Don DeLillo - Underworld

Baseball's oh so simple. You tag a man, he's out. How different from being it . What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

The young man struck the match with one hand. He'd learned this when he first started smoking, about a year ago, although it seemed to him that he'd been smoking forever, Old Golds, isolating the match by closing the cover behind it and then bending the match back against the striking surface below and driving the head with his thumb. Then he brought the flared match up to his cigarette, his hand cupping the whole book with the match still secured. He lit up, shook out the flame and conceded use of the other hand to pluck the spent match from the book and send it to match hell.

You need these useless skills to make an impression on the street.

The science teacher fading into the evening, southbound, and his former student Shay, a mopey C-plus in introductory chemistry, walking the other way on the same street, into the shopping district, taking deep drags on his cigarette, with numbers running in his head.

Ever since the game yesterday, Nick's been seeing the number thirteen. The game, the mass hurrah, the way he crouched over his radio, ready to puke his guts all over the roof. All day today, thirteens coming out of the woodwork. He had to get a pencil to list them all.

Branca wears number thirteen.

Branca won thirteen games this year.

The Giants started their pennant drive thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers.

The month and day of yesterday's game. Ten three. Add the digits, you get thirteen.

The Giants won ninety-eight games this year and lost fifty-nine, including the play-offs. Nine eight five nine. Add the digits, reverse the result, see what you get, shitface.

The time of the home run. Three fifty-eight. Add the digits of the minutes. Thirteen.

The phone number people called for inning-by-inning scores. ME 7- 1212. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Add the five digits, old thirteen.

Take the name Branca-this is where he started going crazy. Take the name Branca and assign a number to each letter based on its position in the alphabet. This is where he started thinking he was as crazy as his brother doing chess positions or probabilities or whatever the kid does. Take the name Branca. The B is two. The r is eighteen. And so on and so on. You end up with thirty-nine. What is thirty-nine? It is the number which, when you divide it by the day of the month of the game, gives you thirteen.

Thomson wears number twenty-three. Subtract the month of the year, you know what you get.

Two guys were pushing a car to get it started. Nick nearly went over to help but then didn't. He was done with baseball now, he thought, the last thin thread connecting him to another life. He saw the old man who dressed as a priest, more or less, wearing a cassock sometimes with house slippers, or one of those ridged black hats a priest wears, blessing the fucking multitudes, and ordinary shabby street clothes.

He walked into the butcher shop. The bell over the door rattled and the butcher stood above the block, Cousin Joe, hacking at a pork loin.

The other butcher said, "Hey. Look who's here."

He said it the way you say something in passing, to no one in particular.

Cousin Joe looked up.

"Look who's here," he said. "Nicky, what's the word?"

The other butcher said, "Hey. He wants to be called Nick. You don't know this?"

"Hey. I know this guy since he's four years old. A little skinny malink. How long you been coming in here, Nicky?"

Nick smiled. He knew he was only a stationary object, a surface for their carom shots.

"I seen him with that girl he goes with. Loretta," the second butcher said.

"You think he's getting some?"

"I know he is. Because I look at his face when they walk by."

"Nicky, tell me about it. Make me feel good," the butcher said. "Because I'm reaching the point I have to hear other people's, you know, whatever it is they're doing that I'm not doing no more."

"I think he's a cuntman. Up and coming."

"This is true, Nicky?"

Nick's mood was improving.

"I think he's getting so much there's not enough left over for the rest of us," the second butcher said, Antone, barely visible behind the display case.

"Make me feel good, Nicky. I stand here all day, I look at them go by. Big women, short women, girls from Roosevelt, girls from Aquinas. You know what I say to myself. Where's mine?"

"Nicky's got yours. He's got mines too."

"Him, I could believe it."

"And you know why, Joe?"

"He's doing something he shouldn't be doing."

"He's got that pussy smile when he walks by. Which could only mean one thing. The kid is eating box lunch at the Y."

" Sboccato ," the butcher said happily, berating Antone, rasping the word from deep in his throat. Foulmouth.

Nick went to the door and opened it and waited for a woman to walk past and then flicked his cigarette toward the curbstone.

"Who's better than him?" Antone said.

" You going to school, Nicky?"

"He goes when he goes. Hey. Who's better than him?" Antone said. "I would give my right arm."

Antone took the bag out of the case. It held chops, chicken breasts and fresh bacon. He passed it over the top to Nick.

"Who's better than you?" he said.

"Be good," Cousin Joe said.

"My right arm I would give. Look at this kid."

A taste of blood and sawdust hung in the air.

"Regards to your mother, okay?"

"Be good, okay?"

"Be good," the butcher said.

Bronzini lay beaming in the massive bath, a cast-iron relic raised on ball-and-claw feet, only his head unsubmerged.

Salt crystals fizzed all around him.

His wife leaning against the door frame, Klara, with their two-year-old affixed to her leg, the child repeating words that daddy issued from the deeps.

"Tangerine," Albert said.

This was happiness as it was meant to evolve when first conceived in caves, in mud huts on the grassy plain. Mamelah and our beautiful bambina. And his own mother, ghastly ill but here at last, murmurous, a strong and mortal presence in the house. And Albert himself in the hot bath, back from the hunt, returned to the fundamental cluster.

He summarized the meeting with Father Paulus. A slouching Klara seemed about to speak several times, the way her body begins to drag along a surface, going restless and skeptical.

"An impressive man. I want you to come along next time. Or I'll invite him here."

"He doesn't want to come here."

"Doctorate in philosophy at Yale. Graduated magna cum laude in sacred theology from some Jesuit center in Europe. Louvain, I believe," and he formed the word as a privileged utterance. "Holds a chair in the humanities at Fordham."

"But he's not inclined to help you with the boy."

"He'll help. He'll come to a match. Tangerine," he said to the child and raised his arms out of the water.

Klara lifted the girl up over the roll-rim of the tub and Albert sat up and took her under the arms, holding her upright, feet in white socks barely touching the water so she could step along the surface, laughing, making little kick-waves. And he felt like a mother seal, yes, a mother, not some raucous coughing bull or whatever the male is called-he would have to look it up.

"Do you know the old painting," he said, "that shows dozens of children playing games in some town square?"

"Hundreds actually. Two hundred anyway. Bruegel. I find it unwholesome. Why?"