Seventeenth Hole, Old Course
St. Andrews, Scotland
TAM DUNN WATCHED the golf ball take a hard kick left and slip into the infamous Road Hole Bunker, a sandy-bottomed pothole that fronted the seventeenth green.
Bud Amherst, one of an American four-ball that teed off at 7:00 that morning, first on the ballot, threw his five-iron to the ground. “Goddammit,” he shouted, turning to Tam. “Course’s nuthin but sand traps. Why didn’t you tell me it was there?”
The way Bud played golf it would have made no difference if Tam had first led him by the hand and stood him in the bunker. But Tam the caddy, always hopeful of an American-sized tip, bit his tongue. “My mistake, sir.”
Close to the green, the bunker looked more like a hole in the ground, its face a vertical wall of divot bricks that even the pros struggled to overcome.
“Whaddaya think?” Bud asked Tam.
“Sand-iron, sir.”
“I know that, goddammit. Which way’s it gonna break?”
“About three feet from the left.”
“As much as that?”
“At least, sir.”
Tam kept tight-lipped as Bud took a few clumsy practice swings. The only way Bud was going to get the ball onto that green, he thought, was to lift it and place it. Bud turned to the bunker, prepared to step down into it, then stumbled backwards.
“Aw God, aw God.”
“Sir?”
Bud slumped to his knees. The sand-iron slipped from his grip.
One of the Americans, the tall one called JD, trotted across the green. “Hey, Bud, you okay?”
Bud stretched an arm out and flapped it at the bunker.
Tam stepped to its lip and stared down at the hand, at skin as white as porcelain, bony fingers clawed like talons. Even from where he stood he could tell it was a woman’s hand, a fine hand, he thought, except the wrist looked butchered and bloodied, like a cut of meat hacked, not sliced, the bone glistening like a white disc smeared with blood.
And all of Tam’s hopes for an American-sized tip evaporated in the cold Scottish air.