The Putt at the End of the World Read online

  “I’ve been to the beach,” he said, flushing slightly as she bent over another ball.

  She smiled, and bent lower than was necessary toward the ball. She squeezed her arms together, gave an exaggerated waggle of the club just as Vin turned his gaze from her breasts toward the distant mountains.

  Rita smiled to herself. Vin was her agent and business manager, but he was fairly new to the job. He was young — younger than she was, at least — and he would take time to break in. But unlike Nathaniel Phillips, her previous manager, Vin had not so far tried to tell her what to do. He had been content to couch his suggestions about what you might call her “exuberant” lifestyle in relatively deferential terms. This deference had a great deal to do with the fact that she was one of Vin’s better-known clients, that despite her spotty earnings on the tour these past few years, there were few in the world of sports who were unaware of the accomplishments of Rita Shaughnessy, both on and off the course.

  And even though he hadn’t much to show for all his efforts on her behalf, Vin was eager and energetic, even sincere at times. After all, he’d managed to get her into this clinic, when the Betty Ford had declined to re-enroll her after what had taken place during her fourth sojourn there. Besides that, she thought, he was cute, in a Jerry McGuire kind of way. It had been a while since she’d been around a man whom she could make blush. That in itself made him attractive.

  “I had a call from the clinic director this morning,” Vin said, watching another shot soar out into the desert sky.

  “You two are getting chummy,” Rita said. She tipped the half-empty range bucket on its side, flipped a ball to a relatively unmarked spot on the chopped-up carpet with the wedge blade.

  “She’s a bit concerned. She thinks you’re backsliding.”

  “Nonsense,” Rita said. She put a little something extra into her downswing. There was a sharp report as the ball hit the top of the pavilion, and the old couple ducked in reflex.

  She turned to him, hooked a finger to adjust a bra strap. “The director’s a twenty-four handicapper in a scratch-event world. She’s just upset about the cook.”

  Vin shook his head. “She didn’t say anything about a cook.”

  “The director of cuisine,” Rita said. “That’s his title. He’s really not such a bad guy, though. We made friends; he comes up to the bungalow now and then, brings a little cooking sherry along — ”

  “Jesus, Rita.”

  “He’s the one who found me the clubs.” She pointed to the eelskin bag leaning in the corner, a black monster that looked large enough to house a colony of bats. “Nicklaus left them here.”

  Vin stared. “Jack Nicklaus came to the Forbes?”

  “My mistake,” Rita said. “I meant Nicholson. The actor.”

  “Oh,” Vin said.

  The old couple had ventured a few steps out onto the gravel path that led from the pavilion toward the red-tile-roofed cluster of buildings that constituted the main compound of the clinic. Rita lobbed a pair of wedge shots in quick succession, and the balls smacked down into the sand, bracketing the pathway like mortar fire. The old couple yelped and scurried back under cover.

  “Have you been drinking?” Vin asked.

  “Is it five o’clock yet?”

  “Ten past,” he told her.

  “There’s your answer,” she said.

  “You promised you were going to buckle down, really work on things this time around, Rita. That’s how I got them to agree to take you.”

  She turned to him, wide-eyed. “What do you call this?” she asked, sweeping her arm toward the neat circle of balls below. “Just watch.” She brushed past him, close enough to send him into full-fledged blush, picked up an empty martini glass from the patio table. She walked out onto the strip of grass that abutted the bungalow and bent from the waist to settle the glass securely. She glanced back toward the patio through the inverted V of her legs, but Vin seemed to be examining his fingernails.

  She came back to the patio, adopted a wide-open stance, sent a flop shot in the direction of the glass. The ball landed a foot past the glass, bit hard, leapt backward. There was a tinkling sound as the ball settled into the conical bottom. She glanced up at him and grinned.

  “Now there’s a garnish,” she said. “Two jiggers of vodka, splash of Rose’s lime juice, add a Titleist 2. I’m still working on what to call it.”

  Vin glanced at the glass, then down toward the pavilion. The elderly couple had taken advantage of the moment, were hotfooting it up the path toward the main compound. Rita watched them for a moment, then turned back to him, a sorrowful expression on her face. “Some people have absolutely no sense of humor,” she said.

  Vin nodded, but he wasn’t agreeing with anything. “You’re going to have to leave here, Rita. That’s what I came down to tell you.”

  She turned to stare at him. “Hey, Vin, I’m just having a little fun, that’s all.”

  “They messengered in a refund check,” he said. “And they’ve agreed not to say anything to the press so long as you just go quietly — ”

  “Geez, Vin, stop trying to sugarcoat it. How do they really feel about me here?”

  “I assured the director we’d have you packed up and out before dark . . .”

  Rita saw something in Vin’s face, felt an unaccountable pang shoot through her. She’d had a sudden flash of the incident that had brought her to Forbes. Not halfway through the Jenny Jones Invitational in Santa Barbara, twenty-four strokes over par, at the dead bottom of the pack, a lock to miss her tenth cut in a row. She’d ducked into the ladies for a little pick-me-up toot, had dropped everything onto the floor. She’d been on her hands and knees in front of the toilet, snorting whatever looked right through a rolled-up twenty when Nancy Lopez had walked in on her. Rita had caught a glimpse of her stunned face before she whirled away, slamming the door in her wake.

  She’d stood up, wiped the grime off her knees, smoothed her skirt, and walked out in the bright sunshine, then straight across the fairway and into the clubhouse bar. Someone had called Vin to come get her later that night. Much later. Good old Vin, she thought. She seemed to remember throwing up in his car.

  She laid the wedge down across the patio table, took a step toward him. “Hey, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll drop it in reverse a couple of notches, I promise . . .”

  “It’s too late, Rita.”

  “Come on, Vin. You’re right. I need to work on things a little while. I’m not ready to go back out on tour, not just yet. A couple more weeks here, I can get it together — ”

  “Rita!”

  She heard a note in his voice she never had before, enough to stop her. Stop her dead. She stared back at him.

  So quiet here in the desert, she realized. In the distance, she could hear the sound of music. Mozart, most likely. They liked to pipe Mozart through the public area speakers just before dinnertime.

  “Where am I going to go, Vin?” she said, hating the plaintive tone she heard in her own voice. “I sublet my place in Malibu. They blackballed me at Chateau Marmont, I got this huge tab at Sportsman’s Lodge — ”

  He held up one hand like a traffic cop, was reaching into his coat pocket with the other. “You know me, Rita, I’d never leave you flapping in the wind.” He handed over an envelope.

  “What’s this?” she asked. She noticed her fingers were trembling as she took the paper.

  He shrugged. “It’s a kind of corporate thing — ”

  “Oh no, Vinnie. I told you, no more outings with the suits. I hate those assholes. They’re all like Rodney Dangerfield, without the jokes — ”

  “You’re not in a position,” he cut in, and the chill in his tone stopped her again. He saw the look in her eyes and glanced away, softening his voice. “The money’s good,” he said. “Damned good, considering.” He held up his hand to keep her from saying anything. “The best thing is, this one’s out of the country. It’ll get you out of the eye of the storm for a bit . . .”

&nbs
p; “Out of the country? As in where?”

  “Scotland,” he told her.

  “Scotland, huh. Who’s the sponsor, Cutty Sark?”

  “You wish,” he told her dryly. “This is something Phillip Bates cooked up.”

  “Bates? The guy who owns Macrodyne Software?”

  Vin shrugged. “They wouldn’t let him in Augusta, he built his own course in Scotland.” He pointed at the envelope. “It tells about it in there. He bought a castle, several hundred acres on the coast north of Edinburgh. Apparently, there was one hole there already, the earliest anyone’s ever found. Bates added another seventeen. No one’s ever played the course. No one’s even seen it.”

  She opened the envelope, saw something flutter toward the carpet at their feet. She reached out, snatched the check in midair. She turned it over, checked the figure, looked up at Vin in surprise. “All this for a round of golf?” she said. “What else do I have to do?”

  “Hey, the guy’s made of money,” he said. “And that’s after my cut.”

  She took a breath then, tapping the check speculatively with a nail. “I dunno, Vin . . . all that way . . . and there’s a lot of scotch in Scotland.”

  “There’s a lot of scotch everywhere, Rita.”

  She nodded disconsolately. “Maybe you could come along?” Her voice rose hopefully.

  “I wish I could,” he told her. “But you’ll have to handle this one on your own.”

  She glanced down at the check once more. She’d held bigger in her day. But she’d be hard pressed to remember just how long it had been. All that money that had come and gone. Would it have been any different if she’d gone into computer programming? she wondered.

  “We can always tell them no,” Vin was saying.

  She glanced up at him, feeling the chill that always came to the desert about this time of day. She turned, picked up her robe from one of the patio chairs, wrapped it tightly around her. She reached and patted Vin’s well-tanned cheek.

  “Never mind that,” she told him. And went to pack her things.

  Squat Possum Golf Club, near Cambridge, Ohio

  “Lordy, what a shot,” the man in the gimmee cap said, watching Billy Sprague’s ball drift down toward the tiny green set in the valley floor far below. “It’s going in.”

  “No it isn’t,” Sprague said calmly. He was tall and angular, with a certain resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, his voice carrying a similar down-home twang that lent an extra note of gravity to whatever he said. “It’s going to hit about six feet past the pin, and stick.”

  There were four men in the group altogether, and they stood watching from an elevated tee, built on a ridge that had once been part of a strip-mining tract. When demand for soft coal had fallen sometime in the late forties, the strip mine had been abandoned, and the golf course constructed atop its somewhat softened contours. The project had been the brainchild of Earle “Doc” Toland, who’d picked up the land for a song and built the course despite the general disparagement of the surrounding community’s business leaders, most of whom thought the site far more suited to become a bass-fishing lake, or perhaps a tire vulcanizing plant, maybe even the town dump.

  Toland, however, was something of a visionary. He had traveled to Europe, studied medicine in faraway Cleveland, had seen such miraculous sights as department store escalators, soft-serve ice cream, and golf courses. When he had returned to his hometown to practice, he had brought with him not only some knowledge of the physical needs of his patients, but their spiritual needs as well. Thus it was not long before the vision of Squat Possum Golf Club had taken shape in Toland’s mind, and he had spent every spare dollar and every free moment away from the swabbing of strep throats and the delivering of squalling babies to see that the vision became reality.

  Though Toland was certainly one of the area’s most eligible bachelors, he never married, for his true passion was Squat Possum. From the initial stirrings of spring to the first day snow flew in winter, it was the same: nine holes in the mists of early morning, before his rounds at the county clinic, another nine in the fading light of evening, after he’d ducked away from his burgeoning family practice. In his younger days he reserved whole Saturday afternoons for a full eighteen, and Sundays for thirty-six, for even in those days the one permissible substitution a God-fearing man might make for a contemplative hour or two in church was that properly reverent walk through the natural sepulcher of golfdom.

  In his later years Toland modified his routine, spending more time tending to the course itself, modifying and making improvements (a driving range, fairway bunkers, an irrigation system) to his initial design, as well as spending more and more time in the tutelage of youngsters who might carry on his passion once he was gone. And though Toland had been mentor to many a fine player in his day, had sent more than one lad off to college on the wings of a golf scholarship, none of his pupils had been more apt than the one who had just struck the ball this tender summer evening, and the name of that man was Sprague.

  For a number of years Billy Sprague’s name had been affixed to every trophy awarded in every amateur tournament held south of Akron and east of Cincinnati, and many more besides. He’d attended Ohio State University in Columbus, where he’d equaled or broken every record set by the great Golden Bear himself. And when he had girded up his loins and strode out upon the field of professional play a dozen years before, expectations of his success were boundless.

  The man in the gimmee cap knew none of this, however, for he was from West Virginia, a man who had come to golf late, after a career in dragline operation and maintenance had finally provided him with the wherewithal to retire and pursue more leisurely interests. With much practice and great determination he had whittled his handicap down into the high teens, and had accepted this day at the invitation of a friend, Blaine Craig, the owner of a Cambridge trucking company, to join in a round of golf at Craig’s home club of Squat Possum.

  As it turned out, the foursome included Craig, his brother Tom, Billy Sprague, and Winston Park, former dragline operator. The Craig brothers were good, significantly better than Park, their scores just a few strokes over par as they stood on the tee box of the par-three fourteenth hole. Park had not done badly himself. He was holding it at even bogey, not bad for a strange course, and with the strokes the Craigs had given him, he was already feeling his wallet fatten.

  It was Billy Sprague, however, who had dazzled them all. He had belted every tee shot straight enough to lay pipe to, lashed irons to every green in regulation, his swing equally effortless and well made, no matter what club he held. On the greens themselves he’d lipped out a putt or two, but not many. Though the bets had been arranged according to match play and the Craigs thus paid attention to what happened scorewise only hole by hole, Winston Park knew that Sprague, who had declined the invitation to join in the wagering, stood at least six under, and this with five holes left to play. He might have been a rank amateur, Park thought, but he knew enough to realize he was in the presence of greatness.

  Right now, for instance, as he gazed down through the southeastern Ohio haze to the tiny green on the valley floor below, he was watching the whirling ball do exactly what Sprague said it would do, strike no more than six feet beyond the flag and stop dead.

  “Man,” Winston Park said, doffing his Weirton Steel hat and clapping it to his chest. “You are something else.”

  Sprague glanced up from retrieving his tee and gave Park his guileless smile. “Thanks,” he said, as if he’d never heard such a compliment before. And then they were all off the tee.

  “This guy is a club pro?” Park said to Blaine Craig a few minutes later. “Your club pro?”

  Craig, who was driving the cart down the precipitous path toward the green below, glanced over casually. “You making some sort of comment about Squat Possum?”

  “No, no, it’s a nice little course,” Park protested. “I mean, we still have sand greens down where I play.” Park was wishing Craig would turn his
attention back to the narrow roadway. “It’s just that . . . well, he’s really good. Even I can see that much.”

  Blaine Craig nodded, apparently appeased. “Twelve years we’ve had him, ever since Doc Toland retired.” He turned back, gave Winston Park an odd look. “Sprague is sumpin’ all right.” He took the cart around the last bend, gave it full out down the last straightaway, his normally vacuous expression turning thoughtful. As they were getting out of the cart, Craig nodded toward the green where his brother and Billy Sprague were already walking.

  “I want you to watch something now,” Craig told him.

  “Watch what?” Park asked, puzzled.

  “Just wait and see,” Craig said enigmatically and went to whisper something in Billy Sprague’s ear.

  Winston Park never did find his ball in the scrub brush bordering the creek that ran left of the green and gave the course its name. After five fruitless minutes of searching, he had to take a drop, then skulled his chip shot well past the hole. He misjudged the speed of the green coming back and nearly sent his first putt into the opposite fringe. He managed a decent lag on his next attempt and Tom Craig conceded the short putt for a six. Tom and Blaine were already in at four, both having made lengthy putts to salvage bogey. Twenty dollars going the other way, Winston Park thought ruefully.

  It fell to Billy Sprague, then, to finish up. He surveyed his putt for what seemed an uncharacteristic length of time, then stepped up, hitched at his pants a couple of times, glanced at Blaine Craig at least twice before he bent over the putt in earnest. Craig, meantime, seemed to have turned his attention on the swifts wheeling about in the dusk, the creatures feinting and diving after insects like giant commas finally set free from a page.

  Something going on, Park thought, just as Sprague drew back to putt. Instead of the smooth stroke Park had come to expect, however, what came next was a palsied stab, a slashing movement that sent the ball screaming past the hole, all the way across the green, where it disappeared into the thick collar of the second cut.