Seaview

by Toby Olson

  Because of the intensity of their study of the dolphin and the attendant difficulties of the hole, they had lost track of time, and only when the three of them stood together waiting did they discover that dusk was advancing and the course beginning to darken. The far side of the dolphin’s body now had shadows within it; its skin was darker, and it seemed more seaworthy. The shadows masked the peel of paint, and the eye above the hole no longer seemed vacant to them. Over the body of the dolphin they could see the rise of the figures they had worked their way through as they had played the first half of the course. The failure of the sun and the coming of shadow enlivened them also; the shark seemed fresh from the sea, and the penguins looked like a trio of small children in formal wear watching them at play. At the very top of the expanse behind them stood the whale’s jawbone. It looked immaculate and unsullied, very skeletal and bone hard and very white. They could see the sky around it and through it. It stood like a firm, stylized rendering in the air, but it seemed to have incredible weight at the same time, to be permanent in its place, as if it had never had another. Clouds moved and shadows shifted around it; the first coming of points of stars were in its arc, the moon’s sliver was above it and to its left. But its outline and its sur – face were untouched by any movement or magnitude. Though it was entrance to this place, it seemed pivotal, the still center of something, and they found they could not and did not want to pull their eyes away from it. They stopped for a long time, looking up at the jaw, and then Melinda touched him lightly on the bone of his elbow and whispered below and behind him into his shoulder.

  “But miles to go before I sleep,’ ” she said. And Bob White grunted, and Allen moved his elbow from her touch, and the three disengaged themselves from the matrix of their placement, though very slowly, each stretching almost imperceptibly, waking themselves.

  “The ball,” Allen said. And he walked slowly around to the front of the dolphin and knelt down on the fairway, getting his head at a level with the hole and peering into it. It was darker now, and it was hard to see, but he thought the hole went straight into and through the dolphin’s body. Still on his knees, he turned his head and reached back and motioned for Melinda’s putter. He had left his leaning against the embankment on the other side, and he took hers; holding the club head in his hand, he slowly insinuated the shaft into the hole in the dophin’s side. It’s like a strange injection, he thought, and he took his time, and he was careful not to hit the shaft against the sides of the hole as he entered the dolphin’s body, and his left hand felt a brief need to elevate above the dolphin, to hold the bottle up. When the shaft was almost a foot in, he struck something. It was hard; it was surely the ball, but it gave way a little when he hit it and then pushed back a little and caused the head of the putter to shake a little in his hand. He pushed again, a little harder this time, and he heard a slight whisper of sound, a kind of scraping, from deep in the hole; there was a strong spasm along the putter shaft, and the head pressed back into his palm. Bob White was still on the other side of the dolphin, and he spoke softly.

  “Come here,” he said. And Melinda put her hand on Allen’s shoulder and squeezed, and he got up from his knees, leaving the putter imbedded in the wound, and they both walked slowly around the dolphin to the back of the upper green. As they got close to where Bob White was standing, he raised his arm, indicating that they should move even slower, and they did that, watching Bob White and not the dolphin. When they got beside him, they turned and looked to where he was looking.

  Below the place containing the recessed ring of the dolphin’s eye, in shadow and behind its fixed smile, the snake’s head and its encumbrance had unfurled and stood transfixed in the air a good three inches from the surface of the dolphin’s body. The encumbrance was a small bird. A nestling, it was too young for coloring and its fear petrified it. The snake’s black head was very large, and with its mouth open and the bird locked in its jaw, it was hard to see how it had managed to come from the hole, but it had done so, possibly releasing its grip a little on the bird’s body after exit. The snake’s head was very black, its wide-open eyes were very small and bright red. The body of the bird was sideways in the snake’s mouth; its outer wing was open and hanging down and over the snake’s lip. The wing opened and closed slowly and repetitively, like a feathered fan or a sail touched in the rhythm of a wave-action breeze. The bird was like a carried banner, or a war bundle, or a burden of shame. The head of the snake moved slowly from side to side, scanning, and the three watchers felt guilt and immediate failed responsibility, and they surged forward imperceptibly and recoiled from the vision at the same time.

  He thought about the ball in the hole behind the body of the snake. He wondered if it would have enough roll left in it if the snake left the hole. Would it be able to bounce out and possibly reach the first tunnel opening in the upper green? He already lay three, having missed two attempts to get his ball into the dolphin’s body. With the right bounce and a good roll he could reach the passage to the lower green and have a putt for par. Was the snake a movable obstruction? Was it a natural hazard? What could the P.G.A. rules be in a case like this? He focused on the delicate body of the bird and came back and away from his quick retreat. The automatic crazy movement of his thought-train startled him and quickly made him sad. He saw the wing and the closed eyes and the bird’s head in repose, and over the bird’s back, the top of the snake’s snout and its small red-blazing eyes. He reached beside him and took Melinda’s hand; it was cool and dry, and it did not respond. He looked at her face and saw that her head was fixed, her mouth slightly open. As he watched her, he saw her head turning very slowly from side to side, in mimic of the snake’s own movement.

  Inside her head there was really very little control going on. There was a foregrounding of brief visions and flickers: snatches from dreams and potentially harmful past realities. What was locked in to its own control was her chemistry, her methodically dying body. Her breath exchange was shallow, expelled and sucked in through her open mouth, through parted lips, held by her fixed jaw. She felt her nostrils closed and a little parched. She held the life of the bird in her own mouth. If she opened her mouth and released it, they could step forward and kill the snake. The life they valued would have escaped from harm, and the other they would find dispensable. But if she pressed down too hard, she would crush the life from the bird, and then they would kill her in rage, though she would be already dead, because surely it was the life of the bird that was her own. She thought of the way she took his penis into her mouth to give him and herself pleasure. The same structure of vulnerability was involved here. She felt she was looking into the face of death, and though it was a composite face-the snake’s head and the bird’s body forming, in the increasing darkness, a silhouette emblem—it was not a face at all, but a structure, a fitted machine, mechanized by two past lives conjoined. And so it was a face, like her cells in their matrix were: the face of death then, a place, simply, of meeting.

  They stood like the three penguins on the slope behind their play. She was like the decapitated one, her head, like that of the snake still mostly in the hole, separated in its intensity from her body. Bob White was the one standing a little to the side of the other two, looking slightly away, part of the group in his shape and black-and-white outfit but separated in name and ability. He saw the snake’s head and the bird, saw it could be a totemic emblem, but he had seen such things before; and though the vision had power to stiffen him, he could work within its familiar – ity, and he was calculating. The way the bird was turned it would be difficult for the snake to get it back in the hole if he chose to do so. Snakes ate young birds in a way that was a kind of birth reversal. In birth, the child’s head emerged then turned to allow the shoulders’ exit vertically through the stretched opening. When a snake took a young bird from the nest, he grasped him in a way that allowed a good purchase, gripping the bird sideways at right angles to the jaw. This was a king snake, a constrictor, and he could
not chew the bird but would have to swallow and digest it alive. To swallow it, the snake would have to turn it, getting it parallel to his mouth, take it in headfirst, the reverse of birth.

  Bob White could see some matting of feathers on the top of the bird’s head. He knew that this must be the snake’s secretions. The snake had begun to swallow the bird when they had disturbed him with the ball. Surely he had stopped swallowing when the ball hit. He had waited, and when the shaft of the putter had pushed the ball, he had come out of the hole with the bird so that he could get the bird out of his throat and turn it. If the snake were caught with the bird in his throat, he would be defenseless. With the bird out and crossways again, he could drop it if he had to. He could use his mouth and the power of his body then; he would stand some chance. Bob White knew the snake did not really feel like dropping the bird. Probably he did not really feel at all in the way that we think of such things, but he could taste the bird and did not feel like losing that taste and the beginnings of fullness he had experienced when he had the bird’s head in his throat. His head stood now out of the hole to the side of the face of the dolphin. He held the bird very gently but firmly in his mouth, and he moved his head slowly from side to side, scanning. Bob White thought he understood him.

  He motioned to them with an open hand that they should stay where they were, and because he knew the snake could not pull his head back and withdraw into the dark safety of the hole as long as he held the bird in his mouth this way, he did not hesitate or try to dissemble or trick the snake. He walked slowly around the embankment of the upper green, withdrawing his knife from the sheath inside his shirt as he moved. When he got to the fairway and the other side of the dolphin, he crouched slightly and crept to the face of the wave. The dolphin was hip-high, and he could see the head of the snake over the dolphin’s head. The head of the snake had followed his movement until he was out of its peripheral vision. Then it had returned to the other two, stopping its scanning. Bob White took the blade of his knife and rested it behind the head of the dolphin. Then he slid it over the dolphin’s head and moved it swiftly under the neck of the snake, just back of its jaw. When the snake felt the steel, it tried to withdraw, but Bob White lifted the knife blade, pinning the head of the snake to the top of the hole.

  They could see the glint of the knife blade below the body of the bird, parallel with it. It seemed that the snake’s red eyes blazed out as they contracted. Bob White’s head was above the head of the snake and the head of the dolphin. It was too dark for them to see his eyes, but they thought that he was looking at them. The knife blade seemed to stay where it was for a long time; then, suddenly, it was above the head of the snake. Then the snake’s head with the bird in it fell from the hole, skimming down the dolphin’s body, and tumbled onto the green, to the left and away from the wave. There was a furious shaking inside the body of the dolphin, and when they looked up from the vision of the severed head with the bird still in its mouth, they saw the body of the snake coming out of the wound. It was very long, and it spilled over the side of the dolphin, staining it, and fell like a coiled placenta, and came to rest in an almost perfect ring, still vibrating, on the surface of the upper green.

  There was a moment in which they could see the placenta and the tableau of the head with the bird in it, and all was very fixed in place and silent. Then the ball came. It appeared, white and swollen, in the mouth of the hole. It seemed to linger there enough to turn, so that its black spot appeared, an intense large pupil that changed the mouth into an eye in the dolphin’s side.

  And then it fell out, bouncing once on the dolphin’s body and once on the green. When it quit bouncing it rolled four inches, and then it disappeared again, this time into the tunnel. They heard it rattle in the tube as it descended. Allen moved to the lower green to watch it come out. When it came it had good speed, and it skipped past the final hole and rolled to the board lining the green. It hit the board and started back, crossing the warped green surface. As it was losing its energy it reached the hole, rimmed it, hesitated on the back of the hole’s edge, and then it fell in. From where Bob White stood on the other side of the dolphin, he could not see the ball enter the cup. But he could hear the click.

  “Birdie,” he said, very dryly and very softly. The two looked up and over at him. He had not smiled when he spoke. Then Melinda started to laugh a little. Then all three of them were laughing softly and tentatively in the increasing darkness.

  Bob White came around from the body of the dolphin and climbed the embankment to the upper green. The coil of placenta was now still, and the black-leather sheen on the scales shone in the little moonlight and the dim artificial light that came from the backs of the rooms over and across the sea course. The strange cross formed by the head of the snake and the bird was also still, the snake’s eyes still open, but glazing and without any intensity of rage left. The shocked bird seemed dead. It was very quiet, its outer wing gathered back to its body. It was unmarked, but it was still held fast. Bob White knelt down beside the strange small figure. It looked like a lost charm from a crazy bracelet. He put his thumb and index finger over the eyes in the snake’s head, holding it fast to the green. Then he insinuated the tip of his knife blade under the body of the bird, between its small downy belly and the snake’s lower jaw. When he felt the hardness of the lower jawbone and the leathery bottom of the mouth, he pressed the blade into the leather and through the scales until he had pierced the jaw, pinning it to the green.

  Holding it there, he moved his thumb and finger to the front of the head’s snout and slowly opened the mouth. With his ring finger, he gently urged the bird’s body out, till it lay in front of the head. Then he released the open jaw, letting it shut. He picked up the bird then and cradled it in his palm and got up from his knees and slowly turned, looking for a place to put it. He knew there would be no snakes coming now for a while, and he wanted a place where, in the morning, sun would shine on the bird when it came up, a place where the bird would be touched or sur – rounded on all sides, but a place that from the top would be open to the sky. He stopped turning when he faced the dolphin, and then he climbed down the embankment, holding the bird in his hand. When he got down, he reached and tore a handful of weed from where it grew in the gravel of the sea-course path, and he took the weed and the bird around to the fairway side of the dolphin. When he reached the dolphin’s side, he took a bit of the weed and scrubbed at the stains on the far side of the dolphin’s body with it, mixing grass stains with the snake’s fluids, changing the smell. Then he threw the bit of weed down on the coiled placenta. He took what remained of the weed and gathered it in the clean, faded blue-check handkerchief he took from his back pocket. Then he rubbed the handkerchief and the weed slowly along the ball groove that ran in the side of the dolphin, pressing hard, staining the handkerchief and the groove.

  When he was finished, he gathered the weed and the handkerchief into a crinkled low pocket, fitting it near the top of the dolphin’s side where the groove was almost horizontal to the ground. Then he placed the small body of the bird into the pocket, tucking it in and spreading the sides of the pocket slightly away from the feathers and head. When he was satisfied, he stood up from his crouch and looked down at the bird. Then he reached down and made a final adjustment, putting the pocket a little bit farther away from the bird’s tail.

  They had been watching him intently from where they were. Melinda was still behind the embankment of the upper green. Allen was standing where his ball had fallen in. And now they watched him coming away from the fairway and the dolphin’s body and climbing back up the embankment. He could have stepped easily over the dolphin to get to where he was, but it was clear that that would have somehow been inappropriate, and they stood where they were and waited for him. When he got to the upper green and the placenta and the severed head, he reached down and picked the head up and took it with him down the embankment again to where his ball and Melinda’s lay among the gravel of the walk, both
distinct in the limited light. He took the head of the snake and wedged it down among the stones, so that it stood up with its closed jaws pointing toward the sky, a gesture not unlike that of the whale’s jaw, and though diminutive, its recent history might have held a similar complexity. Then he took his knife and opened the mouth of the snake, and holding it with the blade twisted, he picked up a good-size piece of gravel and used it to wedge the jaw so that the snake’s mouth stood up wide open when he removed the knife.

  “Wait,” Melinda said softly from the other side of the embankment. “Let me.” And she came around to where he was and reached down beside him and picked her ball from among the stones. When she came up with it in her fingers, her hand held up a little in front of her so that the ball shone in the half darkness, she could see Allen, the upper half of his body only, mouth open and looking at them across the embankment and the upper green. She moved over and down to the snake’s head and placed her ball where the bird had been. Bob White stood back and to the side.

  She was at the side of the snake’s head and the ball now, intent on the coming break of the perceptible structure that had grown up around them. She wanted to finish it. It was not real life. She felt she was now a living monitor of such things. As she addressed the snake’s head with the blade of the putter, she stopped breathing, holding a brief modicum of air in the fragile domes of her alveoli. The blade was square to the head of the snake. The ball stood in the open jaws. The configuration was now like the handle of a garish cane. She brought the shaft of the club back, keeping her left arm and wrist stiff, and with no other move in her body, she stroked down and into the side of the snake’s jaw, below where the ball was. There was a dull thud, followed by a slight click as the blade struck the jaw and the ball afterward. Both the ball and the head lifted up from the stones, the head spinning and falling and the ball continuing. The head landed and bounced on the embankment, and the ball bounced on the upper green, and then it bounced again, clearing the rotten board lining the far side and falling and landing on the lower green, coming to rest four feet from the cup.