Seaview
Page 16
“That’s a good shot,” Allen said, finishing the game of the structure and beginning to end it at the same time.
“I’ll pick up,” Bob White said, and he reached down and lifted his ball out of the stones. She made her putt. Bob White took an X on the hole. It had gotten too dark for them to continue further, and with no real discussion they agreed to quit. Bob White checked the bird a last time, adjusting the handkerchief pocket where it rested. Then he took the body of the snake, like a coiled hose, in one hand and its head in the other and walked across the sea course to where the weeds and the corn pressed in as the desiccated fields began. When he got there, he stopped. He set his feet. Then, turning like a discus thrower, he spun and released the coiled snake’s body into the air. It unwound as it lifted, straightening for a moment like a spear. Then, as it descended, it telescoped in on itself, becoming increasingly smaller and inconsequential as it disappeared. He threw the head out in the same direction he had thrown the body.
When he finished, he came back to them, and they started together back up and out of the dark, broken sea, past the pelicans and the shark and the other fish figures, until they passed under the whale’s jaw. They stopped there, turned, and looked back under the massive archway. It was quite dark now, and though they could see the form of the dolphin behind them, they could not see the place where the bird rested upon it at all.
When they got back to their rooms, Melinda said she was very tired and thought it would be a good thing if she slept alone that night. Allen said he thought they could arrange that, and maybe she should take Bob White’s room and bed, and he and Bob White could sleep together in their room. They did that, and though the walls were thin, Melinda wept very quietly in Bob White’s bed, and Allen did not hear her. And though Allen was very tired, Bob White lay so still beside him that he kept feeling and listening for movement and breath, so it was a long time before he was able to fall asleep.
Early in the morning, at the beginning of first light and while they were still sleeping, Melinda got up and went back out to the whale’s jaw and the sea course. She was in her bathrobe and slippers, she was too intent to notice the way the day changed the look of things, and she stepped carefully down between the sea figures, retracing the way to the dolphin. When she got to the dolphin’s side, she saw that the small pocket was empty, the bird was gone. She went back to the room, and when the three were sitting together having coffee in Bob White’s room later, she mentioned to them that she had gone out and that the bird was no longer there.
“What do you think?” she asked Bob White.
He looked at her, hesitating a moment before answering, thinking that he could lie to her. But then he thought that the lie would be feeble, and also that to lie to her would be the wrong thing to do. And he said:
“I do not think that bird has come to a good end.”
Two
Day
THERE WERE TWO PICTURES HANGING IN THE CLUBHOUSE, side by side, on the wall behind the glass case. The one on the left, put up with tape and brown and peeling at the edges, was a mock blueprint rendering of an eighteen-hole course, and scribed in between the lines denoting the location and shape of the new clubhouse were the words Seaview Links Proposal and below that Baron Associates / 1955. The other was an old and faded photograph, about a foot square, in a glass frame. It was a picture of the seventh green, taken from the fairway close in front of it, with the lighthouse in full view in the background. Four men, all of them in baggy knickers and jaunty tams, stood on the green. One was tending the flagstick, while a second addressed a putt of about fifteen feet. The other two stood to the side, both with hands on hips, each with one foot planted a little ahead of the other. Off the green to the right stood a fifth figure, more faded than the others. It was hard to tell what he was wearing, not golf togs surely, but his posture was very erect and formal, and he seemed not to be in anyway involved in the proceedings. He was looking away from the green in the direction of the camera. On the sur – face of the glass, in felt-tip marker, various hands had drawn little arrows pointing to the figures, and there were names and statements beside the arrows: Fred Borker considers a putt, The Chair watches critically, John Hope holds stick.
Around the head of the figure standing off the green, a small feathered headdress had been carefully inked in, and beside the arrow pointing to the figure were the words, Chief Wingfoot’s Revenge ! and then, in very small parentheses, Chip. A white card had been tacked below the photograph, and typed on it were the words Seaview Links, One of the oldest courses in America. Continuous play since 1892. Above photograph, 1920.
Sammy winked at the photograph and the blueprint, as he did most mornings when he came in to open up. Barefoot, in old jeans and a worn madras shirt, he moved behind the glass counter to the old cash register, pushed the “No Sale” button, and gave the handle a crank. The bell rang and the door slid open. He saw that there was plenty of change, enough for the traffic of the first major tournament of the summer. He closed the door and went around the counter to the stove in the kitchen area. The clubhouse was small and L-shaped. Where the two rectangles joined, and across from the door, was the glass case, about four feet long, containing balls, tees, and gloves. To the left of the case, at the end of the building, was the kitchen: a large refrigerator, formica counter and stove, a sink, and a card table. Behind the glass counter, filling the shorter rectangle, was Sammy’s golf gear concession: a few windbreakers, a couple of sets of clubs, various hats and other golf equipment. Windows in the back wall of the concession overlooked the short ninth fairway and beyond that the longer, par-four eighth. Sammy fiddled with the percolator, got it loaded and on the fire, and then went to the concession room to get his hat, a large crumpled fedora he liked to wear because it kept his long hair from getting in his eyes and because it kept the sun out, but most of all be-cause he liked the way he looked in it. He put it on and scratched the wispy hairs of his untrimmed beard.
“Right on time,” he said aloud. He could see across the eighth fairway, about a hundred yards from the clubhouse, big Chief Wingfoot walking stiffly toward him. The Chief moved very methodically, and such was the monotony of his gait that he was almost upon the terns pecking in the fairway before they were aware of him and rose up in little flashes of white (it seemed from this distance), right in the Chief’s face. Sammy saw the Chief stop, pick something up and study it for a moment, and then get back into his gait. He was walking the trail of the underground river, Tashmuit, that cut across and under the fairway, turning near the clubhouse and heading for the sea. The grass was greener where the river ran, and when it swelled up in winter, it was visible as a slight ridge. Even in summer, its strength was notable. The ground was soft-er above it, and the attentive could feel it pulsing under foot. He called it People’s River when he had occasion to speak of it, keeping its ancestral name to himself. It was where the people had come for their water. They could walk to it when they had need. It was out of the way for him, but he used its path when he entered the golf course at most times. It gave him strength in its place as evidence and a time for thought to renew his purpose. When it turned seaward he quit its path and headed toward the clubhouse.
Though it was early July, the morning air was crisp and cool; there was plenty of dew on the spare grass of the eighth and ninth, and the white brick of the lighthouse shone like a new dime in the morning sun. Sammy poured the hot coffee into two stoneware mugs marked Seaview Air Force Station, with a little emblem on each, and went out to where the Chief was sitting on the transplanted park bench overlooking the ninth green.
“Good morning, Chief. Coffee,” Sammy said, and handed him one of the mugs.
“Hey,” the Chief grunted. “Feather,” and he handed Sammy the clean white tern feather he had picked up.
“That’s a fine feather,” Sammy said, holding it up in the sun. He took his fedora off and plugged the root of the feather into the band so that it stood up straight along the crown.
The road that ran in front of the clubhouse separated the seventh fairway and the rest of the course behind it from the eighth and ninth. It ended in a cul-de-sac parking lot right in front of the lighthouse. The lighthouse perched on the edge of the high dunes, a hundred feet or so above the narrow beach, with the Atlantic Ocean beyond it. Earl Sawgus chugged his pickup truck along the road, saw as he usually did the backs of Sammy and the Chief on the park bench, went the hundred yards to the parking lot, turned in a slow circle, enjoying the condition of the seventh green and the eighth tee, came around and back down the road, and parked along the side of the clubhouse.
“Now where the hell is that Chip?” he said to himself as he got out of the truck.
“Yo, Sam. Yo, Chief. Morning,” he called as he walked toward them. “Now where the hell is that Chip, you think?”
“Chip here,” the Chief said.
“Oh yeah? Where?” said Earl.
“I’m here, ma man, I’m here!” came a voice from over by Earl’s truck. “Here I come.” And a young man of about eighteen, very scrawny and tan with close-cropped dark hair, started a slow and crooked walk toward the threesome at the park bench.
“That was somethin’, I mean, that was some action Earl! I mean, that was definitely not on my agenda. I wonder can you dig it? Came right up to my leg then; stopped on a dime. Too much! ‘Student crushed by pickup at Seaview Links.’ What a routine that was …”
“Fucked up,” Sammy murmured.
“Made the turn—the avenging angel—spacy day—whose thoughts were elsewhere—young boy asnooze watching the eyelid light show—mysterious tires crunching in gravel—stopped on a dime. What a scenario!—Hey, Chiefie! what’s happening? Hey Sam! What’s up for today, Earl? Do we plant trees? Do a little, you know, green care?” He danced a little jig. “I can dig it!—reprieve from death!”
“Most definitely fucked up again,” Sammy said. And Earl, with Chip loping behind him, walked toward the parked machines on the far side of the clubhouse. Earl was the greens keeper at Seaview. Chip, a horticulture student at Cape Tech, was his helper. Sammy was the club manager and pro. Chief Wingfoot believed he owned the golf course.
BY THE TIME IT WAS SEVEN O’CLOCK, CHAIR FREDRICKS had showered and shaved, carefully cleaned, cut, and filed his fingernails, shined his golf shoes, laid his golf clothes across his bed, broken open a three-pack of Top Flights and put them in the zipper compartment of his plaid bag, put up the coffee to perk on the Sears workbench in the basement, and was now standing in front of a hot cup of it, looking out at the wheel cover of his new Oldsmobile, framed in the basement window. The cup and saucer were bone china, with blue flowers on them; the coffee was black and hot; the wheel cover was clean and shining, because he kept it that way. It was a beautiful morning in town, and in the yard of his accounting office in the front of the house, a couple of mockingbirds were showing off. The Chair was dressed in a short blue robe. His woods rested beside the coffee cup on the workbench, and as he lifted the driver up and began to clean the head’s grooves with a small silver pick, he was thinking about the difficulties with the Quahog People and what he hoped the day would bring to him. When he finished picking the flecks of dirt out of the grooves, he put the shaft of the driver in the small vise attached to the bench, sprayed a little polish on the head, and began buffing it with a clean white rag.
As chairman of the golf commission at Seaview, all communication with the Quahog People fell to him. It was not the kind of thing he had bargained for when he had politicked for the position five years ago. What he had wanted was to keep the operations of the course professional, and he had thought of his only major adversary there as Sammy. Now these Indians were writing him letters and calling him up. They usually called him when he was at work on somebody’s books or with a client. He kept telling them that he, as chairman, had nothing to do with their claim of ownership; the course was run by the National Seashore, only leased to the town, and they would have to deal with the Seashore Commission. But every time one of them called or wrote, it was a different one. They seemed to have no leader, and he kept having to repeat himself. And then there was this Frank Bumpus person; for two years now he had hung around the course. He was not good for the professionalism of the place, and being an Indian, though he never mentioned or did a thing about it, he must have been connected with the Quahog People. The rest of the golf commission members were all too happy to let this business fall to the Chair, and since the Chair would not have trusted anyone else with it anyway, the hassle was all his.
He finished buffing his driver and reached for another club. He could hear his wife stirring upstairs. He put the club shaft in the vise, took another sip of coffee, and began to pick. Well, to hell with the Quahog People, the Chair thought. This is a more important day. It was the day of the first major Saturday tournament of the season. All the others had been tune-ups and haphazardly run by Sammy. The Chair favored these early, official tournaments, the ones that were for members only. The members rule kept most of the tourists out, and most of the players were locals. The Chair knew their ways and could keep things in line. More important, he was set this year to get Sammy, and he was going to start things off right this season by beating him. He kept buffing at the club heads until the luster came up the way he liked it.
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, CHIP WAS WELL INTO the swing of things. At nine, in the bathroom in the clubhouse, he had snorted a line of coke, using a clear plastic ball-point pen with the inkholder removed. That, on top of the joint he had smoked around seven-thirty, had done the job. Now he was rambling down the second fairway on the mower, aiming for the second green in the far corner of the golf course.
“Out of sight of them all, ha ha!” he said to himself in the mower’s hum. He stopped short of the green and turned the mower off. He could hear the dull grind of Earl on the fairway mower on the other side of the course. He got off his machine, took a look up the fairway behind him, then turned his attention to the task at hand.
The second hole at Seaview was a par-five, five-hundred-and-ten-yard hole, with a dog leg to the left. The tee was cut at the top of a hill, with a heavy rough in front of it running down about seventy-five yards to the beginning of the fairway. The fairway before the dog leg was wide open. There was a large trap to the left, on a knoll from which the ground ran down to an open area just at the dog-leg knee. The open space was where the average hitter aimed to drop his drive. From that point, the fairway turned and narrowed a little, with heavy rough running up a hill to the left and pine trees run-ning up a steeper hill on the right. At the end was the untrapped green, of average size, closely guarded in the back by low pine and scrub running up yet another, gradual hill and toward the cliff, high at the sea’s edge, about a hundred yards away.
From the tee one could see the edge of the green in the distance. A strong shot could leave the hitter under a hundred and eighty yards to the green. It was possible to get home in two. From the tee, looking up to the top of the hill that bordered the narrower part of the fairway to the right, were three massive radar domes. They looked very much like golf balls and were the property of the Seaview Air Force Station, a lookout command on the edge of the Atlantic down the coast from the lighthouse. Below the radar domes, about halfway up the hill, was a small, medieval-looking stone tower. It was called the Jenny Lind tower and had been given the name by the man who bought it when the old Fitchburg Depot in Boston had been demolished around the turn of the century. The story was that he had heard Jenny Lind sing from the tower, had fallen in love with her and had put the tower up on land he owned at the time as a tribute to his impossible dream.
The second was Chip’s favorite hole, and when he had made his “Special Seaview Map” it had gotten the most detail and attention. He liked riding the narrow fa
irway on his mower, the way the slopes on either side guarded it. In late July, he liked to climb up the hill and sit close to the tower, eating blueberries he had picked on the slope out of his hat, watching the golfers try for the green. The fairways at Seaview, all but the eighth, were hardpan and sand, with little grass, and he liked to watch the golfers duff their shots, yell down the cavern of the fairway, throw their clubs, and stomp their feet. They never knew he was there watching them. More than any of this, he liked the apron, the collar, and the green. He had worked hard, removing small stones and large ones, filling and level-ing with fresh soil, planting what he could get to grow, cutting things to just the right length.
Though he was buzzing a little from the drugs he had taken, he was in no way distracted, and seeing his work and its results brought things into an even clearer focus. He got down on his belly and sighted across to where the apron met the green, a blade of grass tickling his nose. “One little place,” he said aloud as he studied the slopes and contours leading into the manicured sur – face of shorter grass that was the collar and then onto the green itself. He reached into his pocket and took out a new golf ball, a Club Special, and placed it just in front of his nose, sighting along it to a small pine in the rough beyond the green. The spot in question lay on that line, and he marked it before he rose. He went to the mower and took a small trowel out of a canvas bag that hung from the seat. He returned to the golf ball, where it stood up, white and shining, and sighted down the line again. Then he crawled on his stomach along the line and to the questionable spot. When he got there he saw that some miscreant weeds had stuck their arrogant spiked heads up through the body of his work, and he shook a finger at them as he rose up to his knees. “This is it for you, little nasty fuckers,” he said, and began scratching and digging, moving bits of grass, weed, and dirt with his special little trowel.