Toby Olson - Seaview

He thought about the ball in the hole behind the body of the snake. He wondered if it would have enough roll left in it if the snake left the hole. Would it be able to bounce out and possibly reach the first tunnel opening in the upper green? He already lay three, having missed two attempts to get his ball into the dolphin’s body. With the right bounce and a good roll he could reach the passage to the lower green and have a putt for par. Was the snake a movable obstruction? Was it a natural hazard? What could the P.G.A. rules be in a case like this? He focused on the delicate body of the bird and came back and away from his quick retreat. The automatic crazy movement of his thought-train startled him and quickly made him sad. He saw the wing and the closed eyes and the bird’s head in repose, and over the bird’s back, the top of the snake’s snout and its small red-blazing eyes. He reached beside him and took Melinda’s hand; it was cool and dry, and it did not respond. He looked at her face and saw that her head was fixed, her mouth slightly open. As he watched her, he saw her head turning very slowly from side to side, in mimic of the snake’s own movement.

Inside her head there was really very little control going on. There was a foregrounding of brief visions and flickers: snatches from dreams and potentially harmful past realities. What was locked in to its own control was her chemistry, her methodically dying body. Her breath exchange was shallow, expelled and sucked in through her open mouth, through parted lips, held by her fixed jaw. She felt her nostrils closed and a little parched. She held the life of the bird in her own mouth. If she opened her mouth and released it, they could step forward and kill the snake. The life they valued would have escaped from harm, and the other they would find dispensable. But if she pressed down too hard, she would crush the life from the bird, and then they would kill her in rage, though she would be already dead, because surely it was the life of the bird that was her own. She thought of the way she took his penis into her mouth to give him and herself pleasure. The same structure of vulnerability was involved here. She felt she was looking into the face of death, and though it was a composite face-the snake’s head and the bird’s body forming, in the increasing darkness, a silhouette emblem — it was not a face at all, but a structure, a fitted machine, mechanized by two past lives conjoined. And so it was a face, like her cells in their matrix were: the face of death then, a place, simply, of meeting.

They stood like the three penguins on the slope behind their play. She was like the decapitated one, her head, like that of the snake still mostly in the hole, separated in its intensity from her body. Bob White was the one standing a little to the side of the other two, looking slightly away, part of the group in his shape and black-and-white outfit but separated in name and ability. He saw the snake’s head and the bird, saw it could be a totemic emblem, but he had seen such things before; and though the vision had power to stiffen him, he could work within its familiar — ity, and he was calculating. The way the bird was turned it would be difficult for the snake to get it back in the hole if he chose to do so. Snakes ate young birds in a way that was a kind of birth reversal. In birth, the child’s head emerged then turned to allow the shoulders’ exit vertically through the stretched opening. When a snake took a young bird from the nest, he grasped him in a way that allowed a good purchase, gripping the bird sideways at right angles to the jaw. This was a king snake, a constrictor, and he could not chew the bird but would have to swallow and digest it alive. To swallow it, the snake would have to turn it, getting it parallel to his mouth, take it in headfirst, the reverse of birth.

Bob White could see some matting of feathers on the top of the bird’s head. He knew that this must be the snake’s secretions. The snake had begun to swallow the bird when they had disturbed him with the ball. Surely he had stopped swallowing when the ball hit. He had waited, and when the shaft of the putter had pushed the ball, he had come out of the hole with the bird so that he could get the bird out of his throat and turn it. If the snake were caught with the bird in his throat, he would be defenseless. With the bird out and crossways again, he could drop it if he had to. He could use his mouth and the power of his body then; he would stand some chance. Bob White knew the snake did not really feel like dropping the bird. Probably he did not really feel at all in the way that we think of such things, but he could taste the bird and did not feel like losing that taste and the beginnings of fullness he had experienced when he had the bird’s head in his throat. His head stood now out of the hole to the side of the face of the dolphin. He held the bird very gently but firmly in his mouth, and he moved his head slowly from side to side, scanning. Bob White thought he understood him.

He motioned to them with an open hand that they should stay where they were, and because he knew the snake could not pull his head back and withdraw into the dark safety of the hole as long as he held the bird in his mouth this way, he did not hesitate or try to dissemble or trick the snake. He walked slowly around the embankment of the upper green, withdrawing his knife from the sheath inside his shirt as he moved. When he got to the fairway and the other side of the dolphin, he crouched slightly and crept to the face of the wave. The dolphin was hip-high, and he could see the head of the snake over the dolphin’s head. The head of the snake had followed his movement until he was out of its peripheral vision. Then it had returned to the other two, stopping its scanning. Bob White took the blade of his knife and rested it behind the head of the dolphin. Then he slid it over the dolphin’s head and moved it swiftly under the neck of the snake, just back of its jaw. When the snake felt the steel, it tried to withdraw, but Bob White lifted the knife blade, pinning the head of the snake to the top of the hole.

They could see the glint of the knife blade below the body of the bird, parallel with it. It seemed that the snake’s red eyes blazed out as they contracted. Bob White’s head was above the head of the snake and the head of the dolphin. It was too dark for them to see his eyes, but they thought that he was looking at them. The knife blade seemed to stay where it was for a long time; then, suddenly, it was above the head of the snake. Then the snake’s head with the bird in it fell from the hole, skimming down the dolphin’s body, and tumbled onto the green, to the left and away from the wave. There was a furious shaking inside the body of the dolphin, and when they looked up from the vision of the severed head with the bird still in its mouth, they saw the body of the snake coming out of the wound. It was very long, and it spilled over the side of the dolphin, staining it, and fell like a coiled placenta, and came to rest in an almost perfect ring, still vibrating, on the surface of the upper green.

There was a moment in which they could see the placenta and the tableau of the head with the bird in it, and all was very fixed in place and silent. Then the ball came. It appeared, white and swollen, in the mouth of the hole. It seemed to linger there enough to turn, so that its black spot appeared, an intense large pupil that changed the mouth into an eye in the dolphin’s side.

And then it fell out, bouncing once on the dolphin’s body and once on the green. When it quit bouncing it rolled four inches, and then it disappeared again, this time into the tunnel. They heard it rattle in the tube as it descended. Allen moved to the lower green to watch it come out. When it came it had good speed, and it skipped past the final hole and rolled to the board lining the green. It hit the board and started back, crossing the warped green surface. As it was losing its energy it reached the hole, rimmed it, hesitated on the back of the hole’s edge, and then it fell in. From where Bob White stood on the other side of the dolphin, he could not see the ball enter the cup. But he could hear the click.