Slim and None

It had to be the first bare navel on the Masters veranda. Luckily it came with a shapely adorable. Could have been a bulker. All in all, she was your basic tri-state crime-spree gorgeous. Make you try to eat corn through a chain-link fence, as Cary Grant or Fred Astaire used to say, or maybe it was Grady Don Maples.

Picture this: a long-haired brunette babe poured into a pair of low-hanging stretch jeans looking like the same thing as one of those halftime college showgirls. She stood between the two big trees on the veranda. Her tummy was flat as a West Texas fairway, and she was wearing the minimum legal requirement of a white knit top. This helped her display two tickets that would easily gain her admittance to the hospitality tent at any golf tournament she'd wish to attend.
I should add that she also wore a clubhouse badge for the Masters.

"Screen-saver," Jerry Grimes said alertly.

"Fire in both engines," Grady Don said.

"Riders up," I said.

I don't know that there'd been too many sights at Augusta to equal that one. Usually the veranda was a gathering of geezers in their green jackets, scads of privileged folks sitting at tables under bright umbrellas, scattered groups of serious business execs looking worried about something, and assorted media intellectuals shopping around for scoops and scandals.

As a rule, the serious business execs would be talking to each other, their hands clasped behind their backs while they rocked back and forth in their FootJoys. They could be equipment salesmen, they could be the dapper officials of various golf organizations, or they could be powerful sports agents, but if they were powerful sports agents their eyes would be darting this way and that, and they'd have a tendency to bite their nails.

Assorted wives of Tour pros frequently emerged from indoors--two lookers, say, and one bulker. They would have dined upstairs on the balcony, where they'd discussed maladies, child-rearing, exercise classes, difficult mothers-in-law, catalog orders.

Players' wives have changed over the years. I wasn't around when they were all needlepoint ladies, but I'd been around long enough to see the lookers go from stately former yearbook favorites to Barbie dolls that could actually make noises like human beings talking.

We'd walked up on the roped-off veranda after our Tuesday practice round. I'd smiled at the two security guards who were stationed there to keep out the K mart shoppers. That's when we spotted the shapely screen-saver displaying her finest features.

She was obviously at the magnolia joint for the first time. If she was trying to arouse any of the gentlemen on the veranda, she was making a mistake. Most of the veranda gentlemen were on the high side of sixty and were more likely to be aroused by the report of a new oversized driver that would give them fifteen more yards.

Jerry Grimes said, "It's too bad that lovely thing happens to be the asshole's mother, Bobby Joe."

"That's no mother," I said. "I know what mothers look like. Mothers look like Betty Crocker."

"They do?"

"Cheerios."

"Mothers look like Cheerios?"

"Detergent . . . type of thing."

Grady Don Maples said, "I guess she don't crochet a lot, but she's still the asshole's mother."

"Which asshole?" I said. "I have choices."

"Scott Pritchard," Grady Don said. "That's old Gwendolyn Pritchard, it sure is. Scott's mom. Right there with her steel belly and her lung problem. Kill me first, Gwen."

"That's the child star's mother?"

I must have blurted it out. The dapper official of a golf organization glared at me. Guy in a dark blue blazer, white shirt, striped tie, red face. Looked like he knew for a fact that I ate with my hands.