by Toby Olson
The father spoke to the son. The mother handled something that the daughter had brought to her from the ground. It was all very tight and exclusionary, but Melinda knew that were she to catch any one of them alone, and had enough time to watch, things of herself would occur in action or become manifest in repose. And knowing this with such certainty that brought her comfort, she quit both the fantasy and the knowledge and came back firmly to the place she was sitting. She released the bench. She touched Bob White on the knee.
“What do you say, time to get back to Allen?”
“I do suppose it’s about that time,” he said. And he got up again and helped her to her feet. She was very light, and her eyes were energetic and crystal clear, but her legs were weak and she felt pain in her stomach when she rose and had to slump and lean against him. And then they walked, with arms holding arms and bodies brushing and touching, across the low meadow toward the wine cathedral.
The father and mother of the family at the redwood table saw them going. They did not speak to each other about it.
The mother’s hand moved back and forth over the ripples in the grain of the tabletop. Both of them saw that the man was quite a bit older than the woman, that he was possibly a Mexican or something else foreign, and that she was white though dark-skinned. They thought they were lovers and ordinarily would have had bad feelings about this. But there was something in the way the man and woman walked and touched against each other that they could not find it in themselves to feel anger or disapproval. They both liked looking at the backs of their bodies as they strolled away.
IT WAS NOT SO MUCH THE SHOT ITSELF, A DIFFICULT fade around a stand of trees, that gave him pleasure as the realization which came to him when he considered it and then got ready to hit. It was a strange pleasure, not unmixed with a little growing pain. He had been thinking of Melinda all through the round. There had been no gambling possible. He was feeling a little guilty about leaving her with Bob White, and though he tried to chalk it up to conventional husband’s golf-playing guilt, he knew how pathetic his attempt was and that that was not it at all. It had more to do with privateness, the intensity of this exclusionary involvement. It may have been the sight of the goofy wishing well in the middle of the fairway that he kept catching out of the corner of his eye as he considered his shot. Whatever it was, a sense of the silliness of playing golf came to him. Why don’t I just drive this fucker off into the trees on the other side and be done with it, he thought as he sighted around the bend. Maybe I could chip it into that wishing well and forget it. But the pleasure came in knowing that he probably could get it in the well, could probably knock it just where he wanted it to go in the trees, and that he had a very good possibility of getting it to the green too. He could fail at all three, of course, and of course that was of essential importance. What enriched the pleasure was the thought that he could manage to say fuck it to his other involvements too. He could just walk away and be done with that matrix as well.
This realization of choice had not occurred to him before, and he saw as he thought of it how obsessive and locked in he must have been not to have thought of it. He learned a little something about himself, and once past the learning he felt very loose and what he might have called free. The shot itself seemed almost perfunctory, though it really wasn’t. It was the result of the thoughts that passed through him before he hit it that gave him room for the kind of intensity he needed to hit it correctly.
He used his three-wood, altered his stance slightly, and sent it around the trees, low and very tight and swift. It carried the trap and the flagstick, hit against the slight upslope of the back of the green, bit in, trickled up, and stopped about ten yards from the hole. The two men with him applauded and yelled loudly. He bowed to them and tipped his cap. Somewhere deep in him he realized the pathetic nature of the thing. He wanted very badly to get back to Melinda, and the want felt very good to him. When he got to the green, he sank his rather long, downhill putt for an eagle.
THEY GOT TO THE CAPE AROUND NOON AND HEADED DOWN the highway that ran along its center. They could see neither the bay nor the ocean from the road, but they could smell the salt in the air and taste it, and they didn’t feel landlocked. Melinda sat in the corner of the backseat and looked out of the window at the familiarity of trees and shrubs. Bob White sat at the door in front, looking at the Cape map, making provisional markings on it with a pencil. He touched the point of the pencil to his tongue often before making his marks. He was wearing glasses, and neither Allen nor Melinda remembered seeing him wear them before. When they got down the Cape to Seaview, Melinda said, “Here we are.” She said it almost inaudibly, but both of the men heard her and did not speak.
“If you’ll take the next road off to the left there, that would be good,” she said. Allen took the road, slowed down considerably, and waited for Melinda to give further directions. She told him to just keep going, and then, when they came to it, she told him to make a sharp left. They entered a curving blacktop road that ran between fairly high pines. After about a half-mile, the road climbed up out of the small pine forest and continued along the crest of a low hill. The land now was very open and rolling, and they could see the bay about two miles away over gradually lowering moors. The road ran between houses on both sides. The houses were well apart, set on parcels of land each more than an acre in size.
“Over there,” she said, and Allen pulled up across from a simple white house with green shutters and a split-rail fence running in front of it. There was no life apparent through the windows, but they could see the edge of a children’s metal swing set in the backyard. The yard in front was very well kept, almost meticulous in its rows of slate walks and planted beach roses, day lilies, and heather. The clapboard on the front of the house looked freshly painted, and the roof had been recently shingled with new cedar shakes.
“Looks very well kept,” Melinda whispered from her place in the backseat.
“It does that,” Allen answered.
“It’s a beautiful house,” Bob White said, “a very good place for a young girl to grow to be a woman. Something nice to remember and think about.”
“Oh, it was all right, I guess, really not bad at all,” Melinda said, and then after a few moments, “I guess we can go now.”
“But look at that honeysuckle blooming and that juniper over there. Been around for a while I’d guess,” Bob White said.
“Yes, it was there,” Melinda said after a moment. And they sat in the car across from the house for a few more minutes.
“Guess it’s time to go?” Melinda said after a time.
“It’s time,” Bob White said, and Allen pulled slowly away, Melinda turning in the backseat, watching the house recede, then disappear as the car sloped down again and entered another small forest.
HE CAME UP AND SAT BACK IN HIS CHAIR WHEN HE WAS finished packing. The duffle was a small, tight bundle at his feet, the mouth rolled in and the cloth handle on top. They both had watched his economical movements and his sureness about the placement of things, and they had watched with an intensity that neither of them was aware of, so that the packing seemed to take a very long time, broken into such small increments, though he had accomplished it in only a few minutes. Allen felt there was something to be said now that he had finished and was ready to go, but Melinda did not have such a feeling.
“Well, time to go,” Bob White said, and he stood up and took his time looking over at both of them. Melinda smiled at him and nodded, and Allen took a step toward him, lifted his hand, and spoke as he took Bob White’s hand.
“Well, thanks for the company, the snake dinner, and the rest of it,” he said, and he shook Bob White’s hand for a long time, not wanting to let it go, but he did when Bob White released him. The Indian walked over to the motel room’s sliding doors, reached behind the wisps of curtain, and pushed one of the panels aside. He turned back to them and smiled before stepping out.
“It has been my pleasure,” he said. “You h
ave my letter? I appreciate your kindness, and I say good-by now.” Melinda smiled, lifting her body from the bathroom doorframe where she had been leaning.
He stepped behind the veil of the thin curtain, and they could see his shadow, his arm coming up, as he slid the glass door closed again. They heard him crunching across the gravel as he left them, and then they were alone again and together. They were silent, and they didn’t speak to each other for a long time. They both knew that the nature of the closure would take a while. They had a while, and they silently agreed to let it happen in its own good time.
MY DEAR MELINDA & ALLEN,
Now that I have written and look back to correct I see that I have spoken more than I had intended. There are things we have to shake ourselves free of in time. Life is one of them, fancy talk is another. Perhaps it is in the body only that we come to live. Closing in on death and other intensities is where we can best do it. The search for lost things is hindered by routine habits, and that is why it is so difficult to find them. This last sentence is not mine. I read it somewhere, but I have come to see in the words of it the kind of message that I would presume to send you as I am leaving. Let the routines and forms go. Live in the force of the habits clear through to the other side of them. You’d want of an Indian that he say profound and often mysterious things, but this is not always possible now, and it never was. Melinda, let me be the first to welcome you home with words. Allen, I bless your skill and the translation of its habits when necessary. I do not give you the history of my name now, after my going, but as a gift, I give you the two song strokes of my namesake:
Bob White
THE SAND GRAINS SEPARATED AS THEY FELL, BECOMING a light shower and then individual and harmless bits that came to rest only a few feet from the edge in the side of the escarpment below Richard’s feet. The wood stopped its vibration against the fabric of his shoulder shortly after he had kicked it. He fingered the coin medallion on his chest, feeling the individual embossments of the rods and, faintly, the wires. He saw the firelight flicker out down the beach below him.
On Monday he had been a good boy, pressing the barrel of the pistol into her forehead between her eyes as he rammed her. He had told her it was loaded, knowing she would think that part of the snuff-movie game and believe it was not loaded. He had put the hollow points into it while she was in the bathroom in the motel, and he had taken the safety off. He had known that there would be little passion in him and that he would not lose control and pull the trigger, blowing her head open when she came. She had liked it, he thought, and he had been a good boy in letting her have it, not tainting it with irony or other kinds of put-downs that she would not be able to understand but would feel were present and be brought down by. Tuesday he had struck her viciously in the small of her back, making sure that the sharp surface of the ring he was wearing bit into her flesh as he came into her from behind. He did this to make up for Monday when, after he had banged her, she had said, “That was good, Daddy! You were a good boy.” On Wednesday they made it to the Cape. He got them a place in a modern motel on the highway, a little below the town of Seaview.
He turned once in a circle, very slowly, before he left the cliff. He could see the silver in the water by starlight below him, but the light was dim and the silver flashed out very hard and stationary, as if knifeblades turned to catch the light. Down the cliff to his right there were two kinds of darkness. There were the holes in the night where the cliff turned and jutted, and there was the darkness of ragged growth at the cliff’s edge. Turning to the course, the jagged places became spotty. He could distinguish the rolling slopes that were the fairways. Coming around he saw the thick shaft of the lighthouse. He started then along the path toward it, his medallion swinging slightly on his neck and stuttering against his chest. When he got to the blacktop of the small parking lot, he walked to the driver’s side of the car, opened the door, and slid in. She was pressed into the wedge where the seat met the doorframe on the other side.
“Hey, Gerry, what’s happening?” he said as he got in. He said it quietly, pinning her with a slightly ominous edge in his voice, as if she had somehow been a disappointment to him while he was gone and there would be dues to pay because of that.
“Nothing, Daddy, just sitting here thinking.”
“Thinking, huh. It’s getting to be time,” he said as he stuck the key in the ignition and twisted it, starting the car.
“Hey, good Daddy, I’ve been waiting for the right time,” she said, but he thought she didn’t understand what he was referring to and thought it was sex. He let it go, feeling what for him was a kind of benevolence in not taking her up on her mistake.
They drove out of the parking lot and down the blacktop road past the small clubhouse on the right. The yellow night light at the clubhouse door was burning, and it shone enough to illuminate the dark figures of pine trees and the edge of the green beyond them. He caught a glimpse of the ripple of the flag on the flagstick as they passed. When they got to the end of the road, they turned right and headed back toward the mid-Cape highway. The road that took them there was guarded from the openness of the course and the sea beyond it by high trees and brush.
It could have been a road in another part of the country entirely, and as such it seemed of little consequence to Seaview Links and its fortunes.
THE TWO OF THEM SAT ON THE SAND OF THE WINTER berm below the lighthouse, and up the beach and away from it. It was not really cold there, but they both felt a little chill and pulled their blankets around their shoulders, gathering themselves in tight around the small fire they had built with driftwood. The stars seemed very hard in the sky, the partial moon a dark, burnished yellow and not giving off much light. Frank Bumpus talked, and Bob White listened. At times Bob White asked questions about particular people or the nature of local political affiliations. He jotted things down in a small notebook, holding it close to the fire when he wrote. Then he talked for a while, and Frank Bumpus listened, interjecting information when necessary. They tried hard to admire the beauty of the night on the beach and the sounds and look of the waves when they curled and flashed phosphorous, but they continued to feel a little cold and their admiration never really got a good start.
After a while, seeing that there was not much use in staying there, they stirred the fire in sand, rolled their blankets and, staying in close to the cliff, headed under the lighthouse and down the beach to the cut that would take them up the dunes to Frank Bumpus’s house. When they got there, they drank tea and talked a little more by candlelight. Frank Bumpus got some Courvoisier and a couple of Swiss cigars out of the cupboard when their tea was gone. They drank and smoked and talked about strategy and implementation. Then they talked some about Thoreau, and Frank Bumpus spoke about the Seaview Historical Museum, where the Pamet documents were on display, suggesting they go there tomorrow and have a look at them. He said he would also show Bob White the place of the underground river that had been the people’s watering place. Bob White spoke of the Indian school he knew about where the teacher, herself a Pima, had taught the students by having them assemble the skeleton of a deer from the bones brought from various places. The students were asked to do it without the aid of books or foreknowledge about human or animal anatomy. It was a good way for them to learn about skeletal structure, he said. He said that it may be that it is a good way to learn about other things as well. They talked on for a little while, finishing their brandy and cigars. When they were done, it was one o’clock in the morning, and they went to bed.
Gerry
I LEARNED WHIPPING AND WHAT IT COULD BE ABOUT when it was tender. And I was good at it and could teach it too. It was a way of cleaning up before lying down, properly, with a woman. And then I taught it to him, and he twisted it. I liked it that way too at first, but coming out was like going into a dream—he had so much scag and blow for me—and I didn’t see he turned it to shame and guilt. You grow too old for those things after a while. It’s a look back into childhood,
and there comes a time to get rid of that. Forcing and saying the words, faking and pretending, don’t really make it happen.
I never hit Annie very hard, just enough to sting her, to wake her up, and I talked to her all the time that I did it. The talk was about how the men, though they never really beat her, might as well have been doing the same thing, because they wore her mind down, and I told her she needed a change of attitude.
Before Annie got sick and died in the joint, the whipping stopped, and we had a good two months together before they took her off to the infirmary. We used to lie in bed facing each other, just the nipples on our breasts and the tips of our toes touching. I’d run the end of my tongue over her lips then, and we would put our hands on the curves above each other’s hips. We didn’t use any devices that reminded us of men, nor did we touch each other in manly ways. I kissed her eyes, and she kissed mine. I bit her ear lobes gently. I took quiet handfuls of her soft flesh. She kissed the little cups behind my knees. We rubbed our mounds together and had sweet names for them. We were never violent or aggressive, nor did we order each other to do things. I gave her a swatch of fabric from the inside of the leg of an old pair of jeans of mine. She gave me a metal comb. I took her to the window to see the birds in the high trees beyond the walls. She told me stories about dreams of flying. I read her Virginia Woolf and Kate Chopin. I gave her cigarettes. I liked the way she sighed when she saw the birds sit on the walls under the trees. She gave me a small purse that she made out of cigarette wrappers. She said she liked the way I was thin and graceful when I walked. I gave her a green marking pencil. She liked to draw pictures of natural objects on my stomach. I liked the way she hummed to herself in the morning, washing up. We painted each other’s toenails with glitter.