Fast Greens (20 page)

“I had some small contractions and a couple of false alarms,” Jewel told me. “But I made it past nine months, and I was sure that everything would be okay.

“The convent had a musty library—just a dim room with stacks of old books. Every day I'd sort through some of the mess and try to get things organized. Books in English I'd arrange on one wall, books in Spanish on another. One morning I came across a medical book in Spanish. The true measure of a pregnancy, it said, was not nine months, but forty weeks.

“Feeling faint, I leaned back against the wall, and dropped the book to the floor. A spasm pulled at my stomach. Then another. ‘No!' I cried out. ‘Not yet! It's too soon.'

“Unable to walk, I laid down on the floor. Alone, in a room no bigger than a closet, I fought to keep your mother inside of me. Sister Elena found me—I don't know how long it had been—and they put me in bed for the baby's arrival. They told me to push, and I pulled. They told me to pant, and I held my breath. They told me to relax against the contractions, and I fought them with every ounce of strength. I
knew
that it was March's baby, and only I could prove it.”

It was a battle of nature against will, a battle that two weeks later still had Jewel refusing to push until she could refuse no more, until a baby girl forced her way into the world as March's rightful child.

And that was my mother, Martha Anne Hemphill, who, no matter how much affection and reassurance she was given in her life, never felt wanted in her home or in this world at all. Sometimes on the coldest nights of winter, even after all these years, I listen to the January winds howling through the bare trees outside my window, and I wonder what became of her.

33

Sneak around in the bushes eavesdropping on any regular golf foursome and you'll hear them talking about the random breaks of the game. If one golfer lips out eight putts in a row, his partners and opponents will just shrug and say the cup's too small (in fact, the ball lips out because the cup is round and not square). If the weird breaks and unlikely bounces start rearing their ugly heads to another in the group, it's explained that the unlucky golfer didn't go to church on Sunday (of course he went to church, he played golf). And hitting one tree or barely catching the lip of just one trap is a sure invitation to repeat the disaster over and over again.

“The golf gods just weren't with you today,” console the playing partners. “You must have pissed off somebody upstairs.”

If you stop to think about it, these players are describing the true nature of the game. Golf is more religion than sport, a religion with a very tiny and unforgiving goal: perfection. As in some groovy Eastern religion, the golf gods have a habit of rewarding the believer who approaches that perfection with a yin/yang philosophy of both diligence and indifference. Work your tail off to learn each and every shot that may confront you, but try not to give a hoot about any of them. The way to golf in the groove is to not worry about the ball going in the hole, but rather to just get in the groove and stay there—the golf gods allowing, that is.

When I was caddying for Sandy at one of the Texas regional qualifiers, he started off by telling me he'd been hitting the ball great, never better.

“I don't know,” he said, half talking to himself. “I been in the groove for weeks. Every shot seems sweet and pure. I can feel it, twenty-four hours a day. I can feel it at breakfast, I can feel it at dinner. I can feel it in my sleep.”

“That's super!” I told him.

“Yeah, I guess. Except…”

“Except what?”

“Now I don't feel it. I woke up this morning and it was gone. I can still chip and putt. I been out here practicing for hours and I can still hit the shots, but I can't
feel
it anymore.”

He was right. It was gone. Poof! Vanished like a genie after the third wish. And there was nothing Sandy could do about it. He was damned lucky to beat some yo-yo with a swing worse than my own.

“God, I want it back,” Sandy said to me after the match. “I want it back so bad!”

What was the problem? Was he trying too hard? Had he offended the golf gods? Or did he just have too many sticks in his bag? That was March's theory.

“The problem with golf,” March told me, “is you got too many tools. You give a carpenter fourteen hammers all different weights and lengths, and I guarantee he'll come home with his thumb beat to a bloody pulp. We don't half know how hard this game is. Fact is, we're lucky to come back alive.”

The fact is, golf is a fickle game: alive, but only in myth; marvelous, but only in theory; generous, but rarely in practice. I don't know why we curse and pray to the gods of golf. Do they live only in our minds, or are we, the mortal golfers, the products of their invention? No one really knows, of course, because it's a question meant for keener minds than those who take up sticks and balls as an unwitting form of worship.

And speaking of those without keen minds, Beast had been casually rewarded one of the worst breaks in golf. His approach shot to the seventh green backed all the way from the hole to the front edge of the green, and finally came to rest against the first cut or ridge between the short grass and the longer fringe. In such a case it's nigh on impossible to get the flat blade of the putter onto the full face of the ball. Either the flat iron hangs up in the thick grass behind the ball, or it sweeps over the grass and tops the ball. To compound matters, there was a twisting, double-helix break between his ball and the hole. For once I was glad he didn't ask me for assistance in reading the putt. Instead, he asked for his wedge.

I'd long heard of a Texas sand wedge—using a putter from a sand trap—but the other way around—a wedge from the green—that
must be
what an overly proud Texan would call an Oklahoma putter. Beast, with an already difficult putt, hoped to sweep the sole of the club over the deep fringe and square into the middle of the ball, which was just peeking at him over the lip of grass. Getting the ball near the hole would have been quite a feat. Knocking it dead in the heart for a birdie would have been a true miracle. And that's exactly what Beast did. Some days chicken; some days feathers.

“Hot damn!” said Roscoe. “My animal came to play!”

“One up,” said Fromholz. “One up, two to go.”

The golf gods had certainly come down upon Sandy, who sunk his head into his hands as if the whole match was over. But you wouldn't have known it by March. Having rejoined the game, he tried to recharge Sandy's spirit with another song.

“Oh, there's free beer tomorrow,

But there's heartache today!

Now we're filled with sorrow,

But tomorrow we won't pay!”

In wonder, Sandy turned to look at his older partner, whose boundless optimism seemed incapable of giving in.

“It ain't over till it's over,” March told him with a wink.

Knowing that in golf one never abandons ship, Sandy nodded his head in reply.

Beast, meanwhile, walked cockily up to the hole, stuck his wedge into it, and popped the ball straight up into the air. Instead of catching the ball in his hand, though, he bounced it several more times on the flat blade of the wedge.

“That's quite a little circus trick, Bobo,” said March. “Bet you can't bounce it fifty times without missing.”

Beast quickly caught the ball and turned to March. “How much?”

“Fifty bucks!” said March. “A buck a bounce.”

“Done,” said Beast, with a loud crack of his knuckles. Holding the wedge just below the grip, he began to bounce the ball up and down as easily as if it were on a tennis racquet.

Everyone paused to watch. Around bounce forty, he nearly missed and the ball went off at a sharp angle, but Beast deftly extended the club and brought the errant orb back into its vertical hop.

“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty!” counted Beast and Fromholz.

“Pay up, doofus!” added Beast. “You owe me half a c-note.”

March already had in his hand the engraving of Grant looking green.

“Tell you what, big man,” March told him. “I'll bet you can't do five hundred bounces for five hundred bucks!”

“Money from home,” said Beast, turning toward the eighth tee. “Somebody help me count.”

And with Fromholz trailing behind, Beast strolled casually across the green, whistling off-key as he bounced the ball on the wedge over and over and over.

*   *   *

In addition to playing both left- and right-handed, links hustler Titanic Thompson had quite a few other interesting golf bets: that he could chip a ball into a hat from thirty feet; balance a driver, a golf ball, and a tee on his nose; or hit a drive half a mile at the place of his choosing (he chose a frozen lake).

My favorite of his short cons, like Beast's trick wedge bounce, wasn't really a golf bet at all; it just took place on a golf course with golf equipment. Having reamed his suckers right-handed, left-handed, one-handed, and possibly even no-handed (he could putt with his foot), Ti would generally say he felt sorry for his opponents and suggest some wild and wonderful wager so they could win their money back.

Back at the car, having already untied his golf shoes, he'd take out his putter and hold it by each end. Then he'd wager that he could jump out of his shoes, pass his bare feet over the putter held horizontally in his hands, and land his feet back in his golf shoes. This was clearly impossible, and I doubt that anyone ever declined the wager.

It was said that Ti won a quarter of a million dollars a year for fifty years with his original short cons. And I wouldn't be surprised if half of it was with that single impossible feat, a stunt that he could accomplish each and every time. How did he do it? He was a natural athlete, he practiced for hours a day—after all, hustling was his job—and what the heck, maybe the golf gods were just on his side.

34

Beast was already on the four hundredth bounce when he arrived at the eighth tee. Fromholz, still counting, eased up next to me.

“This guy…” Fromholz said to me softly. “Four-o-eight, four-o-nine … This guy pisses me off! Four-eleven, four-twelve…”

“You missed one!” yelled Beast, still bouncing. “You started jabbering and you missed one!”

“No I didn't,” answered Fromholz, missing several more.

“Yes you did, you missed one!” Beast insisted.

“Are you sure?” asked Fromholz, no longer counting at all.

“Damn right I am!”

“Okay. You ought to know. Four-thirteen, four-
fifteen
,” skipping forward one bounce in correction, by then having missed at least twenty others.

I expected Beast to be pissed about Fromholz's tactics or for March to jump in there and distract Beast himself, but the fact was March had made a bad bet. As if to prove it, while the ball bounced toward five hundred, Beast explained to us that he had learned the trick by picking up balls on his dad's range: bucket in one hand, wedge in the other, he'd slip the blade of the wedge under a ball, pop it into the air and bounce it into the bucket. If he had to walk to the next ball, he continued bouncing the first one until it was time to lift the next.

“It's been a few years,” boasted Beast, “but I've done at least a million bounces!”

“Four-ninety-nine, five hundred,” Fromholz concluded.

“Too bad I didn't get a buck from some sucker for every one of them. Come on, March, pay up! You owe me five hundred!”

“Yes I do,” agreed March. “But you'll have to be patient 'cause my money's in the car.”

“It better be!” crowed Beast. “I don't like a guy who welshes on a bet!”

“Nobody does,” added Fromholz, shutting the Beast up cold.

Jewel slid up next to March and took his hand. I'm not sure if it was a sign of affection or if she was just checking his pulse.

“Nice bet, William,” she said. “Are you still going to have a little money left when this thing's over? Three don't live too easily on a teacher's salary.”

“Well, Jewel,” piped March, “let's don't worry about that. When life deals you lemons, you just gotta make whiskey sours.”

This put a frown on Jewel's face. Now that she had March, the challenge was not only to keep him alive but also to mold him into some sort of respectable head of a household. Her prospects for accomplishing the latter, I viewed as slim. Roscoe, on the other hand, just wanted to get the whole thing over with so he wouldn't ever again have to watch Jewel and March talking soft and sweet.

“Beast! Your shot!” he barked.

Beast asked for a six-iron and stepped onto the tee. As soon as he moved into his stance I could tell something was wrong. He was gripping the club kind of funny and there was a slight tremor to the clubhead, as if we were in a small earthquake.

Being a seasoned veteran, Beast backed away. He cracked his knuckles loudly, then regripped the club and stepped back up. If anything, the shaking had grown worse. I saw him tighten his grip to a choke-hold, a terrible mistake common to duffers and high handicappers. As Roscoe might have put it, the true golf grip is no tighter than a prostitute handling a teenage boy.

“What's wrong?” asked Roscoe. There was a note of panic in his voice as Beast backed away again.

“I don't know,” said the big man. “My right hand feels screwy. I guess I was gripping my wedge and bouncing that ball too long at a time.”

March, like the March of old, was grinning from ear to ear, winking at Sandy and making goo-goo eyes at Jewel, all at the same time.

“My partner the dumb-butt!” said Roscoe. “I swear, if we wuz to shove a bowling ball in your brain, it'd bounce around like a BB in a boxcar! Hell, if you wait much longer, Fromholz'll probably penalize you for slow play. He don't really seem to care much for you anyways, so you better swallow your medicine and hit it.”