Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  When he got back with the dog, two men were coming down the poolroom steps. He thought he recognized one of them from the poker game and they came down the steps in a kind of rumble, making the dog back off.

  Mike was alone, at the counter, doing his tally.

  “Where’d you take him, to the men’s room at Grand Central?”

  Nick wagged a thumb at the men who’d just left.

  “I know those guys?”

  “I don’t know. You know those guys?”

  “Serious business, right?”

  “I might as well tell you,” Mike said. “You’ll hear about it anyway.”

  “What?”

  “You remember the guy who sat by the door when we ran the games?”

  “Sure. Walls.”

  “Walls was not here the night of the holdup.”

  “I thought that was interesting.”

  “A number of people did. And a number of people who were here that night thought that one of the three holdup men.”

  “Wait. They wore masks, right?”

  “Could have been Walls. Mask or no mask. And of course Walls has not been seen since. So you can imagine the interest being shown in his whereabouts. Not to mention two of the players are very close,” Mike said, “to the organization.”

  “The organization. And now?”

  “Walls has been seen.”

  “Walls has been seen. They found him.”

  “And he’s shit out of luck. In a Puerto Rican grocery about a mile from here.”

  “What’s he doing in a Puerto Rican grocery?”

  “Buying a green banana. Hey. How the hell do I know?”

  Nick laughed. The news excited him. He found it satisfying even though he liked Walls, he admired Walls, based on the few words they’d exchanged that one time. They’d found him and killed him. He told himself to remember to get a paper first thing in the morning. It was bound to be in the papers, this kind of thing.

  “He took your money too,” Nick said. “Not just the cash on the table.”

  Mike stood on a chair to turn off the TV, which was running without the sound.

  “I’m not looking to celebrate,” he said. “This is a thing it brings the wrong kind of attention. I have the precinct I have to keep greased so they don’t close me down. The robbery was bad enough. This thing brings homicide detectives and reporters coming around.”

  “How’d they do it?”

  “How’d they do it. They shot him. Bang bang.”

  “I know. But how? How many guys? What kind of weapons?”

  Photograph of blood-streaked body with towel covering head for decency sake.

  “They shoot anyone else? They get away in one car, two cars?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “He was armed, this Walls, when they shot him?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said.

  “They shot him in the head or what?”

  “Nicky. I say all right. Go home and get some sleep.”

  They went to the show downtown and walked around Times Square looking at people, all kinds, and they felt superior and dumb at the same time.

  They took the el back home late at night with JuJu and Ray sitting next to each other and Nick stretched out on the long wicker seat across the aisle.

  “You know, I’m thinking,” JuJu said. “We never should of gone in there. It’s not right. Fool around, fool around, fool around. I say all right. But this is not a thing we should of done.”

  “You’re guilty,” Nick said.

  “The man’s laid out. Leave him alone. If he was some jerk sat on his ass all his life, be different maybe. This is a working man. The man’s laid out.”

  Nick assumed the position of a prepared body.

  “You’re guilty. Go to church and confess. You’ll feel better,” he said.

  Ray Lofaro had no idea what they were talking about. JuJu wouldn’t tell him as a matter of principle and Nick wouldn’t tell him because he didn’t want to be bothered.

  The train was a local and took forever.

  They rode past the dark tenements of the lower Bronx, past the sleeping thousands in their beds, and Nick got up and tried to rip the wicker apart, first with his hands, which was hard to do, and then by kicking it in and using his hands again to pick apart the weaved strands.

  A man at the other end of the car got up and went into the next car and Nick watched him, deciding whether this was an insult or not.

  Then he kicked some more, standing back and using the heel edge of his shoe to stave in the back of the seat. He poked with both hands, peeling off strips of wicker in a series of long dry snapping sounds.

  His buddies had nothing to say.

  He got off one stop before their regular stop and they watched him go out the door. He walked over to the building where she lived. He stood across the street smoking, watching the building. The lamp was lit in the front room but the bed was gone now.

  He knew that Mr. Bronzini’s mother had died recently. His own mother telling him. And over a day or two he began to make the connection that the bed was the old woman’s bed, that the apartment was Mr. Bronzini’s apartment, that the woman he’d fucked in the apartment was Mr. Bronzini’s wife.

  He found it didn’t matter much. He’d walked past the building a number of times, in daylight, and never saw her. He’d stood on the stoop once or twice, smoking, and she hadn’t come out. Lately he’d been standing in the dark and watching the building, after midnight mostly, those sameshit nights, passing the time before he was ready to go to bed.

  He was seventeen years and some months. He’d get drafted soon and that was probably not a bad thing to happen. His friend Allie was in uniform now, finished basic, and he was headed to Korea, where he’d fuck the best-looking women, he said, and leave sloppy seconds for Nick and the others.

  He stood there smoking. He watched her building and he thought about a thousand things, sane, crazy, dumb, and he thought about the woman.

  6

  * * *

  The empty lot was less than a block from the school entrance, a rambling waste with a higher and lower level, boulders, weeds and ruined walls, signs of old exploded garbage here and there, brown bags tossed from adjacent buildings, and this is where young kids had rock fights and older kids roasted sweet mickeys in the evening chill and where a kid named Skeezer ate a grasshopper live, which was a legend of many a neighborhood, the kid with grasshopper juices running down his chin, but in this case there were reliable older men who’d witnessed, and where other and darker stories were set, a man who slept in a ditch every night and the guys from the other poolroom, Major’s, taking a girl into the ruins, late, a summer night, and lining up for sex, and who was the girl, and was she willing, and other stories of the lots.

  It was a single expanse of land that was called the lots the way a back alley was called the yards and this is where Matty got his hand busted up in a card game called shots on knucks.

  He walked in the apartment and went into his mother’s bedroom, where she was doing her beadwork, and he stuck the hand in her face.

  “What’s this?”

  “What does it look like?” he said.

  “Blood.”

  “Then that’s what it is.”

  “Then you should go and clean it.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?”

  “What happened?”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  He sat in the living room and examined the marks and scrapes, the mudlet streaks of dried blood. He felt a self-pitying pleasure, doing this, even a fascination, an animal attachment just short of licking, but then his brother walked in the door, earlier than usual, and he tried to conceal the hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Show me, jerk.”

  “I just need to clean it.”

  “You need to put iodine on that. Let me see.”

  “I don’t need iodine,” he s
aid with a soft insistence.

  He extended the hand and looked away at the same time, sort of tactfully.

  “He needs iodine,” Nick said to their mother.

  “Is that the 7-Up man?”

  “Eye-oh-dine, eye-oh-dine.”

  Matty went small in his chair as his brother looked at the hand. Nick’s own hands were dirty and bruised and so much bigger, five, six years bigger—a man’s hands, almost, blistered on the palms and cut by broken glass.

  “How’d it happen? You punched a little girl in the mouth?”

  “Card game in the lots.”

  “You go in the lots?”

  “Just at the edge.”

  “Does she know you go in the lots?”

  “I don’t go way in.”

  “You think it’s a good idea, going in there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think go in. But watch yourself. There’s kids in there from all over. They don’t know you’re my brother.”

  Nick held his hand and looked at it.

  “It doesn’t hurt the way it did.”

  “You played shots on knucks.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you ended up holding some cards and the winner whacked you how many times.”

  “I had a choice.”

  “I remember this choice.”

  “Either he gives me nine scraping shots with the edge of the deck or he gives me four scraping shots and then one killer shot with the deck held up and down.”

  “Blunt end. Where he hits you square on your knuckles, full force.”

  “That’s right,” Matty said.

  “Let me ask. How could you lose a kid’s card game, a brain like you, supposedly, playing with a bunch of little pisspots?”

  “They weren’t so little,” Matty said.

  Nick held his hand. Many times through the years Nick had bopped him on the head, a flick of the middle finger that carried slingshot force. Many times Nick had lifted him off a chair and sat himself down. Nick had held him out the window once for rubbing snot on a door edge. Many times Nick had booted him in the ass for no reason except he was passing through a room that had Matty in it.

  “I think we’re talking about iodine here.”

  “I don’t need iodine,” he whispered.

  He looked at his hand in Nick’s. His brother had an odor of work and heat and sharp salami, the spicy bright salami he ate on the job.

  Their mother came in and looked at the hand.

  She said, “Mercurochrome.”

  Nick took the hand away from her.

  “Iodine,” he said.

  “First he washes the hand with soap and cool water, Matthew, are you listening? Then he dries the hand.”

  “Then he puts iodine on it.”

  “I don’t want the iodine,” Matty said. “I want the mercurochrome.”

  “Iodine. It’s stronger, it’s better, it’s hotter, it burns.”

  “Mercurochrome,” Matty said.

  “It eats right into the wound, cleaning and burning.”

  “Mercurochrome,” Matty said.

  But he didn’t want his brother to drop the hand, to let go of the hand just yet.

  Klara stood on the roof watching stormclouds build bluish and hard-edged, like weather on some remote coast, a sky that seemed too lush and wild to pass this way.

  The child played with a neighbor’s child on a blanket nearby.

  She’d taken down the laundry and put it in the basket but wasn’t ready to go inside just yet. The wind was gaining force and she could see women on rooftops all up and down the block unpinning clothes from swaying lines, ducking under bedsheets walloped up, and she could hear other women pulling on the lines that crisscrossed alleyways between windows and laundry poles, the screech-song of old ropes passing through the grooved rims of all those rusty wheels.

  She missed Albert’s mother. It was strange to walk into the front room now, an awkward empty place, first the empty bed and now not even the bed, just floor space that needed filling.

  It was also strange how they hadn’t wanted to get rid of the bed, either one of them. They’d kept it around for weeks, cranked to her daylight angle, the hours when she liked to close her eyes and feel the sun on her face.

  The white of her nightgown and hair and the white sheets and the sheets billowing on the rooftops and the women fisting them down to gatherable size.

  The first drops hit thick and splatting.

  She’d been up here once, not long ago, more or less hiding from her life, and she saw the young man standing across the street, standing smoking by a lamppost.

  Most of the time when she thought of him at all she thought of him in motion, she thought of notched hands moving on her body and dirt grained deep in his fingers, she thought of the turn of his shoulder and the way he looked at her over his clenched fist.

  She’d liked it when she saw him by the lamppost looking at the building. Then she thought about it and didn’t like it so much. But that was the only time she saw him there.

  The two children did not want to go inside but the rain was getting close.

  He’d been easy in a way, natural in a way, not distant or totally unknown. At first she thought it might be nice to think of him as the Young Man, like a character in a coming-of-age novel, but she only thought of him in motion, and nameless, and nonfictional, a sort of rotary blur that hovered just off her right shoulder somewhere, the thing her brain condensed from all that pleasure and wet.

  She looked over the ledge and saw three girls playing jacks on a stoop across the street, seated on different steps, the girl with the ball still-bodied and hunched, only her hand working among the strewn jacks, frantically, and Klara could hear them calling threesies and kissies and interference, an argument breaking out, steely and clear.

  She didn’t want more, she wanted less. This was the thing her husband could not understand. Solitude, distance, time, work. Something out there she needed to breathe.

  She took the laundry basket to the door and left it just inside. The surrounding rooftops were just about empty now and the yowl of the alley lines had stopped. Even from this height she could hear the rapping sound. A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in from play.

  Then the rain came hard. Klara picked up her daughter and scooped the blanket under her arm and took the other child by the hand and they ran laughing across the roof under racing skies.

  At dinner she told him she’d been selfish.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” he said.

  He tore a length of crusty bread in two, a thing he did ritually and with such depth of dependable habit that she could not imagine him getting through a full meal, all the switches and intervals and hand movements, without this crucial flourish.

  “The painting’s a waste. I’m not getting anywhere. We’ll put Teresa in that room.”

  “Give it time,” he said. “And anyway where do you expect to get with it? Do it for the day-to-day satisfaction. For the way it fills out the day.”

  She had a small print of a Whistler, the famous Mother, and she hung it in a corner of the spare room because she thought it was generally unlooked at and because she liked the formal balances and truthful muted colors and because the picture was so clashingly modern, the seated woman in mobcap and commodious dark dress, a figure lifted out of her time into the abstract arrangements of the twentieth century, long before she was ready, it seemed, but Klara also liked looking right through the tonal components, the high theory of color, the theory of paint itself, perhaps—looking into the depths of the picture, at the mother, the woman, the mother herself, the anecdotal aspect of a woman in a chair, thinking, and immensely interesting she was, so Quaker-prim and still, faraway-seeming but only because she was lost, Klara thought, in memory, caught in the midst of a memory trance, a strong and elegiac presence despite the painter’s, the son’s, doctrinal priorities.

  “No, we’ll do something with th
e room. That’s what I ought to be doing. Getting this place in some kind of livable shape.”

  “We have the front room to do,” he said.

  “We have the front room, which is still a kind of no-man’s-land. I’ll do the front room. Then I’ll do the spare room.”

  “And I’ll step up my own efforts. Head of the science department. I’ll make this my goal. And we’ll travel this summer. To Spain or Italy. Wherever you like,” he said.

  She liked to watch him eat because he did it so deeply, handling and savoring things, handling utensils, chewing food thoroughly, the way he paused unpretentiously with the wineglass an inch from his lips, waiting, savoring, a sense of earth and our connection to it, that was Albert over a dish of inky squid—earth and sea and the way he looked at food in the plate, breathing it all in before he even touched a fork.

  “To Spain,” she said. “Madrid. The Prado.” And she laughed a little coldly, with the hollow tone she used when she was punishing herself. “I want to look at pictures till I drop.”

  Then she saw him on the street with a friend, veering toward an army-navy store, and she stopped and stood right there, stationed in his path, and he nearly walked into her before he saw who it was, and he stopped and showed only the thinnest surprise, and his friend stopped, and then she went around them and crossed the street.

  The next day he was standing by the lamppost when she looked out the window. She was putting up new curtains in the front room and he was standing there smoking. A Railway Express truck passed between them. Then he looked up and saw her. He flicked the cigarette and walked across the street.

  She threw down the mattress. Nick watched her and pulled his shirt over his head. Then he watched her again. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember something, and then she undid a button at the side of her skirt.

  She didn’t finish her kisses. This was interesting and a little puzzling, unlike last time when they kissed nearly into old age. The way she broke off now and looked away just when he thought a kiss was getting her warm and soft, and the way she looked when she did this, ripping away hurt, almost, and he was surprised at how different she looked, not what he remembered from last time but paler maybe, hands weightless and drained, these white things floating past, and eyes that bugged out a little and seemed to see things he didn’t know were there.