Death at the Member Guest

by James Y. Bartlett

  “Gawwwwwwdddddddd-DAMN-it ALL!” he screamed. He took two giant strides to the left, bent over from the waist until his face was parallel to the ground and screamed again. “DAMN it !... DAMN IT! DAMN…DAMN…DAMN! I can’t believe that ball stayed out! GAWD-damn-it-all TO HELL!”

  He held his putter up to his bulging eyes and glared at it in unrestrained fury. His face had now turned a dangerous shade of red, and his black hair had fallen forward over his eyes. I was beginning to think that Vitus Papageorge was quite mad, in the certifiable, call-the-guys-in-the-white-coats kind of way. It was shocking to see him react this way. After all, he still had won the hole with an excellent par four. Yet here he was throwing a force-five tantrum. I looked over at Jackie, who was standing on the edge of the green, his arms crossed, smirking.

  “That’s good, Vitus,” Jack said, referring, I think, to the two-inch putt Papageorge had left and not about the performance we had just witnessed. “You guys are one-up.”

  We headed for the third tee while Vitus stomped around the green talking about the injustice of that last putt, until he realized nobody was left listening to his fervid ranting. Fred already had his ball teed and let fly with a pretty good rip down the middle. Adamek was not a bad player. He just had the typical handicaps of his age: a lack of flexibility and upper-body strength. But I could tell he’d once been an strong athlete and a pretty good golfer.

  Vitus, still muttering and red-faced, finally climbed onto the tee, waggled angrily and made a hasty swing. The ball went straight up into the air and fell with a heavy plunk no more than a hundred yards away. He let out a mighty yell – a primal screech – reared back and hurled his driver down the fairway after the ball.

  “Whoa,” I said as I watched his club helicopter end over end, before it landed, dislodged a chunk of turf and bounced a couple times. I hadn’t seen a temper like this since I was 10 years old and playing in the Wallingford town tournament, junior division. Even then, allowing for the immaturity of youth, it had been unforgivable behavior. I still remembered the time when I was a kid when, after missing a short putt, I had thrown my putter in frustration across the green. I had been playing with my uncle, who walked over, picked up the offending club and snapped it neatly in two across his knee. “There,” he’d said, “That’ll fix it.” It did. I haven’t thrown a club since.

  Vitus stomped off the tee, muttering and kicking at clumps of grass. I was about to say something to him when Jackie caught my arm and shook his head quickly. Although the man deserved a lecture, if not a left cross to the jaw, I held my tongue. We played on.

  Jack hit two abysmal worm-burners to get within shouting distance of the green, then one beautiful chip to about four feet. He made the putt to halve the hole against Fred, who managed a routine par. Vitus and I made bogies, me after hitting my approach just over the green to a place from which I couldn’t get it up and down. Donald Ross strikes again.

  I stood there watching while Fred putted out.

  “Hey!” I said suddenly. “You putt left-handed!”

  “Great powers of deduction there, pard,” Jack said sarcastically.

  I did feel a little stupid, but I hadn’t noticed that while he played his full-swing shots right-handed, Fred putted from the left side. “Have you had the yips?” I asked as we strolled over to the fourth tee. “I know some guys on Tour have tried putting lefty to smooth out the stroke.”

  He laughed. “Naw,” he said. “I’m actually a natural lefty. But when I picked up the game as a kid, there weren’t many left-handed clubs available. So I learned the game from the right side.” He shrugged. “My first putter was a Bullseye model with the flat blade, and it just felt right to putt with it lefty. So I did. And I’ve played that way ever since.”

  The fourth hole at Shuttlecock is a pretty par-three over the narrow slice of river to a well-bunkered green on the mainland side. The river had carved out a deep ravine over the centuries, so the water wasn’t in view. An old steel-girder bridge, just wide enough for a golf cart to squeeze through, lay across the channel. While we waited for the group in front of us to putt out, Vitus and Fred walked to the front of the tee and looked over at the old bridge. Fred pointed and said something, and Vitus began shaking his head. They turned and walked back towards us.

  “I’m telling you, it can’t be done that way,” Fred was saying, his face reddened. “You gotta repour the footings, and the steel has to meet state specifications. It’s the law, Vitus. Our price is the best I could come up with, and I’ve already cut it to the bone.”

  “Your estimate is just way beyond what the grounds committee has budgeted,” Vitus said. “It simply must come down if you want the contract. That’s all there is to say about it.”

  “Hell, Vitus, I’m not making a goddam dollar on this job,” Freddie started to protest angrily, but he stopped quickly when he saw Jack and I listening.

  “Right,” Vitus said quickly. “It’s still our honor I believe. Play away, Fred.”

  Fred bunkered his tee shot, but the rest of us made it onto the putting surface. As we drove our cart across the rickety bridge, I asked Jackie what that was all about.

  “They gotta replace this bridge,” he said, motioning at the rusting girders above and around us. “Been here since about the 1940s. Guess Freddie wants the job. Guess Vitus wants to make him sweat for it.”

  When Vitus and Fred, who continued their heated discussion as they walked across the bridge, trailed by their caddie, reached the green, Fred took a sand wedge and climbed down into the front bunker. He skulled his sand shot over the green, and waved his hand in surrender. Vitus putted first and just missed on the low side. He cursed loudly again and tapped in for his par. I was next and ran my putt past the hole about two feet. I marked.

  “They’re pretty quick, pard,” I told Jack as he lined up his putt. He nodded. His putt looked good all the way, but at the last moment it veered slightly to the right and skirted past the hole, finishing just three inches away. We groaned in unison. Jack walked up and scooped his ball away. “I hate this game,” he sighed.

  “Good try, though, Pards,” I commiserated. “Makes mine good.” I leaned over and picked up my coin, slapped Jack on the back and we headed for the next hole.

  Vitus was standing on the edge of the green, scorecard and pencil in hand, shaking his head sadly. “I’m sorry gentlemen,” he said. “But neither my partner nor I conceded either one of your last putts. So according to Rule 3-2, the hole is ours. We’re now two-up.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks, unbelieving. Jack, amazingly, kept on walking. As he passed Vitus, he turned his head and said quietly “That’s real bullshit, Vitus.”

  “Rules of Golf, Connolly,” Vitus snapped. “I informed you on the first tee that we’re playing strict Rules of Golf. If I don’t concede you must putt out. You didn’t putt out, you lifted your ball. You should know the Rules, especially in a tournament. You may thank me, come Sunday afternoon.”

  I looked at Jackie appealingly, hoping he’d give me the nod that would permit me to knock the sanctimonious shit out of this insufferable little man. But he just shook his head sadly and kept walking back to the cart. I looked around for Fred, hoping his sense of decency would assert itself, but Fred, having chased his ball across the green and into the woods, had his back to us, pissing against the trunk of a large oak. Vitus stalked off to the next tee.

  I slammed my putter back into my golf bag with an unrestrained fury, and added a kick to the cart tires for good measure. I plopped down on the bench seat of the cart and Jack Connolly and I stared at each other. He handed me a cold beer. Together, as if on cue, we burst out laughing.

  “Let’s kill this motherfucker,” Jack said.

  “Onward,” I nodded.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Anger is a useless emotion on the golf course. It just tightens muscles that should be loose. It clouds judgment. It takes you out of the present and the task at hand, and puts you
in the past, filled with recrimination, or the future, filled with dread. It releases endocrines into the bloodstream that cause a chemical reaction remarkably similar to that caused by a healthy snort of cocaine. Except for the rush, of course.

  So I didn’t get angry. I got serious.

  Vitus had a stroke coming on the par-five fifth, a shortish hole that played up a long hill. Sure enough, he played three conservative and steady shots to reach the green in regulation. Forcing my mind and body to relax, and focusing on the task at hand, I crushed my drive and watched it fly and roll nearly 300 yards straight down the middle. I followed that shot with a clean two-iron that flew up the hill and bounded onto the green, stopping just under 20 feet below the hole. Fred and Jack had their usual problems: sideways drives and stubbed irons.

  Vitus rolled his approach putt up close to the hole, maybe 18 inches short. He looked at me, but I said nothing. As far as I was concerned, the son-of-a-bitch was going to have to putt everything out for the rest of the round. He marked.

  I took a few extra seconds to study my putt. It was straight uphill, with just the hint of a break to the right near the end. I nailed it solidly and watched it drop cleanly into the center of the cup for an eagle and a win. Jackie gave me a thumbs-up and one of his patented Connolly grins, and as we walked back towards the sixth tee, Fred came over and slapped me on the back.

  “Great playing, Hacker,” he said. “I can’t remember the last time I saw an eagle. Beautiful!”

  I thanked him. He seemed like a nice man. Unlike his partner. Vitus, as usual, didn’t say anything. He walked up to the tee with his scorecard and pencil in hand. “I had a net birdie there,” he said. “What did you take?”

  I laughed, recognizing the man’s shameless gamesmanship. I had played with assholes like Vitus many times, even on occasion during my short stint on the PGA Tour. There are all kinds of ways to get under someone’s skin, and Vitus was trying them all.

  “Three,” I said, and he wrote it down.

  “Go ahead, Fred,” he said, putting the scorecard back in his hip pocket. “Play away.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “We won that hole. If I remember the Rules of Golf correctly, that means we get the honor on the tee.”

  Vitus just looked at me and shrugged. “No need to get snippy,” he said reprovingly. “Just trying to keep play moving along. I abhor slow play. Detracts from the enjoyment of the game, in my opinion.”

  Nobody stroked on the sixth hole, a short par four, so I made a routine birdie: nice drive, wedge to six feet and drained the putt. Vitus and Fred made pars; Jackie made another “X” when he couldn’t get the ball out of a greenside trap. We were back to even in the match.

  Jack cracked open another beer back in the cart. “Keep it up, pards,” he said, “We’re doin’ great!”

  “What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?” I cracked.

  Jackie actually made a contribution on the par-five seventh, as he managed to make a par-net-birdie to hold off Vitus, who did the same. I let my drive drift too far to the right and got caught behind some trees guarding the dogleg, and had to scramble to make par, while Fred made a bogey. Eight was also halved: my four against Vitus’ five-net-four.

  We came to the ninth at Shuttlecock with the match even and a hundred bucks on the line. Every Donald Ross course I’ve ever seen has a hole like the ninth. It says par-three on the card, but those who play it week-in and week-out know that it’s really a par three-and-a-half. Ross loved long par threes. This one was 220 yards, playing from an elevated tee box to an elevated green. In between was a rocky gully that swept upwards steeply in front of the green. There were woods to the right and a swampy marsh to the left. Long, shallow bunkers protected the bail-out area to the right of the green, and the left side was death: bunkers, trees, rocks and mounds. The hill in front of the green was closely mown, so a ball that didn’t quite get up and over the lip of the hill would run all the way back down to the bottom, at least twenty yards away.

  It was still our honor. I tried to work a two-iron in from right to left, but it caught one of those greenside bunkers to the right of the green. Jack bumped his shot down to the bottom of the hill in front of the green. Fred hit a high pop-up drive, but it landed on a rock in the gully and leaped forward, coming to rest near Jackie’s ball.

  Vitus was the last to hit, and his three-wood started right and stayed right, fetching up in the thick and heavy rough beyond the bunkers. I looked at the scorecard and saw that both Fred and Vitus stroked on this hole, so if the prick could get his shot up and down for par, they’d probably win the hole and the fronine.

  The hole was cut in the back of the green, just ten paces from the back edge. Behind the green was a row of young junipers and behind that was the snack shack, where golfers could order a hot dog and a beer. On this course, as at the Old Course in St. Andrews, the ninth green was about as far from the clubhouse as one can get.

  Fred and Jackie headed off into the gully together, each armed with a wedge and a putter. Vitus walked around the high road above the gully, and the caddie lugged the clubs up the hill, over the green, and dropped them on the back fringe before disappearing into the snack shack to get himself something to drink. I drove our cart around the path to the green.

  Fred flubbed his first chip, and his second ran just to the edge of the green before losing its momentum, stopping and running almost back down to his feet. He looked at the ball despairingly, sighed, and picked it up. Jack hit a nice chip that stopped in the middle of the green, maybe 30 feet from the hole.

  My ball had landed in the first of two bunkers, a bit further away from the hole than Vitus’ shot, which had carried over the sand. Walking past his ball, I was glad to see that it had nestled down in the deep stuff. Good, I thought to myself, he’ll have trouble getting it out of that lie with any kind of control or spin. Could go anywhere.

  Then I caught sight of my ball, and my heart sank. It had hit the soft sand and plugged. The old and dreaded fried egg. The ball was nestled in its pitch mark, surrounded by the ring of displaced sand. Because I was still a long way from the hole, I couldn’t explode the ball out of that lie – with that ring of sand surrounding the ball, my club would slow down as it neared the ball and I’d probably leave it in the bunker. Instead, I’d have to close the face down, dig it out with a hard blow, and hope it didn’t run all the way off the other side of the green. My chances of getting it close ranked somewhere between slim and none.

  I dug in and tried to make the swing, but the ball actually came out softer than I imagined, and it landed and stopped well short of the hole. I had probably 25 feet for par. Two putt range. Well, I consoled myself as I smoothed the sand with a rake, at least Vitus will have a tough shot too.

  I turned to watch him make his important chip. My mouth dropped open in amazement. Vitus’ ball was now sitting atop a soft cushion of grass. Unless there had been a major earthquake at Shuttlecock in the last two minutes, which I hadn’t felt, some unknown force had moved Vitus’ ball from its position nestled deep beneath the thick grass to its current soft and lovely lie. I suspected the foot wedge, and could not believe the chutzpah of the man.

  As Vitus prepared to hit his shot, I bit down hard on my back teeth. For all his sanctimonious crap about the honor of the game and playing by the rules, the truth was that Vitus Papageorge was a cheater. He knew nothing about sportsmanship, gentlemanly behavior or anything else that made golf such a great and genial game. I decided the man had gone way beyond the category of world-class prick. He was now All-Universe.

  From its new and improved lie, Vitus caught the ball cleanly, with a bit of spin. It bumped onto the green, checked slightly and began to roll out towards the hole. I watched it with sinking heart as it headed straight for the flag. Vitus began to run towards the green, holding his wedge high above his head, readying for a triumphant celebration.

  But at the last second, the ball veered imperceptibly and caught just an
edge of the hole. The power lip-out gave the ball enough added momentum to keep it rolling past the flag, where it caught the slight downhill crown and kept rolling on and on, trickling finally off the back of the green and bumping up against one of the golf bags that the caddie had laid in the fringe.

  ArrrrrrRRRRRRR-SHIT!” Vitus screamed. Turning his body in a coil, he threw his wedge in a beautiful, arching parabola over the juniper trees and out of sight. We heard it land with a crash on the roof of the snack shack, and someone inside yelled “What th’ FUCK?”

  “Oh. Wonderful shot, Vitus,” Fred said, ignoring the post-shot hammer throw. “You got robbed. That was in all the way.”

  “Yeah, great effort, Vitus,” Jack said with a smirk. “I hope you didn’t put a hole in the roof. I’d have to make sure you got assessed for the damages.”

  Papageorge didn’t respond. His face red and angry, he stalked over to his ball, jerked his golf bag upright, and yanked his putter out. He squatted down and began to study his putt, just a shade over ten feet away from the hole.

  I didn’t say anything. I took a minute to finish raking the bunker smoothly. As I walked onto the green, Jack was watching his par putt skim by the hole. He walked over and knocked it in the hole backwards. “I putt, I miss,” he said apologetically.

  I still didn’t say anything. My ball lay on the green where it had stopped after my bunker shot. I walked over and picked it up, and kept going towards the snack shack. Jack made a gagging sound of disbelief. Vitus was also staring at me in amazement.

  “You are conceding the hole?” he asked, unable to keep a tone of gloating out of his voice.

  “No,” I said. “We won the hole.”

  “What?” Vitus stuttered. “That’s preposterous. You and I both lie two and I have a stroke here. How do you figure? I’m sorry, but you picked up your ball. That’s a concession. The hole is ours. . .”