Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  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.

  MANX MARTIN 3

  * * *

  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 cl
imax, 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.

  “That’s right. You got it,” Manx says, hearing himself adopt a high pitch that’s meant to be cheerful and optimistic.

  But the man’s not looking at the baseball. He’s looking at Manx.

  “And I’m supposed to stand here.”

  Manx begins to understand, close range, that this guy’s a bus driver or sewer worker or bricklayer.

  “And listen to this bullcrap.”

  The man is chewing and talking.

  “I think you better haul ass out of here, buddy, before I call a cop.”

  Manx puts the ball back in his pocket.

  “They put son of a bitches like you behind bars is where you belong.”

  Talking like that in front of his own kid.

  The kid is hungry, he’s going through the lettuce like a lawn mower.

  They’re standing there eating, both of them, looking at Manx, and the son resembles the father to such a degree, stocky and full-faced, that Manx wants to warn him against growing up.

  Think they own the earth.

  It takes him an hour, scouting the lines, doing three circuits of the stadium, talking to this and that person, getting a feel for the individual, seeing how it goes, and it’s not going well, giving himself another five minutes by the clock on the wall at the southwest end, and then five more minutes, telling himself if he doesn’t spot someone in five minutes, with a wholesome kid in tow, he will give up and go home, and then one more minute, and then one more, prowling the lines, making approaches that don’t pan out, and about an hour later he is talking to a man and his son who are squatted down outside the bleacher section near the end of a very long line, camped out with a sleeping bag for the kid and a duffle coat for the man, and Manx is working his way into the names.

  “Which I’m saying, in all honesty.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying this baseball you claim to have in your possession.”

  “Right right right. But I don’t know the player’s name, y’understand, which I’m being honest with you.”

  “You mean Bobby Thomson?”

  “That’s the one. All right. I feel better now.”

  See, Manx believes he can be straight-up with this man. Expose his own shortcomings. He’s not a fan and shouldn’t pretend to be. And at the same time, only deeper, he thinks this is a strategy that can work, it’s a scheme, a plot—show the man your weakness and he will swallow your story whole.

  “I’m of the attitude where if you’re doing a little business, you put all your cards on the table. And I’ll tell you what I think. That tomorrow a wholesale rabble show themselves at the clubhouse entrance. Carrying a baseball, every one of them, and saying I got the ace.”

  “When in fact, according to your claim,” the man says.

  “When in fact the ace is in the hole,” Manx says, and he reaches into his pocket and takes out the ball.

  The man smiles. The man is on his haunches against the wall and Manx is in a squat himself, holding the ball slightly atremble for comic effect, staring hard at the man, showing the man a fake intensity, which they both know is fake, just for effect, and the man holds out his hand for the ball, amused but skeptical, meaning in other words that he’ll play along for now.

  But Manx doesn’t give him the ball.

  The boy is sitting up in the sleeping bag, trying to stay awake.

  “Now see this tar spot,” Manx says. And he shows the man and he shows the boy. “I think I ought to rub it off, being it has no business here.”

  And he wets his thumb with a flourish and tries to remove a scant trace of tar, because Cotter must have bounced the ball in the street, but he only succeeds in smudging the area and has to wonder why he is doctoring the ball at all.

  “By the way,” the fellow says, maybe to distract Manx from his embarrassment. “My name’s Charlie.”

  “You call me Manx. And the boy. What’s your name, son?”

  “Tell him.”

  “No,” the kid says.

  “We got us a rascal here,” Manx says. “How old’s this rascally son of a gun?”

  “Eight,” the man says.

  “Eight. Imagine being eight. Imagine going to the first game of the World Series and seeing all these famous players. Something he’ll remember for the rest of his life.”

  “His name’s Chuckie.”

  Manx looks at Chuckie. Kid rather be home sleeping in a soft warm bed with dog drawings on the wall. That’s okay. What we’re talking about here is not the present but the future. Pop’s looking to build a memory for the boy.

  “Being eight. Yankee Stadium. The most famous ballpark in the country.”

  Manx puts the ball in the man’s hand.

  “But if a dozen people show up with baseballs at the clubhouse entrance,” Charlie says, “how do I convince anyone? How do I convince myself this is the Bobby Thomson ball? Or anyone else?”

  Manx is in his crapshooter’s squat.

  “Let me put it this way,” he says, and he does not shy from the question because he’s been waiting for it ever since he walked across the bridge from Harlem. “Do they believe you or me? Who do they believe? Put yourself in their place, friends of yours, people in the office. Then look at me and look at you. Who they gonna believe?”

  Manx knows the logic in this argument is about six times removed from the question of the ball’s actual history. But he thinks he can count on this fellow to see the underlying subject, the turn of mind.

  “And I can believe it, personally, myself,” he says, “because my own boy give me the goods on this baseball. And no way on earth he’s gonna lie to the old man about a thing like this. He lie all right. Lie about school. Miss school, tell a lie. Miss a visit to the dentist.”

  “But this is baseball,” Charlie says helpfully.

  “Exactly right. But I have to admit I wasn’t convinced at first. Like you. Like anyone. I was first gave over to doubt. But then I heard the boy.”

  “And you felt you knew.”

  “I felt exactly. I knew. Because I heard it in his voice.”

  “And saw it as well.”

  “Saw it right there. Wouldn’t lie about this. Good boy when it counts.”

  “And baseball. This counts.”

  Manx takes heart from the man’s cooperation because he doesn’t want to suffer another bringdown. But at the same time he doesn’t want to think of Charlie as a sucker, a rube in a duffle coat, falling for an easy line. The line is true in this case but what’s the difference? Manx has told amazing lies that were a lot easier falling from his lips than anything he could say about this little spheroid fact.

  The man is studying the ball.

  Manx decides to shut his mouth for fifteen seconds. Let the occasion take a solemn turn. Give the customer a chance to fall in love with the product.

  “Well, I see there’s a green, a little sort of green paint smudge near the seam here, between the seam and the trademark,” Charlie says, “and I know for a fact because someone said so on the radio that the ball struck a pillar when it went in the stands. And the pillars are green, I also know for a fact, at the Polo Grounds.”

  Manx does a little squat-jump. He is elated to hear this. It’s as though he himself has to be convinced, as though the man’s remark is the confirmation he needs to see Cotter as an honest boy, transformed from a back-talking kid who jumps turnstiles into an honest upright dutiful boy, at last.

  The man raises his eyes from the ball and looks at Manx. It’s a look that says, I want to believe. And Manx can’t think of a thing to say, for the life of him, the actual life, that would br
ing the man across the line and clinch the deal completely.

  Charlie takes up the task himself, says some fairly convincing things, this time to his son, about the company that makes the ball and the name of the league president that’s stamped on the ball and other matters and details, all of them checking out okay, it seems, and the boy is sleepy and cold and unimpressed and Manx looks around for a vendor with hot chocolate because it never hurts to be considerate.

  “Vendors scarce tonight.”

  “He had some soup.”

  “I was a vendor I be out here in force. Put the wife and kids to work.”

  “He had hot soup in a thermos. He’s all right.”

  But Chuckie says, “I don’t think I’m so all right.”

  “Just stay awake. I want you awake for this.”

  Manx understands this is for his benefit more than the kid’s. The man and the kid just going through the motions. Kid’s not even doing that. Kid stopped listening to the man somewhere around the diaper stage.

  Chuckie slithers into the bag with that mutinous look kids get once they understand they’re not property.

  “I want you to remember everything that happens here tonight,” Charlie says.

  But the boy is already down under, even his head vanished in the flannel.

  “You’re a father, you must know,” Charlie says.

  “I wrote the book.”

  “What a danger-laden thing it is, in all respects, trying to raise a child.”

  “Take forever to grow up on the one hand. But it goes so fast on the other.”

  “I’ve only got the one.”

  “You’re looking at four.”

  “Four,” Charlie says, and in his look there is admiration, sympathy and some wonder as well, and something else Manx can’t quite identify—maybe just the sense of different lives, a thing that has nothing directly to do with the number of kids.

  There’s a fire going in an oil drum and Manx goes to the curb, grabs the rusty can and drags it over to the line of waiting fans, fire and all. He feels the metal burn his hand as an afterthought, burn like hell in a picture book, but the fans are impressed by the gesture, big smiles abounding, it is the kind of thing that rightly marks a night like this, and Charlie seems delighted.