He remembered how the dog woke up and tried to scrambled when the chair leg hit the floor. Maybe thought he was dreaming all the rest.
Plural got up slowly, washed his face in the sink, washed out his T-shirt, and then crawled into the shelf above Train. He had thin calves and tiny misshapen feet, and Train watched them hang for a while over the edge while he finished the paper, and then he lay down up there and they disappeared.
Plural never turned off the lights and never slept but an hour or two at a time. He would be quiet at first, and then he start to tossed and turn, and a little later he would make a whinny noise, and then before long he would tossed and turn himself into the wall, push his face into it where he couldn’t breathe. That scared him awake, and the next minute he was in the ring naked, shadowboxing and talking about stealing chickens.
Train would lie still and watch him break a sweat— he had to break a sweat to go back to sleep— and without understanding nothing about the sport of boxing, he recognized something about what Plural was doing, saw that the movement made some perfect kind of sense. That’s how Plural slept, got up to shadowbox two or three times every night.
“Well,” Plural said above him now, “I see they’s two boys finally cut each other up over to Paradise Developments.” He sounded disappointed, like he’d been warning this would happen all along. Train sat up and leaned out until he could make out a little of Plural.
“Paradise?”
Plural chuckled. “Oh, yes, they got big ideas over there.”
Plural’s arm come over the side and gave him up the paper, and Train noticed again how his hands was small and lumpy, but perfectly formed— not like his feet— delicate, like a girl’s.
Train had seen the
Standard
before. It was for sale all over Darktown; he supposed in Watts too. There was usually an article on the front page how a professor proved Jesus was a Negro or a little girl was run over by a white man’s truck right out in front of her house. And there was always something about the war. An article where somebody fought for his country and came home debilitated and couldn’t get work. From the pictures, there was more colored people lying around with one leg than two.
The story about the stabbings was on the front page. The participants, the story said, were both young Negroes, gave their names and ages, said they were members of the maintenance crew. The man that owned Paradise Developments said he went down to the barn and found the one on the tractor first. “It’s just some kind of tragic misunderstanding,” he said.
The reporter was named Lutheran Hollingsworth. Looking over the rest of the page, Train saw that the same reporter had his name attached to every story.
“They could be something for you there,” Plural said.
“Look like they could be something for us both,” Train said. He been thinking lately it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get Plural out of the gym now and again, get his mind off stealing chickens. Not to get too comfortable not working.
“Not me,” he said, “I’m strictly an indoor man now.”
A tall link fence ran the perimeter of the golf course, and there was a sign every fifty yards.
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS, MODERN HOUSING AND GOLF
INQUIRE WITHIN
From outside the gate, Train could see places in the fairways where the sun had baked the grass brown. The parking lot was half-full, and most of the cars was not much better than no car at all. Nothing like Brookline. A delivery truck rolled past him and into the driveway, the tires chewing the gravel and broken glass, and parked outside the double-wide trailer that seem to been the clubhouse.
Train took a few minutes to get calmed down for the interview— waited until the deliveryman returned to his truck with the empties and left— and then tucked in his shirt all the way around and went in.
Coming out of the morning sun, it took him a minute to see the people inside: two men standing at the cash register, and a woman behind it. He heard them before he could make them out. The man said he wanted their money back; the woman was trying to hold them off. Train been hearing one version or another of this same conversation every day of his life. She was a big heavy woman— taller than either of the men— with dirty jeans and a wide cowboy belt and a sunburn.
“Lady, if I wanted to play a cow pasture,” the smaller man said, “I’d have gone out to the farm.” The one with him nodded along, as if that was what he’d done too. The woman behind the cash register had pale eyes. It looked like she’d been smoking a thin black cigar when this started, the ashes spilled out now on a plate next to the remains of a sandwich. White bread with lipstick prints. A crack ran the length of the window that overlooked the first tee.
“If the course was so bad,” the woman said, “how come you played eighteen holes before you decided to ask for your money back?” She sounded like she’d smoked cigars a long time, and that her voice wasn’t never in the soprano section to begin with.
“I have played golf all over the state,” said the smaller one, “and never saw a course in this kind of shape.”
The man with him nodded again, like it went for him too.
The woman at the cash register picked a piece of tabacco off her tongue, sizing them up. Then she noticed Train. A certain disappointment passed over her face, like she was hoping for something better. “Shit,” she said, looking the little one up and down, “why don’t you go join a nice country club like everybody else? I understand they keep them in wonderful shape.”
The customer looked around the double-wide and said, “You got a very nice situation here yourself, dear.” The woman saw sarcasm was his strong suit, and without another word, she opened the cash register and took out two five-dollar bills and threw them across the counter.
“Don’t come back,” she said. “I never forget a face.”
“But I bet you’d like to,” said the little one.
“I was wondering if they might be some opportunities,” Train said. His voice sounded strange to him whenever he asked for anything. Asking went against his nature. “Something outside.”
The woman was still watching the door where the customers went. “Myself,” she said, scratching her head, “I just as soon be robbed by somebody with a gun.” She began writing something down, stopped to bite off a hangnail, then looked at Train. “That isn’t what you’re doing, is it?”
“No ma’am, I was here about an opening.”
She finished what she was writing and stuck it in the open cash register. Her hair was dyed so blond, it was almost white. “You run a tractor?” she said.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You know what a Triplex is? You run one of those too?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“What height you mow greens?”
“Depend on the rain, the time of year,” Train said. “Usually three-eighths.”
A moment passed, and then the woman scratched at her hairline again, found something there, and closed her eyes and pulled. Her fingers come out pinching a tick still attached to a little piece of her scalp. She held it up to the light, the legs all walking away; Train thought it must be wondering why it wasn’t moving. The woman set the tick carefully on the edge of her lower front teeth and bit down. There was a tiny pop and then she spit on the floor and made a face.
“Where did you say you worked previously?” she said, but she couldn’t get the tick taste out of her mouth now and wasn’t paying attention.
Train stumbled and froze, not wanting to say Brookline. The woman suddenly looked at him more closely and said, “Is it prison? You’re kind of young for that.” He realized his face was soured up like he’d put the tick in his mouth too.
“No ma’am,” Train said. “I never been in prison.”
“No,” the woman said, reconsidering him, nodding, “I guess not. Well, if you can run a tractor, I don’t care where you been. You’re not a socialist, are you? I only ask because we had one of those out here already, and that was enough. The boy would not take a bath.”
The woman’s name was Whitey Stafford, and she walked down the dirt path to the storage barn sore-legged and stiff, like a truck driver. She seemed old to Train, maybe forty, but it was hard to say when they were heavyset. Halfway to the barn, she stopped and picked a weed.
“Let me give you the lay of the land around here,” she said. “The first thing is, I shouldn’t ought to tell you this. The second thing is, I been employed by Mr. Cooper clear back to the termite business, and I know how the man thinks.”
Train stood still, no idea in the world what this was about. “Cooper’s Discount Bug and Rodent Extermination?” she said. “He put up those tents over your house, defumigate the insects and made a million dollars, but that bug dust left him a little skippy, if you know what I mean, and then one day a girl came out from the newspaper, doing a write-up on people who have jobs that nobody else wants to do, and the next thing I know, she’s hanging around in his office all the time, and then Mr. Cooper quits getting his regular haircut every week, and the next thing is, he’s talking about doing something more important with his life than killing roaches.
“I saw it coming as soon as she walked in the door— she’s that bohemian type they all like. I know what the man is thinking before he does. He moved his second wife out of the house— I was surprised that one even noticed, if you know what I mean— and moved this one in and married her. She’s a photographer, half his age and probably twice as smart. Which, when you get right down to it, ain’t that hard.
“Well, she moved in and been in his new place a week or two when she decided she could smell death on him when he came home from work. She’s an artist and can’t work with the odor of death in her nostrils. So Mr. Cooper went ahead and built her a studio— by then, she already quit the job at the paper to devote her energies to art and poetry and leading Mr. Cooper around by the pecker— but she could smell death just as bad over there as she could in the house. I was office manager at that place eight years, I never smelled a thing. The money didn’t bother her, though. She never said there was anything wrong with the way that smelled.
“So the next thing I know, Mr. Cooper sold the business to some Chinese and gave all his work clothes to the Salvation Army and took up golf. Like I’m going to work for some Chinaman. And before long, of course, he gets tired of telling people he used to be the bug exterminating king of Southern California and starts looking around for something else to do, and the idea hits him, a golf course. And not just a golf course, he’s going to build a real estate development around it. He thought she’d like that, golf being on the other end of things socially from the pest business.”
