“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 soundsâheavy implosive thuds, motors, kinds of cracking, unidentifiableâover 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.
“I got what I wanted,” he finally said. “Now let's finish this hole!”
Only Allen knew immediately what the Chair meant. Campbell and Costa seemed a little bewildered, as if they had forgotten why they were there, in golf carts, halfway down a fairway. Melinda was already, in her different nature, slightly separated from any events. Allen stepped out of the cart, and as none of the others moved, he spoke.
“Okay, I'll hit then.” He walked over to where his ball was,
stood back ten feet behind it, sighting along the line. Because there was no other movement, the others watched him.
The ball sat five feet down from the entrance into the rough running along the fairway toward the green. It was on the flat, and he would have a good place for a stance. He was about a hundred and sixty-five yards from the front of the second green; the pin stood twenty-five or so feet back to the right and on the high side of the slope. He figured he could go straight at the pin with a wedge, get it to bite and pull up quick. The green had begun to glisten; the rain, though the drops were still infrequent and far apart, was steady now and real. The drops were large, and he figured that the green had softened a little already. The shot gave him nothing interesting to negotiate. He turned and went back to the cart, grabbed the head of his eight-iron, and pulled the club free of the bag. When he got behind the ball again, he looked up the groin of the slowly dampening fairway and thought about the lines.
The lines were best when they arced. There were lines in the air and lines on the ground. The lines on the green were visible to anyone when it rained. You could retrace the putt after it was finished then. The ball would make a kind of trough, pushing the drops to either side in its roll and bending the wet grass down before it. When the rain had been heavy, a small rooster tail of water would rise up behind it, and as the tail shrank the ball would slow in its pace, and when it stopped the tail would stop. And then there would be a trail like a snake left behind when it had passed through sand. You could see every detail of the breaks the ball had negotiated, how it had fought against them or rolled comfortably with them when the pace was right, taking it to finish somewhere near the hole or in it. If you watched long enough, the trail would begin to disappear as the grass rose up again in the trough and the rain fell. It would leave the surface of the green in increments, starting from where the head of the putter had rested, the end of its tail becoming faint and slowly vanishing as you looked up it toward the hole or the final resting place of the
ball near it. It could be almost as if the movement of your eye along the line registered and then canceled it, until, when your glance reached the presence of the ball or the absent place in the green where the hole was, there was no longer any use for the line, and it was gone.
But this was for anyone to see, and for him it was the lines in the air, the gentle and hooked arcs and graceful fadings and dips, that gave him better pleasure. He felt it as a kind of geometry he could trace back to his body, and when things were exactly right, he knew it was an actual aura emanating from him, and in that extension beyond his body he experienced a unique kind of power. At least he thought of it as unique, felt that there was enough difference in it, though he had heard that archers knew of a similar thing. The line would start out in the bundle of hiss that sat in the muscle of his heart, that tangled and self-regulating system of twisted and complex nerves which made the heart go and in turn extended its influence, making his whole body operate.
After the planning, but before the hit, it was as if the bundle of hiss tensed a little, became a different kind of system and potential. It was as if it became one continuous long nerve coiled in the flesh of his heart. It was as if it unraveled slowly, sending itself like a catheter into a pulmonary artery and from that to the brachial and down into the wrist of his left arm and into his thumb, where it pressed into the grip of the club. And a moment before the club face struck against the ball, and as the ball itself seemed to swell in that way it did, reaching out to the club face to touch it, the visible letters on the Golden Ram sharpening in their outlines, it was as if a small hole opened in the end of his thumb and the tip of the nerve came through and there was a kind of synapse, an electric arcing, between his thumb and the ball, and the arc continued into the air when the ball shot off the etched surface of the club face, and the lines began. It was not an unraveling. It was as if the air were a surface on which the ball could trace and map its path, but it looked like a filament of gold or
silver, depending on the place of the sun, and it stayed and marked its arc until the ball had descended and found out its resting place. He felt, at certain special times, that the line was somehow part of his body and that his influence throbbed along the line and was connected to the ball until the shot was finished, when the ball came to rest.
He moved up to the ball and got slightly down in his stance and addressed it. He had decided on a half eight, a slight punching fade, to take the ball low and left, then bring it back right so that when it hit in the apron it would be coming in on an angle from the left and would have some side spin in it. That
way it would roll up the hill toward the right back of the green where the pin was. He figured it would stop close and would get them their eagle. He shifted his feet, lifted the club head from the ground, then replaced it, then did that again, sighting his line in, picturing the filament he expected to come this time. Then he brought the club head up in a half backswing, began the slight hip-shift toward the green, brought the club down and through, dug into sand in the crude fairway in front of the place where the ball had been, and the force of the swing brought the club through and up.
His head was pulled up by his arms; he looked to see how the ball flew and caught sight of it when it was already a good fifty feet from him. Then the line began to materialize, silver this time under the dark cloud cover. The ball, etching the line, reached its apex and then began to descend, turning its arc to the right and in toward the green. But his eyes stopped at the apex, and they widened. There was another line there, this one a dirty white, and it cut across the top of the arc, dividing the air above the fairway from high rough on the left to an equally high place on the right. His concentration broke. He quit watching the ball, got up from his stance, and turned to the others, but he kept his club head in the air and pointed with it.
“There's another line,” he said. They did not know what he meant at first, but then Campbell saw it too, and he pointed.
“There!” he said. And when the others saw it, it was shaking and whipping slightly, and their eyes followed along it to the right, and they saw some rustling in the scrub high up in the rough, the kind of movement a small animal would make or a large bird foraging. But the thing happened too fast for them to judge the movements. The bird leapt up from the brush so quickly it seemed to materialize in the air a few feet above it. Like a great hawk, or an osprey, or an eagle even, it danced and fluttered on stiff wings, and the absence of the glare of sunlight or the backdrop of shadows was such that they could see it very distinctly. It was not a bird at all but a small man with wings. His face was in profile, his chin up and his jaw-set, arrogant, but austere in its stillness. He wore a feathered headdress and fringed shirt and trousers, and in his small right fist he carried a tomahawk. He dipped down a little and then rose quickly as the line connected to him snapped taut. Then they heard the rustle in the paper as the high breeze above the still fairway caught him, sending him higher.