“He want you to know he’s thinking about you,” the little man said; “that’s all he said, people saying you played him with money you didn’t have. He see you around, something might happen. That’s why if you got any sense, nigger, you stay out here with the frogs, where it’s safe.”
“He knows where his money’s at,” Train said. “All he got to do is come out and take it back.”
The little man looked again down into the water, trying to spot one of the snappers. “Sometime I like to see that,” he said. “See that look on their face when the bullet come through the shell.”
11
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE MISSED A PERIOD, WHICH WAS NOTHING new. Since the rape, it was a crapshoot anyway. Spotting all the way through the cycle. Something seemed different now, though. She sensed it was different.
She was lying on her back in the pool when she heard the phone. She had been thinking about Packard, worrying how she would tell him about this, if she would be able to see what he was thinking when she told him.
She could not picture him holding a baby, but you never knew.
The phone rang a dozen times, then stopped. A minute later she stood up in the water to go inside, and it began again. She wrapped a towel around her waist and noticed Mr. Moffit was in one of the downstairs windows next door, watching her. She stared directly at him, and he moved slowly away into the shadows. She walked into the house, and thought she might have seen him wave. Maybe telling her the petition wasn’t his idea.
She counted the rings as she went through the kitchen, picked up at fifteen. She thought it might be Packard, although he did not ordinarily call. The phone made him uncomfortable; he liked to be able to see how he was doing.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Rose?”
She stood very still.
“Mrs. Rose? Have I reached Norah Rose?”
“Who is calling please?”
“Is this Mrs. Rose?”
“Who is calling?” she said. She thought it might be the old man from the funeral home again. The son was running the business now, but his father came in a couple of days a week, and dunned people for payment. The son had apologized for him but said there was nothing he could do. Technically, he still owned the business.
“My name is Luther Hollingsworth,” the man said, “with the
Standard.
”
“The what?” She laughed out loud.
“The
Darktown Standard.
A newspaper for the Negro community. I was calling for Mrs. Rose.” She waited and he said, “In regard to Mr. Rose.”
“Mr. Rose has passed away,” she said.
“Oh, I’m aware of that,” he said; “that’s what I’m calling about. In fact, I was wondering when it might be convenient to have an interview.”
“What are you referring to?”
“An interview,” he said, “about Mr. Rose. About the circumstances surrounding his death.”
It was silent again and then, slowly, distinctly, he said, “We just need to verify what happened.” And she hung up.
12
PARADISE DEVELOPMENTS
H
E DROVE THE TRUCK BACK TO THE BARN from the pond, tired out from whatever had got into him when he picked up that wrench, thinking now about what might have happened, how far he been ready to go. He stayed in the barn all afternoon, replacing the truck’s brakes, wondering what the hell happened to his sense, trying to calm himself down. His fingers was shaking again and unmanageable. He kept going over how the little man incited him at the pond, at how close he come. What else was he gone do with a wrench in his hand? And then what? He thought of the way Mayflower’s head blossomed open, and pictured it happening again.
He got tired of thinking after a while, and forgave himself for what he almost did, because there wasn’t nothing to be done about it one way or the other now, and went on from there. A little later, though, he caught himself wondering how much of the little man the snappers could eat.
He was thinking about the snappers, in fact, when he forgot where he was with the brake job and smashed all eight of his fingertips at once, slamming the drum back on the wheel. It was a hundret times worst than running his toe into the root after Florida died, the only time in Train’s life something hurt too bad to make any noise. He started to, but nothing come out.
Train staggered out of the barn, breathless, his eyes blind with tears, and walked bent over to the street and waited for the bus. He sucked on his fingers; he made his hands into fists. Everything he did hurt him worse. It was a confusion of pain. He felt his pulse in his fingertips, and his pulse in his head too, only faster, pounding like it was trying to keep up. The bus came and he could barely get the change out of his pocket for the ride.
Back at the gym, he turned off the lights and rolled up into a ball, his hands between his legs. Plural came up the stairs later, drunk and in the company of a woman a yard wide, and the first thing he done was turn the lights back on.
“Lookit here, Lionel,” he said, “I brung enough for us both.” She laughed and lift him up off the floor, and Train rolled over and moved his fingertips under his armpits and held them there, tried to hold himself like that, see if it did any good. Nothing helped, though, and when Plural asked him what was wrong and he never answered, Plural had the girl put him down. He come over and unrolled Train like a shirt he was going to iron and saw his fingertips was swollen and red, except the nails, which was now turned purple.
Plural laughed and pulled him up off the mat and walked him to the sink. He laid Train’s hands on the edge, the girl watching over his shoulder, and then opened his wallet and found a sewing needle— a sewing needle— and begun turning the point into the nail of the pinkie on Train’s left hand. Train jumped at the pressure, but things already hurt as bad as they could, and a minute or two later he heard a little popping noise as the needle broke through, and then a line of blood squirted three inches in the air, and then relief.
The girl squealed and ast if she could do one herself.
Plural went through each nail like that, and one after another they squirted blood two or three inches in the air, and he felt better after each one.
The day had worn Train out, start to finish, and he went back to where they slept and crawled into the bottom shelf and fell asleep. He woke later in the night, Plural and the girl up there above him, both of them snoring, and saw the boards bending under their weight. He pulled his mat off the shelf and all the way into the ring and went to sleep in the shadows of the ropes, not wanting to be an accident victim twice in the same day.
He woke up again and the girl was gone. He sat up and checked his pants pocket; the money was still there. Plural slept with the windows open, and the place was never completely quiet, not even at four in the morning. Always something going on in the street, people yelling or drinking or fighting, horns— you could always hear horns somewhere.
An hour passed. Cars went by outside; then a siren wailed its way into the city. When it was gone too, he looked over at the window screen, and it was covered with a thousand moths.
13
BEVERLY HILLS
S
HE WATCHED PACKARD PARK AND WALK THROUGH the back door into the kitchen. He took off his coat and his shoes and got a Pabst Blue Ribbon out of the icebox. He dropped into a chair and closed his eyes and rested his head against the back. She came into the room and sat next to him, not knowing what to tell him first. He put his arm across her lap without looking up. They had been arguing earlier; she couldn’t remember what it was about. His arm was uncomfortable and heavy.
“Somebody called today,” she said. He opened his eyes, but nothing else moved. He didn’t like her to answer the phone when he wasn’t home. His feet were crossed at the ankle and there was a tiny hole in one of the socks. She knew they would be in the wastebasket tomorrow. “He wanted to talk about Alec. I didn’t get his name.”
She saw his feet tense. They mentioned Alec only when there wasn’t some way to avoid it. Packard was impatient with the past, her past and his. On the whole subject of things that were over, he was like a dog wanting to move on to the next scent, a dog who only knew there was something up ahead to put his nose into next. He took a long drink of his beer, then offered her the bottle. He thought for a minute and watched her drink.
“What did he say?”
She tried to remember the exact words. “That he wanted to verify what happened. He was with a newspaper. And he kept calling me Mrs. Rose.” She finished what was left in the bottle.
“What newspaper?” he said.
“That was the funny part,” she said. “Something called the
Darktown Standard
? It’s supposed to be in Watts.” He moved his arm off her lap and put it underneath her, and then stood up. He carried her upstairs, and up there, on the bed, she thought about the tiny thing inside her, bouncing off the walls as he drove it in and backed it out, again and again, and wondered, when it was over and things in there were quiet again, if it would imagine it had been in a storm.
“Nobody can verify what happened,” he said later, indicating somehow that he included himself in that, and her.
14
DARKTOWN
P
LURAL WAS GIVING SOME ROUNDS THESE DAYS to a young white boy that was getting ready for a ten-rounder at the Olympic. The white boy’s trainer had turned Plural around left-handed, paid him a dollar a round to move with him but not do nothing to take away his confidence. The boy was always late— come in sometimes at seven-thirty or eight o’clock, after all the regulars had left. The trainer looked like he gone bleed out the ears if he don’t get into another business.
Train watched them night after night. Plural with his mouth all misshaped by whatever mouthpiece he found that night lying around the sink, letting the boy touch him now and then, but always turning with the punch, turning away just as it got there, like a door somebody opened from the other side just as you were going in. The boy had half a foot and twenty, twenty-five pounds on Plural and it frustrated him not to be able to hurt him.
Plural had the stumbles, of course— Train watched him bend down to tie a shoelace one day and just stop cold, trying to remember how, and then it was like a child going through the steps one by one— but in the ring, with this young bull coming after him, trying to break him up, Plural was as natural as the breeze. He just moved where the dance took him, this way and that, and nothing ever hit him solid.
