Seaview

by Toby Olson

  Before anyone putted, the imaginary lines running from where the balls rested on the green to the cup were multiple and complex; they dictated where one might walk, and this in turn dictated who might stand by whom. There was little if any talk from one side of these lines to the other. Each player was intent on his own line and the study of the possibilities of break and pacing. As each putted and got down, he was free to give full attention to the putts of those who followed him. The limitations on movement in the physical area diminished as the amount of attention given to each putt increased. There were exceptions to this rule, but most often the last to putt was he who was in the position of winning the hole if his putt fell in, and it was he whom the others, freed from any concern with putts of their own, were watching with various unspoken desires and wishes.

  The way such self-interest was handled and denied was through silence, demure standing back, in physical stillness, in postures of unconcern.

  Allen felt that right now he could win it without putting. The fact that Steve was ready and aware of the psychological game possibilities was enough to make it likely. All he needed to do was speak. He was thinking, this is a speed putt, there’s too much break and trickiness in his line for him to risk trying to leak it in. If he had spoken this thought, he would have thickened the social matrix by interrupting Steve’s attention to the putt. The break in the attention would have been insignificant. Steve was good enough at golf for that not to bother him. It would have been Steve’s sense of the motive behind the talking that would have thickened things. He could have stood in crucial places, could have altered his expression in various ways, could have coughed or cleared his throat. But he did nothing, and it is possible that that in itself took its toll, because it was contrary to Steve’s expectations.

  And he began to think, while Steve was working at getting ready, that this may well be the sense in which this game today was at bottom characterological. It was just that Steve could not possibly imagine that the man he was playing against now had certain standards that would not allow him to reduce the grandeur of the game they were playing to something that had to do with relationships between people. The stakes, the money, was something he accepted as the catalyst to what they were doing. For him, at one end of the hierarchical scale on which the money stood was the game played for pleasure, for practice and enjoyment. On the other end was the game played for life and death. With the stakes as given, the morals of the game entered.

  These had to do with the other man and the ball and the ground to be covered. And that complex of tensions and chemistry was sacrosanct to him. At least he thought it was. It was not to be messed with, and he would not violate it. Steve’s limitations were moral; but at bottom his morals, those of business and power, were contradictory to those of golf. At least, this was the way Allen romanced it; this was why he knew Steve would lose, why he had already lost.

  Steve stepped up to his ball finally, took a few smooth practice swings, and addressed it. He moved his head slowly from the head of his putter to the ball and down the imaginary line where he intended to send it. Out of the corner of his eye as he sighted he saw nothing. There was no opponent there, nothing for him to deal with, no one for him to exert power over. Even before he took his putter back for the stroke, his concentration was without attentive focus. When he struck the putt, he pushed it slightly, sending it out too far to the left. It caught the middle and not the down side of the slope that he wanted it to hit; it bent in toward the cup as it turned, but it did not bend enough.

  He missed the cup by a good two inches on the high side, his ball coming to rest only a foot beyond it. When the ball stopped he tried to shrug, but he could not manage it. The shrug was like a tick in him. He stepped up and punched the ball home for his par.

  Then it was Allen’s turn. Always his turn came. He never minded slowness of play, because his turn would always come up, and when that happened he would be alone again. It would be something else altogether. He never minded waiting for it, because of what it was. This one was for all of it, this one putt. Nobody else was involved in it. The mower had cut the green; he could hear it cutting another one in the distance. He could feel the slight wind. The birds were singing, and he picked out red-winged blackbird, brown thrasher, and catbird, isolating the differences in voice between the last two, then he released them.

  He looked back up the fairway to the top of the mound. The faces in the pole looked away from him, the Indian at the top was turned away, high up, distant, and uninterested. He glanced at the other three. They were very still, very unimportant.

  He smiled. He walked up to the putt, saw that it was straight with a slight curl to the left, just at the hole. He was close enough that he could just drive it home, with speed, taking the curl out of the putt. He decided instead to play the curl. All he had to do was hit the ball so that it would stop about a foot on the other side of the hole, play it into the right side. He stepped up to it. He sighted it, and then he stroked it. It came off the putter with some speed. About a foot from the hole it began to die. Six inches out on the right it slowed enough so that it could catch the break. It entered the middle of the cup, and fell in with that nice hollow sound. It never touched the back of the hole.

  IT WAS ONLY AFTER HE WAS HALFWAY TO THE MOTEL that he began to come back to himself, to the matrix of real life and the structures he was involved in. First the gas gauge took his notice; it was below half full, and he pulled into a self-service station and filled up. He had worked in gas stations when he was a boy, and he liked to fill his own tank, to catch the smell of the gas fumes as he pumped. The station was at the side of a small shopping mall. He saw a liquor store with its light on, even though it was only six-thirty and still light, between two other stores in the mall’s crescent, and when he had finished with the gas and paid the attendant, a young woman in white overalls, he drove over to the liquor store, where he bought two bottles of good chilled champagne. Melinda liked champagne, and he liked to surprise her with it. When he left the liquor store, he saw that there was a flower shop near the far edge of the crescent, and leaving the car with the champagne on the front seat he walked over and bought some roses. Then he left the mall and got back on the road that ran in front of it.

  When he drove onto the gravel drive of the motel, dusk was beginning to come on. There was a nice reddening sky near the horizon above the Sangre de Cristos; the mountains were beginning to become shadows that would get back light when the sun lowered behind them. He heard the sound of voices as he approached the door.

  “Here I am,” he said, knocking and speaking at the same time, the paper bag with the champagne in it in his hand and the bouquet of roses held in the crook of his arm. Bob White opened the door, smiled, and bowed slightly from the waist, extending his left arm, his palm open, directing him into the room.

  The voices had been the two of them talking. Melinda was sitting in her robe in the roughly upholstered chair; a straight-back chair had been pulled up in front of her. She had her back to them. She turned in her seat as he entered, smiling.

  “Hi,” he said. “Look what I got here.” He handed her the flowers, and put the bag with the bottles of champagne in it in her lap.

  “Terrific! You did it good, huh?”

  “I did it very good,” he said, and he sat on the chair in front of her and reached his head over to her and kissed her, a rose brushing the tip of his chin.

  “What have you two been up to today?”

  She smiled in the direction of Bob White, who stood somewhat behind him, and nodded. Bob White came into the side of his vision when he went over to the drapes that covered the large sliding doors in the back of the room. He looked over at Melinda when he had located the lines tucked behind the fabric. She nodded again, laughing softly, and Bob White slowly pulled on the lines, opening the drapes, revealing the small lit patio on the other side of them. He had turned in the chair, and he laughed when he saw what the patio contained.

  Th
ey had put the low, dark, imitation-wood formica table from the motel room out in the center on the bricks. On it, on top of a white towel and to its right, were the ice bucket and three of the plastic glasses from the room. In the center of the table was the rectangular motel room tray. Melinda had covered it with aluminum wrap, pinching bits of the foil along the edges to create a scalloped pattern. From the ends of the tray inward were rows of small cherry tomatoes, olives, slices of cucumber, and radishes. There was a large rectangular pocket left in the center of the tray, and this was lined with crisp lettuce leaves. On the far right of the table was a tall, fat candle covered in foil, with a foil lip about the wick as a wind guard. The candle was lit. To the right of the table, in the corner of the patio, was the hibachi, the coals ashen but with a glow of light emanating from their center. On top of the hibachi, in the boat of aluminum foil, in the bed of odd and colorful clippings, the strips of snake meat were cooking. Above and away from the hibachi, to its right, the carefully hung snake-skins shone in a row over the latticework at the end of the patio.

  “Snake,” Bob White said softly, looking down into the carefully formed boat of foil.

  “Allen, it’s rattlesnake!” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Fantastic!” he said.

  While he was showering, standing among the golf balls, Bob White and Melinda tended to the preparations. They put paper plates and plastic knives and forks on the counter outside the bathroom door. They put a bottle of the good champagne down among the cubes in the ice bucket. They waited for him, watching the snake cook and smelling it.

  When he was finished drying himself, he put on a pair of shorts and a blue terry shirt, brushed his teeth and brushed at his hair. When he came out he went to the champagne and opened it. Beside it on the now crowded table were the roses, standing in a plastic pitcher. He popped the cork and filled the three glasses with the wine. He handed one of them to Melinda and one to Bob White, who was over close to the hibachi, keeping an eye on the cooking.

  “To the snake,” he said, lifting his glass.

  “To the snake,” the other two said in reply, and then they drank.

  “Snake’s ready,” Bob White said, and he and Melinda, using white washcloths from the bathroom, lifted the boat of foil to the table. When they got it there, Melinda put her end down in the corner of the waiting space, and Bob White, using his knife, held the snake and the cuttings back while he pulled out the foil, letting the snake come to rest in the place they had prepared for it. Then the three of them just stood and looked at the rare and delicate strips of snake meat and the cuttings.

  “Let’s eat ’em,” Bob White said, and he stepped up with a slight flourish and took the small blue flower he held in his hand and dropped it among the strips of meat. It was a soft blue in color, but it was the only blue thing on the arrangement, and it seemed to command its small portion of space, distinct in its petals and stamen. Melinda got the paper plates and the plastic knives and forks. He got the upholstered chair from the room. When Melinda returned, he helped her to sit in the chair, and Bob White served her snake and brought her a fresh glass of champagne. He and Bob White remained standing, holding their plates in their hands. They ate, making sounds of pleasure and smiling at each other between bites.

  When they were finished and the coals from the hibachi glowed brighter as night came on, he sat on the arm of the chair with his hand on Melinda’s shoulder, holding his glass, full of champagne from the second bottle. Bob White squatted on his haunches on the patio bricks, taking occasional sips from his glass, which he replaced at the side of his right foot without looking at it. They talked a little, quietly, about the snake, the pool, the golf course, and the weather, the look of the Sangre de Cristos that day. After a while, Bob White told a kind of story that had to do with what Allen had told them about the play. When he was finished, Melinda raised her glass to him, and she and Allen toasted him and his grandmother. Then Bob White raised his glass, and he and Melinda toasted Allen on his win. After that, chatting and laughing softly, they cleared things to the sides of the patio, making a place for Bob White to bed down. Soon after that, Bob White said he thought he might retire, and bidding them good night, he went outside, pulling the glass doors shut behind him. He did it in such a comfortable manner that neither Allen nor Melinda were concerned that he not be sleeping in the room with them. When Bob White had left, Allen and Melinda caught each other yawning, laughed a bit about it, and decided that it was time to go to bed. They decided to leave the end of the cleaning up until the morning. Allen waited until Melinda was in bed and set, and then he turned the light off and got into bed himself.

  HUNTING SNAKES CAN BE DIFFICULT, BUT DOING IT IS understandable. Playing golf may be understandable too, but you understand I don’t play golf. I wouldn’t know anything about that then. I don’t really hunt snake either, you understand, but I did it a lot when I was a boy, and a little after that, and I think I can understand it pretty well. Now Indians always talk a lot, it is said, about how the white man sometimes doesn’t understand things too well, and it is true that Indians do talk like that. I know that for a fact, because I have heard them do it, and I apologize to say that I have done it too sometimes. Indians don’t understand things too sometimes, so you see we don’t get very far with this. That is okay, however, because this is not what I am going to talk about here. A couple of years ago I made a trip to Lake Havasu City to see that London Bridge they have over there. Lake Havasu City was not a city or a lake when they started in there. First they made the lake, then they made the city. Then they put that London Bridge there so they could get across the lake to the other side. They put part of the city on the other side of the lake so they could use the bridge to get to it. When I went there, I didn’t understand what was going on there. I went there because people I knew who had been there told me I wouldn’t understand it when I saw it. They were right. But it was not a waste of time going over there to it.

  This is about the time I was hearing about the mound you talked about over here at the golf course. It was a while ago, and I knew somebody who worked up around here, and when he came back he told me about it. There was that Mount Rushmore and that place where that man is building that mountain into a statue of Crazy Horse. I hear he is not finished doing that yet. Anyway, he said that they made the mound bigger, big enough to put the whole Pima nation in it if they wanted to. That would be pretty big, of course, and I knew that that man that I knew made things bigger than they were when he talked. Still, I knew that it had to be pretty big for him to get it that big in his talk. That’s why we talked about Mount Rushmore and that Crazy Horse statue at the same time. One thing we understood when we talked about the mound was that we both thought that the way they had made it part of their game was a pretty fucking shitty thing to do, excuse me, but that’s exactly what we said and how we felt about it.

  One day my grandmother came up while we were talking. Now this man I’m talking about was a little bit of a dummy; that is to say, he didn’t have good sense. My grandmother asked us what we were talking about, and this man piped right up. The big mound over at Tucson, he said. You mean Lake Havasu City? she asked. I poked at him, but he didn’t get it. No, no, the big burial place at the golf course over there, he said. What are you talking about? she said. What place is that? This one, he said, and he took a post card of the mound, a colored one with that big prick of a phony pole stuck in it, out of his breast pocket and showed it to her. She didn’t understand it I don’t think for a little while, but she pulled the post card away from me when I tried to get it. What is this? she said. It’s nothing, Grandma, I said, and tried to get the card away from her again, but she pulled it away again. They say that’s one of our people’s burial places over there by Tucson, that dummy said. They say that’s King Philip, some Eastern Injun, on the top there, he said. Then my grandmother got it. King Philip? she said, the Sachem? They stuck him in there? They stuck a pole in there! a pole! Then
she dropped the card down on the ground, and she sat right down alongside of it. She sat there a long time, but she didn’t look at the card any more.

  That night my grandmother died. It was the pole in the mound with her own King Philip from the East that got to her, I think. She was old, and she was going to die pretty soon after that time anyway. In the evening before she died we had a long talk.

  I mean all of my family that was still alive then sat around the place, and we talked to my grandmother. She was very old, and I understand that before she died she had forgotten about the mound and the pole altogether. I believe that she was very happy when she died. She had a good life as those things go. This is not really a sad story that I have finished telling you. I thought of it because you mentioned that mound.

  Rain

  THE ADJOINING ROOM BECAME VACANT, AND HE INSISTED that Bob White take it. The Indian had slept on the patio, using Melinda’s egg-carton mattress, the night of the snake dinner. At midnight it had started to rain, and he had come in, to a corner of the room by the door, and finished the night there. In the morning it was still raining, and they had run back and forth from the car to Bob White’s new room, carrying his few belongings into it. When he was set up, he went with Allen and got cartons of coffee and fresh donuts from the restaurant and brought them back to the room, walking close to the building, under the narrow canopy, in the rain.