Toby Olson - Seaview

SHE WAS SHAPING THE FOIL, EACH PIECE WITH THE edges slightly turned up to catch the oil. He was cutting beside her. She was getting a little tired from standing. She reached a little too quickly for one of the bags on the ice; she wanted to measure the snake against the foil containers. She felt a little dizzy from the motion. There was some oil on her hands, and the bag slipped out of them and fell to the floor. He put his knife on the counter and reached down at her feet to pick it up. Her hand touched his shoulder lightly for balance.

“Hell, that snake is nuts with that slipping,” she said.

He came up with the bag, put it back on the ice, then turned and smiled at her. They both laughed lightly, and she put her hand up on his shoulder and leaned a little against him. He reached down and picked her up and carried her to the bed.

He placed her gently on it and put a pillow against the headboard. Then he took her under her arms and lifted her to a half-sitting position.

“Just have to rest a little,” she said.

“You rest a little, while I finish up with the cutting,” he said. “Then we can get to work with the good stuff.” She nodded weakly as he looked down at her. Then he turned and walked back to the counter.

Even before they got to the tenth he was beginning to feel a little down about the situation. Earlier he might have considered the hot dog as someone to deal with, but Lou’s desperateness, exacerbated now by the difficulty he would have to face in betting with Steve at a game of skill, made him feel something for the younger man. As for Frankie, he had come to like him. Whatever the density of his tie to Steve, he seemed to be his own man. He might be a little freed by the fact that he was simply not as good at golf as Steve was and could, therefore, go all out without worrying about winning big. But more important than that, while he was respectful he was not a panderer, and Allen liked him for his apparent clarity in the relationship. Among other things, Steve was a prick, he thought. The meanest thing about him was that he showed his power but acted as if he were above using it on someone as inconsequential as Lou. He let him, the outsider, know that he could step on either of these two others anytime he wanted to do it. He could step on Allen too, but he liked better to show him what his power was all about.

The tenth was a long par four with a dog-leg right; a stand of thick, beautiful oaks at the knee obscured sight to the green. A man-made stream ran along the right rough, starting at the tee and opening and cutting into the fairway about two hundred yards out, short of the bend. The stream formed a small pond there, complete with lilies. There was some fairway remaining to the left of the pond, about fifty feet of it, guarded by a long, lateral trap at the edge of the left rough. It was the number-one hole on the course. Its difficulties were these. If you played up short of the pond too far to the right, you would have a blind shot over the oaks to the green. That shot was sufficiently long from there that it would be hard to clear the trees and have enough left to get to the pin. On the other hand, if you played to the left, between the pond and the trap, you would have to hit a very controlled shot that was quite long; from the tee, that fifty-foot space was very narrow looking. If you got it close to the trap and a little short, you could see the green; close to the pond and short, you might still be blinded. Halfway between the two would be good, if the shot were long enough.

The hole was a four-hundred-and-seventy-five-yard par four; the fairway to the dog leg beyond the pond was slightly uphill; the green was small and elevated, and the rough started thick, very close in behind it. Regardless of pin placement, it was one hell of a golf hole. He almost laughed at the absurdity of finding it on this course. He wondered who in the hell had designed and built it, who kept its foreign growths in such good shape here in the desert. He did not figure to par it. He felt very ready to play it.

The entrance of a new element, one that did a lot for Allen’s spirits, occurred with the first two hits. Steve automatically took the honors, and Lou followed him. Steve was smiling faintly as he teed up at the blues. He took a practice swing and then looked back at the three of them, still smiling, before he hit.

His drive was the longest he had hit that day. He had a deeper backswing, and he clicked through the ball with force.

The drive must have been at least two hundred yards on the fly. It dropped on the far side of the pond, coming to rest about twenty yards beyond it. Lou was next. His ball was a little higher than Steve’s, but it was longer. It had a very slight tail on it, and it carried a good two hundred and fifty yards, stopping a couple of feet from where it hit. It finished well beyond Steve’s ball, in the middle of the fairway, in clear and unobscured sight of the green. Frankie seemed a little nervous, and he took his time getting set. He lined up a little to the left, and he hit his ball where he aimed it, playing for the far left of the fairway. The ball wound up short of the trap, with a very long but fairly open shot to the green. Then it was Allen’s turn.

He knew now that they were hustling him. This did a lot for him. It cut him free of his concern for Lou; it allowed him to begin to dislike Steve in a very comfortable and unambivalent way. The fact that they were as good as they were helped also. It would be difficult to beat them, and that warmed him. He felt that he had two very distinct advantages over them now. The first was that it had been they who had abandoned golf as a sport of individual skill. They were going to try to play him as a team. That would hurt them in two ways. It would hurt them, simply, because golf is not a team sport, and he knew that the diffusion of attention that came from such thinking would take an edge off. It would also hurt them because it would introduce more material from their relationship into the game. A lot would be dragged in, and some of it would have to get in their way.

The second advantage he had, had to do with money.

For them, for Steve at least, the money was no more than a kind of whip or a term of humiliation. He was sure Steve did not care about the money, but he was also sure that what the money represented was a very serious thing having to do with self-esteem, which was much harder to lose and much harder to win also. For him, on the other hand, the money was very important. If he won it, he would be pleased to have it. He needed it; it would buy things that he needed. But if he lost it, and he certainly did not want to lose it, it would be no more than the money he was losing. He could imagine himself going back without it; he would be sad about it, but that was all.

“That was a wonderful shot,” he spoke softly to Lou, who stood a few feet from him. Steve was sitting in the cart, ready to go, while Frankie was getting ready to hit.

“You think so?” Lou said, a new coldness in his voice. Allen ignored the tone and pressed it a little, as a start.

“A really wonderful shot!” He kept his tone warm and open, his eyes clear.

“Right. Thanks,” Lou said. He was uncertain about how to take the statement. He would think about that a little. Allen was not sure yet how he might work on Steve, if it became necessary. He thought he would give it some time.

When he got up to hit, he was feeling very loose and good. He knew that after a while he would lock into the game in the way he liked, and the anticipation was very nice. He also liked very much to play a golf course for the first time. Whenever he played a new course, he was careful not to study the upcoming holes too carefully, check the map out too much. There were things he might have articulated to himself about this, but they were so close to the bone that there were no good words for them. Very practically, in this case especially, ignoring the map and the distances spelled out would help him to concentrate not on pictures and symbols but on the tangibles.