They got closer to the barn, and Train began picking up bottles and paper cups off the ground. She walked ahead, didn’t seem to notice.
“And she said, ‘You mean like a country club? Rich old Republicans?’ And he thought about that, as much as he is capable of thinking with his dick in her mouth— excuse my French— and decides his project will be integrated. Integrated housing on a golf course, he calls it the idea of a lifetime.”
She stopped, out of breath, and noticed Train had an armload of trash. “I talk too much,” she said again.
“All right,” she said, “they started out in there, in the barn; she had them posing. Grown men, one of them with a wife and a backwards child. He was the superintendent of greens, Don Lance Peters; the other was Freddy Short. Freddy was the socialist. She had them take off their shirts, asked how they decided who was the boss and who was the assistant. That’s as much as the third boy back there heard. That boy’s name is Lester, and he’s a good boy, but you tell him to dig a hole, you also got to go back out and tell him to stop, if you know what I mean.”
The woman had a key ring in her belt and went through it, looking for the one to open the padlock on the barn door. “A few minutes later, they commenced fighting,” she said, “and then one of them picked up a screwdriver, the other got a mower blade, and the first one got a sickle, and then the other one got something I don’t even know what the hell they call it, and they came all the way up the hill like that, stabbing and hacking away, all the way out to the road.” She looked in the direction the fight had gone. “The oldest story in the book,” she said.
Train nodded, all of this making exactly as much sense as eating ticks. She tried key after key, seemed to pick them at random, and it looked to him like she kept trying the same two over and over.
“And you know what she did? She took pictures. Followed them right up the hill with that camera. Click, click, click. Did everything but ask them to smile. Afterwards, Freddy Short’s lying in the road and Don Lance Peters comes back to the barn, climbs up on the tractor, and bleeds out. You see what I mean? A man learns how to kill bugs and he thinks he knows the ways of the world. That’s how they are. Once they get a taste of success, you can’t tell them a thing.”
She looked at him now, waiting for some kind of answer.
“Well, I just mind my own business,” he said.
She stared at him a little longer, trying to see if he’d meant to insult her. He saw how she’d took it that way, but he knew enough not to try to explain it, that he’d only make it worse. She held him there on the edge another minute and then shrugged. “I warned you I was a talker,” she said.
And then, still looking for the key, she said, “Right now, the whole place looks like Mexico. Weeds growing in the bunkers; the greens ain’t been punched since we got here. Trees down where they’re cleaning the homesites. Plus, we got grasshoppers and wasp nests in the ground. The famous bug killer can’t even keep the bugs off his own damn golf course. The first four people that asked for refunds were attacked by hornets— did I tell you that? I told Mr. Cooper, and after all these years he just looked at me, like I was this
disappointment
to him, or like it might not even be true. He doesn’t trust anybody but his sweet little photographer.
“It’s been one thing after another,” she said, still trying the same keys, “ever since we bought the place. Police, lawyers, refunds, dissatisfied customers, permit problems, investigators, insurance men, reporters. Anybody you can think of in this world you don’t want to talk to has come to the door. And the grass stops growing for no one. I’d put Lester on the mower, but Christ knows he’d end up in Nevada.”
She found the key to the padlock then and they went into the barn. Train walked over to the tractor, an old rusted-out John Deere with huge iron wheels and vertical exhaust and a chair cushion for a seat, and pulled himself up.
She watched him from the ground. Train paused when he got up even with the seat, seeing that this was where the one that had made it back to the barn sat down to die. He stepped over and eased himself into it anyway. He had on tan JCPenney & Co. pants, the best trousers he owned, but he didn’t want the woman to think he was afraid to get his pants dirty. Did not think it would do to get on her bad side at all, unless you was married to the boss.
“An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” she said, “that’s the man’s motto.” A piece of a butterfly wing was struck to the tractor wheel, and she picked it off and tasted it, and then spit it out. She looked at him quickly then, in a different way. “That and keep your shirt on around Mrs. Cooper.”
And when she spit again, it had something to do with the new wife. Like in spite of what she said about him, Whitey could have an interest in Mr. Cooper too.
Train took a moment, looking over the controls, and then pulled out the choke and started the engine.
It was hot and shadeless on the course and the old tractor shook, even going down the fairways, and the smoke came up out of a hole in the muffler and into his face. It was nothing like the tractors they had at Brookline, and it was nothing like the fairways. There were no big trees here, only one pond on each nine, at the fifth hole and the sixteenth, rocks in the bunkers. The greens were dry and spotted with disease, and the fence that went around the property was pushed down a dozen places. The lots that was cleared for houses looked like scabs. He saw a spot where bums or kids had lit a fire and sat around drinking beer. The blow of dry grass and dust came up into his face when he made his turns, and he smelled grasshopper juice and saw lizards and snakes everywhere he looked.
Once, for no reason, he turned the engine off and let the tractor coast a few yards, listening to the grasshoppers and the dry metallic sound of the mower blades. Then it was quiet, and he sat still, looking half a mile back to the barn, and everything he saw made him happy, right down to the vultures picking over the remains of a jackrabbit beside the fourteenth green.
He didn’t know what the job paid, or what there was to it beyond driving the machinery and keeping his shirt on around Mr. Cooper’s new wife, but it felt good to have something again, something of his own. He finished in the heat of the late afternoon and drove into the storage barn and parked. He spent an hour cleaning and sharpening the mower blades and added two quarts of oil to the engine. Then he rinsed out the cushion that he’d been setting on and laid it outside to dry. His pants clung to his behind, and when he pulled them away, he saw they were stained with blood. It took him a minute to see what had happened, that he must have sweated on the seat.
By the time he left the barn, the office was closed and the gate was locked to the street. He climbed the fence to get out and caught the bus, conscious of his pants, worried that some pretty girl might see him and think he was the kind of boy that saw a puddle of blood somewhere and sat down in it on purpose.
That whoever she was would look at him and think that this life had left him skippy too.
5
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
T
RAIN WAS IN THE BARN ALONE WHEN SHE came in with her cameras hanging from her neck. He was eating lunch.
Her hair was dark and straight, pulled back into pigtails to make her look like a little girl. She was wearing a T-shirt, and the camera straps lay across her chest, and she wasn’t any little girl. Beyond that, you couldn’t say if she was pretty or not. She stopped when she saw him, like she was surprised, and sat down on the floor, crossing her legs Indian-style, and watched him eat. Curious. Train noticed his sandwich had lost its taste.
After awhile, she looked up at the heavy pine beams that ran the length of the barn. Swallow nests and wasp nests, ropes, tractor tires, a pully— everything looked like it was there a hundred years ago. There was windows in the walls near the ceilings, covered with spiderwebs, that gave the room most of its light. Her eyes came back to Train, caught him looking at her.
“It’s all right to look at me if you want to,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, “thank you.” He began to smile politely, but got caught in the middle of it staring at the camera straps, and for one long moment he couldn’t move his face. His cheeks had froze. He got hold of himself and looked away, in the direction of the door.
She laughed a movie star laugh, pulling him back in her direction.
“After all,” she said, “I’m looking at you.”
Train nodded and then turned away in another direction. He heard her take a picture or two. “I suppose by now Whitey’s told you the stories,” she said.
“This and that,” he said. “None of my business . . .”
“I mean about what happened.” It was quiet again and he nodded, and then, in a lower voice, like she was telling him a secret, she said, “It was extraordinary.” And now he did look at her, right into the camera, to see what she meant. “You could taste the hate that had built up between those two men as soon as you walked in. It must have been going on for years, around each other every day, blaming each other for the way white people had been treating them all their lives, looking at each other, smelling each other, and suddenly there it was, all out in the open. . . .”
She seemed excited, like it was about to happen again.
“I don’t know the gentlemen myself,” he said.
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said, but he didn’t. She leaned forward and played with the focus, and he noticed the word
Nikon
printed across the top. She looked at him through the camera while she twisted the lens back and forth. It reminded him of the way a child might press his forehead against yours and turn, trying to see what you look like up close.
“An intelligent face,” she said, like she was talking to somebody else, “not handsome, exactly, but great intensity. Great intensity in the eyes.” And then the shutter clicked a dozen more times and she let the camera down.
“Eyes tell their own story,” she said, “I’ve learned that.” And then she leaned forward again and squinted, staring at Train’s eyes for a long time, like she was waiting for them to do something unusual.
Train wrapped the rest of his sandwich back in the wax paper and put it away for later. “I’m susan,” she said, “no capital
S.
Just susan.” Train nodded. He knew from his frequent conversations with Whitey that the girl had gave up on last names when she married Mr. Cooper, but he didn’t know that she’d gave up capital letters. A moment passed. “And you would be . . .”
“I would be Lionel Walk,” he said.
She lifted the other camera, fooling with the focus. “And what does Lionel Walk do around here?” She talked like anything was possible between them, and he felt her voice wake up the spider; something shaking the web.
“This and that. Just work for Mr. Cooper, like everybody else.”
She made a face at the name, and then began taking more pictures, faster pictures, the shutter going off every second or two. “What does Cooper pay you?” she said. Then, before he could answer, she said, “No, wait, let me guess. Three dollars a day.”
Train didn’t reply to that. Mr. Cooper had a rule about not telling anybody what you made. She spread her legs wider, as if to steady herself, and said, “Tell me a story, about what you’re doing here.” Train looked at the way she was sitting and put the heel of his hand against his pocket to push down the stiffness, forgetting she could see him through the camera. Then he remembered, and the more embarrassed he turned, the faster she took the pictures.
