Toby Olson - Seaview

There were three women in the car, two in the front seat, one in the back. Their arms were resting in visible places, on shining window sills and over the white roll of the folded-down top. They were smiling, and their arms and faces were brown. They were leaving the Cape after a sweet week in the sun. They had their hair gathered, hooked up with barrettes, combs, and colorful ribbons, in different and careful styles, loosely but held back enough to handle what breeze would come into the open car. They wore bright blouses of natural fabric, just a little flamboyant, but tasteful. The one who was driving the car was about forty; the other two were somewhat younger. The driver lifted her hand up, and the woman beside her reached out and opened the door.

There was a moment in which the slight figure paused in the open doorway. The inside of the door was patterned with blue and white rolled-leather ribbing, chrome handles with clear plastic buttons with little blue flowers in them, and deep pouches. Someone had hung a plastic bag of fresh fruit over one of the handles: dark plums, small oranges, and bright yellow bananas; there were a few walnuts in the bag also. With the door open, the brown legs of the three women were visible. In the front seat, the legs formed a pattern, those of the driver (a little thicker in ankle) a compliment, seen over, between, and behind the fine thinness of those of the passenger. The woman in the backseat had her legs crossed, a brown sandaled foot hanging down in the air. They all wore loose skirts with Paisley and silk-screened designs.

She lifted her head up to their faces, and as her head came up her whole body lifted, pushing its form out against her blouse and skirt. She lifted her arms up and stretched and smiled, and the three women laughed lightly, and they raised their arms also, beckoning for her to enter. She stepped into the backseat, putting her suitcase in the corner, herself beside the woman there.

The woman in the passenger seat in the front pulled the door closed, and as the car moved slowly back on the highway, she turned in her seat and began talking. She moved her hands as she spoke, and she had a way of touching the tip of her thumb against the tip of her middle finger, moving them slightly together and apart from each other while she was making a point or listening to one of the others. The car moved up the gradual westward slope of the highway. The four women were talking and laughing. The breeze began to lift strands of their hair as the car picked up speed. As the car came to the crest, the woman in the backseat handed something to her new companion. The woman took it and looked at it. She nodded her thanks, and then she brought her hands up, arching her body in the seat. She reached back and began to gather and order and hook up her hair. Then the car dipped over the western crest and left the field of the glasses.

AND NOW HAVE I COME TO WALK THIS SOMBER PLAIN AT the final edge of evening. There is earth light under it, of course, but no shine yet. Our small fires mark the perimeter, lit in the faces of governments and the press, and our young boys are loose now behind them, but they keep it quiet. Militant before, they are now awestruck and a little unbelieving. The occupation is all political and a matter of visibility and negotiation. They cannot spill, methodically, our blood yet; they have to sit down and talk some.

It is some cheer to Frank Bumpus (who meets already with them, in the name of Chief Wingfoot) that the talks will include the Chairman, a good buffer for us, though he be injured and limping, to keep things knotted and confused for a good long time. He grieves some for his wound, but more for the purely innocent, the young boy: workmanly pro. The mad products, in their borrowed and tortured uniforms, have laid him low. He was a victim of what his own people (Thoreau and Bradford, no heeded correctives) have, predictably, brought forth.

A worn brown fedora, with a tern feather in its band; a leather vest; a brace of golf bags; an old flying cap; a new Golden Ram; various weapons, clubs, spears, and chains: these are the products of my reconnoitering. I carry Frank’s old wooden golf club as a staff. There is some scarring, but only the traps are deeper wounds, and these have been salved a bit by their filling of sand. The greens, like gentle haircuts, and the careful cutting of the aprons and rough lines do not give us much pain. Theirs was a kind of ritual also, having to do with land, and mostly in respect of it, though in the service of a game. But not for Allen. Soon I will take a cart over and check the stone tower.

It has all been matters of priority, but tempered by being in one place at one time, sane, because one cannot be elsewhere. Thus, they are mostly insane; they find it hard to be where the body is. For Melinda, in her circumstance, it was possible. Being elsewhere was only, properly, a story. And so I tell one for myself and for the two of them.

WHEN I WAS A BOY I HAD A FINE AND SECRET NAME. I liked it, but I had no use for it. I could not speak it outside my family, and my father, who was very conservative as those things went at that time, seemed nervous even when he whispered it to me when he instructed me. This rubbed off, and I avoided its use entirely. I could say it now if I wished. It would be okay to do so, but I have not said it in a long time, and it would come rusty to my mouth, and so I will keep silent on that account.

Now I was a child of great virtue, I thought, and I dreamed about the future and how I would have various successes when I got big enough to have them. I felt I had evidence to predict this. I rode well, was sufficiently easy with people, if a little sharp and arrogant, and women seemed already able to see a man in me, and they did not touch me much when I was with them. In this time I am talking about, we lived just outside Jerome, Arizona, that copper mining town, in a time when the mine was thriving and there seemed to be as many executives around as there were miners. Maybe too many chiefs, as some might say in some circumstances. There were inspectors and a lot of well-dressed people in offices. I used to see them come and go, in white shirts, from where I sat above the post office there. Well, in one summer I did get tired of all that sitting around, and I headed out to the edge of town to the golf course there, to see if I could find something to do.

There may be some passing historical import in what I will say now, maybe not. In Jerome they had a bowling alley, and they hired mostly Mexicans as pinsetters there. Sometimes town boys would get jobs there, but they didn’t last. The story had it that Mexicans could stand the heat of the pin pit better in the summertime, and it was also said that they had bigger hands. There was one they told about, name of Manny, who could get five pins in each hand at a time. That was the whole rack of pins, and after a strike was thrown, he could have those pins racked up and down on the alley in one stoop, before even the ball got back down that trough they have for its returning to the thrower in such places. Some of the stories about the Mexican hands went on a little, and they got upward even to their ancestors, and into myth, and that the size of the hands came from miraculous acts early on down south in Mexico. There were of course the other stories, those about big hands for swimming across the river to get into America without passing through customs at the gate, but these were not told often, and when they were it was mostly by those who had no sense and could not set pins either, and they were of little matter. If it hadn’t been for the cheap four cents a line that the Mexican pinsetters were paid there at that bowling alley, they would have had the corner on a very good market indeed.