Train shrugged. “Slow or fast,” he said.
“What kind of game you want?” Melrose said after Hollingsworth left. Train looked at the jockey and the big man, remembering the sandbaggers he’d seen back at Brookline. Melrose said, “How ’bout me and Alexander against you and Girth, twenty-dollar Nassau? . . .”
Train shook his head.
“Twenty dollars too rich?”
“Man,” the jockey said, “I’m out here wasting my precious time.”
“Skins,” Train said. “Everybody for themself.”
Melrose shrugged, and the two other players shrugged too. The big man looked bored. Melrose said, “Fifty for eighteen, that all right with everybody?” Testing him somehow. Train tried not to think about fifty dollars, how long it took him to earn that toting bags.
Melrose won the first four skins, chipping it in from the back side of the green, playing his game. Train felt everybody watching him, seeing if he was scared and bothered. “You got this covered, man?” Melrose said as they went to the fifth tee. Then he stepped up and hit it down the middle, deep for him, feeling good. “I mean, if we get done and the money ain’t right, you know, that’s bad for everybody.”
But the way Train was looking at things, he was playing out of Melrose’s pocket. He could lose every hole all day, still be up $210. He was beginning to get the feel of the rental clubs, waiting on the head just a little longer with the ones with the whippier shafts, and Melrose wasn’t gone chip the ball in forever. He waited on the driver now and hit the ball past Melrose fifty yards.
Melrose chipped in again on five, but this time it was to tie the hole. And that was the last sniff he got.
At the end of it, everybody but Girth sat down at the picnic table outside the double-wide to settle up. Girth couldn’t fit in. It wasn’t until the money came out that Train saw they been playing fifty dollars a hole, not fifty for the eighteen. He picked up the cash in front of him and counted it— nineteen hundred dollars— and felt his fingers shaking.
Melrose couldn’t stand the sight of him now, but the other two didn’t seem bothered by the game, and they was out nine hundred each, and they sat there cool and happy, drinking gin and 7UP. One of them, the jockey, was the best putter Train ever seen. Another day, the little man might have took all the money himself.
Train kept the money in his back pocket, and in a week was already tired of carrying it around, tired of hiding it when he went to sleep or took a shower, hiding it even from Plural. When he was on the tractor, it made his leg numb. Folded in half, it was three inches thick— over two thousand dollars, more money than he ever expected to be sitting on in his life— and he worried over it like he used to worry that old Lucky was dying under the kitchen table, running from the bus home to make sure he hadn’t passed on while Train was at work.
In some ways, two thousand dollars was more trouble than no money at all.
The grounds crew at Paradise Developments took an hour for lunch. The hour was unpaid. There were five regulars, and they ate their sandwiches and fruit and boiled eggs and Hostess cupcakes and then sprawled out on the grass under a big live oak behind the barn until Whitey come down and yelled at them that it was time to go back to work. They always groaned getting up, and one of them always told her that they didn’t have no watches, that she ought to give them a watch, and that got under her skin, to have them asking Mr. Cooper for something more, and she would say she noticed she never had to come down and tell them it was time to lay down.
The grounds crew liked to see her worked up like that, especially when they got her mad enough to grab poor Lester by the belt and scold him, flop him around like a doll. Lester was scared to death of Whitey.
Train didn’t care to be around for the bemusement of Lester, and after he ate, he usually took the old brakeless Ford pickup out to the pond on number five, where the boys had been diving for golf balls, and sat out on the hood, feeding a one-footed duck pieces of sandwiches that people left in the trash. He called the duck Marliss. Sometimes, if he found a dead snake or rabbit on the course that day, he brought it along for the snappers. There were eight or ten of them at least, some that had to weigh a hundred pounds.
All Train could figure out about what was going on at the pond was Marliss lost her foot to one of the turtles and refuse to leave the scene of the crime. Twice, Train had got off a tractor and ran her down himself and took her to the other pond over on sixteen, but both times she was back at number five in the morning. She settle herself in right next to the snappers while they laid out in the water, moving closer and then a little closer, and then closer again, until finally one of them went for her, and the second it moved, she was gone, honking and flapping out the way, leaving a trail of feathers in the wake.
The duck had been there ever since Train started. The first time he saw her, she limped out in front of the tractor, beating her wings to stay upright, look like she was trying to commit suicide. That wasn’t it, though; she’d just fell into the daredevil life, and couldn’t go back.
He was sitting on the hood of the truck, tossing bread to Marliss, when a person in a suit and a straw hat came toward him from the direction of the road. Vagrants had broke down the fence again, so anybody could walk onto the course, and Mr. Cooper hadn’t brought in the fence company yet to put it back up. Everywhere you looked, there was things Mr. Cooper hadn’t did; all he cared about was to keep those bulldozers pushing dirt.
The person was built on the slight side, and appeared to had a crick in his neck, maybe looking up all the time at adults. He rolled when he walked, recalling Sweet.
The person came up a dirt hill on the other side of the pond, trying not to get his shoes dirty, and then stood still a minute, popping his knuckles, staring at one of the big snappers. His shoes shined in the sun. Train waited; never first, never sorry. The little man looked up from the turtle, the straw hat throwing a shadow across his face. All Train could see was his teeth. Train threw more bread to the duck, just like this person wasn’t there.
“How come you ain’t killed them snappers?” the little man said. He had a deep voice for somebody that size. Delicate hands, polished nails. A mustache as thin as a pencil line across his lip.
“Ain’t done nothing to kill them for,” Train said.
The duck stood up straight and shook. The person moved in for a closer look, careful where he put his feet. Must of bought his clothes in the boy’s department. “They’d do it to you— that’s a reason.” He made a gun of his thumb and finger and aimed at the turtles, pretended to shoot. His hand jumped and he made shooting noises three times. “They thinking they all safe in their shell. Probably ain’t afraid of nothing.”
“I don’t know,” Train said.
That remark seem to aggravated him, turned him ugly. “I didn’t ast you what you know,” he said. Train noticed that before with little people, they fly off the handle without the regular reasons. When he spoked again, though, he already forgotten he was mad. “You ain’t never killed nothing for sport?” He waited a little, but Train didn’t answer. “You missed the great outdoors.”
Train had a sudden cold moment when he thought he felt Mayflower’s hand on his neck. One of the snappers slipped under the water, drawing the little man’s attention. “Lookit there. They got a head on them like an old man’s dick,” he said. “You could kill them for ugliness. That’s a reason too.” He took a cigarette from his shirt pocket, letting Train see what he had under his coat, then lit it and flicked the match into the pond. Maybe smoking stunt your growth after all.
Train threw the last of the bread to the duck and pushed himself off the hood. “Where you going?” the person said. “I thought we was talking.”
“Work,” Train said. “I got to get back to work.”
“You cutting the grass around here, picking weeds and all? That’s what you do?” Train opened the truck door to climb in, then stood where he was, still holding the door handle, and waited while the little man came toward him now, still careful where he put down his feet.
“You ain’t believe what people downtown been talking about,” he said. “They saying that this boy out at Paradise Development got into Melrose’s pocket. Made a fool of Melrose English, saying this boy just lull him to sleep and took his roll.”
“How am I gone lull somebody to sleep?” Train said.
“That ain’t the point,” the little man said. “The point is, it’s going around this boy did it without nothing in his pocket.” He was watching Train’s face to see if that was true, and then he was shaking his head and smiling, like he caught him red-handed.
The little man dusted his hands and then his clothes. He looked back at the pond, but the snappers were gone now, underwater. “You know,” he said, “I believe you found the right place, out here with the ducks and shit. You see what I mean? I was you, I’d stick to it.” And then he reached up, the cigarette still between his fingers, and patted Train on the cheek. Train felt the heat from the cigarette and pulled away.
The little man started back toward the pond, the way he’d come. Walking that rolling walk, like the world was his.
“He want it back, then?” Train said. “He sent out his little midget to get it back?”
The little man turned around, then came back halfway to the truck, showing him again what was under his coat. There was a wrench lying on the front seat, and Train reached in and picked it up. The little man smiled at that, but then, so did Mayflower when he saw the chair leg.
