He’d gone into the place with a ten-dollar bill, bought a beer and gotten into a fifty-dollar game of nine ball, knowing what could happen, but all night long he couldn’t lose on purpose, and ended up six hundred ahead, and then spent a hundred of it buying drinks and tipping. He’d gotten himself a little drunk.
The car windows were fogged— that was the first thing he noticed— then a faint glow inside as one of them lit a cigarette. Then, at two o’clock in the morning in South Philadelphia, standing outside on the coldest night of the year, he suddenly felt alone.
A minute later they were out of the car, one of them with a crowbar, the other with a bat. They wore loafers and leather caps and long camel-hair coats, and slipped on the ice as they separated and then closed in. There was no reason for them to hurry, though. Packard didn’t want a head start.
The younger one, who still had the cigarette in his mouth, came in a wide circle around a puddle frozen over with ice and then found himself behind another, smaller puddle. He hesitated a moment and then jumped, skidded when he hit the sidewalk, and went into the air backward, turning as he fell, like a child who decides too late that he doesn’t want to go down the slide. Then he hit, and lay still a moment, and the crowbar rang on the cement.
“Albert, for Christ’s sake,” the older one said, “you’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”
He came up off the sidewalk slowly, holding his knee, limping and furious, and wiped at the dirt on his coat. Then he picked up the crowbar and began to beat it against the parking meter, slipping half off his feet again as he swung.
“All right, Albert,” the man said, “that’s enough.”
And the kid stopped.
The man looked at Packard almost apologetically. Packard had seen him a few times before— he was not from this neighborhood, but was from some neighborhood, somebody who’d come up the old way, gotten his nose spread a few times, his ears lopped, and had made something of himself in the business. Packard noticed that he’d spent some money on his shoes— Packard knew clothes and shoes, especially shoes— and nothing on his teeth. The locals had called the man Mr. Bambi when they told Packard that he’d been around looking for him. “You’re a nice guy, Packard,” they’d said, “pay him his money.”
It was eleven hundred dollars, and they’d been after him for six, seven weeks, and at that moment Packard could have written a good check for eleven hundred dollars five hundred times in a row. One of his great-grandfathers had invented tire tread, and nobody in the family had worked for a living since. Packard had been connected to money all his life.
Mr. Bambi stood beneath the streetlamp, casting a gorilla’s shadow across the cement. The shadow looked healthier than Mr. Bambi did— younger, and you couldn’t see his teeth.
“You don’t mind my asking,” he said, “what was the plan?”
That was the question all right.
What was the plan?
“Fuck, Mr. Bambi,” the kid said, “I tink I bwoke my leg.”
Packard had seen the kid before, too, hanging around with his friends, always in new clothes, combing his greasy hair over and over, talking to girls who never even looked up. The kid had lost an index finger somewhere in his travels, and sometimes stuck the stub in his nose for the girls as they walked by. And still they didn’t pay attention.
Go figure women, right?
“What do you say we go inside where it’s warm,” Mr. Bambi said, “take care of this like gentlemen.” He sounded like a reasonable man.
The kid was still limping around, holding his knee. “He tinks he’s got a bwoken leg,” Packard said. “Maybe you should take him to the hospital.”
Hearing that Packard was laughing at him, the kid ran at him with his eyes closed, swinging the crowbar at his head. Packard took a step backward and fell into Mr. Bambi, who was surprised and stumbled and then pushed him away. It wasn’t an angry push, though; in some way, he was still asking if they couldn’t all just be reasonable.
Then they closed in, the kid feinting with the crowbar, Mr. Bambi coming straight on, looking resigned, and Packard waited, timing the kid’s swing, and then went right past him and up the sidewalk.
He ran flat-footed for traction, and it felt slower this way, but he could hear them behind him and knew where they were, and could tell by the ragged breathing that they were not used to running. He slowed down, not wanting to lose them yet, and led them a block like that, the kid yelling bloody murder, Mr. Bambi not wasting his air, just trying to keep up.
Another block, and Packard heard them slow and stop. He stopped too, grabbed his knee and limped around in a circle, imitating the kid.
They came after him again, balls out, and he ran ahead, running easily, feeling light and happy, crossing the street.
He thought he’d been hit by a car. One second he was there, the next second he wasn’t. Then there was a blur of mange and teeth somewhere on the edge of his vision. It brought to mind the night he was lifted out of his bunk in the Pacific. But there were no lights now, no sound except the footsteps behind him, only the animal’s terrible breath before she closed down on the junction of his neck and shoulder.
She was still mauling him when they caught up; it seemed like a long time. They stood there awhile with their hands on their knees, catching their breath, watching, and then the kid stepped forward with the crowbar over his head, but Mr. Bambi was looking at the strange turns Packard’s leg took as it lay in the snow, and stopped him. He watched a little longer and then kicked her away. He winked at Packard and held off the boy.
“Too many cooks in the kitchen,” he said.
Packard was lying across the side of a snowbank, which he estimated was as steep and cold as the row-house roofs above him. He had been hurt before, and knew that afterwards he would not remember the pain. If he were pushed, he could describe it, tell you something about it, but the experience itself, it was gone when it was gone. Like a palm job, he thought, looking at the kid. But if you wanted to talk about pain— which was not the same thing as remembering it— you might as well ask the old women out on their stoops all summer about having babies. They could talk to you about pain.
Packard saw the kid was excited in a damp, queer-bait way, and hoped, speaking of palm jobs, that he never got even that close to a girl in his life.
He was a hard case, and he had been hurt before, if never in quite this way. His leg, at least, was broken in ways he couldn’t figure out. He went in and out of focus. He’d thought before about what it would be like if they caught him, if he’d try to give them the money or just smile and find out where it all led.
It never occurred to him that it could turn out anything like this; that he’d be alone in the street, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, double-crossed and heartbroken over a dog that wasn’t even his.
In the end, when the focus began to come back, it was from another place. It was hard to say exactly where, but approximately from one of the row-house roofs. He began to see himself and the street clearly, though, see the whole mess he was in, and then it changed and it was the mess
he
— the other he— was in, and it was all suddenly secondhand.
The ambulance arrived much later, and the medics found him lying half-conscious in the snow and saw the leg— told him he might lose the leg— and gave him a shot of morphine for the pain and wrote in their report later that the victim was delirious, that nothing they said would make him stop laughing.
2
BROOKLINE
Los Angeles, March 1953
T
HE FAT MAN COULDN’T TURN IT LOOSE. GOT the sun in the sky, birds in the trees, shine on his shoes— everything a gentleman need but two wives and a death wish, as the old saying went— but he still just stood there froze over the ball, the seconds ticking away, like somebody couldn’t pee for the nurse.
And yellow pants, speaking of urination.
The boy was a few steps behind the fat man and to the side, carrying his bag. He’d been standing by watching half the morning, and there was something about the fat man he still couldn’t place. Something familiar that reminded him of something else. The boy waited for the connection to come, not trying to hurry it along. Connections came to him all the time— people to things and things to people, things to each other, surprises and amusedments out of the thin air— it wasn’t anything he did to cause it, and sometimes, like now, he knew one was there before he knew what it was.
And sometimes, of course, it turned out to be a surprise but not no amusedment at all.
The boy was almost eighteen years old, but innocent-looking for that age, still hadn’t grown into his feet, and when he spoke, it was soft and mumbled, where you could barely tell what he said. He was known around these environs as Train.
The fat man’s weight hung over his belt in bags in front and over the sides, and his thighs moved around under those big loose pants— it look like children hiding in the curtains. He took a long breath and then went still, with eyes like a strangling.
This same thing been going on long enough now that it lost its comical aspect. Then a ripple passed across his face, like a fish swam up to the surface, and they all saw it and knew it was time to shut up and hold still, and for a little while nobody moved, nobody dare to move, because any little perturbation now, any flutterance in the air, and they got to all go back and start over from the beginning. The breeze itself stopped blowing.
The boy held his breath, and held the bag— his hand went over the irons to keep them quiet— and then the fat man sighed, like the news on this shot was already in, feeling that old, familiar misery stalking him again, and picked the club almost straight up off the ground.
Which was a relief to all concerned.
Once the swing was safely begun, Train went squint-eyed, as he sometimes did to diversify himself when things was slow, and watched the whole scene transmogrified around to Little Bighorn, Montana. (The boy picked up that word off a tote, a retired justice of the peace from someplace down south, who found it himself in the
Reader’s Digest
’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” and ever since, every time he hit it into the water or out into the yards and houses and streets beyond the course, he turned to his playing partners and said, “Gentlemen, you have witnessed an officer of the court transmogrified to human shit,” and that was surefire material for the regular associates of his, no matter how many times they heard it before.)
The fat man lifted the club higher, pulling himself up with it, and Train saw Custer, all wore-out, fighting to the end in his yellow pants, standing his ground and swinging at the redskins with an empty rifle as they floated past on their war ponies. The last white man alive.
There was a thought.
And then, just like the movie, here come the tomahawk, cutting down through the sky, death on a stick, and then a wet, heavy noise when it hit home. And then Custer was gone as fast as he come, and the club head had took a divot half a foot deep, and the ball itself squirted almost straight right, off the cart path toward the trees.
Time slowed down and everybody went numb-mouth at once. The ball ran like a jail break, and the boy knew to a certainty that even though it was only a twosome, this round was surely three hours a side, and there wasn’t no chance in hell he was finishing in time to carry two bags today. They gone out late in the first place— didn’t get on the first tee till 10:22— and as soon as the fat man had hit it once, Train realized that his wet dreams was better organized than his tote’s golf swing.
