He motioned to them with an open hand that they should stay where they were, and because he knew the snake could not pull his head back and withdraw into the dark safety of the hole
as long as he held the bird in his mouth this way, he did not hesitate or try to dissemble or trick the snake. He walked slowly around the embankment of the upper green, withdrawing his knife from the sheath inside his shirt as he moved. When he got to the fairway and the other side of the dolphin, he crouched slightly and crept to the face of the wave. The dolphin was hip-high, and he could see the head of the snake over the dolphin's head. The head of the snake had followed his movement until he was out of its peripheral vision. Then it had returned to the other two, stopping its scanning. Bob White took the blade of his knife and rested it behind the head of the dolphin. Then he slid it over the dolphin's head and moved it swiftly under the neck of the snake, just back of its jaw. When the snake felt the steel, it tried to withdraw, but Bob White lifted the knife blade, pinning the head of the snake to the top of the hole.
They could see the glint of the knife blade below the body of the bird, parallel with it. It seemed that the snake's red eyes blazed out as they contracted. Bob White's head was above the head of the snake and the head of the dolphin. It was too dark for them to see his eyes, but they thought that he was looking at them. The knife blade seemed to stay where it was for a long time; then, suddenly, it was above the head of the snake. Then the snake's head with the bird in it fell from the hole, skimming down the dolphin's body, and tumbled onto the green, to the left and away from the wave. There was a furious shaking inside the body of the dolphin, and when they looked up from the vision of the severed head with the bird still in its mouth, they saw the body of the snake coming out of the wound. It was very long, and it spilled over the side of the dolphin, staining it, and fell like a coiled placenta, and came to rest in an almost perfect ring, still vibrating, on the surface of the upper green.
There was a moment in which they could see the placenta and the tableau of the head with the bird in it, and all was very fixed in place and silent. Then the ball came. It appeared, white and swollen, in the mouth of the hole. It seemed to linger there
enough to turn, so that its black spot appeared, an intense large pupil that changed the mouth into an eye in the dolphin's side.
And then it fell out, bouncing once on the dolphin's body and once on the green. When it quit bouncing it rolled four inches, and then it disappeared again, this time into the tunnel. They heard it rattle in the tube as it descended. Allen moved to the lower green to watch it come out. When it came it had good speed, and it skipped past the final hole and rolled to the board lining the green. It hit the board and started back, crossing the warped green surface. As it was losing its energy it reached the hole, rimmed it, hesitated on the back of the hole's edge, and then it fell in. From where Bob White stood on the other side of the dolphin, he could not see the ball enter the cup. But he could hear the click.
“Birdie,” he said, very dryly and very softly. The two looked up and over at him. He had not smiled when he spoke. Then Melinda started to laugh a little. Then all three of them were laughing softly and tentatively in the increasing darkness.
Bob White came around from the body of the dolphin and climbed the embankment to the upper green. The coil of placenta was now still, and the black-leather sheen on the scales shone in the little moonlight and the dim artificial light that came from the backs of the rooms over and across the sea course. The strange cross formed by the head of the snake and the bird was also still, the snake's eyes still open, but glazing and without any intensity of rage left. The shocked bird seemed dead. It was very quiet, its outer wing gathered back to its body. It was unmarked, but it was still held fast. Bob White knelt down beside the strange small figure. It looked like a lost charm from a crazy bracelet. He put his thumb and index finger over the eyes in the snake's head, holding it fast to the green. Then he insinuated the tip of his knife blade under the body of the bird, between its small downy belly and the snake's lower jaw. When he felt the hardness of the lower jawbone and the leathery bottom of the mouth, he pressed
the blade into the leather and through the scales until he had pierced the jaw, pinning it to the green.
Holding it there, he moved his thumb and finger to the front of the head's snout and slowly opened the mouth. With his ring finger, he gently urged the bird's body out, till it lay in front of the head. Then he released the open jaw, letting it shut. He picked up the bird then and cradled it in his palm and got up from his knees and slowly turned, looking for a place to put it. He knew there would be no snakes coming now for a while, and he wanted a place where, in the morning, sun would shine on the bird when it came up, a place where the bird would be touched or sur â rounded on all sides, but a place that from the top would be open to the sky. He stopped turning when he faced the dolphin, and then he climbed down the embankment, holding the bird in his hand. When he got down, he reached and tore a handful of weed from where it grew in the gravel of the sea-course path, and he took the weed and the bird around to the fairway side of the dolphin. When he reached the dolphin's side, he took a bit of the weed and scrubbed at the stains on the far side of the dolphin's body with it, mixing grass stains with the snake's fluids, changing the smell. Then he threw the bit of weed down on the coiled placenta. He took what remained of the weed and gathered it in the clean, faded blue-check handkerchief he took from his back pocket. Then he rubbed the handkerchief and the weed slowly along the ball groove that ran in the side of the dolphin, pressing hard, staining the handkerchief and the groove.
When he was finished, he gathered the weed and the handkerchief into a crinkled low pocket, fitting it near the top of the dolphin's side where the groove was almost horizontal to the ground. Then he placed the small body of the bird into the pocket, tucking it in and spreading the sides of the pocket slightly away from the feathers and head. When he was satisfied, he stood up from his crouch and looked down at the bird. Then he reached down and made a final adjustment, putting the pocket a little bit farther away from the bird's tail.
They had been watching him intently from where they were. Melinda was still behind the embankment of the upper green. Allen was standing where his ball had fallen in. And now they watched him coming away from the fairway and the dolphin's body and climbing back up the embankment. He could have stepped easily over the dolphin to get to where he was, but it was clear that that would have somehow been inappropriate, and they stood where they were and waited for him. When he got to the upper green and the placenta and the severed head, he reached down and picked the head up and took it with him down the embankment again to where his ball and Melinda's lay among the gravel of the walk, both distinct in the limited light. He took the head of the snake and wedged it down among the stones, so that it stood up with its closed jaws pointing toward the sky, a gesture not unlike that of the whale's jaw, and though diminutive, its recent history might have held a similar complexity. Then he took his knife and opened the mouth of the snake, and holding it with the blade twisted, he picked up a good-size piece of gravel and used it to wedge the jaw so that the snake's mouth stood up wide open when he removed the knife.
“Wait,” Melinda said softly from the other side of the embankment. “Let me.” And she came around to where he was and reached down beside him and picked her ball from among the stones. When she came up with it in her fingers, her hand held up a little in front of her so that the ball shone in the half darkness, she could see Allen, the upper half of his body only, mouth open and looking at them across the embankment and the upper green. She moved over and down to the snake's head and placed her ball where the bird had been. Bob White stood back and to the side.
She was at the side of the snake's head and the ball now, intent on the coming break of the perceptible structure that had grown up around them. She wanted to finish it. It was not real life. She felt she was now a living monitor of such things. As she addressed the snake's head with the blade of the putter, she
stopped breathing, holding a brief modicum of air in the fragile domes of her alveoli. The blade was square to the head of the snake. The ball stood in the open jaws. The configuration was now like the handle of a garish cane. She brought the shaft of the club back, keeping her left arm and wrist stiff, and with no other move in her body, she stroked down and into the side of the snake's jaw, below where the ball was. There was a dull thud, followed by a slight click as the blade struck the jaw and the ball afterward. Both the ball and the head lifted up from the stones, the head spinning and falling and the ball continuing. The head landed and bounced on the embankment, and the ball bounced on the upper green, and then it bounced again, clearing the rotten board lining the far side and falling and landing on the lower green, coming to rest four feet from the cup.
“That's a good shot,” Allen said, finishing the game of the structure and beginning to end it at the same time.
“I'll pick up,” Bob White said, and he reached down and lifted his ball out of the stones. She made her putt. Bob White took an X on the hole. It had gotten too dark for them to continue further, and with no real discussion they agreed to quit. Bob White checked the bird a last time, adjusting the handkerchief pocket where it rested. Then he took the body of the snake, like a coiled hose, in one hand and its head in the other and walked across the sea course to where the weeds and the corn pressed in as the desiccated fields began. When he got there, he stopped. He set his feet. Then, turning like a discus thrower, he spun and released the coiled snake's body into the air. It unwound as it lifted, straightening for a moment like a spear. Then, as it descended, it telescoped in on itself, becoming increasingly smaller and inconsequential as it disappeared. He threw the head out in the same direction he had thrown the body.
When he finished, he came back to them, and they started together back up and out of the dark, broken sea, past the pelicans and the shark and the other fish figures, until they passed under the whale's jaw. They stopped there, turned, and looked
back under the massive archway. It was quite dark now, and though they could see the form of the dolphin behind them, they could not see the place where the bird rested upon it at all.
When they got back to their rooms, Melinda said she was very tired and thought it would be a good thing if she slept alone that night. Allen said he thought they could arrange that, and maybe she should take Bob White's room and bed, and he and Bob White could sleep together in their room. They did that, and though the walls were thin, Melinda wept very quietly in Bob White's bed, and Allen did not hear her. And though Allen was very tired, Bob White lay so still beside him that he kept feeling and listening for movement and breath, so it was a long time before he was able to fall asleep.
Early in the morning, at the beginning of first light and while they were still sleeping, Melinda got up and went back out to the whale's jaw and the sea course. She was in her bathrobe and slippers, she was too intent to notice the way the day changed the look of things, and she stepped carefully down between the sea figures, retracing the way to the dolphin. When she got to the dolphin's side, she saw that the small pocket was empty, the bird was gone. She went back to the room, and when the three were sitting together having coffee in Bob White's room later, she mentioned to them that she had gone out and that the bird was no longer there.
“What do you think?” she asked Bob White.
He looked at her, hesitating a moment before answering, thinking that he could lie to her. But then he thought that the lie would be feeble, and also that to lie to her would be the wrong thing to do. And he said:
“I do not think that bird has come to a good end.”
Two
Day
THERE WERE TWO PICTURES HANGING IN THE CLUBHOUSE, side by side, on the wall behind the glass case. The one on the left, put up with tape and brown and peeling at the edges, was a mock blueprint rendering of an eighteen-hole course, and scribed in between the lines denoting the location and shape of the new clubhouse were the words
Seaview Links Proposal
and below that
Baron Associates / 1955
. The other was an old and faded photograph, about a foot square, in a glass frame. It was a picture of the seventh green, taken from the fairway close in front of it, with the lighthouse in full view in the background. Four men, all of them in baggy knickers and jaunty tams, stood on the green. One was tending the flagstick, while a second addressed a putt of about fifteen feet. The other two stood to the side, both with hands on hips, each with one foot planted a little ahead of the other. Off the green to the right stood a fifth figure, more faded than the others. It was hard to tell what he was wearing, not golf togs surely, but his posture was very erect and formal, and he seemed not to be in anyway involved in the proceedings. He was looking away from the green in the direction of the camera. On the sur â face of the glass, in felt-tip marker, various hands had drawn little arrows pointing to the figures, and there were names and statements beside the arrows:
Fred Borker considers a putt
,
The Chair watches critically
,
John Hope holds stick
.
Around the head of the figure standing off the green, a small feathered headdress had been carefully inked in, and beside the
arrow pointing to the figure were the words,
Chief Wingfoot's Revenge !
and then, in very small parentheses,
Chip
. A white card had been tacked below the photograph, and typed on it were the words
Seaview Links, One of the oldest courses in America. Continuous play since 1892. Above photograph, 1920
.