Underworld

  It was not outside Bud’s effective range to say something personal about his wife, maybe her sex preferences or digestive problems, and whenever he mentioned her name old Richard caught his breath, hoping and fearing something intimate was coming, and even though he knew Bud did this to shock and repel him, Richard absorbed every word and image and smell description, watching Bud’s long creased face for signs of mockery.

  “She’ll be sorry she missed you,” Bud said, looking up from the wood rot and hanging dust.

  He was not left-handed but taught himself to shoot with the left hand. This is what Bud would never understand, how he had to take his feelings outside himself so’s to escape his isolation. He taught himself based on the theory that if you are driving with your right hand and sitting snug to the door it is better practically speaking to keep the right hand on the wheel and project the left hand out the window, the gun hand, so you do not have to fire across your body. He could probably talk to Bud about this and Bud might understand. But he would never understand how Richard had to take everything outside, share it with others, become part of the history of others, because this was the only way to escape, to get out from under the pissant details of who he was.

  Bud was saying, “So cop says, Feet together, head back, eyes shut please. Which Aetna starts to laugh when he says please. Now spread your arms wide, he says. Now bring your left hand around and touch your nose with your index finger. Which I’m standing there in sheets of rain and he’s advising from the car. Touch your nose with your index finger, he tells me.”

  “You’re a left-hander driving a car you’re five times likely to die in a crash.”

  “Than a right-hander.”

  “Than a right-hander,” Richard said, religiously convinced.

  Bud ripped a board out of the floor.

  “Not my problem.”

  “Mine neither.”

  “I die from stress,” Bud said. “I’ll tell you where my stress level’s at.”

  Richard waited for the rest. He used to sit in a glass booth at the supermarket batching personal checks and redeemed coupons and giving out rolled nickels to the checkout personnel but he seemingly messed up somehow and was out at the counters again, running items over the scanner, keying fruit and vegetables into the register, subject to the casual abuse of passing strangers in the world.

  “We have to do our business outside because the toilet’s not ready for human habitation. So I built a thing outside where this is the only workable method pending I figure out the toilet. And Aetna, well you can imagine.”

  “Coming home from work.”

  “The stress builds up real personal.”

  “Driving that drive,” Richard said.

  “And she has to go. And then she remembers. There’s no working toilet in the house. And she looks at me outright murderous.”

  They said unbelievable things, obese women in the express line, with him having two sick parents at home, or one sick and one bad-tempered, like that’s sixteen cents off on the tomato paste or that’s not a red pear that’s a an-jew. They forced him to ask across the aisle. Can’t you see it’s not red? He charged me for red, this here’s a an-jew. He had to speak across the aisle to the other checkout, where any person on either line could hear what he said.

  “For myself I don’t mind,” Bud said. “Because it makes a certain amount of sense to take your business outside. When you think about what’s involved.”

  They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver’s side, which you have to do if you don’t want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver’s side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand.

  “I just noticed what it was I couldn’t figure out,” Bud said.

  They heard the dog barking and Richard looked through the dusty sheeting and saw the animal thrust up on hind legs at the end of its chain, dog balls taut, and he hoped it might be Aetna come home early. Aetna made a pie for them once that had a latticed crust. This was something he remembered. Seeing it wasn’t her coming home but likely some critter in the woods that roused the dog, he felt a sadness out of all proportion. But then everything was out of all proportion. The wind beat at the sheeting, making it shiver and pop. Crack cocaine is supposedly the cravingest form of substance abuse, according to studies made over time.

  “You’re wearing a tie,” Bud said.

  Richard paused, wary about how to take this, peering inwardly ahead for a setup, a possible remark.

  “Well that’s from work,” he said. “I went home from work and didn’t change.”

  “But you wear ties? To check out groceries?”

  “It’s a company regulation, statewide, pretty much.”

  Be calm, he thought.

  “And there’s the thing Aetna said, which she’s right for a change. That you look like a guy that wears glasses. Except you don’t. Except when she said it, we weren’t sure. We said, Does he or doesn’t he?”

  “Never did,” Richard said.

  When he first walked in the house and Bud barely noticed him, it was like the normalcy of dying. It was the empty hollow thing of not being here. A forty-mile drive into being transparent, awful but not unaccustomed. But now this scrutiny as to what he wears and what he looks like. A panic set in. He tried to think of what to say. There might be something he could say about the dog. He searched for a glimpse of the dog through the sheeting. How nothing gets dirtier than plastic sheeting, retaining, absorbing the dirt.

  “Well maybe you should. Glasses give appearance to a person. Get yourself some thick dark frames that match your tie.”

  He didn’t know why Bud would want to talk to him this way. Bud sat cross-legged over the narrow rent in the floor. He held the hammer at rest on his shoulder and looked directly into Richard’s face. Richard tried to smile, make the whole thing humorous. He felt the stupidity of the look on his face, as if a turn of the mouth can alter the outside world.

  “I can think about it.”

  “You do that.”

  “I should probably be getting back.”

  “She’ll be sorry she missed you.”

  “Tell her I said.”

  “I’ll be sure and do that.”

  The only person he ever talked to from the heart was Sue Ann. She made him feel real, talking on the phone. She gave him the feeling he was taking shape as himself, coming into the shape he’d always been intended to take, the thing of who he really was. It was like filling out—did you ever feel things pouring out from the center of who you are and taking the shape of the intended person? Well that’s what Sue Ann did and you can disbelieve it or disrespect it but he was never really who he was until he talked to her.

  He heard Bud ripping up wood as he walked out the door to his car.

  With mental killers roaming the earth, the checkout boys wear neckties.

  That’s what he thought Bud might say.

  He made the call to Sue Ann from a house he broke and entered. Switched on the TV and called the superstation in Atlanta and touched thin
gs with a hanky and placed the voice device on the phone that he’d ordered from the back pages of a mercenary magazine. This was not a publication Richard normally perused. He was not a surveillance man or gun lover. His gun was his father’s old .38. It did not have massive knockdown power and it did not shoot through concrete blocks or make fist-size holes in silhouette targets. It just killed people.

  He drove out of the wooded area and into the open sky, where the road dropped down to the floodplain and he felt the true force of the wind.

  He made the call and turned on the TV, or vice versa, without the sound, his hand wound in a doubled hanky, and he never felt so easy talking to someone on the phone or face-to-face or man to woman as he felt that day talking to Sue Ann. He watched her over there and talked to her over here. He saw her lips move silent in one part of the room while her words fell soft and warm on the coils of his secret ear. He talked to her on the phone and made eye contact with the TV. This was the waking of the knowledge that he was real. This alien-eyed woman with raving hair sending emanations that astonished his heart. He spoke more confidently as time went on. He was coming into himself, shy but also unashamed, a little vain, even, and honest and clever, evasive when he needed to be, standing there in a stranger’s house near a lamp without a shade and she listened and asked questions, watching him from the screen ten feet away. She had so much radiance she could make him real.

  This was an untraveled road. Travel thirty miles on this road and you may not see another car. You see power lines extended to the limits of vision, sinking toward the earth as a matter of perspective. When the wind dies there’s a suspense that falls across the land and makes you think about the hush before the Judgment.

  Then they cut away to the tape. He was suspicious of the tape because it had a vista different from his experience and he kept thinking the girl was going to move the camera and get him in the picture. He’d watched the tape a dozen times sitting with his pain-racked dad and every time he watched the tape he thought he was going to turn up in his own living room, detached from who he was, peering squint-eyed over the wheel of his compact car.

  He called Sue Ann twice after that but the switchboard would not put him through because many others were trying to reach her now and the switchboard was leery and abrupt and unbelieving. He needed her to keep him whole. He probably would have told her his name. She would have broken him down completely over a number of calls over a number of days, watching him from the screen. He would have surrendered to her in a blaze of lights, Richard Henry Gilkey, hustled down a hallway with Stetsoned men all around him and Sue Ann Corcoran by his side.

  He drove past the flagpole with the banging halyard. The wind was banging the halyard against the pole and it made him weak somehow, the repeated meaning of this noise.

  He went in the house and saw his dad twisted whole in front of the TV set. Mother was in the kitchen running a beater inside a white bowl.

  “Look what got dragged in by the scruff.”

  “I went out to Bud’s.”

  “Do we have time for you to go out to Bud’s?”

  “We need to give daddy his Nitrospan.”

  “Well go ahead and do it.”

  “Well aren’t we supposed to call about the new dosage?”

  “I didn’t call. Did you call?” she said.

  The glass booth had a talk hole where you talked. But they sent him out to the checkout and forced him to talk across the aisle.

  “I’ll call,” she said, “but he’s not there.”

  “You’ll get the answering service.”

  “I’ll get the answering service and they’ll tell me he’s not there.”

  “I meant to call,” he said.

  “I’ll call,” she said, “and you do the ointment.”

  After dinner he did the ointment on his father’s chest. His father lay back on the bed with the stubbled look of an old man turning into a castaway, a reject of the islands, except for his eyes—they were moist and deep, pleading for time. Richard spread the ointment and buttoned his father’s pajama tops and he thought about the time, any day now, when he would have to wipe his behind.

  Pending notification of next of kin.

  He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double figures.

  He stood at the kitchen door watching her stir some solution for his father’s first intake of the next day.

  “Well you have a good night now.”

  “You sleep well,” she said.

  He went to his room and sat in a chair to take off his shoes. All the meaning of a given life was located in the act of leaning over to untie your shoes and set them in a designated place for the start of the following day.

  He thought about the other person.

  When he was stationed in the booth he had the talk hole to talk through. But when they put him back at the checkout he had to talk in the open space where anyone could hear.

  He kept the gun hidden in the car and he thought about this as he drifted near sleep and he thought about the other person who’d shot a driver on one of the highways where he had shot a driver, just one day later. The so-called copycat shooting. He did not like to think about this but found it was lately, more and more, a taunting presence in his mind.

  He was an early riser. He heard the rain on the roof and he dressed and ate a muffin standing up, a hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. He had three and a half hours before it was time to report to work. He heard the rain dripping off the eaves and hitting the pie tin where he left food for a stray cat when he remembered.

  I know who I am. Who is he?

  He zipped up his jacket. Then he put the glove on his left hand, a woman’s white glove, and he went out to the empty street, where his car sat waiting under the sheet-metal sky.

  PART 3

  THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

  SPRING 1978

  1

  * * *

  I’ve always been a country of one. There’s a certain distance in my makeup, a measured separation like my old man’s, I guess, that I’ve worked at times to reduce, or thought of working, or said the hell with it.

  I like to tell my wife. I say to my wife. I tell her not to give up on me. I tell her there’s an Italian word, or a Latin word, that explains everything. Then I tell her the word.

  She says, What does this explain? And she answers, Nothing.

  The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza. Distance or remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained, it’s the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate mobster—the made man. Once you’re a made man, you don’t need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself. You’re all there. You’re made. You’re handmade. You’re a sturdy Roman wall.

  I was in Los Angeles thinking about these things. People say L.A. is only half there and maybe that’s why I was thinking about my father. And also because my brother Matt—it was Matt’s endless premise, his song of songs, that our old man Jimmy was living somewhere in southern California under the usual assumed name.

  I told him Jimmy was dead under his own name. We were the ones with assumed names.

  But the curious thing, the contradiction, is that I was standing in the middle of a fenced enclosure in a bungalow slum looking up at the spires of the great strange architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers, an idiosyncrasy out of someone’s innocent anarchist visions, and the more I looked, the more I thought of Jimmy. The towers and birdbaths and fountains and decorated posts and bright oddments and household colors, the green of 7-Up bottles and blue of Milk of Magnesia, all the vivid tile embedded in cement, the whole complex of structures and gates and panels that were built, hand-built, by one man, alone, an immigrant from somewhere near Naples, probably illiterate, who left his wife and family, or maybe they left him, I wasn?
??t sure, a man whose narrative is mostly blank spaces, date of birth uncertain, until he ends up spending thirty-three years building this thing out of steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh, all hand-mortared, three thousand sacks of sand and cement, and who spends these years with glass specks crusting his hands and arms and glass dust in his eyes as he hangs from a window-washer’s belt high on the towers, in torn overalls and a dusty fedora, face burnt brown, with lights strung on the radial spokes so he could work at night, maybe ninety feet up, and Caruso on the gramophone below.

  Jimmy was an edge-seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh, but he looked at his hand one day, according to my little brother, and it was blank. And did he become, could I imagine him as a runaway eccentric? In a way, yes, a man who doesn’t wash or change his clothes, bummy looking, talks to himself on the street, and in another way, maybe, I could imagine him rising this high, soaring out of himself to produce a rambling art that has no category, with cement and chicken wire.

  This was the contradiction. Jimmy’s future closed down the night he went out for cigarettes. Why would I even try to imagine him in an alternative reality, coming out here, half here, escaping to the Angeleno light, the Mediterranean weather?

  I walked among the openwork towers, three tall, four smaller ones, and saw the delftware he’d plastered under a canopy and the molten glass and mother-of-pearl he’d pressed into adobe surfaces. Whatever the cast-off nature of the materials, the seeming offhandedness, and whatever the dominance of pure intuition, the man was surely a master builder. There was a structural unity to the place, a sense of repeated themes and deft engineering. And his initials here and there, SR, Sabato Rodia, if this was in fact his correct name—SR carved in archways like the gang graffiti in the streets outside.

  I tried to understand the force of Jimmy’s presence here. I saw him shabby and muttering but also unconstrained, with nothing and no one to answer to, in a shoe-box room somewhere, slicing a pear with a penknife. Jimmy alive. And then I thought of a thing that happened when I was about eight years old and it was a memory that clarified the connections. I saw my father standing across the street watching two young men, greenhorns, trying to lay brick for a couple of gateposts in front of someone’s modest house. First he watched, then he advised, gesturing, speaking a studied broken English that the young men might grasp, and then he moved decisively in, handing his jacket to someone and redirecting the length of string and taking the trowel and setting the bricks in courses and leveling the grout, working quickly, and I didn’t know he could do this kind of work and I don’t think my mother knew it either. I went across the street and felt a shy kind of pride, surrounded by middle-aged men and older, the fresh-air inspectors, they were called, and you’ve never seen happier people, watching a man in a white shirt and tie do a skillful brickwork bond.