Underworld (86 page)

That's when I got the idea and felt the twinge of regret.

I stopped for dinner in a candlelit restaurant in the 70s, where they
seated me with three others because it was shared tables tonight. There was only one subject, of course, at least for a while, and we wondered how widespread the blackout might be, and whether it was sabotage, and someone said, a book editor with a bow tie, that this was the title of an early Hitchcock film, with Sylvia Sidney, and he named the rest of the cast compulsively—a film that starts with the lights going out. We skipped dessert and coffee for the sake of those waiting on line and I had a drink in a bar nearby and thought Jerry was right, Jerry Sullivan, this was the twinge, the pinch of guilt—we ought to be going to the Bronx tonight, Jerry and I, not trying to commandeer a taxi but walking all the way, something crazy and emotional, a trek through a city gone dark and cold.

But then I thought stupid, no, forget it—we'd lose interest on the way or get in a fight with looters and muggers or just get tired, or Jerry would, and what happens after that?

A man directed traffic with a rolled-up magazine, a man of some girth but quick on his feet, dipping and gliding, addressing the major mess at 86th Street, a man who shrugged off beeping horns and did a hundred semaphores, extravagant of gesture, in a topcoat with a velvet collar, his glossy baton flashing and people pausing to watch, and there was a great and fervent feeling that attended his performance, which was conscientious and deft however befrilled by theater, and it spread among the people in the street.

But it would have been tremendous somehow too, a beautiful thing, I thought, walking up Manhattan and into the Bronx, as a gesture, a remembrance, and all the way to the old neighborhood, tonight of all nights, with the world coming down, but what would we do when we got there, at two in the morning?

People walked along listening to transistor radios because there were stations with auxiliary power and there were men wrapped in headscarves who sold flashlights and candles and there were candles in thousands of apartment windows and people on line for candles outside the five-and-ten and long lines at phone booths on every second corner.

The power grid gone. What did it mean? The whole linked system down. Or not linked sufficiently perhaps. Sylvia Sidney in the dark.

From certain vantages the city was all haunted silhouette, secret and recessed, its neon ego shut down. There was a sky tonight. The towers across the park were planed down to a kind of night velvet that was etched and deathly and lacking the static that makes the high nights throb.

I heard the sound of drums, drumbeats, not staccato shots but hand drums maybe, dull and soft-skinned, coming out of the park.

I was a stranger here. I knew Manhattan only at street level, fitfully, and felt a little isolated, and the place scared me with its knowingness, its offhand vaunt, a style of mind and guise that can be harder to learn than some dialect of the Transvaal. Everybody knew the same seven things. But it could take you years to work through the list and by that time the number would be different, or the whole list.

They came out of the park at 90th Street, a band of hippies on a candlelight march, with flutes, drums and tambourines, about fifty chanting people, and a man with a needle stuck in his protruding tongue, and a woman with a snake around her neck, and a haze of pungent smoke that had the whiff of some congenial misdemeanor, and there were kids walking along and babies in backpacks and slings, and the marchers chanted a sort of hummed syllable, a thing with a twang, it sounded to me like
Bomb,
a vibe with the gravid tone of prayer, repeated, repeated, but they wouldn't be chanting an ominous word, would they, with infants strapped to their chests and backs.

And maybe Jerry had been correct. I didn't have the right to refuse him. This tremendous thing of his, this trip to the Bronx—I felt guilty about slipping away and betraying a sweet idea.

I watched the marchers go south along the park edge. The streets began to darken, drained of traffic and headlights, and an odd calm set in, edged with apprehension. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands trapped in subways or aloft in packed elevators waiting. The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rateye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyway.

I walked east on 96th Street. Going empty and dead, stores closed, bus stops deserted, phone booths unoccupied. Ego gone and vertigo
too, a city without its merengue spin, and a car pulled up at the center stripe, anonymous sedan going the other way, and the driver stuck his head into the gusty wind and called across to me.

I said, “What?”

“Where you go? I take you. Cheap.”

I looked at him. I was glad I'd walked away from Jerry. It would have been deadly. It would have been crap. I wouldn't have been able to listen to that crap. I got in the car and told the guy where my hotel was. I wanted to call Marian from my room, if the phones were working, Marian Bowman, and tell her what was happening here and ask what they knew about it there.

There was a hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been located. But I asked the guy if he'd heard any news.

“All out. State of Maine out. Boston, Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, my sister lives. Ontario, Canada. Very big, this thing.”

I sat back and watched the streets roll by and saw what I could see in the moonlight.

We'd be married three years later. Our daughter would be born in 1970, the year a small group of radicals bombed the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Marian's Big Ten town by igniting a carload of agricultural fertilizer and fuel oil. Killed one man, injured five others.

We'd have a son two years later. Children. This was remote to me sitting in the Romanian's car, or the Greek's. Marriage remote. Fatherhood a vague regret somewhere in the kitchen smell of another country. The decades not exactly unpromising but remote, and maybe unpromising too, in this phantom Manhattan, with only a few stragglers astir and the darkness so dense it had physical mass.

I looked out the Greek's dusty window and could see the past and never stop seeing it but could not summon the future, even in cartoon strokes, the strong bright Sunday of the world.

We rode without talking the rest of the way.

And the enormity of the night. You could feel the night expanding, standing on the sidewalk near Times Square, a siren sounding half a mile away.

I looked at the candles lined up on the desk in the lobby. The lobby
was empty and the candles threw light high on the walls. The clerk came out of a room somewhere.

“I could take you up but frankly.”

“Not necessary.”

“I took up people I lost count.”

“I'll just take a candle.”

The clerk held a flashlight. He gestured when he spoke and the beam swung across the small lobby.

“I did something to my back with the climbing,” he said. “But I lit these candles you can take, in case some people come in they don't have a match.”

I took a candle and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. When I entered the room I went right to the window to see how the night looked from up here.

I didn't call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that's the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

He walks along the curving base of the stadium wall, under the blue and white bunting, and he is trying to spot an easy mark.

He is in the crowd, a large and moving swarm, elbows and shoulders, faces suddenly jutting, eye to eye, and they're still coming down from the elevated train station, men and boys, talking and whooping, and the line is forming for bleacher seats even though the gates won't open until nine in the morning, hours from now, and they're coming up from the subway and streaming out of the local streets and he walks some more, caught up in the rush of sensation, flags flying and emblems bejeweling the high wall and a second long line, this one for standing room tickets, men eating and drinking, some sitting in beach chairs covered with blankets, and Manx goes walking through clouds of cigar smoke and sees whiskey flasks showing here and there, with caps on chains.

Now what does he do? Does he look for some highjiver from Harlem, a Giant fan all flush with victory and ready to drop some dollars on a genuine all-time souvenir?

Won't work, Manx thinks. Black man's not gonna believe anything he says. Think I'm some fool running a penny hustle. Black man's gonna look him down with that saucy eye he's got for outrageous plots against his person.

No. Got to go white. Only way to go. Besides, the numbers mostly white, so it's the percentage play.

A happy rumble. The street is one big buzz and rumble, a steady roar of talk and song and people calling to each other, filled with good feeling.

Manx walks over to two men. He does this on an impulse, in the spirit of why not, and because he doesn't want to stand around all night studying faces and calculating odds, even though that's exactly what he ought to be doing, and he knows it, and he'd planned to do it, but the best-laid plans, like the man says, have a habit of collapse.

His hand grips the baseball. He keeps his hand outside the jacket pocket and he grips the ball through the cloth.

And in the spirit of good feeling. In the swelling presence of two groups of fans, Giants and Yankees, both winners this year—a happy steady join-in roar that brings him up and gives him heart.

He walks over to two men standing on line in front of one of the booths. Excuse me. Something here you might be interested in. He talks to them. He tells them about the baseball, this is the baseball that the guy hit into the stands, the home run that won the game, and the longer he talks the more unbelievable he sounds to himself. He can't even believe this is him talking. His voice sounds like something released from an air mattress when you pull out the nipple.

The two men seem to step back although it's probably not actual physical motion so much as a wishful maneuver he sees in their eyes.

“I'm talking what is a fact. Whatever it sounds,” he says, “this is the thing that happened at the ballpark across the river,” and he knows he is working now at restoring a certain self-respect—never mind making a sale.

One guy says, “I don't think so, no. Not interested. You interested?”

Other guy says, “Not interested.”

Manx takes the ball out of his pocket. He's not sure why he's doing this since it proves nothing except the fact that he has a ball, at least
he has a ball, and he holds it much the way his son Cotter had held it earlier in the evening, gripping it in one hand, spinning it with the other, hard-eyed and defiant.

Then he turns and walks away, feeling their looks, seeing smirks so clear he could draw them with a pencil, and going small, bristling a little at the back of the neck, and going smaller with every step.

He walks a little ways.

He always thought he'd like to get himself a flask, flat enough to pocket conveniently, with a cap on a chain.

He puts the ball back in his pocket and walks out past the wooden barricades near gate 4.

You got these guys come out here think they own the earth.

He remembers he's supposed to write a letter excusing his son from school because he's got a fever of a hundred and two, which is a secret they are keeping from the boy's mother. Not the fever but the letter. The fever is a made-up deal.

He stands and watches a while. Then he gets an idea. He watches, thinking there's crowds of people and I'm holding something every last one of them would like to own, but who's gonna believe a story that comes out of nowhere. Then he realizes what he ought to be doing. He gets an idea. He gets it from the crowd. He ought to be looking for fathers and sons.

Get the man to do it for the boy.

Appeal to the man's whatever, his rank as a father, his soft spot, his willingness to show off a little, impress the boy, make the night extra special.

And yes there are men who have brought their sons here tonight, as an adventure, you know, a fair number of sons on the scene, as a thing you want the boy to experience, staying up all night to buy World Series tickets.

See, even if the man doesn't believe it, the boy will. And Manx can imagine a little conspiracy in the making, the father and the hustler working as a team to make the boy believe the baseball's real.

It takes these turns of mind to work a deal.

He begins to prowl the lines, to scout the prospects standing on line along the high wall, he checks out faces and attitudes, he doesn't want
to rush, he follows the wall in a westerly direction and sees what he thinks he might be looking for, finally, the kid's maybe eleven, the man's pulling a sandwich from a gym bag and they're standing there in total innocence of his approach.

He does his intro, which he takes to be the toughest part, making the details clear, and he looks from man to boy and back, trying to get them both involved, and it seems to be going well, and the man tears the sandwich and gives half to the kid, and they look at Manx and eat.

They are listening and chewing and he tries to read their looks. He is stymied, though, by the names involved, the players at the climax, he doesn't know their names, faces, numbers, all the things the fans know from childhood to the day they die, and this slows his narrative and muddies it up and he tries to compensate by taking out the baseball.

Now the man is talking, through a mouthful of food.

“So what you're saying is. You're telling me. In other words.”

White meat and lettuce are showing behind his teeth.