When he was finished, he gathered the weed and the handkerchief into a crinkled low pocket, fitting it near the top of the dolphin’s side where the groove was almost horizontal to the ground. Then he placed the small body of the bird into the pocket, tucking it in and spreading the sides of the pocket slightly away from the feathers and head. When he was satisfied, he stood up from his crouch and looked down at the bird. Then he reached down and made a final adjustment, putting the pocket a little bit farther away from the bird’s tail.
They had been watching him intently from where they were. Melinda was still behind the embankment of the upper green. Allen was standing where his ball had fallen in. And now they watched him coming away from the fairway and the dolphin’s body and climbing back up the embankment. He could have stepped easily over the dolphin to get to where he was, but it was clear that that would have somehow been inappropriate, and they stood where they were and waited for him. When he got to the upper green and the placenta and the severed head, he reached down and picked the head up and took it with him down the embankment again to where his ball and Melinda’s lay among the gravel of the walk, both distinct in the limited light. He took the head of the snake and wedged it down among the stones, so that it stood up with its closed jaws pointing toward the sky, a gesture not unlike that of the whale’s jaw, and though diminutive, its recent history might have held a similar complexity. Then he took his knife and opened the mouth of the snake, and holding it with the blade twisted, he picked up a good-size piece of gravel and used it to wedge the jaw so that the snake’s mouth stood up wide open when he removed the knife.
“Wait,” Melinda said softly from the other side of the embankment. “Let me.” And she came around to where he was and reached down beside him and picked her ball from among the stones. When she came up with it in her fingers, her hand held up a little in front of her so that the ball shone in the half darkness, she could see Allen, the upper half of his body only, mouth open and looking at them across the embankment and the upper green. She moved over and down to the snake’s head and placed her ball where the bird had been. Bob White stood back and to the side.
She was at the side of the snake’s head and the ball now, intent on the coming break of the perceptible structure that had grown up around them. She wanted to finish it. It was not real life. She felt she was now a living monitor of such things. As she addressed the snake’s head with the blade of the putter, she stopped breathing, holding a brief modicum of air in the fragile domes of her alveoli. The blade was square to the head of the snake. The ball stood in the open jaws. The configuration was now like the handle of a garish cane. She brought the shaft of the club back, keeping her left arm and wrist stiff, and with no other move in her body, she stroked down and into the side of the snake’s jaw, below where the ball was. There was a dull thud, followed by a slight click as the blade struck the jaw and the ball afterward. Both the ball and the head lifted up from the stones, the head spinning and falling and the ball continuing. The head landed and bounced on the embankment, and the ball bounced on the upper green, and then it bounced again, clearing the rotten board lining the far side and falling and landing on the lower green, coming to rest four feet from the cup.
“That’s a good shot,” Allen said, finishing the game of the structure and beginning to end it at the same time.
“I’ll pick up,” Bob White said, and he reached down and lifted his ball out of the stones. She made her putt. Bob White took an X on the hole. It had gotten too dark for them to continue further, and with no real discussion they agreed to quit. Bob White checked the bird a last time, adjusting the handkerchief pocket where it rested. Then he took the body of the snake, like a coiled hose, in one hand and its head in the other and walked across the sea course to where the weeds and the corn pressed in as the desiccated fields began. When he got there, he stopped. He set his feet. Then, turning like a discus thrower, he spun and released the coiled snake’s body into the air. It unwound as it lifted, straightening for a moment like a spear. Then, as it descended, it telescoped in on itself, becoming increasingly smaller and inconsequential as it disappeared. He threw the head out in the same direction he had thrown the body.
When he finished, he came back to them, and they started together back up and out of the dark, broken sea, past the pelicans and the shark and the other fish figures, until they passed under the whale’s jaw. They stopped there, turned, and looked back under the massive archway. It was quite dark now, and though they could see the form of the dolphin behind them, they could not see the place where the bird rested upon it at all.
When they got back to their rooms, Melinda said she was very tired and thought it would be a good thing if she slept alone that night. Allen said he thought they could arrange that, and maybe she should take Bob White’s room and bed, and he and Bob White could sleep together in their room. They did that, and though the walls were thin, Melinda wept very quietly in Bob White’s bed, and Allen did not hear her. And though Allen was very tired, Bob White lay so still beside him that he kept feeling and listening for movement and breath, so it was a long time before he was able to fall asleep.
Early in the morning, at the beginning of first light and while they were still sleeping, Melinda got up and went back out to the whale’s jaw and the sea course. She was in her bathrobe and slippers, she was too intent to notice the way the day changed the look of things, and she stepped carefully down between the sea figures, retracing the way to the dolphin. When she got to the dolphin’s side, she saw that the small pocket was empty, the bird was gone. She went back to the room, and when the three were sitting together having coffee in Bob White’s room later, she mentioned to them that she had gone out and that the bird was no longer there.
“What do you think?” she asked Bob White.
He looked at her, hesitating a moment before answering, thinking that he could lie to her. But then he thought that the lie would be feeble, and also that to lie to her would be the wrong thing to do. And he said:
“I do not think that bird has come to a good end.”
Two
Day
THERE WERE TWO PICTURES HANGING IN THE CLUBHOUSE, side by side, on the wall behind the glass case. The one on the left, put up with tape and brown and peeling at the edges, was a mock blueprint rendering of an eighteen-hole course, and scribed in between the lines denoting the location and shape of the new clubhouse were the words Seaview Links Proposal and below that Baron Associates / 1955. The other was an old and faded photograph, about a foot square, in a glass frame. It was a picture of the seventh green, taken from the fairway close in front of it, with the lighthouse in full view in the background. Four men, all of them in baggy knickers and jaunty tams, stood on the green. One was tending the flagstick, while a second addressed a putt of about fifteen feet. The other two stood to the side, both with hands on hips, each with one foot planted a little ahead of the other. Off the green to the right stood a fifth figure, more faded than the others. It was hard to tell what he was wearing, not golf togs surely, but his posture was very erect and formal, and he seemed not to be in anyway involved in the proceedings. He was looking away from the green in the direction of the camera. On the sur — face of the glass, in felt-tip marker, various hands had drawn little arrows pointing to the figures, and there were names and statements beside the arrows: Fred Borker considers a putt, The Chair watches critically, John Hope holds stick.