Underworld

1

I’ve always been a country of one. There's a certain distance in my makeup, a measured separation like my old man's, I guess, that I've worked at times to reduce, or thought of working, or said the hell with it.

I like to tell my wife. I say to my wife. I tell her not to give up on me. I tell her there's an Italian word, or a Latin word, that explains everything. Then I tell her the word.

She says, What does this explain? And she answers, Nothing.

The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza. Distance or remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained, it's the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate mobster-the made man. Once you're a made man, you don't need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself. You're all there, "fou're made, You're handmade. You're a sturdy Roman wall.

I was in Los Angeles thinking about these things. People say L.A. is only half there and maybe that's why I was thinking about my father. And also because my brother Matt-it was Matt's endless premise, his song of songs, that our old man Jimmy was living somewhere in southern California under the usual assumed name.

I told him Jimmy was dead under his own name. We were the ones with assumed names.

But the curious thing, the contradiction, is that I was standing in the middle of a fenced enclosure in a bungalow slum looking up at the spires of the great strange architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers, an idiosyncrasy out of someone's innocent anarchist visions, and the more I looked, the more I thought of Jimmy. The towers and birdbaths and fountains and decorated posts and bright oddments and household colors, the green of 7-Up bottles and blue of Milk of Magnesia, all the vivid tile embedded in cement, the whole complex of structures and gates and panels that were built, hand-built, by one man, alone, an immigrant from somewhere near Naples, probably illiterate, who left his wife and family, or maybe they left him, I wasn't sure, a man whose narrative is mostly blank spaces, date of birth uncertain, until he ends up spending thirty-three years building this thing out of steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh, all hand-mortared, three thousand sacks of sand and cement, and who spends these years with glass specks crusting his hands and arms and glass dust in his eyes as he hangs from a window-washer's belt high on the towers, in torn overalls and a dusty fedora, face burnt brown, with lights strung on the radial spokes so he could work at night, maybe ninety feet up, and Caruso on the gramophone below.

Jimmy was an edge-seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh, but he looked at his hand one day, according to my little brother, and it was blank. And did he become, could I imagine him as a runaway eccentric? In a way, yes, a man who doesn't wash or change his clothes, bummy looking, talks to himself on the street, and in another way, maybe, I could imagine him rising this high, soaring out of himself to produce a rambling art that has no category, with cement and chicken wire.

This was the contradiction. Jimmy's future closed down the night he went out for cigarettes. Why would I even try to imagine him in an alternative reality, coming out here, half here, escaping to the Ange-leno light, the Mediterranean weather?

I walked among the openwork towers, three tall, four smaller ones, and saw the delftware he'd plastered under a canopy and the molten glass and mother-of-pearl he'd pressed into adobe surfaces. Whatever the cast-off nature of the materials, the seeming offhandedness, and whatever the dominance of pure intuition, the man was surely a master builder. There was a structural unity to the place, a sense of repeated themes and deft engineering. And his initials here and there, SR, Sabato Rodia, if this was in fact his correct name-SR carved in archways like the gang graffiti in the streets outside.

I tried to understand the force of Jimmy's presence here. I saw him shabby and muttering but also unconstrained, with nothing and no one to answer to, in a shoe-box room somewhere, slicing a pear with a penknife. Jimmy alive. And then I thought of a thing that happened when I was about eight years old and it was a memory that clarified the connections. I saw my father standing across the street watching two young men, greenhorns, trying to lay brick for a couple of gateposts in front of someone's modest house. First he watched, then he advised, gesturing, speaking a studied broken English that the young men might grasp, and then he moved decisively in, handing his jacket to someone and redirecting the length of string and taking the trowel and setting the bricks in courses and leveling the grout, working quickly, and I didn't know he could do this kind of work and I don't think my mother knew it either. I went across the street and felt a shy kind of pride, surrounded by middle-aged men and older, the fresh-air inspectors, they were called, and you've never seen happier people, watching a man in a white shirt and tie do a skillful brickwork bond.

When he finished the towers Sabato Rodia gave away the land and all the art that was on it. He left Watts and went away, he said, to die. The work he did is a kind of swirling free-souled noise, a jazz cathedral, and the power of the thing, for me, the deep disturbance, was that my own ghost father was living in the walls.

The waitress brought a chilled fork for my lifestyle salad. Big Sims was eating a cheeseburger with three kinds of cheddar, each described in detail on the menu. There was a crack in the wall from the tremor of the day before and when Sims laughed I saw his mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

We heard the test flights shrieking out of Edwards. Sims said they had aircraft that bounced off the edge of space and came back born-again.

We were at Mojave Springs, a conference center some distance from Los Angeles. I'd recently gone to work for Waste Containment, known in the industry as Whiz Co, and I was here in the spirit of freshmen orientation, to adjust to the language and customs, and my unofficial advisor was Simeon Biggs, a landfill engineer who'd been with the firm for four or five years. There were a number of waste-handling firms represented at the Springs and we were sharing seminar space with a smaller and more committed group, forty married couples who were here to trade sexual partners and talk about their feelings. We were the waste managers, they were the swingers, and they made us feel self-conscious.

Sims said, "The ship's been out there, sailing port to port, it's almost two years now."

"And what? They won't accept the cargo?"

"Country after country."

"How toxic is the cargo?"

"I hear rumors," he said. "This isn't my area of course. Happens in some back room in our New York office. It's a folk tale about a spectral ship. The Flying Liberian."

"I thought terrible substances were dumped routinely in LDCs."

An LDC, I'd just found out, was a less developed country in the language of banks and other global entities.

"Those little dark-skinned countries. Yes, it's a nasty business that's getting bigger all the time. A country will take a fee amounting to four times its gross national product to accept a shipment of toxic waste. What happens after that? We don't want to know."

"All right. But what makes this cargo unacceptable? And why don't we know what the shipment actually consists of?"

"Maybe we're trying to spare ourselves a certain amount of embarrassment," Sims said.

The tremor had hit at cocktail time when I was standing in the hospitality suite with a number of colleagues, who peered over their drinks in the slow lean of the world. The room whistled and groaned. I worked at controlling the look on my face, waiting for the situation to define itself. It was not a mild shock. It was in the middle fives, we later learned, a five point four, and I felt justified in my sense of potential alarm, seeing the crack in the restaurant wall when we sat down to lunch.

"You think what, it's a drug shipment? Disguised as toxic waste? Because I hear rumors too."

"Tell me about it," Sims said.

He sat across the table, meat face and wide body, the jut underlip, the odd little unlobed ears, round and perfectly worked, the tiny mannered ears of a sprite child.

"I'm eager to hear your version," he said, a trace of sweet condescension in his voice.

"One, it's a heroin shipment, which makes no sense. Two, it's incinerator ash from the New York area. Industrial grade mainly. Twenty million pounds. Arsenic, copper, lead, mercury."

"Dioxins," Sims said agreeably, biting into the middle of his mesquite-grilled beef.

Four couples took the round table nearby and Sims and I observed a pause. We wanted to be amused and slightly derisive. These were swingers, of course, dressed assertively, in the third person, and they leaned back in sequence when the boy poured water.

"They take time out for lunch. I respect that," Sims said.

"I hear things about the ship."

"The ship keeps changing names. 'Vbu hear that?"

"No, I don't."

"The ship left a pier on the Hudson River with one name, I don't know what it was but it got changed three months later off the West African coast. Then they changed it again. This was somewhere in the Philippines."

"Enormous quantities of heroin, I hear. But why would heroin get shipped from the U.S. to the Far East? Makes no sense."

"Makes no sense," Sims said. "Except it ties in with another rumor. You know this rumor?"

"I don't think so."

"Mob-owned."

He liked saying this, he rounded out the words, popped his eyes a little.

"What's mob-owned?"

"The company that owns the ships we lease. The mob has a lot of involvement in waste carting. So why not waste handling, waste shipment, waste everything?"

"There's a word in Italian," I said.

"Maybe it's not just the shipping company. Maybe it's our company. We're mob-owned. They're a silent partner. Or they own us outright."

He liked saying this even more. Not that he believed it. He didn't believe it for half a second but he wanted me to believe it, or entertain the thought, so he could ridicule me. He had a hard grin that mocked whatever facile sentiments you might be tempted to shelter in the name of your personal conspiracy credo.

"There's a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event."

"They need this science. I don't need it."

"I don't need it either. I'm just telling you."

"I'm an American. I go to ball games," he said.

"The science of dark forces. Evidently they feel this science is legitimate enough to require a name."

"People who need this science, I would make an effort to tell them we have real sciences, hard sciences, we don't need imaginary ones."

"I'm just telling you the word. I agree with you, Sims. But the word exists."

"There's always a word. There's probably a museum too. The Museum of Dark Forces. They have ten thousand blurry photographs. Or did the Mafia blow it up?"

This is where Sims laughed, showing a mouth crisscrossed with cheddar.

I checked the round table. Two of the women smoked. Two of the women wore studded western vests. One was nearsighted, sticking her head in the menu, and one had an accent I couldn't place. All the women were ornamented, decked in chains, bracelets and breastpins, in hoop earrings with bead pendants, jewelry with a hammered look, a pounded look, and one chewed a carrot stick and talked about her kids.

"You know Italian?" he said.

"I studied Latin for a while. In school, then on my own, pretty intensively. And dabbled in German and Italian."

"My wife is German," he said. "Met her when I was stationed there."

"A GI with a swagger."

"That pretty much says it. Except I was Air Force."

"She speaks German around the house?"

"A little bit. Yeah. Quite a lot."

"You understand?"

"I better understand," he said.

The men wore broad-collared print shirts unbuttoned to the thorax. The men were all hair. Not the protest hair of the sixties of course. Chest hair, mustaches, brushy sideburns, great heads of Hollywood hair-real hair that resembled toupees in bad taste, wish-fulfilling rugtops, sort of spit-curled and heavily surfed.

Big Sims called for the check.

"But we like our jobs, don't we, Nick? Whoever owns the ships we use."

"I like my job."

"I like my job."

His sport coat was draped over the back of his chair, too broad to fit snugly over the palmettes that adorned the top rail. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a dark tie and a tie clip shaped like a scimitar.

He gave me a tight-eyed look.

"Want to go to a Dodger game?"

"No," I said.

It did not seem surprising, all these ghost-ship stories, even if they were only elusive hearsay, because we'd been told the night before that waste is the best-kept secret in the world. This is what Jesse Detwiler said, the garbage archaeologist who'd addressed the massed members about an hour after the tremor-an address that did not go down well with the grilled squab and baby Zen vegetables.

Our faces showed a pristine alertness, back there at cocktail time, when the room shook around us. It was a look that trailed a self-awareness in its wake, a sheepish sense of our own glimpsed fear, of being caught unaware, just before we gained control, and this is the face that traveled through the suite, above the vodka tonics, creating an ironic bond among the managers, in the indoor wind.

We saw Detwiler in the lobby after we paid the bill. Sims went over and collared him, literally, got him in a headlock and mock-pummeled his shaved dome. They were acquaintances, it seemed, and the three of us made a date to drive out to a landfill that Sims had designed, a massive project still in development.

A man and woman walked across the lobby and I watched her carefully. Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin. I went over and checked the schedule of events on the easeled board near the revolving doors, registration and coffee, licensing laws, spent fuel storage, all the topics and speakers in movable white type, ten to twelve and two to five and on into the night, and I thought about the swingers and their arrangements.

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the subject.

I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speechwriter and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace.

Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste.

I went running with Big Sims and we ran along trails that hikers used, backpackers with rugged boots, and we ran on bridle paths that went into the hills. We wore sunglasses and peaked caps and ran on stony rubble and red sand and Sims didn't stop talking, he talked and ran across the desert scrub and I labored to keep up.

"You know, it's funny, I took this job four years ago and it's a good job and pays well and has the benefits and provides for my widow when I die from overwork but I find-you find this, Nick? From the first day I find that everything I see is garbage. I studied engineering. I didn't study garbage. I thought I might go to Tunisia and build roads. I had a romantic idea, you know, wear a safari jacket and pave the world. Turns out I'm doing fine. I'm doing real work, important work. Landfills are important. Trouble is, the job follows me. The subject follows me. I went to a new restaurant last week, nice new place, you know, and I find myself looking at scraps of food on people's plates. Leftovers. I see butts in ashtrays. And when we get outside."

"You see it everywhere because it is everywhere."

"But I didn't see it before."

"You're enlightened now. Be grateful," I said.

Our sneakers were flimsy things against the slabstone and tuff. We ran on trails littered with straw shit from the rented horses and we ran gasping and panting, panting as we talked, and the sweat came down Sims' face in intersecting streams. I kept up with him. It was necessary to keep up, keep running, show you can talk while you run, show you can run, you can keep up. The sweat came down our bodies and plastered our shirts to our backs.

"We get outside and we're waiting. The guy's bringing our car around. I peer into the alley meanwhile. And I see something curious. An enclosure, a barred enclosure set along the wall. A cage basically. Three sides and a top. Wrought iron bars and a big padlock." He's talking and pausing, the words are pumping out of his chest. 'And I have to step a little ways into the alley. Before I can see exactly what this is. And I smell it before I see it. The cage is filled with bags of garbage. Food waste in plastic bags. A day and a night of restaurant garbage."

He was looking at me as we ran.

"Why do they cage it?" I said.

He looked at me,

"Derelicts come out of the park and eat it."

We turned back toward the compound of rose stucco buildings burning in the light. It was not easy keeping pace with Sims. He had the plodding force of a fleshy ex-boxer who still has reserves of deep endurance, oil reserves, fossil fuel-he had calories to burn, sweat to yield in abundance.

"Why won't the restaurant let them eat the garbage?"

"Because it's property," he said.

Five fighter jets went over in tight formation, flying low, a haunted roar spilling through the valley, and Sims jerked his thumb at the sky as if to signal something that had slipped my mind.

I kept seeing my own face of the evening before, when the fiver shook the room, all the work it took to reconcile the forces that pressed against each other.

We pounded down past the golf course and guest cottages, a cropped world of people in soft pastels, alive by the handful, by the orderly foursome, and I felt relieved the run was nearly over.

"Ask me about the ship," he said.

"Is the ship Liberian register?"

"It was when it started out. I hear it's registered in Panama now."

"Is that possible? Change registry in midcourse?"

"I don't know. It's not my area," Sims said. "But the rumors about the ship don't only concern what the ship is carrying in its hold. Or who owns the ship. Or where the ship is headed."

"Okay, what else is there?"

"Is this an ordinary cargo ship? Or is there some degree of confusion about this?"

"What kind of ship would it be if it carries cargo but isn't a cargo ship?"

"Remind me to give you a lesson in sludge sometime."

He laughed and ran, capering a little, bop-running, elbows out and fingers snapping, and he surged ahead of me. I felt a flare of competition, a duress of the spirit that warns against the shame of losing, and I hurried to catch up.

And interesting that later this business of picking through garbage, old winos and runaway kids slipping into an alley to get at broken bread chunks and slivers of veiny beef-later, with Detwiler, the subject would reoccur, but differently, with a touch of the renegade theater of the sixties.

The three of us went out to the landfill in the early evening, half an hour's drive to the east, some of this on roads restricted to military use. Sims had a permit that allowed entry at select times, an arrangement worked out between Whiz Co and some agency buried in the Pentagon, and this saved us the trouble of taking the long way around.

The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe-the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gas-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial. I listened to Sims recite the numbers, how much methane we would recover to light how many homes, and I felt a weird elation, a loyalty to the company and the cause.

Sims spoke to both of us but mainly to Jesse Detwiler because this was the visionary in our midst, the waste theorist whose provocations had spooked the industry. And Sims was eloquent, he loved his subject and gestured sweepingly, hand-shaping the layers of plastic and earth, the shredding of tires, the mixing of chemicals with kiln dust. I hadn't seen these things yet, myself, but it was easy to perceive what they meant to Sims, a labor of earth, utterly satisfying in its mingled tempers of technology and old hard useful work, dust in the mouth and a wall of drenching smells.

Detwiler stood at the rim of the crater, looking in.

"What about the hot stuff?"

"Well drum it and segregate it. But we won't forget it. It'll be logged on three-D computer records. We can find it if we have to."

"What's your approach to bomb waste?"

"Bomb waste. That's why we hired Nick."

I saw the gleam in Simeon's eye and I said deadpan, "I have a background in public relations."

Detwiler tilted his chin, marking the small measure of amusement he might attach to this remark. He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief. And he looked remade, retooled, shaved head and bushy mustache, a guy in firm control, with a workout coach and a nice line of credit, in a black turtleneck jersey and designer jeans. It occurred to me that except for the plucked hair he could have been a swinger.

"I'll tell you what I see here, Sims. The scenery of the future. Eventually the only scenery left. The more toxic the waste, the greater the effort and expense a tourist will be willing to tolerate in order to visit the site. Only I don't think you ought to be isolating these sites. Isolate the most toxic waste, okay. This makes it grander, more ominous and magical. But basic household waste ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don't hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage. And the hot stuff, the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia. Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it."

Sims wasn't sure he liked this.

"What kind of nostalgia?"

"Don't underestimate our capacity for complex longings. Nostalgia for the banned materials of civilization, for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts."

Detwiler had been a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the Director's house in northwest Washington and this is what people remembered, what I remembered when I first reheard the name Jesse Detwiler. He'd earned a brief feverish fame in the chronicles of the time, part of the strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children.

A bird flew across the width of the crater, a finch or wren, moving with the nervous fleetness, the urgency of sundown.

Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out-workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven-

He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate. He was a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, and I don't think he cared whether we were two people listening or half a million.

"See, we have everything backwards," he said.

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down.

"Do you really believe that?" I said.

"Bet your ass I believe it. I teach it at UCLA. I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it."

The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car. Detwiler sat in the middle of the rear seat, needling us about dumping our garbage on sacred Indian land. And about Whiz Go's vanguard status. He thought the firm had the hard-core appetites of any traditional company

We drove an empty road.

"You tracking the rumors, Sims? This ship you've got."

"It's not my area."

"Cruising the oceans of the world trying to dump some hellish substance."

"I'm looking the other way," Sims said.

"Look this way. I hear it's headed back to the U.S."

"ibu know more than we do." Sims hated saying this. "What do we know, Nick?"

"We're not sixties people. We're forties and fifties people."

"We're limited," Sims said.

"We don't know much of anything."

"We listened to the radio," Sims said. "We know the Lone Ranger and Ton to."

"From out of the past," I said.

"The thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver."

"A fiery horse with the speed of light."

"This is what we know, Jesse."

"A cloud of dust."

"And a hearty hi-yo Silver."

Deep-pitching our voices to the baritone drama of the old radio show.

"Guys think you're funny," Detwiler said. "Bet you don't know the name of Tonto's horse. Come on, Sims. You know the white man's horse. Why don't you know the Indian's horse?"

I didn't think I liked Detwiler but I liked to listen to him. Sims did not. Sims wanted to get him in another headlock, not so fraternal this time. No, he didn't know the Indian's horse and maybe it bothered him a little.

Jesse kept talking.

"The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic it will become. Irradiated ground. The way the Indians venerate this terrain now, we'll come to see it as sacred in the next century. Plutonium National Park. The last haunt of the white gods. Tourists wearing respirator masks and protective suits."

I said, "What was the name of the Indian's horse?"

"Scout, okay? And I'm amazed and shocked. This is a deep cultural failure, you guys. Tonto's horse. You have to know this."

He leaned toward us, needling.

"A ship carrying thousands of barrels of industrial waste. Or is it CIA heroin? I can believe this myself. You know why? Because it's easy to believe. We'd be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know."

"What do we know?" Sims said.

Choppers in formation, ten or twelve, coming at us right over the road, large assault transports lighted like manic angels, and they passed above us with a rackety blast that sucked the air out of the car and left us limp and ducking.

"That everything's connected," Jesse said.

Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mainly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white-haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. I went along on one such trip with a chairman named McHenry, a sweet and decent man in fact who owned a number of software companies that had contracts with the government, And his grandsons were at the lake, a pair of white-browed boys in down vests, primed for blood sport. And I stood and looked at the old lakeside house with its cedar shakes and tall chimneys and all the shabby and splintery porch furniture of a backwoods retreat. I looked at the house and missed it on some curious level. It might have been some object of my own past, some augury in reverse, stately rustic and high-ceilinged and mothballed in the unused rooms, with thick scratchy blankets on the guest beds, bearing college emblems- the promise of things I'd never had but somehow seemed to know, collectively, at the edge of memory. And the way the boys handled their shotguns, born to it, you see-they were kids and I was a man but I think I took a measure of instruction from them, Johno and Todd, not that I joined them in their game stalking. Mostly I sat on the porch and worked on speeches for McHenry but I gleaned from the boys what it must be like to grow into this kind of world, how commensurate to one's expectation of what is due-the world that money makes and erect bearing and clear speech and college emblems on the beds and a sense of birthright and usable history. At dinner we talked about things, about their schools and sports, and I took pleasure in all this effortless youth, rude youth in the best sense, robust and vigorous and unfinished. I took secondary pleasure, felt myself walking in their angled strides, felt what it was like to cast a line in the sun with nothing obtaining in the world but the rub of the boat's burred wood and the early heat on my arms, and even when I felt something drawn up out of me, some cornered shape, I was able to pull it down in the table talk and lose it in the throbbing fires that burned inside the great fieldstone hearth.

I took notes and introduced myself around, walking the floor, a crowded couple of acres-cranes and grapples, hydraulic units for heavy balers and then the hauling equipment, the refuse trucks that seemed toylike for all their bulk, innocent in shiny paint, unprepared for the nasty work ahead.

I was standing by a model of a confidential shredder called the Watergate, talking to a sales rep about some technical matter, educating myself, jotting notes as we talked, and that's when I saw the woman in a row of new computer products, dressed in tense denims and carrying a shoulder bag with a satin applique-not one of us.

When she raised her head and looked my way, I knew who she was. I'd watched her walk across the lobby with her husband, a day earlier or two days or whenever it was, walking high on the balls of her feet, camera-selected in the liquid mingle of loiterers and bellmen, and now she stood looking at me dead-on, secretly amused by something.

We had coffee by the pool. It was ten in the morning and the pool man and the gardeners drifted along the edge of the conversation.

"Among the waste machines. Strange way to spend a morning, Donna."

We'd exhanged first names only.

"Change of pace," she said.

"From what?"

"From what. From being here to do what we're doing."

She sat on the shady side of the table, hands flashing when she reached for her coffee, and when the umbrella edge lifted in the breeze her face caught contour and warmth.

"You're beginning to feel restricted?"

A slight twisty smile.

"You think the program's too confining?"

She was dark-haired and had a way of pursing her lips demurely to plant a curse on a remark she didn't like.

"Where's your husband?"

"Sitting around somewhere with a bloody mary."

"How do you know he's not fucking one of the wives?"

"Or he's fucking one of the wives."

"This is what you're here for after all."

"Exactly," she said.

She watched a maintenance man test a sliding door on a balcony.

"Why aren't you there while they're doing it? He's in bed with another woman and you're not allowed to watch? There must be a review board you can talk to."

"It's a nice day. Be quiet."

"They're all nice days."

"What's your name again?" she said flatly, teasing out a casually Complex irony-mocking herself and me and the swimming pool and the date palms.

"Donna, I like your mouth."

"It's my overbite."

"Sexy."

"So I'm told."

"What if you and I decided? Or do you have to stick to your own kind?"

"Barry saw you watching me yesterday. I didn't see you but he did. And last night at dinner he pointed you out."

"Does he think that you and I?"

"We decided we know who you are.You're the ice-blue Aqua Velva man."

"And who are you?"

"We're two swing clubs getting together."

"No, you. The mouth and eyes."

She watched the maintenance man slide the door back and forth.

"I'm a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I'm a person if you're too inquisitive I tune you out completely."

She kept looking into the middle distance.

"Private person who fucks strangers."

"Where's the contradiction?" she said, smiling warmly over the spume of her cappuccino, not looking at me. 'Actually you sort of hate us, don't you?"

"Not true."

"And I know why. Because we make it public."

"It's business. Why shouldn't it be public?" I said. "We're all busi-nesspeople here to make contacts, expand the range of possibility."

"Yes, it's true, you hate us."

These were movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action. First the wordless moment in the exhibit space, where the characters trade looks amid the truck bodies. Then the poolside exchange with close-ups and pauses, the people a bit detached from their own dialogue, and a sense throughout of morning languor in the standard birdsong, in the rhyth mic motion of men with hedge clippers and the shimmer of perfect turquoise in the background.

The long lens insinuates a certain compression, a half-lurking anxiety that serves not only the moment but the day and week and age.

And now the scene in the room, my room, where she took off her jeans, mainly because they were too tight, and sat on the bed in her shirt and briefs, legs stretched toward the footboard. I pulled up a chair and sat alongside, in a posture of consultation, my hand around her ankle.

She was not so pretty in direct light, with a sad wash under the eyes and a spatter bruise on her upper thigh, like an eggplant dropped from a roof. But I liked the way she looked at me, curious, with a tinge of challenge. It made me ambitious, this look, eager to decondition the episode, make it intimate and real.

"Icbu hate the fact that it's public. You can't stand us coming out here and saying it and doing it and acting it out. We talked about this at dinner."

"You and Barry."

"We play a game."

"The two of you. You and Barr'."

"Where we study people in a restaurant. And he is really good at this? And we do their habits and secrets and favorite whatever, right down to underwear."

"Want to tell me what I'm wearing?"

"Actually with you."

"You didn't get that far."

"No. Because we found there were more important things. Like why you hate us."

I watched and listened, trying to locate the voice and manner, place her in some small industrial city, maybe, a Catholic girl growing up by the dreary riverfront, in a house that looked falling-down drunk.

"You know what I like about you? You make me aggressive, a little reckless," I said. "I'm having a relapse just sitting here. I'm backsliding a mile a minute."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means all the interesting things in my life happened young."

"If you fuck me, it'll be a hate fuck. This what you want? This what you mean by aggressive?"

"No. But what do you want? You're in my room half undressed."

"Maybe this is what Barry wants."

"To put you in bed with a man who hates you?"

"We're here to stretch ourselves."

"This is for him then."

"Maybe."

"Carry out a command."

"No, share a fantasy, carry out a fantasy."

"What does Barry do for you?"

"None of yer business, bud," and she says this in a rural barroom twang.

I didn't want to understand her too quickly. It was possible she wasn't here for sex at all but only back matter, the kind of supplementary material that fills out an experience. We would talk a fuck but not do it and she would go back happy to her swapmeet. I looked at the bruise on her thigh. It was depressing to think she might be an agent of her husband's will, here to do the thing and run it back for him, and old Barry a sometime screenwriter, probably, who makes his money over the phone, selling real estate to retirees. When I leaned forward to kiss her, she turned away with an expert shrug, minimal, impersonal, that managed to place me on the outer brow of the perceivable.

"Maybe you're not completely wrong about me, Donna. Maybe I have a theory about the damage people do when they bring certain things into the open."

"Go on. We're always interested in constructive criticism."

"But I don't think you want to hear this. Too personal."

"Oh but I do."

"I'll probably make a fool of myself."

"Oh make a fool. I want you to."

She took off her watch and dropped it on the bed beside her. I felt an urge to fuck her now and risk the malaise of bleak bargain sex that might drift into the room from the boat show of the swingers. Because I didn't know how dumb I'd sound, how schoolboy earnest, or what exactly I'd be giving up with this digression into personal history.

"Go on. We want to be enlightened," she said.

I moved into a kiss and she did not lean away this time but returned a certain tepid sip, a hint of distances we'd yet to cross.

"A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. Written by an anonymous mystic, I'm not sure, fourteenth century maybe, whenever the Black Death was-he was writing in the days of the Black Death. A priest gave me this book. This was the priestly part of my life. He pressed this book upon me. And I've forgotten most of this book over the years. But I know that it made me think of God as a force that withholds himself from us because this is the root of his power. I remember one sentence."

"Neat title."

"I remember the title and I remember one sentence."

I stopped here, letting the words take shape and sequence, my hand around Donna's ankle, and I sensed a certain receptiveness, a thing I needed to beat back the incongruity. What the hell, I thought. Take a chance.

"The sentence appears near the beginning of the book and it made me feel I was being addressed directly by the writer, whoever he was, a poet maybe, a poet-priest, I like to imagine. Tause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.' See, that was me, sort of incisively singled out, living in a state of pause and stocktaking, twenty years old and stupider than my fellows and desperate to find a place for myself. And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can't know him through the intellect. The Cloud tells us this. And so I learned to respect the power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don't know him. We don't affirm him. Instead we cherish his negation. We wretched weaklings, you see. And we try to develop a naked intent that fixes us to the idea of God. The Cloud recommends that we develop this intent around a single word. Even better, a single word of a single syllable. This was very appealing to me. I became preoccupied with this search for the one word, the one syllable. It was romantic. The mystery of God was romantic. With this word I would eliminate distraction and edge closer to God's unknowable self."

"What kind of word?"

"I searched. I thought about it. I took it seriously. I was young."

"Love would be a word. But not for you. Too namby-pamby," she said.

"Help would be a word. But even for a weakling, this was a little pitiful. And I thought the problem is the language, I need to change languages, find a word that is pure word, without a lifetime of connotation and shading. And I thought of the Italian word for help because this is what my father used to say when we annoyed him, my brother and I, he'd clasp his hands and wag them and roll his eyes toward heaven and he'd say, Aiuto. The way his own father or grandfather probably did. A word to penetrate the darkness. Aiuto."

"Too many syllables."

"Too many syllables and too comical. Because he did it basically to make us laugh, distract us with laughter. Maybe my father knew twenty words of Italian, I don't know, he was born here, or maybe he spoke the language fairly well, I don't really know. But he did this word. This word was a three-act play the way he did it, drawing it out, croaking like a poisoned duke. Ay-oo-tow And we laughed because on some level he was making fun of the old country and the old mannerisms. A great and profound word but I couldn't use it."

Oddly now she reached down and took my hand and moved it up along the inside of her thigh and placed it sort of cuppingly snug in her crotch, adjusting her posture to get completely comfy, like a child at story time.

"Where's your father now?"

"Dead."

"Where's your brother?"

"I don't know."

She waited for me to continue.

"But I knew I was right to abandon English. And finally I came upon a phrase that seemed alive with naked intent. Alive with something I knew and felt from my own experience. A beautiful spontaneous prayer. Five syllables but so what. Three words and five syllables but I knew I'd found the phrase. It came from another mystic, a Spaniard, John of the Cross, and for that one winter this phrase was my naked edge, my edging into darkness, into the secret of God. And I repeated it, repeated it, repeated it. To Jo y nada."

"Todo y nada."

"Yes. And what does it make you think of? What does it refer to, in your own life? What does it describe?"

"Sex," she said at once. "The best sex. Todo y nada."

"Yes, exactly."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering."

"Don't take it into the open, you're saying. But this is because you're still the same romantic person, probably, you were at twenty. Sex is not so secret anymore. The secret is out. You know what sex means to most people?"

She put her hand down over mine and shifted her pelvis slightly, working into my palm.

"Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself."

She paused and it was true, she looked a little toneless in here, away from the Sundance of poolside light, her face deprived of its unquiet shading, the mica animation that gave her bones a line and edge. All the more interesting, I thought. All the graver, the weightier. I was after real time and an honest reading of the woman.

"And anyway there's all kinds of public sex," she said. "Horny writers write sex scenes."

"Alone. They write them alone. And you read them alone."

"How do we meet people with similar interests?"

"I don't know. Silently, clandestinely."

"Like criminals. But we're not criminals. We want our own conference, with hors d'oeuvres and little napkins. There's too much loneliness in America? Too many secrets? Let them out, open them up. And don't look at me so closely. You're looking too closely."

"How else do I know you?"

"You don't know me. You don't want to know me. We're in the desert here."

"There's another sentence from The Cloud. But I only recall a fragment. About the sharp dart of longing love."

"Sounds porno."

"You're porno and your friends are porno. You have your own magazine, right? Like any business. Like the rock and gravel business and the mortician business. Only you show pubic hair. And home movies through the mail."

Head erect, her mouth pursed in mock self-righteousness.

"This isn't about smut, you know. I'm not a smutty person believe it or not"-she began to laugh a little wildly, her voice cracking-"as I sit here with a strange man's hand on my pussy." And she hip-twisted and moaned oohingly at the friction-moaned in parody but also in earnest.

"I'm not a strange man's hand."

"Don't look at me."

"Who will I look at?"

"I didn't come to this freaking outback to be analyzed."

"You're my relapse. Not the first but the first in a very long time. And that's what makes you unsafe."

"What makes you unsafe?"

"I'm your exception to indiscriminate fucking."

"You think you're discriminate? What makes you discriminate? I don't even remember your name."

I told her my name, first and last, and she said it sounded phony.

"More. I need more," she said. "There you were. Weak and wretched."

"Yes."

"Reading books about God."

"Yes,"

"Talking to priests."

"Yes!"

"So what was your sin? Your secret? The reason for your wretched state?"

She had that original challenge in her eyes but without the know-ingness, the amused and slightly tilted-not disdain but unwillingness to allow the possibility of surprise. This was gone and there was a curiosity that was less sheer and frontal.

I withdrew my hand from her body and sat back and folded my arms across my chest, head tilted, as a sign of resignation, of being abject before a mystery, a young man unstatus'd and base.

"I'd been in correction."

"In correction."

"As we called it. A juvenile correction center. They'd sent me away for a time and when I got out, I went to a small Jesuit outpost in northern Minnesota, where they specialized in hardship kids and others of uncommon qualities."

"And you were in correction?"

"For shooting a man. I shot a man."

"Killed him?"

"Killed him. I was seventeen when it happened and to this day I'm not sure whether the intent was express or implied or howsoever the law reads. Or was it all a desperate accident?"

"And you've thought about this a great deal?"

"I've tried, on and off. I retain the moment. I've tried to break it down, see it clearly in its component parts. But there are so many whirling motives and underlying possibilities and so whats and why nots."

"What does that mean?"

"Well at some point, with my finger already moving the trigger, at some micropoint in the action of the mind and the action of the finger and the trigger-action itself, I may have basically said, So what. I'm not really sure. Or, Why not do it and see what happens."

"Who was the man?"

"Who was the man. He wasn't an enemy or a rival. A sort of friend if anything. A guy who helped me out occasionally, an older guy, not an influence in any way, I don't think, except in the sense that he owned a shotgun."

I had a rash inspiration then, unthinking, and did my mobster voice.

"In udder words I took him off da calendar."

A voice my wife had never heard and a story I'd never told her and how strange this was and how guilty it made me feel. But not right away. Guilt later in Phoenix-save the guilt for the bookwalled rooms and the Turkish prayer rugs and the fashion magazines in the bathroom basket.

Donna had the sniffles. She'd taken a midnight swim and caught a chill and that was all we talked about for a while. We talked about the night and the chill air and the food in the restaurant.

Then she took off her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed.

I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being. We were patched together grappling and straining, not enough hands to grab each other, not nearly sufficient body to press upon the other, we wanted more hold and grip, a sort of mapped contact, bodies matching point for point, and I raised up and saw how small she looked, naked and abed, how completely different from the woman of the movietone aura in the hotel lobby. She was near to real earth now, the sex-grubbed dug-up self, and I felt close to her and thought I knew her finally even as she shut her eyes to hide herself.

I said her name.

We were hollowed out like scooped guava when it was over. Our limbs ached and I had a desert thirst and we'd killed the morning off. I went and peed and watched the fluid splash amber in the sun-washed bowl. What well-being in a barefoot piss after a strenuous and proper screw In the room she sniffled a little and sounded hoarse and brassy and I rolled a blanket over her. She fell into pretend sleep, leave-me-alone sleep, but I eased onto the blanket and pressed myself upon her, breathing the soft heat of her brow and tasting at the end of my tongue the smallest beadlets of fever. I heard room maids talking in the hall and knew we were gone from each other's life, already and forever. But some afterthing remained and kept us still, made us lie this way a while, Donna and I, in the all-and-nothing of our love.

You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room. What's the point of asking why? Guilt later in Phoenix, where I could evade vexing questions in the daily wheel of work.

I was the juniormost fellow with the fixed smile. There was a spirit of generous welcome, the spirit of one-of-us and how-many-kids and letVhave-lunch. I wanted to be bound to the company. I felt com-plicit with some unspoken function of the corporation. I stayed late and worked weekends. I corrected my foot-drag step. I heard my own voice and saw my smile and earned an office at the end of the hall, where I wore a crisp gray suit and grew stronger by the day.

It was a long run through a narrow draw on the last day of the conference and we jostled for space, Sims and I, just beginning to forget the tremor in the fives and the way the room spoke to us, and I thought this is when we get the aftershock, after we forget the shock.

The first part of the run was a monologue that Sims delivered with a veteran's artful zest and he stopped talking only to take deep breaths or blow sweat off the edge of his upper lip.

"The thing about raw sewage," he said. "You treat it with loving care. You route it through bar screens way underground. And pump it up to settling tanks and aeration tanks. And you separate it and skim it and nurse it with bacteria."

He went through the process in lushest detail, stroking certain words, drawing them out, oozy, swampy, semisolid, thick, slick, sludge.

"Because this is your medium now. A tarlike substance with a funky savor to it."

What gusto he managed to salvage from our punishing run, eyes wide and voice strong-he made it sound like a personal attack.

"One crew leaves, they have to press-gang another."

He pulled ahead of me and I caught up and we went hard past the golf course in the bright clean heat.

Later we drove back together and went directly to the campus, our Los Angeles headquarters, a series of bridge-linked buildings with mirrored facades, high above a freeway, and I could see it all shatter in slow motion in my mind.

A cobbled road took us past ponds and blond sculpture and cinnamon trails for jogging.

"You see these buildings breaking apart and coming down?"

He looked at me.

"You don't think this is what we're supposed to see when we look at these buildings?"

He wanted nothing to do with this idea.

"You don't think it's a new way of seeing?"

We walked along hallway mazes fitted with electronic gates that Sims opened by inserting a keycard in a lockset. This was the smart new world of microprocessors that read coded keys. I liked the buzz and click of the card in the lock. It signified connection. I liked the feeling of some power source accessible to those of us with coded keys. In the elevator he spoke his name into a voiceprint device, Simeon Branson Biggs, suitably sonorous, and the machine lifted instantly to three.

We sat in his office.

"Nobody dies here. I get blood pressure readings right down the hall. We have exercise rooms. They measure my body fat and tell me what to eat in grams and ounces."

He lit a cigar and looked at me through the skeptical smoke.

"People come to work in tennis shoes and blond beards. Play tennis and volleyball. I go to sleep black every night and come back white in the morning."

He wore shoes we used to call clodhoppers, great heavy things with squared-off toe caps.

"You believe in God?" he said.

"Yes, I think so."

"We'll go to a ball game sometime."

"And you wait for a sludge tanker to come and get it. Honey buckets, they're called in the Northeast. The tanker dumps the sludge in the ocean. Like you take a dump in your own home. One hundred and six miles from the Jersey shore, legally. Or less, illegally."

"Interesting."

"Interesting," he said. "Isn't it?"

"Yes it is."

"Never thought about it, did you?"

"I thought about it a little."

"Never thought about it. Say it."

"I thought about it vaguely maybe."

"Vaguely maybe. I see. That's well put. Perfect really."

A delta-wing plane nudged the sun and vanished in the dizzy ozone, climbing dreamily.

"But how is it my medium?" I said.

We ran through the gulley, over the stony surface.

"This is what you and I. And all of us here. Fundamentally deal with. Over and above. Or under and below. Our stated duties."

"You're saying all waste."

"That's what I'm saying."

All waste defers to shit. All waste aspires to the condition of shit.

We poked and elbowed, jockeying for advantage, and Sims blew mist off his upper lip.

"How are things at home? Things all right at home?"

"Things are good. Things are fine at home. Thanks for asking."

"Love your wife?" he said.

"Love my wife."

"Better love her. She loves you."

We went a little faster and he took off his cap and hit me with it and put it back on.

"But this ship thing," I said.

"This ship thing is a dumb rumor that builds on itself."

"The ship is a running joke."

"The crew keeps changing. You know that?" he said. "They change the crew more often than they change the name of the ship."

He laughed and hit me with his hat.

He was waiting for Chuckie Wainwright. The broad-backed work of the waterfront went on around him, a sense of enormous tonnage and skyhook machinery, tractor-trailers crooking into marked slots and containered goods stacked on the decks of tremendous ships, you almost can't believe how big, and the what-do-you-call, the booms of dockside cranes swinging cargo through the mist. And farther out in the bay an aircraft carrier easing toward the Golden Gate, sent on its way by a mongrel fleet of small craft and three fireboats spritzing great arcs of water like a champagne farewell.

Marvin checked his watch for the tenth time in the last hour. He stood near a transit shed where he was safe from the action. He resembled a gentile lost in a fog, wearing a suede touring cap and a double-breasted raincoat with epaulets, gun flaps, raglan sleeves, he knows these terms from years in dry cleaning, broad-welt pockets, belt loops, sleeve straps and so many buttons he felt dressed for life.

He carried a telescopic umbrella enclosed in a sheath that belonged to a different umbrella, he has kelly green inside sky blue, not that it mattered to anyone but his wife.

Sims had calls to make and mail to read. I spent some time with other people and then took a taxi to my hotel-I'd be here for a couple of days. And the taxi driver said something odd. We were driving along. I didn't know where we were. You come to a city and you go where the driver takes you-you go on faith. And he said something either to me or to himself. He was an old guy with nervous hands and a catch in his voice, a half gasp like a splice that wasn't working.

He said, "Light up a Lucky. It's light-up time."

Neither one of us had a cigarette in hand or showed any sign of reaching for one. Maybe he was just recalling the old slogan, idly, reciting the thing simply because he'd thought of it, because it had shot to mind out of some nowhere in the memory, but it was odd and unsettling. You come to a city and hear a thing like that and you don't know what to think. I looked at him. I leaned to the side and looked at his profile and I tried to figure out what he meant.

"Remind them of what?"

She waved her guidebook at him.

"Sometimes bad luck is writ large and plain."

"What do you mean?"

"The clock stopped at seventeen minutes past five in the morning. Five one seven, dear. Add the digits and you get thirteen."

Maybe there was a shift in the breeze. He noted the smell again and found it moved him in strange ways, one of those smells that traces back through memory, musty and earthy in this particular case, and he felt an unaccountable urge to follow it to its source.

"Where is your Mr. Wainwright?"

"Boat's late," he said.

"Don't be so pessimistic."

"Where's pessimistic? I'm standing here having a conversation."

"You're hunched and slumped."

"I'm always hunched and slumped. This is how it came from the factory."

"You're more hunched than usual when the subject is the baseball."

Eleanor was not wrong. Was Eleanor ever wrong? He grouched at her sometimes but they both knew she was almost always right. She had her English accent, her popovers she baked that he felt the anticipation a day in advance, her excruciating neatness of dress that he thought might be a disease, he caught her talking to her closet a couple of times-but always seemly is a word he likes, tastefully matching this to that. She had a stern determination that she soft-pedaled but made sure he got the point. And now that their daughter was on her own, with a nice job and an apartment on a safe street, Eleanor stood guard over Marvin's obsessiveness and joke-spattered gloom.

They were walking now, taking an amble along the Embarcadero, and Marvin realized the pier numbers were getting higher as they walked-high numbers and even numbers, which meant they were moving away from pier 7. But this is where the odor seemed to be leading him, a stinky wisp intermittent on the wind.

"And you need this fellow Wainwright to tell you what?"

"How his father acquired the ball, who's dead and buried."

"And in this way you will complete the what?"

Eleanor was here, the first time she'd ever accompanied him on a trip in search of the baseball. This was San Francisco, don't forget, which she didn't want to live a life and miss it.

And that was the Bay Bridge over his right shoulder, flashing a million cars a minute that never heard of Marvin Lundy and his baseball mania.

He checked his watch again and peered across the bay.

Chuckie Wainwright was a crewman on a tramp steamer coming down the coast from Alaska. Marvin had communicated with shipping companies, harbormasters and actual captains on matters pertaining to the whereabouts of the ship and the roster of the crew, making phone calls and sending radiograms. And it was confirmed more than once, it was determined and duly documented that Charles Wainwright Jr., known as Chuckie, was aboard the Lucky Argus steaming out of Anchorage with a load of sand and pulverized rock.

Chuckie was his key to the chain of possession. Marvin had gathered a thousand tidbits of information that connected the baseball to previous owners and finally, what is the word for the thing that is not ultimate but next to ultimate-finally the Wainwright name came into play.

He waited half an hour and then went to the Ferry Building to ask about the Lucky Argus, should he be worried or not, and they told him it would put in at pier 7 in about an hour and a half.

Outside he caught a whiff in the air, a faint sort of stinkhole odor, barely detectable but odd in its emotional force. Then it passed, gone on the breeze, and he heard the watery shush of traffic on the bridge and saw his Eleanor approach, alight with her strawberry smile, under a sky blue umbrella.

"Thought I'd find you here. I came to see this lovely old building."

Marvin looked behind him to fathom what was lovely that he'd missed.

"Did you know this building survived the great earthquake but the clock stopped dead and stayed that way for a whole year?"

"There's always a clock somewhere that's stopping," Marvin said morosely,

"As if to remind everyone in visual range."

rowed a boat across the Volga under a strafing attack by Stukas, who was captured by the Germans and escaped, who fled south wearing newspapers for shoes and married a gypsy in the Carpathians and ate whitefish from the Black Sea and disappeared somewhere in the Urals.

Such Russian stuff, and here was Marvin today looking for a baseball. But he wasn't inclined to make light of his preoccupation. It had its own epic character, its history of comebacks and sweet memories and family picnics and buggy evenings on the back porch and hopes that rise and fall and the song of loss that goes unwritten in the records.

"Let's turn back, shall we? I don't think I want to get any closer to that smell."

She said the word with a grimace of suspicion, the response reserved for certain smells, clutching up the mouth and nose, beading the eyes against the sight of criminal matter at the source.

"Just some sewer work probably. Comes and goes. Let's walk a little more."

"I'm on holiday," she said.

"This makes you squeamish? People eat camel meat barehanded, they're back at work in the morning."

"Make a deal. We'll walk as far as that construction site up ahead. Then we'll come back."

"What's a little smell?" he said.

But it wasn't a little smell anymore. It grew stronger and drew him nearer and he recalled those old hotels and their toilets, the toilets down the hall, fortunately, and he thought of the public toilets in railroad stations, a stranger in the next stall with his own autobiography of foreign foods and personal smells, through England, France and Italy, but it wasn't other people's smells that began to overwhelm him-only his own.

Marvin's bowel movements seemed to change, gradually, in grim stages, as he and Eleanor moved east through Europe. The smell grew worse, deeper, it acquired a kind of density, it ripened and aged, and he began to dread the moment after breakfast every day when it came time for him to haul himself to the toilet.

What is the word, ignoble?

"The what-do-you-call."

"The lineage."

"The lineage," Marvin said.

1. The ex-wife of Chuckie Wainwright, Susan somebody-never mind the details.

2. The one-eighth Indian, Marvin forgets the tribe, who led him to the former wife.

3. The shock of other people's lives. The truth of another life, the blow, the impact.

4. Chuckie in the Air Force, in Greenland, in Vietnam, and going AWOL, which is a what, an acronym, and drifting afar and growing a beard and fathering a child and naming it Dakota.

5. Which is where Marvin found the ex-wife, coincidentally, in Rapid City, walking sick people across a swimming pool in four feet of water.

6. The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

"Marvin, you know what I'm going to say."

"There's a three-hour time difference. I don't think I can wait."

"Pick up your feet when you walk. You're a healthy man who tries to look sick."

"This is chitchat on the people channel."

She did not quibble or carp, she spoke gently to him, she was better than he deserved, writing postcards when she went back home to visit-imagine getting a postcard from your wife.

Then she stopped dead, going rigid in her brilliant slicker.

"What's that I smell?" she said.

Marvin began to understand why the odor was so compelling. It came, in a way, from him. He recalled the trip they'd made through Europe six years after the war, he and Eleanor, newly wed, a girl of modest background, taking a long honeymoon by the cheapest means possible, slow trains and old hotels squeezed of every convenience, but they were also embarked on a mission important to Marvin's family. He was trying to find his half brother, Avram Lubarsky, who'd served in the Red Army, who was wounded at Leningrad, who was wounded at Stalingrad, who shot himself in the toe at Grodno, who

"This is as far as I'm going," she said now.

"We're not at the construction site."

"I will die gasping if I take another step."

Ahead a hundred yards was an area of halted roadwork, there were unmanned bulldozers and dump trucks, the pavement heaved-up and rubbled and not a living soul in sight except for a lone figure asleep in a mail sack, one of those draggled men Marvin sees everywhere these days-where have they been hiding all this time?

"Til just go ten, twenty yards," he told her. "Just to see what's causing this, some ruptured pipe probably, out of curiosity."

He had to conceal the memory from her just as he'd once concealed the smell. And the strain of evacuation grew worse, they had their passports, they had their visas, they went to Pinsk, they went to Minsk, he grunted on the seat until all the elements issued-earth, air, fire and water.

The deeper into communist country, the more foul his BMs.

They were accompanied everywhere they went by an Intourist guide. A guide dropped them off, another guide met them, someone sneaked a look in their luggage, a guide made sure they did not cast a passing glance at certain sensitive buildings, at rivers with dams a hundred miles upstream, at roads that led to military sites a thousand miles away. It was like sharing every breath with your personal policeman. Even the weather was a secret, unpublished in newspapers and never mentioned in tones above a whisper.

He had names and addresses and talked to a dozen people and followed a trail that led to Gorki, where a cousin many times removed told him to go to a street of unfinished buildings and that's where they found Avram, the first time he and Marvin had ever set eyes on each other, he's living in a tiny flat with his second wife and his second, third and fourth children. They embraced and wept, maybe it was real, maybe partly for effect, speaking smidgens of Russian, English and Yiddish, and soon they were arguing strenuously. Avram was a dedicated communist with a beetled brow and he spat little word-flecks of contempt at the U.S., the system is corrupt, we will eat you for lunch, you are a what-do-you-call-it kind of culture, a mickey mouse culture, and that night Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a

Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he'd heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other's smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody's birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer.

His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife.

They entered Czechoslovakia, where the toilets flushed so weakly that he had to flush and wait and then flush some more and he opened windows and waved towels, feeling guilty and trapped. There was something cold and hard in the streets, a breathable tension, many arrests, people on trial. The newlyweds argued with an ironworker in a cafe, he was proud of the smoke and filth that hung over the landscape, this was progress, this was industrial might and drive- the darker the skies and the more property owners in prison, the greater the future of the socialist state.

Who are they, Marvin thought, that it drives me crazy not to convince them that they're wrong?

His BMs grew steamier as they traveled up through eastern Poland. They argued with workers in a stand-up bar, men drinking morning mugs of beer. They argued with a woman who did ticket prices on an abacus. Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he'd left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he'd established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench- all that radiant energy from a single BM.

Lucky for him that Eleanor went first every day. Because she Shouldn't have to confront this, an English girl with hair that's nearly blond. He made sure she never passed a toilet he'd just used.

He said to Marvin, We're making bigger bombs than the West can even dream. That's why the windows break so easy.

Yes, it galled Marvin to think of a man living under these circumstances, carrying a kitchen tap back and forth, the spout and two valves but only the cold gives water, the family crowded up the walls and he's so cocky and flushed, this was the thing that drove Marvin nuts, how the guy gets along without the basic whatevers, Eleanor knows the word, the things that contribute to material comfort-she says it so refined.

She called out to him now, "Come away."

And on the way back to Western Europe his system slowly returned to normal, branny BMs, healthful and mild.

And they were on a train in Switzerland, a normal neutral place, going through tunnels and past moonlit lakes, and Marvin heard a familiar voice up ahead, a radio crackle and yak, and he followed the sound to the front of the car, where two GIs were huddled over a little portable radio with a stunted antenna, listening to Russ Hodges on the Armed Forces Network, his account of the game interrupted whenever the train entered a tunnel, and that's where Marvin was when Thomson hit the homer, racing through a mountain in the Alps.

Eleanor was just out of the shower when Marvin walked in, collapsing the room with his mood. She stood in a towel, pink-toed, and looked at him.

"The ship came in. Lucky Argus. Pier seven. Exactly when they said to the minute."

"But Wainwright," she said.

"Not onboard."

"Stand up straight."

"Jumped ship in Vancouver."

"Do they know where he went?"

"Signed on some other ship. Going north somewhere. He's a cold-weather person, this Chuckie."

"You'll find him."

"It doesn't matter."

firewall of chemical waste. The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep-she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.

He walked to the edge of the construction debris and realized this was not the source of the smell. The smell was still distinct, completely reminiscent of his Soviet experience, only less farshtinkener than his personal output, a bit toned down, and it was not coming from a sewer main break or a communal toilet of the homeless.

Then he saw the ship. It was docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks in languages he did not recognize and in alphabets unknown.

He turned and looked at Eleanor. She had a thing she did to show impatience, where she dipped her body and tilted her head and went half limp, her mouth showing a yawny oh.

The name of the ship was unreadable, covered with rust and graffiti. Such a woebegone thing, an oceangoing vessel that carries a public funk of portable toilets in a field.

Marvin and Avram argued for three days. They ate meals in the little unheated flat where you had to unscrew the tap from the kitchen sink and take it down the hall to the bathroom when you wanted to take a bath because construction of this block of flats ended on a certain date, finished or not. The two men traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them, and it grated on Marvin to hear these things from a man so self-assured who's a total nobody, a little guy who pushed upward when he talked, with two false teeth made of stainless steel, he's the shiniest appliance in sight. The flat came without windows. Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk, A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.

America, a fact he'd managed to miss-the things, the places, the bright buzz of products on the shelves, the sunblast of fortune's favor. Here they were in a strange bed in California, what twists to life, how uncertain go the turns, an English girl in his arms, pink and innocent even if she's not, and Marvin's polymerized hairpiece secure on his head.

She wanted Japanese but that wasn't enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating.

Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

They faced each other over the low table, in their stocking feet.

"What's the word for the thing that's not ultimate but next to ultimate?"

"Penultimate."

"Penultimate. See, that's what I've got in Chuckie Wainwright."

"Sit up straight," she told him.

"Greenland. I always had my suspicions about that place."

"What do you mean?"

"That's where he was stationed in the Air Force if he was actually there."

"Why wouldn't he have been there?"

"Do you personally know anybody who's ever been there?"

"No, I don't," Eleanor said.

"Let me advise you. Neither do I. And neither does anyone I've talked to lately."

"I think there's a main city."

"You think there's a main city. Do you know the name of this place?"

"No, I don't."

"Did you ever look at Greenland on a map?"

"I guess I have, once or twice perhaps."

"Did you ever notice that it's never the same size on any two maps?

The size of Greenland changes map to map. It also changes year to year."

"Actually it does. I used to think you were mad. But I understand now. Yes, you're mad but there's a certain reasoning behind it. There's a little childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there's no way to be sure how the story ends. What good's a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it's not the ending we need but the beginning."

He liked her in a towel. They'd first met near the end of the war, said hello-goodbye but corresponded, she was an air-raid warden with a torch, they called it, and he was a quartermaster handing out condoms for D-day that the troops fixed to the muzzles of their rifles to keep out sand and water and he still liked her in a towel or slip, married twenty-seven years to this point.

He sat in his shorts at the edge of the bed, taking off his ribbed socks. They would do like tourists in commercials, have marital sex in a nice hotel. Their room had a view of a view. From their window they could look across the courtyard to office towers and reflected clouds in the picture window of the hotel restaurant.

"Marvin, do you plan to wear it?"

She was talking about his toupee.

"I need it for how I see myself."

He also needed it because it took the edge off his large ears and sorrowful Marvin nose. He wanted to look nice for her even if she didn't think it mattered. Tonight he'd wear his best shirt, with cuffs so French he wanted to hum the what-do-you-call.

"You're my man, with or without."

A thing she said with a half-fake quiver of her mouth that made him feel he owned the earth.

She slipped off the towel and placed a knee on the end of the bed. They were honeymooners still, shy but eager, and Marvin in his Brooklyn-bornness, his religion of skeptical response-he was only now beginning to see how hard it was to persist in the sentimental myth, after all these years, of their dissimilarity, a thing he'd fabricated out of her accent and complexion. He was glimpsing his Eleanor truth by truth, that she matched him in appetite, that her ambitions for the business were bigger than his own, that her main ambition was

The waitress brought saki for her, beer for him. She called the drinks beverages and Marvin thought he was on an airliner. All the traveling he'd done, baseball-related, the unsheveled lives, the words and sentences.

Wait-listed passenger Lundy please present yourself at the podium.

1. The mother of twins in what's that town.

2. The man who lived in a community of chemically sensitive peo ple, they wore white cotton shifts and hung their mail on clotheslines.

3. The woman named Bliss, which he was younger then, Marvin was, and maybe could have, with eyes as nice as hers, done a little something, in Indianola, Miss.

4. The shock of lives unlike your own. Happy, healthy, lonely, lost. The one-eighth Indian. Lives that are blunt and unforeseen even when they're ordinary.

5. Who knew a Susan somebody who spoke about a baseball with a famous past. Marvin forgets the tribe.

6. Stomach acting up again.

7. The chemically sensitive man, his whole body vibrated when somebody snapped a photo a mile and a half away.

8. And Chuckie Wainwright gone to sea, leaving a woman and child behind, a hippie Christian cluster, barefoot with beads, and Marvin tracking him ship by ship.

9. And the bone cancer kid in Utah, which his mother blamed the government.

10. Marvin often lost, setting out one day for Melbourne, Florida and nearly ending up Down Under.

11. And the woman with the chipped tooth-a whole long story, you shouldn't ask.

12. And the chemicals in the core of the ball that made the man run in place after breakfast every day.

"Tell me what we're going to do after dinner." "Me you're asking?"

"You've been to this city before. I haven't," she said. "What's left to do by the time I pick myself off the floor? I've got a knot in my leg a cannibal would spit it out." "Come on. Show me a good time."

"It's large," she said.

"It's very large. It's enormous. But sometimes it's a little less enormous, depending on which map you're looking at."

"I believe it's the largest island in the world."

"The largest island in the world," Marvin said. "But you don't know anyone who's ever been there. And the size keeps changing. What's more, listen to this, the location also changes. Because if you look closely at one map and then another, Greenland seems to move. It's in a slightly different part of the ocean. Which is the whole juxt of my argument."

"What's your argument?"

"You asked so I'll tell you. That the biggest secrets are staring us right in the face and we don't see a thing."

"What's the secret about Greenland?"

"First, does it exist? Second, why does it keep changing its size and its location? Third, why can't we find anyone who's personally been there? Fourth, didn't a B-52 crash about ten years ago that the facts were so hush-hush we still don't know for sure if there were nuclear weapons aboard?"

He pronounced it nucular.

"You think Greenland has a secret function and a secret meaning. But then you think everything has a secret function and a secret meaning," she said.

"The bigger the object the easier it is to hide it. How do you get to Greenland? What boat do you take? Where do you find an airport that has a flight to this main city that nobody knows the name of and nobody has ever been to? And this is the main city. What about the outlying areas? The whole enormous island is one big outlying area. What color is it? Is it green? Iceland is green. Iceland 's on TV You can see the houses and the countryside. If Iceland is green, is Greenland white? I'm only asking because nobody else is asking. I have no personal stake in this place. But I watch the nature channel and I see tribes they wear mud on their body in New Guinea and I see those thingabeests, they're mating in some valley in Africa."

"Wildebeests," Eleanor said.

"But I never hear a peep from Greenland."

ing about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, or bugs in the wall, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he's a hard-on with a briefcase-you're talking about men on the eleven o'clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take over a person's life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

The Float had an edge, it had a midnight finish.

They stepped briefly into shops that sold autopsy photos, that sold movie stars' garbage, the actual stuff deep-frozen in a warehouse- you looked in a catalog and placed an order.

Eleanor was delighted by the ambiance, a word she pronounced a little French. Bare-board floors and stained walls. She took Marvin's arm and they went down the street, spotting a sign in a first-floor window, Foot Fetish Cruise of Spanish Ports.

Floating zones of desire. It was the what, the dismantling of desire into a thousand subspecialties, into spin-offs and narrowings, edgewise whispers of self. There was a dive with a back room where they showed sex movies involving people with missing limbs. They had gay nights and straight nights. If you were open to suggestion you could float through the zone, finding out who you were by your attachments, slice by slice, tasting the deli specials of the street. You were defined by your fixation.

A boy walked by in clothes so raggedy he could have been a ticker-tape parade.

There was a place called the Conspiracy Theory Cafe. Shelves filled with books, film reels, sound tapes, official government reports in blue binders. Eleanor wanted to have a coffee and browse but Marvin waved the place off-a series of sterile exercises. He believed the well-springs were deeper and less detectable, deeper and shallower both, look at billboards and matchbooks, trademarks on products, birthmarks on bodies, look at the behavior of your pets.

"She wants to go gallivanting."

"Let's make this our city, Marv."

Strange how he was compiling a record of the object's recent forward motion while simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past. Sometimes he thought he was seeing the ball sort of fly by. He wanted to find Chuckie and establish the last link, the first link, the connection to the Polo Grounds itself, but if he couldn't find the guy he would probably buy the ball anyway, the reputed ball, once he located it, and keep looking for Chuckie till he died.

"I want you to show me the seamy underside," Eleanor said.

The ball brought no luck, good or bad. It was an object passing through. But it inspired people to tell him things, to entrust family secrets and unbreathable personal tales, emit heartful sobs onto his shoulder. Because they knew he was their what, their medium of release. Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his own cockeyed march through the decades.

All right. Marvin was not a night person but he knew one place he might take her, one street really, that's all it was, called the Float, out near the old hippie district, shops that came and went overnight, buildings without house numbers, an area catering to very select desires that changed with the phases of the moon.

He lifted himself off the floor mat in stages, joint by joint, and they called a cab and went outside.

Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers about, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin's raincoat. PEACE IS COMING-BE PREPARED. Most of the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they were selling, Role-Reversal Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions-jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.

They went into a hole-in-the-wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you're not talk-for good or ill, he didn't know where in the world-a shaking in the earth that could alter everything.

"All right, Marv. I'm ready to go to bed now."

One more place. The one place on the street he'd been to before, run by an acquaintance, you could call him a colleague, Tommy Chan, maybe the country's first baseball memorabilist if that's an actual word.

They went down a grimy set of steps into a dark cubby stacked with scorecards and old songbooks and a thousand other baseball oddities, whole slews of records and documents in tottering columns.

Eleanor sighed in her chest like a shot partridge.

And there was Tommy in his high chair, the chair and cash register platformed, islanded higher than the surging mass of old paper that was going chemically brown, and it made Marvin think of all the game footage he'd seen during his search, fans in the Polo Grounds throwing scorecards and newspapers onto the field as the day waned and the Dodgers approached their doom. All that twilight litter. Maybe some of it was sitting here today, preserved by the stadium sweepers and eventually entering the underground of memory and collection, some kid's airplaned scorecard, a few leaves of toilet tissue unfurled in jubilation from the upper deck, maybe autographed delicately by a player, the scatter of a ball game come to rest all these years later, a continent away.

"This is my wife."

"We don't see many women," Tommy said like a Buddhist monk in a backcountry compound, polite and wise.

"It's a wonder you see anybody. Because frankly who would come here?" Marvin said. "You have to make the place halfway presentable."

"Presentable." Nice word. "Marvin, think. What am I selling here? I'm not selling housewares in a regional mall."

He was a smart guy and would-be likable but ageless in the face, which disconcerted Marvin because you like to know how old a man you're talking to.

"What did you sell today?"

"You're the first people in the shop."

"Don't look so smug."

Something's staring you straight in the face.

The largest shop was at street level, a dozen men standing around, furtive, in raincoats, looking at old copies of National Geographic. These were used magazines, used and handled, lived-with, and the address labels were attached, machine-stamped and ink-smudged and skin-greasy, and printed on the labels were the names and addresses of real people out there in magazine America, and the men in raincoats stood by tables and bins and read the labels and leafed through the magazines, heads never lifting.

A man bought a magazine and left quickly, slipping it under his coat.

Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset. It was something else they sought, a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic. A pornography of nostalgia, maybe, or was it something else completely?

And was there a back room, because isn't there always a back room, another splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren't the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there's another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders only, empty folders, handled a thousand times, and Eleanor was completely creeped out by this place, it was more than she'd bargained for, raincoated men with National Geographies, furtively thumbing the labels.

Across the street they saw a tall woman's shop, called Long Tall Sally, but not for dresses and coats. Fantasy Enhancements, the sign read. Books, movies, appliances-tall women only.

You see a few funny things in some off-street on a rainy night and you wonder why they seem significant. Marvin thought there was something here that might be an early sign of some great force beginning to tremble awake, he didn't know what exactly, he didn't know

"The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously."

The remark had an impact. Marvin felt a thing in his chest like a Korean in pajamas who's crushing a brick with the striking surface of his hand. But then he thought, How can I not be serious? What's not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

He knew Eleanor wanted to leave. He knew Eleanor was thinking, At least Marvin keeps the basement neat.

There was something he had to buy first. A small empty box semi-discarded in a corner, marked Spalding Official National League Number 1-it once held a new baseball, many years ago. And he would save it for the time when the old used bruised ball came into his possession, if and when.

He reached up to pay the man. Hung on the wall was a photograph of President Carter and his daughter what's-her-name standing in the Rose Garden with Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, a strained smile on every face.

They went out to the street. A woman in rags pushed her belongings in a shopping cart, seemingly bent on a specific destination. Was there a family waiting, was she a commuter of the future, did people live unknown to us in the crawlspaces of the what, the infrastructure, down the tunnels and under the bridge approaches?

"Tommy looks so happy. How is that possible, living in the dark?"

"Pick up your feet, Marv. You're healthy, not sick."

"Alone in that dungeon every day."

"Does he have a wife and children?"

"I don't know. Who would ask? That's not a question we ask in the memorabilia field."

"Does he enjoy the amenities, do you think, of our basic way of life?"

"You say that word terrific."

"Does he have a little backyard where he grows Jersey tomatoes every summer?"

"I look at him I don't think I see a tomato looking back."

"Does he take his bride on business trips?"

"I've been here since noon. These other merchants don't open till very late."

"Since noon. And no one."

"How interesting to see a woman," Tommy said.

Eleanor stood motionless, maybe part paralyzed by her exotic status.

She said, "Don't you have to give people an incentive to buy? Not that it's any of my."

"An incentive." What a novel idea. "The incentive is within, I think. These materials have no esthetic interest. They're discolored and crumbling. Old paper, that's all it is. My customers come here largely for the clutter and mess. It's a history they feel they're part of."

Marvin said to Eleanor, "I always thought the people who preserved these old things, baseball things, I always thought they lived in the East. I thought this is where all the remembering is done. Tommy is the first collector I found anywhere west of Pittsburgh."

Tommy had a smile so slight and fleeting it could only be photographed on film stock developed by NASA. His little knickknack face floated in the gloom and Marvin had a childlike urge to reach up and touch it, just to see if it felt like his, the rough dull surface he washed and shaved every day.

"Did you find your man?" Tommy said.

"I found my ship. The man, forget about."

"You must give it up."

"Who's talking?"

"You can't precisely locate the past, Marvin. Give it up. Retire it. For your own good."

"Who's talking?"

"Free yourself," Tommy said.

"You sit here inhaling dust like what kind of statue."

"Equestrian," Eleanor said.

"An equestrian statue in the park."

"True. My situation is even more unreal than yours. At least you move about. I sit here with my crumbling paper. There's a poetic revenge in all this."

"What revenge?"

A hummingbird's breath of a smile brushed across Tommy's lips.

3

The club was not exactly jumping. There were seven patrons, counting Sims and me, and four guys on the bandstand-a goateed sax and his hunchy sidemen.

I didn't know where we were, it might have been Long Beach or Santa Monica or some blurry suburban somewhere. This was the third club we'd stopped at and my scant sense of bearing lay in ruins. Big Sims was not talkative tonight, racing through the landscape with dark determination, half a drink and out the door, like a man assigned a task in an epic poem.

"Hey Sims. Go home, okay? You're not enjoying the music. I don't want you to think."

"The music's okay. It's music."

"But don't think you have to show me the sights. Go home. I'll stay a while and grab a cab."

"Go home."

"Go home. That's right. But first tell me who you're mad at."

"This isn't mad. If you think this is mad," he said.

An elderly fellow brought our drinks, a guy with a wad of cotton in

Eleanor knew how to make him feel lucky. And she was right, she was nearly always right, the tomatoes, the cleaning business, the house with the spacious basement, the daughter who hadn't caused them major aggravation by doing something stealthy out of wedlock. Think of Tommy eating Cambodian takeout in his shop at midnight. Think of Avram in Gorki walking down the hall with the kitchen tap every time he wanted to take a bath.

They found a taxi idling in front of an old flophouse.

But in truth, let's be honest, it was Marvin who shuffled, Marvin who was the true schlimazel, bad-lucked in his own mind, Marvin the Dodger fan, doomed in ways he did not wish to name.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen-she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

Time to think about going to bed. But first he took her dancing in the penthouse lounge of their hotel, an intimate room with a combo, well past midnight.

They moved across the floor, swayed and dipped-not really dipped but only showed a pause, a formal statement that such a thing as a dip could happen here. They liked to dance, were good together, used to go dancing but forgot, let the habit slip away through the years the way you forget a certain food you used to devour, like charlotte russes when they were popular.

She ran her hand through his fire-resistant hair.

And Marvin held her close and felt the old disbelief of how they'd found a life together, such fundamentally different people even if they weren't, and he knew the force of this disbelief was the exact same thing, if you could measure it, as being stunned by love.

But in the deep currents, in the Marvinness of his unnamed depths, there was still an obscure something that caused disquiet.

And when they danced past the window he looked out at the lights of the Bay Bridge spotting through the mist and saw the old forlorn tanker snug in its berth, pungent and shunned, and he counted over to pier 7 and found that the Lucky Argus was already off-loaded and gone, borne on the tide, a dark shape going at what, flank speed, in the great deep danger of night.

"He's wearing a white suit and those shoes I can never remember what they're called."

Out of nowhere I thought about how our faces changed, how I tried to spy out a sign in another man's eye that would tell me how worried I ought to be but at the same time how I avoided eye contact until I'd had a chance to gain a certain purchase on the situation and how we seemed to agree together, as the room whistled and groaned, that if we all carried the same face we would be free from any harm.

"Can I call a cab from here? Go home. Make up with her. Don't subject the episode to ten hours of neurotic scrutiny."

"Go home."

"Go home. What are those shoes called that I'm trying to think of? Tell her you're sorry. Don't let it fester. Old-fashioned two-tone shoes."

He looked at me, measuring.

"We'll go to a ball game sometime. You're coming back in a few months, right? We'll go to a game."

"I don't want to go to a game."

"We'll go to a game," he said.

We drank up and left. In less than fifteen minutes we were in another club listening to hornplayers rake the walls, four guys in fezzes and caftans with a physical sound and a drummer who's making mostly vocal noise, off-pitch wails and cries.

We ordered drinks and listened a while and then Sims leaned in closer.

"Happen to me twice since I been out here. Pull their guns. My life held in some cop's bent finger because I resemble a suspect or my tail-light's out. And he's out of the car. And he gets me out of the car. He says, I need you to get out of the car right now. And I get out of the car. And he says, I need you to hit the roof and spread them wide. But I just look at him. And he looks at me. We look at each other with a longing to kill that's completely puzzling in one sense and completely natural in another."

I nod and wait. He sits very serious over his drink, Sims.

"You want to be my friend, you have to listen to this," he said.

The walls were decorated with old Pacific Jazz album covers and we one nostril. He had a T-shirt that read Monday Night Football at Roy Earley's Loins and Ribs. It wasn't Monday and we weren't there.

I said, "What happened?"

"What happened. What happens at home?"

"You had a fight with Greta."

"Forget it," he said. "Drink up."

"These guys ain't half bad."

"It's music. Drink up," he said.

"lour stomach's knotted up."

"The fact is we never fight."

"You never fight. Marian and I never fight. So when it happens."

"Ibu retain it in the body."

"You feel a knot, a weight."

"We never frigging fight."

"We never fight, Marian and I. Go home and make up. I'll call a cab. Can I call a cab from here?"

"You're going a little gray," he said.

"You're going a little bald."

"I'm going a lot bald. But you're going a little gray."

The tenor was hitting cubist notes and we'd had a number of half drinks and the drummer was firing rim shots or whatever they do and in the local noise and the wider dislocation of a nightscape that was unfamiliar, I tried to understand what Sims was saying.

"Seriously, go home. I'm fine. I like these guys. It's hard-driving stuff."

"It's race music," he said.

"It's hard-driving free-wheeling jazz."

"It's race music. You like it for what you want to like it for. I'll like it for what I want to like it for. I'll show you this picture I've got at home. Great photograph, circa I don't know, nineteen-fifties. Charlie Parker in a white suit in some club somewhere. Great, great, great picture."

"A club in New York."

He gave me a flat-eyed look.

"You know this?"

"Great picture," I said,

"Wait. You know this? A club in New York?"

shoes by the way. Those aren't the shoes I mean when I talk about two-tone shoes."

"It sounded like the death and burial of music."

"Jerk. You should have kept it."

"Wait. I'm a jerk?"

"Great thing to have. You keep things like that. A secondhand horn? Great thing."

"Wait."

"Big mistake, Sims."

"I'm a jerk?"

The pianist came out first, then the bass. The drummer wore a headband and dark glasses.

"The ship's back," he said. "You know that?"

"No."

"Up the coast in San Francisco."

"Who tells you these things?"

"You know how rumors work. Nobody tells you. You just hear."

"What do you hear about the cargo?"

"That's a whole other deal," Sims said, slipping into the forced-air voice of a used-car salesman, and a cracker at that, and a laugh shot out of me. "That's real innerestin. That's the sweetest deal about this whole buncha rumors."

The horn finally showed, a rangy man with a gold chain and a gap in his front teeth, wearing resort clothes and sandals.

"They said it was heroin. They said it was the CIA moving heroin to finance some covert operation. But we didn't believe this, you and I."

"Because we're responsible men."

"And we were right," Sims said. "Because it's not heroin. It's not toxic chemicals, it's not industrial ash and it's not heroin."

"What is it?"

"It's a mixup over a word. That's what it is."

"Which word?"

"You know what heroin's called. It's called scag, it's called horse, it's called H, it's called smack, it's called this, it's called that. And what else, Nick?"

"Called shit."

turned our heads toward the bandstand and felt the force of the music, a sophisticated jazz that had the texture of life-and-death argument.

I told him, "Yes." I said, "Yes, I'm going a little gray. But I don't understand why this is worse than all-out bald. Which is your own admitted destiny."

"That's the point."

"What point? A little gray is not the most ominous thing that happens to a man."

"Let's get rolling, okay?"

"Why?"

"There's a place."

"I'm enjoying this place."

"I'm showing you some things, okay? You have to accept this," he said. "I'm here, you're not."

"All right. But you ought to go home. Tell her you're sorry."

"I want you to know something about us."

"What?"

"We never fight."

"We never fight either. Our friends fight."

"That's why I'm twisted up inside."

"I hear you talking."

"Then let's roll," he said.

The next place was in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A.-the term had a secret life I couldn't clearly read. The group was between sets and a haze of ten-year-old smoke hung over the room.

"I played the horn. You know that?"

"Still play?"

"An old hockshop horn. Threw it away finally."

"But you still have it."

"Threw it away," he said.

"But you kept it. You still have it."

"Threw it away."

"Irbu didn't keep it?"

"What for? It sounded like hell."

"Great thing to have. An old trumpet? They're not called saddle

"Look. Go home, tell her you're sorry, take a bath and go to bed."

He looked at me, underlip jutting.

"There's something else."

"What's that?" I said.

"A judge issued an order, an injunction that they couldn't dump the sludge because there's a body buried there," Sims said, and took a drink, and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.

"Whose body?"

"Whose body. Whose body do you want it to be? That's whose body. Some mobster, I hear. Shot in the head execution-style."

A trio with a singer. She had streaky reddish hair and copper skin, holding the mike at her spangled thigh while the sidemen cued the next verse.

"We never fight. Our friends fight," I said.

When the set ended a fatigue passed over us, a staleness. Sims blew smoke past my shoulder. I jabbed an ice cube in my drink, poked it with a finger and watched it bob.

"There's this man I knew once. I didn't know him, I met him once. I was young," I said. "He came around the poolroom."

"You're speaking in reference to what?"

"To the body in the sludge."

"A mob figure. Who was he?"

"I was young, high-school age. I only talked to him that one time. But my father had known him years earlier, which he told me about. Badalato told me, not my father. They weren't friends, they were acquaintances. They might run into each other somewhere."

"This is Mario, you're talking about, Badalato? Who I saw one time on TV," he said, "when they're putting him in an unmarked car to take him to be arraigned and some detective places a hand on his head to keep him from bumping his head on the door frame and I sit there thinking why is it the police put so much effort into keeping these criminals from bumping their heads when they get into police cars, it's a major concern of the police, lately, this hand on the head."

"You're talkative all of a sudden."

"He's always being photographed on the courthouse steps. He's the king of the steps."

"See, it's not a boatload of heroin. It's a boatload of shit."

We were momentarily alert and uncircling. It was one of those episodes of heightened clarity in a night of talking and drinking.

"At one point, am I right, the rumor suggested it wasn't an ordinary cargo ship."

"A sludge tanker. Turns out the rumor was correct."

"Carrying treated human waste."

"Port to port, it's nearly two years," he said.

We listened to the music, a cash register ringing at the end of the bar and a trace of a radio voice, radio or TV, coming from a back room somewhere.

"Tell her you're sorry. Go home, Sims."

"Maybe she ought to tell me."

"Tell her first."

"Maybe I'm not the guilty party. Ever think of that? The instigator."

"Doesn't matter, you jerk."

"That's the second time," he said, showing me two fingers.

We got out of there and went somewhere else, zebra walls and small tables, a fairly crowded room with a body hum, people in aviator glasses and silver shirts.

"He's wearing a white suit."

"Right."

"He's playing his alto."

"Right."

"And he's facing out of the picture, out of the frame."

"And he's wearing white and brown shoes. Two-tone shoes. But they're not saddle shoes."

"I didn't ask what kind of shoes. I don't care about his shoes."

"I'm just saying."

"I'm not interested in his shoes."

"They have a name I'm trying to think of."

"Do it somewhere else."

"In a club in New York," I said.

"You know this? And I don't? And it's my photograph? In my house we're talking about?"

The waiter brought drinks.

not who he resembled at all. He resembled the cabdriver I'd hailed earlier in the day, or the day before, the guy who'd said, "Light up a Lucky. It's light-up time."

When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn't supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I'd shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent and strict, and the other thing I remember is that no one put a hand on my head and folded me into the car because evidently this was not something they did at the time, this was something they developed later, preventing the felon from bumping his head when they took him in.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Con-estoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.

"Be nice to her," I said. "Go home, talk to her, make nice. You know this phrase? Make nice. They use this phrase when you were a Negro child in St. Louis, Sims?"

"They came to take the census."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"Your father knew him. This means-what?"

"It means he knew him."

"In other words I have to show respect. I have to be reverent when I mention his name. This guy who runs a criminal enterprise in narcotics, extortion, what else. Murder, attempted murder, what else."

"Waste carting," I said.

"Could be. Why not? And I have to respect him. Because he was nice to your father."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"I didn't say I wanted to leave. I don't want to leave."

"Tell her you're sorry and take a bath," I told him.

Half an hour later we were in the last club of the night, a blues room with an air of desperation, and the waiter resembled the old guy from two or three places ago, facially resembled-he wore a standard waiter's getup but looked a lot, I thought, like the other guy, in the football T-shirt, three or four places ago, or whenever it was, the T-shirt and cotton nose plug.

"This place reminds me. You know how they're always saying, Where were you when such and such? Where were you when Kennedy? Well, remember the time the lights went out. This place reminds me. The great Northeast blackout."

"Am I supposed to ask where you were?" he said.

"Thirty million people affected."

"I was in Germany. I never knew what caused it. What caused it?"

"Nobody remembers. Thirty million people. Not one of us remembers."

"But you remember where you were."

"Ask me where I was. I was in a bar that was a little like this place," I said. "Dead souls, sad jazz. Palm trees painted on the wall."

"This place doesn't have palm trees on the wall."

"Even better, even more similar. And the lights went out."

"They made a movie. I was in Germany," he said.

"Maybe they didn't have jazz at this other place. Maybe they used to have jazz but stopped. They had a jazz policy that became a policy of no jazz, which is much the same thing if you examine it closely."

He didn't resemble the old guy from three or four places ago. That's

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait."

"Think about it," he said.

He plucked his shirt, he did a thing big men do, he used both hands to pluck his shirt away from his chest and then he shook it, half dainty, letting his upper body breathe.

"Sims, you and I."

"Just think about it."

"We're not, remember, we don't have a word, you and I, for the science of dark forces. For what is behind an event. We don't accept the validity of this word or this science. Remember that conversation?"

"This is another conversation. And in this conversation I'm saying, Think about it."

"But you and I. We go against the tide, Sims. The tide is easy, it's irresponsible. We're responsible men. We've established this. We don't believe there are secret forces undermining our lives."

"Thirty million people affected by your local blackout. But only twenty-five million, they're saying, black people in the whole huge country."

"If that's the number, that's the number."

"And this is all you can say. We have an issue that's crying out for, really, scrutiny, to use one of your words."

"Go ahead, scrutinize it."

"Ibu're willing to accept this number."

"Twenty-five million. Yes, why not?"

"You don't think this number is way too low."

"Twenty-five million's not so low. It's twenty-five million," I said.

"You don't think this number is totally underreported."

"Why do you say scrutiny is my word?"

"Because you used it."

"This makes it my word?"

"I didn't use it. You used it."

"I believe the number. It's a believable number to me."

"You don't think somebody's afraid that if the real number is reported, white people gonna go weak in the knees and black people gonna get all pumped up with, Hey we oughta be gettin' more of this and more of that and more of the other."

"Yes, and what?"

"And my mother told me to hide."

"What for?"

"What for. That's the point. I didn't know what for. She thought, I don't know what she thought. I went and hid, you know. Two people at the door with clipboards. She said, Get inside, stay down."

"Stay down."

"She said, Stay down. I don't know what I thought and I don't know what she thought."

"It was only the census."

"Don't say only the census."

"You tell me I'm going a little gray. And I'm supposed to understand how this is worse than total baldness."

"Because it's in my history, it's in my family," he said. "I'm supposed to go bald. It's expected of me. Stay down, she said."

"Stay down."

"You believe the census, Nick?"

He sat there with his loosened tie and wrinkled jacket, relighting the discontinued cigar, a line of sundown pink visible above the jut of his lower lip.

"What do you want me to say? Yes, I believe it. No, I don't believe it."

"I want you to say what you believe."

"Because I can sense we're about to enter some touchy area."

"What do you believe?" he said.

"I believe the census. Why shouldn't I believe it?"

He gave me a flat-eyed look with a nice tightness to it.

"You believe it."

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"You believe the numbers. You believe there's only twenty-five million, for example, black people in America."

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"You believe it then."

"If that's the number, that's the number."

"And you don't think they might be underplaying the true number."

"Wait a minute."

"You don't think."

an African blackness, you know the saturate blacking of a bandwidth somewhere on the continent, some nomad swath of high desert grace and shape, but in gesture and stance, I saw, the way he tongued some spittle off his lip between riffs, a body demotic that was locally made- he was another scuffling trumpet from an inner city somewhere.

"Charlie Parker in a white suit in a club in New York," I said.

"Now how many references to New York have I heard from you tonight?"

"And I know what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"Spectator shoes."

"I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing."

"They're not saddle shoes. They're called spectator shoes."

"I don't care what they're called."

"Look. Here's what you do," I told him. "You go home, you say you're sorry, you put some fizzy stuff in your bathtub and you take a bath and go to bed."

Ten minutes later we were standing outside the club waiting for someone to bring the car around and Sims put his hands on my shoulders and head-butted me.

I didn't know how to take this.

He gave me a tight grin and butted me high on the forehead and I didn't know if this was an impulsive gesture at the end of a long night when you're muzzy with booze and hoarse with talk and smoke, a thing that brings an evening to a formal close, or something a little more deliberate.

I pushed his arms away and butted him back, put my hands on his shoulders and butted him back and he looked at me with interest and did it again.

It hurt of course, it set off a throb, it was a monosyllabic thing, a butt, a blow, a downward driving shock that sent an electric pain through the back of the head and into the neck and shoulders.

And it was up close, eyeball tight, a combat space without maneuvering room or finer points, a certain amount of acted rancor filling the visual field, a scowl and glare, or a hooded look, a sort of sleepy killer thing, lidded and dumb.

"You and I," I said.

"You don't think the number is underinflated by maybe forty percent."

"We don't indulge ourselves in cheap and easy delusions, Sims."

"Cheap and easy."

"Am I right? You and I. We don't believe that what is behind an event is so organized and sinister that we have to make a science out of it."

"You don't think white people gonna be so depressed, so, I hate to say it, menaced by the true number."

He didn't hate to say it at all.

"You think the census bureau is hiding ten million black people," I said.

"Not hiding the people. They're hiding the number. This is an easy thing to hide."

"But a number so large. What a tremendous manipulation. And it's going on in front of our eyes. Maybe it's the mothers," I said. "Ten million mothers telling their kids to stay down. Stay down," I said.

A brief smile from Big Sims, a reflex smile minus the ensuing brightness of eye.

"Face the issue," he said.

"What's the issue?"

"We have a right to know how many of us there are."

"But you do know."

"We don't know. Because the number is too dangerous. How threatened do you feel by the real number? I'm talking to you. Think into your own heart."

"All right, I'm thinking."

"Tell me in your heart you don't think there's something genuine in what I'm saying."

"There's genuine paranoia. That's the only genuine anything I can see here."

He seemed to take pleasure in this. He sat back and looked off to the side, grimly happy, examining what there might be in the nature of human exchange that makes people so smoothly predictable.

I listened to the blues trumpet, a young guy in a beat-up suit, he had

"What do you hear about the body in the sludge?"

"They won't find a body The body's just another embellishment," he said. "The main thing is the ship itself."

"What about it?"

"A ship being on the high seas for two years, changing names and crews-that's just a story too. The ship made one recent voyage, East Coast to West Coast. Carrying sludge to California to deliver to a composting operation. Ordinary simple shipment."

We ran along city streets, landscaped avenues of a certain fallen aura, an out-of-timeness that was ravishing in its open regret.

"Look, Sims, here's the thing."

"Let's run," he said.

"I don't know. I'm a little, and I shouldn't say this, I know, to someone like you."

"Love your kids, right?"

"Yes of course."

"Then run," he said.

"How close I am, some of the time, I sometimes think, as much as I love them all, to feeling like an imposter, Because it has not fucking, ever, been something I am comfortable with."

We stood in the kitchen wasted by miles of hills and hot pavement, reluctant to move about for fear of dripping sweat on something, two men in shorts, and Greta gave us glasses of water, a brown-haired woman with long hands and a half-hidden gauntness, a sort of lean and angular suchness, an x-ray Greta that probably showed itself in argument or stress.

"You like this place?" I said.

"I think I'm at the ends of the earth. Four years we are here and I am waking up every morning and trying to remember where I am. So far from everything."

"We are backed up," Sims said, "to a very big ocean."

And the son, the five-year-old, sitting at the table with his cereal bowl and oversized spoon, Loyal Branson Biggs, a boy so softly handsome, so offhandedly blessed with expressive beauty that I could not stop looking at him, I looked at him while I spoke to his parents and they looked at him too and they looked because I was looking-I reminded them to renew their sense of amazement in the child.

I was taller than Sims but not so solid and volumed and I'd never used my head as an instrument of medieval siege.

I butted him just above the nose, driving down, and it stung him, I could tell, it sent a message unit ringing through his skull.

He jolted me good. He hit me so hard I was stunned backwards half stumbling, right out of his grip on my shoulders, and the guy showed up with the car and stood by to watch.

The pain was electric and compact, reducing everything to its own sort of benumbment, making the world beyond my head seem small and dazed.

This is what we did, we hairlined in, blocking out everything but the butting and glaring and pain.

When he butted me again I moved my head, eased back a quarter inch, trying to tone the blow a little, and he jutted his chin and glared.

Pain is just another form of information.

We knocked heads one more time, one time each, and the guy stood there with the car keys, watching.

In my hotel room I looked in the mirror above the washbasin. I put both hands to the wall and leaned into the mirror and saw bruises and welts, deep discolorations, and a slash of dried blood with a winy flush around it. I used cold water to clean the wounds and then I went to bed. But I felt dizzy as soon as my head hit the pillow and I had to sit in a chair for an hour before the feeling passed.

The thing kept coming back to me and I tried to get inside it, inside the tremor, our faces sort of double-framed over the ice cubes in our drinks, flying out of focus, then in again-not to detail my own feelings but only to understand the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being.

We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not-I might have been devising my own newsreel.

everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.

When I shot George Manza I began to understand the nature of this kind of feeling. They put me in a radio car with a cop who smoked and they sent me eventually to a facility in upstate New York, a place that featured one of the oddities of the penal system. This was a miniature golf course, nine holes, with cartoon turrets and windmills-we were youthful offenders, you see, and maybe the guidance counselors thought we'd take snug comfort in the nursery shapes and bright colors or in the anal stuff of balls and holes. I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. But my mates and I, the D-felonies, the E-felonies, the head breakers, the thieves in the night, a mixed group as you'd imagine, with races, creeds, cries in the dark- we used to amble past the windows in the mess and look at the layout' down there with its loopedy-loops and tunnels and puddle lakes, its sward of tinsel grass, and we called it California.

Phoenix was a neater package for me. I needed a private life. How could you have a private life in a place where all your isolated feelings are out in the open, where the tension in your heart, the thing you've been able to restrict to small closed rooms is everywhere exposed to the whitish light and grown so large and firmly fixed that you can't separate it from the landscape and sky?

I walked in the door and Marian said, "What happened to your face?"

I walk in the door and this is what I hear, children playing, radio playing, the news, the traffic, the phone is ringing, the washer is pumping through a cycle.

I smiled and kissed her and she picked up the phone. The kids were making noise out back, our kids and the neighbor's kids, a game made up by Lainie-I knew this from the quality of the shrieks. Lainie made up fiendish games, inventive shrill spectacles of torture and humiliation.

"What did you do to your hair?"

"Had it cut. You like?" she said, still on the phone with someone. "What happened to your face?"

I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out

"What happened to your face?" Greta said to me.

I looked at Loyal work his spoon through the lumpy milk.

"Well, this is a good question actually."

"And what is the answer?" she said.

"Well, I had a little scuffle in the elevator. It's noticeable? At my hotel. I didn't know the marks still showed. Two drunks. A white guy and a black guy."

I could feel Sims enjoy this in his hot Reeboks.

"Nick started the fight," he told her.

"This is true?"

She said it to me but she was looking at the child eat his breakfast. We were all looking at Loyal.

"They told him he was going a little gray and he went berserk," Sims said.

Greta had to take the child to school and then she had to go to her own school where she taught chemistry three days a week with the ocean at her back.

Sims and I stood on our spots, drinking water.

"You two still mad?" I said.

"She's still mad. I got over it."

"I have a plane to catch," I told him.

He showered and dressed and took me to my hotel and I hurried through a shower and got dressed and grabbed my bag and got back in the car and there was a man on the freeway, a man on an embankment, nodding his head to drive-time radio, and he sat on the grass with an object across his knees and Sims said it was a rifle and I said it was a crutch, one of those metal crutches with a forearm brace, and it took me a couple of seconds to understand that Sims was kidding- this was just the language of the freeway.

I found southern California too interesting. The experimental aircraft, the fault systems, the inferno of cars and smog, the women from nowhere, even the street gangs that were coming into prominence at the time, adopting varsity colors. I made business trips but kept them brief and blinkered, after the first one. The place had that edge-of-ranger for a few minutes before we drifted off, one by one, although there was nothing else, essentially, to see.

I read a plaque and then watched Jeff stalk a ground squirrel. He wasn't wearing his hat but I didn't say anything, I just thought, Tough shit kid, don't say we didn't warn you. Then I relented and called him over and gave him the car keys. The effort to relent, the effort to slacken and yield, to love him in his careless slouch, this was a brutally difficult thing to do, small as it seems, small and fleeting-it was surprisingly hard. But I called him over and gave him the car keys, I knew he would like this idea, and told him to get his hat and lock the car and bring me the keys, and off he went, happy as I'd ever seen him.

I drifted back to the main structure and stood among a dozen tourists and listened to the ranger talk, a heavyset woman who scratched her elbow. No one knew the purpose of this structure, she told us, which was three stories high with a faint trace of graffiti near the top. I found I was more interested in the protective canopy than I was in the ancient structure. The ranger said the building was abandoned about a hundred years after it was built, the building and the whole settlement abandoned for no discernible reason, one of those mysteries of a whole people who disappear. But I found myself studying the protective canopy with its great canted columns, maybe seventy feet tall, and the latticed framework that supported the roof.

Lainie came and stood next to me, sort of collapsed against my haunch in a way that meant she was irreversibly bored.

The ranger listed some reasons why the people might have disappeared, the desert dwellers. She named flooding, she named drought, she named invasion, but these were only guesses, she said-no one had a clue to the real reasons.

I thought of Jesse Detwiler, the garbage archaeologist, and wondered if he might suggest that the people abandoned the settlement because they were pushed out by waste, because they had no room to live and breathe, surrounded by their own mounting garbage, and it was nice in a way to think it was true, one of those romantic desert mysteries and the answer's staring us in the face.

I was becoming Simslike, too soon, seeing garbage everywhere or reading it into a situation.

the color in the carpets, the apricots and clarets, the amazing topaz golds.

I told Marian the next night about the thing I'd done, or the night after that, the thing with Donna at Mojave Springs. I thought I had to tell her. I owed it to her. I told her for our sake, for the good of the marriage. She was in bed reading when I told her. I'd anguished about the right time to tell her and then I told her suddenly, without immediate forethought. I didn't tell her what I'd said to Donna, or why Donna was at the hotel, and she didn't ask. I stood near the armchair with my shirt in my hand and I thought she took it well. She understood it was an isolated thing with a stranger in a hotel, a brief episode, finished forever. I told her I felt compelled to speak. I told her it was hard to speak about the matter but not as hard as withholding the truth and she nodded when I said this. I thought she took it fairly well. She didn't ask me to tell her anything more than I'd told her. There was an air of tact in the room, a sensitivity to feelings. I stood by the chair and waited for her to turn the page so I could get undressed and go to bed.

And the first available Saturday, the first Saturday I didn't go to the office, we drove south with the kids to see an ancient ruin.

We had sunscreen and hats and drinking water, which was Marian's idea, the water was, because this was desert scrub and the heat was intense.

Lainie stood behind the front seat, sometimes elbowed forward between Marian and me, leaning toward the windshield, quick to point out stupid maneuvers by other drivers. She reacted angrily to this, a habit that drained my own anger, and Marian's too, and prompted us to make excuses for the stupid and dangerous moves she pointed out.

Jeff was two years younger, he was six and liked to curl in a corner of the backseat, curl and twist, slide toward the floor in an astral separation from everything around him, using his body to daydream.

Even if it wasn't a rifle, what was he doing on the freeway, on the grassy verge, sitting there with a metal crutch in his lap just yards from that madman traffic?

The ancient ruin was over six hundred years old, a single major structure with smaller scattered remains and a trace of a wall somewhere. We stood in the late morning heat and listened to a park

Marian could not even watch the detective's hand on the suspect's head, bending him into the unmarked car. It was all a violence, a damage to the spirit. But she wanted my stories, my things, the fiercer the better.

I was selfish about the past, selfish and protective. I didn't know how to bring Marian into those years. And I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

She said it was her mother, she said it was two years ago today that her mother died and I repeated it for the kids and the kids relaxed a little. I reached back and got a stick of gum from Lainie. Two years ago today and of course Marian knew this and we didn't, I didn't, I hadn't kept track, and I felt relieved and the kids did too because at least there was a reason, at least it wasn't a thing where the parents act funny and the children learn to make their faces blank.

She shone brilliantly, she glowed in her weeping, she smiled, I think-a smile that was a wince but also a real smile, with her mother in it somewhere.

After a while the kids started to sing.

And I was relieved, I was goddamn glad because I'd sat there thinking I was to blame or thinking maybe she does it all the time because how the hell do I know what goes on when I'm not home.

And the kids were singing, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, if one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer."

She looked at me and looked at the road and the kids kept singing, counting backwards all the way to one as Marian drove-cried and drove.

I told Lainie to go find her brother and see what he'd done with the car keys. Then we started home like a ragged band of pilgrims who'd failed to see the statue weep.

We were in the car ten minutes when Marian began to cry. She was at the wheel and her face lit up and she started crying softly. Lainie backed off from her standing station just behind us and took a seat by the window, hands folded in her lap. Jeff got interested in the scenery.

I said, "Want me to drive?"

And she shook her head no.

I said, "Let me drive, I'll drive."

And she gestured no, she preferred to drive, this is what she wanted.

We were on a back road flanked by saguaros and wildflowers, notched saguaros, pecked by birds that nested there, and then we reached the interstate and edged into the windblast of streaming traffic.

No last names, no echoing second thoughts. This is the pact of casual sex. But I told her my last name and it wasn't casual, was it? That's the odd dominant of the piece, that I wanted to reach her, still her breathing, to make her breathless, yes. There was something about Donna that untongue-tied me. Guilt later, feeling Marian next to me, asleep in the dark.

When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other's face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you've seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that's wrong-when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we'd exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn't exhausted anything really-there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian felt denied.

Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it-privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing. All the scenes she recoiled from when she watched T^ the narrative of local crime, we see the body in the street, the lament of the relatives, the suspect doubled over to conceal himself-

The super comes gimping toward him. Before he takes five steps along the street the super comes gimping toward him from a building down the block, moving with that hip-lurch of his that takes up half a sidewalk.

"Been looking for you," the man says.

Manx Martin stands with folded arms, not bothering to cock his head just yet-a little early for gestures of the superior type.

"You seen those shovels?"

"What shovels?" Manx says.

"Because they're missing out of the basement."

"Things always missing. Bought a new pair of socks missing in the wash."

"Two snow shovels from the utility room standing against the wall this morning."

"We expecting snow?" Manx says.

And he looks heavenward. Look like snow to you? Don't look like snow to me. Weatherman say snow?

Most janitors around here are floaters who work in one neighborhood and then another, come and go, staying one step ahead of something. This man's dug in like infantry.

"You and me, we're through passing the time," he says. "You show up at my door with a shovel in your right hand and a shovel in your left, then I listen to what you say."

Manx cocks his head, makes his eyes go tight in phonied concentration. He's looking to stare the man down, put the man in his place.

But the super pushes on past. Manx is leaning into the man but the man pushes on past, clumsily, every step a contortion and a labor, and Manx is fazed once more-he was just getting set to make a major statement.

He walks over toward Amsterdam Avenue. Three kids run by, going like hellfire, and he sees Franzo Cooper in a suit and tie, standing by the shoe repair.

"Who died? You're all dressed up, Franzo."

Turning as he speaks, wanting one last look at the super, he's not sure why, to shoot a beam of evil, maybe.

"You seen my brother?" Franzo says.

He's wearing a hat with a little feather in the band and his shoes have a military shine. The neon shoe is out of juice.

"I'm going to Tally's."

"You see him, tell him I need his car."

"Who died, Franzo?"

"I need to go to Jersey to see a lady. Else I die. What you doing?"

"Nothing much."

"I die of lovesick, man. Tell him to get over here with that junkheap. Be worth his while."

There's the beauty school, the shoe repair, the furnished rooms and over the door of the shoe repair there's a neon highshoe and the neon, he sees, is dark and cold, which brings him down a ways, a little sag in his mood.

The traffic stops and rolls at the corner, rolls on into the night, and a man stands by the rib joint preaching. Three or four people stop a minute and get the drift and stand another minute and go where they're going and two or three others come and listen and leave and the cars roll past and the light changes and the cars roll on.

The preacher says, "They say that only insects survive."

He's an old man with a hungry head, veined at the temples, and his hands are coming out of his sleeves. The sleeves of his jacket are so shrunk down that you can see way up his wrists. Long flat fingers marking his words and bicycle clips on his pants.

Three kids race by, like fleeing the scene.

"This is what they say and I believe them because they study the matter. All the creatures God put on earth, only insects survive the radiation. They have scientists studying the cockroach every second of his life. They watch him when he sleeps. He comes through a crack in the wall, there's a man with a magnifying glass been waiting since dawn. And I believe them when they say the insects still be here after the atom bombs will fell the buildings and destroy the people and kill the birds and the animals and masculate the dogs and cats so they can't begat their young. I believe them in and out and up and down. But I also got news for them. I know this before they do. We all know this, standing here right now, because we veterans of a particular place. Do we need somebody telling us how insects survive the blast? Don't we know this from the morning we born? I'm talking to you. Nobody here need scientific proof that insects be the last living things. They already pretty close. We dying all the time, these roaches still climbing the walls and coming out the cracks."

Manx glances back the other way. He'd like to get one last look at the super to nourish his grudge.

People stop to get the street preacher's drift, six or seven folks standing in the wind. Manx looks at the old man in his cuffed pants like some uniform a boy invents, playing army. There's something thin-skulled about him, his head is naked and veined and papery A man listens, interested, in a French hat, a black beret, and two women in those sister outfits, sister so-and-so from the storefront church, glad to meetcha, with napkins on their heads and frown faces.

"Nobody knows the day or the hour."

Two men in suits and their well-dressed wives, the men want to listen, the ladies say no thanks-cockroach talk is not their deedly-dee.

"Russians explode an atom bomb on the other side of the world. You got your radio tuned to the news? I'm telling you the news. Clear across the world. And you're standing there saying don't mean nothing to me. Old business, you're saying. The business of the generals and the diplomats. But right now, this here minute, while I'm talking and you're listening, officials making plans to build bomb shelters all over this city. Building bomb shelters that hold twenty-five thousand people under the streets of this city. And guess what you don't hear on today's news. You have to stand in the wind and hear it from me. Every one of those people standing in those shelters while the bombs raining down is a white person. I'm talking to you. Because not one single shelter's being built in Harlem. All right. They're putting shelters on the Upper East Side. They're putting shelters down lower Sixth Avenue. They're sheltering Forty-second Street all right. They're putting shelters out in Queens all right. They're sheltering Wall Street deep and dry. A-bombs raining from the sky, what are you supposed to do? Take a bus downtown?"

Manx has a faint grin.

A girl's standing there with her boyfriend and she says, "He's a agitator, let's go."

Manx can appreciate the man's argument but it's a little removed. The argument is satisfying because it's the multiplying into millions of the little do's and don'ts he carries around every day.

She says, "He's a agitator, let's go."

But it's the do's and don'ts he has to live with, not the news of the world with that rooster that goes scraw scraw in the movie house down the street.

The man's still talking, standing tall and with a whippy kind of bend in his body, a head like a hatched egg that's all veined out, and three kids race by, and a face so naked you think you've known him all your life, pants cuffed tight, and some kids race by.

"Where's your bicycle, man?"

And the boyfriend's got his cap slung low, not moving from the spot, and the girlfriend's saying, "He's a agitator, let's go."

The man's swiveling his head to catch an eye somewhere.

"They say stop paying rent. I don't say stop paying rent. I don't say blow up the gas and electric, the power and light. They say walk the landlords to the river. I don't say walk the landlords to the river or stand them up against the wall. I say take a dollar bill out of your pocket where it's folded up tight because you been saving it for this and that. Unfold this dollar bill and turn it over to the backside where they keep their secret messages. They keep their Latin words and their Roman numbers."

And the man takes a wadded bill out of his pocket and unfolds it like a magic trick and then he waves the money at the group in front of him.

"You see the eye that hangs over this pyramid here. What's pyramids doing on American money? You see the number they got strung out at the base of this pyramid. This is how they flash their Masonic codes to each other. This is Freemason, the passwords and handshakes. This is Rosicrucian, the beam of light. This is webs and scribbles all over the bill, front and the back, that contains a message. This is not just rigamarole and cooked spaghetti. They predicting the day and the hour. They telling each other when the time is come. You can't find the answer in the Bible or the Bill of Rights. I'm talking to you. I'm saying history is written on the commonest piece of paper in your pocket."

And he holds the bill by its edges and extends his elbows, showing the thing for what it is.

"I've been studying this dollar bill for fifteen years. Take it to the privy when I do my hygiene. And I worked those numbers and those letters all whichway and I hold the bill to the light and I read it underwater and I'm getting closer every day to breaking the code."

And he draws the dollar to his chest and folds it five times and puts it in his pocket, smaller than a postage stamp.

"This is why they're watching me with that eye that floats over the top of the pyramid. They're watching and they're following all the time."

Manx needs a drink. He hurries up Amsterdam past a TV-radio store where a TV is flickering and half a dozen people are watching in the cold. About a block away he see some guys running toward him, grown men, you know, pounding over the sidewalk, over the iron hatchways that lead to storage cellars, rattling the metal as they come, and he sees they're sort of half laughing, they're embarrassed, must be a crap game down an alley that the police broke up, and they go past him rattling the hatchways and looking back, running and half laughing and looking back.

He almost wants to turn around and run with them. He sees the humor of it. They'll meet in some doorway three blocks away laughing and panting and catching their breath, feeling grown-up stupid, and they'll find a place to do their gambling, the back room of a barbershop or someone's living room if the wife's not there.

But the wife is there.

Because I got a wife can't stand the sight of me even if I'm ten miles away, and will not let me breathe without a comment, and makes more comments in her head, and she is definitely there.

A dog looks out a first-floor window.

Yeah, black men running in the streets. Manx found himself running in the '43 riot and he probably had that same look on his face, conscious of being caught up in something he shouldn't be doing but doing it anyway, running past Orkin's where Ivie bought a sample coat, a coat a dummy used to wear, on sale cheap, and it rankled his mind all right, and all the Orkin's dummies were on the sidewalk now, torsos tumbled in the gutter, and heads without bodies, and slim necks and pale hair, and dummies armless like famous statues. He recalls this now, the big windows busted and dummies in garters, dummy legs in stockings and garters and kids in tuxedos, men running in the streets and a kid maybe twelve years old in a top hat and looted tux and a cop was leading him to a prowl car, funniest damn thing, top hat and tails and dragging pants-even the cop had a sweetheart smile.

He goes the last four blocks with his head turned away from the wind and the wind is whipping off the Hudson and Manx is walking like a horse with a spooked head.

But how different once you step inside the bar. The warm buzz, the easy breathing, the rumps happy on their stools. The buzz in Tally's is special tonight, more bodies than the usual midweek slump and more static in the air-and then he remembers. There's a tone, a telling rustle in the room and he pats the side of his jacket and feels the baseball and understands that they're talking about the game.

He waves to Phil, who's behind the bar, Tally's brother, in his plain shirt and fancy suspenders, and he gestures a question where-and Phil nods toward the far corner and there is Antoine Cooper sitting with a drink in front of him and two tall shovels leaned on the wall behind.

Manx sits across from Antoine, sits sideways in his chair so he doesn't have to look at the shovels.

"I seen Franzo standing in the dark."

"I know it. He wants my car. But he can't have it."

"What's that you're drinking?"

"He's looking to make some chick he's better off avoiding. Trust me. I already done her."

Manx looks around the room, takes in the buzz, hears half a sentence fly up out of shared laughter and he decides not to mention the shovels. He is aghast at the shovels. The shovels should not be here in any manner, way, shape or form. But he decides for now he won't say a word.

"What was that riot in forty-three? I'm trying to recall how it started. They filled so many holding cells in so many station houses they had to open an armory."

"Forty-three. I'm in the army, man."

"They had bleeding men carrying their loot under armed guard. Put them in an armory on Park Avenue."

"We had our own riot," Antoine says.

Manx goes to the bar and gets a Seagram's from Phil-he likes his rye in a short glass with a single ice cube.

Phil says, "What's happening?"

"I hear they played a ball game today."

"Goddamn it was something."

Manx carries the drink back to the table with one hand clutching the glass in the usual manner and the palm of the other hand under the glass, supporting it like some polished object in a church.

The ice cube is mainly scenery.

Antoine says, "How the boys doing?"

"The boys. The boys spread far and wide," Manx says. "Randall's in the South somewhere, bivouacking, you know, training in the field. And Vernon."

"I know where Vernon 's at."

" Yemen 's on the front line is where he's at. They got a quarter million troops they're looking at across the line. Them Chinese."

"What division he's with?"

"What division."

"Second Infantry's in Korea," Antoine says.

"I don't know what division."

"You don't follow the war?"

"What's that you're drinking?"

"I like to follow the war. They plot their strategies."

"They blow horns and whistles, that's their strategy, them Chinese. They come charging down in swoops."

"This here's brandy, my man. Drinking imported tonight."

"It's sitting there a little potent," Manx says.

"Only in the glass. Goes down the hatch real smooth."

"They come in swoops. That's their strategy."

"You say a prayer now and then. That's what you do."

"Sure, Antoine. I kneel by the bedside."

"You done okay with your kids."

"Sure, Antoine. They take care of me in my old age."

"You got some work?"

"They come visit me in the old folks. Slip me a bottle through the gate."

"You done okay, considering."

"Rosie's the one. That's a great girl. That's the only one that shows respect."

"You need some work. Change your temperament around. You're walking on eggs lately."

"They're laying off. They're not hiring. They're laying off."

"You need to get into long-distance moving."

"They bring me a cake on my birthday," Manx says.

"Long-distance, that's the ticket. I got a cousin in Alabama, which he's based in Birmingham, gets plenty of work long-hauling furniture and whatnot."

"I keep that in mind."

"Yellow yams from Birmingham."

"I place that on my list of things I need to think about."

"Greenest greens you ever seen," Antoine says a little croony.

Manx decides he can't contain it any longer. But he doesn't look at Antoine. He looks across the room at one of those wall lamps, the old-fashioned-type lamp bracketed to the wall where the sleeves that hold the bulbs have fake candle wax running down the sides.

And he says, "Shit man you got those shovels in plain sight."

Antoine has a long slick head and narrow neck, a man of schemes and contrivances, called Snake when he was younger, and he determines it is necessary to turn his upper body to the wall behind him so he can identify the objects in question. Oh yeah, these things, for shoveling off the patio after a white Christmas.

And he turns back to Manx real low in his chair so he's peering out confidentially over his drink.

"I don't think there's an FBI bulletin circulating tristate. What do you think?"

"I think they belong in your car, like we stated."

"The point is you got to raise your sights. Because these things don't bring no return."

"We stated beforehand, Antoine."

"Not worth arguing. Ibu're right, I'm wrong. But you got to raise your sights."

They sit drinking a while and Manx thinks about leaving but he doesn't move off the chair. He thinks about taking his shovels and leaving but he sits there because once he gets up and takes the shovels off the wall he is committed to walking the full length of the barroom with two large snow shovels in early October, and no place sensible to take them, and the thought of it, and the sight of it, keeps his ass in the chair.

Instead he takes out the baseball and sets it on the table. Then he waits for Antoine to take some time out of his busy day so he can notice.

"My kid brought it home from the game, my youngest, says it's the home run that won the game."

"That game they played today?"

"That's right," Manx says.

"I seen people on Seventh Avenue hollering up and down. Hands pressed on their horns, hollering out the windows. I said to Willie Mabrey. You know Willie? I said, They must be opening the vaults. The banks opening up their vaults. First come first serve. I said, Let's go get ours."

"My youngest. He come home with the ball. This is the ball what's-his-name hit in the stands. The game winner. Win the pennant."

Manx feels uneasy, he feels separated from what he's saying-it comes out of his mouth like a lie, the way a lie hangs in the air independent of right and wrong, making you feel you're not responsible.

He feels an urge to take the ball off the table and put it back in his pocket.

"This is the ball what's-his-name? What you saying exactly?"

"I'm saying it could be worth something."

"And I'm saying raise your sights. Because the circumstantial fact, you can't prove nothing. And who do you sell it to anyway?"

"I sell it to the ball club. They want it for a trophy. They make a display."

"Let me look at this thing. This thing's all smudged up."

Manx realizes he doesn't want Antoine to touch the ball. Antoine will look at the ball and say something that's a bringdown, something that gets Manx riley and griped, and he is already feeling tense enough, with his stomach acting up.

He takes the ball and puts it in his pocket.

Antoine leans back, hands up and palms facing out, showing his old snakehead smile, cool and mean.

"Tell you something. Maybe you sell the thing somewhere. But I don't think you be buying a sofa from Ludwig Bauman's," he says. "Or a pretty di-nette."

Manx goes to the bar to drink in peace. After a while Phil comes over and they talk a while. The place is quieter now, down to serious drinkers, they talk about the game. Phil is a straight-up guy, barn-sized, looks you in the eye. He talks about the game and Manx listens carefully, hoping for an angle, something to go on. The Dodgers are finished for the year. Dead and buried. The Giants play in the World Series starting tomorrow-starting today, Phil says, checking his watch, because it's past midnight now.

"Who they playing in the Series?"

"Yankees, who else?"

"All New York in other words."

"All New Irbrk series. And people already lining up for tickets. Heard it on the radio. All night they'll be lining up. Sleeping bags, you know. Hove to go myself."

"All night?" Manx says.

"People do anything to see this series, the way the Giants got in."

Manx likes the sound of that. People do anything. He tells Phil to pour one for himself, knowing the man will decline, he always declines, and Manx feels a little snakelike, caught it from Antoine.

He goes back to the table with a little shuffle in his step.

"You leave your brother standing in the cold."

"I know it," Antoine says.

"He wants the car one night is all."

"I'm doing him a favor. Because that lady he's looking to make is all kinds of two-faced."

"Let him find out for himself. He's a young guy looking for some action."

"See, you're not a jealous man. Let me explain something. I'm a jealous man. When I say jealous I mean the full meaning of the word. Everybody jealous," Antoine says. "The word don't mean shit unless you give it the full meaning. It needs a adjective. Like crazy jealous or can't-think-straight jealous. So if I say I'm jealous, you have to picture eyeballs filled with blood."

"You already done with her. What do you care? He's a good boy, Franzo. Let him learn."

"Let him find out, you mean. Because he won't learn nothing."

But Antoine seems to soften. He eases toward the tabletop, elbows spread, his chin nearly touching the brandy glass.

"Yeah I like that boy a lot. He's a good boy, Franzo. But I got my car in an awkward position."

"You wrap it around a pole?"

"You know Willie Mabrey?"

"Don't think so," Manx says.

"Willie and I been talking about my car. A way to make some fast cash. I ain't broke per se. But I can use some hurry in my income." Sipping his brandy. "And this here's my first payment in advance. Go down smooth. The cream de la cream."

"Payment for what?"

"Willie opened a restaurant about six weeks ago. Doing okay. But he's got a problem with his garbage. The city's talking about private companies coming in to pick up this trash. But right now the city does it and there's an ordinance about what time of day or night a restaurant can leave garbage on the street. You can't leave it there all night."

"Smells bad."

"Smells bad, attracts vermin. And if you keep it on the premises, you have a situation where the rats talking to the customers."

"So you made an arrangement with the man."

"Me and my car both."

"Which this reminds me," Manx says. "You mind give me a lift?"

"Take you anywhere," Antoine says.

They drain their glasses and get up and sort of shake themselves out, shake off the complacent airs and humors of the tavern and rearouse themselves for whatever's out there, the edgy wind-spooked street.

Antoine gets into his jacket and rolls his shoulders and zips the jacket to the throat. He cuffs his nuts for good measure, aligning for comfort and symmetry, placing them squarely at the center of the world. Manx is already wearing his jacket, he never took his jacket off, he's been wearing his jacket since he left the house in the morning, drinking in it, eating dinner in it, washing the dinner dish, and he zips it to the throat and sinks into the hull, the shell, already a little lightweight for the season.

They wave to Phil on the way out. They walk down to the end of the block, where the car is parked. Manx goes around to the passenger side and puts his hand on the door handle and then he stops and looks.

Antoine says, "Get in, man. Faster you get in, faster we move. Where you want to go?"

Manx is looking. He looks in the window at the rear seat and it is filled with garbage. He'd smelled it when he walked down the street but this is not an unoccurring smell and he took it for the general thing it was, garbage in an alleyway or empty lot. Now he sees it is Antoine's car that smells, it is Antoine's car packed with mounds of ripe trash.

"Oh man. Sheesh. I misdescribed this in my mind. Because I thought."

"Get in, man. Friggin cold tonight."

There is garbage in paper bags and cardboard boxes. There are two metal garbage cans wedged between the front and rear seats, regulation street-size cans with dented tops sort of erupted up by the pressure. Manx sees garbage stowed on the ledge by the rear window. He sees front-seat garbage in a peach crate smack on the seat, the oozy smell so near you can drink it.

"I thought you were on your way to get the man's trash and take it somewhere."

"Took it here. Trash right here. I filled up the trunk while they were still eating their dinner. Then I started on the inside of the car, working backseat to front seat. Move the crate and get in."

Manx opens the door and sets the peach crate on the mat and sits down, trying to find room for his feet on either side of the crate.

"Where you want to go?" Antoine says.

"Not far. But fast. Up by One Fifty-fifth Street. Where you taking this stuff?"

"Drive it to the Bronx. There's a tower of garbage under the White-stone Bridge somewhere. I fling the trash out the door and press the gas pedal hard."

"You do me a favor and press it now," Manx tells him. "Because I'm about to die sitting here conferring."

"Be calm. I take you where you going."

Antoine puts the vehicle in motion. He drives steady and unfazed, pointing the car up Broadway like a poison dart.

Manx realizes this is why the snow shovels were not in the car, where he'd told Antoine to put them. No room for shovels in the car.

Then he realizes they left the shovels in the barroom. Good a place as any. Except they won't be there tomorrow. So cross that little caper off the slate.

The last thing he realizes is that Antoine's been telling him all night to raise his sights. And him driving a DeSoto full of garbage.

"You drop me just up ahead there."

"I take you exactly where you're going."

"Broadway be fine," Manx says.

The stink is killing him, lifting him out of the insulated state of a day's slow whiskey burn.

The trash is bumping and mashing around and it has a life of its own, a kind of seething vegetable menace that pushes up out of the cans and boxes, it's noisy and restless, or maybe that's just the vermin moving around, on the verge of being carsick.

"This here's fine," Manx says. "Right at the corner."

"You're not gonna tell me where you're going?"

"I tell you where you're going if you want to take this trash to the Whitestone Bridge. You cross the river and get on One Sixty-first, which I think it runs two ways, and you take it to Bruckner, you be okay, Boulevard."

Antoine looks at him. Manx is already out of the car and he's standing on the sidewalk and Antoine looks at him, sitting unfazed at the wheel. A long lazy snake-eye look.

"Or I could dump it in the street."

"That's what I thought. That's what I said to myself."

"While the city sleeps," Antoine says. "And the cops be eating their chowder."

Manx watches the car move off. The feel of empty streets after midnight and the wind off the Hudson as he walks east. The hawk at his back. The cutting wind that sends loose trash skidding in the street.

Could be Antoine unleashing early.

He'd like to see an Alka-Seltzer is what he'd like to see, sizzling down the length of a cold glass of water.

He walks down the long ramp with the ballpark on his left, the Polo Grounds, and he looks for people standing in line or huddled on the pavement with blankets and food, the all-nighters, the men and boys eager for tickets, the kids who get paid by scalpers to stand in the cold and buy tickets that desperate fans will haggle over next day, paying prices out of sight.

The place is deadly still. And Manx has a stale acid feeling, that fidgety indigestion where you drink too much on an empty stomach, even though he knows he ate a meal he recalls the dish Ivie left him, he tastes the meat loaf and greens, but there's a wrenching pull like he's all sucked dry.

He's down on Eighth Avenue now wandering the perimeter of the ballpark, looking for a sign that someone's still alive. The place is stone cold quiet.

What's a pyramid doing on a U.S. bill? That's a question you do well to ask.

The only thing he sees is a dog of the slinking type, been kicked so often it decides it's being petted. He can't understand how Phil could be wrong about this. Phil's a straight-up guy. If Phil says the fans will be lining up all night to buy tickets and then you go there and look around and the place is deadly still, you have to wonder who's messing with your head.

It is frankly a fly-by-night moving and storage. They call him and he works, they don't and he don't.

Now he sees a car stopped for a light and he walks on over, sliding his feet the way he does when things get culminated on him. A man sits at the wheel. He sees Manx coming and rolls up the window, a white man with a look on his face like I ain't ready to die. Manx makes a motion with his hands. He shakes his hands in the air, no no no no- I only want to ask a question. And the man hits the pedal and he's gone, never mind the light's still red, burning rubber real impressive.

The sound dies into the night stillness and a deep quiet comes on again. The old ballpark stands over the avenue and makes its own enormous silence, different from the street and the river. Kids still swim in the Harlem River in the summer, way uptown where it turns out of the Hudson, and his own boys used to leap off a dock, arms all flung-he sees them momentarily in midair.

It grieves the bejesus out of him.

He feels a little empty. He feels low and put off and frankly humanly disgusted and he wants to lie down and sleep. He feels a little messed with. He wants to somehow, from someone, make some money.

One chance in ten million the ball club even lets him in the door. He has to find the paying fans. And he only walked toward the car to ask where they are. And the face at the wheel, like don't cut me up in little pieces please.

He looks across 155th Street, south to the tenements, and he sees a woman standing under the Power of Prayer sign, soliciting her trade.

He hears a sound across the river.

What's the point of all the secret codes on a U.S. dollar except to disconnect you from the people who know the facts?

He hears something. He's ready to head home, there's nowhere to go but home unless he finds another bar, and he knows he has to go down the subway and wait for a train in an empty station, another bringdown, stand there on the long platform waiting, half an hour maybe, and he hears a sound from across the river, far away but clear, the way voices travel exact on the water at night.

He stands near the bridge approach and listens. Men singing, the sound of a great many voices, some following behind the others, rambunctious and uneven, and he knows the tune.

They're singing, Riding on a pony.

They're singing, Stuck a feather in his cap.

They're singing, Called it macaroni.

And he hears laughter drift across the river and begins to understand finally. It wasn't the bartender who made the mistake. Phil never said the people would be lining up at the Polo Grounds. He never named the ballpark. It was Manx who made the mistake. Because they're lining up at Yankee Stadium just across the river. It's the Giants versus the Yankees at Yankee Stadium and the voices travel so exact it's like someone's whispering just to him.

He hears a group of fans chanting Say Hey Willie and of course those are Giant fans and that's Willie Mays they're singing his praises.

And he hears the answering chant from the Yankee fans with that old Joltin' Joe DiMaggio song from before the war, he thinks, that they were playing on every radio in the country, we want you on our side, and it's all rough-and-tumble and good-natured and his mood picks up and he gives the ball a smack with the palm of his hand where it's tucked in his jacket pocket, the perfect roundness and hardness of an object that's substantial.

He walks across the swing bridge and hears them in the streets and then he begins to see them. They're walking across the public park to the stadium, across the fields and pathways, and they're coming down from the elevated train, men and boys in long streams turning the bends in the high stairways, and they're laughing and singing.

He sees flags waving on the stadium roof and World Series bunting hung high on the outer wall. He sees fires on the pavement, they're building fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, and he is struck a little dumb by the masses of people out to buy tickets at this time of night. His mouth hangs a little open and he is wide-eyed dumb. He paces himself to the crowd, feeling pulled along, feeling frankly happy to be among them, and they're carrying food and chairs, webbed chairs for the beach that fold up light, and they have sleeping bags strapped to their backs, a dozen college boys with their hair clipped short, and they're passing thermos bottles that smoke up when you screw off the lid, strong coffee to keep them awake and warm.

He sees fathers and sons standing around the fires to warm themselves, masses of people if you could count them, and mounted police with horses breathing steam, and he feels a rare elation, a wanting-to-be-among-them, and he is pulled along a little slack-jawed because it's a great thing to see, and they're singing roaring warring songs, they're back-and-forthing on the street with rough-and-tumble humor, all these ball fans striding toward the ticket lines at two or three in the morning or whatever the actual hour.

Manx is wearing a watch that stopped running six weeks ago. This is a situation he will direct his attention to when his life gets back to being regular.