Underworld (104 page)

She even gave them marks in Health, based on days absent and late, and times requesting trips to the lavatory, and amount of dirt and grime stuck under their fingernails and squeezed into the creases of their palms.

And she wanted to teach them fear. This was the secret heart of her curriculum and it would begin with the poem, with omen, loneliness and death, and she would make them shake in their back-to-school shoes.

She paced the floor and walked the empty halls and memorized the lines. Soon they'd come back, uniforms blue and white, notebooks crisp, fountain pens filled, schoolbags swinging from their soft fists, and she would arrange them along the walls in size places and she would seat them in alphabetical order and she would inspect their hands and nails and crack their palms with a ruler when it was called for.

They would know who she was and so would she.

And she would recite the poem to them, crooking her finger at their hearts. She would become the poem and the raven both, the roman-nosed bird, gliding out of the timeless sky and diving down upon them.

These summer nights the women on the upper floors could not wash the dishes because the johnny pump was on, kids dancing under the fanned spray, and there wasn't enough pressure to move water through the building.

All movement toward the air, the night, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there, women waiting to feel a breeze and men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going, a ball game from breezy Cleveland.

Kids running, sweating, shirtless, a kid with a boxful of bared ribs down the front of his body. Other kids on line at the rear of the Bungalow Bar truck, fudgsicles and orange pops, and there is the kid with ink on his tongue, there is always a kid with an inky tongue. Waterman's blue-black. What does he do, drink the stuff?

Women on the porch of a private house, sitting in the dark talking.

Older kids on rented bikes, ten cents an hour, and girls riding with some of the boys, sitting sidewise on the crossbar, and the boys riding into the gushing water, making everybody happy, the stoop sitters, the window heads, the shrieking girls on the bikes and the smaller kids who separate to let the bikes pass, all happy together, and finally the
kid in his brother's bathing suit who holds a coffee can at the nozzle to flare the stream of water, geyser it high and wide.

Later the young men will stand on corners smoking as the lights go out, bullshitting the night away, and people will sleep on fire escapes, here and there, because there's a breath of air outside.
Finalmente.
A little bitty breeze that changes everything.

Nick sat reading a magazine with the hollow knocks volleying back from the far wall, across eight lanes.

“Nicky, what's the word?”

“Hey Jack. You're a married man, I hear.”

“Went and did it. No regrets.”

“She lets you out to bowl?”

“Only to bowl,” Jack said.

Lonzo was crouched down there at the end of the alley, about the only black person you could see, regular, in a radius of five or six blocks. He was an ageless man, hard to tell if he was twenty-five or forty-five, and he worked setting up pins, just about every night, soft-footed, fine-featured and slightly out of tune. A little
stunat',
Lonzo, and they were careful not to treat him badly, the regulars at the alley, because he wore the same clothes for many days and nights and seemed to have no regular place to sleep and carried a whiskey-stink sometimes, soft-footing past the counter on his way to the lanes.

JuJu came in and sat next to Nick.

“What's the word?”

“Your turn's coming,” Nick said. “I see you married with three kids. Getting paunchy and going bald.”

“Come on, we bowl a few lines.”

“Forget about it. Not my sport. She'll let you out to bowl once a week.”

“People get married and have kids. This is not normal?”

“Bowling, to me, it's like lifting weights.”

“Do me a favor.”

“It's something I rather be bad at it than good at it.”

“But do me this one little favor.”

“Because being good at it means there's something wrong with you.

“Forget I mentioned it, all right?”

“I rather die the death of a thousand cuts.”

“Everytime you see a Charlie Chan movie. Which, come to think of it, don't you owe me five bucks from the last time we bowled?”

“It's a brouch,” Nick told him.

“How come?”

“Because I'm not trying to win. Because winning insults my dignity. Beat me in pool I'll pay you the five dollars. Otherwise
u'gazz'.
I'm pulling a brouch.”

The regulars taunted each other constantly and said things to the girls who showed up now and then and they always looked a little narrow at strangers walking in. But they were careful to be patient with ageless Lonzo even when he was slow or clumsy setting up the pins, a birdlike figure hunched aloft down there at the end of the lanes, white-eyed in the spatter of flying wood.

JuJu found someone to bowl with and after a while Nick put down the magazine and left.

“Hey. Be good okay?”

“Be good, Jack.”

“Be good.”

“Be good,” Nick said.

It was dark and quiet now and he went up the narrow street toward his building but then swung into a gateway on an impulse and went down the steps and into the yards.

There was no light in the outer passage and he felt along the walls for the door that led inside. He smelled wet stone where the super had hosed the floors. He went inside and walked past the furnace room to the door at the end of the passage.

He still felt uneasy about the basement room, about the needle and strap and spoon, but it was passing little by little into faded time, half lost in the weave of a thousand things.

George was in the room all right, playing solitaire.

“I thought you might be here.”

“Cool down here.”

“That's what I thought,” Nick said.

George gathered and stacked the cards and shuffled them. Nick sat across the table and George dealt out three to a man and turned over a club trump and they started playing a game.

“The trouble with cards, when you play for money,” George said, “and you concentrate on all those numbers and colors for hours and hours, a poker game into the morning, you can't fucking sleep when you go home.”

“Your mind's too active.”

“You can't fucking no-way sleep.”

“Your brain is racing.”

“But we play a little friendly game of
briscola.
Maybe I can sleep in an hour or two.”

“You have trouble, normally, sleeping?”

“I have trouble sleeping. I also have trouble staying awake.”

They laughed and played. They played for an hour and talked about nothing much and smoked a couple of cigarettes each and dropped the butts in an old beer bottle.

“This thing I want to show you. Found it a couple of days ago,” George said, “in a car I was parking at the track. Slid out from under the seat when I made a quick turn.”

“The turns you make.”

“I'm cautious. Hey. Compared to most guys.”

“You respect the automobiles you park.”

“Not so much the owners. The cars, definitely.”

They laughed. George reached behind him and came up with an object from the bottom shelf, down behind paint cans and rolled linoleum.

It was a shotgun, sawed-off, the barrel extending only a couple of inches from the forearm part and the stock cut down to a pistol grip arrangement.

“What? You found it?”

“I didn't want to leave it in the car where somebody who's not responsible.”

“Let me see,” Nick said.

He reached across the table for the weapon. He sort of bounced it in his hands and then stood up to hold it more naturally.

“I know one thing about shotguns,” George said. “You shoot with both eyes open.”

“Sawed-off is illegal, right?”

“That's the other thing I know. Once you cut the thing down it's a concealed weapon.”

“Looks old to me.”

“It's old, rusty, wore out,” George said. “Piece of, basically, junk.”

He posed with it, Nick did, a pirate's pistol or an old Kentucky flintlock if that's the word. It was more natural two hands than one, the left hand under the forepart to steady and point.

He hefted it and pointed it. He saw an interested smile fall across George's face. He had the weapon pointed at George. He was standing a couple of yards from George and George was in the chair and he held the weapon midbody, slightly above the hip, which meant it was pointed at George's head.

A little brightness entered George's eye. Rare in George. This brightness in the eye. And an interested look moved across his mouth. It was the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

“Is it loaded?”

“No,” George said.

This made him smile a little wider. They were having a good time. And he had a look on his face that was more alive and bright than George had ever looked. Because he was interested in what they were doing.

Nick pulled the trigger.

In the extended interval of the trigger pull, the long quarter second, with the action of the trigger sluggish and rough, Nick saw into the smile on the other man's face.

Then the thing went off and the noise busted through the room and even with the chair and body flying he had the thumbmark of George's face furrowed in his mind.

The way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the gun was loaded and the man said no and the smile
was all about the risk, of course, the spirit of the dare of what they were doing.

He felt the trigger pull and then the gun went off and he was left there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the trigger pull and heard the gun go off and the man and chair went different ways.

And the way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the thing was loaded and the man said no and now he has a weapon in his hands that has just apparently been fired.

He force-squeezed the trigger and looked into the smile on the other man's face.

But first he posed with the gun and pointed it at the man and asked if it was loaded.

Then the noise busted through the room and he stood there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he force-squeezed the trigger and saw into the smile and it seemed to have the spirit of a dare.

Why would the man say no if it was loaded?

But first why would he point the gun at the man's head?

He pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the action of the trigger and saw into the slyness of the smile.

He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man's face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head.

But first he went through the sequence and it played out the same.

When they took him out to the cop car there were people on the stoops, in robes, some of them, and heads in many windows, hanging pale and hushed, and a number of young men stood near the car, some he knew well and some in passing, and they watched him closely and gravely, thinking this was a kind of history taking place, here in their own remote and common streets.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire—not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

We're sitting in a pub called the Football Hooligan. There's a man at the next table and I've been waiting for him to turn this way so I can confirm the uncanny resemblance.

I'm talking to Brian Glassic, old buddy Brian, and he seems to listen intently below the music. This is a thing called cult rock, loud, yes, but mostly piercing and repetitive, on an icy kind of wavelength, and Brian sits with his head low, nodding now and then, in agreement or fatigue—it's hard to tell.

Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will
custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

Here the people are eating ethnic fast food and drinking five-star cognac and they are crowding the dance floor and falling down, some of them, and being dragged half senseless to the sidelines.

I have to lower my head to speak to Brian, who seems to be sinking into his drink, but I resist the urge to nod along with him. True, I am mostly quoting remarks made to me earlier in the day by Viktor Maltsev, a trading company executive, but they are remarks worth repeating because Viktor has thought about these matters in the very ruck of every kind of changeover a society can bear.

Brian mutters that he finds this place frightening. I look at the kids on the bandstand, five or six gawks with fuzz heads and fatigue pants and bomb packs strapped to their bare chests—college boys probably who've appropriated a surface of suicide terror.