Fast Greens (19 page)

Uncle Piggy tried to count to ten but kept having to start over at four. Roscoe fired first and missed. With the leisure of time on his side, March drew a steady bead on Roscoe's hard heart, but at the last minute, he just didn't have it in him. As he pulled the trigger, March jerked the gun down toward the ground. Though he was attempting to miss, he still blew off Roscoe's kneecap.

It was months before Roscoe was able to walk again (and even then with a hobble he'd never shake). In the meantime, March's guilt took over. Maybe it really wasn't Roscoe's fault. After all, from the first night at the Wing Ding, Miss Jewel Anne Hemphill had been the foundation of a house divided. By virtue of countenance and deed, by way of innocence and vanity, she had driven a festering wedge between the two friends.

God, what had he done? March had almost killed his pal; he'd crippled him for life over some kind of horrible jealous love or infatuation. It was like a sickness both of them had contracted, an infection of the heart, a poisoning. That was it: they'd been snakebit.

There was no righting the kind of wrong that March had done to Roscoe, but he did the best he could and gave back half the well, indeed half of that well and all future wells. They'd be partners again. And they'd be friends. At least they'd try.

As for Jewel—well, March only wanted her if she needed him, or cared for him. She was bound to write, he thought, but he received no word.

31

The shadow of a small, billowy cloud, the mid-morning edition of what would later be a rumbling thunderstorm, floated toward us and momentarily cast its cool relief across the seventh fairway. The shade wasn't much, but it was enough to bring March back to life. Or perhaps he'd simply come to a decision that would finally bring things to a conclusion one way or the other. Pulling an iron from his bag, he tossed a ball down in the fairway.

“What the hell are you doing?” asked Roscoe.

“I thought I'd get back in the hole,” March answered.

“Well, it's too late for that, honcho! You tell him, Fromholz. No scramblin'! No mulligans! No damn cheatin'!”

March hadn't even hit a tee shot, so for once Fromholz had to agree with Roscoe.

“What's up, March?” Fromholz asked.

March told Fromholz to bring out the thirty-year-old scorecard from the first match and Fromholz produced it.

“Notice anything funny about it?” March asked.

“Yes sir! I been meaning to ask you about that. Roscoe won with an ace on the last hole? That would have to be the most miraculous shot in the history of golf!”

“Oh, it was more than a miracle,” March assured us.

“What the hell's that supposed to mean?” Roscoe demanded to know as he limped toward March with just a little more hobble than usual. “You saying I cheated? After all these years, you're saying I cheated?”

“Hold it! Just wait a dang minute,” said Beast. “How does a guy cheat to make a hole-in-one? Either it goes in or it don't go in. What, were you guys blind?”

“Well, big man,” said March, “as a matter of fact we were blind, 'cause it can get real dark when you're playing at night.”

“At night!” Beast threw up his hands in surrender. “You're both looney-tunes!”

“I don't get it either,” added Sandy. “Why would you play a big match at night?”

“That's when we thought of it,” said March.

“And it was too damn hot to play in the day,” added Roscoe. “It'd been a hundred and ten every day for weeks. The glare was bright enough to sunburn your eyeballs.”

“Besides,” added March, “that way, Roscoe could cheat.”

“You want me to admit it? Is that it? Okay! Fine!” trumpeted Roscoe. “I did cheat! I fixed your pants good, didn't I, March? And there's nothing you can do about it now, you dumb hillbilly. I found that ball in a patch of prickly pear and just dropped that sucker in the hole!”

March must have been waiting a long time for this confession, not just wanting to get even, but hoping to finally satisfy the doubts in his mind.

He shook his head sadly. “Christ, Roscoe, of course you cheated! We've played golf together once a week for twenty-seven years and you've cheated every damn time. If you weren't teeing it up in the rough you were finding out-of-bounds shots in the fairway. If you weren't neglecting to count a topped shot or a scooped chip, you were on the green marking your ball over and over, each time moving it a foot closer to the hole. It's the only way you've been able to stay in the game.”

“Screw you!” said Roscoe.

“And you had to live with it, you sorry bastard! Just like you're the one that has to live with having run our company into the ground. It wasn't my field reports that bankrupted us. It was you trying to screw everybody in the oil business a second time after you already bent 'em over and poked 'em once before. And now we're just oil bidness history. It'd bother me if I knew I screwed the pooch, but since I was just along for the ride in your own little donkey show, I really don't shiv a git.”

For the first time I'd ever seen, Roscoe was speechless.

When March had finished his little rant, he took a swing at the ball he'd dropped and caught it with a giant yanking hook that sent it farther left than ahead.

“Would you look at that! I'm a pitiful excuse for a sad sonuvabitch myself. Like taking candy from a rube! I talk myself into a free shot and I blow it.”

The rest of us just looked on helplessly while March laughed at his own sad self, then coughed and choked and laughed some more.

It was Jewel who calmed him, who took his hand and held it to her own soft face, who soothed him with gentle words as if he were a sick child or an injured dog. And it was Jewel who had a solution.

“March, it's not worth dying over,” she told him. “Just drop it. Walk away. Come with me and start all over. Even if we can't be young, we can still manage carefree. But please, God, don't just stand there wasting away a little bit at a time. That's not what you want, is it?”

“No,” said March, hanging his head.

“Well, it isn't what I want either. I'm tired of you two fighting over me anyway. In case you two old coots haven't noticed, I still have a certain amount of choice in the matter and my choice will always be you, March. So if I'm all you're fighting about, it's settled. Let's get out of here. Let's get out of here right now and start our lives over.”

March took her hand away from his face and kissed it.

“That's good enough for me,” he said.

For a moment the two of them might have been a little porcelain portrait of ageless love, then March led Jewel back to the cart and gallantly brushed the dirt off her seat.

“Sorry, Sandy. You're on you're own! But you don't need me to whip these mugs, anyway.”

“Jewel!” ordered Roscoe, pushing her lightly to one side. “You stay out of this! It was never about you; it was always about him and me.”

He pointed a stubby finger from March to himself.

“The better man, the tougher, the smarter, the meaner; and by God, it's just about over and I aim to see it through. March, after all these years, don't you even want to know who won?”

“You poor bastard,” March said softly. “That may be what you thought it was about, but as far as I'm concerned, it was about Jewel. I never did get her out of my heart or my head. Every day and every night, I missed her. I miss her right now 'cause you're standing between us like always, you and your sense of being wronged. Drop it, man. Leave it alone. It's over. Finished. Done. Go drill your damn well in the North Sea or marry that woman Rowena who's always following after you, but get it through your head that whatever you do, it ain't gonna have nothing to do with us.”

March tipped his hat to the rest of the group.

“Gentlemen, it's been interesting!”

“Hold it, hoss,” said Roscoe. “I got something for you.”

Roscoe moved to his bag at the back of the cart, opened a zipper, and stuck in his hand. I knew that little gun was in there and suddenly I realized that the only way out of this humiliation, the only way for Roscoe to preserve his twisted sense of honor, was to kill March.

“No!” I yelled.

All heads turned slowly and looked at me in surprise. Then Roscoe, muttering in disbelief at the general level of insanity, instead of a gun pulled out a wrinkled, faded envelope and waved it at March.

“I promised to deliver this to you,” he said. “And if you leave now I might not see you again. I wouldn't want to go back on my word, ol' buddy!”

Jewel looked at the envelope like she'd been struck by lightning.

“Roscoe, you son of a bitch! You dirty rotten bastard! Thirty years! You ran off and left me, a homeless pregnant woman in the middle of the Depression, and all I asked was that you deliver this letter to March. You swore! You
swore
you'd do it.”

“That's right,” Roscoe admitted. “But I didn't say when.”

Jewel took the letter from Roscoe and held it bunched in her hand.

“Oh, William!” she sobbed. “I'm so sorry! I kept waiting for you to come. I was just a girl and I didn't understand why you wouldn't come for me. Finally I decided you didn't want me. I would have come to you sooner or later, but not if you didn't want me.”

March just looked at the letter blankly, like the rest of us, trying to understand what had happened.

“When Roscoe found out I was pregnant, he started packing and I wrote this letter for him to take to you.”

Jewel tugged on the flap of the envelope. The decayed or broken seal flopped open and the letter tumbled out onto the seat of the cart. March picked it up and began to read.

“‘My dearest March, how can you ever forgive me? How could I not want to keep your child, our child—'”

“That's not what you told me it said!” Roscoe yelled. “You swore just like I did, but you lied too! And you kept writing those lies to March, didn't you? For months you wrote, but ol' Roscoe always picked up the mail. It was the only job fit for a cripple! You both thought I was some kind of fool you could just treat any way you wanted, but I showed you different, didn't I? Didn't I show you different?”

Jewel sobbed softly and March just stared at Roscoe for a long, long time.

“I can't leave yet, Jewel,” March finally said, “not till I see this heartless bastard beat to the bone, and hear him say he's sorry.”

32

Maybe all three of their lives would have taken better turns if Jewel had been certain who the father was; perhaps she'd have wanted that baby all along. But after Roscoe left her alone, some change came over Jewel. March became more important than her situation, and her baby became more important than anything.

There was one large Catholic convent in San Angelo, populated mostly by Latinas who had exchanged the harshness and poverty of the outside world for the harshness and boredom of a poor convent. When she walked up the dirt path to the heavy wooden gates, Jewel told me, she didn't know that the nuns hadn't taken in pregnant girls since times got so hard in 1930. Hers was a hope devoid of foundation, a plan lacking in fact. But while Jewel waited there to see the Mother Superior, she was visited by the one miracle of the entire affair. Not much showing her pregnancy and being better dressed than most supplicants of the day, she was mistaken as an applicant for the low-paying job of English teacher for the Spanish-speaking nuns, a job the Mother Superior had advertised in the
San Angelo Standard-Times
that very morning.

It was a good day for miracles. The front page of the paper was emblazoned for the first time in months with a page-high imprint of a large rooster, so big and red you could almost hear it crow. This same rooster has always appeared in the San Angelo paper on a morning after the miracle of rain. That day it was overprinted on black ink stories of hard times beginning to soften to good, of a panhandle family once torn asunder and now reunited in the relative plenty of California, of the dawning hope of what was being termed a New Deal.

“It was Christmas Eve, turning cold, and I didn't have a penny to my name when out of the heavens arrived not only food and shelter, but an income and a purpose to fill my life.”

Jewel told me all this a couple of Christmases after the big golf match. Christmas had always been an introspective time for her, a time when her thoughts turned away from others, the only time that her expansive personality was insufficient to fill her many parental roles. Even at age ten, I wondered why it had long been up to me to play Santa. About the time I entered high school, I finally asked her.

“I was smart enough to keep quiet about the baby,” she said. “The Mother Superior would find out about that sooner or later, but in the meantime, I would be a teacher. And when March came for me, I would still be a teacher. Perhaps I was afflicted with my father's talent to instill, but I would not disseminate blindness as my father had—I would spread light.”

Growing up in Del Rio, Jewel's Spanish was second natural. While she taught the nuns to speak English, she also increased their knowledge of Spanish grammar, and taught them to read and write in both languages. By the time Jewel could no longer hide her condition, not only would it have been inhuman to turn her out, it would have been impossible. The convent had begun to depend upon her.

Besides, Jewel told herself, she would only be there until March came for her. Roscoe would take the letter to March, and March would come. It wouldn't be long. He was bound to come. But Jewel grew larger and larger, and March did not arrive.

In despair, Jewel decided that she would wait for the baby's arrival, then notify him one last time. She felt that if the baby was born much more than nine months after she met Roscoe at the Wing Ding, that if she could keep that baby inside her by sheer will until enough weeks and months had passed, then it couldn't possibly be Roscoe's child, and could belong only to March. It was a matter of inner strength, of refusing to let go. And it was a feat she accomplished with ease.