Fast Greens (9 page)

Not far from the horseback golfers had been a photo taken in front of an old wooden oil derrick: two grimy, smiling young men and a spotless woman between them. Where the years had been kind to Jewel, they'd been positively devastating to Roscoe and March. One crippled and the other all eaten up on the inside, they now seemed almost shadows of their younger selves, both beaten down by dry wells, broken hearts, and inside straights that didn't fill. In the photo they all looked close to the same age, but now you'd never really guess that Roscoe and March were only ten years older than Jewel.

As I contemplated all this, Roscoe, Sandy and Beast examined their putts.

“You want me to line it up for you?” Beast asked his partner.

Roscoe snorted. He'd rather have missed the putt than accept advice in front of Jewel.

“Suit yourself, old-timer,” said Beast. “I'm gonna make mine anyway, and we only need one birdie to win.”

But in Jewel's presence Roscoe was not an old-timer. Feeling his oats, he snaked a long putt up the slope that broke left two feet for every ten it moved ahead, straightening out only when the ball hit the bottom of the cup.

Jewel applauded with excitement, the fingers of one hand patting quickly in the palm of the other. March looked away in disgust, not so much at losing the hole but perhaps at being so obviously bettered by Roscoe.

“Just once,” March said to Sandy through gritted teeth. “I'd like to run in a long putt like that when it really means something!”

Sandy would have liked to make one as well, especially the one he now needed to halve the hole. His line was more straight up the hill than Roscoe's, and he should have known that his putt would break less. He should have known, but did not, and the ball slid past the high side of the hole.

“Two up with six to play,” pronounced Fromholz.

“I could have made mine,” said Beast as Jewel congratulated Roscoe with a peck on the cheek. “I could have made mine easy.”

March dropped his ball and the babble and went all slack and sad-eyed as Jewel entwined herself arm in arm with Roscoe and the pair walked away as one.

“Honey, I just love a winner!” she said to Roscoe. “Do you know, you're shining just like when we ran off together in 1935.”

“I could've made mine!” Beast said a little louder; but if anybody heard him besides me, you really couldn't tell.

13

On the thousand and something nights that my mother Martha stayed out till all hours toting drinks to flyboys for tips and squeezes, Jewel filled some of the parenting gaps by cooking, tending, and tucking me in.

“Hush, Squirt. Go to sleep,” she had told me till I grew too big for my britches and her little affections.

“It's too early!” I'd whine. “Can't I wait till the sun goes down?”

“Oh, you rascal! The sun's been down for hours. How about a story?”

Being a schoolteacher and well-read to boot, she knew all the traditional wolf, sheep, and prince stories, and by the time I was six, so did I. That's when I began to realize I could actually ask for whatever story I wanted. It didn't have to have a moral, and it didn't have to be out of a book.

Jewel just reached into her past and her family's past, pulled out whatever she thought was of interest or instruction, and wove a spell over me with her words. I still remember it all. Her grandfather, Adoniram Judson Hemphill; Adoniram, the Old Testament's Lord of Height; Adoniram, Civil War hero, Indian fighter, pioneer settler of Texas; Adoniram, who begat Elisha Judson Hemphill.

Elisha Judson Hemphill, self-anointed prophet, Baptist circuit rider, pioneer radio proselytizer, and Jewel's father; a stern man who followed the twentieth century from horseback to airwaves without changing his moral tune or his mind about heathens, sinners, adulterers, liars, cheats, back stabbers, or drinkers of backsliders' wine.

Despite being a preacher, Elisha Judson Hemphill was not a man of belief, being more of the disbelieving type. The list of things he didn't believe in was almost longer than my wakefulness. He didn't believe in dancing, drinking or the worshipping of idolatrous devils. He didn't believe in purposeless joy, ready compassion or the singing of anything but hymns on Sunday. He didn't believe in ice cream, root beer, penny candy, or swimming, any more than he believed body heat was meant to be shared in the winter or aired in the summer.

And of course, more than anything else, he didn't believe in fornication. So when Elisha Judson begat Jewel Anne, she was living proof of the single sinful lapse of his life, one failed misstep intended to produce a male offspring. Though he had fallen from grace with a taste of evil fruit, and been punished with a girl, he became not a saint among sinners, but a sinner among men, determined to find the right track, to ignore his wife's cursed desires, and to raise a child more perfect and less sinful than himself.

So Jewel, begat of Elisha, begat of Adoniram, was admonished for sixteen years of Sunday sermons and dinnertime harangues on the major and minor disbeliefs: avarice and sloth, jealousy and greed, alcoholic fortification and bestial cohabitation. To me, the things he didn't believe in were like a roll call of shaggy unicorns, scaly-winged griffins, and long-toothed dinosaurs. Jewel loved to tick them off to me one by one, laughing all the while at how she had once plotted secretly to violate each of his disbeliefs, starting with the world's number one and number two evils: dancing and drinking.

By 1935, the residents of both Del Rio, Texas, and its sister village of Villa Acuña, Mexico, had all had a bellyful of Elisha Judson. There was nothing the sinners would have loved more than to trumpet Jewel's fall in her daddy's face, nothing they'd have loved so much as to get his rantings off Acuña's 500,000-watt radio station, XER. So powerful was the station that its signal bled through onto every band of the radio. For six hours each day and night the only damned station you could listen to was that raving Baptist maniac, when all anyone wanted was a little bit of dancing music from New York, Los Angeles, or Mexico City.

At least in the evening you could hear the brash nerve of XER's owner and primary broadcaster, Dr. Brinkley—the goat-gland surgeon. Brinkley entertained with his advertisements for transplants that guaranteed “renewed potency for the male patient and satisfaction for the wife who panteth for the running brook.”

But no, it was Elisha Judson's god-awful preachin' all day long, and no choice but to leave the radio off, which, for some folks, still brought no peace. The unlicensed Mexican station was so strong that some people with a mouthful of cheap metal fillings could pick up the broadcast through their bridgework. More than once one of them just went insane from all that screaming in their brain. So Jewel knew better than to fall drunk into the street anywhere nearby, lest the locals paint her as Jezebel, people's exhibition number one in the trial of Elisha's self-righteousness.

Jewel's Cinderella ball would have to be in another kingdom, ninety hard miles away, in the town of Sonora, Texas. With four of her friends, Jewel set out from Del Rio one hot summer afternoon in a borrowed jalopy, willing to endure the rutted, unpaved roads in order to simply have some fun. And it was only when they topped a big hill, passing an iridescent turkey gobbler standing majestically beneath a sign marking the Sutton County line, that Jewel finally felt free of her father's foul breath and well-aimed accusations.

As they came up the valley of the Dry Devil's River into Sonora, bouncing along the dusty road and breathing through handkerchiefs, she began dreaming of the Prince Charmings who awaited her at the Wing Ding, southwest Texas's finest example of switching off the preacher and switching on the fun.

It was a big hoo-hah, too big for the county courthouse, too big for the high school auditorium, too big even for the town square. Only the largest buildings within fifty miles would suffice: the Western Star Wool and Mohair Warehouses numbers one and two. Each summer, right after all the smelly spring goat and sheep shearings had been shipped off to markets east and north, the ranchers of West Texas paraded into Sonora and begat a reverberating din of celebration and iniquity.

One of the barns was primarily for families: kids, old ladies and little babies. The main attractions were music, social games, lemonade, and a hundred yards of homemade food. To get in, you had to bring a covered dish of edibles. Twenty plates of sliced tomatoes and goat cheese or thirty hominy casseroles were not uncommon. There was apple bobbing, watermelon-seed spitting, and a thousand other activities, each of which, to an aspiring young woman of the world, was more boring than the next.

The second barn was for couples, ex-couples, would-be couples, confirmed bachelors, gamblers, whores, and other sinners too numerous to mention. To get into the main barn, you had to pony up a case of beer or a bottle of liquor, usually homemade. Though Prohibition was two years gone, West Texans went on as they had for years, making it and drinking it and paying no mind whatsoever to whether the law or XER's Elisha Judson felt it was a good idea.

None of Jewel's friends had the requisite booze or looked old enough to get in. They didn't really care, though, for they were happy to listen from outside with a hundred other young people in the same situation. Jewel looked the age, or at least by proud beauty and sheer determination she looked unstoppable, except she lacked a bottle. No problem: she just stood there in virginal radiance listening to the strains of Bob Wills and his infernal Texas Playboys as they tuned their instruments inside.

Before the band had played a single waltz, a man walked up to Jewel with two bottles in his hand, two bottles because his partner had intended to be there too. But their oil well, the sum total of their future financial prospects in and on the earth, and yet to hit pay dirt, was behaving strangely. Leaking a variety of noxious gases, the well required careful tending.

The whim of a single cut of the cards had left one sorely disappointed partner back at the drilling site, and sent one, both bottles in hand, straight into Jewel's tony white arms at the entrance to that barn. Her skirt was scandalously scalloped just above her knees and her hair was cut above her bare collarbones in a loose Gibson the way she'd seen Joan Crawford's in
Grand Hotel
. It was a stunning combination of cowgirl, virgin and movie star. To a lonely oilman she looked like fun in a pair of boots.

Her new escort whisked her straight through those gigantic double doors into a whirling cloud of dancers and sawdust, ten thousand dizzying turns an hour, drinking and laughing and dancing like the dickens to a West Texas waltz. Several hours and too many drinks later, Jewel lay back on the seat of the man's pickup truck. Half passed out as he tugged at her clothes, she stopped him in a panic because she couldn't remember his name, and then allowed him to complete her indoctrination into a whole new set of beliefs when he reminded her for the twentieth gol-dang time that his name was Roscoe.

14

As I stood on the fourth tee and watched my grandmother flirting shamelessly with Roscoe Fowler, I could not help but wonder, was he my grandfather? Though I'd never known my own father, I'd at least known who he was, known by my mother Martha's childish vitriolic reminders that if he'd only taken the time to marry her before he got killed in Korea, we'd have been rolling in Air Force pension money. But Jewel had never identified my grandfather in her many stories, and I'd always hoped it was because he was still alive and would one day step forth and assume his rightful role at Jewel's side.

But Roscoe Fowler—crippled, pockmarked, tobacco-drooling grouch—could he possibly be the one? I'd refused to believe it from the moment I heard his name and connected it to Jewel's confession of her deflowering. He couldn't be my grandfather. I refused to accept the possibility. At least until I saw them cooing and wooing and carrying on like young fools. Then I wasn't so sure.

Why do I need a grandfather, anyway? I thought.

After thirty years, it was pretty damn late to step back into shoes that long vacant. To hell with him.

Jewel must've seen my scowl because, after some moments of questionable merriment, she left Roscoe and came to my side.

“I brought you something, Squirt,” she said.

I flushed with embarrassment at the baby name as she pulled a brown paper sack out of her large straw handbag. In the sack was a tall bottle of Dr Pepper and a bag of Tom's salted peanuts.

I opened the bottle with the buckle on Beast's golf bag, ripped open the peanuts, and poured them into the soda bottle. Before the resulting fizz could surge out of the top, I took a huge swig. It was cold, wet, salty and crunchy, and more heavenly than tasting stars, which is why we called it caddie champagne.

“Thanks!” I said, releasing a rush of air from my lungs.

Jewel took off my cap and straightened my hair.

“You look almost like one of the men, Billyboy.”

Smiling halfheartedly at her idea of a compliment, I messed up my hair a little, took the cap back, and replaced it in its natural cockeyed position.

“What about me?” came Roscoe's voice from just over my shoulder. “Didn't you bring your sweetheart Roscoe nothing cool to drink?”

I hoped that she hadn't brought him a thing, but even so I had no intention of sharing mine.

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Fowler, I did bring you something,” she said.

His paper bag, smaller than the Dr Pepper sack, was the kind you get in liquor stores. The thing that amazed me most about this new and wondrous city of Austin was just how darned many liquor stores there were. Everywhere I went it seemed I was passing a liquor store. I figured it must be something to do with the legislature, which met infrequently and drank continuously here in the state capital.

It wasn't so easy to get a bottle in West Texas. San Angelo was—and is to this day—a dry town, which doesn't just mean they suffer from a shortage of rainfall. Being a dry town means you can't sell booze in the city limits. This prohibition does not apply, however, to beer or wine, which can be had by the bottle, quart, six-pack, case, jug, keg, or truckload on about every fourth corner of town.