The Folded Heart

Lagoon

14 Lagoon Four or five of us stripped to our underwear, bobbing in the dark. The acrid stench of mud and sulfur. And then clouds closing over the moon above. Rain pocking the surface, and a silence, separate from the grassy banks, sand traps and palm trees that hissed and darkened with the stinging rain. Steam rose everywhere. Our feet in the clayey ooze. Patches of algae floating to the top. And our treading in the murk for a few golf balls, with their shiny black or red script, their covers smooth and perfect or gashed and contused with their dark creases and miles of rubber band wound round the small ball in the center-black as a fish eye, inky as a hideous gland. And at the center of the lagoon that thing we were drifting down toward, our legs as white as roots, reaching slowly and blindly for anchor, we never found, for always back of the rain, back of our wish to drown, we could hear the whirr of the watchman's Cushman, see his searchlight sweep fairways and hazards, hear the bone crunch of tires over gravel paths and the pounding of his dog set loose. The stiff-legged shepherd that broke through the oleanders lining the irrigation ditch to find us scaling the supple web of the chain link fence, the high visible screen that surrounded the golf course and trapped the dog in the domain of his fury. 15 ...