The blind man was missing a front tooth, and there was some suggestion in the way he moved that he hadn’t been blind very long. That he wasn’t used to not seeing. She found herself worrying about him, where he would go after this. She watched him in the yard; he seemed fascinated with the water hose, with the water itself. Sometimes when the sprinklers were on, he trapped one in his bare feet and stood over it in the yard, grinning, the water squirting up over his pants legs.
She thought that perhaps he and the boy had worked together before it happened, and took a narrow comfort in that. Allowed herself to believe somehow that made it easier for him now.
It took the boy three days to finish the roof, and the morning after that, he and the blind man moved in. They carried their belongings in grocery bags while the Moffits watched from the windows.
On that same day, the Moffits began to visit their backyard at odd hours of the evening. One or the other of them was always watching, although you could see Mr. Moffit was not paying much attention. Sometimes they sat out in the yard together, slapping at mosquitoes, reading magazines by the spotlights in their trees, or just feeding the fish or the flamingos, Mrs. Moffit glancing up at any sound, any movement from the other side of the fence.
To Packard, it was more fun than the circus.
He left the house open now when they went out to lunch, as if to prove he trusted them. He left money and keys on the table beside the pool when he swam.
She looked across the table at the restaurant now, and, with the swelling and the bruises under his eyes, his face was only vaguely familiar. It reminded her of her own face after the boat.
“Does it hurt?” she said. The first mention either of them had made of it.
He picked up his salad fork and poked himself gently under both eyes, then straight into the holes in his nose. He thought about it, looking for the answer, and then nodded his head. “Yes,” he said.
She smiled at that without meaning to. “Something at work?” she said.
He shook his head no. “The blind guy?” he said. “I was teaching him to drive.”
She looked at him more closely and he motioned to the waiter and asked for a clean fork.
“Certainly, sir,” the waiter said. He’d been watching their table awhile with a certain familiar interest, but you couldn’t say for sure which one of them he liked. “I apologize.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” Packard said.
The waiter looked at Packard’s eyes, then at Norah. “Perhaps it would be safer for you with spoons,” he said, and Packard laughed out loud. He was smiling at her, happy, pleased with himself. She remembered the blind one standing in the yard with his foot over the sprinkler, the simple pleasure of that, and felt a sudden pang of conscience.
“You can’t just use people like this,” she said.
“Use them? I’m giving them a place to stay.”
She could see she’d bothered him with that, though, maybe touched his conscience, too. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“They need a place to stay,” he said. “They were sleeping in a gym and the guy threw them out.” He thought for a moment and then said, “Plus, I’m going to spend some time with the kid, working on his golf game. That kid could turn out to be a player.”
“There’s a lot of future for him in that,” she said. But the truth was, there was as much future for a Negro in that as anything else.
“You know I’m going to keep the baby,” she said.
“There’s plenty of time to think it over,” he said. “You don’t have to decide anything right now.”
“If you don’t want babies,” she said, “you shouldn’t be fucking people in elevators.”
26
BEVERLY HILLS
I
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE MORNING WHEN HE saw her. The old roof creaked under his feet and begun to smell of tar as it collected the sun’s heat, and he could feel the sweat drops falling from his armpits to his ribs and then running down into his pants. It was just a glimpse— she come out to collect the paper and then hurried back inside— but she was beautiful and her hair was pulled back off her face, and what he remembered clearest afterwards was her ears. He never seen such delicate, perfect ears. (The ears Train was used to seeing in fact was Plural’s, which were all gnarled and swollen, and it hurt him to lie on them at night, which was why he slept on his back.) Mrs. Packard’s reminded Train of the seashells they sold off card tables along the Santa Monica Pier, pink and pearly down to where they narrowed into the dark, and beyond that was the hidden place where the thing itself had lived.
He tried to think what it might be like in there, but nothing came.
Three days later they moved in. Him and Plural.
Somebody had laid out sheets and pillows and blankets on the beds, but Plural said the floor was fine for him. “Folks got a place like this, they read the sheets,” he said. “You don’t know what might set them off.”
Train hadn’t slept in a bed or a room of his own since he left home, and he looked away from the bed, trying not to remember all that, because it had a way of leading back to the situation there in the kitchen. In spite of himself, it come to him anyway. He thought of the chair leg dropping on the floor, how it startled the dog. Until then, Lucky been peacefully asleep.
“Besides that,” Plural said, “you lay in a feather bed, it come up around you, feels too familiar.”
It took Plural awhile to get used to a new room, and until he was used to it, he talked in his sleep. Before when he dreamed, he just made that whinny noise.
“They didn’t have to do her like that,” he said that first night.
Train had just slipped off the edge, but he wasn’t all the way gone yet. He sat up straight in bed. “Plural?”
“Little bitty thing like that, she wasn’t but four, four and a half feet tall.”
“Who’s that, man?”
“Didn’t have to do her like that at all.” Getting louder now.
Train got up and touched his shoulder, being careful not to stand where he could be hit. “Plural,” he said, “you talking in your sleep.” The muscles jumped under Train’s fingers and then Plural’s eyes opened. Except for that he lay still.
“You talking in your sleep,” Train said again.
“She didn’t have nobody to save her,” he said.
“Who?”
“Joan of Arc,” he said. “Who you think we was talking about?”
Mr. Packard came out in the morning with ham sandwiches. “I hope the beds were all right,” he said.
“No sir,” Plural said, “we didn’t bother them beds at all.”
That stopped him a minute, but then he just continue on. “Well, if you need more blankets or pillows, Norah put some in the closet.” He started to leave, then remembered about the paint, ast what color they wanted inside. Plural mulled that one over and said, “Salmon is always nice.”
It turned out, though, that fresh paint gave Plural headaches and made his nose run, and he took to sleeping outside, and Train took his blanket and pillow out there too, to make sure Plural didn’t talk in the night and walk into the house or the swimming pool. He didn’t know if Plural could swim; it wasn’t something that ever come up in conversation. Their conversations— the ones where they knew what each other was talking about— tended more and more in the direction of poultry. That or the water pressure. Plural been in Watts and Darktown most of his life, never had water pressure all the time like they did here. He loved the water hose.
So they lay outdoors together at night, Train looking at the stars, Plural at whatever it was you saw when you was blind. The neighborhood was quiet, and a long way off you could hear cars and sometimes music. The swimming pool made noises, too, sounded like a human stomach, and from time to time the flamingos stirred in the neighbor’s yard.
“You know,” Plural said one night, “I never ate a duck.”
