'The Royal & Ancient Golf Curse' - Part 9. Eclipse

By: Richard Voorhees


[Editor's Note: In the eighth episode, Beer Boy returned and Irish Coffee got lightly penalized for plucking a four-leaf clover. This is the ninth in our friends' series of misadventures, suffered under the spell of the "Royal and Ancient Golf Curse."]

My companions look alarmed seeing me come out of the bushes scratched and bleeding. Wild Turkey had a close scrape himself on hole No. 2 with a lion. From his wide-eyed look I see he thinks I've been mauled.

"Holy crap, Coffee, what happened?"

"I'm fine. Didn't watch what I was doing."

"I guess not!"

"Blackberry bushes."

"Oh."

"Swerve around the thorns of life, Irish. Stick to the cart path," says Single Malt.

"Tell me about it," I say a bit glumly. "I have an announcement. I've been assessed a stroke penalty. I removed a living plant next to my ball."

"Idiot!"

"Looks like you were assessed more than a stroke," says Beer Boy.

"Anyway. Did you see my shot? Threaded it through the trees. Wasn't half-bad."

"It was nice."

"Did you try to wrestle a blackberry bush?"

"Worse than that," says the golf nymph, piping up. "He plucked a defenseless, little four-leaf clover. He knows better now, don't you Irish Coffee?"

"Indeed," I say, stinging from my head to my shoestrings.

"Come here, Irish. I've got a first aid kit," she says.

I approach the cart nymph, a bit warily I admit, and she rummages around in her stores, pulling out a box, a bottle of ointment, and a cloth.

"Hold still…" She proceeds to daub me with her medicine and the stinging starts to go away.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome!"

"When all those scratches scab over, you're going to look like the Milky Way," says Wild Turkey.

"Maybe we should start calling you Café au Lait."

"Olé!"

"Or White Russian."

"Especially since you're rushin' around, not lookin' where you're goin'."

I give my friends a completely serious look and put it to them: "Well, do you know where we're going? Really, do you?"

"Heck, no!" they reply, more or less in unison.

"I didn't think so."

"No one has the slightest idea where they're going, Irish."

"Golfmologically speaking."

"We're chasing the white orb at our feet."

"One shot at a time."

"Follow the bouncing ball!"

"Tee to green is all," says Beer Boy, "tee to green."

"There is this one certainty, though, Coffee," says Single Malt, "it's your shot."

So be it. I'm ready to concentrate again (and, as I've been made painfully aware, I better concentrate). I take a couple practice swings. No pain. The stinging has gone away completely. Now, let's see. Where am I? Oh, yeah, I'm lying three. One shot into the woods. One shot out of the woods. One penalty.

"This is a par-5, right?"

"You got it."

I uncork a nice 3-wood and it skims over the steep hill in front of me. I've hit worse. Single Malt hits a solid second shot and so does Wild Turkey. Beer Boy hasn't even caught up to his ball yet. He climbs a bit woozily to the top of the hill, but there's no ball there. From the ridge, we see the green a long way off. Four balls are visible in the fairway in the valley below. One is the Beer Dude's first shot. His tee shot must have run like a soul sprung from Hell.

We find our balls. With his monster drive, Beer Dude's still closest to the Promised Land. We three hit ours. Not bad but nothing to crow about. None of us hits the green.

Then Beer Boy steps up. Calm, self-possessed, he summons all the golf magic he's ever trained for. Hitting all those buckets of balls at the driving range. All those winter months, hitting balls in his garage. His belching and farting have subsided. This is one of those moments in a golfer's life.

Everything starts to grow a little dim for me. I want to see what he's going to do. This could be huge. But he's fading from sight. What's happening? What is this? More punishment for my peccadillo back there in the clover? Everything fades to black and I then hear the sound of a real golf shot.

"Whoa!"

"That sounded good…"

"What's going on?"

"I can't see a thing!"

Apparently, I'm not the only one having trouble seeing.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" the golf nymph says. "Today there's a total eclipse of the sun. Here it is." We look up and sure enough the sun is blocked by the moon. Its corona looks like a magnificent, raging lion's mane.

"Don't look at it! You'll go blind!"

"Where's a pinhole camera when you need it?"

The golf course has become even more otherworldly, steeped in darkness, silent. The temperature is plummeting. We stand planted, breathing it in, staring, wondering.

"Whoa! Check out Irish Coffee! Dude, you look like the Milky Way!"

"Whoa! Coffee! You're glowing in the dark!"

"What the…?"

I look down at myself and, sure enough, all the places the blackberries scratched me are shining like stars. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

"Don't worry. It's not permanent," says the cart nymph. "It's a natural reaction. It's the iodine I used to heal your wounds."

"What was it, radioactive iodine?"

"It's harmless. And rather striking, don't you think? You look like a beautiful night sky."

When I hold my hands up in front of me, the back-and-forth movement of the darkness and the floating, glowing tracks on my skin make me dizzy.

"Looking good, Irish. Very pretty."

"Beautiful!"

"Why don't you jog around for us, Coffee? You could be a regular shooting star."

"No, man, don't," pleads Wild Turkey. "We don't need any trailers. I think I'm having a flashback already."

"When was that eclipse? 1979? Was that Goldendale?"

"Of course it was Goldendale."

"You fellows come along when you're ready," says the cart gal. "For a change, I'm going to give Beer Boy a lift and help him find his ball." Beer Boy obeys the cart nymph and plunks himself in the cart's passenger seat. We hear them drive off, swallowed up by the darkness. As they scoot along, Beer Boy studies the cart nymph. All he can make out is her white outfit glowing in the shadows. Her face is totally invisible. As they approach the green, Beer Boy can see a single white dot, hanging on the lip of the cup.

"Is that my second shot?"

"It might be, Beer Boy. Why don't you check?"

He scrambles out of the cart and half-strides, half-jogs across the green to the ball. Even in an eclipse, he can see that it's his ball. As he's well aware, he's lying two.

"It's mine!" he says, back at the cart.

"Congratulations! That's a gimme. A tap-in eagle. You couldn't possibly miss that."

"They'll insist I putt it anyway. These friends of mine might as well have lockjaw when it comes to gimmes."

"Listen, Beer Fellow," says the nymph, "why don't you let me encourage your ball to go in the hole? A little tremor and you'll have yourself an albatross. Have you ever had an albatross? That's what it's called, isn't it?"

"A double-eagle."

"An albatross," she says, not to be contradicted. "No one will know. Even the glow-in-the-dark Coffee can barely see his hand in front of his face."

Once again a thoughtful, focused calm befalls Beer Boy. The word "albatross" is echoing in his mind as he begins to imagine the possibilities. More rounds of drinks in the clubhouse. More cigars. A dead albatross hanging around his neck for eternity. An albatross screaming down out of the sky and ripping his nuts off.

"No, no. A tap-in eagle's perfect," he shouts. "Please, no, don't do anything!"

As he makes this fateful decision, the moon continues its somnolent path past Phoebus and the sun begins to reclaim its dominion over day. Single Malt, Wild Turkey, and I walk up to a triumphant Beer Gent, standing jauntily next to his ball, waiting to gently tumble it in for an eagle.

"Whoa! That's your second shot?!"

"You almost had an albatross!"

"Al-Ghataz!" says Single Malt, who's always liked the word's original meaning. "Dude, you almost had a 'giant white sea eagle'!"

"Oh well," says Beer Boy, happy as a giant white sea eagle himself.

"Listen to this guy."

The cart nymph gracefully pulls the pin from the hole and the Beer Giant firmly swipes his ball into the cup. Then he hesitates, pausing as he goes to reach for it. A hallucination flashes through his mind … of an albatross bursting from the hole, clamped on his hand, chomping its way up his arm. Such an idea would give anyone pause. But he shakes it off and goes ahead and reaches into Hole No. 4, where all he finds is what should be there - his eagle putt. He retrieves it, almost elegantly.

"Bravo," we all say, more or less in unison.

"Well done," says the cart nymph, "golfer whose name will never be Mud again."

When not writing about golf, Richard Voorhees is a novelist, filmmaker and lexicographer. His novel, "Shooting Genji," and his dictionary of occupations, "The World's Oldest Professions," are available on Amazon.com and at his website, www.rgvoorhees.com.