We Are Still Married (25 page)

When I walked over to the clubhouse after breakfast, it was obvious that Tennessee had had a hard winter, too. Frost had killed most of the Bermuda grass on the greens, where the flags stood in circles of light-brown dust like the spot in the schoolyard where we played Fox and Geese, and the fairways looked worn and ratty for so early in the season. The woods were lush and dense, though, and the foliage of the golfers around the first tee was positively inspiring, their pants in particular. Pinks and yellows and oranges, a pair of peach and one of lilac, and an assortment of plaids such as I've seldom seen outside of the circus, including one that looked like a test for color blindness. They were such a brilliant, cheerful sight I felt sheepish about my quiet good taste in tans. It seemed stingy.

Chet arrived a few minutes later in a blue shirt and bright-green pants, and while he went in the clubhouse to sign up, I sidled up toward the crowd for a closer look. Men in clothes the colors of extravagant good humor strolled around behind the tee, pressing the flesh, putting their arms around each other's shoulders and patting each other on the belly and saying, “You're looking good.” Being a writer, I took out my checkbook and made some notes on who was there—songwriters such as Whitey Shafer (“That's the Way Love Goes”) and Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart (“Tennessee Waltz,” both of them) and Wayne Carson (“Always on My Mind,” “She's Actin' Single, I'm Drinkin' Doubles”), and singers Mickey Newbury and Del Reeves, and Buck Trent, the banjo player, and pianist Floyd Cramer—and kept occupied, writing “Sunny, air smells fresh and green” and “1st hole 345 yards” and “F. Cramer sliced into sand trap,” until Chet appeared at my elbow, and men came over to pat him, including a tall, lanky man named Howard, who said, “I appreciate you, Chet. I want you to know that. I love you.” When Chet introduced me to him, he patted me, too, and said I looked good, which was good news to me. Mickey Newbury told Chet he looked good, and they got to laughing about a man they knew named Walter who promoted a public barbecue by flying over in a plane and dropping a pig in a parachute (“Didn't hurt the pig. Pig got up and walked away”), and about a golf hustler named Titanic Thompson. “He'd make bets with you about anything,” Chet said. “He'd bet you he could pitch cards under a door and into a hat. He'd bet you he could toss his door key into the lock. He'd bet fifty thousand dollars on the exact circumference of a rock a hundred feet away. Once he bet he could hit a golf ball a mile, and he did it. On Lake Michigan, after it froze over.”

Meanwhile, foursomes of all colors and shapes of golfers straggled one by one up to the business end of the tee, posed for an official tournament photograph, took hefty practice swings, looked down the fairway, and teed off, to the great amusement of the bunch behind them. “God! He hit it!” someone yelled after Pee Wee King chopped a sharp ground ball up the middle. “You look nervous, Wesley,” a frizzy-haired man called to Wesley Rose, the son of Fred Rose and president of Acuff-Rose, decked out in green. “You look like it's royalties time.” And to a fat man: “You don't need anybody to play with—you are a foursome.” A drive hooked into the woods. “For his next shot, a McCulloch chain saw!” An especially fluorescent pair of orange trousers appeared and bent down to tee up the ball. “His handicap is his pants!” said a man whose own pants resembled wallpaper in a cheap restaurant. “Where'd you get those? From the Highway Department?”

Chet introduced me to Archie Campbell, whom I recognized right away from watching “Hee Haw,” and Billy Edd Wheeler, whom I remembered for a song the first few lines of which I've sung hundreds of times to myself (“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. We been talkin' 'bout Jackson ever since the fire went out. I'm goin' to Jackson ... ”), and who looked a little flushed in the hot sun. He sported a lilac ensemble and a yellow visor on his thick sandy hair, which at the moment he was adjusting. Archie, an elegant, silver-haired gent in navy blue with a distinguished black mustache, was smoking a foot-long cigar. “Nicaraguan,” he said. I was admiring both of them, the man and the cigar, when Chet said that the fourth partner hadn't shown up yet. “You play,” he said. “You can play out of my bag.”

“You look like a golfer,” said Archie. “Either that or your dog just died.”

It occurred to me to say that golf makes me feel bad, but it also occurred to me that I was feeling good enough to afford some misery and that if I begged off I'd feel bad about it later, so when Chet put a driver in my hand and two balls—a white one and a green one—and a white Acuff-Rose tournament hat, I put on the hat, and posed with my partners. “Smile. Look like you're winners,” said the photographer. I teed up the white ball, and tried to think of grace and ease. I imagined the ball, its tiny engines revving up,
wanting
to fly, imagined a long, perfect shot, and—as a hush fell on the gallery of pants, who didn't know me well enough to give me a hard time—swung
hard
and sent a high pop fly about where the first-base bleachers would have been. It hung up in the air long enough for me to see more of it than I wanted to, took a fifty-foot-high bounce off the parking lot, and landed in tall grass between the lot and the highway. A bad moment, like a major soup spill, but someone said “That'll teach 'em not to bring their Cadillacs!” and though it wasn't a great line, some of the pants laughed, and I teed up the green ball and drove it a respectable distance into the rough and walked down the fairway to play some golf.

Second chances are fundamental to their game, I found out, including my redemptive second drive and also forgiveness of a bad lie. “Everybody gets to walk his dog in hillbilly golf,” Billy Edd told me. “Walking the dog” means moving the ball out of the trees or off of hard dirt and teeing it up on a tuft of grass. He kicked his out of a little hollow.

Archie looked at his ball and said, “I believe I'll walk this one.”

“That dog needs walking,” said Billy Edd.

My green relief ball stayed in the game the rest of the way. I shot a 7 on the first hole, a triple bogey, and went on to shank a few and top some others, which leaked off at weird angles and made my partners look away and say,
“That's
all right. We all do that,” and spent time in the woods shooting trees
(klok!),
and once or twice I thought longingly of my typewriter, which when I type “golf” prints “golf,” and not “pgwft” or “xxxxx,” but I also made par on one hole, sank a twelve-foot putt, and hit a drive that I still remember. When Chet hit a great drive on the long third, he said, “That felt better than sex and almost as good as eating watermelon.” Mine on the dogleg fifth didn't feel as good as
that,
but I did feel something smooth and synchronized that started in my head and in my hips and came together at the ball, and I looked up to see it fifty yards out and rising, sailing, a tiny green star lighting up the bright-blue sky.

“That's a beauty. That's a good layup, hoss. You're going to love that,” said Billy Edd. “You know, I could learn to admire you if I just worked at it a little.” He set his ball down, squinted, hitched up his lilac pants, wiggled his seat, and uncorked a high one that drifted slowly to the right. “Whoa! Hold up! Draw!” he yelled, dancing to the left to pull it back in bounds. “Work! Stay! Stay! Thou art so fair! Stay!” And it worked, drew back, stayed, and fell fair, and rolled in the short grass in the shadows of the tree line. “I didn't hit that as well as I thought I was going to,” he said. “But then I didn't think I was going to.”

Then Archie. He tossed his ball in the air, caught it on the back of his hand, let it roll slowly down his arm, flipped it up, caught it, and set it on the tee. “Watch this lick here, boys—the old pro is about to perform,” he said. He puffed on the cigar, spat, gave us a big footlight smile, and adjusted the bill of his blue cap to the right to compensate for a slight hook on his previous drive. He addressed the ball with a sweet slow swing, but the cap adjustment was perhaps too much or else the weight of the Nicaraguan cigar was off center, because his drive headed woodsward.

“Over the hill to Grandpa's!” said Billy Edd.

Archie yelled “Don't you
dare!”
and the white dot hesitated, drew back, hung up short of a stand of pine, and fell into the dogleg's knee.

“Look at that! I believe he made it. It's a show, isn't it!” Chet said.

“If you'da hit that perfect, it would've been even better,” said Billy Edd.

“All right, I'm going to get serious again now,” said Chet. He stood over the ball, bent, took a long, slow backswing, and socked it a little beyond Archie's. “That's the greatest shot I ever saw in my life!” he announced, and added, “But the wind was behind me. And, of course, I'm young.”

Chet had told me that he feels a little guilty when he plays well, knowing he's probably playing too much golf and not enough guitar. “The way I'm playing today, though, I guess I must be a pretty good guitar player,” he said. Hiking down the fairway in the sunshine, he looked loose and tan and happy. Archie cruised by in his white cart, trailing a ribbon of fragrant cigar smoke, and when we all got to Archie's ball Chet and Billy Edd had put their heads together and were singing a song:

“Let me take the baritone, Chouster,” said Archie, and the three of them sang it. It sounded so good they sang it again. And once more. Archie pulled out a 4-iron. He walked his dog a few feet. “Don't you ever play by our rules with somebody else,” he told me, grinning. “You might get shot.” That reminded Billy Edd of a story about a hillbilly golfer who walked onto a green and picked up all the dimes. “I remember the first time I ever went on tour, I was with another musician and I picked up the tip he left on the table,” Chet said. “I'd never seen anybody leave a tip before. I don't know that I'd ever been in a restaurant before.”

Archie said, “You've heard that one about Roy Acuff when he was touring with the Smoky Mountain Boys—the one where they were supposed to stop and have supper at the lady's house?”

I had never stood around in the middle of the fairway listening to jokes before. I kept glancing back at the tee, expecting to see angry golfers waving clubs at us, but nobody appeared. We were all by ourselves, four men standing in the hot sun and laughing. Eventually, Archie shot his second shot, and then Billy Edd. My arms were turning red and my neck, too. I rubbed on some lotion that made me smell like a ripe peach. I stood over my ball, hitched up to swing, and smelled Archie's cigar. I laughed on the backswing, my knees caved in a fraction, and I lifted a chunk of sod like a flying toupee and lofted a high fly ball that landed just short of the pin. It wasn't the play that Uncle Don's grounder was, but if you had seen it you would have clapped. I felt awfully lucky. Even a blind dog gets a little meat from the smokehouse now and then, as someone said later, I forget who.

WORKED LIKE A PLOW HORSE for about fifteen years, doing two radio shows, hauling them up one row and turning at the ditch and coming back the other way, and all that time not much happened to me that wasn't part of work, which made me sad one night in September when my wife and I left Copenhagen for New York. Five minutes after take-off, we felt a
whump,
the plane lurched, and a nearby steward turned pale green and disappeared into the galley. The plane was still climbing. I touched my wife's arm, she took my hand, and two or three thoughtful minutes passed, and then she took out a piece of paper and began writing a letter to her eldest son. The pilot came on the horn and said, in a dry Swedish voice, that we had experienced an explosion in the No. 3 engine, the fire was out now, and we would return to Copenhagen as soon as we dumped our fuel. “Let me assure you that everything is normal for a situation of this type,” he said.