The fat man finished with the foliage, and half the limb was in pieces on the ground and the air smelled like cut wood and the leaves did not touch the club head when he swung. Then he skulled it anyway, the shot coming out low and hot, headed into the pond, but it caught the lip of a bunker instead, caromed sideways, and rolled out into the fairway 155 yards from the green.
“You cunt,” the fat man said, almost like whispering in her ear, and dropped the club on the ground. Train picked it up and followed him out of the trees. Another saying come to him— The wrong place at the wrong time— and he had the sudden realization that that was the direction things was going ever since he got up.
“You see that, Miller?” the fat man said. “The whore don’t hit the trap, it’s on the green.”
Mr. Packard had that Mile Away Man look on his face, but he turned back to the tee box, saw there was nobody waiting, in spite of how long it took the fat man over the ball, and said, “Hit another one. I don’t care.”
The fat man seem to considered that, then shook his head like he couldn’t bring himself to break the rules. “No, fuck, we got a bet. . . .”
Train seen by now that Mr. Packard had his bait in the water, even if he wasn’t paying no attention to the game, but now it occurred to him that the fat man might be doing the same thing. Mr. Packard was the golfer— he was giving the fat man a stroke a hole— but who was in the boat and who was in the water, that was anybody’s guess now. It was about money, though; the two of them wasn’t friends.
Mr. Packard came to his own ball and turned back to Florida. “What’s left?” he said. Florida put the clubs down and squinted at the green.
“Two ten, sir, but most of the gentlemens say it seem to play an extra club.”
Mr. Packard thought it over, then took an old, scarred persimmon wood from his bag and hit the ball high over the pond. It landed just on the cut of the green, thirty feet below the hole. Train noticed he quit the swing a little short again, like something was bothering with his knee.
As they were walking up, the fat man moved closer to Mr. Packard, breathing hard from catching up, and said, “Miller, you don’t mind, I just as soon trade caddies at the turn. . . .” He looked back quickly at Train and said, “This fucking kid I got is giving me the willies. I don’t think he can talk.”
Train walked up the fairway behind him, carrying his bag, feeling the blood in his face. They got to the fat man’s ball, and this time, to prove his point, he said, “Okay, sport, what do I got left?”
Train didn’t answer. Florida scanned the scene in a leisurely way, but when his eyes fell across Train, they was a four-alarm fire. One of the players got upset with a caddy, sometime they all did, cost everybody their gratuity. He looked away and the sweet, ignorant expression returned to his face.
“See what I’m talking about?” the fat man said.
Mr. Packard didn’t like to be brought into it. “C’mon, Pink,” he said, “it’s your own course. You know what you got left.”
“That ain’t the point,” the fat man said. “You missed my point.” Then he stepped directly in front of Train and pronounced each word distinctly, so there couldn’t be any mistakes over what the point was. “All right,” he said, “go slow, Nee-gro. What do I got left?”
Train looked at the green, at the pond. There was a dead carp floating in some brown froth near the bank. They stocked carp to eat the froth, keep the ponds looking nice, but there were more dead fish all the time, and if there was something worse-looking than brown froth on the pond, it was a carp floating in it. It smelled too.
Train wouldn’t answer.
“You understand English, correct?”
He nodded, and now he felt Mr. Packard looking at him too, curious if he was afflicted, and Train still didn’t say a word. It felt exactly like Miss Binion handed him the chalk and said, “Lionel, perhaps you would like to diagram this sentence for the class.” That’s how much chance he had.
“Let me ast it a different way,” the fat man said. He was beginning to enjoy it now. “If it was you standing here, and I was carrying the bag”— he smiled at Mr. Packard to make sure he was catching this—“if I was toting your bag, and you come up to this shot, what club would you ast me for to hit it?”
Train looked at the green.
“You played this course, ain’t you?” the fat man said. “Monday mornings, the caddies all come out here and have a big time. . . .”
Train nodded, and then was sorry he gave him even that.
“And you supposed to be a caddy, ain’t you, sport?” When Train didn’t answer, the fat man slipped into his Negro dialect and said, “You-all is a caddy, right?”
Train nodded again, wishing he hadn’t, wishing that he could take off his shoes and walk away. Just like that, drop the clubs, kiss my ass, and walk up the fairway barefoot, while the grass was still cool. Instead, he stood still, and the fat man reached into the bag and came out with the thermos. Looking at him the whole time. He filled the lid and drank it down, and this time he didn’t shiver afterwards.
“So it’s Monday morning, Leroy. What is you-all gone hit?”
It was quiet again while they waited. He heard Florida say “Lawdy” under his breath.
“Nine iron,” he said.
The fat man screwed the lid on the thermos, looking surprised. “A nine iron?” He put his fingers on Train’s arm and squeezed. “You must be stronger than you looks.”
Train held still.
“Then what the fuck, Leroy, give us the nine.” Train pulled the iron out of the bag and the fat man gave him the thermos to put away.
He swung the club once, a slower, easy practice swing, then looked again at Mr. Packard, and then at Train. “You says the nine, sho enough?”
The fat man stood over the ball only a few seconds, not nearly as long as before, and then his stomach rolled up— Train glimpsing that awful pelt of hair— and then it dropped back over his belt and the ball came off the club straight and high, a bit of the divot still stuck to the face, and the fat man held a finishing pose while it was in the air. Showing Mr. Packard his real game now, let him feel the hook in his mouth.
“Be the stick,” the fat man said.
Mr. Packard gave Train a quick look of amusedment, and the ball hung there in the sky, perfectly on line, right until it disappeared into the pond. About ten feet short of the far bank. The fat man opened his hands and the club dropped behind his shoulder.
“The nine iron,” he said, almost like he was asking a question.
The wrong place at the wrong time, that was the expression.
“Yessir,” Train said.
“Yessir? Yessir what? You seen where it went?”
Train looked at the pond and saw a line of bubbles.
“I liked him better when he couldn’t talk,” the fat man said, making a joke of it, but then he took a step closer and Train saw the flat shine in his eyes and knew it was trouble. He’d heard that sometimes a member forgot himself when things went wrong and slapped his caddy. It was against the rules at Brookline, and after it happened, the member had to cool down and give the caddy something to take care of it.
The way the caddies looked at it— most of them— the members was feeble enough, it was like finding a dollar in your shoe. There were some, though, that didn’t see it that way. Some of them wouldn’t take the money, and sometimes if they stared too long at the man after it happened, made his sand tingle, the member would say something to Mr. Boyd in the pro shop after the round, and the caddy had to go home and think over what else he could do for a living.
The fat man wasn’t feeble, though; he looked like he moved furniture.
“Pink . . .”
Mr. Packard said his name, and everything stopped. Didn’t say it any particular way that you’d remember— in fact, you could almost hear a chuckle inside the word— but something was rolling down on Train, right on top of him, and just like that it turned around and rolled the other way. A moment passed and then the fat man smiled.
“I was only fucking with him, Miller,” he said. “He’s fucking with me, I’m fucking with him. He’s a smart boy, he knows that.” Then he turned and looked at Train again. “That’s right, ain’t it, Leroy? You’re a smart boy. . . .”
Train couldn’t answer. Back to that.
“We all seen you got a sense of humor. . . .”
Train picked up the nine iron and waited for the fat man to start down the fairway. Waited the way a Mexican would for the problem to go away. There were days he wished he could be Mexican himself— give up toting the bags and just work on the ground crew for History, come out early and rake the traps or weed the flowers. He could always make things grow. But the Mexicans was all illegal, and the club hired them by the day, first come, first serve, and didn’t pay them but a dollar for ten hours, and even then Train sometimes saw them fighting in the morning over a place in line. Train guessed it was better work than picking fruit, and guessed they would caddy if the club would let them.
Carrying the bags, Train got a dollar and a half for eighteen holes, plus whatever the tote gave him at the end. Sometimes in the summer, when the sun set at eight-thirty or nine, he made twelve, fourteen dollars. He liked to lie in bed at home at the end of those days and take an ink pen and color in George Washington’s eyes. Color them blue. He gave half the money to his mother, rolled the other half up in a sock and put it in his drawer with the other socks, didn’t look any different from them. Then there was two socks, and then there was three. He always knew exactly how much was in the socks, and sometimes at night he pulled one on his foot, just to see how it felt to push his toes in there with all those dollar bills.
This particular morning, though, he wouldn’t minded being a dollar-a-day Mexican in a flower bed. The fat man was staring at him again, trying to see if Train was laughing at him. Train could tell sometimes what white people were thinking, and was afraid it went the other direction too. He heard Mr. Packard again, sounded like he was fooling in a way, and in a way it didn’t. “So what are we going to do, Pink? We waiting for the kid to apologize for you hitting the ball in the water?”
“Miller, you mind?” There was a bad note in that, stepped over the line between them, and the fat man heard it too, and then tried to change it after it was already out of his mouth. Tried to pull back the reins. Even now, mad as a snake and the best shot he hit all day laying in the pond, he seemed a little afraid. Like he worked for Mr. Packard, only it wasn’t that. Train guessed that he’d seen the man’s bad side, or maybe just knew it was there, the way Train did.
“Lookit,” the fat man said, “I’m the one down five, one and three. This is between me and him.”
“If that’s what’s bothering you, forget the bet,” Mr. Packard said. “We’re just hacking it around today anyway.”
“No,” the fat man said. “Fuck no, a bet is a bet.” Train heard in his voice how bad he wanted to win, and knew then the way it would turn out. You wanted something too much, it never came.
Florida was sweating. He’d set his bag down and was standing beside it, looking out of focus. The fat man pulled the thermos out again and had another drink. Loose lips sink ships, that was an expression he heard out here too. Fat lips sink ships. Train liked the sound of that. Mr. Packard was watching the fat man too, and then he looked around and seem to chuckle again without making noise and said, “You know, Pink, I been thinking maybe we ought to call it a day.”
“I never said I didn’t want to play,” the fat man said. He was eager to clear up the misunderstanding, couldn’t get his feet under him fast enough. “I only said this fucking kid’s spooky, is all,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing about you. I just want to switch caddies at the turn.”
“Fine with me,” Mr. Packard said, “unless the boy’s gotten too attached to you to change sides.” And then he looked over at Train and winked.
So Train and Florida traded bags, and Florida stumbled backward under the new weight, then caught himself, rattling the clubs.
“Now I got a problem with you?” the fat man said, trying to make it all a joke again.
“No sir,” Florida said. “I just eventuated to lost my balance.”
The fat man bust out laughing at that—
eventuated
— and somehow the word changed everything. One word, and the game was relaxed and easy, and Train’s troubles with the fat man seemed like the grudges that people hold without remembering what they were about, the kind they just kept there to occupy the space. Harmless. The sun was warm and the air smelled sweet and the new bag was lighter and comfortable against his shoulder, and five minutes later Florida was on the way to the next world.
He’d set the fat man’s bag down beside the green, taken a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped at his neck, and then smiled in a peculiar way, a confusion passing over his face, and then pitched onto the ground.
Mr. Packard got down next to him and rolled him over and loosened his shoelaces and his shirt. Florida’s eyes looked hungry, and white foam spilled out his mouth and down over his lips and chin and his neck.
