Underworld (9 page)

He looks at Bill, a flushed and panting man who has vainly chased along a railroad track for the five-oh-nine.

Then he turns his back and walks slowly down the street. He begins to think about the game's amazing end. What could not happen actually
happened. He wants to get home, sit quiet, let it live again, let the home run roll over him, soaking his body with a kind of composure, the settled pleasure that comes after the thing itself.

A man calls from a window to a man on a stoop.

“Hey baby I hear she put your nightstick in a sling.”

Cotter turns here, looks there, feeling a sense of placeness that grows more familiar.

He sees a kid he knows but doesn't stop to show him the ball or brag on the game.

He feels the pain from the seat leg.

He sees a street-corner shouter making a speech, a tall man in a rag suit with bicycle clips nipping his pants at the ankles.

He feels a little bringdown working in his mind.

He sees four guys from a local gang, the Alhambras, and he crosses the street to avoid them and then crosses back.

He gets to his street and goes up the front steps and into the sour air of his building and he feels the little bringdown of fading light that he has felt a thousand times before.

Shit man. I don't want to go to school tomorrow.

Russ Hodges stands on an equipment trunk trying to describe the scene in the clubhouse and he knows he is making no sense and the players who climb up on the trunk to talk to him are making no sense and they are all talking in unnatural voices, failed voices, creaturely night screaks. Others are pinned to their lockers by reporters and family members and club officials and they can't get to the liquor and beer located on a table in the middle of the room. Russ holds the mike over his head and lets the noise sweep in and then lowers the mike and says another senseless thing.

Thomson goes out on the clubhouse veranda to respond to the sound of his chanted name and they are everywhere, they are on the steps with stadium cops keeping them in check and there are thousands more spread dense across the space between jutting bleacher walls, many arms extended toward Thomson—they are pointing or imploring or making victory fists or stating a desire to touch, men in
suits and hats down there and others hanging over the bleacher wall above Bobby, reaching down, half falling over the edge, some very near to touching him.

Al says, the producer, “Great job today, Russ buddy.”

“We did something great just by being here.”

“What a feeling.”

“I'd smoke a cigar but I might die.”

“But what a feeling,” Al says.

“We sure pulled something out of a hat. All of us together. Damn I just realized.”

“What's a ball game to make us feel like this?”

“I have to go back. Left my topcoat in the booth.”

“We need a walk to settle us down.”

“We need a long walk.”

“That's the only coat you've ever loved,” says Al.

They leave by way of the Dodger clubhouse and there's Branca all right, the first thing you see, stretched facedown on a flight of six steps, feet touching the floor. He's still in uniform except for shirt and cap. He wears a wet undershirt and his head is buried in his crossed arms on the top step. Al and Russ speak to a few of the men who remain. They talk quietly and try not to look at Branca. They look but tell themselves they aren't. Next to Branca a coach sits in full uniform but hatless, smoking a cigarette. His name is Cookie. No one wants to catch Cookie's eye. Al and Russ talk quietly to a few more men and all of them together try not to look at Branca.

The steps from the Dodger clubhouse are nearly clear of people. Thomson has gone back inside but there are fans still gathered in the area, waving and chanting. The two men begin to walk across the outfield and Al points to the place in the left-field stands where the ball went in.

“Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or some such thing.”

Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power. People are climbing lampposts on Amsterdam Avenue, tooting car horns in Little Italy. Isn't it possible
that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams? Russ wants to believe a thing like this keeps us safe in some undetermined way. This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells—the surge sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren—they'll be the gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen, pressing in with medicine breath, that they were here when it happened.

The raincoat drunk is running the bases. They see him round first, his hands paddling the air to keep him from drifting into right field. He approaches second in a burst of coattails and limbs and untied shoelaces and swinging belt. They see he is going to slide and they stop and watch him leave his feet.

All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can't be counted.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that's completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant—allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There's nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.

It's a culmination in a way, machines made and shaped outside the little splat of human speech. And this made my rented car a natural match for the landscape I was crossing. Heat shimmer rising on the empty flats. A bled-white sky with ticky breezes raking dust across the windshield. And the species factually absent from the scene—except for me, of course, and I was barely there.

Let's just say the desert is an impulse. I'd decided in a flash to
switch planes and get a car and hit the back roads. There is something about old times that's satisfied by spontaneity. The quicker you decide, the more fully you discharge the debt to memory. I wanted to see her again and feel something and say something, a few words, not too many, and then head back into the windy distance. It was all distance. It was hardpan and sky and a wafer trace of mountain, low and crouched out there, mountain or cloud, cat-shaped, catamount—how human it is to see a thing as something else.

The old road bent north, placing the sun approximately abeam, and I wanted to feel the heat on my face and arms. I turned off the air conditioner and lowered the windows. I reached for the tube of sunblock, protection factor fifteen, a thing I keep nearby even though I'm olive-skinned, dark as my father was.

I slowed the car to a no-hands crawl and applied the stuff to half my face and one arm, the exposed person, because I was fifty-seven years old and still learning how to be sensible.

The musky coconut balm and the adolescent savor of heat and beach and an undermemory of seawater rush, salt scour in the eyes and nose. I squeezed the tube until it was sucked dry. It sucked and popped and went dry. I glimpsed something, a mental image, a sort of nerve-firing, a desert flash—the briefest puddled color of an ice-cream vendor weaving through high sand.

Later the wind died and a cloudreef rimmed in pale rose hung low and still. I was on a dirt road now, spectacularly lost, and I stopped the car and got out and scanned the landscape, feeling pretty dumb, and I thought I saw some funk holes out among the yucca—old concrete bunkers from a mining operation or military test site. It would be dark in forty-five minutes. I had a quarter tank of gas, half a can of iced tea, nothing to eat, no warm clothes, a map that scanted the details.

I would drink my tea and die.

Then a scatter of dust, a hazy mass rising from the sundown line. And an approaching object that made me think of a hundred movies in which something comes across the wavy plain, a horseman with scabbarded rifle or a lone cameleer hunched in muslin on his dumb-headed beast. This thing was different, raising twin kicks of sand, coming at a nice clip. But not your everyday average all-terrain vehicle.
It had a roof light and a gleam of yellow paint and it was brassy and jouncing, with a cartoon shine. The happiest sort of apparition, coming down the rutted path like a pop-art object. Less than fifty yards away. It seemed to be, it clearly was a New York taxi, impossible but true, yellower than egg yolk and coming fast.

What better gesture might I devise than an outstretched hailing hand?

But the damn thing did not slow down. Windows open, music ripping out—a surge of steroid rock. I stepped back out of the way, my arm still raised, the suntan arm, sleek with chemicals. I saw the cab was jammed with people and I called out as they went by—a person's name, a password in the throbbing air.

“Klara Sax,” is what I shouted.

And there were answering shouts. The taxi slowed briefly and I could hear them cheering. Then arms came jutting from two or three windows, waving and beckoning, and a single smiling yellow head, a blond woman sunny and young and looking back at me—the driver serene in all that ruckus, driving blind—and the taxi springing away, hightailing through the studded vegetation and out across the desert.

I got in my silent car and followed.

The volunteers were mainly art students but there were others as well, history majors and teachers on leave and nomads and runaways, coming and going all the time, burnt-out hackers looking for the unwired world, they were people who heard the call, the whisper in the ear that sends you out the door and into some zone of exalted play.

Working with the hands. Scraping and painting. Stirring the indolent mixture. Seeing brushstrokes mark a surface.
Pigment
. The animal fats and polymers that blend to make this word.

They were nice to me. They ate and slept in a set of abandoned barracks at the edge of an enormous air base. Toilets, showers, cots and an improvised commissary. They were a good-humored workforce with an array of skills. They fixed things, sang songs, they told funny stories. When their numbers grew beyond the capacity of the barracks, they slept in pup tents or sleeping bags or in their dusty cars.

I told a student with a welcome badge that I was not here to wield a brush or sandblaster but only to see the piece—the artwork, the project, whatever it was called—and to say hello if that was possible to Klara Sax.

I told him I didn't want to take up space and he gave me directions to a motel where I might spend the night, maybe twenty-five miles away, and then asked me to meet him later at a place he called the paint shop.

I washed the sunblock off my hands and face and got in a food line, sandwiches and kiwis and fruit juice. Then I sat and talked with five or six others. They were all nice. I asked about the taxi and they said it was someone's car that they'd decided to paint and ornament, a gift for Klara on her birthday earlier in the week. Not the car itself, which had been returned to the owner in its taxified form, but the paint, the gesture, the sense of her ancestral New York.

They asked where I was from and I replied with a line I sometimes used.

I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix. Pause. Like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

I hated the line by this time but it seemed to bend the edge of inquiry, to set a patently shallow tone. All the while we were talking I looked around for the taxi driver with the honey-blond hair.

A number of people wore T-shirts inscribed
Long Tall Sally
.

I thought I could guess Klara's age within a year or two and when I asked which birthday she was celebrating somebody said seventy-two. This sounded about right.

It was a clear night with swirled stars burning low and close and a sweet breeze skimming the earth. I drove for about a minute and a half—don't walk, they'd said—and followed a line of road reflectors stuck in the dirt. There were strung lights and a cluster of jeeps and vans and a single long concrete structure about ten feet high and divided along its length into a dozen compartments, room-sized, open at the front and rear.

This was the operation center, where the project was coordinated—designs created, daily assignments made, most of the material stored.

One of the spaces was filled with people and I spotted a mike boom
suspended over the massed heads. Lights, a camera, a woman with a clipboard—and spectators from the workforce, maybe forty of them, some with protective face masks dangled on their chests, many wearing shirts or jackets with the same inscription I'd seen earlier. I parked nearby and walked to the edge of the group. It took me a moment to find the subject. She was seated in a director's chair with a cane alongside and one leg propped on an overturned bucket. She smoked a black cigarette and talked to people while the crew set up.

Now that I was a word or two away, a name away, the oddness of the trip pressed in on me. Seventeen. That's how old I was last time I saw her. Yes, that long ago, and after all this time it might seem to her that I was some invasive thing, a figure from an anxious dream come walking and talking across a wilderness to find her. I stood and watched, trying to generate the will to make an approach. And maybe it was stranger still, odder than the years between meetings, that I was able to see her retrospectively. I could lift the younger woman right out of the chair, separate her from the person in the dark plaid pants and old suede blazer who sat talking and smoking. I'd seen photographs of Klara but could never quite isolate the woman I'd known, straight-bodied and pale, with a little twist about the mouth, the turned mouth that made her seem detached from what she said. And the evasive eyes, the look that seemed to bend the question of what it was we wanted from each other.