Mr. Packard came home at two o’clock in the afternoon and looked over the inside of the house. He went into all the rooms that Train had painted, then spoke to Plural, who was sitting at the kitchen table, eating crackers and milk. “It looks good,” he said.
Plural shrugged. “We like it,” he said.
“You be all right for a while?” Mr. Packard said, looking around again. The truth was, he never was truly comfortable around Plural since he got hit, even now they knew who each other was. Always kept an avenue of excape. “I want to take Lionel out to Western Avenue.” It had been two weeks now, and the bruises beneath his eyes had faded to yellows and browns, colors where he looked like he been sick rather than punched in the face.
“I been all right all my life,” Plural said.
Train didn’t know what Mr. Packard wanted with him at Western Avenue, but he seen all along that the man didn’t just wake up one day and decided he needed a couple extra Negroes for houseguests. A thousand thoughts floated past, and then one of them stuck— that Mr. Packard had found out what happened to Mayflower— but then that floated downstream like the others. It was no point worrying over spilled milk. That was one Mayflower himself used to say.
Mr. Packard drove out to Inglewood using side streets. They passed into city limits and saw a sign: INGLEWOOD, A PROUD CAUCASIAN COMMUNITY.
Mr. Packard kept headed to the west, out toward the airport. In the distance, planes took off and come in, and Train tried to think what it would be like, being inside one of them, leaving Mother Earth.
Mr. Packard turned left two times, and a little later Train saw the golf course. He remembered he been out here one day a long time ago when he was looking for a job. Right after he moved into Sugars with Plural. It took him three buses and two and a half hours to get here, and when he told the man behind the counter he was hunting for work, the man leaned over his lunch plate to cover it, like Train just asked for half his sandwich.
They pulled into the parking lot and Mr. Packard stopped the car. It coughed a few times before it died. “All right,” he said, “let’s go see what we’ve got to work with.” It seemed like a strange thing to be finding out now, after the man already moved him in.
Now that Paradise Developments was closed due to the ground being on fire, there was only two places left in Los Angeles where Negroes could play golf, Western Avenue and Griffith Park, and there was stories around about things had happened at Griffith Park. Colored people going off into the tree branches after their ball and end up hanging from one, or all beat-up and in the ER.
Everybody heard of those stories, and some of the white community
abhorred
them, had wrote letters to the paper how they abhorred them, which Train had read, and which he guessed must have been what Mr. Cooper had in mind when he come up with the idea for Paradise Developments.
The man had seen the future and it was harmony of the races.
The engine finally gave up and quit and Mr. Packard set the emergency brake and got out, and when he opened the trunk, Train saw there was two bags of clubs inside, one of them brand-new Tommy Armours. He picked up that bag and handed it to Train. Never said a word. Then he shut the trunk, leaving his own bag inside.
Train stood still, looking at the clubs. Until this moment, nobody had gave him anything in his life that somebody hadn’t finished with it first. Even his dog was all broke-up when he got it.
He walked a little behind Mr. Packard, carrying the new clubs and looking at them at the same time. There was a certain excitement to it that went beyond the clubs themself. The last time he played golf, he gone home with nineteen hundred dollars, and a day hardly passed when he didn’t think of what it was like seeing all that money at once.
They walked out to the driving range, and Mr. Packard left him there and went inside the office for some balls. When he come out, he found a comfortable spot on the ground and sat down to watch. Train tipped over a bucket of balls, the ones on top spilling over the ground, and he took the nine iron out of the bag, noticed he could see hisself in the shaft.
It was awkward at first, with Mr. Packard there, but then Train began to feel the weight of the club head in his hands, to feel where it was, and after that, the swing happened by itself, like it always had, like something he hid and then remembered where it was.
He changed to a longer club, but it didn’t matter what he had in his hand now, ’cause it would swing itself. The balls came off the iron low and long, and he hit a half dozen on a line into the same spot in the bottom of the fence, a little over two hundred yards away.
He felt Mr. Packard stir behind him and he remembered he hadn’t thanked him yet, didn’t know what to say, and a minute later, thinking about that, he caught one of the balls thin and felt the sting all the way to his elbows.
“One thought,” Mr. Packard said. “Focus on one thought.”
Train heard that advice before, of course— all the twenty-six handicappers in the world was somewhere on a golf course right now, giving each other swing thoughts— but himself, he didn’t think one thing at a time, and didn’t know how. To start with, everything he saw had names— the ball, the grass, the club, his shoes— and he looked at those things and knew the names, and the names were thoughts. Just like being cold was a thought, and being hungry, and being worried. And besides the thing he was worried about, the worrying itself was a thought. Things came and went away; you couldn’t stop it if you tried. He wondered if it was the same way for people that did the big thinking— Eisenhower and General MacArthur— or if somehow they could turn off the names while they was envisioned in a better world.
“What’s your swing thought?” Mr. Packard said behind him. “What are you telling yourself over the ball?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just get out the way and let it go.”
That seem to amuse Mr. Packard, and he leaned back on his elbows and shut up to watch. The thing that made it work right wasn’t a thought anyway. It was whatever moved the ideas and thoughts along, the breeze that kept things circulating in and out of your head at a speed where nothing was hurried but nothing stayed so long you had to notice. That was all you wanted in your head to swing a golf club, a light breeze to empty things out.
Didn’t mean you had to be stupid to play the game, but it didn’t hurt.
A brittle old man and his wife come out of the office half an hour later, carrying balls and their clubs. She had smoke blue hair and more makeup than she was lying in a casket, and her hat matched her socks and her lipstick. The man walked ahead of her a little ways, not looking back. You could see it wasn’t his idea, her taking up the game.
They went to a spot not too far from where Train was still hitting balls, and she bent over and picked a ball out of the basket, looking it over like she was shopping for apples, and then knelt down and took a long time to get it to stay on the tee, and then creaked coming back up. Train couldn’t tell how old old people were— after about fifty, they all looked the same— but he could see these two were older than most. She stood still a moment, out of breath and getting herself back together, and then took one of the clubs out of her bag and swung. The ball stood where it was.
It was quiet a minute and then the husband started in. He corrected her grip; he flexed her old knees; he straightened her elbow and her back and lifted her chin. He told her to stick out her fanny and not to hit so much from the top. And then he told her to relax.
She set the club down on her bag, very dignified, opened her purse, and pulled out a cigarette. She lit it, staring at him, and then gasped at the smoke like she was surprised. There was a kiss of pink lipstick on the cigarette, and a tiny bit of the cigarette paper attached to her lip.
“What now?” he said.
“Relaxing,” she said. “You told me to relax.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “I was not the one who thought this was such a wonderful goddamn idea in the first place.” Mr. Packard was watching them now, smiling like a baby with gas. He couldn’t help it; Train could see that. Made him smile himself.
“Why, of course not, Phillip. Of course not. It was all my idea.” There was something in the tone that Packard just loved.
“I told you you wouldn’t like the game,” the man said. “It takes too much practice.”
“We haven’t played the game,” she said. “So far, all I have done is attempt to hit a single ball, which has somehow provoked ten minutes of criticism of every aspect of my posture.”
“What do you expect? You can’t just go out on a golf course.” She stared at him and her eyes narrowed. “You’d have people backed up behind you all the way to the parking lot. You have to be able to play the game to go out on the course.”
“You’re saying one has to be able to play the game to play the game,” she said.
Mr. Packard covered his face.
“You have to be able to hit the ball somewhere,” he said.
“How, pray tell, does one learn?” she said. The woman had a way of saying things; you had to gave her that.
“One listens by example,” he said, and picked up her iron and swung it himself. He was an old man and had an old man’s golf swing. He hit one ball, and then another and another, like he was punishing her. Train pictured him and three old men just like him out on the course, smoking their cigars, quarreling over the rules and quarter bets. Telling jokes about penalty strokes for killing wives with golf balls.
