least one art teacher and one English teacher, new professions. Word was that Mr. Blythedale, who taught world literature for college credit to the small cadre of college-bound kids (Jennifer Cooke was his best student), had accepted a job at a car dealership in a city hours away because he thought it was a better alternative than staying in a doomed town.

            Someone decided to throw a keg party in a field just outside of town. It was late October, and everyone was wearing knit caps and long, checked shirts. Our dilapidated cars were in a loose circle around the small bonfire someone had managed to strike up, and everyone alternated which hands their plastic cups were in as they warmed the other over the flames. No one said much, everyone staring at the licking orange and thinking about what life was like before the golfers came. Some had whispered that the golfers would surely show up, others arguing that no, there was no house to destroy, no woods to melt into. If the golfers came, surely they’d be caught. The cops, who caught wind of the party, ignored it. No one called with noise complaints.

            The golfers didn’t come. The party and the fire died, and we went home, some of us drunker than we should have been, our cars swerving over the yellow lines of empty roads, tires leaving divots in under-tended yards as we pulled into driveways. Everyone made it home, whether they cared to or not. Parents ignored their children’s loping steps, their failing attempts at quiet entries into dark houses. In the weeks that followed, no one even whispered about the golfers’ absence, no one grew hopeful that they were really gone; there wasn’t anyone left to party with and nothing to celebrate.

            Eventually the golfers became nothing more than a hazy legend, a memory dotted with holes in the heads of the few families that stuck around. Town shrunk, turning to dust, nothing but a rusty gas station and a McDonalds touched only by those in need of a break from long journeys through the state. It became one of those places that people pass in a flash and think, Who would want to live there? Both Jennifer Cooke’s and Tracey Mulcahy’s parents stuck around, even though their daughters both went off to college out of state and rarely came home. We all told stories about our hometown, its death by murderous, mysterious vandals. People would tell us that they remembered that story, and they would then tell their other friends that they knew someone from that one town, the place where those guys attacked parties, you know the one. Will Chillicothe stayed, too, keeping his job but only because there was no one to run against him. He would stop in at the gas station for a cup of runny coffee, the machine spitting out grainy black liquid that looked more like old motor oil than anything worth drinking, finding a new attendant more often than not, and he would spout about the golfers. He’d look out the window toward his squad car and shake his head, ruing that the men had never been found, hating the fact that they were now just a whisper, that they’d destroyed our town, turned us all away from where we came from, that everything they had touched—and everything they hadn’t—had crumbled into sand.

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