Toby Olson - Seaview

As the players organized their clubs and balls, they were all watching. Four figures appeared along the line carrying a large boxlike object, two on either side at the rear, two in the front. It looked like a casket, and the four stumbled, holding the line up behind them, and pulled back and forth against the smooth possible rhythm of carrying the object gracefully, the box bobbing and tilting. At the edge, they got some help in going over, but the object tilted up precariously anyway, and sunlight flashed momentarily off what seemed to be the object’s black-lacquered underside before it slipped and disappeared, the front end halfway over and held back from crashing down by the rear men before it went out of sight. The four players around the carts had gotten fixed in their looking, their hands coming to rest on club heads and golf bags, but a slight cough from Melinda broke the concentrated effort, and they began to move again, back into their efforts.

“Better hit off now,” the Chair said quietly, and Campbell moved up to the markers, stuck his tee in the ground, and put his ball on it. He hit and dubbed his shot, squirting the ball out low so that it struck the hill about forty yards from the tee, bounced high, and disappeared over the rise and into the beginning of the hard-edged shadows that stained the fairway, to where the green sat, higher than the tee, still alive and shining bright in the sun, its red flag limp along the flagstick. Not even the Chair had energy to say an appropriate thing, and as Campbell shook his head and picked up his broken tee, they avoided looking at him. Eddie Costa moved to the markers, teed up, and hit and sent his ball, straight but short, thudding it into the side hill, a good seventy-five yards from the apron. They all saw the ball hit and stick, imbed and make a wound at the sharp edge of a shadow in the sunlight. The Chair hit a fair shot also, but his was a little high, and it suffered in distance, winding up only a few yards in front of Costa’s. He rapped his club on the tee, driving the head into the grass, almost imbedding it, but he did not speak, and he moved back, offering the area to Allen.

The closer Allen got to the markers to get ready to hit, the more vertigo he felt. It was something about angles. The tee was a little cockeyed and was not perfectly flat. Instead of its rectangle pointing directly at the green, it was wrenched off at a slight angle, and a ball hit straight from it would go into the heavy rough to the right. The markers pointed that way, and the one on the left was perceptibly lower than the one on the right. The hills in the fairway, and the green too, seemed slightly tilted; the flagstick did not stand straight, and under the large geometric shadows, though they seemed to try hard to right the tilting, could be seen into with concentrated effort, and under them the ground bent in wrong ways. He tried to shake it off by figuring it, judging the last hill before the flag against the green’s surface, but he was not sure of his judgment, and when he hit his three-wood he could not be certain of sending the ball out correctly. He hit it straight, but he had overcompensated, and the ball landed to the left of the green, rolled past the maw of the trap on that side, and pulled up, he thought, a little short.

“A very good hit, we’ll play that one,” the Chair said, but without much enthusiasm in his voice.

Allen replaced his three-wood in the bag and got into the cart next to Melinda.

“Was that a good shot?” she said.

“Not particularly,” he said. The cart’s foot pedal was jumpy; it lurched off, sending Melinda’s head and shoulders back, and he stopped the cart and looked over at her, putting his hand on her shoulder. She said she was okay, and he helped her settle in better. He eased the pedal down, and the cart moved off more smoothly. The other cart was halfway down the path to the green. Eddie Costa had walked to his ball and dug it out of the embankment with his pocket knife. The sky was darkening. It looked like it might rain, and where the sun came through it was as if through incisions in the sky, throwing the dark shadows down even sharper.

He cut from the cart path, heading off toward the left of the green where the other cart now waited, the two men still sitting in it. Costa was looking over the line from Allen’s ball to the hole. He pulled up and saw that he had, indeed, passed the trap, and that there was an open and flat chip to the hole, the ball back about ten yards on the short apron. There was a good twenty yards of green to work with, the pin cut back and right, and beyond the pin about ten more yards of flat green. On the other side of the green there was some rough, and then the cart path, and beyond that and slightly elevated from where they were, the tee for the second hole. The Chair put a marker beside Allen’s ball, lifted it, and handed it to him. Campbell hit his chip too strongly, blading it slightly, and it scooted past the pin to the left and rolled over the jagged lip and into the rough backing the green. Costa, with his odd stance, struck the ball cleanly, rolling it up to within three feet of the pin on the near side. The Chair chipped close also. Allen figured that they were close enough, and he missed his shot, hitting it fat, and wound up short of the other two. They selected Costa’s ball to putt. Campbell missed the putt. Costa sank it. They took a birdie three on the first hole.

Now the darkness was getting serious. Rain threatened but seemed to tease and hold back. There was very little breeze, but what there was was chilling, and Allen got his slicker out of his golf bag and put it around Melinda’s shoulders. She hunched her body slightly, sliding down deeper in the seat. She seemed smaller. Allen was careful to avoid bumps on his way over to where the cart path paused beside the second tee. He got out, looked questioningly at her; she nodded to reassure him, slumped down further in the cart, and he went to the back to get his driver and walked with the three men to the surface of the tee. When he got there he saw the way the par five dropped off in the distance, noted the slight dog leg and the green off to the left and far away. He saw the Jenny Lind tower and the three domes of the Air Force Station. A little up the hill in the right rough, about halfway between it and the tower, he saw a strange, wooden-looking object. It was nothing he could place, and he squinted but could not make it out. When Campbell hit a fair shot, a little high with a slice in it, but far enough to get over the downslope of the rough and make the edge of the fairway, Costa and the Chair watched the ball, and when it landed it was on a line with the tower and the strange object below it.

“What the hell is that thing?” Costa said, pointing in the direction of the tower. “What is that?”

“That was never there,” the Chair said. “I can’t quite make it out, Eddie. Let’s hit and go down and check it.”

When Allen hit, he picked the line of the object and the tower above it. They were very high up, and he knew that he could get past the dog leg with what looked from here as no more than a nine-iron to the green. Such an easy hole, he thought. He clicked smoothly through the ball, jumping it out and up. It moved straight off the screws, and when it landed it rolled only a few feet up the embankment toward the rough, stopping in the fairway near the red one-fifty marker, on a line with the object and the tower above it.

“That was one hell of a shot,” Costa said and smiled at him. Then they got in their carts and headed down, Costa trailing on foot behind them. Allen noticed that Costa was limping slightly when he and Melinda passed him.

As they descended, it was as if they were entering an inverted, groined dome. The trees and the hills on either side seemed to climb up around them. There was no sunlight in the fairway they headed for. It got colder as they descended, but the trees and the configuration of the land were natural protections against the breeze, and what they entered felt like a damp cavern.