Don DeLillo - Underworld

"How'd it happen? You punched a little girl in the mouth?"

"Card game in the lots."

"You go in the lots?"

"Just at the edge."

"Does she know you go in the lots?"

"I don't go way in."

"You think it's a good idea, going in there?"

"What do you think?"

"I think go in. But watch yourself. There's kids in there from all over. They don't know you're my brother."

Nick held his hand and looked at it.

"It doesn't hurt the way it did."

"You played shots on knucks."

"That's right."

"And you ended up holding some cards and the winner whacked you how many times."

"I had a choice."

"I remember this choice."

"Either he gives me nine scraping shots with the edge of the deck or he gives me four scraping shots and then one killer shot with the deck held up and down."

"Blunt end. Where he hits you square on your knuckles, full force."

"That's right," Matty said.

"Let me ask. How could you lose a kid's card game, a brain like you, supposedly, playing with a bunch of little pisspots?"

"They weren't so little," Matty said.

Nick held his hand. Many times through the years Nick had bopped him on the head, a flick of the middle finger that carried slingshot force. Many times Nick had lifted him off a chair and sat himself down. Nick had held him out the window once for rubbing snot on a door edge. Many times Nick had booted him in the ass for no reason except he was passing through a room that had Matty in it.

"I think we're talking about iodine here."

"I don't need iodine," he whispered.

He looked at his hand in Nick's. His brother had an odor of work and heat and sharp salami, the spicy bright salami he ate on the job.

Their mother came in and looked at the hand.

She said, "Mercurochrome."

Nick took the hand away from her.

"Iodine," he said.

"First he washes the hand with soap and cool water, Matthew, are you listening? Then he dries the hand."

"Then he puts iodine on it."

"I don't want the iodine," Matty said. "I want the mercurochrome."

"Iodine. It's stronger, it's better, it's hotter, it burns."

"Mercurochrome," Matty said. "It eats right into the wound, cleaning and burning." "Mercurochrome," Matty said.

But he didn't want his brother to drop the hand, to let go of the hand just yet.

Klara stood on the roof watching stormclouds build bluish and hard-edged, like weather on some remote coast, a sky that seemed too lush and wild to pass this way.

The child played with a neighbor's child on a blanket nearby.

She'd taken down the laundry and put it in the basket but wasn't ready to go inside just yet. The wind was gaining force and she could see women on rooftops all up and down the block unpinning clothes from swaying lines, ducking under bedsheets walloped up, and she could hear other women pulling on the lines that crisscrossed alleyways between windows and laundry poles, the screech-song of old ropes passing through the grooved rims of all those rusty wheels.

She missed Albert's mother. It was strange to walk into the front room now, an awkward empty place, first the empty bed and now not even the bed, just floor space that needed filling.

It was also strange how they hadn't wanted to get rid of the bed, either one of them. They'd kept it around for weeks, cranked to her daylight angle, the hours when she liked to close her eyes and feel the sun on her face.

The white of her nightgown and hair and the white sheets and the sheets billowing on the rooftops and the women fisting them down to gatherable size.

The first drops hit thick and splatting.

She'd been up here once, not long ago, more or less hiding from her life, and she saw the young man standing across the street, standing smoking by a lamppost.

Most of the time when she thought of him at all she thought of him in motion, she thought of notched hands moving on her body and dirt grained deep in his fingers, she thought of the turn of his shoulder and the way he looked at her over his clenched fist.

She'd liked it when she saw him by the lamppost looking at the building. Then she thought about it and didn't like it so much. But that was the only time she saw him there.

The two children did not want to go inside but the rain was getting close.

He'd been easy in a way, natural in a way, not distant or totally unknown. At first she thought it might be nice to think of him as the Young Man, like a character in a coming-of-age novel, but she only thought of him in motion, and nameless, and nonfictional, a sort of rotary blur that hovered just off her right shoulder somewhere, the thing her brain condensed from all that pleasure and wet.

She looked over the ledge and saw three girls playing jacks on a stoop across the street, seated on different steps, the girl with the ball still-bodied and hunched, only her hand working among the strewn jacks, frantically, and Klara could hear them calling threesies and kissies and interference, an argument breaking out, steely and clear.

She didn't want more, she wanted less. This was the thing her husband could not understand. Solitude, distance, time, work. Something out there she needed to breathe.

She took the laundry basket to the door and left it just inside. The surrounding rooftops were just about empty now and the yowl of the alley lines had stopped. Even from this height she could hear the rapping sound. A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in from play.

Then the rain came hard. Klara picked up her daughter and scooped the blanket under her arm and took the other child by the hand and they ran laughing across the roof under racing skies.

At dinner she told him she'd been selfish.

"I don't think that's true," he said.

He tore a length of crusty bread in two, a thing he did ritually and with such depth of dependable habit that she could not imagine him getting through a full meal, all the switches and intervals and hand movements, without this crucial flourish.

"The painting's a waste. I'm not getting anywhere. Well put Teresa in that room."

"Give it time," he said. "And anyway where do you expect to get with it? Do it for the day-to-day satisfaction. For the way it fills out the day."

She had a small print of a Whistler, the famous Mother, and she hung it in a corner of the spare room because she thought it was generally unlocked at and because she liked the formal balances and truthful muted colors and because the picture was so dashingly modern, the seated woman in mobcap and commodious dark dress, a figure lifted out of her time into the abstract arrangements of the twentieth century, long before she was ready, it seemed, but Klara also liked looking right through the tonal components, the high theory of color, the theory of paint itself, perhaps-looking into the depths of the picture, at the mother, the woman, the mother herself, the anecdotal aspect of a woman in a chair, thinking, and immensely interesting she was, so Quaker-prim and still, faraway-seeming but only because she was lost, Klara thought, in memory, caught in the midst of a memory trance, a strong and elegiac presence despite the painter's, the son's, doctrinal priorities.

"No, we'll do something with the room. That's what I ought to be doing. Getting this place in some kind of livable shape."

"We have the front room to do," he said.

"We have the front room, which is still a kind of no-man's-land. I'll do the front room. Then I'll do the spare room."

"And I'll step up my own efforts. Head of the science department. I'll make this my goal. And we'll travel this summer. To Spain or Italy. Wherever you like," he said.

She liked to watch him eat because he did it so deeply, handling and savoring things, handling utensils, chewing food thoroughly, the way he paused unpretentiously with the wineglass an inch from his lips, waiting, savoring, a sense of earth and our connection to it, that was Albert over a dish of inky squid-earth and sea and the way he looked at food in the plate, breathing it all in before he even touched a fork.