He went a long time— sometime on the sidewalk, sometime out in the street itself, dodging traffic— all the way back to the golf course, but the gates were locked when he got there, and Mr. Cooper’s car was gone. And he knew it was too late to give him back his three dollars and tell him he didn’t want to watch out for nobody stealing his gasoline. That he didn’t want to be the one to watch.
He sat down against the fence, dripping sweat, exhausted, and tried to figure out what he was doing, scared to death and running a mile through traffic on a Friday night over a blind lady in the bus window.
Mr. Cooper’s new wife came down to the barn one more time. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the sun was down below the windows, turning the whole place a strange color in the minutes before it set.
Train was stretched out on the floor, working on the mower blades. Somebody thrown a piece of barbed wire over the fence in the night, maybe eight or ten feet of it, and Lester run over it in the morning with the mower and wrapped it up like Christmas. Train was lying down for leverage with two pairs of pliers, cutting the wire away. Lester was sitting on a gas can in the corner, watching him work. Scared to death. The rest of the crew was long gone.
Lester wasn’t allowed to drive the tractor, and he was afraid Mr. Cooper would fire him if he found out what he did. He was crying when he come back looking for Train to tell him what happened, and he was still there crying when Whitey come down later to see why the hell nobody was out mowing.
Train told her the tractor was broke and he had to transmogrify a gasket. By now, they both knew he had took over the golf course, even though she come down time to time and acted like she was still in charge, warning him one way or another to stay away from Mr. Cooper. If there was anybody going to be his right-hand man, it was her. The woman was loud and bossy and tasted everything on the course, but she didn’t understand how things ran or what made things grow, and neither did nobody else. Mr. Cooper had hired his ground crew on the basis of various shades of skin color, how they would look when prospective buyers come by to visit, and there wasn’t nobody but Train around that knew how to keep a lawn green, much less a golf course.
Lester stood up without a word when the new wife came into the barn, and walked crablike toward the door, never turning his back. You had to tell him everything twice because he always thought you was teasing him the first time you said it, but nobody had to tell him to stay away from her. He had been down here when the fight started, seen the trouble she could get you in.
Train stopped working and looked at her from his back. He had a cramp in his hand, and when he held it up and flexed it, he saw it was cut and bleeding from the wire. “Does it hurt?” she said, but it was only a curiosity, not like it mattered if he answered her yes or no. This girl had took pictures while two men hacked each other to death over her that spring; she didn’t have much impression over a few cuts somebody got fixing a mower blade.
He shook his hand and blotted the cuts against his pants. He noticed she didn’t have her cameras with her, wondered if she’d took up something new. She lifted up her skirt like a girl wading in a creek and walked over the wire Train had cut out and tossed on the floor, then stopped right over him, looking down. There was no underpants; she didn’t wear underpants. Train looked another way, but she stood there holding her skirt, looking at him like a puppy.
“You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What was the other ones like?”
A minute passed and she glanced at the door and said, “It’s all right. Cooper’s up in the office.” Cooper. She always called him Cooper. She moved a little, drawing his eye to the bait. He lay tight and still, losing an argument with his business. He remembered that word for it suddenly— his
business
. It was what his mother called it when he was young.
When Mr. Cooper’s new wife spoke to him again, her tone was changed, like he’d hurt her feelings. “I only came down to invite you to an exhibit,” she said.
“I got to get this wire untangled from the mower blade,” he said. “Thank you all the same.” And went back to work. He heard her move then, bending over. She leaned under the tractor and got close to his ear to talk— she always like to talked close to his ear— to watch what it did to him.
“It’s my pictures,” she said. “You’re in some of my pictures. I thought you might like to come to the opening and see them.” He lay still as long as he could, and then felt his business pop loose from his underwear, and it stuck straight up in his pants. Lying on his back, the bottom of his T-shirt lay across his stomach, leaving that much of his skin exposed, and he suddenly felt her fingers, very lightly, touching his stomach. “Here’s the card,” she said, still close to his ear, and slipped it beneath the elastic of his underpants, and in that same moment, the spider began to crawl. “It’s got the address and the time, if you feel like it,” she said, but he barely heard the words.
It blew through like the Southern Pacific, like to shook him out of his shoes, the milk spilling all over him and into his pants and everywhere else. She left her hand where it was until the last spasms passed, and his lap begun to feel cool and sticky, and then he heard her say, “Oh my,” and she was gone.
When he was alone again, he rolled over and got to his feet. He looked at his pants and then at the card. The exhibit was called “Images from the Working Life, by susan,” and was sponsored by Southern California Artists for a Better World.
He put the card in his pocket and looked around the barn. He thought of the place as his own, and realized suddenly that all she had to do was go up that hill and tell Mr. Cooper he looked at her sideways, and that was that. It was the other side of disappearing into the scenery. Tomorrow the barn and the tractors and mowers would still be where they was, Whitey would still be stealing gas, Lester would still be running over wires, and you had to known the place firsthand to realize Train was missing.
He knew that what just happened didn’t matter enough to her to do that to him, but he thought she might like to do it to Mr. Cooper.
6
BEVERLY HILLS
D
R. SPEERS CAME BY AT NOON TO CHANGE her dressing, four days after she had been raped. He was old and clumsy and smelled of cough syrup, and it hurt when he pulled off the tape. It didn’t make sense, but little things hurt more now than before. There were carpenters on the roof, hammering, and the ceiling moaned beneath their shoes. He wore an Omega wristwatch and a class of 1929 ring from Southern Methodist and gave her another shot of penicillin against the chance that one of the Negroes had been carrying a venereal disease. Sometimes in the female, he said, screwing the last half inch of a Camel into the ashtray, the disease could exist without any symptoms at all.
The doorbell rang again five minutes after he left. She had just washed down two of the sedatives the doctor left her, and was on the way up to the guest room on the second floor, as far from the hammering as she could get, to take a nap. She stopped on the stairway and considered the front door, thinking it was probably lawyers. Her husband had left the sort of money behind that lawyers didn’t like to lose touch with, even for a few days.
She took a moment, thinking of the cool feel of the sheets, and then went to the door instead, and saw who it was, and tried to remember if she had at least brushed her hair.
They sat together in the kitchen, beneath the hammering. She offered him a beer, and was surprised when he took it— she assumed he was on duty somewhere— and then opened one for herself. It was almost one o’clock, and she was still in her slippers and housecoat. Nothing on underneath. It was warm in the kitchen, and he took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Brooks Brothers.
“You look like you could use some sleep,” he said.
“I look like I fell out of a car.” Her face was still swollen and bruised; she’d spent half an hour that morning at her makeup table, not knowing where to start. She’d spent the last four days not knowing where to start. He looked up at the ceiling, where a light swayed gently as the workmen moved around.
“Howard Hughes’s plane crashed into the roof right after the war,” she said, “and they still haven’t gotten the lattice right. I never much cared, but Alec couldn’t let it go. That was the way he was. I should probably just send them home and forget it.”
“Here?” he said, “That happened here?” The crash had been a big story in the newspapers, pictures everywhere of Hughes in the hospital, his head bandaged, his arms in casts, a nurse holding his cigarette.
“They still occasionally find little pieces of the plane in the neighborhood,” she said. “People take them home after parties.” She gestured toward the backyard, as if she were offering him whatever he might want.
“I’m not much on souvenirs.”
She understood he was intelligent, and when he said that, it seemed to hold some second, hidden meaning, but she was fogged in and couldn’t see what it was. A moment had passed and he was looking at her more closely. “Are you faint?” he said.
She thought about that and said, “No, but the day’s young.”
“Your color drained. You looked scared.”
“I probably am.”
“Of me?”
“Of everything.”
He shrugged. “I’m harmless.”
