Train Read Free

began to come back, it was from another place. It was hard to say exactly where, but approximately from one of the row-house roofs. He began to see himself and the street clearly, though, see the whole mess he was in, and then it changed and it was the mess he — the other he— was in, and it was all suddenly secondhand.
     
     
The ambulance arrived much later, and the medics found him lying half-conscious in the snow and saw the leg— told him he might lose the leg— and gave him a shot of morphine for the pain and wrote in their report later that the victim was delirious, that nothing they said would make him stop laughing.
     
     
     
     

2
     
     
BROOKLINE
     
     
Los Angeles, March 1953
     
     
T HE FAT MAN COULDN’T TURN IT LOOSE. GOT the sun in the sky, birds in the trees, shine on his shoes— everything a gentleman need but two wives and a death wish, as the old saying went— but he still just stood there froze over the ball, the seconds ticking away, like somebody couldn’t pee for the nurse.
     
     
And yellow pants, speaking of urination.
     
     
The boy was a few steps behind the fat man and to the side, carrying his bag. He’d been standing by watching half the morning, and there was something about the fat man he still couldn’t place. Something familiar that reminded him of something else. The boy waited for the connection to come, not trying to hurry it along. Connections came to him all the time— people to things and things to people, things to each other, surprises and amusedments out of the thin air— it wasn’t anything he did to cause it, and sometimes, like now, he knew one was there before he knew what it was.
     
     
And sometimes, of course, it turned out to be a surprise but not no amusedment at all.
     
     
The boy was almost eighteen years old, but innocent-looking for that age, still hadn’t grown into his feet, and when he spoke, it was soft and mumbled, where you could barely tell what he said. He was known around these environs as Train.
     
     
The fat man’s weight hung over his belt in bags in front and over the sides, and his thighs moved around under those big loose pants— it look like children hiding in the curtains. He took a long breath and then went still, with eyes like a strangling.
     
     
This same thing been going on long enough now that it lost its comical aspect. Then a ripple passed across his face, like a fish swam up to the surface, and they all saw it and knew it was time to shut up and hold still, and for a little while nobody moved, nobody dare to move, because any little perturbation now, any flutterance in the air, and they got to all go back and start over from the beginning. The breeze itself stopped blowing.
     
     
The boy held his breath, and held the bag— his hand went over the irons to keep them quiet— and then the fat man sighed, like the news on this shot was already in, feeling that old, familiar misery stalking him again, and picked the club almost straight up off the ground.
     
     
Which was a relief to all concerned.
     
     
Once the swing was safely begun, Train went squint-eyed, as he sometimes did to diversify himself when things was slow, and watched the whole scene transmogrified around to Little Bighorn, Montana. (The boy picked up that word off a tote, a retired justice of the peace from someplace down south, who found it himself in the Reader’s Digest ’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” and ever since, every time he hit it into the water or out into the yards and houses and streets beyond the course, he turned to his playing partners and said, “Gentlemen, you have witnessed an officer of the court transmogrified to human shit,” and that was surefire material for the regular associates of his, no matter how many times they heard it before.)
     
     
The fat man lifted the club higher, pulling himself up with it, and Train saw Custer, all wore-out, fighting to the end in his yellow pants, standing his ground