Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  Bronzini didn’t own a car, didn’t drive a car, didn’t want one, didn’t need one, wouldn’t take one if somebody gave it to him. Stop walking, he thought, and you die.

  George the Waiter stood smoking near the service entrance of the restaurant where he worked. He was a face on a pole, a man not yet out of his thirties who carried something stale and unspontaneous, an inward tension that kept him apart. Over the spare body a white shirt with black vest and black trousers and above the uniform his jut features looking a little bloodsucked.

  Bronzini walked over and took up a position next to George and they stood without speaking for a long moment in the odd solidarity two strangers might share watching a house burn down.

  Three boys and a girl played down-the-river against the side of a building, each kid occupying a box formed by separations in the sidewalk. One of them slap-bounced a ball diagonally off the pavement so that it hit up against the wall and veered off into another player’s box.

  He was George the Waiter in a second sense, that his life seemed suspended in some dire expectation. What is George waiting for? Bronzini couldn’t help seeing a challenge here. He liked to educe comment from the untalkative man, draw him forth, make him understand that his wish to be friendless was not readily respected here.

  Then the second player bounced the ball into someone else’s box, hitting it hard or lightly, slicing at the lower half of the ball to give it english, and so on up and down the river.

  “The thing about these games,” Bronzini said. “They mean so much while you’re playing. All your inventive skills. All your energies. But when you get a little older and stop playing, the games escape the mind completely.”

  In fact he’d played only sporadically as a child, being bedridden at times, that awful word, and treated for asthma, for recurring colds and sore throats and whooping cough.

  “How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I don’t even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns. Carpet guns were dangerous.”

  He checked his watch as he spoke.

  “You talk about the cork,” George said.

  “What was the cork for?”

  “We used the cork to make cages for flies. Two flat pieces of cork. Then we got straight pins from the dressmaker which were all over the floor of the shop.”

  “My god you’re right,” Bronzini said.

  “We stuck the pins between the cork discs. One disc is the floor, one is the ceiling. The pins are the bars.”

  “Then we waited for a fly to land somewhere.”

  “A horsefly on a wall. You cup your hand and move it slowly along the wall and come up behind the fly.”

  “Then we put the fly in the cage.”

  “We put the fly in the cage. Then we put in extra pins,” George said, “sealing the fly.”

  “Then what? I don’t remember.”

  “We watched it buzz.”

  “We watched it buzz. Very educational.”

  “It buzzed until it died. If it took too long to die, somebody lit a match. Then we put the match in the cage.”

  “My god what terror,” Bronzini said.

  But he was delighted. He was getting George to talk. How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

  Directly across the street George the Barber was sweeping the floor of his shop. Voices from Italian radio drifting faintly out the open door. Bronzini watched a man walk in, a custodian from the high school, and George put away the broom and took a fresh linen sheet out of a drawer and had it unfolded and sail-billowing, timed just right, as the man settled into the chair.

  “Maybe you heard, Albert. The hunchback died, that used to carve things out of soap.”

  “We’re going back a few years.”

  “He carved naked women out of soap. Like anatomical. The hunchback that used to sit outside the grocery.”

  “Attilio. You’d give him a bar of soap, he’d carve something.”

  “What’s-his-name died, the softball player, the pitcher that threw windmill. He had shrapnel from the war. He had shrapnel actually in his heart from in the war. That only now killed him.”

  “Jackie somebody. You and he.”

  “We used to work together at the beach. But I barely knew him.”

  George used to sell ice cream at the beach. Bronzini saw him many times deep-stepping through the sand with a heavy metal cooler slung over his shoulder and a pith helmet rocking on his head. And white shirt and white ducks and the day somebody got a cramp while George sold popsicles in section 10.

  “Remember the drowned man?” Bronzini said.

  They were playing salugi in the street. Two boys snatched a school-book belonging to one of the girls, a Catholic school girl in a blue pinafore and white blouse. They tossed the book back and forth and she ran from one boy to the other and they threw the book over her head and behind her back. The book had a thick brown kraft cover that Bronzini was sure the girl had made herself, folding and tucking the grainy paper, printing her name in blue ink on the front—name and grade and subject. Salugi, they cried, that strange word, maybe some corruption of the Italian saluto, maybe a mock salutation—hello, we’ve got your hat, now try and get it back. Another boy joined the game and the girl ran from one to the other, scatterhanded, after the flying book.

  Or Hindi or Persian or some Northumbrian nonce word sifting down the centuries. There was so much to know that he would die not knowing.

  “What about the kid?” George said. “I’m hearing things that I don’t know if it’s good or what.”

  “He’s coming along. I’m pleased one day, exasperated the next.”

  “I have respect for people that can play that game. When I think to myself this kid is how old.”

  “I try not to lose sight of that very thing, George.”

  “I hear he beats experienced players. This could be good or bad. Not that I’m the expert here. But I’m thinking maybe he should be in the street with these other kids.”

  “The street is not ready for Matty.”

  “You should impress into him there’s other things.”

  “He does other things besides playing chess. He cries and screams.”

  George didn’t smile. He was standing off, faded into old brooding, and he sucked the last bland fumes from his cigarette. One drag too many. Then he dropped the butt and stepped on it with the tap toe of his way-weary shoe, the border of uniformed George, rutted and cut across the instep.

  “Time I showed my face inside. Be good, Albert.”

  “We’ll talk again,” Bronzini said.

  He walked across the street so he could wave to George the Barber. How children adapt, using brick walls and lampposts and fire hydrants. He watched a girl tying one end of her jump rope to a window grille and getting her little brother to turn the other end. Then she stood in the middle and jumped. No history, no future. He watched a boy playing handball against himself, hitting Chinese killers. The hi-bounce rubber ball, the pink spaldeen, rapping back from the brick facade. And the fullness of a moment in the play street. Unable to imagine you will ever advance past the pencil line on the kitchen wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.

  The barber waving back. Bronzini went to the corner past a man unloading jerry cans of Bulgarian sheep cheese from the trunk of a beat-up car. He walked north again, the savor of sweet peel in his hand. He realized he was still holding the fruit rind. It made him think of Morocco. He’d never been there or much of anywhere and wondered why the frailest breath of tangerine might bring to mind a reddish sandscape flashing to infinity.

  Buck buck how many horns are up?

  The clear cry reached him as he tossed the skin toward some cart
ons stacked at a cellar entrance. They are jumping on the backs of their playpals. It is usually the fattest boy who serves as cushion, standing against a wall or pole while the boys on one team stoop head to end and their rivals run and jump one by one and come yowing down. With the stooped boys swaying under the weight, the leader of the mounted team holds fingers aloft and calls out the question. How many horns are up? Bronzini tried to recall whether the padded boy, the slapped and prodded roly-poly, the one who dribbles egg cream down his chin—is he officially called the pillow or the pillar? Bronx boys don’t know from pillars, he decided. Make him the mothery casing stuffed with down.

  Twenty past four. The appointment was ten minutes hence and he knew that even if he arrived after the specified time he would not be late because Father Paulus was certain to be later. Bronzini envied the blithe arrivals of life’s late people. How do they manage the courage to be late, enact the rude dare repeatedly in our waiting faces? A goat and four rabbits were hung upside down in a window, trussed at the hind legs, less affectingly dead than the flounder in the market—dumb scuzzy fur with nothing to impart. Envy and admiration both. He took it that these people refuse to be mastered by the pettier claims of time and conscience.

  The butcher appeared at the door of his shop, flushed and hoarse, loud, foul, happy in his unwashed apron, a man who lived urgently, something inside him pushing outward, surging against his chest wall.

  “Albert, I don’t see you no more.”

  “You’re seeing me now. You see me all the time. I bought a roast last week.”

  “Don’t tell me last week. What’s last week?”

  The butcher called to people walking by. He called across the street to insult a man or engage a particular woman with knowing references. The rasping spitty sandblast voice. Other women twisted their mouths, amused and disgusted.

  “What are you feeding that genius of yours?”

  “He’s not mine,” Bronzini said.

  “Be thankful. That was my kid I drive him out to the country and leave him on a hillside. But I wait for the dead of winter.”

  “We let him chew on a crayon once a week.”

  “Feed the little jerk some capozella. It makes him ballsy.”

  The butcher gestured at the whole lamb hanging in the window. Bronzini imagined the broiled head hot from the oven and sitting on a plate in front of Matty. Two cooked heads regarding each other. And Albert is telling the boy he has to eat the brain and eyes and principal ganglia. Or no more chess.

  “It puts some lead in his pencil.”

  The butcher stood at the corner of the window looking well-placed among the dangled animals, his arms crossed and feet spread. Bronzini saw an aptness and balance here. The butcher’s burly grace, watch him trim a chop, see how he belongs to the cutting block, to the wallow of trembling muscle and mess—his aptitude and ease, the sense that he was born to the task restored a certain meaning to these eviscerated beasts.

  Bronzini thought the butcher’s own heart and lungs ought to hang outside his body, stationed like a saint’s, to demonstrate his intimate link to the suffering world.

  “Be good, Albert.”

  “I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “Give my best to the woman,” the butcher said.

  Bronzini checked his watch again, then stopped at a candy store to buy a newspaper. He was trying to be late but knew he could not manage it. Some force compelled him to walk into the pastry shop not only on time but about two and a half minutes early, which translated to a wait of roughly twenty minutes for the priest. He took a table in the dim interior and unfolded the Times across the scarred enamel.

  A girl brought coffee and a glass of water.

  The front page astonished him, a pair of three-column headlines dominating. To his left the Giants capture the pennant, beating the Dodgers on a dramatic home run in the ninth inning. And to the right, symmetrically mated, same typeface, same-size type, same number of lines, the USSR explodes an atomic bomb—kaboom— details kept secret.

  He didn’t understand why the Times would take a ball game off the sports page and juxtapose it with news of such ominous consequence. He began to read the account of the Soviet test. He could not keep the image from entering his mind, the cloud that was not a cloud, the mushroom that was not a mushroom—the sense of reaching feebly for a language that might correspond to the visible mass in the air. Suddenly there the priest was, coming in a flurry, Andrew Paulus S.J., built low and cozy, his head poked forward and that glisten of spittle in his smile.

  He had books and folders slipping down his hip but managed to extend a cluster of scrubbed fingers, which Albert gripped in both hands, pressing and shaking, half rising from his chair. It took a moment of clumsy ceremony with overlapping salutations and unheeded questions and a dropped book and a race to retrieve it before the two men were settled at the table and all the objects put away. The priest heaved, as they say, a sigh. He wore a roman collar fitted to a biblike cloth called a rabat and over this a dark jacket with pocket square and he could have been George the Waiter’s tailored master in black and white.

  “How late am I?”

  “You’re not late at all.”

  “I’m doing a seminar on knowledge. Wonderful fun but I lose track.”

  “No, you’re early,” Bronzini said.

  “How we know what we know.”

  You had to look hard at Andrew Paulus to find a trace of aging. Unfurrowed and oddly aglow, with a faint baked glaze keeping his skin pink and fresh. Hair pale brown and fringed unevenly across the forehead in boyish bangs. Bronzini wondered if this is what happens to men who forswear a woman’s tangling touch and love. They stay a child, preserved in clean and chilly light. But there were parish priests everywhere about, leaky-eyed and halting, their old monotones falling whispery from the pulpit. He decided this man was not youthful so much as ageless. He must be thirty years senior to Albert and not an eyelid ever trembles or a bristly whit of gray shows at the jawline.

  “Did you see the paper, Father?”

  “Please, we know each other too well. You’re required to call me Andy now. Yes, I stole a long look at someone’s Daily News. They’re calling it the Shot Heard Round the World.”

  “How did we detect evidence of the blast, I wonder. We must have aircraft flying near their borders with instruments that measure radiation. Or well-placed agents perhaps.”

  “No no no no. We’re speaking about the home run. Bobby Thomson’s heroic shot. The tabloids have dubbed it for posterity.”

  Bronzini had to pause to take this in.

  “The Shot Heard Round the World? Is the rest of the world all that interested? This is baseball. I was barely aware. I myself barely knew that something was going on. Heard round the world? I almost missed it completely.”

  “We may take it that the term applies to the suddenness of the struck blow and the corresponding speed at which news is transmitted these days. Our servicemen in Greenland and Japan surely heard the home-run call as it was made on Armed Forces Radio. You’re right, of course. They’re not talking about this in the coffeehouses of Budapest. Although in fact poor Ralph Branca happens to be half Hungarian. Sons of immigrants. Branca and Thomson both. Bobby himself born in Scotland, I believe. You see why our wins and losses tend to have impact well beyond our borders.”

  “You follow baseball then.”

  “Only in distant memory. But I did devour today’s reports. It’s all over the radio. Something propelled this event full force into the public imagination. All day a steady sort of ripple in the air.”

  “I don’t follow the game at all,” Bronzini said.

  He fell into remorseful thought. The girl appeared again, sullen in a limp blouse and shuffling loafers. Only four tables, theirs the only one occupied. The plain decor, the time-locked thickness in the air, the trace of family smell, even the daughter discontented—all argued a theme, a nonpicturesqueness that Albert thought the priest might note and approve.

&nb
sp; “But baseball isn’t the game we’re here to discuss,” Paulus said.

  In other shops the priest had made an appreciative show of selecting a pastry from the display case, with moans and exclamations, but was subdued today, gesturing toward the almond biscotti and asking the girl to bring some coffee. Then he squared in his chair and set his elbows firmly on the table, a little visual joke, and framed his head with cupped hands—the player taut above his board.

  “I’ve been taking him to chess clubs,” Bronzini said, “as we discussed last time. He needs this to develop properly. Stronger opponents in an organized setting. But he hasn’t done as well as I’d expected. He’s been stung a number of times.”

  “And when he’s not playing?”

  “We spend time studying, practicing.”

  “How much time?”

  “Three days a week usually. A couple of hours each visit.”

  “This is completely ridiculous. Go on.”

  “I don’t want to force-feed the boy.”

  “Go on,” Paulus said.

  “I’m just a neighbor after all. I can push only so hard. There’s no deep tradition here. He just appeared one day. Shazam. A boy from another planet, you know?”

  “He wasn’t born knowing the moves, was he?”

  “His father taught him the game. A bookmaker. Evidently kept all the figures in his head. The bets, the odds, the teams, the horses. He could memorize a scratch sheet. This is the story people told. He could look at a racing form with the day’s entries, the morning line, the jockeys and so on. And he could memorize the data of numerous races in a matter of minutes.”

  “And he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared. About five years ago.”

  “And the boy is eleven, which means daddy barely got him started.”

  “Adequate or not, on and off, I have been the mentor ever since.”

  The priest made a gesture of appeasement, a raised hand that precluded any need for further explanation. The girl brought strong black coffee and a glass of water and some biscuits on a plate.