Don DeLillo - Underworld

He walks, he wants to walk but he doesn't want to reach home, ever, necessarily. He has to think this out, how he has the right to enter into money matters concerning any object that belongs to his family, which he is still the head of, regardless.

Being broke makes him feel guilty. Get a little cash and you're guiltier still.

He pees in an alley unashamed.

It occurs to him further that he could take a Greyhound bus out of here, ride that skinny dog into the sweet distance. The way his own sons raise up to him sometimes, all that wrangle in their eyes.

He will write the letter for Cotter. To excuse his absence from school. As he had a fever of a hundred and two.

Make the boy feel better about things.

It also occurs to him that he's approaching the corner where the street preacher spoke earlier in the evening, or last night, and then he realizes no, he's confused, he's still ten blocks north of there. Then he forgets this and looks around for the man. The man's gone of course, to wherever he goes, and this isn't his corner anyway, and there's nothing moving but a car or two, cars with mystery drivers coming out of the gloom, alive like insects all hours of the night.

Thirty-two dollars and change.

He feels the familiar stab of betrayal. Be messing with his head. Tricked him every which way. The baseball's bound to appreciate is the word. And the cash be worth less by the minute.

He looks in doorways for the preacher because he wants to give him the money. Get it off his hands. He wants to push the money in the old man's clothes just to be done with it. Give it to someone with a scientific interest in the stuff.

Booshit, man.

Money's his and he'll keep it. Take a bus somewhere. Or a room in some shambly street only a mile from home. Find a woman who'll look at him when her eyes sweep the room.

He forgets where he is again. He walks, he wants to walk, he's writing the letter in his head.

Please excuse my son from school yesterday.

He hears the rumble and grind of a garbage truck around a corner somewhere. Cars moving, trains running under the street, he's the only walking soul.

Old Charles be laughing up his sleeve for tricking old Manx. Tell his kid we gulled that fool.

Flat enough to pocket conveniently, with a cap on a chain.

He comes into his street and goes past the shoe repair and the beauty school.

His hand hurts where it touched hot metal.

It's beginning to get light when he reaches his building. He goes inside and climbs the stairs, each step taking basically a year, this is how it seems to Manx, until he is age eighty when he reaches his floor. He goes in the door, shadow soft, a silence with a set of eyes, and he moves slowly across the kitchen.

The alarm clock goes off in the bedroom.

He sits at the kitchen table and waits. She comes out in her nightdress and slippers, Ivie, the wife, and sees he hasn't been to bed and looks him over slowly.

She says, "What's this?"

"Need to put some butter on it."

"It's all blistered up. I don't like the looks of this."

"Just a surface burn."

"This election night? I thought election night was bonfires. I don't like the looks of this at all."

"You go on, get dressed. I take care of it."

"Not with butter you won't. That's old folks' nonsense," she says. "Do you more harm than good."

She takes the fruit out of the fruit bowl and fills the bowl with cold water and gets an ice tray out of the freezer.

"This doesn't help, we're taking you to emergency."

"I don't require no emergency."

She drops ten or twelve ice cubes into the water and sits next to him, holding his hand in the bowl of ice water and looking him over slowly. She keeps her questions, if she has them, for later.

Maybe the pain is subsiding slightly, maybe it's not. The water is so cold he only feels the cold. He tries to take his hand out of the bowl but Ivie keeps it there, her own hand pressing firmly on his, and Manx looks away, too tired to make a struggle of it.

"This only helps if the burn is recent," she says. "If the burn's not recent we have to see what they can do for you in emergency."

"And I'm telling you. I don't require no emergency."

They sit like this a while, her hand pressing his into the melting ice, and then she has to dress and go to work. Manx remains at the table, staring at his hand in the water and waiting for his son to wake up.

Bronzini thought that walking was an art. He was out nearly every day after school, letting the route produce a medley of sounds and forms and movements, letting the voices fall and the aromas deploy in ways that varied, but not too much, from day to day. He stopped to talk to card-players in a social club and watched a woman buy a flounder in the market. He peeled a tangerine and wondered how a flatfish lying glassy on flaked ice, a thing scraped with a net from the dim sea, could seem so eloquent a fellow creature. Its deadness was a force in those bulging eyes. Such intense emptiness. He thought of the old device of double take, how it comically embodies the lapsed moment where a life used to be.

He watched an aproned boy wrap the fish in a major headline.

Even in this compact neighborhood there were streets to revisit and men doing interesting jobs, day labor, painters in drip coveralls or men with sledgehammers he might pass the time with, Sicilians busting up a sidewalk, faces grained with stone dust. The less a job pays, Bronzini thought, the harder the work, the more impressive the spectacle. Or a waiter having a smoke during a lull, one of those fast-aging men who are tired all the time. The waiters had tired lives, three jobs, backaches and bad feet. They were more tired than the men in red neckerchiefs who swung the heavy hammers. They smoked and coughed and told him how tired they were and looked for a place on the sidewalk where they might situate the phlegm they were always spitting up.

He ate the last wedge of tangerine and left the market holding the spiral rind in his hand. He walked slowly north glancing in shop windows. There were silver points of hair in his brush mustache, still so few they were countable, and he wore rimless spectacles with wire temples because at thirty-eight, or so said his wife, he wanted to convince himself he was older, settled in his contentments, all the roil-some things finally buttoned and done.

He heard voices and looked down a side street filled with children playing. A traffic stanchion carried a sign marking the area a play street and blocking the way to cars and delivery trucks. With cars, more cars, with the status hunger, the hot horsepower, the silver smash of chrome, Bronzini saw that the pressure to free the streets of children would make even these designated areas extinct.

He imagined a fragment of chalked pavement cut clean and lifted out and elaborately packed-shipped to some museum in California where it would share the hushed sunlight with marble carvings from antiquity. Street drawing, hopscotch, chalk on paved asphalt, Bronx, 1951 . But they don't call it hopscotch, do they? It's patsy or potsy here. It's buck-buck, not johnny-on-the-pony. It's hango seek-you count to a hundred by fives and set out into alleyways, shinnying up laundry poles and over back fences, sticking your head into coal bins to find the hiding players.

Bronzini stood and watched.

Girls playing jacks and jumping double dutch. Boys at boxball, marbles and ringolievio. Five boys each with a foot in a segmented circle that had names of countries marked in the wedges. China, Russia, Africa, France and Mexico. The kid who is it stands at the center of the circle with a ball in his hand and slowly chants the warning words: I de-clare a-war u-pon .