Underworld

  But not just different lives. Completely other ways of thinking and doing. And Manx isn’t sure if they’re supposed to be sad about this. He’s ready to do whatever’s called for.

  “What kind of seats you expecting you get?”

  “Bleachers. Love to get reserved seats but they’re long gone. Everything’s gone but bleachers and standing room and I know Chuckie’ll never forgive me if I force him to watch a ball game standing up.”

  “After he spends a night sleeping on the sidewalk? Who can blame him?”

  Charlie smiles again, throwing a wayward slap at Manx’s kneecap. Then he hands Manx the ball but only because he’s reaching into his coat for something. Turns out to be a flask, sweet little silvery thing with a cap on a chain like those army canteens, only flat, small, expensive, that you can pocket easy, a pick-me-up on a down day.

  “Now what have we here?” says Manx.

  “Give you one guess.”

  “Could say orange juice.”

  “Too soon for breakfast.”

  “Could say spicy tea from old India.”

  “Too late for teatime,” Charlie says.

  They’re having a pretty good time, the one on his haunches against the wall, the other in his crapshooter’s squat, with the lump in the flannel bag gone totally still, either pouty-stiff or sleep-stiff.

  Charlie says, “Do the honors,” and he hands the flask to Manx, who tosses the ball back to Charlie, and this small blurry exchange has an odd depth, it’s a sign of some kind, a deal that’s completely outside the transaction in progress, and it brings Manx up a little higher.

  He unscrews the cap and lets it dangle and he takes a connoisseur’s sniff of the action in the jug.

  “Do believe this is what they call spirits.”

  “Irish whiskey,” Charlie says.

  “Do love the Irish, don’t we?”

  “Many lasting contributions,” Charlie says.

  “Well said, my man.”

  They share a complicit grin. And Manx raises the flask and tilts his head and knocks back a not too sizable shot, for courtesy sake, and gives the thing back to Charles.

  He calls him Charles now, for the social aspect, gentlemen drinkers at the club.

  And he waits for Charles to drink. A moment of stinging truth. Manx has put his mouth to the rim of the flask and now he waits for Charles to do the same.

  A brief, deep and knowledgeable suspense.

  Doesn’t even wipe off the rim. Just tips the flask and drinks, too deep, and comes up teary-eyed and gasping but happy too. Both men happy, having a princely time.

  “Went down the wrong pipe,” says Charlie, forcing out the words.

  “Happens to the best.”

  “Occupational hazard,” says the gasping man.

  Hands over the flask. Manx takes a klondike swig and keenly feels the effect, oh yes, as the Irish aerates a number of crucial passages in his head and chest.

  They pass the flask a while.

  “One of mine’s a girl,” Manx says. “Rosie. Best ever daughter you could find.”

  “How old?”

  “How old,” he says.

  He feels a drifty look come into his eyes.

  “Maybe twice yours. Yours eight, right? Imagine being eight.”

  They pass the flask.

  “I’ll be honest,” Charlie says. “You were honest with me. Least I can do is tell you what I’m thinking.”

  All up and down the line there are people crouched in sleep or in drowsy bundled waiting, out of conversation now, heads slumped, some cigarettes going, most people asleep in blankets or thick parkas or just nodding off, squinch-eyed, and a cough and a moan and a radio playing Latin music but not too loud, and shaking awake and nodding off and a cop on a horse over by the barricade, and Manx shifts position slightly to observe the stillness of the tall brown animal, a dead-still quality that is not like men when they are motionless, or dogs for that matter, or fish in a bowl, and not peaceful or unperturbed but immobile in its own way, great and strong, shining at the flanks.

  “I’ll be honest,” Charlie says, “because what’s the point of all this if we’re not honest?”

  “Go, man.”

  “I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth. But the ball looks like a ball they’d be using in a National League game in the year 1951. That’s one mark in your favor, relatively minor, because there’s balls and there’s balls.”

  “And there’s ball breakers.”

  They pass the flask.

  “And the other mark is, the major mark, I look at you and I don’t think I see a con man or a liar.”

  A brief pause.

  “Then you the first,” Manx says.

  They laugh and stop and laugh again. It’s one of those jokes that reverberates for ten or twenty seconds, bouncing around the premises, one meaning echoing into another, and it’s only a matter now of signing on the line.

  “How much?” says Charlie.

  Manx looks away. He hasn’t come this far in his tactics and plans and he doesn’t know how much. But he feels himself get tense. The horse makes a snuffling sound behind him.

  “It’s entirely up to yourself,” he says, and feels immediately, unspecifically cheated.

  Charlie holds the ball in both hands now, pressed up under his chin.

  “See, I don’t know what I’m buying,” he says. “This is a consideration we have to keep in mind. Sure, buyer beware and all that. But we’re talking about an object that belongs properly to the heart.”

  You don’t want to squeeze the eagle on me, do you, boss?

  “Entirely up to yourself. Because I trust you to do right. You know your baseball. A fan. I want a fan to own this thing,” Manx says.

  He feels his gaze sliding away, drifting inward, and notes a certain tightness in his chest.

  Charles. Charles is suddenly all-decisive. A little lull, you see, with the mention of money. But suddenly Charles is sliding up the wall to dig into his pockets and he’s all bustle and rush.

  Manx tips the flask and drinks.

  Pulling bills out of two or three pockets and uncrumpling a five and smoothing out a single. Manx looks down the line at the nodding heads, men breathing steam in the chill air, sleepers and dreamers deep in the night.

  The sum arrived at looks like this. A ten, two fives, another ten, two singles, a quarter, two nickels and a tiddlywink dime.

  Plus the kid pops out of the camp bag.

  Charlie says, “I want you to take it all because it’s all I’ve got. Even the change. I want you to even have the change. Because I’ve got the ticket money here.” And he pounds his chest. “And the car keys here.” And he slaps his thigh. “And I want you to have every nickel in my pocket above and beyond.”

  Manx thinks all right. He tries to keep his eyes from fluttering while they count. He thinks this is more than he could have gotten for those snow shovels he boosted from the utility room in his building. Plenty more. A hell of a lot, actually, more.

  The small angry head is jutting from the bag.

  “I want to go home now,” Chuckie says.

  Manx takes the money. He licks his thumb to count it for the benefit of the kid. Says some things to the kid, feeling good, trying to draw half a laugh.

  Says to Charlie, “Bought yourself a souvenir of the great game. Calls for a drink, old boy.”

  They pass the flask and this is the only thing in the course of the long night and early morning that seems to engage Chuckie, the sight of two men guzzling booze right out of the bottle.

  Half sigh, half pain in the sound they make when they open their mouths to exhale the fumes, eyes tight and pink.

  Charles arches his fleecy brows.

  “Now that the ball is mine, what do I do with it?”

  Manx retakes the flask.

  “Show it around. Tell your friends and neighbors. Then put it in a glass case with the fancy dishes. You saw those crowds go crazy in the street. This is bigger than som
e wars I seen.”

  Manx has no idea what he means by this. The Irish is beginning to talk. He sees that Charlie is feeling slightly down at the moment. Charlie is probably passing from the stage of half belief to the stage of disbelief. Feeling rooked and beetle-brained. Slyed out of his honest wages by some rogue off the street with a tale so staggering Charlie’s embarrassed to tell his friends.

  Let the buyer, like they say, beware.

  He tries to think of the word that means a thing will increase in value over the years. But the Irish is not only talking, it is thinking, and anyway it is probably not a good idea at this point to say encouraging things to Charles. Only sound phony, won’t it?

  They look at each other. Charles has the baseball and the flask and Manx has the money. Okay. It is one of those happenstances where the mood downshifts once the deal is made. Only normal. The boy is asleep now, his face partly visible over the flap, and Manx wonders if he’ll recall any of this, ever, or if it’s already sunk in the dreaming part of his mind, the vague shape of a crouched man who is part of the night.

  Charles looks at Manx and smiles, complicatedly, with an element of drowned affection in the mix.

  Then they shake hands wordlessly and Manx is on his feet and out of there, feeling a slight ache in his calves and a hard tight serious-minded pain in his left hand from dragging the fire drum across the sidewalk. Put some butter on it when he gets home.

  He walks past the humped and bundled bodies and the smoky grills where some of them cooked their meals and he walks past the cop on the tall horse and goes back across the bridge and up to Broadway and maybe there’s the faintest line of light low in the eastern sky.

  It occurs to him. A lot of things occur to him, all dulled by drink, but it occurs to him that he doesn’t want to stand on an empty platform under the street waiting for a train.

  He walks down Broadway and begins to wonder why the man gave him the change in his pockets. There wasn’t any need for coins to be changing hands. Maybe it was just what the fellow said, the heartfelt thing of wanting to give whatever’s on your person, giving the shirt off your back, or maybe it’s an honest deal that two men make and one of them turns it into a handout.

  He walks, he wants to walk but he doesn’t want to reach home, ever, necessarily. He has to think this out, how he has the right to enter into money matters concerning any object that belongs to his family, which he is still the head of, regardless.

  Being broke makes him feel guilty. Get a little cash and you’re guiltier still.

  He pees in an alley unashamed.

  It occurs to him further that he could take a Greyhound bus out of here, ride that skinny dog into the sweet distance. The way his own sons raise up to him sometimes, all that wrangle in their eyes.

  He will write the letter for Cotter. To excuse his absence from school. As he had a fever of a hundred and two.

  Make the boy feel better about things.

  It also occurs to him that he’s approaching the corner where the street preacher spoke earlier in the evening, or last night, and then he realizes no, he’s confused, he’s still ten blocks north of there. Then he forgets this and looks around for the man. The man’s gone of course, to wherever he goes, and this isn’t his corner anyway, and there’s nothing moving but a car or two, cars with mystery drivers coming out of the gloom, alive like insects all hours of the night.

  Thirty-two dollars and change.

  He feels the familiar stab of betrayal. Be messing with his head. Tricked him every which way. The baseball’s bound to appreciate is the word. And the cash be worth less by the minute.

  He looks in doorways for the preacher because he wants to give him the money. Get it off his hands. He wants to push the money in the old man’s clothes just to be done with it. Give it to someone with a scientific interest in the stuff.

  Booshit, man.

  Money’s his and he’ll keep it. Take a bus somewhere. Or a room in some shambly street only a mile from home. Find a woman who’ll look at him when her eyes sweep the room.

  He forgets where he is again. He walks, he wants to walk, he’s writing the letter in his head.

  Please excuse my son from school yesterday.

  He hears the rumble and grind of a garbage truck around a corner somewhere. Cars moving, trains running under the street, he’s the only walking soul.

  Old Charles be laughing up his sleeve for tricking old Manx. Tell his kid we gulled that fool.

  Flat enough to pocket conveniently, with a cap on a chain.

  He comes into his street and goes past the shoe repair and the beauty school.

  His hand hurts where it touched hot metal.

  It’s beginning to get light when he reaches his building. He goes inside and climbs the stairs, each step taking basically a year, this is how it seems to Manx, until he is age eighty when he reaches his floor. He goes in the door, shadow soft, a silence with a set of eyes, and he moves slowly across the kitchen.

  The alarm clock goes off in the bedroom.

  He sits at the kitchen table and waits. She comes out in her nightdress and slippers, Ivie, the wife, and sees he hasn’t been to bed and looks him over slowly.

  She says, “What’s this?”

  “Need to put some butter on it.”

  “It’s all blistered up. I don’t like the looks of this.”

  “Just a surface burn.”

  “This election night? I thought election night was bonfires. I don’t like the looks of this at all.”

  “You go on, get dressed. I take care of it.”

  “Not with butter you won’t. That’s old folks’ nonsense,” she says. “Do you more harm than good.”

  She takes the fruit out of the fruit bowl and fills the bowl with cold water and gets an ice tray out of the freezer.

  “This doesn’t help, we’re taking you to emergency.”

  “I don’t require no emergency.”

  She drops ten or twelve ice cubes into the water and sits next to him, holding his hand in the bowl of ice water and looking him over slowly. She keeps her questions, if she has them, for later.

  Maybe the pain is subsiding slightly, maybe it’s not. The water is so cold he only feels the cold. He tries to take his hand out of the bowl but Ivie keeps it there, her own hand pressing firmly on his, and Manx looks away, too tired to make a struggle of it.

  “This only helps if the burn is recent,” she says. “If the burn’s not recent we have to see what they can do for you in emergency.”

  “And I’m telling you. I don’t require no emergency.”

  They sit like this a while, her hand pressing his into the melting ice, and then she has to dress and go to work. Manx remains at the table, staring at his hand in the water and waiting for his son to wake up.

  PART 6

  ARRANGEMENT IN GRAY AND BLACK

  FALL 1951–SUMMER 1952

  1

  * * *

  Bronzini thought that walking was an art. He was out nearly every day after school, letting the route produce a medley of sounds and forms and movements, letting the voices fall and the aromas deploy in ways that varied, but not too much, from day to day. He stopped to talk to card-players in a social club and watched a woman buy a flounder in the market. He peeled a tangerine and wondered how a flatfish lying glassy on flaked ice, a thing scraped with a net from the dim sea, could seem so eloquent a fellow creature. Its deadness was a force in those bulging eyes. Such intense emptiness. He thought of the old device of double take, how it comically embodies the lapsed moment where a life used to be.

  He watched an aproned boy wrap the fish in a major headline.

  Even in this compact neighborhood there were streets to revisit and men doing interesting jobs, day labor, painters in drip coveralls or men with sledgehammers he might pass the time with, Sicilians busting up a sidewalk, faces grained with stone dust. The less a job pays, Bronzini thought, the harder the work, the more impressive the spectacle. Or a waiter having a smoke du
ring a lull, one of those fast-aging men who are tired all the time. The waiters had tired lives, three jobs, backaches and bad feet. They were more tired than the men in red neckerchiefs who swung the heavy hammers. They smoked and coughed and told him how tired they were and looked for a place on the sidewalk where they might situate the phlegm they were always spitting up.

  He ate the last wedge of tangerine and left the market holding the spiral rind in his hand. He walked slowly north glancing in shop windows. There were silver points of hair in his brush mustache, still so few they were countable, and he wore rimless spectacles with wire temples because at thirty-eight, or so said his wife, he wanted to convince himself he was older, settled in his contentments, all the roil-some things finally buttoned and done.

  He heard voices and looked down a side street filled with children playing. A traffic stanchion carried a sign marking the area a play street and blocking the way to cars and delivery trucks. With cars, more cars, with the status hunger, the hot horsepower, the silver smash of chrome, Bronzini saw that the pressure to free the streets of children would make even these designated areas extinct.

  He imagined a fragment of chalked pavement cut clean-and lifted out and elaborately packed—shipped to some museum in California where it would share the hushed sunlight with marble carvings from antiquity. Street drawing, hopscotch, chalk on paved asphalt, Bronx, 1951. But they don’t call it hopscotch, do they? It’s patsy or potsy here. It’s buck-buck, not johnny-on-the-pony. It’s hango seek—you count to a hundred by fives and set out into alleyways, shinnying up laundry poles and over back fences, sticking your head into coal bins to find the hiding players.

  Bronzini stood and watched.

  Girls playing jacks and jumping double dutch. Boys at boxball, marbles and ringolievio. Five boys each with a foot in a segmented circle that had names of countries marked in the wedges. China, Russia, Africa, France and Mexico. The kid who is it stands at the center of the circle with a ball in his hand and slowly chants the warning words: I de-clare a-war u-pon.