Fast Greens Page 12

  These were all things I learned and confirmed in the years after I met William March, but I first saw them in his lined eyes and felt them in his calloused hand as it dawned upon me that, if Jewel had become my mother, then he had become what I had never had, and always wanted, a father.

  * * *

  March and I sat down on the grassy slope next to the sixth tee, leaned back on our elbows, and looked up at the sky. The wind had begun to blow hot like a furnace, a sure sign that summer was here to stay. The sun blazed down, an ill-defined orb suspended in a perfect pale-blue bowl that had been inverted dead center on top of our group. How curious that no matter where you stand on earth, your single-point perspective testifies that you are the center of the universe.

  I started to speak. I wanted to ask him what was going to happen to us, but March shushed me into quiet attention. After a short silence I began to hear what he heard: bees searching out a blossom, a woodpecker hard at work, the wind rustling the cedars that lined the course, and way off in the distance, a truck whining up a big hill on the Llano highway, then shifting into a lower gear.

  A funny bird with two long, skinny tail feathers flapped and glided over our heads, then flapped and glided again. Dipping and twisting his auburn-colored tail feathers gracefully like a rudder, the bird steered itself away from our upturned gaze.

  “Scissortail!” said March softly. “That’s my favorite bird!”

  I thought he’d said the same thing about a mockingbird that had pestered the group earlier, and I imagined that he probably said it about all of them.

  “You got a girlfriend at that new school of yours?” he asked.

  “No Sir,” I lied.

  “Well, treat her good, son. You won’t regret it.”

  25

  When we moved from San Angelo, Jewel had just sent her twenty-third class of students on to the third grade, and I had moved to the eighth. Since I’d started school a year younger than the other kids of my grade, I’d long lagged behind my pals in ability at contact sports and interest in girls, so I really hadn’t bothered with either.

  When we arrived in Austin I discovered, to my absolute horror, that school was still in session. Jewel, always the teacher, insisted that I finish out the term in my new school, essentially graduating from the seventh grade all over again.

  “Haven’t you heard of double indemnity?” I asked her.

  But Jewel’s natural wisdom was at work in its usual wondrous way. Rather than spending a friendless summer in a new town, I had a little time to get acquainted. And my best consolation turned out to be that the end-of-school dance had not yet been held. Much to my surprise, I was asked by a girl to be her date. She was completing the ninth grade but she invited me to be her escort because, unlike the boys her age, we saw eye-to-eye. After all, I was descended from Adoniram, Lord of Height.

  Jewel drove us to the dance while I nervously tried to pin a gigantic corsage to a slender shoulder strap on my date’s dress—about as humiliating an experience as a young teen is gonna find.

  The similarities to Jewel’s Wing Ding were few. The kids were seventh-to-ninth graders, and the copy band played 1965’s rock-n-roll favorites, including what seemed like an awful lot of slow tunes, during each of which my date held me closer and tighter while my body temperature rose about five degrees per song.

  The funny thing is I don’t even remember her name. But I’ll never forget that while we danced close—cheek to cheek, pelvis to pelvis—every time her hip swayed out to the right it gave a little bouncing pop as it shifted in the other direction.

  Curious to discover whether this was some sexual secret about which I knew nothing or whether she merely had an artificial hip in need of lubrication, I just kept pushing her hip out there with my own. I pushed and we swayed and my date popped in time to the music until, soaked to the skin, I danced us over to the refreshment table. We drank three quick, cold glasses of punch, not knowing that it had been spiked by some smart aleck with 180-proof Everclear. Outside the gym we gleefully and groggily leaned against each other face-to-face. Our lips touched and she so completely surprised me when she slipped her tongue into my mouth that I must’ve jumped three feet into the air.

  When summer was over she’d be moving up to high school where all the boys were tall. So I knew I only had three months to figure out some way to make it happen again. As it turned out, March’s advice to treat her good was perhaps the single greatest pearl of wisdom I would ever be given.

  * * *

  “Are you gonna marry Jewel?” I asked March.

  “Far as I know, we are married,” he told me. “It’s been a long time, but I haven’t heard any mention of divorce.”

  “I mean, are you gonna live with her like you were married?”

  March laughed. “I don’t rightly know, son. I been single most of my life, just staying out late and hanging around with my bad habits. Fear and whiskey kept me going. I haven’t run out of whiskey yet, but I about used up my ration of fear. What I’m trying to say is, it’s up to Jewel. And you, of course. It’s up to you and Jewel.”

  He gave me a smile and I smiled right back at him. The bees were still humming sweetly and I laid back on the cool grass and closed my eyes for a few seconds to think about how my new life was going to be: French-kissing with older girls, going fishing with my dad March, and playing golf with Sandy until it was too dark to find your ball.

  The next thing I remember a shadow came across the face of the sun. I opened my sleepy eyes and blinked up at a gigantic figure.

  “Skinny, get up off your bony ass and hand me my driver!”

  I scrambled to my feet, noticing that March was already back at his cart.

  “Billy!” I said to Beast. “My name is Billy!”

  While I had napped, Sandy had evidently stayed loose by swinging his driver to and fro. I looked into his blue eyes and saw that he’d found some kind of electric golf groove. It was funny about Sandy’s eyes. They changed color with the sky and his emotions; clear blue now, where earlier they had been hazy and gray with the morning overcast. At night they deepened to a dark royal blue, and if you sneaked a close enough look, you could almost see the stars in the little flecks of his irises. In San Angelo he once hit his number ten tee shot into the murky South Concho River. I’d never seen him lose his temper and I felt sure this would be the time, but it only affected his eyes, which assumed the musty hazel color of the water until we left the hole and the river well behind with an eagle on the par-five eleventh.

  Along with his fair-haired fraternity-boy good looks, those mysterious eyes made Sandy a bull’s-eye target for women wherever he went. But he didn’t even seem to notice how their heads turned slowly to follow after him or how they got that distant, dreamy look in their own eyes when he came close. Like a lot of good golfers, Sandy was just a big kid who found a game he didn’t have to give up and who never really wanted to grow up at all. The two of us played miniature golf with our dinner once—peas for balls and carrot sticks for clubs; I nearly beat him too.

  Now Sandy’s blue eyes were flashing. He’d seen Beast lose his temper and he sensed that opportunity was at hand. With a giant, arcing swing of the driver just in front of Beast’s nose, Sandy issued a challenge.

  “Come on, Larsen. Let’s see what you got.” He swung the club again, harder this time. “How ’bout a little game of chicken?”

  Beast cracked his knuckles loudly.

  “You’re on, weenie!”

  I didn’t even know what they were talking about.

  Sandy stuck a tee into the ground between them and they both stepped into a wide-anchored version of their golf stances, facing each other about six feet apart. They waggled their clubheads and set them face-to-face on opposite sides of the tiny wooden tee, golfers and clubheads both staring at each other intently.

  Finally I figured it out. It was like playing chicken with cars, where two idiots drive straight at each other and whoever turns off first is the chicken. O
nly the golf clubs would be moving a lot faster than speeding cars. This seemed like an exceedingly stupid thing to do. I ducked down behind Beast’s bag and peeked around for a look. Everybody else, including Jewel, stepped way back.

  They both took a little warm-up; feeble swings about like wedge shots. The clubheads passed by each other safely, but it still looked plenty scary to me.

  “You ready?” asked Beast with a wicked grin.

  “Let’s do it,” answered Sandy.

  Just as they started to swing, Roscoe interrupted: “A hundred on the Beast.”

  “Covered,” said March.

  Fromholz took the money from each of them, and now that he’d been made the ref in this contest as well, he stepped forward to insure that everything was in order.

  “Don’t kill yourselves off,” Fromholz told them before scampering safely away.

  Working up their nerves again, both took their clubheads back. With no worries as to where a ball might go and their only concern whether or not to chicken out, they were free to swing as hard as they wanted or were able. That’s exactly what they did: two huge, powerful, simultaneous swats.

  Neither chickened out. Instead both screamed mightily as the clubheads met head-to-head in an incredible explosion of wood and steel. Splinters of persimmon and hot metal shards flew in all directions. Sandy bent over with a groan while Beast merely grimaced, his hands vibrating like church bells.

  “Well, I’d have to rule that a draw,” said Fromholz. “How about two out of three?”

  Neither of them seemed so inclined (or had another driver), so Roscoe snatched his money back.

  “Don’t worry about it, partner,” he said to Beast. “Some days you eat the chicken; some days you eat the feathers.”

  Smelling something like burnt flesh, I looked down at Beast’s bag and found two finger-size holes where flying hot metal from one of their shafts had torn through the leather.

  Sandy still had ahold of his grip, with most of the shaft attached, but the head of his driver was no more; it had completely disintegrated. He spiked the shaft into the ground and shook off his pain the way basketball coaches told you to after you’d broken a couple of fingers or had your nose flattened. Then he took out his three-wood and hit a great shot up the fairway of the long par five.

  “Oh! That’s how you do it!” complimented March. Then he teed one up, swung easy, and hit his straight down the middle as well.

  Beast stuck his big paw in my face. “Gimme my three-wood,” he growled.

  I hesitated, not sure I’d heard him right.

  “Gimme my goddamn three-wood! Are you deaf?”

  Taking out the two pieces of his three-wood that he’d smashed against the tree on number four, I held them out to him. He looked at the pieces like they were from Mars. I guess between the snake in the grass and the cup popping out of the ground, he’d forgotten all about breaking his fairway wood. A wave of understanding swept his face as he realized what Sandy’s game of chicken had really been about.

  “I’ll beat you with a one-iron, smart-ass,” Beast said to Sandy. But I got the feeling he didn’t believe it.

  26

  I had a hard time keeping my mind on the job at hand as we walked up the sixth fairway, climbing a long, slow hill like all the holes on the course. It’s hard to figure how, but somebody built that course so you’d always be walking uphill. It felt like we’d end up about a mile higher than we started, but I didn’t give a hoot ’cause I was just about tickled pink with the way things were turning out.

  I believed then that a golf course was some sort of magic spot. The only places I’d ever been happy were sitting down at Jewel’s dinner table or walking on the golf course. Seemed like everywhere else I went, either some kid was bragging about the neat stuff he’d been doing with his dad, or people were talking about something shitty that had happened. To me it sounded like there must be a lot of crummy goings on, and I had begun to suspect that the world was not as nice a place as everyone would have a kid believe.

  From what they told me, Texas was supposed to be just about the greatest place on earth, but that hadn’t kept Jewel from being lonely—sometimes I used to hear her crying softly in the night—and it hadn’t even kept my mother Martha from going to some other place where she didn’t have to think about me or any of her other troubles—and she always had plenty. Seemed to me like no one ever had enough rain or money or good times, but there was always plenty of trouble—trouble at school, trouble at home, trouble with a bunch of nosy neighbors who were having trouble with the bill collectors who were having trouble with their wives and girlfriends who were all having trouble finding a good hairdresser or a Mexican housekeeper to do their dirty work for them.

  I didn’t understand why, if Texas was such a great place, all the Mexicans had to live in such crummy houses in neighborhoods that really were on the other side of the railroad tracks. Everybody called it Mezkin town. There weren’t any paved streets or sewer lines, so when it rained the whole place just turned into a mud hole, and if it rained enough it turned into a shit hole. Then everybody on this side of the tracks would start complaining about the gawd-awful smell coming from Mezkin town and how can them people live like that?

  About the only answer anybody ever had for that question was that “those people wouldn’t live any other way if they could.” That was just the way they were. Hell, if you put in a bunch of paved driveways and fancy toilets, they’d still go right on parking their cars in the grass and doing their business in the bushes or the outhouse, at least that’s what folks said. Besides, if you gave ’em an inch, they’d start wanting to live in the regular neighborhoods and send their kids to the regular schools where they wouldn’t know how to speak no English and they’d just cause a bunch of trouble anyway. And the last thing anybody needed was any more damn trouble!

  That was what I could never figure. If the world was such a fine place to live—especially our corner of the world—then how come everybody had so darn much trouble in mind?

  Now all of a sudden I was looking at the other side of the coin. Everything that had been tails was about to come up heads. Beast was licked; you could tell it by the way he talked. Before when he bragged, it seemed as factual as if you had read it in the newspaper, and there was a chance that you would read it the next day.

  Now it sounded sort of hollow. “I’ll beat you with a one-iron,” he said, but it sounded more like, “If I don’t beat you, nobody can blame me. All I got is a one-iron.”

  The tide had definitely turned. Roscoe was about half looped on Jewel’s whiskey, so there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that March and Sandy were going to win the match. Sandy was going to take his winnings, go out on the Tour, and make a potful of money. He’d be famous and I’d probably be his caddie at the Masters and the Crosby out at Pebble Beach, and at the British Open at St. Andrews where March had learned to play.

  March and Jewel were finally going to be man and wife, and since Jewel had been my mother, that meant March was going to be my father. I could call him Dad if I wanted, but I wouldn’t ’cause March was the coolest name going.

  Maybe we’d all move out to Sonora and drill some oil wells and open up that old golf course again. If Sandy was too rich and famous to be the head pro, then maybe Fromholz could take the job, or maybe someday I could. In the meantime March could take me horseback riding and camping, and on New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July, the three of us—my family and I—could drive down to Villa Acuña for a big celebration with fireworks and mariachis.

  It was all going to be great fun, and I wasn’t gonna have any more trouble in mind, that’s what I decided. I was all through with trouble in mind.

  BOOK TWO

  Walk tall and loose, carrying your club at your side, as you go toward your ball.

  —Count Yogi

  27

  In trying to understand what happened then, I’ve gone “own and own” (as March would’ve said) about who I used to be, but I haven
’t even hinted at who I am now, these twenty-five years later. Perhaps the point is, who I am now is the product of what happened to me then. Suffice it to say that I’ve never been able to get any of it out of my head or my heart, and I guess the truth is, I never really wanted to.

  I dreamed of March last night; of what he told me and what I learned in the too-short time that I knew him. In my dream March was young, like in the photo with the horses that he’d taken down off the wall of his office and presented to me as a gift that day it all began. Even in the dream I remembered that March’s horse was the Appaloosa. Jewel was with him, and her age was undefined—timeless—just the way I always think of her; her cheeks like roses and her hair like fine silk. March kept trying to tell me something; it was terribly important but I couldn’t understand what he was saying, and Jewel brushed my hair back out of my eyes and repeated over and over, “That’s right. That’s exactly right. You’ll find out sooner or later that he’s right.” But I never did understand what they were trying to tell me.