Fast Greens Read Online Free Page A

Finally the tear fell free in the slowest of motions, then landed with a tiny splash on her hand in her lap. The deafening sound of that splashing tear was enough to jump-start time again, and as I glanced back at March, the second hand of his watch was ticking yet again.
    â€œGlad I caught you,” March told me softly, no longer out of breath. “You forgot your picture.”
    I didn’t know what he meant at first, but I took the big folder he passed in through the window and there inside was the framed photograph of the two golfers on horseback. Unable to find my voice, I gazed at it in total disbelief that such a treasure should be mine.
    â€œGolf will never be like that again,” March told me, “and now you’re part of it.”
    As we drove home, Jewel remained pensively quiet. During the drive, and through much of the evening, I studied the photo closely, wanting to discover everything about this wonderful joining of golf and horses—a new game from out of the old West. There was both mystery and magic in that photo, though I did not know how, or why.
    I was reminded of a western I’d once seen on TV. A white man tells an Indian that the whites must rule the land because they know much more than the red man. With his spear, the Indian draws a circle in the sand.
    â€œThis … what red man know.”
    The Indian draws a larger circle.
    â€œThis … what white man know.”
    The white man nods in smug self-assurance.
    â€œAnd this…” says the Indian, sweeping his hand across the vast horizon, “this is what neither of us know.”

3
    That night, unable to sleep, I lay in my bed gazing at the photo, trying to take myself back almost thirty years to that place. The story March had told me of playing golf on horseback was clear in my mind, but now the pictures were filled out by the moonlight outside my window.
    â€œIt was the fall of 1938,” he had told me, “and the course practically glowed in the light of the harvest moon. The hard edges of the scrub oaks and scrawny mesquite trees were showing their softer sides, and there was no place I would rather have been.
    â€œWe considered it a private affair, a challenge between two drunken friends. What with looking for the balls in the darkness, it had taken us most of the night to play only eight holes, and with one par three to go, we were dead even. Roscoe stepped up to the ball on the tee, but halfway through his long, drawn-out preshot routine, the ball disappeared. The damndest thing: without Roscoe swinging the club, without the ball even moving off the little mound of sand that we used as tees in those days, it simply disappeared! I looked up to see if Roscoe was trying to pull a fast one, but he had vanished too.”
    March’s voice, as if telling a ghost story, began to gather a hissing speed.
    â€œA chill ran across my flesh, then it dawned on me. The moon had sunk like a stone into the gathering fog, dropping a pitch-black cloak over us, our horses, and the whole course.”
    To March, in the black of the moonless, starless night, it seemed futile to continue, but Roscoe wasn’t having any of that. Lighting one of his stubby Camels, Roscoe smoked it down to a bright ember and set it next to the golf ball, which glowed in eerie red reflection. Then with the sudden sharp sound of forged steel on hard rubber cover, the ball again disappeared. Where Roscoe’s shot in the dark had landed was anybody’s guess.
    They were contesting, March told me, for the position of chairman and head honcho in their own oil enterprise. And with that burgundy leather chair came the right to name the company. Damned determined to call it March Oil, he placed his own ball next to Roscoe’s still-glowing cigarette. Guided by the scent of the lantana blossoms that surrounded the little adobe clubhouse beyond the green, March swung a smooth six-iron, knocking the ball out into the