Underworld

  Half an hour later we were in the last club of the night, a blues room with an air of desperation, and the waiter resembled the old guy from two or three places ago, facially resembled—he wore a standard waiter’s getup but looked a lot, I thought, like the other guy, in the football T-shirt, three or four places ago, or whenever it was, the T-shirt and cotton nose plug.

  “This place reminds me. You know how they’re always saying, Where were you when such and such? Where were you when Kennedy? Well, remember the time the lights went out. This place reminds me. The great Northeast blackout.”

  “Am I supposed to ask where you were?” he said.

  “Thirty million people affected.”

  “I was in Germany. I never knew what caused it. What caused it?”

  “Nobody remembers. Thirty million people. Not one of us remembers.”

  “But you remember where you were.”

  “Ask me where I was. I was in a bar that was a little like this place,” I said. “Dead souls, sad jazz. Palm trees painted on the wall.”

  “This place doesn’t have palm trees on the wall.”

  “Even better, even more similar. And the lights went out.”

  “They made a movie. I was in Germany,” he said.

  “Maybe they didn’t have jazz at this other place. Maybe they used to have jazz but stopped. They had a jazz policy that became a policy of no jazz, which is much the same thing if you examine it closely.”

  He didn’t resemble the old guy from three or four places ago. That’s not who he resembled at all. He resembled the cabdriver I’d hailed earlier in the day, or the day before, the guy who’d said, “Light up a Lucky. It’s light-up time.”

  When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn’t supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I’d shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent and strict, and the other thing I remember is that no one put a hand on my head and folded me into the car because evidently this was not something they did at the time, this was something they developed later, preventing the felon from bumping his head when they took him in.

  This happened back east of course. I’ve heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It’s a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it’s time disguised, it’s light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they’re talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

  The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.

  “Be nice to her,” I said. “Go home, talk to her, make nice. You know this phrase? Make nice. They use this phrase when you were a Negro child in St. Louis, Sims?”

  “They came to take the census.”

  “Yes, and what?”

  “And my mother told me to hide.”

  “What for?”

  “What for. That’s the point. I didn’t know what for. She thought, I don’t know what she thought. I went and hid, you know. Two people at the door with clipboards. She said, Get inside, stay down.”

  “Stay down.”

  “She said, Stay down. I don’t know what I thought and I don’t know what she thought.”

  “It was only the census.”

  “Don’t say only the census.”

  “You tell me I’m going a little gray. And I’m supposed to understand how this is worse than total baldness.”

  “Because it’s in my history, it’s in my family,” he said. “I’m supposed to go bald. It’s expected of me. Stay down, she said.”

  “Stay down.”

  “You believe the census, Nick?”

  He sat there with his loosened tie and wrinkled jacket, relighting the discontinued cigar, a line of sundown pink visible above the jut of his lower lip.

  “What do you want me to say? Yes, I believe it. No, I don’t believe it.”

  “I want you to say what you believe.”

  “Because I can sense we’re about to enter some touchy area.”

  “What do you believe?” he said.

  “I believe the census. Why shouldn’t I believe it?”

  He gave me a flat-eyed look with a nice tightness to it.

  “You believe it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe it?”

  “You believe the numbers. You believe there’s only twenty-five million, for example, black people in America.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe it?”

  “You believe it then.”

  “If that’s the number, that’s the number.”

  “And you don’t think they might be underplaying the true number.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “You don’t think.”

  “Wait wait wait wait wait wait.”

  “Think about it,” he said.

  He plucked his shirt, he did a thing big men do, he used both hands to pluck his shirt away from his chest and then he shook it, half dainty, letting his upper body breathe.

  “Sims, you and I.”

  “Just think about it.”

  “We’re not, remember, we don’t have a word, you and I, for the science of dark forces. For what is behind an event. We don’t accept the validity of this word or this science. Remember that conversation?”

  “This is another conversation. And in this conversation I’m saying, Think about it.”

  “But you and I. We go against the tide, Sims. The tide is easy, it’s irresponsible. We’re responsible men. We’ve established this. We don’t believe there are secret forces undermining our lives.”

  “Thirty million people affected by your local blackout. But only twenty-five million, they’re saying, black people in the whole huge country.”

  “If that’s the number, that’s the number.”

  “And this is all you can say. We have an issue that’s crying out for, really, scrutiny, to use one of your words.”

  “Go ahead, scrutinize it.”

  “You’re willing to accept this number.”

  “Twenty-five million. Yes, why not?”

  “You don’t think this number is way too low.”

  “Twenty-five million’s not so low. It’s twenty-five million,” I said. “You don’t think this number is totally underreported.”

  “Why do you say scrutiny is my word?”

  “Because you used it.”

  “This makes it my word?”

  “I didn’t use it. You used it.”

  “I believe the number. It’s a believable number to me.”

  “You don’t think somebody’s afraid that if the real number is reported, white people gonna go weak in the knees and black people gonna get all pumped up with, Hey we oughta be gettin’ more of this and more of that and more of the other.”

  “You and I,” I said.

  “You don’t think the number is underinflated by maybe forty percent.”

  “We don’t indulge ourselves in cheap and easy delusions, Sims.”

  “Cheap and easy.”

  “Am I right? You and I. We don’t believe that what is behind an event is so organized and sinister that we have to make a science out of it.”

  “You don’t think white people gonna be so depressed, so, I hate to say it, menaced by the true number.”

  He didn’t hate to say it at all.

&n
bsp; “You think the census bureau is hiding ten million black people,” I said.

  “Not hiding the people. They’re hiding the number. This is an easy thing to hide.”

  “But a number so large. What a tremendous manipulation. And it’s going on in front of our eyes. Maybe it’s the mothers,” I said. “Ten million mothers telling their kids to stay down. Stay down,” I said.

  A brief smile from Big Sims, a reflex smile minus the ensuing brightness of eye.

  “Face the issue,” he said.

  “What’s the issue?”

  “We have a right to know how many of us there are.”

  “But you do know.”

  “We don’t know. Because the number is too dangerous. How threatened do you feel by the real number? I’m talking to you. Think into your own heart.”

  “All right, I’m thinking.”

  “Tell me in your heart you don’t think there’s something genuine in what I’m saying.”

  “There’s genuine paranoia. That’s the only genuine anything I can see here.”

  He seemed to take pleasure in this. He sat back and looked off to the side, grimly happy, examining what there might be in the nature of human exchange that makes people so smoothly predictable.

  I listened to the blues trumpet, a young guy in a beat-up suit, he had an African blackness, you know the saturate blacking of a bandwidth somewhere on the continent, some nomad swath of high desert grace and shape, but in gesture and stance, I saw, the way he tongued some spittle off his lip between riffs, a body demotic that was locally made—he was another scuffling trumpet from an inner city somewhere.

  “Charlie Parker in a white suit in a club in New York,” I said.

  “Now how many references to New York have I heard from you tonight?”

  “And I know what kind of shoes he’s wearing.”

  “I don’t care what kind of shoes he’s wearing.”

  “Spectator shoes.”

  “I don’t care what kind of shoes he’s wearing.”

  “They’re not saddle shoes. They’re called spectator shoes.”

  “I don’t care what they’re called.”

  “Look. Here’s what you do,” I told him. “You go home, you say you’re sorry, you put some fizzy stuff in your bathtub and you take a bath and go to bed.”

  Ten minutes later we were standing outside the club waiting for someone to bring the car around and Sims put his hands on my shoulders and head-butted me.

  I didn’t know how to take this.

  He gave me a tight grin and butted me high on the forehead and I didn’t know if this was an impulsive gesture at the end of a long night when you’re muzzy with booze and hoarse with talk and smoke, a thing that brings an evening to a formal close, or something a little more deliberate.

  I pushed his arms away and butted him back, put my hands on his shoulders and butted him back and he looked at me with interest and did it again.

  It hurt of course, it set off a throb, it was a monosyllabic thing, a butt, a blow, a downward driving shock that sent an electric pain through the back of the head and into the neck and shoulders.

  And it was up close, eyeball tight, a combat space without maneuvering room or finer points, a certain amount of acted rancor filling the visual field, a scowl and glare, or a hooded look, a sort of sleepy killer thing, lidded and dumb.

  I was taller than Sims but not so solid and volumed and I’d never used my head as an instrument of medieval siege.

  I butted him just above the nose, driving down, and it stung him, I could tell, it sent a message unit ringing through his skull.

  He jolted me good. He hit me so hard I was stunned backwards half stumbling, right out of his grip on my shoulders, and the guy showed up with the car and stood by to watch.

  The pain was electric and compact, reducing everything to its own sort of benumbment, making the world beyond my head seem small and dazed.

  This is what we did, we hairlined in, blocking out everything but the butting and glaring and pain.

  When he butted me again I moved my head, eased back a quarter inch, trying to tone the blow a little, and he jutted his chin and glared.

  Pain is just another form of information.

  We knocked heads one more time, one time each, and the guy stood there with the car keys, watching.

  In my hotel room I looked in the mirror above the washbasin. I put both hands to the wall and leaned into the mirror and saw bruises and welts, deep discolorations, and a slash of dried blood with a winy flush around it. I used cold water to clean the wounds and then I went to bed. But I felt dizzy as soon as my head hit the pillow and I had to sit in a chair for an hour before the feeling passed.

  The thing kept coming back to me and I tried to get inside it, inside the tremor, our faces sort of double-framed over the ice cubes in our drinks, flying out of focus, then in again—not to detail my own feelings but only to understand the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being.

  We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not—I might have been devising my own newsreel.

  “What do you hear about the body in the sludge?”

  “They won’t find a body. The body’s just another embellishment,” he said. “The main thing is the ship itself.”

  “What about it?”

  “A ship being on the high seas for two years, changing names and crews—that’s just a story too. The ship made one recent voyage, East Coast to West Coast. Carrying sludge to California to deliver to a composting operation. Ordinary simple shipment.”

  We ran along city streets, landscaped avenues of a certain fallen aura, an out-of-timeness that was ravishing in its open regret.

  “Look, Sims, here’s the thing.”

  “Let’s run,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I’m a little, and I shouldn’t say this, I know, to someone like you.”

  “Love your kids, right?”

  “Yes of course.”

  “Then run,” he said.

  “How close I am, some of the time, I sometimes think, as much as I love them all, to feeling like an imposter, Because it has not fucking, ever, been something I am comfortable with.”

  We stood in the kitchen wasted by miles of hills and hot pavement, reluctant to move about for fear of dripping sweat on something, two men in shorts, and Greta gave us glasses of water, a brown-haired woman with long hands and a half-hidden gauntness, a sort of lean and angular suchness, an x-ray Greta that probably showed itself in argument or stress.

  “You like this place?” I said.

  “I think I’m at the ends of the earth. Four years we are here and I am waking up every morning and trying to remember where I am. So far from everything.”

  “We are backed up,” Sims said, “to a very big ocean.”

  And the son, the five-year-old, sitting at the table with his cereal bowl and oversized spoon, Loyal Branson Biggs, a boy so softly handsome, so offhandedly blessed with expressive beauty that I could not stop looking at him, I looked at him while I spoke to his parents and they looked at him too and they looked because I was looking—I reminded them to renew their sense of amazement in the child.

  “What happened to your face?” Greta said to me.

  I looked at Loyal work his spoon through the lumpy milk.

  “Well, this is a good question actually.”

  “And what is the answer?” she said.

  “Well, I had a little scuffle in the elevator. It’s noticeable? At my hotel. I didn’t know the marks still showed. Two drunks. A white guy and a black guy.”

  I could feel Sims enjoy this in his hot Reeboks.

  “Nick started the fight,” he told her.

  “This is true?”

  She said it to me but she was looking at the child eat his breakfast. We were all looking at Loyal.
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  “They told him he was going a little gray and he went berserk,” Sims said.

  Greta had to take the child to school and then she had to go to her own school where she taught chemistry three days a week with the ocean at her back.

  Sims and I stood on our spots, drinking water.

  “You two still mad?” I said.

  “She’s still mad. I got over it.”

  “I have a plane to catch,” I told him.

  He showered and dressed and took me to my hotel and I hurried through a shower and got dressed and grabbed my bag and got back in the car and there was a man on the freeway, a man on an embankment, nodding his head to drive-time radio, and he sat on the grass with an object across his knees and Sims said it was a rifle and I said it was a crutch, one of those metal crutches with a forearm brace, and it took me a couple of seconds to understand that Sims was kidding—this was just the language of the freeway.

  I found southern California too interesting. The experimental aircraft, the fault systems, the inferno of cars and smog, the women from nowhere, even the street gangs that were coming into prominence at the time, adopting varsity colors. I made business trips but kept them brief and blinkered, after the first one. The place had that edge-of-everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.

  When I shot George Manza I began to understand the nature of this kind of feeling. They put me in a radio car with a cop who smoked and they sent me eventually to a facility in upstate New York, a place that featured one of the oddities of the penal system. This was a miniature golf course, nine holes, with cartoon turrets and windmills—we were youthful offenders, you see, and maybe the guidance counselors thought we’d take snug comfort in the nursery shapes and bright colors or in the anal stuff of balls and holes. I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But my mates and I, the D-felonies, the E-felonies, the head breakers, the thieves in the night, a mixed group as you’d imagine, with races, creeds, cries in the dark—we used to amble past the windows in the mess and look at the layout down there with its loopedy-loops and tunnels and puddle lakes, its sward of tinsel grass, and we called it California.

  Phoenix was a neater package for me. I needed a private life. How could you have a private life in a place where all your isolated feelings are out in the open, where the tension in your heart, the thing you’ve been able to restrict to small closed rooms is everywhere exposed to the whitish light and grown so large and firmly fixed that you can’t separate it from the landscape and sky?