by Turk Pipkin
“Pull it!” yelled Beast.
I pulled harder. Nothing.
“Pull it!” hollered Beast and Roscoe.
At the last second I yanked hard, dragging both pin and metal cup up out of the hole. It happened so fast I didn’t even know I’d done it. The ball barreled straight at what should have been a hole, struck the raised cup, and bounced about three feet away.
With the pin and cup still in my hand, I looked up in horror and saw Beast charging at me. His putter was cocked back behind his head like a baseball bat, and a scream of rage was issuing from his mouth. It didn’t occur to me to run. After all, I was guilty. I had pulled the cup up. I had kept him from winning the same hole on which he’d nearly been killed by a snake. Whatever he did to me—and it looked as if he was going to lop my head off—was certainly my due.
About ten feet of the charge and two seconds of my life remained when Fromholz stuck out a foot at the same time that he cuffed Beast on the back of the neck with the six-shooter. An elephant gun wouldn’t have brought the big man down any faster.
While Beast was coming to his senses, Fromholz proceeded to investigate the stuck pin and quickly discovered that someone had put chewing gum in the bottom of the cup. Chewing gum? I quickly swallowed mine and glanced over to March. He no longer seemed to be chewing his, either.
That’s twice, I thought. That’s twice he cheated.
Beast was learning some hard lessons. His three-wood was broken, his pants were torn, and there was a knot on his head about the size of one of the smaller British golf balls. On top of that, the putt was not considered good.
Fromholz kindly waived the penalty for striking the pin with a putt from on the green because, technically, the ball had struck the cup. But the ball was not in the hole and the birdie had flown the coop. With Fromholz’s help I separated the pin from the cup, and replaced the latter in its hole so the others could putt. But still no birdie putts went in, and number five was halved by pars from both teams.
“No blood,” said Fromholz. “Well, not much anyways. Four holes to go, gentlemen. Fowler and Larsen are still one up.”
“Not for long,” said March with a grin. “Not for long.”
22
The bump on his noggin was sufficient to deter Beast from beheading me, but it didn’t keep him from methodically yanking open each of the ten or twelve zippers on his bag, turning it upside down, and dumping the clubs, balls, tees, cigarettes, matches, and miscellaneous junk in a pile on the fringe of the green.
“Pick ’em up!” he ordered; then stomped off cursing. “What the hell kind of crummy course is this? Bunch of damn cheap greens!”
I gathered up the mess, trying to remember whether the extra shoe spikes went in the pocket with the tees, and if the divot-repair and club-cleaning tools had a place of their own. At the same time I was feeling guilty for what I’d done, and inwardly, I guess, I was blaming March, who must have been the cause of it all.
Twice now he’d cheated, and that was only what I knew about. Who knew, maybe March had put that snake by Beast’s ball. And even if that theory was a little far-fetched, I also suspected that he had something to do with the weird cutting of the greens, which continued to be alternately slow and fast.
And then I noticed that March was standing there by my side. Whether he’d come to apologize, bribe me, or beg my forgiveness, I didn’t know. He removed his hat—a straw version of LBJ’s Open Road Stetson—and wiped the sweat from his brow. I realized that now was the time to come clean and confront him. But as I opened my mouth to speak, his words came first.
“Found something you might take an interest in, young’un.”
He held out his closed hand and unwrapped his leathery fingers to reveal an ugly rock just a little smaller than a golf ball. It was a burnt reddish-brown color and it appeared to be both exploded like a kernel of popcorn and melted around the edges.
“Take it.”
He dropped the rock in my hand in the same manner as the stick of gum. I was astonished at its weight. It seemed more like lead than a rock.
“I figgered a guy that keeps a snake rattle in his pocket needs some good ju-ju to go with it. And that’s what you got there: ju-ju, magic, good vibes, as Fromholz would say.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“It’s a meteorite,” he told me. “A moon rock. I found it back there in the rough. Must’ve been a giant meteor hit here hundreds of years ago. We’re probably standing in the crater.”
I looked around at the large bowl depression surrounding us and the green.
“Yeah?”
“Moon rocks are magic, you know. You hold ’em tight in your hand and concentrate heart and soul on what you want.”
He had to be pulling my leg.
“You mean I wish for a Frito pie or to get out of doing my homework?” I asked him skeptically.
“No! That ain’t it at all! Nothing selfish. Moon rocks are very perceptive. They know the difference between a grabby little piss-ant and someone in true need. You think magic is about a Frito pie, son? No, sir! Magic is the most basic form of nature. You wanna learn something in life, you hang on to that moon rock and you think for a while about what it takes to make a miracle.”
I looked down at the heavy pellet in my hand. A major interest in seventh-grade science told me it had probably been snatched from a passing asteroid cloud by the earth’s gravity. Most likely it was comprised primarily of nickel and iron that had been melted when speeding through our atmosphere. Once on earth it had remained undisturbed until March found it and handed it to me with this far-fetched tale that only a kid would believe. And yet I did believe it. I believed it because he’d given me something special, because I was a kid who wanted to believe. Because he’d made it magic. My magic.
March patted me on the head and left me to finish my cleanup. It wasn’t till I put the rock in my pocket that I realized I’d forgotten to confront him about cheating.
Beast’s bag finally reassembled, I caught up with Jewel and we walked up to the sixth tee. She saw the worried look on my face and told me not to feel bad about yanking up the cup.
“If one person was cheating,” I asked her, “and another person knew it, should he rat on them? I mean, are you cheating too if you know about it and you don’t tell? Or are you just a snitch if you do tell?”
“Hypothetically?” Jewel asked me.
“Oh, yes ma’am!” I told her. “Hypothetically. Definitely.”
We walked on a ways to the shade beneath a large cluster of live oaks, our feet rustling through the small brown leaves of years past. In the top of the trees two cicadas buzzed back and forth to each other.
“No. I don’t think you should tell,” she said. “Hypothetically or otherwise.”
“Why not?”
She didn’t answer at first, so I gathered my courage and took the plunge into the great unknown.
“Just because March is my grandfather?” I asked her.
I shifted the bag higher onto my shoulder and the cicadas grew silent.
“No. Not because of that.”
I bit softly on my lip. Here was final confirmation of what I had suspected since Jewel first sent me to caddie for him weeks ago.
“Not just because March is your grandfather, but also because I’m in love with him. Because I’ve always been in love with him. And because he needs to win. You’re asking about something being right and something being wrong, Billy. Well you look in those two men’s eyes, then you tell me who is right and who is wrong.”
23
After all this time, it’s hard for me to separate what I knew then about Jewel’s early time with March and Roscoe from what I learned in the time that followed that amazing day. During my junior and senior high school years, Jewel would sometimes get a faraway look in her eyes, and the corners of her mouth would crawl slowly upward. I knew that meant she was going to tell me about some picnic with March on the Dry Devil’s River, or of the let
ters she’d written that he’d never answered. The odd part was that she never seemed bitter to have lost those thirty years with the man she fell in love with that day at the well.
Since Jewel had come all the way from Del Rio with the honorable intention of letting Roscoe down easy, she managed to convince herself that suddenly falling in love with March was not a problem. Roscoe had been off fetching the mail and supplies when she arrived, so she didn’t actually have the opportunity to tell him the original purpose of her visit. Surely the right time and place would present itself, she thought. Unfortunately, the right time and place never arrived.
March and Jewel became fast friends and soon-to-be lovers. Because of what had already transpired between Jewel and Roscoe, neither of them was immediately eager to take the ultimate step of intimacy. A true courtship ensued. Traveling to Del Rio as often as he could get away from the well, March would formally request the honor of Jewel’s company from her father the preacher. That Elisha Judson would grant this permission indicates just what a smooth talker March must have been.
There being little or no nightlife in Del Rio, March and Jewel would head across the river for dinner and dancing in the festive town of Villa Acuña, Mexico. Their favorite place was Ma Crosby’s, where they ate fried catfish fresh from the Rio Grande, washing it down with ice-cold Carta Blancas drunk from small, often-refilled glasses barely four inches high. The idea was that the beer go down fast and cold and easy.
There were cantadas and bailles under the stars in the main plaza and numerous bandidos of Pancho Villa’s former employ singing ballads and telling heroic tales of the Mexican Revolution. To appease Roscoe—and because he was more fun back then than later in his life—they sometimes invited him to come along.
Jewel gave little thought to Roscoe’s feelings in all this. It wasn’t as though he had been in love with her, or as if they’d spent five sober minutes together. But March knew better. He’d seen another side of Roscoe and he knew that it was only a matter of time before his partner’s jealousy erupted in a violent rage, much like the well they were still hoping to bring in any day.
After two months of this uncomfortable situation, March left one night without telling Roscoe. Driving down to Del Rio in the very same truck in which Jewel had forever misplaced her virginity, March found Jewel waiting for him across the street from her father’s Victorian mansion.
They drove slowly over the rickety bridge that barely spanned the muddy Rio Grande, and waved at a new friend who guarded the international border from a comfortable seated position, leaning way back on two legs of his chair. After convincing a local merchant to reopen her dress shop, they strolled arm in arm to Villa Acuña’s main cathedral. There—in the presence of a priest, a nun and a half-wit—they were married.
“For long as you both should live,” pronounced the priest in his broken English.
It was the first time either of them had been in a Catholic church.
Their honeymoon took them all the way back to Sonora, where they spread a blanket beneath the brilliant night sky on a point of land that would in three years become the ninth tee of a strange new sporting field, but which that night was a vantage point to a whole new universe.
Imagining them when they were young, it was easy for me to picture how March and Jewel would have lain together, would have rolled and tossed among the thick woolen blankets, Jewel grasping at tightened muscles, and March with fistfuls of hair, both sighing at the joy and wincing at the pain of being in love. Neither would have the slightest idea that the son of the daughter they begot that night would only be able to compare their tryst with a night he spent forty years later atop a building in Paris with a girl who knew just three words of English.
The red wine and baguettes that kept that beautiful French girl and myself going till dawn tasted to me like the warm beer and cold tacos that March and Jewel bought from a vendor in Mexico and carried to their wedding supper on the hill. My gaze wandered over the city of lights and I thought of the meteor shower Jewel told me they saw that night. The honking of Parisian horns became the hooting of owls, and whatever type of creatures were scurrying about, be they rats or cats, were to me a kit of young foxes come to bask in the glory of the night, to roll and tumble together in scratching, nipping, biting yelps of pain and innocence.
As we awakened with the coming dawn, perhaps like March before me, I wondered if that wondrous girl and I had conceived a child. To this day I wonder still, because I never saw her again.
24
There was a little outhouse in the middle of the golf course, and from the sixth tee we could all hear Beast in there exercising his temper and his golf shoes on the sheet-metal walls and wooden throne.
“Whooo-eee!” said Roscoe. “Glad he’s not mad at me!”
Sandy was swinging his driver to stay loose, and Fromholz just sat still and watched us all, buzzardlike, from his perch on the stump of an old rotted fruit tree. If someone were to fall over dead, I thought, it wouldn’t take him long to hop over and peck out one of our eyes to match his own.
Jewel and March stood close to each other at one side of the tee. Jewel was speaking softly to him. I couldn’t hear her words, but March’s sad blue eyes were staring in my direction all the while.
When she’d had her say, March came walking over toward me. Again he held out his closed hand as if to give me something, but when he uncurled the fingers, there was no chewing gum or moon rock. This time there was only an open hand reaching out to me. It was my turn to put something in his hand. I extended my arm and opened my clenched fingers slowly and we shook hands until a tear appeared in the corner of March’s eye.
“Jewel tells me you’re a good boy,” he said.
“She thinks so.”
“Well, Jewel’s an excellent judge of character,” he said. “Except in Roscoe’s case … and mine. I guess there’s no denying that I let her down sadly. I hope that hasn’t cursed me forever. I’m not a bad guy. I’ve always tried to get some enjoyment out of life. I try to take care of my business and my friends. Now I’m trying to take care of my family.”
I gave him a weak smile.
“I feel bad when I make the wrong decisions,” he continued. “And I forget to notice when I make the right ones. I don’t hit a guy when he’s down. And I’m just beginning to learn that when somebody knocks me down, I’m gonna get right back up again. I been down on my knees a long time, but never again. However long I got left, I’d like to spend it with my head held high. I’d like for you to be proud of me. I’d like for the two of us to be friends. And I wish I had a little more time. There’s a lot of places and things I’d like to show you.”
“I’d like to see ’em all,” I told him, fighting back a tear of my own.
“Someday, everything I own’ll belong to you. My daddy’s ranch will be your ranch, my golf course yours too. It’s a beautiful land. My heart left with Jewel, but my soul is out there on that unforgiving land.”
* * *
The Llano Estacado—“staked plains” it means in Spanish. Supposedly the conquistadors marked their way across the Indian country with stakes so as to find their way back to the gulf, laden with the gold of seven cities. But secretly they expected death at every turn, and believed that their souls—lost angels—would need the stakes to guide them back to a civilized afterlife. Then, as they traveled farther into the country, their actions grew more and more barbarous and they thought less and less of becoming angels.
From the estuaries and intercoastal tide pools of the gulf, there’s no way to tell just how God-almighty big or how unbelievably dry this land can be. The early settlers, from the Spanish all the way through March’s Irish ancestors, entered this vast scape through the mouths of its rivers—rivers that run neither wide like the Mississippi nor deep like the Columbia.
Instead, numerous small rivers meander back through the sunken coastal plains to their time-eroded cuts of the elevated Balcones Fault and beyond into the hostile canyons,
draws, and creeks where ancient man made his home. That habitation of thousands of years is still given witness by stacked-rock burial mounds, spent or discarded tools of work and war, and limestone cliffs painted in the glyphs of their written language.
If, like the original inhabitants, you continue to follow the water to its source, you’ll eventually find a limestone crevice, grown all around in ferns and sweet watercress, with a freshet of cold spring water gushing out, gathering with other trickles and founts and warming slowly as it heads to the sea. But if you follow the riverbeds farther inland, beyond the springs, you’ll find the isolated pools that remain from the last rain and river rise; the catfish trapped in ever-dwindling puddles as they flounder in panic until raccoons or bobcats feast on their flesh and drink the last of the water. Only bleached skeletons remain on the baked and cracked soil which cries out for rain farther upstream.
And still the canyons continue on, past any signs of water but their own eroded existence, cutting into country that survives by hoarding more, by needing less. The prickly pear cactus, fat even through the drought until the cattle or the buffalo, dying for water, eat them thorns and all. The mesquite trees, with tiny leaves catching little of the hot sun and providing minimal shade; the thin-bladed grass growing lush in the violent spring storms and waiting patiently, brown but standing tall, through the passing of the other seasons. The wildflowers springing forth in brilliant rainbows after the storm, then burning brown till their seedpods explode, scattering future life to the southwest winds. The snakes, the lizards, and the horny toads, all living as can on gathered dew and, like the larger animals, keeping one eye cocked to the sky and one ear to the ground for the hopeful sound of distant thunder.
And then there is man, greediest of consumers: grudgingly adapting through conservation, then lowered expectations, and lastly by insanity. Postponing the inevitable by digging wells or drilling, by constructing dams to hoard in times of plenty, by defending their impoundments against the downstream thirsty with ancient yellowed papers, bribes, or guns. By hiring charlatans: white-whiskered old men, crazy Indians, fireworks experts, aviators, scientists, and quacks of all denomination; each promising to make it rain, each coming on the happy rumor of success and leaving on the sad fact of failure, so all that continues unchanged is the vastness of the land and the smallness of man; never conquering but sometimes adapting; looking alternately reddened and browned, increasingly cracked and tanned like a discarded hide, becoming in apparition more and more like an organ or appendage of the living land; and ending up as dust, blowing on the hot breeze, sighing contentedly at the sound of soothing thunder, waiting like all the land for the rain to come, waiting to be washed back to the distant sea.
