It got darker, and the lights created a kind of lawn party atmosphere, a lighted space with the slight mystery of the encroaching darkness held back. The tapedeck floated Frank Sinatra's “Nancy” over the various grasses and the trees. The geese, what few were left, quietly honked in response to Frank's singing. The owner of the nearby Exxon station and his wife, who took a lighthouse drive each evening, saw the activity and stopped and joined in. They were excellent dancers, and their turns on the green were admired by all.
There was a chipping contest. Sammy talked about the whales and saving them and handed out a few bumper-stickers. Chip talked to a few men about various green-maintenance techniques that he had learned in school. Melda Bando talked to the women about Texas chili. Manny Corea told the story of the mussel find. The Chair's poses and gestures were subtle and abbreviated and unobtrusive. He felt calm and peaceful. His wife came, and he danced with her. They did a simple two-step. Chief Wingfoot came over and sat in the shadows above the green, beyond the play, and watched. Sammy brought him a bowl of quahogs.
Eddie Costa sang an old Portuguese fishing song. They all loved hearing it, but he refused to translate it, saying that that would not do at all. The women gave Melda Bando recipes for kale soup.
It was a clear night, and the lighthouse was dark and silent; no warnings were necessary. Out beyond its softened whiteness, the lights of a few boats glimmered on the sea, a mile away. The surf washed almost inaudibly on the sand, sparks of phosphorous in its gentle wake. The last of the day retired, and the stars came
out. Frank Sinatra sang his songs again into the night. The people moved in loose and changing clusters, talking, laughing softly, and listening. The party continued, sweetly, until after twelve. Sammy took the last dance with Melda Bando. The two drifted formally across the green. Everyone became silent and watched them. When the song ended, a light applause rose up. The dancers bowed and smiled. When the party ended, they all went home knowing they would sleep peacefully when they got there. Once they were gone, Chief Wingfoot rose from the grass and stretched. Then he followed the throb of the underground river, Tashmuit, heading home in the dark. A light mist developed out over the sea, and the lighthouse began its sweep, its beam touching the tops of the trees and the roof caps of the clubhouse. The air was perfectly still. The course, under the warning beam, was safe in darkness. And it was quiet at Seaview, there on the edge of America.
Three
The Hive
HE WOKE TO DISCOVER HE WAS STANDING AT THE EDGE of a cliff, looking at something. In the lingering tail-end rush of the cocaine, there had been two women in his head, one silver and one gold, and both severely battered. They were tall and pubescent and very thin, and he had shaved the head of the silver one and driven a slightly domed thumbtack through the flesh in the side of her nose. The head of the tack was black lacquer, and where she reclined, naked like the other, she had been placed with cheek on biceps, her arm extended with palm open, face tilted to keep the tack's placement, lest it should fall away. He had left the hair on the gold one. In places it was matted and twisted from perspiration; where it was dry it was strawlike, black at its roots and heavily peroxided. He had placed a ring of barbed wire in an anklet above her foot. This he saw as a kind of taming that had something to do with animals and America. It had been the first time for both of them, but he had known that they had the experience in their monads, and he had cracked them like geodes, with his instruments opening the hollow crystal cores to the dark. A bicycle chain, a small surgical bone saw, a diamond-head needleholder, a blunt sand wedge, four atraumatic needles, a shackle, a pair of pliers, his wet towel, four dilators, blunt and sharp curettes.
Except for the velvet-covered platform on which they lay, the room itself was not dark. It was the center of a glowing hive with a chamber at the core. The chamber was like the inside of a
geodesic dome or a massive, hollow golf ball. Extending up from the platform on the circular floor, the walls to the apex were a grid of small, square openings, the mouths of narrow ducts through which women were trying to enter. He stood next to the dark platform, watching them. In various places, and in a kind of swelling and receding rhythmic pattern, their heads darted into the chamber or came in slowly through the squares, thrusting for entrance. But the squares were too small to allow their shoulders to pass, and they thudded and bounced back, then darted and moved in, trying again and again. In one place a woman had managed to thrust her arm through an opening; her shoulder pressed against her agonized head at the ear, her sharp earring slicing her flesh; her arm was extended like a battering ram, in the position of a body surfer on the crest of a wave, her fingers snapping and waving and beckoning to him, her red mouth contorted, black eyes blazing. In other places the women had given up and took their lust and ambition in looking. Their heads pushed in as far as they could get them, they craned their necks and strained hard to see him and the two on the dark platform. They avoided the eyes in the heads of those in the other openings across the chamber.
He had a device with buttons in his hand, and the buttons controlled the sliding doors that could close off the glowing hive openings individually. He had ways of making his selection, and he would push buttons to activate the slow sliding, and the heads would reluctantly recede from the openings as the doors came down from above. At times the adamant would not give it up easily. The doors would press their necks like soft, slow guillotines, and only when the pressure was convincing enough would they wiggle their heads free and recede as the doors closed down. With these adamant ones he would only open the doors again when he judged that the pounding of the heads against them had caused sufficient pain and frustration. At the heart of his pleasure was the knowing that what the women desired was less the activity on the dark platform than the culmination and stasis of what
he had done there. The gold one was patterned with silver cuts that were pink lipped, and with hot silver stripes. The silver one had the shapes of small copper cymbals ringing on her shoulders, her back, and her thighs. The two were unconscious and slightly entwined on the purple surface. He felt peace in their posture. If one lifted any part of her body, he would put her to rest again.
She was in the car in the parking lot at the foot of the thick shaft of the lighthouse, where he had told her to wait for him. She was neither silver nor gold, and there were no spaces on her body that he could think of as virginal, nothing for him to touch into that way; it was scars over scar tissue, a surfeit of a kind of knowledge. He did not bring her with him, and when he reached near the cliff edge, he turned away from it and watched the shadows darken and cut cavities into the fairways and the slopes of rough as the sun left them. Clear across the course, before the sun finished, he saw a hard glinting off large white objects, three of them in a cluster on the far side. Turning back, it was the feminine moon he woke to, half axed away and the color of tarnished brass, to see it moving into a black cloud, and the stars that looked to him like pulsing tattoo needles, puncturing through the skin of the dark sky. He stood erect and singular, totally unaware of the limiting romance of his perceptions and the melodrama of his visions. If there were things going on at the lighthouse or down the beach below him where a small fire flickered, he was apart from it. If the action of the moon had been a slow camera shutter, closing, he was not the one involved in the activity photographed but was standing to the side, looking into the lens. He wore a Western leather vest, tight Levi's, and black leather tennis shoes. His pendant was a thick gold chain with a large coinlike object at the end of it. On the face of the object was an etched figure of small wires and rods that formed a rough circle, a complex matrix. His shoulder brushed the wood of the barricade that kept him back from the cliff 's lip, an erosion-control device. He kicked the wood firmly, and bits of sand fell away at the edge.
IN THE MORNING AFTER THE MINIATURE GOLF GAME, THEY had packed up and headed north. Melinda had thought of the small bird freed from the snake's jaws and its possible whereabouts and fortunes for over a hundred miles of travel, but in the end she came to suspect that Bob White was correct. Regardless of what final mystery might remain, it had most probably come to its end, and that was now over, and the way was no longer important. Wherever it was it was at peace now. And so she turned her thoughts to the traveling, and in turning from the bird, she turned from the way of her own ending. She knew the place of it, was fairly certain about the timing. The passage of the car now stirred up grasses symmetrically along the roadside, and she watched these waves for a while, dozing at times and awakening in a kind of sureness of comfort to find them continuing and unchanged. They put on considerable mileage that day, steadily working their way north, and they were up early the next morning and on the road again. In the late afternoon, after passing Niagara Falls, they moved through the outskirts of Lockport and pulled into a motel near Albion. After loading their gear into the adjoining rooms, Bob White excused himself, said he would be back shortly.
“Got to phone some boys back in Niagara.”
When he returned, Allen had some ice waiting in a plastic bucket, a quart of J & B on the table beside it. They filled up motel glasses with Scotch and water for two. Melinda took hers neat, and she and Bob White talked quietly over their drinks, while Allen took a look at the lay of the land in his
Golf Digest
encyclopedia. After they had had their drinks, and Allen and Bob White had gotten them some sandwiches, they sat on bed and chair eating. Allen suggested they might want to stay there for the next day and rest up, and maybe Melinda and Bob White would like to look around a bit. Bob White agreed, and Melinda smiled and nodded.
“You found a good possibility, huh?”
“Yeah,” he laughed, “I think I did. Pretty good-sized private
club. Looks quite tight: a lot of water, Scottish-type rough and fairways. Do you mind?”
“No, no,” she said, “why rush it? I'm tired too. And I could go for a little rest and maybe some sightseeing.”
“Fine. You can drop me off in the morning. I'll find a way back,” Allen said.
They dropped him off in the morning and went about their business. There was a farmer's market fair nearby in Medina. Melinda and Bob White drove there and took pleasure in seeing the prize vegetables and smelling them. They bought some peaches and a couple of good-looking apples, a bunch of red cherries, three nectarines, and a stalk of sweet grapes and found a nice park in the heart of the town, near the city hall, and made a picnic. When they were finished eating, they drove out of town to a winery they had learned of from a brochure in the motel room. Melinda did the driving, and Bob White sat over by the door, a little half turned toward her, watching her hands on the wheel.
The winery had an odd, heavily stained wooden building for a tasting room. It looked like some kind of cathedral, and they stood at the counter in the high-vaulted central room inside of it, tasting various wines. The wines were just okay, nowhere near as good as what Allen and Melinda had gotten in California while they were there. These were fruitier, closer to the land, and a little raw. There was a meadow and a lot of hilly land behind the cathedral, and there were a couple of picnic benches out there and a stand of thick trees. They sat in the sun, and Bob White showed her how he could make a pennywhistle out of a twig he had found at the foot of one of the trees. They handed the whistle back and forth between them, playing and testing each other with the identification of simple tunes. Melinda pointed out the way the sunlight hit among the trees, the way of the shadows there, and how she would go about doing them in charcoal. As she spoke her fingers moved in the remembered gestures. She itched a little for it, but not much. She knew she now saw better than when she had tried hard to see while drawing and doing pastels, and
she felt it was the seeing that had been the point all along; she didn't need to render it anymore.
When Bob White moved closer to her on the bench and put his arm around her, first putting his large hand on the side of her face and pressing it down to his shoulder, then holding her shoulder firm in his palm, she was not startled, nor did she feel uncomfortable in the embrace. His lips were a little sticky with wine, and when he kissed the top of her head and withdrew his mouth, a few hairs came away, and he used his free hand to remove them from his mouth. He didn't feel like a father or a brother to her, but he was not embracing her as a priest might or a lover either. She couldn't give a name to the quality of the touch. She realized that she could make love with him and that he would be wise about her illness and how weak she was. It would not be exactly passionate, but it would be as if passion were a kind of guarding prevention against intimacy. What they would do together would be much deeper than passion; it would not take physical stamina but would take a kind of effort that she was incapable of because of her weakness. He seemed to know something like this too, and though neither of them did anything with their bodies in contact that was translatable into an understanding, there was a kind of knowledge between them. When, after a few long moments, he did speak to her, she realized how much she needed the very fact of speaking and the words as well. She needed very little quantity anymore when it came to the larger scheme of things, but what Allen could not quite bring himself to say had started to become an absence to her in her self-involved state.
There was a family at one of the other benches, about fifty yards away, and some birds and a dog had put their song and motion into evidence. There was the occasional sound of tires on gravel in the parking lot on the other side of the cathedral and a steady, almost subliminal hum from the distant highway. It was as if a previously hidden empty space in her had revealed itself, begun to ache, and then been salved to fullness and closure all at
the same time in the quick process in which he slowly touched and moved her and began to speak.