The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  Park stared in astonishment, but the Craig brothers idled about, apparently unconcerned, as Sprague went soundlessly after his ball. At the collar, Sprague didn’t bother to change clubs. He steadied himself over a dark clump of grass, then swatted his putter down in a way that made Winston Park think of his own swing as fluid.

  The ball careened on a wild diagonal out of the thick grass, finally wobbling to a halt some fifty feet away, near the front of the green. Sprague was looking at no one by this point. He strode to the front of the green, resumed his stance over the ball, drew back . . . and whistled this one so far beyond the hole that Winston Park had to use the flag he’d been tending for a balance point, do a little two-step to get out of the way.

  “I think that’s enough,” Sprague called, his voice as untroubled as ever. “You can pick that up for me, if you don’t mind.”

  Winston stared down at the ball, then back at Sprague, who was already following the Craig brothers off toward the nearby tee. What was going on? Park wondered. He was suddenly hesitant about picking up Billy Sprague’s ball, but he told himself that was foolish and forced himself to snatch the thing up. The ball wasn’t really glowing hot, Park told himself as he hurried away. But it sure seemed as if it were.

  By the time Park caught up, the others were already on the fifteenth tee, a long par-four, according to the carved wooden marker that featured a colorful relief map of the dogleg ahead. The tee box was set into the side of a hill, with the back and right side fashioned into a bulkhead of railroad ties. The big things had been stacked up where the hillside had been cut away to prevent erosion onto the flat surface of the tee itself, but the effect was one of teeing off alongside the walls of a log cabin. The Craig brothers went off first, both of them managing decent, if undistinguished, efforts toward the fairway. Sprague turned to motion Winston Park forward, but Park shook his head.

  “Hell no,” he said, tossing Sprague his ball. “No way I’ll ever take honors from you.”

  Sprague shrugged, snatched the ball deftly. As he bent to tee it up, Blaine Craig gave Park a knowing smile.

  “You better watch yourself,” he said softly.

  “Why’s that?” Park whispered back, just as Sprague swung, an awkward lunge that bore no resemblance to the graceful passes he’d made all the livelong day.

  There was a terrific crack as Sprague’s ball shot nearly sideways off the tee. It slammed into one of the heavy ties, then caromed sharply backward, narrowly missing Park and the Craig brothers as it disappeared down the hill in the direction of the meandering creek.

  “Dear Lord,” Winston Park said as he straightened. He had no idea what it must have felt like to watch Rome burn, of course, but the stirrings inside him at that moment could not have been greatly dissimilar.

  “Sorry, guys,” Sprague said. His face showed no hint of emotion. “Looks like I’m going to have to go in anyway.” He juked his thumb over his shoulder. Down the fairway, Park saw a cart fast approaching. In contrast to the beige models the four of them were driving, this one was painted a dark color, with a Plexiglas windscreen glinting orange with the last rays of the sun. As the cart neared, Park saw that a narrow-shouldered black man in bib overalls was at the wheel, that no clubs were tethered at the back.

  “Sorry if I let you down, Blaine,” Sprague said. “But you ought to know better. Nice meeting you, Mr. Park. You come back anytime, you hear?”

  Winston Park felt his hand wave of its own accord as Sprague conferred briefly with the driver of the black cart. In the next moment, Sprague was in the seat and gone, and Park had turned in disbelief to the Craigs. “What the hell did you say to him?” Park asked. “I never saw such a thing.”

  Blaine Craig and his brother shared a smile that turned into a laugh, then outright guffaws. “That’s the thing about Sprague, you see,” Blaine Craig said, when he finally managed to stop laughing. “He’s the best that ever was, so far as anyone around here knows, anyhow.”

  “But . . .” Winston Park was still shaking his head in bewilderment. “It was like a switch flipped.”

  “It did,” Tom Craig cut in, wiping at his eyes. “That’s just it. That’s why the guy bombed out on the Tour. So long as there’s no money involved, Billy Sprague can play like the angels. But the minute you bet him a dime.” He pointed at the nearby tee. “Well, you saw what happens.”

  Winston Park stared off down the darkening fairway in the direction of the departing cart. “I still don’t get it,” he said to Blaine Craig. “If he knows it, why’d he accept your bet?”

  Blaine shook his head. “I didn’t bet him. I didn’t have to. I just told him you laid a hundred with me, you wanted to take ten strokes and see if you could beat his score for the last five holes. That’s all it took to throw him, just being the subject of a bet.”

  Winston Park digested the enormity of it for a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “that seems kind of cruel then, what you did.”

  Blaine Craig considered this, staring off into the dusk and the whirling cloud of swifts. “Well I suppose it is,” he said as a delicious leer crossed his face. “But ain’t it a hell of a lot of fun to watch?”

  “What do you mean the old man’s sick?” Billy Sprague was saying as Teddy drove them resolutely through the gloom. “Did you call the doctor?”

  “He didn’t want the doctor,” Teddy told him. “He said to get you.”

  “You shouldn’t pay attention to that,” Sprague said. “He’s an old man.” He wasn’t one to make an outburst — and had long ago learned how to control those impulses that might have sent him into a rage at what had just happened with the Craigs and Winston Park, for instance — but for God’s sakes, it was Doc Toland they were talking about now.

  Teddy seemed unmoved. “He says get you, that’s who I get.”

  “All right,” Sprague told him. “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

  “Nope,” Teddy said, arraying them on. “I told Doc, let’s take the governor off your cart, but he says, ‘Teddy, ever’body else has a governor on their cart, so we’ll just have to live with one ourselves.’”

  “You do him pretty well,” Sprague said, his eyes on the maintenance building that was taking shape in the gloom up ahead.

  “Ought to,” Teddy said, allowing himself a rare smile. “Been listening to the man fifty years.”

  The cart bounced onto the rough gravel of the maintenance yard, crackling on toward the base of the old stone structure, its whitewashed face glowing unnaturally white in the last light. The building had originally housed the offices of the strip-mining operation, but Toland had pressed it into service as his clubhouse for Squat Possum’s first couple of decades.

  As the membership had grown and Doc’s practice swelled, a new clubhouse had been erected on a promontory out near Byesville Road, a handsome glass and native fieldstone building that afforded a striking view of the rolling, hardwood-studded countryside. The old offices had been converted again, this time to a maintenance building, along with spartan residential quarters Doc Toland had rigged down in the basement rooms, where he could stay close to the place that he loved.

  As a child visiting Doc’s chambers, Billy had always found it a dank, almost subterranean place, more like a cave than somewhere for a person to live. But as he’d grown older he’d come to understand something of Doc’s fondness for it.

  Not such a bad place for an eccentric bachelor to tuck himself away, Sprague had come to understand, and at the same time felt an uncomfortable jolt, as if he might be envisioning dragging himself into the very same cave one day. There were certain unmistakable similarities between the two of them after all.

  Though, unlike Doc, Sprague had once been married; the union had not long survived the aftermath of his colossal failure upon the Tour. The daughter of an Upper Arlington banker was not about to settle down as happy homemaker for the head professional of far-flung Squat Possum Country Club, and for that Sprague could not really blame her. Since Daisy, however,
he had not found anyone — or perhaps, he thought, he simply had lost the heart for it, had turned his passions toward the one lover who never failed to give him all he might desire (or almost never), and that focus was what linked him, so to speak, most obviously with Doc.

  Sprague had reached the bottom of the steps by now and turned to knock at the great wooden slab of a door, entered when he heard Doc’s wheezy voice sound inside. From what Teddy had said, Sprague had expected to find the old man laid out in his bedroom. Instead, he was surprised to find him in the cluttered living room, propped up in the old leather recliner he often slept in these days. It was a battered old thing but comfortable, its footrest often raised, as now, in front of the stone fireplace where Teddy kept a fire banked against the perennial damp and chill of the place in all but the hottest months.

  “How’d you hit ’em?” Toland wheezed, raising a hand in greeting as Sprague entered.

  “A bit too often,” Sprague said. “Especially toward the end.”

  “That happens,” Toland said. “Even to the best.”

  Sprague nodded, his eyes adjusting to the dim light of the room. The old man had been failing in recent months, but it was something he didn’t want to recognize he supposed. Something they all simply refused to see. Now, however . . . he shook his head. “Teddy told me you weren’t feeling so hot,” he said. “He said you wanted to see me.” He stood regarding the old man for a moment longer. “I think we need to take you into town.”

  The old man waved his hand as if there were a bothersome fly at his face. “Forget about town,” he said. He patted the arm of his chair. “You come over here. Sit yourself down.”

  Sprague hesitated. He was almost thirty-five, but old habits died hard. Doc Toland asked — or told — you to do something, you found yourself doing it. He’d never spoken sharply, never shown anything but a moment’s disappointment at Sprague’s numerous failings over the years, but still you just did what the man said.

  He stepped over a pile of golf magazines, found his way to Toland’s chair. The old man glanced down at the stack, gave a laugh that turned into a long, hacking cough. “They send me all that stuff,” he managed finally, his eyes glistening. “Hundred ways to help your game.” He shook his head wonderingly. “How to shine your sticks and keep ’em shined.” He laughed at his own feeble joke.

  “So how come you wanted to see me?” Sprague asked. He had an awful premonition. Doc Toland had summoned him for the final speech. “All this will now be yours, my son . . .”

  Sprague’s own parents were long dead. His father in an auto accident his senior year of college, his mother of a heart attack not long after. He got no more than an annual Christmas card from Daisy, who had remarried several years ago. Toland was all the family he had left.

  “Got something in the mail today for you, too,” the old man said. He paused to cough again, then reached for a heavy-looking envelope that lay on the fireplace platform at his side.

  “What is it? Another invitation to a qualifier? You can just toss it right in there.”

  “Ah no,” Toland said, pulling the envelope back from him. “You don’t want to burn this one up, son.”

  “If it’s about a golf tournament, I do.”

  “That’s not exactly what we’re talking about,” the old man said.

  “If there’s money involved — ”

  “Just keep quiet a minute,” Toland said, and the tone in his voice sent Sprague right back into eighth-grade yes-sir mode. “You ready to listen to me?”

  “Sorry, Doc.”

  Toland nodded, but he was already past the moment, had something more important on his mind. “I met a man in Scotland once, when I was about your age, taught me a few things about the game.”

  “What does that have to do with — ”

  “Just quiet!” the old man said. He cleared his throat and began again. “We’ve kept in touch over the years, he and I, one thing and another, I told him about you, of course . . .”

  “What about me?”

  The old man glanced up, fixed him with a gaze. “That you were the best, son. The best I ever saw . . .”

  “Let’s not get into that again.”

  Toland waved that away. “This man knows about the thing with you and the money. But he needs you anyway.”

  Sprague shook his head. “Needs me for what?”

  “What else? He needs you to play a round of golf, that’s all.”

  “That’s what this is about?” Sprague said. He was relieved, of course, but a little annoyed as well. He had another look at Toland. Where he’d seen frailty a few moments ago, he now saw strength, the canny gaze of a fox. So he was to give some wizened Scotsman a playing tour of Squat Possum, let the man see all of what Doc Toland had wrought. He sighed. What was all the fuss for? “When’s your pal coming in?”

  Toland shook his head. “You’ll have to go to him, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh yeah, like to Scotland I suppose.” Sprague was trying to keep the irony out of his voice.

  Toland seemed almost agitated now. “That’s it, son. That’s exactly it.”

  Sprague was reaching his limit. He was tired and hungry and vaguely embarrassed about what had happened with the Craig brothers earlier. He wanted to trudge on up to the grill in the nice new clubhouse, have himself a beer or three, scarf down a burger, drag himself into town to bed.

  “Now why would I want to go to Scotland just to play a round of golf with some guy I’ve never met?”

  Doc Toland smiled and pulled himself up straighter in his chair at that. “To lift the curse, that’s why.”

  “The curse?” Sprague glanced around the room, feeling his hackles rise. Clearly Teddy had been right after all. The old man needed help, and fast. “Just sit still, Doc, I’m going to bring my car around — ”

  But the old man seemed frantic, had lunged all the way out of his chair now. He staggered forward, thrusting the envelope toward Sprague. “You’re going over there to save the world as we know it, son.” And as Sprague felt the envelope come into his hands, the old man pitched onto his face and lay still.

  Chapter Two

  BLASTING OUT

  by Ridley Pearson

  The Roundtable, on the shores of Lake Washington, Seattle, Washington

  Mired in controversy from its inception, the Roundtable, a staggering architectural accomplishment, perched out over the relatively tranquil waters of Lake Washington looking like a combination of a Frank Lloyd Wright and a Marriott Courtyard hotel. Its four acres of copper roof winking relentlessly at the downtown Seattle skyline, its one hundred and twenty-five west-facing windows gleaming squeaky clean in the noonday sun. Moderately mature trees would someday fill out and obscure a good deal of its facade, but for the time being anyone with a boat could view the entire monstrosity from just offshore. Larger and grander private residences existed in the world. Versailles came to mind. Maybe some palace in the Middle East no one had ever heard of. But even Ted Turner could not lay claim to the largest, most expensive private home in North America. That title belonged solely to Phillip Bates.

  “Anyplace you want to be?” Bates said, standing in front of the living room wall with a small electronic remote in hand. “Just name it,” he said to his guest and COO, Roger Felt.

  Felt said, “Venice.”

  “Any particular hotel or address?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Bates answered with an impish grin. At thirty-nine, all the man lacked was pimples in order to complete the impression of a boy of eighteen. He wore a T-shirt and blue jeans, Air Jordans, and white Peds bearing the Nike logo. His voice, like Michael Jackson’s, had never broken, but instead reminded the listener of a castrato. “I’ll give you my favorite.” What had appeared to be a window looking out on Lake Washington — complete with traffic on the floating bridge and a sailboat on the water — suddenly offered a menu of choices in its uppermost corner. Bates expertly surfed through the menu in a matter of seconds, exp
laining, “What you were actually looking at just now was a high-res video image of the live action outside. Looked pretty convincing, didn’t it?” he said proudly. “HDTV eat your heart out!” He completed the work with the remote, his final click delivering an astounding view down Venice’s main canal. The other six windows in the room also changed views simultaneously, each affording a different angle on the same spectacular Venetian cityscape. “I can give you midnight, sunset, sunrise — any time of day you want. And what’s especially phenomenal is . . . Well, go ahead and step up to one of the windows and look outside.”

  Roger Felt hauled his graying, fiftyish, large-bellied self to one of the displays and gasped. “But . . . how is that possible?” He scurried to the next window. He could see the entire city, no matter which direction he looked.

  “We’ve installed this in both the dining room and my bedroom in the castle,” Bates crowed. “Wait till they get a load of this!”

  “This is going to revolutionize interior design.”

  “Want a Rembrandt? A van Gogh? Just a click away. Any one of these windows will convince you you’re in the Louvre.”

  “You know,” Felt said, “for all the board meetings, all the number crunching, you don’t really have any idea how cool this shit is until you see it in person.”

  “Twenty thousand and change, per window. Another five years, that’ll fall to below ten. A decade from now, smaller units will be installed in mobile homes. Mark my words. We just changed the way the world relates to the environment. Basement office? No problemo. Tired of the power lines? Digitize them out of the picture and change your view. Live in Venice for a year. Your choice.” He beamed. “That’s why I love that new slogan: ‘We Imagine Your World.’ A play on words there: Reimagine your world. Right?”

  Felt rarely disagreed with Bates. Not with those stock options lurking out there. Not with four teenagers lined up for college like jets for landing at O’Hare. “Right,” he echoed.