Fast Greens Page 9

  They used to be partners, not just in the oil business but in golf as well. While March drove me home after that first round, he told me that in the early fifties, when their swings were smooth and the oil business easy, he and Roscoe would travel around Texas laying the sandbaggers’ hustle on unsuspecting country clubbers. On the hunt for some winter prey along the Gulf Coast, they’d been set up by the pro at Corpus Christi Country Club with a Mr. Thompson, an out-of-towner who appeared to be an easy mark.

  Thompson didn’t look anything like a golfer; instead of slacks and a cap, he wore a suit and a gray fedora. March and Roscoe quickly got him into a hundred-dollar Nassau six ways: a hundred on the front nine, two hundred on the back, and three hundred on the total. And Thompson was going to play against March and Roscoe’s best ball. It must have seemed like money from home.

  Once the bet was set, Mr. Thompson called over a caddie.

  “Run out to the black Cadillac,” he told the kid, “and fetch my golf clubs for me.”

  The kid returned empty-handed.

  “Did you want the left-handed clubs or the right-handed ones?” the caddie asked.

  Mr. Thompson scratched his neck for a minute while he thought.

  “Get some of both,” he answered. “I need the practice.”

  “We knew we were screwed,” March said. “But we’d have been damned before we’d turn tail and run. I shot 79, Roscoe shot 80, and the man in the fedora took us for four hundred apiece—driving right-handed, chipping from the south, and putting with a two-iron ’cause the caddie forgot to get a putter out of the trunk.

  “After the round we found out Mr. Thompson’s first name was Ti, as in Titanic Thompson, the king of the cons; and man, he sunk us but good. He took our money and then we all got drunk in the bar and laughed about it. What a grand old scoundrel he was!”

  Later, I asked Roscoe if it was true they once played Titanic Thompson, and Roscoe said it was all gospel except for one thing: “March got it backwards as usual: I shot 79 and March shot 80.”

  18

  When March chipped in for an eagle from just off the fourth green, it no longer mattered that Beast had hit his second shot out of bounds. And Beast could reach the only remaining par five with a driver and a one-iron, so it didn’t even matter that he’d broken his three-wood. Nothing mattered except that March bounced his ball into the hole with a little chip shot learned, he said, “from an old Chinaman.”

  “Well, you can’t lose ’em all!” he declared.

  “One down with five to go,” said Fromholz. “This is getting interesting.”

  I’d had enough of riding, chewing, and upchucking, so I fell in line with those afoot and started the climb up the hill to the fifth tee. Jewel, siding with the winner again, hopped into March’s cart for a ride. Watching this, Roscoe mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like “goddamn her hide,” then climbed into his cart and sped off after them.

  “This is getting interesting,” said Fromholz.

  Now that the sun had burned off the morning dew, we began to suffer under the not-too-pleasant delusion of golfing in a gigantic steam bath. None of us was quite to that point in Texas summer golf where the sun starts burning a hole in your eyes, but it was only a matter of an hour or two.

  Needing relief, we lined up at the water well next to the fifth tee. I was last. Jewel, of course, was first.

  “William March!” she called out. “You cut out that nonsense and have a cool drink before you keel over dead.”

  March, in hopes of knocking down a fat pear for his lady love, was tossing a golf club up into the limbs of a big fruit tree that shaded the well. But rather than a pear coming down, his club stayed up, lodged in the branches. Attempting to knock it down, he hung a second club with the first. For a while it looked as though he might lose his whole set to the squirrels, but eventually they all rained down—the clubs, that is. He never did dislodge a pear.

  “It’s a fine day in Texas,” he said. “Blue skies. Gulf breezes. Money on the line!” He turned to me. “A momentous event, Billy. A day you aren’t ever going to forget. Lots of big things are gonna happen in your life; you’ll have kids. I guess before that you’ll probably get married. And if you’re lucky, before that you might even get laid!”

  I blushed a bright red and Jewel came to my defense.

  “William March!” she said. “You be nice to that boy or I’ll whip you with an ugly stick!”

  “Too late for that,” Roscoe snickered.

  “Okay! I’m nice. I’m nice. See how nice I am?” March cut in front of Fromholz, filled the long-handled tin cup under the stream of well water, and handed it to me.

  “Drink up. A man needs ten glasses of that a day in this sun. Enough to make you sweat. Right, Roscoe?”

  “Nobody does it better,” Roscoe answered, tilting his whiskey bottle for relief and showing us the dark expanding sweat stains that threatened to conquer his entire cowboy shirt.

  “Golf is like sex,” March said. “You have to take a shower after both.”

  “I used to think that joke was funny—twenty years ago,” said Roscoe.

  “It was—then,” said March, not the least insulted. “But we got older. And so did the jokes.”

  “Kid, if it’s wisdom you want,” Roscoe told me, “I’m your man: never trust a queer or a golfer who wants you to give him strokes.”

  “Roscoe!” commanded Jewel. “We don’t need that kind of talk.”

  Much to my surprise, Beast came to Jewel’s support. “My old man told me to watch out for a guy with a gimp leg who wants to play for money!”

  “Amen to that!” said the guy with the gimp leg. “Watch out for ol’ Roscoe; I’ll jump on you like ugly on ape!”

  “My turn,” said Fromholz. “Golf advice,” he told me, “ain’t worth the wind it’s written on. You want to enjoy life like a true bohemian? Get yourself a fat girl: warm in the winter and shady in the summer.”

  “Very educational,” Jewel scolded the whole shameless lot of them. “And oh-so-kind: advising this youngster about the trickeries and meanness of life. Well, here’s one for all of you: ‘I’ve lived some years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors.’ Henry David Thoreau.”

  They all looked at her, dumbfounded. She was always talking that way, quoting some dead guy that you couldn’t remember who he was. I was used to it, but those other guys didn’t know whether she was coming or going. Still, they were so taken with her radiant charm and generous smile that they’d have put up with rickets, hives, or the quoting of Scripture just to be near her. Men had been barking up her tree for as long as I could remember, scratching on the screen door like cats in heat, but Jewel just fended them off with a glass of sun tea and a sprig of fresh mint.

  Some women have the knack of capturing men, and others master the fine art of keeping them at bay. Jewel’s tools in these conflicting tasks were charm, mystery, and me, which greatly increased my stock with her suitors. Jewel’s beaus were always taking me out for milk shakes and burgers or dropping off a wrist-rocket slingshot, a baseball glove, or even some fancy new putter, all in hopes that I’d put in a good word for them.

  Even there on the golf course, my relationship to Jewel was increasing my stock to the point that the golfers were beginning to include me almost as a participant in the game. Being the closest to Jewel made me in some ways the most respected of the group.

  “Kid, you seem to know a lot about bag shagging,” said Roscoe. “Can you play?”

  “Can he play?” answered Sandy. “Heck, yes! I’ve seen him working out on the range, hitting three, four buckets a day, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess? Once you beat that slice, you’ll be darn good.”

  I hadn’t known Sandy was such a great believer in me.

  “Slice, huh?” said Beast. “You’ll never be nothing with no slice. I bet you got one of them long, loose, loop-de-loop back-swin
gs with all the power at the top and no finish. I could cure that in a minute. Answer me this, Skinny: How long is the backswing?”

  This had to be a trick question. Nevertheless, I moved my hands from in front of where my belt buckle would have been—if I’d owned a belt—to above and behind my shoulder at the top of my swing.

  “That long?” I asked him.

  “Just what I figgered. You’re all turned around like a dog after his tail.”

  Beast pulled a club from his bag—only the second time he’d done so all day—and handed it to me. The club felt heavy, but it felt good to grip it like a golfer instead of like a caddie. And it also felt powerful, like I could do no wrong.

  “Do it again,” he said.

  I turned my body and shoulders once more, careful not to take the club back so far.

  “Here?”

  “Wrong!” He made a little buzzer noise like the ones game shows use when you miss a question. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!”

  With everyone watching, this was quickly turning into the most intimidating lesson of my life. Sandy had already helped me with my swing, strengthening my grip and helping me to feel rooted to the ground. He’d also told me about Ben Hogan’s “pane of glass” theory concerning swing planes along an axis from the ball through your heart.

  “That’s the plane the club travels through,” Sandy had said. “Actually there’s two planes. One going back and a less steep one as you come down to the ball.”

  That had helped me to get away from my all-arms-no-body swing, but it had, just as Beast guessed, given me a big loop when the clubhead changed direction at the top.

  Beast grabbed the club from my hands and set up to hit the ball. “Where’s my left shoulder?”

  Another trick question. “Right there?”

  “Square and level, right?”

  I nodded as he took the club to the top of his swing. “Where’s my shoulder now?”

  “Under your chin.”

  “Riiiiiight!” He drew the word out over the full length of his takeaway. “So how long is the swing?”

  I still didn’t know the answer.

  “Eight inches—less for a kid. That’s the distance the shoulder travels from square to just under your chin. Don’t wrap the damn club around you like a vine. Take it back and put it in the slot. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  I wasn’t nearly so sure as I sounded; I just wanted the lesson to be over. But I was not to be so lucky. Advice hung in the air like clothes on a line.

  “And don’t forget,” said Roscoe, taking over the pulpit. “Golf is ninety percent mental, ninety percent skill, and ninety percent luck.”

  “What’s the other thirty percent?” Beast asked in all seriousness.

  We did our best not to laugh out loud. Beast was such a good golfer, maybe he didn’t need to add past even par.

  March had been uncharacteristically quiet through all of this, but he didn’t intend to let his archrival get away with being the sage of the group.

  “Roscoe,” he said, “I always knew you were an unabashed egotist, but I didn’t know you were also golf’s primary authority.”

  “Hell, I’m so smart you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You got that right!”

  “Screw you!”

  “You been doing that for years, every time I turned my back.”

  These two couldn’t carry on a conversation for ten seconds without coming to an argument. It was hard to believe that they’d put up with each other for so long. This time it was Jewel who came to their rescue.

  “Don’t you want to see if Mr. Larsen’s lesson was functional?”

  “Lady,” said Beast, “what are you talking about?”

  “I think it’s time you let Billy hit a ball. You can see if he learned anything.”

  I protested the best I could: I wasn’t warmed up and I didn’t have my clubs. But Sandy handed me his driver and offered his shoes.

  I looked down at his size nines, still sporting two holes with spots of dried blood from Beast’s spikes. I already wore a size twelve; Jewel always said I’d have been seven feet tall if there wasn’t so much turned under. Hopping on one foot and then the other, I pulled off my tennies and then, embarrassed by the big holes in the toe of each sock, removed them as well. The grass felt good under my feet.

  “Barefoot?” asked Roscoe. “You gonna hit it barefoot?”

  “In San Angelo they called him the Wild Indian,” Jewel told them.

  Everybody had a laugh over that one while March teed up a ball for me. The whole thing was like the customers massaging the masseuse. I gripped the club lightly, stepped up to the ball and closed my left eye into its usual concentrated squint. The rest—as with most good golf shots—was a mystery. The next thing I remember the ball was soaring down the middle of the fairway with a slight draw, then bounding over the ridge out of sight, a near-perfect shot.

  There followed an open-mouthed silence.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  After a beat, they all began talking at once.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “How tight was your grip?”

  “See, you put it in the slot…”

  I did my best to feign nonchalance, but I think they knew.

  “Heckuva shot, Billy,” said March. “That makes me real proud!”

  “Yes Sir!” came a new voice in the group. “That was an admirable endeavor you struck upon there, mister.”

  Turning our heads in unison, we were surprised to see that our group had grown. From out of nowhere, or so it seemed, a mysterious little man—ninety years old if he was a day—had appeared on the tee.

  “A very admirable endeavor, indeed.”

  I supposed he had walked up the path from the fourth green, but we didn’t see him till he was right on us. His clothes were different than any I’d ever seen, Scottish or Chinese or somewhere in between, and I think he wore a beekeeper’s helmet on top of his head. The flimsy canvas bag on his shoulder held three or four clubs, one an ancient wood with a hickory shaft. He withdrew the wood from the bag and turned to us with a wrinkly smile.

  “Morning,” he said. “Mind if I play through?”

  We all stood there, dumbfounded. Finally Fromholz took charge.

  “All yours, Pops! Hit it good.”

  The old guy teed up a ball with a Texas tee—meaning he scuffed the sole of the club down into the ground, creating a little peak of turf on which to set his ball. The ball itself was rather yellowed and appeared to be of an entirely different make from anything then in use. He took no practice swing, just stepped up to the ball, took it back effortlessly, made flawless contact and a nice finish. Even with his limited power and antique equipment, the ball flew at least two hundred yards.

  “How’s that one?” he asked Fromholz, mimicking my own query.

  “Solid, Pops! Solid!” replied Fromholz.

  “Well, it didn’t go far,” the old man said with a twinkle. “But I can find it!”

  Find it? There was a long narrow indentation exactly in the center of the fairway where the ground had sunk along the irrigation pipe. The old man’s ball had to come to rest in that depression.

  “Thank you, young’uns,” he concluded, and before any of us could utter so much as a word of reply, he was gone. I felt as if I were in a trance or something. One minute he was there, and the next he was unshouldering his bag down in the fairway.

  “Mother, Mary of Jesus!” said Roscoe. “Did you see that? He split the goalpost! First the kid; now the old geezer. Jewel, you wanna hit one?”

  19

  I had not yet discovered that the basis of life is to be afraid, though Jewel already had me reading my Faulkner, so it was there before me as plain as the nose on my face. But I had not seen it and did not yet know that once I truly accepted fear, I would at last be able to ignore it. And so I walked in the timidity of the young: afraid that Jewel would leave me the
way my mother had, afraid of Beast’s intimidating demeanor, afraid of the bullies in school who twisted your spine to wring out your tears, afraid to hit the ball from the sand for fear of leaving it there, afraid to do what I knew to be right for fear of being wrong.

  But as I bent over in the fifth fairway and picked up the ball that I’d hit there by choking down my fear, a burst of pride welled up in me and I saw for the first time that the track was open, the sky was blue and the way was clear. And I was not the only one to see. March pulled up next to me in his cart and looked me in the eye.

  “Like I said on the tee, you make me proud, Billy, real proud.”

  I did not know why, but I blushed.

  “You want some gum?” he asked, holding out a package of Juicy Fruit.

  When I reached out to take a piece, he touched my hand. We’d never even shaken hands before, but I will never forget that he touched me then. He also unwrapped about three sticks of gum for himself, shoved them all in his mouth, and sped away in the cart.

  I swung my sock-stuffed tennies over my shoulder and hustled off on my tough bare feet to catch up with Beast. The ball I’d picked up felt warm in my pocket. That was a lucky ball if I ever saw one. And March had put it on a red tee for me too. I wished I’d kept it. A red tee was considered very lucky, but I’d been so excited at the shot that I’d forgotten to pick it up.

  * * *

  Sometimes I wonder if Jewel ever walked in the timidity of the young. For even though she feared Elisha Judson, she refused to let that fear stand in the way of what she felt she must do. Jewel had learned that if there comes a time when the rules or the beliefs that govern your life can be broken then there must follow a time when you learn to no longer need rebellion. That time must come or you are lost. Back in that fateful summer of 1935, it was a full week before Jewel could get a ride from Del Rio back to Sonora. A full week during which her father locked her in her room as punishment for her post–Wing Ding daylight return, a week during which she came to look upon her night of rebellion with great horror. Jewel realized her moments of debauchery hadn’t improved her situation at home, or her life in general. And that is the reason, I suspect, that she eventually told me the rest of her story: so that I wouldn’t do what she had done.