The sergeant took his finger off the trigger and set the shotgun against the hatch door. She saw the relief in the mulatto’s expression, and almost in the same instant the sergeant crossed the deck, picked him up by the waist of his trousers, and threw him over the railing. A foot caught in a stay going over, and one of his loafers fell off his foot and back onto the deck.
His eyes found hers again as he went over, held her there an instant, and then he was gone. There was a small splash when he hit the water, and then there were other noises, and then it was quiet. The sergeant picked up the loafer and tossed it over too, then came back to her and sat down.
He had his thoughts; she had hers.
A little time passed, and she suddenly pictured the mulatto, wild-eyed and stiff, somewhere in the current beneath the boat. She wondered if he might still have some thread of consciousness, if he might still know who he was and what he had done to her. And realize what had been done to him.
She had no idea if that was possible; she’d lost track of time.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said softly.
And that was true, and it wasn’t. She knew there would be statements to give, that she would have to go over what happened in the cabin again and again, every detail, every word they’d said. And she knew that she would have to say the Negroes were trying to escape. And she would do that— give them all the statements they wanted, testify in court, if it came to that. Truth and lies, whatever they wanted. The wires had touched and intentions didn’t matter, and somehow in the confusion, she’d been claimed by the wrong side.
A single part of it, though, was beyond the claim. She looked away, afraid somehow that he already knew, and in that moment the name came to her— she heard the name, as if he’d spoken it himself.
Sweet.
Friday night, in the same cabin where her husband was now lying on the floor, he’d called himself Sweet.
4
DARKTOWN
T
HE DEPUTIES FILLED HALF A ROW OF THE parking lot with cruisers at seven o’clock Monday morning, but the caddies were already out on the course— Monday mornings, the club encouraged the employees to play golf themselves, to teach them respect for the game— and because his own parish priest and the head of the Police Benevolent Association were both members at Brookline, the lieutenant in charge would not allow his men to drive their cars down onto the course to round them up.
The lieutenant didn’t play the game himself, but he’d dealt with the country club set before and knew how they felt about their fairways.
And so eight officers in heavy black shoes and buttoned collars started down the first hole, walking, and then turned up the second, and followed the golf course that way until they began catching up with the caddies. It was already seventy-five degrees, headed into the nineties.
Three other deputies— including the lieutenant— went to the clubhouse and served the manager with a search warrant, and then followed him down the gravel path to the caddy shed and began tearing the place apart, beginning with the desk behind the wire screen where Sweet kept his business. It took them less time to pick the lock than it took Sweet to open it with his key, and a few seconds more to find the metal box hanging behind the drawer from a shoelace. There were seventeen twenty-dollar bills inside, and they chased off the manager and split it four ways— five bills for each of them and two for the captain back at the station.
Beneath the money was a small black notebook, filled with names and addresses and phone numbers and dates. The lieutenant opened the book, fanned through the pages, and noticed all the names were women, at least the ones that were written out. Some of it was only initials. He put the book in his coat pocket, thinking it might turn into something for him later. That he might like to visit some of the women personally, see what they looked like, maybe ask one or two how they ended up in a notebook like this anyway. No? Well, maybe their husbands might have some idea. He didn’t mind watching women squirm, didn’t mind at all.
Next, the policemen went to the lockers where the caddies kept their belongings, and it was slower going. The caddies didn’t keep things tidy, the way they were behind the wire cage. Sandwiches, liquor, cigarettes, playing cards, small amounts of marijuana, large amounts of marijuana, bus passes, old calendars with pictures of cars and half-naked girls. A syringe, a catcher’s mitt, a starfish. A package of morning glory seeds, cigars. There were also articles of clothing, mostly hats and bright-colored sweaters with figures of golfers knitted into the front and back. Clothes the caddies wouldn’t wear themselves, but were not inclined to throw away. They’d heard what sweaters with golfers knitted into the stomach cost up in the pro shop.
Everything the deputies found that they didn’t want or couldn’t use themselves was tossed into the middle of the floor, to be picked through and swept up later by less senior members of the force. Then the empty lockers were pitched onto the floor too so that the policemen could look behind them. The lockers went over, and then the roaches and silverfish washed out, thousands of them, rolling up over the officers’ shoes and the cuffs of their pants, crossing the room like surf. One of the deputies yelled, and the panic spread, and then they were all stomping the floor harder than you had to stomp to kill bugs, trying to make examples of the ones they got, and then one of the deputies injured his heel, aggravating an old baseball injury, and the other two helped him to the doorway, where they waited for the bugs to find their way back into the cracks in the walls and corners, out of the light.
The deputies stood in the doorway, shaking their pants, feeling phantom roaches on their legs. There were two umbrellas behind the lockers— the spokes and handles anyway; the cloth had been eaten away a long time ago— an ancient leather golf bag, some dusty bottles of soda pop and beer, a single snakeskin cowboy boot, and, not far from it, what appeared to be the bones of a human leg. The deputies stopped cold when they found the bones, looked at each other, silently considering the paperwork, and tossed them into the middle of the floor with the rest of it.
Train was headed up the slope of the short rough along the ninth fairway when the deputies and caddies rounded the corner of the dogleg behind him. Looked like bad weather rolling in. The caddies were out in front of the officers, eighteen or twenty of them, and the officers were herding them along with their nightsticks, keeping the slackers going. Some of the officers were smoking cigarettes; some of them were carrying their shoes and limping.
Train hid his golf club and sat down against a tree to wait. He was always expecting for somebody to come along, ask where did he get a Tommy Armour autograph in the first place. He watched them climb the long hill, began to hear their voices. He supposed he was done golfing for the day, but he’d been forcing it anyway; couldn’t stop himself trying to make the ball go to the pin instead of letting it go. That was the knack, or his sense of it: The shot was already there somewhere, and he just got out of the way and let it go home. But then, some days you could, and some days you couldn’t. Like some days the radio station came in nice and clear, and some days you had to keep moving the dial because of the static out on the edges.
He put the ball in his pants pocket, remembering where it had been, on the chance that they let everybody loose once they had them all rounded up. There was no sense in that, of course, but the law did things that nobody understood but the law itself.
The deputies were tired and blistered and sweating, in no mood at all for golfing niggers. One of them had took out his pistol and held it in his hand as he walked. They took the caddies back to the shed and set them down against the outside wall, directly in the sun, to wait for the paddy wagons. Some of the caddies were nervous, and one named Roger Ennis tried to confess to a liquor store robbery, but the cops guarding them were out in the sun too, and they told him to sit still and shut the fuck up.
The club manager came partway down the hill and then stalled when he seen what was going on, and then tilted his head back a minute, like he might have a nosebleed, before he come the rest of the way down. He was a thin man in pressed slacks and loafers with tassels.
The manager put one hand on his rump and bent at the waist— an old lady’s posture, like she’s scolding the children— and counted the caddies sitting against the shed. He used a finger to count, keeping track of where he was at in that long line of black faces. Then he turned to the lieutenant in charge, looking like somebody would rather just went back up the hill.
“You’re taking them all?” he said.
Even with the extra hundred dollars in his pocket, the lieutenant did not care for loafers with tassles. “Well, sir, I don’t see how we can straighten it out here,” he said.
The manager nodded, as if he saw the officer’s reasoning. Train guessed he was used to that, to seeing other people’s point of view. “I gotcha,” he said, looking again at the caddies, “but the situation from this side of the fence is that we have tee times starting at one o’clock, front and back, and now I’ve got no caddies. The mayor himself is scheduled for two-twelve.”
The lieutenant waited a minute before he answered, like he was reminding himself where he was. “Well, sir,” he said finally, “I appreciate your situation, the mayor being a member out here and all, but it comes right down to it, it’s even more complicated than that.” The lieutenant took a breath and closed his eyes to calm down, but the fuse had been lit. “You might say the situation is that somebody’s supposed to be in charge out here, and there’s a criminal enterprise being run right under your fucking nose, and now good people been killed for no reason, and if that means fucking Eleanor Roosevelt herself has got to fix her own divots today, then that’s what’s going to happen. That is the fucking situation from this side of the fence.” The lieutenant’s face had turned red by now, and the club manager was nodding a long time before he finished.
“Of course,” he said. “I understand completely. . . .”
“So if I was you, I’d go back inside my fucking office, where the air condition was on, and have a good cry and then call up all the dignitaries and golfers and tell them that until further notice they got to carry their own fucking bags.”
The man with the loafers sighed. Being club manager, he was immune to crude language and personal insults. “Easier said than done,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, sir,” the lieutenant said, “being ass-deep in Democrats at nine-thirty in the morning is not what I was hoping for today either.” And then he turned away from the manager to watch the paddy wagons negotiate the gravel path from the parking lot down to the shed.
