Fast Greens (7 page)

“Don't leave out my daddy's grave and headstone. They're part of it,” said March.

Beast perked up his ears. “Did I hear something about a golf course?”

“The Dry Devil's Golf Club,” said Roscoe. “We built it.”

“On
my
land!” said March.

“Aw hell, March! Don't start that doo-dah again. That land was a company asset from the very first, just like my drilling equipment. We each made a capital investment.”

“Your drilling equipment wasn't handed down to you by your father.”

“How could it have been? I was a bastard. You gonna hold that against me now?”

“If you keep acting like one, yeah!”

March grabbed the papers back from Fromholz and waved them in Roscoe's face.

“Just sign the deed and we'll play for it.”

*   *   *

On the big oak desk in his office March had rolled out a map of West Texas to show me what this match was all about. By myself I picked out points nearer to San Angelo, places I knew well: the parks with swimming holes and rope swings at Christoval and Knickerbocker, a railroad trestle high over the Concho River that I'd jumped from on a dare, and the abandoned U.S. Cavalry station at Fort McKavett. But March had to point out the dot indicating the golf course he and Roscoe had built in a crazed attempt to duplicate the links-style courses of Scotland, where they had learned to play the game.

“We went to Scotland in nineteen hundred and thirty-eight,” March told me. “We were hunting for oil. A fat cat Scottish lord had come to Texas looking to shoot some big game. Roscoe and me, we steered him in the right direction. One night we were all drinking and telling oil wildcatting stories when his lordship informed us they'd been mining shale oil in Scotland for sixty years. Mining, but no drilling. I found that curious!

“We walked across Scotland for days. It was hell on Roscoe's knee, so we sort of limped from pub to pub across the Lothians into Fife, searching for seepages and uplifts and smelling the air for the faintest one-millionth of a whiff of oil.”

I didn't believe you could smell oil beneath the ground, but March insisted I was wrong. They'd taught us similar such stuff in San Angelo at Santa Rita Elementary, which was named for Texas's first major oil well and where—Jewel's classes excepted—the three
R
's became four: readin', 'ritin', 'rithmetic, and royalties.

One day an old man came to our school and demonstrated the use of a doodlebug or divining stick. Holding the forked branches of the stick with upturned palms, stem pointed to the sky, he crossed our schoolyard until the base of the stick shot mystically toward the earth. The stick had found water, he told us.

The first graders were impressed, but we sixth graders knew better: we put our faith in science. That is, until Coach White gave Tommy Story one end of a long tug-of-war rope and sent him to the water meter at the street. Another kid took the other end over to the water cutoff at the side of the school, and they stretched the rope tight to find the run of the school's main water line. The rope crossed the exact spot indicated by the old man's doodlebug. He'd found water all right, a pipe full of it. Even the sixth graders were impressed. And with a branch from a beech tree, he told us, he could just as easily find oil.

Now March was telling me he could find oil with his snoot. He claimed that traces of iron inside our noses act as a compass—like a salmon's homing device—but due to evolution most people no longer notice.

“I'm just less evolved,” boasted March. “To me the smell of oil is as strong as rhubarb pie.”

A geologist is a great one for maps. March soon covered the one of West Texas with an old chart of Scotland; then he carefully traced their journey from Edinburgh around to the north side of the Firth of Fife, past the hamlets of Alloa, Dunfermline, Pittenween and Crail.

They were in the ancient town of St. Andrews when March finally picked up the scent. Triangulating with his nose and the very same map he was showing me, March got a bearing from the south of the ancient town and another from the north. On his last day of searching he planned to find a third and final bearing from within the boundaries of the town itself.

“I was so excited,” March told me, “that Roscoe could hardly keep up.”

Still waiting at the third tee for the mower to finish, I heard a second, more abbreviated version of the journey and how it led to the building of a golf course. But Roscoe's recollections were not so pleasant.

“It was cold as a well-digger's ass that day,” Roscoe said. “Which was about the warmest it got the whole time we were there. Between my bum knee and three layers of wool I could hardly move, but March just hopped an eight-hundred-year-old stone fence like it was built yesterday. He waded across a road full of puddles and strolled onto a big green meadow that stretched all the way down to the waves. Then March sticks the ol' sniffer into the air and says he smells oil, lots of it!

“‘How lots'? I ask him, and he says, ‘More than you can even imagine.' ‘Well, where is it?' I say. And this joker points straight out at the cold ocean.

“Hell, he was pointing at the North Sea, and I
knew
we couldn't drill out there! Now here it is twenty-five years later and next week I'm going to the North Sea to drill for that same damn oil. When it makes me rich, I guess I'll have the last laugh, huh?”

“Well, Roscoe,” March said. “The way I see it, you already got the last laugh. Don't you remember whiffing the ball?”

“Oh, hell, March, don't tell that again!”

Suddenly impatient, Roscoe began to yell at the greenskeeper.

“Hey, Manuel! Manuel Labor! We're waiting here like a bunch of hogs for slop. Fore, goddammit, fore!”

Over the loud roar of the mower, the man could hear nothing and just kept mowing. The course was, after all, closed for the day. The fact that March had slipped the pro a hundred bucks to let us play didn't mean anything to the guy who did the real work.

So Roscoe hobbled back to his cart and March told us about the big whiff.

“We're standing there staring at the North Sea when suddenly …
Yeow
! Roscoe grabs his shoulder and lets out a yelp like you never heard before. I think he's been shot for trespassing. We look around for our attackers and all we see is this odd white ball laying by us on the ground.

“‘What the hell is that?' says Roscoe. ‘Some kind of aigg?' And I swear he turns his gaze straight up, searching for some giant Scottish bird. Hell, we were just a couple of hillbillies, but even I knew what a golf ball was. I knew St. Andrews was the spiritual home to the oddball game that had swept the States during the twenties. I just thought the game was a waste of time, but hell, so is life.”

“That's the first damn thing you said was true,” hollered Beast, who was pissing loudly into a growing puddle just off the tee.

March ignored him. “But Jesus, to hear Roscoe howl, to see that purple bruise, I was impressed. The ball must have been struck with an incredible force. And sure enough, out of the mist came four Scotsmen dressed like they were heading to church. And tagging along behind them were four little tykes with bags on their shoulders.”

“Caddies!” I blurted out like some damn fool.

March gave me a look, then he continued.

“Roscoe, doing a little St. Vitus' dance with the pellet in his hand, is about to spew some vile Mescalero curse on the Scotsmen when they beat him to the punch. ‘Ha'e you no sense, lad? Ye mooved me ball froom its prooper place. Are ye trying to spoeyl me game, or are ye merely daft, eh?'”

It was a fair to middling Scottish accent that March affected, but Roscoe wanted to get to the point.

“I threatened to turn his hide bass-ackwards, that's what I did!”

“Yeah, Roscoe, you were always quite a scrapper. So when the Scotsman figures out Roscoe wants to fight, he starts in with the brogue about how he don't ‘ken the coostoms' of our own land, but there in Links Land gentlemen settle their differences with a match of ‘gowf.' But of course, the fella says it wouldn't be fair for a seasoned ‘gowfer' to complete against a ‘rank rookie' like Roscoe!”

Just telling the story is beginning to make March snicker.

“‘Rookie!' shouts Roscoe. ‘Give me one of them sticks! How hard can the damned game be?'

“So they show him the basics of the overlapping grip, and we watch the Scotsman hit a shot that bounces onto what I figure must be the target, a big green area adorned by two waving flags.”

“
Two
flags?” I ask.

“At the Old Course,” Sandy had to explain to me, “some of the holes going out share big double greens with holes coming in.”

I shrugged; how was I supposed to know?

“So Roscoe takes a mighty swing at the ball, almost drilling himself into the ground. He looks toward the green, then at the sky, and finally at his feet. Ignominies of callous fate, curses of obdurate execration, O scourging plagues of malediction-and goddammit too! He'd missed it.”

“Big deal,” says Roscoe from the cart. “So I missed it.”

“Yeah, Roscoe, but you swung harder when you missed it the second time. I lost count about fifteen swings later when I fell on the ground laughing with the Scotsmen. Finally Roscoe hits the ball for the first time, a little top that sends it maybe twenty feet ahead. ‘There!' he says. ‘I told you I could do it.'”

“Tell 'em the rest of it!” Roscoe demanded. “I learned to hit it. I learned in
one
day.”

“Well, you stayed up all night to do it,” countered March.

Even Fromholz took an interest in the story. “Sounds like you were hooked solid Pops, hooked through the gills.”

“We were both hooked,” said March. “And that's how we came back from Scotland more interested in golf than oil. Since there wasn't a course within a hundred miles of home, we built one ourselves. Which brings us back to the deed. Whadaya say, Roscoe?” March pushed again. “Do we bet the course?”

“Not a chance. There's still oil under that land.”

“Roscoe, it's all played out,” insisted March. “Drained! Sucked dry!
¡Perdido! ¡Ya no hay más!
All that's left is my land.”

“
Our
land.”

“My father's buried there! What the hell are you worried about, anyway? You're one hole up and you got nothing to lose.”

“Forget it; let's play.”

Roscoe pulled a club from his bag and we looked down the third fairway. The mower was gone.

*   *   *

Easier on the eye than it is to play, the third hole at Pedernales Golf Club is a classic example of the strategic design theory of golf course architecture. The strategic theory, the wolfsbane of the casual golfer, was developed and refined by a long line of masochistic architects who were obsessed with their mamas and hated their papas. In order to punish the latter, they built golf courses which guaranteed that a golf shot lacking proper planning, let alone near perfect execution, would end up in a place from which the hole looked like a flickering star as seen through the windblown branches of a bare tree. On a strategic course the duffer has to go around the trouble and thus ends up playing a much longer layout than the pro. Sounds fair enough—if you're the pro.

What it meant here was that this short dogleg hole had a large pond yawning across the left corner of the fairway. The front side of the water was only about two hundred and twenty yards from the tee; the far side about two-fifty. Strategic intelligence tells the few who have it that they're not likely to fly the ball two and a half football fields. So the prudent course is to lay up short with a shot that lands high on the right side of the fairway and rolls down the slope to the bank of the pond. Any shot foolishly landing in the middle of the fairway might as well be bouncing off the end of a diving board because it's just as certain to get wet. On the other hand, a bold long knocker who successfully navigates his tee shot to the far side is faced with an easy wedge instead of a long iron to the bunkered green.

Beast, I figured, was considering all these pros and cons as he stared long and hard down the third fairway and scratched loudly at the stubble on his chin.

“Have a shot somebody,” interjected March. “But don't hit the ducks on the pond.”

“I don't see no friggin' ducks and neither do you,” said Beast flatly.

“Right you are, Mr. Larsen,” answered March. “I don't see 'em. I
smell
'em.”

“Bullshit!” mumbled Beast, testing the wind with a lofted pinch of grass. “Roscoe, you hit first, and don't whiff it!”

Some people shed life's capricious insults and embarrassing moments like a duck sheds water, while others are forever burdened by the heavy wet feathers of these past vagaries. Because Roscoe's mightiest blows had once been spurned by a lowly Scottish golf ball, he had taken great pains to learn to hit the ball properly. And a perfectly placed shot from the third tee at Pedernales finally proved that he could still do it.

With Roscoe's ball as insurance, Beast was free to go for the other side of the pond. Standing to one side, I could sense Beast's toes gripping the ground through his leather Foot-Joys. I could see the veins bulging in his forehead; each muscle and tendon tightened toward one object: power. It occurred to me then that I was caddying for the biggest, meanest, ugliest golfer that ever came out of Texas. When he swung I was sure that the clubhead had broken the sound barrier, but that mini-sonic boom we all heard was just the sound of wood on ball, a scorching blast that soared in screaming flight. Turning slightly to the left as if it had eyes, the ball landed safely on the other side of the pond, and bounded up the hill toward the green. From where the ball stopped Beast could probably toss it into the hole for an eagle.