The Putt at the End of the World

by Lee K. Abbott

  “Aye. Picked it up a while ago.”

  “And where are you, then? Where is it?”

  “Never you mind. It’ll be there when you need it. You’ve the access we talked about?”

  “Aye. Given over by kin of the MacGregors themselves. Ha! They’ll know the wrath of the MacLouts! Vengeance is a dish best served cold!”

  Sheena smiled at that, running a hand over her lover’s chest. “Aye, Angus. That it is. I have to go now,” she said as Le Tour reached for her breast. “We’ll meet as planned. Try to keep out of trouble until then.” She hung up as he tried to go on some more about the Mac-Gregors and the time of reckoning.

  “Your friend was not finished, cherie,” Le Tour pointed out, rubbing his thumb back and forth across her nipple.

  “Angus never tires of his ranting. He’s no doubt still talking, not having even noticed me hang up.”

  “What is this vengeance he seeks, cherie?” he asked, pulling back from her. He sat up enough to lounge against the mountain of fine down pillows. He’d made a lovely woman. He made an even lovelier man, with the body lines of an art model, the face of a wicked angel. “These Mac-Gregors did something to his family?”

  Sheena sighed, already regretting the loss of the few minutes it would take for her to tell the ridiculous tale. “Two hundred years ago a MacLout bet a MacGregor his terrier could beat the MacGregor’s terrier in a race. And he might have done if he hadn’t leapt off course to attempt to breed a passing deerhound. MacLout — a drunken ass by all accounts — had bet Rathgarve.

  “Angus believes the tale of his ancestors: that the MacGregors were responsible for the bitch in heat. The MacLouts claimed for two centuries the MacGregors were a crooked, cheating lot. And more than one MacLout lost life or limb in a duel because of it — them being terrible shots, drunk or sober. Angus believes that being the last of the MacLouts, Rathgarve is rightfully his, and therefore so is the money Phillip Bates paid for it.

  “It’s kind of like me saying that, as my name is Cameron — as is the fella who directed Titanic — that I’m entitled to a piece of the movie’s profits. Do you think I should call him up, then?”

  Le Tour chuckled deep in his throat, then slowly sobered. “And this Angus will not create a problem for us?”

  “Oh no, my love,” Sheena cooed, sliding into his embrace. “I can take care of Angus. Don’t you worry about that.”

  Chapter Four

  NEVER UP, NEVER IN

  by Lee K. Abbott

  El Puma

  Fernando Gaspara lay on the bed of his damp, cramped Edinburgh hotel room, staring dispiritedly at the water stains on the ceiling, waiting for the call that would tell him that the others had arrived, that soon their plans to show the world that El Puma had regained his former greatness could at last go into effect. Strange, he thought, as he listened to the incessant rain drumming on the gray windows, how those stains up there seemed laid out in the very map of Winged Foot. He’d been among the very best back then, he thought, suppressing a shudder. Now he was quite possibly the only person ever to have played the pro tour not invited to Phillip Bates’s tournament. Yet things would change. El Doctor had promised him.

  Fernando felt another chill course through him, and he wrapped the musty bed quilt tight, his thoughts drifting back those few short weeks, to the day he had met the man who had undertaken this journey out of despair. The great, the terrible, El Doctor . . .

  . . . by three o’clock Fernando Gaspara had forgotten how many times in the last hour he had checked the time — first on his Rolex, then on the timepiece in the shape of a human ear on El Doctor’s desk. The appointment, he was sure, had been for two. On the dot, he’d been reminded only a few days earlier by what would turn out to be the disturbingly comely receptionist, a blonde with skin like mayonnaise and a voice on the phone that all but melted hair.

  “The Doctor does not wait,” she had said. “Waiting is for the hoi polloi. The serving class.”

  Fernando could appreciate that. He too was a busy man. Or rather, he had been a busy man. Before, of course, the advent of the Troubles. Those of a downright epochal sort.

  “Only two weeks ago, President Bush was late. He had hoped to get his mind right, sharpen the edges, rid himself of a number of annoying rhetorical habits. His mind, sadly, remains wrong. Do we understand each other, Señor Gaspara?”

  They did, he said, happily imagining a myriad of other understandings, each more delicious than its predecessor, they might reach together.

  “We have other — what shall I call them? — rules, Señor Gaspara. For example — ”

  “Por favor,” Fernando said, “call me Fernando. Or, better yet, El Puma. To the world I am the Puma, a sportsman of exceptional ferocity and daring.”

  She cleared her throat — as delightful a noise as he had heard that month.

  “I’m afraid, Señor, that the Doctor has certain strictures against common informalities.”

  For an instant — as long, in fact, as it had taken in his golden olden days for a twenty-footer to hang on the lip before tumbling into the bottom of the cup — Fernando was crestfallen. First his game had deteriorated, and now even his legendary charm was turning sour. Then he reminded himself that he was El Puma, notorious for his recovery shots. A linkster no bush or whin or burn or swamp or bunker or waste area or rough could waylay. A caballero who at Winged Foot in ’96, on the thirteenth hole, had played a shot out of the crotch of a tree to walk away with a par. And backhanded to boot!

  “Strictures?” The word was as hard to get out of the mouth as was a three-putt to get out of the mind.

  “We have a list of do’s,” she said. “And, not surprisingly, an even longer list of do not’s. For example, you must never wear Ban-Lon. Or Sansabelt slacks. Pink is likewise a no-no.”

  “I, too, am opposed to pink. It is for girly-men. For the house pets of girly-men. For the women of Nueva Jersey — ”

  Again she cleared her throat, this time a sound with no delight in it whatsoever. “So we shall see you on Tuesday next, correct?”

  Sí, he had said.

  “At two o’clock,” she had added. “Promptly.”

  And now here he was — had been, in fact, for over an hour. El sit-up-straight, mind-your-manners Puma. Apparently a schoolboy again. Yanked out of class and hustled to the assistant headmaster’s office for a scolding, or a dozen swats on the tenderest tissues of his hindmost. He shifted in his chair, consulted his watch afresh. Ten minutes, he decided. He would give the doctor with all the strictures ten minutes. Then — oh, then, imperious as Caesar himself — one Fernando Gaspara would rise and exit, his chin high, his eyes dark with resolve.

  He regarded his expression in the large mirror on the wall behind the desk. Sí, he was a handsome specimen. Hair slick as an otter’s back, black and gleaming. The nose of a king. Sí, this was Fernando Maria Angel Gorostiza Miguel DeSoto Vasquez Pepito Garcia Colon Esperanza Gaspara: El Puma! The winner of seven majors. Four-time Ryder Cup veteran. Three-time winner of the Order of Merit. Holder of —

  “A beverage, Señor Gaspara?”

  It was the blonde, now standing in the door, hers a body that brought to mind the words “extirpation” and “thermocline.” “A martini,” he said. “Vodka, not gin. And a cocktail onion, if you please. A very small cocktail onion. In fact, put the onion on the counter next to the glass. Do not allow them — he-he-he — to get friendly.”

  Almost immediately she lifted her eyebrows, an expression of infinite disapproval. Her eyes were almost glacial — brilliant blue orbs that, so it appeared to Gaspara, had seen everything this side of the moon at least once.

  “A stricture?” he asked.

  She nodded. So sorry, she explained. Rules were rules. In life as in golf. Without rules, only chaos. Goths loose in the streets. Catamites, perhaps. Even Tyuratum vertebrates. The potentialities boggled.

  “A Pepsi?”

  Alas, another stricture.

  “Ginge
r ale?”

  “Rule twenty-four dash six point seven, paragraph three,” she said. “We’re as particular about ours as the USGA is about its.”

  Fernando thought hard for a moment, a nearly herculean effort given the extraordinary distractions that were her thermoplastic go-go boots and a much bejeweled copper breastplate.

  “A cerveza perhaps. Light.”

  Another rule, he learned, this from the darksome pages of the appendix.

  “What then?” he asked, frustration growing.

  She smiled, a despot with a new dungeon to populate. “Tonic water,” she said. “An aid to digestion. A regimen of that — six weeks, say — and you’ll have a lower bowel of stainless steel.”

  A second later she had turned, her hips doubtlessly on a swivel, and Gaspara, in his throat a heart swollen with desire, was about to follow when he suddenly felt against the nape of his neck a breeze as cold as that rising from the bottom of an ancient grave.

  “El Puma, I presume.”

  The voice was like gravel in a bucket, Gaspara’s moniker growing to a word no less than seven syllables in length. True, the Doctor had skin the color of week-old pork. And true, he seemed to be built like a toolbox. And yes, he was wearing a caftan and red ballet slippers. But Fernando sensed he would one day inform the journalistas from the world press that this Doctor would prove a miracle worker. A magician with everything but the wand and a top hat full of the continent’s most endangered species.

  “Have a seat, please,” the Doctor said that day, a sentence about as sonorous as a train wreck. “You have a problem you wish to discuss, yes?”

  For a moment, Gaspara studied the wall. On it were citations from the Tattooers of La Dominica and the Order of the Golden Dawn. On the desk sat a paperweight of a chimney from the college of cardinals. This was — gulp — embarrassing. Still, the Puma had come many miles and crossed many time zones to seek help from the greatest of sports psychologists — to the mind, so Bobby Stoops had put it, what Attila had been to the Huns.

  “My game,” he began, “it has — Carumba! — fallen apart.”

  “So I have read,” the Doctor said. “The writer from Golf World called you a renegado and a hapless wight. You were likened to pestilence, I believe.”

  Gaspara shrugged with resignation. “And chemical warfare.”

  “Just so,” the Doctor said.

  “I am cursed,” Gaspara complained. “At the Dubai Classic, Monty withdrew when my shadow fell on his shoes. My caddie, Humpy? He’s taken to wearing Halloween masks. At Estoril in Portugal, he was Jesus of Nazareth.”

  The Doctor was taking notes now, his penmanship as tiny as crewelwork.

  “At Bay Hill,” Gaspara went on, hugely relieved to have someone to discuss his innermosts with, “the fans stood behind a Plexiglas wall. The official scorer wore body armor.”

  “I have read of the dark cloud over your head.”

  That was not all, Gaspara said. Not by a long shot. An exorcist had been dispatched from the Vatican. At the Peugeot Open de España, a marshal suffered a heart attack. In his locker, messages had begun to appear. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Tokens and talismans as well. India silk panties. A song had been written to ridicule him. An invitation to King Juan Carlos’s polo party had been withdrawn. At the Hero Honda in Delhi, his courtesy car, good God, was to be a hearse.

  The Doctor’s hand sped across the page while Gaspara caught his breath. From the distance the clank of chains was reaching him. The air, he thought, smelled like brimstone.

  “And your dreams?” the Doctor asked.

  Terrifying, Gaspara said. In them a savage flitted in the trees, a being of lope and skinned knuckles. A bush prattled. In French. The earth shook. Fire poured down in waves. A dog in eye shadow and Princess Di’s rubies.

  “And your, uh, love life?”

  Gaspara took note of his own hands. In his lap, they seemed to be locked in mortal combat.

  “A standard question,” the Doctor offered. “All is related, you know. The yin and the yang. The alpha and the omega. The heart and the head.”

  Again Gaspara regarded hands. The left one seemed to have declared victory. “A true story,” he said. “I am at a reception. As many dignitaries as — how do you say? — Carter once had Little Liver Pills. This is in Seville. A villa. I meet a woman. She is from the pages of a novel. Full-sprung thighs, a bosom to put an asp to. I approach. She has wet lips, the air around her special as blood. We converse. She is Sylvia, the daughter of a count from Slovenia. She is on holiday. She is delighted, may I say, to have made the acquaintance of El Puma, the Saracen of the Sweet Swing. I laugh. I am modest. I am in a tuxedo almost worth more than my first hacienda. I, too, am happy an acquaintance has been made. I take her hand. A charge passes between us. She is enthralled. I am hot with anticipation. Just then a waiter passes by. Champagne. Expensive champagne. More air than liquid. We toast, Sylvia and I. Passion, I am thinking, is imminent. Her gown is surgical gauze, held together by only a handful of threads. A pulse beats in her throat. I raise my glass. Her eyes twinkle. Only a moment, I think. And then — ”

  “You miss your mouth,” the Doctor said.

  Gaspara nodded. The champagne had dribbled down his shirtfront. It was one thing to whiff in the rough of the U.S. Open, he told the Doctor, quite another to shank one’s own miserable cabeza.

  For several moments the silence between them had both heft and hue. Gaspara remembered the lithe and luscious Sylvia virtually scampering away, snickering. El Puma? No, El Pollo was more like it. The Chicken.

  “And now you seek my assistance,” the Doctor said.

  “I am at my wit’s end,” Gaspara allowed. “I stand on the tee and my legs wobble. The club will not wag. The ball has a mind of its own.”

  “You skull?”

  Was the pope a Christian?

  “You chili-dip?”

  That too. Usually enough sod to carpet a hotel lobby.

  “You top, I’m assuming.”

  Not only that, he also pulled and pushed and yanked and sliced and snarked and lopped and diddled and hotchopped and wizzled.

  “The chunk is especially dispiriting.”

  Didn’t compare to the foop. Talk about the slough of despond. The foop is to the chunk as the blowtorch is to the kitchen match.

  “I am expensive,” the Doctor said.

  “I have money,” Gaspara answered. “Reals, rupees, dinars, marks, pesos — you name it, I’ve got it. You want seashells and eyeteeth, you got them. The juice of nine Tanna leaves, the tears of an angel — anything.”

  “I am also demanding,” the Doctor declared.

  Gaspara had heard. The doctor had been compared to, among others, George S. Patton and Darth Vader. He was said to employ both thumbscrews and pliers.

  “Failure is always possible,” the Doctor continued. “No guarantees.”

  Right, Gaspara said. Ian Baker-Finch, Chip Beck, Corey Pavin. Failure was a given. Like sunrise. Because there was up, there was also down. No heights without depths. No Desi without Lucy. No Moby without Dick.

  “First,” the Doctor announced, “we must establish that you are a viable candidate for the program.”

  Gaspara took in the character of the office. In a word, spartan. A suitable situation for either a monk or an accountant named Meents. In addition to the desk and two chairs in the middle of the room, a plant stood in one corner. It could have been flesh once. Now it resembled a condition of being. Venery perhaps. Privation certainly. The Program, Fernando was sure, would be grueling.

  “You have time,” the Doctor said, “for some preliminary testing?”

  “Sí,” he said. After a dozen consecutive missed cuts, enough bogeys to open a franchise, his birdies only those that soared in the heavens, and a lateral hazard last week at the Dutch Open in Hilversum that couldn’t eat enough of his Maxflis, he had nothing but time.

  “Excellent,” the Doctor proclaimed. “We’ll start with word associat
ion.”

  The first few, El Puma would forever remember, were exceedingly easy. Red? Why, the lips of Maria Elena Fernandez, Madrid’s foremost flamenco dancer. Hot? The tramp of Tejas, of course, Rita Louise Shaughnessy. Interesting? Oh, a nun in a garter belt and stiletto heels. Fussy? Another gimme: the graybeards who ran the Masters. Warm? The breast of a woman named Sheena. Dark? Madre mio, the brow of the first ex-wife. Love? The seventeenth at Congressional. Smooth? The haunch of Miss Teenage Toledo.

  “Page two,” the Doctor said.

  Gaspara had rearranged himself in the chair. Already he felt better. Stronger. Keener of eye and ear. Focused. Time was falling away like old skin. The King? The Bear? The Walrus? Lefty and Boom-Boom and the Volcano and Long John and Jumbo — hah! Atención, los linksters! El damn Puma was on his way back!

  “Insufflate,” the Doctor said.

  “New Etonics,” Gaspara answered. “Black, with the stabilizer sole.”

  “Manchineel?”

  Gaspara smiled. The air had never tasted as sweet. “A tropical euphorbiaceous shrub,” he said.

  The Doctor grunted, making a check mark on the topmost of a sheaf of papers as thick as the instructions for operating a solar system. “Palinode,” he prompted.

  Gaspara had to ruminate a second before answering.

  “Use it in a sentence, please.”

  El Puma puffed himself up. The Program had become a stroll in high cotton. “Her palinodes made DL Three want to eat dirt.”

  At page four the Doctor had put on reading glasses. Now he was taking them off, his eyes lifeless as river rock. “Ethmoidal,” he said.

  Gaspara shuddered, his blood going cold and grainy around his lungs. His reply, scary as the spells a witch casts, had to be whispered. “The island green as Sawgrass.”

  For a moment, this long enough to be important, neither of them spoke. A darkness seemed to have descended. A wind had come up, steady and heavy with the stink of fear.

  “Perhaps a libation,” the Doctor said presently. “A meal maybe? I could have the chef whip up a dish or two.”