“Now here,” the chief was saying. “You see this?” He pointed to the withered grass that covered the mound.
“What?” Melvin said, touching himself on the forehead. He had begun to feel dizzy and could not hear very well.
“I’ll show you everything you need to know,” the chief replied. “I like a boy to ask. Shows he’s a thinker. Now, son, let me have that bucket. That little bucket of balls. Right there she is. You got her in your hand.”
Melvin handed him the bucket. Carefully, as though it might explode, the old chief set the bucket down. Then he squinted across the prairie toward a succession of tin signs spray-painted to resemble rainbows, and with a look of mild good humor he shook his club at them. Each sign had been stenciled with the distance from the tee.
“This grass,” he said, bending over a little stiffly to place a ball on a tuft, “you got to sprinkle two, three times each day, especially on extra warm days like today.” He waited, half-bent over, to see if the new man was paying attention.
“Two or three times each day,”
“That ain’t all, boy,” said the chief with some asperity.
“Especially on extra-warm days like today.”
“You don’t look clear about it. Something puzzling you? Speak up. Anything you want to know, make sure to ask.”
“I’m all right,” Melvin said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Well, now, that’s fine,” the old chief said. He placed one hand against his spine, grunted, hesitated, and at last straightened up.
Suddenly Melvin asked, “How long have you been here?”
But the CPO was examining the brassie and did not hear.
The noonday sun was burning through Melvin’s blue shirt and dungarees and he thought the top of his head was missing—he removed his cap and touched his hair. It felt curiously slick and scorched. He blinked, cautiously put on his cap, and wandered around in a circle. “Will you explain this whole thing again?” he demanded in a loud, wild voice. “The whole damn business? From the beginning to the end?”
“Of course I will, son,” remarked the kindly old chief. “You fill up a can full of water from the hydrant yonder and keep this here grass wetted down so’s she don’t burn. The sun burns up the grass. Dries her all up. You got that so far?”
“Who’s buried here?”
The chief was shocked and stepped backward. “Why, this ain’t no grave! They ain’t nobody buried here. Whatever in the world give you such an idea?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Melvin answered, putting his hands in his pockets and staring, in spite of himself, into the miles of undulating heat. “What happened to the guy who used to have this job?”
“That boy was transferred not long ago,” the chief mused, thinking back. “And he was a good boy, too. I don’t know where he went. Yes, I do, come to think of it. He went to New Orleans. They give that boy orders to some aviation unit back in New Orleans, Louisiana. Now, son, would I be standing on this grass if they was anybody buried underneath?”
Melvin shook his head.
The chief rebuked him gently. “Of course not! Pay attention to me here now.” He spat on his palms, waggled the club, and having considered the ball for several seconds with a look of extreme gravity, he took a swing at it, but missed.
“Son,” he said, “will you squunch up that grass? The ball appears to be a little hid.”
Melvin sat on his heels and squeezed and twisted the grass until it would support the ball.
“You’re a fine boy,” the chief said. “Now step aside. Out the way.”
He assumed a new stance and raised his head, the better to see over the plains. His lips trembled. His pale eyes were lusterless and cast with film. He stood that way for a long time with a gentle, benign smile. Then he remembered what he was doing. He lifted the club as high as he could and swung again. After a long silence he asked, “Which way did she go, son?”
Melvin quietly stood to one side with his thumbs hooked in his belt, unable to think of an answer.
“Must have been a right high one,” the old man muttered, shading his eyes and moving his head from one side to the other as he searched the blue heights of the sky. After a while he looked down and he located the ball on the tuft of grass. He was neither perturbed nor ashamed. He examined the ball, bending down to make certain it was not some mean illusion. Then he straightened up swiftly with a ruthless expression and swung again. The ball trickled off the tee. It oscillated a few yards through the alkaline dust.
“Fix me another!” he ordered vigorously, stamping his feet. “Thirty-six years I been in this man’s Navy! I was in China before you was on this earth! Why, son,” he said, and he was breathing heavily, “I sailed around the world! Around the entire world! I could tell things you ain’t never dreamed about. Things you ain’t never heard of. Someday I’ll tell you all I seen and done. You’re a fine young fellow.”
Half an hour later, when the pail had been emptied, the chief inquired if he understood what had happened so far, and Melvin said he did.
“All right, sonny boy, hop to her!”
“What am I supposed to do?” Melvin asked.
“Why, run out there and shag them balls!”
Melvin took another look at the prairie where the balls were winking out of sight in the heat and reappearing like planets or moth balls at the bottom of a hill. He picked up a pail and started walking toward them.
But the chief called after him, “Son? Come here! Son, you can’t do that. I told you three, four times already. You’d ought to pay close attention. I like a boy to think.”
“Can’t do what?” said Melvin, and his own voice seemed to arrive from a distance.
“Them gunny sacks, boy. You wasn’t listening. You was day-dreaming!”
“Gunny sacks?”
“It’s all right this time. Only from now on you’d ought to keep on your toes. I’ll tell you once more. Them gunny sacks is piled up behind that first sign and that’s where you squat down to wait. The officers, they’ll let you know when it’s time to shag the balls.”
“All right,” Melvin said. “Let me see if I’ve got it right. First of all, I’m out behind the sign while they’re shooting.”
“Now you got her. What else, boy?”
Melvin took a guess. The CPO had not given any instructions about the gunny sacks, but they could be there for only one purpose. “After the officers give me the word I’m supposed to collect the balls and put them in a sack? Is that right?”
“That ain’t all.”
“No?”
“You got to hustle back here on the double and fill up them there little buckets so’s the officers don’t never run shy of balls to play with. Them officers love to play ball.” The chief paused and lifted his hat to scratch his head.
“Extra buckets is inside the BOQ, right behind the door, and there’s where you stand up the clubs in the corner when the day is over. Now I raised a blister here on my thumb, otherwise I’d give you a bit more practice.” Thoughtfully he studied the new seaman. “You won’t have no trouble. Recollect to keep your head down like I told you. Don’t go sticking your head up over that sign or you’re liable to get beaned. Them balls is hard. Mighty hard. Feel of one. Knock you silly, boy.”
“I think I’ll sit down behind the two-hundred-yard marker,” said Melvin. “They couldn’t hit me that far away.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can’t? Why not?”
“I’m going to tell you just once more. Them gunny sacks, I told you four times them gunny sacks is piled behind the fifty-yard sign. You sit on them sacks to wait for the signal.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll carry them out to the two-hundred-yard marker.”
The chief was patient, but he was firm, and it was evident that he had begun to lose confidence in the capability of the new seaman. He said, “Son, now hear this. You can’t do that.”
“Well,” replied Melvin, growing angry, “why not?”<
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“Because,” the chief said, and he paused after each word, “they is not behind the two-hundred-yard sign.”
Melvin took a long time to think it over. Up to this point the Navy had taken moderately good care of him. No matter in what difficulty he found himself, no matter how illogical the situation, the Navy had presupposed it and had formulated a procedure. For this reason, a little unwillingly, he had come to trust the Navy and to believe in its omniscience. It had no sense of humor and it had no soul. Being in the Navy was rather like being in church, its attitude benevolent and its comportment mildly bizarre. Knowing it meant him no harm he had accepted the occult dogma, but now, at last, the wild roots were exposed. Still, after further reflection, he decided not to struggle. The system was too big. Certainly it would overwhelm any one man.
“You’re right, chief,” he said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
The CPO was enormously relieved that the new seaman finally comprehended the situation. Before leaving Melvin in charge of the tee he observed, in the gentle dignity of his nature, “You’ll get along fine, son. Something puzzles you, you come ask. You know where to find me.”
Melvin promised to do this, and when the elderly chief had walked away, mopping the band of his hat with his handkerchief, Melvin collected the golf balls, which had been sprayed in a broad arc, and then filled the pail and sat down on the patio to wait for his first customer. The afternoon was remarkably quiet, the spring sunshine debilitating.
When an hour passed without a sound he took off his shoes and put his feet on a table. In this position he fell asleep.
He was wakened by a hard kick on the soles of his feet. He had been dreaming, though he did not know about what, and the kick coincided with the climax of the dream; he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at three identical, incredibly tall lieutenants, whom, from the wind wrinkles around their bleak, unflinching, desert eyes, and by the flowered leather boots they wore, he judged to be Texans.
“How’d you like to go on the re-port?” one of them murmured, and Melvin, not yet fully conscious, suspecting they might be three evil brothers from his dream, nodded drowsily.
“How’d you like thet?” another said, chuckling. “How’d you like thet?”
Melvin awoke, then, and put on his shoes as fast as possible. Without bothering to tie the laces he grabbed the gunny sack and fled over the prairie to the first sign, where he huddled with his head tucked down between his knees while the balls came whistling by and soared away in space. One after another the balls came howling by, searing the wind.
“Out theah, hey! You theah! Wake up, you!” the Texans called.
Melvin sprang to his feet with the sack in both hands and saw them standing on the bunker, standing in a row like characters from a myth of the Western frontier.
“Get goin’!” one of them called.
He turned around wretchedly and for a minute, seeing no balls, thought he was still asleep—but the balls were there, far, far out on the prairie, out among the rippling telephone poles.
“Le’s go! You! Le’s move!” the Texans cried in remote, yodeling unison.
Melvin started walking, knowing it would take a long time to reach the balls, and then he began to trot and then he began to run. Out where the crop was thickest he looked toward the patio and could just make out three lank figures beneath an umbrella. They seemed to be on a level with him but he knew they must be higher because of the distance they had driven the balls; the floor of the prairie sloped down to where he was, and he saw, as he bent to pick up the balls, that some of them were still moving. The balls would stop, trickle a few inches farther, hesitate, and move on, and for a moment he was overwhelmed with panic and began gathering them frantically or they would lead him onward and downward forever. He was out so far that there were cracks in the earth, and dust, or volcanic smoke, seeped ominously upward, swirling around him so that there were times when the entire base was obscured.
After he had delivered his sack to the patio the officers sent him out again.
Not until the middle of the afternoon did they get tired of playing; then they lounged in the shade of the striped umbrellas and drank and talked while he crouched on the prairie with the sack over his head to defend himself from the sun.
Toward evening several other officers emerged from the BOQ and fired a few rounds. A breeze had come up and, occasionally, as it shifted, he was able to hear the clink of ice in the glasses, and once in a while he would hear a word or two, or faraway laughter. In spite of the chief’s advice he had taken to crouching behind the two-hundred-yard marker. This offered a number of advantages. For one thing, the balls bounced and rolled so far that even the weakest drive carried almost two hundred yards and some of them were still fairly well up in the air when they passed overhead. For another thing, he felt less confined well out on the prairie; he was no longer quite the vassal he was when close to the patio. But the principal advantage, as he had suspected from the beginning, lay in the safety of the outer ramparts. Occasionally a ball would carom off the sign where he had concealed himself and if the range was fifty or a hundred yards the concussion was paralyzing; it was as though a fire engine had run over him, or somebody had crept up and exploded a paper bag next to his ear, and the hair stood up all over his body.
He reported for work at nine o’clock each morning and spent the entire day behind a sign, or collecting balls, or sitting on the patio ready to leap to his feet when the screen door creaked. Despite the winter declination of the sun, his blue dungarees faded almost white, while his skin began to look like pemmican, and from a distance, except for his dangling arms and flat-footed Midwestern stance, he resembled a Comanche who had brazenly outfitted himself in material stolen from a settler’s wagon.
The CPO, a solicitous man, often stopped by to ask how he was getting along. Melvin would invariably say all right. Then the chief would caution him to keep his head down so as not to get hit.
One day Melvin asked, “When the war is over, chief, do you think we’ll ever have another one?”
But the CPO was staring at the tee. “Son,” he muttered with a worried frown, “I give you instructions to sprinkle this grass.”
The officers, too, had observed that the grass was dying, for which reason Melvin was put on report. However, he was in splendid physical condition from so much running and scarcely minded the additional work. He was, in fact, growing rather fond of his job. He had a great deal of time for meditation and relaxation—during the hours he spent alone on the patio he had taught himself to juggle—and, so affected was he by the magnitude of the earth, that he had been moved to draw some pictures of it: cached in a depression behind one of the signs was a pencil and a tablet, and often, while the officers took their exercise, he would be sitting with his back to them, the tablet on his knees, sketching gophers and sagebrush, or the line of the horizon.
During certain ineffably quiet afternoons when the telephone wire hummed in the desert wind, when the sagebrush bent low to the earth and tumbleweed spookily bounded over the flagstones and struck the adobe wall without a sound and bounded on and on until it was lost from sight, compelled to wander through all eternity, it seemed to him that from beyond the horizon someone was whispering to him, and he grew restless and was filled with a sweet yearning. Then it was that he went shuffling around the patio, his arms swaying from side to side, pausing now and then to cock his head to the unutterable tidings of he knew not what, until, unable to remain, he sprang over the wall and slunk away, looking across his shoulder with a guilty expression in which there was, yet, the hint of a crafty grin, and went trotting over the dust-packed primeval earth with his head lifted, eagerly sniffing the wind. There were times when he would lope a mile or more across the plains with the conviction that he would never stop, and he considered the idea of subsisting on wildlife, for he was sure that before long he could learn to catch gophers and jackrabbits and would locate a water hole. More than anything else he lik
ed to squat on a ridge about a mile southwest of the buildings and passionately think over his life while studying the horizon. Three years or so he had been in service—time was less meaningful now and he had difficulty remembering. But such cogitation soon exhausted him; mildly addled, as though he had been smacked on the nose with a folded newspaper, he would stretch, get to his feet, stiff-legged, and trot a little farther.
In the enlisted men’s barracks whenever he listened to a news broadcast, or read a paper, he half-expected to come across the names of his friends. When the American forces attacked Iwo Jima he wondered if Sam Horne had been there in a Corsair, or if Nick McCampbell had come hurtling down like an avenging monkey on Mount Suribachi. And once, after calculating the time differential, he was struck by the fact that General Schmidt’s Marines had been running across the beach at Iwo at the precise instant he himself was reporting for duty on the golf tee. He offered up this information to the man who bunked above him, a hulking pock-marked half-breed named Dawes; but Dawes, who was picking his teeth, did not respond.
Letters he received from his father in Kansas City grew longer and more ebullient with each assault on the Axis, and shortly after the twenty-seventh of April, when news was radioed that the Russian and American armies had joined on the bank of the Elbe northwest of Dresden, he received a letter which so extolled not only the contribution of the Russians to the Allied cause but the excellence of virtually everything Russian, that he became somewhat uncomfortable and sought to recall if it had always been this way, or if, a few years previous, his father had been hostile to Russia. But he could not be certain; he had been so young at the time, and had not paid much attention.
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