The way such self-interest was handled and denied was through silence, demure standing back, in physical stillness, in postures of unconcern.
Allen felt that right now he could win it without putting. The fact that Steve was ready and aware of the psychological game possibilities was enough to make it likely. All he needed to do was speak. He was thinking, this is a speed putt, there’s too much break and trickiness in his line for him to risk trying to leak it in. If he had spoken this thought, he would have thickened the social matrix by interrupting Steve’s attention to the putt. The break in the attention would have been insignificant. Steve was good enough at golf for that not to bother him. It would have been Steve’s sense of the motive behind the talking that would have thickened things. He could have stood in crucial places, could have altered his expression in various ways, could have coughed or cleared his throat. But he did nothing, and it is possible that that in itself took its toll, because it was contrary to Steve’s expectations.
And he began to think, while Steve was working at getting ready, that this may well be the sense in which this game today was at bottom characterological. It was just that Steve could not possibly imagine that the man he was playing against now had certain standards that would not allow him to reduce the grandeur of the game they were playing to something that had to do with relationships between people. The stakes, the money, was something he accepted as the catalyst to what they were doing. For him, at one end of the hierarchical scale on which the money stood was the game played for pleasure, for practice and enjoyment. On the other end was the game played for life and death. With the stakes as given, the morals of the game entered.
These had to do with the other man and the ball and the ground to be covered. And that complex of tensions and chemistry was sacrosanct to him. At least he thought it was. It was not to be messed with, and he would not violate it. Steve’s limitations were moral; but at bottom his morals, those of business and power, were contradictory to those of golf. At least, this was the way Allen romanced it; this was why he knew Steve would lose, why he had already lost.
Steve stepped up to his ball finally, took a few smooth practice swings, and addressed it. He moved his head slowly from the head of his putter to the ball and down the imaginary line where he intended to send it. Out of the corner of his eye as he sighted he saw nothing. There was no opponent there, nothing for him to deal with, no one for him to exert power over. Even before he took his putter back for the stroke, his concentration was without attentive focus. When he struck the putt, he pushed it slightly, sending it out too far to the left. It caught the middle and not the down side of the slope that he wanted it to hit; it bent in toward the cup as it turned, but it did not bend enough.
He missed the cup by a good two inches on the high side, his ball coming to rest only a foot beyond it. When the ball stopped he tried to shrug, but he could not manage it. The shrug was like a tick in him. He stepped up and punched the ball home for his par.
Then it was Allen’s turn. Always his turn came. He never minded slowness of play, because his turn would always come up, and when that happened he would be alone again. It would be something else altogether. He never minded waiting for it, because of what it was. This one was for all of it, this one putt. Nobody else was involved in it. The mower had cut the green; he could hear it cutting another one in the distance. He could feel the slight wind. The birds were singing, and he picked out red-winged blackbird, brown thrasher, and catbird, isolating the differences in voice between the last two, then he released them.
He looked back up the fairway to the top of the mound. The faces in the pole looked away from him, the Indian at the top was turned away, high up, distant, and uninterested. He glanced at the other three. They were very still, very unimportant.
He smiled. He walked up to the putt, saw that it was straight with a slight curl to the left, just at the hole. He was close enough that he could just drive it home, with speed, taking the curl out of the putt. He decided instead to play the curl. All he had to do was hit the ball so that it would stop about a foot on the other side of the hole, play it into the right side. He stepped up to it. He sighted it, and then he stroked it. It came off the putter with some speed. About a foot from the hole it began to die. Six inches out on the right it slowed enough so that it could catch the break. It entered the middle of the cup, and fell in with that nice hollow sound. It never touched the back of the hole.
IT WAS ONLY AFTER HE WAS HALFWAY TO THE MOTEL that he began to come back to himself, to the matrix of real life and the structures he was involved in. First the gas gauge took his notice; it was below half full, and he pulled into a self-service station and filled up. He had worked in gas stations when he was a boy, and he liked to fill his own tank, to catch the smell of the gas fumes as he pumped. The station was at the side of a small shopping mall. He saw a liquor store with its light on, even though it was only six-thirty and still light, between two other stores in the mall’s crescent, and when he had finished with the gas and paid the attendant, a young woman in white overalls, he drove over to the liquor store, where he bought two bottles of good chilled champagne. Melinda liked champagne, and he liked to surprise her with it. When he left the liquor store, he saw that there was a flower shop near the far edge of the crescent, and leaving the car with the champagne on the front seat he walked over and bought some roses. Then he left the mall and got back on the road that ran in front of it.
When he drove onto the gravel drive of the motel, dusk was beginning to come on. There was a nice reddening sky near the horizon above the Sangre de Cristos; the mountains were beginning to become shadows that would get back light when the sun lowered behind them. He heard the sound of voices as he approached the door.
“Here I am,” he said, knocking and speaking at the same time, the paper bag with the champagne in it in his hand and the bouquet of roses held in the crook of his arm. Bob White opened the door, smiled, and bowed slightly from the waist, extending his left arm, his palm open, directing him into the room.
The voices had been the two of them talking. Melinda was sitting in her robe in the roughly upholstered chair; a straight-back chair had been pulled up in front of her. She had her back to them. She turned in her seat as he entered, smiling.
“Hi,” he said. “Look what I got here.” He handed her the flowers, and put the bag with the bottles of champagne in it in her lap.
“Terrific! You did it good, huh?”
“I did it very good,” he said, and he sat on the chair in front of her and reached his head over to her and kissed her, a rose brushing the tip of his chin.
“What have you two been up to today?”
She smiled in the direction of Bob White, who stood somewhat behind him, and nodded. Bob White came into the side of his vision when he went over to the drapes that covered the large sliding doors in the back of the room. He looked over at Melinda when he had located the lines tucked behind the fabric. She nodded again, laughing softly, and Bob White slowly pulled on the lines, opening the drapes, revealing the small lit patio on the other side of them. He had turned in the chair, and he laughed when he saw what the patio contained.
They had put the low, dark, imitation-wood formica table from the motel room out in the center on the bricks. On it, on top of a white towel and to its right, were the ice bucket and three of the plastic glasses from the room. In the center of the table was the rectangular motel room tray. Melinda had covered it with aluminum wrap, pinching bits of the foil along the edges to create a scalloped pattern. From the ends of the tray inward were rows of small cherry tomatoes, olives, slices of cucumber, and radishes. There was a large rectangular pocket left in the center of the tray, and this was lined with crisp lettuce leaves. On the far right of the table was a tall, fat candle covered in foil, with a foil lip about the wick as a wind guard. The candle was lit. To the right of the table, in the corner of the patio, was the hibachi, the coals ashen but with a glow of light emanating from their center. On top of the hibachi, in the boat of aluminum foil, in the bed of odd and colorful clippings, the strips of snake meat were cooking. Above and away from the hibachi, to its right, the carefully hung snake-skins shone in a row over the latticework at the end of the patio.