Toby Olson - Seaview

It all meant nothing they could have agreed upon, but what it meant to each of them displayed itself in posture and movement. Campbell got closer to the back of the cart and put his hand on the open mouth of his golf bag. Allen shifted in his seat and looked over to where his ball had come to rest and its line into the green. The Chair looked back at the spire and the shark’s jaw, then back at his soiled knees, and shuddered. Melinda breathed through her parted lips, sucking in air like Costa, and continued to stare at the shawl. Then, gaining sufficient breath, Costa rolled slowly over onto his stomach, put his palms on the ground, and pushed back up to a kneel. He reached back by his foot, grasped the end of the braided rope, and pulled it forward to his knee. He flicked his wrist, rolling a loop across his forearm and catching it in his other hand. He leaned back on his haunches and thrust his arms out in front of him, palms up, the three-foot braid that sagged in the middle held at arms’ length and offered to the Chair. The Chair shrank back in his seat in the cart, pushing in the air in front of his body, and shook his head.

“You do it, Eddie.”

Looking at him, and with arms still extended, Costa did a strange turn with his hands and wrists, bringing them together in slow trick. When his hands came apart again there was a small nooselike loop tied in the rope. He rolled back on his heels and pushed forward again, coming to his feet, then limped to the back of the Chair’s golf cart and, using the little noose, tied the rope around the bumper. The Chair craned around in the seat to watch him, and when Costa finished with the tying, he rose up from the back and looked again at him.

“The rest is yours,” Costa said. The Chair got down out of the cart then, slowly, but with some resolve.

“Give me the fucking thing, give it to me!” he said, and Costa handed him the end of the rope. He took it and looked up at the spire briefly, then headed toward it up the side hill of the rough. The others watched him and did not see Eddie Costa gathering the objects in the Paisley shawl, shoving them back into the slit in his golf bag.

The Chair climbed awkwardly, slipping back at times, grabbing at tufts of scrub for purchase. When he reached the base of the odd cross, he was careful not to touch it. He took the rope in his left hand, held the end of it in his right, a good length of braid between them. His first cast missed the mark, and he had to do it again. On the second throw the end dropped through the half ring of the shark’s jaw, sliding between two of the bottom shell teeth. He played the rope up, the weight of it moving the end down toward him. He was close to the spire, and he had to force his head back on his shoulders to see what he was doing. From where the others were, the perspective seemed to put him almost under the shark’s jaw, and it looked as if he were offering his vulnerable neck to it in some ritual of acceptance. The rope’s end seemed to avoid his fingers as he reached up to it, and only after what seemed a long time did he get a hold of it. As quick as he could he tied it, and then he backed down the hill awkwardly, keeping his eyes on the jaw.

When he got to the surface of the fairway, he turned and headed back to his cart, waving Campbell away from it with an impatient gesture. Campbell lingered near his bag, and he had to jump clear when the Chair put the cart in reverse, jammed at the gas pedal, and twisted the wheel to get it to turn in a tight little circle so that it faced away from the side hill and the spire. Then he drove it forward to the other side of the fairway, slowly, until the braid lifted up off the ground and became taut. He had his left arm back over the seat of the cart, his head turned, watching the spire. A few heavy drops of rain fell, spotting his knit shirt at his biceps. The sky was very dark now, and the only strong light was in the aura around the spire, the polished shells softly gleaming. He pulled forward, and the jaw seemed to vibrate. They could all hear a kind of humming coming from the taut rope, and the Chair could feel it in his body and in the cart. Then the back wheels of the cart began to turn slowly, guttering down into the fairway earth, throwing up sand and tufts of grass. The spire held. The Chair threw the cart into reverse and moved it back a few yards. Then he raced it forward, snapping the rope up from the fairway this time. When he reached the end of his tether, his head snapped back, the wheels guttered deeper, and the front end of the cart came up like a bucking horse a good three feet off the ground. The spire shook, and two shells spun out of the shark’s jaw, but it held again.

Allen and Melinda watched what was happening in the darkening day. Had they been able to step away from it, it might have been funny, at least in some way ironic in its incongruity and inappropriateness. As it was, it was purely mad. They watched the spire shaking and holding, the Jenny Lind tower above it dark and very stationary, the cut windows in its stone like vacant eyes. The deep groin of the fairway was exaggerated in its depth by the darkness. The slopes of the rough on either side seemed to press in and down on them. They thought they could hear sounds — heavy implosive thuds, motors, kinds of cracking, unidentifiable — over the hills toward the sea, but they were not sure of them. The overriding sound was that of the whine of the cart as it moved and jerked. The Chair moved it back and forth. He raced up the fairway and down it. He headed again across it. He tried various angles of pull. The cart wheels were hot and smoking, and they could smell rubber burning and oil in the air. Twice, the cart came close to flipping on its side, but with unexpected nimbleness, and like a sailor leaning over the gunnels of a small skiff to keep it righted, the Chair thrust his body half out of the cart, using his weight to keep it down, holding the steering wheel, his feet hitting the pedal.

The braid kept falling slack and then leaping up, taut and humming, from the fairway. The spire held, but then, very suddenly, it stopped holding. The Chair was trying the cross fairway attack again, his body hunched down and ready for the violent jerk. When he reached the end of the rope, there was a sharp crack, like the splitting of a large rock, and the rope broke. The cart raced across the fairway and halfway up the hill into the rough on the far side. When it went as far as its momentum and power could take it, it turned in a tight circle and came to rest, its nose butted up against a small pine. They had all watched it go up and were looking that way, but then they heard the sound behind them and turned to where the Chair was looking from where he sat with his chest against the wheel up in the rough, and they saw the spire slowly falling toward them.

Though it was over forty feet away, they each shrank back a little as it tipped. The arms of the slicker waved disjointedly, and its body billowed out with air. The golf glove flicked its fingers on the wood of the crosspiece. The changing perspective in the fall made the shark jaw seem to broaden its smile into a grin. The wood sighed, and shell teeth began to fly out of the mouth, turning and spinning in the air. Then the spire was perpendicular to the line of their vision, and they could not see its complexity. When it hit and disappeared in the side hill scrub, there was little sound.

The Chair brought the cart down out of the rough, the trailing braid wiggling and ascending like a massive decapitated snake up toward where the cart had been; the tip disappeared into the scrub and went up to where it was looped around the pine. He stopped the cart alongside Allen and Melinda’s, and Costa spoke to him.

“Do you want that fucking slicker?” The Chair could not speak for a moment, but he shook his head.