The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  Jesper had told him about the fare at the Doctor’s. Ash, for starters. Tree bark. And garbanzo beans the size of bowling balls. The meat, he’d been told, was plywood. The outdoor grade.

  “How am I doing?” Gaspara wondered.

  The doctor sawed the air with his hands. The effect, Gaspara thought, was not unlike hearing your name called by Beelzebub. Or Moloch.

  “You have a busy mind,” the Doctor said softly. “I am thinking of a ferret in the trousers.”

  The blot test, the Doctor announced, would consume the better part of an hour. “Perhaps a short break,” he said. “A rain delay, as it were.”

  Fernando thought not. He was ready now. He had stood over this sidehiller too long. It was time to putt or hit the showers.

  “We are finding the parameters,” the Doctor was saying. “It is my job to get the demons out of your head, to restore your confidence. I am to give you your macho back, your swagger. Twofold, if possible. If you are to swash anew, we must reinvigorate your buckle.”

  Fernando was taking an inventory of himself, especially the organs in outright revolt. “I am desperate,” he said at last. “I have tried everything. The Shark’s Secret. The Tempo Timer. The bullwhip shaft. Two days ago, to keep from looking up, I considered bolting a barbell to my forehead.”

  There was more, he said. He’d changed his grip, his stance. He addressed the ball as he would a rabid skunk. He’d tried new clubs, these alleged to be strengthened by an element the gringo astronauts had sneaked back from the moon.

  “Patience, my friend,” the Doctor said. “You have put yourself in the hands of a professional. I am to be your fakir, your shaman, your medicine man. We are trafficking in serious wampum here.”

  A word had occurred to El Puma, one composed of too many X’s and C’s to be used in polite company. In the mirror his reflection trembled on the verge of tears. “You spied on me,” he said.

  For a second the Doctor’s face had an unlived-in aspect, an expression about as welcome as whooping cough.

  “Behind the mirror,” Fernando said, pointing to the wall. “You have a little room back there, no? While I waited, you watched. You were amused that I tried to work my wiles on your receptionist.”

  The Doctor smiled. Ten thousand of the most perfect teeth in the Northern Hemisphere. Then, evidently, he activated a switch hidden in his desk, for a door hissed opened behind him, revealing a room so dark and deep that Fernando believed virtually anything could now burst out of it. The furies themselves. Or the leggy tarts of the Moulin Rouge.

  “I observed,” the Doctor was saying. “It is a customary practice. I took notes. I do not judge. One does not judge the wind or a cloud.”

  Wind? Cloud? Gaspara looked around himself nervously. He had been likened to many things in his life, usually by his ex-wives — a snake’s belly once, a vampire, the nightmare a worm has — but never the weather.

  “You are a phenomenon,” the Doctor said. “You are a mountaintop. Everest, say. Or a river. One does not condemn the Ganges for its riverness. Nor Pike’s its peak. I am to reconnect you to your essential golfness.”

  Gaspara nodded. Of course. This was as reasonable as poetry.

  “Your golfitude,” the Doctor was saying. “Golficity. Golfation.”

  “I am a bird,” Fernando suggested. “I must fly.”

  “Exactamente,” the Doctor replied. “A toad must croak, mustn’t it? And a toddler toddle? So must a duffer duff and a hacker hack.”

  Again Gaspara nodded, with growing enthusiasm. The sense here was so volatile he thought it might spontaneously combust. “You will restore me,” he said, hopefully.

  El Puma would be remanufactured, the Doctor explained. He would be broken down, disassembled, his parts cleaned and polished. His belts would be replaced, his gears reground. Psychologically speaking, of course. “At the appropriate hour,” the Doctor concluded, “a swing guru will be brought in. I have a number on call . . .”

  Gaspara shivered. Swing guru. The phrase had all the appeal of a vacation in a Turkish prison. “How long will this take?” he asked.

  The Doctor exercised elaborate care in straightening the paperwork around him. Something about the endeavor seemed to exhaust him. “How long do you have?”

  Not long, El Puma said. He had to be in Scotland in less than a month.

  “The Bates affair,” the Doctor said.

  Instantly and unaccountably, time seemed to be moving in three directions at once. The invitations — or in El Puma’s case, the non-invitation — had supposedly been secret. Only the concerned parties, et cetera. So how — ?

  “I am a licensed sports psychologist, Fernando. Golf is my specialty. Little escapes my purview.”

  Now it was El Puma’s turn to be tired. The day had been long. The first of many, he feared. A routine, he guessed, would be established. A new diet probably. No more gazpacho. No flan. No chimichangas. Porridge instead. Even gruel. Cross training too. No matter. It must be done. History was to be made there on Bates’s magnificent course in Scotland. There El Puma would be resurrected.

  “There is something else,” he confided. “Another reason for haste.”

  The Doctor was studying his fingernails, an undertaking that seemed to require the concentration of a contract killer.

  “Alfonzo Zamora,” he said. “The Marvelous Mex.” An hour from this moment, El Puma would be describing what he saw in the ink blots. A cat’s intestines in one. In another, a group of caddies playing strip poker. In a third, the shoes of a fisherman. An hour after that, he would be telling stories based on glossy pictures the Doctor had spread before him. A threesome of women engaged in rank carnality while their fiancés toiled on the practice tee. His papa weeping into his sangria. A cur pissing in a bowl his mother had made. But now El Puma was seeing nothing. Nothing except the greasy jowls of the living devil in a sombrero.

  “I seek a grudge match,” he told the Doctor. “He brings shame upon the Iberian heritage. He is a clown in the land of knights.”

  “He is Pancho,” the Doctor said.

  “And I am Cisco.”

  Fernando leaned forward. Declarations needed to be made. Points of view clarified.

  “He is Cantinflas,” he whispered.

  “And you,” the Doctor whispered back, “are Cervantes.”

  El Doctor

  “And then you know what, Mrs. Sprague?” The Doctor was addressing his receptionist through the partially open door separating them. She was about to try on her fourth outfit of the evening. The shepherdess, the Doctor believed. An hour earlier, she had been a flight attendant, the transatlantic edition. Before that, a carpenter named Trixie — a carpenter with a full tool belt and a scarf joint to toy with. “Do you know what he said then?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” she said. “I had Lumpy on the line. He needed more counsel. He was facing a pitch shot over a pot bunker on the tenth at St. Andrews. He hadn’t moved in forty-five minutes.” She chuckled, the laughter of Cleopatra herself. “That part of the booklet you gave him is in Persian. It computes using yods.”

  The Doctor took a moment for himself. On his CD system Themes from Great Cities, his favorite, was playing. This was cut four, “Islamabad,” in particular the section where the Pakistani finger cymbals are meant to replicate an icy, almost providential rain. On the video monitor overhead he was watching Fernando Gaspara, El Puma, in his room, naked to the waist, rope in his fist.

  “He was saying,” the Doctor went on, “that he was upholding the honor of — what was his exact phrase? — the chippers of Chile and the putters of the Pampas.”

  “I know them,” Mrs. Sprague said. “They can do handstands, too.”

  There was more, the Doctor said. On his way out of the office no more than three hours ago, El Puma had been declaring himself a crusader on behalf of Spanish bloodlines, the nobility of even the meanest. He was the toreador, Zamora but the lowly picador. El Puma was fine Corinthian leather, Zamora the squ
eaky “hide” of the cowardly Nauga. “Guess,” El Puma had hollered, “who is the balata, who is the thing stuffed with goose feathers!”

  “Shall I use the staff?” Mrs. Sprague stood in the doorway now, her hair styled by a tornado, hers the outfit sheep bleat for.

  No, the Doctor sighed. Tonight would be staffless.

  “Very good,” she said. “Just one more minute. I need more straw.”

  On the monitor, noting that Fernando had begun his therapy, the Doctor turned up the volume.

  “Forgive me, Señor Jones,” El Puma was groaning, lashing himself twice on his bare back. “Deliver me, Ben Hogan. I am worthy only of your spikes.” Again he struck himself, his lips curled in excruciating ecstasy. “I am begging your indulgence, old Tom Morris. I prostrate myself.” The crack of the rope against El Puma’s shoulders sounded like gunfire. “Harry Vardon, I seek only to carry your laundry. Perhaps a tip later on the backswing.”

  On the stereo “Addis Ababa” was playing now, it another melody equating volume with virtue.

  “Mrs. Sprague,” the Doctor called, “have you seen my address book?”

  In his room, El Puma was asking for the forbearance of Messrs. Sarazen, Nelson, and Snead.

  “Try the right-hand drawer,” the receptionist called back. “It’s beneath the Hokmah.” It took him only a moment to locate it, scarcely another to find the number he was looking for.

  “Who did we use last time?” he called again to Mrs. Sprague. “Motley or Cowboy Putt Fenno?”

  Again Mrs. Sprague appeared in the doorway, fleece slipping fetchingly free of one shoulder. Much about her posture suggested pain and transcendence. All she needed was a cudgel and a twenty-minute head start.

  “Onan, I believe,” she said. “Worked with that gorilla from the Australasian Tour. Bobby Stoops.”

  The Doctor thanked her.

  “A maximum of two minutes, Doctor,” she said. “I’m blackening my teeth.”

  While he dialed the number, he watched Fernando rise from and fall to the stone floor of his room at least five times. El Puma was up, hands clasped in prayer of the most abject sort, then he was down, whining like an abandoned puppy. His shoulders were beginning to redden nicely.

  “This better be good,” barked the voice on the phone. It sounded sixteen. Chinese, possibly. With a limp. “Cowboy Putt Fenno, please,” the Doctor said.

  “Who wants to know?”

  No, eighteen. From the Dakota badlands. A southpaw. With, another tap-in, a tendency to lay it off at the top.

  “Please tell Mr. Fenno that his meal ticket is about to be punched.”

  As a courtesy between colleagues, the Doctor had visited Fenno’s ranch exactly once, a place in the trackless desert of loneliest New Mexico, south of a crossroad named — fittingly, the Doctor had decided — Lordsburg. About ten zillion miles from anything with a modern idea and the skill to use it. So far as the Doctor could tell, nothing was being raised there. Except gnarled flora and heat. Still, that’s where Fenno, swing guru, had set up shop. It only made sense. You wanted to see Moses, you went to where the seas had permanently parted.

  “Tarnation, I’m about to sit down to my grub, Doc. What’s got your mashie in the meatloaf?”

  “Let me guess,” the Doctor began. “Her name is, oh, Ida Lou, and she’s playing Howdy to your Doody.”

  It took Putt Fenno nearly thirty seconds to stop laughing. “Her name is Florimel,” he said at last. “And I’m tuning up her short game. Got the yips something spooky.”

  Now it was the Doctor’s turn to ho-ho-ho. “I conclude, then, that you’re in fine fettle this evening.”

  Putt Fenno snorted, sufficient decibels to occasion an avalanche in Switzerland. “What’s my fettle got to do with a hog’s affection for mud, Doc? I got fettle the way Congress has rascals.”

  “Belgrade” had come on now, the abbreviated version. Just enough so that you’d know, sooner rather than later, the difference between action and activity.

  “Let’s play a little game,” the Doctor said. “A guessing game.”

  “Why in a ten-gallon chapeau would yours truly be interested in guessing any darn thing, Doc? I got about as many guesses as a gelding has lady friends.”

  “It involves money,” the Doctor said. “A lot of it.”

  In the gulf between his words and Fenno’s the Doctor heard what sounded like gristle. And, yes, a hinge creaking.

  “Goldarnit, Doc, I don’t need any more money. I got a filly here in buckskin and spurs about to giddyup her way into the LPGA!”

  Putt Fenno liked the Doctor, not least because over the years the man had sent considerable repair work his way. Wanna-bes with swings that looked like the paths drunks followed falling down. Once a journeyman from the Japan tour with a swing so complicated it took him most of the morning to complete his preshot routine. You had to listen to a fellow, even a city slicker, that kept a steady stream of the halt and blind washing up against your chuck wagon.

  “He’s already called upon most of the saints,” the Doctor was saying. “Leadbetter and Harmon. Pelz and MacLean. I figured it was time for the best.”

  “It’s not Stankowski, is it? Sandals on the Tour? That’s an affront to the game, Doc. A sin. And I won’t abide it. Might as well pave over Pebble Beach, call up the folks at the Roller Derby and have done with the whole shebang.”

  Doc quite agreed. Sin was everywhere in the land. In the mulligan, for instance. And in the four-hundred-pound loose impediment.

  “And not that Bates scallywag either,” Putt said, only part of his attention devoted to the work of nature about to fit herself into the Swing Analyzer, a contraption that had arrived with more parables and metaphors than the Old dadgum Testament. “Bates was down here a year ago. Brought every blessed one of his sodbusters. A tenderfoot for each shoe, I swear. Wore the bonnet of a beekeeper, had a glove that could have been the skin of America’s first virgin. Lordy, Doc, the Ephraimites could have lived out of his shag bag alone. Nicholson was with him, too. Kept snarling at the help. Miss Buckshot about soiled her pantaloons.”

  “You’ll like this one, Putt. It’s a total rehab. Wrist cock, follow-through, haircut, wave to the crowd.”

  Across the room, Florimel was working on her stance, an activity that, briefly, put Putt in mind of the sharpshooting talents of Lash LaRue and the Lone Ranger.

  “I got a new curriculum, Doc. For a week, the client doesn’t even touch a club. We do essay questions, fill in the blank. I got a fellow here right now still trying to figure out his first name.”

  From the Doctor’s end of the line, Putt could hear music — most of it, as far as he was concerned, dangerously darn close to the soundtrack for the apocalypse itself. Like the clang of seven swords on seven shields or some such. The boom of a busted convenant. Maybe the bottom of high heaven letting go.

  “It’s Fernando Gaspara,” the Doctor said. “El Puma himself.”

  Now Florimel was attending to her waggle, it as heartening to behold as a Roy Rogers fast draw.

  “El Puddy-tat’s more like it,” Putt said. “What I saw at the One 2 One in Arden made me want to spit up.”

  Doc said he knew the feeling. Had you considering giving up membership in the human race.

  “What was that thing he was doing with lips, anyway? That kind of behavior’s illegal, ain’t it? Hell, hereabouts you get arrested for even thinking the word ‘petrous.’”

  “I work on his mind,” the Doctor said, “you work on his take-away.”

  For a moment, Cowboy Putt Fenno let the silence do all the talking. El Puma, huh? The mighty brought low, the meek bearing down fast on his fanny.

  “This is the ultimate challenge.” The Doctor sounded as excited as the last man scrambling for the last train bound for paradise. “You do this, you got nothing but pooh-bahs and pashas thereafter. And that’s just the P-family of hackers. Wouldn’t surprise me to see the whole Hooters and Nike tours come a-knocking. You know how good news t
ravels.”

  Putt Fenno counted to himself. He didn’t want to rush into anything. Last time he’d rushed in, he’d found himself with a one-iron in his hand, half of Death Valley to clear on the fly, and a buckboard of tinhorns present to applaud the effort. “What’s that music?” he said at last.

  The seaport of Pondicherry, the Doctor said. Putt was to ignore the Klaxons and sirens, not to mention the constant screams of terror.

  “Mrs. Sprague, eh?”

  “Little Bo Peep herself.”

  Putt spent the next several seconds reflecting upon his circumstances. A practice tee full of folks paying a thousand greenbacks a week to get their bushes whacked and their sores saddled, golfwise speaking. A catalog called Fenno’s Fairways, which sold memorabilia and learning aids, including a shirt that kept score, and Cowboy Putt to Nirvana, a series of inspirational videos that featured his staff of seventeen and the voices of the Sagebrush Sisters of Sacramento doing backup. And, yes, across the room a thoroughbred linkster with a swing of nearly gunslinger specifications.

  “Okay,” Putt said. “Get him here in two days.”

  “Two days?” the Doctor sputtered. “But he and I can be there tomorrow.”

  Putt took a deep breath. Something tight was snapping loose in his gut bucket. He felt he was in the circus again.

  “Tomorrow, Doc, Sister Florimel here will be perfecting her ability to pronate.”

  At precisely the gong of midnight, Mrs. Sprague threw open the door to the dressing room and stepped into the shadows of what the Doctor referred to as his Theater of Possibility. Oddly, she’d been thinking about Billy, that knucklehead, trying to remember how many years had passed since she’d fled Squat Possum and the endless yakety-yak about niblicks and spoons and divot repair tools, never mind all that Little Pink Book hokum that creepy Earle Toland spewed forth. Geez, you’d have thought the geezer was Professor Aristotle himself. “Life is a chip shot from the froghair of fortune.” Cripes, what the dickens did that mean?

  “Billy on the brain again, eh?”