by Toby Olson
They passed through two more small towns and then jogged back to an old highway and traveled it for three and a half hours. Melinda slept in the corner of the backseat behind him, and Bob White read sections from Moby-Dick and studied the road atlas, giving close attention to the Eastern seaboard. Then they headed north again on two-lane country roads. At a gas stop, Allen called Richard from a phone booth to the side of the old building.
The conversation was short, and Richard’s voice was strangely flat.
“We’re talking about twenty-thousand dollars so far, man. When you hit K .C. do it right. We’ll see about the other. Call me when it’s done.”
Allen didn’t tell him what he had done with the Kansas City package, but he did say he didn’t plan to risk going to K .C. He started to mention Melinda, but he changed his mind and didn’t do it. Richard would have none of the K .C. risk talk. He spoke as if he hadn’t heard it, and when he was finished he hung up.
IN ANOTHER HALF-HOUR THEY WERE AS FAR NORTH AS Sioux City, Iowa, about seventy-five miles west of it, and they came to a town where they agreed to stop. Even as they approached the far reaches of the town they could tell that it was one of those places whose economy had depended in large part on the road passing through it being well traveled. The coming of the big highway, a good four miles from it, with no exit roads or signs, had taken the traffic away, and now the town lay waste. It had to get what it could from truck traffic and occasional sightseers. Weeds grew in the small town square; many of the buildings in the short central block of Main Street were boarded up. Few people were on the sidewalks. They went through the town, and about a block after the stores quit and the seedy motels began, across the street from a small, closed Dairy Queen, they found a place that seemed adequate. There was an office in front, a small unconnected building with a driveway on either side. The drives lead between the sides of the office and the two low, severe, rectangular blocks of rooms extending back from the road. Between the rectangles, the rooms facing into it, was an empty swimming pool with grass growing between the slate of its decking. He parked and went into the office to check them in. When he came out he had a slight smile on his face.
“What’s up?” Bob White said when he got back into the car.
“A little surprise,” he said, and he drove the car across the cracked blacktop to their adjoining rooms. He and Bob White unloaded their gear. Melinda checked the bathrooms, finding them clean enough, and tested the springs on the bed on their side. It was four-thirty by the time they were finished getting settled. They were sitting in the chairs in Bob White’s room. They had eaten a late lunch, and they had decided that a drink and snack would be enough. They drank watery Scotch and ate cheese and crackers. All the time they had been unloading, Melinda and Bob White had been watching Allen, wondering about the surprise and playing the game of not asking about it.
“Are you two ready for a little action?” he asked them finally. They both nodded, enjoying his withholding.
“Okay, wait here, I’ll be right back,” he said, and he left the room and headed over to the office. Bob White got up and opened the drapes that covered the window, and they watched him enter the office. He came out a few moments later, carrying something.
“What’s he got there?” Melinda asked.
“Looks like golf clubs,” Bob White said, “looks like putters.”
When he entered the room again, he was grinning broadly; he had the three putters in his left hand, and he raised a finger on his right, indicating that there should be no questions yet. He went to the gunny sack in the corner of the room, flipped its neck over, and pushed on the bag to get a few balls out of it; about ten rolled out into the room. He ran his hands over them, turning them, and selected three: a nearly new Golden Ram and two range balls, one with a red stripe around it, the other with a large black circle on its side. He put the three balls on the bed and turned to Melinda, holding the three putter heads in his hands, fanning the shafts out and presenting them to her for selection. By this time she was grinning too, and she chose one of the putters. Then he turned to Bob White and did the same thing with the remaining two clubs.
“Now we had better practice some before we go out to the links,” he said, and he pushed a good number of balls out of the gunny sack onto the carpet and began to show them how to hold their putters and how to stroke. Melinda already knew how to hold a putter, and Bob White had seen enough golf in his time so that he too had no trouble with this. The three of them began to putt balls around the room, aiming for the legs of furniture, thudding balls against the wall and the door. Allen gave them various clipped phrases of instruction: head down, feet well planted, accelerate through the ball, hit on the sweet spot, don’t push. The room was a small space for such activity; they had a lot of balls on the floor, and they hit balls into each other and bounced them off each other’s feet at times.
“This is a crowded green,” Bob White said, and the other two agreed, laughing, and they all said excuse me when they got in each other’s way. After a while, he suggested that they quit, that they were ready now, and he pointed to the bed, suggesting that Melinda take her pick of balls. She selected the Ram, and Bob White took the ball with the red stripe around it.
After he had rounded up the golf balls on the rug and put them back in the gunny sack, he led them out the door and down to the end of the rectangle in which their rooms were located. At the end, where the cracked sidewalk ended, there was a dirt path leading around the back of the building, and he motioned for them to follow him down it. When they got to the back of the building, he stopped. Melinda and Bob White came up beside him, and they looked at what was before them.
The upper mandible of the whale stood as an archway of entrance into the grounds of the miniature golf course. At either side of the jaw’s hinges, where they pressed into the ground, a low white picket fence went out and around the ragged oval of the course. The fence dipped half into ruin in various places where the course descended into the bottom of its cavity behind the whale’s jaw, and weeds curled into the fence, making it an awkward crown of thorns. The jaw of the whale had the shape of a massive wishbone; it was at least eight feet high at its apex, and he wished the feel of the place did not remind him so much of Tombstone, the bag lying at the edge of the desert, the man coming up off the ground like a crab toward him, the gun in the torn sleeve. This place too was at the edge of things, the course a kind of exaggerated instance of the slow ruin of the town that had been passed by. Beyond the course were the wasted grainfields moving in from the hum of the highway, a good three miles away, and the fields seemed to be reclaiming the ground the course stood on. The weeds and obscure offshoots of the dead stalks of old corn had crept back into and over the course, and they were touching up against the back of the cinder blocks of the motel itself.
The jaw of the whale was pinioned with a large bolt where the wishbone joined at its top; the head of the galvanized bolt protruded on one side, the nut on the other. The entire surface of the jaw was marked with initials carved into its bone and the peeling remnants of fingernail polish and other paints that had been used by those who had no knives or chisels. Weathering had turned the carvings into signs and emblems, and away from words, and when they stepped into the tortured archway, Melinda thought of the mutilation of goosefish on the bay beaches of the Cape. When she was a child, she had seen other children stab and hack at the horny skin of the beached monsters in outrage at their ugliness, leaving them with pointed sticks standing like quills in their hides. The difference was in the bone quietness of the whale’s jaw and the fact that it was in Nebraska. It seemed ancient here and beyond any quality of pain. Its shape stood out of the carvings and the paint, its power within its stillness hardly diminished, and the three of them were a little nervous standing within it.
They stood for a long time, under the jaw, somehow in the whale’s presence, not as a live whale but one so single-minded in its power that the marrow in the bone retained a forc
e beyond its long-ago death, as if it had pushed up out of the earth of Nebraska, its mysterious place of burial.
They moved out from under the jaw in time and approached the slab of rubber, scuffed and worn, that was the first tee, about eight feet the other side of the archway. As they looked up to study the hole, a straight par two in a keyhole shape, they could see the remnants of the sea theme of the course beyond it. Slightly to the left and down near the bottom of the cavity, about ten holes away, was the figure of a small dolphin, its body bent in an arch, under which they thought they would have to hit when they got there. Three pelicans, one with its head missing, stood on the green of another hole. There was a shark, a small sperm whale, a barracuda, and configurations they would not be able to make out until they got nearer to them. They flipped a coin, and Melinda won the honors. The keyhole was outlined with one-by-three pine, and there were no hazards to negotiate. The only hint of a sea theme were the few shells left glued to the boards surrounding the square green: quahog shells, some mussels, and a few oysters. Melinda putted on the warped surface. Her shot went past the cup, thudded against the board beyond it, and rolled back two feet, stopping only a foot from the hole. Allen and
Bob White both missed their putts also, and the three of them managed to get down in two, even at the end of one.
As they moved from hole to hole, considering each putt carefully, they began to feel themselves descending. They had made a rule that each ball would be putted out, were engaged in a kind of medal play, and such was the decayed condition of the course that they would often find themselves flying off the green or the fairway of the hole they were playing, having to come in from the scarred ground of other fairways, chipping into their proper pathway from stones and sand. It was not unusual for holes to be won with sevens and eights, and as they descended and the competition moved them, they began to become exhausted. Behind them, up the narrow and winding crushed-stone path that ran through the course from hole to hole, they could see the cracked and mutilated figures of sea life: a giant lobster with a broken claw, a seahorse with a crushed muzzle, fish painfully twisted. Allen was just a little ahead. Melinda was on his tail, and Bob White was still within striking distance. They had finished the ninth hole, and they felt half submerged.
At the tenth, the dolphin hole, the course seemed to level off and bottom out. They were under the sea, various levels of sea life around and above them, behind and ahead. Their alliances fell apart and came together as their scores altered. At times Allen was engaged in a struggle with Melinda and she with him. At times Bob White surged, and one or the other of them felt threatened. The oval of the picket fence seemed to lean inward. Standing on the tenth tee, they felt pressed down in the middle of the purgatory of a sea garden, one that was the mirrored reversal of the health of the real sea, that romance of paradise. Even their putters felt like burdens, tools they had to carry as a kind of penance. They felt too comfortable now with their grips, and this was an embarrassment, as if a hint of some indulgence in sin, so that they often hid the putters along their legs or hung them down from clasped hands, like European walkers, behind their backs.
They were catalyzed, and they rose a little when they saw the situation of the tenth hole. The tenth, the dolphin hole, was a par four, with a right-angle dogleg near its end. The dolphin, about four feet long and bent into a graceful arc, crossed over the narrow two-foot fairway of worn green carpeting. Where from a distance they had thought they could go under the body of the dolphin, there was no opening at all but a sculptured and chipped blue wave on which the dolphin was riding, having leapt up on it, its head slightly on the decline, as if it would soon plunge, come up, and catch another. The end of its nose was gone, and the paint that might have marked its pupil had worn away. Its mouth had a smile in it, but it could see nothing, and this turned it away from any hint of motivation or pleasure, and its dive seemed totally insouciant. It would go down into the wave, and the structure and attitude of its body would cause it to curl and come up again. Then it would enter another wave, and another. It was locked in its motion and could not turn out of the waves. Cute as it might have once been, it was no dolphin from an aquarium show. The human and weather damage done to it, and the neglect had given it a history of seriousness they each felt as being not much different from their own.
The dolphin guarded the way to the getting down, the finality and the repose of the satisfied click of the ball as it fell into the cup and settled. It seemed impossible that the concentration of the dolphin could be passed. Beyond the dolphin was the square of green on the upper level with two holes in it, and these were the entrances to tunnels that ran under the upper green and would drop balls that rolled through them onto the lower, final green surface to the left. One tunnel exit was at the side of the lower green, about five feet from the cup and around a corner. From that point a bank shot off the rotted boards might well be required. The other tunnel came out directly in front of the cup, about two feet away from it, and the best shot coming out of that tunnel might fall in. But the greens were in the future, the cup at the very bottom of the groin of the sea, and first they must negotiate the upper waves and the dolphin riding on them.
At the end of the narrow incline of the fairway, at the base of the ascending curl of wave, there had once been a slide, a halftube of corrugated metal pipe that had arched up through the wave and into a groove fashioned gently in the dolphin’s side. The lower bit of pipe was still there, but a good eight inches were missing between that bit and the groove, and time and the set of the wave had shifted the dolphin’s body some, and it bent inward slightly toward the rubber of the tee. Bob White thought he would try that path. He had the honors because he had won the ninth, and he placed the ball with the red ring around it on a flat place on the rubber of the tee. He addressed a place slightly behind the ball, took a practice swing, then set his feet again, addressed and stroked firmly through the ball, keeping his head down, accelerating through the putt. The ball clicked sharply off the blade of the putter, rolled true to the broken tube, and was kicked into the groove in the dolphin’s side. But the dolphin had bent over enough so that the ball, instead of sliding over the dolphin’s body and dropping onto the upper green, spun up into the air, arched back a bit and fell and clattered into the crushed stone to the side of the fairway. Bob White’s putter was still elevated, pointing toward the dolphin, the shaft following the putt, but when the ball spun off and landed, he lowered the club and shook his head.
“Difficult to negotiate,” he said, and he stepped back to let Melinda have her shot at it. She had been standing back and watching the dolphin intently, and when it was her turn, instead of settling in and putting, she walked around behind the upper green, bent over slightly, and squinted at the body of the dolphin from the other side.
“There’s something here,” she said, and she beckoned to the two of them to join her to see what it was. They walked around and came up beside her.
“There,” she said, and they both looked where she pointed and saw that there was a small hole in the left of the snout of the dolphin, about two inches below its vacant eye.
“We’d better check the other side,” Allen said, and they went around to the fairway, moved up close to the foot of the wave, and studied the dolphin’s body. He ran his hand from the curve of the tail up the dolphin’s side, and about halfway up he discovered there was indeed a hole there too, and that it had been stuffed with a bit of cloth which had been packed carefully into it, so that it was not apparent from a distance. He pulled the cloth out, revealing the hole, and he pointed to a place below it where there was a remnant of a second piece of corrugated piping. The hole was a good eight inches up from the top of the wave, and that put it about two feet from the surface of the fairway. They could now see that this had once been the desired way of playing the hole, that the proper shot had gone through the dolphin and not around or over it.
Melinda touched her face and thought for a few moments. Then sh
e decided on a way to play her shot. She lined up behind the rubber tee, but she aimed to send her ball through a break in the rotted boards at the side of the fairway. This would take it, if she hit it well, out and alongside the upper green a little past the dolphin. There were broken boards around the upper green also, and a steep incline to the little hill the upper green was on. She figured that she might be able to roll her second shot up the embankment and onto the flat surface. Her first shot was a good one; the ball went between the broken boards, clicked among the gravel, and quit beside the embankment, a good approach-shot placement.
Now it was Allen’s turn. He took a handful of gravel from the path beside the fairway and ran a finger through it in his open palm until he found a proper piece. He put this piece on the rubber of the tee and placed his ball on it, so that the ball was a little elevated off the rubber. It would be an extremely difficult shot, and he would have to hit it hard enough to take most of gravity’s pull out of it. He figured he’d miss the hole at least once before getting the range. He stepped up over the ball, adjusted his line, glanced up at the body of the dolphin over and over again as he shifted his feet. When he thought he had the line just right, he settled in and placed the head of his putter on the rubber. He glanced up a few more times, and then he held his head steady, looking down over the ball. His hands shifted slightly, moving a couple of inches in front of the ball on the stone. Then the club head moved back to the top of his quarter swing, and then it accelerated down, and the ball shot off the stone and struck against the dolphin’s body a few inches to the side and below the hole. His second shot failed also, but it was closer, and when he sent his third, the ball hit the hole, clattered and vibrated in its entrance and fell in out of sight. He walked quickly to the other side of the dolphin to see where the ball would come out and how it would fall, but nothing happened. He waited a moment. Still nothing. The other two came around beside him and waited also.