“The suspension run out. That’s what called me back.”
Mr. Cooper looked at Train first like he was disappointed, like he thought there was some discussion Train might wanted to hold about “Is it in the blood?” Train held still, and presently Mr. Cooper seem to ran out of air.
“This kind of thing could ruin us,” he said.
Train nodded like he agreed with that, just like he cared.
“Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise,” he said, “a kind of message. Maybe what we need out here is some sort of screening committee, to assure buyers that we’re only taking the right kind of people.”
The next morning, Wednesday, Train stepped off the bus at the corner and then turned around and led Plural off by his hand. He’d been leading him around enough by now that touching each other’s hands seem an ordinary-enough thing. Both of them was still stinging clean from the shave and shower, dressed in fresh clothes. They walked up the street, and Mr. Cooper’s car was already in the parking lot, and on the way in they went past two signs that said wagering was strictly prohibited.
By now, Train decided not to say nothing about Plural to Mr. Cooper or Whitey neither. He just decided to hire him on his own.
None of the machinery in the barn was took care of during the suspension. The John Deere was almost three quarts low on oil, and the blades of the mowers was so dull, they couldn’t tossed a salad. Probably shake you out of the seat pulling them around. He gave Plural a broom, started him at the back of the barn, and then spent an hour on the tractor; added oil to the crankcase and sharpened the blades, and then rode it out of the barn into the sun.
He turned off the mower reel and drove the course backward, starting at eighteen and going to number one, noticing uneven patches of grass in the fairway looked like somebody been grazing cattle. Clover everywhere.
The dust from the lots Mr. Cooper was clearing blew in the air and was on the leaves of all the plants. Someone thrown a bag of garbage over the fence on number seventeen that nobody cleaned up, and there was a deer carcass laying by the pond on the sixteenth tee. Must have been out there a week; the coyotes and birds had took everything but the spine and the feet and the skull. Half a foot of scum covered the pond itself. Train stopped the tractor to take in how bad it was, and in the sudden quiet he heard the bulldozers in the distance, clearing more lots for Mr. Cooper’s development.
Gophers had took over the whole fairway on number ten, but Train decided to fix that later, put off killing them until everything else was done. He stopped the tractor again to look at a dried-out camellia, dead to the roots.
All that work for nothing. When he finished looking around, he went up to the office without even washing off the dust to tell Mr. Cooper what he had to do to get things back in shape. Mr. Cooper’s door was closed, though, and as Train got closer, he heard Whitey inside, telling Mr. Cooper there was storm clouds on the horizon and trouble waiting to happen.
It made him suddenly timid, to realize that she was trying to push him out the door. He wondered how it get to that this time.
He went back to work. Plural and him come every morning at six, and in spite of what Mr. Cooper said, he didn’t wait around for Whitey to tell him what to do. She didn’t arrived until seven-thirty or eight anyway, about the time the bulldozers fired up for the day.
The rest of the crew— all except Lester— didn’t see the point to starting till she yelled at them to move. By then, Train was long gone and Plural was usually walking the perimeter of the the barn with his broom, talking to himself, sweeping. He worked slowly, stopped dead as a bug whenever he ran into anything unfamiliar— boxes and bags or attachments to the equipment, all the things people hadn’t put away the night before— and then moved it to the side or found his way around.
Train paid him Friday out of his own pocket, half of what he made himself. Plural always liked getting paid. Never did nothing with his money though but save it, and once a week go out for Mogan David and White Castle hamburgers. As the black spot took his eyesight away, he ruminated on things more, sometime went all day without saying a word to the rest of the crew, not even to Train at lunch. When he did say something, it usually only meant that he come to a place in his thoughts where he saw something about the way things fit together. He’d chuckle and shake his head and say, “Well, nigger, sometime it happen.”
More and more, though, whole days passed without a report from the dark regions. Then one afternoon, laying out in the shade of the barn after they ate, Plural suddenly picked up his head and said, “Uh-oh, now. Look out.”
Train had been watching vultures circling in the sky half a mile south, wondering what had died out there now. Plural was laughing at something. He said, “A woman about to get flammable on you, man.”
“What woman?”
Train sat up, the pine needles and specks of dirt dropping off the back of his head and sifting down his back, and a moment later she appeared on the path coming down from the double-wide, her shirt tucked into her cowboy belt, her stomach jiggling like it always did. She walked like she was holding a wheelbarrow— little jerky steps, like it was pulling her down the hill. It came to Train that Plural must of heard her before she even come out of the double-wide, that he must of known from how she was walking that she was mad. He wondered if the blind could hear things that nobody else did. He heard of that someplace before. She stopped, standing right over him, damp, trying to catch her breath. She liked to stand over you when she talked.
“Miss Whitey,” Plural said.
She shook her head. Didn’t like having him around, and made that plain. “We’re taking down the big oak Monday,” she said to Train.
“What oak is that?”
“The big one, on the edge of fifteen.”
“That tree ain’t bothering nobody.”
“It’s obscuring the view from the lots,” she said.
“The view,” the blind man said. “You got to have a view.”
Train did not think it was a good idea, having Plural doing the talking.
He sat still, which was the only thing he could do. When she reported it to Mr. Cooper, anything he said was going to sound like he was arguing. So, because she was waiting for him to say something back, he said, “Which lots?” even though he already knew what lots she meant; the foundations had been laid on the hill over there and the framing was already going up. They was supposed to be the first houses completed on the back nine.
“I ain’t got time to stand around talking about it,” she said. “This is straight from Mr. Cooper. He wants that tree down Monday; there’s investors coming in later in the week to look at the property.”
“Miss Whitey, I don’t know how to take a tree like that down,” Train said.
“I never said that, did I? To take it down. Mr. Cooper’s hired somebody for that. We’re just going to clean up afterwards. That’s what I came down here to tell you, to plan on it for Monday.”
The tree cutters showed up four days late in a prewar Chevy pickup with the words TREES STIRGEONS hand-painted on the sides. Train went out to watch; thought it couldn’t hurt to learn how a person was supposed to take down a tree. It look like the first step was, you sat for a while in the shade of the tree itself and passed around some reefer.
The Mexicans laughed and coughed and talked, and lit each other up, and Train saw that like everything else he did, Mr. Cooper had hired them on the cheap, and Train knew that last month the Trees Stirgeons was probably housepainters or electricians. The Mexicans just decided they like the way some occupation look, and the next thing you knew, that’s what they were. When you seen a dentist sign in their neighborhoods on the other side of the bridges, that meant a Mexican with a pair of pliers.
Half an hour passed, and Whitey showed up in the company truck and stared at them awhile, but the Mexicans was immune to that and hardly seemed to notice her standing there with her arms folded across her chest. She might as well been staring down the tree. She went over to them finally, a hundred keys jingling from her belt, to ask if they ever planned to take down the damn tree. She was one of them people that never gave up a key.
It turned out, though, that none of them understood her kind of English. They just smiled and offered her a toke. She got back in the company truck, slammed the door, and went to find Mr. Cooper.
Another half hour passed, and one of the Mexicans— the smallest one, he look like about thirteen years old— threw a thick rope from the back of the truck over his shoulder and shinnied halfway up the oak, looking down more and more often the higher he got, laughing with the ones left on the ground, and then tied it off as soon as the tree was narrowed enough to get the rope around it.
While he was descenting the tree trunk, the other two fastened the end of the rope to the truck bumper and then pulled it taut— it didn’t especially look like anybody planned out how to do this before the little one monkeyed up the tree— and then the three of them took turns on a two-man saw that got stuck more and more often as they worked deeper into the wood. When that happened, whatever Mexican who was not on the saw picked up another, smaller saw and angled in from above until the two-man saw could be wedged loose. Then they all traded places and started over again. It was hard work, and they took off their shirts and sweated and took breaks to smoke another joint every few minutes.
Then they stopped for lunch, looked like they might be a third of the way through, and Train went back to the barn to check on Plural and to look for the poison. Whitey been after him to kill the gophers ever since he said he’d do that last— once she saw something he didn’t like to do, that’s what she wanted him to do right now— and he was in the barn, hunting for it, when the tree fell.
The noise gathered and rolled and broke like a storm, and by the time he got back out there, the tree was laying one side of the fairway to the other, bits of splintered limbs scattered all over hell, and there was huge ruts in the ground where the branches had hit and broke off. A jagged spike, six foot high, was sticking up out of the stump like somebody broke the last tooth in their mouth.
The Mexicans was in the bed of the pickup, celebrating. The trunk of the tree had fell no more than a yard from the trunk, the rope still attached, and the Mexicans was half-hidden by the limbs and leaves. The one that had went up the tree looked over at Train and smiled, the beginning of a soft mustache over his lip.
