The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  It was the Doctor, his body seeming to have absorbed virtually all the light in the room. Nowadays she believed him to be as much in her head as out.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” she said. “Months can go by and I barely remember him. Then — poof — I’m seeing that freckled back going into the shower.”

  “It’s the ions,” the Doctor said. “A change in barometric pressure. An aberration in liver function, a drop in the blood sugar perhaps.”

  She stood beside him now. He was on his stomach, face turned away from her. His caftan, big as a mainsail, lay on the floor in a heap. His slippers, she supposed, were outside the security door. With his hairpiece. And his teeth.

  “You smell delicious tonight, Mrs. Sprague.”

  “It’s an ointment,” she said. “A gift from Miss Shaughnessy. Before, of course, that business with the Nabisco people. The ingredients are in Norse.”

  She spent a minute gazing at the closed-circuit monitor mounted near the ceiling in the far corner. Señor Gaspara was asleep, his burlap bedclothes twisted around his legs. His dreams appeared to concern long-distance swimming. In a pool of piranha.

  “He didn’t eat his bean,” she remarked.

  “True,” the Doctor said. “But most of the mulch is gone.”

  Time seemed to move ahead in spasms and jerks. In a moment or two, she knew, they would commence. The sequence had been established early on, less than a year after her discharge from the marine corps, where she’d fled for surcease after Billy. All had once been familiar, comforting. The gestures. The dialogue. The heave of the heart. But now? Well, how had that stupid book put it? “Now is a pin placement on the green of then.” Sheesh.

  “Daisy,” he was saying. “That’s such a pretty name.”

  It had been her granny’s. The shrew.

  “Tell me, Daisy,” the Doctor began, “have you ever been to Scotland?”

  “Isn’t that where they play golf?”

  He smiled at her. “Why is it that you don’t like golf?”

  Her fingertips rested on his flank now. It felt like a truck fender.

  “Oh, I don’t mind golf,” she said. “It’s golfers who drive me crazy.”

  Chapter Five

  TIGHT LIES

  by Tim O’Brien

  Billy Sprague, Alfonzo Zamora, and Rita Shaughnessy were among the first guests to arrive at Rathgarve Castle. It was a drizzly, forlorn afternoon — Scotland’s finest weather in months.

  At the registration desk, as they were checking in, Rita gave Billy Sprague a sharp nudge in the ribs. “Hey, stud,” she whispered. “Over there. Isn’t that — you know — isn’t that Bob Hope?”

  “Where?” said Billy.

  “By the fireplace.”

  “The guy with the frizzy beard?”

  “No, silly, that’s the pope.” Rita made a pointing motion with her breasts. “Over there. On the sofa.”

  “The dead one?”

  “He’s dozing.”

  Billy whistled. “Bob Hope! I guess this is a big deal.”

  Alfonzo Zamora snorted and wagged his head. “Yeah, it’s Hope all right, but don’t get yourself all in a lather. I played with him once at Pebble, that pro-am nonsense. Dude couldn’t hit a green with his own nose and a bombardier. If it’s talent you want, take a gander over at the elevators.”

  “Billy Joel!” said Rita.

  “That is not Billy Joel,” said Alfonzo.

  “Well, hey, it sure as heck looks like — ”

  “Matt Lauer. Dirty sandbagger took a hundred bucks off me in Gumbel’s tournament last year. Twelve handicap, my ass.”

  Rita laughed. “What’d you do, play him with that taped-up Pepsi bottle of yours?”

  “No, the guy just happened to — ”

  “Or maybe you pulled out that other stubby club of yours? I mean, no wonder you got clipped.”

  Alfonzo saw not the slightest humor in this. He was still suffering from the aftershocks of the attack on his cranium back in London. Rita had found him on the floor of her hotel room, semiconscious, muttering to himself, a divot the size of a prayer rug carved out of the back of his skull. He still had no idea who — or exactly what — had hit him. A sand wedge, maybe. Possibly a nine-iron. In any case, he was feeling wobbly. His vision, which had been deteriorating for some time, had now taken a decided turn for the worse.

  He blinked and glanced back at the elevators. Christ, maybe it was Billy Joel. Or Bill Murray. A guy in knickers, that much for sure.

  Almost for sure.

  “Hey, daydreamer!” Rita snapped. “Here’s the program. Let’s hit the showers, freshen up, then meet at the first tee for a quick nine holes. Get in a warm-up round.”

  “Sounds fun,” said Billy. “Just a friendly game, right?”

  “You betcha,” Rita said. She swatted him on the rear. “In your case, stud, real extra friendly.”

  Alfonzo shook his head. “Count me out. Some sleep, that’s all I need. About eight hours of sack time.” He shot Rita a wink. “You’re always welcome, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” Rita said. For a moment it looked as if she were about to slug him, but then she grinned and flicked her eyebrows. “Tell you what, Alfie. I’ll golf you for it.”

  “Say again?”

  “You heard me. Nine holes. Match play. If by some once-in-a-zillion fluke you beat me, you get to play a tenth hole.”

  “Tenth?”

  “Luscious dogleg, the boys tell me.”

  Alfonzo squinted. “Yeah? What’s the hitch?”

  “No hitch,” said Rita.

  Billy Sprague gave Rita a disapproving frown. “Well, gosh. I’m not so sure I go for this. I thought you and I were sort of a pair now. Playing partners.”

  “Oh, we are,” Rita cooed. “That’s what I meant by freshening up.”

  “Then why — ?”

  “Teach this fat Mex a lesson, that’s all.”

  The three of them made their way toward the elevators. Already the lobby was beginning to fill up with celebrities of all stripe and station. Phillip Bates had just strolled in with the prince of Wales; Madonna was showing off her new lob wedge to Fidel Castro and Hale Irwin, while over near the bellhop stand, deep in conversation, were Ken Venturi, Augusto Pinochet, and Bob Costas.

  Rita punched the elevator’s up button. “Now here’s the deal,” she said. “If I beat you, Alfie — about which there is absolutely no doubt — then I never hear another sex-Mex comment out of you. No more bragging. No more come-ons.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Plus a thousand bucks.”

  Alfonzo took a short step backward. “Let’s get this straight. Match play, nine holes. You win, I shell out a thousand clams. I win, all I get is laid?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You must be nuts.”

  “Are we on?”

  “On,” Alfonzo said, and giggled. “You bet your sweet ass.”

  Upstairs, Billy and Rita finished their lovemaking in record time, the lowest stroke total ever recorded on Rita’s much-played public course.

  “Now that,” said Rita, “was a pick-me-up.”

  Billy nodded. The last stroke had been a gimme — a nine-incher at most — but even so he’d come close to blowing it. Story of his life.

  “Very nice,” he said, then paused and cleared his throat. Rita’s wager was still bothering him. “Listen, you aren’t serious about playing Alfonzo for — you know — for sex? A joke, right?”

  Rita shrugged her formidable shoulders, farted, slipped out of bed, and lit up a Winston 100. “No sweat, tiger,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I could whip that greasy has-been with a Wiffle ball and a set of trainer Spaldings.”

  “Yes, but — ”

  “But what?” she said. “You aren’t getting possessive, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Rita turned and looked down at him. “Because, sweetheart, here’s the straight scoop. You and I just met.”

  “True.” />
  “Well, there we are then. Besides, I’m my own woman, captain of my vessel, all that good stuff.” She paused. “You’re a nice guy, Billy, but I’m not into property rights.”

  Billy watched her march off toward the bathroom.

  Lovely creature, he thought. But it wasn’t a question of property rights. No way on earth.

  Just love.

  Twenty minutes later, Rita and Billy and Alfonzo — sans Hector, laid up in his Rathgarve rollaway with a combination of jet lag, head cold, and dread — stood under their umbrellas on the first tee. It was late afternoon, nearly three-thirty, and the day’s drizzle had become a full-fledged rain. The unseasonably superb weather was holding.

  On an adjacent putting green, also under umbrellas, mingled such notables as Tony Blair and Al Gore, both decked out in tweeds and starched golf shirts. Nearby, Mu‘ammar Qaddafi was giving a now-or-never, sink-it-before-you-die putting lesson to Jack Lemmon, while only a few feet away Chi Chi Rodriguez did his best to adjust the clumsy, rather primitive one-handed putting stroke of former senator Robert Dole.

  “So what’s the batting order?” Alfonzo asked. He glanced at Rita, bowed from the waist, and issued a taunting chuckle. “You plan to hit from the ladies’ tee?”

  Rita smiled. She put down her umbrella, strolled forward, teed up a scarred old Titleist, and whacked it two-eighty down the center. “Ho-hum,” she said.

  Alfonzo glanced over at Billy Sprague. “Not bad,” he grunted. “The tramp put both hams into that one.”

  “Be polite,” Billy warned.

  “Hey, amigo. That was polite.”

  Billy went next. He felt like a third wheel — along for the ride, no pressure at all, nothing at stake — and his drive sailed a good ten yards past Rita’s.

  “Side wager?” Alfonzo said.

  Billy shook his head. “No thanks. I’m not a betting man.”

  “So I hear.”

  Alfonzo cackled at this. He waddled up to the tee box, took a quick look down the fairway, then ripped off his patented high fade, a truly gorgeous drive that seemed to find its own air currents before settling down well past Billy’s ball.

  “Shit-a-rino,” he muttered. “Shanked it.”

  Then he cackled again.

  Their Scottish caddies hefted up the bags and began heading down the fairway, but after only a moment or two there was a loud huffing noise behind them. It was Bob Dole. He wished to join them.

  For a few seconds Alfonzo pretended not to notice. He picked his teeth with a tee, stared off into the rain. “Jeez, Senator, I don’t know,” he finally said. “Is it contagious?”

  Dole scowled. “Is what contagious?”

  “Well, you know, that business on TV. That disease. I forget what you call it.”

  “Erectile dysfunction?”

  “Yeah, right. No offense, my man, but . . . See, I’ve always played with pretty stiff shafts, if you follow my drift. Super stiff, actually.”

  “Listen, you fat little — ”

  Rita and Billy separated them.

  “Okay, okay,” Alfonzo growled. “Let the guy tag along. One thing I can’t stand, it’s a pissed-off Republican.” He thrust out a conciliatory right hand toward Dole. “Forget I said a word. Shake on it.”

  As it turned out, however, the former GOP standard-bearer returned to the clubhouse midway down the first fairway. (In part, no doubt, his departure had to do with Alfonzo’s running commentary about the senator’s “weak grip,” how he should “give some serious thought to working on that handicap.”)

  Watching Dole stalk off into the rain, Alfonzo shook his head sadly. “There goes one dude,” he said, “who most definitely keeps his head down.”

  Alfonzo won the first hole with a tap-in birdie. Rita captured the second hole, a two-hundred-thirty-yard par-three, with her own slick little birdie.

  It went back and forth that way, no real blood, and after five holes the match stood dead even. Both Rita and Alfonzo played well, collecting their pars, bearing down, focusing on each shot. Nothing fancy. No risks, no mistakes. The really brilliant play, though, came from Billy Sprague, who birdied five straight holes effortlessly, his swing as graceful as a panther on the prowl. For Billy, the game of golf had little to do with mechanics, even less to do with wagers or competition. Golf was man-in-nature. It was wind and rain. It was grass. It was the flap of the flag, the earth beneath his feet, the flex in his knees as he addressed a tough sidehill lie.

  Watching the match between Alfonzo and Rita — the cussing, the elation, the tension, the relentless ups and downs — Billy Sprague felt a deepening melancholy. This, he thought, was a corruption not only of golf, but also of the human spirit. Playing for sex — playing for anything beyond the pure joy of playing — struck him as the next closest thing to blasphemy.

  Besides, he loved her.

  Yes, he did.

  And his heart was breaking.

  Rita eagled the sixth hole, a long and very difficult par-five, to go one up. Alfonzo immediately replied with a birdie on the seventh. Again, the match was square, but for Billy Sprague the world was not so square: the world was fucked up.

  It mattered nothing to him that his own score now stood at seven under, that he was playing the best golf of his life.

  On a rise overlooking the eighth green, in the gloom and steady rain, Ned Gorman looked on through a pair of binoculars. At his side was a decidedly soggy Edna Zuckerman.

  “What the hell’s happening?” she said.

  “They’re all even,” Ned said.

  “I don’t mean that! I mean, why the fuck are we out here in the first place? I’m drenched, I’ve got a fucking head cold. Besides, I fucking hate this fucking game!”

  Ned smiled and stared through the binoculars. “It’s a job, honey.”

  “Job how? What’s the point?”

  Ned kept his eyes locked on Rita Shaughnessy as she stood over a ticklish five-footer. Quietly, for the hundredth time, he explained that they needed to get the lay of the land, that a terrorist might well be lurking in any bramble bush or bunker or patch of gorse. “The tournament officially kicks off tomorrow,” he said patiently, “and we’ve got to know this place — the whole layout — the way a farmer knows his back forty. Like I say, it’s our job, baby.” He leaned forward and squinted into the binoculars. “Besides, one of those three idiots could be our man. Or woman. Depending.”

  Edna yelped. “But I’m freezing!”

  “Well, you never know, pumpkin. Anybody crazy enough to play in weather like this . . .”

  “Of course they’re crazy! They’re golfers, for chrissake.” She shivered and hugged herself. “And don’t call me fucking pumpkin!”

  “Shhhh.”

  “Shhhh what?”

  “The Shaughnessy woman’s putting. Pipe down. Try to show some manners.”

  Down on the eighth green, as Rita stroked her putt, Edna Zuckerman’s angry scream pierced the gloom.

  “Scuffed it, huh?” said Alfonzo.

  “That wasn’t fair!”

  “Sorry, señorita. I guess them’s the breaks.”

  “Well, sure, but — ”

  “No mulligans.”

  And thus, as the waterlogged threesome trudged toward the ninth and final tee box, Rita Shaughnessy was one down and in deep trouble.

  Billy Sprague was eight under and heartsick.

  Alfonzo Zamora was one up and cackling.

  And Ned Gorman was lecturing Edna Zuckerman on issues of golf etiquette. And getting nowhere.

  “Well now, here we be,” said Alfonzo. He was beaming, flush with confidence, gazing serenely at the short par-three ninth hole below them. The green lay at the bottom of a deep gorge, which was now partly shrouded in fog and rain. “Way I figure it, Rita, the best you can hope for is a tie. Best I can hope for is that famous tenth hole of yours.” He grinned. “Tight fairways, as I recall. Lots of cleat marks around the cup.”

  “Watch your language,” said Rita. “And
don’t start counting unhatched chickens.”

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” said Alfonzo.

  Billy Sprague said nothing.

  It was nearly dark now. The famous gloaming had set in, bewitching hour, and the relentless rain gave the course a dismal, deserted, even forbidding aspect. A mass of bloated, purply-blue clouds seemed to press down upon the earth; the heather along the tee box had the look of mutant seaweed, and a deep pot bunker in front of the green had filled with enough rainwater to house Nessie and her brood. And that was just the start of it.

  Over the last half hour the temperature had dropped to just above freezing. Gale force winds knifed in from the North Sea, whipping sleet across the course, and shards of hoarfrost clung to Alfonzo Zamora’s super-stiff titanium shafts. (“Difficult conditions,” Ken Venturi might well have commented to a television audience, had he not been warming himself before a roaring fire back at the hotel. Indeed, even the caddies had abandoned them more than an hour ago, somewhere along the third fairway. “Ill bodings, lads and lassies,” one of them had squealed, and then scampered away into the dark.) For ordinary souls, in other words, here was the biblical prototype of hell. But for the true golfer — certainly for Billy Sprague and Rita Shaughnessy and Alfonzo Zamora — it was also the purest heaven.

  “Your honors,” said Rita.

  “Ladies first,” said the courtly (and now very cocky) Alfonzo. “I insist.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do.”

  Rita shrugged. She teed up her old Titleist, stood back, and surveyed the shot.

  Unlike most championship par-threes, the ninth was laid out in a very short, very simple configuration — a modest hundred and forty-two yards from tee to green. Much of it straight downhill. No water. No rough. Just a lonely-looking pot bunker fronting the green. To a professional eye, however, the green’s steep back-to-front slope presented trouble. Like a great funnel, the entire front of the green was little more than a giant ball collector running downward into that innocuous pot bunker.

  Anything short of pin-high, Rita realized, and you were dead.

  She pulled out her nine-iron, paused a moment, then changed her mind in favor of an eight. Then the nine again. Then the eight. Then her wedge. Then back to the nine.