Fast Greens

by Turk Pipkin

  * * *

  William March’s secretary tilted her head down, peered over the top of her small wire-rim glasses, and looked me over from head to toe. Apparently I passed her inspection, for she told me to wait in the hall, then she turned and disappeared through a heavy wooden door.

  The walls of the hallway were covered in framed photographs, all of people standing near drilling rigs and oil wells, all except one. Raising on my toes to the level of that faded photo, I saw two men dressed in dusty cowboy clothes: wide-brimmed hats, leather chaps, bandanas around their necks. One of them was holding the flag from a golf hole while the other putted. In the background stood two horses with worn leather saddles, and hanging from each of the saddle horns was a golf bag.

  “Golf on horseback?” I whispered to no one. I’d never thought of that.

  My grandmother Jewel had let me off here on her way to the beauty parlor—though for the life of me I could never figure out why Jewel needed to be made more beautiful. We’d moved to Austin less than a month before, and already she had her choice of several suitors. Despite that, her only interest seemed to be in Roscoe Fowler and William March, two men she had not seen in almost thirty years.

  Shortly after arriving in Austin, Jewel told me she’d run into an old friend who’d asked if I would caddie for him. She assured me that William March would make me laugh, and was a big tipper to boot, an important point because I was saving every penny to buy myself a new set of irons.

  I had already carried for March at the Austin Country Club on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Jewel had been right; he did make me laugh, at least until he and Roscoe Fowler began to bicker and quarrel, exchanging deadly verbal darts the way I imagined desperate men might fight with knives. The round had started pleasantly enough, but on the back nine, with March three holes up, things started to get ugly.

  “This friggin’ heat makes my goddamn knee hurt!” Roscoe complained as he knelt awkwardly for a better look at a do-or-die two-foot putt.

  “I thought your knee hurt in the cold,” March answered.

  “It hurts in the heat and the cold!” Roscoe shot back. “And it’s your goddamned fault. It’s all your fault!”

  “My fault?” March protested. “You sorry bastard! After the way you screwed up our company, you ain’t laying the blame on me!”

  “Up yours!” said Roscoe, giving March the old one-finger salute.

  I was beginning to think they’d go at it this way all day long, but Roscoe lost the match then and there by jabbing the two-foot putt about four feet past the hole.

  True to Jewel’s word, March was a big tipper. He even gave me a ride home and bought me a chocolate milkshake at Dinty’s Hamburgers on the way. We pulled up to our little rented house in South Austin, and March seemed pretty disheartened when I pointed out that Jewel’s car wasn’t in the driveway. I got out, thanked him for the tip and the milkshake, and went inside. A half hour later, I peeked out the window and March was still sitting there in his big Cadillac, just staring up at the house.

  That night at the dinner table, I hadn’t even said grace before Jewel started pestering me for details about the game.

  “It was okay,” I told her. “But I didn’t understand what they were always arguing about.”

  “Well, they’re probably just being pigheaded,” Jewel told me. “But if you really want to know, ask March. You might find it … interesting.”

  The pause as she considered that final word, combined with the slightest hint of mystery in her voice, suddenly seemed proof positive that March would allow me a glimpse of some secret of the adult world that lay beyond my imagination. And that was all it took for me to find myself staring at old photos in the hallway of an oil company.

  The tall door of March’s office swept aside and the secretary led me in. I’d never been in a real office before and it was different than I expected, darker, a little scary. The curtains were drawn tight and the room was lit only by a desk lamp that threw tall shadows onto the bookcases and walls.

  Only half in the light, March was barely discernible from his big leather chair. Approaching slowly, I rested a hand on the big desk; it felt solid and heavy, and compared to the stuffy room it was cold as chiseled marble. The way it grew out of the floor reminded me of a tombstone. There was an odd odor in the room that reminded me of science class formaldehyde and dissected frogs, and I wanted to run away.

  Looking older than his years, March produced a quart of Scotch from the desk drawer, opened it, and poured a glass halffull. Then he scooped in two heaping teaspoons of bicarbonate, stirred the concoction into a murky cloud, and drank it down.

  “Scotch and soda, kid. That’s what it comes to sooner or later. A man spends a lifetime washin’ down greasy chicken-frieds and jalapeño pinto beans with a hundred dry wells and it all comes down to Scotch and soda.”

  He held the bottle out toward me.

  “You want a taste?”

  I shook my head.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. “Have a sit.”

  Releasing his death grip on the bottle, March’s focus swung involuntarily toward the cloudy dregs in his glass. I couldn’t imagine what he saw in there, but his gaze reminded me of the snow scene in a crystal that Jewel had given me. When I shook it and stared through the swirling snow, I liked to think I could see through the windows of the tiny house to a happy family gathered around a dinner table, the father saying grace before he carved a big golden turkey.

  “Tell me, kid,” March finally said. “A good caddie can really make a difference, can’t he?”

  I looked up at his eyes and noticed he was smiling now. It was as if the very mention of golf had lifted the pall from the room.

  “Yes Sir!” I told him. “A good caddie can read the greens like a book, and he knows the grain and the yardages, lots of stuff.”

  March leaned forward.

  “You like golf, don’t you kid?”

  “More than anything,” I answered.

  “And for you—tell me if I’m right—for you golf is a pure game: physical and mental, joined together without any questions of right and wrong?”

  I wasn’t sure I understood but I nodded yes anyway. Golf is a noble game, a combination of uncertain skill and specific laws, untainted by ethical dilemmas or moral quandaries. The first twelve years of my life had been spent in hot dry West Texas, where the only snow was in my crystal jar, so golf was for me the one thing pure.

  “What would you think of a man who cheated in a golf match?” March wanted to know.

  I didn’t hesitate, not on the one thing in the whole world that I knew to be true.

  “A guy that cheats is lower than a skunk or a snake or a scorpion, Sir. I mean I’ve seen lots of people tee it up in the rough or miscount their strokes after a bad hole, but they’re not golfers, they’re just people with bags of clubs.”

  He shifted his weight, leaning closer across the big desk until his face was full in the light.

  “I want you to help me cheat in a golf match, son. Would you do that for me?”

  Not wanting to believe my ears, I looked away to the rows and rows of fat leather-bound volumes on the bookshelves.

  “No Sir,” I said, silently counting the books to avoid his gaze. “I couldn’t cheat at golf, not to save my life.”

  2

  We moved to Austin, my Grandmother and I, in the spring of 1965, and celebrated my thirteenth birthday on the day of our arrival. I had long hoped to trade the slow and easy small-town life of San Angelo for the excitement of a big city like Austin. My main desire, though, was to escape the memories of my mother Martha, who had gone out for cigarettes six years earlier and never come back.

  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, an
d 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 cha
llenge 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.