Underworld

  He climbs to four and goes inside. His sister is there, Rosie, poring over her homework at the kitchen table. Rosie’s sixteen, always blasting away at the books, and he has two older brothers, one in Korea with the infantry and one in the airborne stationed in Georgia. This is the peach state. But if Cotter had to choose between these two forms of employment he thinks he’d rather face a weaponed enemy in snow and mud than walk out a door into the balmy evening air with a snatch of bundled silk hanging on his back.

  “What’s he carrying in his pocket? Makes a person wonder,” Rosie says. “Looks like an apple to me. Maybe he went to an orchard on his day off.”

  “What day off?”

  “Traveled upstate on a bus to pick some apples. Of course we have apples right here. But that’s for after school. No school, no apples. Is that why he found his own apple?”

  “If I didn’t go to school, where did I go?”

  “I don’t know but when I saw you from the window you had no books and when you walked in the door, lo and behold.”

  “Then you know that’s not an apple in my pocket.”

  He takes out the ball and does his flip trick, back-spinning the thing over his hand and wrist and catching it with a sort of gearshift motion, elbow in reverse. This gets Rosie smiling and she plants her face in the book again, which tells Cotter he has won a little victory because it is only when this girl goes wordless that you know she is showing respect.

  In his room he looks out the window, the room he used to share with his brothers, remarkably his own now, and then he drops the ball on the khaki blanket in the lower bunk, it is the only military touch, the sturdy olive drab, and he grabs a sweater off the chair back. He fits the sweater over his head and looks out the window again, watching people move through the streetlights and into the partial dark. Gets dark too soon. He stands and looks, just watching, being nobody in a window, and then he hears his mother pushing through the door.

  He snaps to, thinking what he has to say if he is challenged about missing school. But he knows Rosie will not snitch on him. He thinks he knows this. He is confident more or less. He thinks he feels her loyalty through the walls and he goes into the kitchen where his mother is putting away groceries and he drops a hand on Rosie’s shoulder and stands at the table with an eye fixed on the bright boxes and cans his mother is placing on the shelves.

  His mother says, “How many times?”

  “What?”

  “You have to be told. Don’t wear that sweater. I need to clean that sweater.”

  “Plunge it in something strong,” Rosie says.

  “That’s a filthy sweater.”

  “Take it to the cleaner, they’ll give it back,” Rosie says. “Rejected.”

  See, the world is filled with things he’s not supposed to do and not supposed to wear. But maybe he likes it when they array against him, it’s different from his brothers, who bossed him a little and teased him a little but did not show this picky interest, this endless searching concern. His sister’s head poked forward so she can study the particular jut of his dumbness. He likes running his fingers over the edge of the fruit bowl, over the specked glaze, with Rosie’s books sprawled on the table and the fruit in the bowl and his mother doing things at the stove or cabinet, the way his mother talks to him and never looks in his direction but knows where he is and measures her voice to his sliding whereabouts, room by room. Maybe he wants them to figure him out so they can let him in on the secret.

  “The sweater’s got burrs,” Rosie says. She seems to like that word and puts a teasey nonchalance in her voice. “He’s full of burrs from some apple orchard he must have visited sometime or other.”

  He runs his fingers over the inside edge of the bowl, feeling the sort of spatter of whirled material, the bubbly pinpoint warps. His mother tells him to wash his hands. She is not looking at him but knows the state of his hands from the position of the sun and moon. He must be walking dirt. Walking talking filthman from the planet Dirt.

  At dinner they are quiet. This is because his father is not here and might walk in any time and then again might not and they are in a state of involuntary waiting. Funny how his mother pushes through the door, shouldering in with shopping bags and bundles and her purse that she wears on a long strap over her head and across her body, maybe dragging a handled bag or nudging it out of the hallway with a peg-leg motion and making six kinds of noise even when she’s not carrying something, bringing the streets in with her, the subways, buses and streets, all the noise and labor of getting uptown and downtown, that’s his mother, and his father usually sliding in unannounced, standing and glaring, stuck to the wall like he wandered in the wrong door and needs to work out the details of his mistake.

  His mother is tall and slightly lopsided and she is strong. He knows this because he has lifted things she has lifted, he has come up four flights with things she often carries, and poker-faced—it takes her half a minute to work a smile out of those unused muscles.

  She says, “I saw that man who preaches in the street. Same place every time.”

  “I did too,” Cotter says.

  “I said to myself this man has a life even if we can’t imagine it. This man goes home somewhere. But where does he go? How does he live? I try to imagine what does he do when he’s not out there preaching.”

  Rosie says, “I see these people lots of places.”

  “But this man’s steady. Same place. I don’t think he cares if people listen. He’ll preach to cars going by.”

  “What was he preaching?”

  “How no one knows the day or the hour. Seems there’s been the Russians exploding an A-bomb. So no one knows the day or the hour. They announced it on the news.”

  Rosie says, “I can’t get worked up.”

  “I got worked up until I started up the stairs with those shopping bags. Thought I was going to pull my shoulder out of the socket.”

  “Back to normal,” Rosie says.

  “But I stood and listened to him. I have to say. First time I listened to the man.”

  “He’s always there,” Cotter says.

  “First time I listened. No one knows the day or the hour. I believe this is Matthew twenty-four.”

  “I can’t get worked up,” Rosie says.

  “But the man has a life and it’s a mystery to me how he lives it.”

  “People always preaching,” Rosie says.

  “Those clothes he wears. I think it’s a shame. And he’s not a crazy man. He knows his scriptures.”

  “You can know your scriptures,” Cotter says. “There’s people know their scriptures they’re crazy as a loon.”

  “Amen,” says his sister.

  After dinner he’s back in his room looking out the window. He’s supposed to be in his room doing his homework and he’s in his room all right but he doesn’t know what his homework is supposed to be. He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there’s another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents. There’s a kid in his class who eats pages from his history book nearly every day. The way he does it, he places the open book under the desk in his crotch and slyly crumples a page, easing it off the spine with the least amount of rustle. Then he has the strategy of wait a while before he brings his fist to his mouth in a sort of muffled cough with the page inside the fist, like whitesy-bitesy. Then he stuffs in the page and the tiny printed ink and the memorized dates, engrossing it quietly. He waits some more. He lets the page idle in his mouth. Then he chews it slowly and carefully and incomplete, damping the sound by making sure his teeth do not meet, and Cotter tries to imagine how it tastes, all the paper points and edges washed in saliva, becoming soft and limp and blottered so you can swallow smooth. He swallows not so smooth. You can see his adam’s apple jerk like he just landed a plane on a foreign shore.

  War and treaties, eat your Wheaties.

  Rosie
’s in the shower now. He sits on his bunk and hears water beating on the other side of the wall and he thinks about the game. He remembers things he didn’t know he’d seen or heard, people on the exit ramp—he sees shirt colors and hears voices coming back to him. A cop on a horse, the boot shine and animal heat, and he hears water beating on the galvanized walls of the shower, the rattling stain-walled shower that someone added to the bathroom years before.

  When his father comes in, there is no doubt of the entrance, the singing of the hinges when the door opens slowly, the way he does not carry sound with him out of the entranceway—there’s no shaking out of clothes or heavy breath from the climb up the stairs. Not that you can’t hear him at all. He maintains a presence near the door, a hear-able something, maybe just the tension of a man standing on a linoleum floor or some tone that comes off his body, a tightness that says he’s home.

  Cotter sits on the lower bunk and waits. His father comes through the kitchen and appears in the doorway, Manx Martin. He’s a working man, a furniture mover when he’s employed and a whiskey swigger when he’s not. He looks at Cotter and nods pointlessly. He stands there nodding, a gesture that has no point, that seems to mean Oh yeah it’s you if it means anything at all. Then he comes in the room and sits on the unused bed, the cot. They listen to the water beating on the shower walls.

  “Had your dinner?”

  “Meat loaf.”

  “Leave some for me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know Why, you left the table early? You had an appointment downtown?”

  He sees the man is kidding. His father’s eyes go narrow and he does his pencil-line smile. He is a man with high cheekbones sort of poxed in the hollows, rough-graded, and a thin mustache that he keeps well above his lip, tended and particular. He looks around the room. He studies things. He seems to believe this is the right time to see what kind of surroundings his sons grew up in. He is average size, a little developed in the chest, a little bowlegged, and Cotter would not have thought he had the brawn to move heavy pieces up and down long flights of stairs. But he has seen his father lift and hoist with much bigger men.

  “Which one’s in there?”

  “Rosie.”

  “Washing up a storm.”

  “The way she does homework. To the last ounce.”

  “Finishes what she starts, that girl.”

  It bothers Cotter in some lurking way, to sit here with his father talking about Rosie while they hear her in the shower. Just then the water stops.

  “Because I need to take a leak, you see.”

  “Super wants to talk to you.”

  “He’s a yard dog. Pay no mind.”

  “How come he knows us if he just got here?”

  “Maybe we’re famous, you and me. Two hombres that they put out the word these guys be mighty tough.”

  Cotter relaxes a little. He thinks maybe this is going to be all right. The man is feeling no pain as they say and there’s something he can get from his father that he can’t get from his mother.

  Manx calls out, “Rosie baby. Your daddy needs to use the fa-cil-i-tees.”

  They hear a smothered word or two and then she goes across the hall barefoot in a towel and Manx stands and hitches his pants and clicks his tongue and walks out of the room.

  Cotter thinks without knowing it, without preparing the thought—he sees Bill Waterson on Eighth Avenue with his jacket bunched in his hand. He picks up the baseball and looks at it and puts it down. His father is taking a king leak. You don’t usually hear anything but the shower in there and noises from the pipes but his father is taking a leak that is the all-time king. It is quickly becoming funny, the time span and force of the leak, and Cotter wishes his brothers were here so they could all be amazed together.

  He comes back in and sits down. He’s still wearing his jacket, a corduroy windbreaker that used to belong to Randall, speaking of brothers.

  “There now. We feeling better.”

  “How’d you like to write a letter for me? I need it for school,” Cotter says.

  “Oh yeah? That says what?”

  “That says I missed a day due to illness.”

  “Dear so-and-so.”

  “That’s right. Like that.”

  “Please excuse my son.”

  “That’s the way.”

  “Due to he was ill.”

  “Tell them it was a fever.”

  “How feverish’d you get?”

  “Say one hundred ought to do it.”

  “We don’t want to be too modest. If we’re gonna do this thing.”

  “Okay. As he had a fever of a hundred and two.”

  “Of course you look to me like you’re in the pink.”

  “Recovering nicely, thanks.”

  “Except what’s that on your sweater?”

  “I don’t know. Burrs.”

  “Burrs. This here’s Harlem. What kind of burrs?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I get around.”

  “And where did you get around to that you missed a day of school?”

  “I went to the game.”

  “The game.”

  “At the Polo Grounds. Today.”

  “You were at that game?” Manx says. “That made that fuss in the streets?”

  “That’s nothing. I was there is nothing. I got the ball he hit.”

  “No, you didn’t. What ball?”

  “The home run that won the pennant,” Cotter says softly, a little reluctantly, because it is such an astounding thing to say and he is awed for the first time, saying it.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I chased it down and got it.”

  “Lying to my face,” Manx says.

  “Not a lie. I got the ball. Right here.”

  “Know what you are?” Manx says.

  Cotter reaches for the ball.

  “You’re a stick that makes a noise once in a while.”

  Cotter looks at him. He sits in the lower bunk with his back to the wall, looking out at the man on the opposite bed. Then he picks up the baseball, he takes it off the khaki blanket where it is sunk beside his thigh. He holds it out, he spins it on the tips of his fingers. He holds it high in his right hand and uses the other hand to spin it. He doesn’t give a damn. He sports it, he shows it off. He feels anger and bluster come into his face.

  “Are you being straight-up with me?”

  Cotter does a little razzle, shaking the ball in his hand like it’s too magical to hold steady—it’s giving him palsy and making his eyes pop. He’s doing it nasty and mad, staring down his old man.

  “Hey. Are you being straight-up with your dad?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Okay. Why would you? You wouldn’t.”

  “No reason for it.”

  “All right. No reason. I can see that. Who else you tell?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You didn’t tell your mother?”

  “She’d tell me give it back.”

  Manx laughs. Puts his hands on his knees and peers at Cotter, then rocks back laughing.

  “Damn yes. She’d march you up to the ballpark so you could give it back.”

  Cotter doesn’t want to go too far with this. He knows the worst trap in the world is taking sides with his father against his mother. He has to be careful every which way, saying this and doing that, but the most careful thing of all is stick by his mother. Otherwise he’s dead.

  “All right. So what do we want to do? Maybe we go up to the ballpark in the morning and show them the ball. We bring your ticket stub so at least they see you were at the game and sitting in the right section. But who do we ask for? Which door we go to? Maybe seventeen people show up saying this one’s the ball, no this one’s the ball, I got it, I got it, I got it.”

  Cotter is listening to this.

  “Who pays attention to us? They see two coloreds from nowhere. They gonna believe some colored boy snatch the ball out of them legions in the c
rowd?” Manx pauses here, maybe waiting to hear an idea develop in his head. “I believe we need to write a letter. Yeah. We write you a letter for school and then we write us both a letter and send it to the ball club.”

  Cotter is listening. He watches his father lapse into private thought, into worries and plots.

  “What are we saying in this letter?”

  “We send it registered. Yeah, give it the extra touch. We send it with your ticket stub.”

  “What are we saying?”

  “We offering the ball for sale. What else we possibly be saying?”

  Cotter wants to get up and look out the window. He feels closed in and wants to be alone doing nothing but watching the street from the window.

  “I don’t want to sell it. I want to keep it.”

  Manx tilts his head to study the boy. This is a thought he has to adjust to—keeping the ball around the house so it can gather dust and develop character.

  He says quietly, “Keep it for what? We sell it, we buy you a wool sweater and throw away that hermit shirt you got on. Look like you’re living in a tree. We buy something for your mother and sister. Crazy to let the thing sit here and do nothing and earn nothing.” His voice is sensible and thought-out, defining things for the teachable son—we are responsible to our family, not to the vanity of keepsakes and souvenirs. “We buy your mother a winter coat. Winter’s coming and she needs a heavy coat.”

  Cotter wants to be manly here, equal to the issues.

  “What kind of money they give us?”

  “Don’t know. Plain and simple do not know. But they want this ball. They put it on display somewhere. I believe a letter is the thing that we send them registered mail. And we include your stub. What’s it called, your rain check.”

  “I don’t have a stub.”

  His father gets the look, the injured surprise—injury into the depths.

  “What you trying to do to me?”

  “I didn’t get a stub.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t buy a ticket. I went over the gate.”

  “What you doing to me, son?”

  “I didn’t have money for a ticket. So I went over the gate. If I had the money, I’d a bought the ticket.” And he adds helplessly, “No money, no tickee.”