Fast Greens

by Turk Pipkin

  The semifinals were at Fort Worth’s famed Colonial, a long trip on the train that still carried passengers twice a week east and west from San Angelo. Jewel had a teacher’s seminar that weekend, but put her trust in me by letting me go alone (with Sandy meeting me at the station in Fort Worth).

  I didn’t get a chance to study the course because the train arrived only the evening before, but it mattered little, as Sandy’s opponent was a stiff, unable to work the ball under the big oaks (now dead but not forgotten) that used to overhang Colonial’s greens. On the way to winning seven and six, Sandy taught me more about golf than I’d ever known there was to learn.

  He taught me how to read the grain of the greens by the angle of the sun and the cut at the cup, how to tell the differences between bent grass (slick putting but lots of bite) and Bermuda (slow putting but bounding approaches), how not to be fooled by the mower cut, and on short putts how to listen for the ball to drop before moving my head. He told me to chip uphill with less loft and downhill with more, and never to hit a driver from the fairway when the grass is leaning toward the ball and away from the green.

  Sandy could name all of the great Texican golfers and he occasionally did so when walking down the fairway, as if he were in a trance: “Guldahl Nelson Hogan, Mangrum Thompson Trevino, Sanders Zaharias Rawls…” chanting their names over and over like a mantra.

  “Who was Trevino?” I asked.

  “Is Trevino,” Sandy corrected. “Who is Trevino.”

  “Okay. Who is Trevino?”

  “The guy who taught me how to fade the ball.”

  “A fade is easy,” I told him.

  “Not a slice, Brainiac, a fade,” answered Sandy. “There’s a big difference. A fade is intentional; a slice is a curse.”

  According to Sandy, the reasons why Lone Star golfers win so many tournaments include the diversity of the courses in the huge state, the ability to play in the constant coastal and western winds, and having to putt on both bent and Bermuda greens. More important, they have that infernal sense of moral and physical superiority that’s brainwashed into all Texans at an early age, and a Texan’s commitment to a life’s pursuit that doesn’t take place behind a desk or in a store.

  In learning all this, I had no doubt that one day Sandy would join the ranks of those chanted greats himself. And he saved the best for last, finally informing me that he’d also learned to play the game by caddying. So there was hope for my game yet. I was in caddie heaven.

  But my elation was deflated somewhat when Sandy returned to Austin for the finals at Morris Williams, a course named for the most charismatic and heroic Texas golfer of his day. Morris Williams was a Harvey Penick student who was the only player in history to win the Texas Junior, Texas State Amateur, and Texas PGA championships, and he did it in one twelve-month period. Sadly, his career was cut short when he was killed while flying a training mission during the Korean War.

  Knowing this, unfortunately, was no help in convincing Sandy to take me to caddie at the finals.

  “It’s too far from San Angelo, and there’s no train,” Sandy explained. “Plus you don’t know the course.”

  True, but not the real reasons I didn’t get to go. Just as Sandy had known in his previous matches that he was the better golfer and would certainly win, he also knew that Beast was the better golfer and would beat Sandy in the finals. He simply didn’t want me to see him lose to Beast. In a way, I suppose I didn’t want to see it either. I had never seen Sandy lose.

  Now I’d ended up a traitor, caddying for his archenemy, the evil Beast. Luckily, Sandy carried only one grudge and it wasn’t against me. He’d proven that by picking me up long before dawn and fueling me up for the big match with breakfast at the Big Wheel truck stop. As we made the drive through the hills to the course in his beat-up Plymouth Valiant, we talked about everything but his chances that day.

  When the early hour overcame me, I leaned my head against the window and watched sleepily as the black sky was imposed upon by a slender turquoise wedding band of dawning light, creeping ever upward from beyond the hills in the east.

  I was jolted to attention when Sandy pumped hard on his brakes to avoid hitting a red-tailed fox that scurried across our headlights and off the road.

  Wow, a fox! I thought. That’s a good sign.

  “Almost hit him,” Sandy said. “That would’ve been bad luck.”

  I glanced at Sandy, his face lit up green by the dashboard lights. He looked spooked.

  9

  Beast was to Sandy as a timber wolf is to a clever circus dog. Back when Beast was still called Carl, his old man owned a driving range, which is to say Pop drank a lot of beer and collected the money while young Carl picked up the balls. When you’re in your preteen years and picking up and washing ten thousand golf balls a day, retrieving an extra thousand balls you hit yourself isn’t much worse. So Carl grooved his swing by hitting balls till his hands bled.

  When Carl was fifteen, Pop went out in true white-trash style, going on a three-day stinker and taking a folding buck knife in the gut (unfortunately, it was unfolded at the time). The bank took the driving range and Carl took to hustling golf for a living. No matter how much money he won, and it was plenty, he couldn’t escape his trailer-trash heredity and always lived in a cheap motel. And no matter how much he lost (he often played the best at Hundred-Dollar Low Ball with equal side bets on greenies and sandies), he never carried his own bag. He’d picked up so many range balls as a kid, he didn’t even like to pick ’em up out of the hole. A caddie I knew once followed him at a safe distance around the Austin Country Club where Carl was playing a solo practice round. My pal picked up eighteen brand-new Titleists that Carl had left in the holes.

  In typical Texas-schoolboy style, Carl got passing grades, despite the fact that he rarely attended class; the schools needed all the winning athletes they could muster. Thanks to the curve of the grade and to some nifty work with a one-iron, Carl was medalist in the state high school championship as a junior, but he was disqualified for gambling on the tournament. To make matters worse, that meant he lost the bet he’d placed on himself. Maybe it was the bookies who turned him in. In any event, the treasured first prize was passed to the second-place finisher, Sandy Bates. I heard Sandy threw the trophy into a pond at Morris Williams. He knew who’d won.

  A couple of years later, in Knoxville, Nashville or Gatlinburg—one of those faceless, reporterless stops on the Southern beans-and-rice tour—Carl met a golf groupie with substantial backspin and bite of her own. It must have been lust at first sight, for after winning his first tournament against the semi-big boys, Carl married her on the eighteenth green. Not long after, so the story goes, Carl’s new wife started playing midnight driving range with a number of other golf pros who began to refer to her as the Dragon Lady (supposedly in tribute to her fiery talents with lips and tongue).

  It was the Dragon Lady who rechristened big Carl as Le Beast. Apparently they were quite a team. If Beast was in the finals of a match-play tourney, she’d slip him a late-night mickey, sneak over to the opponent’s motel room, and screw his lightbulbs in and out all night long. Beast, having slept like a baby, never understood why he was winning all those final rounds against tired guys with limp putters, till one of them—desperate to get back in the match—confronted the jealous husband with the bare-assed truth.

  It was a rare day in the history of match-play golf. Since neither of the players in the final eighteen actually completed the round, the winner of the consolation match was awarded the five hundred dollar first-place prize. Beast was resting comfortably in the county jail and his opponent was in guarded condition at the local hospital. The other guy’s memory lapses cleared up after a few weeks, but his hearing was never the same. Beast had bitten off much of the guy’s right ear but, lucky for them both, the crowd pulled him off before he could get the other one.

  10

  “One up,” said Roscoe as we waited on the third tee for the greenskeep
er to finish mowing the fairway. “Wanna press the bet?”

  “You seem pretty confident,” answered March.

  “Confident? Hell, we gonna kick your butts! You and your pretty-boy partner.”

  “In that case,” said March, pulling a sheaf of folded documents from his golf bag, “let’s bet the whole kit ’n’ caboodle.” March handed the papers to Fromholz and the girth of our circle tightened considerably.

  “What’s that?” asked Sandy.

  Fromholz cocked his head and held the papers in front of his good eye to look them over.

  “That, Miss Curious, is the deed to a golf course, a clubhouse, a house, a barn, and some very old and tired oil wells.”

  “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 littl
e 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.”