Toby Olson - Seaview

Frank Bumpus knew how much of this was politics, how much rabblerousing and magic, and how much pure bunk. Still, there were a lot of small chunks and pieces that came from the core philosophy, and these kept the rest of it in proper perspective. His enigmatic buffoon role on the links at Seaview was politics and a preparing of the false adversary as communications buffer once the occupation began. The Free the Skin Beach Coalition was bunk but of a fortuitous nature, in that it would serve well as a diversionary force. The kind of victory he hoped for was territorially minimal, and they would only need to hold the land for a short time for the tactical end to be accomplished. Visibility would grease the wheels; their lawyers would begin to handle it from there. The code post card had gone off, and he trusted that his relative, the tactician, was on his way, slowly and in an underground fashion. The government’s people had been watching them all for close to a year now, but Frank Bumpus was sure they had them properly confused. Soon enough Bob White would be here, and then they could begin the specifics in earnest.

THE CHIEF WAS LIFTED FROM HIS REVERIE BY THE SOUND of voices. He could hear the Chair yelling out as the foursome he was in reached the top of the hill that fronted the fifth green, and he pulled his feet back from the cliff’s edge, putting on and lacing up his left tennis shoe. He then took a large blue-and-white handkerchief from his pocket, tied it around his right ankle, and put his right shoe on as well. While they were over on the fifth green putting, he adjusted his cap, cleaned up his niblick by rubbing it against his leg, and stood up and dusted his clothing.

When Sammy, Chair, Eddie, and Wall were on their way over to the sixth tee, Chief Wingfoot stepped out of the bushes that bordered it. He was leaning heavily on the shaft of his niblick and limping. The handkerchief around his ankle flopped against his tennis shoe as he moved out to greet them.

“Now what in the hell is this?” the Chief could hear the Chair say, a little too loudly, to Wall and the others. Sammy and Eddie nodded to the Chief, and when the four got close to the tee, the Chief addressed them.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen, I wonder if you could give me some aid; I seem to have pulled up lame.”

“Lame, my ass,” the Chair said under his breath, and then more audibly, “Why don’t you sit here and wait a little? Some of the guys with power carts will be along, and they can give you a lift in. We’ve gotta move on.”

“That would be fine,” the Chief said, “but I have business to transact, and I must get back soon. Could you not afford me some assistance?”

“Why the hell are you out here, anyway?” the Chair said sharply. “This is no place for the lame!”

“True, true,” Chief Wingfoot sighed, “but I am here, and I am in need.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake!” the Chair said and rapped his thigh with his gloved hand.

Sammy had a wide grin on his face. Wall was standing off to the side, not wanting to get involved in the thing. Eddie was the only one who was busy. He was digging around in the large side pocket of his golf bag, pulling things out of it and tossing them on the grass of the tee. So far he had withdrawn a pint of Wild Turkey and a worn three-wood head cover he kept it in, a good-sized piece of fishing net, two lures with corks stuck on their hooks that he used when he plugged for bass, a paper bag full of sinkers, an obscure piece of scrimshaw, a fillet knife in a tooled leather sheath, a pair of torn undershorts, a pocket calculator, a rigid three-inch oyster measure, an ivory cue ball, and a pair of dice.

“Mother of God!” the Chair yelled when he saw what Eddie was up to. Sammy’s grin was widening, and even Wall could not hold back. He had his hand over his mouth, his head shaking, his laughter muted.

“Got it,” Eddie said, and he pulled a good length of thin nylon rope out of the deep recesses of the pouch. “We can truss up the carts together, hang the net between ‘em; we’ll get you in okay, Chief.”

“Now wait just a minute,” the Chair said, but Sammy and Eddie were already at work. Before the Chair could get himself organized and formalize his complaint, they had hooked their two handcarts together with rope, Eddie tying complex nautical knots quickly and automatically, had hung the piece of netting, double-folded, between the two carts, and had helped the limping Chief over to the contraption, each taking him by an arm, and had lowered him into the sling. The Chief reclined there, his niblick in one hand across his chest and his other gripping the mouth of Sammy’s bag, his legs spread apart, and his feet firm on the axles of the inner wheels. He was smiling graciously.

“This is just fine,” he said.

The Chair was steaming, and when he hit his drive, he shanked it badly. It sailed off into the rough on the right, between the fairway and the cliff that ran along the ocean’s edge.

“Shit!” he screamed, and he jumped up into the air once. When he landed he spun around, something like a discus thrower, and flung his driver down the fairway a good forty yards; it turned end over end, and when it hit it rapped the ground loudly. He was instantly embarrassed at his loss of control, and he tried to be demure as he stepped back and waited for the others to hit.

Each of the others had hit shots like the one the Chair had just managed. And each of them had, at one time or another, lost control in a similar way. This, and a sense of fundamental comradeship that went with golf at Seaview, prevented them from responding to the Chair’s behavior in any uncharitable way.

“Tough luck, Chair; you can still get there in three, still get a par,” Sammy said before he drove his ball, and the others nodded and grunted in agreement. The Chief did not say anything. He just sat in his sling.

Sammy and the two others had good drives, and the Chair found his ball easily, hit a fair shot out of the rough, and was beyond the others in three. He tried to keep away from them, to disassociate himself in some way from the mad contraption with the Indian in it that Sammy and Eddie pulled down the fairway, but this was impossible; they were clearly a foursome. The bathers who walked along the path cut in the right rough, heading for the narrow dune passage that led down the cliff to the beach, stopped to stare and point. Somebody who was flying a kite at the edge of the cliff gawked at them, forgetting his kite for a moment, and it drifted in circles and fell in the middle of the fairway. It was a plastic skyhawk, and when the flyer tried to jerk it up again, it danced like an injured bird as the trussed-up carts passed over its line, caught a slight breeze, and rose up a few feet above the carts, flapping insanely, its line caught and twisted in the carts’ wheels. The procession paused to disentangle the kite line; the bearded man who was flying it came out in the fairway to help with the mess, and the Chief reached down from where he was slung to give aid. Sammy’s feathered fedora bobbed as he and Eddie worked with the knots and twists.

The foursome playing the fifth and parallel fairway came over the hill in their power carts, stopped at the top, turned to the right, and came down to see what was happening. Just then the specter of a hang-glider, huge and casting a broad shadow into the rough, lifted from below the cliff’s edge near the lighthouse and began to drift along. The rider must have seen the goings on on the fairway, because he drifted a little too far inland, lost his updraft, and began to sink in wide circles, finally coming to rest about fifty yards from the cluster of power carts, kite, men, and contraption. Wall rushed over to the glider, helped its occupant to his feet, and began to talk seriously to him. A tourist bus had stopped in the parking lot of the lighthouse, and a line of senior citizens-women in flowered dresses and gray hair, with a few old men in baggy suits behind them-had made their way down the path between cliff and fairway and had stopped to watch the spectacle. A few gulls drifted in with shells in their beaks and began dropping them on the fairway’s hardpan. Then the fog came.