Toby Olson - Seaview

They stood for a long time, under the jaw, somehow in the whale’s presence, not as a live whale but one so single-minded in its power that the marrow in the bone retained a force beyond its long-ago death, as if it had pushed up out of the earth of Nebraska, its mysterious place of burial.

They moved out from under the jaw in time and approached the slab of rubber, scuffed and worn, that was the first tee, about eight feet the other side of the archway. As they looked up to study the hole, a straight par two in a keyhole shape, they could see the remnants of the sea theme of the course beyond it. Slightly to the left and down near the bottom of the cavity, about ten holes away, was the figure of a small dolphin, its body bent in an arch, under which they thought they would have to hit when they got there. Three pelicans, one with its head missing, stood on the green of another hole. There was a shark, a small sperm whale, a barracuda, and configurations they would not be able to make out until they got nearer to them. They flipped a coin, and Melinda won the honors. The keyhole was outlined with one-by-three pine, and there were no hazards to negotiate. The only hint of a sea theme were the few shells left glued to the boards surrounding the square green: quahog shells, some mussels, and a few oysters. Melinda putted on the warped surface. Her shot went past the cup, thudded against the board beyond it, and rolled back two feet, stopping only a foot from the hole. Allen and

Bob White both missed their putts also, and the three of them managed to get down in two, even at the end of one.

As they moved from hole to hole, considering each putt carefully, they began to feel themselves descending. They had made a rule that each ball would be putted out, were engaged in a kind of medal play, and such was the decayed condition of the course that they would often find themselves flying off the green or the fairway of the hole they were playing, having to come in from the scarred ground of other fairways, chipping into their proper pathway from stones and sand. It was not unusual for holes to be won with sevens and eights, and as they descended and the competition moved them, they began to become exhausted. Behind them, up the narrow and winding crushed-stone path that ran through the course from hole to hole, they could see the cracked and mutilated figures of sea life: a giant lobster with a broken claw, a seahorse with a crushed muzzle, fish painfully twisted. Allen was just a little ahead. Melinda was on his tail, and Bob White was still within striking distance. They had finished the ninth hole, and they felt half submerged.

At the tenth, the dolphin hole, the course seemed to level off and bottom out. They were under the sea, various levels of sea life around and above them, behind and ahead. Their alliances fell apart and came together as their scores altered. At times Allen was engaged in a struggle with Melinda and she with him. At times Bob White surged, and one or the other of them felt threatened. The oval of the picket fence seemed to lean inward. Standing on the tenth tee, they felt pressed down in the middle of the purgatory of a sea garden, one that was the mirrored reversal of the health of the real sea, that romance of paradise. Even their putters felt like burdens, tools they had to carry as a kind of penance. They felt too comfortable now with their grips, and this was an embarrassment, as if a hint of some indulgence in sin, so that they often hid the putters along their legs or hung them down from clasped hands, like European walkers, behind their backs.

They were catalyzed, and they rose a little when they saw the situation of the tenth hole. The tenth, the dolphin hole, was a par four, with a right-angle dogleg near its end. The dolphin, about four feet long and bent into a graceful arc, crossed over the narrow two-foot fairway of worn green carpeting. Where from a distance they had thought they could go under the body of the dolphin, there was no opening at all but a sculptured and chipped blue wave on which the dolphin was riding, having leapt up on it, its head slightly on the decline, as if it would soon plunge, come up, and catch another. The end of its nose was gone, and the paint that might have marked its pupil had worn away. Its mouth had a smile in it, but it could see nothing, and this turned it away from any hint of motivation or pleasure, and its dive seemed totally insouciant. It would go down into the wave, and the structure and attitude of its body would cause it to curl and come up again. Then it would enter another wave, and another. It was locked in its motion and could not turn out of the waves. Cute as it might have once been, it was no dolphin from an aquarium show. The human and weather damage done to it, and the neglect had given it a history of seriousness they each felt as being not much different from their own.

The dolphin guarded the way to the getting down, the finality and the repose of the satisfied click of the ball as it fell into the cup and settled. It seemed impossible that the concentration of the dolphin could be passed. Beyond the dolphin was the square of green on the upper level with two holes in it, and these were the entrances to tunnels that ran under the upper green and would drop balls that rolled through them onto the lower, final green surface to the left. One tunnel exit was at the side of the lower green, about five feet from the cup and around a corner. From that point a bank shot off the rotted boards might well be required. The other tunnel came out directly in front of the cup, about two feet away from it, and the best shot coming out of that tunnel might fall in. But the greens were in the future, the cup at the very bottom of the groin of the sea, and first they must negotiate the upper waves and the dolphin riding on them.

At the end of the narrow incline of the fairway, at the base of the ascending curl of wave, there had once been a slide, a halftube of corrugated metal pipe that had arched up through the wave and into a groove fashioned gently in the dolphin’s side. The lower bit of pipe was still there, but a good eight inches were missing between that bit and the groove, and time and the set of the wave had shifted the dolphin’s body some, and it bent inward slightly toward the rubber of the tee. Bob White thought he would try that path. He had the honors because he had won the ninth, and he placed the ball with the red ring around it on a flat place on the rubber of the tee. He addressed a place slightly behind the ball, took a practice swing, then set his feet again, addressed and stroked firmly through the ball, keeping his head down, accelerating through the putt. The ball clicked sharply off the blade of the putter, rolled true to the broken tube, and was kicked into the groove in the dolphin’s side. But the dolphin had bent over enough so that the ball, instead of sliding over the dolphin’s body and dropping onto the upper green, spun up into the air, arched back a bit and fell and clattered into the crushed stone to the side of the fairway. Bob White’s putter was still elevated, pointing toward the dolphin, the shaft following the putt, but when the ball spun off and landed, he lowered the club and shook his head.

“Difficult to negotiate,” he said, and he stepped back to let Melinda have her shot at it. She had been standing back and watching the dolphin intently, and when it was her turn, instead of settling in and putting, she walked around behind the upper green, bent over slightly, and squinted at the body of the dolphin from the other side.

“There’s something here,” she said, and she beckoned to the two of them to join her to see what it was. They walked around and came up beside her.

“There,” she said, and they both looked where she pointed and saw that there was a small hole in the left of the snout of the dolphin, about two inches below its vacant eye.