Seaview (12 page)

When he drove onto the gravel drive of the motel, dusk was beginning to come on. There was a nice reddening sky near the horizon above the Sangre de Cristos; the mountains were beginning to become shadows that would get back light when the sun lowered behind them. He heard the sound of voices as he approached the door.

“Here I am,” he said, knocking and speaking at the same time, the paper bag with the champagne in it in his hand and the bouquet of roses held in the crook of his arm. Bob White opened
the door, smiled, and bowed slightly from the waist, extending his left arm, his palm open, directing him into the room.

The voices had been the two of them talking. Melinda was sitting in her robe in the roughly upholstered chair; a straight-back chair had been pulled up in front of her. She had her back to them. She turned in her seat as he entered, smiling.

“Hi,” he said. “Look what I got here.” He handed her the flowers, and put the bag with the bottles of champagne in it in her lap.

“Terrific! You did it good, huh?”

“I did it very good,” he said, and he sat on the chair in front of her and reached his head over to her and kissed her, a rose brushing the tip of his chin.

“What have you two been up to today?”

She smiled in the direction of Bob White, who stood somewhat behind him, and nodded. Bob White came into the side of his vision when he went over to the drapes that covered the large sliding doors in the back of the room. He looked over at Melinda when he had located the lines tucked behind the fabric. She nodded again, laughing softly, and Bob White slowly pulled on the lines, opening the drapes, revealing the small lit patio on the other side of them. He had turned in the chair, and he laughed when he saw what the patio contained.

They had put the low, dark, imitation-wood formica table from the motel room out in the center on the bricks. On it, on top of a white towel and to its right, were the ice bucket and three of the plastic glasses from the room. In the center of the table was the rectangular motel room tray. Melinda had covered it with aluminum wrap, pinching bits of the foil along the edges to create a scalloped pattern. From the ends of the tray inward were rows of small cherry tomatoes, olives, slices of cucumber, and radishes. There was a large rectangular pocket left in the center of the tray, and this was lined with crisp lettuce leaves. On the far right of the table was a tall, fat candle covered in foil, with a foil lip about the wick as a wind guard. The candle was lit. To the right of the
table, in the corner of the patio, was the hibachi, the coals ashen but with a glow of light emanating from their center. On top of the hibachi, in the boat of aluminum foil, in the bed of odd and colorful clippings, the strips of snake meat were cooking. Above and away from the hibachi, to its right, the carefully hung snake-skins shone in a row over the latticework at the end of the patio.

“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.

That night my grandmother died. It was the pole in the mound with her own King Philip from the East that got to her, I think. She was old, and she was going to die pretty soon after that time anyway. In the evening before she died we had a long talk.

I mean all of my family that was still alive then sat around the place, and we talked to my grandmother. She was very old, and I
understand that before she died she had forgotten about the mound and the pole altogether. I believe that she was very happy when she died. She had a good life as those things go. This is not really a sad story that I have finished telling you. I thought of it because you mentioned that mound.

THE ADJOINING ROOM BECAME VACANT, AND HE INSISTED that Bob White take it. The Indian had slept on the patio, using Melinda's egg-carton mattress, the night of the snake dinner. At midnight it had started to rain, and he had come in, to a corner of the room by the door, and finished the night there. In the morning it was still raining, and they had run back and forth from the car to Bob White's new room, carrying his few belongings into it. When he was set up, he went with Allen and got cartons of coffee and fresh donuts from the restaurant and brought them back to the room, walking close to the building, under the narrow canopy, in the rain.

It was still raining up in the Sangre de Cristos where it had started. The clouds had come in black and low, and it rained as though when the clouds hit the mountain tops they had been ripped open. In the first three hours, the sand had held the water, but then it became saturated, and the remnants of old stream beds started to flow again. Before too long, before morning, the water coming off the mountains had entered the washes and streams below at the foot of the mountains, swelling them. After they had finished their coffee, by ten o'clock, some of the streets of the city were flooding. The road Bob White had taken into the hills to find javelinas was a shallow river, and the rich in the houses in the foothills were marooned. At noon, the rain slowed and settled from a flood to a steady downpour. The radio talked
about isolation, closed businesses, accidents; it said it was going to rain for a while.

“I have heard it can rain here for quite a while,” Bob White said as they stood at the front glass doors, watching the sheets of rain. By one o'clock they had ordered the room. Allen had wiped each of the golf balls in the bottom of the shower stall and put them back in the gunny sack. Melinda had straightened up, discarding the remnants of the snake dinner, had made up one of the twin beds, had rested between jobs for a few minutes. Bob White had gone to his room to organize his belongings.

Allen backed the car in under the canopy, close to the door, and organized the trunk. He checked to see that it was dry, no water leaking between the seams, and he took the Tombstone Diamond matchbox and put it in a place in the wheel well where it would be easy to get at. Then he moved the car back off the

sidewalk, getting soaked when he hopped out from under the canopy to move it. At one-thirty Bob White came back, and they had a smoke together, and then Bob White excused himself and went back to his room. It was still raining. It was getting damp in the room, and the clothes he had taken off and hung on the shower rod to dry were not drying. He wore a robe, and he put the small space heater on in the bathroom to get some humidity out of the air. Melinda rested in her unmade bed, her head turned to the side, watching the rain come at a slant, keeping the glass doors opaque. By two-fifteen the only job left was the Laetrile. Allen got the works out, moved the table to the side of the bed, and tried to hang the bottle, the tubing dangling down, from the lamp fixture on the wall at the bed's head. It would not hook up, and he finally put the bottle down between Melinda's knees.