Fast Greens (15 page)

As we awakened with the coming dawn, perhaps like March before me, I wondered if that wondrous girl and I had conceived a child. To this day I wonder still, because I never saw her again.

24

There was a little outhouse in the middle of the golf course, and from the sixth tee we could all hear Beast in there exercising his temper and his golf shoes on the sheet-metal walls and wooden throne.

“Whooo-eee!” said Roscoe. “Glad he's not mad at me!”

Sandy was swinging his driver to stay loose, and Fromholz just sat still and watched us all, buzzardlike, from his perch on the stump of an old rotted fruit tree. If someone were to fall over dead, I thought, it wouldn't take him long to hop over and peck out one of our eyes to match his own.

Jewel and March stood close to each other at one side of the tee. Jewel was speaking softly to him. I couldn't hear her words, but March's sad blue eyes were staring in my direction all the while.

When she'd had her say, March came walking over toward me. Again he held out his closed hand as if to give me something, but when he uncurled the fingers, there was no chewing gum or moon rock. This time there was only an open hand reaching out to me. It was my turn to put something in his hand. I extended my arm and opened my clenched fingers slowly and we shook hands until a tear appeared in the corner of March's eye.

“Jewel tells me you're a good boy,” he said.

“She thinks so.”

“Well, Jewel's an excellent judge of character,” he said. “Except in Roscoe's case … and mine. I guess there's no denying that I let her down sadly. I hope that hasn't cursed me forever. I'm not a bad guy. I've always tried to get some enjoyment out of life. I try to take care of my business and my friends. Now I'm trying to take care of my family.”

I gave him a weak smile.

“I feel bad when I make the wrong decisions,” he continued. “And I forget to notice when I make the right ones. I don't hit a guy when he's down. And I'm just beginning to learn that when somebody knocks me down, I'm gonna get right back up again. I been down on my knees a long time, but never again. However long I got left, I'd like to spend it with my head held high. I'd like for you to be proud of me. I'd like for the two of us to be friends. And I wish I had a little more time. There's a lot of places and things I'd like to show you.”

“I'd like to see 'em all,” I told him, fighting back a tear of my own.

“Someday, everything I own'll belong to you. My daddy's ranch will be your ranch, my golf course yours too. It's a beautiful land. My heart left with Jewel, but my soul is out there on that unforgiving land.”

*   *   *

The
Llano Estacado
—“staked plains” it means in Spanish. Supposedly the conquistadors marked their way across the Indian country with stakes so as to find their way back to the gulf, laden with the gold of seven cities. But secretly they expected death at every turn, and believed that their souls—lost angels—would need the stakes to guide them back to a civilized afterlife. Then, as they traveled farther into the country, their actions grew more and more barbarous and they thought less and less of becoming angels.

From the estuaries and intercoastal tide pools of the gulf, there's no way to tell just how God-almighty big or how unbelievably dry this land can be. The early settlers, from the Spanish all the way through March's Irish ancestors, entered this vast scape through the mouths of its rivers—rivers that run neither wide like the Mississippi nor deep like the Columbia.

Instead, numerous small rivers meander back through the sunken coastal plains to their time-eroded cuts of the elevated Balcones Fault and beyond into the hostile canyons, draws, and creeks where ancient man made his home. That habitation of thousands of years is still given witness by stacked-rock burial mounds, spent or discarded tools of work and war, and limestone cliffs painted in the glyphs of their written language.

If, like the original inhabitants, you continue to follow the water to its source, you'll eventually find a limestone crevice, grown all around in ferns and sweet watercress, with a freshet of cold spring water gushing out, gathering with other trickles and founts and warming slowly as it heads to the sea. But if you follow the riverbeds farther inland, beyond the springs, you'll find the isolated pools that remain from the last rain and river rise; the catfish trapped in ever-dwindling puddles as they flounder in panic until raccoons or bobcats feast on their flesh and drink the last of the water. Only bleached skeletons remain on the baked and cracked soil which cries out for rain farther upstream.

And still the canyons continue on, past any signs of water but their own eroded existence, cutting into country that survives by hoarding more, by needing less. The prickly pear cactus, fat even through the drought until the cattle or the buffalo, dying for water, eat them thorns and all. The mesquite trees, with tiny leaves catching little of the hot sun and providing minimal shade; the thin-bladed grass growing lush in the violent spring storms and waiting patiently, brown but standing tall, through the passing of the other seasons. The wildflowers springing forth in brilliant rainbows after the storm, then burning brown till their seedpods explode, scattering future life to the southwest winds. The snakes, the lizards, and the horny toads, all living as can on gathered dew and, like the larger animals, keeping one eye cocked to the sky and one ear to the ground for the hopeful sound of distant thunder.

And then there is man, greediest of consumers: grudgingly adapting through conservation, then lowered expectations, and lastly by insanity. Postponing the inevitable by digging wells or drilling, by constructing dams to hoard in times of plenty, by defending their impoundments against the downstream thirsty with ancient yellowed papers, bribes, or guns. By hiring charlatans: white-whiskered old men, crazy Indians, fireworks experts, aviators, scientists, and quacks of all denomination; each promising to make it rain, each coming on the happy rumor of success and leaving on the sad fact of failure, so all that continues unchanged is the vastness of the land and the smallness of man; never conquering but sometimes adapting; looking alternately reddened and browned, increasingly cracked and tanned like a discarded hide, becoming in apparition more and more like an organ or appendage of the living land; and ending up as dust, blowing on the hot breeze, sighing contentedly at the sound of soothing thunder, waiting like all the land for the rain to come, waiting to be washed back to the distant sea.

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.