Underworld

  Like my god Nick, how could this be here without my knowing?

  The tension of our pressed bodies was heightened by the physical fact of color, painted light pouring toward us. The sun burned high on the line divide. We’d dropped to two hundred feet and Jerry ran a blast of flame. When we were nearly on it the work grew rougher and frontal. I could see unpainted intervals, dead metal strips across the wings of several planes, peroxide white, scabby and gashed, and a trace of stenciled safety instructions apparent on one fuselage. The piece looked hard-won. It lost its flow and became more deeply grained, thick paint in uneven sheets, spray-gunned on. I saw the struggle to make it, scores of people in this chalk heat, muscles and lungs. And I looked for the blond girl in the flouncy skirt painted on a forward fuselage and was elated to spot her, long and tall and unre-touched, the nose art, the pinup, the ordinary life and lucky sign that animated the work.

  I could see Marian try to absorb the number. She was not counting but wanted to know, simply as a measure of her amazement. And when I whispered two hundred and thirty at last count, she concentrated more deeply, testing the figure against the dense array, the giddiness of general effect. We passed directly over. The planes were enormous of course, they were objects of hulking size, stratofortresses, thick and massy, slab-finned, wings set high on the fuselage, a few missile pylons still intact, a few outrigger wheels suspended, the main wheels chocked on every plane.

  And truly I thought they were great things, painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to augur it.

  And we moved toward the blank flats that framed the aircraft and saw how the work lost vigor at the fringes, giving way, melted by intention in the desert.

  Marian said, “I can never look at a painting the same way again.”

  “I can never look at an airplane.”

  “Or an airplane,” she said.

  And I wondered if the piece was visible from space like the land art of some lost Andean people.

  The breeze took us past and the pilot yanked the blast handle, giving us a final inchmeal rise. We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they’ve been up there, the same two birds since bible times. There were stones tumbled in a field, great bronze rocks with carved flanks. I felt my wife at my side. We saw dust blowing off the dark hills and a pair of abandoned cars flopped in forage grass, convertibles with shredded tops. Everything we saw was ominous and shining, tense with the beauty of things that are normally unseen, even the cars gone to canker and rust. The pilot pointed to an object some miles away and we saw it was the chase car, a droplet nosing down a long road toward the place on earth where we would light.

  That night we had friends over for dinner and the talk was swift and funny, flying cross-table well past midnight, and when they were gone but also while they were there—they were still there when I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.

  When they were gone we lay in bed. We slept in a bookwalled room with creamy shelves and deep carpets and lighting that had a halftone density, warm and whiskeyish. Marian looked at a magazine, turning pages with a crispness that might have seemed short-tempered to someone who didn’t know her habits.

  “The long day.”

  “The long drive. The drive was oh boy,” I said, “a killer.”

  “Is this the longest day of my life?”

  “The drive was the screaming meemies. I hate those trucks, man.”

  “I still feel the drive. But it was marvelous, all of it.”

  “It was unmarvelous. It was marvelous because you slept.”

  She turned a page.

  “Did you notice how they finish each other’s sentences?”

  “I drove, you slept.”

  “She says, Da da da. He says, Dumdy dum.”

  “It’s not the worst fate. I mean even strangers do it. Everybody does it to somebody.”

  “And I didn’t sleep. I was one level down for ten minutes.”

  “It’s the only way to get certain sentences finished.”

  “They ate the roasted corn relish.”

  “Of course they ate the roasted corn relish. The roasted corn relish was great. Speaking of maps. I’d like to get some old maps. I hate our maps.”

  “Look at this. The Rapture is approaching. October twenty-eight. They give the exact date.”

  “I saw that.”

  “The mark of the beast. Did you see that? It’s on the universal product code. Every product.”

  “That’s right. Every box of Jell-0 they put through the scanner.”

  “I’m having one of those nights,” she said.

  “What?”

  “One of those nighty nights.”

  “What?”

  “I’m having that sort of thing where I know I won’t sleep. It’s the knowing that does it. It’s not the tired. Because I’m actually very tired.”

  “Restless.”

  “No, it’s a tired but not sleepy type thing. Six six six. So the supermarket is a weird sort of place.”

  “We always knew it was.”

  I turned off my light and looked into the deep cream ceiling with my hands behind my head.

  “She’s got a great body for how many kids? Alison. Four kids?” I said.

  “Which means I’m either half as great or twice as great but let’s not pursue it. What’s-his-name Terry was here. The heavyset one.”

  “Been years since I looked at a real map. It’s a sort of Robert Louis Stevenson thing to do. We have maps of highways and motels. Our maps have rest stops and wheelchair symbols.”

  “Just tell me what his name is.”

  “For what, the faucet?”

  “Day before yesterday or yesterday. Today’s been so long I don’t know anymore. No, the showerhead.”

  “The hell’s wrong with the showerhead? Our maps have pancake houses.”

  “What’s-his-name with the orange pickup.”

  “Which shower are we talking about?”

  “Terry, right?”

  She turned a page. She used a book pillow to read when she was in bed. I ordered it for her out of a catalog, jewel-tone jacquard, a wedge-shaped cushion that nestles in the lap and holds your book or magazine at the proper angle, with tasseled bookmarks built in and a slot in back for your reading glasses.

  “I’m going Tuesday. I tell you that?”

  “This is, what, Moscow? Or Boston. Too soon for Moscow. Which is the heavyset one? I get them completely.”

  “I need to get these shoes resoled before I go. Remind me to do that tomorrow.”

  “I have this thing on my leg.”

  “It’s not Boston,” I said.

  “It’s not Boston.”

  “It’s Portland.”

  “It’s Portland.”

  “What thing?” I said.

  “On the inside of my thigh.”

  “Call Williamson.”

  “It could be an irritation.”

  “Call Williamson. When did you get it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it comes and goes.”

  She turned a page.

  “Lainie had the wallpaper today.”

  “About time.”

  “That was her that called.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell her.”

  “Of course I didn’t tell her. What was I going to tell her? Sweetheart, we drove right past but didn’t stop.”

  “Stopping would have been.”

  “We saw them when was it. Recent recent recent. Not that recent actually.”

  “Recent enough. We don’t want to overdo it.”

  “Paperhangers. One was a woman, she said.”

  “I’m still not completely over this motherfucking cold. Why is that?” I said.

  She turned a page.

  “Why is that?” I said.

  “Ta
ke some of those antihistamines you take. They’re hard to buy.”

  “The tablets.”

  “The caplets.”

  “You’re all revved up. I can feel the energy.”

  “I’m not revved up. I’m tired. My mind is in that sort of place. You can forget about sleep, it’s telling me.”

  I selected the jewel-tone jacquard over the ivory because the weave went well with our carpets.

  “I saw him in that orange truck he drives. The heavyset one. Last time I installed it myself but this time nothing fit.”

  “Because the universe is expanding. It expands in warm weather. Remind me we need some sixty-watt bulbs.”

  “I pulled alongside and he said he could be here in an hour and he showed up exactly on time and he installed the thing in exactly ten minutes and that was the end of that.”

  She turned a page and then another. She had a way of sounding grim when she was actually showing satisfaction, showing completion—the finishing of a task or the telling of a story with a moral.

  “Did you tell her to spackle?”

  “They did the baby’s room first.”

  “Because this is not something Dex is going to figure out for himself. I only hope they spackled.”

  “Take the twelve-hour antihistamines. The four-hour make you drowsy.”

  “What’s wrong with drowsy? Remind me we need bulbs for the pantry.”

  “Just tell me his name. The heavyset kid is the one whose father, right?”

  “And had to be subdued by four or five cops.”

  “Heavyset.”

  “Can’t you call him fat? Call him fat. He is tremendously fat,” I said.

  “He has rolls of fat. It’s true.”

  “Maybe the bulb’s loose. Remind me to tighten the bulb. Too soon for Moscow.”

  She turned a page.

  “Is it a lump?” I said.

  “What? No, I wouldn’t use that word. No, it’s an irritation.”

  “Maybe it’s the estrogen.”

  “No no no no no.”

  “Call Williamson,” I said.

  I turned on my side and heard a plane in a landing pattern, a late flight from somewhere.

  “Eight hours of solid sleep. That’s what I need.”

  “It’s true actually. You’ve got one good pair of shoes and they need fixing.”

  “I almost bought some shoes in Italy. I almost bought some shoes in Italy.”

  She turned a page.

  “What’s the name of that stuff I wanted to tell your mother to use?”

  “Wait a second. I know.”

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she said.

  “Wait a second. I know.”

  “You know the stuff I mean.”

  “The sleep stuff or the indigestion?”

  “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  “Wait a second. Wait a second. I know.”

  About three hours later I sat in the armchair in a corner of the bedroom feeling damp and cold, a chill sweat across my back and neck and under my arms. I’d come out of a dream deep-breathing and clammy, breathing fast and loud—so odd and loud and fast it woke me up, or something did.

  I had the baseball in my hand. Usually I kept the baseball on the bookshelves, wedged in a corner between straight-up books and slanted books, tented under books, unceremoniously. But now I had it in my hand. You have to know the feel of a baseball in your hand, going back a while, connecting many things, before you can understand why a man would sit in a chair at four in the morning holding such an object, clutching it—how it fits the palm so reassuringly, the corked center making it buoyant in the hand, and the rough spots on an old ball, the marked skin, how an idle thumb likes to worry the scuffed horsehide. You squeeze a baseball. You kind of juice it or milk it. The resistance of the packed material makes you want to press harder. There’s an equilibrium, an agreeable animal tension between the hard leather object and the sort of clawed hand, veins stretching with the effort. And the feel of raised seams across the fingertips, cloth contours like road bumps under the knuckle joints—how the whorled cotton can be seen as a magnified thumbprint, a blowup of the convoluted ridges on the pad of your thumb. The ball was a deep sepia, veneered with dirt and turf and generational sweat—it was old, bunged up, it was bashed and tobacco-juiced and stained by natural processes and by the lives behind it, weather-spattered and charactered as a seafront house. And it was smudged green near the Spalding trademark, it was still wearing a small green bruise where it had struck a pillar according to the history that came with it—flaked paint from a bolted column in the left-field stands embedded in the surface of the ball.

  Thirty-four thousand five hundred dollars.

  How the hand works memories out of the baseball that have nothing to do with games of the usual sort.

  Bad luck, Branca luck. From him to me. The moment that makes the life.

  Marian caught me once looking at the ball. I was standing at the bookshelves with the ball in my hand and she thought it was like Hamlet gazing on Yorick’s skull or maybe Aristotle, even better she said, contemplating the bust of Homer. That was nice, we thought. Rembrandt’s Homer and Thomson’s homer. We smiled at that.

  I thought of the old radio voice, Russ Hodges, dead now twenty years or more, disbelief and thrill, the force of a single human voice coming out of a box.

  She didn’t ask whether it was Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon when I said it was not Boston, it was Portland, and I’d felt the question coming, layered in the sequence of our exchange, waiting to edge out, but one of us fell asleep before she could ask which Portland by the way in those words exactly, I think I fell asleep first but maybe not—the light was out, the last light was out.

  Then I came up out of a dream and felt my way to the armchair, breathing funny, and switched on the small reading lamp.

  And the crowd noise behind the voice, the incessant smash and tension, the thickness, the sort of bristle and teem that deepened at a turn in play—a noise so dense it might have had a flash point, a heat to blow out the radio.

  I heard my mother in the next room getting up to go to the toilet. I listened to her come out of the room. I waited and listened, nearly breathless. I waited for the shuffle of slippers along the hall, for the pace, the familiar rate and pace of the shuffle, and then I listened for the sound of water flushing—fully intent, listening in the fiercest kind of concentrated stillness until she was safely back in bed.

  I hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face, the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

  Maybe that was the dream—I wasn’t sure.

  Then I got the baseball from the bookshelves and sat in the armchair and looked into the whiskey-cream ceiling.

  I didn’t listen to the Dodger station that day. I listened to Russ Hodges instead, trying to work a reverse kind of luck. Never occurred to me at the time—I didn’t think of it in fact until I sat in the armchair squeezing the baseball—but Russell Hodges, if you count the letters, if you’re odd enough to think of doing such a thing, spinning out the full name and counting the characters, you may be amused to see old thirteen.

  I felt calmer now. I felt all right. My arm hung over the side of the chair and I squeezed the baseball, listening to Marian sleep-breathe—squeezed it hard, the veins leveling on the back of my hand, going dead flat.

  Maybe we fell asleep simultaneously. Then I felt my way to the armchair and switched on the lamp. I stood there, pulling my pajama shirt away from my body where the sweat made it cling. Then I went to the bookshelves and got the baseball.

  She was sitting up. She wasn’t exactly sitting up, she was propped—I realized she was awake, propped on an elbow looking at me, rubbing her temple with her right hand.

  “Nick?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Come back to bed.”

  “I’m a
ll right. Go to sleep.”

  “It was a lovely birthday, wasn’t it?”

  “Do you want me to turn out this light?”

  “No. Just come to bed.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “I want you next to me,” she said.

  I stood on the roof with my radio placed on the ledge and sometimes I squatted and took the radio down with me, down behind the ledge, surrounding it sort of, taking hope from it, suffering the game’s slides and veers, rooting from the gut—an Emerson, maroon, that I took everywhere. But when I stood I faced southwest, looking beyond the hospital for the incurable and past the elevated tracks on Third Avenue, looking toward the river that cuts the boroughs. That’s where the Polo Grounds stood, west by southwest, and I imagined the field and the players, the crisp blues and elysian greens on that great somber-skied day—great and terrible, a day now gone to black and white in the film fade of memory.

  MANX MARTIN 1

  * * *

  Then he remembers his books and goes back down the stairs because you can’t come home from school without your schoolbooks, fool. He forces the baseball into his side pocket and leans into the dim triangle behind the stairs, where the bottom of the first flight meets the floor, and he scoops the three books he left there in the morning, slides them out and scoops them up, plus a composition book with a mottled cover, and he blows away the dust and smut and sourness.

  The janitor comes in the back door from the yards, the new janitor, he limps so bad you’re not even sure you feel sorry for him—maybe you wonder why he’s walking around at all.

  “What’s this?”

  “Dropped something,” Cotter says.

  “I need to talk to your father.”

  “When I see him.”

  “Tell him,” the man says.

  Cotter can’t figure out how the janitor knows who he is. The last janitor left in a hurry and the new man just arrived and he has four buildings he takes care of and a limp that’s hard to look at and he already knows which son belongs to the matching father and it’s probably not a mistake. People always want to talk to his father. His father spends hours every day in flight from these conversations.