Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(17)

Charlie Conner, the Jacksonville sportswriter, took a sip from his own glass of Stroh's and tried to slouch back in his chair with the same easy grace he observed in Dallie Beaudine. “Do you think Jack Nicklaus's withdrawal will affect the Orange Blossom this week?” he asked.

In Dallie's mind that was one of the world's stupidest questions, right up there with “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” but he pretended to think it over anyway. “Well, now, Charlie, when you take into consideration the fact that Jack Nicklaus is on his way to becoming the greatest player in the history of golf, I'd say there's a pretty fair chance we'll notice he's gone.”

The sportswriter looked at Dallie skeptically. “The greatest player? Aren't you forgetting a few people like Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer?” He paused reverentially before he uttered the next name, the holiest name in golf. “Aren't you forgetting Bobby Jones?”

“Nobody's ever played the game like Jack Nicklaus,” Dallie said firmly. “Not even Bobby Jones.”

Skeet had been talking to Luella, the bar's owner, but when he heard Nicklaus's name mentioned he frowned and asked the sportswriter about the Cowboys’ chances to make it all the way to the Super Bowl. Skeet didn't like Dallie talking about Nicklaus, so he had gotten into the habit of interrupting any conversation that shifted in that direction. Skeet said talking about Nicklaus made Dallie's game go straight to hell. Dallie wouldn't admit it, but Skeet was pretty much right.

As Skeet and the sportswriter talked about the Cowboys, Dallie tried to shake off the depression that settled over him every fall like clockwork by indulging in some positive thinking. The ‘74 season was nearly over, and he hadn't done all that bad for himself. He'd won a few thousand in prize money and double that in crazy betting games— playing best ball left-handed, betting on hitting the middle zero on the 200-yard sign at a driving range, playing an improvised course through a dried-out gully and a forty-foot concrete sewer pipe. He'd even tried Trevino's trick of playing a few holes by throwing the ball in the air and hitting it with a thirty-two-ounce Dr Pepper bottle, but the bottle glass wasn't as thick now as it had been when the Super Mex had invented that particular wrinkle in the bottomless grab bag of golf betting games, so Dallie'd given it up after they'd had to take five stitches in his right hand. Despite his injury, he'd earned enough money to pay for gas and keep Skeet and him comfortable. It wasn't a fortune, but it was a hell of a lot more than old Jaycee Beaudine had ever made hanging around the wharves along Buffalo Bayou in Houston.

Jaycee had been dead for a year now, his life washed away by alcohol and a mean temper. Dallie hadn't found out about his father's death until a few months after it had happened when he'd run into one of Jaycee's old drinking buddies in a Nacogdoches saloon. Dallie wished he had known at the time so he could have stood next to Jaycee's coffin, looked down at his father's corpse, and spit right between the old man's closed eyes. One glob of spit for all the bruises he'd earned from Jaycee's fists, all the abuse he'd taken throughout his childhood, all the times he'd listened to Jaycee call him worthless... a pretty boy... a no-account... until he hadn't been able to stand it anymore and had run away at fifteen.

From what he'd been able to see in a few old photos, Dallie got most of his good looks from his mother. She, too, had run off. She had fled from Jaycee not long after Dallie was born, and she hadn't bothered to leave a forwarding address. Jaycee once said he heard she'd gone to Alaska, but he had never tried to find her. “Too much trouble,” Jaycee had told Dallie. “No woman's worth that much trouble, especially when there are so many others around.”

With his thick auburn hair and heavy-lidded eyes, Jaycée had attracted more women than he knew what to do with. Over the years at least a dozen had spent varying amounts of time living with them, a few even bringing children along. Some of the women had taken good care of Dallie, others had abused him. As he grew older, he noticed that the ones who abused him seemed to last longer than the others, probably because it took a certain amount of ill temper to survive Jaycee for more than a few months.

“He was born mean,” one of the nicer women had told Dallie while she packed her suitcase. “Some people are just like that. You don't realize it at first about Jaycee because he's smart, and he can talk so nice that he makes you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. But there's something twisted inside him that makes him mean right through to his blood. Don't listen to all that stuff he says about you, Dallie. You're a good kid. He's just afraid you'll grow up and make something of your life, which is more than he's ever been able to do.”

Dallie had stayed out of the way of Jaycee's fists as much as he could. The classroom became his safest haven, and unlike his friends he never cut school—unless he had a particularly bad set of bruises on his face, in which case he would hang out with the caddies who worked at the country club down the road. They taught him golf, and by the time he was twelve he had found an even safer haven than school.

Dallie shook off his old memories and told Skeet it was time to call it a night. They went back to the motel, but even though he was tired, Dallie had been thinking about the past too much to fall asleep easily.

With the qualifying round completed and the Pro-Am out of the way, the real tournament began the next day. Like all major professional golf tournaments, the Orange Blossom Open held its first two rounds on Thursday and Friday. The players who survived the cut after Friday went on to the final two rounds. Not only did Dallie survive Friday's cut, but he was leading the tournament by four strokes when he walked past the network television tower onto the first tee on Sunday morning for the final round.