Don DeLillo - Underworld

Bronzini didn't own a car, didn't drive a car, didn't want one, didn't need one, wouldn't take one if somebody gave it to him. Stop walking, he thought, and you die.

George the Waiter stood smoking near the service entrance of the restaurant where he worked. He was a face on a pole, a man not yet out of his thirties who carried something stale and unspontaneous, an inward tension that kept him apart. Over the spare body a white shirt with black vest and black trousers and above the uniform his jut features looking a little bloodsucked.

Bronzini walked over and took up a position next to George and they stood without speaking for a long moment in the odd solidarity two strangers might share watching a house burn down.

Three boys and a girl played down-the-river against the side of a building, each kid occupying a box formed by separations in the sidewalk. One of them slap-bounced a ball diagonally off the pavement so that it hit up against the wall and veered off into another player's box.

He was George the Waiter in a second sense, that his life seemed suspended in some dire expectation. What is George waiting for? Bronzini couldn't help seeing a challenge here. He liked to educe comment from the untalkative man, draw him forth, make him understand that his wish to be friendless was not readily respected here.

Then the second player bounced the ball into someone else's box, hitting it hard or lightly, slicing at the lower half of the ball to give it english, and so on up and down the river.

"The thing about these games," Bronzini said. "They mean so much while you're playing. All your inventive skills. All your energies. But when you get a little older and stop playing, the games escape the mind completely."

In fact he'd played only sporadically as a child, being bedridden at times, that awful word, and treated for asthma, for recurring colds and sore throats and whooping cough.

"How we used to scavenge. We turned junk into games. Gouging cork out of bottle caps. I don't even remember what we used it for. Cork, rubber bands, tin cans, half a skate, old linoleum that we cut up and used in carpet guns. Carpet guns were dangerous."

He checked his watch as he spoke.

"You talk about the cork," George said.

"What was the cork for?"

"We used the cork to make cages for flies. Two flat pieces of cork. Then we got straight pins from the dressmaker which were all over the floor of the shop."

"My god you're right," Bronzini said.

"We stuck the pins between the cork discs. One disc is the floor, one is the ceiling. The pins are the bars."

"Then we waited for a fly to land somewhere."

"A horsefly on a wall. You cup your hand and move it slowly along the wall and come up behind the fly."

"Then we put the fly in the cage."

"We put the fly in the cage. Then we put in extra pins," George said, "sealing the fly."

"Then what? I don't remember."

"We watched it buzz."

"We watched it buzz. Very educational."

"It buzzed until it died. If it took too long to die, somebody lit a match. Then we put the match in the cage."

"My god what terror," Bronzini said.

But he was delighted. He was getting George to talk. How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

Directly across the street George the Barber was sweeping the floor of his shop. Voices from Italian radio drifting faintly out the open door. Bronzini watched a man walk in, a custodian from the high school, and George put away the broom and took a fresh linen sheet out of a drawer and had it unfolded and sail-billowing, timed just right, as the man settled into the chair.

"Maybe you heard, Albert. The hunchback died, that used to carve things out of soap."

"We're going back a few years."

"He carved naked women out of soap. Like anatomical. The hunchback that used to sit outside the grocery."

"Attilio. You'd give him a bar of soap, he'd carve something."

"What's-his-name died, the softball player, the pitcher that threw windmill. He had shrapnel from the war. He had shrapnel actually in his heart from in the war. That only now killed him."

"Jackie somebody. You and he."

"We used to work together at the beach. But I barely knew him."

George used to sell ice cream at the beach. Bronzini saw him many times deep-stepping through the sand with a heavy metal cooler slung over his shoulder and a pith helmet rocking on his head. And white shirt and white ducks and the day somebody got a cramp while George sold popsicles in section 10.

"Remember the drowned man?" Bronzini said.

They were playing salugi in the street. Two boys snatched a school-book belonging to one of the girls, a Catholic school girl in a blue pinafore and white blouse. They tossed the book back and forth and she ran from one boy to the other and they threw the book over her head and behind her back. The book had a thick brown kraft cover that Bronzini was sure the girl had made herself, folding and tucking the grainy paper, printing her name in blue ink on the front-name and grade and subject. Salugi , they cried, that strange word, maybe some corruption of the Italian saluto , maybe a mock salutation- hello, we've got your hat, now try and get it back. Another boy joined the game and the girl ran from one to the other, scatterhanded, after the flying book.

Or Hindi or Persian or some Northumbrian nonce word sifting down the centuries. There was so much to know that he would die not knowing.

"What about the kid?" George said. "I'm hearing things that I don't know if it's good or what."

"He's coming along. I'm pleased one day, exasperated the next."

"I have respect for people that can play that game. When I think to myself this kid is how old."

"I try not to lose sight of that very thing, George."

"I hear he beats experienced players. This could be good or bad. Not that I'm the expert here. But I'm thinking maybe he should be in the street with these other kids."

"The Street is not ready for Matty."

"You should impress into him there's other things."

"He does other things besides playing chess. He cries and screams."

George didn't smile. He was standing off, faded into old brooding, and he sucked the last bland fumes from his cigarette. One drag too many. Then he dropped the butt and stepped on it with the tap toe of his way-weary shoe, the border of uniformed George, rutted and cut across the instep.

"Time I showed my face inside. Be good, Albert."

"We'll talk again," Bronzini said.

He walked across the street so he could wave to George the Barber. How children adapt, using brick walls and lampposts and fire hydrants. He watched a girl tying one end of her jump rope to a window grille and getting her little brother to turn the other end. Then she stood in the middle and jumped. No history, no future. He watched a boy playing handball against himself, hitting Chinese killers. The hi-bounce rubber ball, the pink spaldeen, rapping back from the brick facade. And the fullness of a moment in the play street. Unable to imagine you will ever advance past the pencil line on the kitchen wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.

The barber waving back. Bronzini went to the corner past a man unloading jerry cans of Bulgarian sheep cheese from the trunk of a beat-up car. He walked north again, the savor of sweet peel in his hand. He realized he was still holding the fruit rind. It made him think of Morocco. He'd never been there or much of anywhere and wondered why the frailest breath of tangerine might bring to mind a reddish sandscape flashing to infinity.