Fast Greens Read Free

thing.
    â€œHold it!” said Roscoe. “How do I know our ref is honest?”
    â€œHell, you can shoot craps with him over the phone,” said March. “Let’s play.”
    Gathering round, the golfers assembled in natural affinity; March and Sandy standing tall at one side, Fromholz in the middle, and the blackhats Roscoe and Beast on the other. Unable to take sides beyond reluctantly carrying Beast’s bag, I stood to myself.
    â€œNine holes. Best ball. Winners take all,” said Fromholz.
    Then he pulled out a yellowed scorecard that looked a hundred years old. Squinting his good eye at the faded nine holes of figures scrawled on it, he came to a decision.
    â€œRoscoe, you won the last hole, so I do believe, after twenty-seven years, you still got the honors.”
    Subtracting quickly, twenty-seven from 1965, I came up with the year of the last hole: 1938. Unfortunately, I was not as strong in history as I was in math, and I was unable to place any particular event with the year in question. Likewise I had no conception of the clothes, the music, even the cars. With regards to 1938, I was nearly blank. The only image that would form was one I had first seen just one week earlier, an image that I could not get out of my head.
    *   *   *
    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.
    â€œGolf 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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œI thought your knee hurt in the cold,” March answered.
    â€œIt hurts in the heat and the cold!” Roscoe shot back. “And it’s your goddamned fault. It’s all your fault!”
    â€œMy fault?” March protested. “You sorry bastard! After the way you screwed up our company, you ain’t laying the blame on me!”
    â€œUp 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