Underworld (19 page)

I felt calmer now. I felt all right. My arm hung over the side of the chair and I squeezed the baseball, listening to Marian sleep-breathe—squeezed it hard, the veins leveling on the back of my hand, going dead flat.

Maybe we fell asleep simultaneously. Then I felt my way to the armchair and switched on the lamp. I stood there, pulling my pajama shirt away from my body where the sweat made it cling. Then I went to the bookshelves and got the baseball.

She was sitting up. She wasn't exactly sitting up, she was propped—I realized she was awake, propped on an elbow looking at me, rubbing her temple with her right hand.

“Nick?”

“I'm here.”

“You all right?”

“Yes. I'll be there in a minute.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I'm all right. Go to sleep.”

“It was a lovely birthday, wasn't it?”

“Do you want me to turn out this light?”

“No. Just come to bed.”

“I'll be there in a minute.”

“I want you next to me,” she said.

I stood on the roof with my radio placed on the ledge and sometimes I squatted and took the radio down with me, down behind the ledge, surrounding it sort of, taking hope from it, suffering the game's slides and veers, rooting from the gut—an Emerson, maroon, that I took everywhere. But when I stood I faced southwest, looking beyond the hospital for the incurable and past the elevated tracks on Third Avenue, looking toward the river that cuts the boroughs. That's where
the Polo Grounds stood, west by southwest, and I imagined the field and the players, the crisp blues and elysian greens on that great somber-skied day—great and terrible, a day now gone to black and white in the film fade of memory.

Then he remembers his books and goes back down the stairs because you can't come home from school without your schoolbooks, fool. He forces the baseball into his side pocket and leans into the dim triangle behind the stairs, where the bottom of the first flight meets the floor, and he scoops the three books he left there in the morning, slides them out and scoops them up, plus a composition book with a mottled cover, and he blows away the dust and smut and sourness.

The janitor comes in the back door from the yards, the new janitor, he limps so bad you're not even sure you feel sorry for him—maybe you wonder why he's walking around at all.

“What's this?”

“Dropped something,” Cotter says.

“I need to talk to your father.”

“When I see him.”

“Tell him,” the man says.

Cotter can't figure out how the janitor knows who he is. The last janitor left in a hurry and the new man just arrived and he has four buildings he takes care of and a limp that's hard to look at and he
already knows which son belongs to the matching father and it's probably not a mistake. People always want to talk to his father. His father spends hours every day in flight from these conversations.

He climbs to four and goes inside. His sister is there, Rosie, poring over her homework at the kitchen table. Rosie's sixteen, always blasting away at the books, and he has two older brothers, one in Korea with the infantry and one in the airborne stationed in Georgia. This is the peach state. But if Cotter had to choose between these two forms of employment he thinks he'd rather face a weaponed enemy in snow and mud than walk out a door into the balmy evening air with a snatch of bundled silk hanging on his back.

“What's he carrying in his pocket? Makes a person wonder,” Rosie says. “Looks like an apple to me. Maybe he went to an orchard on his day off.”

“What day off?”

“Traveled upstate on a bus to pick some apples. Of course we have apples right here. But that's for after school. No school, no apples. Is that why he found his own apple?”

“If I didn't go to school, where did I go?”

“I don't know but when I saw you from the window you had no books and when you walked in the door, lo and behold.”

“Then you know that's not an apple in my pocket.”

He takes out the ball and does his flip trick, back-spinning the thing over his hand and wrist and catching it with a sort of gearshift motion, elbow in reverse. This gets Rosie smiling and she plants her face in the book again, which tells Cotter he has won a little victory because it is only when this girl goes wordless that you know she is showing respect.

In his room he looks out the window, the room he used to share with his brothers, remarkably his own now, and then he drops the ball on the khaki blanket in the lower bunk, it is the only military touch, the sturdy olive drab, and he grabs a sweater off the chair back. He fits the sweater over his head and looks out the window again, watching people move through the streetlights and into the partial dark. Gets dark too soon. He stands and looks, just watching, being nobody in a window, and then he hears his mother pushing through the door.

He snaps to, thinking what he has to say if he is challenged about
missing school. But he knows Rosie will not snitch on him. He thinks he knows this. He is confident more or less. He thinks he feels her loyalty through the walls and he goes into the kitchen where his mother is putting away groceries and he drops a hand on Rosie's shoulder and stands at the table with an eye fixed on the bright boxes and cans his mother is placing on the shelves.

His mother says, “How many times?”

“What?”

“You have to be told. Don't wear that sweater. I need to clean that sweater.”

“Plunge it in something strong,” Rosie says.

“That's a filthy sweater.”

“Take it to the cleaner, they'll give it back,” Rosie says. “Rejected.”

See, the world is filled with things he's not supposed to do and not supposed to wear. But maybe he likes it when they array against him, it's different from his brothers, who bossed him a little and teased him a little but did not show this picky interest, this endless searching concern. His sister's head poked forward so she can study the particular jut of his dumbness. He likes running his fingers over the edge of the fruit bowl, over the specked glaze, with Rosie's books sprawled on the table and the fruit in the bowl and his mother doing things at the stove or cabinet, the way his mother talks to him and never looks in his direction but knows where he is and measures her voice to his sliding whereabouts, room by room. Maybe he wants them to figure him out so they can let him in on the secret.

“The sweater's got burrs,” Rosie says. She seems to like that word and puts a teasey nonchalance in her voice. “He's full of burrs from some apple orchard he must have visited sometime or other.”

He runs his fingers over the inside edge of the bowl, feeling the sort of spatter of whirled material, the bubbly pinpoint warps. His mother tells him to wash his hands. She is not looking at him but knows the state of his hands from the position of the sun and moon. He must be walking dirt. Walking talking filthman from the planet Dirt.

At dinner they are quiet. This is because his father is not here and might walk in any time and then again might not and they are in a state of involuntary waiting. Funny how his mother pushes through
the door, shouldering in with shopping bags and bundles and her purse that she wears on a long strap over her head and across her body, maybe dragging a handled bag or nudging it out of the hallway with a peg-leg motion and making six kinds of noise even when she's not carrying something, bringing the streets in with her, the subways, buses and streets, all the noise and labor of getting uptown and downtown, that's his mother, and his father usually sliding in unannounced, standing and glaring, stuck to the wall like he wandered in the wrong door and needs to work out the details of his mistake.

His mother is tall and slightly lopsided and she is strong. He knows this because he has lifted things she has lifted, he has come up four flights with things she often carries, and poker-faced—it takes her half a minute to work a smile out of those unused muscles.

She says, “I saw that man who preaches in the street. Same place every time.”

“I did too,” Cotter says.

“I said to myself this man has a life even if we can't imagine it. This man goes home somewhere. But where does he go? How does he live? I try to imagine what does he do when he's not out there preaching.”

Rosie says, “I see these people lots of places.”

“But this man's steady. Same place. I don't think he cares if people listen. He'll preach to cars going by.”

“What was he preaching?”

“How no one knows the day or the hour. Seems there's been the Russians exploding an A-bomb. So no one knows the day or the hour. They announced it on the news.”

Rosie says, “I can't get worked up.”

“I got worked up until I started up the stairs with those shopping bags. Thought I was going to pull my shoulder out of the socket.”

“Back to normal,” Rosie says.

“But I stood and listened to him. I have to say. First time I listened to the man.”

“He's always there,” Cotter says.

“First time I listened. No one knows the day or the hour. I believe this is Matthew twenty-four.”

“I can't get worked up,” Rosie says.

“But the man has a life and it's a mystery to me how he lives it.”

“People always preaching,” Rosie says.

“Those clothes he wears. I think it's a shame. And he's not a crazy man. He knows his scriptures.”

“You can know your scriptures,” Cotter says. “There's people know their scriptures they're crazy as a loon.”

“Amen,” says his sister.

After dinner he's back in his room looking out the window. He's supposed to be in his room doing his homework and he's in his room all right but he doesn't know what his homework is supposed to be. He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there's another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents. There's a kid in his class who eats pages from his history book nearly every day. The way he does it, he places the open book under the desk in his crotch and slyly crumples a page, easing it off the spine with the least amount of rustle. Then he has the strategy of wait a while before he brings his fist to his mouth in a sort of muffled cough with the page inside the fist, like whitesy-bitesy. Then he stuffs in the page and the tiny printed ink and the memorized dates, engrossing it quietly. He waits some more. He lets the page idle in his mouth. Then he chews it slowly and carefully and incomplete, damping the sound by making sure his teeth do not meet, and Cotter tries to imagine how it tastes, all the paper points and edges washed in saliva, becoming soft and limp and blottered so you can swallow smooth. He swallows not so smooth. You can see his adam's apple jerk like he just landed a plane on a foreign shore.

War and treaties, eat your Wheaties.

Rosie's in the shower now. He sits on his bunk and hears water beating on the other side of the wall and he thinks about the game. He remembers things he didn't know he'd seen or heard, people on the exit ramp—he sees shirt colors and hears voices coming back to him. A cop on a horse, the boot shine and animal heat, and he hears water beating on the galvanized walls of the shower, the rattling stain-walled shower that someone added to the bathroom years before.

When his father comes in, there is no doubt of the entrance, the
singing of the hinges when the door opens slowly, the way he does not carry sound with him out of the entranceway—there's no shaking out of clothes or heavy breath from the climb up the stairs. Not that you can't hear him at all. He maintains a presence near the door, a hear-able something, maybe just the tension of a man standing on a linoleum floor or some tone that comes off his body, a tightness that says he's home.

Cotter sits on the lower bunk and waits. His father comes through the kitchen and appears in the doorway, Manx Martin. He's a working man, a furniture mover when he's employed and a whiskey swigger when he's not. He looks at Cotter and nods pointlessly. He stands there nodding, a gesture that has no point, that seems to mean
Oh yeah it's you
if it means anything at all. Then he comes in the room and sits on the unused bed, the cot. They listen to the water beating on the shower walls.

“Had your dinner?”

“Meat loaf.”

“Leave some for me?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know Why, you left the table early? You had an appointment downtown?”

He sees the man is kidding. His father's eyes go narrow and he does his pencil-line smile. He is a man with high cheekbones sort of poxed in the hollows, rough-graded, and a thin mustache that he keeps well above his lip, tended and particular. He looks around the room. He studies things. He seems to believe this is the right time to see what kind of surroundings his sons grew up in. He is average size, a little developed in the chest, a little bowlegged, and Cotter would not have thought he had the brawn to move heavy pieces up and down long flights of stairs. But he has seen his father lift and hoist with much bigger men.

“Which one's in there?”

“Rosie.”

“Washing up a storm.”

“The way she does homework. To the last ounce.”

“Finishes what she starts, that girl.”

It bothers Cotter in some lurking way, to sit here with his father talking about Rosie while they hear her in the shower. Just then the water stops.

“Because I need to take a leak, you see.”

“Super wants to talk to you.”

“He's a yard dog. Pay no mind.”

“How come he knows us if he just got here?”

“Maybe we're famous, you and me. Two hombres that they put out the word these guys be mighty tough.”

Cotter relaxes a little. He thinks maybe this is going to be all right. The man is feeling no pain as they say and there's something he can get from his father that he can't get from his mother.