Train Read Free Page A

and swinging at the redskins with an empty rifle as they floated past on their war ponies. The last white man alive.
     
     
There was a thought.
     
     
And then, just like the movie, here come the tomahawk, cutting down through the sky, death on a stick, and then a wet, heavy noise when it hit home. And then Custer was gone as fast as he come, and the club head had took a divot half a foot deep, and the ball itself squirted almost straight right, off the cart path toward the trees.
     
     
Time slowed down and everybody went numb-mouth at once. The ball ran like a jail break, and the boy knew to a certainty that even though it was only a twosome, this round was surely three hours a side, and there wasn’t no chance in hell he was finishing in time to carry two bags today. They gone out late in the first place— didn’t get on the first tee till 10:22— and as soon as the fat man had hit it once, Train realized that his wet dreams was better organized than his tote’s golf swing.
     
     
He looked back up the fairway now to keep the fat man from seeing what he was thinking. Not that he would necessarily know exactly what it was, but they were all quick to notice cheek in their caddies.
     
     
The fat man, though, was still staring at the spot where the ball gone into the trees, like he was offering it one last chance to give itself up and come out, and then without any warning he wheeled around and sent the club in there too, a sound vomiting up out of him that wasn’t in any Reader’s Digest, or any dictionary, that didn’t have letters to spell it, a sound as old as the ancient game of golf itself. He grunted with the effort and the shaft winked in the sun as it crossed the morning sky.
     
     

“They must of left the sprinklers on all night,” the fat man said after he got back in control of his deportment again. He lifted his shirt to look at the line of mud that had splashed up, and Train saw a patch of wild red hair on the hanging underside of his belly, and the skin beneath it was faintly blue with veins. “It’s getting worst than the public courses,” he said, “the way History keeps this thing.” And then, glancing at his stomach, as if something there reminded him of it, he said, “Maybe he got his pecker stuck in Helen Sears’ storm drain last night. . . .”
     
     
The man he was playing with started to laugh at that, got about halfway home. He didn’t make no laughing sound, just the motion, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking. He was a guest, though, not a member, so he didn’t know who Helen Sears was, didn’t know nothing about the situation. Just walked around so far looking like something out here might amused him. What it was, Train couldn’t say. The name tag on his golf bag was from Hillcrest, said Mr. Miller Packard, but Train named him “the Mile Away Man” on the first tee, on account it seemed like in all that amusedment, the man was someplace else half the time, like not everything was getting through. It was an old habit, naming his totes; there was five or six he called “the Living Dead.” Not out loud, of course, only to himself, behind his expressionless face.
     
     
Train, whose name was Lionel Walk, Jr., kept to himself and always had. The other caddies laughed at their totes back in the shed, imitated what they said and how they limped, but then they picked up the bag and it was “Yessir” and “No sir” and “Thank you, sir,” all the way around. The boy did not have the looseness for that, but expected that someday he would. From what he seen, the world conducted its business by who was there when you was talking.
     
     
Even the members themself watched what they said, he noticed, at least around each other. Or until they started to playing bad. Around the working people, of course, they didn’t care. For instance, they been calling the greens superintendent “History” all year, sometimes right to his face. As in “He’s history.”