Don DeLillo - Underworld

"The sweater's got burrs," Rosie says. She seems to like that word and puts a teasey nonchalance in her voice. "He's full of burrs from some apple orchard he must have visited sometime or other."

He runs his fingers over the inside edge of the bowl, feeling the sort of spatter of whirled material, the bubbly pinpoint warps. His mother tells him to wash his hands. She is not looking at him but knows the state of his hands from the position of the sun and moon. He must be walking dirt. Walking talking filthman from the planet Dirt.

At dinner they are quiet. This is because his father is not here and might walk in any time and then again might not and they are in a state of involuntary waiting. Funny how his mother pushes through the door, shouldering in with shopping bags and bundles and her purse that she wears on a long strap over her head and across her body, maybe dragging a handled bag or nudging it out of the hallway with a peg-leg motion and making six kinds of noise even when she's not carrying something, bringing the streets in with her, the subways, buses and streets, all the noise and labor of getting uptown and downtown, that's his mother, and his father usually sliding in unannounced, standing and glaring, stuck to the wall like he wandered in the wrong door and needs to work out the details of his mistake.

His mother is tall and slightly lopsided and she is strong. He knows this because he has lifted things she has lifted, he has come up four flights with things she often carries, and poker-faced-it takes her half a minute to work a smile out of those unused muscles.

She says, "I saw that man who preaches in the street. Same place every time."

"I did too," Cotter says.

"I said to myself this man has a life even if we can't imagine it. This man goes home somewhere. But where does he go? How does he live? I try to imagine what does he do when he's not out there preaching."

Rosie says, "I see these people lots of places."

"But this man's steady. Same place. I don't think he cares if people listen. He'll preach to cars going by."

"What was he preaching?"

"How no one knows the day or the hour. Seems there's been the Russians exploding an A-bomb. So no one knows the day or the hour. They announced it on the news."

Rosie says, "I can't get worked up."

"I got worked up until I started up the stairs with those shopping bags. Thought I was going to pull my shoulder out of the socket."

"Back to normal," Rosie says.

"But I stood and listened to him. I have to say. First time I listened to the man."

"He's always there," Cotter says.

"First time I listened. No one knows the day or the hour. I believe this is Matthew twenty-four."

"I can't get worked up," Rosie says.

"But the man has a life and it's a mystery to me how he lives it."

"People always preaching," Rosie says.

"Those clothes he wears. I think it's a shame. And he's not a crazy man. He knows his scriptures."

"You can know your scriptures," Cotter says. "There's people know their scriptures they're crazy as a loon."

"Amen," says his sister.

After dinner he's back in his room looking out the window. He's supposed to be in his room doing his homework and he's in his room all right but he doesn't know what his homework is supposed to be. He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there's another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents. There's a kid in his class who eats pages from his history book nearly every day. The way he does it, he places the open book under the desk in his crotch and slyly crumples a page, easing it off the spine with the least amount of rustle. Then he has the strategy of wait a while before he brings his fist to his mouth in a sort of muffled cough with the page inside the fist, like whitesy-bitesy. Then he stuffs in the page and the tiny printed ink and the memorized dates, engrossing it quietly. He waits some more. He lets the page idle in his mouth. Then he chews it slowly and carefully and incomplete, damping the sound by making sure his teeth do not meet, and Cotter tries to imagine how it tastes, all the paper points and edges washed in saliva, becoming soft and limp and blottered so you can swallow smooth. He swallows not so smooth. You can see his adam's apple jerk like he just landed a plane on a foreign shore.

War and treaties, eat your Wheaties.

Rosie's in the shower now. He sits on his bunk and hears water beating on the other side of the wall and he thinks about the game. He remembers things he didn't know he'd seen or heard, people on the exit ramp-he sees shirt colors and hears voices coming back to him. A cop on a horse, the boot shine and animal heat, and he hears water beating on the galvanized walls of the shower, the rattling stain-walled shower that someone added to the bathroom years before.

When his father comes in, there is no doubt of the entrance, the singing of the hinges when the door opens slowly, the way he does not carry sound with him out of the entranceway-there's no shaking out of clothes or heavy breath from the climb up the stairs. Not that you can't hear him at all. He maintains a presence near the door, a hear-able something, maybe just the tension of a man standing on a linoleum floor or some tone that comes off his body, a tightness that says he's home.

Cotter sits on the lower bunk and waits. His father comes through the kitchen and appears in the doorway, Manx Martin. He's a working man, a furniture mover when he's employed and a whiskey swigger when he's not. He looks at Cotter and nods pointlessly. He stands there nodding, a gesture that has no point, that seems to mean Oh yeah it's you if it means anything at all. Then he comes in the room and sits on the unused bed, the cot. They listen to the water beating on the shower walls.

"Had your dinner?"

"Meat loaf."

"Leave some for me?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know. Why, you left the table early? You had an appointment downtown?"

He sees the man is kidding. His father's eyes go narrow and he does his pencil-line smile. He is a man with high cheekbones sort of poxed in the hollows, rough-graded, and a thin mustache that he keeps well above his lip, tended and particular. He looks around the room. He studies things. He seems to believe this is the right time to see what kind of surroundings his sons grew up in. He is average size, a little developed in the chest, a little bowlegged, and Cotter would not have thought he had the brawn to move heavy pieces up and down long flights of stairs. But he has seen his father lift and hoist with much bigger men.

"Which one's in there?"

"Rosie."

"Washing up a storm."

"The way she does homework. To the last ounce."

"Finishes what she starts, that girl."

It bothers Cotter in some lurking way, to sit here with his father talking about Rosie while they hear her in the shower. Just then the water stops.

"Because I need to take a leak, you see."

"Super wants to talk to you."

"He's a yard dog. Pay no mind."

"How come he knows us if he just got here?"

"Maybe we're famous, you and me. Two hombres that they put out the word these guys be mighty tough."

Cotter relaxes a little. He thinks maybe this is going to be all right. The man is feeling no pain as they say and there's something he can get from his father that he can't get from his mother.

Manx calls out, "Rosie baby. Your daddy needs to use the fa-cil-i-tees."

They hear a smothered word or two and then she goes across the hall barefoot in a towel and Manx stands and hitches his pants and clicks his tongue and walks out of the room.

Cotter thinks without knowing it, without preparing the thought- he sees Bill Waterson on Eighth Avenue with his jacket bunched in his hand. He picks up the baseball and looks at it and puts it down. His father is taking a king leak. You don't usually hear anything but the shower in there and noises from the pipes but his father is taking a leak that is the all-time king. It is quickly becoming funny, the time span and force of the leak, and Cotter wishes his brothers were here so they could all be amazed together.