Fast Greens (3 page)

Martha was only fifteen herself when I was born, a teenager with bangs and curls. Perhaps if she had sported long hair instead, I might have been able to hold her close. But my arms were too short and my cry too soft for me to grasp her young heart. Instead I turned to Grandmother Jewel, who fed me, changed me, loved me, and scolded me as her own, while Martha assumed the role of disinterested older sister. And since Jewel had been for many years without a man in her life, that was a role I was destined to fill as well. Ignored by a teenage mother and cradled by a grandmother still in her thirties, I was already the man of the family.

As I grew into my toddler years and beyond, Martha continued her life as before, idling away her time with dating and gossip, and sometimes caring for me while Jewel taught school. Among the few memories of my mother during those years is of Martha constantly yelling for Jewel because I needed something or because I was misbehaving.

“Jew-el! The baby won't quit playing with the tee-veeee!”

Even when I was six years old, Martha still persisted in calling me “the baby.”

“Jew-el! The baby's messing up my clo-set!”

Jewel would then come to correct the situation or else she'd yell to Martha to handle it herself. The latter approach generally elicited more protests until Jewel finally did arrive, or until Martha simply left the house, the town or the state, depending on how put-upon she felt.

“Stay out of the backseat of those boys' cars!” Jewel would shout after her as Martha bounded out for an evening of pleasure or work.

The only job my mother was qualified for was as an underage cocktail waitress in the one real nightspot in town, the Enlisted Men's Club at Goodfellow Air Force Base. There she continued to grow wild and restless until she eventually flew the nest, leaving her “baby brother” far behind.

Martha had been gone two years when she wrote from California to say she missed us; and would Jewel mind sending her clothes. That's when I knew I would never see my mother again.

Now Jewel and I had also left West Texas, and the only thing I regretted leaving behind was my nickname. While the other kids still wore the stupid crew cuts and greasy butchwax stubbles that their dads demanded, my long hair and dark tan had made the Wild Indian alias seem natural. But it did not follow me to Austin, and I soon discovered it is not an easy matter to rechristen yourself with a heathen name among strangers.

Sitting in William March's office that day, I suppose it was the Wild Indian side of me that felt so certain I could never cheat.

“Oh hell, I knew that already,” March told me. “I mean you are Jewel's kid. That says it all right there. I was just testing you.”

I smiled at him uncomfortably, not sure what he was getting at.

“No, what I really need is an honest caddie, not for me, but for the other team. There's a big match coming up, and I promised to find a bag-shagger for Roscoe's partner. The guy's a player.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“None other than Carl Larsen, state amateur champion.”

I sat up straight. Carl “Beast” Larsen was the longest hitter in Texas, and he'd actually played against the pros.

Trying not to look too eager, I asked March about the pay.

“Oh, that's between you and your golfer,” March said. “But if he pays you less than twenty, come see me about it.”

Twenty dollars? The going rate was six bucks plus a tip that
might
get you up to ten. This was too good to be true.

March picked up a silver dollar off his desk and absentmindedly began to roll it one-handed across the backs of his fingers, sliding it back in a circle with his thumb.

“So whadaya say, son? Can I count on you?”

I was about to say yes, but hesitated for a moment. There was something in that last question I didn't quite understand. If I was caddying for the other team, why would March be counting on me? Then I remembered the twenty bucks, and I knew that at the very least he could count on me to do my job.

“Yes Sir,” I told him. “Count me in.”

For the first time since I'd been there, March smiled at me. He had a very memorable smile.

Now that we had come to that simple agreement, March seemed eager to talk about the big match and its participants. About the only thing he didn't tell me was who his own partner would be. Had I known he would be playing with Sandy, I'd never have agreed to caddie for Beast.

Soon Jewel was honking for me out at the curb. It seemed I had been there only minutes, but I looked to the big clock on the wall and was surprised to find that it had been exactly one hour, just as she had promised. Saying a quick good-bye, I bolted for the door before March could even get out of his chair.

I was climbing into Jewel's car when March came running down the sidewalk, arriving out of breath and almost out of words as we were about to pull away. Resting his arms on my half-open window, he knelt down so he could look straight across at Jewel who, after her trip to the beauty parlor, looked like she'd come right out of some movie magazine.

Not a word passed between the two. From either side of me their gazes met, and there on Cedar Street in Austin, Texas, in June of 1965, time stood still. I heard no ringing of church bells nor the sound of passing cars. It was almost as if the sun stood motionless in the sky. In front of my eyes the second hand of the heavy gold watch on March's wrist was frozen like a ship in ice.

Across from me, I noticed for the first time that Jewel's hair was different than I had seen before, though my mind raced to photos I had seen from her youth. I realized then that William March was lost in the sights and smells and sounds of a sweeter day, when life had been good and love easy. At first there was only sadness in his eyes, like sails hanging limp on a ship becalmed at sea. Then somewhere on the far horizon of their lost youth, a breath of sweet wind came rushing to the rescue of that floundering ship, flying across the blue and unfurling his eyes in a glorious recollection of a girl and a dress and a place so far away; and yet so close.

If that same memory shone in Jewel's face, it was also adorned by a single tear, which emerged slowly from the corner of one eye and slid down her cheekbone. Finally the tear fell free in the slowest of motions, then landed with a tiny splash on her hand in her lap. The deafening sound of that splashing tear was enough to jump-start time again, and as I glanced back at March, the second hand of his watch was ticking yet again.

“Glad I caught you,” March told me softly, no longer out of breath. “You forgot your picture.”

I didn't know what he meant at first, but I took the big folder he passed in through the window and there inside was the framed photograph of the two golfers on horseback. Unable to find my voice, I gazed at it in total disbelief that such a treasure should be mine.

“Golf will never be like that again,” March told me, “and now you're part of it.”

As we drove home, Jewel remained pensively quiet. During the drive, and through much of the evening, I studied the photo closely, wanting to discover everything about this wonderful joining of golf and horses—a new game from out of the old West. There was both mystery and magic in that photo, though I did not know how, or why.

I was reminded of a western I'd once seen on TV. A white man tells an Indian that the whites must rule the land because they know much more than the red man. With his spear, the Indian draws a circle in the sand.

“This … what red man know.”

The Indian draws a larger circle.

“This … what white man know.”

The white man nods in smug self-assurance.

“And this…” says the Indian, sweeping his hand across the vast horizon, “this is what neither of us know.”

3

That night, unable to sleep, I lay in my bed gazing at the photo, trying to take myself back almost thirty years to that place. The story March had told me of playing golf on horseback was clear in my mind, but now the pictures were filled out by the moonlight outside my window.

“It was the fall of 1938,” he had told me, “and the course practically glowed in the light of the harvest moon. The hard edges of the scrub oaks and scrawny mesquite trees were showing their softer sides, and there was no place I would rather have been.

“We considered it a private affair, a challenge between two drunken friends. What with looking for the balls in the darkness, it had taken us most of the night to play only eight holes, and with one par three to go, we were dead even. Roscoe stepped up to the ball on the tee, but halfway through his long, drawn-out preshot routine, the ball disappeared. The damndest thing: without Roscoe swinging the club, without the ball even moving off the little mound of sand that we used as tees in those days, it simply disappeared! I looked up to see if Roscoe was trying to pull a fast one, but he had vanished too.”

March's voice, as if telling a ghost story, began to gather a hissing speed.

“A chill ran across my flesh, then it dawned on me. The moon had sunk like a stone into the gathering fog, dropping a pitch-black cloak over us, our horses, and the whole course.”

To March, in the black of the moonless, starless night, it seemed futile to continue, but Roscoe wasn't having any of that. Lighting one of his stubby Camels, Roscoe smoked it down to a bright ember and set it next to the golf ball, which glowed in eerie red reflection. Then with the sudden sharp sound of forged steel on hard rubber cover, the ball again disappeared. Where Roscoe's shot in the dark had landed was anybody's guess.

They were contesting, March told me, for the position of chairman and head honcho in their own oil enterprise. And with that burgundy leather chair came the right to name the company. Damned determined to call it March Oil, he placed his own ball next to Roscoe's still-glowing cigarette. Guided by the scent of the lantana blossoms that surrounded the little adobe clubhouse beyond the green, March swung a smooth six-iron, knocking the ball out into the blackness where he thought the hole might be.

As I envisioned the story from my bed in South Austin, I could smell the lantana blooming outside my own window. And in my mind I could see that clubhouse perched on a hill above the Dry Devil's River.

March had described the sound of his shot: the simultaneous
whoosh
and
whack
vibrating outward only slightly faster than the actual flight of the ball. He told me that the sweet haunting sound of his clubhead making contact with the glowing ball was something that he'd never forgotten. He knew, and would always know, that his own shot had sailed more true than Roscoe's.

Finding his ball on the putting surface, March picked up a heavy iron roller and, in the dim light of the coming dawn, he smoothed out the sand between his ball and the cup. That's right, sand! In a futile attempt to find irrigation water for their new nine-hole course, March and Roscoe had drilled nine more holes, bored 'em deep into the earth; but instead of life-giving water, one by one the wells had come in gushing oil. Each one gave up a daily supply of West Texas crude, good for a growing country but hell on growing greens. With no other choice, they installed putting surfaces made of hard-packed sand. And to keep the sand from blowing away in the constant West Texas gales, they
watered
with a light mist of oil.

March's ball was one sandy putt from victory, but Roscoe's ball was nowhere to be found. I had witnessed Roscoe Fowler's perpetual complaining when I carried for March, and now I could picture Roscoe's increasing bitterness and panic, picture him stooping close to the ground, groping blindly for the ball, searching with desperation in the right rough, the left rough, short and long. I can almost hear him now, Roscoe the original curmudgeon, cursing the sun for coming so slow, the moon for setting so early, and the fog for staying so long.

“Oh mama!” Roscoe had cried out as he tripped over a root or a rock or a deaf armadillo, and landed on a prickly-pear cactus. “I'm in a world of shit now!”

But it was March who was really in a world of shit, because March was about to win control of Roscoe's life, and that could not be allowed. The senior partner picks the wells to drill while the junior partner picks his nose.

“Hey March,” cried Roscoe. “Git out the Bird! Let's have us a drink!”

The Bird: Wild Turkey, Kentucky whiskey. March knew Roscoe was stalling but didn't mind giving his friend time for the light to dawn.

“I moved to the horses and groped in my daddy's oiled saddlebag for the bottle,” said March, turning to catch my eye. “Those horses were my pride and joy, a necessity born of Roscoe's leg and my own invention. They liked to carry golfers, and waited untied while we hit our shots. My Appaloosa was born wild. I found her dying of thirst near a wildcat we were drilling in Big Bend; put out water and hay every day for a week till she'd eat right out of my hand. She never let Roscoe ride her either. When it comes Judgment Day and St. Pete wants to know did I have any friends, I'm gonna tell him about that Appaloosa.

“We huddled together, Roscoe and me, beneath a mesquite tree not much taller than ourselves, and passed the bottle back and forth. The gray-streaked dawn arrived before long, but didn't reveal Roscoe's missing ball. He took one last look around, planting his footsteps in the sand of the green in the process, and finally he conceded that the ball was lost.

“Fair enough, I thought as I stepped up to stake my claim. Two putts would have won, even three; but hell, I rammed it right in the cup for a birdie and the only key to the executive washroom of that soon-to-be-renowned ground-poking enterprise, March Oil! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, hallelujah!

“Kid, I literally waltzed across ten feet of Texas to fetch my ball from the hole and, goddamn! There were
two
balls in there! We'd never thought to look in the hole, not in the middle of the night, on a dark par three? Who in their wildest imagination would have ever dreamed that Roscoe could've knocked his tee shot dead in the cup for a hole-in-one?