Down to the caddy shed, though, things wasn’t the same. The place was tore up and there was a new man sitting at Sweet’s desk, a white man with glasses on going through a pile of papers, and he told Train, without looking up, that anybody wanted to come back to work had to submit an application. Train looked around the room. The lockers were on the floor, everything in them spilt out. Clothes, umbrellas, sandwiches, bones . . . The bones stopped him, but not for long. It was the kind of thing in his life that if nobody else mentioned it, neither did he. The wire cage had been torn down, and he noticed Sweet’s pool cue lying in the rubble with everything else.
It seemed like the whole room was turned upside down and shook, and everything come out of the pockets and then dropped back on the ground.
Train leaned over the desk to look at the man’s papers, trying to see what kind of application it was. The man made a face, like he smelled something bad, and Train backed away and began to leave, just wanted to get back outside where things looked familiar. Get back to that thought he had walking up the driveway, that he could go back to who he was. The man pointed off in the general direction of the door. “Service entrance,” he said. “That’s where they’re taking applications.”
Train followed the cement path around the back of the clubhouse to the service entrance, where a table had been set up and the club manager was conducting interviews. The line of applicants was twenty yards long. The manager was wearing a light blue sport coat and sunglasses and had a carnation pinned to the collar of his jacket.
Plural was up near the front of the line in a clean white T-shirt, but the sleeves didn’t look right because of the muscles in his shoulders. Plural always kept himself clean— a clean shirt and shined shoes— and he always smelled like fresh laundry. The sun shined off his skin, and you could see the color of it beneath the shirt where he’d begun to sweat. Train moved up toward the front without getting closer to the line itself, the other men watching him every step to make sure he didn’t try to cut in. He been around people who were hungry before, and seen them do sudden, violent things without no reason you could call a reason. Been around enough of them to know that the way some of them look at it, a place in line or an old comb that they found that morning, or a baby bottle left on a bench, that was all the excuse they need.
At the front of the line, Plural was standing politely now with his hands behind his back, sweating through his shirt, offering the manager his lumpy, smiling face even while the man told him that due to the present circumstances, none of the former caddies at Brookline was being rehired at this time. “The board of directors has taken the position that there is no way to separate the wheat from the shaft, and decided to make a clean breast of it,” he said, like that would be good news for all concerned.
Plural kept his hands politely behind his back and waited until the manager had finished, and then he said, “Yessir, I understand your positions, but that clean titty bi’niss ain’t concerned with me. I never had no dog in that fight.”
The manager took off his sunglasses and repeated what he’d just said about the board of directors, but went through it slower this time. Under the present circumstances, none of the former caddies was being rehired. Perhaps at a later date, but not at the present. Plural took off his own sunglasses, showing him a home-stitched eyebrow, and leaned in close to the manager and then cocked his head birdlike for a better look. Every inch closer he got, the manager moved that much away.
“Yessir,” Plural said, “I see what you trying to say. But what I’m saying, under the present circumstances, I don’t need that rehiring business, due to I wasn’t never unhired in the first place.”
“I’m afraid that’s what I’m talking about,” the man said. “You no longer have a job.” He looked around behind him, about to yell for help.
Plural stood up suddenly, and the manager jumped at the movement.
“The man took it away?” he said.
The manager nodded elaborately, relieved, like they just had a breakthrough. “Yessir,” he said, “I’m afraid that’s it. Your position has been withdrawn.”
Plural stood still a moment, seemed to be collecting that, and then when he had it all, he just turned around and walked away.
The manager closed his eyes for a minute and slumped in his chair. When Train looked back at him again, he was feeling his pulse.
Train caught up to Plural, didn’t know particularly why, except he seem to felt safer that way, and they headed in the direction of the street. Train and Plural, walking together. Plural smelling like a clean sheet.
“Well, sometime it happen like that, you know,” Plural said. “You come in for your money, and the man took it to cover the expenses. That’s how it goes.” He looked over at Train. “How you did, Lionel?” he said. “You win or lose, man?”
Train stumbled over that. Wasn’t nobody had called him Lionel around here in the two years of his employedment, and Plural never talked to anybody but himself anyway. He stole a look, thinking that all the time Plural was sitting alone in the caddy shed, people calling him No-Tank— in front of him, but not exactly to his face— you couldn’t tell what the man was thinking. People just assumed it was some craziness about some fight or another that mashed up his brain in the first place.
Plural looked back at the clubhouse as he walked away. “Suppose I got to steal somebody’s chickens over this however,” he said. “It don’t pay the bills, but it’s something to eat.” Plural laughed at what he just said, picturing it somehow, and Train saw that one of his teeth was broke. Train wondered if he had did that himself with his knee in the back of the paddy wagon when the deputies hit the breaks. Either that or the deputies did it later. Plural nudged him in the ribs with his elbow, playful, hurting him without meaning to.
“Ain’t that how it goes?” he said. “You look in the damn mirror all morning, can’t remember did you won or lost.”
They walked together a little ways, Plural talking about stealing the man’s chickens, trying to remember if he won or lost.
Days passed and nothing happened. Nothing in the
Mirror News
on Mayflower, no sheriffs asking around where he was. Train began thinking more and more that the world might of decided to let him alone.
He spent days looking for work and slept at night at Sugars Gym, where Plural stayed. Been there about four years now. Mr. Sugars wore big straw hats and checked Train’s arms for needle tracks before he let him in, and then told him he wasn’t running no Salvation Army. The reason he let him stay, he said, was that now he had Plural around the premises at night to keep the neighborhood kids from stealing his gloves and cups, and he had Train to keep Plural from setting the place on fire. “You don’t smoke yourself, do you?”
“No sir,” Train said. “It made me dizzy.”
The gym was on the border of north Watts, less than a mile from his mother’s house, and Train played with the idea sometimes about going over, dropping in to see her and old Lucky, but he never took even a step that direction. The truth was, he was afraid to go home, afraid that she might look at him now the way she did when she come into the kitchen and saw him holding the table leg in his hand. Thought the dog might be scart of him too. He thought about that and then wandered off to wonder again where he got a table leg from, to keep himself from thinking about what she stopped and stared at when she come in the door. Now he thought about it, she might not of even noticed the table leg if he hadn’t dropped it and woke up the dog, who yelped and scrambled his toenails on the floor, tried to get his feet under him. Train thought it must of reminded him of that feeling when he was hit by that car and rolled across the road.
But whatever the dog thought, he seen something jumping in his mother’s throat, and he could not stand to see her scared of him like that again.
Wednesday night. He climbed the stairs to the gym in the dark, up into the heat, and found Plural sitting alone in the ring, his back against the turnbuckle, smoking some hemp, reading the
Darktown Standard.
The room’s walls was plastered with old fight posters, and it stunk the way gyms stink.
Train had gone out early, got on the buses and went to country clubs. He’d found a
Herald Express
and a
Mirror News
both on the bus floors and looked again for a story about Mayflower, but there still wasn’t nothing. Just like it didn’t happen. He tried to imagine what his mother told the deputies. She was pretty enough; if it was the right officer, they might take her word that she just come home and found him like that, maybe write down that he was fixing the sink and the light socket at the same time. Then, if it was the right officer, they might of just carted Mayflower out of there, just because she was pretty, and then took his ass out into the desert and left it.
Train imagined those gray eyes staring at the stars night after night.
He had no luck at the country clubs. Nobody wanted no caddy that never caddied before, and when Train told them he been at Brookline, they suddenly remembered they didn’t have no openings at the present time. By now, the scandal out there passed through country clubs all over the city, until some of the members at Brookline had even quit their own club over the rumors. Didn’t want nobody thinking some caddy slipped off into the foilage with their wives.
Train lay down on the mat that he hauled up onto a plywood shelf for a bed— just like Plural’s— and worried his way around a familiar circle. It begun with the dog, wondering where did he think Train was these days. Then he worried if his mother remembered to feed him. Then he wondered where was his bowl. Train pictured the scene in the kitchen, with Mayflower lying there leaking out his personality through the crack in his head, and it bothered him that he couldn’t find the dog bowl in the picture. He could see Mayflower; he could see dirt around the heels of his feet as he lay on the floor, the cigarette in the ashtray. Then he pictured the ashtray in the deputy’s office, and how that one looked impaled on his spike. Seemed like all he could think of was the messes in the rooms he left.
That brought him to his own room, all tore up when he got home, and then how the house looked when he came back later, and he knew it wasn’t his house anymore, and then he could see his mother again, the exact look on her face when she pushed him out the door. He could hear the bolt go into the lock and knew that was that, and then he imagined her turning back into the house to get herself used to what was lying on her kitchen floor.
