They stood like the three penguins on the slope behind their play. She was like the decapitated one, her head, like that of the snake still mostly in the hole, separated in its intensity from her body. Bob White was the one standing a little to the side of the other two, looking slightly away, part of the group in his shape and black-and-white outfit but separated in name and ability. He saw the snake’s head and the bird, saw it could be a totemic emblem, but he had seen such things before; and though the vision had power to stiffen him, he could work within its familiar — ity, and he was calculating. The way the bird was turned it would be difficult for the snake to get it back in the hole if he chose to do so. Snakes ate young birds in a way that was a kind of birth reversal. In birth, the child’s head emerged then turned to allow the shoulders’ exit vertically through the stretched opening. When a snake took a young bird from the nest, he grasped him in a way that allowed a good purchase, gripping the bird sideways at right angles to the jaw. This was a king snake, a constrictor, and he could not chew the bird but would have to swallow and digest it alive. To swallow it, the snake would have to turn it, getting it parallel to his mouth, take it in headfirst, the reverse of birth.
Bob White could see some matting of feathers on the top of the bird’s head. He knew that this must be the snake’s secretions. The snake had begun to swallow the bird when they had disturbed him with the ball. Surely he had stopped swallowing when the ball hit. He had waited, and when the shaft of the putter had pushed the ball, he had come out of the hole with the bird so that he could get the bird out of his throat and turn it. If the snake were caught with the bird in his throat, he would be defenseless. With the bird out and crossways again, he could drop it if he had to. He could use his mouth and the power of his body then; he would stand some chance. Bob White knew the snake did not really feel like dropping the bird. Probably he did not really feel at all in the way that we think of such things, but he could taste the bird and did not feel like losing that taste and the beginnings of fullness he had experienced when he had the bird’s head in his throat. His head stood now out of the hole to the side of the face of the dolphin. He held the bird very gently but firmly in his mouth, and he moved his head slowly from side to side, scanning. Bob White thought he understood him.
He motioned to them with an open hand that they should stay where they were, and because he knew the snake could not pull his head back and withdraw into the dark safety of the hole as long as he held the bird in his mouth this way, he did not hesitate or try to dissemble or trick the snake. He walked slowly around the embankment of the upper green, withdrawing his knife from the sheath inside his shirt as he moved. When he got to the fairway and the other side of the dolphin, he crouched slightly and crept to the face of the wave. The dolphin was hip-high, and he could see the head of the snake over the dolphin’s head. The head of the snake had followed his movement until he was out of its peripheral vision. Then it had returned to the other two, stopping its scanning. Bob White took the blade of his knife and rested it behind the head of the dolphin. Then he slid it over the dolphin’s head and moved it swiftly under the neck of the snake, just back of its jaw. When the snake felt the steel, it tried to withdraw, but Bob White lifted the knife blade, pinning the head of the snake to the top of the hole.
They could see the glint of the knife blade below the body of the bird, parallel with it. It seemed that the snake’s red eyes blazed out as they contracted. Bob White’s head was above the head of the snake and the head of the dolphin. It was too dark for them to see his eyes, but they thought that he was looking at them. The knife blade seemed to stay where it was for a long time; then, suddenly, it was above the head of the snake. Then the snake’s head with the bird in it fell from the hole, skimming down the dolphin’s body, and tumbled onto the green, to the left and away from the wave. There was a furious shaking inside the body of the dolphin, and when they looked up from the vision of the severed head with the bird still in its mouth, they saw the body of the snake coming out of the wound. It was very long, and it spilled over the side of the dolphin, staining it, and fell like a coiled placenta, and came to rest in an almost perfect ring, still vibrating, on the surface of the upper green.
There was a moment in which they could see the placenta and the tableau of the head with the bird in it, and all was very fixed in place and silent. Then the ball came. It appeared, white and swollen, in the mouth of the hole. It seemed to linger there enough to turn, so that its black spot appeared, an intense large pupil that changed the mouth into an eye in the dolphin’s side.
And then it fell out, bouncing once on the dolphin’s body and once on the green. When it quit bouncing it rolled four inches, and then it disappeared again, this time into the tunnel. They heard it rattle in the tube as it descended. Allen moved to the lower green to watch it come out. When it came it had good speed, and it skipped past the final hole and rolled to the board lining the green. It hit the board and started back, crossing the warped green surface. As it was losing its energy it reached the hole, rimmed it, hesitated on the back of the hole’s edge, and then it fell in. From where Bob White stood on the other side of the dolphin, he could not see the ball enter the cup. But he could hear the click.
“Birdie,” he said, very dryly and very softly. The two looked up and over at him. He had not smiled when he spoke. Then Melinda started to laugh a little. Then all three of them were laughing softly and tentatively in the increasing darkness.
Bob White came around from the body of the dolphin and climbed the embankment to the upper green. The coil of placenta was now still, and the black-leather sheen on the scales shone in the little moonlight and the dim artificial light that came from the backs of the rooms over and across the sea course. The strange cross formed by the head of the snake and the bird was also still, the snake’s eyes still open, but glazing and without any intensity of rage left. The shocked bird seemed dead. It was very quiet, its outer wing gathered back to its body. It was unmarked, but it was still held fast. Bob White knelt down beside the strange small figure. It looked like a lost charm from a crazy bracelet. He put his thumb and index finger over the eyes in the snake’s head, holding it fast to the green. Then he insinuated the tip of his knife blade under the body of the bird, between its small downy belly and the snake’s lower jaw. When he felt the hardness of the lower jawbone and the leathery bottom of the mouth, he pressed the blade into the leather and through the scales until he had pierced the jaw, pinning it to the green.
Holding it there, he moved his thumb and finger to the front of the head’s snout and slowly opened the mouth. With his ring finger, he gently urged the bird’s body out, till it lay in front of the head. Then he released the open jaw, letting it shut. He picked up the bird then and cradled it in his palm and got up from his knees and slowly turned, looking for a place to put it. He knew there would be no snakes coming now for a while, and he wanted a place where, in the morning, sun would shine on the bird when it came up, a place where the bird would be touched or sur — rounded on all sides, but a place that from the top would be open to the sky. He stopped turning when he faced the dolphin, and then he climbed down the embankment, holding the bird in his hand. When he got down, he reached and tore a handful of weed from where it grew in the gravel of the sea-course path, and he took the weed and the bird around to the fairway side of the dolphin. When he reached the dolphin’s side, he took a bit of the weed and scrubbed at the stains on the far side of the dolphin’s body with it, mixing grass stains with the snake’s fluids, changing the smell. Then he threw the bit of weed down on the coiled placenta. He took what remained of the weed and gathered it in the clean, faded blue-check handkerchief he took from his back pocket. Then he rubbed the handkerchief and the weed slowly along the ball groove that ran in the side of the dolphin, pressing hard, staining the handkerchief and the groove.