Because of the intensity of their study of the dolphin and the attendant difficulties of the hole, they had lost track of time, and only when the three of them stood together waiting did they discover that dusk was advancing and the course beginning to darken. The far side of the dolphin’s body now had shadows within it; its skin was darker, and it seemed more seaworthy. The shadows masked the peel of paint, and the eye above the hole no longer seemed vacant to them. Over the body of the dolphin they could see the rise of the figures they had worked their way through as they had played the first half of the course. The failure of the sun and the coming of shadow enlivened them also; the shark seemed fresh from the sea, and the penguins looked like a trio of small children in formal wear watching them at play. At the very top of the expanse behind them stood the whale’s jawbone. It looked immaculate and unsullied, very skeletal and bone hard and very white. They could see the sky around it and through it. It stood like a firm, stylized rendering in the air, but it seemed to have incredible weight at the same time, to be permanent in its place, as if it had never had another. Clouds moved and shadows shifted around it; the first coming of points of stars were in its arc, the moon’s sliver was above it and to its left. But its outline and its sur — face were untouched by any movement or magnitude. Though it was entrance to this place, it seemed pivotal, the still center of something, and they found they could not and did not want to pull their eyes away from it. They stopped for a long time, looking up at the jaw, and then Melinda touched him lightly on the bone of his elbow and whispered below and behind him into his shoulder.
“But miles to go before I sleep,’ ” she said. And Bob White grunted, and Allen moved his elbow from her touch, and the three disengaged themselves from the matrix of their placement, though very slowly, each stretching almost imperceptibly, waking themselves.
“The ball,” Allen said. And he walked slowly around to the front of the dolphin and knelt down on the fairway, getting his head at a level with the hole and peering into it. It was darker now, and it was hard to see, but he thought the hole went straight into and through the dolphin’s body. Still on his knees, he turned his head and reached back and motioned for Melinda’s putter. He had left his leaning against the embankment on the other side, and he took hers; holding the club head in his hand, he slowly insinuated the shaft into the hole in the dophin’s side. It’s like a strange injection, he thought, and he took his time, and he was careful not to hit the shaft against the sides of the hole as he entered the dolphin’s body, and his left hand felt a brief need to elevate above the dolphin, to hold the bottle up. When the shaft was almost a foot in, he struck something. It was hard; it was surely the ball, but it gave way a little when he hit it and then pushed back a little and caused the head of the putter to shake a little in his hand. He pushed again, a little harder this time, and he heard a slight whisper of sound, a kind of scraping, from deep in the hole; there was a strong spasm along the putter shaft, and the head pressed back into his palm. Bob White was still on the other side of the dolphin, and he spoke softly.
“Come here,” he said. And Melinda put her hand on Allen’s shoulder and squeezed, and he got up from his knees, leaving the putter imbedded in the wound, and they both walked slowly around the dolphin to the back of the upper green. As they got close to where Bob White was standing, he raised his arm, indicating that they should move even slower, and they did that, watching Bob White and not the dolphin. When they got beside him, they turned and looked to where he was looking.
Below the place containing the recessed ring of the dolphin’s eye, in shadow and behind its fixed smile, the snake’s head and its encumbrance had unfurled and stood transfixed in the air a good three inches from the surface of the dolphin’s body. The encumbrance was a small bird. A nestling, it was too young for coloring and its fear petrified it. The snake’s black head was very large, and with its mouth open and the bird locked in its jaw, it was hard to see how it had managed to come from the hole, but it had done so, possibly releasing its grip a little on the bird’s body after exit. The snake’s head was very black, its wide-open eyes were very small and bright red. The body of the bird was sideways in the snake’s mouth; its outer wing was open and hanging down and over the snake’s lip. The wing opened and closed slowly and repetitively, like a feathered fan or a sail touched in the rhythm of a wave-action breeze. The bird was like a carried banner, or a war bundle, or a burden of shame. The head of the snake moved slowly from side to side, scanning, and the three watchers felt guilt and immediate failed responsibility, and they surged forward imperceptibly and recoiled from the vision at the same time.
He thought about the ball in the hole behind the body of the snake. He wondered if it would have enough roll left in it if the snake left the hole. Would it be able to bounce out and possibly reach the first tunnel opening in the upper green? He already lay three, having missed two attempts to get his ball into the dolphin’s body. With the right bounce and a good roll he could reach the passage to the lower green and have a putt for par. Was the snake a movable obstruction? Was it a natural hazard? What could the P.G.A. rules be in a case like this? He focused on the delicate body of the bird and came back and away from his quick retreat. The automatic crazy movement of his thought-train startled him and quickly made him sad. He saw the wing and the closed eyes and the bird’s head in repose, and over the bird’s back, the top of the snake’s snout and its small red-blazing eyes. He reached beside him and took Melinda’s hand; it was cool and dry, and it did not respond. He looked at her face and saw that her head was fixed, her mouth slightly open. As he watched her, he saw her head turning very slowly from side to side, in mimic of the snake’s own movement.
Inside her head there was really very little control going on. There was a foregrounding of brief visions and flickers: snatches from dreams and potentially harmful past realities. What was locked in to its own control was her chemistry, her methodically dying body. Her breath exchange was shallow, expelled and sucked in through her open mouth, through parted lips, held by her fixed jaw. She felt her nostrils closed and a little parched. She held the life of the bird in her own mouth. If she opened her mouth and released it, they could step forward and kill the snake. The life they valued would have escaped from harm, and the other they would find dispensable. But if she pressed down too hard, she would crush the life from the bird, and then they would kill her in rage, though she would be already dead, because surely it was the life of the bird that was her own. She thought of the way she took his penis into her mouth to give him and herself pleasure. The same structure of vulnerability was involved here. She felt she was looking into the face of death, and though it was a composite face-the snake’s head and the bird’s body forming, in the increasing darkness, a silhouette emblem — it was not a face at all, but a structure, a fitted machine, mechanized by two past lives conjoined. And so it was a face, like her cells in their matrix were: the face of death then, a place, simply, of meeting.