Underworld

  “She sells you beer on Sunday? Before one o’clock?”

  “What kind of beer? This is root beer.”

  A boy in a white suit with a red tie and a red armband and his hair plastered down trying to wriggle out of the grip of his mother, who’s swinging her handbag at his head.

  “What’s your confirmation name?”

  “Never you fucking mind,” JuJu said.

  First the close air of the long stairway and the metallic taste of the air and the thick distant stir of men’s voices on a busy night, the roil of muddy voices, and the smoke of the big room and a ball game on TV and a player softly chalking his stick, looking like a soldier in some old eccentric war, and the beautiful numbered balls and green baize and dreamy prowl of a shooter on a run, and the endless caroming clack of the balls hitting, the touch sounds of the cue, the balls, the cushions, the slap of the pocket drop.

  That night Nick shot a game with George the Waiter. George parked cars at the racetrack on his nights off from the restaurant and he told stories about the cars he parked, about flooring the pedal and slamming the brake, that sounded like dirty jokes, the chrome and upholstery and handling, all tits and ass.

  Nick felt a little wary of George since the episode of the needle. He felt cut off in a way, less free and easy, but George never referred to the thing and didn’t even seem to remember.

  Still, he felt he’d lost some standing with George, showing shock and confusion that way.

  Nick looked up from the shot he was lining up. There was something in George’s face that made him follow the man’s line of sight to the other end of the room.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You don’t know him?”

  Mike stood talking to a man near the counter, heavyset, in a too-tight jacket, two-toned, over an open-collar shirt.

  “Take your shot,” George said.

  He called seven in the side.

  “That’s Mario Badalato,” George said.

  He made the shot.

  “Not bad,” George said. “You know this name?”

  He wasn’t sure but shook his head.

  “It’s a name, over the years, that’s been connected to that particular life.”

  Nick moved crouched to the far end of the table, studying his next shot.

  “Understand what I’m saying? Father, uncles, cousins, brothers.”

  “That particular life.”

  “You’re never gonna bank the four. You should be looking anywhere but the four,” George said. “People in that life.”

  “That life,” Nick said.

  “Malavita. Who, once they’re in, they’re in for good.”

  Nick glanced at the man in question, forty years old, maybe, thick and packed, a thickness of body that had no rolling or sagging but was hard, packed, built on other men’s lesser luck, on the way an unfortunate occurrence across town makes you stronger.

  “You should be looking at the two ball meanwhile. The four is not your shot, Nicky.”

  “The two ball.”

  “Madonn’, what do I have to do, send an engraved invitation?”

  “That life,” Nick said.

  “That particular life. Under the surface of ordinary things. And organized so that it makes more sense in a way, if you understand what I mean. It makes more sense than the horseshit life the rest of us live.”

  Nick studied the table some more.

  “So is this the man who had Walls, you know, put on ice?”

  “What do I know? I don’t know, I don’t want to know, I don’t even want to talk about it no more.”

  “No more, no more.”

  “Take your shot,” George said.

  Mario Badalato. Maybe he knew this name from somewhere. They shot a couple of games and George gave him hints and tips and a guy at the next table was singing to the tune of a popular song.

  “Don’t know why. I’ve got lipstick on my fly. Slop-py blow-job.”

  “It’s almost beach weather, George.”

  “This makes you happy? I hate the beach. I used to work at the beach.”

  “Don’t tell me lifeguard. I pity the drowning child.”

  “Wise guy. I used to sell ice cream. This was years ago. Ninety degrees with a cooler on my back that felt like a thousand pounds.”

  “They still have those guys.”

  “We had to wear sun helmets. Like Africa.”

  “They still wear them.”

  “I never want to see another beach. You want the nine ball here. Look. It’s set up beautiful.”

  It was time for George to get back to the restaurant. There was a gin rummy game going and Nick stood and looked and got bored and called the dog and took it for a walk.

  He stood in Mussolini park while the dog went scratching at patches of dirt. He watched a tow truck go by, doing sixty easy, the driver taking the traffic circle like a rodeo rider, slanted to jump. A guy named Grasso came up to him, they were in the same shop class once, and he pointed at two guys diagonally across the street, at the luncheonette, at the outside counter, standing eating something, black guys both of them with team jackets.

  “They come out of the bowling alley. Then they go over to the window and order whatever they order.”

  “Ever seen them before?”

  “Here? They never been here.”

  The two guys put their paper cups back on the counter and walked toward Third Avenue and Nick and Grasso followed, with the dog trailing. The guys knew there was someone behind them. Not that they turned. But Nick saw the way they stopped talking and the way their stride seemed, maybe, to tighten a little.

  “What’s it say on the jackets?”

  “Hawks, I think.”

  “Ever hear of them?” Nick said.

  “Never. Hawks? What fucking Hawks? Plus I don’t think it’s a team. I think it’s a gang.”

  They went past the funeral home and walked a block and a half along Third Avenue through the slatted shadows of the el and then the two guys stopped and turned around.

  Nick and Grasso walked up to them.

  “Hawks? What’s Hawks?” Grasso said.

  They didn’t answer. One guy ready, the other still thinking about it.

  “You live here, the Hawks? Because I don’t think I seen any Hawks before.”

  They didn’t answer.

  The dog caught up to them and began to go nose-twitching around the feet of one of the guys.

  “It’s better, you know, at night especially, if you stay where you belong. In the day too,” Grasso said. “But at night especially because otherwise people get the wrong idea.”

  The train passed over with a great staccato clatter and they all waited until it was past. But then the two guys didn’t say anything.

  “I still don’t know what’s Hawks. I aksed nice. But I don’t hear no explanation.”

  Cars creeping around the el pillars when they made a turn. And Mike the Dog sniffing at the guy’s shoe and the guy sort of flicking the shoe, doing a little foot-jerk that made the dog back off, and Nick stepped up and punched him.

  A car stopped in the middle of a turn.

  Nick stepped up and hit the guy once, a fair to good shot that caught him on the temple when he tried to duck under, and this car came to a sudden stop and four guys got out and left the doors hanging open of this car just stopped in the middle of the street.

  They were guys from the other poolroom, Turk and his fuckface friends, and one of the black guys started running but the other one stood there and glared, six white guys and a brown dog more or less surrounding him.

  Nick half smiled at Turk.

  “He kicked my dog,” he said.

  The one still here was the one he’d hit and he was looking at Nick, glaring, and Nick shrugged and smiled and the guy turned and walked away slowly and the four other guys took a breath and hitched their pants and got back in the car. The doors closed bangedy bang and the car drove off.

  Grasso said, “Fucking Turk.”
r />   “I know.”

  “Thinks he’s king shit walking the earth.”

  “I know,” Nick said.

  “Where’d you get that animal?”

  “Lives at Mike’s.”

  “I never seen an animal so ugly.”

  Nick faked a punch to the guy’s head and they walked back to the lighted streets with the roar of the el behind them.

  • • •

  About a month later the man was back in the poolroom, standing at the counter late one night, with Mike, they’re eating baked ziti out of tin plates.

  Mike flashed the light over the table where Nick was playing.

  When Nick looked up he said, “Come over here.”

  Nick walked over with a self-conscious saunter like he was about to meet his future father-in-law.

  “Mario here, he wants to say something you should listen to. Mario knew your father just after the war. During the war and after the war.”

  Badalato was standing with his back to the room and Nick went around the counter, where Mike was standing, behind the counter, so he could face the man.

  They had glasses of wine, which Nick had never seen in here, and they had a canister of red pepper they passed back and forth, eating standing up, every forkful of ziti trailing long strands of mozzarell’.

  “I knew your father. Jimmy. I liked Jimmy.”

  Nick could not fail to understand the consequence of the moment, a man of this particular life who is going to talk to him about his father.

  “Mike told me. He said, Jimmy’s son he comes in here. Jimmy Costanza. I said, I haven’t heard this name in a while. I liked Jimmy, I said.”

  And the consequence of the man himself, the thick hands and dark brows and thick hair and the slightly flattened nose, like a boxer’s.

  “I said. What did I say? Jimmy had a talent, this guy, he’s mister invisible.”

  Nick could not fail to understand the weight of the occasion. But he was also wary of it, he was hesitant, he wanted to say something unsolemn because anything about his father made him apprehensive.

  “The way I understand it from Mike, you think your father had no choice in the matter. How he left. How he disappeared. Somebody put him in a car. This is what you think, as his son, is what happened to the man. And they drove him somewheres. But I have to tell you one thing.”

  Badalato took a sip of wine from the low squarish glass.

  “Nothing could of been done to your father without me knowing about it. I have to tell you this. I would of known. And even if I don’t know beforehand, which isn’t about to happen, but even if it did, then I find out later. I would of heard. You understand what I’m saying? It’s not possible this could happen without me knowing about it sooner or later.”

  The warm smell of the food was making Nick hungry and he couldn’t help wondering how the food could be carried here from a restaurant still steaming hot.

  “I liked your father. I don’t think Jimmy had serious enemies. He owed money, so what? If somebody owes you money, you work out an arrangement. There are ways to do these things where you use simple business methods, the way Mike runs a business, the way a haberdasher runs a business. You buy a suit, you pay so much down, so much a month. You buy a car and so forth.”

  The man looked at Nick while he spoke. He didn’t sound superior or offhand. He wanted to make an honest connection and get his point across.

  “Jimmy was not in a position where he could offend somebody so bad that they would go out of their way to do something. No disrespect but he was penny-ante. He had a very small operation he was running. Made the rounds of the small bettors. Mostly very small these bets. This is what he did. Factory sweepers and so forth. You have to understand. Jimmy was not in a position to be threatened by serious people.”

  Nick watched him take a bite of food. He could not help feeling grateful. The man stood there and talked to him. The man took time to tell him something he thought would settle the matter in Nick’s own mind.

  “I appreciate,” he said.

  “I liked your father. And I know what it’s like, myself, to lose a father at an early age. From cancer this was.”

  “Your taking the time. I appreciate.”

  “Forget about it. Go finish your game,” the man said.

  Nick still had the pool stick in his hand. He gestured toward the light over the table.

  “Mike, tell me you’re not gonna charge me for the time you guys spent eating ziti.”

  The men enjoyed that. He went back to the table and finished the game with Stevie and Ray. They wanted to know what he’d been talking about with the guys at the counter.

  He thought of a half-ass joke but then said nothing.

  He was grateful for the time, genuinely, but he didn’t think he had to accept the logic of the argument. The logic, he decided, did not impress him.

  They played cards down there, pinochle, and drank homemade wine, in the room under the shoemaker’s shop, off the dim passageway that led out to the yards.

  Bronzini looked on, sitting in when someone left but otherwise a kibitzer, unmeddlesome, content to savor the company and try the wine, sometimes good, sometimes overfermented, better used to spike a salad.

  He was in a hurry to be an old man, Klara told him. Why else sit here with these elders of the streets, some of them nearly twice his age, spending whole afternoons in argument and aimless talk.

  Outside in the deep slow swelter, cats were asleep in the shade and people keeping to the sides of buildings if they were out at all, moving dazed in the unexpected heat.

  Down here in the basement room it was dry and quiet and stone-cool, quiet except for the voices of course, and he liked the voices, loud, crude, funny, often powerfully opinionated, all speechmakers these men, actors, declaimers, masters of insult, reaching for some moment of transcendence.

  John the Super loosed a bullfrog fart.

  He told them about the garbage he used to handle when he worked as a janitor downtown, temporary, in a large apartment building, elevators, doormen, dry cleaning delivered, taxis left and right.

  Mannaggia l’America.

  This goddamn country has garbage you can eat, garbage that’s better to eat than the food on the table in other countries. They have garbage here you can furnish your house and feed your kids.

  They played and bid and made sissing noises to acknowledge the bountiful folly of clothes in the garbage that are good enough to wear.

  Albert told them about the ancient Mayans. These people did not bury their dead with gleaming jewelry and other valuable objects. They used old broken things. They put cracked vases in with the dead, or chipped cups and tarnished bracelets. They used the dead as a convenient means of garbage disposal.

  This story satisfied the cardplayers. It was very satisfactory. Disrespect for the dead was a nice cruel satisfying joke, especially to men of a certain age. A joke on the dead was a beautiful joke. A joke with balls.

  Albert felt isolated here in the safest of ways, the slap of the cards, the men making theatrical bids, the wine seeping into his system, and he knew finally why there was something familiar about these lost afternoons under the shoemaker’s.

  Like childhood, he thought. Those bedridden days when he was islanded in sheets and pillows, surrounded by books, by chess pieces, deliciously sick at times, a fever that sent him inward, sea-sweats and dreams with runny colors, lonely but not unhappy, the room a world, the safe place of imagination.

  Liguori didn’t take wine anymore, the printer, because he had a liver condition. He talked about the strolling musicians who used to come around, a fiddler and a trumpet player, and how people wrapped coins in paper and threw them from the windows.

  Quanta sold’?

  His wife used to say, How much is it gonna cost me to listen to this cafone play his fiddle? But they didn’t come around anymore. They had liver conditions, or half a stomach between them, or the noise of traffic, Albert said, made music futile.

&n
bsp; The men spoke mostly English but used the dialect when an idea needed a push or shove into a more familiar place. And odd how Albert, barely nearing forty, could feel his old-manness within him, here in particular, as the voices took him back to earliest memory, the same slurred words, the dropped vowels, the vulgate, so that English was the sound of the present and Italian took him backwards, the merest intonation, a language marked inexhaustibly by the past.

  Someone was evicted, put out on the street, chairs, tables, bed, right around the corner—the bed, John said, the super. Frame, spring, mattress, pillows, out on the sidewalk.

  Porca miseria.

  What a wretchedness it was, what a complete humiliation of the spirit. You’re like a museum of poverty. People walk by and look. The bed, the plates and glasses, the suitcase with your clothes, a pair of old shoes in a paper bag. Imagine shoes. And they walk by and look. Who says this, who says that, who sits in a chair, who points from a car. They should be ashamed to look. A man’s shoes on the sidewalk.

  There was always the neighborhood and who was leaving and who was moving in, showing up on the fringes. Tizzoons. A word Albert wished they wouldn’t use. A southern dialect word, a corruption, a slur, an invective, from tizzo, he assumed, a firebrand or smoldering coal, and broadened to human dimensions in tizzone d’inferno, scoundrel, villain. But the word they used suggested a hellishness, a fiendishness that made it more unspeakable, in a way, than nigger. But they spoke it, of course, these men, these immigrants or sons of immigrants, the hordes who threaten society’s peaceful sleep, who are always showing up and moving in. Tizzoon. They masked the word. They narrowed their eyes and barely moved their lips. But they spoke it, they half hissed the word in a way that made Albert wish he hadn’t heard.

  Spadafora told them about the washing machine that was automatic, where the woman sets a control and walks out the door and the machine washes, rinses, spins, dries, shuts off—everything automatic.

  They shook their heads and made sissing noises and muttered casual curses, baffled at their luck in being here, amazed and confused, searching a way to train their skepticism on the wonders that unfolded daily.