by Don DeLillo
Look at the ushers locking arms at the wrists and making a sedan seat for the cardiac victim and hauling him off to the station under the grandstand.
One glance back at the area above, he allows himself a glance and sees the rival getting to his feet. The man stands out, white-shirted and hulking, and it’s not the college boy he thought it might be, the guy in the varsity jacket who’d been scrambling for the ball.
And the man catches his eye. This is not what Cotter wants, this is damage to the cause. He made a mistake looking back. He allowed himself a glance, a sidewise flash, and now he’s caught in the man’s hard glare.
The raised seams of the ball are pulsing in his hand.
Their eyes meet in the spaces between rocking bodies, between faces that jut and the broad backs of shouting fans. Celebration all around him. But he is caught in the man’s gaze and they look at each other over the crowd and through the crowd and it is Bill Waterson with his shirt stained and his hair all punished and sprung—good neighbor Bill flashing a cutthroat smile.
The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays a hurdy-gurdy.
Edgar stands in the aisle fitting together the two facing pages of the reproduction. People are climbing over seats, calling hoarsely toward the field. He stands with the pages in his face. He hadn’t realized he was seeing only half the painting until the left-hand page drifted down and he got a glimpse of rust brown terrain and a pair of skeletal men pulling on bell ropes. The page brushed against a woman’s arm and spun into Edgar’s godfearing breast.
Thomson is out in center field now dodging fans who come in rushes and jumps. They jump against his body, they want to take him to the ground, show him snapshots of their families.
Edgar reads the copy block on the matching page. This is a sixteenth century work done by a Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel, and it is called The Triumph of Death.
A nervy title methinks. But he is intrigued, he admits it—the left-hand page may be even better than the right.
He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls. He stands in the aisle and looks at the naked man pursued by dogs. He looks at the gaunt dog nibbling the baby in the dead woman’s arms. These are long gaunt starveling hounds, they are war dogs, hell dogs, boneyard hounds beset by parasitic mites, by dog tumors and dog cancers.
Dear germ-free Edgar, the man who has an air-filtration system in his house to vaporize specks of dust—he finds a fascination in cankers, lesions and rotting bodies so long as his connection to the source is strictly pictorial.
He finds a second dead woman in the middle ground, straddled by a skeleton. The positioning is sexual, unquestionably. But is Edgar sure it’s a woman bestraddled or could it be a man? He stands in the aisle and they’re all around him cheering and he has the pages in his face. The painting has an instancy that he finds striking. Yes, the dead fall upon the living. But he begins to see that the living are sinners. The cardplayers, the lovers who dally, he sees the king in an ermine cloak with his fortune stashed in hogshead drums. The dead have come to empty out the wine gourds, to serve a skull on a platter to gentlefolk at their meal. He sees gluttony, lust and greed.
Edgar loves this stuff. Edgar, Jedgar. Admit it—you love it. It causes a bristling of his body hair. Skeletons with wispy dicks. The dead beating kettledrums. The sackcloth dead slitting a pilgrim’s throat.
The meatblood colors and massed bodies, this is a census-taking of awful ways to die. He looks at the flaring sky in the deep distance out beyond the headlands on the left-hand page—Death elsewhere, Conflagration in many places, Terror universal, the crows, the ravens in silent glide, the raven perched on the white nag’s rump, black and white forever, and he thinks of a lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb, and he can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave. What secret history are they writing? There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires, things even the Director cannot guess—a man whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western world—because these plots are only now evolving. This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert—for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.
And what is the connection between Us and Them, how many bundled links do we find in the neural labyrinth? It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.
The old dead fucking the new. The dead raising coffins from the earth. The hillside dead tolling the old rugged bells that clang for the sins of the world.
He looks up for a moment. He takes the pages from his face—it is a wrenching effort—and looks at the people on the field. Those who are happy and dazed. Those who run around the bases calling out the score. The ones who are so excited they won’t sleep tonight. Those whose team has lost. The ones who taunt the losers. The fathers who will hurry home and tell their sons what they have seen. The husbands who will surprise their wives with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. The fans pressed together at the clubhouse steps chanting the players’ names. The fans having fistfights on the subway going home. The screamers and berserkers. The old friends who meet by accident out near second base. Those who will light the city with their bliss.
Cotter walks at a normal pace in the afterschool light. He goes past rows of tenements down Eighth Avenue with a small solemn hop in his stride, a kind of endless levered up-and-down, and Bill is positioned off his shoulder maybe thirty yards back.
He sees the Power of Prayer sign and carries the ball in his right hand and rubs it up several times and looks back and sees the college boy in the two-tone jacket fall in behind Bill, the guy who was involved in the early scuffle for the ball.
Bill has lost his buckaroo grin. He barely shows an awareness that Cotter exists, a boy who walks the earth in high-top Keds. Cotter’s body wants to go. But if he starts running at this point, what we have is a black kid running in a mainly white crowd and he’s being followed by a pair of irate whites yelling thief or grief or something.
They walk down the street, three secret members of some organized event.
Bill calls out, “Hey Cotter buddy come on, we won this game together.”
Many people have disappeared into cars or down the subways, they are swarming across the walkway on the bridge to the Bronx, but there are still enough bodies to disrupt traffic in the streets. The mounted police are out, high-riding and erect, appearing among the cars as levitated beings.
“Hey Cotter I had my hand on that ball before you did.”
Bill says this good-natured. He laughs when he says it and Cotter begins to like the man all over again. Car horns are blowing all along the street, noises of joy and mutual salute.
The college boy says, “I think it’s time I got in this. I’m in this too. I was the first one to grab ahold of the ball. Actually long before either one of you. Somebody hit it out of my hand. I mean if we’re talking about who was first.”
Cotter is watching the college boy speak, looking back diagonally. He sees Bill stop, so he stops. Bill is stopping for effect. He wants to stop so he can measure the college boy, look him up and down in an itemizing way. He is taking in the two-tone jacket, the tight red hair, he is taking in the whole boy, the entire form and structure of the college boy’s status as a land animal with a major brain.
And he says, “What?” That’s all. A hard sharp what.
And he stands there agape, his body gone slack in a comic dumbness that’s pervaded with danger.
He says, “Who the hell are you anyway? What ar
e you doing here? Do I know you?”
Cotter watches this, entertained by the look on the college boy’s face. The college boy thought he was part of a team, it’s us against him. Now his eyes don’t know where to go.
Bill says, “This is between my buddy Cotter and me. Personal business, understand? We don’t want you here. You’re ruining our fun. And if I have to make it any plainer, there’s going to be a family sitting down to dinner tonight minus a loved one.”
Bill resumes walking and so does Cotter. He looks back to see the college boy following Bill for a number of paces, unsurely, and then falling out of step and beginning to fade down the street and into the crowd.
Bill looks at Cotter and grins narrowly. It is a wolfish sort of look with no mercy in it. He carries his suit jacket clutched and bunched in his hand, wadded up like something he might want to throw.
With advancing dark the field is taking on a deeper light. The grass is incandescent, it has a heat and sheen. People go running past, looking half ablaze, and Russ Hodges moves with the tentative steps of some tourist at a grand bazaar, trying to hand-shuffle through the crowd.
Some ushers are lifting a drunk off the first-base line and the man warps himself into a baggy mass and shakes free and begins to run around the bases in his oversized raincoat with long belt trailing.
Russ makes his way through the infield and dance-steps into an awkward jog that makes him feel ancient and extraneous and he thinks of the ballplayers of his youth, the men with redneck monickers whose endeavors he followed in the papers every day, Eppa Rixey and Hod Eller and old Ivy Wingo, and there is a silly grin pasted across his face because he is a forty-one-year-old man with a high fever and he is running across a ball field to conduct a dialogue with a pack of athletes in their underwear.
He says to someone running near him, “I don’t believe it, I still don’t believe it.”
Out in dead center he sees the clubhouse windows catch the trigger-glint of flashbulbs going off inside. He hears a shrill cheer and turns and sees the raincoat drunk sliding into third base. Then he realizes the man running alongside is Al Edelstein, his producer.
Al shouts, “Do you believe it?”
“I do not believe it,” says Russ.
They shake hands on the run.
Al says, “Look at these people.” He is shouting and gesturing, waving a Cuban cigar. “It’s like I-don’t-know-what.”
“If you don’t know what, then I don’t know what.”
“Save the voice,” says Al.
“The voice is dead and buried. It went to heaven on a sunbeam.”
“I’ll tell you one thing’s for certain, old pal. We’ll never forget today.”
“Glad you’re with me, buddy.”
The running men shake hands again. They are deep in the outfield now and Russ feels an ache in every joint. The clubhouse windows catch the flash of the popping bulbs inside.
In the box seats across the field Edgar sets his hat at an angle on his head. It is a dark gray homburg that brings out the nicely sprinkled silver at his temples.
He has the Bruegel folded neatly in his pocket and will take these pages home to study further.
Thousands remain in the stands, not nearly ready to leave, and they watch the people on the field, aimless eddies and stirrings, single figures sprinting out of crowds. Edgar sees someone dangling from the wall in right-center field. These men who drop from the high walls like to hang for a while before letting go. They hit the ground and crumple and get up slowly. But it’s the static drama of the dangled body that Edgar finds compelling, the terror of second thoughts.
Gleason is on his feet now, crapulous Jack all rosy and afloat, ready to lead his buddies up the aisle.
He rails at Frank. “Nothing personal, pal, but I wonder if you realize you’re smelling up the ballpark. Talk about stinko. I can smell you even with Shor on the premises. Usually with Shor around, blind people are tapping for garbage cans in their path.”
Shor thinks this is funny. Light comes into his eyes and his face goes crinkly. He loves the insults, the slurs and taunts, and he stands there beaming with balloonhead love. It is the highest thing that can pass between men of a certain mind—the stand-up scorn that carries their affections.
But what about Frank? He says, “It’s not my stink. It’s your stink, pal. Just happens I am the one that’s wearing it.”
Says Gleason, “Hey. Don’t think you’re the first friend I ever puked on. I puked on better men than you. Consider yourself honored. This is a form of flattery I extend to nearest and dearest.” Here he waves his cigarette. “But don’t think I am riding in any limousine that has you in it.”
They march toward the exit ramp with Edgar going last. He turns toward the field on an impulse and sees another body dropping from the outfield wall, a streaky length of limbs and hair and flapping sleeves. There is something apparitional in the moment and it chills and excites him and sends his hand into his pocket to touch the bleak pages hidden there.
The crowd is thinning quickly now and Cotter goes past the last of the mounted police down around 148th Street.
“Hey Cotter now let’s be honest. You snatched it out of my hand. A clear case of snatch and run. But I’m willing to be reasonable. Let’s talk turkey. What do you say to ten dollars in crisp bills? That’s a damn fair offer. Twelve dollars. You can buy a ball and a glove for that.”
“That’s what you think.”
“All right, whatever it takes. Let’s find a store and go in. A fielder’s glove and a baseball. You got sporting goods stores around here? Hell, we won the game of our lives. There’s cause for celebration.”
“The ball’s not for sale. Not this ball.”
Bill says, “Let me tell you something, Cotter.” Then he pauses and grins. “You got quite a grip, you know. My arm needs attention in a big way. You really put the squeeze on me.”
“Lucky I didn’t bite. I was thinking about it.”
Bill seems delighted at the way Cotter has entered the spirit of the moment. The side streets are weary with uncollected garbage and broken glass, with the odd plundered car squatting flat on its axle and men who stand in doorways completely adream.
Bill runs toward Cotter, he takes four sudden running steps, heavy and overstated, arms spread wide and a movie growl rolling from his throat. Cotter sees it is a joke but not until he has run into the street and done a loop around a passing car.
They smile at each other across the traffic.
“I looked at you scrunched up in your seat and I thought I’d found a pal. This is a baseball fan, I thought, not some delinquent in the streets. You seem to be dead set on disappointing me. Cotter? Buddies sit down together and work things out.”
The streetlights are on. They are walking briskly now and Cotter isn’t sure who was first to step up the pace. He feels a pain in his back where the seat leg was digging in.
“Now tell me what it’s going to take to separate you from that baseball, son.”
Cotter doesn’t like the tone of this.
“I want that cotton-pickin’ ball.”
Cotter keeps walking.
“Hey goofus I’m talking to you. You maybe think this is some cheapo entertainment. String the guy along.”
“You can talk all you want,” Cotter says. “The ball’s not yours, it’s mine. I’m not selling it or trading it.”
A car comes veering off the avenue and Cotter stops to let it go by. Then he feels something shift around him. There’s a ripple in the pavement or the air and a scant second in a woman’s face nearby—her eyes shift to catch what’s happening behind him. He turns to see Bill coming wide and fast and arm-pumping. It seems awful heavy traffic for a baseball. The color coming into Bill’s face, the shiny fabric at his knees. He has a look that belongs to someone else entirely, a man out of another experience, desperate and propelled.
Cotter stands there for one long beat. He wastes a head-fake, then starts to run down the empty side st
reet with Bill right on his neck and reaching. He cuts sharp and ducks away, skidding to his knees and wheeling on his right hand, the ball hand, pressing the ball hard in the tar and using it to pivot. Bill goes past him in a drone of dense breath, a formal hum that is close to speech. Cotter sees him stop and turn. He is skewed with rage, face bloated and quirked. A sleeve hangs down from the jacket in his hand and brushes softly on the ground.
Cotter runs back up to the avenue with the sound of rustling breath behind him. They are past the ballpark crowd, this is unmixed Harlem here—all he has to do is get to the corner, to people and lights. He sees barroom neon and bedsheets strung across a lot. He sees Fresh Killed Chickens From The Farm. He reads the sign, or maybe gathers it whole, and there’s an odd calm completion in it, a gesturing of safety. Two women step aside when he gets near—they glance past him to his pursuit and he notes the alertness in their faces, the tapering of attention. Bill is close, banging the asphalt in his businessman’s shoes.
Cotter goes south on the avenue and runs half a block and then he turns and does a caper, he does a physical jape—running backwards for a stretch, high-stepping, mocking, showing Bill the baseball. He’s a cutup in a sour state. He holds the ball chest-high and turns it in his fingers, which isn’t easy when you’re running—he rotates the ball on its axis, spins it slowly over and around, showing the two hundred and sixteen raised red cotton stitches.
Don’t tell me you don’t love this move.
The maneuver makes Bill slow down. He looks at Cotter backpedaling, doing a danceman’s strut, but he doesn’t detect an opening here. Because the maneuver makes him realize where he is. The fact that Cotter’s not scared. The fact that he’s parading the baseball. Bill stops completely but is too smart to look around. Best to limit your purview to straight ahead. Because you don’t know who might be looking back at you. And the more enlightened he becomes, the more open grows the space for Cotter’s anger. He doesn’t really know how to show it. This is the second time today he has taunted someone but he doesn’t feel the spunky rush of dodging the cop. The high heart of the gatecrash is a dimness here—he is muddled and wrung out and can’t get his bad-ass glare to function. So he stands there flatfoot and looks at Bill with people walking by and noticing and not noticing and he spins the ball up and over the back of his hand and catches it skipping off his wrist with a dip and twist of the same hand, like fuck you mister who you messing with.
