Fast Greens (16 page)

“Come on, Larsen. Let's see what you got.” He swung the club again, harder this time. “How 'bout a little game of chicken?”

Beast cracked his knuckles loudly.

“You're on, weenie!”

I didn't even know what they were talking about.

Sandy stuck a tee into the ground between them and they both stepped into a wide-anchored version of their golf stances, facing each other about six feet apart. They waggled their clubheads and set them face-to-face on opposite sides of the tiny wooden tee, golfers and clubheads both staring at each other intently.

Finally I figured it out. It was like playing chicken with cars, where two idiots drive straight at each other and whoever turns off first is the chicken. Only the golf clubs would be moving a lot faster than speeding cars. This seemed like an exceedingly stupid thing to do. I ducked down behind Beast's bag and peeked around for a look. Everybody else, including Jewel, stepped
way
back.

They both took a little warm-up; feeble swings about like wedge shots. The clubheads passed by each other safely, but it still looked plenty scary to me.

“You ready?” asked Beast with a wicked grin.

“Let's do it,” answered Sandy.

Just as they started to swing, Roscoe interrupted: “A hundred on the Beast.”

“Covered,” said March.

Fromholz took the money from each of them, and now that he'd been made the ref in this contest as well, he stepped forward to insure that everything was in order.

“Don't kill yourselves off,” Fromholz told them before scampering safely away.

Working up their nerves again, both took their clubheads back. With no worries as to where a ball might go and their only concern whether or not to chicken out, they were free to swing as hard as they wanted or were able. That's exactly what they did: two huge, powerful, simultaneous swats.

Neither chickened out. Instead both screamed mightily as the clubheads met head-to-head in an incredible explosion of wood and steel. Splinters of persimmon and hot metal shards flew in all directions. Sandy bent over with a groan while Beast merely grimaced, his hands vibrating like church bells.

“Well, I'd have to rule that a draw,” said Fromholz. “How about two out of three?”

Neither of them seemed so inclined (or had another driver), so Roscoe snatched his money back.

“Don't worry about it, partner,” he said to Beast. “Some days you eat the chicken; some days you eat the feathers.”

Smelling something like burnt flesh, I looked down at Beast's bag and found two finger-size holes where flying hot metal from one of their shafts had torn through the leather.

Sandy still had ahold of his grip, with most of the shaft attached, but the head of his driver was no more; it had completely disintegrated. He spiked the shaft into the ground and shook off his pain the way basketball coaches told you to after you'd broken a couple of fingers or had your nose flattened. Then he took out his three-wood and hit a great shot up the fairway of the long par five.

“Oh! That's how you do it!” complimented March. Then he teed one up, swung easy, and hit his straight down the middle as well.

Beast stuck his big paw in my face. “Gimme my three-wood,” he growled.

I hesitated, not sure I'd heard him right.

“Gimme my goddamn three-wood! Are you deaf?”

Taking out the two pieces of his three-wood that he'd smashed against the tree on number four, I held them out to him. He looked at the pieces like they were from Mars. I guess between the snake in the grass and the cup popping out of the ground, he'd forgotten all about breaking his fairway wood. A wave of understanding swept his face as he realized what Sandy's game of chicken had really been about.

“I'll beat you with a one-iron, smart-ass,” Beast said to Sandy. But I got the feeling he didn't believe it.

26

I had a hard time keeping my mind on the job at hand as we walked up the sixth fairway, climbing a long, slow hill like all the holes on the course. It's hard to figure how, but somebody built that course so you'd always be walking uphill. It felt like we'd end up about a mile higher than we started, but I didn't give a hoot 'cause I was just about tickled pink with the way things were turning out.

I believed then that a golf course was some sort of magic spot. The only places I'd ever been happy were sitting down at Jewel's dinner table or walking on the golf course. Seemed like everywhere else I went, either some kid was bragging about the neat stuff he'd been doing with his dad, or people were talking about something shitty that had happened. To me it sounded like there must be a lot of crummy goings on, and I had begun to suspect that the world was not as nice a place as everyone would have a kid believe.

From what they told me, Texas was supposed to be just about the greatest place on earth, but that hadn't kept Jewel from being lonely—sometimes I used to hear her crying softly in the night—and it hadn't even kept my mother Martha from going to some other place where she didn't have to think about me or any of her other troubles—and she always had plenty. Seemed to me like no one ever had enough rain or money or good times, but there was always plenty of trouble—trouble at school, trouble at home, trouble with a bunch of nosy neighbors who were having trouble with the bill collectors who were having trouble with their wives and girlfriends who were all having trouble finding a good hairdresser or a Mexican housekeeper to do their dirty work for them.

I didn't understand why, if Texas was such a great place, all the Mexicans had to live in such crummy houses in neighborhoods that really were on the other side of the railroad tracks. Everybody called it Mezkin town. There weren't any paved streets or sewer lines, so when it rained the whole place just turned into a mud hole, and if it rained enough it turned into a shit hole. Then everybody on this side of the tracks would start complaining about the gawd-awful smell coming from Mezkin town and how can them people live like that?

About the only answer anybody ever had for that question was that “those people wouldn't live any other way if they could.” That was just the way they were. Hell, if you put in a bunch of paved driveways and fancy toilets, they'd still go right on parking their cars in the grass and doing their business in the bushes or the outhouse, at least that's what folks said. Besides, if you gave 'em an inch, they'd start wanting to live in the regular neighborhoods and send their kids to the regular schools where they wouldn't know how to speak no English and they'd just cause a bunch of trouble anyway. And the last thing anybody needed was any more damn trouble!

That was what I could never figure. If the world was such a fine place to live—especially our corner of the world—then how come everybody had so darn much trouble in mind?

Now all of a sudden I was looking at the other side of the coin. Everything that had been tails was about to come up heads. Beast was licked; you could tell it by the way he talked. Before when he bragged, it seemed as factual as if you had read it in the newspaper, and there was a chance that you would read it the next day.

Now it sounded sort of hollow. “I'll beat you with a one-iron,” he said, but it sounded more like, “If I don't beat you, nobody can blame me. All I got is a one-iron.”

The tide had definitely turned. Roscoe was about half looped on Jewel's whiskey, so there wasn't a doubt in my mind that March and Sandy were going to win the match. Sandy was going to take his winnings, go out on the Tour, and make a potful of money. He'd be famous and I'd probably be his caddie at the Masters and the Crosby out at Pebble Beach, and at the British Open at St. Andrews where March had learned to play.

March and Jewel were finally going to be man and wife, and since Jewel had been my mother, that meant March was going to be my father. I could call him Dad if I wanted, but I wouldn't 'cause March was the coolest name going.

Maybe we'd all move out to Sonora and drill some oil wells and open up that old golf course again. If Sandy was too rich and famous to be the head pro, then maybe Fromholz could take the job, or maybe someday I could. In the meantime March could take me horseback riding and camping, and on New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July, the three of us—my family and I—could drive down to Villa Acuña for a big celebration with fireworks and mariachis.

It was all going to be great fun, and I wasn't gonna have any more trouble in mind, that's what I decided. I was all through with trouble in mind.

BOOK TWO

Walk tall and loose, carrying your club at your side, as you go toward your ball.

—Count Yogi

27

In trying to understand what happened then, I've gone “own and own” (as March would've said) about who I used to be, but I haven't even hinted at who I am now, these twenty-five years later. Perhaps the point is, who I am now is the product of what happened to me then. Suffice it to say that I've never been able to get any of it out of my head or my heart, and I guess the truth is, I never really wanted to.

I dreamed of March last night; of what he told me and what I learned in the too-short time that I knew him. In my dream March was young, like in the photo with the horses that he'd taken down off the wall of his office and presented to me as a gift that day it all began. Even in the dream I remembered that March's horse was the Appaloosa. Jewel was with him, and her age was undefined—timeless—just the way I always think of her; her cheeks like roses and her hair like fine silk. March kept trying to tell me something; it was terribly important but I couldn't understand what he was saying, and Jewel brushed my hair back out of my eyes and repeated over and over, “That's right. That's exactly right. You'll find out sooner or later that he's right.” But I never did understand what they were trying to tell me.

It was raining when I awoke; the middle of the night. I heard the water dripping from the roof, dripping, it seemed, in sweat upon my brow, then running a salty trickle down my nose like a tear. I knew it would be quite a while before I could sleep again.

I thought about March and Jewel and the love they shared; undying in both their hearts through thirty years of separation and in my own mind for another twenty-five years after, and I wondered how it is that man survives the misery of circumstance and the burden of regret. March would have said that it was like surviving the scarcity of rain: by hoarding more, by needing less.

A distant flash of lightning illuminated the room for a moment, and I considered getting up to check on my son, five years old and just learning a fear of thunder. But it wasn't loud enough to wake him, so I decided against turning on the light and bothering my wife, a sound and happy sleeper. Insomnia is not an affliction to be shared.

As the rain grew heavier I wondered how I'd ever be able to tell my boy what March had meant to me. I figure I owe that much to both of them. I've already told Squirt parts of it; shown him the photo and explained about playing golf and riding horses, but none of it seems real to him—they're just bedtime stories. Sometimes, though, he'll be about to doze off and some detail will fascinate his idling mind and pull him back from Sandland.

“Poppy! You were an Indian?”

“No, Squirt. I just looked like one. Now hush up. If you get some sleep you can go out to the course with me in the morning.”

“Can I take my golf club?”

“You bet you can.”

The game goes on: his one treasured club, a cut-down ladies' five-iron. He whales away at the ball, and though it doesn't go far, like the shot of a very old golfer, it often sails straight and true, demanding that you marvel at the miraculous flight.

The thunder began to move away and with it the chance of a real soaking rain. In Texas the best part of the storm is always somewhere else. I lay quietly in the dark and in my mind I played a near-perfect nine holes of golf, nine holes at the Pedernales Golf Club just the way it was, and just the way it is now, essentially unchanged this quarter-century later, though perhaps the greens are no longer as fast. Each shot was crystal clear in my mind. My drives split the fairways and my crisp irons bit nicely at each and every pin. The making of the putts, if I paid the proper attention to a light grip and a square putter face, were mere formalities.

Nine under through eight holes, with only the long par four remaining, I began to wonder what the course record was for an imaginary round. And though the south breeze at the end of the storm blew fresh in my face, the fluid swings were rapidly sending me from insomnia to dreamland. I stood over the ball, driver in hand, and lazily dragged the clubhead back. My legs were already asleep, so I blocked the shot, cutting a huge bending slice right out of my childhood, my drive soaring from the fairway into the driving range. With my ball lost among thousands of range balls, I waded through them searching for that single pellet without a stripe, desperate to finish a perfect round of golf that only my mind kept from completion. But before I found the ball, I was fast asleep.

*   *   *

“Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while.”

That's what Roscoe said when he hit his ball up close to the sixth green from what he called “the seven-iron pole.” Actually the big telephone pole he was talking about was way over on the far edge of the rough, but Roscoe had been lying about even with it.

“It's the only place on the whole danged course I know what club to use.”

If he'd been twenty-five yards inside the seven-iron pole, he'd probably have chipped backwards so he could hit that seven-iron with some confidence. Golf does strange things to the brain.

Now Roscoe was hitting a little chip shot, and from the look of things, he really was rooting around for acorns, 'cause he looked up, chili-dipped, burped and farted all at a time.

“Same damn dummy hit that shot as the last one,” he said, again taking a long pull on the bottle of whiskey Jewel had brought him.