Ten o’clock at night, Train was just drifting away when Plural’s head drop over the ledge like it was disconnected off his shoulders. He had a cigarette in his lips and a smile on his face. One of his eyes didn’t move; the other one did.
Plural said, “That white boy’s trainer, you know what he said? Said he give me three dollars a round tomorrow, I let the boy hit me.”
“Three dollars a round?”
“He can’t get no other work for that boy. Not turned around. Now he’s worried about the boy’s certitude, wants me to let him hit me.” He finished what he said but stayed where he was, grinning, his head hanging over the ledge.
“You don’t need that,” Train said.
Plural chuckled and said, “Sometime that man forgot to pay me, and then I told him I might had to see about his chickens. . . .”
He could tell Plural couldn’t quite remember now who the man was, and he was tired of all this talk about chickens. Sometime, it seem like Plural was turning back to his childhood.
“That’s hard work for him to be forgetting to pay.”
Plural chuckled at that too. “Ain’t too hard,” he said. “That boy come back in two years, then it’s hard money indeed.”
Indeed.
He remembered old Florida working his totes.
Plural had a pull off the cigarette again and tapped the ashes into his hand, and then he ate them. He never used ashtrays in his life. “The first time I got a thousand dollars, Train, you know what I done? I took off my clothes and throwed the money on the bed and just rolt around in the bills.”
It didn’t surprise Train to hear that; Plural went wherever his thoughts took him. He remembered his own money.
“I put my feet in my socks sometimes— that’s where I kept mine,” Train said.
“Damn, how that felt?”
“Not too good.”
“No,” Plural said, “it don’t, do it?”
Plural lay back on his mat, disappeared from view. A little later he said, “This white boy’s trainer, he come up after the boy left today, said he pay me three dollars a round, I let him hit me some.” A horn honked out of the street; someone yelled and glass broke, and then tires squealed off into the other sounds of the night.
“You don’t need that,” Train said. “You come with me Sunday, I’ll give you more than that.”
“Three dollars a round,” he said. “That’s good money.”
Plural was a long time getting to sleep that night. Train always knew when he fell off, even if he wasn’t snoring. He knew he was up there now with his eyes open, smiling, thinking of three dollars a round, all he got to do is let this white boy hit him.
Train woke up Plural Sunday morning with a crutch that been sitting in the corner with cobwebs as long as Train had been here. Plural been drinking Mogan David and eating White Castle hamburgers the past evening, and you didn’t want to be the first thing standing in front of him on the morning after that. Train poked him ten, eleven times, and Plural’s eyes suddenly opened, looked like you just took the lid off two cans of tomatoes. His head didn’t move an inch; he just lie there staring with one live eye. Didn’t recognize Train at all.
“Plural?”
No answer.
“You gone come along today?”
Plural got out of bed naked and picked up his box of Tide and walked without a word across the floor to the shower. He turned it on and got in before the water had time to turn warm— it was only a trickle anyway— and stayed in there a long time.
He came out wrapped in a towel, but he still had that wild red color in his eyeballs, and Train could see that he wasn’t all there in the room yet. He sat down on the ring apron and began to put on his shoes and socks, which was the normal way he dressed himself, bottom to top.
Train left him to get into his pants and went to the diner on the corner for coffee and sweet rolls. Came back and Plural was still sitting where he was in his shoes and socks, nothing else on. Thinking. He drank the coffee straight down, scalding hot, and then ate four sweet rolls. All that time, he seemed to be looking hisself over, taking some kind of inventory. Trying to remember. Train stayed quiet, giving him room. And then, suddenly, he looked up and spoke.
“Who is this cat again?” he said.
“Name is Melrose English.”
Plural thought for a minute and then nodded his head. “Yeah,” he said, “I heard of him.” And for all Train knew, maybe he had.
They took the bus to the golf course, and had to wait half an hour downtown to transfer. The bus companies been fussing at each other, and now they wouldn’t honor each other’s transfers no more. Thousands of people were paying fifty cent a day to get to work instead of twenty-five. Some of them had a riot one weekend and put a bus on fire. The governor asked Ike to send in the National Guard, and the president of one of the companies, a man named Appleby, had his picture in the paper with the soldiers, saying if these people had enough money to get drunk and set buses on fire, they had enough money to pay for their own transfers.
Plural had gone quiet again, and Train kept looking for some sign he had a finger in the pudding, but it never come. They got on the next bus and Plural went to sleep, the smell of alcohol sweating through his skin. Train looked at the way the man perspired, and reasoned that even if he wasn’t right yet, he’d sweat all that confusion out of him by the time they were walking down the fairway.
Which might of happened, and might not. They got off the bus stop nearest Paradise Developments and Train collected some clubs from Whitey and loosened up, and then he walked to the practice green and putted. Plural sat down on a stone and threw crackers to the crows, laughing out loud at the ways they ganged up and stole from each other.
Melrose rolled into the parking lot ten minutes to eleven and let his white boy Peter take the clubs out of the trunk. He hit two or three putts to check the speed of the greens and pronounced himself ready. That was as much as he ever done before he played. Wanted everybody to know he beat you without half-trying.
Melrose and his boy Peter came over to the spot where Train was throwing up some soft lob shots like the ones he used to drop through the hoop back at Brookline, watched him a minute, dropping shot after shot in the same place, and then shook his head. “You gone have to be better than that, man,” he said.
Melrose’s white boy stood behind him holding his bag, the strap tight against his chest, all the veins and the muscles popping out of his neck and his head, smiling like the muscle man at the circus when he held up two show girls and a pony. He said something of his own then, to Train.
“Ain’t gone be like last time, boy.”
And that was true enough. Hearing those words, Plural— who up to that moment had gave no indication that he even seen Melrose and his white boy arrive— Plural stood up, tossed the rest of the crackers to the crows, causing a riot, and then ambled across the putting green, walking about like you would to the refrigerator, and put Melrose’s white boy to sleep before he could even raise his hands.
The white boy had his mouth half around the last half of the word
cocksucker
when it occurred. He was saying, “Well, look at this bandylegged cocksucker—” and Plural caught him flush on the chin, and the white boy never saw it at all. He was still holding the bag, and it hit the ground first, making a noise that scattered the crows, and then the white boy crashed down on top of it, and while Train was trying to lucidate what he just saw— while there was still a part of his brain arguing that he didn’t seen what he just did— Plural hit Melrose with the same hand, and the same tight little arc that just seem to uncoiled.
Melrose might of been trying to say something too, and Train distinctly saw his jaw slide out from under his face. It all happened in one second, maybe less, and Train saw it and had the thought that even if he only had six rounds in him, Plural could do this for another eighteen minutes before he got tired.
Plural stood over them a moment, studying his work, and then turned to Train with that peaceful expression he got when he thought things was all out of his hands. He said, “Sometime it happen.”
A small crowd gatherered, and Whitey came running out of the double-wide, her stomach jiggling under her shirt, and a minute later Mr. Cooper came out, too, looked horrified to have Melrose and his white boy lying on the ground bleeding. Train stood there not knowing what to do with his hands, Mr. Cooper’s ambassador of goodwill and integrated housing.
“Dear Christ,” Mr. Cooper said.
Plural moved a step closer to Train and asked quietly if Mr. Cooper was the reverend.
Then Mr. Cooper got behind Melrose and tried to help him up, but it was too soon for that, and Melrose issued a short, horrible noise and grabbed his face with both hands, like he was trying to hold it together. Melrose’s white boy got to his knees, try to put a good face on it, but he considered Plural again and sat back down where he was. Train seen an indentation in the grass where he fell on top of the bag.
“How did this happen?” Mr. Cooper said, and Train was relieved to see that he was talking to Whitey and not to him. Like it was up to her to sort this out. Train himself had no idea what set Plural off.
“It’s just a misunderstanding,” Whitey said, like she was begging somebody not to hurt her, “the kind of thing that happens on a golf course.” She looked around then for help, and Train felt himself begin to nod like she was right.
“We all clear on it now,” Plural said, sounding reasonable and calm. “We just come to a meeting of the minds.”
Mr. Cooper turned on Train, careful not to look at Plural. He had white shit in the corners of his mouth. “You’re suspended,” he said.
Melrose sat up slowly, hung his arms over his knees. A line of blood drooled out one side of his mouth and dropped between his feet. Mr. Cooper said, “Sir, should we call an ambulance?” And then, when Melrose don’t move to answer, he looked over the scene, like he was taking in the whole Grand Canyon at once, and said, “Thank Christ susan wasn’t here.”
“A-men to that,” Plural said.
15
DARKTOWN
H
OLLINGSWORTH WAS LATE FOR HIS meeting with the Reverend Willie Green, who was a political man too. They carried the same angry message to the people, but somehow the people preferred to hear it from the reverend, would walk across the street to talk to him, to touch him, sometimes to give him money, but nobody ever went out of his way to touch Hollingsworth. In that way he was shunned.
He worried at times that someone had somehow found out how he’d been burned, about the grease fire on his ship. Or that they’d known all along it wasn’t the Klan. He was a cook and they gave him a Purple Heart. He’d never been in Indiana in his life.
He was on the bed in his underwear, with his arms crossed, while his wife ironed his white shirt and trousers— it made her nervous to be watched when she worked, and this was the best he could do right now to punish her— and the clothes were still warm when he put them on. “You want something to eat?” she said.
He walked past her out the door and was pleased to notice that she trembled. He went into the bathroom to comb his hair, and that was when he heard some fool banging on the screen door. A man banging like that was probably selling insurance by the week.
