The man in the wheelchair didn’t answer, and Frankie the player turned around, knowing everybody was watching, and stalked off in the direction of the clubhouse. To show the ones that couldn’t hear that he didn’t have nothing to do with it. By now there was fifty, sixty people out on the green, and more all the time. Every time the clubhouse door opened, there was another three or four coming out. The new arrivals asked the ones who was already there what happened, everybody talking in quiet voices about the nigger on the putting green. The Cassidy family— which, it turned out, included some black-haired cousins— stood together off to the side.
Train heard someone from the clubhouse say Frankie had done the right thing, standing up to his brother, that here in Wisconsin the rules were the same for everybody.
Frankie already disappeared into the clubhouse, though, and the boy carrying his sticks went around the side, and the man in the wheelchair looked over to Mr. Packard and shrugged. “Well, that’s an anticlimax for you,” he said. “After you spent all that money to get out here.”
Mr. Packard walked over to the wheelchair, and Train saw the beginnings of the decline of civilized behavior. Train thought he might like to hit a few putts himself, or swing an iron, to do something familiar. Looked around for somewhere else to be.
“What can I tell you, Miller?” said the man in the wheelchair, “Frankie won’t play the shine.”
“That’s all right,” Mr. Packard said, and patted him on the shoulder.
“He won’t do it. I tried to talk to him— you heard me— but he’s hardheaded. Besides, I guess you could say that the rules are the rules. That’s why people join a country club.”
“You knew,” Mr. Packard said. Train heard that and began to walk away. Did not want to hear Mr. Packard discuss at what point he told the man he was colored. He took a step or two, but then saw there wasn’t no place to go, and stopped. They was surrounded. Train looked off into the distance, feeling all that excitement turning into scart, wishing he’d stayed home with Plural.
“You can appreciate Frankie’s situation,” the man in the wheelchair said. “They could bring him up to the board. It was supposed to look like your boy was his guest, supposed to be strictly on the sly.”
Mr. Packard nodded like he agreed with all that. “Thirty-six holes, a two-thousand Nassau, that’s twelve thousand,” he said.
The man in the wheelchair looked around at his relatives, and then he was chuckling and laughing and shaking his head. “Miller Packard,” he said, “the one and only.”
Mr. Packard poked at something under the man’s shirt and said, “Albert, you shit in that bag, or is that your lunch?” A murmur went through the clubhouse crowd; somebody said that was definitely uncalled for, but if it bothered the man in the wheelchair, he didn’t let it show.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said to Mr. Packard. “You think you’re still in California? You see any fucking coconut trees around here?”
Mr. Packard looked up into the trees for coconuts, then shrugged and reached out suddenly and grabbed the cowboy hat off the man’s head and set it on his own. “You’re right,” he said, “we’ll call it even.”
For a moment nobody moved, and then one of the Cassidys come up behind Mr. Packard and hit him in the back of the neck with a judo chop. Mr. Packard turned around and grabbed a handful of red hair. Another one jumped him from the side, took a head lock on him, and then come off the ground like Gorgeous George, and there was three of them in a pile on the ground, and then other relatives ran over and began kicking anything that moved and then jumped into the pile themselves, yelling words that sent a portion of the female membership running for the clubhouse.
In the stampede, a woman screamed and tripped, and then other people tumbled over her. A purse spilled lipstick, dimes and nickels, and a feminine napkin. Train saw a hearing aid lying beside a pair of sunglasses.
Back at the other pile— the one with Mr. Packard in it— somebody rolled into the wheelchair and tipped it over. Albert dropped out of it sideways and splayed across the practice green, his legs bent across each other like somebody tossed their pants on the floor when they got in bed. He was red-faced and embarrassed, but dead from the nipples down, and after awhile he give up trying to get to his feet and just lay still, looking at the sky, and waited for the end of the family reunion.
Train heard a distinct snap, like a bone, and then somebody screamed, and a second or two later Mr. Packard crawled out of the pile of bodies with the cowboy hat in his teeth, grinning like the last day of school.
31
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE DID NOT WANT PACKARD TO LEAVE AND then, once he was gone, she did not want him back. She thought of things that happened around him, that he caused to happen, and did not want him back. She remembered exactly the way he had picked the mulatto’s shoe off the deck and tossed it after him into the ocean, as if to demonstrate the point that nothing that happened could be undone. She remembered the plink the shoe made in the water after the splash. She remembered the crack-up on the ocean highway, the deer in the windshield, and then the man and the girl in the car. Oh yes, Packard would go to the end of the road too. She thought of the scene with the photographer at the art opening, the places he decided to have at her, the Negroes in the guest house. He was drawn to movement and friction, to chance; he had to have something in play.
In their best moments, they seemed to be in it together.
She lay awake that night, thinking of all reasons to leave him, all the qualities that were different now that she was going to have a baby.
In the morning she missed him so badly she wept.
Later— evening— she felt safe and quiet and happy, and knew that in some way the tiny thing taking shape inside her felt safe too. She found herself thinking of the blind man in the guest house and remembered that he liked eggs, and that Packard had asked her to look in on him while he was gone.
She went out the back door, carrying a tray of sandwiches, thinking what a beautiful yard it would be to grow up in, as happy as she had been in a long time. She knocked on his door and waited, alive and full of life.
She sat in the guest house’s kitchen with the blind man, watching him eat, glad she’d decided to come over. Thinking she should have done it earlier. He was shirtless, wearing trousers and shoes without socks. The room was tiny and the windows were shut and the air was close and warm. There was something familiar between them, as if they’d known each other a long time.
“My husband said you were a fighter,” she said.
He smiled and put one of the sandwiches in his mouth. Half of it, actually— she’d cut them in half. “Not consequentially,” he said. “Turned out I don’t have no tank.” The food rolled in his mouth— it reminded her of a clothes dryer— and she wondered if he’d missed breakfast and lunch. She’d made four sandwiches and he picked up the second half, with the first one still in his mouth, and held it a few inches off the plate; he seemed to be feeling its weight.
“They’s this man Art Love— they call him ‘Digger’— he running the program out of his own pocket. Digger’s the promoter, the referee, and the manager of one of the fighters in the main event, and he got me in there with Irish Jack McKinney, and we moving around a little bit, you know what I mean, and then along about the third or fourth round, everything suddenly gone black. Then Jack scream like he was bit, which I can’t see the reason for that, except Irish Jack was a primal man. That man could hit you in the head and break your legs. Neverthemind, I’m about niney percent sure Jack ain’t knocked me out, but how can you be sure of something like that, standing there in the dark? I says, ‘Jack? We still here?’
“And Jack says, ‘Shit, I thought a spider got on me.’
“And I says, ‘I was hoping you ain’t knocked me out.’
“He says, ‘No, but I think I might of got Digger.’ ”
“Who’s Digger again?” she said.
“Digger Love, the ref.”
“Right, Digger Love, the referee . . .”
“Shit, this boy of his named the Duke come into the ring with a flashlight and says they blown the main fuse, and this was at a little club out in Ohio, where they had all their connections down in the cellar, and as long as me and Jack was already dirty, would one of us mind going down there and putting a penny in the box, get us through the night so they don’t have to give refunds and everybody could get paid.
“Jack says, ‘I don’t touch electricity’— that man always knew his mind— and so I guessed it’s up to me do we get paid, and I gone down there with the Duke and he holding the light while I crawl in that cellar space and put a penny behind the main fuse. And that motherfucker light me up like Christmas. We go back upstairs— I’m all covered with dirt and bugs and Jack is lost his sweat— and they got a new referee ’cause Digger is too embarrassed to continue in the public eye, and I can still feel that feeling when the electricity lit me up. ‘Jack,’ I says, ‘I don’t touch electricity neither.’ ”
She looked at him, waiting for him to finish the story, but to Plural that was the finish. “What happened?” she said.
He didn’t understand the question.
“The fight,” she said. “Who won the fight?”
Plural thought for a moment, trying to remember; then he gave up. “Jack might knowed that,” he said. “He kept track of them things better than me. The last time I seen him, though, we was cracked wide open together about old Digger Love, how it wasn’t no spider at all, he just knocked poor old Digger right out from underneath his hair. It lit on Jack’s arm, and Jack throwed that thing off like fire.”
“The referee’s toupee?” she said.
“Yes ma’am. Couldn’t face his public without that rug on his head. It takes all kinds, I guess.”
She looked at the blind man with tenderness, felt herself beginning to weep.
32
WISCONSIN
A
T ELEVEN IN THE MORNING, TRAIN WAS setting with Mr. Packard at the gate when Mr. Albert Cassidy and all his brothers and cousins from West Chicago come past on the way to their plane, limping and stitched up and depressed. Looked like the Confederate army in retreat. Albert was back in the saddle, pushed along by a younger black-haired man with a ordinary-size head— might of been an in-law— that Train didn’t remember from the tussle. The man been in it, though. He had a bandage on his forehead looked like an earmuff.
Albert hisself wasn’t busted up like some of the relatives, but he looked sore and gloomy, and you could tell it was a long ways up the hill to the bright side of life this morning.
Mr. Packard watched the procession move past their seats, and then, about the volume they used to announced the flights, he said, “It must be a goddamn chain gang, Charlene.” Who Charlene was, Train didn’t know.
Hearing that remark, some of the Cassidys of West Chicago looked around and spotted Mr. Packard, and saw that he was playing with them again, and then they seen Train too, and the one pushing the wheelchair changed directions, tried to save Albert from any further rumination over yesterday’s indignities, and how fucked up things had generally got. Albert saw them, though, and leaned out his seat, like a dog riding half out the back window, staring pitchforks as he went by.
