Underworld (96 page)

The story voice, the play voice was all too Albertlike, rippling with incidental music and fanciful plot. She put the dinner on the table and spoke his name.

They talked through dinner, inconsequentially. She smoked her last cigarette of the day in the spare room, looking at the wall. She put out the cigarette by grinding it into the bathroom mirror and then she flushed it down the toilet and went to bed.

The first one ran into the playground, the one with the dark cap. Nick was punching the other one, both of them skidding on the icy surface.

He'd never seen the guy before and this is why he was punching him. He punched the guy to his knees, or the guy skidded to his knees, and then Nick looked into the playground. JuJu was chasing the first one but skidded and fell, a leg flying up. JuJu sat there a moment watching the guy run toward the steps that went down to the lower level. The playground was white and still, swings hanging empty, an inch of snow on the seats.

The other one was on his knees, looking embarrassed to be there. Nick crouched and set himself and threw a punch. He knew it was not necessary to throw this punch but he'd hit the guy only glancing blows to the face and he wanted to hit him solid. It was a chance to hit someone solid that he didn't want to miss. He punched him under the eye, a short-stroke blow, and the guy rocked back on his haunches, hands to his face, and Nick felt better now.

JuJu came out of the playground and took some frozen dog shit out
of the snow. He wasn't wearing gloves. He picked it up and mashed it into the guy's head, into his hair and ears.

He said, “Here, stroonz, this is for you.”

Then he washed his hands in the snow and they walked over to Mike's to shoot a game.

Matty knotted the blue tie. The Catholic school boys wore white shirts and blue ties. For a long time his mother had to knot his tie for him. And he couldn't figure out how to put his jacket on, how to hold it so that a certain arm goes in a certain sleeve hole, and sometimes he had to place the jacket flat on the ground, sit down in front of it and then match an arm to a hole, sort of lying down backwards into the jacket.

Imagine what Nicky said, watching this spectacle.

But he was over that now. He was over the tantrums, pretty much, and the silent treatment he used to give his mother when he was mad at her, and the times he locked the bathroom door and tried to suffocate himself with the shower curtain.

He was over the tantrums because he wasn't playing chess. Mr. Bronzini called it a sabbatical. One of those words of his, to be spelled, explained and acted out. Matty had his own word. Sick.

He could not take the losing. It was too awful. It made him physically weak and massively angry. It sent him reeling through the flat, arms windmilling. His brother bopped him on the head and that made him madder. He did not have enough height and weight to contain all his rage. He was past the point of crying. Losing made his limbs shake. He gasped for air. He did not understand why someone so small, young and unprepared should have to squat in the path of this juggernaut called losing.

He put on his tie and went to school. First he slipped the new dog tag over his neck, for atomic attack, with his name and school inscribed on the disk, and then he put on his blue tie and walked the five blocks to school.

Matty sat in the row next to the cloakroom and was one of three pupils who opened and closed the sliding doors of the cloakroom at
designated times. They worked in unison, with a whoosh and bang. This was their assignment.

It was Catherine Conway's assignment to clap the erasers every Friday, out the back door above the schoolyard, her eyes smarting in the chalk dust.

Richard Stasiak was assigned to open and close the windows. He took the window pole with the hook at one end and he fitted the hook into the loop at the top of the window and then pushed or pulled. Richard Stasiak was big and tall and this was the logical job for him.

They sat at their desks, forty boys and girls, sixth-graders, this drab gray day, backs erect, feet together, watching Sister Edgar.

Sister prowled the space between her desk and the blackboard, moving in a rustle of monochrome cotton, scrubbed hands flashing. She recited questions from the Baltimore Catechism and her students responded in a single crystal voice.

Matty believed in the Baltimore Catechism. It had all the questions and all the answers and it had love, hate, damnation and washing other people's feet, it had whips, thorns and resurrections, it had angels, shepherds, thieves and Jews, it had hosanna in the highest.

He didn't know what that meant, hosanna in the highest, and was afraid to ask. They were all afraid. They'd been afraid for a week, ever since Sister had banged Michael Kalenka's head against the blackboard when he gave a snippy answer to an easy question. They were studying the Creation and the Fall of Man, lesson five in the Baltimore Catechism, and Sister pointed to a picture in the book of a man and woman standing more or less undressed beneath an apple tree with a serpent coiled on a limb and she called on Michael Kalenka and asked him to identify the man and woman, the easiest question she'd ever asked, and Michael Kalenka stood up and looked at the picture, and he thought and looked and thought, and Sister said, “The original parents of us all,” and Michael Kalenka thought and grinned and said, “Tarzan and Jane.”

Sister flew at Michael Kalenka and collected the boy in the wing-folds of her habit. He was practically out of sight until she suddenly propelled him toward the blackboard headfirst. The impact was strong and true. There was a sound so real, a thud and a subsequent
hum, the whole panel vibrating, that the boys and girls went slack in their seats, wide-eyed and semiliquid. Blown out of their rigid posture. And Michael Kalenka stood stunned and rag-dollish, sheepish, guilty, grinning but mostly just stunned and rag-armed and sagging.

Sister asked questions from the catechism and they responded in unison. Matty liked doing this. To hear the assigned questions and to recite the right answers was the best part of the school day.

Sister knew the catechism by heart and Matty knew each day's lesson by heart, with more time for homework now and with a secret respect for Sister Edgar, who was known throughout the school as Sister Skelly Bone for the acute contours of her face and the whiteness of her complexion and the way her lean hands seemed ever ready to administer some grave touch, a cold and bony tag that makes you
it
forever.

He liked the way the response to each question repeated the question before delivering the answer.

Sister said, “What do we mean when we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead?”

The class replied in unison, “When we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead, we mean that on the last day Our Lord will come to judge everyone who has ever lived in this world.”

Then Sister told them to place their dog tags out above their shirts and blouses so she could see them. She wanted to make sure they were wearing their tags. The tags were designed to help rescue workers identify children who were lost, missing, injured, maimed, mutilated, unconscious or dead in the hours following the onset of atomic war.

Sister went up and down the aisles, bending to read each tag. At approach distance she smelled laundered and starched, steam-ironed, and her nails were buffed to a glassy lava finish, and the rosary beads that hung from her belt like a zoot-suiter's key chain were blinky bright, and when she rustled low and near she smelled more intimately of tooth powder and cleansing agents and the penance of scoured skin.

She said, “Woe betide the child who is not wearing a tag or who is wearing someone else's tag.”

It had been known to happen, in other classes, that a boy and girl switched tags to signify a kind of atomic fondling.

When Sister was finished with her inspection she said nothing, which surprised the class. They were expecting a drill, the duck-and-cover drill, which they'd rehearsed before the tags arrived. Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.

Instead she went back to the catechism, to questions and answers, until Annette Esposito, an eighth-grader, came in with a note from the principal. Sister read the note and looked at Annette Esposito and said, “What are these?”

At first nobody knew what she meant. Then the class realized she was looking at Annette Esposito's chest, her breasts, which caused bulges under her blue jumper.

“What's all this? Get rid of this. I don't want to see this next time you come in here.”

The boys and girls went low in their seats, tingling a little at the exposure of Annette Esposito as a freak of nature. Their eyes went shifty and bright. They bit their knuckles and made small damp throat noises. When Annette Esposito walked out the door, not unproud, flouncing slightly, shoulders thrown back, every eyeball in the room clicked in her direction, fastened on her breasts of course, not a common object of contemplation in the life of the sixth grade.

Sister did not call the drill. She did penmanship instead, demonstrating on the blackboard the cursive flair of her own hand. She showed the slant, the loop, she stressed the need to stay between the ruled lines, she told them to take their fountain pens and follow the motions she made in the air, and they did, working the wrists, looping in unison, and they shaped a tempestuous capital T that resembled a rowboat in a rainstorm.

Matty sat there nearly spellbound, writing in the air with his brother's old Parker vacumatic, a streaked green model with an arrow clip, but his mood went flat when the bell rang for lunch and Sister crook'd a forefinger in his direction.

“Matthew Shay.”

His own name stunned him, coming from her lips.

“See me before you leave the room.”

With his two assigned mates he slid open the cloakroom doors and got his coat and waited for the room to empty and then presented himself at Sister's desk.

She had tight blue eyes and thin lips and a nose that was slightly bumpy up near the bridge.

“In the schoolyard yesterday. You were huddled with several others. Looking at a magazine.”

The terror of being alone with Sister Edgar.

“I would like to know. Firstly. The name of the magazine.”

She leaned on a corner of the desk lightly twirling her beads, the big crucifix moving in a wobbly spin with Christ's body bowed out from the cross.

“Secondly. A summary of the contents.”

The answers passed through his mind.

1. Movieland magazine.

2. Full-page faces of Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. Also, Mario Lanza's Heart Stood Still. There were articles about stars he'd never heard of. There were ads for French nighties and dance panties.

What if she asked him about these things?

Sister peered closely, waiting. He kept his hands behind his back to conceal his gnawed fingernails and the shreds of dead skin at the edges.

Would he have to explain that a dance panty is when they embroider a fox-trotting couple on the leg of a lady's underwear?

And what if the magazine was banned by the Legion of Decency and she asked him who it belonged to? Although she would never end a sentence with a preposition.

“Matthew. Yes?”

If he had a choice between lying to Sister Edgar and snitching on a classmate, he'd have to snitch, instantly and remorselessly. And what about the ads all over the back of the magazine for bust creams and better bust contours?

Matthew-yes was not a question. It was a summons to urgency and truth. And he told her the name of the magazine and who was on the
cover and what was inside, sticking to the romances and heartbreaks of the stars, and Sister seemed interested and pleased.

He was surprised and encouraged and became less tentative, describing the Hollywood homes of certain stars, and Sister asked little leading questions, trying to obscure her interest by looking out the window, and he grew confident and expansive, speaking rapidly and more or less uncontrollably, making things up when he couldn't recall the details of a story or a photograph, feeling a sense of desperate elation, and Sister was eating it up.

She knew a lot about the stars. Their favorite flavors and worst insect bites and their wallflower nights in high school. Their basic everydayness inside the cosmetic surgeries and tragic marriages. She looked out the window and asked him sly testing questions and dropped little comments here and there.

He was able to stand outside the scene, hearing his own voice, watching the babbling boy at ease in the company of the hooded nun. But he wasn't completely unwary. It was her after all, habit and hood. The cloth was daunting. She was all cloth. She was a wall of laundered cloth. A woman of the cloth.

In the schoolyard after lunch Richard Stasiak did an amazing thing. Matty saw it without knowing for a moment quite what he'd seen. Richard Stasiak wore underwear so shabby and itchy and threadbare that he unbuttoned his fly and stuck his hand in there and pulled the underwear right off his body, yanking the ratty thing out of his fly and throwing it at Mary Feeley, who skipped away backwards, hands to her mouth as if she'd seen something it was best to keep unspoken.

Then they all went into class again.

Nick grabbed a ride every morning with another packer in the plant, waiting on a cold corner in the dark and then driving down to the assend of the Bronx where one river does a curl into the other and the ice-cream plant sits in the weeds like a pygmy prison on the Zambezi and this was better than taking the train in the lockstep drudge of the rush.

After work he got dropped near the zoo and walked west past his
brother's school, where he saw a guy in one car giving a push to six guys in another. He came to the building where they lived and turned at Donato's grocery and went thirty yards down the narrow street and swung into an opening that led down a set of concrete steps into the network of alleyways that ran between five or six buildings clustered here.