Now this is where it starts to get good, if you want to say that about it. The man running the camera said that the other man should lift me up on his shoulders for a picture. I got up there, and the man with the camera got ready, but then he stopped and ran over to the car and got one of those small toy tomahawks out of it. He gave it to me, reaching it up above the other man to where I sat. He said I should hold the tomahawk up in the air and look mean. Well, I did that one, and then pretty soon they were telling me to do all sorts of things for pictures. In one time, they told me to pretend to scalp one of the women. I didn’t know where to put the tomahawk, but they showed me. In another one they had me point a little bow and arrow at the kids, who they had hold up their hands and lean back as if they feared me. It was when they were having me do the one with the rubber knife, in which I held it across the throat of one of the girls-I had to stand on my toes to reach her, because she was very tall that my father came out of the store and saw what was going on with me and the people there.
He had some rope and some few bundles, and I don’t think he would have broken his stride coming out of the place when he saw me, but he did drop one of the bundles and had to pick it up. When he did that he didn’t look my way, but he went right over to the horses. He tied his bundles onto the saddle straps and put the rope over the horn. The man took the picture then, and I dropped the rubber knife and walked away. My father was on his horse, and he walked it to the edge of the highway, where he stopped it. Then both my father and the horse, it seems to me, looked both ways down the highway as he had taught me to do. Then my father crossed the road on the horse. When he got to the other side, he pulled up. He kept his horse facing away from me and the people and the cars. He just sat there on the horse, aiming in the direction of the desert there and over in it to where we lived at that time. I know for sure that there was no talking right then or calling out.
I climbed onto my horse, and when I threw my leg over it, I could tell by the way the sun hit my face that I had forgotten my derby. I walked my horse over to the edge of the highway. After I stopped and looked both ways and when my horse’s hoofs started to click on the highway, my father started his horse up, and when we were both over there in the desert, I was about thirty feet behind him. I knew I had to stay there and go the whole way like that on the ride home. We didn’t pass too many people, but we did pass some, people we knew and ones we didn’t. All these people looked at us riding this way. I was always thinking that they all knew I had done wrong. By the time we got home I was very tired and hot and sad. My father never said a word about all this when it was over. Maybe that evening he patted my back or smiled at me or some such thing. When the times of a thing were over with my father they were over. Even now and at this somewhat significant distance from the events told in what I have just spoken about, I cannot append some powerful moral to this tale beyond the obvious. I would say, though, however vaguely I might put it, that there was something about disentanglement and walking away that has stayed with me from it. Sometimes, I guess, in some circumstances, there is no other hope for it, no help on the inside. I remember that trip home behind my father as a kind of purgatory passage. I bore it with some lessening of pain, I guess, because there was a kind of light at the end of it.
SHE WAS SHAPING THE FOIL, EACH PIECE WITH THE edges slightly turned up to catch the oil. He was cutting beside her. She was getting a little tired from standing. She reached a little too quickly for one of the bags on the ice; she wanted to measure the snake against the foil containers. She felt a little dizzy from the motion. There was some oil on her hands, and the bag slipped out of them and fell to the floor. He put his knife on the counter and reached down at her feet to pick it up. Her hand touched his shoulder lightly for balance.
“Hell, that snake is nuts with that slipping,” she said.
He came up with the bag, put it back on the ice, then turned and smiled at her. They both laughed lightly, and she put her hand up on his shoulder and leaned a little against him. He reached down and picked her up and carried her to the bed.
He placed her gently on it and put a pillow against the headboard. Then he took her under her arms and lifted her to a half-sitting position.
“Just have to rest a little,” she said.
“You rest a little, while I finish up with the cutting,” he said. “Then we can get to work with the good stuff.” She nodded weakly as he looked down at her. Then he turned and walked back to the counter.
Even before they got to the tenth he was beginning to feel a little down about the situation. Earlier he might have considered the hot dog as someone to deal with, but Lou’s desperateness, exacerbated now by the difficulty he would have to face in betting with Steve at a game of skill, made him feel something for the younger man. As for Frankie, he had come to like him. Whatever the density of his tie to Steve, he seemed to be his own man. He might be a little freed by the fact that he was simply not as good at golf as Steve was and could, therefore, go all out without worrying about winning big. But more important than that, while he was respectful he was not a panderer, and Allen liked him for his apparent clarity in the relationship. Among other things, Steve was a prick, he thought. The meanest thing about him was that he showed his power but acted as if he were above using it on someone as inconsequential as Lou. He let him, the outsider, know that he could step on either of these two others anytime he wanted to do it. He could step on Allen too, but he liked better to show him what his power was all about.
The tenth was a long par four with a dog-leg right; a stand of thick, beautiful oaks at the knee obscured sight to the green. A man-made stream ran along the right rough, starting at the tee and opening and cutting into the fairway about two hundred yards out, short of the bend. The stream formed a small pond there, complete with lilies. There was some fairway remaining to the left of the pond, about fifty feet of it, guarded by a long, lateral trap at the edge of the left rough. It was the number-one hole on the course. Its difficulties were these. If you played up short of the pond too far to the right, you would have a blind shot over the oaks to the green. That shot was sufficiently long from there that it would be hard to clear the trees and have enough left to get to the pin. On the other hand, if you played to the left, between the pond and the trap, you would have to hit a very controlled shot that was quite long; from the tee, that fifty-foot space was very narrow looking. If you got it close to the trap and a little short, you could see the green; close to the pond and short, you might still be blinded. Halfway between the two would be good, if the shot were long enough.
The hole was a four-hundred-and-seventy-five-yard par four; the fairway to the dog leg beyond the pond was slightly uphill; the green was small and elevated, and the rough started thick, very close in behind it. Regardless of pin placement, it was one hell of a golf hole. He almost laughed at the absurdity of finding it on this course. He wondered who in the hell had designed and built it, who kept its foreign growths in such good shape here in the desert. He did not figure to par it. He felt very ready to play it.