Loopy (20 page)

At breakfast, they discussed their plans for the day. Margaret was going to mass in the local church. There, she promised, she would pray for them both that they would emerge unscathed from the pagan stronghold of the golf club. To her, it was a bastion of privilege, inside whose walls she would not venture in the unlikely event of her ever being invited to do so. Worse still, it was a nest of Protestant and Presbyterian vipers waiting to lure the likes of an impressionable Loopy away from the one true faith. To protect them both from such blandishments, she sprinkled holy water from a bottle on their shoulders before hurrying off to mass.

With relief, Loopy watched her go. When O'Hara had described her as a “lighting bitch,” he had not lied. The house was, like herself, a monument to rectitude. No sooner had he or O'Hara risen from a chair but Margaret was over, like a flash, to pat the cushion back into shape. If as much as a crumb fell from the kitchen table, she would rise from her seat wordlessly and retrieve it with brush and scoop. Then with a self-pitying sigh, she would deposit the errant crumb into the pedal-bin. The bin had a crocheted cover that matched the tea cozy. Breakfast consisted of cereal, tea, a boiled egg, and one slice of toast. As O'Hara remarked while she was out of earshot, it was hardly the breakfast of champions, vowing that from then on they would breakfast at the golf club.

When they reached the golf course, the flagsticks were bending in the gale blowing in off the ocean. As good as his word, Weeshy awaited them, huddled in his familiar long coat as he sheltered behind the caddy master's hut. Loopy grasped his hand and introduced him to O'Hara. Weeshy responded by way of a grunt and what might have been the merest hint of a nod. As O'Hara unloaded his golf bag from the car and went to see about hiring a trolley to carry it, Loopy and his caddy went to the locker room to retrieve Loopy's clubs.

On the first tee, Weeshy seemed to be the only one present who was suitably dressed for the weather. Though he was wearing the same old heavy overcoat as before, now his neck was swathed in several scarves. Instead of trainers he wore rubber Wellingtons, though no rain had yet fallen.

The starter called, “Laurence Lynch of Trabane Golf Club and partner!”

They were off. O'Hara struck a safe three wood down the middle of the fairway. Loopy took out the new driver Joe had given him and, after a few tentative practice swings, hit a long but far from straight ball off the tee. It finished deep in the dune grass and tucked neatly in behind a clump of heather. Loopy's first attempt to extricate himself from the rough failed miserably. Though he dislodged a sizable chunk of Ballykissane, leaving a divot big enough to bury a fair-sized cat and wreaking mayhem on the heather, the golf ball scarcely moved at all. O'Hara was too far away to witness this disaster. As for Weeshy, he merely grunted, this time more forcefully, but said nothing.

Loopy's next attempt was more successful in that the ball, again followed by a thick wedge of turf, just made it to the edge of the fairway. This left him with a long iron for his fourth shot to the first green. To his credit, he caught the three iron flush on the ball. It cut through the wind like a hot knife through butter, finding the front portion of the green but still a longish way from the pin. Weeshy maintained a stony silence, not even offering to point out the line of the long first putt. More by luck than skill, Loopy stroked the putt with just the right pace, but misread the line by five feet. He was relieved to see his next putt stagger into the hole. He had carded a horrendous six, two over par. O'Hara, who had charted a steadier course down the middle, knocked his ball along the fairway to reach the green in three, taking two putts to card a highly respectable—for him—five.

“One up,” he announced to no one in particular, and strode purposefully to the second tee. This was a difficult, downhill par three, which was halved in fours. O'Hara still had the honor at the next tee and struck off first. Again he scuttled the ball a short distance along the fairway. Loopy duplicated his drive off the first tee by hitting the ball a tremendous distance into the wind. For most of its flight his ball maintained a low trajectory, keeping it above the narrow fairway yet below the main force of the wind. However, toward the end of its flight, it suddenly gained height and was caught by a crosswind that unceremoniously dumped it in the second cut of rough. This time there was no heather to contend with, but the dune grass prevented clean contact between the club and the ball. Still, Loopy told himself, he was within a hundred yards of the pin.

Since they had started out, Weeshy had not uttered a single intelligible word. He confined himself to a selection of grunts, but these were growing increasingly animated. They became even more so when Loopy plucked a pitching wedge from the bag. Weeshy retreated backward from the ball, clucking angrily to himself and glaring at Loopy and his choice of club, leaving no doubt as to his feelings.

Determined not to be intimidated by this, Loopy stayed with his choice of club. It was, he reminded himself, supposed to be a practice round, a warm-up for the tournament proper. To hell with Albert Neumann and his course record. These college boys, he told himself, had the time and the money to get in twenty practice rounds before The Plate, never mind the tournament proper. What's more, they could afford to stay in The Royal Hotel, where, he knew from experience, the breakfast alone was sufficient to keep a man going for the rest of the day, unlike Margaret's spartan offering.

As he squared up to the ball, he tried to banish from his mind that, on the opening hole, pretty much the same shot had ended in disaster. He tried to think positive, reminding himself that this time there was no heather to contend with and the green was much nearer.

He exhaled slowly in an effort to calm his jangling nerves. Taking a deliberately slow practice swing before addressing the barely visible ball, he was only too aware of Weeshy's eyes drilling twin bullet holes in his back. He flicked the club downward in a steep curve, just as Joe Delany had taught him to do when digging the ball out of really thick rough. He prayed that the sharp leading edge of the pitching wedge would slice through the wiry dune grass, causing the ball to pop up out of the dense undergrowth and float in a lazy arc to the green. He even opened the clubface a touch more than usual to encourage the scything action that would prevent the blade of the pitching wedge from getting entangled in the grass before making contact with the ball.

However, the dune grass at Ballykissane made a nonsense of his best effort. The ball broke free but only just. It flew only a few feet—flopping down again like an exhausted bird into lighter rough, not much nearer to the green. Exasperated, Loopy cried out in a strangled voice, “Will someone
please
tell me what I am doing wrong?”

Though the question was yelled at the sky, Weeshy saw his chance. “I'll tell you what's wrong, young fella. You're not hitting the fairway, that's what's wrong. Unless you're on the fairways round here, you can throw your hat at The Atlantic, anyways.”

Looped stared at the ground for a while, then looked up at Weeshy. “This new driver, I hit it great on the practice range back home. I was sure it would work out here.”

Weeshy gave him a scowl, grunting, “These newfangled drivers are more temperamental than Old Moll herself. You can't just come here with any old driver, y'know. What you need is one that was built for this course—one that keeps the ball low and straight, anyways. That contraption of yours is ballooning the ball up all over the place and getting it caught in the wind. Just go back to your old one and we'll be right as rain.”

Loopy again stared at the ground, more crestfallen than ever. “I can't. I shattered the head while I was practicing back home. My boss gave me this one instead. Said it was the best on the market.”

“The dearest, mebbe. Sure as hell it's not the best for 'round here, anyways. You're rightly banjaxed without your old one, that's for certain. You're hitting that yoke”—here Weeshy pointed disgustedly at the offending club—“all over the bloody place. Leave in your bag for the rest of the round. Use the spoon.”

“The spoon?”

Loopy was completely mystified. By now Weeshy was almost beside himself with fury.

O'Hara, who had played his shot from the fairway, came over to see what was wrong. “Weeshy means the three wood. It used to be called a spoon when I started playing the game.”

For the rest of the round, Loopy struggled round the course, using the unfamiliar three wood off the tee. What he lost in distance, he more than gained in accuracy. Now that he was playing his approach shots from the fairway rather than the rough, his game improved as the round progressed, but to nowhere near the level at which he would offer anything more than a token resistance to the experienced Neumann. Nevertheless, Weeshy seemed in much better humor by the time they played out the last hole. Loopy had blasted out of a deep bunker and sunk a tricky downhill putt to halve the match with O'Hara, a feat that earned an appreciative grunt from the caddy.

They shook hands with each other as they left the eighteenth green. It was just after one o'clock and O'Hara was talking in terms of lunch. Even had they so wished, Weeshy could not have joined them because caddies were not allowed to set foot inside the clubhouse. It did not matter, for Weeshy had other plans for his man. He beckoned Loopy over to him with the crook of a finger and, out of earshot of O'Hara, muttered vehemently, “If ye want to have any chance at all against the Yank, ye'd better listen to me here and now. I didn't want to be telling you what you're doing wrong out on the course—anyways that's not my job.”

“Tell me now, so. It's the driver, isn't it?”

Weeshy nodded. “Yes, yes, that driver's no bloody good to you. Not here, anyways. Not for this kind of course with narrow fairways and thick rough. You saw yourself that once you got the ball on the fairway off the tee, you were fine. Trouble is, using the spoon means you're leaving yourself too far from the green.”

“So what'll I do?” Loopy tried hard not to make the question sound like a wail, even though that was exactly what he felt like doing—wailing.

“I'll tell what you'll do.” Weeshy's voice took on a new intensity as he explained what he had in mind. “And if, mind you it's a big
if,
you'll do what I tell you, we might still be in with a chance.”

Loopy gave a hollow laugh. “You mean I've a chance to
beat
Neumann?”

“I'll put it another way, young fella. If you don't believe with all your heart and soul that you're going to beat him anyways—and beat him well—then you haven't a snowball's chance in hell.”

“I'm not quite sure I understand.”

“Of course you don't. How could you? Sure, what are you, only a grown-up child, anyways? Anyone in his right senses would have seen that taking a wedge for that first shot out of the rough was pure madness. The grass will catch you every time. They sent you out here to do a man's job, though, and make no mistake.”

There followed a long pause. Loopy wasn't sure that Weeshy had finished, so he, too, remained silent. After what seemed like a lifetime, Weeshy spoke again, this time in a quieter, less impassioned tone.

“Y'see, I'm thinkin' I have this oul' club back at the house that just might do the trick. As a driver, I mean. Don't ask me where I got it because you won't be told. You can be sure 'tis a damn sight better article than that excuse for a golf club you have in your bag, anyways.”

Loopy didn't even try to argue. He knew that Weeshy had given up a lucrative bag in exchange for his. The least he could do was to humor the old man and see what use he could make of this mysterious driver.

Weeshy was speaking again: “You go off with your man and have a bite to eat, anyways. I'll go home for that club, and I should be back here inside an hour with any luck. Meet me on the practice ground and then we'll see what we can make of you.”

Lunch for Loopy was a hurried sandwich and a cup of coffee. O'Hara was in a celebratory mood, having performed way above his norm and on a links he had never dreamed he would ever get a chance to play. To him, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. His feeling of well-being to all and sundry was being enhanced by a succession of whiskeys. The shepherd's pie he had ordered from the bar menu remained untouched. As the drink took hold, he grew ever more expansive.

“Your caddy was right, you know. That new driver is no good to you. On this track—”

Oh, God, he's talking as if he owned the course after playing one half-decent round,
Loopy groaned inwardly.

“—if you're not on the fairway, you're dead as a bloody doornail. Your man Weeshy—or whatever his name is—said as much. My advice to you is to do whatever he says. He's a sour old bastard to be sure, but I'd say he's forgotten more about golf than the rest of us would know after ten lifetimes. You've no choice anyway but to put yourself in his hands. If you play like you did today against the Yank, we'll be on our way home by lunchtime tomorrow with our tails between our legs. Now, why don't you take yourself off out to the practice ground. It's bound to be quiet during lunchtime, and you can get in a bit of practice while you wait for your man to come back with this famous club of his.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, O'Hara added nonchalantly, “I'll stay here for a while. I might even chance my luck and join the high and the mighty for a quick nap in the members' lounge. I preferred the look of them leather armchairs to Margaret's ones in the parlor. Then I'll join you on the practice ground later and see how you and Weeshy are getting on with each other. Does that sound okay to you?”

Loopy nodded and made his way out through one of the French windows and past the practice putting green, which was now full of people stroking putts as if their very lives depended on it. On his way to the practice ground, he paused to let a threesome hit off the first tee. One of them stood out from the others. His hefty frame and blond crew cut would have marked him out in any group. His face and forearms were bronzed from the sun. The last shred of doubt as to his identity was dispelled when he ambled over to a golf bag with
HARVARD
emblazoned on it. The bag was so big that his caddy had to bend almost double to heave it on his back. Swishing the driver as if it were no heavier than a toothpick, he took a few long, leisurely practice swings. Then he squared up to the ball and, with a lazy stroke, smooth as silk, propelled it straight and true down the middle of the first fairway, to the admiration of his two playing partners.