Fast Greens Read online

  Jewel’s situation was complicated by her sense of fear and honor: fear that her new beau would come howling like a hyena in heat at her father’s back door, and honor that it was her duty to get out of the mess she’d gotten herself into. For there could be no doubt that she was not the least bit in love with Rodney or Roger or whatever his name was.

  He’d drawn her a crude map to his well site, and she was determined to go there and tell him that what had happened could never happen again. Telling her father she was visiting friends, Jewel embarked on the hot and miserable bus ride from Del Rio to Sonora. The driver let her off where a bald rubber truck tire hung in a tree to mark the faint sidetrack into rough country. As the bus rumbled away, she picked her way down the packed caliche road, presumably toward the well.

  Topping the ridge of a hill, her handbag hanging limply at her side, she halted, wide-eyed with wonder at the noisy clanging of the salvaged and borrowed drilling rig that whip-snaked a rusted cable through a protesting crownblock and down into the violated ground. The crooked drilling tower was lashed and welded together from mismatched timbers and steel scavenged from broken-down tractors and wrecked trucks and stolen from other wells. Cowering beneath it was a wood-fired boiler that was patched and rusted and patched again, hissing and belching like a giant snake about to explode from inhaling too many rats.

  It put her in mind of her father, who often preached that oil was the God-given source of fire and brimstone and was used to fuel the furnaces of Hades. If those damned oilmen didn’t cease the withdrawal of the oil from the earth, they might cause the fires to go out. In his eyes they were evil, wicked men, extinguishing the all-important threat of eternal damnation.

  Two small, dark-skinned Mexican men, who looked in no way evil, were chopping and tossing cedar stumps into the boiler fire. What’s-his-name was nowhere in sight, and neither was the dusty red pickup in which she’d made her bed.

  “¿Dónde está Señor Roger?” she asked the Mexicans, yelling over the noise.

  “¿Cómo?” they replied.

  “¿Señor Roger? ¿Dónde está?”

  “¡Lo siento! ¡No hablo Español¡” one of them answered, flashing pearly teeth studded with a variety of metal and stone fillings.

  Having had their joke, they directed her to another man as he stepped clear of the crownblock atop the drilling platform. Spotlessly clean amid the all-pervading grime, he was studying the copper-colored tailings that streamed out of the hole. When his men yelled to him, he turned to see a stunning mirage in a long dress and sun hat. Dropping a heavy wrench on his own toe, he limped and climbed and leapt down to greet her.

  Beneath his clean clothes he was tan to the bone and his eyes shone brightly through the sweat that beaded on his forehead. He came over and extended a hand that was hot to her touch. As she shook the hand and looked into his bright, clear eyes she fell instantly and madly in love with him. His name, I know now, was William March.

  20

  “Get own up there!” said March as his ball flew a hundred and fifty yards down the fairway and bounded up the slope in front of the fifth green.

  Not that I’d noticed at the time how he pronounced words like “on.” It wasn’t until years later, after I’d spent some time out of the state, that I realized how funny and wonderful we Texans talk. The lazy combination of two words into one (Sa-nangelo), three words into two (“Haw yew?”) and the even lazier tongue that turns “fine” into “fahn,” all require a more removed perspective before they really come home to roost. It’s like eating a chicken-fried steak all smothered in cream gravy—you really have to miss it awhile before you begin to ’preciate it properly.

  “Fahn-lookin’ shot, March!” said Roscoe, outdoing March’s accent by a power of five. “Ah bulieve wur both puttin’.”

  “You are right as rain!” replied March. Their tee shots had been side by side in the fifth fairway and, incredibly, their second shots were nearly kissing on the green.

  “Hot damn, this is almost fun!” said Roscoe.

  “Just like old times,” said March. “You know, it’s not too late to shake hands, pool our cash, and go someplace godforsaken to drill a well.”

  Roscoe looked him up and down in amazement. “Sun getting to you, March?”

  “Nah! Don’t you remember when we stood together and took on all comers, butt to butt against the sunrise and the sunset, so those other bastards always had the glare in their eyes?”

  March grabbed the bottle from Roscoe. “Here’s to us; to hell with them!”

  Then came the most unimaginable occurrence of the day: Roscoe’s perpetual frown relaxed for a moment; his squinty eyes opened just wide enough so we could see they were brown; his tight, cracked lips separated a bit; and, ever so slowly, some fond memory came blooming across his face. It almost made you want to smell him; the sheer epiphany of some forgotten adventure long since misplaced in that attic full of mostly rotting memories of their mutual past. It only lasted a few moments, then Roscoe’s mind began to wander into darker corners. The blazing rose just shriveled back into the same old grouchy curmudgeon who chewed and spit and scratched his ass, and had long since forgotten that life could be basically good with just a bit of shit thrown in rather than the other way around.

  Roscoe snatched the bottle back from March.

  “And all I got to do to make us unbeatable again is just stick out my hand and say the word, right?”

  “Yeah,” said March, extending his open hand. “Why not?”

  “Aw hell, March!” said Roscoe. “That’s a bunch of crap if I ever heard any! We ain’t been friends for thirty years, not since the moment we both set eyes on Miss Jewel Anne Hemphill there. I got her. You wanted her; then you got her. Then she didn’t want you anymore and I got her back.”

  Through all of this talk, Jewel had stood quietly to one side, weaving the wildflowers she had picked into the sun hat which she often carried in her bag. Now she placed the hat on her head and stepped between the two men. “Nobody’s got me now,” she said.

  “That’s true enough,” said Roscoe. “But March and I aim to change that, don’t we, March? And that’s why we ain’t calling off nothing: a bet’s a bet. Play ball!”

  It looked like the good part was over, so I hustled along to catch up with Beast. My tennies bounced and swung from my shoulder as I stretched out my strides in the direction of the left rough where my boss was stomping around looking for his ball. Always trying to get that extra edge, Beast had actually tried to drive the green by bounding one down the road that paralleled the fairway. I guess the ball must have taken an asphalt hop in the wrong direction because it was nowhere in sight. But before I could get to him, Beast began raving like a madman.

  “Aigghhhhh!” he screamed. It was an awkward shriek, like he hadn’t had much opportunity to express fear.

  I ran toward him; with each step the big bag bounced off my shoulder and slammed down on my hip, while the flopping tennies kicked me double-time in the back and chest. I tried to find some kind of smooth canter, but both bag and the tennies continued to rattle my bones.

  “Yeee-aigghhhh!” hollered Beast again. His screams were improving with practice and had now attracted everyone’s attention. March and Roscoe were driving over in their carts, but I was the closest, about twenty feet from him when he finally got out an intelligible word.

  “S-s-snake!” he hollered as if it were biting him in his private parts. “S-s-snake!”

  Hearing the reference to slithering reptiles stopped me in my tracks. There was no use carrying this Wild Indian thing too far. I unslung my tennies from the bag, and by the time the others arrived, I had the shoes on my feet.

  March, Roscoe and I walked up together and, sure enough, we found Beast darn near cornered by a snake—a diamond-back rattler, to be precise. We couldn’t tell how long the snake was because it was coiled around Beast’s ball as if it were hatching an egg. Beast’s behind side was backed up against a barbed-wire fence, and as he
moved to get away, the snake pulled back its head in indication of striking at him.

  “Somebody kill it,” begged Beast. “Please somebody kill it!”

  “Ease on out of there, son,” advised March. “Nice and slow-like.”

  “I cain’t. My pants are hung on the bob wire. You gotta kill it.”

  Roscoe strolled closer, nonchalant. “Well, I’ve seen a snake-milking, a toad-roping, and a duck fart under water,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if this chicken squawking don’t beat all!” He turned back to March like he’d discovered something marvelous. “I think the big man’s afraid of snakes!”

  “Hell, yes, I’m afraid of snakes!” Beast whimpered. “Somebody kill it.”

  “Calm down, big guy,” said Roscoe. “No reason to panic. You get a free drop, right Fromholz?”

  By this time Fromholz, Sandy and even Jewel had arrived to survey the situation. Fromholz stepped in next to Roscoe, about six feet from the snake and just out of striking range.

  “A drop? For a rattlebug?” said Fromholz. “Not a chance. A snake is a natural hazard.”

  “Aw, hell, of course he gets a drop!” argued Roscoe. “You look in that dang rule book! There’s gotta be something in there about snakes!”

  “Forget the damn drop and kill the snake!” pleaded Beast.

  “Hell, no, we won’t forget the drop! We ain’t counting you out of the hole, pawd-no!” Roscoe turned back to Fromholz. “Ref, this just ain’t fair!”

  “Maybe not, but that’s my ruling,” said Fromholz.

  “I don’t believe this!” said Beast. “I’m about to get eat up by a snake and you guys are arguing rules!”

  The three of them would have bickered over that rattler till they were blue in the face if one sane voice hadn’t risen calmly above the din.

  “Give me a golf stick.”

  We all turned slowly to look at Jewel, who was holding out her hand for a weapon.

  “Give me a club,” she repeated. “I’ll kill it.”

  * * *

  I was about five years old. Jewel was showing me the ruins of the Mission San Saba, an eighteenth-century Spanish outpost on the San Saba River that lasted a dozen years before the Indians drove the heathen Catholics back to Bejar.

  Walking a few feet ahead of her, I was about to climb the stone steps into one of the roofless buildings when Jewel told me to freeze. I’d never heard her speak with such a chill and it frightened me bad. I froze in my tracks and stayed there.

  There was a snake, she said, a rattlesnake, coiled just in front of me. I couldn’t see it; my eyes were darting all around in search of the snake, but all I could focus on was Jewel’s hand edging ever so slowly toward a heavy oak log in the dry leaves. She steadily closed the gap till at long last she had her flattened palm against the log, and then her fingers around it. Just as slowly, that thick timber came up into the air, rising above my head, and exactly as it crashed down from the sky like an instrument of God, I saw the snake, coiled on a little stone ledge not eighteen inches from my face with its cold eyes fixed on mine. The snake struck forward and a hand’s width from my eyes, the log came down squarely on its head. I jumped back, and Jewel screamed as she pounded that snake’s head over and over and over until it almost became a part of the stone path.

  “You son of a bitch!” Jewel screamed through her tears as she continued to swing the log. “You son of a bitch! You leave my baby alone!”

  She just kept pounding and screaming and crying until finally I had to wrap my arms around her leg and tell her the snake was dead.

  * * *

  “Jewel!” warned Roscoe. “You stay back!”

  “Yeah,” said Beast. “Skinny, you kill it.”

  “Billy?” said Fromholz in disgust. “Why, you pantywaist!”

  Having heard all he cared to hear, Fromholz reached into the pocket of his jacket—actually I think he reached right through the pocket of the jacket. From somewhere beneath it he withdrew a large six-shooting pistola and nonchalantly blasted that snake’s head off with one loud, terrifying shot. Then with a second shot he blew off its rattle. We all jumped when the gun went off, but none higher than Beast who leapt straight into the air, tearing his pants on the fence.

  “Souvenir for you, kid,” said Fromholz, pointing to the still-quivering rattle.

  I picked it up gently. The rattle twitched on my palm as I counted the sections—eleven of them—one for each skin the snake had shed during its life. I collected stuff like that: little things that meant something to me. They were all at home in an old wooden cigar box with a warped top that wouldn’t close: arrowheads and flint scrapers, old-timey marbles made of clay, two stamps from Tanzania showing gigantic white birds in flight, and even a harmonica with Herb Shriner’s Harmonicats engraved on it. But this rattle was the best of all.

  “Six-iron always was my best club,” said Fromholz, putting the pistol away as quickly as he’d produced it.

  “Damn! I ripped my pants!” complained Beast.

  “That ain’t so bad,” answered Roscoe. “We thought you was going to wet ’em! Now have a shot.”

  The others backed away from the messy snake while I selected a seven-iron and handed it to Beast. He didn’t even look to see what club it was. As he addressed the ball, I could see his hands quivering like the snake’s rattle. After a long time of just standing there, he backed away and called to Roscoe.

  “What the hell is that guy doing with a gun?” he whispered in a shrill voice.

  “Protecting you, evidently. What’s the problem?” said Roscoe.

  “He’s not protecting me!” said Beast in a panic. “He’s here to get me. I owe Binion a lot of money. If we lose, that guy’s gonna kill me, ain’t he?”

  Roscoe didn’t answer.

  “Ain’t he?” repeated Beast. “Ain’t he gonna kill me if we lose?”

  Roscoe pursed his lips together and rubbed his tongue around the inside of his mouth. Either he’d lost his chew or he was searching for something to say. Finally it came to him.

  “Don’t lose.”

  21

  When the money’s on the line, golf becomes like poker: you can play to win or you can play to not lose. Or, if you don’t have any real idea what the difference is, you can do what most golfers and poker players do: play to lose. They don’t know that’s what they’re doing, but the loss is just as inevitable as if they had drawn four cards to a deuce kicker or used a putter off the tee.

  Shortly after buying that first five-iron at Santa Fe Park, I learned that golf is much harder than it looks. So after a lot of frustration and a good deal of pleading, Jewel finally enrolled me in a junior golf class.

  I was by far the youngest student in the class. The course covered everything from driving to irons, chipping to putting, and even included a little lecture about common courtesy. It was complete in every way except one: the coach hardly touched on the rules. Oh sure, they told us about a number of penalties: stroke and distance for out of bounds, two strokes for hitting the pin when putting, and a whole variety of strokes for encountering water, lateral or otherwise. All examples of how the rules worked against us, but nothing about how the rules might work for us. They told us what to do if you lost a ball, but they never told us anything about what to do if you found a ball, but couldn’t figure out how to hit it. And on the very first hole of the class graduation tournament, that was exactly what my drive rolled into: an unplayable lie.

  It was Bermuda grass, about eighteen inches deep. For most kids the ball would have been lost, but I knew it was in there. My eyes did not deceive. And when I found it nestled at the bottom of that jungle, I knew right away that I could never hit it out. But I’d never heard of an unplayable lie, that I could just take a one-stroke penalty and drop the ball out within two club lengths. I pulled out a seven-iron—having already graduated to a larger mismatched set of clubs—and I began to whale away.

  Two, three, four; hit it some more. Five and six; change sticks. Seven, eigh
t, nine; let out a little whine. Ten, eleven; bad-mouth heaven.

  By fifteen the ball still hadn’t moved, but I was digging a nice tunnel toward it. How high can an eight-year-old count anyway?

  I got the ball out of that patch of grass on the twenty-second stroke. Then a kid who was a couple of years older than me came over laughing and told me I could have dropped it out with one penalty stroke. I stood on my tiptoes and punched him in the nose.

  My final score was one hundred and thirty-eight, for which they gave me a trophy in the shape of a boxer for fighting the course (not to mention the other golfers). Just like Sandy’s consolation trophy when Beast was disqualified for gambling, I refused to accept it. A trophy is for the winner. The awfully adult lesson I learned is that it’s often not that important if you win, only that you don’t finish last.

  My third-grade pals and I used to tell a riddle about a two-man Olympic race won by an American (of course) and lost by a Russian. The headline in Russia read: RUSSIAN SECOND. AMERICAN NEXT TO LAST.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, Sandy and March still seemed more likely to come in second than next to last. After Roscoe’s admonition about not losing, Beast hit his shot from next to a headless-but-still-squirming snake to the front of the fifth green. I tended the pin while he stalked the putt for the kill. He studied it from all sides, plumb-bobbing it from back and front, then bent over it with the usual cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “Don’t be short,” warned Roscoe as Beast was about to putt. Beast tilted his head menacingly in Roscoe’s direction, then looked back down at the ball and stroked it hard up the slope.

  I was surprised how fast it was coming at me. Hurriedly I pulled on the pin. Nothing happened. Confused, I pulled again: still nothing. The pin was stuck in the cup.