Fast Greens (23 page)

One day the dreaded “S” word reared its ugly head and I shanked a little wedge shot that skidded across the practice green at Santa Fe Park and bounced out onto Beauregard Avenue. I yelled for her to stop, but a golden always gets her ball.

I don't remember the car that hit her or the driver who stopped to try to help. I just remember that sweet, beautiful dog as she came limping and dragging back toward me in horrid shock: screaming for me to make it better, crying for me to stop the pain, howling in lack of understanding of what had happened. How could life have been so wonderful one minute, chasing balls for her buddy, and so filled with pain the next?

It seemed to take her a long time to die. I buried her in the unkempt edges of the park, down by the river where she once caught a rabbit and carried it proudly back to show me. It was the only time I ever hit her—how dare she kill such a little creature! When I struck her she dropped the rabbit, and she'd been holding it so gently in her teeth that the bunny ran away unharmed. I've never quit regretting hitting that dog, not yet anyway. And the thing it taught me is that regret has the ability to change the past not one iota.

“A high rate of regret,” March had told me.

What I gathered he meant was that his field was full, there was no more fertile imagination in which to sow weeds and stickers, only a field too overgrown to plow. And now March would have to plow no more. From here on in it would be nothing but smooth fairways and fast greens, and good bounces, an unbroken string of pars and birdies, and a very low rate of regret.

38

From that last, lonely fairway I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Jewel was still kneeling next to March. Her hair was in disarray, the careful bun fallen and her tresses down about her face like a veil. It was hot out in the sun and she had the two of them in the shade of her little parasol.

She'll be okay, I thought. We'll leave her alone while we finish, and then go back to help.

Between the tee and the fairway I'd almost cried out in despair at the thought that my carelessness might have killed March. I remembered putting the medicine in the pocket of the bag and I thought I remembered zipping it up, but there was no sound to go with the memory of the zipper closing. We'd moved March's bag to Roscoe's cart just after that. Maybe the medicine fell out when the bag was tipped.…

And then it came to me. In a Texas flood of terrible understanding it washed my guilt away. Roscoe had been screwing around with March's bag. I hadn't left the zipper down, Roscoe had. Roscoe had stolen the medicine from March's bag, and either not managed to close the zipper or left it down on purpose so that it would look like an accident.

Roscoe was climbing out of his cart nearby. Even in the heat he looked cool and composed.

Cold-blooded, I thought. Isn't that what it's called? Cold-blooded murder.

I was both lost and found; lost in a rage of hate and revenge, and newly discovered of the cynicism life imposes upon its suckers. Whether I might successfully enact the plan that was quickly taking hold in one side of my mind—to steal Roscoe's little gun and blow his head off—was beside the point. The other side of my mind had already concluded that whether or not I had the satisfaction of seeing his gushing blood flow deep into the cracked limestone, pumping out the last of his miserable life that seemed to have been conducted solely to confound my grandfather's happiness, whether I spat on Roscoe's grave or not, March was not coming back.

Jewel was once again alone and I was alone with her. The fishing trips on wild rivers, the backpack journeys into the high desert, all the things I would have done with my new father, grandfather, and friend, they were all just fodder for the conflagration burning hot inside me. Burning to a dry white ash that seared my tongue with the bitter taste of the way things really were and are and always will be: one big shit sandwich with just a little bit of bread and a whole lot of filling.

March had eaten his last, thanks to Roscoe; but Sandy still had to play out one more futile hole and the rest of his ill-advised life as if he had a chance. And that sorry son of a bitch Roscoe seemed to be enjoying every minute of it. That was the part that really pissed me off!

Roscoe was so confident now that he picked up his ball to allow Beast to finish the hole solo. Scooping out another big wad of his poisonous tobacco, he shoved it into his cheek.

“Ith over!” he mouthed through all that crap. “I win! Beasth could three-putt and I'd thill win!”

He was right. Sandy's ball had veered into the left rough, the most inhospitable piece of terrain on the course, and he was searching there among knee-deep weeds, wildflowers and little white rocks for his one lonely pellet. A month farther into the summer and the whole hillside would be dry and barren, but today the remnants of the wet spring were still working against him.

Still uncertain just how I could help Sandy, I found myself dragging up next to Beast in the fairway.

“Well, ol' March died with his spikes on!” said Beast, laughing like the heartless prick that he was.

Determined to say nothing, I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood.

Beast couldn't have been more than an eight- or nine-iron from the green. I pulled out his eight-iron and began to work on the grooves with his little file, tilting my hand first to one side and then to the other in an effort to round off the edges and take some of the bite out of the big man's clubs. Beast was still laughing at his little joke when it dawned on him that he'd been had.

“Hey! That deadbeat back there owes me five hundred bucks! Son of a bitch! Well, I'm gonna get it back on this last green!”

“Last green!” That's what March had said to me. Or was it? No, March wouldn't have told me what I already knew. It wasn't “Last green!” that he'd whispered. It was “Fast green!” He had meant that this was another of the slick greens like number two and number five, and the putts would roll across it like ball lightning down a mountainside! That was the message: his last wish. March was gone but he wanted me to help Sandy win. He wanted me to keep Roscoe from getting his father's land.

Beast looked me in the eye.

“Nine-iron,” he said.

I choked down a dry swallow and handed him the eight that I'd been filing smooth.

Beast took the club. Then he reached out, grabbed me by the front of my T-shirt, and lifted me toward him. I was caught, and knew that I would soon be dead.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded to know.

I stuttered, trying to tell him it was an accident, that I had meant to hand him the nine. But the words would not come out.

“I told you to hold that file square,” he bellowed. “Not at an angle! You trying to screw me up?”

I couldn't believe my ears. He still hadn't seen the number on the club, no real surprise considering he was holding me completely off the ground.

I'm flying! I thought, grinning like a fool in the big dummy's face. My feet don't touch the ground and I'm flying!

“You want your buddy Sandy to win, don't you?” he said, shaking me for an answer. Suddenly the truth was out and I was no longer afraid of him.

“Yeah!” I told him. “I do. I wish he'd beat you. I wish he'd beat you every round and every hole and every day of your life!”

“Well, why don't you wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first,” Beast suggested as he set me down. “It don't matter, Skinny. I'm gonna win, square grooves or not. Especially with these woolly greens. I'm Beast, legendary golf monster. Your buddy Sandy, he's just a legendary choke. Now watch this.”

Beast wrapped his big paws around the grip of the eight-iron, made a perfect nine-iron swing, and sailed the ball toward the elevated green. From below the hill all we could see was the flag, but it looked to me like the ball had gone way long.

“Where'd that end up?” he demanded to know as he handed me the club.

I shoved it into his bag.

“Perfect,” I said. “Right at the flag.”

“All
right
!” he said. “That's what I been talking about!”

Sandy's ball was another story. From the tee I'd seen his shot hit a rock or root and bound straight left. Now he was looking in the wrong place; thirty yards from where I'd last seen the ball. Fromholz was walking around doing his best to help, but he was no closer.

“Two minutes, Fromholz!” Roscoe yelled from his cart in the fairway. “He's only got two minutes left to look for that ball. And that's
noocular
time!”

Roscoe started laughing at his joke and laughing at March and Sandy and at me. He was right too. Sandy was running out of time and that was something I couldn't let happen. If he didn't find that ball, Sandy would have to go back to the tee, move March's limp body to one side, and hit another drive. There was no way he had that in him. Even if he did, he still wouldn't beat Beast.

I dropped Beast's bag and started up the hill to help Sandy.

“Hey! Where you going?” Beast yelled.

I kept walking.

“If you help him find that ball, you can forget about getting paid!”

He kept yelling but I tuned him out and hurried toward where I'd last seen Sandy's ball. When I found it half-hidden under a little bush, my heart sank.

Even without the bush, the ball was in a terrible lie: half dirt, half caliche, and what seemed like half a mile from the green. There were several cedars about twenty yards ahead of him, which meant jumping the ball up fast, and there was a larger cluster of live oaks near the green, which meant carrying the shot a long, long way. Not that I hadn't seen Sandy hit some amazing recoveries. I mean he had just made a hole-in-one with the pressure on full throttle. I had once seen him almost hole one from a creek at Colonial. The ball had been completely submerged in three inches of water, and Sandy had come out of there covered by the sheet of mud and moss that his swing had raised, but by God, he made par! This situation didn't look nearly so promising.

You could almost hear Sandy's heart racing when I yelled that I'd found the ball. He came running, but as soon as he saw the situation, his excitement was replaced by the seriousness of the matter at hand.

“Billy,” he said. “Get my clubs.”

I walked back to where he'd dropped his bag, hefted it on my shoulder, and brought it to him as if I were his caddie. Actually, I guess I was.

“Whadaya think I should do?” he asked me.

I handed him his five-iron.

“Hit it sweet,” I told him.

Sandy smiled at me, then he took the club. As he stepped up to the ball and began to search for the proper angle that would accomplish the required miracle, I began to hear a buzz in the air, a slight electrical mumble that I couldn't quite identify until I looked at Sandy's lips, barely moving as he whispered to himself.

“Guldahl Nelson Hogan, Mangrum Thompson Trevino, Sanders Zaharias Rawls, Haynie Whitworth … March … Bates…”

His lips slowly stilled, the sound of the mantra faded away, and Sandy took the clubhead back and up above his head. With the rest of his body almost motionless, his arms sliced the air and he picked the ball clean from the lie. It rocketed off his clubface, faded around the cedar trees and landed—I thought—somewhere near the green. Unfortunately, neither of us could see the target.

“Goddammit!” yelled Roscoe from the fairway, coughing on his chew for the second time that morning. “Goddammit, Beast! You better not let him beat you!”

39

“I picked you 'cause I wanted someone who knew how to carry a grudge!”

So March had spoken to Sandy earlier that morning. March would never know if he was right, but the rest of us soon would. After all the mighty drives, ripping irons, tender chips, and putts that “needed one more bean,” after all the gamesmanship and trickery and spite, it had all come down to the flat blades: Sandy versus Beast, two quick rolls on a fast green for money and honor.

For Sandy, to make his twelve-foot putt and win the match would almost certainly mean redemption from the Beastly burden he'd borne on his shoulders for so many years. For Beast, the win literally meant salvation, the repaying of Benny Binion's Vegas loan sharks and a second chance at life, this time swearing only by the certain ball and club and never by the fickle dice. But instead of lining up his long putt from the back of the green, Beast was frantically searching through his bag for his last pack of butts, which I highly doubted he'd find, since they were in my pocket.

“What the heck?” I thought. “The guy smokes too much, anyway.”

Finally he gave up the search, declined Roscoe's offer of a chew, and began to nervously examine the downhill putt from all sides. Since I was now Sandy's caddie, I tried to stay as far from Beast as possible. As you'd expect, he was pissed about my having found Sandy's ball, pissed that the ball I'd found was now well inside his own, and pissed that I'd been screwing up the grooves on his wonderful irons.

The word
pissed
would have been far insufficient to describe his mood if he'd known that the main reason he was so far past the hole was that I'd given him the wrong club. I prayed that I'd left no telltale grass stains on the eight-iron (certainly all the other clubs were spotless, cleaned after every shot). He was also annoyed that I'd abandoned his bag for Sandy's. Having to carry his own bag was an atrocious thing to Beast, and he no doubt blamed me for the missing cigs as well.

If this was bad for me, it was worse for Beast. What he needed to do was remember what he'd said about that other stuff not mattering anymore. It was all in the past, and a promising future lay in a good read of the slick downhill green and a sweet stroke right at the heart of the hole.

“Make sure it'll come up, asshole!” he told me as I tended the flag.