Mr. Packard just smiled and opened up his travel bag and pulled out the cowboy hat and set it on top of Train’s head. The hat fit his head like a lamp shade, balanced on top and hung loose around his ears.
That event seem to of blessed the whole day, seeing the Cassidys in their present condition, and Mr. Packard was blithesome on the way home. Felt luckier than Moses in an inner tube. They sat up in front together, Train at the window, the stewardess calling him “sir” when she brought him his menu. The plane was entitled the
Constellation.
The stewardess served three drinks before dinner, and Train was afraid that the alcohol would make Mr. Packard talk more than he liked to and that afterwards, when it wore off, he would realize what he’d did and there would be resentments.
But Mr. Packard didn’t talk that much after he started to drink, mostly just dropped his head back into the cushion and watched the stewardess walk up and down the aisle. Train did the same. The girl had a bottom that just made you want to eat her skirt, although when he looked over, it didn’t seem like Mr. Packard was on the same page with him on that. Blithesome, but out there in the distance. The Mile Away Man rides again.
Sometime after dinner the plane banked south, and for a few minutes the sun was right out Train’s window, hanging on the lip of the world. And then it dropped over the other side, and a little later the plane dropped with it. The stewardess come past, picking up the glasses, and she waited while Mr. Packard finished his last drink. When Train looked outside again, the city of Los Angeles seemed to be floating up to meet them.
He heard Mr. Packard sigh. Wherever he been at, he wasn’t ready yet to come back. He finished what was left in the glass and handed it to the stewardess. She smiled and said, “Going home?” A girl from the South.
Mr. Packard nodded and said, “Home from the hunt.”
“You-all hunters?” she said. She was sweet on Mr. Packard; Train could see that. Mr. Packard looked up at her, seemed surprised at the prettiness of the girl. It made Train wonder what he been looking at the last several hours.
“Me, I’m just the gun bearer,” Mr. Packard said. “This here is the hunter. I only carry the guns.” That tickled the stewardess and she sissy-slapped him on the shoulder and walked on up the aisle.
Mr. Packard sighed again, like he just ate. Then he closed his eyes. A little later, after Train thought he’d went to sleep, he suddenly begun talking. “You know how sometimes you read a story in the paper,” he said slowly, “that a person out in the valley somewhere stepped out the front door to get the milk and was run over by the milk truck? You know the kind of thing I’m talking about?”
Train nodded, thinking he had an understanding of how that might feel, at least afterwards when you were splayed out over the rosebushes, trying to figure out how you got there.
“Well,” Mr. Packard said, “from what I’ve seen, it happens more than you think. In fact, if you live long enough, something like that is bound to happen. And afterwards, some people get over it fast, and some people can’t seem to get over it at all. The doctors can put their legs back together and tell them they’re as good as new, but they never really believe it, and every time the victim stands up, they wonder if something in there might come loose, like somebody pulling a can out of the bottom of a display at the grocery store, and the whole pile is going to come down on top of itself. Inside, I mean. They walk around waiting for their bones to crumble. Or maybe they got hit by lightning while they were on the phone, and now it rings even on a clear day and they can’t bring themselves to pick it up.”
Train waited, and for a long time it seem like that was as much as Mr. Packard had to say. But then he opened his eyes wide— for a moment, it was like he just seen the milk truck with his name on it bouncing acrost the lawn— and his expression was so fierce, it made Train pull back in his seat. “I only mention it,” he said, calmer than he looked, “because Mrs. Packard’s going through a bad time again. So you understand what’s happening.”
“No sir. I haven’t seen nothing like that.”
Mr. Packard continued to stare; then he seem to focus in more on Train, like he was draining the lake to see what was on the bottom.
33
BEVERLY HILLS
T
HE REST OF THE MONTH, EVERY WEEKEND, Mr. Packard found a game for Train at Western Avenue. Sometimes he said what Train was playing for; sometimes he didn’t. Mr. Packard collected the money in the parking lot, or in the bar inside the clubhouse. Always gave Train something. Fifty dollars, sometimes a hundred or two. Train counted the money and hid it away, but the thing he liked best was the importance of it. When he was on the golf course and there was money down, everybody knew who he was then.
Some of the players he beat made the regular excuses about they had tennis elbows and foot blisters, and some of them just threw their sticks in the trunk and drove away. The worst people played, the more they discussed illness and injuries. It was always like that. He remembered sometimes he caddied a foursome, it was like they was having a contest, who was gone die first. He liked winning, and he liked hearing the excuses. He liked that feeling when he took the heart out of other players with shots they never thought of hitting. He liked it every time he made them reassess him up.
He begun trying to think of some way to keep it like this, looking beyond tomorrow. Begun to think like it was his.
At the house, it didn’t seem like things was going Mr. Packard’s way. It was two weeks since Train even glimpsed Mrs. Packard. For all he knew, Mr. Packard kept her tied up.
The next week they went to New York, and the week after that to Texas— he thought he’d played in the wind till he got to Texas— and then for two weeks there wasn’t no games, and Train and Mr. Packard just went back out to Western Avenue and played each other for a dollar or two. Mr. Packard wouldn’t take no strokes, and by then Train seen all the game he had, and it wasn’t no fun really playing the same course, beating the same man that couldn’t never beat him, with nothing come of it in the end anyway. Not after he played for thousands of dollars in places even Plural never seen.
34
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE TOOK SOME FOOD OVER TO THE BLIND MAN on a Saturday night. It was her habit these long days when Packard was out of town with the boy. It was hot and she’d gained eight pounds, and nothing fit, not even her Mexican wedding ring. She’d gotten it off that morning, but her finger was still indented and green all the way around. She sweated all the time now and stayed away from bathroom mirrors. She tried not to look at herself when she dressed. Her feet were swollen and a small vein appeared one morning, blue and lumpy, on the inside of her thigh.
She was fat-faced and lonely, and found that she craved the company of the blind. She brought him scrambled-egg sandwiches and some carrot sticks. She presumed finger food was the easiest for him to eat.
“I thought you might be hungry,” she always said.
She was sitting with him at the little kitchen table again, feeling comfortable with him in a way she didn’t feel with Packard, or anybody else. She slipped off her shoes. The strap lines were red and ugly, and he suddenly sniffed the air, and she thought for a moment it was her feet.
“Eggs,” he said, like he was in love.
“It’s practically all I eat these days,” she said. “Eggs and sherbet.” Then realized he might notice she hadn’t brought any sherbet for him. “I just ran out of the sherbet,” she said. “I might have some ice cream.” Did he even know what sherbet was? He seemed to be thinking it over.
“Well, any way you look at it,” he said finally, “it got to hurt. Great big egg like that come out that little pucker hole.”
She could not think of a word to say.
He edged a sandwich into his mouth and talked around it. “Y’all hear people complain this chicken won’t lay, that chicken won’t lay, but shit, I wouldn’t lay neither. Of course, in regard to that, they ain’t unsimiliar to womens. The skinny ones ain’t used to it scream like to die, and the ones with more meat and experience, they just spit out a baby like a watermelon seed.”
Then he smiled politely, showing the eggs in his mouth, and said, “Did you had children yourself, ma’am?”
“Excuse me,” she said, and picked up her shoes, and once she was out of the guest house she ran barefoot into her own house and upstairs to her bedroom, locking doors as she went through.
She got into bed and lay still, listening to crickets, and then the flamingos. There was a faint hum from the hallway light, and she could hear a faucet dripping downstairs in the kitchen. The house made the occasional noises it made at night, something like popping knuckles. She lay with her face against the pillow and heard herself breathe.
She thought about what the blind man had said, and wondered at what horrible things he’d done. They— the Negroes— all had something hidden in the basement; she’d known it all along. And he’d been laughing at her. He’d made her embarrassed and afraid and ashamed of herself, and she knew he was over there now, still laughing.
They could smell fear.
35
COLORADO
T
HEY WAS ON THE AIRPLANE AGAIN, THIS TIME for the Rocky Mountains. The player there was a college boy, wasn’t much older than Train. He hit the ball a long way, shaped his shots to the course, left and right, but Train seen he was thinking too much. Maybe about the money, maybe about the men whose money it was, taking little looks at them after he hit, see how they liked what he was doing. Trying to please everybody at once.
The player’s name was Otto Stiles, and he just been to the quarter finals of the U.S. Amateur, and Train beat him six and five in a course six thousand feet up in the mountains. Never hit a bad shot.
They finished in less than two hours, late in the afternoon, and the ball had hung in the air longer than it seem like it could, like it didn’t want to come down. Train could hear it land from the tee box sometimes, the soft, solid thump hundreds of yards away. Without putting it into words— there wasn’t no reason to put it into words— it was the purest day he ever had. There would be better scores— it wasn’t but a sixty-six; there was already lots of better scores than that— and days he hit it farther, and straighter, but somehow on this afternoon, nothing was wasted. In the end, that’s as much as there was to it: Nothing was wasted. There was owls in the trees, and the college boy and him played a nice speed and nobody talked too much. It wasn’t no “Nice shot” or “Fuck me” or “Hit it, Alice” all the way around. Nobody laughing or crying the blues or saying they was hurt.
The men with the college boy had little meetings with each other as they went along and saw the match getting out of hand, but they kept what they said to themself, standing somewhere away from Train and Otto Stiles, where they couldn’t hear. They quit after thirteen holes, with the college boy down six.
Afterwards, they went to the parking lot to settle up; Mr. Packard and the people that brought the college boy was taking care of the money. Train was used to that by now. They let him play the course, but it was understood he couldn’t be took inside. Didn’t bother him any; he was what all of them was there about. He was the stick.
