Toby Olson - Seaview

“Birdie,” he said, very dryly and very softly. The two looked up and over at him. He had not smiled when he spoke. Then Melinda started to laugh a little. Then all three of them were laughing softly and tentatively in the increasing darkness.

Bob White came around from the body of the dolphin and climbed the embankment to the upper green. The coil of placenta was now still, and the black-leather sheen on the scales shone in the little moonlight and the dim artificial light that came from the backs of the rooms over and across the sea course. The strange cross formed by the head of the snake and the bird was also still, the snake’s eyes still open, but glazing and without any intensity of rage left. The shocked bird seemed dead. It was very quiet, its outer wing gathered back to its body. It was unmarked, but it was still held fast. Bob White knelt down beside the strange small figure. It looked like a lost charm from a crazy bracelet. He put his thumb and index finger over the eyes in the snake’s head, holding it fast to the green. Then he insinuated the tip of his knife blade under the body of the bird, between its small downy belly and the snake’s lower jaw. When he felt the hardness of the lower jawbone and the leathery bottom of the mouth, he pressed the blade into the leather and through the scales until he had pierced the jaw, pinning it to the green.

Holding it there, he moved his thumb and finger to the front of the head’s snout and slowly opened the mouth. With his ring finger, he gently urged the bird’s body out, till it lay in front of the head. Then he released the open jaw, letting it shut. He picked up the bird then and cradled it in his palm and got up from his knees and slowly turned, looking for a place to put it. He knew there would be no snakes coming now for a while, and he wanted a place where, in the morning, sun would shine on the bird when it came up, a place where the bird would be touched or sur — rounded on all sides, but a place that from the top would be open to the sky. He stopped turning when he faced the dolphin, and then he climbed down the embankment, holding the bird in his hand. When he got down, he reached and tore a handful of weed from where it grew in the gravel of the sea-course path, and he took the weed and the bird around to the fairway side of the dolphin. When he reached the dolphin’s side, he took a bit of the weed and scrubbed at the stains on the far side of the dolphin’s body with it, mixing grass stains with the snake’s fluids, changing the smell. Then he threw the bit of weed down on the coiled placenta. He took what remained of the weed and gathered it in the clean, faded blue-check handkerchief he took from his back pocket. Then he rubbed the handkerchief and the weed slowly along the ball groove that ran in the side of the dolphin, pressing hard, staining the handkerchief and the groove.

When he was finished, he gathered the weed and the handkerchief into a crinkled low pocket, fitting it near the top of the dolphin’s side where the groove was almost horizontal to the ground. Then he placed the small body of the bird into the pocket, tucking it in and spreading the sides of the pocket slightly away from the feathers and head. When he was satisfied, he stood up from his crouch and looked down at the bird. Then he reached down and made a final adjustment, putting the pocket a little bit farther away from the bird’s tail.

They had been watching him intently from where they were. Melinda was still behind the embankment of the upper green. Allen was standing where his ball had fallen in. And now they watched him coming away from the fairway and the dolphin’s body and climbing back up the embankment. He could have stepped easily over the dolphin to get to where he was, but it was clear that that would have somehow been inappropriate, and they stood where they were and waited for him. When he got to the upper green and the placenta and the severed head, he reached down and picked the head up and took it with him down the embankment again to where his ball and Melinda’s lay among the gravel of the walk, both distinct in the limited light. He took the head of the snake and wedged it down among the stones, so that it stood up with its closed jaws pointing toward the sky, a gesture not unlike that of the whale’s jaw, and though diminutive, its recent history might have held a similar complexity. Then he took his knife and opened the mouth of the snake, and holding it with the blade twisted, he picked up a good-size piece of gravel and used it to wedge the jaw so that the snake’s mouth stood up wide open when he removed the knife.

“Wait,” Melinda said softly from the other side of the embankment. “Let me.” And she came around to where he was and reached down beside him and picked her ball from among the stones. When she came up with it in her fingers, her hand held up a little in front of her so that the ball shone in the half darkness, she could see Allen, the upper half of his body only, mouth open and looking at them across the embankment and the upper green. She moved over and down to the snake’s head and placed her ball where the bird had been. Bob White stood back and to the side.

She was at the side of the snake’s head and the ball now, intent on the coming break of the perceptible structure that had grown up around them. She wanted to finish it. It was not real life. She felt she was now a living monitor of such things. As she addressed the snake’s head with the blade of the putter, she stopped breathing, holding a brief modicum of air in the fragile domes of her alveoli. The blade was square to the head of the snake. The ball stood in the open jaws. The configuration was now like the handle of a garish cane. She brought the shaft of the club back, keeping her left arm and wrist stiff, and with no other move in her body, she stroked down and into the side of the snake’s jaw, below where the ball was. There was a dull thud, followed by a slight click as the blade struck the jaw and the ball afterward. Both the ball and the head lifted up from the stones, the head spinning and falling and the ball continuing. The head landed and bounced on the embankment, and the ball bounced on the upper green, and then it bounced again, clearing the rotten board lining the far side and falling and landing on the lower green, coming to rest four feet from the cup.

“That’s a good shot,” Allen said, finishing the game of the structure and beginning to end it at the same time.

“I’ll pick up,” Bob White said, and he reached down and lifted his ball out of the stones. She made her putt. Bob White took an X on the hole. It had gotten too dark for them to continue further, and with no real discussion they agreed to quit. Bob White checked the bird a last time, adjusting the handkerchief pocket where it rested. Then he took the body of the snake, like a coiled hose, in one hand and its head in the other and walked across the sea course to where the weeds and the corn pressed in as the desiccated fields began. When he got there, he stopped. He set his feet. Then, turning like a discus thrower, he spun and released the coiled snake’s body into the air. It unwound as it lifted, straightening for a moment like a spear. Then, as it descended, it telescoped in on itself, becoming increasingly smaller and inconsequential as it disappeared. He threw the head out in the same direction he had thrown the body.

When he finished, he came back to them, and they started together back up and out of the dark, broken sea, past the pelicans and the shark and the other fish figures, until they passed under the whale’s jaw. They stopped there, turned, and looked back under the massive archway. It was quite dark now, and though they could see the form of the dolphin behind them, they could not see the place where the bird rested upon it at all.