Book
Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Train
by Pete Dexter Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Raw Every word Pete Dexter chose in his new
novel, Train,
fits. No extra words, nothing missing. His sparse style forces a reader to
stay glued to every page, and receive pleasure with each page turn. Protagonist
Lionel Walk’s nickname gives the book its title. A caddie, he meets Miller
Packard, on the course, and the pain of their lives dominate the book. Dexter
is a master at pain, as he’s shown in his earlier novels. Love and loss,
racism, physical abuse, murder, are all parts of the pain in Train. It’s raw,
efficient and real. In the hands of a great writer, it’s a pleasure to
experience. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 2 (pp. 9-13): BROOKLINE Los
Angeles, March 1953 The
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 yellowow 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 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 die 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 banging 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." Not that it
bothered the superintendent any. He started calling himself that lately, in
fact, seemed pleased with the idea he had them wanting to fire him. It was the custom at Brookline when you got mad
enough to throw your sticks, the first thing you did when you come back to
your senses was to blame it on History, but these days it was more connected
to his romance with Helen Sears than his habit of sitting around on his ass
all day reading books while the course went to hell. She was even driving him
to work now. Bud Sears was dead since Halloween, but that wasn't the point.
The point—at least the way History explained it—was that you die and then the
greenskeeper just walks in the front door and heads to the liquor
cabinet, probably wearing your shoes. It was everything wrong with being old
and rich, the core of the apple: scavengers was everywhere. It tickled History to death. Sometimes in the morning when there was extra work out on
the course, History called down to the caddy shed for Train and paid him
three dollars for the day to run the mowers or fill divots or punch the
greens or whatever it was had to be done. He used Train because he was
strong—stronger than the rest of the grounds crew could believe, looking at
him—and a fast learner, and never complained that he had too
much to do. When Train was finished, History was usually back in the storage barn, sitting
around on his ass drinking a martini and reading The Great Gatsby.
He'd been inside that same book ever since he started up with Helen Sears,
seemed like he couldn't get enough of the story. Sometimes he read parts of
it out loud. He kept gin, vermouth, and a bottle of olives on the same shelf
with the motor oil, and one afternoon he showed Train how to make a dry
martini, and told him that anything further he needed to know about the
country club set he would find in the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dexter’s books are few and far between, so
enjoy Train
soon, and spend some years waiting for another masterful novel. Steve Hopkins, November 24, 2003 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Train.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
