Fast Greens (11 page)

16

“That lyin' sumbitch!” said Beast. “He's got a lot of balls to pull that crap on me.”

March's medicine had not set well on the big man's stomach. Not only had Beast's tee shot ended up under an oak tree on number four, but the ball had dropped down so that the trunk of the tree stood between the ball and the spot where Beast should have been standing to make a swing. He could take a left-handed stance and rotate one of his long irons so that the toe of the club pointed straight down at the ground, swing like a southpaw and probably hit it a hundred yards. But hell, March was putting for eagle. Beast had to do more than hack it back into play. He had to pull something out of his hat.

He snatched his one and only fairway wood from out of my hand and began to experiment with various stances: both feet ahead of the tree, both behind it, standing on one foot or the other, and finally bear-hugging the trunk with both arms as if he were humping it. But it was just no use; he couldn't see the ball for the tree.

The best option, at least the one he chose, was to stand with the tree between himself and the green, his body aiming to hit the ball way left, and the face of the three-wood opened to hopefully slice the ball back in the proper direction. He also had to start the ball low to avoid hitting the overhanging oak limbs,
and
he had to stop his follow-through dead or he was likely to carry the club and possibly his hands into the trunk of the tree.

It was cool there in the deep shade, a pleasant spot to watch him consider each of these options as his attention turned step by step from being duped by March to the business at hand.

Taking the club back faster than usual, he tomahawked the ball, carving hard and furious at its upper right corner. Launching out from under the tree like an artillery fusillade, the shot exploded as the clubshaft slammed into the hardwood trunk and snapped cleanly into two pieces.

“Son of a bitch!” Beast screamed as he threw down the short end of the stick. “Son of a bitch never sliced!”

I couldn't believe it. He wasn't cursing about the broken club or the pain that must have vibrated through his hands to his brain. He was pissed off because the ball had failed to do exactly what he wanted, furious because he'd hit it straight when he wanted it to slice.

“Son of a bitch! I should have hit it left-handed!” he said as he stomped off.

The ball's straight flight path had taken it into the woods left of the green—out of bounds. Beast declined to take the penalty stroke and drop another ball beneath the tree, so he was out of the hole—and so was I.

I picked up the two pieces of the three-wood, marveled at the sharp edges of the broken steel, and put them both in the bag.

“Them new shafts break a mite cleaner than the old hickory clubs.”

I jerked my head up and saw Roscoe sitting in his cart nearby.

“I used to break a club or two myself, but I got tired of picking them hickory splinters out of my hands so I had to give it up. But like the man said, ‘It's better to break one's clubs than to lose one's temper.'”

I had to laugh at that one.

“Now you're laggin' behind, Spud, so quit lollygaggin' around and climb your butt in here.”

The passenger's seat was once again empty, Jewel having abandoned Roscoe for a closer look at some wildflowers in the far rough. I thought about telling her to watch for snakes, then remembered that she could handle herself.

“I said haul your butt in here. There's nothing wrong with riding now and then. Hell, I been doing it ever since March blew a hole in my leg.”

I looked at him wide-eyed, my face a slow green waiting to be read by an old caddie. I was sure of what he'd said, but unable to believe it.

“Oh yeah, it's true. March was jealous of me and Jewel, so he crippled me with his thirty-ought-six. But never mind that. That's all in the past. Bygones are gone by and all that stuff. Now climb in here and let's have us a chew.”

Burying three fingers and a thumb into a pouch of Red Man, Roscoe withdrew a gigantic wad of tobacco and stuffed it into his cud.

“Dig in!” he said, extending the open pouch in my direction.

I looked closer at the jumble of stems and leaves, and the smell about knocked me out of the cart.

“Just pick a cheek and shove it in!” he said. “Jewel tells me you're her blood. I hadn't figgered that. We're gonna be great friends, you and me.”

Taking a small pinch, I placed it gingerly into one cheek. It burned like the dickens.

“Hell, boy! We ain't gonna have none of that pussy-style chewing around here. You ain't got enough to taste. Come on! Make like an outfielder: grab yourself a fistful!”

Aw, what the hell! I crammed my right cheek with the stuff and felt an immediate wave of giddiness.

While we drove slowly to the green, Roscoe began to tell me a little story about golf tempers—his own, that is. Shortly after he and March moved Fowler Oil to Austin, Roscoe goes out by himself for a practice round. But he just can't get it together: one shot a hook, the next a slice. Finally he comes to a dreaded par three, a long shot over water. Fearing the worst, Roscoe takes a big cut at it, and damned if he doesn't hit a nice high shot that soars toward the green. But halfway there a friggin' bird dives at the ball; the two collide and both fall dead in the water. He can't believe it. Of all the damned luck!

Somehow Roscoe avoids losing his temper. Instead—very calmly, according to his reckoning—he decides to quit golf forever. This is not a rash decision. He simply knows it's over. Taking all the balls from his bag, he tosses them down and hits them one at a time into the lake, his only aim a tiny island of pampas grass. His target might as well have been Mars, because each shot is worse than the last: a slice, a duck hook, fat, topped, a shank. Each shot fills him with joy because he's one ball closer to the last damn shot he'll ever have to hit.

“The last ball! Hallelujah, just one more crummy shot,” Roscoe told me. “So I take a half-assed swing at the ball … and it cuts through the air like a bullet, lands dead in the center of the pampas grass—a virtual hole-in-one! Holy moly! I was stunned. It looked just like the pros! Trying to remember exactly how I did it, I start searching like a madman for a ball, any ball—in the thick grass, in the rough, in the bushes—nothing! Finally, I remember where there's plenty of them balls. So I wade into the pond—damn near drown when my boots fill up with water—and find me a couple of golf balls so I can keep playing.

“You can't quit this game, son!” Roscoe concluded. “It's the game that gets to quit you!”

Either the story or the chew was very moving, for at that moment I hopped out of the cart and upchucked in the flowers by the green.

17

These guys really had it in for the youth of America. First March offers me a glass of Scotch and a golden opportunity to corrupt my morals, then Roscoe makes a play for my grandmother and forces a wad of tobacco down my throat. Did they want my help, my affection, or my soul? Whatever it was, they sure had a funny way of going about it.

For all I knew, Roscoe's leg could have been the result of childhood polio; I'd seen kids just a few years older than me who had that same kind of limp. Maybe Roscoe was conning me by blaming March. Roscoe had a history of that sort of thing, or so March said. Who was I to believe? Had March entered into a partnership with all of a valuable ranch and left it with half a worthless one? Or had Roscoe come into the deal with two good legs and gone out a cripple? The only answer was that neither was to be trusted: they were both a couple of hustlers.

They used to be partners, not just in the oil business but in golf as well. While March drove me home after that first round, he told me that in the early fifties, when their swings were smooth and the oil business easy, he and Roscoe would travel around Texas laying the sandbaggers' hustle on unsuspecting country clubbers. On the hunt for some winter prey along the Gulf Coast, they'd been set up by the pro at Corpus Christi Country Club with a Mr. Thompson, an out-of-towner who appeared to be an easy mark.

Thompson didn't look anything like a golfer; instead of slacks and a cap, he wore a suit and a gray fedora. March and Roscoe quickly got him into a hundred-dollar Nassau six ways: a hundred on the front nine, two hundred on the back, and three hundred on the total. And Thompson was going to play against March and Roscoe's best ball. It must have seemed like money from home.

Once the bet was set, Mr. Thompson called over a caddie.

“Run out to the black Cadillac,” he told the kid, “and fetch my golf clubs for me.”

The kid returned empty-handed.

“Did you want the left-handed clubs or the right-handed ones?” the caddie asked.

Mr. Thompson scratched his neck for a minute while he thought.

“Get some of both,” he answered. “I need the practice.”

“We knew we were screwed,” March said. “But we'd have been damned before we'd turn tail and run. I shot 79, Roscoe shot 80, and the man in the fedora took us for four hundred apiece—driving right-handed, chipping from the south, and putting with a two-iron 'cause the caddie forgot to get a putter out of the trunk.

“After the round we found out Mr. Thompson's first name was Ti, as in Titanic Thompson, the king of the cons; and man, he sunk us but good. He took our money and then we all got drunk in the bar and laughed about it. What a grand old scoundrel he was!”

Later, I asked Roscoe if it was true they once played Titanic Thompson, and Roscoe said it was all gospel except for one thing: “March got it backwards as usual: I shot 79 and
March
shot 80.”

18

When March chipped in for an eagle from just off the fourth green, it no longer mattered that Beast had hit his second shot out of bounds. And Beast could reach the only remaining par five with a driver and a one-iron, so it didn't even matter that he'd broken his three-wood. Nothing mattered except that March bounced his ball into the hole with a little chip shot learned, he said, “from an old Chinaman.”

“Well, you can't lose 'em all!” he declared.

“One down with five to go,” said Fromholz. “This is getting interesting.”

I'd had enough of riding, chewing, and upchucking, so I fell in line with those afoot and started the climb up the hill to the fifth tee. Jewel, siding with the winner again, hopped into March's cart for a ride. Watching this, Roscoe mumbled something that sounded an awful lot like “goddamn her hide,” then climbed into his cart and sped off after them.

“This is getting interesting,” said Fromholz.

Now that the sun had burned off the morning dew, we began to suffer under the not-too-pleasant delusion of golfing in a gigantic steam bath. None of us was quite to that point in Texas summer golf where the sun starts burning a hole in your eyes, but it was only a matter of an hour or two.

Needing relief, we lined up at the water well next to the fifth tee. I was last. Jewel, of course, was first.

“William March!” she called out. “You cut out that nonsense and have a cool drink before you keel over dead.”

March, in hopes of knocking down a fat pear for his lady love, was tossing a golf club up into the limbs of a big fruit tree that shaded the well. But rather than a pear coming down, his club stayed up, lodged in the branches. Attempting to knock it down, he hung a second club with the first. For a while it looked as though he might lose his whole set to the squirrels, but eventually they all rained down—the clubs, that is. He never did dislodge a pear.

“It's a fine day in Texas,” he said. “Blue skies. Gulf breezes. Money on the line!” He turned to me. “A momentous event, Billy. A day you aren't ever going to forget. Lots of big things are gonna happen in your life; you'll have kids. I guess before that you'll probably get married. And if you're lucky, before that you might even get laid!”

I blushed a bright red and Jewel came to my defense.

“William March!” she said. “You be nice to that boy or I'll whip you with an ugly stick!”

“Too late for that,” Roscoe snickered.

“Okay! I'm nice. I'm nice. See how nice I am?” March cut in front of Fromholz, filled the long-handled tin cup under the stream of well water, and handed it to me.

“Drink up. A man needs ten glasses of that a day in this sun. Enough to make you sweat. Right, Roscoe?”

“Nobody does it better,” Roscoe answered, tilting his whiskey bottle for relief and showing us the dark expanding sweat stains that threatened to conquer his entire cowboy shirt.

“Golf is like sex,” March said. “You have to take a shower after both.”

“I used to think that joke was funny—twenty years ago,” said Roscoe.

“It was—then,” said March, not the least insulted. “But we got older. And so did the jokes.”

“Kid, if it's wisdom you want,” Roscoe told me, “I'm your man: never trust a queer or a golfer who wants you to give him strokes.”

“Roscoe!” commanded Jewel. “We don't need that kind of talk.”

Much to my surprise, Beast came to Jewel's support. “My old man told me to watch out for a guy with a gimp leg who wants to play for money!”

“Amen to that!” said the guy with the gimp leg. “Watch out for ol' Roscoe; I'll jump on you like ugly on ape!”

“My turn,” said Fromholz. “Golf advice,” he told me, “ain't worth the wind it's written on. You want to enjoy life like a true bohemian? Get yourself a fat girl: warm in the winter and shady in the summer.”

“Very educational,” Jewel scolded the whole shameless lot of them. “And oh-so-kind: advising this youngster about the trickeries and meanness of life. Well, here's one for all of you: ‘I've lived some years on this planet and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors.' Henry David Thoreau.”