The old man looked up suddenly and noticed Train watching. He stared a moment, stepped away from the ball he was about to hit. A Negro staring at him while he was fighting with his wife— he looked to Mr. Packard, like he want him to do something about it, but then he seen Mr. Packard been staring at him too. Staring and laughing. The old man seem to hold his breath and then turned bluish.
“Fucking public courses,” he said.
“Pardon me, Phillip?”
“Let’s go,” he said, and picked up his bag to leave.
She stood where she was. “Phillip,” she said, “you are making a perfect ass of yourself.”
“Are you coming?”
“We haven’t played yet,” she said. “I want to play.”
The man headed off without another word. She crossed her arms and watched him go. He walked into the parking lot and disappeared, and she turned back to the bucket of balls on the ground, knelt, and set another one carefully on a tee.
All the way home, Mr. Packard was amused with the world at large. The old man had come back for her about ten minutes after he left, wild-eyed and wild-haired and deranged, looked like somebody was asleep when the house caught fire. The old woman hit about six balls by then, and she seen him coming too, stood there steely-eyed waiting for him, and for a moment Train thought she might brain him with the iron. In the end, though, she only picked up her clubs and followed him to the car.
Mr. Packard reached over and polished Train’s head, and for a little while everything was more comfortable between them than it ever been before.
They stopped at a store on the way home, and went up and down the aisles, throwing things in the grocery cart. Crackers and cheese and mayonnaise for Plural. Mr. Packard had seen Train drinking grape Nehi back at Brookline, and he bought a crate full of that. He got canned spinach, Spam, deviled ham, potato chips, and baked beans. He bought a bag of carrots, a can opener.
Train looked in the cart, and it was the most food in there that he had seen in one place since he left home. Toilet paper, napkins, paper plates. They went down an aisle where they had the jelly and peanut butter, and Train remembered a night upstairs in the gym when he and Plural ate a jar of strawberry jelly for supper.
The people in the store stared at Train from behind and around from the ends of the aisles, wondering what he was doing in here, wondering what him and Mr. Packard were doing in here together. He heard a man say this to the woman with him: “Why don’t they just take it back to Pershing Square?”
Train and Mr. Packard walked into the guest house that evening carrying four sacks of groceries. Mr. Packard set his on the kitchen sink, keeping his safe distance from Plural, and then went on over to visit the missus. That’s what he said, “visit the missus.” Seemed like he wanted to stay around there, but something was calling him home. Plural helped Train put the groceries away, touching the food all over, interested in the shapes of things, like a possum.
“What do he want?” he said later on, after they had ate.
“All he want so far is to go hit golf balls,” Train said. “He just sit there and watch me hit golf balls.”
“But what do he want?”
And it was quiet there in the little house, and then they heard the flamingos. One of them went off, and then they all did, and then they settled down, a little at a time, like every one of them had to get the last word. It was getting dark in the guest house, but Train saw him smile at the noise.
27
BEVERLY HILLS
F
OR AS LONG AS SHE HAD KNOWN PACKARD, he had come and gone at irregular hours, showing up at the house in the afternoon or morning, sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes not going to work for a week at a time. Now, he took the boy to the golf course at the same time every afternoon, and it was always just after dark when he brought him back. It unsettled her in some way, thinking of him on a schedule.
The blind man was alone in the guest house all afternoon, and rarely came out. He kept the doors and the windows open, and at five-thirty every night he turned on a radio and listened to “Sky King” and then “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.”
Afterwards, sometimes, after the radio went off, she heard him talking to himself about one of them or the other, about what they should have done.
Mr. Packard took Train to the store for golf shoes before they went out to hit balls. The shoe man had him look through the fluoroscope to see how they fit. Showed the bones in his feet. Train put the shoes on when they got to Western Avenue, and then walked across the parking lot in them, feeling like he was on high heels. The shoes embarrassed him at first, but nobody else paid no attention. And when he thought about it later, it was no more out of place to see a colored boy in golf shoes than to see him playing golf at all.
Mr. Packard got balls from the office again, like he always did, and sat down to watch Train swing. The new shoes felt strange at first— his feet didn’t slide in the grass the way they did in his tennis shoes— but once he got used to them, the swing begun to happen in a tighter space, and it felt more easy and natural to do than it did before.
Then on the way home, Mr. Packard said, “You seem to lay the club off at the top a little. That’s the only thing I noticed.” Train thought about that, couldn’t see it at all. “At the top,” Mr. Packard said. “Try not to lay it off at the top. . . .”
“What did the man want today?” Plural said.
They were outside, lying under the moon.
“Bought me spike shoes,” he said. “Told me I was laying it off at the top.”
Plural chuckled at that, but Train didn’t know which part of it struck him funny.
The next time at the driving range, Mr. Packard pulled his own clubs out of the trunk and showed Train what he meant. The boy tried it Mr. Packard’s way, aiming the club shaft behind his shoulders at the flag, but thinking where the shaft was supposed to be, he couldn’t get out of the way of the swing. He did it over and over, a hundred times at least, but it was always the same: Thinking one thing led to thinking about another, and once you got started in that direction, once you begin taking questions, then you couldn’t do it anymore. You took a living thing apart to see how it worked, you killed it.
Mr. Packard watched from the grass for an hour and then stopped him, said to forget everything he said.
“What do you do all afternoon?” she said.
“Mostly, he hits balls and I watch.”
