The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  “After you,” Billy Sprague said.

  “No way,” Zamora said. “Hit the ball, Gomer.”

  “Alphabetical order on the first tee, gentlemen,” Bates said from his cart. “Except for me. I’m last no matter what.”

  Billy Sprague teed up one of the tournament balls and, almost as if he didn’t even care, hit the ball twenty yards beyond Rita’s.

  “Nice shot,” Zamora said, addressed his ball, then hit it directly into the ball washer. But he’d hit it pretty good. The ball rebounded into the Plexiglas shield of Bates’s cart, then bounced madly across the fairway into the far end of the crater.

  “Mulligan?” Billy said.

  “The day I take a mulligan from you, hayseed, is the day I give up golf,” Zamora said. “Ground under repair,” he added. “Free drop.”

  Meantime, a commotion had arisen in the gallery, where Henry Kissinger, Al Gore — both all decked out in the same pink plaid knickers and matching sweaters and shirts — and Margaret Thatcher in a tweed skirt and sensible sweater, waited behind the tee. Bob Costas, trying to move into a tougher sport — politics — was trying to talk to Kissinger and Gore. Kissinger, who didn’t know who Costas was, and Gore, who did, refused to talk to little Bobby.

  Phillip Bates watched with a raised eyebrow, then turned to his teed-up ball and, with a stroke as jerky as a marionette’s dance or an old liberal’s version of the Mashed Potato, scuffed his drive about a hundred yards down the center of the fairway. Of course, it didn’t matter. The small gallery was mostly watching the shouting match among the pinkish plaid, who squabbled like a flock of guinea hens. And what the viewers of the Jumbotron in the castle saw, transmitted by the miniaturized virtual reality suit built into Bates’s clothes to the PC in the cart and then to the main console in the castle, where it was enhanced, was a Phillip Bates swing as fluid as Rita’s and stronger than Billy’s that carried to another landing area no bigger than a queen-size bed seventy yards beyond their balls.

  The virtual Bates won the hole with a perfect flag-high wedge, followed by a fourteen-foot putt across two breaks for a birdie. The actual Zamora, blinking wildly to clean last night’s tequila scum off his contacts, scrambled to a workingman’s par while Billy and Rita made pars as casually as they made love. Nobody even noticed when the real Phillip Bates gave himself a six-footer for an eight.

  The rest of the front nine went the same way. Billy and Rita cruised, giggling a lot, paying more attention to each other than the game, both making the turn three under, Zamora scrambling just to stay even, and Bates a virtual dream but an actual disaster. He’d taken to obviously cheating but still was twenty over. Zamora’s contacts were so cloudy that the oak trees looked like large green rocks, the ball a faint gleam at his feet. He had to do something.

  “Hector,” Zamora whispered to his caddy as he dropped his contacts into his huge hand, “I forgot to clean these fucking things. You gotta hustle up to my room and clean them. You’ll find the stuff in the nightstand.”

  “I don’t know nothing about this shit, man.”

  “Then read the fucking instructions, dumb fuck.”

  Hector’s stone forehead wrinkled as imperceptibly as the earth’s crust does under the influence of continental drift. Names hurt him. “Who’s gonna carry your clubs, boss? You ain’t carried clubs in twenty-five years.”

  “I’ll put them on the geek’s cart,” Zamora said quickly. “Now run, Hector. I’m running out of holes.”

  Hector paused for a moment, handed the bag to his boss, then lumbered away in dreadfully slow motion. Zamora stepped over to Bates’s cart, slammed his bag into the carrier, then fastened the strap.

  “What are you doing?” Bates squealed.

  “My caddy,” Zamora said. “He had a personal emergency.”

  “He had what?”

  “We gonna play golf?” Zamora said, repeating St. Peter’s line to God in the old joke, “or fuck around?”

  Across the tee, Billy wrapped his arm around Rita’s shoulders. She fit surprisingly snugly for such a large woman, and quite warmly for a woman who didn’t want to be possessed. “You’ve changed,” he said.

  “So have you,” she responded.

  “You make it all right, lady.”

  “What’s with the bet? You planning to go home broke?”

  “I’m planning to go home with you,” he said.

  “You planning to bear down on the back nine, boy?” she asked with a smile so dazzling that caddies two holes away tripped over their erections.

  “What do you think?”

  “Press,” she said.

  “I don’t think it’s right to press with money you don’t have.”

  “Press with my money,” she said. “The little fart owns a controlling interest in a course up in the mountains outside Ruidoso, New Mexico. Great scenery, perfect weather, and the sweetest eighteen holes you’ve ever seen.”

  “What would we do with a golf course?”

  “Be the happiest club pros in America,” she said. “It’s become increasingly clear that I can’t handle the Tour without liberal doses of drugs, alcohol, and . . .” At this point, Rita paused and blushed, an emotion so unfamiliar she thought she’d suddenly been overcome by dengue fever. Billy, on the other hand, thought the blush made her look incredibly cute.

  “. . . and aimless, unsatisfying sex.”

  “Can you stand a press, Zamora!” Billy shouted across the tee box.

  Zamora, who had never refused a bet in his life, answered without thinking. “You bet your skinny gringo ass,” he said, “and how about pressing on her ass, too.”

  “That’s not my style anymore,” Rita answered softly.

  Then, realizing that he couldn’t even make out Sprague’s face, Zamora hustled over to Rita’s caddy, snatched the glasses off his face, and quickly placed them on his. It wasn’t perfect, but, damn, it was better, so much better, in fact, that he felt like a new man and apologized to Rita.

  “Sorry,” Zamora said. “No problem.”

  Rita and Billy exchanged amazed looks. Bates angrily plowed the cart down the path, glanced over his shoulder at Zamora’s bag as if it were a large, ugly backseat driver.

  Back in Bates’s room the Spanish maid had nearly finished draining the thick gel out of the water bed. She turned to the stack of distilled water she planned to replace it with and didn’t notice the pencil-slim remote detonator slip into the drain tube. Maria was no fool, and not a terrorist either. She was just a good peasant girl with a better job than she’d ever dreamed possible. And out of the heat too. She hated the heat, loved the clotted Scottish skies, the cold rain that felt like a blessing on her face. As she had changed the damp sheets, it occurred to her that perhaps she should change the water. It felt thick and tired. Maybe it had gotten old. Everything else did. Except for her boss. His image on the room’s windows looked as fresh and clean as a baby’s smile.

  As Hector shambled as fast as he could past the following foursome on the ninth tee, he wondered who the gray golfer might be. Al Gore had taken the occasional raindrop and the gusting wind as an excuse to encase his pink plaid in the death pallor of a cheap gray plastic rain suit. Kissinger had pulled a hamstring trying to evade the odd little man with the microphone and the oddly unruffled hair. Mrs. Thatcher was playing solid bogey golf, perfectly happy that it had only taken two rounds fired at Bob Costas’s feet from the Webley .455 she carried in her bag to get him to move away. Of course, at the sound of the shots, automatic-weapon actions slammed back all over the course, chambering rounds, followed by muffled cursing as the security details unloaded their pieces.

  Ned, still heartbroken over what he presumed was Edna’s reinvolvement with Thomas Franklin, needed some place to direct his anger, so he grabbed the giant Hector as he passed.

  “Where you headed, partner?”

  Zamora’s contacts Frisbee’d into the air, tiny saucers gleaming briefly in the ashen light before they dove into the rough grass like kam
ikaze alien ships just as the storm broke with a burst of lightning and a clap of thunder like an explosion.

  “I’ve got a wife in Homestead,” Hector answered, “another in Tampico, and a third one growing mota outside of Mendocino. So I guess I’m going home, wherever they’ll take me in.”

  “Some people have all the luck,” Ned said, distracted by the sudden appearance of Edna’s sturdy body revealed among the dark shadowed trunks of the oaks by a flash of lightning. He also swore he’d seen Thomas’s lumpy form lurching toward her.

  Then a wall of rain as thick as flying mud swept over the course, felling fat ewes and unstable golfers alike in its wild wake. But Ned had his bearings and would not be deterred.

  Another lightning bolt split a giant oak just off the tenth tee, then bounced off to scatter Zamora’s clubs. The lead foursome would have fallen down if they could have.

  “What should we do?” Bates squealed as soon as he could.

  “Hold up a one-iron!” Zamora shouted through the rain. “Not even God can hit a one-iron!” He had survived a direct strike once before and always played well after a close call. He was happy.

  “Jesus,” Rita said quietly as she and Billy huddled under an umbrella, her marvelous breasts beautiful beneath the damp Ban-Lon. “That was close.”

  “I’m hard as the fifteenth at Augusta,” Billy said, drawing her into the shelter of the shattered oak.

  The rain was over almost as quickly as it began. The fat ewes scrambled to their feet more quickly than the golfers. They had been molested by men in kilts before. Ned had worked his way into the dark forest. Thomas was jumping up and down, shouting at Edna about political and personal betrayal when Ned stepped around a thick oak trunk and shot him in the back of the head with his 10mm Glock. It was a bit of overkill at that range. Most of Franklin’s brain and a recognizable chunk of his nose lay at Edna’s feet.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

  “Protecting myself,” Ned said, hysterically calm. He’d never shot anything before, not even a ratty-ass gull, much less a man. Either he was breathing too much or not enough. “I guess. I didn’t exactly think about it,” he added. “I loved you, Edna, and you spent the night with him.”

  “What you don’t know would fill a book, you idiot,” she said, glancing down at what was left of Franklin. “Do you perchance have some plan in mind?”

  “I don’t know,” Ned said, unable to get the picture of J. Edgar in drag out of his head. “I think perhaps I’ll shoot you, then myself,” he suggested.

  “Great plan, you idiot.”

  “Just off the top of my head, you know.”

  “I think I’ve got something a bit better,” Edna said. “Think Grand Cayman.”

  “Grand what?” he asked. “Giant reptile?”

  “A three-acre cay, six-bedroom house, and a million dollars tax free,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” Ned said.

  Edna dug into her purse, pulled out papers, waving them at him. “A fake Canadian passport, title to the cay and the house, letter of credit. We can disappear, you fool, have a real life,” she said as she moved toward him and stuffed the papers back into her purse. “Nobody trying to break your arms and legs, darling. I’ll make you forget that pimple-butted geek the first night.”

  “But what about the FBI — ” Ned started to say.

  A tiny woman who looked like Nancy Lopez stepped from behind a tree and fired a round from a small pistol into Ned’s head just behind the right ear.

  “Fucking FBI, my ass!” she screamed.

  Edna knew that golfers were crazy, but she couldn’t think of a reason for Nancy Lopez to shoot Ned. Though Edna was glad she had saved her the trouble. Edna also didn’t know Nancy was so tiny. Maybe television made her look larger — like they say, the camera always adds ten pounds — and maybe it also masked the thick Scottish accent.

  “Why did you do that?” Edna asked.

  “The rat-fuck was going to do you, luv,” Sheena said calmly. “And I hate fucking Yanks. Particularly the FB-fucking-I. And, unless I’m misinformed, we work for the same man.” She lifted her wig to show Edna something of her real self.

  “Well, thank you. I think.”

  “That thing you said,” Sheena said, “about the island. Is that true? You must be more important to Bates than me, luv.”

  Edna preened. “I arranged the whole scam with the Semtex. Kept the FBI on the wrong track. And I can’t even begin to tell you the sort of personal services I had to perform. Let’s just say that his mother was very fond of champagne and high colonics.”

  “Enemas?” Sheena said. “Poor child.”

  “Sympathy is harder to come by when you’re involved.”

  “But that thing you said about the island?”

  “Just blowing a little smoke up Neddy’s ass,” Edna said as she reached into her purse. “Just some old papers — ”

  Edna nearly had the 10mm Glock out of her purse by the time Sheena emptied the Walther’s clip into her forehead. Edna died without another word. Sheena piled the three bodies into the rill where she’d earlier stashed Ox and Angus — good Scotsmen, true, but blinded by personal agendas — then she went through Edna’s purse, pulled out the important papers, and gave Edna’s fake Canadian passport picture a long look.

  “I can do that,” Sheena quietly said to herself, then glanced at the pile of bodies and the circle of ravens circling above. “And after I do Mr. Bates, I could do with a vacation.”

  Sheena pulled a tiny laptop tuned to Phillip Bates’s Jumbotron signal out of her backpack. But instead of a picture of the virtual Bates on the tenth tee, Sheena saw a touching shot of the actual naked Bates masturbating with a golf glove to a videotape of the Shark’s collapse in the ’96 Masters.

  “I’ll be doing you a favor, Master Bates,” Sheena whispered as she jammed another clip into the Walther and shoved it into her bra holster. “You poor bastard.” Then she quickly hacked into the Jumbotron. She couldn’t block Bates’s private file from being transmitted to the screens in the castle, but she could block the feed to the whole wide world. Sheena just wanted to kill the little bastard. She didn’t want to humiliate him.

  In the great hall of the castle, a small group finished brunch. Only Dan Quayle, Marlon Brando, and the limping pope seemed to notice that something weird had replaced the golf tournament being broadcast over the Jumbotron: Phillip Bates whacking off to golf.

  “Thank God Sean Connery has left,” murmured the pope in Polish, crossing himself, “and thank God that there will be no children.”

  “What’s that man doing?” Quayle sincerely wanted to know.

  “Working on his short game,” Brando snorted. “’Cause that’s the only game he’s got.”

  Celebrity guests and Macrodyne employees stirred frantically like gulls over a garbage scow, then fled like rats as it sank.

  After the storm, the sky cleared. The Scottish sun even came out. The sheep lay down, butt to butt for protection, and dried out. Some of them for the first time in their lives.

  As the first foursome played the back nine, only Zamora, with his new glasses, seemed to notice that the rest of the course was oddly deserted. Even the television crews and security details seemed to have disappeared. He didn’t care though. With his newfound sight, Alfonzo knew that now he could hustle golf the rest of his life. He had politely offered Rita’s caddy a turn with the glasses, but the gnome declined happily. The caddy had used his newly recovered myopia to bump into Rita’s hard and beautiful body a dozen times on each hole. Post-Calvinist jism poured from his body like arterial blood. The front of his kilt dripped like a junkie’s nose. But neither Rita nor Billy noticed. The three-stroke encounter behind the oak tree had made them oblivious to anything outside of themselves. Rita’s hair seemed naturally blond for the first time in years. Billy grinned like a possum in a persimmon tree.

  And Phillip Bates? He was playing the best golf of his life. Surviving the l
ightning strike had focused him perfectly. Not once did he think of his business or his billion dollars, not of his odd mother, who was after all just another lonely old woman, and the media fools who treated him like an odd but interesting child. All that went out of his mind. Phillip was the club, the ball, and the hole. He was also very happy.

  Zamora had a couple of strokes of bad luck. On the par-three thirteenth his seven-iron looked dead stiff. Until it hit the flagstick and bounced into a bunker as deep as a grave and about half as wide. His bogey against Billy’s birdie cost him two of his four strokes. On the par-four sixteenth Zamora hit one of his classic three-wood fades two hundred forty yards into the elevated green. Just like him, though, it was a little fat and a little short. His ball buried itself so deeply into the side of a bunker guarding the front of the green that only the Z was visible. Zamora saved par with the best sand shot of a life filled with thousands of great sand shots. Then a fifty-foot lag putt that stopped six inches below the hole on the steeply sloped green. But Billy Sprague’s tap-in for an eagle wiped out Zamora’s last two strokes.

  “You just got to love it,” Billy said to Zamora on the seventeenth tee.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “The golf,” Billy said, still grinning. “That was a great hole, man. You’re a genius, Zamora. Nobody in the world can recover from bad luck like you.”

  “Thanks, amigo. You ain’t playing too badly yourself.” Being able to see had turned Zamora back into the affable goof he’d been in his younger days.

  “It’s a great fucking tournament, Mr. Bates,” Billy said. Rita blushed again. Her caddy almost fainted. Billy repeated himself. “A great tournament.”