The Legend of Bagger Vance (14 page)

In the morning round, the galleryites had been a source of terror to Junah. Witnesses to his public mortification, they had only made him want to hide, to recede if he could into invisibility. Now suddenly, now that he was banging the pill, they became his allies. His boosters. His bosom confidants.

As he strode down the fairway, voices rang out. “Get ’em, Junah!” “Knock it stiff!” “Ram it in!” When he struck a drive or an iron, the applause was wild and immediate, followed by yet more fevered shouts of encouragement.

It is something to hear strangers calling your name. Cheering you onward, urging you to triumph. To watch massed formations surge and swell, break into stampedes, jostling one another
merely for the chance to glimpse you, to bask in your aurora and, yes (the word is not too strong), worship you.

Junah may have witnessed this before, but he had never experienced it. I of course had done neither. I was astonished at the power, the sheer walloping electricity that surged from the massed galleries. It was palpable. A force as raw and primordial as heat, and all of it focusing like a sun on Junah.

What must he be seeing, beholding the Field? What power and energy were radiating off the auroras of the gallery? Junah ate it up. To be cheered. To be hurrahed and adulated! All fear left his swing. He planted solid and swung from the heels. With each flushed blow, the spectators’ cheers rang louder and lustier.

A wild, insane thought began to percolate.

Junah could win.

He could beat Jones and Hagen!

On eight, a 442 par four into the wind, Junah’s drive finished within a yard of the spot he had played to in the morning. He had hit a three-iron then into an identical wind. I squinted at the flag and was sure it was a mashie. Two clubs less.

Adrenaline. The jolt of power from the gallery and from Junah’s own surging self-confidence. He drilled the mashie stiff. The crowd didn’t so much cheer as stand witness in awe. Junah was intoxicated. Invincible. He began to feel there was nothing he couldn’t do. To stand at 180, knowing the shot was normally a five-iron, and be able now to go long with a seven…all horizons seemed to shoot back to infinity. What couldn’t he do?

He began cracking jokes. I heard him tell someone in the gallery, “Bet on me.” Vance watched in silence. He could see Junah
stealing glances at Jones and Hagen. He had them going. They were tempted to press, to equal his stunning shots that were so electrifying the gallery.

They wouldn’t do it of course. Both these champions were far too canny to be drawn into playing an opponent’s game. But Junah was making them think. He was making them resist. They were daunted, reaching deep to summon their full powers.

Then there were the women.

Until now the fair element had clustered mostly with Hagen, with minority enthusiasm following Jones. Now I saw a beauty’s eyes flirt with Junah, and his eyes smile back. Other belles scooted in like quail, their silk-clad hind ends wriggling as they scurried through a fairway crossing in their covey. Junah didn’t gawk but you could see he felt them. At the break of each shot, more maidens rallied into view, flitting before Junah’s path on the fairway like eager does seeking the eye of the stud buck.

I felt a terrible chill seeing that. I glanced at Bagger Vance. Before, I had interpreted his silence as his blessing on Junah, like a jockey giving his steed its head. Now I saw a darker light in Vance’s eyes.

He was giving Junah rope.

Junah birdied eight, to draw two back of Jones and Hagen. If he could do the same at nine, eminently possible on this downwind par five, he would make the turn in 31.

His three nines would be 41, 35, 31.

He stepped to the tee and absolutely crushed one. A leviathan that snapped the gallery’s necks as it streaked from the clubhead,
roared mightily into the jet stream and pounded down the slot to finish thirty or forty yards past the three hundred mark.

It was the kind of monster that utterly daunts your opponents. Unmatchable. Hagen and Jones were too smart to try; you could see them simply settle, centering themselves in their own games. They both ripped beauties past 280.

In that surge with the massed gallery down the ninth fairway, Junah seemed almost to levitate. The phrase “walking on air” couldn’t be more apt. Members of the gallery, boys and young men, were actually pressing in, just to touch him. All momentum flooded to his side. He had his foes on the run. On the ropes.

Nine was the only hole at Krewe Island that required a carry over water. The shot to the green on this 590-yard par five crossed a small rocky cove, a gorgeous-looking approach to a big green on a bluff. The player going for it in two, as Junah now could after his gorilla drive, was faced with a carry of more than 250 to a wide and deep target that would hold even the hottest, most spinless wood. Jones creased a brassie to the landing area left; Hagen followed with a high cut spoon that rode the wind to the same plateau, about 40 yards short. Now it was Junah’s play.

He had driven the ball 330 with a three-club wind at his back: 260 left. I looked; it was a brassie…maybe a cloud-riding spoon with the gale pushing from behind with such force. Junah stood beside Bagger Vance, both of them squinting across the cove toward the green rising beyond. The fingers of Junah’s hand rested lightly on the knitted head cover. Then they shifted, to the driving iron. Vance shook his head. Junah’s hand didn’t
move; he was so pumped up, he wanted to hit that iron. A 240-yard carry with a hickory-shafted one-iron and a 1931 Spalding Dot. Vance said something I couldn’t hear. “I know what I’m feeling,” I heard Junah answer. “I can do it.”

I had never heard that tone in his voice, at least never to Vance. It was dismissive. Arrogant. Vance pulled his own hand back from the three-wood. I felt a desperate chill. Junah tugged out the driving iron.

There’s a kind of sick foreboding that one experiences sometimes at a sporting event. It welled up in me now as I saw the gallery, including the first comely damsel who had wriggled down into Junah’s line of sight, thrill at Junah’s club selection. He was going over the water with
that?
With an iron? They were already rehearsing the tale to tell their grandchildren. Junah addressed the ball in his perfect easy rhythm. He nailed it. Flush in the sweet spot with all the adrenaline flowing and streaking straight for the flagstick. Vance didn’t move, didn’t even watch it. The ball started hard and low, like Junah’s iron shots always did, then began to climb with the spin as it started to carry the cove. Then the wind hit it. The following wind that Junah was sure would lift it and add that extra bit of juice that the shot needed. But the wind didn’t lift it. It knocked it down. Unlike Jones’ and Hagen’s woods, which had more than enough steam for the carry, Junah’s iron needed the spin to climb and the wind wouldn’t let the spin take. The ball dropped ten yards short, hit the bluff face before the green and splashed back into the sea.

A groan rose from the gallery. Hagen’s eyes flickered once. Vance’s hand slid to the bag strap; he hoisted his player’s clubs
to his shoulder, starting to stride down toward the drop zone at the margin of the cove where Junah would take his one-shot penalty and go at the green with a pitch.

“Where are you going?” Junah’s voice was harsh. Vance stopped in his tracks. The gallery froze. What was Junah thinking? The rules allowed him to go forward to the point where the ball crossed the margin of the hazard—in other words 150 yards closer to hole. Why wasn’t he going? He wasn’t going to hit the shot again—from this same spot?

The gallery had already started forward, overrunning the fairway directly before Junah. Now they realized,
My God, he’s going to play from there!
Junah dropped a ball. The marshals were herding the spectators back. Vance said not a word. I looked in Junah’s eyes and there was a cold rage, a pride. Vance had become withdrawn, even meek. He didn’t scold Junah; he just stepped back and let him hang himself.

As if in the thrall of some demonic spell, Junah took the driving iron again and hit the identical shot. Into the identical sea.

Now the shock wave hit him. You could see his eyes darken. There was disbelief. Then confusion, disorientation. Junah’s mind struggled to calculate. How many shots had he thrown away? What was he lying now? How far behind had this madness dropped him? His mind went blank. Refused to make the computations.

“You lie five,” Bagger Vance said softly. Junah reeled. Now in his eyes, when he met his caddie’s, was not arrogance but humiliation. He was shamed, chastened; he knew what he had done.

And still he had to play.

Still he had to make the death march down to the drop zone at the edge of the cove and somehow play a pitiless downwind pitch over the water that he’d just dumped two balls into and who was to say he wouldn’t dump another and another after that?

He got the ball into the hole in eight.

Hagen and Jones both parred.

Junah was now five back of both of them.

He bogeyed ten, pressing off the tee and snap-hooking into a bunker. Blind luck saved him when Hagen and Jones bogeyed too.

“We’re trying to come back to you, kid,” Hagen wisecracked as they crossed to the eleventh, “but you won’t let us.”

Junah was dead in the water. You could see it, smell it. It reeked from him. Far worse than his ineptitude in the morning round, which could have been explained as nerves or simply being overmatched.

This was different.

This was a collapse.

This was choking, this was the bottom dropping out, this was the wheels coming off.

A look of empathy played across Jones’ face, looking far too much like pity. And all of it was made worse for Junah because he knew it was not that, it was not the pressure or the tension. He had destroyed himself by his own arrogance. With his own hand he had crushed the Grace that had been granted him. Bagger Vance had set the snare that Junah had not just tripped upon, but stampeded into headlong.

Where were the women now?

They had fled. Vanished. Flown. You couldn’t even glimpse them in the gallery….

Junah scratched out a wobbly-kneed par on the short eleventh.

He barely slopped in a 20-footer for the same on twelve.

We strode down the thirteenth fairway after a miserable pushed fade that left him a full 240 to a desperately tight target. The galleries had evaporated too. All but the ghouls and ambulance chasers.

“Why did you do it?” Junah’s voice to Vance was tight with pain. “You set me up!”

“I gave you what you wished for,” the caddie answered calmly.

Suddenly Junah’s anger surged. “Oh, give it a rest, will you? It’s horseshit and I’m tired of listening to it. Who the hell are you to keep serving up this crap? It’s a piece of cake to stand on the sidelines holding the bag, to talk and rattle on about…”

Junah pulled up, realizing he had overstepped his bounds. “Please, Bagger, forgive me,” he blurted. “Don’t be angry with me….”

“I am not angry, my friend. Rather, out of my deep love for you, I will answer your question. I will show you who I am.”

Junah froze, chastened. “I have failed, Bagger. Here on this field and in all else in my life. I know you’ve brought me here deliberately, and I know it’s out of love for me. Love I can’t seem to understand or return. Help me, please. Show me. I am ready at last to see.”

V
ANCE UTTERED NO WORD
. He simply motioned to me to take the golf bag from him, which I instantly did. Then he stepped forward, from the caddie side of the bag to the player side. The hair stood up on my neck. Vance was in shirtsleeves, in his caddie cap with his dark eyes veiled in the shadow beneath the brim. Junah stepped back, as if compelled by Vance’s force. “Only to you, Junah, will I show myself in all my power. I give you the divine eye with which to see; otherwise the merest fragment of this vision would be your end.” The caddie reached to the bag, which I tilted forward for him, presenting the clubs arrayed between their leather dividers; Vance’s fingers cradled a single emery-buffed blade; he tugged up Junah’s one-iron. Junah turned in the direction of the gallery. How were they reacting to the sight of a caddie suddenly stepping from his servant’s role and seizing his player’s most dangerous and difficult weapon? I saw Junah’s face freeze and then I turned too.

There was no gallery.

Every face, every form had vanished, obscured by the densest, most impenetrable fog I had ever seen. The sky was gone. There was no sun, only a viscous light leaking through the eerie murk from above, and the sound, still present and even more terrifying thereby, of the surf crashing invisibly beyond the mist that enshrouded us. I felt as if we had stepped back ten thousand years, or ten million. A tunnel had formed, excluding all else in the world save we three and the green, 240 yards distant. Even the green had been transformed. There was no flag anymore. Nor had the surface remained its manicured, modern self. It had become raw, a product of nature, yet still recognizably a green; it was whatever the first shepherds or warriors or wanderers saw. Terror struck me, like one feels in the face of Nature unleashing its power, or more precisely, Nature preparing to do so. I glanced to Junah, to see if his eyes were seeing what mine thought they beheld. His expression plunged me deeper into dread; his eyes dark with dismay and disorientation, his soul sensing that this, this thing that was coming, was beyond courage, beyond any response that mortal flesh could produce.

Now Vance, still swiftly, still without a word, dropped three brand-new balata Dots to the turf. The club was in his hands; he stepped to the first ball. Whatever terror had gripped me was now superseded in the hypnotic spell of the sight Junah and I now beheld. Perhaps no one but a golfer, indeed none but a passionate lover of the game, could appreciate the sheer beauty and intelligence—no other words will do—of the way the caddie now placed his hands upon the club.

Motionless, actionless, Vance’s grip embodied all motion and all action. His swing, unswung, lay within it. Every aspect of his game and all other games resided silently, pregnantly there, waiting to be brought to form.

Vance coiled and fired.

The shot exploded off the clubface, streaking like a bomb toward the green. Junah gasped. I staggered. The sound was like an artillery shell; the ball thundered through the ether like a midnight freight. Before it had reached the pinnacle of its flight, Vance stepped to the second ball.
BOOM
! This too detonated skyward, dead flushed; but while the first, still airborne, was drawing toward its target, this its brother arced powerfully from left to right.
BOOM
! The third ball rocketed away, brushing the grass tops, low and hissing, then screaming as it climbed like a bomber. All three balls were still in the air. “Hardy,” Vance spoke in that still, centered voice, “run up and get them. Tell us where they finish.”

Somehow I got one foot started, then the other. “Get the balls and return as fast as you can run,” Vance called to me. “Don’t look back once you’ve left the green. Wait for nothing, do you hear me?” He didn’t have to tell me twice. I took off on a dead run, streaking up the fairway with my heart thundering and my lungs pumping like bellows. One glance backward showed me Vance facing Junah, placing both hands on the champion’s shoulders.

Both hands.

Oh Lord, I gulped and kept running. My heart was pounding so wildly, I could see its beating pulse behind both retinas. My
eyeballs were flashing. Through shreds of tattered mist I glimpsed fragments of the gallery, frozen like statuary. Vance had made the earth stand in place, or lifted it clean out of the grip of time. Despite my terror, curiosity rose. I wanted to dash off to the side of the fairway, just for a moment, to touch one of the petrified spectators. Were they breathing? Hard as stone? I was at the green now. There was no flag, as I said; the turf was not machine mown but tight packed, dense and perfect as the surface of a stone worn smooth by aeons. It was the most impeccable green I had ever seen, shaped only by Nature. There was the hole, flagless, etched precisely to four and one-quarter inches.

In it were the three Spaldings.

I snatched them and turned back, Vance’s words blazing in my brain.
Don’t look back, wait for nothing
. But of course I did. I couldn’t help squinting back down the fairway, past my heaving lungs, through my strobing eyeballs. Junah now knelt before Vance in a posture of abject terror. He was seeing something. Being shown something. I saw his arms raised involuntarily in a gesture of fear and self-protection. I couldn’t go back there. I would die if I did. I turned back toward the green. Where could I run? What direction could I flee in? The sight of the gallery, massed behind the green in its stony paralysis, only redoubled my terror.

I had done what Vance told me not to. I had looked back. Instantly the earth began to tremble. The green shuddered; the turf beneath my feet cracked, black gaps spidering two inches wide, four, six…“God help me!” I cried and turned, with all
my ten-year-old’s speed, to race back down toward Junah and Vance. It was too late. The fairway was quaking beneath me. The skies went black; a storm that had apparently been building beyond the fog now broke with all its massed fury. The heavens split overhead. Wind and gale-blasted rain struck down in a deluge; I was knocked off my feet by the first sidelong blast, I fell, clawing at the fairway grass, which was now lying over flat on its side in the gale. How can I describe the sound? The wind began as a low, eerie, almost musical moan, like ten thousand boys blowing across the mouths of ten thousand pop bottles; then it rose to a cry, a wail, a scream; beyond that it ceased to be a sound and became a force, something physical and palpable that shuddered you in your very cells, vibrating with such power and intensity that nothing could withstand it. Your heart struggled to beat but couldn’t, the sound absorbed the tissue, the muscle, the blood itself in the shriek of its vibration. It consumed your essence, deafening, monstrous, cataclysmic. I was blown backward, tumbling across the fairway, which continued to shudder from beneath, assaulted simultaneously from the planet’s core and from the heavens. I heard voices, skyborne and titanic, and when I looked, the field had been transformed.

It was the battle.

The battle of twenty-one thousand years ago.

That turf which had been fairway a moment past was now torn and sundered by the hoof-strikes of warhorses, the tread of armored infantry digging for traction, the pounding wheels and axles of monstrous engines of war. Rain and blood mingled in the chewed-up muck as steel-girded phalanxes surged past and the
clamor of shield upon shield thundered heavenward into the storm.

I saw Junah, valorous as a god, not his present self but some brilliant primordial incarnation, slashing forward aboard a war chariot.

I saw myself, not the boy I was now but a man grown, breast to breast with the foe amid the thunder of the battle line.

I saw others, yet unborn in this century, and knew them as my comrades across eternity.

A sound like the spine of the earth itself cracking split the banshee howl of the storm. It was the fifteenth and sixteenth holes, the land itself calving into the sea.

In my wild tumble I blew into a fairway bunker.

It was the Scottish kind, as all of Krewe Island’s were, with bricks of turf stacked along the leeward wall. These I now dug my fingernails into and clung to for dear life. The gale howled. Sand blasted from the bunker, the pit itself was scoured clean in seconds. I buried my cheek against the turf bricks, praying with every terrified fiber of my being as the bricks blew away, first in ones and twos, then in clusters.

Somehow I knew that this was not just the battle, but the Great Atlantic Storm, the storm of ’38, seven years in the future, the blow that would efface Krewe Island, all of it save the eighteenth hole. And I knew more. That storm and battle had happened before, millennia past, in another age like ours on the brink of apocalypse. I squeezed my eyes as tightly shut as I could, but still I could see:

That horrible tower I had glimpsed in Junah’s book, the illus
tration of the limbs and mouths. Now the world opened, the continents cracked. It was all Vance. Vance in some horrific cosmic form rending the earth as if it were a bauble. The planet was merely an atom to him. Less than an atom. In the maws of his countless mouths, the warriors in all their valor fell and perished.

I was next. I felt the fragile flame of my life being blown out like a candle in the gale. The bunker blew apart; the full force of the storm struck me, I began to tumble again, blown wildly. Then a hand seized mine. I couldn’t open my eyes, the windblast was too overwhelming. It was Junah. Junah in the present. “Hang on!” he cried in the gale’s teeth. “Hang on, Hardy!”

Up he drew me; I clung blindly as his strong arm lifted me and there, on the one piece of the thirteenth hole still standing, collapsed gasping beside Junah and Bagger Vance.

“Ran!” I cried Junah’s first name. “Are you all right?!”

“Shh, Hardy.” Junah held me with all his athlete’s strength. The gale yet shrieked. Junah stood in a posture of reverence, bowing his head before Vance in fear and awe.

“Junah is unharmed,” Vance spoke and laid his hand gently on the champion’s shoulder. Now the fire, the flame of destruction in Vance’s eye softened, relented and became love, the sweetest, most heartbreaking affection, pure and rapt and unconditional. I began to weep, I was so frightened and confused.

“It’s okay, Hardy.” Junah held me comfortingly. “We’re alive. It’s still the earth beneath us.”

“Why did you disobey me?” Vance addressed me sternly. “You were not supposed to see this. A fraction of a glimpse could have killed you with its power!”

The merest gesture of his hand…and the storm stilled. Fog still enshrouded us; we remained enwrapped in the tunnel, the gallery absent and invisible. But the heavens stood again intact and, most merciful of all, that horrible keening wind withdrew to silence.

“Let me get a look at you,” Vance spoke, now with kindness, bending toward me. His warm hands settled on my shoulders; I felt myself recomposing, coming together again into something that felt mercifully like myself.

“Who are you?” I heard my voice beg of Vance; then to Junah: “Who is he, Ran? You know, don’t you? But you won’t tell me!” I turned again to Vance. “Am I alive? Are we dead? Are you going to kill us?”

“Did you find the three balls?” Vance asked quietly.

“Yes!” I shouted, furious with fear and frustration.

“And where were they?”

“You know damn well where they were! Who
are
you? How do you make this stuff happen?”

Junah held me firmly. “It’s over, Hardy. Calm down.”

“I’ll calm down when he tells me who he is!”

Vance only held out his hand for the balls. I clung to Junah. “Tell him, Bagger,” the champion spoke softly. Then, trembling himself: “I need to hear your words as well, to quench the fear and confusion in my heart.”

Vance’s gaze regarded Junah with pure, limitless love. Then he too knelt, turning my face from where it was, buried in the cotton of Junah’s shirt, to face him. He took the three balls from my fist and spoke softly, directly to me.

“I come again in every age, taking on human form to perform the duty I set myself. I return to right the balance of things.”

These cryptic words only made me more terrified. “Return from where? What do you mean, ‘human form’?” I twisted to Junah for help, but the champion only held me more firmly, turning me back toward Vance as if to say,
Be patient, listen
.

Vance knelt on the grass before me, lowering his eyes to the same level as mine. I peered into them. They were bottomless, endless, without boundary or limit. Up close I could smell again that pungent, wild, suprahuman odor.

“You will know me in every age by the way deluded men respond to me. They despise me, as you yourself did when we first met in the slave kitchen.”

“That’s not true! I just…”

I pulled up, tripped by guilt and truth. Bagger Vance spoke again, his voice even softer and more still.

“Before Time was, I am. Before Form was, I am.”

The hair stood straight up on my forearms. My mouth went dry, I began to tremble….

“I am the Field
and
the Knower,” Bagger Vance said. “Everything that is, is brought into being and sustained by me.”

He glanced once to the battlefield and immediately the sundered turf rose intact from the fog. Spectators reanimated, fairways resumed their wonted contour, the late sun shone brilliantly through. There was Jones, stepping forth in midstride as if nothing had happened. Hagen continued a joke he had been telling. Everything revivified exactly as it had been, as if but a thousandth of a second, a thousandth of a thousandth, had
elapsed. Vance rose and resumed his position behind the bag, on the caddie side.

I stood tight beside Junah, with my arm around him and his around me. “How will I ever hit the ball now?” Junah asked Bagger Vance. “How can I even move after what you’ve just shown us?”

For a moment Vance did not answer. Instead he held out the three Spalding Dots. One he handed to me, one to Junah, and one he kept himself. Then he spoke, addressing the champion. “I have schooled you throughout this day in the hidden ways and mysteries of golf. Now listen, Junah, to the seminal unspoken core. The final and supreme secret of the Supreme Game.”