The Sand Trap (9 page)

Rebecca paused to take a swig from the can
of beer that she held between her legs.

“Blah. Blah. I know all of this,” Melanie
said. “You’ve told me many times how rich and good you are. How you
only ended up at Clapshorn because you blew the president of the
country club’s fourteen-year-old son in the garden shed and
followed that up with some sort of scandal at the private school
you went to. But none of that explains why you quit playing.”

“Thanks for that reminder,” Rebecca stayed
serious. “I guess what I’m trying to say Melanie, is that playing
golf was never something that I chose to do. It seemed that my life
was orchestrated for me either by my parents or some coach or
other. The only thing I actually did have control over was what I
did with my body and I liked that control and still do. But playing
golf? It was just something I did, not something that burned inside
me that had to be nurtured and fed. Until I met you and watched you
play I didn’t think it was very important. It's just a game after
all.”

Melanie had the BMW cruising along the empty
back road at over eighty mph. Trees and scenery were whipping by
them in a blur while the long straight road seemed to lay
unchanging in front of them. Soon they would be in the foothills of
the Rockies and while the speed would go down, the twists and turns
and elevations would partner with Melanie’s driving skill to make
Rebecca shriek with either fear or excitement. But for now the road
was straight and wide and they could talk as well as drive.

“I don’t understand Rebecca? How do I fit
into this?”

“You mean apart from the fact that watching
you helped me realize I will never be good enough to make golf a
lifetime avocation? My poor parents will have to wait for some
grandchild to have the next great golf hope. To be truthful, I’m
not sure I totally understand it either Melanie. But now I know
that I do indeed have something burning inside me that I need to
feed. I feel the urge to know how you are so good at what you do,
and I need to know how good you can actually get.”

They were both lost in their own thoughts
for a moment, the silence inside the car blending with the warm
thrum of the car’s engine.

After a long pause, Rebecca added. “And
without me on your bag you would be a royal fuck up!”

Their laughter broke up the seriousness of
the moment. Melanie had never heard Rebecca speak in such a
thoughtful way when either describing herself or golf. She had
simply thought Rebecca just didn’t want to play anymore and helping
out with the team was a way of staying socially active as well as
keeping some of her scholarship. She needed to know more.

“So your quitting the team was my fault?”
Melanie was astonished.

“Right. So let’s talk about you Melanie.
Maybe you will understand a little more,” Rebecca offered. “Why do
you think you are so good at the game?”

They had often talked about how Melanie
developed her swing and they had a good laugh over Andy Bean and
Hale Irwin. It was only recently a student sports reporter from
Montana State actually found Moe Norman in Kitchener, Canada and
tried to talk to him about Melanie. Norman had never heard of her
and hung up on him, but as the reporter pointed out in his article,
there was no mistaking the similarity between their swings.
Melanie’s was more graceful and arcing, with a wider and more
fulsome backswing. Nights in bed reading the golf magazines from
the seventies, and staring at the Hale Irwin swing broken down in
sequential photos had some influence for sure. Years of well
meaning people trying to correct what they thought was wrong – only
her grip was safe from attack – had changed some aspects of what
her swing looked like as a kid who had watched Moe Norman hit a
hundred “pipeline” irons. Being half a foot taller required swing
adjustments. But she still had the one plane swing that started
with a straight stiff armed address with the club starting a foot
behind the ball, teed up or not. If she stayed in golfing very
long, and continued the success that she had started in college,
someone somewhere would analyze her swing for the things she was
doing right rather than what she was doing wrong. There was
certainly no question that whatever she was doing, the club head
met the ball with incredible force and controlled consistency.

That’s not what Rebecca meant. They had been
all over that many times and Rebecca had just accepted that
whatever Melanie was doing it worked for her. She often argued that
some of the legendary golfers like Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino or
Chi Chi Rodriguez, had swings that would hardly make them
centrefold for Golf World magazine today. What she meant was that
she saw many other instances where Melanie reacted in a way she
could not. That day on the soccer pitch and the night that Melanie
caught the beer bottle were just two examples. Driving was another
one of them. More than once Melanie had seemed to anticipate an
action by another driver that avoided an accident.

“I guess I see things differently,” Melanie
offered.

“What? Like superman? Do you jump tall
buildings, run faster than a locomotive as well?”

Melanie responded quickly and as angrily as
Rebecca had ever seen. “Shut up. I’m not a comic book freak.”

“OK. OK. I’m sorry. What do you mean that
you see things differently?”

“Well there are several ways. Driving for
example, I can see that car coming at us will turn in front of us
and I’ll have to be careful.”

They both paused and waited as the oncoming
farm truck turned in front of them. It was not a dangerous move,
but Melanie had to slow down a bit from 80 mph.

Rebecca was astonished. “My God, you can see
into the future!” She exclaimed.

Melanie laughed. “No such luck or I’d know
if Chad would marry me when we graduate!” she teased.

“It has taken me a long time in my life to
figure it out myself Rebecca, but as far as I can figure it I am
simply good at reading the signs and reacting. I think what I see
is there for others to see, it is just that most either don’t see
it or do not process it.”

“Give me another example.”

“Ok, the soccer game you mentioned. Each
time someone shot at me they told me with their eyes when they were
going to shoot and where. It was easy to anticipate and get in
front of the shot. It appears to me that the shot comes at me in
slow motion.”

Rebecca was more than curious now.

“What about the beer bottle that time Burt
threw it at me?”

“That was easy. You were such a jerk I would
have thrown a beer bottle at you too. I just intuitively put
together Burt’s personality with the booze and the bottle in his
hand and I knew he would throw it. His aim was better than I
anticipated though so while my hand was already moving to stop the
throw before he did it, I was lucky to catch the bottle.”

Then Rebecca moved to the question that she
really wanted to ask.

“Have you thought about how this works with
a golf club?”

“Partly,” Melanie replied. “I know I have a
good sense of the grass, the wind and some of the other external
variables that come into play on a golf shot. I am able to
instinctively adjust my swing to these factors. I suppose that just
comes from my days hitting an endless number of balls at the Folly
and contending with the prairie wind that comes from one way one
moment and swirls from another the next. But I still can't explain
why I can so clearly see my club head make contact with the ball. I
used to think everyone saw this, but if that was so, no one would
miss hit a shot. But most people do, and I don’t.”

Melanie paused and Rebecca was
uncharacteristically quiet and patient as she gathered her
thoughts. Rebecca had never heard Melanie talk like this and she
was not about to break the spell now. She knew she was onto
something special, but if Melanie did not know what it was, or
could not describe it, Rebecca knew that she could not.

After a few miles Melanie offered a final
thought.

“So I guess the answer would be no. I don’t
know what makes me a different golfer than the other girls. Maybe I
am a freak.”

Rebecca sensed that this line of
conversation had gone far enough for the time being.

“Yup,” She offered. “But a very ugly one for
sure! Let’s stop at that roadhouse ahead for lunch.”

As they approached the small town of
Duckhaven, Montana, population 850, Melanie slowed to the speed
limit since she knew that state troopers patrolled the edges of
towns looking for drivers who failed to slow from fifty mph to
thirty. It would have been too much excitement in their dreary cop
lives to catch an eighty mph couple of Clapshorn Coeds. So Melanie
slowed to what seemed like a crawl to both of them at this point
and pulled over for lunch. The conversation of Melanie’s golf skill
was left in the car. But it never left Rebecca’s mind as they
continued on their journey to California.

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They arrived in San Diego the next day after
twenty hours of driving from Billings. They had stayed the previous
night in a motel just outside of Salt Lake City. During the second
day Rebecca said that she wanted to stop in Vegas, only for a month
or so she suggested, but Melanie would not stop and they arrived in
Ramona, California at dinnertime on the second day.

The tournament was actually at Cedar Grove
Country Club just north of San Diego. Most of the collegiate
players had seen the course on TV many times as both the men’s and
women’s pro tour had a stop there. Most had not had the good
fortune to play there, so the organizers had arranged for four days
of practice rounds on the course before the three-day championship.
The Clapshorn golf coach had decided that having his players
staying near the course with over two hundred men and women from
all around the U.S. was asking for trouble, so he booked a group of
rooms at a public golf course just outside of Ramona, an hour’s
drive from Cedar Grove. It was fall so not high season for most
golfers. The locals felt anything under 75 degrees Fahrenheit was
not suitable for golf and the place had yet to be swarmed by the
Canadian snowbirds who kept the California economy afloat. So the
Clapshorn contingent – men and women players, plus a caddy for
each, plus the coaches, plus some helicopter parents, plus one
reporter from the Helena news – eighteen all together had the
resort and the course much to themselves as they practiced and
prepared for the championship. Since their golf day to practice at
Cedar Grove was the third day; they had three days to enjoy the
pleasure of the small town life and public links of Ramona,
California.

The golf was the easy part for Melanie. It
was a late sunny October and the temperature was still in the low
seventies during the day. It reminded Melanie of early fall on the
prairies. She liked the fall at home. The rush of the summer
golfing was over and she would have the course to herself. The
grass, including the greens, grew a little more slowly so there was
less cutting to do. At this time of the year, she would have been
in school, but the days were still long enough to play by herself
for at least three hours after school and the weekends were all her
own. When her father finished the harvest in early October he often
took off for a week or two. He said he was going to Saskatoon to
look at farm equipment, but Melanie had once found a hotel receipt
for Edmonton, Alberta, so she knew that he was not going to, or
doing, what he said. She did not really care as long as she was
left on her own. Once when she was thirteen, her father reluctantly
agreed to leave her on her own, but only if Hank and Mary Snowden,
their closest neighbour agreed to drop in and check on her. They
were good neighbours, quite religious, and generously brought some
food when they dropped in as well. Their son Bruce was only a year
older than Melanie and he sometimes brought her dinner or just came
over to check on her safety.

Melanie liked Bruce. Unlike many of the
other boys he had never made fun of her and spoke kindly of her
passion for the Folly and her own golf. She came across to other
boys as cold and unapproachable, but it was neither. She was just
basically painfully shy and in any conversation other than golf she
felt totally inadequate, almost embarrassed to be around people. It
became easy for her to simply play the hick from Bumstead.
Nevertheless, she was hurt that the boys thought she was something
other than a young girl with the same urges and interests as even
someone like Rebecca, though she accepted that it was mostly her
own fault for rebuffing the guys who came after her. Melanie was
not unattractive. By the time she arrived at Clapshorn she was
taller than most of the girls…slender but athletic…and her
eighteen-year-old figure was showing signs of being more woman than
girl. Despite her long black hair, her facial features were
Scottish Highland rugged. One of the boys once called her an
Amazon, and although at the time it was more a reference to
250-yard drives, it probably could have been an apt description of
both her appearance and her character. Shyness did not mean weak as
a lot of young men learned as they tried to romance an unreceptive
target. There was one boy at Clapshorn who kept after her, and
after months of rejection he gave up and started the rumour that
she was gay. She spent so much time with Rebecca it was an easy
rumour to start, except that Rebecca’s sexual activity put to rest
any notion of which gender she at least enjoyed. When Melanie
confronted him one evening on the driving range after everyone had
left, all she said was “Stop it.” She glared at him and walked away
and as he told his friends later, he was truly afraid of the
“freak.”