Toby Olson - Seaview

“If you’ll take the next road off to the left there, that would be good,” she said. Allen took the road, slowed down considerably, and waited for Melinda to give further directions. She told him to just keep going, and then, when they came to it, she told him to make a sharp left. They entered a curving blacktop road that ran between fairly high pines. After about a half-mile, the road climbed up out of the small pine forest and continued along the crest of a low hill. The land now was very open and rolling, and they could see the bay about two miles away over gradually lowering moors. The road ran between houses on both sides. The houses were well apart, set on parcels of land each more than an acre in size.

“Over there,” she said, and Allen pulled up across from a simple white house with green shutters and a split-rail fence running in front of it. There was no life apparent through the windows, but they could see the edge of a children’s metal swing set in the backyard. The yard in front was very well kept, almost meticulous in its rows of slate walks and planted beach roses, day lilies, and heather. The clapboard on the front of the house looked freshly painted, and the roof had been recently shingled with new cedar shakes.

“Looks very well kept,” Melinda whispered from her place in the backseat.

“It does that,” Allen answered.

“It’s a beautiful house,” Bob White said, “a very good place for a young girl to grow to be a woman. Something nice to remember and think about.”

“Oh, it was all right, I guess, really not bad at all,” Melinda said, and then after a few moments, “I guess we can go now.”

“But look at that honeysuckle blooming and that juniper over there. Been around for a while I’d guess,” Bob White said.

“Yes, it was there,” Melinda said after a moment. And they sat in the car across from the house for a few more minutes.

“Guess it’s time to go?” Melinda said after a time.

“It’s time,” Bob White said, and Allen pulled slowly away, Melinda turning in the backseat, watching the house recede, then disappear as the car sloped down again and entered another small forest.

HE CAME UP AND SAT BACK IN HIS CHAIR WHEN HE WAS finished packing. The duffle was a small, tight bundle at his feet, the mouth rolled in and the cloth handle on top. They both had watched his economical movements and his sureness about the placement of things, and they had watched with an intensity that neither of them was aware of, so that the packing seemed to take a very long time, broken into such small increments, though he had accomplished it in only a few minutes. Allen felt there was something to be said now that he had finished and was ready to go, but Melinda did not have such a feeling.

“Well, time to go,” Bob White said, and he stood up and took his time looking over at both of them. Melinda smiled at him and nodded, and Allen took a step toward him, lifted his hand, and spoke as he took Bob White’s hand.

“Well, thanks for the company, the snake dinner, and the rest of it,” he said, and he shook Bob White’s hand for a long time, not wanting to let it go, but he did when Bob White released him. The Indian walked over to the motel room’s sliding doors, reached behind the wisps of curtain, and pushed one of the panels aside. He turned back to them and smiled before stepping out.

“It has been my pleasure,” he said. “You have my letter? I appreciate your kindness, and I say good-by now.” Melinda smiled, lifting her body from the bathroom doorframe where she had been leaning.

He stepped behind the veil of the thin curtain, and they could see his shadow, his arm coming up, as he slid the glass door closed again. They heard him crunching across the gravel as he left them, and then they were alone again and together. They were silent, and they didn’t speak to each other for a long time. They both knew that the nature of the closure would take a while. They had a while, and they silently agreed to let it happen in its own good time.

MY DEAR MELINDA & ALLEN,

Now that I have written and look back to correct I see that I have spoken more than I had intended. There are things we have to shake ourselves free of in time. Life is one of them, fancy talk is another. Perhaps it is in the body only that we come to live. Closing in on death and other intensities is where we can best do it. The search for lost things is hindered by routine habits, and that is why it is so difficult to find them. This last sentence is not mine. I read it somewhere, but I have come to see in the words of it the kind of message that I would presume to send you as I am leaving. Let the routines and forms go. Live in the force of the habits clear through to the other side of them. You’d want of an Indian that he say profound and often mysterious things, but this is not always possible now, and it never was. Melinda, let me be the first to welcome you home with words. Allen, I bless your skill and the translation of its habits when necessary. I do not give you the history of my name now, after my going, but as a gift, I give you the two song strokes of my namesake:

Bob White

THE SAND GRAINS SEPARATED AS THEY FELL, BECOMING a light shower and then individual and harmless bits that came to rest only a few feet from the edge in the side of the escarpment below Richard’s feet. The wood stopped its vibration against the fabric of his shoulder shortly after he had kicked it. He fingered the coin medallion on his chest, feeling the individual embossments of the rods and, faintly, the wires. He saw the firelight flicker out down the beach below him.

On Monday he had been a good boy, pressing the barrel of the pistol into her forehead between her eyes as he rammed her. He had told her it was loaded, knowing she would think that part of the snuff-movie game and believe it was not loaded. He had put the hollow points into it while she was in the bathroom in the motel, and he had taken the safety off. He had known that there would be little passion in him and that he would not lose control and pull the trigger, blowing her head open when she came. She had liked it, he thought, and he had been a good boy in letting her have it, not tainting it with irony or other kinds of put-downs that she would not be able to understand but would feel were present and be brought down by. Tuesday he had struck her viciously in the small of her back, making sure that the sharp surface of the ring he was wearing bit into her flesh as he came into her from behind. He did this to make up for Monday when, after he had banged her, she had said, “That was good, Daddy! You were a good boy.” On Wednesday they made it to the Cape. He got them a place in a modern motel on the highway, a little below the town of Seaview.

He turned once in a circle, very slowly, before he left the cliff. He could see the silver in the water by starlight below him, but the light was dim and the silver flashed out very hard and stationary, as if knifeblades turned to catch the light. Down the cliff to his right there were two kinds of darkness. There were the holes in the night where the cliff turned and jutted, and there was the darkness of ragged growth at the cliff’s edge. Turning to the course, the jagged places became spotty. He could distinguish the rolling slopes that were the fairways. Coming around he saw the thick shaft of the lighthouse. He started then along the path toward it, his medallion swinging slightly on his neck and stuttering against his chest. When he got to the blacktop of the small parking lot, he walked to the driver’s side of the car, opened the door, and slid in. She was pressed into the wedge where the seat met the doorframe on the other side.

“Hey, Gerry, what’s happening?” he said as he got in. He said it quietly, pinning her with a slightly ominous edge in his voice, as if she had somehow been a disappointment to him while he was gone and there would be dues to pay because of that.