Toby Olson - Seaview

THEY CROSSED THE ROAD AND THE SHOULDER BEYOND it and moved over and down to where the desert floor began. They moved to the left a little, locating a place that was fairly flat: slabs of shale, with a thin layer of sand blown away from them in various places and some seed spill from the road’s shoulder that had sprouted into feeble grass. The Indian put the gunny sack and the clubs down, leaning the clubs against a low rock so that the heads were elevated slightly off the ground. He stood back a little and looked out into the desert. The sun was still high but a little over their shoulders now; the hard lines of their shadows had begun to cast shade to their left. There were a few giant saguaros staggered out in the distance ahead of them and a few barrel cactuses in the spaces between, some clustered and some loners. This and the very spare brush and the sand was all there was from there to the distant mountains.

“I mark that one at about two hundred yards, that big one almost three,” he said, not looking back at where the Indian stood.

“You know, this will take a while.”

“Big one’s two city blocks, about,” the Indian said. “I got a while.”

He glanced back sharply, and then he shrugged at the Indian’s way of measurement and at his resolve. He reached into the gunny sack and took out a small grasslike mat, a piece of Astroturf. In a corner of it, a small one-inch length of thin hose stood up. He found a flat place and spread the mat out. He reached back to the gunny sack and pulled it over to the right of the piece of turf. Then he lifted the closed corners and let the balls flow out onto the sand. The balls gleamed in the sun. A few had red stripes around them. Some were cut. Others were marked with black paint. The clubs in the Sunday bag were only of fair quality. There was a driver and a fourwood and two irons, a three and a seven. The woods had black, composition heads with red inserts and gold screws; their grips were dark red.

The irons had black grips, were noticeably step-shafted, and came from another set. He took a light-blue golf glove from his back pocket and put it on, pushing between his fingers to snug it up. Then he took the four-wood by its head and pulled it free of the bag. He turned it around and used it to poke one of the balls onto the middle of the piece of turf.

He took his stance, his feet square to the ball, toes slightly outward for stability, knees bent. With his right hand he pushed his hat down on his head. He looked out across the desert, and then he addressed his attention to the ball. The club head rested on the turf; his hands, at crotch level, held the grip. He moved his hands slightly to the left, bringing them an inch in front of the ball. Then he began. The club head moved back from the ball as the shaft came up in the sun and lifted; the shaft paused for a moment, hanging parallel to his shoulders in the air above him. Then it moved over and downward, coming through to the ball and back over his shoulder from the other side. There was a small sharp click a moment after he had hit. The ball lifted in a low trajectory from the mat. It kept rising until it peaked about forty yards above the desert, and then it gradually sank, and then it hit into the sand. It rolled about ten yards and came to rest on a straight line out from where he had hit it, about halfway between the two large saguaros. It was very easy to see against the desert floor.

“ Two-fifty,” he said and put the four-wood back in the bag and took the driver out.

“Long game,” the Indian said from where he sat on a low rock behind and to the left of him.

He placed a ball on the rubber tee in the corner of the piece of Astroturf and addressed it. This time he started the ball out to the right, but it did not stay there. He had put a slight draw in it, and near its peak it began to bend back left. When its roll had stopped it was twenty feet to the left of the first ball. The third ball hooked even more than the second, but he had started it even further right, and it came back also. When it landed it formed a triangle with the other two, equally close to them. He hit about twenty balls with various degrees of draw in them. They gathered together in their small space in the distance. Then he began to start the balls off to the left, slicing and fading them back in so that they gathered with the others. Some of the time he would come off the ball, dropping his left foot back off his stance after he had hit it, even stumbling occasionally. The balls continued to drop in the cluster. About five times he topped his shot, squirting the balls out only thirty to forty yards; these balls formed a cluster of their own.

He liked to let it come in this way, very casually, and not to force it. He was halfway through the bag and working with the seven-iron when he knew it. He began to be able to feel the club head in the tips of his fingers through the shaft and grip and the difference in his right hand and in his gloved left. When the club face struck the ball, he could feel it in the hair on the inside of his thighs. The swing he had to take to hit the ball seemed very perfunctory, a kind of ritual movement only, and even hitting the ball seemed unnecessary. He simply put the ball where he wanted to put it, and the thing was that no matter how far away he put the ball, or how he got it there, he still felt connected to it. The balls constantly changed their tight pattern in the desert, the pattern he felt he held in him; the balls were out there as a part of the way he was. And he toyed with it. He hit the balls in slightly different places, almost imperceptibly altering their trajectory and final placement.

Behind him, the Indian sat on his rock watching. “Short game,” he thought, as the head of the seven-iron put the balls to rest at the side of a barrel cactus a hundred and seventy yards out in the desert. He took a folded post card from his shirt pocket, opened and studied it, listening to the sharp clicks and the occasional sounds of birds. On one side of the post card was a photograph of a road leading up to a lighthouse. On the left of the road was a small building with two figures standing in front of it. To the right was a brief golf course fairway, with a green at the end of it; a flagstick with a red flag stood up from the center of the green. The lighthouse was prominent and white in the background. In the sky to the left of it a small, precise arrow, pointing downward, had been penned in. At the top of the arrow were the words my place . On the other side of the card, beside the address and stamp, was the message: My dear Relative, thisis my place.I am doing well. You can send my best regards to all.

You can enjoy this view of my place on the other side of this, under my arrow. I wish you well out there. I remain yours truly Frank Bumpus .

The Indian looked at the picture again for a while, then he folded the post card carefully and placed it back in his pocket. The man had finished hitting the golf balls, and he was now standing with the seven-iron hanging along his leg, looking out into the desert. He was tall, and his blond hair was cut short.

He had a broad back, but his posture was poor. “Would not sit a horse well, I’d say, and he doesn’t look like a golfer,” the Indian thought. The man stood there for a while, just looking, and then he turned away and put the club back into the bag with the others. The sun was now well behind him, and the man’s shadow was longer and almost in front of him. The day birds had changed places with the evening birds, who were here a little early. There were no more morning birds around. The man turned to the Indian sitting on the rock.

“Okay,” he said. And the Indian got up, lifted the limp gunny sack, and walked out into the desert.

When he entered the room again he had been gone for over two hours. Melinda was covered with the blanket, huddled near the edge of the bed, and sleeping.