Mr. Packard ordered two double bourbons from the stewardess and closed his eyes. “Look,” he said, “something’s gone wrong at home. She’s scared to death all the time, and it’s getting worse instead of better.”
“Of what?”
“Plural, I think. It’s hard to say for sure.” And now they were talking like people talked to each other, like there was nothing in between them to consider.
Train nodded, thinking again of putting Plural someplace else. A home for the blind, or back in a gym somewheres. The stewardess brought the drinks and Mr. Packard killed one and gave her the glass back empty before she left the spot. “Oh my,” she said. “Somebody’s having a good time tonight.” He smiled in a weak way, like somebody just tucked him in bed with the mumps.
“I hope you can understand it,” he said a little later. “That you won’t hold it against us.”
Us.
“It’s not even actually about your friend, I don’t think. She’s afraid of him because of something that happened before. It went away for a while, and now it’s come back.”
There was a certain sound to his voice that reminded Train of how Mr. Packard been sounding at night from inside the house. The man was looking for relief.
He turned to Train, got nothing back at all, and then put his face in the window. “I don’t know how all this is going to come out,” he said. “But at least you found out that you can play, you can play with anybody. That’s worth something.”
But he already said that.
The plane stopped in San Francisco, where they picked up passengers off another flight. One of them, an old red-faced priest, had Train’s seat number on his ticket. The stewardess checked both tickets while the priest looked down the barrels at Train.
The rest of first class was full.
“We could reseat you in the back,” the stewardess said to the priest. He turned to her, to eyewitness this person going to put the body of Christ or whatever they call it into coach.
She gave it up fast and turned and smiled at Train, not wanting to be in the middle of this at all. Train noticed the rings on the priest’s fingers, four of them on one hand; he could hear him breathing. Sounded like an iron lung. The priest swayed slightly, and Train smelled alcohol, something he couldn’t quite place, maybe vodka. He noticed the blood vessels in the old man’s nose and cheeks. Train stayed where he was, waiting for Mr. Packard to straighten it out. He held on to the thought that Mr. Packard could straighten things out.
But Miller Packard was six drinks into the flight and gone staring out the window again, watching the suitcases come up the ramp to the plane.
“Let me get the pilot,” the stewardess said, and stepped through the door into the cockpit. By now, everybody in the cabin but Mr. Packard was watching. The priest rested one of his hands against the back of the seat; Train smelled cigarette smoke on it, felt the man’s weight. Felt himself running out of time.
The pilot came out, putting on his cap. He looked at the tickets, shaking his head, and puckered his lips. Then he leaned forward, smiling politely, and said to Train, “Sir, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if we reassigned your seat?” Train waited one last minute, but Mr. Packard was off somewhere else. Already left him behind. And that seemed like the last chance he had. The pilot leaned a little closer and whispered to him, like he wanted to keep this away from the rest of the passengers. “It’s a man of the cloth,” he said.
Train got up and followed the stewardess toward the back of the plane. As he passed through the curtain separating the compartments, he turned back and saw the priest brushing off the seat with a handkerchief before he sat down.
Mr. Packard was waiting for him at the gate when he got off the plane. “What happened?” he said. “I look around, I’m sitting next to a priest.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but went mile-away and sad, staring at an old woman sitting on a crate, talking to a dog named Barney that was inside it.
And then the same thing all the way home. A mile away.
He come out of it long enough to give Train an envelope three inches thick. It was full of money, but by now it smelled bad, just like Mr. Packard said. It was probably all the money they won since they started.
Mr. Packard started to say something, and then just let it go. Probably to tell him again that at least he found out he could play.
41
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE LAY IN BED IN THE DARK, HER ARMS CROSSED over her stomach, staring at nothing. She’d taken three sleeping pills and a Christmas tree, but it only seemed to make her more awake, more aware of things moving, patterns on the ceiling, dark shapes coming and going; everything was familiar but indistinct. She wanted something distinct. And then she looked into the corner of the room, and for an instant she saw the dead bird’s head spilled over the blind man’s fist.
She lay still, unable to see it again, knowing it was there. She was aware of the baby, of frightening the baby, and Christ, she wanted them gone. She wanted them all gone.
All the Negroes in her life, past and present. She did not want them in the guest house, or sitting out by the pool before Packard got home from the office. She did not want to know they were being executed in Waycross, Georgia; she didn’t want the boy in the yard with the lawn mower or cleaning the pool; she didn’t want to see the blind man smiling like an idiot in the sun, with his foot cupped over the sprinkler head while the water bubbled up between his toes. She didn’t want him listening for her in the driveway, trying to open doors. She didn’t want him knowing where she was.
What did she want? She tried to think.
What did she want?
Nothing. That would be enough.
She wanted to lie in the bathtub, just that, lie in the tub doing nothing and have nothing done to her or for her, lie there until the odor of wet feathers and bird blood was off her skin. Just lock the door and lie in the tub, but she couldn’t do that. With the noise of the water, she might not hear him coming in. Or he might slip in after she was already in the tub and she wouldn’t see him in the bathroom steam. How would she know? She imagined rising up out of the water and somehow clearing a path of sight— clearing it the way you would clean the fog off the bathroom mirror— and finding him sitting on the floor, his back against the closed door, holding her baby in his fist.
What had he said? “You know it’s a hungry world”?
She gagged, and then waited until the feeling passed and then tiptoed to the window. He was sitting by the pool now, talking to himself. As she watched, he stretched, and even in the half-light of the patio, she saw the deep-etched muscles in his back and his arms. His tiny misshapen feet. Her arches began to cramp, and she came down off her toes. She sat back on the bed and did nothing, and a long time later she heard the door open downstairs. A minute passed and there were no more sounds, and then she felt him there, standing at the bottom of the stairs, gazing toward the second floor, finding her. Fixing on the heat of her body.
She caught a reflection of herself in the window, a dark glimpse of her face. It seemed unfamiliar, vulgar and thick, the way it had felt when she’d touched it after the beating. She wasn’t pretty anymore, and it occurred to her that she never had been, that people had only assumed she was because she’d tried so hard to be that.
She moved into the corner and waited for him to come up the stairs. Waited a long time, and then a light went on suddenly overhead, and she saw him in the doorway, swaying, smiling, as if he were about to laugh but couldn’t, like a man waiting to sneeze, and realized in the second before she pulled at the trigger who she had been afraid of all along.
42
BEVERLY HILLS
T
RAIN AND PACKARD HAD DROVE HOME together; neither one of them could find nothing to say. Like it was already tomorrow or next week, and they both just gone their own way.
It begun to feel eerie between them now, and when they got home, Mr. Packard turned off the engine and let the car coast to the curb, not to wake up his wife. He steered in close and stopped. The street outside Train’s window glowing red in the brake lights.
Mr. Packard got out, sad and patient, seem so tired he could barely shut the door, and walked up the driveway to the side of the house. The man was inside that house before he was inside, and never even said good night.
Mr. Packard stopped at the door to find his keys, and Train went past him to the back, everything happening slow motion and a hundred miles an hour at the same time. He heard Mr. Packard slide the key into the lock, and Train made a deal that the lock itself was one more last chance to straighten this out, that Mr. Packard could still turn around and fix things up, but once the bolt slid open, it was like he open the car window, everything would fly out into the wild.
And the bolt slid open.
The door opened too, and Mr. Packard walked inside. Train went on back through the gate to the guest house. He heard the whinny noises Plural made when he dreamed, could hardly stand to hear it now.
Train opened the door and let himself in. Plural was naked, asleep in the rocking chair, his cheek resting on his shoulder. Feathers all over the room; the place smelled like blood and poultry. Plural had high arches, and the toes of his feet barely touched the floor.
Train moved quietly into the kitchen and stared at the bird lying across the table. The neck and the head anyway. The rest was in the sink, half-plucked. He went back outside to get away from it and Plural both.
He sat down on one of the deck chairs and took off his shoes and his socks and lay down on the cool plastic. He felt like he ought to go up to the house and tell Mr. Packard that he didn’t want this to end like everything else did, just everybody gone their own ways.
And then the connection come in like lightning on the telephone. It echoed through the dark, and then things broke and splintered inside the house, sounded like a collapse of the keepsakes, and in that second, he seen that he missed the whole point. That all this time he been thinking how he could keep what he had for the future, keep what him and Mr. Packard was together— all that money and importance— but the point all along was Plural.
He had to take Plural along or there wasn’t no point.
He looked up at the house, imagining how Plural would look to the police when they come, covered with feathers and blood, and somebody shot upstairs.
He went into the guest house and Plural was still asleep and innocent in the rocking chair. Train shook his bare foot to wake him up. Sticky with blood. “C’mon, Plural,” he said, feeling his fingers peel off the blind man’s skin. “C’mon, man, we got to go.”
43
THE BEDROOM WINDOW
N
OTHING COULD BE TAKEN BACK, OR TAKEN over. Things were what they were.
He’d seen the empty bed; he’d seen something move. He’d turned on the light, and she was sitting on the floor, up against the bed, her knees pressed together, with the shotgun resting in the space where they forked open. The gun from the boat. He saw her, and she saw him. Recognized him over the barrel, and whatever her intentions had been, there was no misunderstanding. A second passed and he began to tell her the boy and the blind man were leaving. He began to ask what she was doing out of bed.
