by Toby Olson
“I think a three, can’t quite tell how far I am,” he said.
“Can’t help; don’t know how ya hit,” Frankie said. “There’s the one-fifty marker over there.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the other side of the fairway ahead of them, indicating a red stick at the edge of the rough.
Allen approached his ball and stood behind it, sighting down the row of trees, then he stepped up to it. When he hit it, he caught a little grass behind it, meeting it fat. It was low, along the line of trees, and straight.
“Trap,” Frankie said matter-of-factly behind him before the ball landed. It hit in the middle of the sand trap to the right of the green.
“Right,” he said, and he got back into the cart with Frankie.
Frankie was next. He hit a shot, again with a slight hook in it, that was high and stopped where it landed, on the green to the left of the flagstick, pin high, about twenty-five feet from the cup. Steve hit a seven-iron; the shot was as straight as his drive had been. It hit about ten yards short of the green and ran up to within six feet of the hole. The hot dog used a wedge, less club than he needed. He came through it smoothly and with considerable snap; it clicked off the club face, and a good-sized divot rose up a few feet in the air ahead of where it had rested. It was high and true. It landed to the back of the green, bit, and shot back about three feet, coming to rest on the high side of the hole, about twelve feet away, leaving him with a tricky downhill putt.
When they got to the green, all of them got out of the carts, and the three others waited for Allen to hit from the trap before they walked up onto the putting surface. The trap was wide and flat; good sand, he thought, and his ball sat up cleanly, a thin furrow in the sand running from the back of the trap, where the ball had hit, to where it now rested. He was about ten feet from the lip, which was low and would not come into play. There was about fifteen feet of green between him and the cup. The first five feet or so were level, and then the green sloped down a little. On the other side of the cup there was another thirty yards of level green and another ten feet of good apron before the slope down into the thicker rough. He hit the ball thin, lifting only a little sand, and the ball flew most of the green, hitting near the far edge, and trickled to the back of the apron and just over into the beginning of the rough. He looked up to the others and shrugged in an embarrassed way, then raked the trap and walked around their lines on the green to the far side. He had forgotten to get a club, had his sand wedge in his hand, and he trotted back to the cart to get one.
“Take your time,” Steve said, smiling for the first time.
He got three clubs out of his bag, a wedge, a seven-iron, and his putter, and crossed the green again. He looked the shot over, took a practice chip with his seven-iron, then dropped it beside the putter in the grass and selected the wedge. He did not want to mess with roll on this shot. He could see enough level green near the pin where he could lay it down. He had a good lie, and he decided not to bring the ball back at all. He lifted it carefully, quite high; it landed and rolled a few feet and came to rest five feet from the hole. Lou missed his putt and took a tap-in for a four. Frankie missed his also, had a tricky three-footer coming back, but knocked it in with some authority. Allen took a bogey five. Steve ran his into the heart of the cup for a birdie three. It was not until they got to the back nine that they began to gamble in earnest.
IT WAS HOT IN THE FOOTHILLS, BUT THE AIR WAS DRY. When he got to where the road ended abruptly beside a staked-out lot, he sat on a rock and took a sip of water from the small cough-syrup bottle he carried in his shirt pocket. From his back pocket he took out a piece of cloth and tied it around his forehead as a sweatband. While he was resting he checked the gunny sack for holes, and in the bottom of it he found an old golf cap with the words Redwood Links stenciled on a patch above the brim. He put it on, and his face felt cooler.
He had gotten a ride from two Indians in a pick-up truck who were headed over the foothills to their reservation. They had passed a few words, and they had let him out where the last of a series of dirt roads spurred off from the blacktop, heading deeper into the hills. When he got to the end of the road, where he rested, he was above all the development, though the two men had told him that that would not last and that the white men were planning more roads further up. After he’d rested he walked off into the wilds of the foothills, snaking back and forth though moving significant distance away from the developed land.
He stopped occasionally to listen and watch birds and to sip some drops from his bottle. Much of what he was walking through was sand, red clay, and shale, with low cactuses and occasional desert flowers growing here and there. He found four small arroyos where there was a little shade and greener growth, and he came upon two caves where he found what he took to be javelina spore, but it was not fresh and he did not see any javelinas.
He gave up his search for the javelinas after a while and sat down to think about the rattlers before hunting them. It was well into July, so it would be a little tricky, though not as bad as August. In August, the snake shed his skin; he was blind then, and he would strike out at anything that moved, without any kind of warning. He was a little skittery in July, so you would need a good stick. He found one about four feet long, broke the twigs off it, and waved it a little for feel. Then he began looking for the snakes.
He poked the stick around the bases of cactuses. When he came to places where the shale was a little elevated, he circled them, checking for sunny resting places. After about a half-hour, he found his first one. It was good size, about five feet long he guessed, and good and fat. It lay flat, strung out from tail rattles to a point about eight inches from its broad head, where there was a bend in it, a little slack it used when it raised up some to check things. Its head was flat on the rock, its eyes half open and a little glazed. The piece of red shale it was on was about two feet off the ground; it protruded in a shelf out from a configuration of shale that was about ten feet in diameter. He was standing off to the side of it. “Good afternoon,” he said to himself and moved slowly away and to the left to get a look at what was behind it.
Though the rock to the rear of the snake’s tail was in shade, it seemed darker than it should be there, and he suspected that there was an opening between rocks where the snake, if he startled it, could go. He would not want to mess with it if it got in there. He moved slowly, a little more to his left, aiming to come close to getting between the sun and the snake. When he had moved far enough back and to the side, he was about thirty feet from the snake, a little to the left of its head. He raised both of his hands, linking his fingers together, and moved them slowly into the path of the sun. He was humming softly, a kind of cricket whistle, disjointed and without any clear rhythm. When his hands got in the sun’s way, they threw a shadow on the ground about six feet from the overhang on which the snake rested.
He altered his fingers slightly, forming the shape of a small rodent on the ground. He tested it by rippling his fingers slightly; the shadow undulated like some injured thing. He bent quickly to the left, his hands still in the air, and then moved back again. For a moment he had thrown a shadow across the snake’s head. The snake’s head lifted in a quick fluid gesture, its eyes snapping open. For a full two minutes, it looked slowly around, shifting its body slightly. Then it lowered its head to the same place on the rock, but its eyes remained open.
Bob White began to move the shadow slowly back and forth on the ground. It was not in clear sight of the snake, but it must have done something to the temperature of the air or to the small insects it passed over or to the attitude of the few places where there was grass, because the snake began to inch its way slowly forward toward the edge of the shale ledge. In ten minutes it got there, and when Bob White saw that it was getting close, he stopped the movement of the shadow and began to twitch it slightly at intervals of about five seconds. The snake looked at the shadow intently. After twitching the shadow for a while, he began to edge it away from the snake s
lowly, with little flutters and jerks. The snake stayed where it was, but when the shadow was about eight feet away from it, it dropped its head over the end of the ledge and began to slide off the shale, curling to other pieces of shale below it, until all of its body was on the sandy ground.
It had added twists to itself, and it began to glide slowly over the sand, head slightly erect now, the small trough where its body had been leaving a shallow trail behind it.
When Bob White had the shadow about ten feet from where he stood, he stopped it, making it quiver in place.
About six feet from the shadow the snake stopped moving, then began to edge forward again to reach striking distance. When he thought he had the snake close enough to him, out in the open enough, he pulled his hands out of the sun’s path. The snake stopped moving immediately and was poised, as still as a piece of twisted pipe. He left it there, and walked quickly back and got the gunny sack and the stick. When he moved, the snake jerked its head in his direction and began to rattle. He returned to where he had been, held the gunny sack in his left hand, and began to rap with the stick on the ground in front of him.
“I’ve got you now, old salt,” he said aloud, and then he yelled out, “Hoo!” and rapped the stick sharply against a piece of shale. The snake jerked his head up higher and began to rattle more furiously, and Bob White moved in. He tapped the tip of the stick between the snake and the opening of the gunny sack in his hand. When he saw the snake tighten its body, shortening it like a compressed spring, he stopped moving the stick toward the sack and just tapped it in place on the ground. The snake was now about three feet from the stick, and he moved the gunny sack in closer. When the snake struck, he jerked the stick away, and at the same time he thrust the gunny sack toward it. The snake landed in the sack up to the midpoint of its body. Bob White lifted the sack, and the snake fell into the bottom of it, twisted and turned for a moment, and then was still.
By the time he had gotten two more snakes into the sack, the sun was high above him and it was very hot. He found a shaded place and drank what water remained in his small bottle. Then he untied the piece of twine from the mouth of the sack and let it rest on the ground. He found a few good-sized stones and took his stick and prodded the snakes until they began to emerge from the sack. He killed each one by dropping a stone on its head. Then he cut off the heads and the rattles, throwing the heads into the desert and putting the rattles in his pocket. When he had done that, he took out his knife again and skinned the snakes on a rock. He put the skins, rolled into loose coils, into small plastic sandwich bags that he took from his back pocket. From the fold of bags, he extracted three larger ones and put the snake meat into them. Then he packed the bags into a corner of the gunny sack and folded it into a square. He put the sack in the shade and sat on a rock, smoking and looking at the few flowers around him and listening to the birds. The smoke curled up from his lobster-claw pipe, gathering in a thin cloud in the still air above his head. After a while he got up, knocked his pipe empty against a rock, fetched the bag from the shade, and set off in the same zigzag manner he had used to get where he was, back by a different route toward the dirt-road spur and the lower foothills.
THERE WAS A HINT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT MATERIALIZE when they reached the ninth hole, a short par three with a tee that was elevated so that one hit considerably downhill to the green. Because of the shortness of the hole (about a hundred and sixty yards) the green had been made small, and there were traps guarding it on all sides.
“Farthest from the pin buys lunch?” Steve said, as they were climbing out of their carts. Frankie had loosened up some as they played the front nine. He was not as good as the other two, but he was close enough in skill to keep himself in things, and he seemed pleased there was someone playing with them whom he was better than. Steve and Lou were playing about even, near par. Frankie was four over, but he had missed three short putts, rimming the cup. Allen was five over and had dropped three long putts to save pars.
Steve had the honors, and he dropped his shot in close, about eight feet from the hole. Lou was next; he pushed his shot slightly. It hit and trickled to the rough on the other side of the green, far to the right. Allen was pleased to see that Frankie had a good chance. His shot was short, hitting in front of the green, but it had been rather low, and it rolled up, finishing about four feet from the cup.
“All right!” Frankie said.
Allen dropped his shot to the right of the two close balls, between them and Lou’s. Lou had lost, and he joked about it a little. When they had finished the hole, they parked their carts to the rear of the clubhouse and entered the back arch that led into the patio.
Lunch had been no small wager. He could see from what they ordered that the tab would come, with drinks and tip, to more than fifty dollars. They asked him a few questions about where he was from and what he did. His answers were direct but sufficiently comprehensive so that they did not feel they were pushing for information. He asked Frankie what he did, figuring that would be the easiest way to get to the associations. Frankie owned a small, executive flying service. Steve was in real estate and “speculation,” and whatever he did, it was big. He kept a plane of his own at Frankie’s place, an eight-seater. Lou was the youngest vice-president that one of the local banks had ever had; he found a way of making this known to Allen. He, and Frankie to a lesser extent, seemed clearly dependent on Steve in ways that were not spoken of but apparent in their behavior. Frankie just held to a lower station. Lou remained obsequious.
Before they were finished, Allen let it drop that he did not think the course was very tough. (He had checked the map of the back nine, noting that the fairways were quite a bit narrower than on the front.) Now that he had gotten used to the way it played, he said, he thought he could beat it without too much trouble.
He had worked the front nine by spraying a lot. He had seldom been off the fairways, but he had seldom been down the middle. Steve looked up sharply at him when he spoke.
“Steve’s on the board here,” Lou chuckled. “Them’s fighten’ words!”
It was better and easier than he had thought it would be.
“Still,” he said, “not much water, the greens aren’t too tricky, the holes are a little short, no problems with sight lines.” That seemed to do it.
“Well, what would you say to some friendly wagering on the back nine,” Steve said, bending slightly forward, looking at Allen across the table. “Say twenty a hole for outright winners and a hundred for the match; unless that’s a little too steep for you?”
Allen demurred slightly, backing up at the force of Steve’s intensity. “That is a little steep,” he said.
“Thought it might be,” Steve said dryly.
“But okay, sure, why not,” Allen said.
“Good,” Steve said, “very good.” He smiled benignly, sipped at his whiskey and water, wiped his mouth delicately with his napkin. It was getting close to noon. Allen excused himself and went to call Melinda.
SHE HUNG UP AND WENT BACK TO HER POOLSIDE CHAIR at the table under the beach umbrella. There were two children at the shallow end playing in the water, a boy and a girl about seven and ten. Their mother lounged in the water up to her chest, leaning her back against the pool’s side, her arms resting on the edge. The children played well together, and the mother seemed relaxed; she watched, but she did not interfere or direct. Occasionally a high giggle would come from the girl when her brother splashed water at her, but their play never got too frantic. They had a float in the shape of a dolphin with an inflated ring that could be gotten inside of and a beach ball. At times the dolphin was used in their play, but at other times it bobbed off by itself, oddly commanding a space in the pool; moved by their wake, it often seemed ready to dive under the water. It stayed close to them, though the beach ball floated away at times.
There was a middle-aged man with a paunch, his wife next to him, sitting in a deck chair beside a poolside table. He was very white, and both he and his wi
fe were sipping at tall drinks and watching the children play. One thin young girl lay in the sun on one of the beach lounges, getting her tan.
When she came back from the phone, the sun had shifted a little; but the walk back and forth had tired her, and in addition she was not worried about the longevity of her skin anymore, so she did not move the chair but let the sun hit her face and arms and her chest above her one-piece suit. “Wither away,” she said to herself. She was very thin, and she knew she looked good this way; she had always tried to keep her weight down, but in recent years she had been unsuccessful. When she fell ill, the weight had begun to drop off. After a while it had leveled off, and now she was the way she had always wanted to be. She thought of this as a fringe benefit. The major benefits included this trip, the fact that they had no money to speak of, and the fact that he could earn some through his skill: a skill connected to his body. This made him very desirable. Over the years she had not really known how little he thought of himself, though he spoke of what he felt as inadequacy in his work. He was a physical person who had denied that part of himself too much, and what he had been always desperate about, as she saw it, was the futile search for a body component in the mind work that he had to do for his teaching. The heart of the benefit was a time thing, very ironic of course. He had found his body when her need arose. She had found hers beneath the added weight she had carried. Her new body was the evidence of her need for him to connect to himself in the way he had. His body had gained some weight, all muscle, from his practice. She felt she had given him some flesh. They had a beginning, though it was near the end.