Toby Olson - Seaview

“We’d better check the other side,” Allen said, and they went around to the fairway, moved up close to the foot of the wave, and studied the dolphin’s body. He ran his hand from the curve of the tail up the dolphin’s side, and about halfway up he discovered there was indeed a hole there too, and that it had been stuffed with a bit of cloth which had been packed carefully into it, so that it was not apparent from a distance. He pulled the cloth out, revealing the hole, and he pointed to a place below it where there was a remnant of a second piece of corrugated piping. The hole was a good eight inches up from the top of the wave, and that put it about two feet from the surface of the fairway. They could now see that this had once been the desired way of playing the hole, that the proper shot had gone through the dolphin and not around or over it.

Melinda touched her face and thought for a few moments. Then she decided on a way to play her shot. She lined up behind the rubber tee, but she aimed to send her ball through a break in the rotted boards at the side of the fairway. This would take it, if she hit it well, out and alongside the upper green a little past the dolphin. There were broken boards around the upper green also, and a steep incline to the little hill the upper green was on. She figured that she might be able to roll her second shot up the embankment and onto the flat surface. Her first shot was a good one; the ball went between the broken boards, clicked among the gravel, and quit beside the embankment, a good approach-shot placement.

Now it was Allen’s turn. He took a handful of gravel from the path beside the fairway and ran a finger through it in his open palm until he found a proper piece. He put this piece on the rubber of the tee and placed his ball on it, so that the ball was a little elevated off the rubber. It would be an extremely difficult shot, and he would have to hit it hard enough to take most of gravity’s pull out of it. He figured he’d miss the hole at least once before getting the range. He stepped up over the ball, adjusted his line, glanced up at the body of the dolphin over and over again as he shifted his feet. When he thought he had the line just right, he settled in and placed the head of his putter on the rubber. He glanced up a few more times, and then he held his head steady, looking down over the ball. His hands shifted slightly, moving a couple of inches in front of the ball on the stone. Then the club head moved back to the top of his quarter swing, and then it accelerated down, and the ball shot off the stone and struck against the dolphin’s body a few inches to the side and below the hole. His second shot failed also, but it was closer, and when he sent his third, the ball hit the hole, clattered and vibrated in its entrance and fell in out of sight. He walked quickly to the other side of the dolphin to see where the ball would come out and how it would fall, but nothing happened. He waited a moment. Still nothing. The other two came around beside him and waited also.

Because of the intensity of their study of the dolphin and the attendant difficulties of the hole, they had lost track of time, and only when the three of them stood together waiting did they discover that dusk was advancing and the course beginning to darken. The far side of the dolphin’s body now had shadows within it; its skin was darker, and it seemed more seaworthy. The shadows masked the peel of paint, and the eye above the hole no longer seemed vacant to them. Over the body of the dolphin they could see the rise of the figures they had worked their way through as they had played the first half of the course. The failure of the sun and the coming of shadow enlivened them also; the shark seemed fresh from the sea, and the penguins looked like a trio of small children in formal wear watching them at play. At the very top of the expanse behind them stood the whale’s jawbone. It looked immaculate and unsullied, very skeletal and bone hard and very white. They could see the sky around it and through it. It stood like a firm, stylized rendering in the air, but it seemed to have incredible weight at the same time, to be permanent in its place, as if it had never had another. Clouds moved and shadows shifted around it; the first coming of points of stars were in its arc, the moon’s sliver was above it and to its left. But its outline and its sur — face were untouched by any movement or magnitude. Though it was entrance to this place, it seemed pivotal, the still center of something, and they found they could not and did not want to pull their eyes away from it. They stopped for a long time, looking up at the jaw, and then Melinda touched him lightly on the bone of his elbow and whispered below and behind him into his shoulder.

“But miles to go before I sleep,’ ” she said. And Bob White grunted, and Allen moved his elbow from her touch, and the three disengaged themselves from the matrix of their placement, though very slowly, each stretching almost imperceptibly, waking themselves.

“The ball,” Allen said. And he walked slowly around to the front of the dolphin and knelt down on the fairway, getting his head at a level with the hole and peering into it. It was darker now, and it was hard to see, but he thought the hole went straight into and through the dolphin’s body. Still on his knees, he turned his head and reached back and motioned for Melinda’s putter. He had left his leaning against the embankment on the other side, and he took hers; holding the club head in his hand, he slowly insinuated the shaft into the hole in the dophin’s side. It’s like a strange injection, he thought, and he took his time, and he was careful not to hit the shaft against the sides of the hole as he entered the dolphin’s body, and his left hand felt a brief need to elevate above the dolphin, to hold the bottle up. When the shaft was almost a foot in, he struck something. It was hard; it was surely the ball, but it gave way a little when he hit it and then pushed back a little and caused the head of the putter to shake a little in his hand. He pushed again, a little harder this time, and he heard a slight whisper of sound, a kind of scraping, from deep in the hole; there was a strong spasm along the putter shaft, and the head pressed back into his palm. Bob White was still on the other side of the dolphin, and he spoke softly.

“Come here,” he said. And Melinda put her hand on Allen’s shoulder and squeezed, and he got up from his knees, leaving the putter imbedded in the wound, and they both walked slowly around the dolphin to the back of the upper green. As they got close to where Bob White was standing, he raised his arm, indicating that they should move even slower, and they did that, watching Bob White and not the dolphin. When they got beside him, they turned and looked to where he was looking.

Below the place containing the recessed ring of the dolphin’s eye, in shadow and behind its fixed smile, the snake’s head and its encumbrance had unfurled and stood transfixed in the air a good three inches from the surface of the dolphin’s body. The encumbrance was a small bird. A nestling, it was too young for coloring and its fear petrified it. The snake’s black head was very large, and with its mouth open and the bird locked in its jaw, it was hard to see how it had managed to come from the hole, but it had done so, possibly releasing its grip a little on the bird’s body after exit. The snake’s head was very black, its wide-open eyes were very small and bright red. The body of the bird was sideways in the snake’s mouth; its outer wing was open and hanging down and over the snake’s lip. The wing opened and closed slowly and repetitively, like a feathered fan or a sail touched in the rhythm of a wave-action breeze. The bird was like a carried banner, or a war bundle, or a burden of shame. The head of the snake moved slowly from side to side, scanning, and the three watchers felt guilt and immediate failed responsibility, and they surged forward imperceptibly and recoiled from the vision at the same time.