Underworld (46 page)

“What happened to your face?” Greta said to me.

I looked at Loyal work his spoon through the lumpy milk.

“Well, this is a good question actually.”

“And what is the answer?” she said.

“Well, I had a little scuffle in the elevator. It's noticeable? At my hotel. I didn't know the marks still showed. Two drunks. A white guy and a black guy.”

I could feel Sims enjoy this in his hot Reeboks.

“Nick started the fight,” he told her.

“This is true?”

She said it to me but she was looking at the child eat his breakfast. We were all looking at Loyal.

“They told him he was going a little gray and he went berserk,” Sims said.

Greta had to take the child to school and then she had to go to her own school where she taught chemistry three days a week with the ocean at her back.

Sims and I stood on our spots, drinking water.

“You two still mad?” I said.

“She's still mad. I got over it.”

“I have a plane to catch,” I told him.

He showered and dressed and took me to my hotel and I hurried through a shower and got dressed and grabbed my bag and got back in the car and there was a man on the freeway, a man on an embankment, nodding his head to drive-time radio, and he sat on the grass with an object across his knees and Sims said it was a rifle and I said it was a crutch, one of those metal crutches with a forearm brace, and it took me a couple of seconds to understand that Sims was kidding—this was just the language of the freeway.

I found southern California too interesting. The experimental aircraft, the fault systems, the inferno of cars and smog, the women from nowhere, even the street gangs that were coming into prominence at the time, adopting varsity colors. I made business trips but kept them brief and blinkered, after the first one. The place had that edge-of-
everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.

When I shot George Manza I began to understand the nature of this kind of feeling. They put me in a radio car with a cop who smoked and they sent me eventually to a facility in upstate New York, a place that featured one of the oddities of the penal system. This was a miniature golf course, nine holes, with cartoon turrets and windmills—we were youthful offenders, you see, and maybe the guidance counselors thought we'd take snug comfort in the nursery shapes and bright colors or in the anal stuff of balls and holes. I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. But my mates and I, the D-felonies, the E-felonies, the head breakers, the thieves in the night, a mixed group as you'd imagine, with races, creeds, cries in the dark—we used to amble past the windows in the mess and look at the layout down there with its loopedy-loops and tunnels and puddle lakes, its sward of tinsel grass, and we called it California.

Phoenix was a neater package for me. I needed a private life. How could you have a private life in a place where all your isolated feelings are out in the open, where the tension in your heart, the thing you've been able to restrict to small closed rooms is everywhere exposed to the whitish light and grown so large and firmly fixed that you can't separate it from the landscape and sky?

I walked in the door and Marian said, “What happened to your face?”

I walk in the door and this is what I hear, children playing, radio playing, the news, the traffic, the phone is ringing, the washer is pumping through a cycle.

I smiled and kissed her and she picked up the phone. The kids were making noise out back, our kids and the neighbor's kids, a game made up by Lainie—I knew this from the quality of the shrieks. Lainie made up fiendish games, inventive shrill spectacles of torture and humiliation.

“What did you do to your hair?”

“Had it cut. You like?” she said, still on the phone with someone. “What happened to your face?”

I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out
the color in the carpets, the apricots and clarets, the amazing topaz golds.

I told Marian the next night about the thing I'd done, or the night after that, the thing with Donna at Mojave Springs. I thought I had to tell her. I owed it to her. I told her for our sake, for the good of the marriage. She was in bed reading when I told her. I'd anguished about the right time to tell her and then I told her suddenly, without immediate forethought. I didn't tell her what I'd said to Donna, or why Donna was at the hotel, and she didn't ask. I stood near the armchair with my shirt in my hand and I thought she took it well. She understood it was an isolated thing with a stranger in a hotel, a brief episode, finished forever. I told her I felt compelled to speak. I told her it was hard to speak about the matter but not as hard as withholding the truth and she nodded when I said this. I thought she took it fairly well. She didn't ask me to tell her anything more than I'd told her. There was an air of tact in the room, a sensitivity to feelings. I stood by the chair and waited for her to turn the page so I could get undressed and go to bed.

And the first available Saturday, the first Saturday I didn't go to the office, we drove south with the kids to see an ancient ruin.

We had sunscreen and hats and drinking water, which was Marian's idea, the water was, because this was desert scrub and the heat was intense.

Lainie stood behind the front seat, sometimes elbowed forward between Marian and me, leaning toward the windshield, quick to point out stupid maneuvers by other drivers. She reacted angrily to this, a habit that drained my own anger, and Marian's too, and prompted us to make excuses for the stupid and dangerous moves she pointed out.

Jeff was two years younger, he was six and liked to curl in a corner of the backseat, curl and twist, slide toward the floor in an astral separation from everything around him, using his body to daydream.

Even if it wasn't a rifle, what was he doing on the freeway, on the grassy verge, sitting there with a metal crutch in his lap just yards from that madman traffic?

The ancient ruin was over six hundred years old, a single major structure with smaller scattered remains and a trace of a wall somewhere. We stood in the late morning heat and listened to a park
ranger for a few minutes before we drifted off, one by one, although there was nothing else, essentially, to see.

I read a plaque and then watched Jeff stalk a ground squirrel. He wasn't wearing his hat but I didn't say anything, I just thought, Tough shit kid, don't say we didn't warn you. Then I relented and called him over and gave him the car keys. The effort to relent, the effort to slacken and yield, to love him in his careless slouch, this was a brutally difficult thing to do, small as it seems, small and fleeting—it was surprisingly hard. But I called him over and gave him the car keys, I knew he would like this idea, and told him to get his hat and lock the car and bring me the keys, and off he went, happy as I'd ever seen him.

I drifted back to the main structure and stood among a dozen tourists and listened to the ranger talk, a heavyset woman who scratched her elbow. No one knew the purpose of this structure, she told us, which was three stories high with a faint trace of graffiti near the top. I found I was more interested in the protective canopy than I was in the ancient structure. The ranger said the building was abandoned about a hundred years after it was built, the building and the whole settlement abandoned for no discernible reason, one of those mysteries of a whole people who disappear. But I found myself studying the protective canopy with its great canted columns, maybe seventy feet tall, and the latticed framework that supported the roof.

Lainie came and stood next to me, sort of collapsed against my haunch in a way that meant she was irreversibly bored.

The ranger listed some reasons why the people might have disappeared, the desert dwellers. She named flooding, she named drought, she named invasion, but these were only guesses, she said—no one had a clue to the real reasons.

I thought of Jesse Detwiler, the garbage archaeologist, and wondered if he might suggest that the people abandoned the settlement because they were pushed out by waste, because they had no room to live and breathe, surrounded by their own mounting garbage, and it was nice in a way to think it was true, one of those romantic desert mysteries and the answer's staring us in the face.

I was becoming Simslike, too soon, seeing garbage everywhere or reading it into a situation.

I told Lainie to go find her brother and see what he'd done with the car keys. Then we started home like a ragged band of pilgrims who'd failed to see the statue weep.

We were in the car ten minutes when Marian began to cry. She was at the wheel and her face lit up and she started crying softly. Lainie backed off from her standing station just behind us and took a seat by the window, hands folded in her lap. Jeff got interested in the scenery.

I said, “Want me to drive?”

And she shook her head no.

I said, “Let me drive, I'll drive.”

And she gestured no, she preferred to drive, this is what she wanted.

We were on a back road flanked by saguaros and wildflowers, notched saguaros, pecked by birds that nested there, and then we reached the interstate and edged into the windblast of streaming traffic.

No last names, no echoing second thoughts. This is the pact of casual sex. But I told her my last name and it wasn't casual, was it? That's the odd dominant of the piece, that I wanted to reach her, still her breathing, to make her breathless, yes. There was something about Donna that untongue-tied me. Guilt later, feeling Marian next to me, asleep in the dark.

When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other's face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you've seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that's wrong—when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we'd exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn't exhausted anything really—there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian felt denied.

Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it—privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing. All the scenes she recoiled from when she watched TV, the narrative of local crime, we see the body in the street, the lament of the relatives, the suspect doubled over to conceal himself—
Marian could not even watch the detective's hand on the suspect's head, bending him into the unmarked car. It was all a violence, a damage to the spirit. But she wanted my stories, my things, the fiercer the better.

I was selfish about the past, selfish and protective. I didn't know how to bring Marian into those years. And I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

She said it was her mother, she said it was two years ago today that her mother died and I repeated it for the kids and the kids relaxed a little. I reached back and got a stick of gum from Lainie. Two years ago today and of course Marian knew this and we didn't, I didn't, I hadn't kept track, and I felt relieved and the kids did too because at least there was a reason, at least it wasn't a thing where the parents act funny and the children learn to make their faces blank.

She shone brilliantly, she glowed in her weeping, she smiled, I think—a smile that was a wince but also a real smile, with her mother in it somewhere.

After a while the kids started to sing.

And I was relieved, I was goddamn glad because I'd sat there thinking I was to blame or thinking maybe she does it all the time because how the hell do I know what goes on when I'm not home.

And the kids were singing, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, if one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer.”

She looked at me and looked at the road and the kids kept singing, counting backwards all the way to one as Marian drove—cried and drove.

The super comes gimping toward him. Before he takes five steps along the street the super comes gimping toward him from a building down the block, moving with that hip-lurch of his that takes up half a sidewalk.

“Been looking for you,” the man says.

Manx Martin stands with folded arms, not bothering to cock his head just yet—a little early for gestures of the superior type.

“You seen those shovels?”

“What shovels?” Manx says.

“Because they're missing out of the basement.”

“Things always missing. Bought a new pair of socks missing in the wash.”

“Two snow shovels from the utility room standing against the wall this morning.”

“We expecting snow?” Manx says.

And he looks heavenward. Look like snow to you? Don't look like snow to me. Weatherman say snow?

“Gone by noon, right out the door. And I'm asking up and down the street.”

“You ought to be more careful who you ask. Because some people touchy on the subject.”

“I'm asking you because I hear things.”

The super is wearing a light shirt in this chill. Manx smells the change of season, the bite of wet and the cutting wind, and the man's standing here with his sleeves rolled up, getting on in years, the super, with stubble specked a little white.

“Somebody tells me straight out,” he says to Manx. “Talk to the klepto.”

“You're saying to my face.”

“I'm saying what I hear.”

“Who you hear it from?”

“And I'm saying those shovels worth good money. Those are tools I need to do my job. Those blades, understand. Try pushing snow with a coal shovel.”