“Snake,” Bob White said softly, looking down into the carefully formed boat of foil.
“Allen, it’s rattlesnake!” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder.
“Fantastic!” he said.
While he was showering, standing among the golf balls, Bob White and Melinda tended to the preparations. They put paper plates and plastic knives and forks on the counter outside the bathroom door. They put a bottle of the good champagne down among the cubes in the ice bucket. They waited for him, watching the snake cook and smelling it.
When he was finished drying himself, he put on a pair of shorts and a blue terry shirt, brushed his teeth and brushed at his hair. When he came out he went to the champagne and opened it. Beside it on the now crowded table were the roses, standing in a plastic pitcher. He popped the cork and filled the three glasses with the wine. He handed one of them to Melinda and one to Bob White, who was over close to the hibachi, keeping an eye on the cooking.
“To the snake,” he said, lifting his glass.
“To the snake,” the other two said in reply, and then they drank.
“Snake’s ready,” Bob White said, and he and Melinda, using white washcloths from the bathroom, lifted the boat of foil to the table. When they got it there, Melinda put her end down in the corner of the waiting space, and Bob White, using his knife, held the snake and the cuttings back while he pulled out the foil, letting the snake come to rest in the place they had prepared for it. Then the three of them just stood and looked at the rare and delicate strips of snake meat and the cuttings.
“Let’s eat ’em,” Bob White said, and he stepped up with a slight flourish and took the small blue flower he held in his hand and dropped it among the strips of meat. It was a soft blue in color, but it was the only blue thing on the arrangement, and it seemed to command its small portion of space, distinct in its petals and stamen. Melinda got the paper plates and the plastic knives and forks. He got the upholstered chair from the room. When Melinda returned, he helped her to sit in the chair, and Bob White served her snake and brought her a fresh glass of champagne. He and Bob White remained standing, holding their plates in their hands. They ate, making sounds of pleasure and smiling at each other between bites.
When they were finished and the coals from the hibachi glowed brighter as night came on, he sat on the arm of the chair with his hand on Melinda’s shoulder, holding his glass, full of champagne from the second bottle. Bob White squatted on his haunches on the patio bricks, taking occasional sips from his glass, which he replaced at the side of his right foot without looking at it. They talked a little, quietly, about the snake, the pool, the golf course, and the weather, the look of the Sangre de Cristos that day. After a while, Bob White told a kind of story that had to do with what Allen had told them about the play. When he was finished, Melinda raised her glass to him, and she and Allen toasted him and his grandmother. Then Bob White raised his glass, and he and Melinda toasted Allen on his win. After that, chatting and laughing softly, they cleared things to the sides of the patio, making a place for Bob White to bed down. Soon after that, Bob White said he thought he might retire, and bidding them good night, he went outside, pulling the glass doors shut behind him. He did it in such a comfortable manner that neither Allen nor Melinda were concerned that he not be sleeping in the room with them. When Bob White had left, Allen and Melinda caught each other yawning, laughed a bit about it, and decided that it was time to go to bed. They decided to leave the end of the cleaning up until the morning. Allen waited until Melinda was in bed and set, and then he turned the light off and got into bed himself.
HUNTING SNAKES CAN BE DIFFICULT, BUT DOING IT IS understandable. Playing golf may be understandable too, but you understand I don’t play golf. I wouldn’t know anything about that then. I don’t really hunt snake either, you understand, but I did it a lot when I was a boy, and a little after that, and I think I can understand it pretty well. Now Indians always talk a lot, it is said, about how the white man sometimes doesn’t understand things too well, and it is true that Indians do talk like that. I know that for a fact, because I have heard them do it, and I apologize to say that I have done it too sometimes. Indians don’t understand things too sometimes, so you see we don’t get very far with this. That is okay, however, because this is not what I am going to talk about here. A couple of years ago I made a trip to Lake Havasu City to see that London Bridge they have over there. Lake Havasu City was not a city or a lake when they started in there. First they made the lake, then they made the city. Then they put that London Bridge there so they could get across the lake to the other side. They put part of the city on the other side of the lake so they could use the bridge to get to it. When I went there, I didn’t understand what was going on there. I went there because people I knew who had been there told me I wouldn’t understand it when I saw it. They were right. But it was not a waste of time going over there to it.
This is about the time I was hearing about the mound you talked about over here at the golf course. It was a while ago, and I knew somebody who worked up around here, and when he came back he told me about it. There was that Mount Rushmore and that place where that man is building that mountain into a statue of Crazy Horse. I hear he is not finished doing that yet. Anyway, he said that they made the mound bigger, big enough to put the whole Pima nation in it if they wanted to. That would be pretty big, of course, and I knew that that man that I knew made things bigger than they were when he talked. Still, I knew that it had to be pretty big for him to get it that big in his talk. That’s why we talked about Mount Rushmore and that Crazy Horse statue at the same time. One thing we understood when we talked about the mound was that we both thought that the way they had made it part of their game was a pretty fucking shitty thing to do, excuse me, but that’s exactly what we said and how we felt about it.
One day my grandmother came up while we were talking. Now this man I’m talking about was a little bit of a dummy; that is to say, he didn’t have good sense. My grandmother asked us what we were talking about, and this man piped right up. The big mound over at Tucson, he said. You mean Lake Havasu City? she asked. I poked at him, but he didn’t get it. No, no, the big burial place at the golf course over there, he said. What are you talking about? she said. What place is that? This one, he said, and he took a post card of the mound, a colored one with that big prick of a phony pole stuck in it, out of his breast pocket and showed it to her. She didn’t understand it I don’t think for a little while, but she pulled the post card away from me when I tried to get it. What is this? she said. It’s nothing, Grandma, I said, and tried to get the card away from her again, but she pulled it away again. They say that’s one of our people’s burial places over there by Tucson, that dummy said. They say that’s King Philip, some Eastern Injun, on the top there, he said. Then my grandmother got it. King Philip? she said, the Sachem? They stuck him in there? They stuck a pole in there! a pole! Then she dropped the card down on the ground, and she sat right down alongside of it. She sat there a long time, but she didn’t look at the card any more.