by Toby Olson
“You get in front,” he said. He got her there, and put his hand in the middle of her back, his arm out stiff. He used his three-iron as an awkward staff, and he pushed what strength he could into her, leaning forward, so that she could make it uphill. They went in tight little zigs and zags in order to cut down the steepness of the incline. They kept their heads down in their effort. Allen glanced up occasionally in order to steer them. With less effort and time spent than he had anticipated, they came to the wet, stone base of the small tower.
RICHARD’S INTENTION WAS TO KILL HIM ON THE EIGHTH green. He had seen that the eighth was set no more than a hundred feet from the public road that ran parallel to the high, jagged cliff, the golf course between it and the sea. The eighth was also set down in a shallow valley protected from wind, and the rough that ran from behind the green and continued all the way to the road was almost a forest. The pines in it were high and straight and very dense, and they started very close to the green’s back, just beyond the sand trap behind it. He had seen him and his wife and the other three at the first tee through his binoculars, from where he stood against the car at the lighthouse parking lot, and he figured he had close to two hours, safely an hour and a half. He would get Gerry and something to eat, then he would come back and wait for them. The road to the lighthouse was crowded with walkers heading for the beach, and it had taken him a while to get past the clubhouse and away from the course.
When he got back to their motel room, Gerry had their things packed and ready in the way he had told her to. He told her to get in the car, and he took her to a drive-in on the highway where they got some food. On the way he told her that she was to keep quiet and stay in the car and that, if she was good, he would find a good way later of giving her something she would like. When he got to the road that headed to the golf course, an hour and a quarter had passed, and as he came to the turn toward the lighthouse, he could see something was going on and that his plans might have to change.
He passed a policeman standing beside a motorcycle near the place where he had intended to enter the pines on foot. Up ahead, he saw a cruiser blocking the mouth of the lighthouse road. Some people were standing around on the road, but the land sloped up from there, and little could be seen in the direction of the course and the sea. He slowed but did not stop, passing the lighthouse cutoff.
“What’s happening, Richard?” she said in the seat by the door.
“Just shut up and sit there,” he said.
He continued along, west of the course, until he passed the entrance of a campground and came to the road that moved off left, at an angle, to the Air Force Station, and then he stopped the car. He could see that the Air Force road ran along the downcoast edge of the golf course. Above the ascending road, up and to the right of it, he could see the three white domes. To the left, and also well up and toward the sea, he saw the parapet of the stone tower. There was a sign, marked government property, authorized vehicles only, at the mouth of the road, and a short way up it, at a turn, he could see the nose of a green military truck sticking out. Two men in uniform, with rifles in their hands, stood in front of the truck. He turned the car around and went back to the campground. When he got there, he parked in front of a small building near the road. The building was white cinder block, and it had a sign above the door, marked office. He went in. Gerry stayed in the car. In a few minutes he came out with a paper in his hand and a canvas packet under his arm. He got into the car and checked the simple numbered map on the paper. Then he drove around the building and entered the open meadow behind it.
There were a number of campers and tents, and as he entered the central dirt carpath that ran down the middle between them, he saw short sticks with numbers on them and the spokes of driving paths moving off to both sides. He turned at the second spoke, driving very slowly; when he came to number forty-three he stopped the car and got out.
The meadow was about three hundred yards deep, from the road to the hill that started up toward the golf course. He could see there were a good number of men in military dress lining the perimeter between the meadow and the course. Some of them had weapons slung over their shoulders, and some had sidearms. A number of the campers were milling around along the line, talking and looking up the hill behind it. There was smoke rising in the air in places from beyond the hill. The rain and the uniform and heavy cloud cover had begun to move off. It was still cloudy, but there was some hazy sun in places brightening the day a bit. He turned and looked over to the right and behind him. There was a low white building, the back of which came up close to the pines that covered the hill running between the campground and the Air Force Station road. The sign on the front of the building read: showers/men.
He told Gerry to get out of the car and help him. The tent was small, a one-man pup, and they got it up quickly. They took what they could find out of the trunk of the car, making the camp appear serious. Then he told her to get back in the car and wait. He told her she could get in the tent when she wanted to, but that the car and the tent were her only two places. He smiled at her, tightlipped, giving her the rules. The tent was very small and uninviting. He got his blue robe out of his suitcase and his shaving kit. Then he got in the tent, took off his shoes and socks and rolled them in the towel he had with him. He rolled his pants to the knee. When he was ready, he got out of the tent and headed over to the white building in his robe. When he got in, he checked the stalls to see no one inside of them. The place was empty, and he figured they were all outside, checking the military action. He went to the screened window at the back of the building, raised it, and with the heels of both hands knocked the screen out. He put his shoes and socks on and made a bundle of his robe and towel and shaving kit. Then he got through the window, dropped to the ground, and stepped into the pines.
He headed up through the trees in the direction of the sea, passing to the right of the line of Air Force men. It took him a good ten minutes to reach the crest of the ridge. When he got there he looked down and saw the second fairway. He could see the green and the dark object on it, though he could not identify it. He saw the golf cart turned on its side to the right of the green in the low rough. Above him, up the ridge in the pines to his right, he could see the top of the stone tower. He took his binoculars out of his shaving kit and trained them on it. He saw Allen, his head and shoulders visible, at the parapet, standing still and looking out. Allen seemed to be alone, his wife nowhere in evidence. He dropped his kit and towel and robe in the brush. He checked his pistol and shoved it down in his belt. Then he headed up and along the ridge. He was starting to buzz a little, and he would have liked to hurry. But the pines were thick, forcing a slow pace. He figured it would take him a good twenty minutes to get there.
THEY STRUGGLED TOGETHER UP THE ENCLOSED SPIRAL. He stayed to the outside of her and pressed his hand on the cold stone for support, his bag scraping against the curve as they ascended. She wasn’t limp, but she was staggering, and it was little more than his body on one side and the inner wall on the other that she felt was keeping her up. She knew it certainly wasn’t her breath, because she couldn’t get much of it, and she was trying to mask her wheezing, keep it from bothering him, and that too took its effort. It took them a long time, but the tower was under forty feet high, and when they finished climbing, she had something left.
They came out into the cool of the late afternoon air, and she found that if she leaned back against the tower’s upper core she could stand. He let her do it, slipping the bag from his shoulder, leaning it against the notched parapet. It was still heavily overcast, but it had stopped raining, and even as he watched the cloud cover again, the sky began to clear, and some sun came through, and there were soft shadows on the stone. He looked at her, and they both managed parts of smiles. He stood at the parapet that came to the level of his lower chest and looked away from her and out. He had expected the sight line to be better than it was. He could see the whole of the upper green on top of the hill over which the
gliders had come, but he could not see much farther. Off to the right, and higher still, he could see the sixth tee and the tall brush at the sea’s edge that came up to it. There were two hand carts in front of the tee and what looked like a couple of golf bags lying on it. Smoke was rising in places across the course, from sources beyond his vision. There were no longer any sounds of the kind they had heard earlier. He could just see the edge of the green below him and the far edge of the fairway running back from it. He could not see the cart or the gliders from where he was.
He turned back from the notched outer wall and walked to where she was leaning against the inner core and pressed against it beside her. Their shoulders touched, and he felt a little stab where he’d been hit when his forearm brushed her, but he did not move it away, and he put his hand down and took her hand.
“It’s kind of like we’re little people on top of a rook from a chess set,” he said, and she laughed halfheartedly in agreement. His other hand came up and touched her cheek and then came down again. They stood, leaning and looking over at the wall in front of them. The sun brightened the notches in some places. It was as if they were waiting for something. She had been waiting for her breath to come back, and it did. He had no idea what he might be waiting for. They continued to stand there, each gathering strength and as long as they had that task, their postures didn’t seem awkward to them, but after a while his mind began to fidget, and he felt he had expectations. They were here now. They had done things. They could even smell the sea. They were so close to it, they could walk over to it were the circumstances other than they were. What had happened down below had not thrown either of them. They had been so much in it that they had not had space to think about it, but now they had that space and time.
She felt her illness coming back to her, unsullied again, and she sensed she had the final closure back, contained in her body, and she had no need for talk, explanations, or plans. He had none of what she had, and he felt odd and restless and uncomfortable. He would have talked, and he did feel that talking would be very useful to him, and he tried hard to think of something to say, but he could not think of a single thing. Half-ideas formed in his head, but when he tried to move them into words they seemed to dissolve and go away. She knew that when he had touched her cheek fleetingly a moment before, that had been it, about all she would get, not near enough, but all.
She did not exactly wonder why the young boy messenger had to die so violently down there. She needed nothing in the way of philosophical explanation of such things and never had. But he was so sweet and harmless, she thought, the place of his death so isolate from human concern, and she did think that it would have been good to note the circumstances through tender talk. Who else was left to give some proper weight to his passing but the two of them here? She said a silent prayer of sorts for the boy, something outside her own concerns and Allen’s as well, something she realized was in all ways beyond him as a possible thing to do. When she was finished, she thought to help him out, and she said:
“Help me to sit down by the wall there, please.”
He took her arm and helped her over to the wall and squatted down as she lowered herself. Then he got up and got his golf bag and brought it over to her. When he moved it, he felt something about its weight, and then he remebered the gun and the binoculars he had put in the zipper pouch. He handed the bag down to her so she could use it as an awkward pillow, and she took hold of it, propping it up beside her against the outer wall, and leaned against it. The smell of its leather was familiar and almost human. He reached in and pulled his four-iron by the head out of the bag’s mouth, and then he squatted beside it and got a handful of Rams out of the small zipper compartment and stood up.
“The gun and the binoculars are in the pouch,” he said. “I guess I better do something, better go over there and see what’s up, get us some help out of here, okay? Will you be okay?”
“Okay, right,” she said. “I’ll be here. Be careful.”
“Okay,” he said, and he seemed ready to speak again, to say something more extended, but the air came out of his mouth without any words in it except, “Bye-bye.” He raised his hand and waved his fingers at her, and she raised her own hand and waved in the same way back at him. He turned then and went to the opening in the core, and then he started down the spiral.
SHE APPRECIATED THE SOFT BREEZE THAT CAME IN through the half-open window on the other side. She was where he had told her to stay, pressed in the wedge between seat and door, her right leg up and stretched out on the seat. Her arm lay in her lap, and the breeze cooled the sunburn she had gotten from having it on the window sill as they were driving cross country. She could see much of the staggered line of uniformed men at the edge of the campground. She watched them, but they did nothing of interest. After the group of Indians came down the hill from the golf course and one of them had spoken with one of the uniformed men, she watched as some of the guards left and the Indians took their places. The Indians wore various kinds of headdresses and buckskin shirts, but from the waist down they were dressed in jeans and work pants and tennis shoes. They looked, even in their rough wear, more interesting than the uniformed men, more various in their gracefulness in standing. She watched to see if they did anything she could spend time with, but they, like the military men, did very little.
She knew she was not biding her time any longer. It was just that she felt inert right then, and the thing she would soon do would get done when she felt like doing it. It was not an important thing at all for her. It was just to make a formal ending. She was already done in the way she had to be, and after she went and got in the tent, she would just do what she wanted to do.
It was no specific event. He had done nothing out of the ordinary, and she could not really even think of it as a slow accumulation of things. It was not her birthday, though she had been thinking recently of its passing a month ago, and she had been thinking of Annie, too, but not in any serious way. All she knew was that when she had awakened in the bed in the motel that morning, she had heard some birds singing outside; she had listened to their clear songs, and then she knew that she would be going.
She sat for a little while longer, and then she swung her leg down, off the seat and turned in it and opened the door and got out of the car. She walked around the car and went to the tent, where he had told her, with that smile of his, she could also sit if she felt like it. It was not that she felt like it, but that she wanted to feel this last limitation to see if it would be like she thought it would be. She got in the tent and sat down in the cramped space. The canvas was catching the sun that had come through the clouds, diffusing it, and there was a golden glow inside the tent. She couldn’t sit straight up without hitting her head on the top, and she sat hunched over. She could feel just how foolish it was to sit there, and she thought he would think she would try it in the way she was doing now, but that he would think she would feel some pleasure when she did it. It did feel nice, in its way; the light was fine, but what she felt had nothing to do with rules. She sighed, then opened up the flap of the tent, pushing the slit open. She pushed up from her haunches and crawled out through the slit, head first, turning her shoulders slightly, and got to her feet and stretched her body.
She went back to the trunk of the car, opened it, and got her suitcase out of it. It was a small canvas case and very light, and she lifted it easily. She didn’t close the trunk. Then she went back to the passenger side of the car, put her suitcase on the ground, and got in. She reached up to the rearview mirror and took hold of the medallion that hung down on its thick chain and slipped the chain from around the mirror, taking the medallion down. It was the one he usually wore, but it belonged to her. She held it in the palm of her hand and jiggled it. It was heavy and solid, and she could feel the embossed complex of rods and wires with her fingers. Then she took the chain in both hands and slipped her head through the opening, putting the medallion on.
She got out of the car and picked up her
suitcase from the ground. As she bent to lift it, the medallion swung slowly at the end of its chain. When she rose up, she heard the two sharp notes of a bobwhite. They came from the hillside to her right and were very loud; she could tell the bird was close. They seemed to cut through what overcast was left and be part of the quality of the coming sunlight. She turned away then, from the direction of the sea, and leaving the tent and the campground, she began her walk to the highway.
RICHARD WAS NO MORE THAN A HUNDRED YARDS FROM the tower when he saw Allen materialize in the dark, vacant space of the cutstone opening that was the doorway. He was a little away from cover and at a level with the base of the tower, and when Allen stopped in the frame, a golf club in one hand across his chest, a fat bulge in the bottom of his left pocket, Richard thought he was looking directly at him and had an urge to jerk the gun from his belt, raise it, and fire. But then Allen was gone, having turned out of the opening, moving quickly to his right and trotting into the pines behind the tower. In a moment, Richard could no longer see him. He stood in his tracks, felt he wanted to enter the dark doorway, made his decision quickly, and started to run toward the tower. When he got to it, he cut around it as Allen had done and started after him. The growth was thick, and there was some sunlight in it, but he knew nothing about tracking and could not read signs, so he guessed at the direction Allen had taken, and moving in a slight crouch, though it was not necessary—the pine growth was higher than a man—he stayed on his level on the ridge and headed in the direction of the sea.