Toby Olson - Seaview

It seemed to stand up on its tail for a brief moment. It had caught an updraft as it reached the near edge of the green where the ground fell off and rolled on down to the carts, and its wings were full of air and taut and open, lifting it almost straight up. They saw the ribbed struts in the wings and the scalloped ends of the fantail and the feathered half-moon curves of the ailerons. The field of the convex surface of the undersides of the taut wings was black, and there were various figures in the field looking down at them. In the umbrella dome of the left wing, the figures were human, and animal, but there was no place to focus, no clear order, and they throbbed and took precedence like dream images, lurid in their Day — Glo colors and comic-strip rendering: a man in uniform, in chains; starved desert animals in cages; a snake swallowing a bird; a miniature woman, handcuffed, half out of a tent; a small coffin; the head of a man in a golf cap; a transfixed dolphin on a spear; a coinlike medallion in a gloved hand.

In the dome of the other wing, and partly following the ribs and struts, there was a huge geometric figure, a rough circle of red sticks and green wires that did not touch each other, extending to all corners of the field. They had had to fight to focus on the specifics in the left, but when they looked in the right wing their pupils dilated, and they could take in the whole of what they saw there. It was like looking up into the high skeletal expanse of a cathedral dome. It was airy, and there were a lot of spaces in it, and yet it seemed to press down and contain them.

And then they saw the beginning of ripples in the two domes, and for a moment the figures in them became animated and strangely alive. The tail of the hang-glider lifted as it came up and moved out from the slope into the air above them, and they saw the head of the oblong figure between the wings cock to the side slightly and look down and over at them. He was wearing a black aviator’s cap, hugging his head tightly and buckled under his chin; his eyes were big and insectlike in his flight goggles. He wore a scarf of red silk around his neck, and it rippled out the way the flag had on the green. From his shoulders to his feet he looked embryonic, like a spire encased in wet leather, as if he were a gigantic mutant butterfly only half out of the cocoon. His arms were out and moving, manipulating the steering mechanism, a bar that seemed driven sideways through his neck.

His head came to a stop when his gaze reached them, and they saw him push the bar, lifting the glider so that it stalled and seemed to stop dead in the air, with wings snapping taut and full of the air. Then they saw his right hand drop to his belly and touch the weapon that was slung there and looked like a large and misshapen vestigial organ running from his groin to his upper chest. He quickly got it loose, dropping his left hand from the bar also, and swung it down from his body and out, his arms dangling low now. The weapon was coming around, the barrel dipping down toward them, and they could see the barbed, blue steel of the spearhead and the rubber tubes of the catapult. And then they saw sudden and fleeting indentations in the leather below the flyer’s chest, his body lurch, and a shower of little pellets fall. They heard the quick, dull blasts as Campbell fired his rubber bullets, and the rifle was halfway lowered when they glanced at him. When they looked back up, they saw the glider stop hovering and begin to rotate. They saw the flyer’s still and unconscious body in its trussing, arms limp and slightly waving, and the top of his hanging, leather-encased head.

“Another one!” the Chair yelled, and they all turned to the left and saw the second glider drift down over the hill, back, and a little over the high rough halfway down the fairway near the red one-fifty marker. Campbell trained on it, but he did not fire. Midway through his turn he saw the third one come over the ridge.

“Get down!” he said, and he turned and headed for the rough that ran uphill toward the Jenny Lind tower and the Air Force domes above it. He ran low and zigzagged, and the spears sent from the gliders missed him as he disappeared; they struck and vibrated in the brush beyond the green’s apron in his wake. Allen jumped half over Melinda in a turn, pulling her against his chest, and rolled as gently as he could, bringing the two of them out of the cart and down to the ground behind it, where he lay over her, on one knee, his crouched body supported by his right hand on the cart’s side. Sighting across the seat, he saw Eddie Costa fall and roll, clutching his golf bag along his body, until he got half of himself under the Chair’s cart and the golf bag quickly adjusted against his exposed side. When Costa went down, Allen could see Chip running.

He was headed in back of the green, hitting into the pines in the direction of the sea. His run was a little like a mimicry of Campbell’s run, a half-lope and stutter step with some darting and weaving in it. He turned all the way around once, looking back. There was a muffled burst from above and down the fairway, and Chip stopped his turn and seemed to dive backward into the higher pines. The trees caught and held him, and he landed standing, arms thrown back and out, tangled in the branches. Allen saw him caught, his head cocked to the side, his eyes wide open, and then he saw the beginning of the seepage across his body. It came out at his thin waist and formed a belt of blood there, and there was a place in the middle where the belt had a buckle, a filmy, convex, moonstone shape. For a moment the fluids paused in the belt of holes, and the boy looked girded with many colorful and rich jewels, like those set in the belts of champion wrestlers. His mouth opened and closed on the air, but no sound issued. He wanted to speak, it seemed, to finish or at least add to his story. He pulled his left arm free from his bed of pine and reached out in a sweeping and vague motion.

He either indicated the apron, beckoned to Allen, or gestured for his workbag that sat in the open beyond the carts. Then the jewels of fluid began to break and fall, and his arm came down; his hand moved to his buckle and his palm pressed into it. The fluid oozed between his fingers and began washing down and across his groin and thighs. And as if the buckle had been some kind of switch, as his palm pressed into it his eyes went out; they rolled back in his head, and the lids fell to cover them over. His mouth continued its effort to speak, and then it stopped doing that. Then the noise and the concentrated effort shut down, and it was very quiet.

The rain had stopped, but there was still no sun, and the sky remained uniformly dark. Allen heard the creaking and the yaw and the sound of slapping lines above, and he looked up and saw the unconscious figure hanging from the rigging between the great wings and slowly coming down. The glider turned gradually in a half circle, then caught some air, moved up a fraction as the domes in the wings filled and stretched taut like membranes, and came back around again, lowering. The man’s head and arms hung loosely down, but his feet and legs were still tight together.

Allen kept his hand over Melinda’s face, and when he brought his eyes down from the glider, he saw the Chair standing alone, his arms raised and his hands in fists. He was looking up at the glider, and then he looked down and back to where the second and third had come over. The third, the one with the rifle, was struggling in a gust of air, the flyer jerking at the bar for elevation. The second was climbing, and it looked like it might make the other hill and reach the domes. It was halfway across the fairway in its climb. The Chair swung toward it, shaking his fists and yelling.

“That’s enough, that’s goddamned enough!” he screamed. “Stop it! Stop it! This is a golf course! “