Toby Olson - Seaview

HUNTING SNAKES CAN BE DIFFICULT, BUT DOING IT IS understandable. Playing golf may be understandable too, but you understand I don’t play golf. I wouldn’t know anything about that then. I don’t really hunt snake either, you understand, but I did it a lot when I was a boy, and a little after that, and I think I can understand it pretty well. Now Indians always talk a lot, it is said, about how the white man sometimes doesn’t understand things too well, and it is true that Indians do talk like that. I know that for a fact, because I have heard them do it, and I apologize to say that I have done it too sometimes. Indians don’t understand things too sometimes, so you see we don’t get very far with this. That is okay, however, because this is not what I am going to talk about here. A couple of years ago I made a trip to Lake Havasu City to see that London Bridge they have over there. Lake Havasu City was not a city or a lake when they started in there. First they made the lake, then they made the city. Then they put that London Bridge there so they could get across the lake to the other side. They put part of the city on the other side of the lake so they could use the bridge to get to it. When I went there, I didn’t understand what was going on there. I went there because people I knew who had been there told me I wouldn’t understand it when I saw it. They were right. But it was not a waste of time going over there to it.

This is about the time I was hearing about the mound you talked about over here at the golf course. It was a while ago, and I knew somebody who worked up around here, and when he came back he told me about it. There was that Mount Rushmore and that place where that man is building that mountain into a statue of Crazy Horse. I hear he is not finished doing that yet. Anyway, he said that they made the mound bigger, big enough to put the whole Pima nation in it if they wanted to. That would be pretty big, of course, and I knew that that man that I knew made things bigger than they were when he talked. Still, I knew that it had to be pretty big for him to get it that big in his talk. That’s why we talked about Mount Rushmore and that Crazy Horse statue at the same time. One thing we understood when we talked about the mound was that we both thought that the way they had made it part of their game was a pretty fucking shitty thing to do, excuse me, but that’s exactly what we said and how we felt about it.

One day my grandmother came up while we were talking. Now this man I’m talking about was a little bit of a dummy; that is to say, he didn’t have good sense. My grandmother asked us what we were talking about, and this man piped right up. The big mound over at Tucson, he said. You mean Lake Havasu City? she asked. I poked at him, but he didn’t get it. No, no, the big burial place at the golf course over there, he said. What are you talking about? she said. What place is that? This one, he said, and he took a post card of the mound, a colored one with that big prick of a phony pole stuck in it, out of his breast pocket and showed it to her. She didn’t understand it I don’t think for a little while, but she pulled the post card away from me when I tried to get it. What is this? she said. It’s nothing, Grandma, I said, and tried to get the card away from her again, but she pulled it away again. They say that’s one of our people’s burial places over there by Tucson, that dummy said. They say that’s King Philip, some Eastern Injun, on the top there, he said. Then my grandmother got it. King Philip? she said, the Sachem? They stuck him in there? They stuck a pole in there! a pole! Then she dropped the card down on the ground, and she sat right down alongside of it. She sat there a long time, but she didn’t look at the card any more.

That night my grandmother died. It was the pole in the mound with her own King Philip from the East that got to her, I think. She was old, and she was going to die pretty soon after that time anyway. In the evening before she died we had a long talk.

I mean all of my family that was still alive then sat around the place, and we talked to my grandmother. She was very old, and I understand that before she died she had forgotten about the mound and the pole altogether. I believe that she was very happy when she died. She had a good life as those things go. This is not really a sad story that I have finished telling you. I thought of it because you mentioned that mound.

THE ADJOINING ROOM BECAME VACANT, AND HE INSISTED that Bob White take it. The Indian had slept on the patio, using Melinda’s egg-carton mattress, the night of the snake dinner. At midnight it had started to rain, and he had come in, to a corner of the room by the door, and finished the night there. In the morning it was still raining, and they had run back and forth from the car to Bob White’s new room, carrying his few belongings into it. When he was set up, he went with Allen and got cartons of coffee and fresh donuts from the restaurant and brought them back to the room, walking close to the building, under the narrow canopy, in the rain.

It was still raining up in the Sangre de Cristos where it had started. The clouds had come in black and low, and it rained as though when the clouds hit the mountain tops they had been ripped open. In the first three hours, the sand had held the water, but then it became saturated, and the remnants of old stream beds started to flow again. Before too long, before morning, the water coming off the mountains had entered the washes and streams below at the foot of the mountains, swelling them. After they had finished their coffee, by ten o’clock, some of the streets of the city were flooding. The road Bob White had taken into the hills to find javelinas was a shallow river, and the rich in the houses in the foothills were marooned. At noon, the rain slowed and settled from a flood to a steady downpour. The radio talked about isolation, closed businesses, accidents; it said it was going to rain for a while.

“I have heard it can rain here for quite a while,” Bob White said as they stood at the front glass doors, watching the sheets of rain. By one o’clock they had ordered the room. Allen had wiped each of the golf balls in the bottom of the shower stall and put them back in the gunny sack. Melinda had straightened up, discarding the remnants of the snake dinner, had made up one of the twin beds, had rested between jobs for a few minutes. Bob White had gone to his room to organize his belongings.

Allen backed the car in under the canopy, close to the door, and organized the trunk. He checked to see that it was dry, no water leaking between the seams, and he took the Tombstone Diamond matchbox and put it in a place in the wheel well where it would be easy to get at. Then he moved the car back off the

sidewalk, getting soaked when he hopped out from under the canopy to move it. At one-thirty Bob White came back, and they had a smoke together, and then Bob White excused himself and went back to his room. It was still raining. It was getting damp in the room, and the clothes he had taken off and hung on the shower rod to dry were not drying. He wore a robe, and he put the small space heater on in the bathroom to get some humidity out of the air. Melinda rested in her unmade bed, her head turned to the side, watching the rain come at a slant, keeping the glass doors opaque. By two-fifteen the only job left was the Laetrile. Allen got the works out, moved the table to the side of the bed, and tried to hang the bottle, the tubing dangling down, from the lamp fixture on the wall at the bed’s head. It would not hook up, and he finally put the bottle down between Melinda’s knees.

The insertion of the needle was quick and easy. Melinda’s small, intake of breath as the needle entered was lost in the sound of the rain. He put the strips of adhesive, crisscrossed, holding the needle to her skin with one hand, and in the other he held the bottle above her. When the strips were secure, he reached up to the bottle and adjusted the drip, his two hands, with the bottle in them, elevated. He was sitting on the bed at her hips, and before he could lower the hand he had raised to the bottle, she lifted her left arm and put her hand under the fold of his bathrobe at his chest and put the tip of her index finger into his hair and moved it until she touched his nipple. She then rotated her finger in small circles, outlining the hardening flesh. He looked down at her face; she was smiling. Lying on her back like this, gravity pulled at the skin on her cheeks, deepening the hollows in which the shadows in her pale skin rested. Her fingers moved in a twisted line through the hair on his chest, heading for the other nipple. He anticipated, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.