by Turk Pipkin
March, besides being pale and clammy, looked sort of shrunken and withered. I’d fetched the little bottle of pills from his golf bag, quickly given him two, then returned the medicine to its proper place. But March was not reviving the way he had earlier. The both of them looked like death’s rejections, leftovers from the pickings of the devil that only a buzzard would touch.
I turned to Jewel to see if she’d noticed as well, and for the first time I had ever seen, she wasn’t all beautiful and shining. She just looked very, very sad. And instead of stepping closer to be a part of things, she stepped back where she wouldn’t be noticed, I suppose to hide the tears that were slowly rolling down her cheeks.
“It’s a good thing we’re only playing nine,” March gasped.
“Nine holes is for babies,” said Beast, trying to reignite the game and his possible fortune. “We oughta be playing eighteen.”
“Son!” said Fromholz. “The gods made the game eighteen holes because the first nine you play against the course and the second nine you play against yourself.”
“So?”
“So you don’t have to play eighteen ’cause you’ve already played against yourself.”
“Up yours!” said Beast. “Let’s play some golf.”
Roscoe finally stopped his nosebleed by stuffing a plug of chewing tobacco into his damaged nostril, and March climbed up off the ground with only a little assist from me. Neither of them, however, was in any shape to swing a club. Sensing that he’d lost control of the match, Fromholz ruled that the pros would play the hole alone. Then Beast and Sandy both hit good shots down to the bottom of the big hill.
Trying to referee for March and Roscoe was like orchestrating an insane asylum. Just the technical details were beginning to test Fromholz’s patience. March’s cart was now sitting seriously askew—the landing from the trip aloft having bent the axle beyond repair—so Fromholz shifted March’s clubs to Roscoe’s cart. Roscoe refused to ride with March, who was in no condition to walk, so Jewel was enlisted to be March’s driver.
“Hold up!” Roscoe hollered to Jewel as she passed by us in the fairway. “Forgot my chew.”
Roscoe limped over to the cart and I handed Beast his eight-iron. Then I remembered that Roscoe had used his tobacco on the tee and hadn’t returned to the cart since. I turned around, and for a brief moment I could’ve sworn that he was digging around in March’s bag instead of his own. I would have said something—oh, how I wished I had—but when I looked at March to see if he’d noticed, I lost the thought. For March’s mind had wandered to greener pastures and fairer shores, one final aimless journey of heart and soul, marked only by a faint mumbling delirium.
Drawing closer, as if in a dream myself, I gazed into his sad blue eyes, and I became his witness, an involuntary eavesdropper on the final tally of his life, the way it had been, and the way it might have been as well; March shivering in a stream of icy water, at last a well spewing artesian life instead of smelly oil. It must have tasted sweet as he pursed his lips, tasted sweet like a long putt topping a rise, gathering speed, and rushing toward the heart of the hole. He was humming to the norteño music playing in the background, and Jewel must have been radiant in her white-lace Mexican wedding dress. Lovingly, Jewel had once taken the dress from her closet and shown it to me, telling me its story. The sleepy señorita who owned the shop had held a lantern as Jewel twirled and spun, her hair and the hem of the dress all whirling with dancing, dervish shadows that reflected in March’s eyes. And then he was looking out again from the Scottish Lowlands to the brooding sea. And the bagpipes resounded from off the stone (or perhaps from within it), and he recalled the nun’s funny little accordion as it sang “Here Comes the Bride” in a minor key while the unshaven Mexican priest beseeched the Lord on high in Latin and in Spanish. March’s murmuring was racing in a stream of unconsciousness that had his sad-eyed alcoholic father looking down from the back of the chapel upon his son about to be wed, and for the last time March would ever envision, his father smiled. Smiled so that March could feel the tears streaming down his face as Jewel gripped his hand tightly and said, “¡Si! I do take this man. I do.” And in his reverie they were lying together in the coming dawn, lovers, wrapped in a huge pile of Mexican serapes and colorful handwoven blankets, lying soft upon skin that moves softly on skin softer still. And somewhere his numbed brain or tired soul began to glow, the light approaching from the east to the top of this sacred hill. The darkness fled from their touch, Jewel sighed with the wind, and March knew for the first time since his father died that the God in heaven can also be found on earth.…
And suddenly Jewel’s voice is saying, “William, oh please, William, are you all right?”
His eyes, still without focus, flickered with a little smile, then his lips moved like the wind on a calm day, and the highest leaves of the tallest trees rustled a faint “I love you.”
Jewel put her arms around his neck, hugging for all the lost hugs, then spoke softly back to him, her words seeking out the place where he’d gone to hide.
“William March. You come back here this minute; there’s people here that love you.” Then after a pause to sniffle back a tear, she added, “I love you.”
He was more than one foot down in that grave; both legs were in and sinking fast, but he summoned a wildcatter’s strength long forgotten and pulled himself up out of the dead earth just as surely as he had so many times sucked up long-dead dinosaurs or eons of whale urine or whatever it was he’d spent his life pumping up from out of the old rock. When his eyes began to focus, he breathed deeply, smelled the hot dust on the living wind, and almost smiled.
He still didn’t know where he was, not at first. He looked at us like the strangers we mostly were, and slowly it came to him that he was seated there in the cart next to Jewel on the seventh fairway of a long road home. And for each of his tears, there were tears on Jewel’s cheeks to match.
Sandy stepped up close. “March, you okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m fine.” He turned to Jewel. “It’s just that I been a long time alone. A long time. But it won’t be long now.”
30
Things did not improve after Jewel and Roscoe abandoned March that day at the well, because none of them had actually gotten what they wanted, a sad state of affairs they all seemed unable to admit.
For starters, Roscoe’s lotharial conquest had been just that, a victory, much as losing Jewel to March had simply been a loss. Spending the first fifteen years of his life in a Galveston orphanage had given Roscoe a sense of the score. Those who slept in top bunks and ate at the head of the line were winners. Those who slept on the bottom and scraped the pail were little more than bed wetters and beggars. Life was not meant to be spent on the bottom bunk.
A semifamous wildcatter like Roscoe drew occasional attention from the Texas press; after all, he was successful local color. One of the newspaper interviews—in Roscoe’s own words—told how at age fifteen he’d broken into the office of the orphanage that dared to call itself his home. Discovering whose monthly checks were paying his bill, he escaped his toy prison and hitchhiked to Houston. There he confronted H. R. Hughes: inventor, oilman, and founder of the Hughes Tool Company (which made millions manufacturing the rolling cone drill bit, invented by H.R. himself).
Being smart and tough himself, it wasn’t hard for Roscoe to conclude that he was indeed sprung without consent from the loins of the famous manufacturer, but there was a complication. H.R. already had a son, Howard Hughes, Jr., future aviation pioneer, moviemaker, and proverbial chip off the old block. Not knowing that Howard junior would eventually become an emaciated, germ-fearing billionaire-recluse, H.R. was somewhat less than ecstatic at Roscoe’s arrival.
Denying knowledge of any young bastards, H.R. offered the teenager two choices. Have the crap beat out of him before being tossed out on his ear. Or have the crap beat out of him, then work as an apprentice welder and tool dresser. H.R. had in mind an unproved test well in
Big Lake, Texas, which was about as far from Houston as you could get and not be under the legal jurisdiction of another state where Hughes didn’t own the law.
If keeping score wasn’t already the dominant influence in Roscoe’s life, it didn’t take long as bottom boy on Santa Rita Number One to tattoo it into his soul. The experience must have hardened him like steel. Even for a seasoned roughneck, the work was long, tough, dirty, and dangerous. For a boy, it must have been almost inhuman.
Santa Rita Number One eventually spewed a million gallons of the creamiest crude the world had ever tasted.
“Its specific gravity was so high,” Roscoe boasted decades later, “that a refinery was redundant. One day the foreman’s truck ran out of gas, so I put in a couple gallons of crude right off the wellhead, and it ran, better than before!”
He could burn it in the boss’s truck, but that was the closest he’d ever come to owning it. Not that Roscoe or his bone-tired fellow workers wanted to change the natural order. No, they weren’t interested in none of that commie labor organizing. Oh no, the way to make things better was to tell the boss to shove twenty feet of casing in an alternate location where the sun don’t shine, then get the hell out and drill your own damn well!
That’s what took Roscoe, then in his twenties, to the hills above the Dry Devil’s River, where William March swore there was oil beneath his very own land, known since March’s dad’s lonely and booze-laden final years as the Devil’s Sanctuary.
It was there that Roscoe and March founded a business based on that famous Texas sentiment that a man’s word is as good as his bond. Their deal was sealed by a handshake, less between geologist-owner and drilling contractor than between two men who were bound to act as honestly as they expected to be treated. Of course, that was before they made the acquaintance of Miss Jewel Anne Hemphill. That was before March really knew Roscoe at all.
Once Jewel abandoned March in favor of Roscoe, the score became two to one in Roscoe’s favor. As far as he was concerned, the contest was over. After a few weeks, Roscoe got bored with his amour. And when he found out she was pregnant, he walked out on her. Where did Roscoe go? Where else? Back to the oil business. Back to March.
But things change. In Roscoe’s absence, March had somehow managed to keep the crew working without pay. He worked double and triple shifts himself to cover for those who did leave, and he kept the whole operation going twenty-four hours a day. Every minute of it, they were firing that old boiler with mesquite and cedar stumps so they could keep sinking the bit, adding a pipe, and sinking the bit, ad infinitum. The only break in the routine was when the time came to pull the bit and remove a pipe—over and over for the whole damn drilling string—so that they could sink more casing to chase their progress downward. There was no due date, no known gestation period for this baby, indeed no guarantee that the damn well would come in at all. Nothing really to know for sure except that Jewel was gone and that the hole wanted deepening, was practically crying out for another length of pipe. All the while, March schemed to float the food, tobacco, and whiskey bills, and kept drilling so that he didn’t have to think about anything but landing that bit in gumbo, which, with a lot of cursing and coaxing, he finally did.
The well didn’t come in a showy gusher the way March had hoped, but it was a steady flow; a moneymaker sitting in a potential field of moneymakers. And as far as March was concerned, not a penny or a drop of it belonged to that back-stabbing bastard Roscoe.
Some folks call it a timeless land; some think of it as behind the times. In any event, the Indians hadn’t been murdered or run out of West Texas until the late nineteenth century, and most of the folks of the region hardly noticed the twentieth century arrive. In the Sutton County of the early thirties a horse was often more reliable transportation than a car, and a gun was just another of the tools, like a hammer or an ax, that you grew up learning to use. So when Roscoe returned to demand his share of the well, there was only one way to settle their differences: the old-fashioned way.
March selected a lever-action .30-30, not real fast but deadly accurate, and Roscoe foolishly ignored the shotgun in favor of the traditional Colt six-shooter.
It was an affair of honor. The referee was Uncle Piggy, the alcoholic nitro man who had days earlier blasted the well into production with a nitro torpedo—loading a metal canister with twenty gallons of liquid nitro, dropping it into the well, and running like hell. Ten seconds of free-fall silence was followed by a deep, rumbling explosion that fragmented the subterranean rock in all directions and allowed the nearby oil to come to the surface under the pressure of the field.
Like all nitro men, Uncle Piggy’s problem was his persistent headaches—brain damage really—brought on by breathing glycerin, and temporarily relieved only by massive and steady doses of alcohol. Between the melted brain cells, decaying liver, and your occasional accidental explosion, the career expectancy for a nitro man was about four years. Uncle Piggy had been at it for fourteen.
He did his damndest to load the wrong bullets into the right guns, and then tried to reverse it and load the right bullets into the wrong guns. At last Roscoe and March each loaded their own—one bullet each—then the pair declined to shake hands and impatiently walked several paces apart.
Uncle Piggy tried to count to ten but kept having to start over at four. Roscoe fired first and missed. With the leisure of time on his side, March drew a steady bead on Roscoe’s hard heart, but at the last minute, he just didn’t have it in him. As he pulled the trigger, March jerked the gun down toward the ground. Though he was attempting to miss, he still blew off Roscoe’s kneecap.
It was months before Roscoe was able to walk again (and even then with a hobble he’d never shake). In the meantime, March’s guilt took over. Maybe it really wasn’t Roscoe’s fault. After all, from the first night at the Wing Ding, Miss Jewel Anne Hemphill had been the foundation of a house divided. By virtue of countenance and deed, by way of innocence and vanity, she had driven a festering wedge between the two friends.
God, what had he done? March had almost killed his pal; he’d crippled him for life over some kind of horrible jealous love or infatuation. It was like a sickness both of them had contracted, an infection of the heart, a poisoning. That was it: they’d been snakebit.
There was no righting the kind of wrong that March had done to Roscoe, but he did the best he could and gave back half the well, indeed half of that well and all future wells. They’d be partners again. And they’d be friends. At least they’d try.
As for Jewel—well, March only wanted her if she needed him, or cared for him. She was bound to write, he thought, but he received no word.
31
The shadow of a small, billowy cloud, the mid-morning edition of what would later be a rumbling thunderstorm, floated toward us and momentarily cast its cool relief across the seventh fairway. The shade wasn’t much, but it was enough to bring March back to life. Or perhaps he’d simply come to a decision that would finally bring things to a conclusion one way or the other. Pulling an iron from his bag, he tossed a ball down in the fairway.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Roscoe.
“I thought I’d get back in the hole,” March answered.
“Well, it’s too late for that, honcho! You tell him, Fromholz. No scramblin’! No mulligans! No damn cheatin’!”
March hadn’t even hit a tee shot, so for once Fromholz had to agree with Roscoe.
“What’s up, March?” Fromholz asked.
March told Fromholz to bring out the thirty-year-old scorecard from the first match and Fromholz produced it.
“Notice anything funny about it?” March asked.
“Yes sir! I been meaning to ask you about that. Roscoe won with an ace on the last hole? That would have to be the most miraculous shot in the history of golf!”
“Oh, it was more than a miracle,” March assured us.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Roscoe demanded to know as he limp
ed toward March with just a little more hobble than usual. “You saying I cheated? After all these years, you’re saying I cheated?”
“Hold it! Just wait a dang minute,” said Beast. “How does a guy cheat to make a hole-in-one? Either it goes in or it don’t go in. What, were you guys blind?”
“Well, big man,” said March, “as a matter of fact we were blind, ’cause it can get real dark when you’re playing at night.”
“At night!” Beast threw up his hands in surrender. “You’re both looney-tunes!”
“I don’t get it either,” added Sandy. “Why would you play a big match at night?”
“That’s when we thought of it,” said March.
“And it was too damn hot to play in the day,” added Roscoe. “It’d been a hundred and ten every day for weeks. The glare was bright enough to sunburn your eyeballs.”
“Besides,” added March, “that way, Roscoe could cheat.”
“You want me to admit it? Is that it? Okay! Fine!” trumpeted Roscoe. “I did cheat! I fixed your pants good, didn’t I, March? And there’s nothing you can do about it now, you dumb hillbilly. I found that ball in a patch of prickly pear and just dropped that sucker in the hole!”
March must have been waiting a long time for this confession, not just wanting to get even, but hoping to finally satisfy the doubts in his mind.
He shook his head sadly. “Christ, Roscoe, of course you cheated! We’ve played golf together once a week for twenty-seven years and you’ve cheated every damn time. If you weren’t teeing it up in the rough you were finding out-of-bounds shots in the fairway. If you weren’t neglecting to count a topped shot or a scooped chip, you were on the green marking your ball over and over, each time moving it a foot closer to the hole. It’s the only way you’ve been able to stay in the game.”
