Seaview

by Toby Olson

  She did not think of the cancer as a foreign element in her anymore. What it had done was to make real the delicacy she had always asked him for in their sex. Sex with him before had always been a little desperate, as if he were reaching for something beyond and not in her; he always passed over what was there. Now that had changed, and she still had some hope that more inclusive change, the kind that would extend beyond the sex, was possible because of it. Her mind’s delicacy had become a delicacy of body; her weakness was physical. When they made love he was attentive to this. He lifted her and placed her carefully in different ways. She directed him and moved him by talking. He did not talk much while they were making love or otherwise, but she could see often, afterward, how overcome he was. They made love often, usually once a day, when she was up to it. She had not felt so alive in a long time. What is this thing called love, she thought. Making it, mostly. Much of the rest is dross. How good to feel so self-involved.

  And she was reading a lot of books now, books she had always wanted to read. She read them with care and fine attention, and she learned a lot from them. But what she learned was not material to be used anywhere. She read them for what they contained because they had been written by people who knew how to write. She felt the purity of doing this, the sense of authentic leisure. She loved the books, and she loved him. She loved herself in her test of power, a test that she was passing. She almost thought she loved her foe, the cancer, too: it provided the good test. She had put her water colors and her oils away for good; she had no more interest in representation. She was having the best time of her life.

  When the play of the children in the water became very quiet because their game now was about making small ripples with their hands, she heard the crunch in the gravel over her shoulder to her left. She turned her head and saw Bob White coming, wearing a golf cap and carrying a gunny sack.

  She smiled, and he entered the gate of the fence surrounding the pool, walked over, put the sack on the pool deck, and sat in the chair beside her. He smiled and pointed to his cap as he looked at her. She laughed lightly.

  “Nice,” she said. He nodded, very seriously.

  “Good for the sun,” he said, and she laughed again.

  “Very hot day,” he said. “I got some snakes here.” He tilted his head in a secret, conspiratorial manner in the direction of the bag. “Quite good to eat,” he said. “You ever fix snake?”

  “No,” she said. “You?”

  “No,” he said, “woman’s work.” But he smiled and added, “A very skillful and artful thing to do, I think. You wanna try it?”

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  He gathered her hat and purse for her and helped her up and into her robe. Then he gave her back her purse and picked up the gunny sack in his other hand. Then they went back to the room.

  He had been there before he had gone to the pool. He had cleaned out their hibachi and put fresh charcoal under the grate, and he had placed the grill in the corner of the small patio outside the sliding glass doors in the rear of the room. Tucked under the edge of it, held so that breeze would not scatter them, were a few pieces of torn newspaper. Inside, over the formica counter to the right of the sink in the small mirrored alcove between the room and the bath, he had spread some newspaper with waxed paper over it. In the sink was a square plastic container with the name of the motel on its side, the ice bucket full of chipped ice. On the counter to the other side of the sink was more waxed paper, and on top of it, beside small restaurant packets of salt and pepper, was a small pile of odd-looking plant clippings. Among them was a tiny, delicate blue flower at the end of its own cut stem. His knife rested beside the clippings. It had a bone handle and looked like some kind of fish knife. Both the clippings and the knife blade were touched with drops of water from the washing he had obviously given them.

  “What a beautiful little flower,” she said.

  “Very beautiful,” he said. “Very good with snake.”

  She was a very good cook, and he was very good with his knife. After he had put the snake meat in its bags on top of the ice and had hung the skins to dry over the latticework that separated the patios in back of the rooms, he began to work at the pile of clippings. He cut the small flower off first and put it to the side. Then he stripped some of the greener stalks of their side growths, putting them between his thumb and the blade at their bases, then squeezing and turning his wrists slightly. When he had finished this, he slit each stalk down the middle, revealing its greener inside; the stalks looked a little like leeks. Then he cut them in two-inch sections.

  “Don’t know about this salt and pepper,” he said.

  “I can take care of that,” she said. “Is snake dry or oily? It looks dry.”

  “Snake is very dry,” he said.

  “We’ll need some oil,” she said. She got oil from the styrofoam picnic basket they carried with them.

  “Is it open or closed when they cook it?”

  “I remember they do it open, I believe,” he said.

  “I thought it might be,” she said. “We can do it on foil with holes in it, to let the smoke through and keep the juices in.”

  The story Bob White had told about hunting rattlers had to do with using hand shadows to get them away from holes. In the story he had told of the one time he had felt very close to a snake. This had happened as the snake watched the shadow, becoming in its fury and intensity sort of hypnotized. What had happened was that he had gotten himself kind of lost in watching the snake’s eyes watch the shadow of his hands. It was almost as if the eyes drew him closer, the sheer will of the unblinking force causing the shadow and his hands with it to move too close to the snake. He had awakened in time, and the snake just missed his hands when it struck. He had felt very close to the snake that time.

  While they were working, he with the clippings, she with the foil with the holes in it for cooking the snake and with the oil and the salt and pepper, she thought about the other story, the one she had enjoyed most, the familiar one about his childhood that had reminded her, in its way, of her own.

  IT IS SAID THAT I WAS BORN ROBERT WHITELAW IN NINETEEN and twenty-three. They say this was before much development out this way, and things were pretty good for Indians, almost as good as they are now, but in the middle there things went downhill. My grandmother, who was a Pamet Wampanoag, had come from the East with her father after her mother had died. She married my grandfather, a Pima, and my father was born to them. When my father got ready to begin to think about getting married, my grandmother fixed him up with a Pamet woman who had come out West for other reasons. This woman became my mother. I begin to remember very well about the times when I was seven years old and up. Maybe I remember the tail end of those good times they say were going on in ’twenty-three. But this story is about a time when I was ten years old, so you can forget about what I have just said and listen to what I am going to tell you. My family was not too poor; my father had a few horses, and he worked some on the railroad there. On this day we went in to that place where you picked me up. It was different then, that road was the highway then, and that place was a store with a lot of supplies in it and a place where people who drove along stopped to buy souvenirs of the Southwest. Behind that place they had rattlesnakes and armadillos and some prairie dogs in cages. I think they had a coyote there, but he was very scrawny if they did. People I knew sold them snakes sometimes.

  Well, on this day my father took me and we went there, to that place. My father wanted to get some rope there or something. When we rode up, there were a few cars there, maybe five of them, old cars like they used to drive then, but then the cars were new. I wanted to stay outside and watch the people stretch and go out back to see the snakes and things, so I did that while my father went inside to shop around. It was a hot day, and I had an old derby hat on my head. I believe I found that hat along the highway one day. There were two families there who had stopped there in a fairly big car. There were two men and two women and four
or five kids. The kids were older than I was. The grownups were younger than my father. One of the men had a camera and a stand for it, and he was taking pictures. He would tell the people to move around so he could take their pictures in front of things. They kept moving around, and once he even had them stand in front of the big car so he could take their picture there. Hell, I thought, that man is nuts with that camera. I used to talk to myself in that way. It was the way my father talked sometimes about white men, and I loved my father and the way he talked. I was leaning against the side of the building there, and I had a weed in my mouth to keep it wet, and I had my derby hat tilted down on my forehead against the sun, but because I thought it looked good that way too. I think I must have looked very funny there, the way kids can do when they stand around like that.

  Anyway, those people were looking over at me sometimes, whispering to one another, laughing sometimes, looking the other way. The man with the camera wasn’t seeing me though, though he might have when he pulled up, because he was busy moving the people around for picture taking. Finally, he did see me though, and when he did he just stopped everything, left his camera sit on his stand, put his hands on his hips, and just stared at me. I looked away from where I was looking at them, but I couldn’t keep my head away, and when I turned it back, the man spoke to me. He said something like, Hey, kid, come here a minute. I thought I had nothing to do so I went over there. He said he would give me a quarter if I would take some pictures with them. I said okay. The first one was for me to push the button while he lined up with the others in front of the car. I did that one. Then he said I should get in line and he’d take my picture with the others. After that he wanted to take a picture of me in my derby. Then one of the kids talked to one of the women, who told the man I should put on one of those headbands they sold in the store with a feather in it. I took that picture with the kids. They too put headbands on.

  Now this is where it starts to get good, if you want to say that about it. The man running the camera said that the other man should lift me up on his shoulders for a picture. I got up there, and the man with the camera got ready, but then he stopped and ran over to the car and got one of those small toy tomahawks out of it. He gave it to me, reaching it up above the other man to where I sat. He said I should hold the tomahawk up in the air and look mean. Well, I did that one, and then pretty soon they were telling me to do all sorts of things for pictures. In one time, they told me to pretend to scalp one of the women. I didn’t know where to put the tomahawk, but they showed me. In another one they had me point a little bow and arrow at the kids, who they had hold up their hands and lean back as if they feared me. It was when they were having me do the one with the rubber knife, in which I held it across the throat of one of the girls-I had to stand on my toes to reach her, because she was very tall that my father came out of the store and saw what was going on with me and the people there.

  He had some rope and some few bundles, and I don’t think he would have broken his stride coming out of the place when he saw me, but he did drop one of the bundles and had to pick it up. When he did that he didn’t look my way, but he went right over to the horses. He tied his bundles onto the saddle straps and put the rope over the horn. The man took the picture then, and I dropped the rubber knife and walked away. My father was on his horse, and he walked it to the edge of the highway, where he stopped it. Then both my father and the horse, it seems to me, looked both ways down the highway as he had taught me to do. Then my father crossed the road on the horse. When he got to the other side, he pulled up. He kept his horse facing away from me and the people and the cars. He just sat there on the horse, aiming in the direction of the desert there and over in it to where we lived at that time. I know for sure that there was no talking right then or calling out.

  I climbed onto my horse, and when I threw my leg over it, I could tell by the way the sun hit my face that I had forgotten my derby. I walked my horse over to the edge of the highway. After I stopped and looked both ways and when my horse’s hoofs started to click on the highway, my father started his horse up, and when we were both over there in the desert, I was about thirty feet behind him. I knew I had to stay there and go the whole way like that on the ride home. We didn’t pass too many people, but we did pass some, people we knew and ones we didn’t. All these people looked at us riding this way. I was always thinking that they all knew I had done wrong. By the time we got home I was very tired and hot and sad. My father never said a word about all this when it was over. Maybe that evening he patted my back or smiled at me or some such thing. When the times of a thing were over with my father they were over. Even now and at this somewhat significant distance from the events told in what I have just spoken about, I cannot append some powerful moral to this tale beyond the obvious. I would say, though, however vaguely I might put it, that there was something about disentanglement and walking away that has stayed with me from it. Sometimes, I guess, in some circumstances, there is no other hope for it, no help on the inside. I remember that trip home behind my father as a kind of purgatory passage. I bore it with some lessening of pain, I guess, because there was a kind of light at the end of it.

  SHE WAS SHAPING THE FOIL, EACH PIECE WITH THE edges slightly turned up to catch the oil. He was cutting beside her. She was getting a little tired from standing. She reached a little too quickly for one of the bags on the ice; she wanted to measure the snake against the foil containers. She felt a little dizzy from the motion. There was some oil on her hands, and the bag slipped out of them and fell to the floor. He put his knife on the counter and reached down at her feet to pick it up. Her hand touched his shoulder lightly for balance.

  “Hell, that snake is nuts with that slipping,” she said.

  He came up with the bag, put it back on the ice, then turned and smiled at her. They both laughed lightly, and she put her hand up on his shoulder and leaned a little against him. He reached down and picked her up and carried her to the bed.

  He placed her gently on it and put a pillow against the headboard. Then he took her under her arms and lifted her to a half-sitting position.

  “Just have to rest a little,” she said.

  “You rest a little, while I finish up with the cutting,” he said. “Then we can get to work with the good stuff.” She nodded weakly as he looked down at her. Then he turned and walked back to the counter.

  Even before they got to the tenth he was beginning to feel a little down about the situation. Earlier he might have considered the hot dog as someone to deal with, but Lou’s desperateness, exacerbated now by the difficulty he would have to face in betting with Steve at a game of skill, made him feel something for the younger man. As for Frankie, he had come to like him. Whatever the density of his tie to Steve, he seemed to be his own man. He might be a little freed by the fact that he was simply not as good at golf as Steve was and could, therefore, go all out without worrying about winning big. But more important than that, while he was respectful he was not a panderer, and Allen liked him for his apparent clarity in the relationship. Among other things, Steve was a prick, he thought. The meanest thing about him was that he showed his power but acted as if he were above using it on someone as inconsequential as Lou. He let him, the outsider, know that he could step on either of these two others anytime he wanted to do it. He could step on Allen too, but he liked better to show him what his power was all about.

  The tenth was a long par four with a dog-leg right; a stand of thick, beautiful oaks at the knee obscured sight to the green. A man-made stream ran along the right rough, starting at the tee and opening and cutting into the fairway about two hundred yards out, short of the bend. The stream formed a small pond there, complete with lilies. There was some fairway remaining to the left of the pond, about fifty feet of it, guarded by a long, lateral trap at the edge of the left rough. It was the number-one hole on the course. Its difficulties were these. If you played up short of the pond too far to the right, you would have a blind shot over the oaks to t
he green. That shot was sufficiently long from there that it would be hard to clear the trees and have enough left to get to the pin. On the other hand, if you played to the left, between the pond and the trap, you would have to hit a very controlled shot that was quite long; from the tee, that fifty-foot space was very narrow looking. If you got it close to the trap and a little short, you could see the green; close to the pond and short, you might still be blinded. Halfway between the two would be good, if the shot were long enough.

  The hole was a four-hundred-and-seventy-five-yard par four; the fairway to the dog leg beyond the pond was slightly uphill; the green was small and elevated, and the rough started thick, very close in behind it. Regardless of pin placement, it was one hell of a golf hole. He almost laughed at the absurdity of finding it on this course. He wondered who in the hell had designed and built it, who kept its foreign growths in such good shape here in the desert. He did not figure to par it. He felt very ready to play it.

  The entrance of a new element, one that did a lot for Allen’s spirits, occurred with the first two hits. Steve automatically took the honors, and Lou followed him. Steve was smiling faintly as he teed up at the blues. He took a practice swing and then looked back at the three of them, still smiling, before he hit.

  His drive was the longest he had hit that day. He had a deeper backswing, and he clicked through the ball with force.

  The drive must have been at least two hundred yards on the fly. It dropped on the far side of the pond, coming to rest about twenty yards beyond it. Lou was next. His ball was a little higher than Steve’s, but it was longer. It had a very slight tail on it, and it carried a good two hundred and fifty yards, stopping a couple of feet from where it hit. It finished well beyond Steve’s ball, in the middle of the fairway, in clear and unobscured sight of the green. Frankie seemed a little nervous, and he took his time getting set. He lined up a little to the left, and he hit his ball where he aimed it, playing for the far left of the fairway. The ball wound up short of the trap, with a very long but fairly open shot to the green. Then it was Allen’s turn.