Sometimes while Melrose was laughing over something on the course, Train pictured the girl from Iowa, had her hair in pigtails, the way Mr. Cooper’s wife did when he met her, and she was laughing away too, maybe sitting at a bar in a new dress from Iowa, looked something like Bo Peep, touching Melrose’s hand, thinking she was special to him, not paying attention that he gone moody. That was the thing about Melrose, moodiness. Train could picture a cigarette on the table with an ash as long as her finger, and then in one movement, the one that would be froze in her history, his hand would move and her expression would change, a little at a time, while she realized there was something wrong with her pretty face, and she didn’t know what it was yet, but it felt wrong and it was wet. And sometimes when Train pictured that, he imagined coming in himself and saving her. Sometimes it felt like he loved her.
Melrose mentioned the Iowa girl around the schoolteachers whenever it could be brought up into conversation. The teachers was the easiest ones to scare, and in his business, he scared who he could. When the balls fell wrong and one or two of them ended up in Melrose’s group, you could hear them laughing all over the course, trying to guess what was supposed to be funny.
It wasn’t just that he cut a girl. The man was moody, go stone-cold over a ten-dollar bet, so cold people were afraid to even look at him. Train had seen the schoolteachers and even the Chinese miss little putts so they wouldn’t be in Melrose’s pocket for the day. And nobody ever had Melrose himself putt out, nothing under five feet. There was even an expression about that—“Pick it up, Melrose”— when they was playing among themselves. But they were careful not to say it around Melrose himself. Nobody knew minute to minute what mood he was in, or what he liked, and everybody walked around him scart to say the wrong thing.
As far as Train could tell, an old man called Pincus Lewis was the only one immune. Pincus didn’t care who Melrose English was or who he said he cut. When the boy got like that, he just turned off his hearing aid and just kept on pushing the ball around the golf course.
Melrose was in a group on this day with Pincus, a Chinese, and a boy called Silverman, whose father owned Ruby’s Liquor Emporium in Inglewood. Train tagged along behind, not bothering nobody, just watching the game.
The foursome come to number five, a blind shot from the tee, and Melrose hit it down the right side. Everybody else went left, the safe play, and when they walked over the hill, Melrose’s ball ain’t there. He stood still, looking around himself like he dropped his keys. Below them, down by the green, there was a shallow pond, and two colored boys in their underpants were out waist-deep, diving for balls. One of them had goggles. There was snappers in that pond, and Train noticed snakes down there sunning on the rocks.
Train seen that Melrose’s ball bounced once on the fairway before it disappeared over the hill, but the fairway was sloped right, and there were rocks in the rough. Mr. Cooper was always after Whitey to get those rocks out of the rough, but nothing been done and people lost their ball over there all the time, and when they did find it, they couldn’t hit it without breaking a shaft. That’s why you aim it left.
“That ball have got to be in the fairway,” Melrose said.
Pincus said, “Why is that?” even though he and Melrose was partners that day. The low handicap and the high.
“I ain’t no fucking Chinaman, is why,” Melrose said. The Chinese had lost a ball on the last hole, kept them waiting fifteen minutes while he looked for it. The Chinese all hated to lose a ball, and Melrose hated to wait. Train was already thinking he might just walk back in. It made him nervous to be around Melrose in a bad temper.
Pincus didn’t care nothing about that, golf was golf. He nodded toward the empty fairway and said, “If it’s there, then go hit it.” Silverman look around for the exit. Nobody but Pincus would talk like that to Melrose.
Melrose spotted the two boys in the pond then, diving for balls. A bicycle with a large basket was parked at the edge of the water, and there were at least a couple hundred balls lying in a blanket on the ground. “I see where it went,” he said.
Pincus looked at the boys, and then back at Melrose. “Not unlest you hit that drive four hundret yards,” he said.
“One of them must of got up here and took it,” he said. He turned and looked at the old man. “Whose side you on anyway?”
“Shit, those boys ain’t bothered your ball. They in the water.”
But Melrose wasn’t talking to Pincus anymore. He estimated the distance to the pond and took out one of his irons and dropped half a dozen balls on the ground, new Wilsons, and then began hitting them in where the boys were wading.
The first one hit the bank; the second one hit the water so close that it splashed up into one of them’s face. The boy looked up, like he didn’t understand, and Melrose took another swing, put this one behind him in the bank.
“What the hell you doing?” Pincus said.
“They ain’t got no business out here,” Melrose said, and swung again. The boy saw this one coming and stumbled back and fell under the water. He came back up looking like the tar baby from the muck on the bottom. The older boy pulled the younger one away from there, both of them scrambling up the bank to the bicycle. The older one got on first, to pedal, and waited until the little one got on in front, and then they rode away, leaving all the balls they’d pulled out of the pond there on the ground. Half a day’s work.
Train thought they must be brothers or cousins, for the older one to wait like that for the little one to get on the handlebars. Pincus watched them go. “They was only boys,” he said. “Just trying to make a dollar.”
“The balls belong to the people that hit them,” Melrose said, but Pincus seen all he cared to see and heard all he cared to hear. He stared at Melrose, and for a second he seem to shamed him, and then turned around and walked back toward the clubhouse, pulling his golf cart.
Melrose called after him. “Where you going, man? We got a game here.” Pincus reached up and turned off his hearing contraption. Quitting like that, it might be the last time the old man would ever play out here. Might have to stay home with his wife on Sunday now, maybe take her to church. Train remembered once when Melrose and Pincus was friendly, Melrose asked him what that old stuff was like. “Cactus,” he said. Made Melrose laugh so hard he cried. But that was all bygones now.
“What now?” the Chinese said.
“We play skins, Chinaman. The other game is moot,” Melrose said.
The Chinese nodded, as if he understood
moot,
and maybe he did; it sounded like something they eat. And then they were looking back at Train. They were all looking at Train. Then Melrose said, “You got any money on you, man?”
The news that Train had took $260 off Melrose English and a Chinese and the Silverman boy in a Sunday-morning skins game, without strokes, borrowing clubs out of Melrose’s own bag, passed through the regular players at Paradise Developments and then spilt out into the street.
The boy didn’t just won all the money, he made Melrose English putt out from two feet on the last hole. Melrose put the ball in the hole to save himself another fifty dollars, but the audacity was the boy made him putt it at all.
Melrose handed over the money like he didn’t care. The Chinese and Silverman was afraid to breathe.
“You make it next Sunday, man?” Melrose said, cold as the icebox. And then, before Train could answer, he said, “Bring your money.”
9
THE COAST HIGHWAY
T
HEY GOT DRUNK AND WENT TO MEXICO. THEY went to a live sex show, a woman and a bear, woke up in the morning in a room with a cat in the corner and cockroaches all over the ceiling, and went out and got drunk again and got married. She thought of herself, the grieving widow, watching a bear given a hand job.
Another day passed, and they were in the Jaguar, on the way home. The car had been Alec’s favorite, even though it was in the shop nine or ten months a year. In a way, he’d liked it because it was so hard to keep clean. He’d liked putting effort into little things that didn’t matter to anyone else. The car was painted black, and inside, anything that touched the wood or glass left smudges. Whenever she got in it now, she thought of the print of her behind on the little table at the art gallery. She’d watched it evaporate as she got into her clothes.
Miller was driving, lost in his thoughts. It was nothing new to her— he seemed lost most of the time, but she didn’t know yet what it meant. It hadn’t occurred to her that she never would. They were on the Coastal Highway just north of San Diego and the sun was lying on the water.
She looked down at her legs, and then laid a hand between them, on the inside of her thigh. Her thumb rested a moment on the slight rise at the border of her stocking, and she moved it back and forth, feeling the texture of her skin, then the nylon. She slid a finger underneath, feeling a small, clear pain as it passed over the little bump of scar tissue that had formed where she had been torn in the rape. It was the boy who had done that; it turned out he was only eighteen years old. She let go of the thought and slid her finger inside.
A convertible came past from the opposite direction, three boys who might have been eighteen too, all of them in Navy uniforms, headed back to San Diego. She felt a small sadness watching them, at the parts of her life that were gone. Later, they came across a pickup full of Mexicans, stopped along side the road with the hood up, children spilling out the windows, too many adults to count drinking in the truck bed. Having the kind of good time that only Mexicans could have. He remarked then that you almost never saw their children crying.
He kept the car at seventy a little while and then eighty; it seemed to her that he was happiest when he was taking chances. She reached across his arm, throwing a shadow across his lap, and slowly wiped her wet finger over his lips. He tasted what it was and closed his eyes, and because of that she saw the animal come up over the railing before he did.
He stood up on the brakes and the back end of the Jaguar began to skate sideways, the wheel useless in his hands, the deer straight ahead, not moving, and then the car left the pavement and the deer left it too, but not in time, and there was a noise, unmistakably something alive, the end of life, and then the thing reappeared and the windshield shattered and the car slid along the railing and then crossed back over the highway, spinning now, bounced over a small ditch and came to rest on the frontage road on the other side. She sat still a moment, her skirt hiked to her lap, staring through the shattered glass right into the animal’s face, the steam blowing from the radiator behind it. She felt empty, and then, strangely, she began to cry. Not over the deer, or even the accident. She hadn’t been afraid— it seemed to her that she had lost her capacity for ordinary kinds of fear that morning on the boat— and she wasn’t hurt. She was only empty, and she cried.
He pulled her out of the car as if he were trying to save her, and set her back against the trunk, her feet still in her shoes, and began to kiss her cheeks. Looking into her eyes, kissing her cheeks.
“You’re all right. I’ve got you.”
“I know, I know.”
“You’re not hurt.”
