“How much money?”
“I don’t know. They was some twenties. . . .”
“You make so much money out there carrying golf bags, you can’t keep track how much it is? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t—”
The deputy stood up over the desk, everything trembling under his clothes, and his face went a worst color than it already was. “You goddamn right, you don’t,” he yelled, and spit flew out of his mouth, and then he slammed down his hand again, but this time his foot seemed to slide underneath the desk, maybe on noodles, and he tried to catch hisself at the same time, and the spike went into the palm of his hand and come out between the knuckles. Train sat still, horrified, and the deputy grabbed himself by the wrist and stared at what had happened. He moved his head to look at it from below and above, like he was puzzled what it was.
For a moment, there wasn’t any blood at all, at least on the side Train could see, and then the margin of the wound turned blue, and then a little blood pooled around the spike and then rolled down the back of his hand, and then the deputy’s face drained like somebody inside him pulled the cork, and he fainted.
Train stood up for a better look, and then sat back down and waited. Thinking it might be a trick. He looked at the mirror, then at the door. Nothing happened, nobody came. The deputy lay on the floor, the spike still stuck through his hand, his feet jerking little jerks like a baby in his booties.
Train pictured how this would looked from the door when the other deputies finally come in, and soon, without really knowing he was doing it, he got up and walked out.
The hallway was empty. At the far end he could see sunlight. Glass doors and sunlight. He walked a few steps toward the light, past the room where he’d felt somebody watching behind the mirror. The door was closed, but there was noises inside, things moving against each other, somebody breathing hard and thumping, getting his spurs jingled. He knew that sound all right, heard his mother all the time trying to shush Mayflower in the night.
Mayflower, of course, had his own ways of doing what he did. Always wanted Train to know it when he had it inside her.
Train was through the glass doors and in the street before he saw the car and heard brakes. There was a man behind the windshield, seemed to be yelling at him, and then blowing his horn. Train never broke stride, lit across the street, headed north, and was up in Chinatown before he remembered he’d gave them his name and address.
He let himself in through the back door. There was a light on in front, outside on the porch, but the house itself was dark. There wasn’t no sheriff’s department cars waiting for him in the street, no neighbors on their steps or at the windows. The dog was lying under the table, and he made that sweet squinting expression and dragged his tail across the floor when Train turned on the light.
He went to the icebox and found a plate of fried potatoes and some sliced ham. He made a sandwich and ate the potatoes cold, barely tasting the food. A piece of meat dropped out from between the bread slices, and he picked it up and took it to Lucky, holding it under his nose until he knew what it was.
He heard a noise, and when he turned around Mayflower was leaning against the doorway. His stomach and chest swelled out over his undershorts and he was absently holding his business; his knuckles were the size of your eyeballs. One side of his face was flat from the pillow. “Well, well,” he said. “The convict on the run.”
Train tasted cold potatoes and the ham coming back at him. He tried to hold on to everything at once. “They was here about three hours ago,” Mayflower said.
“Who?”
Mayflower chuckled to himself over that. “The sheriff, man. Who you think?”
“For what?”
“For what? You stick one, give them your momma’s address, they gone come around. That’s the way of the world. They tell me I got to call them when you show up or I’m an accessory too.”
“I didn’t stick him,” he said. “The police did it himself.”
Mayflower shrugged; didn’t matter to him how it happened. “They come in here, tore up your room, upset your mother. . . .”
“Where is she?”
“I took her over to her sister’s, she wouldn’t be around when they come again. She all convulsed the whole time they was going through the house; she keeps saying, ‘Oh, no, he couldn’t of did that. . . .’ ” Then, making his voice high, he said, “ ‘My baby couldn’t of did that.’ ”
He walked past Mayflower, feeling the man’s heat, feeling his eyes, and went to his room. His mattress had been tossed off the bed, all his drawers were open, his comic books and clothes thrown over the floor, the closet door partially off its hinges. His socks was unrolled, and he knew even before he looked that the money was gone. Four hundred and sixty-eight dollars.
“They probably a reward out on your ass by now,” Mayflower said. “I ought to call, see what it is.”
Train began picking his things up off the floor, putting them back in the drawers. Taking his time, just cleaning up the room; he saw that it disappointed Mayflower he wasn’t all convulsed himself. He took his time.
“If I was you, man,” Mayflower said, “I’d be stuffing chicken legs in my pockets on the way out.”
Train didn’t turn around. He’d suddenly begun to cry. Almost eighteen years old, and he still cried. There was nothing he could do about it. Not just because he was scared but the sadness too. The sadness of things came up on him at unexpected times, before he was ready for it. He rolled his socks into pairs again and put them and his underwear back where they belonged and closed the drawers. Then, keeping his back to Mayflower, he slid his mattress back in place too. He wiped his cheeks against his shirtsleeves and began to make his bed.
“You hear me, man? They coming back. . . .”
Train took his time, tucking in the corners. His mother had been a nurse’s aide once at Wadsworth Hospital, way up on Wilshire, the vets’ hospital, showed him how to make a bed. She said the lesson she learned from that job was that the hospital made some people nicer and some of them worse.
When Train had stopped crying and was sure he could talk again, he turned around. Mayflower was standing in the doorway, still holding his business. Reminding him somehow of what everything between them was all about.
“Jail or the road,” Mayflower said, “that’s how the old song goes.”
They looked at each other a little while, the house changing hands right in that room, in that moment, and then Mayflower went into another room and come out with his money clip. His fingers crawled through a dozen bills— ones— and he handed them to Train. “You see your mother again, don’t forget to tell her I done this,” he said. “She likes me being nice to you.”
An hour later, walking the streets of Darktown, smelling the sewage— which was somehow always worst at night— telling stories out loud to see how they would sound to the deputies when they got him, Train stopped at a all-night market run by some kind of slants that seem to smile too much for this neighborhood, and got a grape Nehi. He took the money Mayflower given him out of his pocket and saw the blue circles colored over George Washington’s eyes.
Later on, he couldn’t remember going back; no idea how he got there or where the chair leg was from. It was oak or maple— something heavy— rounded at the bottom and squared at the top. It was still in his hand when she come back to the house and saw him in the kitchen, and saw what he’d done.
Train spent the night pressed into the cool glass window of a bus, staring out at the city from one end of the line to the other, all the way from downtown to the place it turned around in Venice. All night long, people got on and off, drunk and laughing.
In the morning, he went back to work.
It made his lips tremble, walking up the driveway, but he had no place else to go, and no thoughts where he could hide after what had happened, and for now he only wanted to be someplace he knew.
He walked along the driveway and heard the familiar sound of the sprinklers. He stopped a moment and watched the sun make a rainbow in the spray, and smelled the fresh-cut grass, and the place seemed strangely unchanged— the square two-story white building, the flowers, the outbuildings, the empty parking lot— everything that happened yesterday was invisible. He didn’t know what else he expected, but it felt strange.
He walked along toward the club, and it came to him slowly that it was not impossible he was invisible too. The thought took his breath. That even after what happened, he could just blended back into the scenery, into everything alive and dead that was the same today as it was yesterday. That he could just go back, with everything else, to the way things was.
