Underworld

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would drink my tea and die.

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

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

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

"Klara Sax," is what I shouted.

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

I got in my silent car and followed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen. Her hair was white, a mineral glisten, cropped close about her oblong face with a decorative fringe across the forehead. She wore a floppy orange T-shirt under the blazer and a necklace and several rings and one white running shoe and a sock the color of Kool-Aid grape. The injured foot was wrapped in a tan elastic brace.

Somebody passed with a paper cup and she dropped her cigarette in.

She'd rubbed some dark rouge high on her cheeks and it made her look severe and even deathly in an impressive way. But I could see the younger woman. I could make her rise in some sleight of mind to occupy the space I'd prepared, eyes faintly slanted and papery hands and how she used to smile privately and unbelievingly at the thought of us together and how she seemed to move in time-delay-the mind clocks in and the body follows.

I watched her. These first thirty seconds had a compressed power. I could feel my breathing change.

The crew was from French television and they were ready to start filming. The spectators grew still. The woman with the clipboard crouched just out of camera range, the spot from which she would ask her questions. She was in her willowy middle forties, streaked hair and antique jeans, a denim tote bag splay-handled at her feet.

She said, "It is all right we begin I think. I am allowed to be stupid because we edit my questions out of the film. Those are the rules okay? I choke on my English no problem."

"But I must be smart, funny, profound and charming," Klara said.

"It would actually be very nice. We start with the injury of your left leg. You can tell us what happened okay?"

"I fell off a ladder. Very minor. Missed a rung somewhere along the way. We use whatever devices we can find. We don't have a roof over our heads, a hangar or factory. We don't have the scaffolding, the platforms they have in assembly halls where they do construction and repair work."

I moved closer and found myself standing a few feet behind the student with the welcome badge, the young man who'd offered to arrange a room for me.

The interviewer said, "So you are climbing, you are working."

"It's a sprained ankle. Take an aspirin. Yes, I get up there sometimes if it's not too fierce, if the heat's bearable, you know. I've got to see it and feel it. We have many able-bodied volunteers. But I need to pitch in now and again."

"I was at the site tonight the first time and saw many ladders and people crawling on the wings. They're wearing masks. They have strapped to their backs these enormous tanks."

"We have automotive spray guns we use to prime the metal. We have industrial guns that spray oil paints, enamel, epoxy and so on. We use air compressors that are portable. We even use brushes. We use brushes when we want a brush effect."

People in the audience shifted a bit, trying to get a better look at Klara as she spoke or edging nearer to hear the conversation more clearly. Klara's voice had a slight rasp and a kind of wobble, the loose liquid texture of something sliding side to side.

"We scrape and sandblast," she said. "We have many blasting machines with guns and nine-gallon hoppers, I think they are. We have some pressure blasters, big things on wheels. Most of the planes have only one coat of paint to remove because they were painted originally with weight considerations foremost in mind. They were built to carry bombs in other words, not beautiful coats of paint. Of course this is impossible work. Working outside in heat, dust and wind. Completely impossible. Too much dust we don't paint. A little dust we paint. We're not looking for precision. We spray it on, grit and all. Spray it, shoot it, throw it."

She said, "Of course the planes have been stripped of most components that might still be useful or salable to civilian contractors. But the wheels are still there, the undercarriages, because I don't want planes that sit flat on their bellies. So we need a great deal of elevation to work on the fuselage and the massive fin. We have people standing on ladders with twelve-foot pole guns, we have people on the stabilizers spraying away at the damn tail."

"But you have cooperation."

"We have cooperation from the military up to a point. We can paint their deactivated aircraft. They let us paint and they promise to keep the site intact, to isolate it from other uses and to maintain the integrity of the project. No other objects, not a single permanent object can be located within a mile of the finished piece. We also have foundation grants, we have congressional approval, all sorts of permits. What else? Materials donated by manufacturers, tens of thousands of dollars' worth. But we still have to scratch and steal to get many of the things we need."

"And the dry air of the desert this keeps the metal safe."

"It is dry and it is hot."

"It is very hot okay?"

"Abandoned aircraft. Like the end of World War II," Klara said. "The one difference is-two differences. The one difference is we haven't actually fought a war this time. We have a number of postwar conditions without a war having been fought. And second we are not going to let these great machines expire in a field or get sold as scrap."

"You are going to paint them."

"We are in the process of painting them. We are saving them from the cutter's torch. And it's very strange let me tell you because thirty years ago when I gave up easel painting and started doing my castoffs they attacked me for it. And I don't recall when the term first came into use but they eventually started calling me the Bag Lady which I said funny ha-ha, figuring it would last a month. But the name trailed me for quite a long time and I was not amused anymore."

"Now you are here in the desert."

"Back to castoffs. This time it is not aerosol cans and sardine tins and shampoo caps and mattresses. I painted a mattress and some sheets. It was the end of marriage number two and I painted my bed in effect. Anyway yes, I am now dealing with B-52 long-range bombers. I am painting airplanes that are a hundred and sixty feet long with wingspans even longer and total weight operating on full tanks maybe half a million pounds, I don't know about empty-planes that used to carry nuclear bombs, ta-da, ta-da, out across the world."

"This is not a mattress."

"I'll tell you what this is. This is an art project, not a peace project. This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It's the surround. It's the framing device. It's the four-part horizon. This is why we insisted to the Air Force-a cleared area around the finished work."

"Yes it is true the landscape."

"Wait. I'm not finished. I want to say in this passage from small objects to very large ones, in the years it took me to find these abandoned machines, after all this I am rediscovering paint. And I am drunk on color. I am sex-crazed. I see it in my sleep. I eat it and drink it. I'm a woman going mad with color."

And she looked toward her audience, her workers, briefly, and they stirred and laughed.

"But the beauty of the desert."

"It's so old and strong. I think it makes us feel, makes us as a culture, any technological culture, we feel we mustn't be overwhelmed by it. Awe and terror, you know. Unconducive"-and she waved a hand and laughed-"to industry and progress and so forth. So we use this place to test our weapons. It's only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried."

The interviewer asked a series of questions about young conceptu-alists working with biological and nuclear waste and then called for a short break. The spectators applauded lightly and folded into chatty clusters or went outside to watch the night sky build and thicken.

I reached for the guy with the welcome on his chest.

"Can you approach her now? Tell her it's Nick Shay. From New York, tell her. Tell her if she can spare a minute," I said. "We lived near each other in New York."

He was blinking at me.

I told him my name again and watched him head for the director's chair. He had to wait until she was unoccupied and then he spoke to her, gesturing in my direction.

I watched her face, waiting for the name to register, for light to strike her eyes. She paused, then began to look around for me. Her face showed-what? A certain concern, a solicitude on my behalf, grave and memoried. Are you really here? Are you all right? Are you alive?

I walked over there and grabbed a folding chair and set it down alongside her and waited for the kid to go away.

"So this is Nick."

"Yes."

"Talk about surprises."

"You remember."

"Oh yes," she said, and there was the fadeaway smile, the look that says how did this happen.

"I was in Houston."

"You're leading a regular life."

"Shave every day."

"Pay taxes-good."

"I had business in Houston. There was a magazine I took with me that had a story about your project. So I thought why not."

"Nick exercises, I think."

"Well, let's see. I drink soy milk and run the metric mile."

I waited for her to smile. Then I said, "But the story didn't say exactly where the site was located. So I flew to El Paso and rented a car and thought I would drive home to Phoenix and pay a visit along the way."

"And you found us."

"Wasn't easy."

She was looking at me, openly evaluating. I wondered what she was seeing. I felt there was something I ought to explain about the intervening years. I had that half dread you feel when someone studies you after a long separation and makes you think that you've done badly to reach this point so altered and drawn. Unknown to yourself, you see. To reach this point so helpless against your own connivings that the truth has been obscured from you.

"And you're well? You look well," she said.

She was saying I looked well but she was staring in a certain way and there was something in her voice, you see, that made me wary. People kept interrupting to tell her things, to relay messages. Someone came by with a message about some administrative matter and she introduced us.

"An old friend from the cherished past," she said. "Well, cherished in memory maybe. Rough going at the time."

Then she turned to me again.

"Married?"

"Yes. Two children. College-age. Although they're not in college."

"I've married out of impulse, out of a cozy evening with a nice wine. Not lately, though. Lately I've been crazy with work. It took me a long time to realize I was careful and logical about affairs, really sort of scrupulous about who and where and when, and completely reckless when it came to marriage."

I wanted to say, You weren't always careful about affairs. But then it wasn't an affair, was it? Just an occurrence, a thing in two episodes, a few hours only, measured in hours and minutes and then ended. Of course I said nothing. I didn't know how to handle the subject. We could not be wry, considering the difference in our ages, about growing old and deaf and hobbled, and I despaired a little, I began to think we'd already stretched the visit past bearable limits and what a mistake I'd made, coming here, because the subject was not speakable- too secret, still, even between the secret-keepers, after forty years.

"I thought I owed us this visit. Whatever that means," I said.

"I know what it means. You feel a loyalty. The past brings out our patriotism, you know? We want to feel an allegiance. It's the one undivided allegiance, to all those people and things."

"And it gets stronger."

"Sometimes I think everything I've done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don't know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely-what-fictitious."

It was an offhand remark that didn't begin to interest her until she got to the last word.

"This is a long way, Nick. We're a long way from home."

"The Bronx."

We laughed.

"Yes. That place, that word. Rude, blunt-what else do we call it?"

"Crunching," I said.

"Yes. It's like three words they've crunched together."

"It's like talking through broken teeth."

We laughed again and I felt better. It was wonderful to laugh with her. I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to know I was out of there, whatever crazy mistakes I'd made-I'd come out okay.

"So strong and real," she said. "And everything since then-but maybe that's just a function of getting older. I don't read philosophy."

"I read everything," I told her.

She looked at me with something like renewed surprise.

"Maybe I should save this for the French," she said. "But didn't life take an unreal turn at some point?"

"Well, you're famous, Klara."

"No. It's not unreal because I'm famous." Annoyed at me. "It's just unreal."

She pulled a box of fslat Shermans out of her blazer and lit one up. "I'm not pregnant so I can do this."

Another person came and went, a young woman with a schedule change, and Klara's face went distant and tight but not at this news at all. Something else upset her, something stirred and entered and she tilted her head as if to listen.

"Strange you should turn up now. God, how strange and awful in a way. And I didn't make the connection until this minute. What in God's name is wrong with me? Did I forget he died? Albert died two weeks ago. Three weeks ago. Teresa called me, our daughter."

"I'm sorry."

"We were not in touch, he and I. Three weeks ago. Congestive heart failure. It's one of those illnesses, you sort of know what it means even if you don't."

"Where was he living? Back there?"

"Yes, back there," she said. "Where else would Albert die?"

Albert was Klara's husband when I knew them both. He was a science teacher in my high school. Mr. Bronzini. Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms, and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts. Albert and Klara among them. He was the husband, she was the wife, a detail I barely thought about at the time.

Two people leaned over Klara muttering something simultaneously and then one of the crew asked if she was ready to resume.

She said to me, "Your brother."

"Living in Boston."

"Do you see him?"

"No. Rarely."

"What about his chess?"

"I don't see anyone. He gave it up a long time ago."

"But what a pity."

"We couldn't have two geniuses coming out of the same little neighborhood."

"Oh bullshit," she said.

I put a hand on her arm and felt a softening. She looked at me again, eyes protuberant, bloodshot with seeing. I found it deeply agreeable to sit there with my hand on Klara's arm and to recall the younger woman's turned mouth, the kind of erotic flaw that makes you want to lose yourself in the imbalance-mouth and jaw not quite aligned. But this was the limit of reflective pleasure. These were all the things I could put through the squeezer. We'd said what we were going to say and exchanged all the looks and remembered the dead and missing and now it was time for me to become a functioning adult again.

Another person said something and I got up and moved away, feeling Klara's hand trail along my forearm and across my palm. I found a place farther back this time, nearer the opening. It took the audience a moment to assemble and settle down.

The interviewer crouched and spoke.

"Maybe you can tell us why you want to do this thing."

"It's a work in progress, don't forget, changing by the day and minute. Let me try, I'll try to circle around to an answer and maybe I'll get there and maybe I won't."

She held her right hand near her face, the cigarette tilted up, eye-high.

"I used to spend a lot of time on the Maine coast. I was married to a yachtsman, my second husband this was, a dealer in risky securities who was about to go bust any day but didn't know it at the time and he had a lovely ketch and we used to go up there and cruise the coastline. We sat on deck at night and the sky was beautifully clear and sometimes we saw a kind of halo moving across the star fields and we used to speculate what is this. Airliners making the North Atlantic run or UFOs you know, that was a popular subject even then. A luminous disc slowly crossing. Hazy and very high. And I thought it was too high for an airliner. And I knew that strategic bombers flew at something like fifty-five thousand feet. And I decided this is the refracted light from an object way up there, this is the circular form it takes. Because I wanted to believe that's what we were seeing. B-52s. War scared me all right but those lights, I have to tell you those lights were a complex sensation. Those planes on permanent alert, ever present you know, sweeping the Soviet borders, and I remember sitting out there rocking lightly at anchor in some deserted cove and feeling a sense of awe, a child's sleepy feeling of mystery and danger and beauty. I think that is power. I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power. Because I respect power. Now that power is in shatters or tatters and now that those Soviet borders don't even exist in the same way, I think we understand, we look back, we see ourselves more clearly, and them as well. Power meant something thirty, forty years ago. It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing. It was greatness, danger, terror, all those things. And it held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things. You could measure hope and you could measure destruction. Not that I want to bring it back. It's gone, good riddance. But the fact is."

And she seemed to lose her line of argument here. She paused, she realized the cigarette had burned down and the interviewer reached for it and Klara handed it over, delicately, butt-end first.

"Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values."

And she paused again and thought.

"I don't want to disarm the world," she said. "Or I do want to disarm the world but I want it to be done warily and realistically and in the full knowledge of what we're giving up. We gave up the yacht. That's the first thing we gave up. Now I've got these airplanes down out of the sky and I've walked and stooped and crawled from the cockpit to the tail gun armament and I've seen them in every kind of light and I've thought hard about the weapons they carried and the men who accompanied the weapons and it is awful to think about. But the bombs were not released. You see. The missiles remained in the underwing carriages, unfired. The men came back and the targets were not destroyed. You see. We all tried to think about war but I'm not sure we knew how to do this. The poets wrote long poems with dirty words and that's about as close as we came, actually, to a thoughtful response. Because they had brought something into the world that out-imagined the mind. They didn't even know what to call the early bomb. The thing or the gadget or something. And Oppenheimer said, It is merde. I will use the French. J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is merde. He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying, to the status of shit. You can't name it. It's too big or evil or outside your experience. It's also shit because it's garbage, it's waste material. But I'm making a whole big megillah out of this. What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because that's the heart and soul of what we're doing here."

The wobble in her voice. And the way the sound came cornering out of the side of her mouth. It was scary-seductive, it made us think she might trail into some unsteady meander. And the pauses. We waited out the pauses, watching the match tremble when she lit another cigarette.

She said, "See, we're painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we're trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there's a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct-to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage."

She said, "Some of the planes had markings painted on the nose. Emblems, unit insignia, some with figures, an animal mascot snarling and dripping juices from the mouth and jowls. Wonderful, actually, cartoons. Nose art, they call it. And some with women. Because it's all about luck, isn't it? The sexy woman painted on the nose is a charm against death. We may want to place this whole business in some bottom pit of nostalgia but in fact the men who flew these planes, and we are talking about high alert and distant early warning, we are talking about the edge of everything-well, I think they lived in a closed world with its particular omens and symbols and they were young and horny to boot. And one day I came across one of the oldest planes in the ranks, very weathered, with a nice piece of nose art that was faded and patchy and showed a young woman in a flouncy skirt and narrow halter and she was very tall, very blond, she had amazing legs and her hands were on her hips very sort of aspiring-pinup-you knew she didn't have quite the skill to bring it off-and her name was lettered under the painting and it was Long Tall Sally. And I thought, I like this girl because she is not amazonian or angelic or terrifically idealized. And I thought about her some more and this is what I thought. I thought even if she has to be painted over, and maybe she will be and maybe she won't, I thought we will definitely have to salvage her name. I thought we will title our work after this young woman, after the men who fixed her image to the aircraft, after the song that inspired them to do it. Which I recall only vaguely, the song. But there was a song and I thought there is probably a real and original Sally somewhere in the mix. She inspired the songwriter or the nose painter or the crew that flew the plane. Maybe she was a waitress in an airman's bar. Or somebody's hometown girl. Or somebody's first love. But this is an individual life. And I want this life to be part of our project. This luck, this sign against death. Whoever she is or was, a waitress bedraggled you know, hustling a ketchup bottle across the room, and never mind the bomb, I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we've done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I'm sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."

I could see her on television in France, dotted down to reconverted waves. I could hear her voice distanced behind a monotone translation. People watching in every part of the country, their heads clustered in the dark. I could see her flat-screen face buzzing at the edges, her eyes like lived-out moons, half a million Klaras floating in the night.

She said, "Not long ago I saw an old photograph, a picture taken in the midsixties, and there is a woman at the edge of the picture. The picture is crowded with people and they are in the doorway, it looks like the entranceway to a grand ballroom, and they are all wearing black and white, men and women both, and they are wearing masks as well, and I looked at the picture and I realized this was the famous party, the famous event of the era, Truman Capote's Black amp; White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York in the dark days of Vietnam, and I was completely sort of out-of-body looking at this scene because it took me maybe half a minute to understand that the woman at the edge of the frame was me. Absolutely. And I'm standing next to a man who is either Truman Capote or J, Edgar Hoover, one or the other because they had heads that were shaped alike, and the mask and the angle and the shadows make it hard to tell which one it is, and I am wearing a long black sheathy dress that I simply can't believe I ever wore although there I am, it's me, and a little white feline mask. And I thought, What is it about this picture that makes it so hard for me to remember myself? I thought, I don't know who that person is. Why is she there exactly. What is she thinking about? What sort of underwear is she wearing under the stupid dress and I can swear to you that I don't know. Surrounded by famous people and powerful people, men in the administration who were running the war, and I want to paint it over, paint the photograph orange and blue and burgundy and paint the tuxedos and long dresses and paint the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel and maybe this is what I'm doing, I don't know, it's a work in perpetual progress. And let's not forget pleasure. The senses, the pleasures, the body juices. But strata blue yes. But yellow and green and geranium red. Maine geraniums that thrive on cool damp air. But magenta yes. But orange and cobalt and chartreuse."

And someone in the small crowd called out, "Better red than dead."

And we all laughed. The remark had a resonance that seemed to travel on our voices, caroming off the facing walls of the space we shared. We stood and listened to our own laughter. And we all agreed together that the evening was done.

I was walking to my car when I saw the New York taxi. Someone was getting in and when the light came on I saw it was the same young woman who'd been driving.

"Hey thanks," I said. "Back there."

"You're the Lexus."

"Lost and wandering. Good thing you came along."

"We were saying I bet he thinks this is the Texas Highway Killer getting ready to claim another victim."

"I knew you weren't the Texas Highway Killer because this isn't Texas."

"Plus I doubt if he drives a yellow cab."

"That's the other reason."

"Here to help out?" she said.

"Wish I could. But I'm due back at the office tower in the great capital city."

"Could be your last chance to make art history."

"Or whatever it is you're doing here."

"Or whatever it is we're doing here."

She sat in the driver's seat with the door open, broad-bodied, not quite the levitated sylph she'd appeared to be in the bucking dust of that earlier moment.

"This your car?"

"I volunteered it more or less," she said, "so I guess I'm stuck with a taxi, which is slightly inconvenient. But to see the look on Klara's face I'd have to say yeah it was worth it."

Broad and open like a summer waitress who says There you go when she deposits the food in front of you.

"Been here long?"

"Going on seven weeks and I'm sticking it out if it takes forever, which it actually could."

"Not homesick?"

"Now and then. But this is a one-chance thing. You been out there yet?"

"In the morning," I said.

"Go early. The heat is mean."

"I know about heat. I like heat."

"Where you from?"

I didn't tell her I lived a quiet life in an unassuming house and so forth. Instead I told her where I was spending the night and I let her tell me how to get there although I already knew.

I let her tell me about her hometown.

I asked her about the work she did at the site and she said she applied a metal primer and sometimes she hand-scraped paint and sometimes she sanded with a machine.

She sat high in the seat, reciting details, and wagged her head, mock-girlish but also girlish.

I asked her about school and she said she'd dropped out several years earlier but was thinking of going back to get a degree in retailing and I let her tell me about it.

We talked about her brother, who had a rare blood disease.

I let her tell me about a white-water trip she took one summer when she was seventeen.

She said deteriated for deteriorated. When she said okay it sounded like okai.

She sat on a beaded cushion. Her hair was cut short, bulking out her face. I saw that the taxi's details and fittings, up close, and the paint job itself, had more amateurish charm than accuracy. But then it's not easy to get New York right.

"But here's the joke that's going round," she said. "Except no one seems sure it's a joke. We're painting these old planes as a celebration in a way but how do we know for sure the crisis is really over? Is the breakup of the USSR really happening? Or is the whole thing a plot to trick the West?"

She sounded out a laugh from her sinuses. It was oral and it was nasal and it came out harsh and moist, a curious noise designed to ridicule the idea while conceding its dark appeal.

"They're making it seem like they're falling apart so we'll lower our guard, okai?"

I let her tell me about it.

She made the noise again. A long wet whinnying letter k. And I found the more she talked, the more she owed me. But I didn't say a word. It was in my heart to speak, to make a breach in her self-absorption, in the solid stuff of her hometown and dying brother. I wanted to reduce these things to rubble. It was just a passing mood, a thing that erupts out of the formed core of one's middle-minded resolve.

I let her talk. And the more I listened and the more unappealing she became, the more I wanted to get inside her pants, for reasons no one comprehends under heaven.

But I didn't say word one. It was in my heart to talk her into spending the night in my room, or half the night, or an hour and ten minutes. I didn't know why I wanted her but I knew why I didn't want her. It would have been disloyal to Klara, to our shared memory, our own brief time in that small room back there in the narrow streets that were the borders of the world.

"Well, getting late," I said.

"Hey, big day tomorrow." "Best," I said, "be on my way."

She told me again how to get there and then drove off. All the other vehicles had left the area and I went looking for my car in the dark.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

I watched TV in my motel.

I lived responsibly in the real. I didn't accept this business of life as a fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal. History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood-read the speeches of Mussolini-at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

A man sat in a contour chair in a living-room set with a coffee table in front of him and books or the covers of books arrayed on the wall behind.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real. The only ghosts I let in were local ones, the smoky traces of people I knew and the dinge of my own somber shadow, New York ghosts in every case, the old loud Bronx, hand-to-mouth, spoken through broken teeth-the jeer, the raspberry fart.

The man in the chair said, "Down's syndrome. Your toll-free number is one, eight hundred, five one five, two seven six eight. Kor-sakoff's psychosis. One, eight hundred, three one three, seven five eight one. Alzheimer's disease. Call toll-free. One, eight hundred, eight one three, three five two seven." He said, "Kaposi's sarcoma. Twenty-four hours a day. One, eight hundred, six seven two, nine one six one."

I drove out to the site at sunrise. I parked near an equipment shed and began to climb a small rise that would place me at a natural vantage in relation to the aircraft. I heard them before I saw them, an uneasy creaking, wind gusts spinning the movable parts. Then I reached the top of the sandstone ledge and there they were in broad formation across the bleached bottom of the world.

I didn't know there would be so many planes. I was astonished at the number of planes. They were arranged in eight staggered ranks with a few stray planes askew at the fringes. I counted every last plane as the sun came up. There were two hundred and thirty planes, swept-winged, finned like bottom creatures, some painted in part, some nearly completed, many not yet touched by the paint machines, and these last were gunship gray or wearing faded camouflage or sanded down to bare metal.

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light-the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert. But these colors did not simply draw down power from the sky or lift it from the landforms around us. They pushed and pulled. They were in conflict with each other, to be read emotionally, skin pigments and industrial grays and a rampant red appearing repeatedly through the piece-the red of something released, a burst sac, all blood-pus thickness and runny underyellow. And the other planes, decolored, still wearing spooky fabric over the windscreen panels and engines, dead-souled, waiting to be primed.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

She wanted us to see a single mass, not a collection of objects. She wanted our interest to be evenly spaced. She insisted that our eyes go slowly over the piece. She invited us to see the land dimension, hori-zonwide, in which the work was set.

I listened to the turboblades rattle in the wind and felt the sirocco heat come blowing in and my eyes did in fact go slowly over the ranks and I felt a kind of wildness all around me, the grim vigor of weather and desert and those old weapons so forcefully rethought, the fitting-ness of what she'd done, but when I'd seen it all I knew I wouldn't stay an extra second.

Three vehicles moved toward the site, the day's first sturdy workers. I went down to my car and uncapped the tube of sunblock I'd spotted on a rack near the front desk in the mom-and-pop motel, next to the postcards and Indian dolls-the kachina dolls and snack packs of tortilla chips that are part of some curious neuron web of lonely-chrome America. I stood by the car and rubbed the lotion over my arms and face, pausing to read the label again. I'd been reading the label all morning. The label said the protection factor was thirty, not fifteen. I knew this subject well. I'd read up on this subject, seen the research studies, I'd compared the products and the claims. And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.

And it made me think of something strange. I got in the car and headed out toward the interstate. It made me think of the Teller story The Teller story was about Dr. Edward Teller and the world's first atomic explosion, which occurred about two hundred miles northeast of my present position. And the story said how Dr. Teller feared the immediate effects of the blast at his viewing site twenty miles from zero point and how he decided it might be helpful to apply suntan lotion to his face and hands.

These thoughts, these flashes of light, that innocent winsome gesture, this Japanese car-all more or less appropriate to the landscape.

I hit the switch, lowering the windows, and saw mountains reared near Mexico, lyrical in themselves and beautifully named, whatever their names, because you can't name a mountain badly, and I looked for a sign that would point me home.

My mother was living with us at the time. We finally got my mother to come out from the East and we set her up in a cool room at the back of the house.

My wife was good with her. They knew how to talk to each other. They found things to talk about. They talked about the things I did not talk about with Marian, the things I shrugged off when Marian asked, early girlfriends maybe or how I got along with my brother. The small shrewd things Marian used to ask me. I broke my arm when I was eight, falling out of a tree. This is what they talked about.

From the shimmering bronze tower where I worked I used to gaze at the umber hills and ridges that defined the northeast view. Maybe it was a hundred and eight degrees out on the street. Maybe it was a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, and I looked out past the miscellaneous miles of squat box structures where you took your hearing aid to be fixed or shopped for pool supplies, the self-replicating stretch I traveled every day, and I told myself how much I liked this place with its downtown hush and its office towers separated by open space and its parks with jogging trails and its fairy ring of hills and its residential streets of oleanders and palms and tree trunks limed white-white against the sun.

We brought her out from the East. We took her out of the daily drama of violence and lament and tabloid atrocity and matching redemption and how the city is hard and how the city is mean and how the city is nice to a tourist from Missouri who leaves her handbag in a cab and we fixed her up in a cool room where she watched TV

Marian wanted me to tell her about the old streets, the street games, the street fights, the alley sex, the petty theft. I told her about the car, not so petty, but she wanted to hear more. She wanted to hear about the execution now and then of some wayward member of whatever organized group she imagined might be operating thereabouts, the projectile entering the back of the head and making a pathway to the brain. She thought my mother's arrival might yield the basic savor she could not get from laconic Nick. But my mother only talked about the lazy grades I got in school and how I fell out of a tree when I was eight.

And I liked the way history did not run loose here. They segregated visible history. They caged it, funded and bronzed it, they enshrined it carefully in museums and plazas and memorial parks. The rest was geography, all space and light and shadow and unspeakable hanging heat.

I drank soy milk and ran the metric mile. I had a thing I clipped to the waistband of my running trunks, a device that weighed only three and a half ounces and had a readout showing distance traveled and calories burned and length of stride. I carried my house keys in an ankle wallet that fastened with a velcro closure. I didn't like to run with house keys jiggling in my pocket. The ankle wallet answered a need. It spoke directly to a personal concern. It made me feel there were people out there in the world of product development and merchandising and gift cataloguing who understood the nature of my little nagging needs.

They also talked about my father. That's the other thing they talked about in the deep lull after dinner. It's the kind of subject Marian seized on, trying to fill in gaps, work out details. I used to sit in the living room and listen fitfully through the urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher, I used to half listen, listen with my face in a magazine, hearing scumbled voices coming from the back room, a cluster of words audible now and then above the dishwasher and the TV set. The TV set was always on when my mother was in her room.

Travel was an important part of my job. Leaving the reflecting surfaces of the bronze tower, the way people modeled themselves on someone else, a few people, it's only natural, mostly mimicking up, repeating a superior's gestures or expressions. Think of a young man or woman, think of a young woman speaking a few words in a movie gangster's growl. This is something I used to do for pointed comic effect to get things done on time. I made breathy gutter threats from the side of my mouth and then I'd walk past an office a day or two later and hear one of my assistants speaking in this voice.

We fixed her up with a television set and a humidifier and the dresser that used to be Marian's when she was growing up. We emptied and cleaned the dresser and resilvered the mirror and put a plentiful supply of hangers in the closet.

Or I picked up the phone in the middle of a meeting and pretended to arrange the maiming of a colleague, a maneuver that drew snide laughter from the others in the room. I tried not to laugh a certain way myself, the way Arthur Blessing laughed, our chief executive, with articulated ha-has, a slow nod of the head marking the laugh beat. Going away, flying away freed me from the signals that bounced off every waxed and spanking surface.

He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. This is a thing you used to hear about disappearing men. It's the final family mystery. All the mysteries of the family reach their culmination in the final passion of abandonment. My father smoked Lucky Strikes. The pack has a design that could easily be called a target but then maybe not-there's no small central circle or bull's-eye. The circle is large. There's a large red circle with a white border and then a narrower tan border and finally a thin black border, so unless you expand the definition of a bull's-eye or the definition of a target, you probably can't call the Lucky Strike logotype a target. But I call it a target anyway and fuck the definitions.

Marian believed this is the crucial thing you have to consider when making a person feel at home. If you don't provide enough hangers, she will think she is not wanted.

My firm was involved in waste. We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. I traveled to the coastal lowlands of Texas and watched men in moon suits bury drums of dangerous waste in subterranean salt beds many millions of years old, dried-out remnants of a Mesozoic ocean. It was a religious conviction in our business that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation. Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard.

I saw a man on the via della Spiga standing in front of a mirrored column smoothing his hair, running both hands over his hair, and the way he did it, the cast of his eyes, the slightly pitted skin, both hands guiding the flow of his hair-this was half a second in Milan one day-reminded me of a thousand things at once, long ago.

The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections. Were they thinking about waste? We were waste managers, waste giants, we processed universal waste. Waste has a solemn aura now, an aspect of untouchability. White containers of plutonium waste with yellow caution tags. Handle carefully. Even the lowest household trash is closely observed. People look at their garbage differently now, seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a planetary context.

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He'd watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he'd sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn't completely convinced he could not do it. It's the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin versus aluminum. We did plastic containers, without caps or lids, on Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always the temptation.

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it's only natural, isn't it-all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command. It's there in the warbling banks of phones, in the fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer. Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.

Marian drove the car with a pencil in her hand. I don't think I ever asked her why. I don't think we talked the way we used to talk when the kids were growing up. What a richness of subject, two living things changing before our eyes, going from dumb clamor, from milk slop to formed words, or starting school, or just sitting at the table eating, little crayoned faces pumped with being. But they were grown people now with a computer after all, with rotating media shelves and a baby on the way and a bumper sticker (this was my son) that read Going Nowhere Fast. The days of the marriage were no longer filled with dialogues about Lainie and Jeff. We hung on the birth of the grandchild.

I ran along the drainage canal wearing a wireless headphone. I listened to Sufi chanting while I ran. I ran along the palm alleys and through the winding streets of orange trees and handsome stucco homes-streets of westward dreams, the kind of place my father could have taken us half a century earlier, lightward and westward, where people came to escape the hard-luck past with its gray streets and crowded flats and cabbage smells in the hallway.

Lainie was an entrepreneur, a hard driver, a bargainer, our huckster daughter, we called her, and she was living in Tucson with husband Dex. They made ethnic jewelry and sold it over a shopping channel, bracelets, chains, the works, and they did interviews and traveled to festivals and other cultural events. Her pregnancy gave us a lift and she sent photos of her changing shape and we drove down there often to see the booming body.

I rearranged the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the books. Then I strapped my ankle wallet to my ankle and ran.

The larger she got, the happier we became. We never knew how happy we were supposed to be until we turned off Interstate 10 and followed the sweeping traffic on one of those mall arteries that resemble a marathon of headlong metal and found her little street and saw her posing in the doorway in stately profile.

I call the Lucky Strike logotype a target because I believe they were waiting for my father when he went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and they took him and put him in a car and drove him somewhere near the bay, where the river goes into the bay or where the lagoon lies silent in the dark and there are marshes and inlets, remote spits of land, and then they gave it to him good, the projectile entering the back of the head and making a pathway to the brain. And, besides, if it's not a target, why did they name the brand Lucky Strike? True, there's a gold-rush connotation. But a strike is not only the discovery of some precious metal in the ground. It is also a penetrating hit from a weapon. And isn't there a connection between the name of the brand and the design of concentric circles on the package? This implies they were thinking target all along.

3

We sat in the Stadium Club with our sour-mash whiskey and bloody meat, pretending to watch the game. I'd been to Los Angeles many times on business but had never made the jaunt to Dodger Stadium. Big Sims had to wrestle me into his car to get me here.

We were set apart from the field, glassed in at press level, and even with a table by the window we heard only muffled sounds from the crowd. The radio announcer's voice shot in clearly, transmitted from the booth, but the crowd remained at an eerie distance, soul-moaning like some lost battalion.

Brian Classic said, "I hear they finally stopped ocean dumping off the East Coast."

"Not while I'm eating," I said.

"Tell him," Sims said. "Describe it in detail. Make him smell the smell."

"I also hear the more they dumped in a particular area, the richer the sea life."

Sims looked at the Englishwoman, who alone ate fish.

"Hear that?" he said. "The sea life thrived."

And Classic said, "Let's eat fast and get out of here and go sit in the stands like real people."

And Sims said, "What for?"

"I need to hear the crowd."

"No, you don't."

"What's a ball game without crowd noise?"

"We're here to eat a meal and see a game," Sims said. "I took the trouble to book us a table by the window. You don't go to a ballpark to hear a game. You go to see a game. Can you see all right?"

Simeon Biggs, Big Sims, was famous in the firm for his midbody girth. He was fat, bald and fifty-five but also strong, with a neck and arms resembling rock maple. If he liked you enough he might trade chest thumps or invite you to race him around the block. Sims ran the operational end of our Los Angeles campus, as we called it, and designed landfills that were prettier than pastel malls.

Classic looked at me and said, "We need video helmets and power gloves. Because this isn't reality. This is virtual reality. And we don't have the proper equipment."

Sims said, "We can't take our drinks with us if we go to our seats."

"That's a forceful point," I said.

The only time I ate the wrong food, just about, or drank too much, if ever, was when I was out with Sims, who was a living rebuke to the tactics of moderation.

The Englishwoman said, "Now as I understand it the pitcher gets a signal from the catcher. This pitch or that pitch. Fast or slow, up or down. But what happens if he ardently opposes the catcher's selection?"

"He shakes off the sign," Classic said.

"Oh I see."

"He waggles his glove or shakes his head," Sims said. "Or he stares down the catcher."

The Englishwoman, Jane Farish, was a BBC producer who wanted to do a program about the salt domes we were testing for the storage of nuclear waste, under the direction of the Department of Energy. She'd been busy for some years devouring American culture, leaving the earth scorched with interviews, she said-porno kings, contemplative monks, blues singers in prison. She'd just finished a sweep of California and was headed to a poker tournament in Reno and then into the desert to interview Klara Sax.

The Dodgers were playing the Giants.

Sims looked at Parish and said, "You know these two teams go way back. They were New York teams until the late fifties."

"They moved west, did they?"

"Moved west, taking Nick's heart and soul with them."

Farish looked at me.

"There was nothing left to take. I was already a nonfan by that time. Burnt out. This is my first ball game in decades."

"And it turns out to be silent," Classic said.

Big Sims ordered another round and told Farish about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Sims grew up in Missouri and he got some of it right, some of it wrong. No one could explain the Dodgers who wasn't there. The Englishwoman didn't mind. She was absorbing things chemically, sometimes shutting her eyes to concentrate the process.

"Nick used to take his radio up to the roof," Classic said.

Farish spun in my direction.

"I had a portable radio I took everywhere. The beach, the movies- I went, it went. I was sixteen. And I listened to Dodger games on the roof. I liked to be alone. They were my team. I was the only Dodger fan in the neighborhood. I died inside when they lost. And it was important to die alone. Other people interfered. I had to listen alone. And then the radio told me whether I would live or die."

It isn't easy to be smart about baseball if you didn't grow up with the game but Farish asked decent enough questions. It was the answers that came hard. We must have resembled three mathematicians so lost in their highly refined work that they haven't noticed how quaint and opaque the terminology is, how double-meaning'd. We argued the language and tried to unravel it for the outsider.

"Does anyone want wine?" Farish said. "I wouldn't mind trying a local white."

"Wine is a copout," Sims told her. "We clean toilets for a living."

Classic pointed out that an inning was an inning if we were speaking from the viewpoint of a pitcher getting three outs but it was only half an inning in the broader scheme of a nine-inning game with top halves and home halves. And the same half inning is also two-thirds of an inning if the pitcher is lifted with one out remaining.

I asked the waiter to get a glass of wine for our guest. Classic returned to the paradox of the innings but Big Sims waved him off.

"Let's go back to the Dodgers," he said. "We left the kid on the roof with his radio."

"Let's not," I said.

"You have to tell Jane what ended your career as a die-hard rooter."

"I don't remember."

"Killed you so dead you never went back."

"These are local afflictions. They don't travel."

"Tell her," Sims said, "about the Bobby Thomson homer."

Parish looked politely hopeful. She wanted someone to tell her something that made sense. So Sims told her about Thomson and Branca and how people still said to each other, more than forty years later, Where were you when Thomson hit the homer? He told her how some of us had stopped the moment and kept it faithfully shaped and how Sims himself had gone running in the streets, a black kid who didn't even root for the Giants-heard the game on good old KMOX and ran out of the house shouting, I'm Bobby Thomson, I'm Bobby Thomson. And he told Parish how people claimed to have been present at the game who were not and how some of them honestly insisted they were there because the event had sufficient seeping power to make them think they had to be at the Polo Grounds that day or else how did they feel the thing so strongly in their skin.

"You're not saying like Kennedy. Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"

Classic said, "When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war. I don't know."

"I don't know either," Sims said.

Parish looked at me.

"Don't look at me," I said.

"But you were on the roof, were you, when the blow was struck?"

"I didn't have to rush outside. I was already outside. I rushed inside. I closed the door and died."

"You were anticipating Kennedy," Parish said, and got a little laugh.

"The next day I think it was I began to see all sorts of signs pointing to the number thirteen. Bad luck everywhere. I became a budding numerologist. I got pencil and paper and wrote down all the occult connections that seemed to lead to thirteen. I wish I could remember them. I remember one. It was the date of the game. October third or ten-three. Add the month and day and you get thirteen."

"And Branca's number," Sims said.

"Of course. Branca wore thirteen."

"They called it the Shot Heard Round the World," Sims told Parish.

"A little bit of American bluster?"

"But what the hell," Sims said.

Classic was looking at me in a strange way, almost tenderly, the way someone regards a friend who is too dumb to know he is about to be exposed.

"Tell them about the baseball," Classic said.

He reached across the table and took some food from Sims' plate.

Classic was supposed to be my pal. I'd known Sims and Classic a long time and Classic, freckled free-style Brian, a man of shambling charm, was the guy I talked to when I talked about something. I talked to Big Sims but maybe I talked to Classic more readily because he did not challenge me with his own experience, he did not narrow his eyes as Sims did and fix me in his gaze.

"Let's change the subject," I told him.

"No. I want you to speak about this. You owe it to Sims. It's a crime that Sims does not know this. He's the only one here who still loves the game." Classic turned to the Englishwoman. "I go to ball games when I go at all for the sake of keeping up. It's a fall from grace if you don't keep up. Nick has fallen from grace. Only Sims is completely, miserably in touch. We had the real Dodgers and Giants. Now we have the holograms."

Parish said, "What baseball?"

Sims was looking at me. He was finished with his food and was untubing a panatela, a simple exercise that he surrounded with detailed ceremony.

Classic gave me a final melting look and turned to Sims.

"Nick owns the baseball. The Bobby Thomson home-run ball. The actual object."

Sims took his time lighting the cigar.

"Nobody owns the ball."

"Somebody has to own it."

"The ball is unaccounted for," Sims said. "It got thrown away decades ago. Otherwise we'd know it."

"Simeon, listen before you make pronouncements. First," Classic said, "I found a dealer on a trip I took back east some years ago. This guy convinced me that the baseball in his possession, the ball he claimed was the Thomson home run, was in fact the authentic ball."

"Nobody has the ball," Sims said. "The ball never turned up. Whoever once had the ball, it never surfaced. This is part of the whole- what? The mythology of the game. Nobody ever showed up and made a verifiable claim to this is the ball. Or a dozen people showed up, each with a ball, which amounts to the same thing."

"Second, the dealer told me how he'd traced the baseball almost all the way back to October third, nineteen fifty-one. This is not some fellow who turns up at baseball shows looking for bargains. This is pathological obsession. A completely committed guy. And he convinced me to a probability of ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent that this is the baseball. And then he convinced Nick. And Nick asked how much. And they worked out a deal."

"You got rooked," Sims told me.

I watched the Dodger shortstop field a grounder and make a wide throw to first.

Classic said, "The guy spent many years tracing the thing. He probably spent more money in phone calls, postage and travel miles, I'm exaggerating, than Nick paid for the baseball."

Sims had a derisive smile, a fleer, and it grew meaner by the second.

"Whole thing's phony," he told me, "If that was the authentic ball, how could you afford to buy it?"

"I will count the ways," Classic said. "First, the dealer wasn't able to provide absolute final documentation. That cut the price. Second, this was before the market boom in memorabilia and the auctions at Sotheby's and the four hundred thousand dollars that somebody paid for an itty-bitty baseball card."

"I don't know," Sims said.

"I don't know either," I said.

Parish finally got her wine. She looked at me and said, "How much did you pay?"

"My shame is deep enough. Let's not examine the details."

"What shame?"

"Well, I didn't buy the object for the glory and drama attached to it. It's not about Thomson hitting the homer. It's about Branca making the pitch. It's all about losing."

"Bad luck," Classic said, spearing a potato on my plate.

"It's about the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss. I don't know. I keep saying I don't know and I don't. But it's the only thing in my life that I absolutely had to own."

"A shameful secret?" Parish said.

"Yes. First to spend serious money on a souvenir baseball. Then to buy it for the reason I bought it. To commemorate failure. To have that moment in my hand when Branca turned and watched the ball go into the stands-from him to me."

Everyone laughed but Sims.

Classic said, "Even his name. Somber Ralph Branca. Like a figure out of an old epic. Somber plodding Ralph slain in something something dusk."

"Dark-arrowed," said the woman.

"Very good. Except it's not a joke of course. What's it like to have to live with one awful moment?"

"A moment in a game," she said.

"Forever plodding across the outfield grass on your way to the clubhouse."

Sims was getting mad at us.

"I don't think you fellows see the point," The way he said fellows. "What loss? What failure are we talking about? Didn't they all go home happy in the end? I mean Branca-Branca's got the number thirteen on his license plate. He wants us to know he was the guy. Branca and Thomson appear at sports dinners all the time. They sing songs and tell jokes. They're the longest-running act in show business. You fellows miss the point." Making us sound like scrubbed boys in preppy jackets. "Branca's a hero. I mean Branca was given every chance to survive this game and we all know why."

A little pall fell across the table.

"Because he's white," Sims said. "Because the whole thing is white. Because you can survive and endure and prosper if they let you. But you have to be white before they let you."

Classic shifted in his chair.

Sims told the story of a pitcher named Donnie Moore who gave up a crucial home run in a play-off game and ended up shooting his wife. Donnie Moore was black and the player who hit the home run was black. And then he shot and killed himself. He shot his wife several times, nonfatally, and then shot himself. He took a dirt nap in his own laundry room, Sims said. Sims told this story to the Englishwoman but it was completely new to me and I could tell that Classic barely remembered. I'd never heard of Donnie Moore and missed the home run and didn't know about the shootings. Sims said the shootings came a few years after the home run but were directly traceable. Donnie Moore was not allowed to outlive his failure. The fans gave him every grief and there weren't any skits at the baseball dinners,

Sims knew a lot about the shootings. He described the shooting of the wife in some detail.

Parish shut her eyes to see it better.

"We hear what you're saying," Classic said. "But you can't compare the two events on the basis of color."

"What else is there?"

"The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day. The scratchier an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way. Because it's not in competition for our attention with a thousand other pieces of action. Because it's something that's preserved and unique. Donnie Moore-well I'm sorry but how do we distinguish Donnie Moore from all the other ball games and all the other shootings?"

"The point is not what we notice or what we remember but what happened," Sims said, "to the parties involved. We're talking about who lived and who died."

"But not why," Classic said. "Because if we analyze the reasons honestly and thoroughly instead of shallow and facile and what else?"

"Unhistorical," I said.

"Then we realize there were probably a dozen reasons why the guy started shooting and most of them we'll never know or understand."

Sims called us fellows again. I switched sides several times and we ordered another round of drinks and went at it some more. We were not talking to Jane Parish now. We didn't notice her reactions or encourage her interest. Sims called us fellows many times and then he called us chaps. It began to get a little funny. We ordered coffee and watched the game and Parish sat in a thoughtful knot, arms and legs crossed, body twisted toward the window, yielding to the power of our differences.

"Buying and selling baseballs. What heartache. And you never told me," Sims said.

"It was some time ago."

"I would have talked you out of it."

"So you could buy it yourself," Classic said.

"I deal in other kinds of waste. The real stuff of the world. Give me disposable diapers by the ton. Not this melancholy junk from yesteryear."

"I don't know," I said again.

"What do you do, take the ball out of the closet and look at it? Then what?"

"He thinks about what it means," Classic said. "It's an object with a history. He thinks about losing. He wonders what it is that brings bad luck to one person and the sweetest of good fortune to another. It's a lovely thing in itself besides. An old baseball? It's a lovely thing, Sims. And this one's got a pedigree like no other."

"He got taken big-time," Sims said. "He's holding a worthless object."

We paid the bill and started filing out. Sims pointed to a photograph over the bar, one of dozens of sporting shots. It was a recent photo of a couple of gray-haired ex-players, Thomson and Branca, dark-suited and looking fit, standing on the White House lawn with President Bush between them, holding an aluminum bat.

We went out and sat in the company box for ten minutes so Classic could hear the crowd noise. Then we walked down the ramp and headed for the parking area. Parish had some questions about the infield fly rule. Sims and Classic were able to get together on this by the time we got out to the car. It was an unexpected boon for the BBC.

I sat in back and looked at the city flowing past and I thought of Sims the kid running down a street in St. Louis. He's wearing dungarees with the lower legs rolled into bunchy cuffs that are paler than the dark denim twill of the outer cloth. He's waving his arms and shouting that he's Bobby Thomson.

4

I sat with my mother in her room and we talked and paused and watched TV We paused to remember. One of us said something that roused a memory and we sat together thinking back.

My mother had a method of documentary recall. She brought forth names and events and let them hang in the air without attaching pleasure or regret. Sometimes just a word. She spoke a word or phrase that referred to something I hadn't thought about in decades. She was confident in her recall, moving through the past with a sureness she could not manage to apply to the current moment or hour or day of the week. She made fun of herself. What day is it? Do I go to mass today or tomorrow? I drove her to mass and picked her up. This was the steadiest satisfaction of my week. I learned the mass schedule and the types of mass and the length of service and I made sure she had money for the basket. We sat in the room and talked. She seemed untouched by sentiment. She'd summon a moment that struck me with enormous force, any moment, something ordinary but bearing power with it- ordinary only if you haven't lived it, if you weren't there-and I saw how still she sat, how prudent she was in her recollecting.

I used to tell my kids when they were small. A hawser is a rope that's used to moor a ship. Or, The hump in the floor between rooms, I used to say This is called the saddle.

We set her up with the dresser and the air conditioner and a hard mattress that was good for her back. She brought forth names from the family passional, the book of special suffering, and we paused and thought. Her hair was still partly brown in places, gone wiry and iridescent, goldshot in bright light, bobby-pinned, and we sat there with the TV going. I knew she would not say too much or remember carelessly. She was in control here, guiding us safely through the pauses.

After the riots in Los Angeles my son started wearing baggy shorts and a cap turned backwards and sneakers with bloated tongues. Before this he used to be nondescript, sitting in his room with his computer, a quiet kid just turned twenty. He dressed the same way all the time. He dressed for a job interview the way you'd dress to walk your dog-it was one continuous thing to him.

We designed and managed landfills. We were waste brokers. We arranged shipments of hazardous waste across the oceans of the world. We were the Church Fathers of waste in all its transmutations. I almost mentioned my line of work to Klara Sax when we had our talk in the desert. Her own career had been marked at times by her methods of transforming and absorbing junk. But something made me wary. I didn't want her to think I was implying some affinity of effort and perspective.

Famous people don't want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there's something crawling in their clothes.

My father's name was James Costanza, Jimmy Costanza-add the letters and you get thirteen.

At home we removed the wax paper from cereal boxes. We had a recycling closet with separate bins for newspapers, cans and jars. We rinsed out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their proper bins. We did tin versus aluminum. On pickup days we placed each form of trash in its separate receptacle and put the receptacles, from the Latin verb that means receive again, out on the sidewalk in front of the house. We used a paper bag for the paper bags. We took a large paper bag and put all the smaller bags inside and then placed the large bag alongside all the other receptacles on the sidewalk. We ripped the wax paper from our boxes of shredded wheat. There is no language I might formulate that could overstate the diligence we brought to these tasks. We did the yard waste. We bundled the newspapers but did not tie them in twine.

Sometimes we used the pauses to watch TV We looked at reruns of "The Honeymooners" and my mother laughed when Ralph Kramden flung his arms and bellowed great complaints. It was about the only time I could expect to hear her laugh. She must have felt a certain clean release, looking at the sadly furnished apartment, at wife Alice in her apron or dowdy cloth coat, at Norton the neighbor with a bent fedora on his jerky head-things that were close to what she knew. Superficially of course. Close to what she knew in an apparent rather than actual way. A closeness that was shallow but still a bit touching and maybe even mysteriously real. Look at the picture on the screen, flat and gray and staticky with years, not unlike memories she carried to her sleep. She slept in a room in Arizona and how strange this must have seemed to her. But Jackie Gleason on the screen made the place more plausible-he drew her toward a perceptible center.

A hawser is the thing you tie around a bollard.

I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Marian wanted to know me at seventeen, see me at seventeen, and there were small shrewd things she asked about, and they talked about my father and I listened, in the deep lull after dinner. My mother said things I already knew but I listened from the living room with a magazine in my face. He was a bookmaker famous for his memory, never wrote a number on a piece of paper. This was the legend of the street. I was eleven years old when he walked out the door and I heard the story later, that he remembered everything, made his rounds of the barbershops and sweatshops, downtown, in the garment district, the street corners, the hotel lobbies, strictly small-time, and that he never had to commit a figure to paper because he was able to retain the details of every bet. This is the story that settled around his name. It was part of the awe that trails a violent death or an unexplained disappearance.

She posed in the doorway in stately profile and we turned off Interstate 10 and entered one of those death marathons of mall traffic and finally found their little street and there she was, pregnant to beat the band.

My mother said things to Marian, a story now and then in her Bronxy half brogue, and I sat and listened fitfully behind the body-throb of the dishwasher. We gave her room a coat of fresh green paint, Lainie's old room, pale and restful. We fixed her up with the TV set and the resilvered mirror and the good hard healthy bed and we laid in a case of flavored seltzer-lemon-lime, I think.

In my office in the bronze tower I made gangster threats that were comically effective. I said to a consultant who was late with a report, "I'm telling you once and for all that I, me, Mario Badalato, I'll sever your fucking family's head off." This in a scraped-raw voice faithful to the genre and evilly appreciated by the others in the room.

In Holland I went to VAM, a waste treatment plant that handles a million tons of garbage a year. I sat in a white Fiat and went past windrows of refuse heaped many stories high. Down one towering row and around to another, waves of steam rising from the tapered heaps, and there was a stink in the air that filled my mouth, that felt deep enough to singe my clothes. Why did I think I was born with this experience in my brain? Why was it personal? I thought, Why do bad smells seem to tell us something about ourselves? The company manager drove me up and down the steaming rows and I thought, Every bad smell is about us. We make our way through the world and come upon a scene that is medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable object ever thrown together, and it seems like something we've been carrying all our lives.

He was the kind of person you'd have trouble describing if you saw him in the commission of a crime. But after the riots he put on an LA. Raiders hat and an ultralong T-shirt that had a pair of sunglasses slung from the pocket. Nothing else changed. He lived in his room, disappearing into chips and discs, the same shy boy but physically vivid now, a social being with a ghetto strut.

We sat in the room watching reruns, my mother and I. He left her for a time before I was born. This is why I carry her name, not his. She didn't think he'd ever come back and she told me she saw a lawyer, who did some finagling. The courts tend to rule that a child must retain his father's name until he reaches legal age, at which time he can choose for himself. But the lawyer finagled an exception out of some judge and this is why my birth certificate says Shay. Then he came back and stayed a long time before he went out for cigarettes, ten years or so. He was a man from nowhere, she said, slightly resigned, as if this was all she could expect fate to offer us-her and me and my brother-or maybe I misread the tone and she meant this is where he came from and this is where he went, inescapably, given the rhyming slang of life.

Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport-how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, the medicines and aspirins and lotions and powders and gels, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fist-balled in their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in minutes, bags dragging on the shiny floors.

I used to say to the kids. I used to hold up an object and say, The little ridged section at the bottom of the toothpaste tube. This is called the crimp.

Gleason dead but also in the room with us, Irish like her and camped in a stale sweatbox, dressed in a busman's suit, arm-waving, flailingly fat, the only person who could make her laugh. He stalked across the floor pumping his fist. You're goin' to the moon, Alice. My mother liked the familiar things best. The more often he used a line, the more she laughed. She waited for certain lines. We both waited and he never let us down. We felt more closely bound with Gleason in the room. He gave us the line, gave us the sure laugh, the one we needed at the end of the day. Gleason aggrieved. Pounding the table-top and bending his knees and tilting the great head skyward. He was the joke that carried a missing history-the fat joke, the dumb joke, the joke about the rabbi and the priest, the honeymoon joke, the dialect joke, the punch line that survives long after the joke is forgotten. We felt better with Jackie in the room, transparent in his pain, alive and dead in Arizona.

I dropped her off and picked her up and made sure she had money for the basket.

We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word pluto-nium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

I liked to hurry home from the airport and get into my trunks and T-shirt. I ran along the drainage canal with Sufi voices tracking through my head and sometimes I saw a plane taking off, all light and climb and calculus, and I thought of my son Jeffrey when he was younger-the gift he thought he possessed to take an aircraft out of the sky, the mastery of space and matter, a power and control that rose damnably from the curse of unbelonging.

And sometimes I sat with her through the mass, the mass in English, what a stark thing it was, without murmur or reverberation, but still the best part of my week, and I took her arm and led her out of the church and she was not a small woman but seemed to be dwindling, passing episodically out of flesh-she felt like rice paper under my hand.

He used to shave with a towel draped over his shoulder, wearing his undershirt, his singlet, and the blade made a noise I liked to listen to, a sandpaper scrape on his heavy beard, and the brush in the shaving cup, the Gem blade and the draped towel and the hot water from the tap-heat and skill and cutting edge.

Dominus vobiscum, the priest used to say, and we'd push our way out of the vestibule, several kids chanting, Dominick go frisk 'em. What was Latin for if you couldn't reduce the formal codes to the jostled argot of the street?

It was science-fiction stuff or horror-movie stuff except that Jeff was too shy and frightened to test it in the world, even with his sister whistling in his ear to make the thing explode.

5

Brian Classic called late sometimes. He called in streaks, late at night, four calls in one weekend maybe, and what did he talk about when he called? The office, of course, bringing up matters he could not easily discuss in the tower itself, or the latest national scandal maybe, with anatomical details, or he'd carry on about a movie he wanted me to rent, guns and drugs-he thought it made us better buddies.

He also did it as a provocation. Brian believed I was safely encased, solid, with a house and family folded around me, surer than he was, older but also physically superior, physically fit, a man of hardier stuff, this was his own stated theme-a man who keeps his counsel. And it greatly fazed him, it made him want to chip away, make boyish forays, place claims on my attention.

When the phone rang at a certain hour, Marian and I exchanged the Brian look-had to be him.

"You will not believe where I am. Get over here right away. This place is astonishing. You're the only person I can bear to share it with. Come alone," he said.

It took me a while to find the place. I kept crossing MO, out where the map begins to go white, low stucco buildings with satellite dishes-tractor parts and diesel tune-ups, sand and rock and self-defense. Then I spotted a cluster of shops that matched Brian's description, a neat clean minimall, painted sort of rancho pink and green, three of the outlets not yet open for business, and I parked near the last shop on the left, the only going concern, called Condomology.

College kids, gently unkempt. They stood between the shelves talking and browsing, going through the catalogs and reading the small print on the product boxes, and others mixed in, slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle.

Brian pushed me into a corner so I could scan the area. Wide aisles, the carpeting was soft and pale and the aisles were wide and there were wall paintings, five panels on each of the two long walls showing scenes of an ice-cream parlor of the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A soda jerk behind a marble counter making a strawberry float for a couple of girls in school jerseys and bobby socks-that was one mural, flat-painted, painted in a style not current to the scene, and the effect was interesting, completely undreamy. Brian was studying my lower jaw for some reaction. I heard music in the deep distance, a crooner doing lost songs, the kind of ballad that sometimes included a verse or two in slurred Italian, and it was all nicely subdued, I thought, unaffected, without patronizing humor.

Brian whispered at me sharply, as if I hadn't noticed.

"Condoms."

That's what it was all right, condoms, the whole place was condoms, shelves filled with a hundred kinds of protection, male and female, spermicides, body butter, latex gloves, silicone lubricants, with books, manuals, videos, special displays, with novelty items of the big-dick little-dick type, and T-shirts of course, and baseball caps with condom logos.

"And the place is strategically located, out at the new frontier," he said. "I can see a satellite city growing out from this one shop, a thousand buildings, this is my vision, sort of spoked around the condom outlet. Like some medieval town with the castle smack at the center."

"They built their castles on the periphery."

"Fuck you. Show some amazement. They have peach-flavored rubbers. And kids come here to socialize, to hang around and see what's doing. I'm waiting to hear Al Hibbler sing 'Unchained Melody' "

"Al Hibbler was good."

"Good? Fuck you good. He was amazing. You think Ray Charles is blind? Al Hibbler, that was blind. Show some response."

He led me down an aisle. My response was, Look at all these condoms. Studded, snug, ribbed, bareback. We used to say, Don't go in bareback. Meaning wear a rubber or you'll knock her up. Now there were rubbers called barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity.

"These will replace running shoes," Brian said. "Kids will shoot each other for expensive lambskin condoms."

There were loose condoms sold in bowls, in candy jars-grab a handful. A woman looked at a display model of a polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at either end. Brian knew her from the automated teller machine at his bank-hello, how are you, hi, hello. There were finger condoms and full-body condoms, oral condoms with a minty savor. There were condom cases, pocket-sized, and a condom you could wear as a hat.

Brian said, "My brother carried a rubber in his wallet all through adolescence. He showed it to me once, I think I was twelve. Flipped open his wallet and showed me this little wizened thing like a deflated penis and I don't think I ever recovered. This was a world I wasn't ready to enter. I could understand sex on the animal level. This was something else entirely. Something about the material, the plasticky sort of rubber, the look and touch, he made me touch it, and the whole nature and function of the thing, I don't know, it was alien and unsettling. Sex alone was tough enough to encounter. This was technology they wanted to wrap around my dick. This was mass-produced latex they used to paint battleships."

"You were a sensitive boy."

"I was scrawny and mute, barely human. You were a strapping kid who beat the crap out of kids like me."

"We didn't have any kids like you," I told him.

"You carried a rubber?"

"In the little slit pocket in my dungarees."

"By the time I was sixteen they weren't doing that anymore."

"They're doing it now," I said.

"I don't think my brother ever used the condom in his wallet. When he got a car he put it in the car. He put it in the glove compartment. That's when I think he finally got to use it."

A man was singing softly along, crooning the lyrics on the sound system. He moved haltingly toward us pushing a cylinder of oxygen on wheels, a gray-haired guy, with tubes from the tank running all the way up into his nose. The tank was the size of a dachshund in a custom case. And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice-he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in his gnawed voice to a life's own shape, felt in the deepest skin.

We moved out of the way to let him pass.

Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill-We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian.

A young woman stood near the door, a Ramses logo tattooed on her earlobe.

"My kid's got one of those," Brian said. "Only it says Pepsi, Should I be grateful?"

"Which kid?"

"Which kid. What's the difference?"

Brian was wary of his family. He adopted the put-upon pose df the father complaining routinely about kids who are careless with money and forgetful of every caution, we all have this act we perform, it amounts to a second language, the dad's easy-to-master lament, and Brian did scornful solos of high animation, but he also harbored something deeper and sadder, a sense that these were his enemies, forces loose in his own house prepared to drain him of self-worth, a stepdaughter, a daughter and a son, all in high school, and a wife, he said, who was a couple of bubbles off center.

"That's not the only thing she's got planted on her body."

"Which kid?" I said.

"Brittany."

"I like Brittany Be nice to her."

"Be nice to her. Listen to this, she wears an armband, you won't believe this-they had Apartheid Simulation Day at her school."

"What's that?"

"What it says. They attempt to simulate the culture of apartheid. A lesson for the kids. They all wore armbands. You wore gold if you were the oppressed class and I think red if you were the military and green if you were the elite. Brittany volunteered for the oppressed class and now she won't take her armband off. The official simulation lasted one day but she's been doing this for weeks now. Nobody else is doing this but her. She restricts her access to the lunchroom, ten minutes a day She only rides certain buses at certain times. She sits in a specified area of the classroom."

"How do the other kids react?"

"She gets spat upon and shunned."

He made a TV screen with his hands, thumbs horizontal, index fingers upright, and he looked out at me from inside the frame, eyes crossed, tongue lolling in his head.

We took a final turn around the room. A boy and girl in one of the murals sat in a booth with ice-cream sundaes and frosty glasses of water and long-handled spoons for the sundaes and the scene was not contrived to be charming but was close to documentary in tone and the whole place was a little museumlike, I thought, with time compressed and objects arrayed of evolutionary interest. And a woman sang a ballad about a chapel in the moonlight, vaguely familiar to me, and I turned to see if the man with the oxygen tank was still singing along.

Brian bought a package of condoms to give to his son David, a buddy-buddy thing, a token of communication and accord. We went outside and stood in the empty plaza and he opened the box and removed a single sheath in its foil wrap. He looked at it. He had a sputter-laugh he saved for certain occasions, like a semidrowned man bitter about being rescued, and he looked at the thing and laughed.

"Everybody talked about VD then. The clap was a term with a very decisive ring to it. The clap."

"The siff."

"All those terms, one worse than the other. But I couldn't detect a saving element in a condom. Maybe because it brought to mind another term."

"Scumbag."

"And in my little retard sort of twelve-year-old brain, maybe I sensed a secret life in this object in my brother's wallet, this scumbag-how could a thing called a scumbag be safe to use?"

"We're waste managers," I told him. "Scumbags are things we deal with."

"But think of the contempt we invest in this word. It's an ugly word. Full of self-loathing."

"Never mind the words. You bought a rubber for your kid because it's important for him to use it. I hate to be sensible. I know it's thankless to be sensible in the face of someone's primitive distrust."

"You're right."

"People have to use these things."

"You're right," he said. "It's thankless."

He unwrapped the condom and shook it out until the nipple end swung lightly in the breeze. Then he crumpled the thing in his fist and held it to his nose.

He said, "What does it smell like? Is it shower curtains? Is it car upholstery or lampshade liner? Is it those big blocky garment bags where you store the clothes you never wear?"

He was inhaling deeply, trying to absorb the odor, retain it fully so he might mark its nature. His lean head flared, red-roostered. He thought it might be the smell of the bubble wrap around your new computer when you take it out of the shipping container. Or the shipping container itself. Or the computer itself. Or the plastic baggies that have been in your freezer too long, collecting Freon fumes. He thought it might be a hospital smell, a laboratory smell, a discharge from a chemical plant. He couldn't place it exactly. The insulation in your walls. The filter in your air conditioner.

"I thought they were odor-free. Modern condoms," I said. "Except when flavor is added."

"That's the new type that's odor-free. I bought him the old cheap latex that binds the sex member and reduces the sensation and smells bad. Because I want him to pay a price for being sensible."

Marian sat in Jeff's room watching a movie on TV I had to adjust to the sight of someone else in his room. His room was his animal den, his pelt and smell, and I thought she was committing some breach of species, sitting in there.

She wore beat-up jeans and an old tank top that drooped in front, the kind of woman who grows into her beauty, I think, who becomes beautiful over time and then one day you see it, sort of suddenly and all together-it becomes a local scandal of surprise and comment.

"When did you start smoking again?"

"Shut up," she said.

I told her about Condomology I stood in the doorway and talked above the noise from the movie. She was fine-skinned, assertive in a way that was all featural-slightly angular of face, straight-nosed, dark-haired, no-nonsense-looking, very near classical in an American way, a certain sort of old-fashioned way that doesn't stray drastically from plainness, like the face cut in raised relief on the old soap bar, maybe it was Camay, I'm not sure, the woman's head in profile, with marcelled hair, although Marian's was straight.

"Where's Jeff?"

"Went out. I'm watching this."

I told her about Apartheid Simulation Day, standing in the doorway.

She said, "I'm watching this."

"Want something? I want something."

"Mineral water be nice," she said.

I went to the kitchen and got all the things out of all the compartments. I poured the mineral water over ice in a tall glass and dropped a wedge of lemon in. Got the potato vodka from the freezer, smoky cold, and remembered what it was I wanted to say to her. I cut a lune of lemon skin and dropped it in a port glass.

I wanted to say something about Brian.

I'd tried drinking port for a while just to see how it would feel, how it would sound, a port glass, a fortified wine, and now I used the port glass for my vodka, pouring it syrupy cold and opal.

I heard the dialogue from the movie at the other end of the house.

Her skin was Camay-pure and her hair was dark and straight and she usually wore it short because short was easy. Her voice was shaped, it was deep and toned, sort of vowel round and erotic, particularly over the phone or in the bedroom dark, with brandy static in it or just the slightest throaty thing of night desire.

She used to sing in a church choir in her Big Ten town, she liked to call it, but quit over some belittlement, some perceived slight-how she would hate to hear me say perceived.

I handed her the mineral water and she said something about Brian. I thought she might be trying to preempt my own Brian remark. She'd felt it coming in the routine reading of signals in the marriage sensurround.

"Did he recommend another movie where everybody ends up in a storm sewer shooting each other?"

"This is how Brian relieves the pressure of being Brian."

I remembered a party where she stuck herself in a corner of the room with a man we both knew slightly, a university poet with long raked hair and stained teeth, laughing-he talked, she laughed, innocent enough, you say, or not innocent at all but completely acceptable, a party's a party, and if the huddle went on far too long, who is to notice but the husband? And I said to her later. This was a long time ago when the kids were small and Marian drove a car without a pencil in her hand. I said to her later, self-importantly because this was the point, to speak with exaggerated dignity, to speak to the depths of my being and make fun of myself at the same time because this is what we do at parties.

I said, I suffer from a rare condition that afflicts Mediterranean men. It's called self-respect.

I stood in the doorway watching the movie with her.

"Will Jeff be living with us forever, do you think?"

"Could happen."

"The job at the diet ranch. Fell through?"

"I guess."

"He didn't say?"

"I'm watching this," she said.

"Did you do the newspapers?"

"I did the bottles. Tomorrow's bottle day. Let me watch this," she said.

"We'll both watch it."

"You don't know what's going on. IVe been watching for an hour and a quarter."

"I'll catch up."

"I don't want to sit here and explain."

"You don't have to say a word."

"The movie's not worth explaining," she said.

"I'll catch up by watching."

"But you're interfering," she said.

"I'll be quiet and Til watch."

"You're interfering by watching," she said.

The remark pleased her, it had a tinge of insight, and she stretched smiling in a sort of coiled yawn, hips and legs steady, upper body bent away. I guess I knew what she meant, that another's presence screws up the steady balance, the integrated company of the box. She wanted to be alone with a bad movie and I was standing judgment.

"You work too hard," I told her.

"I love my job. Shut up."

"Now that I've stopped working too hard, you work too hard."

"I'm watching this."

"You work unnecessarily hard."

"If he tries to kill her, I'm going to be very upset."

"Maybe he'll kill her off camera."

"Off camera, fine. He can use a chain saw. As long as I don't have to see it."

I watched until my glass was empty. I went back to the kitchen and turned off the light. Then I went into the living room and looked at the peach sienna sofa. It was a new piece, a thing to look at and absorb, a thing the room would incorporate over time. It took the curse off the piano. We had a piano no one played, one of Marian's Big Ten heirlooms, an object like a mounted bearskin, oppressing all of us with its former life.

I turned off the light in the living room but first I looked at the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the peach sienna sofa and the Rajasthani wall hanging and the books on the shelves. Then I turned off the light. Then I checked the other light, the light in the back hall, to make sure it was still on in case my mother had to get up during the night.

I stood in the doorway again. Marian watched TV, body and soul. She lit another cigarette and I went into the bedroom.

I stood looking at the books on the shelves. Then I got undressed and went to bed. She came in about fifteen minutes later. I waited for her to start undressing.

"What do I detect?"

"What do you mean?" she said.

"Between you and Brian."

"What do you mean?" she said.

"What do I detect? That's what I mean."

"He makes me laugh," she said finally.

"He makes his wife laugh too. But I don't detect anything between them."

She thought about ways to reply to this. It was an amusing remark perhaps, not what I'd intended. She looked at me and walked out of the room. I heard the shower running across the hall and I realized I'd done it all wrong. I should have brought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room.

6

We laid in a case of the flavored seltzer she liked and we set her up in a quiet room, Lainie's old room, with the resilvered mirror and the big-screen TV

It wasn't long before Jeff stopped wearing the baggy shorts and turnaround cap and began to resemble himself again. His personal computer had a multimedia function that allowed him to look at a copy of the famous videotape showing a driver being shot by the Texas Highway Killer. Jeff became absorbed in these images, devising routines and programs, using filtering techniques to remove background texture. He was looking for lost information. He enhanced and super-slowed, trying to find some pixel in the data swarm that might provide a clue to the identity of the shooter.

The device weighed only three and a half ounces and it showed the distance I ran and the calories I burned and even the length of the strides I took-clipped to the waistband of my trunks.

I was eleven years old when he went out for cigarettes, a warm evening with men playing pinochle inside a storefront club and radio voices everywhere on the street, someone's always playing a radio, and they took him out near Orchard Beach, where the shoreline is crannied with remote inlets, and they dropped him into the lower world, his body suspended above the rockweed, in the soft organic murk. Not that I really recall the weather or the card players. There's always a radio and someone playing cards.

At home we wanted clean safe healthy garbage. We rinsed out old bottles and put them in their proper bins. We faithfully removed the crinkly paper from our cereal boxes. It was like preparing a pharaoh for his death and burial. We wanted to do the small things right.

He never committed a figure to paper. He had a head for numbers, a memory for numbers.

We fixed her up with the humidifier, the hangers, the good hard bed and the dresser that belonged to Marian when she was growing up, a handsome piece with a history behind it.

In the bronze tower I looked out at the umber hills and felt assured and well defended, safe in my office box and my crisp white shirt and connected to things that made me stronger.

In the bronze tower a fellow executive cleared his throat and I heard something go by in the small hoarse noise, a secret linger of childhood, the game he played inside his life. Maybe it was a hundred and eight degrees out on the street. He was spying on himself. The third person watches the first person. The "he" spies on the "I." The "he" knows things the "I" can't bear to think about. Maybe it was a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, telephones warbling in modulated phrases. The third person sends his nobody to kill the first person's somebody.

I used to say when they were small. I told them more than once. This is the washer, this is the packing, this is the spout.

In the bronze tower we used the rhetoric of aggrieved minorities to prevent legislation that would hurt our business. Arthur Blessing believed, our CEO, that true feeling flows upward from the streets, fully accessible to corporate adaptation. We learned how to complain, how to appropriate the language of victimization. Arthur listened to gangsta rap on the car radio every morning. Songs about getting mad and getting laid and getting even, taking what's rightfully ours by violent means if necessary. He believed this was the only form of address that made an impact on Washington. Arthur recited lyrics to me once on the company plane and together we laughed his wacko laugh, those enunciated ha-has, clear and slow and well spaced, like laughing with words.

Coming home I liked to put suntan lotion on my arms, face and legs and go running down the quiet streets of oleanders and palms and along the drainage canal banked with red dirt. I ran in dense heat and strong light and I thought about the protection factor bumping up to sixty now, I wondered about this even though I'm olive-skinned, dark as my old man-from fifteen to thirty to sixty, where once upon a time a factor fifteen was the absolute maximum sunblock scientifically possible. Running past tree trunks limed white against the unrelenting sun.

You have to cut it thick. That's what he said about the bread, the round crusty loaf he called Campobasso bread, after the name of the store, which itself was named for a mountain town on the spine of Italy. The best bread, you cut it too thin, he said, it's worthless. I watched him shave and I watched him cut bread, holding the loaf on its side with one hand, thumb of the other hand, the knife hand, edged over the haft onto the back of the blade to guide the slicing, down through the crust and into the springy middle of the bread.

When Lainie had her baby, her girl, I felt a soft joy settle in my chest. Or a solace, maybe, an easing of some perennial clutch or grab, some taunt of malehood. All these women now, from my mother in her pale green room to this raw arrival kicking in mortal fret, all gathered near the chimneypiece. It was a kindness that the child should be a girl. I felt an expansive ease, an unthrobbing of some knot in my body. I watched her naked in her mother's arms, swimming in a ribbon of light.

Tuesdays only we did plastic, minus caps and lids. Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and Old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish and devastate.

Residents of Phoenix are called Phoenicians.

They talked about the things I did not talk about, although I told her about the stolen car, and we said to each other, Marian and I, we said if people ever saw our son in the commission of a crime they wouldn't know how to describe him except for his skin color and the jokey sticker fastened to the rear bumper of his Honda, if in fact his Honda was an element in the crime, the bumper sticker someone gave him-Going Nowhere Fast.

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed? First we saw the garbage, then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo. How does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years.

According to street legend he never wrote a number on a piece of paper.

Night after night we sat in the stale glow, my mother and I, and watched reruns of "The Honeymooners." Ralph Kramden wailing his unstoppable pain. Maybe my mother identified with wife Alice. The apron and cloth coat and underfurnished flat and food smells in the hallway. But Alice had a bus-driver husband who kept walking in the door instead of going out. He drove a vehicle licensed by society. And Ralph and Alice had no kids to worry and torment them. You had the kids without the husband. Not even a body risen from the rock-weed and found floating by two guys early one Sunday in a rented row-boat with a cage for trapping crabs-the nibbled body of Jimmy Costanza, age whatever.

I went back to the coastal lowlands of Texas and did an interview with the BBC wearing a hard hat and miner's lamp and standing in a salt passage two thousand feet under the earth. The producer stood off camera and asked questions and I tasted salt dust stirred up by the forklifts and tried to frame responses that would please her.

You had the man who did the job unlicensed by society. In the hallways and alleys you heard the footfalls at night and must have wondered if that was Jimmy coming back. From the dead or the dark or maybe just New Jersey. And that was you dressing quickly at first light before the heat came whistling up the pipes-early mass among the Italians in their graveclothes. You had the kids with their taut nerves, the little woodpushing wonder who was harder to love than a handful of coffee dregs. Alone those cold mornings going to mass. And the older son with his distance and dimmed moods and undimmed rage, up on the roof in the evening sleet to smoke a cigarette.

I look at the Lucky Strike logotype and I think target.

I watched men in moon suits bury drums of nuclear waste and I thought of the living rocks down there, the subterrane process, the half-life, the atoms that decay to half the original number. The most common isotope of uranium is bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium that fissions, if we can generate a verb from the energy of splitting atoms. This isotope has the mass number two three eight. Add the digits and you get thirteen.

But the bombs were not released. I remember Klara Sax talking about the men who flew the strategic bombers as we all stood listening in the long low structure of sectioned concrete. The missiles remained in the rotary launchers. The men came back and the cities were not destroyed.

7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can never look at an airplane."

"Or an airplane," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Is this the longest day of my life?"

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

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

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

She turned a page.

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

"I drove, you slept."

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

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

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

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

"They ate the roasted corn relish."

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

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

"I saw that."

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

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

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

"What?"

"One of those nighty nights."

"What?"

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

"Restless."

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

"We always knew it was."

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

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

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

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

"Just tell me what his name is."

"For what, the faucet?"

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

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

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

"Which shower are we talking about?"

"Terry, right?"

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

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

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

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

"I have this thing on my leg."

"It's not Boston," I said.

"It's not Boston."

"It's Portland."

"It's Portland."

"What thing?" I said.

"On the inside of my thigh."

"Call Williamson."

"It could be an irritation."

"Call Williamson. When did you get it?"

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

She turned a page.

"Lainie had the wallpaper today."

"About time."

"That was her that called."

"I hope you didn't tell her."

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

"Stopping would have been."

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

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

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

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

She turned a page.

"Why is that?" I said.

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

"The tablets."

"The caplets."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did you tell her to spackle?"

"They did the baby's room first."

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

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

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

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

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

"Heavyset."

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

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

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

She turned a page.

"Is it a lump?" I said.

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

"Maybe it's the estrogen."

"No no no no no."

"Call Williamson," I said.

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

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

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

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

She turned a page.

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

"Wait a second. I know."

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

"Wait a second. I know."

"You know the stuff I mean."

"The sleep stuff or the indigestion?"

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

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

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

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

Thirty-four thousand five hundred dollars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Nick?"

"I'm here."

"You all right?"

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

"Come back to bed."

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

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

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

"No. Just come to bed."

"I'll be there in a minute."

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

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

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

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

"What's this?"

"Dropped something," Cotter says.

"I need to talk to your father."

"When I see him."

"Tell him," the man says.

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

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

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

"What day off?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His mother says, "How many times?"

"What?"

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

"Plunge it in something strong," Rosie says.

"That's a filthy sweater."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I did too," Cotter says.

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

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

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

"What was he preaching?"

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

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

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

"Back to normal," Rosie says.

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

"He's always there," Cotter says.

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

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

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

"People always preaching," Rosie says.

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

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

"Amen," says his sister.

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

War and treaties, eat your Wheaties.

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

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

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

"Had your dinner?"

"Meat loaf."

"Leave some for me?"

"I don't know."

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

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

"Which one's in there?"

"Rosie."

"Washing up a storm."

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

"Finishes what she starts, that girl."

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

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

"Super wants to talk to you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There now. We feeling better."

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

"Oh yeah? That says what?"

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

"Dear so-and-so."

"That's right. Like that."

"Please excuse my son."

"That's the way."

"Due to he was ill."

"Tell them it was a fever."

"How feverish'd you get?"

"Say one hundred ought to do it."

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

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

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

"Recovering nicely, thanks."

"Except what's that on your sweater?"

"I don't know. Burrs."

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

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

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

"I went to the game."

"The game."

"At the Polo Grounds. Today."

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

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

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

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

"No, you didn't."

"I chased it down and got it."

"Lying to my face," Manx says.

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

"Know what you are?" Manx says.

Cotter reaches for the ball.

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

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

"Are you being straight-lip with me?"

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

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

"Why would I lie?"

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

"No reason for it."

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

"Nobody."

"You didn't tell your mother?"

"She'd tell me give it back."

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

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

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

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

Cotter is listening to this.

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

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

"What are we saying in this letter?"

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

"What are we saying?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What kind of money they give us?"

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

"I don't have a stub."

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

"What you trying to do to me?"

"I didn't get a stub."

"Why not?"

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

"What you doing to me, son?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rosiewillgetyouup."

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

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

"She throws things at me."

"Catch them and throw them back."

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

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

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

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

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

She says, "You were talking to him."

"Whose business is it?"

She says, "What for?"

"I don't need any what for."

She says, "Talking an awful long time."

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

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

"Let him tell me."

She says, "I'm telling you."

She's moving through the kitchen doing things.

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

He hears the radio playing faintly in their bedroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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