Bob White both missed their putts also, and the three of them managed to get down in two, even at the end of one.
As they moved from hole to hole, considering each putt carefully, they began to feel themselves descending. They had made a rule that each ball would be putted out, were engaged in a kind of medal play, and such was the decayed condition of the course that they would often find themselves flying off the green or the fairway of the hole they were playing, having to come in from the scarred ground of other fairways, chipping into their proper pathway from stones and sand. It was not unusual for holes to be won with sevens and eights, and as they descended and the competition moved them, they began to become exhausted. Behind them, up the narrow and winding crushed-stone path that ran through the course from hole to hole, they could see the cracked and mutilated figures of sea life: a giant lobster with a broken claw, a seahorse with a crushed muzzle, fish painfully twisted. Allen was just a little ahead. Melinda was on his tail, and Bob White was still within striking distance. They had finished the ninth hole, and they felt half submerged.
At the tenth, the dolphin hole, the course seemed to level off and bottom out. They were under the sea, various levels of sea life around and above them, behind and ahead. Their alliances fell apart and came together as their scores altered. At times Allen was engaged in a struggle with Melinda and she with him. At times Bob White surged, and one or the other of them felt threatened. The oval of the picket fence seemed to lean inward. Standing on the tenth tee, they felt pressed down in the middle of the purgatory of a sea garden, one that was the mirrored reversal of the health of the real sea, that romance of paradise. Even their putters felt like burdens, tools they had to carry as a kind of penance. They felt too comfortable now with their grips, and this was an embarrassment, as if a hint of some indulgence in sin, so that they often hid the putters along their legs or hung them down from clasped hands, like European walkers, behind their backs.
They were catalyzed, and they rose a little when they saw the situation of the tenth hole. The tenth, the dolphin hole, was a par four, with a right-angle dogleg near its end. The dolphin, about four feet long and bent into a graceful arc, crossed over the narrow two-foot fairway of worn green carpeting. Where from a distance they had thought they could go under the body of the dolphin, there was no opening at all but a sculptured and chipped blue wave on which the dolphin was riding, having leapt up on it, its head slightly on the decline, as if it would soon plunge, come up, and catch another. The end of its nose was gone, and the paint that might have marked its pupil had worn away. Its mouth had a smile in it, but it could see nothing, and this turned it away from any hint of motivation or pleasure, and its dive seemed totally insouciant. It would go down into the wave, and the structure and attitude of its body would cause it to curl and come up again. Then it would enter another wave, and another. It was locked in its motion and could not turn out of the waves. Cute as it might have once been, it was no dolphin from an aquarium show. The human and weather damage done to it, and the neglect had given it a history of seriousness they each felt as being not much different from their own.
The dolphin guarded the way to the getting down, the finality and the repose of the satisfied click of the ball as it fell into the cup and settled. It seemed impossible that the concentration of the dolphin could be passed. Beyond the dolphin was the square of green on the upper level with two holes in it, and these were the entrances to tunnels that ran under the upper green and would drop balls that rolled through them onto the lower, final green surface to the left. One tunnel exit was at the side of the lower green, about five feet from the cup and around a corner. From that point a bank shot off the rotted boards might well be required. The other tunnel came out directly in front of the cup, about two feet away from it, and the best shot coming out of that tunnel might fall in. But the greens were in the future, the cup at the very bottom of the groin of the sea, and first they must negotiate the upper waves and the dolphin riding on them.
At the end of the narrow incline of the fairway, at the base of the ascending curl of wave, there had once been a slide, a halftube of corrugated metal pipe that had arched up through the wave and into a groove fashioned gently in the dolphin’s side. The lower bit of pipe was still there, but a good eight inches were missing between that bit and the groove, and time and the set of the wave had shifted the dolphin’s body some, and it bent inward slightly toward the rubber of the tee. Bob White thought he would try that path. He had the honors because he had won the ninth, and he placed the ball with the red ring around it on a flat place on the rubber of the tee. He addressed a place slightly behind the ball, took a practice swing, then set his feet again, addressed and stroked firmly through the ball, keeping his head down, accelerating through the putt. The ball clicked sharply off the blade of the putter, rolled true to the broken tube, and was kicked into the groove in the dolphin’s side. But the dolphin had bent over enough so that the ball, instead of sliding over the dolphin’s body and dropping onto the upper green, spun up into the air, arched back a bit and fell and clattered into the crushed stone to the side of the fairway. Bob White’s putter was still elevated, pointing toward the dolphin, the shaft following the putt, but when the ball spun off and landed, he lowered the club and shook his head.
“Difficult to negotiate,” he said, and he stepped back to let Melinda have her shot at it. She had been standing back and watching the dolphin intently, and when it was her turn, instead of settling in and putting, she walked around behind the upper green, bent over slightly, and squinted at the body of the dolphin from the other side.
“There’s something here,” she said, and she beckoned to the two of them to join her to see what it was. They walked around and came up beside her.
“There,” she said, and they both looked where she pointed and saw that there was a small hole in the left of the snout of the dolphin, about two inches below its vacant eye.
“We’d better check the other side,” Allen said, and they went around to the fairway, moved up close to the foot of the wave, and studied the dolphin’s body. He ran his hand from the curve of the tail up the dolphin’s side, and about halfway up he discovered there was indeed a hole there too, and that it had been stuffed with a bit of cloth which had been packed carefully into it, so that it was not apparent from a distance. He pulled the cloth out, revealing the hole, and he pointed to a place below it where there was a remnant of a second piece of corrugated piping. The hole was a good eight inches up from the top of the wave, and that put it about two feet from the surface of the fairway. They could now see that this had once been the desired way of playing the hole, that the proper shot had gone through the dolphin and not around or over it.
Melinda touched her face and thought for a few moments. Then she decided on a way to play her shot. She lined up behind the rubber tee, but she aimed to send her ball through a break in the rotted boards at the side of the fairway. This would take it, if she hit it well, out and alongside the upper green a little past the dolphin. There were broken boards around the upper green also, and a steep incline to the little hill the upper green was on. She figured that she might be able to roll her second shot up the embankment and onto the flat surface. Her first shot was a good one; the ball went between the broken boards, clicked among the gravel, and quit beside the embankment, a good approach-shot placement.
Now it was Allen’s turn. He took a handful of gravel from the path beside the fairway and ran a finger through it in his open palm until he found a proper piece. He put this piece on the rubber of the tee and placed his ball on it, so that the ball was a little elevated off the rubber. It would be an extremely difficult shot, and he would have to hit it hard enough to take most of gravity’s pull out of it. He figured he’d miss the hole at least once before getting the range. He stepped up over the ball, adjusted his line, glanced up at the body of the dolphin over and over again as he shifted his feet. When he thought he had the line just right, he settled in and placed the head of his putter on the rubber. He glanced up a few more times, and then he held his head steady, looking down over the ball. His hands shifted slightly, moving a couple of inches in front of the ball on the stone. Then the club head moved back to the top of his quarter swing, and then it accelerated down, and the ball shot off the stone and struck against the dolphin’s body a few inches to the side and below the hole. His second shot failed also, but it was closer, and when he sent his third, the ball hit the hole, clattered and vibrated in its entrance and fell in out of sight. He walked quickly to the other side of the dolphin to see where the ball would come out and how it would fall, but nothing happened. He waited a moment. Still nothing. The other two came around beside him and waited also.