"Underworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

7

Marian leaned into me and laughed, watching the land surface expand around us. It was first light, a foil shimmer at desert's edge. At three hundred feet we caught a mild westerly and drifted toward the eyelid slice of sun. But we didn't think we were moving. We thought the land was gliding by beneath us, showing a cluster of mobile homes, a truck on a blacktop to the south. And dogs barking up at us-they barked and leaped and ran yapping into each other as we strayed across the trailer park, passed from dog to dog, new dogs appearing at the fringes, twisting in midleap, dogs from nowhere, multiplying yaps and howls, a contagion to wake the known world.

Then we were out over open earth, bone brown and deep in shadow, and we hung in the soft air, balanced in some unbodied lull, with a measure of creation spilling past.

The pilot yanked the blast valve and we heard the burners pulse and roar and this made Marian laugh again. She talked and laughed incessantly, happy and scared. The basket was not large, barely taking the three of us plus tanks, valves, wires, instruments and coiled rope.

Every propane wallop sent a man-sized streak of flame into the open throat of the nylon that bulbed out above us.

Jerry the pilot said, "We need this wind to hold just like it is. Then we make it okay, I think. But we got to be boocoo lucky."

This made us both laugh. We were lighter than air, laughing, and the balloon did not seem like a piece of science so much as an improvised prayer. Jerry spaced the burns and kept an eye on the pyrometer, adding just enough heat to make up for routine cooling inside the envelope. It was a game, a larger-than-life toy we'd found ourselves wickered into, and our eyes went big at the whooshing flames.

The balloon was candy-striped and when Jerry pointed south we spotted a road and a car, the chase car, a matching candy van that towed the small open trailer used to convey the balloon and basket.

The surge of flame, the delayed rise and Marian saying, "Greatest birthday present ever."

"Ain't seen nothing yet," I said.

She said, "What made you think of it? This is something I've always wanted to do without knowing it exactly Or knowing it but not at the level of ever making plans. You must have read my mind."

Then she said, "I didn't know how much I needed to get out and see this landscape again. Too cooped up with job. But I never dreamed I'd be doing it from here. When you said four a.m. I thought what sort of birthday are we talking about."

"Now you know," I said. "But you only know the half of it."

We leaned close, my arm around her, our thighs pressing, and we were rocked and whirled, although not turning-whirled within ourselves, blood-whirled into quickened sense. I had my free hand around an iron bar, part of the rigid frame connecting the basket to the load cables, and I could feel the metal breathe in my fist.

About twenty minutes later Jerry touched me on the shoulder and pointed straight ahead and I saw the first splash of sunlight on wingtips. The piece began to emerge out of distance and haze, the mesh rectangle completed now, ranks of aircraft appearing as one unit of fitted parts, a shaped weave of painted steel in the monochrome surround.

Jerry said, "Now if the Air Force don't shoot our asses off, we'll just mosey on over."

And that's what we did, approaching at an altitude of four hundred feet. I felt Marian hanging a sort of tremulous gawk over the padded edge of the basket. It was a heart-shaking thing to see, bursts and serpentines of color, a power in the earth, and she pulled at my sweater and looked at me.

Like where are we and what are we seeing and who did it?

The primaries were less aggressive than they'd seemed earlier. The reds were dampened, taken down by weather or more paint, deeper permeations, and this brought them ably into the piece. There were orderly slashes across the fuselages in one section, beautifully mixed blues and flat blues and near blues. The piece had a great riverine wash, a broad arc of sage green or maybe mustard green with brushy gray disturbances, and it curved from the southeast corner up and across the north edge, touching nearly a third of the massed aircraft, several planes completely covered in the pigment-the work's circulating fluid, naming the pace, holding the surface together.

Like my god Nick, how could this be here without my knowing?

The tension of our pressed bodies was heightened by the physical fact of color, painted light pouring toward us. The sun burned high on the line divide. We'd dropped to two hundred feet and Jerry ran a blast of flame. When we were nearly on it the work grew rougher and frontal. I could see unpainted intervals, dead metal strips across the wings of several planes, peroxide white, scabby and gashed, and a trace of stenciled safety instructions apparent on one fuselage. The piece looked hard-won. It lost its flow and became more deeply grained, thick paint in uneven sheets, spray-gunned on. I saw the struggle to make it, scores of people in this chalk heat, muscles and lungs. And I looked for the blond girl in the flouncy skirt painted on a forward fuselage and was elated to spot her, long and tall and unre-touched, the nose art, the pinup, the ordinary life and lucky sign that animated the work.

I could see Marian try to absorb the number. She was not counting but wanted to know, simply as a measure of her amazement. And when I whispered two hundred and thirty at last count, she concentrated more deeply, testing the figure against trie dense array, trie giddiness of general effect. We passed directly over. The planes were enormous of course, they were objects of hulking size, stratofortresses, thick and massy, slab-finned, wings set high on the fuselage, a few missile pylons still intact, a few outrigger wheels suspended, the main wheels chocked on every plane.

And truly I thought they were great things, painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to augur it.

And we moved toward the blank flats that framed the aircraft and saw how the work lost vigor at the fringes, giving way, melted by intention in the desert.

Marian said, "I can never look at a painting the same way again."

"I can never look at an airplane."

"Or an airplane," she said.

And I wondered if the piece was visible from space like the land art of some lost Andean people.

The breeze took us past and the pilot yanked the blast handle, giving us a final inchmeal rise. We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they've been up there, the same two birds since bible times. There were stones tumbled in a field, great bronze rocks with carved flanks. I felt my wife at my side. We saw dust blowing off the dark hills and a pair of abandoned cars flopped in forage grass, convertibles with shredded tops. Everything we saw was ominous and shining, tense with the beauty of things that are normally unseen, even the cars gone to canker and rust. The pilot pointed to an object some miles away and we saw it was the chase car, a droplet nosing down a long road toward the place on earth where we would light.

That night we had friends over for dinner and the talk was swift and funny, flying cross-table well past midnight, and when they were gone but also while they were there-they were still there when I felt the distance and stillness of that sprawled dawn like some endless sky waking inside me, flared against the laughter.

When they were gone we lay in bed. We slept in a bookwalled room with creamy shelves and deep carpets and lighting that had a halftone density, warm and whiskeyish. Marian looked at a magazine, turning pages with a crispness that might have seemed short-tempered to someone who didn't know her habits. "The long day."

"The long drive. The drive was oh boy," I said, "a killer."

"Is this the longest day of my life?"

"The drive was the screaming meemies. I Kate those trucks, man."

"I still feel the drive. But it was marvelous, all of it."

"It was unmarvelous. It was marvelous because you slept."

She turned a page.

"Did you notice how they finish each other's sentences?"

"I drove, you slept."

"She says, Da da da. He says, Dumdy dum."

"It's not the worst fate. I mean even strangers do it. Everybody does it to somebody."

"And I didn't sleep. I was one level down for ten minutes."

"It's the only way to get certain sentences finished."

"They ate the roasted corn relish."

"Of course they ate the roasted com relish. The roasted corn relish was great. Speaking of maps. I'd like to get some old maps. I hate our maps."

"Look at this. The Rapture is approaching. October twenty-eight. They give the exact date."

"I saw that."

"The mark of the beast. Did you see that? It's on the universal product code. Every product."

"That's right. Every box of Jell-O they put through the scanner."

"I'm having one of those nights," she said.

"What?"

"One of those nighty nights."

"What?"

"I'm having that sort of thing where I know I won't sleep. It's the knowing that does it. It's not the tired. Because I'm actually very tired."

"Restless."

"No, it's a tired but not sleepy type thing. Six six six. So the supermarket is a weird sort of place."

"We always knew it was."

I turned off my light and looked into the deep cream ceiling with my hands behind my head.

"She's got a great body for how many kids? Alison. Four kids?" I said.

"Which means I'm either half as great or twice as great but let's not pursue it. What's-his-name Terry was here. The heavyset one."

"Been years since I looked at a real map. It's a sort of Robert Louis Stevenson thing to do. We have maps of highways and motels. Our maps have rest stops and wheelchair symbols."

"Just tell me what his name is."

"For what, the faucet?"

"Day before yesterday or yesterday. Today's been so long I don't know anymore. No, the showerhead."

"The hell's wrong with the showerhead? Our maps have pancake houses."

"What's-his-name with the orange pickup."

"Which shower are we talking about?"

"Terry, right?"

She turned a page. She used a book pillow to read when she was in bed. I ordered it for her out of a catalog, jewel-tone jacquard, a wedge-shaped cushion that nestles in the lap and holds your book or magazine at the proper angle, with tasseled bookmarks built in and a slot in back for your reading glasses.

"I'm going Tuesday. I tell you that?"

"This is, what, Moscow? Or Boston. Too soon for Moscow. Which is the heavyset one? I get them completely."

"I need to get these shoes resoled before I go. Remind me to do that tomorrow."

"I have this thing on my leg."

"It's not Boston," I said.

"It's not Boston."

"It's Portland."

"It's Portland."

"What thing?" I said.

"On the inside of my thigh."

"Call Williamson."

"It could be an irritation."

"Call Williamson. When did you get it?"

"I don't know. I think it comes and goes."

She turned a page.

"Lainie had the wallpaper today."

"About time."

"That was her that called."

"I hope you didn't tell her."

"Of course I didn't tell her. What was I going to tell her? Sweetheart, we drove right past but didn't stop."

"Stopping would have been."

"We saw them when was it. Recent recent recent. Not that recent actually."

"Recent enough. We don't want to overdo it."

"Paperhangers. One was a woman, she said."

"I'm still not completely over this motherfucking cold. Why is that?" I said.

She turned a page.

"Why is that?" I said.

"Take some of those antihistamines you take. They're hard to buy."

"The tablets."

"The caplets."

"You're all revved up. I can feel the energy."

"I'm not revved up. I'm tired. My mind is in that sort of place. You can forget about sleep, it's telling me."

I selected the jewel-tone jacquard over the ivory because the weave went well with our carpets.

"I saw him in that orange truck he drives. The heavyset one. Last time I installed it myself but this time nothing fit."

"Because the universe is expanding. It expands in warm weather. Remind me we need some sixty-watt bulbs."

"I pulled alongside and he said he could be here in an hour and he showed up exactly on time and he installed the thing in exactly ten minutes and that was the end of that."

She turned a page and then another. She had a way of sounding grim when she was actually showing satisfaction, showing completion-the finishing of a task or the telling of a story with a moral.

"Did you tell her to spackle?"

"They did the baby's room first."

"Because this is not something Dex is going to figure out for himself. I only hope they spackled."

"Take the twelve-hour antihistamines. The four-hour make you drowsy."

"What's wrong with drowsy? Remind me we need bulbs for the pantry."

"Just tell me his name. The heavyset kid is the one whose father, right?"

"And had to be subdued by four or five cops."

"Heavyset."

"Can't you call him fat? Call him fat. He is tremendously fat," I said.

"He has rolls of fat. It's true."

"Maybe the bulb's loose. Remind me to tighten the bulb. Too soon for Moscow."

She turned a page.

"Is it a lump?" I said.

"What? No, I wouldn't use that word. No, it's an irritation."

"Maybe it's the estrogen."

"No no no no no."

"Call Williamson," I said.

I turned on my side and heard a plane in a landing pattern, a late flight from somewhere.

"Eight hours of solid sleep. That's what I need."

"It's true actually. You've got one good pair of shoes and they need fixing."

"I almost bought some shoes in Italy. I almost bought some shoes in Italy."

She turned a page.

"What's the name of that stuff I wanted to tell your mother to be?"

"Wait a second. I know."

"It's on the tip of my tongue," she said.

"Wait a second. I know."

"You know the stuff I mean."

"The sleep stuff or the indigestion?"

"It's on the tip of my tongue."

"Wait a second. Wait a second. I know."

About three hours later I sat in the armchair in a corner of the bedroom feeling damp and cold, a chill sweat across my back and neck and under my arms. I'd come out of a dream deep-breathing and clammy, breathing fast and loud-so odd and loud and fast it woke me up, or something did.

I had the baseball in my hand. Usually I kept the baseball on the bookshelves, wedged in a corner between straight-up books and slanted books, tented under books, unceremoniously. But now I had it in my hand. You have to know the feel of a baseball in your hand, going back a while, connecting many things, before you can understand why a man would sit in a chair at four in the morning holding such an object, clutching it-how it fits the palm so reassuringly, the corked center making it buoyant in the hand, and the rough spots on an old ball, the marked skin, how an idle thumb likes to worry the scuffed horsehide. You squeeze a baseball. You kind of juice it or milk it. The resistance of the packed material makes you want to press harder. There's an equilibrium, an agreeable animal tension between the hard leather object and the sort of clawed hand, veins stretching with the effort. And the feel of raised seams across the fingertips, cloth contours like road bumps under the knuckle joints-how the whorled cotton can be seen as a magnified thumbprint, a blowup of the convoluted ridges on the pad of your thumb. The ball was a deep sepia, veneered with dirt and turf and generational sweat-it was old, bunged up, it was bashed and tobacco-juiced and stained by natural processes and by the lives behind it, weather-spattered and charactered as a seafront house. And it was smudged green near the Spalding trademark, it was still wearing a small green bruise where it had struck a pillar according to the history that came with it-flaked paint from a bolted column in the left-field stands embedded in the surface of the ball.

Thirty-four thousand five hundred dollars.

How the hand works memories out of the baseball that have nothing to do with games of the usual sort.

Bad luck, Branca luck. From him to me. The moment that makes the life.

Marian caught me once looking at the ball. I was standing at the bookshelves with the ball in my hand and she thought it was like Hamlet gazing on Yorick's skull or maybe Aristotle, even better she said, contemplating the bust of Homer. That was nice, we thought. Rembrandt's Homer and Thomson's homer. We smiled at that.

I thought of the old radio voice, Russ Hodges, dead now twenty years or more, disbelief and thrill, the force of a single human voice coming out of a box.

She didn't ask whether it was Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon when I said it was not Boston, it was Portland, and I'd felt the question coming, layered in the sequence of our exchange, waiting to edge out, but one of us fell asleep before she could ask which Portland by the way in those words exactly, I think I fell asleep first but maybe not- the light was out, the last light was out.

Then I came up out of a dream and felt my way to the armchair, breathing funny, and switched on the small reading lamp.

And the crowd noise behind the voice, the incessant smash and tension, the thickness, the sort of bristle and teem that deepened at a turn in play-a noise so dense it might have had a flash point, a heat to blow out the radio.

I heard my mother in the next room getting up to go to the toilet. I listened to her come out of the room. I waited and listened, nearly breathless. I waited for the shuffle of slippers along the hall, for the pace, the familiar rate and pace of the shuffle, and then I listened for the sound of water flushing-fully intent, listening in the fiercest kind of concentrated stillness until she was safely back in bed.

I hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face, the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

Maybe that was the dream-I wasn't sure.

Then I got the baseball from the bookshelves and sat in the armchair and looked into the whiskey-cream ceiling.

I didn't listen to the Dodger station that day. I listened to Russ Hodges instead, trying to work a reverse kind of luck. Never occurred to me at the time-I didn't think of it in fact until I sat in the armchair squeezing the baseball-but Russell Hodges, if you count the letters, if you're odd enough to think of doing such a thing, spinning out the full name and counting the characters, you may be amused to see old thirteen.

I felt calmer now. I felt all right. My arm hung over the side of the chair and I squeezed the baseball, listening to Marian sleep-breathe- squeezed it hard, the veins leveling on the back of my hand, going dead flat.

Maybe we fell asleep simultaneously. Then I felt my way to the armchair and switched on the lamp. I stood there, pulling my pajama shirt away from my body where the sweat made it cling. Then I went to the bookshelves and got the baseball.

She was sitting up. She wasn't exactly sitting up, she was propped-I realized she was awake, propped on an elbow looking at me, rubbing her temple with her right hand.

"Nick?"

"I'm here."

"You all right?"

"Yes. I'll be there in a minute."

"Come back to bed."

"I'm all right. Go to sleep."

"It was a lovely birthday, wasn't it?"

"Do you want me to turn out this light?"

"No. Just come to bed."

"I'll be there in a minute."

"I want you next to me," she said.

I stood on the roof with my radio placed on the ledge and sometimes I squatted and took the radio down with me, down behind the ledge, surrounding it sort of, taking hope from it, suffering the game's slides and veers, rooting from the gut-an Emerson, maroon, that I took everywhere. But when I stood I faced southwest, looking beyond the hospital for the incurable and past the elevated tracks on Third Avenue, looking toward the river that cuts the boroughs. That's where the Polo Grounds stood, west by southwest, and I imagined the field and the players, the crisp blues and elysian greens on that great somber-skied day-great and terrible, a day now gone to black and white in the film fade of memory.

Then he remembers his books and goes back down the stairs because you can't come home from school without your schoolbooks, fool. He forces the baseball into his side pocket and leans into the dim triangle behind the stairs, where the bottom of the first flight meets the floor, and he scoops the three books he left there in the morning, slides them out and scoops them up, plus a composition book with a mottled cover, and he blows away the dust and smut and sourness.

The janitor comes in the back door from the yards, the new janitor, he limps so bad you're not even sure you feel sorry for him-maybe you wonder why he's walking around at all.

"What's this?"

"Dropped something," Cotter says.

"I need to talk to your father."

"When I see him."

"Tell him," the man says.

Cotter can't figure out how the janitor knows who he is. The last janitor left in a hurry and the new man just arrived and he has four buildings he takes care of and a limp that's hard to look at and he already knows which son belongs to the matching father and it's probably not a mistake. People always want to talk to his father. His father spends hours every day in flight from these conversations.

He climbs to four and goes inside. His sister is there, Rosie, poring over her homework at the kitchen table. Rosie's sixteen, always blasting away at the books, and he has two older brothers, one in Korea with the infantry and one in the airborne stationed in Georgia. This is the peach state. But if Cotter had to choose between these two forms of employment he thinks he'd rather face a weaponed enemy in snow and mud than walk out a door into the balmy evening air with a snatch of bundled silk hanging on his back.

"What's he carrying in his pocket? Makes a person wonder," Rosie says. "Looks like an apple to me. Maybe he went to an orchard on his day off."

"What day off?"

"Traveled upstate on a bus to pick some apples. Of course we have apples right here. But that's for after school. No school, no apples. Is that why he found his own apple?"

"If I didn't go to school, where did I go?"

"I don't know but when I saw you from the window you had no books and when you walked in the door, lo and behold."

"Then you know that's not an apple in my pocket."

He takes out the ball and does his flip trick, back-spinning the thing over his hand and wrist and catching it with a sort of gearshift motion, elbow in reverse. This gets Rosie smiling and she plants her face in the book again, which tells Cotter he has won a little victory because it is only when this girl goes wordless that you know she is showing respect.

In his room he looks out the window, the room he used to share with his brothers, remarkably his own now, and then he drops the ball on the khaki blanket in the lower bunk, it is the only military touch, the sturdy olive drab, and he grabs a sweater off the chair back. He fits the sweater over his head and looks out the window again, watching people move through the streetlights and into the partial dark. Gets dark too soon. He stands and looks, just watching, being nobody in a window, and then he hears his mother pushing through the door.

He snaps to, thinking what he has to say if he is challenged about missing school. But he knows Rosie will not snitch on him. He thinks he knows this. He is confident more or less. He thinks he feels her loyalty through the walls and he goes into the kitchen where his mother is putting away groceries and he drops a hand on Rosie's shoulder and stands at the table with an eye fixed on the bright boxes and cans his mother is placing on the shelves.

His mother says, "How many times?"

"What?"

"You have to be told. Don't wear that sweater. I need to clean that sweater."

"Plunge it in something strong," Rosie says.

"That's a filthy sweater."

"Take it to the cleaner, they'll give it back," Rosie says. "Rejected."

See, the world is filled with things he's not supposed to do and not supposed to wear. But maybe he likes it when they array against him, it's different from his brothers, who bossed him a little and teased him a little but did not show this picky interest, this endless searching concern. His sister's head poked forward so she can study the particular jut of his dumbness. He likes running his fingers over the edge of the fruit bowl, over the specked glaze, with Rosie's books sprawled on the table and the fruit in the bowl and his mother doing things at the stove or cabinet, the way his mother talks to him and never looks in his direction but knows where he is and measures her voice to his sliding whereabouts, room by room. Maybe he wants them to figure him out so they can let him in on the secret.

"The sweater's got burrs," Rosie says. She seems to like that word and puts a teasey nonchalance in her voice. "He's full of burrs from some apple orchard he must have visited sometime or other."

He runs his fingers over the inside edge of the bowl, feeling the sort of spatter of whirled material, the bubbly pinpoint warps. His mother tells him to wash his hands. She is not looking at him but knows the state of his hands from the position of the sun and moon. He must be walking dirt. Walking talking filthman from the planet Dirt.

At dinner they are quiet. This is because his father is not here and might walk in any time and then again might not and they are in a state of involuntary waiting. Funny how his mother pushes through the door, shouldering in with shopping bags and bundles and her purse that she wears on a long strap over her head and across her body, maybe dragging a handled bag or nudging it out of the hallway with a peg-leg motion and making six kinds of noise even when she's not carrying something, bringing the streets in with her, the subways, buses and streets, all the noise and labor of getting uptown and downtown, that's his mother, and his father usually sliding in unannounced, standing and glaring, stuck to the wall like he wandered in the wrong door and needs to work out the details of his mistake.

His mother is tall and slightly lopsided and she is strong. He knows this because he has lifted things she has lifted, he has come up four flights with things she often carries, and poker-faced-it takes her half a minute to work a smile out of those unused muscles.

She says, "I saw that man who preaches in the street. Same place every time."

"I did too," Cotter says.

"I said to myself this man has a life even if we can't imagine it. This man goes home somewhere. But where does he go? How does he live? I try to imagine what does he do when he's not out there preaching."

Rosie says, "I see these people lots of places."

"But this man's steady. Same place. I don't think he cares if people listen. He'll preach to cars going by."

"What was he preaching?"

"How no one knows the day or the hour. Seems there's been the Russians exploding an A-bomb. So no one knows the day or the hour. They announced it on the news."

Rosie says, "I can't get worked up."

"I got worked up until I started up the stairs with those shopping bags. Thought I was going to pull my shoulder out of the socket."

"Back to normal," Rosie says.

"But I stood and listened to him. I have to say. First time I listened to the man."

"He's always there," Cotter says.

"First time I listened. No one knows the day or the hour. I believe this is Matthew twenty-four."

"I can't get worked up," Rosie says.

"But the man has a life and it's a mystery to me how he lives it."

"People always preaching," Rosie says.

"Those clothes he wears. I think it's a shame. And he's not a crazy man. He knows his scriptures."

"You can know your scriptures," Cotter says. "There's people know their scriptures they're crazy as a loon."

"Amen," says his sister.

After dinner he's back in his room looking out the window. He's supposed to be in his room doing his homework and he's in his room all right but he doesn't know what his homework is supposed to be. He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there's another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents. There's a kid in his class who eats pages from his history book nearly every day. The way he does it, he places the open book under the desk in his crotch and slyly crumples a page, easing it off the spine with the least amount of rustle. Then he has the strategy of wait a while before he brings his fist to his mouth in a sort of muffled cough with the page inside the fist, like whitesy-bitesy. Then he stuffs in the page and the tiny printed ink and the memorized dates, engrossing it quietly. He waits some more. He lets the page idle in his mouth. Then he chews it slowly and carefully and incomplete, damping the sound by making sure his teeth do not meet, and Cotter tries to imagine how it tastes, all the paper points and edges washed in saliva, becoming soft and limp and blottered so you can swallow smooth. He swallows not so smooth. You can see his adam's apple jerk like he just landed a plane on a foreign shore.

War and treaties, eat your Wheaties.

Rosie's in the shower now. He sits on his bunk and hears water beating on the other side of the wall and he thinks about the game. He remembers things he didn't know he'd seen or heard, people on the exit ramp-he sees shirt colors and hears voices coming back to him. A cop on a horse, the boot shine and animal heat, and he hears water beating on the galvanized walls of the shower, the rattling stain-walled shower that someone added to the bathroom years before.

When his father comes in, there is no doubt of the entrance, the singing of the hinges when the door opens slowly, the way he does not carry sound with him out of the entranceway-there's no shaking out of clothes or heavy breath from the climb up the stairs. Not that you can't hear him at all. He maintains a presence near the door, a hear-able something, maybe just the tension of a man standing on a linoleum floor or some tone that comes off his body, a tightness that says he's home.

Cotter sits on the lower bunk and waits. His father comes through the kitchen and appears in the doorway, Manx Martin. He's a working man, a furniture mover when he's employed and a whiskey swigger when he's not. He looks at Cotter and nods pointlessly. He stands there nodding, a gesture that has no point, that seems to mean Oh yeah it's you if it means anything at all. Then he comes in the room and sits on the unused bed, the cot. They listen to the water beating on the shower walls.

"Had your dinner?"

"Meat loaf."

"Leave some for me?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. Why, you left the table early? You had an appointment downtown?"

He sees the man is kidding. His father's eyes go narrow and he does his pencil-line smile. He is a man with high cheekbones sort of poxed in the hollows, rough-graded, and a thin mustache that he keeps well above his lip, tended and particular. He looks around the room. He studies things. He seems to believe this is the right time to see what kind of surroundings his sons grew up in. He is average size, a little developed in the chest, a little bowlegged, and Cotter would not have thought he had the brawn to move heavy pieces up and down long flights of stairs. But he has seen his father lift and hoist with much bigger men.

"Which one's in there?"

"Rosie."

"Washing up a storm."

"The way she does homework. To the last ounce."

"Finishes what she starts, that girl."

It bothers Cotter in some lurking way, to sit here with his father talking about Rosie while they hear her in the shower. Just then the water stops.

"Because I need to take a leak, you see."

"Super wants to talk to you."

"He's a yard dog. Pay no mind."

"How come he knows us if he just got here?"

"Maybe we're famous, you and me. Two hombres that they put out the word these guys be mighty tough."

Cotter relaxes a little. He thinks maybe this is going to be all right. The man is feeling no pain as they say and there's something he can get from his father that he can't get from his mother.

Manx calls out, "Rosie baby. Your daddy needs to use the fa-cil-i-tees."

They hear a smothered word or two and then she goes across the hall barefoot in a towel and Manx stands and hitches his pants and clicks his tongue and walks out of the room.

Cotter thinks without knowing it, without preparing the thought- he sees Bill Waterson on Eighth Avenue with his jacket bunched in his hand. He picks up the baseball and looks at it and puts it down. His father is taking a king leak. You don't usually hear anything but the shower in there and noises from the pipes but his father is taking a leak that is the all-time king. It is quickly becoming funny, the time span and force of the leak, and Cotter wishes his brothers were here so they could all be amazed together.

He comes back in and sits down. He's still wearing his jacket, a corduroy windbreaker that used to belong to Randall, speaking of brothers.

"There now. We feeling better."

"How'd you like to write a letter for me? I need it for school," Cotter says.

"Oh yeah? That says what?"

"That says I missed a day due to illness."

"Dear so-and-so."

"That's right. Like that."

"Please excuse my son."

"That's the way."

"Due to he was ill."

"Tell them it was a fever."

"How feverish'd you get?"

"Say one hundred ought to do it."

"We don't want to be too modest. If we're gonna do this thing."

"Okay. As he had a fever of a hundred and two."

"Of course you look to me like you're in the pink."

"Recovering nicely, thanks."

"Except what's that on your sweater?"

"I don't know. Burrs."

"Burrs. This here's Harlem. What kind of burrs?"

"I don't know. I guess I get around."

"And where did you get around to that you missed a day of school?"

"I went to the game."

"The game."

"At the Polo Grounds. Today."

"You were at that game?" Manx says. "That made that fuss in the streets?"

"That's nothing. I was there is nothing. I got the ball he hit."

"No, you didn't. What ball?"

"The home run that won the pennant," Cotter says softly, a little reluctantly, because it is such an astounding thing to say and he is awed for the first time, saying it.

"No, you didn't."

"I chased it down and got it."

"Lying to my face," Manx says.

"Not a lie. I got the ball. Right here."

"Know what you are?" Manx says.

Cotter reaches for the ball.

"You're a stick that makes a noise once in a while."

Cotter looks at him. He sits in the lower bunk with his back to the wall, looking out at the man on the opposite bed. Then he picks up the baseball, he takes it off the khaki blanket where it is sunk beside his thigh. He holds it out, he spins it on the tips of his fingers. He holds it high in his right hand and uses the other hand to spin it. He doesn't give a damn, He sports it, he shows it off. He feels anger and bluster come into his face.

"Are you being straight-lip with me?"

Cotter does a little razzle, shaking the ball in his hand like it's too magical to hold steady-it's giving him palsy and making his eyes pop. He's doing it nasty and mad, staring down his old man.

"Hey. Are you being straight-up with your dad?"

"Why would I lie?"

"Okay. Why would you? You wouldn't."

"No reason for it."

"All right. No reason. I can see that. Who else you tell?"

"Nobody."

"You didn't tell your mother?"

"She'd tell me give it back."

Manx laughs. Puts his hands on his knees and peers at Cotter, then rocks back laughing.

"Damn yes. She'd march you up to the ballpark so you could give it back."

Cotter doesn't want to go too far with this. He knows the worst trap in the world is taking sides with his father against his mother. He has to be careful every which way, saying this and doing that, but the most careful thing of all is stick by his mother. Otherwise he's dead.

"All right. So what do we want to do? Maybe we go up to the ballpark in the morning and show them the ball. We bring your ticket stub so at least they see you were at the game and sitting in the right section. But who do we ask for? Which door we go to? Maybe seventeen people show up saying this one's the ball, no this one's the ball, I got it, I got it, I got it."

Cotter is listening to this.

"Who pays attention to us? They see two coloreds from nowhere. They gonna believe some colored boy snatch the ball out of them legions in the crowd?" Manx pauses here, maybe waiting to hear an idea develop in his head. "I believe we need to write a letter. Yeah. We write you a letter for school and then we write us both a letter and send it to the ball club."

Cotter is listening. He watches his father lapse into private thought, into worries and plots.

"What are we saying in this letter?"

"We send it registered. Yeah, give it the extra touch. We send it with your ticket stub."

"What are we saying?"

"We offering the ball for sale. What else we possibly be saying?"

Cotter wants to get up and look out the window. He feels closed in and wants to be alone doing nothing but watching the street from the window.

"I don't want to sell it. I want to keep it."

Manx tilts his head to study the boy. This is a thought he has to adjust to-keeping the ball around the house so it can gather dust and develop character.

He says quietly, "Keep it for what? We sell it, we buy you a wool sweater and throw away that hermit shirt you got on. Look like you're living in a tree. We buy something for your mother and sister. Crazy to let the thing sit here and do nothing and earn nothing." His voice is sensible and thought-out, defining things for the teachable son-we are responsible to our family, not to the vanity of keepsakes and souvenirs. "We buy your mother a winter coat. Winter's coming and she needs a heavy coat."

Cotter wants to be manly here, equal to the issues."

"What kind of money they give us?"

"Don't know. Plain and simple do not know. But they want this ball. They put it on display somewhere. I believe a letter is the thing that we send them registered mail. And we include your stub. What's it called, your rain check."

"I don't have a stub."

His father gets the look, the injured surprise-injury into the depths.

"What you trying to do to me?"

"I didn't get a stub."

"Why not?"

"I didn't buy a ticket. I went over the gate."

"What you doing to me, son?"

"I didn't have money for a ticket. So I went over the gate. If I had the money, I'd a bought the ticket." And he adds helplessly, "No money, no tickee."

His father's eyes get that drifty look. Cotter sees a kind of panic building, an intimate guilt that he has brought about by mentioning money, the ancient subject of being broke. His father is in retreat, his eyes treading inward, escaping the place he has just built for them both, the world of responsible things. This is a terrible moment, one of those times when Cotter realizes he has won a struggle he didn't know was taking place. He has beat his father into surrender, into awful withdrawal.

He says, "And anyway the ticket stub doesn't say what section you're sitting unless it's reserve seat or box seat. So the ticket's no good for anything. People pick up tickets off the street."

His father says, "We sleep on it. How's that?" Grimly getting to his feet. "Nothing we can do tonight so let's just get some sleep."

Cotter doesn't mention the letter his father is supposed to write, the excuse for missing school. Maybe in the morning it will be all right. And maybe he'll change his mind about selling the baseball. Or forget the whole thing. Cotter knows if he can delay any action on the matter for a day, a day and a half, his father will completely forget. This is one of the things they count on in this house, unspokenly- they sit around and wait for him to forget.

He stands by the window and looks down at the street. In school they tell him sometimes to stop looking out the window. This teacher or that teacher. The answer is not out there, they tell him. And he always wants to say that's exactly where the answer is. Some people look out the window, others eat their books.

He gets undressed and goes to bed. He sleeps in his shorts and polo shirt. His mother comes in and says good night. Good night's fine as long as she doesn't want to know what he and his father talked about. That's another trap that opens out of nowhere. She tells him she has to get up extra early to go to work, which is a long trip by subway down to 21st Street, she's a seamstress in a noisy loft with tall fans going- he worked there four hours a week last summer sweeping fabric off the floor and rolling those cardboard barrels in and out and they joked and teased him, forty or fifty women, and said some very direct things.

"Rosiewillgetyouup."

"I don't need any help," he says.

"If anybody in this world needs help getting up, you're the one."

"She throws things at me."

"Catch them and throw them back."

"Then I'll never get dressed. Because she throws my clothes." His mother leans into the bunk and kisses him, which she hasn't done in a long time, and then she rubs his head roughly, sort of knuckle-rubbing, and squeezes his cheeks so it hurts, twisting sizable sums of flesh, and he hears his father pass by on his way to the kitchen and hopes he missed the damn kiss.

In the dark he thinks about the game. The game comes rolling over him in a great warm wave of contented sleep. The game was lost and then they won. The game could not be won but then they won it and it's won forever. This is the thing they can never take away. It is the first thing he will think of in the morning and one part of him is already there even as he falls asleep, waking up to think about the game.

Manx Martin stands at the refrigerator. He's looking in at the meat loaf. She saved him some meat loaf that's sitting in a plate like the last meal of Prisoner X. He takes it out and sits at the table, eating slowly. His mind is in the throes of this and that. He sees the food in the plate and has to remind himself what it's there for.

He puts the plate in the sink when he's finished and then decides to wash it and dry it and he does this fastidiously, plus utensils. He knows he ought to fix the drip in the faucet but we can save that for a day when there's a little free time. He puts the plate in the cabinet, whisper soft.

Ivie comes in and does not look at him. She has a way of not looking at him that ought to be studied by science. That's how good she is at doing it, sweeping the room with her look but missing him completely-a thing science ought to investigate for military use.

She says, "You were talking to him."

"Whose business is it?"

She says, "What for?"

"I don't need any what for."

She says, "Talking an awful long time."

"He's my son. Whose business is it?"

"Leave him alone. My business," she says. "That's what he wants. Left alone to grow up without advice from you. Only he won't say it himself."

"Let him tell me."

She says, "I'm telling you."

She's moving through the kitchen doing things.

She says, "I'm leaving early in the morning. They have a rush order, which they're paying time and a half."

He hears the radio playing faintly in their bedroom.

"So I'm giving you fair warning. That alarm's going off well before six."

"Before six," he says, and checks his watch, which doesn't work, and what's the difference anyway, and he says the words in a voice unconnected to the facts.

She's in her housecoat and house slippers moving through the kitchen like a sleepwalker and a sleeptalker, not giving him the barest glance. But she's connected to the facts all right. And he is not. He is drifting out of range of the whole damn thing, the morning chill, the working wife, the harsh alarm that's getting ready, even as he stands here, to populate his meager sleep.

She finds the pills she's looking for and goes back down the hall. He stands and waits. He turns off the overhead light and stands in the dim glow of the lamp in the corner.

He stands there for fifteen minutes. A lifetime of thinking into a thing, trying to straighten out the mental involvements.

Okay. He goes and stands in the doorway of Cotter's room. He is looking into the room, getting accustomed to the dark. The boy is sleeping dead away. Manx steps into the room and sees the baseball almost at once. It is sitting in the open on the unused bed. This is what gets him every time. They obtain a valuable thing and don't even bother to hide it. Trust fairies to watch over their valuables. He told them how many times? Protect what's yours. Because the way things are changing, you have to live defensive,

He tries to recall which son slept in which bed when Cotter was a little kid in the top bunk. They came and went so damn fast.

He stands in the dark room. He is arguing out the thought should he do it or not. Then he does it. He takes the baseball. He does it before the argument ends. He does it to end the argument. He takes the ball and walks quietly through the kitchen to the door. The ball fits nice and easy in the roomy pocket of his windbreaker, his oldest son's windbreaker. He opens the door, squinching his face to draw off the noise. Need to oil the hinges when our mind's all clear and we have a little free time at our disposal. He eases the door shut and goes down the stairs and out onto the stoop, wondering how it happened that they're not wearing his hand-me-down jacket-he's wearing theirs.

He looks both ways because he always looks both ways. Then he walks down the steps and into the street.