He walked down the stairs in his stocking feet, the banging still banging, and then stopped when he saw a white man standing on the other side.
“What is it?” he said.
The white man was well dressed, as well dressed as the Reverend Green, and unlike the reverend, he looked like he was hard under his coat. There was a Cadillac parked behind him on the curb. “This is the
Standard
?” he said, looking around.
“You’ve got the wrong place,” Hollingsworth said.
The white man looked at him, up and down. Something disrespectful about his manner, like this was all part of some joke. Hollingsworth trembled in anger at the man’s disrespect.
“No, this is it,” the man said.
“What do you want?” Hollingsworth said. He walked closer to the screen door, and then opened it. He didn’t know why. He and the white man stood a yard apart.
“I want to talk to the man who called my wife,” the man said.
Hollingsworth felt a sudden fear; the words came out of the man with an ordinary, experienced quality. He knew this was the kind of man who would hurt you.
“You think you can come around here and scare me?” he said, raising his voice, thinking somebody would be listening. That this might be a chapter in the story later. “After what white people have done to me”— and now he indicated his face, his arms, his hands—“you think I’m afraid of you?”
The man looked in all the places Hollingsworth indicated with that same insolent expression. “My name is Miller Packard,” he said. “My wife was formerly married to Alec Rose, and I don’t believe either one of us have had the pleasure of your acquaintance.” He looked at the man’s skin more closely and said, “She doesn’t even smoke.” And then he moved a step closer again, so close that Hollingsworth could smell the soap on his skin.
“If you have any questions about that,” he said, “you come see me.” And then he looked behind Hollingsworth and smiled. Hollingsworth’s wife was standing at the bottom of the stairs. “I hope I didn’t disturb you, ma’am,” he said, and then he turned and walked back to the Cadillac.
When the man was almost at the car, Hollingsworth called out. “You think I’m afraid of you?” he said. He felt his wife’s hand on his arm, and that pushed him further on. “After all you people have already done? You think I’m afraid of you
now
?”
16
DARKTOWN
M
ONDAY NIGHT, THE TRAINER BROUGHT HIS boy to Sugars Gym, and Plural went five rounds with him for three dollars a round, letting the boy hit him on the button a few times to build his confidence. After they took off their cups and gloves, the kid come over to Plural and said, “You don’t want no more, pop?”
Plural smiled at the white boy and spoke to the trainer, “That’s fifteen dollars, Collie.”
The kid looked at the trainer; fifteen dollars. Then he followed him into a corner of the room and asked in a loud voice why they were paying this old coon three dollars a round, money that came out of his purse. The trainer told him to shut up and do his bag work and be there on time tomorrow.
Train watched the white boy slide his hands into the bag gloves, noticed the size of his wrists, saw how the bag jumped when he set himself and hit it, and even though he didn’t understand yet much of what went on in a boxing ring, he knew this boy wasn’t somebody you wanted to hit you in the head for any three dollars a round.
The kid did five rounds on the bag and then got into his jacket to leave. “You sure, pops?” he said to Plural. “I got a couple more rounds in me if you got something coming up and need the work.” But Plural didn’t care what the boy said. He had fifteen dollars in his pocket for fifteen minutes’ work, and he always liked getting paid.
The next morning, Train went out for coffee and sweet rolls and found a
Mirror News
lying outside the store. Plural was lumped up a bit, and he picked up the paper and then set it right back down.
Train looked over at the paper to see what it was. The Rosenbergs had been executed in Sing Sing, went to the electric chair for giving away the bomb plans. Him first and then her. They sung to each other the night before from their cells and then it was two thousand volts, and she took it five times before it killed her. The body was too hot to touch, the paper said, and they had to let her cool down before they could got her out of the chair. A witness said it smelled like bacon frying.
Plural got up and sat in the window that looked out over the street, eating a roll. Train wondered if he had a relation on death row himself.
Plural gave the white boy another four rounds that afternoon, and afterwards, coming out of the shower, he walked into a water pipe. The white boy was still in the gym, hitting the heavy bag, and saw it happen. He stopped— but then he was always stopping, looking for some reason not to do the work— and smiled down at his hands. “Collie,” he said, loud because the trainer was over by the shower, “you got to get me some new meat. I fucked this one up.”
There was younger fighters around, and they all laughed at that. Collie didn’t laugh, though. He turned red, and for a little while Train thought he might come over and take a swing at the boy himself.
“Do the work, all right?” he said finally. “After you done something, then you can talk about who you fucked up.” Then he turned around and walked out of the gym, talking to himself like he was both sides of an argument. “You see what I mean, you stupid fuck?” he said. “You see what I mean? And this ain’t nothing. You wait awhile and then you see some real problems.”
Plural sat down on the toilet, which was in the corner next to the shower, and stared at the floor between his feet, and after the blond boy finally left, he stood up, turned around, and vomited, then made his way back to the corner of the room and lay down. Didn’t seemed to notice that he never got paid. “Well,” he said, “sometime it happen.”
Suddenly, everybody was talking to themself.
Then Plural went still, not looking at nothing, a dead man’s stare, and that scared Train, until it was all he could do to stand up. Recalled to him how it felt when he was in the kitchen, Mayflower told him it was jail or the road.
“Plural?”
Plural chuckled, which was his reaction when things went bad or good; it was his reaction to the spin of the earth.
Sometime it happen.
“What’s wrong?” he said. Plural moved his head in Train’s direction and paused there a long time, trying to find him. Train wondered what he was gone do with him now. How it got to be him that had to do it.
“It happened before,” he said. “Everybody just look like an angel, all slow motion and soft, with a black hole in the middle. Like when you get caught in the side of your head with somethin’ you don’t see, only your head don’t clear.” And he chuckled at that too. “And then later on, the hole just grow bigger.”
Hearing him talk about angels, Train saw how it fit together if Plural died. The loss and the relief at the same time. That was one of the troubles with the connections he got: He was always thinking of things he never wanted to think about in the first place. “What kind of angel?” he said.
Plural shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Like a cloud or something, and a empty hole in the middle. Nothing in it but the color black.”
A few minutes passed. It was hot outside and the smell of sewage from the street floated up into the room. Train said, “This was the same thing that happened to the other eye too?”
Plural pulled the skin below his eyeball down so Train could look for himself. He chuckled again.
The next morning, Train had to put the coffee cup in Plural’s hand. Plural played like nothing was wrong, but Train could tell from the way he held his head when he looked up that he was having trouble finding him.
“Maybe if you went to the hospital, they can fix you up,” Train said. He was never in the hospital himself. He watched Plural set the coffee down next to his foot, where he could find it again, and then he picked up the sack of rolls in his lap and ate one like nothing was wrong.
“What hospital is that?” he said.
“Wadsworth, down on Wilshire.”
Plural seemed to thought that was comical. Everything struck him humorous. “The vet hospital?” he said. “Man, you look acrost the street, you know what you see? The vet cemetery. They wheel you in the front, and out the side, and stamped you
Return to sender.
And the nurses in there, they as soon to touch you as bad pork. That’s how welcome you are.”
“You fought in the war,” Train said.
“Yes I did,” he said. “Yes I did.”
The blond boy and his trainer came up late that afternoon for some light work. The fight was that weekend, so the sparring was over. Plural sat in a chair over by the windows in the sun, his face held up into it. The trainer saw that he wasn’t right and gave him the fifteen dollars he owed from last time, and then saw his boy staring at Plural too, sitting there by the window in a block of sun and a thousand specks of floating dust, and tried to hurry him out.
It was too late for that, though. Once somebody saw what they saw, you can’t just erase it off the board.
17
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE TOLD HIM SHE’D MISSED HER PERIOD, AND for a little while she didn’t think he’d heard her. Then he looked up from the paper— he was reading a story about the Rosenbergs’ execution. She’d read it herself earlier; they had two sons.
“It’s stress,” he said.
“It doesn’t feel like stress.”
“Whatever it is, we can take care of it.”
“What does that mean?” she said.
“We can take care of it?”
“It means that whatever you want to do, we can do it. You don’t have to go to Mexico. I have the name of somebody here in Beverly Hills. If that’s what you want to do.”
“You want to kill it?” she said.
“No, just whatever you decide to do about it is fine with me,” he said.
She stared at him, and he saw that was the wrong answer.
He’d only had her a little while and wanted her to himself. He looked at her, wishing he could start the conversation over. He would tell her later on to think of it as a story, with two different people.
18
DARKTOWN
T
RAIN WAITED OUT HIS SUSPENSION, COUNTING the days until he could go back to work. He went for coffee and rolls in the morning, usually found a newspaper somebody had left behind and read the sports section out loud to Plural while they ate. There was a story on Monday about the blond boy freezing up in the ring, said that the manager had put this kid in too deep too fast.
“You can’t blame nobody for that boy,” Plural said. “Sometime they is only so much you can do.”
Two or three times a week, Train rode the bus out past Paradise Developments, looking out the window to see who was on the tractor, if they were cutting the grass too close for this time of year, if the course was getting enough water. It looked worse every time he went by— spots on the greens, everything turning brown and bare. Mr. Cooper had the bulldozers clearing lots along two more fairways, looked like pulled teeth. There was dandelions in the fairways, trash cans by the tee boxes that wasn’t been emptied, and whoever been running the tractor had gone right over a flower bed on number one.
