The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  “Here’s my song,” Billy Angel said. “I wrote it just now without the aid of either a sense of rhythm or a brain.”

  “Spare me,” Rita said.

  But he did not.

  I think the sky is as big as a golf course.

  And the white puffy clouds float like golf balls

  Rolling rolling rolling rolling across the heavens

  Up out of bunkers

  Up out of the deep rough

  Up out of bondage and servitude and dopitude

  The balls loft into the sky, they fall and they roll

  We are the champions of the world

  We are the eye of the tiger of the world

  Golf is rough, golf is bunk, golf is a hazard and a good walk

  Through the manicured woods. Rolling, rolling, rolling, rawhide.

  “You like it, Rita? I’m dedicating it to you.”

  “Rawhide?”

  “It’s an allusion to one of the great songs of my youth. Hell-bent for leather, wishing my gal was by my side.”

  Rita began to rebutton her blouse. She was pleased to discover that there were limits to her lechery. It came with the force of a religious revelation. Rita Shaughnessy actually was capable of some limited sexual discrimination.

  “I see you’re buttoning your blouse, Rita,” said Le Tour, who was still masquerading successfully as Billy Angel. “Am I to infer that you were not aroused by my ballad? Does this mean you will not be my groupie after all?”

  Rita finished buttoning the blouse. Then she tucked it back into the waistband of her plaid skirt. She felt like a schoolgirl. Clean and chaste. She had made a liberating decision. She was free of licentiousness, no longer a slave to the heat in her loins. She had turned down a rock star. A blond rock star at that.

  Billy Angel said, “I make a pretty mean margarita. One sip and you’ll be buzzing for a week. You won’t care if you hook or slice or top or cup. You’ve never been bombed, Rita, until you’ve been bombed by me.”

  Rita hesitated at the doorway, staring at Le Tour, who she continued to mistakenly believe was Billy Angel.

  “Thanks, kiddo, but no. I think I’ll pass.”

  “Oh, come now. Wouldn’t you rather pass out, my dear? I make a mean one. A doozie.”

  Rita licked her lips. Though the heat in her loins had cooled, her thirst had not abated. “No,” she said. “I’ve got other plans.”

  “Not that Possum Squat golfing pro. Please tell me you’re not throwing me aside for that total washout, flop, and failure, that fizzle and dud.”

  “Billy Sprague,” she said, “is twice the man you are.”

  “You walk out that door and you’ll be sorry, lovely Rita meter maid. You’ll be very very fuckin’ sorry. I promise you that.”

  She blew a kiss and walked.

  “They’re not eating their Jell-O,” Phillip Bates said to Marlon Brando, who sat across from him. “They have to eat their Jell-O. It doesn’t work if they don’t eat their Jell-O.”

  “Are you all right?” said Marlon. “Do you need help of some kind, a Heimlich maneuver perhaps? It’s a good way to get the meat chunks loose.”

  “They have to eat the Jell-O. I thought everyone loved Jell-O.”

  “I believe this gathering is really more of a liver pâté crowd,” said Marlon. “If you ask me, Jell-O’s a little boorish.”

  “But they have to eat it. The whole thing falls apart if they don’t eat their Jell-O. Somebody’s got to make them do it.”

  “Perhaps you could pay them,” Brando said. “Bribe them to clean their plates. It always worked for my mother.”

  “Master Bates?” It was Edna Zuckerman again. She was standing behind his chair looking very distressed.

  “I asked you not to call me that.”

  “Master Bates, we have a little problem.”

  “They’re not eating their Jell-O. Now that’s a problem.”

  “Uh, no sir. This is a little more serious, I’m afraid. We must take immediate action or the fate of the world as we know it may be irrevocably altered.”

  “But that’s what the Jell-O’s for.”

  “Master Bates, if you’ll just step outside for a mo-ment.”

  Marlon Brando was stealing a slab of beef off Barbara Walters’s plate as she engaged in a lively discussion with Prince Harry to her right.

  “Master Bates, please! There’s not much time. If we don’t do something quickly, this entire structure, the golf project, and everyone in this castle will be obliterated.”

  “How quickly?” Master Bates said.

  Edna took a furious look at her wristwatch.

  “I’d say we only have a few pages left. Master Bates, please, if we don’t do something in that amount of time, forget it. We’re all doomed.”

  Chapter Nine

  RIGHT INTO THE

  HEART OF THE CUP

  by James Crumley

  When the three pounds of Semtex exploded along the eighteenth fairway, Sheena Cameron came out of her self-induced yoga coma, buried in a cairn of heather and gorse, salt grass and thistle, smelling, she thought, like a pretentious Celtic folk band. She had sensed the violence in Le Tour’s fingers a millisecond before he tried to break her neck.

  Fortunately, her grandmother had been a hippie. Aggie Cameron had followed any number of second-rate British rock bands to India and had come back to Scotland with three things: five keys of temple hash, a thorough schooling in yoga, and Sheena’s mother. When the hash sold out, Aggie supported herself, her daughter, and eventually her granddaughter by faking death and disaster in auto-pedestrian accidents. Her daughter wasn’t interested in following the family tradition — a bit of rebellion perhaps, or a more abiding interest in the sexual merits of mental concentration and joys of a physical agility verging on the truly double-jointed — but Sheena was an apt pupil of the big con. And amazingly limber in the sack too.

  The broken neck–death coma was the most lucrative trick of all, but also the hardest. Sheena came out of her coma with a splitting headache and a seriously bad attitude, discarded the drying vegetation that covered her, then struggled slowly toward the lights of the women’s locker room through the lashings of a rain-shot North Sea wind, dragging her left leg like Frankenstein’s monster. It took an hour, but finally she found herself standing in the locker where Le Tour had stashed her Walther PPK/S, a notoriously inaccurate pistol except at very close range. Except in the hands of James Bond or Sheena Cameron. She fell into a deep but troubled sleep, clutching an ancient golf shoe to her chest as her system shut down in relief.

  Sheena didn’t know how long she had been in standby state, but her clothes were still soaked when she was awakened by the low crooning of a familiar song from an old-time American television program. “Rawhide.” What the fuck? she thought in a Scottish accent. With a rush of warmth, Sheena suddenly remembered that her beloved granny had loved the actor who had played Gil Favor because his face was mostly plastic and he looked dead. Granny Aggie could identify with that. Sheena peeked through the locker door’s louvers. Billy Angel was fixing his mascara at the mirror across the room. He had come into the ladies’ loo because Sean Connery had driven him out of the men’s with a giant two-handed claymore he had snatched from his golf bag, threatening to cut off Billy’s curly head and shove it up his sissy bum.

  “Rawhide, my fucking ass!” Sheena screamed as she burst from the locker and buried the spikes of the golf shoe heel into the back of Le Tour’s head. He just had time to see her reflection in the mirror, turn white, and die, with no chance at all to appreciate her political rant. “Random violence is just fucking random violence, you moron, when it lacks political motive!” she shouted. “Scotland is for the Scots.”

  “Right on, lady!” a deep voice shouted through the vent between the locker rooms, but Sheena paid no attention. Had she known it was Sean Connery, Sheena would have done a Godzilla through the drywall and thrown herself on her knees in front of his kilt. She might be a terrorist
but she was Scottish, after all, and a woman nonetheless.

  She stashed Le Tour in an empty locker, then it was the work of only a few moments, a small batch of makeup and a wig, for Sheena to turn herself into a fairly credible if somewhat miniature version of Nancy Lopez. She stepped back into the locker, fell into the cadence of her breathing, and slept as innocently as a south Alabama redneck safely escaped from a family reunion.

  The foursome assembled on the first tee the next morning consisted of Rita Shaughnessy, Billy Sprague, Alfonzo Zamora — with Hector at last pried from his cot — and Phillip Bates. In the deep gray light Rita and Billy, still in the throes of newfound love, sparkled like diamonds in the rough in spite of the wet, windy fog that always presages a Scottish storm. Zamora looked a bit like a badly hungover Mexican mole. He had fallen deeply into the tequila the night before and had forgotten to clean his contacts that morning, so from the inside they looked like a wino’s pissy sunglasses. Bates acted like a teenager with only three dollars in a border-town whorehouse, rocking from foot to foot, hustling his nuts as if to make sure that nobody had stolen them, and grinning as sadly as an egg-sucking hound with yolk on his nose. They were surrounded by television crews and bodyguards and a small gallery that included Ned, Edna, and Thomas, still working undercover. Everyone carefully avoided looking at the fresh crater surrounded by ground-under-repair yellow tape where the eighteenth fairway had once stood.

  But one of the television cameramen had his camera pointed up into a three-hundred-year-old oak just off the first tee box, a tree that seemed to be decorated for a druid festival, festooned with crows and ravens perched sullenly in the oak’s sturdy branches bearing obvious bits of flesh and clothing. One of the ravens held Putt Fenno’s gnarled left ear in its beak, his silver cowboy-boot earring clearly visible. As dim-sighted as he was, Zamora swore to himself that he recognized, dangling from a crow’s wing, a bit of tattooed skin flapping in the stiff breeze from the inner thigh of the man who once had thrashed him with a bamboo rod for the constant jerk in his putting stroke. Rita suspected that El Puma’s foreskin was suspended from the crow’s arrogant beak. And Billy Sprague knew without a doubt that the bloody scrap of butt-floss panties stuck to the tree’s bark had belonged to his wretched ex-wife. But he was too happy to think about it.

  Phillip Bates, on the other hand, refused to look at the decorated tree. In fact, he rapped the offending cameraman smartly across the backs of his thighs with the handle of his driver. Once, Bates had secretly flown to Eagleho Sanctuary, Arkansas, for a lesson in caddy-flogging from the famous Dr. Golf, so he knew how to get the best effect from a short, compact swing. The cameraman leapt into the air as if shot, then whimpered delightfully.

  Things had not gone well for Phillip the night before. Nobody ate the cherry Jell-O. Not even Marlon Brando, who at one point had farted so loudly that Charlton Heston had threatened to shotgun his sorry Method ass just as soon as street-sweepers were legal in Polynesia. Marlon didn’t seem too worried. He farted again, even more methodically. Madonna stopped by long enough to complain.

  “Hey, dude,” she said, “I don’t mind when I can smell it. Hell, I don’t even mind when I can taste it. But when it burns my eyes, I’m going home.”

  And promptly did. Perhaps for the first time in her professional career.

  Marlon left too, stumbling over the sleeping pope’s red shoes on his way to his suite to order room service. The pope cursed in Polish so loudly he woke Bob Hope, who slept in a chair across from him. A crowd of Swiss Guards disguised as cardinals rushed to the pope’s side, mini Uzis sweeping the crowd.

  Barbara Walters tried to seduce Phillip Bates into an interview after the small international and religious incident, wanting his side of the story. Bates offered her the Jell-O dish.

  “I ate Jell-O with Ronald Reagan once.” She smirked. “But I’d never do it again. Probably.”

  Castro and Qaddafi were discussing Marx when Fidel asked Mu‘ammar why he wore dresses and eye shadow and couldn’t seem to grow a beard. Mu‘ammar had a screaming hissy fit during which he accused Fidel of being a faggot because of the cigar thing. During the resultant food fight, many bowls of Jell-O were spilled. Phillip Bates saw Margaret Thatcher, whom he secretly adored, with a cube of Jell-O wriggling on her spoon halfway to her mouth. But being a veteran of British politics, Mrs. Thatcher had seen all of the food fights a decent body could stand. So she put her spoon down and left the table as regal as a queen. Bates nearly wept.

  That was the most organized part of the evening. Before the serious drinking began. The resultant events were too disgusting to describe.

  Of course, later most of the Scottish wait staff had some Jell-O because it was free, but as a people they had a long history of aggressive disobedience, so the TEEX had no more effect on them than an English shotgun pointed at their heads.

  Phillip Bates went to bed in his top-floor suite as depressed as he had been since he was seventeen and his mother caught him trying to bugger his favorite hamster. She had buried the hamster’s body in her rose garden, thrashed Phillip with the shovel handle, then spent the rest of the weekend holding him in her lap, kissing his pimpled face and cooing apologies.

  In spite of a long night of severe discipline, including three iced-champagne high colonics provided by a truly disgusted Edna Zuckerman, Bates woke up among twisted sheets damp with his tears, wrapped in the arms of a champagne hangover the size of a grizzly bear, thinking “golf, God’s game” as if it were the resolution to all the painful memories of a painful life. If only he could hit the occasional good drive. Or a decent chip shot. Or a putt that didn’t fall off the far side of the green.

  “Change the bed,” he mumbled to the Spanish maid. She placed a tray on his desk — tea as stout as Mel Gibson’s attitude and scones as sweet and as lovely as Rachel Ward’s legs. “Change the bed,” he repeated as he cracked his shin on the four inches of steel plate beneath the forty-seven pounds of Semtex in the water bed, then stumbled to his desk, wondering once again why so many people he really admired — especially the Australians — refused his repeated invitations to the tournament. Even his mother had declined, muttering something about the abuse of small woolly animals, as if she suspected her son coveted the sleepy congress of koala bears.

  “Sí, señor,” the maid answered sweetly.

  “See what?” Bates growled, then hit the computer. The Jumbotron filled all the windows of Rathgarve with silent, shimmering images. April in Paris. Maybe, or prewar Savannah. Bates wasn’t sure he cared. At least there was golf in his future.

  “Why don’t you break his arms and legs?” Ned Gorman whispered to Thomas Franklin on the verge of the first tee box. Franklin had disguised himself as one of the Spice Girls, but Gorman didn’t think the effect was successful. “You know where she was all night.”

  Franklin had no idea what Gorman was talking about. He presumed Edna had spent the night with this incompetent Yank. “Even if your late boss was a Nancy-boy, Gorman, you don’t have to be a jerk,” he answered. He had his hand at his crotch and was staring raptly at Rita’s large and marvelous buttocks as she rocked on the edge of the tee box, smooth, sleek muscle encased tightly in a pair of white pants. “You couldn’t put a pair of panties under those britches with a paint gun.”

  “You’re a foul and inconstant beast, Thomas Franklin,” Ned said, then huffed away, thinking that J. Edgar had probably worn that same little black dress with the hat and the short heels, and they probably had matched perfectly.

  “You’ve got the honors, Miss Shaughnessy,” Bates said in a surprisingly deep voice, roughened by Tattinger, bad memories, and despair. He almost sounded as if his adolescence was over. “Tee ’em high and let ’em fly,” he said, then slumped nervously in front of the PC in his cart.

  Rita’s gnomish caddy, afraid to touch her hand for fear of a sudden and embarrassing sexual experience, tossed her one of the special gold-plated tournament balls. Rita looked at the ball, then
at Bates, and tossed it back. “You mind if I use my own balls?” she asked pleasantly.

  “If you can find them.” Zamora chuckled as Rita’s caddy, who, like most of the others, wore a kilt for the first time in his life, sniffed the ball as if it were her bicycle seat, the lenses of his Coke-bottle glasses immediately clouding with steam.

  Billy Sprague’s practice swing came so close to Zamora’s head that his hairspray shattered. A boyish cowlick waved in the wind and black curls dangled across his low forehead.

  “Watch it, Tonto,” Zamora said as surly as a teenager. “Unless you want a nine-iron embedded in your forehead.”

  “You’re such a child. How much cash you got on hand?” Billy asked calmly.

  “Quarter of a mil, you Possum Squat son of a bitch,” Zamora said.

  “Want to play for it?” Billy said. “I’ll give you three strokes on the front side and four on the back.”

  Rita turned from her stance over the ball to flash a smile like a beam of sunlight at Billy. Hector shook his giant head as if it were stone.

  “I’ll own your skinny white ass,” Zamora said, his dark eyes glittering with greed and laughter. “And when you’re broke in Bumfuck, Kansas, I’ll take Rita to Mexico and — ”

  “That’s Ohio,” Billy said.

  “Qué?”

  “That’s Bumfuck, Ohio.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Gentlemen,” Bates interrupted. “It doesn’t seem to follow the tournament’s spirit of international peace and economic cooperation to wager on something as pure as golf.”

  “You play the fucking stock market, you pure dipshit,” Zamora said. “We’ll play the golf.”

  Bates didn’t say a word. Zamora stuck out his hand. Billy Sprague just looked at it until Zamora put it back into his pocket. Rita turned on her drive with a swoop as smooth as an eagle’s dive.

  The first hole on Bates’s course was an uphill four-hundred-eighty-yard par-four with a slight dogleg right. Oaks the size of apartment houses blocked the right approach, and a series of bunkers as deep as an elephant graveyard blocked the left. The landing area was in the center of the bunkers and about the size of a small house’s backyard and two hundred eighty yards away. Of course, the Semtex crater on the left didn’t come into play, but it sure caught the eye. Rita’s drive nestled like an egg into a basket right in the middle front of the landing area.