Toby Olson - Seaview

They stopped their carts near Allen’s ball, and then they looked up at the object. Christ, a second time — it’s like that pole in Tucson, Allen thought, and felt colder when he thought it. But it was not like the pole, though it was tall, maybe twelve feet high, and roughly cylindrical in its vertical axes. It was organic and muscular looking. It was made mostly of wood, some hewn and some gathered. The spire that was its central core was a tree trunk which had been stripped of its bark and limbs until it was bare and blond, tapering and slightly twisted halfway up.

On the part of its lower surface that was visible above the scrub hiding its base, it was imbedded with shells: sea and razor clams, mussels, blue points, and cherrystones. The shells were inserted carefully in the wood, in a pattern that was suggested but very complex and unclear. It could have been a kind of writing or a series of symbolic markings. The shells were set close together, though with space between them, and the blond wood showed through in contrast, outlining the figures of the shells in relief. Most of the shells were clean and smooth, but the oyster shells among them were sharp and threatening.

Halfway up the obelisk, and affixed partly to a crosspiece near its top, was the lower mandible of a large shark, pointing downward. The crosspiece was made of two-by-four pine pinioned with galvanized bolts to the tree trunk at its center. Near the ends of the crosspiece, the joints in the jaw had been attached through cleanly drilled holes with thick pieces of silver wire. Three feet below the crosspiece, where the front of the jaw had met the lip at the front of the shark’s vicious snout, it was attached with heavy-gauge blond fishline. The jaw faced out at them as if they were inside the shark’s mouth, looking upward. The teeth had been removed, and where they had been, and carefully selected for graduated size and shape, the upper shells of quahogs had been inserted so skillfully that the shells looked like the natural teeth of the shark, but more even and more colorful, turning the imagined shark into an instrument not for ripping but for crushing, the color in the shells turning it into some magnificent mutant.

Melinda saw it could be thought of as beautiful, and she could not look away from it. Allen couldn’t look away from it either, but he could not see beyond its presence to any judgment about it. Art Campbell moved to his bag on the back of the cart, unzipped its vertical side pocket, and adjusted something in it. The Chair made a strange sound when he saw what was above the jaw and the crosspiece. Were it not that a golf glove had been sewn into the end of the limp sleeve, the wrist hung over the edge of the crosspiece and affixed there with a long nail so that the glove dangled over the wood, he might not have recognized his green slicker, the one the woman had ridden away with on the bus. The collar of the slicker was draped over the top end of the trunk above the jaw, another nail holding it there. It hung down slack behind, the tip of its zipper just visible below the crosspiece. It hung very still in the absence of breeze.

“Get it down, get it down,” the Chair said, his voice just above a whisper, and he stepped into the cart and fell into the seat. Nobody moved at first, but then Eddie Costa started, limping a little, favoring his left leg and bent over. Allen and Melinda noticed what they had not seen before, when he was able to stand straight, that there was some slight deformity in his back. As he got on his knees and bent down to his golf bag, which he had placed on the ground of the fairway, they could see the rise like the bulge of a small dolphin running down from his collar to the middle of his back, his jacket stretching tight over it as he opened the zipper compartment of his bag. The sky was dark, and where Costa knelt, surrounded by the two carts, the darkness was even deeper. But though there was no discernible sunlight at all now, the quahog shells in the shark’s jaw and the emblems of the shells below it were reflecting, and they cast light, a kind of vague aura, a rough circle of beams on the ground where Costa knelt. He noticed it and glanced up, and his eyes gleamed in it for a moment before he looked away and down.

He reached into his bag, but he seemed tentative and uncertain. The first thing he took out was a dark and richly colored Paisley shawl, and he spread it on the ground beside the bag. Then he started to take various objects out, searching. He placed them carefully in rows on the square of the shawl as he removed them from the bag. With each thing removed, he had to reach into the zipper compartment deeper to get the next. Soon he was in up to the elbow, still searching. They all watched the objects accumulate. Near the end he was getting desperate, hesitating each time he reached in. The beams of light, now seeming to come from some source in the shell teeth themselves, grew brighter and slightly red around the shawl and the man digging in the bag as the sky continued to darken. He was in up to his shoulder. They could see his hand hitting against the vinyl, like some small animal in the pouch, as he searched, still on his knees, his cheek pressed into the zipper of the slit, his eyes closed. Then he withdrew his arm and sat back on his haunches, bent over, his arms hanging, his hands in the rough fairway grass. Where his cheek had pressed the zipper there was a line like a red scar running from his eye to the corner of his mouth. He seemed to snarl and whimper at the same time. He cocked his head, almost sheepishly, glancing up at the fixed smile on the jaw. Then he lay out flat on the ground, opened the bag’s slit, grasping the zipper on either side, and put his arms and head into it and began to inch forward. Their mouths were open as they watched him go in.

“Get my ankle!” they heard his urgent, muffled voice in the pouch. The Chair slid from his seat, circled the carts, and moved in behind him. He got down on his knees and reached out and took Costa’s right ankle in both hands, keeping his arms extended, his body as far away from the man in the bag as he could get it. There was a slight jerk, and the hump slipped into the slit. He was in the bag now almost up to his waist. There were rumblings like thunder coming from over the hill and the other side of the course. When he was in the bag as far as he could go, he stopped moving, and the Chair somehow knew that it was time to pull back. It took effort, the body seemed to fight against withdrawal, but it came slowly out as the Chair pulled at the leg, urging the breach. Finally, the hump popped out, and then the shoulders, turning, and then the head. The head turned back, as red as a newborn, and looked at the Chair intently.

“Keep pulling,” Costa hissed. The Chair pulled, and Costa’s arms came out, and then his hands, and held tight in them he had the end of a braided rope, and it uncoiled as it came like a length of placenta. When he was out, he rolled over on his back, his body bowed because of the bulk of the hump under him, his chin extended, his chest heaving as he sucked for air. He jerked his left foot, and the Chair released his ankle and fell back on his haunches. Melinda sat in the cart watching, her hands crossed over her chest. It was clear to all of them that they had to wait for Costa to come to himself again, and while they waited and listened to his gasping, they gazed at the shawl and the objects that covered it, starting at the upper corner. Somehow, it seemed proper to read it from left to right, and then down, as if it were a manuscript, wampum, or some other written message.

The first row contained a small carved wooden whale, a matchbook with Richardson’s Funeral Home printed in gold letters on a deep blue-felt background across its surface, a crumpled and faded post card with a picture on it, a moonstone medallion, a snakeskin wallet, a baby’s rattle, and a small wire loop, like a garrote, that obviously had something to do with fishing. In row two: a spool of fishline, an oyster shell, a packet of Red Man chewing tobacco, a lure, a white plastic barrette, a bag of peanuts, a small Diamond matchbox, a hemostat, a plastic bag full of rotten blueberries, a bird whistle. The third row: a small stuffed bird, a curved Kelly clamp, a red-checked bandanna, a little silver spoon, a gutting knife with a scrimshaw handle in a tooled leather sheath, a book of shadow signs, a black-lacquered thumbtack, a dolphin ring. And in the last row: a small dark bottle, a syringe in a plastic tube, a silver thimble, a golf glove, a razor blade, a plastic paperweight with a blue flower in its center, a piece of wooden doweling, a coil of thin wire, four small charms on a ring (three human figures and a putter), and a glass sliver of moon.