Underworld

1

You looked at the hills and they were rolling hills that made you wonder who you were and how you got here. The hills had no more connection to your life than a calendar with a picture of hills, old rolling hills set above a river, fixed to some kitchen wall.

I sensed the river was out there somewhere, a briskness in the wind, and I took deep breaths because I was upstate and it was supposed to be healthy here.

Staatsburg was seventy-five miles from home, farther than I'd ever been, and I got settled in the dorm and took classes for a high school certificate and never missed an afternoon in the old barn where the makeshift gym was located, a boxing ring at one end and a backboard at the other.

You commit your crimes in the city and they send you upstate to take deep breaths and get a perspective on your life.

I played basketball with members of a street gang named the Alhambras after a movie theater in Harlem. They were doing nigger time, they said. They'd come up through Youth House and a number of reformat ries, raised on the felony alphabet, and we pounded up and down the floor in that dusty gym, working off the effects of our transgressions.

We were all juvies, under eighteen. I was an E-felony, criminally negligent homicide, reduced from a charge of manslaughter in the second degree, and we played game after game of half-court, going all-out and taking deep and healthy breaths and having a tussle or two.

You could fight a guy here and then forget it, leave it on the court or in the ring, because you'd already mind-whipped yourself repeatedly for what you'd done out there in the streets, whatever misfit thing of rage or bleakness or stupendous aberration, and maybe you'd reached an early maturity on the subject of running a grudge-how important it is to be selective.

When I entered correction I wanted things to make sense. I kept my bed neat, corners squared, and stacked my clothes sensibly in my cubicle.

The minute I entered correction I was a convert to the system. I went out on work crews that did road repair and I was the eagerest hand, giving myself up to the rote motions of breaking asphalt, leaky-eyed and sneezing in the ragweed brush.

I believed in the stern logic of correction. I did my study assignments every night and pounded the floor and pounded the boards in the old gym, good riddance to bad beginnings, blood beginnings, and I was ready for this, hammering hard surfaces on some country road in the julepy haze of a midsummer day, feeling the dead soul slowly drain out of me, the sedimentary stuff of who I was, gone in the dancing air of insects and pollen.

The hills took on color in the fall and they had about as much meaning in your life as a poem on a calendar, four lines about rolling hills in Ronald Colman English.

At Staatsburg I heard many stories about doojee, which was one of the ninety-nine names of heroin, but I didn't tell them my own weak-kneed story, about how I was scared of needles and drugs.

At Staatsburg they had a psychologist who wanted me to talk about the shooting. She thought it was the way to my salvation. I told her,

No, man, forget it, let's talk about the weather. I gave her nothing she could use on my behalf.

I didn't want sweetheart treatment. I was here to do time, one and a half to three, and all I wanted from the system was method and regularity. When the kitchen caught fire I was disappointed. I took it personally. I didn't understand how a well-trained staff could allow this to happen. When three kids went out the gate in the rear of a bakery truck, fifteen-year-olds, junior Alley Boys as the Alhambras were sometimes called, I thought it was a tremendous, what, a dereliction, a collapse, bunched in the back of a Silvercup truck-I was shocked at the level of neglect.

In the gym that day we played half-court with our customary combat skills, hacking the shooter, wheeling off the boards with elbows jutting, but the intensity wasn't there and the game stopped cold a couple of times so the players could talk about the escape. They cracked jokes and bent over laughing but I thought the joke was on us. We weren't worth much if the system designed to contain us kept breaking down.

All that winter I shoveled snow and read books. The lines of print, the alphabetic characters, the strokes of the shovel when I cleared a walk, the linear arrangement of words on a page, the shovel strokes, the rote exercises in school texts, the novels I read, the dictionaries I found in the tiny library, the nature and shape of books, the routine of shovel strokes in deep snow-this was how I began to build an individual.

But before the snows came and the ground hardened they put in the golf course. Miniature golf, novelty golf. They unloaded the equipment in a field near the mess hall on a sweet and clear November day. Plywood castles and ramps. Enough junk for nine holes. Little waterwheels and bridges and whatnot. I watched it all take shape with an odd kind of disbelief. I felt tricked and betrayed. I was here on a serious charge, a homicide by whatever name, destruction of life under whatever bureaucratic label, and this was where I belonged, confined upstate, but the people who put me here were trifling with my mind.

The club was in West Hollywood, called the Troubadour, and the man walked onto the stage and unscrewed the mike from the stand and waved it over the crowd, blessing them, and maybe they felt they needed a benediction, tonight of all nights, because the President had addressed the nation about six hours earlier, four o'clock Pacific time, on a matter of the highest national urgency.

The man looked into the audience, stroking his chin, body set in a hipster slouch, and he wore a charcoal suit, continental cut, with natural shoulders and half lapels, and a dark slim knit tie, and that New York Levantine look-yes, this was the infamous sick comic, Lenny Bruce, and they waited for him to tell them how they felt.

Because the Russians had put missiles into Cuba. And President Kennedy's grim speech still formed a kind of auditory wall running through the room. Nuclear strike capability. Full retaliatory response. Such resonant and carefully crafted terms. This was an audience accustomed to a different level of dread. Out-of-work actors and musicians, screenwriters doing draft number ninety-two, there were agents with eczema, wholesome blond beach-body hookers with their vicious slithering pimps. And Lenny's wearing a little smirk, eyeing this group like he sees right to the tacky nougat center of their collective soul. Always a few literate junkies. Maybe a couple of beehived tourists who'd wandered in by mistake with their siding salesmen husbands. And there has to be one name actor with a dose of clap and another who's been reduced to doing soaps. And they all needed Lenny to help them make the transition to the total global thing that's going on out there with SAC bombers rumbling over the tarmac and Polaris subs putting to sea, like dive dive dive, it's dialogue from every submarine movie ever made and it's all factually happening but at the same time they find it remarkably unreal-Titans and Atlases being readied for firing.

Lenny studies them a while, letting the moment draw meaning and portent. It's not at all obvious what he's going to say until he says it, with a thrust to his lower lip and an executive timbre in his voice.

"Good evening, my fellow citizens."

And once he says it, the remark is retroactively inevitable because this was the President's opening line of course and it gets a medium laugh but Lenny kills the bit before it begins. He's not about to do a Kennedy imitation.

He leaned back to distance himself further from the line. Smoke rose from the crowd, hanging in the beam of the baby spot, and he shifted into his own voice with its bent vowels and high nasal shadings.

"I dig it on one level. Being on the brink. It's a rush, man. You can talk all you want about living on the edge. Yeah I know, you smoke some grass on Saturday night. Making the scene. Plus you accidentally drove through Watts one night and can't stop talking about it. Made your shorthairs stand on end. Negroes in porkpie hats. No, yes, this thing here, let me tell you what the edge is. The true edge is not where you choose to live but where they situate you against your will. This event is infinitely deeper and more electrifying than anything you might elect to do with your own life. You know what this is? This is twenty-six guys from Harvard deciding our fate."

He swiveled toward the wings and pointed at some shadow presence as a laugh bubble broke over the massed heads.

"Dig it. These are the guys from the eating clubs and the secret societies. They have fraternity handshakes so complicated it takes three full minutes to do all the moves. One missed digit you're fucked for life. Resign from the country club, forget about the stock options and the executive retreat, watch your wife disappear in a haze of secret drinking. You have to be hip to stay connected. These guys wear boxer shorts with geometric designs that contain the escape routes they've been assigned when the missiles start flying."

Lenny was a handsome guy with dark hair and hooded eyes and he resembled a poolshark who'd graduated to deeper and sleazier schemes. His brows were set at a cosmopolitan arch that seemed to function as an open challenge to his hustler aspect-if you're dumb enough to believe my scam, that's your problem, shmucko.

And he said, "Picture it," and snapped his fingers, releasing the genie from the bottle. "Twenty-six guys in Clark Kent suits getting ready to enter a luxury bunker that's located about half a mile under the White House and the faggot decorator's doing a last-minute checklist. Let's see, peach walls, stunning. Found the chandelier in a little abbey outside Paris. None of that Statler Hilton dreck in my bomb shelter."

And even those in the audience who were familiar with Lenny's habitual scat, the vocal apparatus with its endless shifts and modulations and assumed identities, the release of underground words and tensions-they felt a small medicinal jolt at the pitch of the decorator's voice.

"Rugs, fabulous, the purest Persian slave labor. Arched windows, okay we're twelve stories underground but the curtain fabric was irresistible so just shut up. Dining table, plantation mahogany, eleven bottles of Lemon Pledge. Centerpiece, designed it himself, the highlight of his career. A huge mound of crabmeat carved in the shape- they're gonna love this, it's so forceful and moving-yes, Kennedy and Khrushchev wrestling in the nude. Lifesize."

And Lenny did a knee dip with his swivel, pausing to let the audience develop the image.

"All right, can't stand around admiring. They'll be down any second. The President, the Secretary of State, the Joint Chiefs, this guy, that guy, the guy with the secret codes for nuclear launch-he's a toilet-trained Jew, incidentally, so there won't be any mix-ups. Let's see now, what else? Flatware he's done, stemware he's done. After-dinner mints, let's see-do I give them the mocha or the cafe noir?"

He did the opening again, checking the line for style and fit.

"Good evening, my fellow citizens."

A stir of renewed anticipation-maybe they wanted him to pursue the presidential thing but he waved it off again and stood there sort of humming at the hips, doing a little wobble that seemed to get the next thought going.

Then he did the shrillest sort of falsetto.

"We're all gonna die!"

This cracked him up. He bent from the waist laughing and seemed to be using the mike as a geiger counter, waving it over the floorboards.

"Dig it, JFK's got this Russian man-bull staring him down, they're pizzle to pizzle, and this is a guy Jack doesn't know how to deal with.

What's he supposed to say? I shtupped more debutantes than you? This is a coal miner, he's a guy who herded farm animals barefoot for a couple of kopeks. He's been known to stick his fist up a sow's ass to fertilize his vegetable garden. What's Jack supposed to say to him-a secretary gave me a handjob on the White House elevator? This is a guy who craps with the door open on state occasions. He has sex with his bowling trophies."

The seating at the Troubadour consisted mainly of folding chairs and when enough people laughed there was a wheezy groan from the slats and hinges. And the audience sat there thinking, How real can the crisis be if we're sitting in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard going ha ha ha.

"We're all gonna die!"

Lenny loves the postexistential bent of this line. In his giddy shriek the audience can hear the obliteration of the idea of uniqueness and free choice. They can hear the replacement of human isolation by massive and unvaried ruin. His closest followers laugh the loudest. Their fan-fed vanity is gratified. They're included in Lenny's own incineration. All the Lennies. The persecuted junkie. The antihyp-ocrite. The satirist and nose picker. Lenny the hipster fink. Lenny the ass mechanic, girl-spotting in hotel lobbies. Lenny the vengeance of the Lord.

"Powerless. Understand, this is how they remind us of our basic state. They roll out a periodic crisis. Is it horizontal? One great power against the other. Or is it vertical, is it up and down?" He seemed to lose his line of argument here. "The U.S. is putting up a naval blockade. Fine, good, groovy. D'ya hear what he said?" And Lenny did his basso head of state. 'Any offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba gets stopped dead in the water by the U.S. fleet." He jabbed at some imaginary lint on his lapel, signaling a shift, a bit. 'And there's this woman sitting out there in Centralia listening to the speech. She hears, Maximum peril. She hears, Abyss of destruction. She has a job dishing out meat patties in the school cafeteria and she comes home exhausted and turns on the TV and it's the President of the United States and he's saying, Abyss of destruction. And she sits there in her cafeteria whites, with her shoes off, picking her feet. Her name is Bitty. She's thinking they pre-empted Lawrence Welk so this Irish Catholic millionaire can talk about abyss of destruction. Then she thinks, Hey, wait, that's a movie title, right? Sure, it's one of those hard-boiled cynical crime dramas in moody black and white. I saw it with the Muscular Dystrophy Mothers of Central Kansas. The speech goes on and on and Bitty's trying to register the enormous-and the President says something about, Swift and extraordinary buildup. Soviet missiles in Cuba. But she thinks he's talking about the grease in her oven. Yeah that greasy buildup's beginning to bug me, man. She has this oven cleaner she's eager to try. Works fifty-two percent faster than the strongest industrial acid. She tries to concentrate on the President's speech but everything he's saying sounds like a pitch for insect repellent or throat spray. And Bitty's sitting there in Emporia or Centralia and she gets up out of the chair and goes to the phone and calls her friend DeeAnn. DeeAnn is the local movie expert. DeeAnn reviews movies for the cafeteria workers' newsletter, Meat Patty Week. And Bitty says into the phone, Who was in that movie the President's talking about on TV? And DeeAnn says, You're asking me about movies? At a time like this?"

Lenny bent his knees and spread both arms wide, his mouth stretched in a rictus of gaped and grinning terror.

"We're all gonna die!"

He loved this line so much it was a little unnerving, especially in DeeAnn's voice, which could shatter a urinal at fifty feet. An hour later, after all the bits, the scatological asides, the improvised voices, it was this isolated line that stayed in people's mind when they went to their cars and drove home to Westwood or Brentwood or wherever, or roamed the freeways for half the night because they knew they wouldn't be able to sleep and what better place to imagine the flash and burst, where else would they go to rehearse the end of history, or actually see it-this was the meaning of the freeways and always had been and they'd always known it at some unsounded level. And so they drove half the night, at first morose and then angry and then fatalistic and then plain shaking scared, chests tight with the knowledge of how little it would take to make the thing happen-the first night on earth when the Unthinkable crept up over the horizon line and waited in an animal squat, and all the time they drove they heard the keening of that undisguisable Jewish voice repeating the line that had made them bust their guts laughing, astonishingly, only a few hours earlier.

It was a gesture without a history

You hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face. But after that you were in unknown country The slyest kind of shit-eating grin. But after you forced back the trigger. The trigger pull was heavy and rough. And after you force-squeezed the trigger you were in another place, absorbing the noise and movement, the gesture, the way he jerked and fell, although jerked isn't an adequate word-it was a movement beyond your competence as a witness to understand and describe.

At Staatsburg they had the woman in the office, Dr. Lindblad, and I had regular appointments, knock-knock, and she probed the subject of the shooting while I tried to get a look at her legs.

Forget for a minute that you're the one who shot him.

You can't describe the movement properly because it was a level of reality you hadn't rehearsed, either one of you. The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience.

You don't want to forget he was sitting in a chair. The chair moved not unlike the man. The chair could have been a version of the man, so drastic was its tumble into the wall.

And of course your own shock, the trauma of perception-how can you tell what's going on if you're in shock yourself?

Dr. Lindblad said, "Do you think you'd like to have a family someday?"

"I don't know. Haven't thought about it. No," I said. "I don't think so. Kids? I don't want kids. I don't want to be a father."

"And why is that?"

"Why is that. I don't know. After what I've done? I don't think I should be a father. Do you?"

"What have you done, Nick?"

I smiled at her. I liked Dr. Lindblad. She wasn't good-looking but she was stacked. The Alley Boys liked her, the gang members, because she listened to their stones without making judgments. She did delicate twirling tricks with their rage and shame and sullen excuses. She did not try to get them to moderate their sense of inevitability. They were at war with society and what's the point of pretending otherwise. I didn't tell her anything but I liked going into her office and smelling the furniture wax and checking the titles of the books and scouting out the bulge of her breasts under the fabric of whatever snug blouse she was wearing that day.

One of the Alley Boys looked out the window of the mess and said, "That's a Disney picture, man." He was talking about the miniature golf course. 'And we're the dwarfs that supposed to be in it."

I wanted my correction to be consistent and strong. They'd made an attempt to try me as an adult even though I was only seventeen at the time and I agreed with their reasoning, that there was a coldblooded element in this crime whatever the shadings. When a judge ruled that the prosecution couldn't do this, they decided to try me for manslaughter and again I thought why not, considering the recklessness of the act, but my lawyer Imperato, a man with sallow jowls and a briefcase that was shedding skin, arranged a plea deal and they went for a lesser charge and now I stood looking at the golf course on a soft summer morning a few days before my release and saw that someone had painted names all over the ramparts and windmills, the nicknames of gang members, all hail the Alhambras, and the guys gawked and pointed and bent over laughing and I thought this was the time to start my round of guilty goodbyes.

Because you were the shooter and the witness both and you can separate these roles. The second was helpless to prevent the first from acting. The second could not stop the act, could not manage it and finally did not know how to perceive it. It was too down deep even as it reached his eyes, your eyes. The terrible spasticky thing, the whole groanlike abandon, the resignation of life and breath to this vehement depth of gesture, man and chair going different ways.

Dr. Lindblad might have said, "The gesture is extreme because the mind is closing down. It's the end of consciousness. So the body goes berserk. The body shows you what's happening to the mind. The way a person's grief bends the body. This is how consciousness looks. This is how it flails and thrashes when the end is sudden and violent and the mind is unprepared."

And I might have said, "You're talking about his mind, how the end is sudden, or mine?"

But she didn't say it and I didn't say it because I wasn't talking much. The Alley Boys were talking. They told her they were in a state of total war with society. They told her it would be that way until they were dead. Society wanted them dead. The Alley Boys were too smart not to know this. They told her they'd get released and go back to the street, which was another department of the penal system and vice versa, and they'd go back and do what they'd always done, they told her. They'd deal, steal, get the edge, carry the piece and pursue the conduct of the war.

The book fits the hand, it fits the individual. The way you hold a book and turn the pages, hand and eye, the rote motions of raking gravel on a hot country road, the marks on the page, the way one page is like the next but also totally different, the lives in books, the hills going green, old rolling hills that made you feel you were becoming someone else.

Dr. Lindblad tried to work my soul. She believed in my salvation. She probed all the forces in my history and she gave me books to read, and I read them, and she advanced ideas about what had happened, and I thought about them. But I didn't know if I accepted the idea that I had a history. She used that word a lot and it was hard for me to imagine that all the scuffle and boredom of those years, the crisscross boredom and good times and flare-ups and sameshit nights-I didn't understand how the streaky blur in my nighttime mind could have some sort of form and coherence. Maybe there was a history in her files but the thing I felt about myself was that I'd leaned against a wall in a narrow street serving out some years of mostly aimless waiting.

But you felt some things, didn't you? You felt the strange fascination of his dying fall, so crazy-armed and unmade-up that you didn't know how to look at it.

She told me that my father was the third person in the room the day I shot George Manza. This was frankly news to me and I sort of half laughed-you know the way you snicker a nervous draft of air down your nostrils. She told me that one way or another the two events were connected, meaning that six years after Jimmy disappeared I shot a guy who didn't know my father, or barely knew him, or saw him on the street a few times, and this was a link she wanted to probe.

"You have a history," she said, "that you are responsible to."

"What do you mean by responsible to?"

"You're responsible to it. You're answerable. You're required to try to make sense of it. You owe it your complete attention."

She kept talking about history in her tight blouse. But all I saw was the crazy-armed man, his body spinning one way, the chair going another. And all I saw was the rough slur of those narrow streets, the streets going narrower all the time, collapsing in on themselves, and the dumb sad sameness of the days.

Then they came and told me I'd be getting an early release, unexpectedly, one summer day. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. They told me they were sending me to the Jesuits, at the wintry end of the world, somewhere near a lake in Minnesota.

2

The Demings were home this afternoon, busy at various tasks in their split-level suburban house, a long low two-tone colonial with a picture window, a breezeway and bright siding.

Erica was in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. Three cups chicken broth or three chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in three cups boiling water. Two packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. One teaspoon salt. One-eighth teaspoon cayenne. Three tablespoons vinegar. One and a third cups whipped topping mix. Two-thirds cup mayonnaise. Two cups finely diced cooked chicken. Two cups finely chopped celery. Two tablespoons chopped pimiento.

Then boil and pour and stir and blend. Fold spiced and chilled gelatin into chicken thing. Spoon into 9x5-inch loaf pan. Chill until firm. Unmold. Garnish with crisp lettuce and stuffed olives (if desired). Makes six entree salads.

Do not reuse this bottle for storing liquids.

Erica did things with Jell-O that took people's breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. This tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations among half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.

Doing things with Jell-O was just about the best way to improve her mood, which was oddly gloomy today-she couldn't figure out why

From the kitchen window she could see the lawn, neat and trimmed, low-hedged, open and approachable. The trees at the edge of the lawn were new, like everything else in the area. All up and down the curving streets there were young trees and small new box shrubs and a sense of openness, a sense of seeing everything there is to see at a single glance, with nothing shrouded or walled or protected from the glare.

Nothing shrouded or secret except for young Eric, who sat in his room, behind drawn fiberglass curtains, jerking off into a condom. He liked using a condom because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile with a warhead that carried yields of up to forty kilotons.

Avoid contact with eyes, open cuts or running sores.

He sat sprawled in a butterfly chair and thought nobody could ever guess what he was doing, specially the condom part. Nobody could ever guess it, know it, imagine it or associate him with it. But what happens, he thought, if you die some day and it turns out that everything you've ever done in private becomes general knowledge in the hereafter. Everybody automatically knows everything you ever did when you thought you were totally and sneakingly and safely unseen.

Prolonged exposure to sun may cause bursting.

They put thermal pads on the Honest John to heat the solid fuel in preparation for firing. Then they remove the pads and launch the missile from a girderlike launch rail in a grassy field somewhere in the Free World. And the missile's infallible flight, the way it sweeps out precise volumes of mathematical space, it's so saintly and sun-tipped, swinging out of its apex to dive to earth, and the way the fireball haloes out above its column of smoke and roar, like some nameless faceless whatever. It made him want to be a Catholic.

Plus she'd have three chicken mousse salads for leftovers later in the week.

Out in the breezeway husband Rick was simonizing their two-tone Ford Fairlane convertible, brand-new, like the houses and the trees, with whitewall tires and stripes of jetstreak chrome that fairly crackled when the car was in motion.

Erica kept her Jell-O molds in the seashell beige cabinet over the range. She had fluted molds, ring molds, crown molds in a number of sizes, she had notes and diagrams, mold techniques, offer forms for special decorative molds that she intended to fill out and mail at her earliest convenience.

If swallowed, induce vomiting at once.

Eric stroked his dick in a conscientious manner, somber and methodical. The condom was feely in a way he'd had to get used to, rubbery dumb and disaffecting. On the floor between his feet was a photo of Jayne Mansfield with her knockers coming out of a sequined gown. He wanted to sandwich his dick between her breasts until it went wheee. But he wouldn't just walk out the door when it was over. He would talk to her breasts. Be tender and lovey. Tell them what his longings were, his hopes and dreams.

There was one mold Erica had never used, sort of guided missile-like, because it made her feel uneasy somehow.

The face in the picture was all painted mouth and smudgy lashes and at a certain point in the furtherance of his business Eric deflected his attention from the swooping breasts and focused on the facial Jayne, on her eyebrows and lashes and puckered lips. The breasts were real, the face was put together out of a thousand thermoplastic things. And in the evolving scan of his eros, it was the masking waxes, liners, glosses and creams that became the soft moist mechanisms of release.

Intentional misuse by deliberately inhaling contents can be harmful or fatal.

Erica wore a swirly blue skirt and buttercup blouse that happened to match the colors of their Fairlane.

Rick was still in the breezeway, running a shammy over the chrome-work. This was something, basically, he could do forever. He could look at himself in a strip of chrome, warp-eyed and hydrocephalic, and feel some of the power of the automobile, the horsepower, the decibel rumble of dual exhausts, the pedal tension of Ford-O-Matic drive. The sneaky thing about this car was that, yes, you drove it sensibly to the dentist and occasionally carpooled with the Andersons and took Eric to the science fair but beneath the routine family applications was the crouched power of the machine, top down, eating up the landscape.

Danger. Contents under pressure.

One of Erica's favorite words in the language was breezeway. It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was crisper. The Kel-vinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes unmowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn't know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn't know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.

He came in from the breezeway.

"The carrots are in the crisper, Rick."

He liked to nibble on a raw carrot after he'd waxed and buffed the car.

He stood looking at the strontium white loaf that sat on a bed of lettuce inside a cake pan in the middle of the table.

"Wuffwhatisit?"

"It's my Jell-O chicken mousse!"

"Hey great," he said.

Sometimes she called it her Jell-O chicken mousse and sometimes she called it her chicken mousse Jell-O. This was one of a thousand convenient things about Jell-O. The word went anywhere, front or back or in the middle. It was a push-button word, the way so many things were push-button now, the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed.

May cause discoloration of urine or feces.

Eric sidled along the wall and slipped into the bathroom, palming the sloppy condom. He washed it out in the sink and then fitted it over his middle finger and aimed the finger at his mouth so he could blow the condom dry. And in the movie version of his life he imagined how everything is projected on a CinemaScope screen, all the secret things he did alone over the years, and now that he is dead it's all available for public viewing and all his dead relatives and friends and teachers and ministers can watch him with his finger in his mouth, more or less, and a condom on his finger, and he is panting rhythmically to dry it off.

He heard his mother call his name.

He had to wash it and reuse it because this was the only one he had, borrowed from another boy, Danny Anderson, who'd taken it from his father's hiding place, under the balled socks, and who swore he'd never used it himself-a thing that wouldn't be fully established until both boys were dead and Eric had a chance to see the footage.

To avoid suffocation keep out of reach of small children.

Eric hid the rubber in his room, pressed into a box of playing cards. He took a long look at Jayne Mansfield's picture before he slipped it into the world atlas on his desk. He realized that Jayne's breasts were not as real-looking as he'd thought in his emotionally vulnerable state, dick in hand. They reminded him of something but what? And then he saw it. The bumper bullets on a Cadillac.

He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, just to see what was going on in there. The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and ever renewable. But there was something else as well, faintly unnerving. The throb perhaps. Maybe it was the informational flow contained in that endless motorized throb. Open the great white vaultlike door and feel the cool breezelet of systems at work, converting current into power, talking to each other day and night across superhuman spaces, a thing he felt outside of, not yet attuned to, and it confused him just a bit.

Except their Kelvinator wasn't white of course. Not on the outside anyway. It was cameo rose and pearly dawn.

He looked inside. He saw the nine tilted parfait glasses and felt a little dizzy. He got disoriented sometimes by the tilted Jell-O desserts. It was as if a science-fiction force had entered the house and made some things askew while sparing others.

They sat down to dinner and Rick carved the mousse and doled out portions. They drank iced tea with a slice of lemon wedged to the rim of each glass, one of Erica's effortless extra touches.

Rick said to Eric, "Wha'cha been up to all afternoon? Big homework day?"

"Hey dad. Saw you simonizing the car."

"Got an idea. After dinner well take the binoculars and drive out on the Old Farm Road and see if we can spot it."

"Spot what?" Erica said.

"The baby moon. What else? The satellite they put up there. Supposed to be visible on clear nights."

It wasn't until this moment that Erica understood why her day had felt shadowed and ominous from the time she opened her eyes and stared at the mikado yellow walls with patina green fleecing. Yes, that satellite they put into orbit a few days ago. Rick took a scientific interest and wanted Eric to do the same. Sure, Rick was surprised and upset, just as she was, but he was willing to stand in a meadow somewhere and try to spot the object as it floated over. Erica felt a twisted sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours. It flew at an amazing rate of speed over the North Pole, beep beep beep, passing just above us, evidently, at certain times. She could not understand how this could happen. Were there other surprises coming, things we haven't been told about them? Did they have crispers and breezeways? It was not a simple matter, adjusting to the news.

Rick said, "What about it, Eric? Want to drive on out?"

"Hey dad. Ga, ga, ga, great."

A pall fell over the table, displacing Erica's Sputnik funk. She thought Eric's occasional stuttering had something to do with the time he spent alone in his room. Hitting the books too hard, Rick thought. He was hitting something too hard but Erica tried not to form detailed images.

Do not puncture or incinerate.

The boy could sit in the family room and watch their super console TV, which was compatible with the knotty pine paneling, and he could anticipate the dialogue on every show. Newscasts, ball games, comedy hours. He did whatever voice the announcer or actor used, matching the words nearly seamlessly, and he never stuttered.

All the other kids ate Oreo cookies. Eric ate Hydrox cookies because the name sounded like rocket fuel.

One of her kitchen gloves was missing-she had many pairs-and she wanted to believe Eric had borrowed it for one of his chemistry assignments. But she was afraid to ask. And she didn't think she looked forward to getting it back.

Yesterday he'd dunked a Hydrox cookie in milk, held it dripping over the glass and said thickly, "Is verry gud we poot Roosian moon in U.S. sky."

Then he took a bite and swallowed.

The men went out to find the orbiting satellite. Erica cleared the table, put on her rubberoid gloves and began to do the dishes. Rick had kidded her about the gloves a number of times. The kitchen was equipped with an automatic dishwasher of course. But she felt compelled as a homemaker to do a preliminary round of handwashing and scouring because if you don't get every smidge of organic murk off the fork tines and out of the pans before you run the dishwasher, it could come back to haunt you in the morning.

Flush eyes with water and call physician at once.

And the gloves protected her from scalding water and the touch of food scraps. Erica loved her gloves. The gloves were indestructible, basically, made of the same kind of materials used in countertops and TV tubes, in the electrical insulation in the basement and the vulcanized tires on the car. The gloves were important to her despite the way they felt, clammy but also dry, a feeling that defied innate contradiction.

All the things around her were important. Things and words. Words to believe in and live by.

Breezeway Car pools

Crisper Bridge parties

Sectional Broadloom

When she finished up in the kitchen she decided to vacuum the living room rug but then realized this would make her bad mood worse. She'd recently bought a new satellite-shaped vacuum cleaner that she loved to push across the room because it hummed softly and seemed futuristic and hopeful but she was forced to regard it ruefully now, after Sputnik, a clunky object filled with self-remorse.

Stacking chairs Room divider

Scatter cushions Fruit juicer

Storage walls Cookie sheet

She thought she'd lift her spirits by doing something for the church social on Saturday to pep up the event a little.

Do not use in enclosed space.

She would prepare half a dozen serving bowls of her Jell-O antipasto salad. Six packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. Six teaspoons salt. Six cups boiling water. Six tablespoons vinegar. Twelve cups ice cubes. Three cups finely cut salami. Two cups finely cut Swiss cheese. One and a half cups chopped celery. One and a half cups chopped onion. Twelve tablespoons sliced ripe olives.

She remembered coming home one day about six months ago and finding Eric with his head in a bowl of her antipasto salad. He said he was trying to eat it from the inside out to test a scientific theory of his. The explanation was SO crazy and unconvincing that it was weirdly believable. But she didn't believe it. She didn't know what to believe.

Was this a form of sexual curiosity? Was he pretending the Jell-O was a sort of lickable female body part? And was he engaged in an act of unnatural oral stimulation? He had jellified gunk all over his mouth and tongue. She looked at him. She had people skills. Erica was a person who related to people. But she had to put on gloves just to talk to him.

She set to work in the kitchen now, listening all the while for the reassuring sound of her men coming home, car doors closing in the breezeway, the solid clunk of well-made parts swinging firmly shut.

The charismatic black stood outside the church talking to the crowd.

Downtown the young whites leaned on brick walls and parked cars, crew-cut young men in chinos or jeans, or squatted on the curbstone, some older men among them, most showing a small hard salty grin, eyes tight, watching the marchers move out of the bus terminal.

Past the brick dorms and athletic fields of the campus, a group of black men lounged against a car parked in front of a rickety frame house in an alley off Lynch Street. A man with a cane. A man with blue suspenders. A man in a necktie and white shirt and straw fedora. A couple of younger men sitting on the fenders and talking to a woman eating a peach on the porch steps.

The charismatic speaker said, "They made us run, so we got good at it."

The marchers came into town carrying knapsacks and signs. Some of them walked toward the campus as the sun began to set. A number of white-shirted police stood along the route, smoking, some of them, and seeming to disregard the marchers, who walked in two loose columns toward the sound of the speaker's voice.

The young speaker said, "They made us run until we got so good at it we didn't need their inspiration anymore."

In the Greyhound terminal a number of marchers separated from the others and began to sit on the floor of the whites-only waiting room.

But the porch didn't really have steps. It had a couple of loose cinder blocks set against the brick underpinning and that's where the woman sat.

Students joined the crowd in front of the church, listening to the speaker, and some of the cornerboys came out of Cooper's, where they'd been shooting pool, and stood around to watch the crowd.

Men and women kept marching through the downtown streets and the whites sat on the curbstone and watched them, seemingly unable to stop grinning.

Four highway patrolmen stood outside the bus terminal leaning on a cruiser and talking casually, the butt ends of their shotguns leveraged on their hips, muzzles pointing up.

The young speaker said, "But just about the time we became Olympic-class runners, some of us decided we were gonna sit down."

The woman finished eating the peach and held the pit in her hand and when one of the men leaning on a car fender said something racy or tricky or sly, she threw the pit at his feet with a kind of dismissive motion.

Somebody adjusted the speaker's microphone and his voice began to carry now, reaching the guardsmen who were coming down out of trucks at the end of a blocked-off street.

A black woman stood watching in the bus terminal. She'd come from up north, riding buses all the way, and now she was in the terminal, fittingly, about to sit on the floor. She watched local police move among the demonstrators and lift a young man by an arm and leg, taking him in two directions, briefly, at once, until they got straightened out, a pair of short-sleeved cops, not looking at the youngster, who sat unstruggling in their grip as they carried him out to the street.

The charismatic black said, "There's a certain feeling circulating in the culture that black people ought to develop a willingness to die."

The guardsmen formed up and began to fix bayonets and their commander stood nearby in summer tans and a campaign hat, looking around for the armored van.

The miked voice floated over the heads of the assembled marchers and students and townspeople.

On the floor of the bus terminal the woman waited for the police to reach her and carry her out to the truck and take her to the jail, one

Rose Meriweather Martin, known as Rosie, an insurance adjustor from New York City.

"The interesting thing is that this here's not what the white man is saying. It's what the Negro is saying. If they want to kill us, in other words, let's develop a willingness to die. Or was saying. Because we damn well ain't saying it anymore."

There was an armored van moving through the streets, with bulletproof windows and gunports, and the men inside had submachine guns and tear-gas launchers.

The young whites began moving away from the walls and the parked cars. They got up from the curbstone and dusted off their pants and they went to stand at the far end of the street, uninterested in the marchers now or interested in a different way

The woman on the porch saw some young men running in the dark, cornerboys or students, looking back as they ran, and the men lounging against the parked car also saw them but did not stiffen or speak or move away It was their car, their street, and they needed to measure the situation.

The young black man said, "I ain't saying don't resist. I ain't saying assume the fetal position and let them put their cocked revolvers upside your head. Tell you what I'm saying."

The whites didn't look at the marchers as people coming into town to agitate and make trouble. Not anymore. They stopped reading the signs about voter rights and freedom rides. They stopped grinning at white nuns marching with black ministers. It was the armored van they were interested in now, twenty-three feet long, searchlights blazing.

"And I ain't saying you're obliged to love those truncheons they're beating you with."

They watched it go by and began to follow it, some of them, vaguely.

The guardsmen wore standard issue helmets and were putting on gas masks now and the troopers outside the bus terminal wore white ridged helmets that resembled construction hard hats.

Rosie Martin watched them get closer, local police in pairs scooping up the demonstrators and taking them out to flatbed trucks.

Blacks with shirttails flying, looking back as they ran, and maybe the woman on the porch could smell a burning in the air.

The gas masks were bulky devices with goggle eyes and swollen nosepieces. The guardsmen looked insect-eyed, stepping into a floodlit area near the black college campus. The masks had flap mouths and filtration chambers that bulged out of the left side like pineapple tins.

A man lay spread-eagle outside the terminal, being patted down by troopers.

A man was being tug-of-warred, a young black in a striped shirt, two guardsmen gripping an arm and a leg and a marcher holding the other leg and trying to pull him back into the crowd outside Mount Calvary church.

Somebody threw a bottle and the woman on the porch heard it break in the street. She stood up and tried to see what was happening in the dark out there. Voices, people running, people coming this way and then turning back.

"Tell you what I'm saying. I'm saying there's nothing in the world to worry about despite the evidence all around you. Because anytime you see black and white together you know they are joined in some effort of betterment. Says so in the Constitution."

Another bottle broke.

And in the terminal Rosie Martin saw them drag a woman out the door facedown and headfirst.

The guardsmen moved into the crowd outside the church, holding their bayoneted rifles at port arms, and the gas came blowing in behind them.

In the terminal a cop started clubbing people on the arms and legs. Rosie watched him calmly, counting the number of sit-in marchers before he got to her.

The charismatic speaker said, "They're spraying, I'm talking. I'm gonna keep on talking as long as I got a larynx that can function. Black people love to rap," he said.

The marchers sat down, they scattered, some entered the church, some ran the other way, and the guardsmen dragged others along the ground toward the barricaded street.

At the terminal the cops had their billy clubs out and were moving in a stoop among the demonstrators, who sat hunched forward with their arms over their heads.

The gas rolled through the streets scorching people's eyeballs, making their eyeballs feel sucked out by the heat. The streets were filled with running men and women. The gas rolled in and they strayed down alleys, feeling their way, chests tight, coughing in spasms, or chose to walk, some of them, shambling half blind toward the church.

Rosie knew she'd be taken off to jail on a flatbed garbage truck and then put in a crowded cell and given a piss-smelling mattress because this had been the scuttlebutt for days.

Blacks came running down the dark street and the men who'd been lounging against the car began to stir finally. The man with blue suspenders went into a frame house and the man with the straw hat got into the car and rolled up the windows and then got out again and the other men slid off the fenders and went to stand on the porch where the woman stood looking down the street.

Women wanted the same prison conditions the men got. This was a definite issue.

Guardsmen massed around the armored van, insect-headed, and looked down the dark alleys for students throwing rocks or men out of the bars, the juke joints, still holding cans of Colt 45, and they heard the speaker say, "It's all a question of mind over matter. They don't mind and we don't matter."

Rosie was dragged on her ass out into the street and spun around on her britches and left there. She spotted sawhorse barricades and police cruisers, people milling and scuffling and photographers popping flashcubes, and she thought she caught the first taste of gas.

People stagger-ran toward the church through ranks of guardsmen.

She saw the one-legged man on crutches, a familiar figure over weeks of bus rides and marches across state lines. And the man being beaten. She saw a slim man being struck by a cop with a billy club, hit three, four times, a pause, then hit again, white eyes showing.

The woman on the porch felt the air burning and went inside and the men went inside with her. Young men went running past, students and marchers, and one of them stopped long enough to fling a bottle the other way.

The gas, called CS, made people dizzy almost: at once and caused a stinging on the body where the skin was moist.

Rosie smelled the gas, she tasted it before she saw it. A trooper had a man bent over the trunk of the cruiser, in an armlock, and another trooper stood nearby holding two shotguns, his own and his partner's who had the armlock on the marcher.

The armored van moved slowly through the streets, searchlights swiveling on the roof.

The church was filling up with people trying to escape the gas, which rolled through the alleys off Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi on a muggy summer night with radios playing and children standing at the windows of shotgun shacks, watching men run through the dark.

Rosie started running. She saw the cop beating the man methodically, three, four blows and then a pause, and she started running toward them.

The gas had a radiance, a night glow, and the men in insect masks came walking out of the cloud, alive and bright.

The man who'd rolled up the windows of the car, a sixty-year-old in a white shirt and straw hat, proceeded to walk down the unpaved street toward his house, tasting the gas and putting his hat over his face and accidentally kicking a pop bottle someone had thrown, lying unbroken in the dust.

She watched the cop strike the man on the head and arms, three, four blows with his billy club and then a pause, and she pushed through a couple of sawhorses and ran directly toward them, feeling fast and light and unstoppable.

The gas rolled through the streets in tides and drifts, narrowing down alleys and fitting into confined spaces.

She had no idea what she planned to do when she got there, about four seconds from now.

Charles Wainwright was on the phone to a client in Omaha, soothing, stroking, joking, making promises he could not keep. He felt a measure of detachment from the matters at hand, his eyes slightly aswim in the agreeable yield of a long liquid lunch.

He heard himself saying, "Off the top of my head I would estimate, Dwayne, well be able to present this campaign, timewise, in four and a half weeks. Four weeks minimum. We just switched our best art director to the account. Three weeks with heavenly intervention. God keeps an apartment in New York, incidentally, because this is a swinging town. Seriously, the guy's an award-winning art director and he's in his office right now doing roughs."

Just then Pasqualini, the art director, stuck his head in the door.

"What is death?" he said.

Wainwright smiled and shrugged.

"Nature's way of telling you to slow down."

Charlie tossed his head to indicate laughter and Pasqualini headed down the hall to tell the joke to some of the other senior account men, Charlie's peers, the guys with the snap tab collars and chromium smiles-they drank gibsons straight up and said, Thanks much.

In fact Charlie thought the joke was beautifully suited to these surroundings. In the Times every morning, wasn't it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?

Charles Wainwright was an account supervisor at Parmelee Lock-hart amp; Keown, a medium-sized agency located in the Fred F French Building on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The shop had suffered a few setbacks lately. And every time an account went walking out the door, a hush fell over the carpeted halls. People stood in line at the coffee wagons, holding their poignant mugs. The jokes they told had a bitter edge. Executives made phone calls behind closed doors. The pasteup boys sat in the bullpen with the radio off and the lights down low. Copywriters took three-hour lunches and came back stinko. They sat in their cubicles and stared at memos pinned to the corkboard, wondering why they'd sold out if this was how it felt to be a sellout.

Charlie had to fire people sometimes. Once he fired three people in one day, two before lunch and one after. He fired a tall man and a short man in the same week. These were the Mutt and Jeff firings. He fired a man recovering from a heart attack and a woman who'd just died. He didn't know Maxine was dead and he was forced to fire the secretary who'd caused the mix-up.

Charlie said into the phone, "If you want us to do the presentation here, I'll get you a table at the Four Seasons, Dwayne, and you can play footsie with my English secretary. Or I'll schlep the layouts out to Omaha. What a thrill it is to spend time-no, seriously, what do you do on Sundays, Dwayne? Go to the park and look at the cannon?"

This was a line off a Lenny Bruce LP but Charlie didn't think he had to credit the source. He liked Dwayne Sturmer, a decent guy for an ad manager. And the account was fairly sound, the lawn fertilizer division of a giant chemical company. The creative types here in the shop wanted to do a Bomb Your Lawn campaign. A little twist on the fact that these fertilizer ingredients, plus fuel oil, could produce a rather loud disturbance if ignited.

A young copywriter, Swayze, stuck his head in the door.

"Had a date with a Swedish model last night."

Charlie smiled and waited. The kid paused for effect.

"When I touched her Volvo, she Saabed."

It was Charlie who killed the Bomb Your Lawn campaign while it was still in-house. The creative types wanted to use George Metesky as a spokesman. An approach so suicidal Charlie found it somewhat lovable. George Metesky was the Mad Bomber of the 1940s and 1950s, famous for setting off a series of blasts at New York landmarks. They wanted to track him down at the state pen or the funny farm and build the whole campaign around his ancient and fabled deeds and his endorsement of the product.

Bomb your lawn with Nitrotex.

Mad Ave was getting younger all the time and Charlie was forty-six. Almost ready to be placed on an ice floe with his handcrafted English wingtips and his Patek Philippe timepiece. Still, he had solid accounts and a sunlit corner office with a crushed leather sofa. Prints of steeplechase races and frocked lordlings riding to hounds. A painted sea chest he'd spotted in a London shop. And the thing that gave him away as a regular guy-a sort of baseball shrine, three populist mementoes clustered at the far end of the room.

First, a tenth-anniversary limited-edition lithograph entitled The Shot Heard Round the World. The piece included photos of the Polo Grounds, Ralph Branca delivering the pitch, Bobby Thomson swinging the bat, Thomson's teammates waiting in a conga line to greet him at home plate.

Second, a photo of Thomson and Branca standing on a golf course with Dwight D. Eisenhower, all holding drivers, a couple of Secret Service men shadowing the fringes of the picture-Charlie's wife found the item in a junk shop in Vermont.

And, third, a smudged baseball balanced on the rim of a coffee mug that sat on the credenza-a ball he'd bought from a guy who claimed it was the very object Branca had hurled and Thomson had heroically struck.

His secretary walked in, Sandy, in a Mondrian dress and white shoes.

"Dwayne, my secretary just walked in. She's wearing white shoes. She's got a foot fetish and she's dying to meet you."

He liked to tease Dwayne, who was a bachelor, extremely shy, a large flesh-colored man in a pajama-striped wash-and-wear suit and shoes like Chinese gunboats.

Sandy dropped some status reports in his in-box. He listened to Dwayne talk about ad rates and cost-per-thousand. Sandy walked out of the office and he watched her, buttocks swinging meanly, printed with yellow parallelograms.

They'd wanted to give George Metesky a wig, a mustache and spectacles to make him look like Einstein.

These creative minds with their sublimated forms of destruction. Every third campaign featured some kind of play on weapons. The agency was still in shock over the Equinox Oil campaign. This was a very expensive effort that culminated in a sixty-second commercial shot in the Jornada del Muerto in remotest New Mexico. Site of the first atomic test shot ever made. A white space on the map. Totally closed to the public. Charlie thought the idea would fly, actually. Fill up two cars with premium gasoline. One with Equinox, the other with a leading competitive brand. Run the cars across the barren desert. Shoot the commercial with helicopters, crane shots, tracking shots, slow motion, stop action, all the latest know-how. White car versus black car. Clear implication. U.S. versus USSR. First car to get to the Trinity site wins-this is the monument that marks the spot where the bomb went off. We get permission from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, National Park Service. We shoot the thing. Takes many weeks. Costs, per second, more than a Hollywood epic. But it'll fly, baby. The stark scrub. The heat undulations and cow skulls. The dust storms. The high-angle shots-one car pulling away, the other catching up. A voice-over done by a pompous announcer with a cold war tone. Which car will run out of gas first? Which one will get to the marker? Miles per gallon. A huge consumer issue. Of course the white car outlasted the black car and reached the site first. We air the commercial. Heavy schedule. We thought the Soviet embassy might lodge a complaint. We looked forward to it. Free publicity. What happens? We get complaints all right. But not from foreign governments. We hear from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We hear from the Urban League. We hear from the Congress of Racial Equality. Because the white car beat the black car. An amazing firestorm of protest. Threatened boycotts of all Equinox products. We pull the commercial. We reshoot the entire thing and absorb the cost ourselves. Two cars. Both white. Car with letter A painted on roof. Car with letter B painted on roof. Lesson. Don't mix your metaphors.

"Cost per thou, Dwayne, is an overrated device intended to blind us to the truth of our situation." He waited for Dwayne to ask what the truth of our situation was. "There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world."

There were probably two dozen people walking the streets in the days after the game, shysters, heisters, fools and knaves, all claiming they had the one and only baseball. Which Charlie devoutly wanted to believe was the selfsame object on his credenza.

Yes, the baseball that marked him as a regular fellow with a soft streak despite his milled-steel veneer. He got fascist haircuts done by Spadavecchia of Milan-his school actually, since Gianni was frequently overbooked. He wore striped shirts with white collars, or white shirts with blue collars. He wore suits so compulsively custom-fit a fart would split a seam. He played squash and handball, did Canadian Air Force exercises, applied bronzing agents to his face and body and sat in front of a sunlamp all winter long. A regular guy with a station wagon heart despite the giddy MG he'd just treated himself to, perfect for tooling the foothills of the Berkshires around their weekend place.

A sentimental weepy white guy.

Yes, the baseball he dearly wanted to entrust to his son Chuckie. To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance. Flunked out of Exeter, chased out of Choate, walked out of Andover. Chuckie didn't care. But Charlie did and it was painful. How could he give such an emotional object, whatever ambiguity throbbed in the ball's corked heart, to this aimless wayward aging kid, a displaced person in his own life?

Pasqualini stuck his head in the door on his way back to the art department.

"What do you call a six-foot five-inch two-hundred-and-sixty-pound Negro that you run into in a dark alley?"

Charlie smiled thinly, wary of the new wave of civil rights jokes, and raised his head to indicate, What?

"Mister."

He fired a pregnant woman once. He fired a man related to the Dutch royal family. He fired a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew in fairly close succession. He fired a man for falling in the water on the company boat ride and another for carrying a gun to a client meeting.

"They're doing research, Dwayne, on what they call retinal discharge. They secretly photograph women in supermarkets. They have sensitive cameras hidden on the shelves that record excitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink, and it seems that women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages and designs. These are orgasms, basically, of the eye, the brain and the nervous system. How do we use this research? Simple. We correlate high discharge events with the particular items that caused them and then we design our products and packaging accordingly. Once we get the consumer by the eyeballs, we have complete mastery of the marketing process."

Sandy came back in and began to mouth some sort of complicated message.

But if Charlie truly believed the baseball was authentic, would he leave it in plain sight, unguarded, where a cleaning woman might decide to take it home to her kid because she doesn't earn enough money to buy him a baseball, or a delivery boy from the coffee shop around the corner-he pictured a swarthy male drifting through the corridors on a slow afternoon, with creamless coffee and a toasted English in a white bag, looking for something to pinch.

"She wants to talk to us, Dwayne. Yes, my secretary. Did I ever tell you how she types? She likes to fold one leg up under her. Before she began sitting on her foot she did about twenty-five words a minute. Now she does two hundred."

Charlie was fascinated by certain quirks and traits that Sandy brought to her job. She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.

Charlie talked to Omaha and deciphered his secretary's mouthed message at the same time.

"She's telling us she needs to leave early, Dwayne. She's been leaving early quite often lately. And taking conspicuously long lunches. We know what that means, don't we? An affair with a married man."

Sandy did a stand-up collapse, aghast at the man's cheek. His temerity, his effrontery, his American facking New York nerve. Charlie gave her his Richard Widmark grin. He had no reason to keep her around the rest of the afternoon but asked her to order him an orange juice before she left.

Charlie wanted to pitch the Minute Maid account. He thought about orange juice all the time. He looked at it, drank it, had fantasies about it. He knew how to advertise orange juice. Forget Florida. Forget the piddling vitamins. You have to go for appetite appeal, for the visual hit, because this is a beautiful and enticing beverage and women's eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice. You have to show the pulp. You show the juice splashing in the glass. You show the froth on a perky housewife's upper lip, like the hint of a blowjob before breakfast. Of course there is no pulp in concentrate. And there is only a microtrace of pulp in container juice. But you can suggest, you can make inferences, you can promise the consumer the experience of cit-rusy bits of real pulp-a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with partic-ulate matter, like wondrous orange smog. You show it. You photograph it lovingly and microscopically. If the can or package can be orgasmi-cally visual, so can the product inside. There was nothing Charlie liked better than a glass of orange juice on a lazy Sunday morning in the country, nicely spiked with vodka.

He wanted to pitch the Smirnoff account. There was an element of Russian chic in the culture these days. Yevtushenko in his black-market jeans. Those Russian hats that sprouted earlier this winter, still going strong in New York and Chicago. Astrakhans. You wake up one morning and every third man earning a salary in a certain range is wearing a lambskin Russian hat.

"Dwayne, she's gone, good buddy. We've lost her to some lech in the copy department. I'd bet anything on that. Sandy thinks writers are moody and glamorous because they're always in danger of getting canned."

The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.

The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love-the nooner, it was called, or the matinee-meeting in the secretaries' snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white-brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.

And yes, it's true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.

"This is the challenge, Dwayne. You have to read the mysterious current that passes in the night and connects millions of people across a continental landmass, compelling them to buy a certain product first thing in the morning. They gotta have it and you gotta be ready for them when they show up."

He said, "Package goods and painkillers. These are the things that keep the country running."

A swarthy male stood in the doorway.

"Jou order oranjuice?"

Charlie fished some money out of his pocket and paid the guy. He took an extra-strength antacid tablet out of the bottle in his desk and washed it down with the watery pulpless half-rancid juice, for whatever calmative effect it might have on his acidic backwash.

He told a dirty joke to Dwayne and sensed the fellow going pink out there on the prairie. There was nothing left to do but leave. Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate'd his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what's more fun than an impulse buy? He double-timed it across Madison to the Men's Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat-a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime-because he'd decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.

The last express to Westport.

3

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor that can make its way across a country, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don't know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fit, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

"If you'd been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you'd have visions too."

I went to see Father in his office later in the day. It was a three-hundred-yard walk through a billowing white storm. I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorms and open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experience.

Father started talking before I had my jacket off.

"It's when the hair in my nostrils begins going stiff. That's when I want to retire to the south of France."

"The snow on the parade."

"Yes, I know."

"The benches are buried."

"Yes," he said.

"I realized, just out the window there, I was walking over a bench."

"Yes. Sit down, Shay, and tell me how you're doing. A young man's progress. That's the title of this session."

"I borrowed a pair of boots."

He liked that response.

"Do they fit?"

"No."

Even better. When he asked about the state of my mind and soul, which he did only rarely, and when I answered on a practical plane, as I always did, he seemed to think I was devising a down-to-earth reply out of some manly instinct when in fact I was only confused, forever trying to put together a suitable set of words.

"What are you reading?"

I recited a list.

"Itbu understand what's in those books?"

"No," I said.

Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He'd done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who'd made trouble for themselves and others.

"Some of it maybe. What I don't understand, I memorize."

His arm was propped on the desk and he leaned his head into the canted hand. No smile this time,

"That's not why we started this place, is it?"

"I study like a madman, Father."

"But you can't memorize ideas the way you do the endings of Latin verbs."

His hands were unspotted and small. Some of the other jebbies wore flannel shirts and heavy sweaters but Father Paulus was not influenced by climate or geography or the sense of special freedoms at Voyageur. He went black-suited and roman-collared and I respected this and found it reassuring.

"One of the things we want to do here is to produce serious men. What sort of phenomenon is this? Not so easy to say. Someone, in the end, who develops a certain depth, a spacious quality, say, that's a form of respect for other ways of thinking and believing. Let us unnar-row the basic human tubing. And let us help a young man toward an ethical strength that makes him decisive, that shows him precisely who he is, Shay, and how he is meant to address the world."

You were always afraid of disappointing Father, being unequal to the level of discourse. Being bland when he wanted a more spirited sort of traffic, even a bullshit act, wiseass and slouchy. Bland and plodding when he wanted independence and open argument.

"My own life, I confess-yes, why not, you'll hear my confession, Shay. Who better than you? Took me all these years to understand that I'm not a serious man. Too much irony, too much vanity, too little what-I don't know, a lot of things. And no rage, you see. Or a small ingrown toenail rage, a puny frustration. Eventually you get to know these things. Do you act out of principle? Or do you devise self-justifying reasons for your bad behavior? This is my confession, not yours, so you're not required to come up with answers. Not yet anyway. Eventually, yes. You'll know in your heart how well you've met the calling to be a man."

"No rage," I said. "What do you mean?"

"No rage. Rage and violence can be elements of productive tension in a soul. They can serve the fullness of one's identity. One way a man untrivializes himself is to punch another man in the mouth."

I must have looked at him.

"You can't doubt this, can you? I don't like violence. It scares the hell out of me. But I think I see it as an expanding force in a personality. And I think a man's ability to act in opposition to his tendencies in this direction can be a source of virtue, a statement of his character and forbearance."

"So what do you do? Punch the guy in the mouth or resist the urge?"

"Point well taken. I don't have the answer. You have the answer," he said. "But how serious can a man be if he doesn't experience a full measure of the appetites and passions of his race, even if only to contain them or direct them, somehow, usefully?"

Who better than you to hear me confess? He'd said that, hadn't he? Someone who's been in correction. Someone who has the answer. Of course I had nothing that resembled an answer and wondered why he thought I carried a stain of special knowledge for having done what I'd done.

"Have you come across the word velleity? A nice Thomistic ring to it. Volition at its lowest ebb. A small thing, a wish, a tendency. If you're low-willed, you see, you end up living in the shallowest turns and bends of your own preoccupations. Are we getting anywhere?"

"It's your confession, Father."

His office was in an old barracks building and the force of the wind made the beams shift and crick.

"Aquinas said only intense actions will strengthen a habit. Not mere repetition. Intensity makes for moral accomplishment. An intense and persevering will. This is an element of seriousness. Constancy. This is an element. A sense of purpose. A self-chosen goal. Tell me I'm babbling. I'll respect you for it."

We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order-except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain unclean-ness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits.

"Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from."

This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.

"Those are ugly things, aren't they?"

"Yes they are."

"Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face."

"Name the parts," I said. "All right. Laces."

"Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed."

I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.

"Sole and heel."

"Yes, go on."

I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.

"Proceed, boy."

"There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top."

"A front and a top. You make me want to weep."

"The rounded part at the front."

"You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?"

"The tongue."

"Well?"

"I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing."

He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.

"You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names."

He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.

A plain black everyday clerical shoe.

"Okay," he said. "We know about the sole and heel."

"Yes."

"And we've identified the tongue and lace."

"Yes," I said.

With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.

"What is it?" I said.

"You tell me. What is it?"

"I don't know."

"It's the cuff."

"The cuff."

"The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That's the counter."

"That's the counter."

"And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That's the quarter."

"The quarter," I said.

"And the strip above the sole. That's the welt. Say it, boy."

"The welt."

"How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don't know what they're called. What's the frontal area that covers the instep?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. It's called the vamp."

"The vamp."

"Say it."

"The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn't supposed to memorize."

"Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?"

"This I should know."

"Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue."

"I can't think of the word. Eyelet."

"Maybe I'll let you live after all,"

"The eyelets."

"Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace."

He flicked the thing with his middle finger.

"This I don't know in a million years."

"The aglet."

"Not in a million years."

"The tag or aglet."

"The aglet," I said.

"And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We're doing the physics of language, Shay."

"The little ring."

"You see it?"

"Yes."

"This is the grommet," he said.

"Oh man."

"The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it."

"I'm going out of my mind."

"This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs-a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?"

"I don't know."

"A last."

"My head is breaking apart."

"Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren't important, we wouldn't use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it," he said.

"Quotidian."

"An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace."

His white collar hung loose below his adam's apple and the skin at his throat was going slack and ropy and it seemed to be catching him unprepared, old age, coming late but fast.

I put on my jacket.

"I meant to bring along a book for you," he said.

His hands were still young, though, a soft chalky baby blush. There was a chessboard on a table in a corner, opposing pieces marshaled.

"Come to Upper Red tomorrow and I'll dig it out for you."

Upper Red was the faculty residence. They named the buildings at Voyageur after local landmarks-lakes, towns, rivers, forests. Not after saints, theologians or Jesuit martyrs. The Jesuits, according to Paulus, had been treated so brusquely in so many places for their attempts to convert and transform, decapitated in Japan, disemboweled in the Horn of Africa, eaten alive in North America, crucified in Siam, drawn and quartered in England, thrown into the ocean off Madagascar, that the founders of our little experimental college thought they'd spare the landscape some of the bloodier emblems of the order's history.

"By the bye, Shay."

"Yes," I said.

"Did I see you in that little group yesterday signing a petition in support of Senator McCarthy?"

"I was there, yes, Father."

"Signing a petition."

"It seemed okay," I said.

He nodded, looking past me.

"Do you know why the Senate condemned him?"

"The others were signing," I said. "Some of the South Americans," I said a little desperately, knowing how stupid this sounded but thinking, somehow, this was the way to exonerate myself.

"So you signed. The others were shitting, Father. So I shat."

He looked past me, nodding reasonably, and I turned and left.

I walked back and forth across the parade in the blowing snow. Then I went to my room and threw off my jacket. I wanted to look up words. I took off my boots and wrung out my cap over the washbasin. I wanted to look up words. I wanted to look up velleity and quotidian and memorize the fuckers for all time, spell them, learn them, pronounce them syllable by syllable-vocalize, phonate, utter the sounds, say the words for all they're worth.

This is the only way in the world you can escape the things that made you,

They arrived in the rain, a young crowd except for the columnists from the Chronicle and Examiner and a couple of graybeard poets from City Lights, and they waited for Lenny Bruce to come out onstage.

This was Basin Street West and the small stage had a backdrop of fake fieldstone. The wall was supposed to suggest a homey atmosphere but it resembled a mass of ugly bulging rock and it made the club seem dungeonlike or bunkeresque.

They sat there and waited for Lenny, the jazz musicians emitting a faint reek of weed, a few monosyllabic chicks in existential black, the clean-cut college boys with secret deviant tastes, the entire staff of a little magazine called Polyester Wok, five righteous souls whose anger at the world was being undermined by the events of the past few days.

Suddenly Lenny was there, without an intro, slipping into the spotlight and beginning to talk before he'd even lifted the mike from the stand.

"They're evacuating Norfolk, Virginia. You know about this? Norfolk. The huge naval base where ships have been setting out, destroyers, cruisers, to form the blockade. They're evacuating dependents and all nonessential personnel. The question is," and he turned his head sideways so he could look at the audience obliquely with a sly sense of put-on. "Who moves in when they move out? That's right- there goes the neighborhood. Because all the spade undesirables from three hundred miles around are gonna snatch up those houses and ruin real estate values and the Navy's gonna say, Fuck it, man, never mind the Russian subs and cargo ships, let's aim our guns at Norfolk."

Lenny looked a little bloated tonight, his face puff-pastry white and an extracurricular jitter in his body lingo.

"Everything is real estate. You're a product of your geography. If you're a Catholic from New York, you're a Jew. If you're a Jew from Butte, Montana, you're a totally goyish concoction. You're like instant mashed potatoes. And that's what this crisis is all about, incidentally. Instant mashed potatoes. The whole technology, man, of instant and quick, because we don't have the attention span for normal wars anymore, and in the movie version it's Rod Steiger playing Khrushchev as an Actor's Studio chief of state. Dig it, he's deep, he's misunderstood, he's got the accent down pat, the shaved head, he does the screaming fits, he does the motivation-lonely boy from the coal pits ruthlessly fights his way to the top but all he's really looking for is a wisecracking dame who'll give him some back talk and make him laugh once in a while. This is no bumpkin-half man, half sausage. Steiger plays him as a moody and sensitive loner burdened by the whole mishegaas of Russian history. We see his tender feminine side when he has an affair in a coat closet with an American double agent played by Kim Novak in a butch haircut."

Lenny did the voices, the accents. He was not technically sound but mixed in whole cultures and geographies and cross-references to convey the layers of impersonation involved.

There was a beatnik element in the audience, several postbeats in old checked lumberjackets vintage 1950, men with a kind of distance in their gazes but still alert to signs of marvels astir in the universe, and a woman in a patchwork shirt with a baby in a pouch, probably the first and last infant at one of Lenny's shows but this was San Francisco in the week that was.

"Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you hear people say, I saw his hair! Or, I saw his teeth! The spectacle's so dazzling they can't take it all in. I saw his hair! They're venerating the sacred relics while the guy's still alive."

In the beatnik canon it was America 's sickness that had produced the bomb. If the beats were receptive to Lenny's take on hypocrisy and related matters and if they regretted his drug busts and obscenity trials, they were probably unmoved by the Russian accents and other ethnic riffs and bits that came shpritzing out of him like seltzer from an old bottling plant in Canarsie. The whole beat landscape was bomb-shadowed. It always had been. The beats didn't need a missile crisis to make them think about the bomb. The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truck stops on the jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies-things Lenny made fun of. Lenny was showbiz, he was suited and groomed and cool and corrupt, the mortician-comic, and the bomb was part of a scary ad campaign that had gotten out of hand.

He was wearing a Nehru jacket tonight, a dark tunic with a high collar, it needed cleaning and pressing, and he had a white raincoat draped over his shoulders-either he'd forgotten to take it off or he was planning to get out of here in a hurry.

He began an impressionistic ramble. Hard to follow. About court cases, lawyers and judges. Like listening to someone who thought he was talking to someone else.

Then he broke off and said, "Love me. That's what I'm here for. Tonight and every night. Stop loving me, I die."

This was not a bit. The bit followed this. It was a bit he'd thought up sitting in the plastic pygmy toilet on the flight from L.A. with a red light near his right eyeball flashing Return to seat Return to seat.

"The archangel Gabriel appears in the sky over Havana. Bodyguards wake up Castro and he tells them, Lemme alone, and they tell him it's the messenger of God, and he gets in a helicopter and goes up there. The angel's wearing a white robe and he's holding a flaming trumpet and Castro's intrigued when he sees that Gabriel's a black man. He thinks, Great, an articulate Negro, we can have a real no-bullshit dialogue. He says to the angel, I don't believe in God but lemme ask you. Whose side are you on in this crisis? And the angel says, I'm only gonna say this once. The side that has baseball and jazz. Castro says, We have baseball and jazz. We call it Afro-Cuban music and you'd dig it, man. Swings like crazy. And Gabriel says, Don't patronize me, motherfucker. I blew with Bird, you know. Yeah, we jammed together at Minton's in the old days. Okay, you wanna know which side I'm on. The side that has mom and apple pie. Castro says, No problema. The Russians have mom and apple pie. They call it yablochy pirog. The angel says, Okay, you so smart, the side that has Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the Mafia. And Castro says, Damn we threw the Mafia out of Cuba. But how come you're siding with them? The angel says, Lawd Jesus has a soft spot for the mob. Castro says, How come? The angel says, What you think, man? He's Italian.

Castro says, Wait a minute. Jesus is Italian? The angel says, Well- ain't he? And he looks a little uncertain. He starts shaking the spittle off the mouthpiece of his trumpet, a thing Gabe does whenever he's insecure. He's very touchy about his education. He says a little defensively, All the popes are wops. Everybody knows this, man. This because Jesus a wop. Jesus a guinea from the word go. Check his complexion, Jim. Castro says, Jesus lived in the Middle East. Gabriel says, You must be crazy, telling me shit like that. The cat's Neapolitan. Talks with his hands. Castro says, He was a Jew if you wanna know the truth. The angel says, I know he was a Jew-an Italian Jew. They have them, don't they? And Castro says, Why am I standing here listening to this? You're totally loco, man. And the angel says, Are you telling me I believed all my life that Jesus changed water into wine at an Italian wedding-and he didn't/'

Lenny did this bit a little distractedly, slurring lines here and there, but isn't that what he always did, wasn't that part of the whole hipster format-a kind of otherworldly dope-driven fugue.

"I saw his hair! I saw his teeth!"

Then he remembered the line he'd come to love. He went into a semicrouch and put the raincoat over his head and practically stuck the mike down his throat.

"We're all gonna die!"

Yes, he loved saying this, crying it out, it was wondrously refreshing, it purified his fear and made it public at the same time-it was weak and sick and cowardly and powerless and pathetic and also noble somehow, a long, loud and feelingly high-pitched cry of grief and pain that had an element of sweet defiance.

And his voice sent a weird thrill shooting through the audience. They felt the cry physically. It leaped in their blood and bonded them. This was the revolt of the psyche, an idlike wail from their own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs.

Then he gets an idea and flicks it straight out, like a boxer jabbing so well it brings a grin to his face.

"But maybe some of us are more powerless than others. It's a white bomb, dig." And his voice changes here, goes redneck and drawly "It's our bomb. Moscow and Washington. Think about it, man. White people control this bomb."

The idea delights him.

"You look down at Watts. You look up at Harlem. And you say, Fuck with our chicks, man, we drop the bomb. Better end the world than mix the races."

He goes into a bopster's finger-snapping slouch.

"Because we'd rather kill everybody than share our women."

Then the lights went out. Just like that. The spotlight, the bar lights, the exit signs-all out. A vague shape, Lenny's, could be seen moving sort of experimentally toward the large metal door that opened directly onto the street and the customers up front might have heard him muttering, "Return to seat, return to seat."

A rustle in the audience, a few heads turning, several people standing uncertainly. Were they thinking maybe this is it, a bomb, an airburst? Didn't the electromagnetic pulse from a test shot in the Pacific send massive currents surging through power lines in Honolulu, only recently, blowing out lights and setting off burglar alarms all over the island?

The lights came on. The spotlight shone on an empty stage. The field-stone wall had never looked more naked and fake. And there was Lenny, standing about a yard and a half from the exit. He came walking slowly stageward, mimicking a person sneaking back into a room, relieved and abashed, and they waited for him to say something that would pay off the long tense moment and shake them with laughter and he reached the stage and lifted the dangling mike and put it to his face and it began to screech and crackle and then the lights went out again and the afterimage of Lenny's tallowy face stuck to every retina in the house, half a scared smirk across his mouth, and the baby started crying.

When the lights came back on, a twenty-second lifetime later, the stage was empty, the metal door was ajar, the show was evidently over.

There were weeks went by when we barely slept. We were together every hour of the day and night for three or four weeks, much of it, most of it in her car, eating and sleeping there, having sex in her car, sleeping and waking up and looking around and it was still dark, or still light, depending, and finally we'd stop driving for one reason or another, logical or not, and life'd slow down enough so things could happen normally in rooms but only until it was time to go again and she'd rumble up in the 1950 Merc, chassis lowered and driveline slightly souped, and we were headed west again.

"Don't tell me your dreams," I said.

"But you have to hear."

"I don't want to hear."

"Oh you bastard, you have to hear," Amy said, "because everything that happens has to happen to both of us."

"Don't you know people don't want to hear other people's dreams?"

"Oh you bastard, what other people? Who are these other people?"

"Watch the road."

"Every smallest thought we said we'd share."

"Watch the road. Drive the car," I told her.

And once I dropped her off in Santa Fe, where she had family friends, and kept the car myself and didn't play the radio or read the newspaper and she caught up with me a week later in a miners' bar in Bisbee, Arizona and we played a flirty game of liar's poker and climbed the high tight streets and felt a thing so powerful, and knew the other felt it, that we thought our faces might ignite.

"It was a mountain dream. A high clear place near a lake."

"Don't you know dreams are only interesting to the dreamer?"

"Think you're so worldly-wise. You're awful smart for a foreigner."

"Drive the car."

"Who only learned English when he left New York."

Amy was tall and competent and looked good in jeans. She knew how to do things and make things and even her good looks were competent, a straightforward sort of ableness, open and clear-eyed, with a smatter of fading freckles and a dirty-minded smile.

And once we were in Yankton, South Dakota, early on that summer, and the movie theater was just letting out, the Dakota it was called, with a bright tile facade and Audie Murphy on the marquee, and the young people of Yankton got in their cars and drove up and down the main drag and we drove with them, nearly falling asleep, and we went to drive-in movies and talked about life and we rode across prairies and talked about movies and we drove through car washes and read poetry aloud, one of us to the other, and soapy water slid down the windows.

Her car was black and hooded-looking and we thought we were phantoms of the road, djinns who could pee unseen in the country dust. She didn't want me to know her father had given her the car. A graduation gift. But this was a thing I knew because one of her brothers had told me and the other thing I knew was that she'd drop me cold when the trip was done.

"You know what's interesting about you? You say you want to share the smallest thought. But what's interesting about you," I said, "is that you're going to forget everything we said and everything we did and every thought we shared the minute."

"No."

"The minute."

"No."

"The minute we say goodbye. Because you know what you are? A practical hardheaded more or less calculating individual who is planning ten years ahead and knows every passing minute for what it is."

"What is it?"

"A thing you drain every drop of juice from so you can forget it in the morning."

And once we stopped at some stables and she tried to teach me to ride but I got up there and got down again and would not get back up and she rode off with the Indian who led the expeditions, into the cool hills.

She said, "What's wrong with that?"

"I'm just talking."

She said, "Draining every minute. What's wrong with that?"

"I'm talking."

"And I haven't told you everything. So don't accuse," she said.

"You've told me everything twice."

"You are such a bastard."

"Tell me things you haven't told me. Go ahead. Shock me," I said. "You're not shocking me."

She could make and fix things and she liked to talk about the Brookhiser family, the grandparents and pioneer women and gold-panners and all the far-flung offspring of the old rugged stock.

And once we stayed with her oldest brother, an architect, sleeping in separate rooms-she seemed to have brothers everywhere. This one lived near Yuma in a lopsided house he'd built himself, skewed for effect, out of railroad ties and stucco and stamped tin, and Amy was in an elevated state, looking sideways at the place.

We were partly out of our minds from driving and we talked at each other across half a major state, pretty much nonstop, and we had the chemistry of a whole long brutal marriage compressed into weeks, the twang in the air of a thing that stays unadjusted, and we also had the feeling it was wrong to sleep because we could be saying something awful and important.

And once we drove along a dirt road somewhere near Ruby, Arizona and saw four men on horseback driving a bull, a humped bull of amazing size, nearly unreal, and we stopped not only to watch and not only because we thought the animal might charge a moving car but out of a strange and pagan respect, an animal so awesome, a Brahma bull, and the cowboys waved and drove the bull down the red dirt road.

"I have these tantrums in my mind," she said, "where you'd hate me if I told you these raging throwing things of sex and jealousy and spite and wishing the worst kind of pain and slow death on someone who is close."

"Tell me."

"I won't tell you. Not even you. Least of all you."

"I want you to tell me."

"I won't unless you make me," she said

Amy had a danceaway manner at times. She had a ritual thing she did, a reflex, not coy but wary and foxy, pulling away from me the more she showed a need, dancing away, eyes bright, her shoulder rounding against my approach. She could be skittish even in the midst of the act, close to pretending we weren't doing this but something else entirely, I don't know, holding hands in a school corridor maybe, and sometimes she turned me down flat, saying, No you can't, or, No I won't, even as we sprawled on the seat screwing.

I thought our faces might flare up and disappear the night in mid-June when we climbed the narrow stepped streets of Bisbee, Arizona, shocked by love, sort of self-erased, after a beer and a sandwich in a dark bar filled with copper miners and their heartworm dogs. I didn't know it was possible to feel a thing like this, and then to feel it together, our heads half blown away and our minds emptied out, lost to everything but love.

She said, "I know what you do. You stay awake and watch me when I sleep."

"When do you sleep?"

"You want too much. You want to crawl inside me basically. You want to follow your cock right in. Did it ever occur to me?"

"Drive the car."

"No but did it ever occur to me?"

"Don't look at me when you drive."

"No but did it ever occur to me that I would know a man someday who tries to follow me into the bathroom?"

"Drive the car."

She said, "You wanted to crowd into the gas station toilet with me. I just remembered. I almost forgot. Because you thought you might miss something."

And once we were passing through Bakersfield, California and the car overheated and we stopped for water at a trailer camp and this was something I absolutely did not know about. All these rows of trailer homes with people cooking hot dogs in a hundred and seven heat. A woman in a bathing suit ironing clothes on an ironing board outside her trailer with small kids riding tricycles in their underwear. And this was a thing I did not know existed, absolutely, or could ever conceive, a thing I had completely missed, people living permanently in trailers, and Amy called me a foreigner from New York.

I was going to Palo Alto, a textbook editor, fledgling, with an outfit determined to change the nature of the classroom, make it open, fluid, casual and Califomian, and she was heading up to Seattle or Portland, she wasn't sure which, or back across to Denver with a master's in earth science and a number of professional connections she wasn't letting on to.

"I don't know what I'm doing here with you. I don't know anything about you. All this time and all this talk and I don't know anything about you, basically," she said, "except for the fact that you know how to make me mad."

"Good. It's good for you. Getting mad cleans the blood," I told her. "According to my Irish mother."

"You have a mother. This is encouraging."

"Get mad. Be mad," I told her.

I didn't want her looking at me while she drove but sometimes I looked at her and invited a look back.

"I want everything that happens to happen to both of us," she said.

"So do I," I said, and meant it, at the time, truly.

She felt the weight of the gaze and looked across at me on the empty road with a mountain of lavender tailings rising above the old sheds that marked a mineworks and it was a look so intimate and reaching, so deep in things we'd done that it became a crazy kind of dare, a form of drag-strip chicken-which one of us would break the lovers' gaze and look away first to see if the car had wandered into the eastbound lane, with a shiny-eye pickup approaching, half a second from dazzling death.

"Who's strange?" I said.

"You stay awake and watch me when I sleep. I know you do. I feel it in my sleep."

"I'm strange or you're strange?"

"You followed me into a ladies' room."

"No, wait wait wait wait. You can feel me watching you while you sleep and you think I'm strange? Who's strange?" I said.

And there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you.

Or, "You can't make me do this," she'd say, running her hand up the seam of my fly, and I'm trying to drive the car.

And once when I was alone for a day and a night, not playing the radio or reading the newspaper and driving around aimlessly for hours, I finally stopped and parked and took a walk in a picnic grounds where there were white-barked trees and garbage cans for food scraps and a man who looked disturbed sitting on a bench, outside Fresno somewhere, but maybe he was only deep in thought, or worried about something, and I felt a sadness I could not exactly locate, a feeling that could have been mine or could have been theirs, the little families with food on paper plates, the unhappy man slouched on the bench, the place itself, the bench itself, the trash cans that didn't have lids.

I bought a postcard to send her after she went her way and I went mine, a card that showed a picnic table in the trees, and I slipped it in a book inside my bag until I had time to figure out what kind of message I would write.

4

The first man stood by the window of his stately suite at the Waldorf. He watched the yellow cabs sink into soulful dusk, that particular spendthrift light that falls dyingly on Park Avenue in the hour before people take leave of the office and become husbands and wives again, or whatever people become in whatever murmurous words when evenings grow swift and whispered.

The second man sat on the sofa, legs crossed, looking at Bureau reports.

Edgar said, "Of course you packed the masks."

The second man nodded yes, a gesture that went unseen.

"Junior, the masks."

"We have them, yes. I'm looking at a security memo that's a little, actually, rankling."

"I don't want to hear it. File it somewhere. I feel too good."

"Protest. Outside the Plaza tonight."

"What is it the bastards are protesting? Pray tell," Edgar said in a tone he'd perfected through the years, a tight amusement etched in eleven kinds of irony.

"The war, it seems."

"The war."

"Yes, that," the second man said.

They were staying at the Waldorf, which was J. Edgar Hoover's hotel of choice during his sojourns in New York, but the party was taking place, the ball, the fete, the social event of the season, the decade, the half century no doubt-the ball was in the ballroom at the Plaza.

Edgar changed the subject, if only in his mind. He gazed far up Park, where the earth curved toward Harlem. Maybe the deep and fleeting light was making him nostalgic, or the noise perhaps, the muted clamor of taxi horns below, a sound at this protected distance that was oddly and humanly happy, little toots and beeps that seemed to carry a pitch of celebration.

He said, "Where were you when Thomson hit the homer?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Where were you?"

"Yes?"

"Never mind. An idle thought, Junior."

Clyde Tolson, known as Junior, was Edgar's staunchest aide in the Bureau, his dearest friend and inseparable companion.

They were getting on, of course. Clyde was five years younger than Edgar but not so sharp as he used to be, his flash-card memory a little less prodigious now. But where Edgar was pug-nosed and compact, with brows like batwings, Clyde was long-jawed and tallish, sort of semidebonaire, a fairly gentle fellow who liked conversation-again, unlike his boss, who thought you gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Edgar held a tumbler of scotch. He checked the glass for smudges, then sniffed and sipped, feeling the charred fumes prickle his tongue. The complimentary suite, the soothing booze, the presence of Junior in the room, the party that everybody'd been talking about for months, famous long before it happened, the uninvited lapsing into states of acute confusion, insomniac, unable to function-yes, Edgar was feeling pretty good tonight.

Talkative or not, he loved a good party. He loved celebrities in particular and there would be an abundance of mammal glamour at the Plaza tonight. Personage and flair and stylish wit. A frail schoolboy still crouched inside the Director's pudgy corpus and this lonely crypto-child came to robust life in the presence of show people and other living icons-child stars, ballplayers, prizefighters, even Hollywood horses and dogs.

Celebrated people were master spirits, men and women who spiked the temper of the age. Whatever Edgar's own claim to rank and notoriety, he found himself subject to anal flutters when chatting with a genuine celeb.

Clyde said, "And this, of course, as well."

Edgar did not turn to see what the second man was reading. He studied the carpet instead. The carpets at the Waldorf were thick and lush, nesting grounds for bacteria of every sort. If you knew anything about modern war, you knew that weapons utilizing pathogenic bacteria could be every bit as destructive as megaton bombs. Worse, in a way, because the sense of infiltration was itself a form of death.

Clyde said, "I knew it was a mistake to publicize our methods regarding organized crime figures."

"What methods?"

"Ransacking their garbage."

"Makes good copy."

"And creates a copycat mentality. Now we have a situation that's a public relations nightmare. To wit, a so-called garbage guerrilla is targeting guess whose garbage, Boss?"

"Please. I'm enjoying my drink. A man enjoys a drink when the day winds down."

"Yours," Clyde said.

Edgar could not believe he'd heard the fellow correctly.

"This is what our confidential source tells us." And Clyde rattled the page he was reading for maximum nuisance effect. "Team of urban guerrillas planning a garbage raid at 4936 Thirtieth Place, Northwest, Washington, D.C. "

It was the end of the world in triplicate.

"When is this supposed to happen?"

"More or less momentarily."

"You've posted guards?"

"In unmarked cars. But whether we arrest them or not, they will find a way to make public theater of your garbage."

"I won't put the garbage out."

"You have to put it out, eventually."

" Ill put it out and lock it up."

"How will the garbage collectors collect it?"

When FBI agents stole off in the night with some mobster's household trash, they substituted fake garbage, to allay suspicion-aromatic food scraps, anchovy tins, used tampons prepared by the lab division. Then they took the real garbage back for analysis by forensic experts on gambling, handwriting, fragmented paper, crumpled photographs, food stains, bloodstains and every known subclass of scribbled Sicilian.

"Or do this," Edgar said. "Put out simulated garbage. Bland bits and pieces. Unnewsworthy."

"We can't use conventional methods, however clever, on these people. Because what they're doing flies in the face of ordinary confrontation. And no matter how well-guarded the premises, sooner or later they'll snatch a trash can and make off with it."

Edgar walked over to another window He needed a change, as they say, of scene.

"Confidential source says they intend to take your garbage on tour. Rent halls in major cities. Get lefty sociologists to analyze the garbage item by item. Get hippies to rub it on their naked bodies. More or less have sex with it. Get poets to write poems about it. And finally, in the last city on the tour, they plan to eat it."

Edgar could see part of the east facade of the Plaza, about a dozen blocks away.

"And expel it," Clyde said. "Publicly."

The great slate roof, the gables and dormers and copper cresting. How odd it seemed that such a taken-for-granted thing, putting out the garbage, could suddenly be a source of the gravest anxiety

"Confidential source says they will make a documentary film of the tour, for general release."

"Do we have a dossier on these guerrillas?"

"Yes,"

"Is it massive?" Edgar said.

In the endless estuarial mingling of paranoia and control, the dossier was an essential device. Edgar had many enemies-for-life and the way to deal with such people was to compile massive dossiers. Photographs, surveillance reports, detailed allegations, linked names, transcribed tapes-wiretaps, bugs, break-ins. The dossier was a deeper form of truth, transcending facts and actuality. The second you placed an item in the file, a fuzzy photograph, an unfounded rumor, it became promiscuously true. It was a truth without authority and therefore incontestable. Factoids seeped out of the file and crept across the horizon, consuming bodies and minds. The file was everything, the life nothing. And this was the essence of Edgar's revenge. He rearranged the lives of his enemies, their conversations, their relationships, their very memories, and he made these people answerable to the details of his creation.

"We'll arrest them and charge them," Clyde said. "That's all we can do."

Edgar turned from the window, smiling.

"Maybe I can sympathize with the Mafia over this."

Clyde smiled.

"You were always half a gangster," he said.

They laughed.

"Remember the tommy-guns we carried," Edgar said.

"When photographers were around."

They laughed again.

"You were right there alongside me, posed heroically."

"Edgar and Clyde," said Clyde.

" Clyde and Edgar," said Edgar.

Where the current of one's need for control met the tide of one's paranoia, this was where the dossier was reciprocally satisfying. You fed both forces in a single stroke.

"I liked the thirties," Edgar said. "I don't like the sixties. No, not at all."

The desk at the end of the room was out of the thirties in a way, equipped with items fashioned to Edgar's specifications. Two nibbed black pens. Two bottles of Skrip Permanent Royal Blue Ink, No. 52. Six sharpened Eberhard Faber pencils, No. 2. A pair of 5x8 linen-finish writing pads, white. A new 60-watt bulb in the standing lamp. The Director did not want to breathe the dust of old bulbs used to illuminate the reading matter of total strangers. Newspapers, guidebooks, Gideon bibles, erotic literature, subversive literature, underground literature, literature-whatever people read in hotels, alone, thumbing and breathing.

Clyde checked his watch. Dinner first, the two of them, alone, a practice spanning the decades-then the short ride to the Plaza.

It was called the Black amp; White Ball. A godlike gathering of five hundred, a masked affair, invitation only, dinner jacket and black mask for men, evening gown and white mask for women.

The party was being given by a writer, Truman Capote, for a publisher, Katharine Graham, and the factoidal data generated by the guests would surely bridge the narrowing gap between journalism and fiction.

Edgar had not been invited, initially. But arranging an invitation was not difficult. A word from Edgar to Clyde. A word from Clyde to someone close to Capote. They were in the files of course, a number of those involved in planning the event-all catalogued and dossier'd up to their eyeballs and none of them eager to offend the Director.

Clyde took a call from the desk. The mask lady was coming up for a fitting.

Edgar noticed that Clyde was wearing a necktie with a driblet design. The little figures made him think of paramecia, sinister organisms with gullets and feeding grooves. At home Edgar sat on a toilet that was raised on a platform, to isolate him from floorbound forms of life. And he'd ordered his lab people to build a clean room at the Bureau with unprecedented standards of hygiene. A white room manned by white-clad technicians, preferably white themselves, who would work in an environment completely free of contaminants, dust, bacteria and so on, with big white lights shining down, where Edgar himself might like to spend time when he was feeling vulnerable to the forces around him.

She walked in the door, Tanya Berenger, in a maxidress and thrift-shop boots, once a well-known costume designer, now ancient and frowzy, living in a room in a sad hotel off Times Square, a place where the desk clerk sits behind a grille eating a tongue sandwich. People tracked her down, three or four times a year, to do masks for special occasions and she found fairly steady work doing sadomasochistic accessories for a private club in the Village.

The two men, as always with a female in the room, someone they didn't know, and without others present, and lacking an atmosphere of sociable cheer-well, they tended to become stiff and defensive, as though surprised by an armed intruder.

Clyde did not stray from Edgar's side, sensing a potential for wayward behavior on the woman's part. She wore heavy makeup she might have poured from a paint can and cooked. And Clyde noted how one pocket on her dress drooped just a bit, becoming unseamed.

She spoke to Edgar with a sort of rueful affection.

"You know I can't let you wear one of my masks, dear man, without a consultation. I must put my hands on the living head. Bad enough I had to create my objet from a set of written specifications, like I'm a plumber installing a sink already."

She had a European accent slashed and burned by long-term residency in New York. And her hair had the retouched gloss of a dead crow mounted on a stick.

Of course Clyde had been briefed on Tanya Berenger. She was in the files in a fairly big way. She'd been accused at various times of being a lesbian, a socialist, a communist, a dope addict, a divorcee, a Jew, a Catholic, a Negro, an immigrant and an unwed mother.

Just about everything Edgar distrusted and feared. But she did exquisite masks and Clyde had been quick to commission her for the job.

He hurried into Edgar's bedroom and fetched the mask.

When she held it in her hands she looked at Edgar and looked at the mask, weighing the equation, and the Director experienced a queer tension in his chest, wondering whether he was worthy.

She held the object at eye level, six inches from her face, and looked through the eyeholes at Edgar.

And Edgar in turn looked at the mask as if it had a life, an identity of its own that he might feel ballsy enough to borrow for a single midnight on the town.

It was a sleek black leather mask with handlebar extensions and a scatter of shiny sequins around the eyes.

Tanya said, "You want to put it on or have a conversation with it?"

But he wasn't quite ready.

"Do I want to put it on, Junior?"

"Be brave."

Tanya said, "Leather. It's so real, you know? Like wearing someone else's face."

She fitted the mask over Edgar's head, the padded band not too tight and the leather alive on his skin.

Then she took him by the shoulders and turned him slowly toward the mirror over the desk.

Clyde took the whiskey glass from his hand.

The mask transformed him. For the first time in some years he did not see himself as a tenant in an old short popover body with an immense and lumpish head.

"I can call you Edgar-this is okay? I can tell you how I see you? I see you as a mature and careful man who has a sexy motorcycle thug writhing to get out. Which the spangles give a crazy twist, you know?"

He felt creamy, dreamy and drugged.

She made a slight adjustment in the fit and even as he cringed at her touch Edgar felt himself tingle thrillingly. She was insidious and corrupt and it was like hearing your grandmother talk dirty in your ear.

"You are a butch biker to me, you know, riding into town to take over leadership of the sadists and necrophiles."

Clyde watched in civilized alarm as a cockroach crawled out of Tanya's pocket and moved slowly down her flank. It was Spanish-Harlem-sized, with antennae that could pick up the BBC.

"It's a lovely fit, darling. You have savage cheekbones for a full-figure man. I would love to do the total face, you know? Highlights and shadows."

Clyde took her gently by the arm, concealing her roach side from Edgar's view, "In fact, shall I tell you something? The ball tonight is a perfect setting for you. Because you are very black and white to me. So you'll be totally in character, yes?"

When she was gone the men busied themselves with practical preparations. Clyde made dinner reservations and set out their evening clothes. Edgar set the mask on a tabletop and took a bath.

When he was finished he put on his fluffy white robe and stood by a window sipping the rest of his drink. He heard a sound above the beeping traffic, something strident rising in the night. New York was less genial than it used to be when the saloons and supper clubs were hangouts for lively and charming women and for gentlemen-bums with a comic flair.

"Junior, that noise. Can you hear it?"

Clyde walked into the room in his shirtsleeves, a shoe brush in hand.

"Yes, barely."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes, it could be the protesters at the Plaza."

"The wind."

"Yes, the wind is carrying the sound this way."

They heard the hard rhythmic salvo of voices chanting angry slogans, again, louder, fading when the wind shifted, then audible once more.

"You know what they want, don't you?" Edgar said.

Through the battered century of world wars and massive violence by other means, there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and ack-ack and that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds. It was the struggle between the state and secret groups of insurgents, state-born, wild-eyed-the anarchists, terrorists, assassins and revolutionaries who tried to bring about apocalyptic change. And sometimes of course succeeded. The passionate task of the state was to hold on, stiffening its grip and preserving its claim to the most destructive power available. With nuclear weapons this power became identified totally with the state. The mushroom cloud was the godhead of Annihilation and Ruin. The state controlled the means of apocalypse. But Edgar, by the window, heard the old alarums. He thought the time might be coming, once again, when ideas became insurgent and rebel bands were reborn, longhair men and women, scruffy and free-fucking, who moved toward armed and organized resistance, trying to break the state and bring about the end of the existing order.

"They want the power to shake the world. It's the old bolshevik dream being dreamed again and it's the communists who are behind it all. And you know where it begins, don't you?"

"These are kids, mostly, who lie down in the street and wave flowers at the police," Clyde said. " Vietnam is the war, the reality. This is the movie, where the scripts are written and the actors perform. American kids don't want what we've got. They want movies, music."

Let Junior devise his clever perceptions. He didn't understand that once you patronize the enemy, you begin the process of your own undoing.

"It begins in the inmost person," Edgar said. "Once you yield to random sexual urges, you want to see everything come loose. You mistake your own looseness for some political concept, whereas in truth."

He didn't finish the thought. Some thoughts had to remain unspoken, even unfinished in one's own mind. This was the point of his relationship with Clyde. To keep the subject unspoken. To keep the feelings unfelt, the momentary urges unacted-upon. How strange and foolish this would seem to the young people running in the streets, or living six to a room, or three to a bed, and to many other people for that matter-how sad and rare.

Clyde went back to his duties, leaving the Boss by the window.

Edgar thought there was something noble in a constant companionship that does not fall to baser claims. He assumed Clyde believed likewise. But then Clyde was the second man, wasn't he, and perhaps he only followed Edgar's line of march wherever it led, or didn't.

He heard the chanting intermittently on the wind. Clyde was in the shower now. Edgar turned to see where he'd left the mask and saw himself unexpectedly in a full-length mirror, across the room, in his white robe and soft slippers, and he was startled by the image.

Of course it was him, but him in the guise of a macrocephalic baby, sexless and so justborn as to be, in essence, unearthly.

Mother Hoover's cuddled runt.

He crossed the room and picked up the mask. He noted how the stylized handlebars were simple swirls of cut leather designed to flare from the temples.

He heard Clyde come out of the shower.

When they were younger and on vacation together, or away on business, sharing a suite or taking adjoining rooms and keeping the connecting door open so they could talk from their respective beds well into the night, Edgar sometimes managed to angle the mirrors in such a way that he could catch a glimpse-by taking the free-standing antique in an old inn, the cheval glass, for example, and simply moving it to another part of the floor, or opening the medicine cabinet to a certain position when he shaved and letting the mirror absorb the light from the bed in the next room, or leaving a hand mirror propped on a desk-a glimpse, a passing glance, a spyhole peek at Junior as he busied himself dressing or undressing or taking a bath, the arrangement being such that the moment would seem wholly accidental, should the subject realize he was being watched, and an accident not just from his perspective but to Edgar's own mind as well, Junior's likeness being a thing that might simply float across his ken in the normal course of events, away on urgent Bureau business, his companion's body lean and virile, or at a golf resort, or following the ponies west to Del Mar, when they were both a great deal younger.

Junior was going bald now, and bulb-nosed, and he walked with a stoop. But then Junior had always walked with a stoop in an effort to appear no taller than the Boss.

Edgar was in the bedroom with the door closed. He stood at the mirror, a seventy-one-year-old man wearing nothing but his sequined biker's mask and his wool-lined slippers, listening to the voices in the street.

When her workday was finished Janet Urbaniak put on her running shoes. There was a stretch of four desolate blocks between the hospital complex where she did classroom work and got floor experience and the apartment complex where she lived. Bleak and weedy streets, unshoveled snow going grim with bus exhaust, snow that was drilled and gilded with dog piss, and there were usually a few lurking figures in green fatigues, the last of a straggle battalion of wasted men.

So when her workday was finished Janet took off her lightweight casual slip-ons and got the running shoes out of her locker, a pair of firm padded sneakers with shock-absorbent midsoles and a supple and confident feel. Then she went and stood at the hospital entrance with another student nurse and they waited for the traffic lights to turn green along the semideserted length of the four extended blocks, the kind of heartless boulevard you find in parts of town where the architecture is guarded and tense and it always feels like curfew.

Janet stood and waited in the deep and eerie dusk. Then the lights went green and her buddy said, "Go, go, go, go," and Janet started to run, nonstop she hoped, with the lights in her favor, hitting top speed in a matter of seconds and trying to avoid icy patches, and her buddy watched her all the way.

Some evenings, most evenings it's the men you want to look out for. This is why you're running after all. They see you coming in your bouncy blue-and-white shoes and have things to say and gestures to make or just looks to look, or nothing at all sometimes, you're a ghost, a shadow-a number of men clustered near a chain-link fence or empty lot, and you're never sure whether it's better to veer away in a defensive arc or keep running in a straight line because the first tactic might offend them and the second might tempt them to get familiar or maybe even affront them in its unaffectedness, and some evenings it's the snow.

It's the snow or rain or garbage or the stray dogs you have to look out for.

But you're not running because of the dogs. The dogs make you slow down, ease into a walk. It's the men loitering who make you run and the men who are out of sight in doorways or junked cars-you want them to think you're running for the love of running, you and all the others, the evening stream of students making the four-block sprint,

We're just runners, you want them to think, getting our minutes in.

Janet was dashing now, deep-breathing, concentrating on the snow and on the lights staying green, and she watched for men who might be leaning on a wall or getting out of a car-there were usually a couple of junked cars in the course of a run, used as social clubs in winter.

Four long blocks under a streaky northern sky. When she reached the entrance to her building the keys were already in her hand and she went inside and took the elevator up, still running in a sense, with the apartment keys out now, and fifteen seconds after she was in the living room, door double-locked, the telephone rang. It was only then that her heart stopped racing.

The call was routine procedure, another student back at the hospital checking to see if she'd made it safely They gave her eleven minutes door-to-door including the elevator up and the keys in the locks. A number of student nurses lived in the same complex and the routine was designed to allow people to switch roles systematically. Janet ran the dash, made the phone call and monitored the progress of the running woman according to a schedule.

They figured it all out and posted it on a board. Then they changed into running shoes and waited for green.

The second man made the decision to show up late. It was the kind of firm determination in the type of difficult circumstance that Clyde Tolson liked to make.

It proved his mettle. And when you're a man who is variously described as dutiful, deferential, obsequious, slavish and brown-nosingly corrupt, in descending order of distinction, you need to make a show of character now and then.

But first Clyde had to convince the Boss that missing an hour or two of party time was not going to haunt the twilight years of his directorate.

An FBI security detail at the Plaza had reported that the protest was growing loud and that the party guests, as they entered, were being cursed in rhyming couplets, exposed to obscene signs and gestures, spat upon at close range and forced to duck an occasional flying object.

It did not make sense to Clyde to allow the Director to enter a situation, and Edgar finally agreed, in which the dignity of the Bureau might be compromised.

So it was midnight when the two men rolled through the deserted midtown streets in their bulletproof black Cadillac. They'd had a leisurely dinner, bantering with the wine steward and then enjoying a brandy at the bar with old acquaintances because there were old acquaintances wherever J. Edgar Hoover went, some who were loyal supporters, others residing in the files, a few who were enemies-for-life but didn't know it yet, and Edgar and Clyde were in a mellow enough mood, despite reports from the site, seated in the plush rear seat in black tie of course and wearing their masks, like a suave and jaunty crime fighter out of the Sunday comics, a master bureaucrat by day who becomes dashing Maskman at night, cruising the streets in formal dress with his trusted right-hand man.

The driver activated the intercom to report that a car was tailing them.

Clyde turned to look while the Director slumped in his seat, getting his head below the window line.

"Little Volkswagen bug," Clyde said. "Painted top to bottom in very bright colors. Psychedelic. Big bright swirls and streaks. Can't make out the driver's face."

The Cadillac coasted slowly past the Plaza. The klieg lights were gone, the media pack was gone, there was no trace of the crush of curious onlookers drawn by news of the event. There were still a few demonstrators, listless now, young people in their grimy tie-dyes, and city cops as well, idler still, showing the eternal laden strain of a big meal hustled down the gullet, where it sits for hours earning overtime.

The great dark car circled the block, equipped with an Arpege atomizer that contained room freshener, and Clyde checked the other entrances.

The north steps were empty and he tapped on the glass and the driver pulled up and the two men exited and suddenly there was the VW, cutting in front, and people came scrambling out, three, four, what, six people, it's a circus car debouching clowns, about seven people tumbling onto the sidewalk and hurrying up the steps to flank the doorway

All wore masks, the faces of Asian kids, some blood-spattered, others with eyes seamed shut, and they commenced their shouting as Hoover and Tolson moved up the stairs.

The first man was clumsy and slow and the second took his arm to assist and they made their plodding way toward the entrance.

They heard, "Society scum!"

They heard, 'A dead Asian baby for every Gucci loafer!"

Clyde wasn't sure whether the protesters knew who they were. Was Edgar's mask sufficient cover for his gnarled old media mug?

They heard mottoes, slurs and technical terms.

And they labored upward, step by step, eyes front, outer arms stroking, and the protesters jangled and hissed.

" Vietnam! Love it or leave it!"

"White killers in black tie!"

A young woman stood at the entrance wearing the mask of a child's shattered face and she said somewhat softly to Edgar, blocking his way and speaking evenly, whispering in fact, "We'll never disappear, old man, until you're in a landfill with your trash."

Clyde said, "Coming through," like a waiter with a heavy tray, and a couple of minutes later, after a stop in the men's room to collect themselves, the Director and his aide were ready to party.

But first Edgar said, "Who were those jaspers?"

"I have an idea or two. I'll put someone on it."

"Did you hear what she said? I think they're connected to the garbage guerrillas."

"Straighten your mask," Clyde said.

"I'd like to see them maimed in the slowest possible manner. Over weeks and months, with voice tapes made."

They walked down the hall to the grand ballroom. They'd walked down five hundred halls on their way to some ceremonial event, some testimonial dinner, one or another ritual salute to Edgar's decades in the Bureau, but they'd never heard a sound such as this.

A subdued roar, a sort of rumble-buzz, with a chandelier jingle in the mix and the dreamy sway of dance music and a vocal note of self-delight-the lure, the enticement of a life defined by its remoteness from the daily drudge of world complaint.

"Tapes of cries and moans," Edgar said, "which I would play to help me sleep."

They moved through the ballroom, they circulated, seeing prominent people everywhere. The room was high and white and primrose gold, flanked by Greek columns that caught the lickety amber light of a thousand candles.

Swan-necked women in textured satin gowns. Masks by Halston, Adolfo and Saint Laurent. The mother and sister of one American president and the daughter of another. Crisp little men aswagger with assets. Titled jet-setters, a maharajah and maharani, a baroness somebody in a beaded mask. Famous and raging alcoholic poets. Tough smart stylish women who ran fashion books and designed clothes. Hair by Kenneth-teased, swirled, backcombed and ringleted.

"Did you see?"

"The old dowager," Edgar said.

"In the dime-store mask."

"Decorated with pearls."

They shook hands here and there, daintily, and dropped a flattering remark to this or that person, and Clyde knew how the Director felt, mixing with people of the rarest social levels, the anointed and predestined, aura'd like Inca kings, but also the talented and original and self-made and born beautiful and ego-driven and hard-bargaining, all bearing signs of astral radiance, and the ruthless and brutish as well.

Yes, Edgar was damp with excitement.

He stopped to chat with Frank Sinatra and his young actress wife, a nymph in a boy's haircut and a butterfly mask.

"Jedgar, you old warhorse. Haven't seen you since."

"Yes, I know."

"Tempus fugits, don't it, pal?"

"Yes, it does," Edgar said. "Introduce me to your lovely."

Sinatra was in the files now. Many people in the room were in the files as well. Not a single one of them, Clyde imagined, more accomplished in his occupational strokes than Edgar himself. But Edgar did not carry the glow. Edgar worked in the semidark, manipulating and bringing ruin. He carried the small wan grudging glory of the civil servant. Not the open and confident show, the wide-striding boom of some of these cosmic bravos.

On the stage, under the furled curtain, two bands took turns. A white society band and a black soul group. All musicians masked.

People loved Edgar's leather mask. They told him so. A woman in ostrich feathers ran her tongue over the handlebars. Another woman called him Biker Boy. A gay playwright rolled his eyes.

They found their table and settled in for a spell, sipping champagne and nibbling on buffet tidbits. Clyde uttered the names of people dancing past and Edgar commented on their lives and careers and personal predilections. Whatever anecdotal lore he failed to recall, Clyde was quick to provide.

Andy Warhol walked by wearing a mask that was a photograph of his own face.

A woman asked Edgar to dance and he flushed and lit a cigarette.

Lord and Lady somebody held their masks on sticks.

A woman wore a sexy nun's wimple.

A man wore an executioner's hood.

Edgar spoke rapidly in his old staccato voice, like a radio reporter doing a series of punchy news items. It made Clyde feel good to see the Boss show such animation. They spotted a number of people they knew professionally, administration faces, past and present, men who held sensitive and critical positions, and Clyde noted how the ballroom seemed to throb with crosscurrent interests and appetites. Political power mingling lubriciously with art and literature. Domed historians clubbing with the beautiful people of society and fashion. There were diplomats dancing with movie stars, and Nobel laureates telling chummy stories to shipping tycoons, and the demimonde of Broadway and the gossip industry hobnobbing with foreign correspondents.

There was a self-conscious sense of some profound moment in the making. A dreadful prospect, Clyde thought, because it suggested a continuation of the Kennedy years. In which well-founded categories began to seem irrelevant. In which a certain fluid movement became possible. In which sex, drugs and dirty words began to unstratify the culture.

"I think you ought to dance," Edgar said.

Clyde looked at him.

"It's a party. Why not? Find a suitable lady and spin her around the floor."

"I do believe the man is serious."

"Then come back and tell me what you talked about."

"Do I remember a single step?"

"You were quite a good dancer, Junior. Go ahead. Do your stuff. It's a party."

On the floor the guests were doing the twist with all the articulated pantomime of the unfrozen dead come back for a day. Soon the white band reemerged and the music turned to fox-trots and waltzes. Clyde watched the slowly shuffling mass of careful dancers, barely touching, heedful of hairdos and jewelry and gowns and masks and always on the alert for other fabulous people-heads turning, eyes bright in the great black-and-white gyre.

"Yes, show your true colors," Edgar said with a twisted grin.

So that was it. Tipsy and bitter. All right, thought Clyde. If this was to be a night in which old restrictions were eased, why not a turn around the floor?

He approached a woman not only masked but wholly medieval, it seemed, a cloth wound about the head and a long plain cloak sashed at the waist and a tight bodice girdled high under her breasts.

She smiled at him and Clyde said, "Shall we?"

She was tall and fair and wore no makeup and spoke without awe of the evening and its trappings. A levelheaded young lady of the sort that Edgar might admire, and therefore Clyde as well.

She wore a raven's mask.

Clyde 's own mask, an unadorned domino, was in his pocket by now.

"Are we using names," he said, "or shall we abide by strict rules of anonymity?"

"Are there rules in effect? I wasn't aware."

"We'll make our own," he said, surprised by the slightly sexy banter he was generating.

He led her in and out of pairs of bodies ghost-floating to the tune of an old ballad from his youth.

Clyde used to have women friends. But when the Boss started to court other possible proteges, strong-bodied young agents who would serve a social function more than a Bureau function, Clyde knew it was time to submit to Edgar's need for a steadfast and unquestioning friend, a mate of soul and word and unvarying routine. This was a choice that answered Clyde 's own deep need for protection, a place on the safe side of the fortified wall.

Power made his suits fit better.

He saw Edgar being photographed with a group at the far end of the ballroom. Clyde recognized most of the people and noticed how eager Edgar seemed to nestle among them.

Edgar's own power had always been double-skinned. He had the power of his office of course. And also the power that his self-repression gave him. His stern measures as Director were given an odd legitimacy by his personal life, the rigor of his insistent celibacy. Clyde believed this, that Edgar had earned his monocratic power through the days and nights of his self-denial, the rejection of unacceptable impulses. The man was consistent. Every official secret in the Bureau had its blood-birth in Edgar's own soul.

This is what made him a great man.

Conflict. The nature of his desire and the unremitting attempts he made to expose homosexuals in the government. The secret of his desire and the refusal to yield. Great in his conviction. Great in his harsh judgment and traditional background and early American righteousness and great in his quibbling fear and dark shame and great and sad and miserable in his dread of physical contact and in a thousand other torments too deep to name.

Clyde would have done whatever the Boss required.

Knelt down.

Bent over.

Spread out.

Reached around.

But the Boss only wanted his company and his loyalty down to the last sentient instant of his dying breath.

Clyde saw another man, and another, in executioners' hoods. And a figure in a white winding-sheet.

"And that man over there. Having his picture snapped," the young woman said. "That's the person you were sitting with."

"Mr Hoover."

"Mr. Hoover, yes."

"And with him, let me see. The wife of a famous poet. The husband of a famous actress. Two unattached composers. A billionaire with a double chin." Clyde realized he was showing off. 'And a stockbroker-yachtsman, let me think, called Jason Vanover. And his wife, a middling painter called whatever she's called. Sax or Wax or something."

"And you are Mr. Tolson," said the woman.

And how clever, thought Clyde, who was rarely recognized in public and felt a bit flattered and somewhat unsettled as well.

They were dancing cheek, to cheek.

He saw another woman in modified medieval dress, a bit more shrouded and hooded, and it brought to mind-no, not the sixteenth-century painting Edgar was so morbidly fond of, the Bruegel, with its panoramic deathscape. (Edgar had postcards, magazine pages, framed reproductions and enlarged details stored and hung in his basement rumpus room. And he'd ordered Clyde to talk to officials in Madrid about the priceless original and how he might acquire it as a gift to the American people from a Spanish nation grateful for the protective shield of U.S. armed might. But when a B-52 and a tanker collided during routine refueling, earlier this year, and four hydrogen bombs came crashing to earth on the Spanish coast, releasing radioactive materials, Clyde had to deinitiate all discussions.) No, not Bruegel. The nunnish woman brought to mind, of all things and all people, the hip sick dopester comic-Lenny Bruce. No, Lenny Bruce was not a guest at the Black amp; White Ball. Lenny Bruce was dead. Died several months ago, at his home in Los Angeles, of acute morphine poisoning, naked on his toilet floor, limbs gone stiff, mucus trailing out of his nose, his glassy eyes wide open, the syringe still stuck in his arm.

An 8x10 police photo of the bloated body-the picture could have been titled The Triumph of Death-was in the Director's personal files. Why? The horror, the shiver, the hellish sense of religious retribution out of the Middle Ages. And only hours after the body was found a buzz began to circulate in the usual places. Dig it. Lenny's been killed by shadowy forces in the government.

Lynda Bird Johnson danced past with a Secret Service agent.

The rumors had not surprised Clyde. He could smell the decade's paranoid breath. And he wondered suddenly about the woman in his arms. Had he in fact approached her on the dance floor or had she subtly stepped into his path?

A man with a skeleton mask and a woman with a monk's cowl. There, standing at the edge of the bandstand.

"You know my name," Clyde said, "but I'm at a loss, I'm afraid."

"Which doesn't happen very often, does it? But I thought our rules tended to favor nondisclosure."

They were dancing to show tunes from the forties. She pressed slightly closer and seemed to breathe rhythmically in his ear.

"Have you ever seen so many people," she whispered, "gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together? We can look around us," she whispered, "and see the business executives, the fashion photographers, the government officials, the industrialists, the writers, the bankers, the academics, the pig-faced aristocrats in exile, and we can know the soul of one by the bitter wrinkled body of the other and then know all by the soul of the one. Because they're all part of the same motherfucking thing," she whispered. "Don't you think?"

Well, she just about took his breath away, whoever she was.

"The same thing. What thing?" he said.

"The state, the nation, the corporation, the power structure, the system, the establishment."

So young and lithe and trite. He felt the electric tension of her thighs and breasts passing through his suit.

"If you kiss me," she said, "I'll stick my tongue so far down your throat."

"Yes."

"It will pierce your heart."

Then everything happened at once. Figures in raven faces and skull masks. Figures in white winding-sheets. Monks, nuns, executioners. And he understood of course that the woman in his arms was one of them.

They formed a death rank on the dance floor, halting the music and sending the guests to the fringes. They commanded the room, a masque of silent figures, a plague, a spray of pathogens, and Clyde looked around for Edgar.

The woman slipped away Then the figures trooped across the floor, draped, masked, sheeted and cowled. How had they assembled so deftly? How had they entered the ballroom in the first place?

He looked for old Edgar.

An executioner and a nun did a pas de deux, a round of simple circling steps, and then the others gradually joined, the skeleton men and raven women, and in the end it was a graceful pavane they did, courtly and deadly and slow, with gestures so deliberate they seemed acted as well as danced, and Clyde saw his young partner move silkenly in their midst.

I will stick my tongue so far down your throat.

The guests watched in a trance, five hundred and forty men and women by actual count, and musicians and waiters and other personnel, and men assigned to guard the jewelry of the women, all part of the audience for an entertainment other than themselves-respectful, hushed and half stunned.

It will pierce your heart.

When they were finished the troupe stood in a line and removed their headpieces and masks. Then they opened their mouths, saying nothing, and directed hollow stares at the guests. An extended moment, a long gaping silence in the columned hall.

They departed single file.

A couple of minutes later Clyde found the Boss and they went to the men's room to collect themselves.

"Enjoy your dance, Junior?"

"I think I know who they are."

"Didn't you say that last time we were in here?"

"A group little seen and less known. Campus demonstrations mostly. No one, and this is odd."

"What?" the Boss barked.

"No one in Internal Security has come up with a name for the group. They've been known to act out protests, playing all the roles, even the police. Turn around."

"Find the links. It's all linked. The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair."

"There's some dandruff on your jacket," Clyde said.

Men entered and left, carrying a single sullen murmur in and out of the tiled room. They unzipped and peed. They urinated into mounds of crushed ice garnished with lemon wedges. They unzipped and zipped. They peed, they waggled and they zipped.

Edgar stood before the mirrors, still masked, and the sight of him prompted Clyde to think of the secret garden behind the Director's house, a sector fenced away from neighbors and never shown to guests, where statues of nude young men rose from fountains or stood draped in fall-flaming vines. Less titillating than inspirational, Clyde believed. This was the male form as Edgar's idealized double. A role livingly filled by Clyde. At least it used to be that way in the days when Edgar would stealthily tilt a mirror so he could lie in bed and watch Junior doing push-ups in the adjoining room.

That was 1939 in Miami Beach. This was 1966 in New York and we are living in muddle and shock.

He'd let that girl charm and tempt him, and he'd liked it, and he'd been disappointed when she slipped away before the kiss, and he'd been played for a fool in the oldest way-that radical enravishing self-possessed heartless come-hither bitch.

Back in the ballroom half the guests were gone. The rest measured out the time so their departure would not seem influenced by the spectacle, the protest, whatever it was-the mockery of their sleek and precious evening.

The society band played some danceable numbers but nobody wanted to dance anymore. Edgar and Clyde sat drinking with a putty-colored man in smoked glasses and his overmasked wife-satin wings, coq feathers and embedded diamonds.

Possibly Mafia, Clyde surmised.

Edgar would not speak to anyone. He sat, drank and hated. He had the sheen of Last Things in his eye. Clyde knew this look. It meant the Director was meditating on his coffin. It gave him dark solace, planning the details of his interment. A lead-lined coffin of one thousand pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and vandals. They were planning to steal his garbage, so why not his corpse? Lead-lined, yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout.

And when he died, whatever the circumstances, they would suddenly, all those elements that despised his unchecked power-they would invert their distrust and begin to float rumors that the Director himself was the victim of a wry homicide planned and carried out by unknown parties in the vast and layered webwork of the state.

This is how the Boss would finally draw some sympathy, an old man put to sleep in a complex scheme so expedient and deceitful as to be widely admired even as it was only half believed. And Clyde himself was already prepared to half believe it.

Edgar dead, pray God, not for ten, fifteen, twenty years yet.

Maybe the sixties would be over by then.

The woman in the gaudy mask said, "You think they'll be waiting outside, those creeps, to make me miserable all over again?"

The husband said, "It's nearly four a.m. Hey. They gotta sleep sometime."

At four a.m. they were waiting outside. Clyde and Edgar watched from the lobby. The last partygoers straggled out and the protesters rasped and chanted, wearing children's masks again.

An hour later it finally ended. Edgar and Clyde left by the main entrance and went down to the Cadillac as the spent trash of a day and a night in a great coastal city went wind-skidding through the streets.

The armored limousine rolled slowly back to the Waldorf.

Yes, the Director would finally get some sympathy from the same people who made jokes about them both. Smutty swishy jokes. But Edgar and Clyde were not a couple of old queens doddering on. They were men of sovereign authority. And Edgar did not intend to yield control anytime on this earth.

Clyde spotted the bug.

He glanced at Edgar, who sat mute and brooding in his sequined mask. He'd worn the mask steadily since dinner. Hard, cold, laconic, with all the private fury of some unassuageable pain, he wore the leather mask because it eased, if only briefly, the burden of control.

And when Clyde spotted the bug, the poky little Volkswagen with its incandescent doodles and whorls, he decided to say nothing to Edgar. The car was a hundred feet behind them, like a day-glo roach, slow and sleepless and clinging.

He said nothing to the Boss because the night had been filled with shock and distress and he wanted to absorb this final bodeful moment on his own. He was Junior after all, now and always, willingly, necessarily, however tired and befooled, the life companion and loyal second man.

5

This was Thursday. They'd first felt the full impact of the danger on Monday evening when the President addressed the nation on radio and television. On Tuesday they were told that Soviet ships were en route to Cuba with missiles and warheads to add to the number already installed on the island. Wednesday was tense. On Wednesday they found out that our naval blockade was in effect and that fourteen Soviet ships were nearing the quarantine line.

Now it was Thursday. On Thursday evening as SAC bombers carrying thermonuclear weapons circled the Med or flew Arctic routes across Greenland or hugged the western borders of North America, people rode home from work with the radio on or the newspaper up in their eyes.

And with darkness webbing down out of the broad and soaring sky over the lake, deeper into evening now, the night people were out, slipping past the bars and tonky clubs, mingling with tourists and conventioneers who were checking out the action. On the fringe streets they sidestepped taxis on the prowl and veered around the traffic of negotiated vice and they made their way to Rush Street, finally, where Mister Kelly's stood, a big-name room in Chicago's bouncing night.

Lenny Bruce came slouching down from the second-floor dressing room and walked a little bleary-eyed through the kitchen and out the swinging doors, where he did a sidle step onto the stage.

A waiter with a tray said, "It's a human zoo out there tonight."

Fifteen minutes into his act Lenny took a condom out of his pocket and tried to fit it over his furrowed tongue. Then he tried to talk though it, or out of it. Finally he dangled the item between his thumb and index finger, holding it away from his body, specimenlike-it's a dead jellyfish that has the reflex power to deliver one last spasmic sting.

"I can be arrested in twenty-three states for waving this thing in public. You're thinking, Sure in the Bible belt. Actually I'm safe in the Bible belt because they don't know what this is. They put Saran Wrap on their dicks."

He shook his hands hallelujah and took a stagger step back.

"I swear I saw it in Time magazine. You get a box of Saran Wrap and you tear off as much as you need for your particular endowment."

The word endowment got a bigger response than Saran Wrap or Time magazine.

"Leftover meatloaf."

He did his hipster crack-up laugh, bending from the waist like some Hassid at serious prayer. There were a few people in the audience, two, three, four people going small and tight in their seats.

"Saran Wrap. It sounds interplanetary. Picture it. A little town somewhere in America. A housewife pins laundry on a line. White and Negro children play peacefully in a schoolyard. Apple pies are cooling on kitchen windowsills. Suddenly a deathly stillness. People pause in midmotion. A dog named Skipper hides under the porch steps. Then a blinding flash. It's a visit from outer space. Creatures from the planet Saran. They're very thin and sort of filmy looking. They say to the leaders of Earth, Take this new material we've just invented and test it on yourselves, because frankly we're afraid to."

Lenny's heavy lids began to lower slowly as he changed the scene.

"It's a documented thing, farm boys and ranch hands taking strips of Saran Wrap with them when they go on dates. There are teams of sociologists doing fieldwork on this matter. Not to mention admen on the Dow Chemical account, which is the company that makes the stuff, and they're looking to position their product as a food wrap and a scumbag, if only they could devise a diplomatic language. Ad biggies on Madison Avenue. Let's do a nice old country doctor in a lab coat. Sitting in his rustic office pulling Saran Wrap off the chicken sandwich his wife packed for his lunch and he drapes the wrap absent-mindedly around his finger. Talking about freshness and protection. Maybe sneaking in a word about overpopulation. And the admen get excited by the idea. Let's run it up the flagpole blah blah blah. It's nearly subliminal, dig?"

Lenny whirls and points at some phantom confederate in the wings. In fact there are no wings-just walls and doors.

He tried to fit the condom over his tongue again.

"Never underestimate the power of language. I carry a rubber with me at all times because I don't want to inseminate someone by schmoozing with her. Some innocent teenage girl asks for directions to State Street. Zap. A virgin birth."

A small commotion in the middle of the room-could be some walkouts or maybe just a waiter and some noisy plates. The waiters are supposed to work quietly during performances but this was a hungry bunch of trenchermen who made a racket when they ate, gorging on sirloins, barbecued ribs, lobster tails, spaghetti and chicken livers, and more or less thrashing their way through a Mister Kelly specialty, the green goddess salad.

Lenny said, "Love me unconditionally or I die. These are the terms of our engagement."

Kelly's was jam-packed tonight, well over the legal limit of a hundred and sixty, and they were sitting, standing and stacked ten deep at the fire exit. And they were loud, they bawled and lowed like beef on the hoof, men on business trips with dilated veins throbbing at their temples, a group of touring usherettes from the Far West, half expecting to encounter themselves in one of Lenny's bits, and look at the heavyset men in big suits with star sapphires on their pinky fingers, in from the mobster suburbs with lapels so wide they do semaphores when the wind blows. And a table filled with developers chewing on Cuban cigars-a bachelor night on the town. And sophisticated women digging the weird insides of one man's psyche. And a couple of butterball college professors looking for some belly laughs, idea men from the humanistic enclave. And Hugh Hefner and a cluster of Playboy models, aspiring centerfolds on leave from the Mansion, tall, young, fair and so flawlessly complexioned they seem to be airbrushed. And Hef with his dirty paternal smile steel-seamed around a briar pipe.

Walkouts in progress-an old story of course on the Lenny Bruce circuit. Two women and a man offended by the sight of a guy sticking his tongue in a Trojan.

Lenny spotted them and fixed on the woman bringing up the rear. Big-boned, let's say, and able-bodied.

"Look who's splitting the scene. You know who that is, don't you? You can recognize her from the wanted posters. Josef Mengele's head nurse. Up from Argentina on a budget tour." Pause a beat. "She's doing the stockyards, the prisons and the morgue." Pause a beat. "When she was still active, they called her Attila the Huness."

Who else was in the room? Second City comics here to idolize the super sicko. Jazz writers and theater people. Some porko politicos and their rosary-bead wives-they're here under the impression that Lenny's an Italian crooner whose real name runs to eleven syllables and carries a serious curse.

Who else? A number of Cook County vice cops scattered through the room with notebooks and tape machines, sucking up every arraignable word.

Lenny was still hectoring the walkouts.

"Make room, make room. They got a flight to Buenos Aires in ten minutes. Eichmann Air. The stews wear striped pajamas."

Those were the terms of Lenny's act. If you didn't like the bits he did, you were a mass murderer. Or you were the Polio Mother of the Year 1952 or the subject of a brief improvised bit, which he now performed, on the flashing light in airliner toilets, a recent obsession of his.

Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.

Lenny once had a sixty-party walkout in New York. An entire Grey

Line bus tour just upped and fled. Angelo the maitre d' looked at Lenny and said, You gotta talk dirty? Who's gonna make up the tips, you fuck?

Lenny licked and rubbed the condom. He fingered it, twirled it, snapped it.

"I just realized. This is what the twentieth century feels like."

Then he paused thoughtfully, appearing to remember something. He stuck the rubber in his pocket, absently-he was wearing the same Nehru jacket he'd sported in San Francisco, his Hindu statesman number, and the thing was rutted and crushed by now, resembling some wadded discard plucked from the gutter. He also wore a large medal on a chain, an accessory to the Nehru. You got the medal for wearing the jacket.

Yes, he was remembering something heavy and dense. Despite his weeklong anxiety over the missile crisis, the blackout at Basin Street West, the endless bulletins issuing from every surface in the landscape, a network ranging from TV monitors in airport boarding areas to blind newsies selling tabloids on street corners, yes, whatever the level of Lenny's unease-the nuclear showdown had slipped his mind.

Better believe it. Their ships are approaching our blockade.

Lenny nodded, he stroked the mole on his cheek, he waggled his fingers and looked out over the massed heads humming autonomi-cally in the low smoke.

"We're all gonna die!"

He said it four times total, passionately high-pitched, arms flung up.

"And you're beginning to take it personally," he said. "How can they justify the inconvenience of a war that's gonna break out over the weekend? You had it all planned. Friday night. Movie with your highbrow art-film friends. Serious Swedish flick at the little theater near the university. Ursula Andress naked to the waist with a slain calf slung over her shoulder. Saturday morning. Let's see. Dry cleaner, post office, grocery store, pick up shoes, put cat to sleep, call mom back home in French Lick-yeah, I'm fine, how're you, yatta yatta yatta, got a big date tonight with a real nice girl, Raytheon, she's a Mormon, they don't drink tap water or play the saxophone."

Lenny broke off unexpectedly and leaned into the face of one of the real-estate barons sitting ringside, a guy with the bloated cheeks of a trumpet player doing a cardiac solo.

"Mick spic hunky junkie boogie."

There was no context for the line except the one that Lenny took with him everywhere. The culture and its loaded words. He looked around some more. He seemed to need a particular kind of face into which to deliver his scripture.

One of the college profs smiled invitingly and Lenny obliged with, "Fuck suck fag hag gimme a nickel bag."

In fact the words were thrilling. Many people had never heard these words spoken before an audience-by a guy in a Hindu tunic yet- and there was an odd turn of truth, a sense of unleashing perhaps, or disembarrassment.

Lenny followed this flurry with an erudite riff on the German word Sprachgefuhl, a feel for language, for what is idiomatically hip-he reads up on things like this in hotels and on planes and back home in the smoky dawn of L.A. while he's waiting for a woman or a pusher.

A fight broke out in the middle of his commentary. Back near the fire exit. Five burly men in a fur ball of pummel and shove. Lenny egged them on, insulting their mothers, until they more or less rolled out the door.

He remembered the crisis again.

"Yeah so you pick up your date at the pad she shares with six other Mormon chicks. Wow what a shiksoid circus. They have strange shiny eyes and a superhuman blondness. They're the next stage of evolution after Olympic swimmers. They're right at the edge of science fiction, man. Human look-alikes from space waiting for a signal to take over the planet. They think tap water's a government plot. Their water's trucked in from a well in Utah. Raytheon's kinda cute but she's dressed so primly you feel your balls contract. You look at these girls and you mourn the lost glamour of women's undergarments. The whole nazified system of straps and harnesses. It's a legal outlet for your secret fascist longings. But chicks don't buy into it anymore. All that slithery hardware that makes wars worth fighting. You take her to a funky down-home place near the women's house of detention. She orders the knuckle sandwich. Hey, the chick digs soul food. Your spirits soar. You think of the setup at your place. Bottle of Vat 69. Zig Zag cigarette paper. Little baggy of dope from the high Andes. The mood lighting. The cool jazz on the turntable. We'll do Miles, yeah, from his blue period. If Miles can't soften her up she's probably a diesel dyke. Irbu're thinking all the universal things men have always thought about and said to each other. Get in her pants. Did you get in? Did you get some? Did you make it? How far'd you get? How far'd she go? Is she an easy lay? Is she a good hump? Is she a piece? Did you get a piece? It's like the language of yard goods. It's like piece goods. You can make her. She can be made. It's like a garment factory. It's like work that's paid for according to the number of units turned out. He's a make-out artist. She's a piece. Knock off a piece. It's a knockoff. You can't tell the woman from the fabric she's wearing."

This is Lenny in his primitive Christian mode, doing offbeat sermons to desert rabble.

"You hail a cab and the radio's on. Khrushchev wrote a letter to Kennedy. He wants a summit. Who is this Khrushchev anyway? He's a shtarker in a bad suit. You're worried about your summit, not his. The whole point of the missile crisis is the sexual opportunity it offers. You get Raytheon to your place and convince her the whole world's about to go zippo and astonishingly it works and within minutes she's standing naked in your living room and she is all ovals and loops, like the Palmer handwriting method, and so blond she could be radioactive."

Lenny switched abruptly to ad lib bits. Whatever zoomed across his brainpan. He did bits he got bored with five seconds in. He did psychoanalysis, personal reminiscence, he did voices and accents, grandmotherly groans, scenes from prison movies, and he finally closed the show with a monologue that had a kind of abridged syntax, a thing without connectives, he was cooking free-form, closer to music than speech, doing a spoken jazz in which a slang term generates a matching argot, like musicians trading fours, the road band, the sideman's inner riff, and when the crowd dispersed they took this rap mosaic with them into the strip joints and bars and late-night diners, the places where the nighthawks congregate, and it was Lenny's own hard bop, his speeches to the people that rode the broad Chicago night.

We stopped the car half a block before the bridge and switched to a taxi. I gave the guy the address and he looked at me, looked at her, then nodded briefly. I'd been told it was better to take a taxi across the border because if you drove your car you became subject to major delays owing to inspections by customs agents on your return to the U.S. side, for guns and drugs.

The town had a strange electric brightness in the stormlight. Blue and green stucco shops with pottery on display-pottery, copper, blankets, glass.

"I think I'm having second thoughts," I said.

"Please, okay?"

"Maybe they're first thoughts. I never really thought hard enough until now."

Amy could carry a fair amount of reproach in her clear brown eyes.

"I took it for granted that this was the only thing to do," I said. "We should have talked about it some more."

Her look was the kind of look you get when someone wants you to know she is taking great pains not to pity you. When we cleared the town and drove into the brown hills the rain came hard. About six minutes later the driver pulled up in front of a fairly sizable house behind some trees and the sun was hot and bright and the ground was smoking.

The woman who let us in looked at Amy and said, "Please, your name," more or less managerially.

"Amy Brookhiser."

"Yes, you'll come with me."

And that's what happened. Amy went with the woman, who was either the nurse, the wife, the office manager or some combination of these. I thought we might have some reassuring words for each other, Amy and I, or I might say something even if she didn't, although I didn't know what I might say, but they were down the hall and making a left turn and I still had our overnight bags in my hands.

All right. I set the bags down and went into the living room, or waiting room, and sat on the sofa. There were no magazines to read. All the reading was on the walls, painted sayings and occult symbols, and this was unexpected. Circles, chevrons, arrows, birds, mucho mystical drivel, and I was trying to absorb it all. A number of shaped sayings, words that formed triangles and tall palms, trees of life perhaps-sayings in English about the passage of the soul and the eye of God, and there were mystical eyes and admonitory hands on all four walls and the ceiling.

I tried to absorb this surprise, wondering what it meant and why I hadn't been warned, and that's when the doctor walked in. A man I worked with in Palo Alto had given me his name and address, and I'd called and made arrangements, and there were assurances about safety from two other people I'd talked to, safe, clean, professional, but no one had said anything about the walls.

He didn't seem to be looking at me.

He said, "Yes."

I said, "Dr. Swearingen?"

He wasn't looking at me.

He said, "Everything seems to be in order."

I said, "Do I pay now?"

We seemed to be having a conversation that went backwards.

He thought about the question of payment, his mouth scrunched up, my hand at my wallet, waiting.

He was a tall man in a white smock, tall and stooped, with an odd pallor, and deeply introspective, I thought, six feet seven or eight, an American who did abortions, according to the people I'd talked to, out of a sense of duty and compassion, and he hadn't shaved today.

I paid him two hundred dollars cash and he said, "Expect some bleeding," maybe as a way of veiling the transaction, and then he went down the hall.

I sat there with the pictures and the words. I didn't know how to think about any of this. I didn't know what to call it. Maybe Amy knew but she wasn't saying much. All she wanted to do was get it over with.

I was willing to make sacrifices and be responsible. This is what I told myself. I wanted to fix myself to something strong, to a wife, I thought, and child.

But it wasn't strong at all. It was hopeless, worthless and weak.

We wouldn't last a month together. We were restless and grasping, we were a fling that had run intermittently for two years only because we lived in different cities, and we were religious in our attachment to risk, and she was the last thing I needed in this world.

And you felt a strange shaded grief, didn't you, sitting in the room, a sadness shaded by distance, and you tried to think yourself into the middle of the child's unlived life.

Someone was cooking a meal a couple of rooms away and this disturbed me. The savor of the food and the faint sounds of activity, someone opening cabinet doors-this disturbed and confused me and made me a little angry.

Amy was twenty-six years old, a couple of weeks shy of twenty-seven, and she lived and worked in Wichita. I was twenty-four, roughly half a continent away, and I knew she half hated both of us for what had happened.

When Amy came out I realized I hadn't told the cabdriver to pick us up and we waited a while until the woman made the call and someone showed.

They'd given her a local, only, because that's what they were equipped to do, and she wasn't groggy on the ride to the border but sat forward and gripped the edges of the front seat and didn't want to talk.

The customs men checked the cab for contraband and breezed through our bags and we were in our rented car in a matter of minutes.

I drove out of Del Rio headed east on 90. Amy slept a while and woke up and was thirsty. Up ahead of us a pickup went into a spin, just like that, the only other vehicle on the road, skidding and whipping when it came off a sandy ramp, and I slowed down so we could watch objectively.

"Swapped ends," Amy said quietly. "That's what my old granddad Parker would say. Truck swapped ends for sure."

She spoke in a tired and quiet voice and I drove slowly past the pickup, which was facing the way it wanted to face again, with two teenage boys in the cab, collecting themselves in a flurry of stupid grins, and I looked for a place where Amy could get a cool and healthy drink somewhere between here and the airport.

The hotel was called the Waves, and why not? This was Ocean Drive, wasn't it, in the municipality of Miami Beach.

Small rich angry men got out of rented convertibles with their dolled-up wives, women so cultishly tanned they resembled tobacco leaf.

Spoiled savvy with-it kids from northern cities flashed fake I.D.s at the bar. They were enrolled at the resort colleges in the area and were eager to catch the act in the big room.

A contingent of Cubans fell by, headed for the hotel lounge, shod, clad, tropically smart-the women in wraparound white and born to dance and the men sunglassed and wary They looked like bodyguards for some jefe about to topple.

There was a Latin band in the lounge doing mambos and cha-chas and a number of Long Island sexpots were here, looking for second husbands. They traveled in pairs or with a sister, even, like a hunter and her gun bearer, one divorced, one single-dating an orthodontist here and an iffy sort of businessman there. Says he's an executive in the hotel linen supply business? But when I call him on the phone? I have to ask for Marty? And his name is Fred?

Eyelinered, tweezered, mascara'd, flashing acrylic nails, coral, with matching lipstick and blush. These were women who'd always been part of the in-group and some of them preferred the nightclub to the lounge because they wanted to get a taste of Lenny Bruce.

First you laugh, then you dance.

The room was called El Patio and the mambo music from the lounge kept seeping in. Lenny was surprised to spot some old people in the crowd, a few canes propped against the chairs, but he decided not to do any cripple bits. Not because he was getting cautious and soft. No, there was only one subject tonight and it was central to his existence.

"We're less than two hundred miles from Cuba. I know you know this. And I know this. But I still have to say it. Those missiles are just over my right shoulder, dig. A range of one thousand kilometers, which is redundant from our viewpoint but which disturbs me anyway because we haven't even lost the war yet and we're already on the metric system."

And he stood nodding his head, looking semi-jetlagged, a little paranoid, a little overmedicated, his voice subdued and his eyes murky with lunar gloom.

"And we won't get killed for being Jewish. That's the tricky part. They'll kill us for being American. How do we feel about that?"

What a way to begin a night of entertainment. There was a long lugubrious silence. Then Lenny did a standing left turn, posed a moment like some discus Greek and finally shot his upper body forward and pounded the floor with his fist.

A college kid laughed.

"What I love are the names of our protectors. Check it out, Jim."

And he took a clutch of newsclips from the side pocket of the ratty car coat he was wearing. Mumbled some lines of text, made a few Mort Sahlish comments, dropped a clipping and kicked it, speaking briefly in his Transylvanian voice.

"All right, these men are deciding our fate. They're going in and out of solemn meetings all day and night. White shirts, cuff links, striped ties. But their names are where it's at. Adlai Stevenson. Adlai. Gases you right down to your Capezios, right? It's so exclusive it has no gender. This little boy is so special we don't want anyone to know he's a boy. Because, ultimately, dig, being a boy or a girl is so fucking common. And if anyone else uses this name within a five thousand mile radius of our Adlai, we'll pay to have him killed. And all his progeny. Completely extinguish the line. Because this is our family thing. That's it, you see. La cosa nostra. Only they don't have to do it with extortion and murder. They do it with names that no one else could ever think up."

The divorced women laughed. There were lowlifes from the dog track in attendance. Musicians on their night off. Pool boys and out-of-work dancers. There were two tables of travel agents on a junket from Toronto -they thought Lenny was a Scottish comic who did impressions of the royal family.

"All right, dig, Dean Rusk. Dean. Born to lead, to advise and instruct. Born to be bald. No, yes, wise but also tough and shrewd.

Look out for men with one syllable in each name. Unyielding motherfuckers. But here's my favorite, okay. You know what I'm gonna say, don't you?"

An old lady laughed.

"That's right. McGeorge Bundy. McGeorge. How do you survive childhood with a name like that? Was his name reversed at birth? A mistake at the hospital? Of course not. They did it. They marked him for greatness. Besides, he had a grandmother named McMary."

The old lady loved it.

Lenny took a while to riffle through the strips of newsprint, mumbling something.

"Yes, no, here's one. Roswell Gilpatric. Roswell. It's not a put-on. It's real. Look, shown here in the cabinet room. Captured on film. The secretaries, the assistant secretaries, the undersecretaries, the deputy undersecretaries, the advisors on Russian affairs. Alexis Johnson. Alexis. Bromley Smith. Bromley. Llewellyn Thompson. Llewellyn. Four /'s in Llewellyn. Takes balls, baby. Secretly, see, I have to admire them. Because they understand the logic of how to conduct yourself unsentimentally in the world. W Averell Harriman. Averell. This is a man who has his own exit on the New York State Thruway. And here's us, a stone's throw from Cuba. They're not drawn here but we are. Because the atomic bomb is Old Testament. It's the Jewish bible in spades. We feel at home with this judgment, this punishment hanging over us. Illness and misfortune. Speak to us, sweetheart."

But Lenny's paranoia and sense of tragedy may have had a more immediate source. He'd been tipped off at the airport that the Dade County police had planted Jewish detectives in the audience. Yes, Yiddish-speaking fuzz who were prepared to glom onto every vile syllable he uttered in the mother-in-law tongue.

"You want names, I'll give you names. My name is Leonard Alfred Schneider. What was I doing when I took the name Lenny Bruce? I was moving toward the invisible middle. I'm just like you, mister. Don't bug me, man, or insult my ancestors. I'm just another Lenny. Just another Bruce. But that's not what the ordained people do. McGeorge, Roswell, Adlai. They remove themselves from any taint of the big middle. And that's a genius thing. Doesn't matter where they go to church. Their name is their church. They're not only not like Leonard Alfred Schneider. They're not like Lenny Bruce. And I don't blame them, frankly."

He'd spoken quietly, conversationally, in his nasal slant, and didn't expect the large laugh. He put away the papers he'd been waving. The Latin music began to pound the walls and a heckler started talking to Lenny, a drunk with a rolled-up racing form, but Lenny only lifted the mike off the stand and blessed the man.

Then he did an impression of the Queen of England ordering Chinese takeout over the phone.

The travel agents loved it.

"If your name is Roswell or Bromley, you have a real father. Only the most responsible parents give their kids that kind of name. If you're a Roswell, you don't have a father who comes around twice a year and gives you a novelty toy when he leaves. Here, kid, a little something to deepen our relationship. You study the item. It's a rubber vomit blob. Here, kid, put it on your mother's bed." Lenny snapped his fingers and did a shoulder curl. "So happens the Office of Civil Defense is stockpiling rubber vomit in fallout shelters all over the country. They're in a frenzy right now, man. Get those shelters built and stocked. Sanitation kits, medical kits. Phenobarbital, to sedate you. Penicillin, I don't know, for bomb rash. When the radiation makes you too sick to vomit, they hand out rubber vomit, for morale. After the mass destruction of a nuclear exchange"-he looked at his watch- "they're gonna wanna rebuild. And all this cold war junk is gonna be worth plenty, as quaint memorabilia. Those yellow and black signs you've been seeing everywhere but never really noticed until six days ago-Fallout Shelter. Collector's items. All the stuff that's stashed in the storage rooms and laundry rooms that are designated shelters. Drums of drinking water. Saltines. Chapstick, for the flash. Cardboard toilets that double as salad bowls. Incidentally," he said.

A waiter dropped a tray of drinks.

"The Navy boarded a ship yesterday at the quarantine line. First ship boarded. Armed boarding party. Bet your ass it was tense, baby. Turns Out the ship's not carrying missiles. Carrying truck parts and toilet paper. See, there it is, ordinary life trying to reassert itself. That's the secret meaning of this week. The secret history that never appears in the written accounts of the time or in the public statements of the men in power. Those beautiful bombs and missiles. Those planes and submarines. Ever see anything so gorgeous? The weapons get the best engineering and the most poetic names. Meanwhile some old grubby farmer in Cuba is waiting for a carburetor for his beat-up tractor. And he's been wiping his ass with the lettuce crop. They're reminding him he has to be patient, yeah, while they work out their big-power relationships." Lenny did a dip and swivel. "You remember the way your mother talked to you when you were on the potty. Make, sweetheart. Make for mommy." He did a pivot and spin. 'And you cops on special duty. The linguists in the crowd. There's something you oughta know. The word smack, or heroin? Comes from the Yiddish shmek. You know this, experts? A sniff, a smell, like a pinch of snuff. Dig it, he's got a two hundred dollar shmek habit. Next time you bust a junkie who's a coreligionist"-the word gets a little barking laugh from the college kids-"and you stick your rubber glove up his ass to check what kind of stash he's got in there, that smell you smell is shmek, my friend. Which is just another name for ordinary life."

The detectives did not laugh.

A sea breeze blew through the room and the band was playing cha-chas now. A woman sitting down missed her chair. Dancers appeared at the far end of the bar, they were spilling out of the lounge, one-two cha-cha-cha, and Lenny rolled his shoulders and dipped his hips. The travel agents took a vote and decided to order another round. The music drilled the wall like tamale farts and a couple of college girls got up and danced in place among the crowded tables. The original dancers moved in a boxer's crouch, advancing down the bar in pastel skirts and white guayaberas while test missiles in California were reprogrammed with Soviet targets.

Lenny seized the mike and cried, "We're all gonna die!"

They laughed and half wept. He led them in a chorus of the chant. The cha-cha music poured into the room and the dancers followed in beautifully balanced twos and the men and women at the tables got up and danced in place, making pugilistic motions with their hands. One-two cha-cha-cha. They kicked off their shoes and spilled their drinks.

Lenny did a monologue in Spanglish and they loved it and laughed and half wept and a young man majoring in Wardrobe Management chugalugged a glass of straight scotch, a stone's throw from Cuba. It's fabulous, it's marvelous, it's Miami.

Marian Bowman was talking to her mother. They were in the living room of her mother's house, her mother and father's house, where she'd grown up, and there were sprays of baby's breath in most of the rooms and in bud vases on hall tables, small white flowers in branched clusters, a plant her mother liked to display in its starkness, free of the customary larger arrangement, for whatever reason a mother might have, with the elms going yellow and the red oaks blazing on a fine fall day in Madison, Wisconsin, and students running wild in the streets.

"So you've been keeping secrets."

"He's not a secret," Marian said.

"Ifbu've known him all this time and I'm only now hearing. That's a secret."

"I've known him technically all this time."

"And now you know him how?"

The mother smiled first, then the daughter.

"Untechnically," Marian said. 'And he's not a secret. There hasn't been much to say, that's all."

"There's always something to say. What do I sense about this relationship? I think you're very uncertain. You have a tendency. You always did. To act against your misgivings. Because-well, I don't know why you do it exactly."

They heard the voices more clearly now, ripping from stereo speakers set in the windows of A-frames along Mifflin Street.

"I wasn't aware. Have I expressed misgivings."

"Yes. And it's clear I'm meant to notice. And it's clear you want me to argue against the man."

"This is totally. No no no no," Marian said mildly.

"You can't bring yourself to argue against him. You want me to doit."

"And you sense all this, sort of."

"Not sort of. Hard and clear."

"And what happens when you argue against him? Do I say thank-you mother you've saved me from a fate worse."

"Of course not. You defend him. You stand up for him."

"She stands up for her man. And you what, you infer all this from a little bitty talk in which I said practically nothing about him."

"Tell me I'm wrong," her mother said, "and I'll make every effort to believe you."

Her mother turned toward the window showing a faint annoyance. They were running in the streets. They were probably throwing bricks and starting fires. There was a bullhorn voice mixed in with the music that ripped from the speakers.

"They have what they call the riot season."

"Did it ever occur to me," Marian said, "that Chicago would seem peaceful and decent?"

"I don't know if this is the riot season or not. Maybe it's just a block party that the police are trying to contain. Although, no, that can't be right. They have block parties in the spring."

"I'll come back for Thanksgiving if you'll make them stop that noise."

Her mother said, "Is he married?"

And instantly regretted it. Marian saw the self-reproach in the tilt of her mother's mouth. Yes, a rare lapse. It diminished the authority of her earlier remarks and was totally unthought-out, a lapse, a tactical mistake, and the color in her mother's face went flat. Because if he were married, one, why would Marian talk about him without saying so; and, two, why would she talk about him at all?

"No, of course not."

"Of course not. I know that," her mother said.

Marian went upstairs feeling better. She loved her old room. She loved coming back because the quiet streets were here, in theory, and the houses with screened sunporches, and the elmed esplanades and university buildings, and because her room was here, kept safe for her, spare, unspecial, unfussed over, but a place no one could see as she did, containing a sizable measure of what is meant by home.

She started packing for the trip back, taking some winter things out of the closet, and then stopped just long enough to turn on the radio. She found WIBA, Up Against the Wall FM, because she wanted to know what was going on out there, just as a point of exasperated interest, and because the noise was getting louder.

It was too soon to pack but she did it anyway. Home is the place where they have to take you in, said the poet, or said Marian's father paraphrasing the poet, and home is also the place you can't wait to get the hell out of.

She had a job in Chicago she hated. Only she didn't really hate it- she'd acquired gestures of discontent because this seemed to be a thing you were supposed to do. She was twenty-five and saw no future doing backroom work in a brokerage house. But the job was okay in a way because it forced her to be disciplined and involved and unsloppy, and anyway there was nothing else she wanted to try just now.

The radio said, DowDay DowDay DowDay DowDay.

She rummaged through the dresser, finding a couple of old sweaters that might be passable, still, and a number of bright stocking caps that were funny and dumb.

The dresser was the one object in the room worth a second look, outside the text of personal reference-an oak piece fitted with a tall scuffed mirror that was hinged to swivels in a graceful trefoil frame.

The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

She began to understand that some of the noise in the streets, the music and voices ripping from speakers that students had placed in their windows, was coming from the station she was tuned to.

She packed and listened.

The radio said, Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

She began to understand that this was Vietnam Week on campuses across the country. And this was Dow Day here in Madison, a protest against Dow Chemical, whose recruiters were active on campus and whose products included a new and improved form of napalm with a polystyrene additive that made jellied matter cling more firmly to human flesh.

Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

She thought, Small wonder. Because it sounded as if the students were tearing up the campus and it looked as if, earlier in the day, with Vietcong flags on Linden Street and mimes in whiteface tussling with police on Bascom Hill-it looked as if what?

The station was reporting Dow Day and seemingly taking part.

The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

It looked as if something had happened in the night to change the rules of what is thinkable.

She began to understand that the riot out there, if that's what it was, was being augmented and improved by a simulated riot on the radio, an audio montage of gunfire, screams, sirens, klaxons and intermittent bulletins real and possibly not.

She found the old coat she thought she'd lost-how do you lose a coat, everybody said-five years ago at the lake.

The radio said, Take your belt and wrap it around your fist.

When her mother served pork loin last night her father muttered, "Off the pig," and somehow it wasn't meant to be funny although when Marian laughed he did too, a little bitterly.

The radio said, There's an ANFO bulletin coming up.

She was supposed to go to school at night but wasn't, to learn Stocks, bonds, debentures and other instruments of material wealth available for the production of more wealth, but wasn't because she just wasn't, but would, and soon, knowing what she knew, that she needed outside forces to counteract her tendencies.

She wanted to call Nick but knew he wouldn't be there.

The radio played recorded gunfire, car crashes, lines of gritty dialogue from old war movies.

Her mother called her remiss and indifferent. She suffered from disambition, said her mother.

Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

She listened to this because it was happening here but she also tuned out intermittently, let her attention wander, as a form of self-defense. There was a kind of tiredness to it all. It had that wearying insistence that made her want to tune out.

She packed and thought of calling, even though he wasn't there, to leave a message with someone in the school office, clever and sexy, and he wouldn't like that at all but she thought she might do it anyway.

ANFO seemed to be an acronym for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

She put the sweaters back in the dresser. She'd pick them up at Thanksgiving if she thought she needed them and if she didn't change her mind about their passability, which she was in the process of doing.

The radio said, Kafka without the f is kaka. Yes, we are talking about waste, we are talking about fertilizer, we are talking about waste and weapons, we are talking about ANFO, the bomb that begins in the asshole of a barnyard pig.

PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

She dug a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket in the suitcase. Then she opened a window and lit one up. The noise came blowing in, bullhorn cops, news bulletins, rock music, and she turned off the radio and sat by the window smoking.

She'd seen a multicolored Volkswagen beetle with painted faces in the windows, earlier in the day, on Babcock Drive.

She sat there blowing smoke out the window because her mother was supposedly allergic and would have preferred, in any case, that Marian did not smoke, and they were taking off their belts and wrapping them around their fists.

And a Dow recruiter was trapped in Commerce Hall, listening to firecrackers, if that's what they were, going off outside the door to room 104, where he talked across the desk to a potential recruit.

There were trash fires on lower State Street.

There were rumors about Terminal Theater, a group that did not concede its own existence, and a student on a second-story porch on Mifflin Street turned up the volume when she saw police in riot gear moving in a double column down the street.

And over by the Library Mall members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, if that's who they were, kept turning up among the police, more or less suicidally, wearing whiteface and carrying panpipes and dressed in busker costume, quaint and ill-fitting mid-Victorian drag, with cricket caps, a dozen young men and women on the police side of the skirmish line, mimicking the gestures of the cops and getting dragged to a van and beaten.

People everywhere listened to the radio, to the dialogue between what was real and what was spliced and mixed and processed and played, and the speakers dealt out heavy metal and a woman on the air read the copy on package inserts of Dow products, speaking in a hushed and sexy voice.

The police began firing tear gas and students started running toward the gas out of a sort of rompish curiosity or because the gas carried a fragrance of apple blossoms, believe it or not, a fast-acting agent now being used in Vietnam.

Common Sense, Uncommon Chemistry. This was Dow's catchy ad slogan and the woman read it on the air repeatedly in a soft and sexy voice.

There were Dow interviews scheduled in three buildings but the sit-in was taking place at Commerce and that's where the recruiter sat trapped, with a hamburger going cold in a white bag.

Two squads of police formed a wedge.

He said to the potential recruit, "So tell me about what happens between now and graduation day."

The kid said, "Someone had a live rat out there."

"Let's, I think, stick to the issue," the recruiter said, "for our own, really, peace of mind."

Or they ran toward the gas because they thought the moral force of their argument would neutralize the effect of the chemicals.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe was not supposed to be on the Library Mall. This was the interesting thing.

And affinity groups started fires here and there, or broke windows, small bands with names like the Mudville Nine, the members masked in bandannas soaked in baking soda and egg white, a folk remedy against the gas.

And smoke in white streamers rose from projectiles that came flopping down on the broad lawn in front of Bascom Hall. Students were running the other way now, moving in an agitated mass, some with dixie cups over their mouths or hankies out, and others strolled casually on the sidewalk between the squads of helmeted police and the thickening gas, which was beginning to roll in banks toward the columned hall, and a guy resting a guitar lengthwise on his head stood watching from the streetlight.

And the sexy voice on the radio repeated the Du Pont slogan now. Better Things for Better Living… Through Chemistry. The woman enjoyed the pause. She prolonged the pause. She moaned through the pause. She spoke urgently and excitedly up to the pause and then she paused and moaned slowly and then she finished reciting the slogan, finally, all sated and limp and moaned out, and then she started from the beginning again.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe was supposed to be in front of Old Chemistry This was the interesting thing. They were supposed to be passing out copies of Faculty Document 122, in front of Old Chemistry, which is exactly where they were, chanting Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. This was interesting because it meant that the people in whiteface on the Library Mall must be members of Terminal Theater, the legendary factoidal group whose name, even, was subject to conjecture, or was an aspect, perhaps, of the group's borderline existence.

Rock-and-roll everywhere, serpentine twangs of feedback rolling from window speakers all over the campus and on nearby streets.

The police were coming down hard now, clubs out, cops acting without orders or against orders, inevitably, riding their own rampant highs.

The recruiter and the student waited to be rescued and they talked in the meantime about courses and professors as an affinity group entered the building with cherry bombs, lengths of pipe and size D flashlight batteries, the homemade makings of a mortar attack.

The radio reported that Lyndon Johnson was being dangled upside down from a towline on a helicopter, swinging in the breeze over the Primate Lab, right here in Madison, in the outright nude, after being kidnapped by parties unknown.

The radio reported that you could make your own napalm by mixing one part liquid detergent Joy with two parts benzene or one part gasoline. Shake vigorously.

The day-glo VW moved through the streets and Marian shut the window and turned on the radio and then went and flushed the cigarette down the toilet.

She began to understand that someone or some group had taken over the radio and as the day waned a man recited instructions for the manufacture of a fertilizer bomb. How to buy the nitrate, cheap, it comes bagged or bulk, from a farm-supply store, and how to add the fuel oil and what to do to ignite the mix.

There was an interval of static and a brief silence. Then the radio returned to its normal broadcast mode.

What was this?

Three voices chanting liturgically, a priest reciting the same line over and over and two altar boys delivering fixed responses.

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry.

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry.

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry.

She turned off the radio.

Then her father came home and was filled in by her mother and they all sat down to dinner with the poached bass and the baby's breath and her father said, "What is he?"

Marian thought this was funny and maybe her father did too, a little. What could she say? She could say what he wasn't. This would take a fair amount of time. But concerning what he was, well, she could say he was an English teacher in a secondary school in Arizona. But she couldn't say a whole lot more because there wasn't much he'd told her.

Her mother talked about the broken bones of the demonstrators, the students with head wounds, clubbed, gassed, bleeding.

Her father said, "Do you know what this means to me, the injuries of the students? What can I compare it with? Because I want to be fair to them. It's like the life and death of a fly, on a wall, in a village, somewhere in China. That's how much I care."

He had a drained smile that no one liked to see.

"I guess that means you can't be a Buddhist. Because the Buddhists if I understand them correctly," her mother said, and then let the thought drift toward the ceiling.

Marian sat in her room that night and dialed Nick's number. She told him about her day. There wasn't much to tell him because she left out the demonstration. She was feeling needy, moody and lunar and she didn't want distractions.

Then she told him she wanted to get married. She wanted to marry him and live with him, anywhere, wherever he wanted, and not have kids and not have friends and never go to dinner with her parents.

There was a silence at the other end that she could not read. A telephone silence can be hard to read, grim and deep and sometimes unsettling. You don't have the softening aspect of the eyes or even the lookaway glance while he ponders. There's nothing in the silence but the deep distance between you.

They finished the conversation in a halting and awkward manner and she was damn mad, angry at him and at herself, mostly herself, she decided, and she was determined to get back to the grind, to the work of hygiened perfection, shaping herself, willing herself into tighter being.

She opened the window and lit a cigarette and sat there blowing streams of smoke into the cool night air.

His mother didn't want him playing cards on the corner, even with Catholic school boys, and she waited until he came upstairs and told him.

He played a game called sett' e mezz' for pennies, sitting on the one-step terrace outside the grocery store, freezing on the stone, and he memorized the cards coming out of the dealer's hand and won very regular, expecting a picture card and it would come, worth half a point, but she told him not to play anymore.

But before she told him this he sat there in the cold memorizing the cards and making his bets. When he got seven and a half, which was the best score you could get, he turned over his hole card and said, "Sett' e mezz'"

But when the dark seeped down around the players he had to quit the game and go to the butcher to pick up the meat his mother had bought earlier in the day.

The butcher was nicer to him now, with Nick upstate. The butcher asked him if he was old enough to get it up and Matty said thirteen, almost, and the butcher said salut'.

The butcher said he needed someone to tell him what it was like to get it up because he couldn't remember anymore and this was the same thing the butcher used to say to Nick, more or less, when Nick was the one who went for the meat, and Matty felt good about this, smelling sawdust and blood.

When he was walking home with the meat a woman came out of the bread store and gave Matty a tweak with her fingers, a twist of the flesh on his cheek, affectionate, like turning a key, and she told him to give regards to his mother.

He reached his street and the kids were still playing cards in front of the grocery, in the dark, some of the same kids who used to taunt him for his chess when he played chess, or because he had no father, and he sat in for a couple of hands, figuring the meat could not go bad in the freezing cold, and he memorized the cards as they fell.

Then he went upstairs and she told him she didn't want him gambling. She told him even if it was only pennies. She said it didn't look good and led to other things and other kinds of company and she told him she didn't want to say anything in front of the other boys, whether they were Catholic school boys or not, and he stood there with the meat in his arms.

They were the two of them alone and he wanted to obey He felt the solemn weight of the situation, the size of Nicky's going, but there were always kids playing cards on the stoops and corners and he wasn't sure, when they dealt him in, that he'd say no. And not because he could memorize the cards. It wasn't so sneaky as that. It was another kind of thing completely. He was a little bit of a hero with his brother upstate, doing what he'd done, and boys from blocks around wanted to know him.

This is why he thought it might be hard to obey her, with the lamb chops knobby in his arms.

You can't fight a war without acronyms. This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey.

And where do these compressed words come from?

They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe-storky bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek.

But acronyms also come from the ranks, don't they, at least occasionally? Look at old Louis strapped and cramped in his aft-facing ejection seat in the lower deck of the forward fuselage, going through the checklist. And the crews in alert barracks worldwide waiting for the klaxons to sound. And the guys on the line who load the ordnance and juice the engines. These are men who feel an armpit intimacy with the weapons systems they maintain and fly. This gives their acronyms a certain funky something.

And this is why the high-altitude bomber sitting on the ramp out there, crew of six including Louis, a great, massive, swept-winged and soon-to-soar B-52-this aircraft is known as a BUFF to tens of thousands of men throughout the command, for Big Ugly Fat Fuck.

In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him.

"Chuckman, I find myself in a very pussy-minded mood today."

"Hell of a time to be thinking such thoughts."

"I don't think no thoughts. They just come."

"Being we're strapped in this tube for the next."

"That's the fucked-up beauty of the thing. How thoughts just come. Of and by themselves."

"Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman."

"In other words you're saying."

"Hold that thought."

"Hold that thought," Louis said. "Put it on the back burner."

"Exactly."

"First we bomb them."

"Then we fuck them," said the navigator.

Whatever the bluntness of the acronym, there was nothing ugly about the nose art that adorned the area of the fuselage just aft of the cockpit windows. A tall young leggy blond, a cheerleader type in a skimpy skirt and halter with hands on hips and feet apart and a dare-me look on her face, she wants to be sexy but isn't sure she knows how, very girl-next-doorish. And her name painted in script just above the line of mission symbols that numbered thirty-eight.

Long Tall Sally.

The pilot taxied to the runway and the tower cleared the plane for takeoff.

The copilot said, "Five, four, three."

The pilot had the throttles gang-barred to full-on position.

The copilot said, "One, zero, rolling."

When the plane rumbled past marker 7, for seven thousand feet of runway, the copilot said, speaking with a sense of enormous buffeted mass that caused his teeth to feel uprooted because this is nearly half a million pounds of Big Ugly Fat Fuckness laboring to lift itself over the marsh grass-the copilot said, "Committed."

And then the dark body began to loom like some apparition of the mists, long wings bending and flaps extended and wheels breaking contact and then the gear coming up and the smoky spews of trailing black alcohol and the storm-roar shaking the flats.

In the hole the navigator, Charles Wainwright Jr., called Chuckie, continued to scan the skaty-eight meters and switches and disconnects, a whole lifetime of indicators clustered in front of him and above him and to one side-the side not occupied by Louis Bakey, the radar-bombardier.

Chuckie scanned the switches and harassed his buddy, encouraging marriage to a decent woman with church affiliations.

"Don't start in with me," Louis said. "I don't need a wife. I don't need a church. You're the one who needs these things."

"I already, Louis, have had a wife."

"Who you didn't appreciate mentally."

"I had to go through my awkward phase. I was finishing out some things," Chuckie said.

The two men had been crewmates since Greenland, flying through arctic mirages and fifty-knot gales. Their current bombing runs were strangely uneventful by comparison, or a different level of reality at any rate, easier to project as a movie.

"I know what you need," Louis said. "A woman who'll be willing to accept your history of screwups. You need to unload this stuff on someone who's innocent. You want a sweet young female who was born to understand you. Like the sweet thing on the nose of this aircraft."

Louis said sweet thing in a scornful black voice. Since Louis was a scornful black, this was not surprising. Swee' thang. Not that he didn't have a spiritual side that Chuckie responded to, You only had to listen to his Stories of the early A-tests over Nevada-stories he'd told dozens of times through the years in lonely barracks in Greenland, Goose Bay and a number of remote SAC bases in the continental U.S.

"I don't think you ought to deride."

"Deride. That's nice," Louis said. "I rather deride her than ride her, tell you the truth. I believe she's too skinny for my taste. Plus she's been misnamed."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I get so tired. Educating these boys."

"What's it mean, Louis? Misnamed."

"Long Tall Sally."

"From the song of the same title."

"At least he knows that much. Heavens above."

"You think I don't know Little Richard and his Ow-ow-ow-ow?"

"This boy worth saving," Louis said. "But the point being."

"Used to hide his records from my parents. Oh baby woo baby. I was thirteen years old."

"This old Negro is touched, Chuckman. But the point I'm making is that the Long Tall Sally in the song and the Long Tall Sally they painted on our nose are not one and the same female of the species."

"Why not? Check her out. She's long, she's tall, she's got great legs and she looks to me like her name could be Sally. Woo. We're gonna have some fun tonight."

"Gonna have some fun tonight. That's exactly right," Louis said. "Only the Sally in Little Richard's number ain't gonna be seen in no car in no drive-in movie doing a little necking with a youth like yourself."

"Why not?" Chuckie said.

"Because she black and she bad."

Chuckie studied his radar scope and recomputed the aircraft's path over a couple of thousand miles of sea curve and mango atoll.

"What do you mean she black?"

"Because the song has a plot that somehow got lost in the wooing and wheeing."

"This song's been around thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years maybe?"

"More or less," Louis said.

"And in all these years I'm not aware of anybody coming forth with a correction to the skin color of the title character, okay?"

On the intercom the pilot said conversationally, "I wonder if that's Manila down there. Sure looks pretty, Nav."

This was an unfunny dig at the windowless pair in the lower deck, who not only lacked a skyscape but sat facing backwards and not only sat facing backwards but would be forced to eject downwards if nicked by an enemy SAM.

Another sinister acronym designed to kill.

"Pilot, this is Nav," Chuckie said.

And he fine-tuned his scope and requested a minimal turn, aligning the plane's actual path with the track he'd plotted earlier.

Then he said, "Louis, this girl out there is good luck for us. Nearly forty missions without a major incident. Don't abuse her goodwill. She's Long Tall Sally. The one and only."

When Louis became agitated he used a staccato patter, a kind of hyperdrawl with elements of falsetto pique that he strung throughout at a master pitch.

"Song say You have any idea what the song say? This woman in an alley. Old uncle John in the alley with her. She built for speed. She got everything he need. Yes baby woo baby. Gonna have some fun tonight."

They were fifty thousand feet above the South China Sea, flying in a three-bomber formation called a cell, and there were fifteen cells in the air today, and each cell carried over three hundred bombs, and the resulting zone of destruction was known as a sandbox, and Chuckie was bizarro'd in one part of his brain by the crazy conversation he was having with old Louis even as he felt sad and hurt, in another and nearer part, by his buddy's attitude toward the girl on the nose of their aircraft.

"This song written by a black woman from Apaloosa, Mississippi. Richard add the little touches. I guarantee, brother, this Sally we're talking about ain't no skinny blond playing kissy-face in no backseat. She's an advance class of entertainment."

Sad and hurt. Chuckie's mind began to wander to Greenland, his previous posting, not a bad place to survive the breakup of a marriage. His human discontents were muted in the icy mists and the whole blowing otherworld of whiteouts and radio disruptions and unrelenting winds and total cold and objects that did not cast shadows and numerous freak readings on compasses and radar scopes and the BUFF that crashed on an ice sheet with live nukes aboard, anomalies of the eye, the mind, the systems themselves, and the experience made him sense the ghost-spume of some higher hippie consciousness. Or maybe Greenland was just a delicate piece of war-gaming played in a well-heated room in some defense institute, with hazelnut coffee and croissants.

Louis was conversing with the pilot in bombspeak, which must mean it was time for Chuckie to pay attention.

Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar-the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.

"Little Richard's mostly for white people anyway," he muttered to Louis.

"But Long Tall Sally's black. Just so you don't forget it."

His late great dad. Not really such a bad guy in death. But so tensely parental in life, all empty command and false authority, that Chuckie suspected the man's heart just wasn't in it. No, he didn't blame his parents for everything that had gone wrong. Chuckie was misery enough on his own recognizance. But he couldn't think of his father without regretting the loss of the one thing he'd wanted to maintain between them. That was the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me-down.

The ball he'd more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he'd accidentally dumped with the household trash.

One of those distracted events that seemed to mark the inner nature of the age.

Next to him Louis sat in his station with his bomb release mode and his master bomb-control panel and his bombing data indicator and his urinal and his hot cup. Everything you'd want for a fulfilling life in the sky.

Louis said, "Pilot, this is Mad Bomber. Will release in rapid sequence. One hundred twenty seconds to drop."

Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca meant nothing to Chuckie.

Vague names from his unstable childhood. The memory of the baseball itself, the night of the baseball-vague and unstable and dim.

Louis spoke through a teary-eyed yawn.

"Pilot, come right three degrees. Hold. Bomb doors open. Check. Sixty seconds to drop."

So many missions, all those indistinguishable bombs. Chuckie used to love these bomb runs but not anymore. He used to feel a bitter and sado-sort of grudge pleasure, getting even for his life, taking it out on the landscape and the indigenous population. He'd been a proud part of a bomb wing that was dropping millions of tons of ordnance off the racks and out of the bays. The bombs fluttered down on the NVA and the ARVN alike, because if the troops on both sides pretty much resemble each other and if their acronyms contain pretty much the same letters, you have to bomb both sides to get satisfactory results. The bombs also fell on the Vietcong, the Viet Minh, the French, the Laotians, the Cambodians, the Pathet Lao, the Khmer Rouge, the Montagnards, the Hmong, the Maoists, the Taoists, the Buddhists, the monks, the nuns, the rice farmers, the pig farmers, the student protesters and war resisters and flower people, the Chicago 7, the Chicago 8, the Catonsville 9-they were all, pretty much, the enemy.

Louis droned on.

"Steady, steady, steady. On auto now. Tone audible. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven."

Five hundred pounders on this run, sleek and effete, one hundred and eight of them at Louis' drowsy touch, aimed at the Ho Chi Minh trail, a mission based on the bullshit readings of image interpreters who spend their days and nights scrutinizing the itty-bitty blurs on nearly identical frames of recon film that unfurl endlessly across their eyeballs more or less, Chuckie thought, the way the bombs drop endlessly from the B-52s.

Louis droned on.

"Six, five, four."

And Chuckie thought of the Ballad of Louis Bakey, a tale the bombardier never tired of telling and the navigator never wanted to come to an end because it was like a great Negro spiritual that makes your whole face tingle with reverence and awe.

How Louis comes strutting out of bombardier school and finds himself ere wing on a B-52 at twenty-six thousand feet over the Nevada Test Site, simulating the release of a fifty-kiloton nuclear bomb.

Simulating, mind you, while an actual device of this exact magnitude is meanwhile being detonated from the shot tower directly beneath the aircraft.

The idea being, Let's see how the aircraft and crew react, metalwise and bodywise, to the flash, the blast, the shock, the spectacle and so on.

And if they come through it more or less intact, maybe we'll let them drop their own bomb someday.

Whole plane's blacked out. Windows shielded by curtain pads covered with Reynolds Wrap. Crew holding pillows over eyes. Little nylon pillows that smell to Louis intriguingly like a woman's underthings.

A volunteer medic sits in a spare seat with five inches of string hanging out of his mouth and a tea-bag tag at the end of it. He has swallowed the rest of the string, which holds an x-ray plate coated with aluminum jelly, dangling somewhere below the esophagus, to measure the radiation passing through his body.

Louis does his phony countdown and waits for the flash. A strong and immortal young man on a noble mission.

"Three, two, one."

Then the world lights up. A glow enters the body that's like the touch of God. And Louis can see the bones in his hands through his closed eyes, through the thick pillow he's got jammed in his face.

I move my head, there's whole skeletons dancing in the flash. The navigator, the instructor-navigator, the sad-ass gunner. We are dead men flying.

I thought Lord God Jesus. I swear to Jesus I thought this was heaven. Sweat is rolling down my face and there's smoke coming off the circuit breakers and the detonation's blowing us thousands of feet up, against our best intentions.

I thought I was flying right through Judgment Day with some woman's nylon breasts plumped up in my face.

And when the shock wave hit, we got pummeled up another two thousand feet, this big tonnage aircraft acting like a leaf on a blowy night.

And I kept seeing the flying dead through closed eyes, skeleton men with knee bone connected to the thigh bone, I hear the word of the Lord.

And I thought, because, being a black man, I would be harder to see through. But I saw right through my skin to my bones. This flash too bright to make racial niceties.

All the same in God's eyes, so let that be a lesson.

And the medic with the string hanging out of his mouth and his hand on the tea-bag tag so he won't swallow it, and I can see the x-ray plate through skin, bones, ribs and whatnot, and it's glowing like a sunrise on the desert.

When it is safe to withdraw the pillow and open his eyes, Louis opens his eyes and puts down the pillow and makes his way to the cockpit and helps the copilot remove the thermal curtains and there it is, alive and white above them, the mushroom cloud, and it is boiling and talking and crackling like some almighty piss-all vision.

My eyes went big and stayed that way and ain't ever really closed. Because I seen what I seen. That thing so big and wide and high above us. And it was popping and heaving like nothing on this earth. And we flew right past the stem and it's rushing and whooshing and talking, it's pushing the cloud right up into the stratosphere.

Thigh bone connected to the hip bone.

In a few years I lost my handwriting skills. Can't write my name without wobbles and skips. I pee in slow motion now. And my left eye sees things that belong to my right.

And that was the Ballad of Louis Bakey told to a thousand airmen on wind-howling bases through the short days and long years of constant alert in the dark and stoic heart of cold war winters.

"Bombs away," said Louis blandly.

But the mean and cutting fun had gone out of it for Chuckie. He didn't want to kill any more VC. And he was developing a curious concern for the local landscape. Tired of killing the forest, the trees of the forest, the birds that inhabit the trees, the insects that live their whole karmic lives nestled in the wing feathers of the birds.

The aircraft racked into a tight turn.

"Louisman, don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night?"

"Don't start in with me."

"Thinking there's got to be a more productive way to spend your time."

"That's what they're thinking down there."

"Than dropping bombs on people who never said a cross word to you."

"Living in tunnels. I'll tell you what they're thinking. They're living in tunnels they dig in the ground and we're in a Big Ugly Fat Fuck pounding the shit out of them. And they're thinking there's got to be a more productive way."

A number of times lately on these routine missions Chuckie has had ejection fantasies. Check the leg guards and ankle restraints and then pull the trigger ring and boom. He'd be fired down and out and into the smoky sky. To come floating over Golden Gate Park, in the playful movie version, where a miniskirted blond named Sally raises her head from a copy of Frantz Fanon maybe or Herbert Marcuse, two authors Chuckie has had a tough time finding in the PX at the base, to see a polka-dot parachute dropping toward the treetops.

No, he'd never been a fan but the baseball had been sweet to have around-yes, sweet, beaten, seamed, virile and old, a piece of personal history that meant far more to him than the mobbed chronicles of the game itself.

The aircraft headed back to Guam, which rhymes with bomb, but he was thinking of Greenland now, the shadowless white maw, the tricks of light, vistas without horizons at the end of them. A place that never became more than a rumor, even to those who were based there, most of all to those-the kind of unverified information that resembled his life.

Down out of the sky finally. When they landed he heard the hot screech of the wheels and felt the drag chute pop and hold. He knew the Follow Me truck was out there on the taxiway but he couldn't see it of course, still stuck, for a few minutes longer, in the dimlit hole, surrounded by his acronyms.

Louis said, "I want pussy, Chuckman, and I want it now. But she's got to respect me and what I do."

"And what you stand for."

"What I stand for. Very good, son. I see I'm getting through to you."

The truck said Follow Me and the ground crew was already moving toward the aircraft, dragging hoses, pipes, lines of test gear, the men prepared to go through a checklist the size of eleven lengthy novels on the subject of war and peace.

"Because if she don't respect me," Louis said, "I feel empty when it's over."

"I know the feeling."

"The feeling never changes."

"First we fuck them."

"Then we bomb them," Louis said.

And it wouldn't be long at all before the massive aircraft lumbered down the runway again, fatted with ordnance, every rivet straining at the takeoff, up, out, over-a mortal power in the sky.

7

It was a place you might wander into if you didn't know the neighborhood, a graveyard bar under a bridge approach, and you might mistake the place at a glance for one of those Eighth Avenue bars that never seem to close, the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone, where the pipe fitters and garment workers go, or the railbirds back from the track, or the insomniacs back from nowhere, a sandwich and a beer, or a shot and a beer, but this was another category altogether, a place practically outside time, called Frankie's Tropical Bar, on the Lower East Side, and who do I see when I walk in the door but Jeremiah Sullivan, speaking of graveyards, because he didn't look too good.

"Am I seeing right?"

I said, "Hello, Jerry."

"Nick Shay? Where the hell did you come from?"

I said, "Hello, Jerry. Where are we?"

"I know where I am. Where the hell are you? I hear things every so often. California, Arizona. I saw your mother three, four years ago. It's been what? Fifteen years?"

I said, "I'm in town for a week. Doing a research project for some outfit in the Midwest. What about you?"

"Don't be so calm. Fifteen, almost, fucking years. What are you drinking?"

"What are you drinking?"

"Don'task,"he said.

"That's what I'll have."

He looked around for the bartender but the guy was gone. A man with a bandaged head sat at the far end of the bar trying to bounce a coin into a shot glass. And there were two women on stools not far from where Jerry was standing, a couple of local biddies you might assume, only they weren't cozy or talky or interested in other people's talk-just ancient and wasted regulars of the art.

We traded the pure facts of whereabouts and job and then Jerry supplied elaborate reports on people we'd grown up with, news he'd probably been storing for an occasion such as this, his suit pants sagging under his paunch and his tie knotted halfway down his shirt-front.

"You married, Nick?"

"No."

"You seeing someone special?"

"No. I met a woman recently in Chicago. But no's the answer. I'm not the marrying type. I don't see myself married. I don't feel marriage bound. I don't even think about it."

"In your wildest dreams. Me, I'm married. Two kids. I'd show you pictures but you don't want to see pictures."

The bartender showed up and I got a stinger that overflowed the glass. It was late afternoon, in fading light, and there was a palm tree mural, unfinished, behind the bar, and a live sombrero dangling from a beam. Jerry said this used to be a jazz club that failed almost immediately and after they dropped the music and after the clientele changed he found he kept coming back. He needed an hour between the office and the family to be alone, he said, and think.

He was right, I didn't want to see pictures.

"I'm thirty," he said. "When my father was thirty-five he looked like an old man."

"Only to you. You were in first grade. They all looked like old men."

"No, he was old. He was worn down. It's good to see you, Nick. I think about you. I go back there. The place was so crowded once. Now it's empty."

We'd gone to grammar school together, with the nuns, and then Jerry had gone to a Catholic high school and I switched to public and we saw each other only rarely, in a movie lobby maybe buying a Coke, he's with his friends, I'm with mine, and there was a curious sense of separation, not unfriendly but deep, and it was the school difference partly, the veering of habits and practices, but also something irreconcilable, the style, the friends, the future.

"You've been away a hell of a long time. A hell of a long time. Maybe you want to think about coming back," he said.

"Live here? Forget it. No. I like it out there."

"Out there. What's out there?"

"Everything you've never heard of."

"If I never heard of it, how terrific can it be?" he said.

We used to call him Jumpy Jerry because he twitched and squinted and still did, I noticed, wearing glasses now and a school ring.

I didn't tell him about the Jesuits. Too interesting. He'd keep me here for hours. I told him about the project I was working on, to alter traditional methods of school instruction, and how I'd been visiting schools in ghettos and marginal parts of town, here and in Philadelphia, as a freelance associate in a behavorial research firm in Evanston, Illinois.

"And you teach."

"I've taught, I've taught. And I'll go back to it probably," I said, "sooner or later. Secondary schools. Civics and English. But I want to teach Latin."

This was also too interesting. He should have been royally amused but it was too interesting for that. Jerry had seemed for a time to be priestward bound, that was the word on him, or the Irish Christian Brothers maybe, and it put a look of total dislocation on his face, thinking of the Nicky he used to know and the one he'd hear about later, doing Latin in a classroom.

"You go see your mother?"

"Went up there yesterday," I said.

"She still in 611?"

"Still there."

"I like to go back," he said. "I go eat on Arthur Avenue. I walk all over. I take my kids to the zoo."

"See it now. It's disappearing."

"It used to be so crowded. Or is that just in my mind? The summer nights. Fantastic. It's great to see you, Nick. I'm having one more. Have one more."

I wanted to finish the first one and leave, or not finish it and leave. A chance meeting like this, if you run it five minutes longer than it's worth, you ruin the night and the following day.

He kept adjusting his glasses.

A man alone at a table was moaning a bummed-out monologue that involved being followed wherever he went, and they were recording his private thoughts, and they were sending the seeing-eye blind to spy on him with their dogs and their pencils and their cups, and they were doing this on buses and subways both.

"Jerry, you ought to go home and play with your kids. When you're fifty or sixty, you can come here and think about the past."

But he didn't want to go home. He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head. The dead, the married, the moved-to-Jersey, the kid with five sisters who became a safecracker, the handball ace who's a chiropractor, the stuck-up blond in the fifth grade who married a Puerto Rican prizefighter.

"We ought to go up there, Nick. Serious. Take the subway, we'll be there in forty-five minutes. We can get dinner at Mario's. I'll make some calls. Get some of the guys. They'll love it. They'll meet us. Serious, man. Come on, drink, we'll go."

His voice carried an urgent logic. He was defensive and a little angry and about halfway drunk, gripped by the plan and a little angry in advance, wary of the thought that I might not see the beauty and inevitability of a trip to the Bronx, that I might be unswayed by the power of old-times'-sake, and he was already sensing the edges of a bitter affront.

"Come on, serious, we'll take the subway. We'll go see Lofaro. Some of the old faces. They'd love to see you, Nick."

I didn't want to put him off, to seem outside this or above it. Jerry knew I'd been in correction and then more or less lost to news and rumor and now here I was turned out in a tweed jacket and doing a job I liked and looking okay, stopped smoking, didn't overdo the drinking, knew a woman with a sexy cello voice and was probably, regularly banging her, and then look at him, nice Catholic boy gone baggy and stale, hates going home, a wife in Jackson Heights and two small kids, and he's lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, and drinks so much he blacks out, and sells commercial time for a radio station at the end of the dial, and all because he's never killed a man.

"This is a thing we have to do," Jerry said. "We'll grab a cab-on me."

A man named Jorge started a conversation with the bartender. Jorge wore a headband and looked sexually deranged. I didn't think of these people as regulars exactly. They were denizens. That was the word somehow, from the Late Latin, deep within, and that's what they were like, trapped souls trying to emerge, and I began to understand that Jerry came here so he could put aside self-pity and the gnaws of practical worry and be with people who would talk to him in a kind of delusional plainsong, a run-on voice without ordinary sense or strict meter but coming from deeper inside than he could bear to hear in his own locution.

The lights dimmed and flickered.

Jerry was talking to me and there was a woman with Jorge who was saying something to the bartender about the optimum temperature of beer and that's when the lights dimmed and flickered and then went out.

Jerry was saying, "Spur of the moment. I'll make some calls. I'll get some guys. I'll get what's-his-name, Allie. This is a thing, my friend, where you don't have the right to refuse."

Then the lights went out.

The man at the far end of the bar stopped trying to bounce quarters into his shot glass.

Someone said, "Is that the lights?"

We sipped our stingers, Jerry and I.

The bartender said, "You know what?"

Someone started talking in the men's room, loud enough for us to hear.

The bartender said, "Looks like from here the whole block's out."

The first voice said, "Is that the lights?"

"They must be working on something that caused a short," the bartender said. 'And me without candles."

The voice from the toilet grew louder and agitated. One of the old women said something to the other, the first words out of either of them.

Jerry and I sipped our stingers.

"But you know what?" the bartender said.

Jorge was speaking Spanish now.

The bartender came up with a flashlight from the bottom of the bar and he wedged it between two bottles on the shelf beneath the mural.

The woman with Jorge was also speaking Spanish, but badly, talking to the man in the toilet.

The bartender went over to the doorway.

"I thought Allie was killed in Korea."

"That was Viggiano. Korea."

"Stepped on a mine, I thought."

"That was Mike. Stepped on a mine. Viggiano."

The two old women were silent again, adjusted to the dark, sitting there drinking.

"So all these years, you're telling me."

"You've been carrying around the wrong war casualty."

"Or the right war but the wrong guy."

"Let's go outside," he said. "I want to see what's happening."

"I don't have to feel sorry for Allie anymore."

"I think the whole block's out. Allie's selling fish at his father's stall in the market. We'll find him. I'll call him."

We took our drinks out to the sidewalk. The block was out and the area was out. It was after five, dark now, and the traffic lights were also out and we could hear the pulse of car horns at the entrance to the bridge above us and to the west.

People were coming out of shops and apartments, the locksmith and grocery and check-cashing place, and they stood around and talked. We could look down a tenement street to the east and see the river, a narrow strip of shimmer that formed a kind of softness, a visual whisper behind the dark bulk contours in the foreground.

"Is Brooklyn out? I think Brooklyn's out."

"Brooklyn's definitely out."

People talked to each other and looked up periodically. They looked toward the midtown sky or tried to look toward the tip of the island, blocked off of course by clustered buildings, but always up, skywatching, and they pointed and talked.

I went back inside and put my drink on the bar. I left some money near the glass. Someone was still in the toilet, agitated in Spanish, saying something about his mother, or someone's mother, and I figured he couldn't find the toilet paper or he couldn't find the bolt on the door and it was a matter the denizens would have to deal with.

Then I stood in the doorway and watched Jerry talking to the bartender and three or four others, twenty yards up the street, and they were lighted intermittently by passing cars and they were animated, they were roused by the vastness of the circumstance, by the forces involved, and they were talking and pointing.

I went down the street in the other direction. After half a block I crossed to the opposite side and walked through an archway under the bridge and into an area filled with household garbage and smashed cars and mounds of rubble dumped by construction crews and at the north end of the passage I could see the silhouetted towers of mid-town, exact and flat against the streaked sky, and I heard the sound of car horns building, the dinosaur death of stalled traffic at rush hour, calling and answering everywhere, and I made my way out the other end, where the headlights of barely moving cars, cars stopped dead, where rivers of barium light marked my progress through the streets.

He was back in New York, the womb of consciousness, a midnight show at Carnegie Hall, nearly three thousand people, and he stood on the enormous stage looking out across the orchestra and up past two tiers of boxes to the gallery levels, where they stood in the aisles and crowded the exits.

Lenny Bruce in concert.

" New York, New York. We say it twice. Once to entice them to leave Kansas. And once more over their grave."

They heaved in their seats.

" New York, New York. Like a priest doing his Latin gig. Mumbo jumbo, mumbo jumbo. He says it twice because he's talking about shit, piss and corruption and he wants to be sure you understand."

His people were here, the A amp;R guys from the Brill Building, the fellow comics who worked toilets all over Jersey, the actors and would-be actors and actor-waiters and cabdrivers with equity cards. The balding men from the Upper West Side were here, with shaggy sidelocks and intimations of suffering, and the women were with them-frizzy, lippy, opinionated, with full bodies and big rich real faces and a brassy way of laughing.

Lenny wore a white slim-line suit, well-pressed, and a puce pimp shirt with a roll collar, like a man trying to remind himself he is indestructible.

It was midnight in a driving rain but they were all here, musicians and folkies, writers for the high-dome journals, a selection of people with wasted chalk faces and needle lesions under their clothes and there were a fair number of disembodied others just finished smoking some DMT, the quick-acting chemical superhigh devised by NASA to get us to the moon and back whether we want to go or not.

He looked up and down and around.

"What a crazy nerve-wracked morbid week. We're all drained. We were minutes from being fireballed. But now, but now, but now."

He looked past the slender columns into the depths of the third tier and then up at the faces hanging over the balustrade at the top of the house, young people glowing slightly in the overspill from spotlights placed high on the side walls.

"We're not gonna die!"

He did a minstrel dance step, mouth wide, hand high, fingers spread, and stood there laughing a while.

"Yes, they saved us. All the Ivy League men in those striped suits and ribbed black socks that go all the way to the knee so when they cross their legs on TV we don't see a patch of spooky white flesh between the sock and the pants cuff. It's so vulnerable, dig, that strip of pale skin. The legs of powerful men tend to be hairless, which makes them feel secretly weak and effeminate, so they make sure they're wearing high enough socks. Garters are a tricky business for exactly this reason. No, yes, they saved us. They did it. Russians agree to remove missiles and end construction of missile bases in Cuba. Khrushchev is retching in his latkes. He's taking hot baths to relax. Like a plastic pouch of corn coming to a boil."

Lenny's teenage fanatics were here, kids from Brooklyn and Queens who did his bits word for word, memorizing off his albums but more religiously from the rare tapes slyly recorded by traffickers in contraband goods. And Bronx boys who lope along the Grand Concourse to catch every foreign flick at the Ascot, hoping for a glimpse of titty- Lenny was their diamond cutter, their cool doomed master of uncommon truth.

"They saved us in their horn-rimmed glasses and commonsense haircuts. They got their training for the missile crisis at a thousand dinner parties. Where it's at, man. This is the summit of Western civilization. Not the art in the shlocky museums or the books in the libraries where bums off the street infest the men's rooms. Forget all that. Forget the playing fields of Eton. It's the seating plan at dinner. That's where we won. Because they toughed it out. Because they were tested in the cruelest setting of all. Where tremendous forces come into play and crucial events unfold. Dinner parties, dig it, in the Northeast corridor. Your mother used to say, Mix, sweetheart. There was anxiety, a little hidden terror in her voice. Because she knew. Mix or die. And that's why we won. Because these men were named and raised for this moment. Yes, tested at a thousand formative dinners. It started in adolescence. Seated next to adults, total strangers, and forced to make conversation. What a sadistic thing to tell a kid. Make conversation. Some could not do it. Some broke down and were sent to forestry school, They smoked roots and leaves and grew facial hair. They developed involved relationships with animals. But others. The others. The others masturbated to marching songs and married their second cousins and grew strong and dominant. You know they're powerful men when their wives play bridge with the curtains drawn. The sunlight gives them migraines. They twist their handkerchiefs when they talk. Remember how your aunt Tovah would sit twisting her hanky. Stand up straight, she'd say. Talk to people, she'd say Try For me, sweetheart."

Through the long night, too long, three solid hours nonstop, too long because it has to be too long, they've just survived a crisis and need to be intemperate, and too long because Lenny just can't stop, he looks up from under the proscenium arch and sees the ornamented ceiling and the gilded rows of boxes and he knows this is the temple of Casals and Heifetz and Toscanini and it gives him a mainline jolt, and too long because he's been running on scared fumes all week and he feels revived, alive, ready to wail the night away

The disc jockeys were here, guys who did late-night jazz in voices of smoky innuendo. Celebrities were spaced through the orchestra, called the Parquet with a capital P Mixed-race couples were here, displaying a honed nonchalance. People bored with ordinary comedy People who wanted to be challenged and attacked, who wanted to hear their well-meaning sentiments exposed as so much liberal dinner prattle.

Lenny screwed the mike off the stand and blessed them all.

"Lemme tell you the untold story of the week. The President called the Pope." A stir of anticipation. But it puts him off-he's not in the mood for popes tonight. "Yeah, they were in secret communication all week long. Never mind all that separation of church and state crap. They stick together, these crossbacks." Popes are automatically funny-they don't need Lenny to dignify their shtick. "The Pope's got submarines, you know. Justa say the word, Johnny, I send. We nihi-late them sonna ma bitches. Your Holiness, I'm astonished, man. You have your own fleet of subs?"

Lenny lost interest. He swerved into sermons and admonitions, streams of rumination on patriotism, communism, the income tax and women who insert cigarettes in their pussies and blow perfect smoke rings. And when he said something funny or produced an occasional zing of insight, and they applauded, he said, No, don't, please- lemme fly on my own.

"I've always known. I've known since childhood. I'm as corrupt as they are. I grew up here. The police are crooked and so am I. The politicians lie and I lie worse. I wanna kill myself on television so people can go to sleep with the face of a dead sinner on the rim of their eyeballs."

They saw the lounge lizard with bedroom eyes. They saw and heard the frisky kid with the adenoidal voice, the boy who wants to make his mother laugh. They heard the frantic talker who chases after his own discontinuous ideas. They saw the zonked layabout, all lassitude and spent attention span. They heard the crusader for dirty words, the social philosopher, the self-styled lawyer, the self-critical Jew, the Christian moralizer and the commentator on race.

"I flew in from Miami last night and took a taxi direct to the Apollo Theater, where I met up with some friends for the late show because I love that scene, and we came out after the show and I've got a suitcase and a garment bag and it's late and it's cold and we can't find a cab because cabs don't go to Harlem and so we start wandering, dig, and we come across an old man on a corner doing a rap for three people. He's about a hundred years old and he's preaching to three sorry souls and it's like Hyde Park Corner only in blackface."

Lenny did a fair approximation of a street preacher's voice, which was surprising, which was very unhip in fact because even if he'd started in the business as a mimic, doing Cagney and Bogart with German accents, and even if he updated frequently, doing contemporary types of every persuasion, it was not a white comic's option these days to do a black man's voice, was it?

"The old man holds a dollar bill by its edges. It's older than he is. He peers over the top and says, Legal tender. He says, Which is a name, I have to admit, I would not think to call it myself. He says, We all seen the machines print the money in the newsreels nonstop like bottles of pop getting capped, only lightning fast, and they print, they print, they print, but where's it all go is my question. I ain't seen any. You seen any?"

Lenny did the voice, standing slightly hunched beneath the vast draped curtain in his white Italianate suit and campy black boots, the ones with little fruity loops in back.

"He says, Nobody knows the day or the hour. He's standing there in a dark shrunken suit with bicycle clips around the ankles. Understand me when I say I wanted to give him everything I own. Not out of pity or charity or some vintage Christian shit. Out of appreciation. Out of gratitude for the sight and sound of him at that hour and in that place. Because this is New York, New York and we say it twice because it's half Us and half Them, all hours, dig it, in bicycle clips. The man's an actor and this is his gig that he's perfected over decades and I stand there listening and in some funny way I hear myself, all right, or I see myself- I imagine myself at the age of ten or twelve listening to a voice like this old man's. It's his voice and his week. The day and the hour. And he holds the dollar bill. When the hour comes, he says, the world be separated into those that can read the message and those that can't."

A long pause. A hush in the hall. Lenny seemed half lost in reverie, in conjure, and maybe people began to feel uncomfortable because he could not seem to stop doing the voice. It was as if the voice had been crossed with his own. It was as if cross-voices were unavoidable, whether you knew it or not, whether you liked it or not, and maybe this old black man spoke in Lenny's voice at times, alone, unknowing, in his room, on some level, hearing the bandy scales in his head, the push and shove of Lenny's own fluted music, and Lenny did the old man's, spoke in the old man's, unavoidably.

"Then he looked at us, over on the side where we're standing. We're a black guy, a white guy and two white women, except one of the women has been in the street all this time looking for a cab. He looked at us briefly. Took brief notice. Seemed to know us in this brief look. Then he turned back to the original audience, these three lost people of the streets, these wastelings of the lost world, the lost country that exists right here in America. And he resumed his rap and they stood there listening."

Lenny did the voice a little longer and when he finished he had to pause again to return to the stage, the hall and the audience.

"I wanted to give him my garment bag full of suits, my suitcase full of drugs, my house in the Hollywood Hills. We listened only eight, nine minutes. Less. A cab pulled up and we left and I won't go back because-I don't know why, I just won't. Bugged out by the whole scene. His life, his rap. I ought to tell Polish lightbulb jokes."

A laugh, finally

"I ought to stand here doing Chinese waiter jokes."

He did a Chinese waiter joke. Got a big laugh. He went through a medley of movie bits and they loved it. He did routines he used to do when he wore a polo coat, suede shoes and a muffdiver's tickly mustache. They laughed, he moped. He did the old bits with suitable stinging irony but this only made them funnier and got him more depressed. They laughed, he bled. Lenny felt awful. He was supposed to be happy and revitalized but he wasn't. They'd all survived a hellish week and he'd gone dragging through four club dates coast to coast in a state of graduated disarray and now it was over and he was safe and he was appearing in concert and he should have been standing here chanting Were not gonna die We're not gonna die We're not gonna die, leading them in a chant, a mantra that was joyful and mock joyful at the same time because this is New York, New York and we want it both ways.

When he thought they were gonna die, he'd chanted the die line repeatedly.

But that was over now He'd forgotten all that. There were other, deeper, vaguer matters. Everything, nothing, him.

"I came here tonight to be loved like no one was ever loved. Love me like you've never loved anyone before. Come rain or come shine."

There was an unguarded plea in Lenny's eyes.

"Parent, child or lover. I want to be washed in rivers of love."

Return to seat Return to seat Return to seat.

The old material was making him feel bad. And the laughs were worse than the jokes. The laughs dashed and disheartened him. He switched more or less in midsentence to a bit he'd been thinking about before all this missile shit, sitting on the can in L.A. because that's where his best ideas tended to drift into range.

In fact he'd made a casual reference to the subject earlier in the evening. Got a response that seemed to indicate they were interested and unnerved.

He decided to develop the bit on the spot.

Okay. An illiterate sad-eyed virgin lives in a whorehouse in a slum district of San Juan. She has a special talent that has nothing to do with sex per se. It's a kind of parlor trick, okay. Men pay half a week's wages to crowd into a bare room in the basement where the girl, smooth-skinned and innocent, lifts her dress, drops her panties, takes a lit cigarette from the madam and inserts it filter-first in her snatch. The men go wide-eyed. It's a king-size Kent with a micronite filter. Then she contracts her labial muscles, or whatever, and sort of inhales vaginally, and removes the cigarette, and proceeds to blow a series of gorgeous smoke rings. A gasp from the men. Perfect round rings wafting up from her fleecy bush, still somewhat fine and sparse.

Lenny's audience didn't exactly gasp, as the men in the whorehouse had, but there was a certain disquiet in the hall, underscored by a smatter of nervous laughter.

Some people interpret the girl's gift in a religious manner. They think it's an omen, a sign from heaven that the world is about to end. God has selected a poor illiterate undernourished orphan girl to convey a profound message to the world. Because isn't it possible that all these O's coming out of her womb refer to the Greek letter that means The End? Others say, journalists, scientists, priests-these men have come to the bordello to witness the event and they say the rings she is blowing are not representations of the Greek letter omega. They're just ordinary alphabet-soup O's, however beautifully formed. These people say that when the girl is able to blow actual Greek omegas, with the horseshoe effect, dig, the little dipsy-doo at each end of the opening, then they'll start believing in miracles.

This is Lenny Bruce material. This is what they came for, isn't it? Who else does this material? If it's disgusting, so much the better. If it's insulting to you as an individual, get up and leave and take your crossword-puzzle husband with you.

So a rich American widower shows up one night, slumming with friends, and the girl stares proudly, con dignidad, right into his face. Then she inserts the tip of the filter in her snatch and blows a ring inside another ring and then a third tiny ring inside that. The millionaire IS shocked at the tawdry spectacle but also secretly intrigued and he finds himself going back there night after night, alone, and it isn't long before he falls in love with the girl, yes, her limpid eyes and dimpled knees and her sweet and fleecy pubes. He resolves to save her from this squalid life and more or less buys her from the madam for an enormous sum of money and takes her to his hilltop mansion overlooking the Hudson River, where he brings in teams of doctors, tutors, psychologists and nutritionists and where he watches the girl develop intellectually and grow into a healthy young woman who speaks four languages and shows a talent for the oboe.

Lenny paused here, pointing out that the end, the punch line, would have to involve some reversion to type, something the girl does that demonstrates the power of a single old and shocking habit over any number of civilizing influences.

Then he said, "No, yes, wait. We've got it backwards. It's not the girl who reverts. It's the man. Dig it. He's the kind of cat who questions everything he does. Begins to ask himself. Was she a twisted child or an artist? Was she jailbait or saint? In other words did he make a terrible mistake bringing her here and educating her and banning cigarettes from her life? He begins to recall those delirious nights in San Juan." Lenny gave the name of the city an authentic guttural rumble. "Yes, those nights in the basement of the stinking bordello where she performed. Admit it, fool. You've destroyed a strange, crude, beautiful and eerie perversion and replaced it with a boring oboe. Which she plays incessantly by the way. And which is anyway just a displaced version of the king-size Kent, normalized and concertized."

Lenny stood sideways, mike in hand, stroking his jaw.

"He longs to see smoke rings come out of her puss, her nook. First the cigarette between her spindly legs. Then the rising rings. When he bought her from the madam, she was on the verge of intertwining the rings, which is either a symbol of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or it's the Ballantine beer logo-Purity, Body and Flavor. Either way, imagine the rush he would have gotten."

He looked into the wings, thinking.

"They marry in a smoke-free ceremony on the rolling lawn. On their wedding night, still a virgin, she stands in a negligee by the window facing west. He enters, in pafamas and smoking jacket, holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, an unlit king-size Kent."

But he wasn't sure how to end it.

"He takes the cigarette out of the holder and extends it in her direction, glancing at the shadowy mound under her negligee. She steps back, horrified. She says, You must be mad. She says it in four languages. She says almost everything in four languages, a habit that's beginning to piss him off."

Then Lenny got a better idea, deeper, more challenging.

"Wait, listen, no. The millionaire is a myth, isn't he? We stuck him in the story because we needed a rich weak do-gooder, what, a respectable self-deluding jerk who shows his corruption in the end. We made him up. Let's tell the truth this time."

He sensed a disappointment out there. They wanted the wedding night, the negligee, the boudoir, the casually cruel ending like the bit he used to do about the boy raised by wolves, found in the wild, fed, developed, educated, who graduates with honors from MIT and is killed a week later chasing a car down the street.

"Let's tell the truth," he said. "Nobody saved the girl from a life of perversion. She fled the whorehouse on her own initiative. She saved all the meager cash handouts the customers had been giving her and she took a plane to New York, the roach coach, in order to find her mother, who wasn't dead at all-another easy myth."

Shit, he was ruining their fun. He could feel the cooling all the way up to the cheap seats, where his teenage fans craved a final grossness, draped over the rails-some epic sicko finish.

"She never worked in a whorehouse at all," Lenny said. "She never dropped her drawers or blew smoke rings from her pussy. Fact of the matter, she never lived in San Juan, baby."

He loved to say San Juan. And yes, he was disassembling the whole structure. He felt their puzzlement and couldn't blame them.

"Let's make her human. She's real like us. You take the subway to the South Bronx, where she lives with her junkie mother who can't kick. She's just barely old enough so that men are beginning to notice. Her mother comes and goes. Disappears, comes back. Phone company shuts off the phone. Landlord's been coming around. Or putting dispossesses under the door because you never actually see him. He's a corporation called XYZ Realty with a post office box in Greenland.

The girl's hiding in the empty lots, down the maze of back alleys, because her mother's gone again and she thinks the landlord will have her arrested. Let's make her human. Let's give her a name."

But he didn't give her a name. He couldn't think of a name. Not a real name. He went back to old jokes instead. He told a mother-in-law joke and they laughed because in fact it was funny. He told a Jewish mother joke, even better, and they loved it, they laughed, and he worked his way back to form, doing race, sex, religion, and it was funny and offensive Lenny and the night ended finally in booming waves of laughter and applause, in spirited shouts from the kids in the top tiers, and he stood on the great stage in his stupid white suit, small and remorseful, and then he turned and walked toward the wings.

Hours later I was still walking. I walked right past my hotel and kept on going, a nondescript building near Times Square, where they'd give me a candle and show me the door that led to the stairwell, but I wanted to keep on walking, and where I'd only have to climb five flights, but I wanted to walk into the night and see this thing.

I saw taxis with off-duty signs lit up but people took them anyway, just opened the doors and got in because the cabs were captive to the traffic and could not shy off and speed away and I raised the collar of my jacket and walked east a while and went past a huge crowd near the main library and finally realized it was a bus stop, six or seven hundred people at a bus stop, easily that many, massed and more or less orderly, packed along the sidewalk and up on the library steps, and the wind whipping down Fifth, and they were waiting for a bus.

I didn't have a coat. My coat was in Evanston, Illinois. I hunched in my jacket and saw people walking across the Queensboro Bridge and they were taking over the bridge, they were walking eight or nine abreast, maybe fifty deep, followed by a sequence of crawling cars, then another band of pedestrians, and they were walking home to Queens.

That's when I got the idea and felt the twinge of regret.

I stopped for dinner in a candlelit restaurant in the 70s, where they seated me with three others because it was shared tables tonight. There was only one subject, of course, at least for a while, and we wondered how widespread the blackout might be, and whether it was sabotage, and someone said, a book editor with a bow tie, that this was the title of an early Hitchcock film, with Sylvia Sidney, and he named the rest of the cast compulsively-a film that starts with the lights going out. We skipped dessert and coffee for the sake of those waiting on line and I had a drink in a bar nearby and thought Jerry was right, Jerry Sullivan, this was the twinge, the pinch of guilt-we ought to be going to the Bronx tonight, Jerry and I, not trying to commandeer a taxi but walking all the way, something crazy and emotional, a trek through a city gone dark and cold.

But then I thought stupid, no, forget it-we'd lose interest on the way or get in a fight with looters and muggers or just get tired, or Jerry would, and what happens after that?

A man directed traffic with a rolled-up magazine, a man of some girth but quick on his feet, dipping and gliding, addressing the major mess at 86th Street, a man who shrugged off beeping horns and did a hundred semaphores, extravagant of gesture, in a topcoat with a velvet collar, his glossy baton flashing and people pausing to watch, and there was a great and fervent feeling that attended his performance, which was conscientious and deft however befrilled by theater, and it spread among the people in the street.

But it would have been tremendous somehow too, a beautiful thing, I thought, walking up Manhattan and into the Bronx, as a gesture, a remembrance, and all the way to the old neighborhood, tonight of all nights, with the world coming down, but what would we do when we got there, at two in the morning?

People walked along listening to transistor radios because there were stations with auxiliary power and there were men wrapped in headscarves who sold flashlights and candles and there were candles in thousands of apartment windows and people on line for candles outside the five-and-ten and long lines at phone booths on every second corner.

The power grid gone. What did it mean? The whole linked system down. Or not linked sufficiently perhaps. Sylvia Sidney in the dark.

From certain vantages the city was all haunted silhouette, secret and recessed, its neon ego shut down. There was a sky tonight. The towers across the park were planed down to a kind of night velvet that was etched and deathly and lacking the static that makes the high nights throb.

I heard the sound of drums, drumbeats, not staccato shots but hand drums maybe, dull and soft-skinned, coming out of the park.

I was a stranger here. I knew Manhattan only at street level, fitfully, and felt a little isolated, and the place scared me with its knowingness, its offhand vaunt, a style of mind and guise that can be harder to learn than some dialect of the Transvaal. Everybody knew the same seven things. But it could take you years to work through the list and by that time the number would be different, or the whole list.

They came out of the park at 90th Street, a band of hippies on a candlelight march, with flutes, drums and tambourines, about fifty chanting people, and a man with a needle stuck in his protruding tongue, and a woman with a snake around her neck, and a haze of pungent smoke that had the whiff of some congenial misdemeanor, and there were kids walking along and babies in backpacks and slings, and the marchers chanted a sort of hummed syllable, a thing with a twang, it sounded to me like Bomb, a vibe with the gravid tone of prayer, repeated, repeated, but they wouldn't be chanting an ominous word, would they, with infants strapped to their chests and backs.

And maybe Jerry had been correct. I didn't have the right to refuse him. This tremendous thing of his, this trip to the Bronx-I felt guilty about slipping away and betraying a sweet idea.

I watched the marchers go south along the park edge. The streets began to darken, drained of traffic and headlights, and an odd calm set in, edged with apprehension. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands trapped in subways or aloft in packed elevators waiting. The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rat-eye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyway.

I walked east on 96th Street. Going empty and dead, stores closed, bus stops deserted, phone booths unoccupied. Ego gone and vertigo too, a city without its merengue spin, and a car pulled up at the center stripe, anonymous sedan going the other way, and the driver stuck his head into the gusty wind and called across to me.

I said, "What?"

"Where you go? I take you. Cheap."

I looked at him. I was glad I'd walked away from Jerry. It would have been deadly. It would have been crap. I wouldn't have been able to listen to that crap. I got in the car and told the guy where my hotel was. I wanted to call Marian from my room, if the phones were working, Marian Bowman, and tell her what was happening here and ask what they knew about it there.

There was a hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been located. But I asked the guy if he'd heard any news.

"All out. State of Maine out. Boston, Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, my sister lives. Ontario, Canada. Very big, this thing."

I sat back and watched the streets roll by and saw what I could see in the moonlight.

We'd be married three years later. Our daughter would be born in 1970, the year a small group of radicals bombed the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Marian's Big Ten town by igniting a carload of agricultural fertilizer and fuel oil. Killed one man, injured five others.

We'd have a son two years later. Children. This was remote to me sitting in the Romanian's car, or the Greek's. Marriage remote. Fatherhood a vague regret somewhere in the kitchen smell of another country. The decades not exactly unpromising but remote, and maybe unpromising too, in this phantom Manhattan, with only a few stragglers astir and the darkness so dense it had physical mass.

I looked out the Greek's dusty window and could see the past and never stop seeing it but could not summon the future, even in cartoon strokes, the strong bright Sunday of the world.

We rode without talking the rest of the way.

And the enormity of the night. You could feel the night expanding, standing on the sidewalk near Times Square, a siren sounding half a mile away.

I looked at the candles lined up on the desk in the lobby. The lobby was empty and the candles threw light high on the walls. The clerk came out of a room somewhere.

"I could take you up but frankly."

"Not necessary."

"I took up people I lost count."

"I'll just take a candle."

The clerk held a flashlight. He gestured when he spoke and the beam swung across the small lobby

"I did something to my back with the climbing," he said. "But I lit these candles you can take, in case some people come in they don't have a match."

I took a candle and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. When I entered the room I went right to the window to see how the night looked from up here.

I didn't call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that's the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

He walks along the curving base of the stadium wall, under the blue and white bunting, and he is trying to spot an easy mark.

He is in the crowd, a large and moving swarm, elbows and shoulders, faces suddenly jutting, eye to eye, and they're still coming down from the elevated train station, men and boys, talking and whooping, and the line is forming for bleacher seats even though the gates won't open until nine in the morning, hours from now, and they're coming up from the subway and streaming out of the local streets and he walks some more, caught up in the rush of sensation, flags flying and emblems bejeweling the high wall and a second long line, this one for standing room tickets, men eating and drinking, some sitting in beach chairs covered with blankets, and Manx goes walking through clouds of cigar smoke and sees whiskey flasks showing here and there, with caps on chains.

Now what does he do? Does he look for some highjiver from Harlem, a Giant fan all flush with victory and ready to drop some dollars on a genuine all-time souvenir?

Won't work, Manx thinks. Black man's not gonna believe anything he says. Think I'm some fool running a penny hustle. Black man's gonna look him down with that saucy eye he's got for outrageous plots against his person.

No. Got to go white. Only way to go. Besides, the numbers mostly white, so it's the percentage play.

A happy rumble. The street is one big buzz and rumble, a steady roar of talk and song and people calling to each other, filled with good feeling.

Manx walks over to two men. He does this on an impulse, in the spirit of why not, and because he doesn't want to stand around all night studying faces and calculating odds, even though that's exactly what he ought to be doing, and he knows it, and he'd planned to do it, but the best-laid plans, like the man says, have a habit of collapse.

His hand grips the baseball. He keeps his hand outside the jacket pocket and he grips the ball through the cloth.

And in the spirit of good feeling. In the swelling presence of two groups of fans, Giants and Yankees, both winners this year-a happy steady join-in roar that brings him up and gives him heart.

He walks over to two men standing on line in front of one of the booths. Excuse me. Something here you might be interested in. He talks to them. He tells them about the baseball, this is the baseball that the guy hit into the stands, the home run that won the game, and the longer he talks the more unbelievable he sounds to himself. He can't even believe this is him talking. His voice sounds like something released from an air mattress when you pull out the nipple.

The two men seem to step back although it's probably not actual physical motion so much as a wishful maneuver he sees in their eyes.

"I'm talking what is a fact. Whatever it sounds," he says, "this is the thing that happened at the ballpark across the river," and he knows he is working now at restoring a certain self-respect-never mind making a sale.

One guy says, "I don't think so, no. Not interested. You interested?"

Other guy says, "Not interested."

Manx takes the ball out of his pocket. He's not sure why he's doing this since it proves nothing except the fact that he has a ball, at least he has a ball, and he holds it much the way his son Cotter had held it earlier in the evening, gripping it in one hand, spinning it with the other, hard-eyed and defiant.

Then he turns and walks away, feeling their looks, seeing smirks so clear he could draw them with a pencil, and going small, bristling a little at the back of the neck, and going smaller with every step.

He walks a little ways.

He always thought he'd like to get himself a flask, flat enough to pocket conveniently, with a cap on a chain.

He puts the ball back in his pocket and walks out past the wooden barricades near gate 4.

You got these guys come out here think they own the earth.

He remembers he's supposed to write a letter excusing his son from school because he's got a fever of a hundred and two, which is a secret they are keeping from the boy's mother. Not the fever but the letter. The fever is a made-up deal.

He stands and watches a while. Then he gets an idea. He watches, thinking there's crowds of people and I'm holding something every last one of them would like to own, but who's gonna believe a story that comes out of nowhere. Then he realizes what he ought to be doing. He gets an idea. He gets it from the crowd. He ought to be looking for fathers and sons.

Get the man to do it for the boy.

Appeal to the man's whatever, his rank as a father, his soft spot, his willingness to show off a little, impress the boy, make the night extra special.

And yes there are men who have brought their sons here tonight, as an adventure, you know, a fair number of sons on the scene, as a thing you want the boy to experience, staying up all night to buy World Series tickets.

See, even if the man doesn't believe it, the boy will. And Manx can imagine a little conspiracy in the making, the father and the hustler working as a team to make the boy believe the baseball's real.

It takes these turns of mind to work a deal.

He begins to prowl the lines, to scout the prospects standing on line along the high wall, he checks out faces and attitudes, he doesn't want to rush, he follows the wall in a westerly direction and sees what he thinks he might be looking for, finally, the kid's maybe eleven, the man's pulling a sandwich from a gym bag and they're standing there in total innocence of his approach.

He does his intro, which he takes to be the toughest part, making the details clear, and he looks from man to boy and back, trying to get them both involved, and it seems to be going well, and the man tears the sandwich and gives half to the kid, and they look at Manx and eat.

They are listening and chewing and he tries to read their looks. He is stymied, though, by the names involved, the players at the climax, he doesn't know their names, faces, numbers, all the things the fans know from childhood to the day they die, and this slows his narrative and muddies it up and he tries to compensate by taking out the baseball.

Now the man is talking, through a mouthful of food.

"So what you're saying is. You're telling me. In other words."

White meat and lettuce are showing behind his teeth.

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

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

"And I'm supposed to stand here."

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

"And listen to this bullcrap."

The man is chewing and talking.

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

Manx puts the ball back in his pocket.

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

Talking like that in front of his own kid.

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

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

Think they own the earth.

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

"Which I'm saying, in all honesty."

"Wait a minute. You're saying this baseball you claim to have in your possession."

"Right right right. But I don't know the player's name, y'under-stand, which I'm being honest with you."

"You mean Bobby Thomson?"

"That's the one. All right. I feel better now."

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

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

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

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

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

But Manx doesn't give him the ball.

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

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

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

"By the way," the fellow says, maybe to distract Manx from his embarrassment. "My name's Charlie."

"You call me Manx. And the boy. What's your name, son?"

"Tell him."

"No," the kid says.

"We got us a rascal here," Manx says. "How old's this rascally son of a gun?"

"Eight," the man says.

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

"His name's Chuckie."

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

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

Manx puts the ball in the man's hand.

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

Manx is in his crapshooter's squat.

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

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

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

"But this is baseball," Charlie says helpfully.

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

"And you felt you knew."

"I felt exactly. I knew. Because I heard it in his voice."

"And saw it as well."

"Saw it right there. Wouldn't lie about this. Good boy when it counts."

"And baseball. This counts."

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

The man is studying the ball.

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

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

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

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

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

"Vendors scarce tonight."

"He had some soup."

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

"He had hot soup in a thermos. He's all right."

But Chuckie says, "I don't think I'm so all right."

"Just stay awake. I want you awake for this."

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

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

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

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

"'tou're a father, you must know," Charlie says.

"I wrote the book."

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

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

"I've only got the one."

"You're looking at four."

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

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

But not just different lives. Completely other ways of thinking and doing. And Manx isn't sure if they're supposed to be sad about this. He's ready to do whatever's called for.

"What kind of seats you expecting you get?"

"Bleachers. Love to get reserved seats but they're long gone. Everything's gone but bleachers and standing room and I know Chuckie'll never forgive me if I force him to watch a ball game standing up."

"After he spends a night sleeping on the sidewalk? Who can blame him?"

Charlie smiles again, throwing a wayward slap at Manx's kneecap. Then he hands Manx the ball but only because he's reaching into his coat for something. Turns out to be a flask, sweet little silvery thing with a cap on a chain like those army canteens, only flat, small, expensive, that you can pocket easy, a pick-me-up on a down day.

"Now what have we here?" says Manx.

"Give you one guess."

"Could say orange juice."

"Too soon for breakfast."

"Could say spicy tea from old India."

"Too late for teatime," Charlie says.

They're having a pretty good time, the one on his haunches against the wall, the other in his crapshooter's squat, with the lump in the flannel bag gone totally still, either pouty-stiff or sleeprstiff.

Charlie says, "Do the honors," and he hands the flask to Manx, who tosses the ball back to Charlie, and this small blurry exchange has an odd depth, it's a sign of some kind, a deal that's completely outside the transaction in progress, and it brings Manx up a little higher.

He unscrews the cap and lets it dangle and he takes a connoisseur's sniff of the action in the jug.

"Do believe this is what they call spirits."

"Irish whiskey," Charlie says.

"Do love the Irish, don't we?"

"Many lasting contributions," Charlie says.

"Well said, my man."

They share a complicit grin. And Manx raises the flask and tilts his head and knocks back a not too sizable shot, for courtesy sake, and gives the thing back to Charles.

He calls him Charles now, for the social aspect, gentlemen drinkers at the club.

And he waits for Charles to drink. A moment of stinging truth. Manx has put his mouth to the rim of the flask and now he waits for Charles to do the same.

A brief, deep and knowledgeable suspense.

Doesn't even wipe off the rim. Just tips the flask and drinks, too deep, and comes up teary-eyed and gasping but happy too. Both men happy, having a princely time.

"Went down the wrong pipe," says Charlie, forcing out the words.

"Happens to the best."

"Occupational hazard," says the gasping man.

Hands over the flask. Manx takes a klondike swig and keenly feels the effect, oh yes, as the Irish aerates a number of crucial passages in his head and chest.

They pass the flask a while.

"One of mine's a girl," Manx says. "Rosie. Best ever daughter you could find."

"How old?"

"How old," he says.

He feels a drifty look come into his eyes.

"Maybe twice yours. Yours eight, right? Imagine being eight."

They pass the flask.

"I'll be honest," Charlie says. "You were honest with me. Least I can do is tell you what I'm thinking,"

All up and down the line there are people crouched in sleep or in drowsy bundled waiting, out of conversation now, heads slumped, some cigarettes going, most people asleep in blankets or thick parkas or just nodding off, squinch-eyed, and a cough and a moan and a radio playing Latin music but not too loud, and shaking awake and nodding off and a cop on a horse over by the barricade, and Manx shifts position slightly to observe the stillness of the tall brown animal, a dead-still quality that is not like men when they are motionless, or dogs for that matter, or fish in a bowl, and not peaceful or unperturbed but immobile in its own way, great and strong, shining at the flanks.

"Til be honest," Charlie says, "because what's the point of all this if we're not honest?"

"Go, man."

"I don't know if you're telling me the truth. But the ball looks like a ball they'd be using in a National League game in the year 1951. That's one mark in your favor, relatively minor, because there's balls and there's balls."

"And there's ball breakers."

They pass the flask.

"And the other mark is, the major mark, I look at you and I don't think I see a con man or a liar."

A brief pause.

"Then you the first," Manx says.

They laugh and stop and laugh again. It's one of those jokes that reverberates for ten or twenty seconds, bouncing around the premises, one meaning echoing into another, and it's only a matter now of signing on the line.

"How much?" says Charlie.

Manx looks away. He hasn't come this far in his tactics and plans and he doesn't know how much. But he feels himself get tense. The horse makes a snuffling sound behind him.

"It's entirely up to yourself," he says, and feels immediately, unspecifically cheated.

Charlie holds the ball in both hands now, pressed up under his chin.

"See, I don't know what I'm buying," he says. "This is a consideration we have to keep in mind. Sure, buyer beware and all that. But we're talking about an object that belongs properly to the heart."

You don't want to squeeze the eagle on me, do you, boss?

"Entirely up to yourself. Because I trust you to do right. You know your baseball. A fan. I want a fan to own this thing," Manx says.

He feels his gaze sliding away, drifting inward, and notes a certain tightness in his chest.

Charles. Charles is suddenly all-decisive. A little lull, you see, with the mention of money. But suddenly Charles is sliding up the wall to dig into his pockets and he's all bustle and rush.

Manx tips the flask and drinks.

Pulling bills out of two or three pockets and uncrumpling a five and smoothing out a single. Manx looks down the line at the nodding heads, men breathing steam in the chill air, sleepers and dreamers deep in the night.

The sum arrived at looks like this. A ten, two fives, another ten, two singles, a quarter, two nickels and a tiddlywink dime.

Plus the kid pops out of the camp bag.

Charlie says, "I want you to take it all because it's all I've got. Even the change. I want you to even have the change. Because I've got the ticket money here." And he pounds his chest. 'And the car keys here." And he slaps his thigh. 'And I want you to have every nickel in my pocket above and beyond."

Manx thinks all right. He tries to keep his eyes from fluttering while they count. He thinks this is more than he could have gotten for those snow shovels he boosted from the utility room in his building. Plenty more. A hell of a lot, actually, more.

The small angry head is jutting from the bag.

"I want to go home now," Chuckie says.

Manx takes the money. He licks his thumb to count it for the benefit of the kid. Says some things to the kid, feeling good, trying to draw half a laugh.

Says to Charlie, "Bought yourself a souvenir of the great game. Calls for a drink, old boy."

They pass the flask and this is the only thing in the course of the long night and early morning that seems to engage Chuckie, the sight of two men guzzling booze right out of the bottle.

Half sigh, half pain in the sound they make when they open their mouths to exhale the fumes, eyes tight and pink.

Charles arches his fleecy brows.

"Now that the ball is mine, what do I do with it?"

Manx retakes the flask.

"Show it around. Tell your friends and neighbors. Then put it in a glass case with the fancy dishes. You saw those crowds go crazy in the street. This is bigger than some wars I seen."

Manx has no idea what he means by this. The Irish is beginning to talk. He sees that Charlie is feeling slightly down at the moment. Charlie is probably passing from the stage of half belief to the stage of disbelief. Feeling rooked and beetle-brained. Slyed out of his honest wages by some rogue off the street with a tale so staggering Charlie's embarrassed to tell his friends.

Let the buyer, like they say, beware.

He tries to think of the word that means a thing will increase in value over the years. But the Irish is not only talking, it is thinking, and anyway it is probably not a good idea at this point to say encouraging things to Charles. Only sound phony, won't it?

They look at each other. Charles has the baseball and the flask and Manx has the money. Okay. It is one of those happenstances where the mood downshifts once the deal is made. Only normal. The boy is asleep now, his face partly visible over the flap, and Manx wonders if he'll recall any of this, ever, or if it's already sunk in the dreaming part of his mind, the vague shape of a crouched man who is part of the night.

Charles looks at Manx and smiles, complicatedly, with an element of drowned affection in the mix.

Then they shake hands wordlessly and Manx is on his feet and out of there, feeling a slight ache in his calves and a hard tight serious-minded pain in his left hand from dragging the fire drum across the sidewalk. Put some butter on it when he gets home.

He walks past the humped and bundled bodies and the smoky grills where some of them cooked their meals and he walks past the cop on the tall horse and goes back across the bridge and up to Broadway and maybe there's the faintest line of light low in the eastern sky.

It occurs to him. A lot of things occur to him, all dulled by drink, but it occurs to him that he doesn't want to stand on an empty platform under the street waiting for a train.

He walks down Broadway and begins to wonder why the man gave him the change in his pockets. There wasn't any need for coins to be changing hands. Maybe it was just what the fellow said, the heartfelt thing of wanting to give whatever's on your person, giving the shirt off your back, or maybe it's an honest deal that two men make and one of them turns it into a handout.

He walks, he wants to walk but he doesn't want to reach home, ever, necessarily. He has to think this out, how he has the right to enter into money matters concerning any object that belongs to his family, which he is still the head of, regardless.

Being broke makes him feel guilty. Get a little cash and you're guiltier still.

He pees in an alley unashamed.

It occurs to him further that he could take a Greyhound bus out of here, ride that skinny dog into the sweet distance. The way his own sons raise up to him sometimes, all that wrangle in their eyes.

He will write the letter for Cotter. To excuse his absence from school. As he had a fever of a hundred and two.

Make the boy feel better about things.

It also occurs to him that he's approaching the corner where the street preacher spoke earlier in the evening, or last night, and then he realizes no, he's confused, he's still ten blocks north of there. Then he forgets this and looks around for the man. The man's gone of course, to wherever he goes, and this isn't his corner anyway, and there's nothing moving but a car or two, cars with mystery drivers coming out of the gloom, alive like insects all hours of the night.

Thirty-two dollars and change.

He feels the familiar stab of betrayal. Be messing with his head. Tricked him every which way. The baseball's bound to appreciate is the word. And the cash be worth less by the minute.

He looks in doorways for the preacher because he wants to give him the money. Get it off his hands. He wants to push the money in the old man's clothes just to be done with it. Give it to someone with a scientific interest in the stuff.

Booshit, man.

Money's his and he'll keep it. Take a bus somewhere. Or a room in some shambly street only a mile from home. Find a woman who'll look at him when her eyes sweep the room.

He forgets where he is again. He walks, he wants to walk, he's writing the letter in his head.

Please excuse my son from school yesterday.

He hears the rumble and grind of a garbage truck around a corner somewhere. Cars moving, trains running under the street, he's the only walking soul.

Old Charles be laughing up his sleeve for tricking old Manx. Tell his kid we gulled that fool.

Flat enough to pocket conveniently, with a cap on a chain.

He comes into his street and goes past the shoe repair and the beauty school.

His hand hurts where it touched hot metal.

It's beginning to get light when he reaches his building. He goes inside and climbs the stairs, each step taking basically a year, this is how it seems to Manx, until he is age eighty when he reaches his floor. He goes in the door, shadow soft, a silence with a set of eyes, and he moves slowly across the kitchen.

The alarm clock goes off in the bedroom.

He sits at the kitchen table and waits. She comes out in her nightdress and slippers, Ivie, the wife, and sees he hasn't been to bed and looks him over slowly.

She says, "What's this?"

"Need to put some butter on it."

"It's all blistered up. I don't like the looks of this."

"Just a surface burn."

"This election night? I thought election night was bonfires. I don't like the looks of this at all."

"You go on, get dressed. I take care of it."

"Not with butter you won't. That's old folks' nonsense," she says. "Do you more harm than good."

She takes the fruit out of the fruit bowl and fills the bowl with cold water and gets an ice tray out of the freezer.

"This doesn't help, we're taking you to emergency."

"I don't require no emergency."

She drops ten or twelve ice cubes into the water and sits next to him, holding his hand in the bowl of ice water and looking him over slowly. She keeps her questions, if she has them, for later.

Maybe the pain is subsiding slightly, maybe it's not. The water is so cold he only feels the cold. He tries to take his hand out of the bowl but Ivie keeps it there, her own hand pressing firmly on his, and Manx looks away, too tired to make a struggle of it.

"This only helps if the burn is recent," she says. "If the burn's not recent we have to see what they can do for you in emergency."

"And I'm telling you. I don't require no emergency."

They sit like this a while, her hand pressing his into the melting ice, and then she has to dress and go to work. Manx remains at the table, staring at his hand in the water and waiting for his son to wake up.