“Not much of a story,” he said.
“It can’t just be this,” she said, and lowered the camera. She looked around the barn. “This is so boring. . . .”
Train shrugged. “Here we both are,” he said, and she smiled at that like it was the brightest thing anybody told her all month.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she said, and the erection crawled up his pants. Might as well try to push down the rising moon. She began taking her pictures again.
“Excused me, ma’am,” Train said, and got up to leave. “Excused me, but I got a piece of equipment broke out on eleven.” And she laughed again at that; she could see why he had to leave. “I got to go take care of it,” he said, “before somebody drive it back to the barn and spill oil all over the course.” Thinking that adding to the story would make it sound true. Then he walked past her a little sideways, hiding himself, and then outside into the heat.
That was how it started with susan, no capital
S.
Friday was payday. Mr. Cooper come by late in the afternoon every week to study the receipts and personally hand out the money. He wore jeans and a shirt and tie— maybe to keep his wife and the bankers both happy— and smoked all the time, nervous with the cigarette, rolling it around in his fingers like the combination to the safe. He coughed when he went to talk, did that so much he seemed not to notice it himself, just pulled out his handkerchief and waited until it stopped and then spit what come up into the hankie and had a look and then folded it back up and went on with his business.
The crew was up to seven employees, which was one or two less than they needed, and Mr. Cooper always looked them in the eyes when he paid them and made a point to ask after their mother or wife, or how they were doing in school. Must have been one of the principles of pest control, but he never actually listened to the answers, though. Train knew Mr. Cooper liked him to look him in the eye back, but he had trouble making himself do that, with what he was thinking all the time about his wife.
Sometimes on Friday night, susan come along with Mr. Cooper and sat outside in the car, but she had all the pictures of this place she wanted now, and was working in the developing room on her gallery show, and never come in. Train heard her once telling Mr. Cooper how she didn’t like the way the trailer smelled with all the people in there sweating. Said she hated the smell of the crew.
By now she also come back down to the barn and taken more pictures of Train, did that a few times, and then one day she perplexed her face into a question and asked would he do her a favor, would he pose for her without his shoes. And he did, and then she asked would he take off his shirt and pose with the tow chain around his neck. And then she asked what she could do for him now he done all this for her, and when he didn’t say nothing, she done it anyway. Took him in her hand. It went on like that, three or four times a week, all month long, always in her hand, sometimes with her mouth up close to his ear. Never let him touch her back.
Afterwards once, she run her fingers over his lips, her eyes wide open, watching him, waiting. “Now you know what you taste like,” she said.
And then one day, she said, “It’s a little boring, isn’t it?” Like there was something else he was supposed to do. He didn’t know what it might be, and didn’t know if it was polite to ask, and then she was disappointed— he could see that— and then she was angry, and whenever he passed near her after that, she looked through him in a way that reminded him of the membership back at Brookline— that’s how interested she was now.
After awhile, he thought she might have even forgot which one of the ground crew he was. Even with his intelligent face, she wasn’t the kind of girl who made it a point to remember all the names of all the help.
The money came in yellow envelopes, and Mr. Cooper waited till everybody was there in the trailer and then issued his warning that employees was not to discuss what they made. He did that every Friday. And then he told them again about the idea of a lifetime: racial harmony in the future, and how it would all start with the condition of the golf course when the buyers come out here to look. The grounds crew was all his ambassadors.
The room was full and warm tonight, people sweating and excited to be loose for the weekend. Some of them drinking wine over by the radio, some of them watching a dominoes game in the corner. Mr. Cooper suddenly looked up, and Whitey had to tell Lester to turn off the damn radio, and they all waited, and then Mr. Cooper begun passing out the envelopes, checking each one before he let it out of his hand.
The envelopes was laid out in alphabetical order, and by the time he got to Lionel Walk, Train and him was the only ones left in the room. It made Train nervous to be alone with the man like that, with the wife sitting right outside in the car. Train was always afraid what the man was going to say, that he was going to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. That worried him, and then the man was also trying somehow to get closer to Train than he was.
Mr. Cooper opened his envelope— the way he’d done with all the others— and slid the money halfway out, separating the bills with the tip of his pencil to make sure it was right. Then he tucked the money back in and sized Train up. Train could tell from the noise outside that the traffic had picked up out on the street, and he wanted to leave before the buses filled up with drunks. Friday was a hard night to ride the bus; somebody was always falling asleep on your shoulder, and sometimes one of them had a hand in your pocket too. But Mr. Cooper wasn’t ready yet to turn him loose. He took off his reading glasses and said, “I’ve noticed we’ve been going through a lot of gas.”
“I don’t know about that,” Train said.
Mr. Cooper shrugged. “The last couple of months, we’re up fifty gallons.”
“I don’t know,” Train said again.
“You’re not running the tractor extra?”
“Run the tractor six days a week, just like always. Unless it rains, but it ain’t. Using more oil, is all.”
“And you haven’t noticed anything untoward,” the old man said.
“Untoward what?”
“It’s a word that means out of the way, improper.” Train began to worry that Mr. Cooper heard something of what been going on in the barn with his new wife. But it wasn’t that. “Untoward . . . You haven’t noticed anyone driving their car down to the barn at night, or early in the morning?”
Train didn’t answer, but he seen Whitey down there at closing in her Chevy pickup.
“No sir,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
Mr. Cooper took three dollar bills out of his own pocket and laid them next to Train’s envelope. Three dollars, a day’s work. “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’re a boy that’s going to make something of himself in life.”
“Yessir, thank you.” He picked up his envelope and put it in his shirt pocket. Mr. Cooper picked up the three bills and stuck them in there too.
“What do they all call you again? Train?”
“Yessir, most do.”
Mr. Cooper smiled. “Lionel Train . . . very good.” Train smiled along too. That fast, Mr. Cooper turned around, as if Train’s smiling was the signal for him to stop. “Well, someday, son,” he said, “later on, when you’re in business for yourself, you may come to find out that no matter how well you treat them, people steal. If you allow it to happen, they will steal. It’s the bane of small business.” It seem like he was gone talk that old-timers talk now, something from long ago.
“I expect so,” Train said, just wanting to get out the damn room.
“I lost a foreman once,” Mr. Cooper said, “a man that I knew for fifteen years. He went into a house at night that we’d sealed up for fumigation— he was going to take some jewelry— and was found still in the lady’s boudoir the next day. It turned out he’d been stealing all along, right under my nose, and the poison had weakened his lungs and heart. And that last night, he was too weak to make it out.”
Mr. Cooper had a long coughing fit and then lit a cigarette. “And in some way,” he said, “I suppose I allowed it to happen.” He leaned over and spit between his feet. “If that man were here today,” he said, “I’d sit him down and buy him a cold beer and then you’d know what I’d ask him?”
“No sir.”
“I’d ask him what was the point? He was well paid, well treated. What made him steal?” Train was not sure now if Mr. Cooper was talking to him or Whitey or the dead foreman. He flashed again on susan. He didn’t think you could say he’d took anything there, although, like Mr. Cooper, he had to admit he did allowed it to happen.
Mr. Cooper was answering his own question. “He wouldn’t know,” he said, “except it’s human nature. A perfectly good man, dead for no reason. When you keep a man honest, you do everyone a favor.” He patted Train’s shirt pocket and left his hand there a second, and Train felt its heat.
“There is nothing more valuable in business,” he said, “than a man you can trust.”
Walking to the street, Train glanced quickly at the car, where the new wife was sitting with the door open, smoking, waiting for Mr. Cooper to finish paying the help. She looked at him a long second, her mouth still open behind a scarf of smoke, as if she just had some thought that surprised her, and then she smiled and crossed her legs, because she was bored, and watched the moon rise in his pants.
The bus came late, packed like a hamper. Train got on and stood in the aisle, holding on to an overhead strap. A block up the street, it stopped again. More people got on; nobody got off. A woman bumped into him from behind, and Train touched his shirt to make sure the envelope was still in his pocket. He felt drops of sweat fall from his armpits down his ribs, and fought off the panic at being closed in.
He closed his eyes, thinking of other things. Food— his mother’s food— the smell of chicken cooking, the feel of old Lucky’s head under his hand. Mr. Cooper’s new wife looking at him through the smoke, looking at him in that way and crossing her legs. Mr. Cooper’s hand on his shirt pocket.
The bus stopped and started, started and stopped, and then it stopped again, and then he was suddenly pushing his way off, not caring where he was, what neighborhood he was in, and then he was back outside and he stood still for a moment in the street, breathing the cool air. He heard the air brakes release and the bus began to roll, and he looked up and saw a blind lady framed in the pale light of the window. Her eyes were milk, and she looked just beyond him, like she knew he was there and was trying to find him. Train turned away from the face and ran.
