Underworld (20 page)

Manx calls out, “Rosie baby. Your daddy needs to use the fa-cil-i-tees.”

They hear a smothered word or two and then she goes across the hall barefoot in a towel and Manx stands and hitches his pants and clicks his tongue and walks out of the room.

Cotter thinks without knowing it, without preparing the thought—he sees Bill Waterson on Eighth Avenue with his jacket bunched in his hand. He picks up the baseball and looks at it and puts it down. His father is taking a king leak. You don't usually hear anything but the shower in there and noises from the pipes but his father is taking a leak that is the all-time king. It is quickly becoming funny, the time span and force of the leak, and Cotter wishes his brothers were here so they could all be amazed together.

He comes back in and sits down. He's still wearing his jacket, a corduroy windbreaker that used to belong to Randall, speaking of brothers.

“There now. We feeling better.”

“How'd you like to write a letter for me? I need it for school,” Cotter says.

“Oh yeah? That says what?”

“That says I missed a day due to illness.”

“Dear so-and-so.”

“That's right. Like that.”

“Please excuse my son.”

“That's the way.”

“Due to he was ill.”

“Tell them it was a fever.”

“How feverish'd you get?”

“Say one hundred ought to do it.”

“We don't want to be too modest. If we're gonna do this thing.”

“Okay. As he had a fever of a hundred and two.”

“Of course you look to me like you're in the pink.”

“Recovering nicely, thanks.”

“Except what's that on your sweater?”

“I don't know. Burrs.”

“Burrs. This here's Harlem. What kind of burrs?”

“I don't know. I guess I get around.”

“And where did you get around to that you missed a day of school?”

“I went to the game.”

“The game.”

“At the Polo Grounds. Today.”

“You were at that game?” Manx says. “That made that fuss in the streets?”

“That's nothing. I was there is nothing. I got the ball he hit.”

“No, you didn't. What ball?”

“The home run that won the pennant,” Cotter says softly, a little reluctantly, because it is such an astounding thing to say and he is awed for the first time, saying it.

“No, you didn't.”

“I chased it down and got it.”

“Lying to my face,” Manx says.

“Not a lie. I got the ball. Right here.”

“Know what you are?” Manx says.

Cotter reaches for the ball.

“You're a stick that makes a noise once in a while.”

Cotter looks at him. He sits in the lower bunk with his back to the wall, looking out at the man on the opposite bed. Then he picks up the baseball, he takes it off the khaki blanket where it is sunk beside his thigh. He holds it out, he spins it on the tips of his fingers. He holds it high in his right hand and uses the other hand to spin it. He doesn't give a damn. He sports it, he shows it off. He feels anger and bluster come into his face.

“Are you being straight-up with me?”

Cotter does a little razzle, shaking the ball in his hand like it's too magical to hold steady—it's giving him palsy and making his eyes pop. He's doing it nasty and mad, staring down his old man.

“Hey. Are you being straight-up with your dad?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Okay. Why would you? You wouldn't.”

“No reason for it.”

“All right. No reason. I can see that. Who else you tell?”

“Nobody.”

“You didn't tell your mother?”

“She'd tell me give it back.”

Manx laughs. Puts his hands on his knees and peers at Cotter, then rocks back laughing.

“Damn yes. She'd march you up to the ballpark so you could give it back.”

Cotter doesn't want to go too far with this. He knows the worst trap in the world is taking sides with his father against his mother. He has to be careful every which way, saying this and doing that, but the most careful thing of all is stick by his mother. Otherwise he's dead.

“All right. So what do we want to do? Maybe we go up to the ballpark in the morning and show them the ball. We bring your ticket stub so at least they see you were at the game and sitting in the right section. But who do we ask for? Which door we go to? Maybe seventeen people show up saying this one's the ball, no this one's the ball, I got it, I got it, I got it.”

Cotter is listening to this.

“Who pays attention to us? They see two coloreds from nowhere. They gonna believe some colored boy snatch the ball out of them legions in the crowd?” Manx pauses here, maybe waiting to hear an idea develop in his head. “I believe we need to write a letter. Yeah. We write you a letter for school and then we write us both a letter and send it to the ball club.”

Cotter is listening. He watches his father lapse into private thought, into worries and plots.

“What are we saying in this letter?”

“We send it registered. Yeah, give it the extra touch. We send it with your ticket stub.”

“What are we saying?”

“We offering the ball for sale. What else we possibly be saying?”

Cotter wants to get up and look out the window. He feels closed in and wants to be alone doing nothing but watching the street from the window.

“I don't want to sell it. I want to keep it.”

Manx tilts his head to study the boy. This is a thought he has to adjust to—keeping the ball around the house so it can gather dust and develop character.

He says quietly, “Keep it for what? We sell it, we buy you a wool sweater and throw away that hermit shirt you got on. Look like you're living in a tree. We buy something for your mother and sister. Crazy to let the thing sit here and do nothing and earn nothing.” His voice is sensible and thought-out, defining things for the teachable son—we are responsible to our family, not to the vanity of keepsakes and souvenirs. “We buy your mother a winter coat. Winter's coming and she needs a heavy coat.”

Cotter wants to be manly here, equal to the issues.

“What kind of money they give us?”

“Don't know. Plain and simple do not know. But they want this ball. They put it on display somewhere. I believe a letter is the thing that we send them registered mail. And we include your stub. What's it called, your rain check.”

“I don't have a stub.”

His father gets the look, the injured surprise—injury into the depths.

“What you trying to do to me?”

“I didn't get a stub.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't buy a ticket. I went over the gate.”

“What you doing to me, son?”

“I didn't have money for a ticket. So I went over the gate. If I had the money, I'd a bought the ticket.” And he adds helplessly, “No money, no tickee.”

His father's eyes get that drifty look. Cotter sees a kind of panic building, an intimate guilt that he has brought about by mentioning money, the ancient subject of being broke. His father is in retreat, his eyes treading inward, escaping the place he has just built for them both, the world of responsible things. This is a terrible moment, one of those times when Cotter realizes he has won a struggle he didn't know was taking place. He has beat his father into surrender, into awful withdrawal.

He says, “And anyway the ticket stub doesn't say what section you're sitting unless it's reserve seat or box seat. So the ticket's no good for anything. People pick up tickets off the street.”

His father says, “We sleep on it. How's that?” Grimly getting to his feet. “Nothing we can do tonight so let's just get some sleep.”

Cotter doesn't mention the letter his father is supposed to write, the excuse for missing school. Maybe in the morning it will be all right. And maybe he'll change his mind about selling the baseball. Or forget the whole thing. Cotter knows if he can delay any action on the matter for a day, a day and a half, his father will completely forget. This is one of the things they count on in this house, unspokenly—they sit around and wait for him to forget.

He stands by the window and looks down at the street. In school they tell him sometimes to stop looking out the window. This teacher or that teacher. The answer is not out there, they tell him. And he always wants to say that's exactly where the answer is. Some people look out the window, others eat their books.

He gets undressed and goes to bed. He sleeps in his shorts and polo shirt. His mother comes in and says good night. Good night's fine as long as she doesn't want to know what he and his father talked about. That's another trap that opens out of nowhere. She tells him she has to get up extra early to go to work, which is a long trip by subway down to 21st Street, she's a seamstress in a noisy loft with tall fans going—he worked there four hours a week last summer sweeping fabric off the floor and rolling those cardboard barrels in and out and they joked and teased him, forty or fifty women, and said some very direct things.

“Rosie will get you up.”

“I don't need any help,” he says.

“If anybody in this
world
needs help getting up, you're the one.”

“She throws things at me.”

“Catch them and throw them back.”

“Then I'll never get dressed. Because she throws my clothes.”

His mother leans into the bunk and kisses him, which she hasn't done in a long time, and then she rubs his head roughly, sort of knuckle-rubbing, and squeezes his cheeks so it hurts, twisting sizable sums of flesh, and he hears his father pass by on his way to the kitchen and hopes he missed the damn kiss.

In the dark he thinks about the game. The game comes rolling over him in a great warm wave of contented sleep. The game was lost and then they won. The game could not be won but then they won it and it's won forever. This is the thing they can never take away. It is the first thing he will think of in the morning and one part of him is already there even as he falls asleep, waking up to think about the game.

Manx Martin stands at the refrigerator. He's looking in at the meat loaf. She saved him some meat loaf that's sitting in a plate like the last meal of Prisoner X. He takes it out and sits at the table, eating slowly. His mind is in the throes of this and that. He sees the food in the plate and has to remind himself what it's there for.

He puts the plate in the sink when he's finished and then decides to wash it and dry it and he does this fastidiously, plus utensils. He knows he ought to fix the drip in the faucet but we can save that for a day when there's a little free time. He puts the plate in the cabinet, whisper soft.

Ivie comes in and does not look at him. She has a way of not looking at him that ought to be studied by science. That's how good she is at doing it, sweeping the room with her look but missing him completely—a thing science ought to investigate for military use.

She says, “You were talking to him.”

“Whose business is it?”

She says, “What for?”

“I don't need any what for.”

She says, “Talking an awful long time.”

“He's my son. Whose business is it?”

“Leave him alone. My business,” she says. “That's what he wants. Left alone to grow up without advice from you. Only he won't say it himself.”

“Let him tell me.”

She says, “I'm telling you.”

She's moving through the kitchen doing things.

She says, “I'm leaving early in the morning. They have a rush order, which they're paying time and a half.”

He hears the radio playing faintly in their bedroom.

“So I'm giving you fair warning. That alarm's going off well before six.”

“Before six,” he says, and checks his watch, which doesn't work, and what's the difference anyway, and he says the words in a voice unconnected to the facts.

She's in her housecoat and house slippers moving through the kitchen like a sleepwalker and a sleeptalker, not giving him the barest glance. But she's connected to the facts all right. And he is not. He is drifting out of range of the whole damn thing, the morning chill, the working wife, the harsh alarm that's getting ready, even as he stands here, to populate his meager sleep.

She finds the pills she's looking for and goes back down the hall. He stands and waits. He turns off the overhead light and stands in the dim glow of the lamp in the corner.

He stands there for fifteen minutes. A lifetime of thinking into a thing, trying to straighten out the mental involvements.

Okay. He goes and stands in the doorway of Cotter's room. He is looking into the room, getting accustomed to the dark. The boy is sleeping dead away. Manx steps into the room and sees the baseball almost at once. It is sitting in the open on the unused bed. This is what gets him every time. They obtain a valuable thing and don't even bother to hide it. Trust fairies to watch over their valuables. He told them how many times? Protect what's yours. Because the way things are changing, you have to live defensive.

He tries to recall which son slept in which bed when Cotter was a little kid in the top bunk. They came and went so damn fast.

He stands in the dark room. He is arguing out the thought should he do it or not. Then he does it. He takes the baseball. He does it before the argument ends. He does it to end the argument. He takes the ball and walks quietly through the kitchen to the door. The ball fits nice and easy in the roomy pocket of his windbreaker, his oldest son's windbreaker. He opens the door, squinching his face to draw off the noise. Need to oil the hinges when our mind's all clear and we have a little free time at our disposal. He eases the door shut and goes down the stairs and out onto the stoop, wondering how it happened that they're not wearing his hand-me-down jacket—he's wearing theirs.