“That’s all?” She wanted to talk about the baby, but she didn’t know how. Whenever she tried, he told her there was still time to think it over.
“It’s something to see,” Packard said. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
28
WESTERN AVENUE
I
T WAS THE END OF THE WEEK BEFORE MR. PACKARD finally told him what he had in mind. They’d began going out on the course late in the afternoon, when they had the front nine all to themselves and Mr. Packard could drop a ball under a tree or in a divot for Train to hit and wasn’t nobody behind them acting like they was passing kidney stones because they had to wait.
They came down a hill, where Mr. Packard spotted a snake hole in the fairway, a little over a hundred yards to the green, and he took a ball out of his pocket and set it on top. Set there about like ice cream on the cone. Train did not like snakes, never had. He looked at the flag and then at the ball and the pile of fresh dirt it was laying against and took the eight iron out of his bag instead of a wedge, and shortened his swing. The ball came out low and spinning, and stopped where it hit the green. Stopped dead.
Mr. Packard looked at that shot and said that he been playing the game most of his life, and there was nothing he knew about hitting a golf ball that the boy didn’t already understand. Seemed to got sentimental over it too. “Ben Hogan couldn’t hit that any better than you just did,” he said.
The truth was, it never occurred to Train that anyone could. He never seen nobody personally that was close. He remembered he did see Ben Hogan once in a newsreel, laid out in the hospital after a car accident. The doctors pronounced he would never walk again, but this year he just gone out and won the Masters. It wasn’t the first time Train heard of that— the doctors said somebody never walk again, and then they win a dance contest or walk across Death Valley. It seemed to Train that it might be the first thing that went through a doc’s mind when they brought you in.
Train put his club back in the bag and they started toward the green, and on the way there, Mr. Packard mentioned he heard of a game in Milwaukee, a man there named Frankie Cassidy would play a two-thousand-dollar Nassau. Mr. Packard seem to know the man, but didn’t say exactly how. He checked on Train to see if the money scart him off.
“Milwaukee?” Train said.
“Wisconsin, where they make all the dairy products. The man’s famous in the Midwest, but he won’t leave his own golf course. That tells you something right there.”
Train shrugged. “Two-thousand-dollar Nassau,” he said.
“It’s his brother Happy’s money, Happy Cassidy from Cicero? Just outside Chicago city limits?”
Train shook his head.
“He runs the Cassidy crime family. Little people with enormous heads, every one of them. And they’ve all been shot in the head, and they never die. They believe it’s the luck of the Irish— they walk around thinking they were all born lucky— and it never occurred to any of them yet that if they were that fucking lucky, they wouldn’t keep getting shot.”
“I heard Chicago’s a hard place to get paid,” Train said. He heard that from Plural, in fact, who fought there once and said they put him up in a hotel on the South Side, had to open the windows and build a fire in the trash can because there wasn’t no heat, and didn’t feed him nothing but white bread the whole time he was in town.
“That isn’t a problem,” Mr. Packard said. “The brother with the money, Happy, the last time he was shot, it was in the spine, and now betting on his brother is all he does for fun. To keep on the sunny side of life. He didn’t pay his bets, it wouldn’t mean anything.”
Mr. Packard was still watching Train, see if any of this bothered him. “So what about it?” he said.
“How we gone get there?”
“Airplane. You see the curvature of the earth and the stewardesses bring you anything you want.”
Train felt the excitement and the letdown at the same time. He’d wanted to fly in an airplane for as long as he could remember, and he wanted to see the curvature of the earth as much as anybody else, but now it was right in his hand, he couldn’t leave Plural that long to do it. How it happened, he didn’t know. Somewhere along the way, he just picked him up— the longer you went, the more weight you carried, like a racehorse. That was a saying from Brookline too, said by the old men, and it seemed to Train that he was too young to fit into their sayings, but here Plural was, and there wasn’t nobody else to watch him.
“I got to look after Plural,” he said.
Mr. Packard shrugged. “It’s only a couple of days. Leave next Thursday, be back Sunday or Monday. I’ll have Mrs. Packard check in on him, if you want. He seems to know his way around the yard pretty well.”
Train thought about Plural and Mrs. Packard in the backyard, maybe setting out by the pool, eating lunch off a silver tray. The only time he seen Plural in a social situation before was the night he brought that heavy girl up to the gym. What did he said? “Lookit here, Lionel, I bring enough for us both”? Train thought about that, about Plural and Mrs. Packard and the tea set— whatever that was— and he thought again about the airplane.
“And then what happen if I beat the man in Milwaukee?”
That seemed to make Mr. Packard more interested in going than he already was. “Then people like Happy Cassidy are going to be coming to us.”
Train took a minute. “And everybody playing with somebody else’s money. . . .”
“Yeah, that’s usually the way it’s done.”
“And whose money I’m playing with?”
“Don’t worry about that.” Mr. Packard reached over and patted him on the back. In spite of the day he rubbed Train’s head in the car, it was not usual for him to touch Train, and it fuddled them both.
“The thing to remember about money,” Mr. Packard said a little later, “is when you get enough of it together in one place, it smells bad.”
Train thought of the bags he’d toted, putting together the money that Mayflower had stole from his socks. All those pictures of George Washington with blue eyes. He remembered it smelled good to him.
There were two bedrooms in the guest house, but the night was warm again and they slept outside.
“What he said today?”
Train didn’t want to talk to him. He wanted to think about money and the curvature of the earth.
“He wants to know about my thoughts,” Train said.
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
It was quiet again, and then: “What kinds of ideas you been having?”
“Nothing much,” he said.
It was quiet awhile and then Plural said, “You ever think about how you can’t leave a bone outside your door, something come and eat it?”
“No, I never did,” Train said. He had other things on his mind.
“The world is a hungry place, man.” Plural thought about it awhile longer and then he said, “And whatever kind of thing you is, there’s something out there that likes to eat it. It’s natural. That’s how the world keeps tidy.”
Train couldn’t say why, but that left him uneasy.
29
BEVERLY HILLS
I
T WAS A GOOD DAY AGAIN— IT HAD BEEN NOTHING but good days since she’d made up her mind about the baby— and then she’d cried twice just before dark without knowing why. Cried in the bathroom and then washed her face and felt better and went downstairs and cried again.
Packard pulled into the driveway after she’d finished, and she watched him and the boy get out and then separate, and he came toward the house, slowing down as he got to the back door, as if he were afraid to come inside. She caught her reflection in the kitchen window, and her face looked wide and white, like a peasant’s. She wondered why he hadn’t remarked on the change. If he would just ignore everything until the day the baby came out.
“I’m going away a few days next week,” he said.
She felt herself panic, tried to hold it in. She didn’t want him to see her panic. “You’re leaving me alone with them?” she said.
He laughed at that the way he laughed. “You’re not afraid of those two?”
“I just don’t want to be left here alone.”
“You ought to get to know them better,” he said. “You’d like them.”
“I like them enough already. I just don’t want to be alone.”
He was playing with the salt shaker now, spinning it on the table. “Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact, I’m taking the kid with me, so you won’t be here with them both.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“Milwaukee,” he said. “To play golf. I think he’s a player.” He waited a minute, something there between them, and then he said, “And I told him maybe you’d check in on his friend.”
30
WISCONSIN
W
ISCONSIN LOOKED GREEN FROM THE AIR and green from the car and green when they got out of the car at the golf course. Train saw they had different grasses from L.A., and they left the rough deeper here.
He and Mr. Packard walked around the clubhouse, Train carrying his clubs, excited to see this man Frankie, looking everywhere at once. They turned the corner and stopped. There was people all over the putting green, holding their cocktails, eating food that seem to drip when they bit in, old men with their hands in their pockets rocking back and forth on their golf shoes, pants like a box of green crayons. Mr. Packard stood still, looking them over, and then found what he was looking for and pointed out a man sitting in a wheelchair.
The man had a tall drink in a holder attached to the arm of the chair, with two long pink straws and an umbrella in the glass. He was wearing a cowboy hat that was too big for his head and cowboy boots at the end of those dead legs. You could just see his red hair under the hat. A woman in a yellow dress had her hand on the back of his chair, leaning down to him, talking, and suddenly everybody broke out laughing at something he said.
He laughed like the world was a balloon and he was trying to fill it up.
“Albert Cassidy,” Mr. Packard said, “the happy cowboy. He’s the money.” Mr. Packard looked around again and then nodded at another man, also with red hair, this one standing up. “And there’s brother Frankie, the player. And there’s his brother Tommy, and Arthur. There’s about half a dozen of them in all. All redheads, I think. The whole family comes up for this; everybody brings along their girlfriends, it’s sort of a reunion.”
Train followed Mr. Packard in closer to the crowd, looking everywhere at once. The air hum to him with the excitement. The man in the wheelchair saw them first and smiled at Mr. Packard in a certain way that recalled what Plural said about how the world was a hungry place.
Mr. Packard walked straight toward him, smiling too, like it was a contest, and Train was a step behind, still carrying the bag. The people standing around the wheelchair with drinks began looking up, and then moving away like they was afraid. Train had a sudden uncomfortable feeling he turned visible at the wrong time. Then brother Frankie the player looked over and saw Train too. They stared at each other a minute, and Frankie turned back to his brother in the chair.
“That’s the caddy, right?” Frankie said.
Albert just kept smiling at Mr. Packard, had a look like he didn’t have nothing to lose, and Mr. Packard kept smiling back.
“He’s the player,” Mr. Packard said.
The brother acted like Mr. Packard and Train wasn’t there. “You didn’t say it was a nigger,” he said to his brother. “I can’t play a nigger here.”
The man in the wheelchair said, “Do me a favor, Frankie. Work it out. We’re having a nice time here, got the whole family together. Buy some drinks and slap some backs. Me and Miller ain’t seen each other in a long time.”
His brother looked around. “Albert,” he said, “it’s a nigger.” Then he glanced back at Train again, like to make sure. “They ain’t going to let him play out here. What are you thinking?” Then he looked from Train to Mr. Packard and seem to get prickly all of a sudden and said, “Who is this fucking guy anyway? What kind of people you know, shows up here with a nigger?”
