The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  “A golf swing’s going to do that?”

  “That’s right, a golf swing.”

  “You’re already the richest bleeding guy in the world.”

  “But you see, Edna, being rich is nothing. For money to mean something, for money to translate into a better world, that’s the key. That’s what greatness is made of.”

  “I repeat, a bleeding golf swing is going to do that?”

  “Edna, Edna, Edna.”

  “You’re a fucking onanist, that’s what you are. Look at what you’re bleeding doing. Abusing yourself with that golf glove for Christ sakes.”

  Phillip Bates looked down at his left hand, the white golf glove halted midstroke.

  “I’m sorry,” Bates said. “Was that impolite?”

  “I’m a fucking lady,” Edna said. “In case you bleeding forgot.”

  “This glove,” Phillip Bates said, looking at the creamy material coating his left hand. “This is made from the hindquarters of old Democrats. Oh, I experimented with Republicans for a while, but their heinies were far too tough. Too much sitting around. Democrats are best. Very soft. The softest hide there is.”

  “How the hell did I get involved with you people?” Edna said. She was staring up at the digital Bates. Now he was chipping from the short rough, the ball sailing in a perfect arc, plonking on the green, then rolling to the lip of the cup, hanging for a second, then tumbling in.

  “Down in two,” Bates said. “An eagle.”

  “It’s fake,” Edna said. “And anyway, even if it were real, it would still be just fucking golf.”

  “God’s game,” Bates said.

  Edna made a bleating noise of disdain. “Give me tennis any day,” she said. “Now there’s where you have your real athletes. You have to run, you have to sweat, you have to strike the ball in a split second and thread the needle past your fucking opponent. You have to be in shape to play good tennis. All you do in golf is stand around and watch your playing partners waggle their clubs. You sit in a golf cart, drink booze from a flask, and let a battery carry you up and down the slopes. Look at the bellies on golfers. You call them athletes? If you wanted to make a name for yourself as a bleeding jock, Master Bates, you should’ve taken up tennis. Golfers are about as athletic as fucking billiard players. Tossing darts is more aerobic.”

  Phillip Bates stripped off his golf glove and dropped it on the edge of his bed.

  “Edna,” he said calmly. “Do you have anything to report or are you here simply to unload each and every one of your uninformed opinions?” He held up a TV zapper and Edna watched as the window blinked off. Outside the glass wall it was dark and there were glistening ribbons of rain running across the pane. A normal window. Bates began to wilt.

  Edna said, “They’ll be starting the explosive sweep soon, Master Bates. For all the bleeding good it will do them.”

  Bates was staring wistfully at the darkened virtual reality window. He seemed to have shrunken back into his gnomish body now. “Anything else?” he said.

  Edna sat down on the edge of Bates’s double-king bed. The mattress was filled with something spongy. A water bed full of gel? It moved beneath her butt like something alive, something cold and undulating, a reptilian presence. She popped to her feet.

  “What the bleeding hell?”

  Bates was still staring at the window. “I could be a great tennis player too,” he said. “If I wanted, I could be Rocket Rod Laver. I could be Pancho Gonzales or Don Budge or Pete Sampras or John McEnroe or Borg. I could have them digitalized in no time and I could hit topspin and a twist serve. I could do all of that if I wanted.”

  “It’d still be a fucking hoax.”

  “Lew Hoad, Boris Becker, Andre Agassi.”

  “Le Tour has made the change,” Edna said. “He’s taken over Billy Angel’s persona. He wanted you to know.”

  “Good,” said Bates, still distracted by the tennis idea.

  “He said to tell you that everything is set with the banquet. The virus is in the fucking Jell-O. Though why you put it in the Jell-O is a mystery to me. Not everyone likes Jell-O.”

  “Cherry Jell-O with pineapple chunks,” Bates said. “Of course they do. Everyone loves cherry Jell-O.”

  Edna gave the mattress another prod. It responded to her touch like some kind of slithering Gila monster waking from a drowse, a ripple of movement.

  “So tell me, Master Bates, there’s something I don’t bleeding understand.”

  “Yes?” Phillip Bates was still staring at the darkened window having reveries of Wimbledon and Roland Garros. A serve that was unreturnable, groundstrokes of balletic grace, a blur at the net.

  “You’re going to digitally insert yourself in the golf match tomorrow, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You’re out there with the great ones and your virtual reality self is beating the hell out of everybody. I fucking understand that much. Because, yeah, you can tamper with the broadcast signal, what gets sent over the airwaves. You control the bleeding airwaves, sure, you and your computer whizbangs. But what about all the people here, all the fucking eyewitnesses? They’re going to see how sloppy you play, what a bleeding fucking gawky nincompoop you actually are.”

  “The Jumbotron,” Bates said. He was winning the final game at Wimbledon in his head, jumping the net to shake hands with his opponent. The queen was there. She was bowing to him. She was curtseying. She was touching the steel blade of a sword to his shoulders. Sir Bates. I now pronounce you . . . Or whatever the hell they said at the end of Wimbledon when you entered the history books forever.

  “What about the Jumbotron?”

  “The gallery will be watching the match on the Jumbotron. They’ll see my digital self.”

  “No they won’t. They’ll be watching you, the real in-the-flesh ninny that you are.”

  “They may watch me briefly, but what they’ll remember is the Jumbotron.”

  “What they’ll see is that you’ve got a swing like a mongoose having a seizure.”

  “Reality only lasts a second,” Bates said. “Instant replay is forever.”

  Edna was staring at the mattress. It was quivering, sending out strange carnal vibrations.

  “What the hell is in this bleeding mattress, for fuck’s sake?”

  Phillip Bates was picturing Jim Courier and Patrick Rafter and Stan Smith and Roscoe Tanner. Maybe he’d made a mistake settling on golf. Maybe Edna was right. Look at Zamora and Rita Shaughnessy and the rest of that gang. They were awfully out of shape. Probably couldn’t run up a flight of stairs without risking a stroke. It would only take his Virtual Reality Team a few days to work up a digitalized tennis Bates.

  “I asked you what in fucking bleeding hell is this mattress stuffed with?”

  “Oh that,” Bates said. “Don’t prod it too hard. That’s Semtex.”

  Edna stepped back from the bed. “You hid that shit in your mattress? Why in bleeding fuck did you do that? If you ask me, I think somebody’s been inserting their digits into your fucking brain. Sleeping on Semtex.”

  “That’s only a small portion of it,” he said. “The rest is buried out on the eighteenth fairway with a percussion cap for a trigger. My little test in randomness. About this time tomorrow someone will step on it and then we’ll have some quite unfortunate death and dismemberment.”

  “You booby-trapped your own golf course?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “But why?”

  “Why do you think, Edna?”

  “Not for the bleeding publicity. Don’t tell me that.”

  “Of course it’s for the publicity. A golf tournament with the most powerful people in the world in attendance will draw substantial media, sure. But a terrorist attack on that golf tournament, endangering the lives of every major player on the world stage, serious death and destruction, well, Edna, think about it. Weeks of free publicity. And what will they all be watching over and over and over?”

  “Your fucking golf
swing.”

  “Exactly.”

  Then the revelation flashed through him. A white blast of understanding. A nuclear shock wave brightening his brain. Though he never would have admitted it, Edna’s sneers at golf had threatened him mightily. Yes, he had wavered there for a moment. But that was the nature of faith, Bates reminded himself. To test. To doubt. And from that, to renew.

  “Tennis is shit,” Bates said.

  “What?”

  “Tennis and baseball, football, soccer, they’re all shit. They’re boring, full of the great tedious monotony of endless repetition. A court, a diamond, a hundred-yard field. Every game played exactly like the last one because there are only a few strokes and one implement, a racket, a bat. And think of it, each course is laid out with the identical, rigid demarcations. Boxes. It’s like playing a game inside a packing crate. That’s stupid, Edna, stupid and dull and spiritually bereft.”

  Edna was staring at the naked man. His skin seemed to be growing luminescent. There was an angelic shine in his eyes, a vague halo hovering around him like a hazy force field.

  “While golf, on the other hand, is infinitely variable, the mirror of life itself. Every course is unique, every round of golf is distinct, unlike every other round. Different clubs, different strokes. The physical challenges are of an infinite variety. You have the great arcing, gravity-defying tee shots, you have the careful, precise irons from the fairway, you have the chips, the fades, the draws, the slices, the hooks, the cold toppings, pitches, wedges, run-ups, lob pitches, fat-iron shots, single-handed shots, shots from the knees, bunker shots, sandies, and putt chips.

  “You have the subtle reads of the green, sensing the grain of the grass, the shape and slope and texture, the angle and degree of break. You have a thousand different types of rough, bad lies, good lies, impossible lies. Trees become monsters, rocks and sand and water are suddenly mythic in their threatening countenance.

  “The beauty and terror and unforgiving brutality of the natural landscape rises before you. You are a warrior, alone with your narrow shaft, on a quest that is ultimately unrealizable. And you are always awash in the wild tumult of weather, the thousand different breezes that must constantly be factored in, the ever-changing light, the rain, the mist, the fog, the blinding sun, the pewter sky, or immaculate sapphire heavens. That’s golf, Edna. Full of sublime and infinite hazards, sublime and infinite pleasures. Day after day after day, it’s never the same. That’s why it’s the greatest game, God’s game, the challenge beyond all challenges. The putt at the end of the world.”

  Awestruck, Edna Zuckerman stared at Phillip Bates’s beatific smile. She felt the ripple of gooseflesh rise on her back. The man was radiant, launched beyond the gravitational forces of the earth, powered by his own pixilated malarky.

  “Fucking A,” she managed to say. “Fucking A.”

  While the rich and powerful and the merely famous gathered in their tuxedos and evening gowns to eat the Bates banquet, Billy Sprague played a round of golf in the dark. It was not just a shadowy night, but a complete, total, utter, absolute blackness. Billy Sprague was a blind man. He was standing on the lightless bottom of the sea.

  There was a drizzling mist, the quiet drowse of a breeze. There were the stray chirps and tweeterings of birds, the cooing and rustling and rattling restlessness of the burrowing night creatures, but there was nothing to see. Not even the white ball at his feet caught the faintest gleam of moonlight or starlight. The ball was invisible. The course was invisible. Billy Sprague was invisible.

  He was on the eighteenth fairway, on the edge of the right rough. Two hundred and eighty yards out from the pin. He couldn’t see the flag. He couldn’t see his hands before his face. He set his feet, lined up the shot, sending out the weird, sightless sonar he had just discovered that he was capable of, adjusting his feet an inch or two to the right, and with this new blindman’s clarity, this telescopic X-ray vision, Billy Sprague drove his ball into the darkest, blackest, most impenetrable gloom he’d ever known.

  It sailed away.

  Every rustling died. The wind stilled, the owls held their breath. Insects in the grass ceased their ceaseless twitching. The ghostly shadows of the recently destroyed Scottish old-growth forest, those thousand-year-old trees that once rose from this hallowed ground, all sighed in cosmic unison. And far away, a hundred yards into the dark undersea night, Billy heard the plink and plonk of his ball landing and then trickling into the par-five hole. Down in two. Double eagle in the absolute dark. A stone-blind perfect, flawless shot. Hidden in the blackest of nights, Billy stood naked in the dark, his skin aflame, a majestic glow from within. Twenty-one under par.

  Not Buddha or Jesus Christ or even Ben Hogan had ever shot a round that low. No living or dead human being had even dreamed of accomplishing such a feat. And Billy Sprague had done it in the absolute dark.

  No one to verify it, no one to check his scorecard. And no need for any of that. For Billy knew with dead certainty that he could repeat the feat tomorrow and the day after and into the indefinite future. Nothing could deter him, nothing could ever disrupt the absolute calm, the utter certainty that possessed him now. He was in love and he had transcended the mortal plane. He was the golfer of all golfers. The new paradigm. He would never have to open his eyes again.

  He drew the cool night air into his lungs and hefted his bag and set off across the damp grass. He loved Rita and he loved this game. He loved the dark. He loved his nakedness. Billy Sprague had played the ultimate round of golf. He’d done it blind, and in so doing he had changed the world as we know it. He had met and surpassed Earle Doc Toland’s greatest wishes for him. My God, he’d creamed that little ball. Creamed it and creamed it again and lofted it with magical and unearthly precision into the tiny invisible holes hidden in the absolute dark.

  And yet it was only humility he felt. The sober, quiet joy and modesty toward this exalted sport.

  As he slid his seven-iron back in the bag, he heard their voices. People in the distance. A woman’s shrill inflection. Instantly he recognized the whining voice. He had listened to that sniveling mewl for years. Daisy Sprague, his ghoulish ex-wife, come to haunt him on the most perfect night of his life.

  “There’s a naked guy out there playing golf.”

  Fernando Gaspara, El Puma, adjusted his night-vision goggles. The world was a green, fuzzy glow. And thirty yards away there was a naked man stalking up onto the green, bending over to retrieve his ball from the hole.

  The four of them had just arrived at the castle and were wandering around in the damp cheerless cold trying to figure out how they were going to crash this party and display what a fearsome golf machine El Puma had once again become. At that moment they were plodding across the eighteenth fairway, shivering and complaining about the marshy dankness, the bog fog.

  “Ah yes, those are most certainly the flanks and backside and butt and shapely posterior of the man you once loved.” El Puma tucked the shirttails of his pink Ban-Lon shirt into his orange-and-black plaid Sansabelt slacks. Behind him in the dark was the Doctor, so pleased with the Spaniard’s steely new swing that he’d given up his attempts to alter the man’s sense of fashion. “Yes, Mrs. Sprague, that does appear to be your former husband,” the Doctor said.

  “My Billy?”

  Bringing up the rear of their little entourage, Putt Fenno stumbled over his own feet. He’d been doing that ever since he’d put on those damn night-vision goggles. Couldn’t see a freaking thing in them. The whole goddamn night was green, like he was lying facedown in the fairway.

  “The pro at Squat Possum?” Putt Fenno said. “That loser?”

  Daisy Sprague couldn’t help herself. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out into the dark night. She shouted her Billy’s secret pet name.

  “Doofus! Oh, Doofus!”

  As she stepped forward through the wet grass, she felt something tug at her right shoe. She peered down, glimpsing through her night-vision goggles a small round
button protruding from the grass. Just as she put her full weight on the unknown, triggerlike thing, suddenly the night bloomed a dazzling white around them.

  Something very much like a mushroom cloud enveloped the four obnoxious interlopers, and the million million molecules that composed them were instantaneously minced and double minced and minced a few more times until every solid part of their earthly forms was converted to gas, and together the four of them rose in a noxious cloud, mingling with the fog and mist, the dense broth that passed for air in that part of the world, tainting it for a moment. And then they were gone.

  “Did you hear that?” Billy Angel, who was actually Le Tour and working for Phillip Bates, asked.

  “How could I not hear it?” said Rita Shaughnessy. “It was an explosion of the first magnitude.”

  Rita was unbuttoning the pearl snaps on her ecru blouse. She’d never had a rock star before. It was an itch she was ready to scratch.

  “That explosion,” Rita said, “it reminds me of an orgasm I once had.”

  “Well, for me,” Angel/Le Tour said, “that explosion reminds me of the song I’m going to sing tonight to the assemblage of important media personalities and bigwig dignitaries. The pope, royalty, everyone who is anyone or has ever been anyone, or has ever heard of or seen anyone or read so much as a People magazine article about anyone, including Tammy Faye Bakker, that great golf redneck.”

  “Hey,” Rita said. “I didn’t come to your room for a serenade. I came for that margarita you promised. And a little male companionship, though I’m certainly hoping it’s not too little.”