After he rode past the course, he sometimes caught an afternoon movie downtown, lost himself for a while in a story. He was always worried about Plural back at the gym, though, and some of the time he begun to think about Plural so much, he got up and left the show early. He was afraid of having him there by himself after everybody took off.
Once in awhile, usually when something recalled it in the movies, he found himself thinking about the big-money skins game with Melrose English, how all that money looked on the table, the excitement to have people cared who he was. He wanted that again, but he was tied to Plural now, and couldn’t even think about nothing like that in the future without thinking how Plural fit in too.
Sunday night, Plural put “Twenty Questions” on the radio. He never missed “Twenty Questions,” even had Train send in an entry for him on a postcard once, trying to win
The Book of Knowledge
if he stumped the panel. He was sitting with the radio over by the window, where the reception was best, hoping tonight was the night.
The panel was from New York, and sometimes Train could hardly understand what they said. He loved the ladies’ voices, though; he imagined touching those soft throats while they sang. He heard somewhere that all the ladies in New York were singers; they called them “nightingales.”
The show moved along, and so far they didn’t used Plural’s idea, and it seemed like they’d used everything else: Jack Benny’s violin, the bluegrass of Kentucky, and the eggs of a duckbill platypus. Plural had sent in “Dale Evans’ saddle.” He sometimes reminisced how he like to come home to Dale, get one of those big lipstick kisses and sit down to dinner. Said he didn’t care if she ate with her hands.
Plural had ran the pencil off the page when he printed his entry on the postcard—“Dale Evans sadil”— and Train had to fix it before he sent it in. He had to read it back to him, too, twice. Plural seem to loved the sound of the words—
Dale Evans’ saddle.
He sniffed the air like there was beef in the oven.
Plural enjoyed the show best when the panel got stumped, and when they guessed Ben Franklin’s pipe on their eighteenth question, he blew a little air through his nose in disgust and said it ain’t that hard to guess a pipe.
The show ended and the moderator signed off and Plural looked in the general direction of New York and said, “What the fuck is a moderator, Train?” and then listened carefully to everything Train knew about that, like he might be thinking of a new career.
Train had a stab of worry time to time about what to do with Plural when he went back to work. He was getting around a little better— he could find the toilet by himself, and the shower— but anything out of the familiar on the floor could trip him, and that seem to mixed him up about where he was. When he lost his place like that, he could walk right through the window. There was something else too. He’d got the idea in his head again that people owed him money, kept saying that he might have to go outside and steal somebody’s poultry. Train wisht Plural would talk about stealing something else.
Train went downstairs one afternoon to see Mr. Sugars and told him that Plural wasn’t seeing good, and asked if somebody could check in on him from time to time, make sure he wasn’t mixed-up. That he had to go back to work. Mr. Sugars was sitting at his table, wearing a visor like in the movies, counting dimes and quarters and putting them into paper rolls. A coin-operated man.
“He can’t see?” Mr. Sugars said.
“Not good.”
Mr. Sugars kept counting coins, didn’t want to lose his place. He wasn’t a person that had an easy time counting. “You know,” he said, “when No-Tank come in here, I told him I don’t mind helping out an old fighter, as long as there ain’t no complications. And now he gone blind? I can’t have complications like that. I could be liable.”
He mulled it around his head while he counted his money and kept coming back to the same spot. “There was a girl stayed up to the gym for a week a few years ago,” he said, “a loose kind of girl off the street that smelled like Kool-Aid, and she made up a new language when she fucked.
“Afterwards, though, getting that chick out the door was like flushing a tomcat down the toilet. I still got the marks to remind me. And the lesson I learned from her was that in business you have to be heartless.”
And then he told Train that he and Plural better find a new place to stay.
19
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE WAS SICK IN THE MORNING AGAIN. SHE hadn’t brought it back up with Packard, though. Lately, even more than before, he seemed to sense when she wanted to tell him something important and held her off.
She sat down on the edge of the bathtub now— it felt ice-cold— her fingers covering her lips, waiting to see if the nausea had passed. There was a window on the far wall cracked open, and she heard a car door slam outside.
The nausea passed— she realized she was hungry, and that was the signal it was gone for the morning. A moment later, she was starving. Steak and eggs, she thought, and a dish of sherbet at the same time. She ate everything these days with sherbet. It wasn’t just the sweetness mingled with the other taste of meat; it was the cold with the hot. She felt a new wetness in the corner of her mouth and, wiping at it with the back of her hand, realized she was starting to drool.
She stood up and washed her face. She was brushing her teeth when she heard truck brakes outside. A minute later, she thought she heard people talking. The kind of low hum you hear walking into a church before a funeral. No specific words, just the sound of talk.
She rinsed her mouth and went downstairs and into the dining room. There was a floor-to-ceiling window there that looked out over the long yard to the road. And she saw a yellow bus parked against the curb in front of the house, with the words
First Baptist Church Bible School
stenciled along the side. She stood still and counted the people on the sidewalk— there were thirteen of them, all Negroes, some of them carrying signs— and she went straight to the kitchen and tried to call Packard. He didn’t pick up the phone, though. A secretary asked if there was a message.
She hung up and sat at the kitchen table and listened to them outside, furious with Packard.
The police came in about half an hour— there were half a dozen calls in ten minutes— and dispersed the crowd. She’d watched from the kitchen as the Negroes got back in their bus, all except a thin older man who had skin that reminded her of peeling paint, and who sat down in the middle of the street and refused to move until he was handcuffed and arrested.
The bus went off down the street, pouring black smoke, Negroes hanging out the windows, the driver blowing the horn as it went.
Packard arrived half an hour later. He came up the walk to the house with a happy, expectant look on his face, and it reminded her somehow of the way the husband in the movies always looked when the little woman told him she was knocked up.
The police took Hollingsworth into an interrogation room. They did not have any questions for him, though. One of them closed the door, and the other one— the one who had thrown him into the car— began slapping his face. Just that, no nightstick, no hose, just his open hand.
Unaccountably, Hollingsworth felt himself shaking, and then beginning to cry. “There were witnesses,” he said, and he heard the panic in his own voice and realized he was not meant for this. Realized he was meant to stay behind his typewriter. “There were a dozen witnesses who saw me, saw there wasn’t a mark on me.”
That stopped the policeman for a minute. He looked Hollingsworth up and down, then glanced at his partner, who was still standing at the door. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Remus,” he said, “but you’re already so fucked-up looking, there’s nothing we could do that anybody would notice at all.”
And then he slapped him again, not too hard, just making his point.
20
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
T
HE DAY TRAIN COME BACK TO WORK WAS A Tuesday, a month after the suspension. Mr. Cooper was at his desk, worrying over some letters he was reading. There was two small windows in the room. One held the air conditioner, which had leaked a puddle of water on the floor, and the other one looked out over the course, where the trees was now the color of dirt, and there was fungus on half the greens. The spots had got so big they bled into each other, sucked the color out of the grass. Everything you saw outside was dead and dying.
Mr. Cooper took his time getting around to Train, like this business about the suspension was the sixth or seventh thing on his mind. And maybe it was. Train had some other things on his mind too, mostly how to tell him about Plural, that somehow he had to bring him along to work.
Mr. Cooper stubbed out his cigarette, closed his book suddenly, blowing the ashes out of the ashtray, and then he leaned forward and lit a fresh one. The smoke seem to crawl up his nose. He sized Train up awhile, like he couldn’t make up his mind, and then finally he said, “I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page. From now on, you report to Whitey everywhere you go. I want her to know where you are. You understand?”
Train just been standing there waiting, looking out the window, thinking how Mr. Cooper had got into this business without knowing nothing about the way things grew, or probably nothing about building houses either. He just naturally went from one thing to another in the assumption that a man that could kill roaches could do anything else, and this is where it ended up. All the time Train spent out on the course, and it all come to nothing. Less than nothing, because things had died that were alive and kicking when he first came.
Mr. Cooper turned in his seat and looked out the little window— which was a long time since it was washed— over the first fairway, and the bulldozers smoothing over some lots in the distance. A little noise come out of his mouth now and then that sounded like he was sucking his thumb. “First those two boys hack each other to death,” he said, “and then you.” Train heard that he was being scolded. It seemed out of place somehow. Mr. Cooper swung back around suddenly and turned dead serious, like Gary Cooper strapping on the guns.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Is it in the blood? After this business with the other two boys, you seemed like the other side of the coin. The truth is, my friend, I thought you might be running the course for me someday, and then this. What happened? Does something just call you people back?”
