Don DeLillo - Underworld

Bud's place could have been something blown in from the hills. It had a look of being deposited in a natural spree, with lumber warping in the yard and sprung-open doors and an unfinished porch on cinder blocks, one of those so-low porches the house looks sunk in sand. Bud had a coydog that lived in chains in a ramshackle hut out back, part coyote, part alley mutt. Richard thought this dog was less dangerous than legend would have it. Richard thought Bud kept this dog basically for the juvenile thrill of having a chained beast that he could feed or starve according to his whim.

He realized he'd forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the blue and yellow capsule despite the bold-faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was his father's fault for not managing his own intake or his mother's for not being around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I'm sorry and I wish he'd die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard's inner mind.

He did the dumb-joke thing of knocking on Bud's door and saying, "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

Nothing happened. He went in and saw Bud in a large open room sawing a two-by-four that he'd set between benches of unmatching height. The house was still mainly framework although Bud had been working for many months in a conscientious struggle that Richard thought had less to do with gutting and reshaping a house than destroying some dread specter, maybe Bud's old drug habit, once and for all.

"Your phone's out of order," Richard said. "I thought I'd drive on out, see if everything, you know's, okay."

"Why wouldn't it be okay?"

"I reported it to the phone company."

"My only feeling about the phone."

"Sometimes they correct the problem from the office."

"It brings more grief than joy."

Bud finally looked up and noted his visual presence.

"It brings personal voices into your life that you're not prepared to deal with."

Richard kept to the edges of the room, running his palms over the planed sills, examining the staples that kept plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames. It was empty distraction of the type that forestalls the pain of ordinary talk.

"I'm putting in parquet," Bud said. "Herringbone maybe."

"Should be good."

"Better be good. But I probably won't ever do it."

The sound of the wind in the plastic sheeting was hard on the nerves. Richard wondered how an ex-addict could work all day in this scratching and popping. The sheeting popped out, it whipped and scratched. Crack cocaine fools the brain into thinking dope is good for it.

He thought of something he could say

"Tell you, Bud. I'm forty-two years old next week. Week from Thursday."

"It happens."

"And I still feel like I'm half that, pretty much."

"That's because it's obvious why, you living as you do."

"What do you mean?"

"With your folks," Bud said.

"They can't manage alone."

"Who can? My question to you is."

Bud tossed half the length of sawed wood into a corner. He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.

"What?" Richard said.

"Don't they smell?"

"What?"

"Old people. Like bad milk."

Richard heard the plastic windows pop.

"Not so I notice."

"Not so you notice. Okay. You want to feel your correct age. Get yourself a wife. That'll do it for you. It's horrible but true. A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don't make you feel any younger."

Richard fidgeted happily in his corner. He liked the idea of being included in the female salvation of wayward men.

"Where is she?" he said.

"Working the late shift now."

Bud's wife worked on the line at Texas Instruments, mounting microchips on circuit boards, Bud said, for the information highway. Richard thought he was half in love with Bud's wife. It was a feeling that came and went, secret and sort of semipathetic, like his heart was made of some cotton product. If Aetna ever had a clue to what he felt, what would she think? The fear this question carried made him experience actual physical symptoms, a heat, a flush across his upper back, and a tightening at the throat.

He thought of something else to say.

"Left-handers, I read this the other day." And he paused here trying to recall the formal sentences in the narrow column of type. "Lefthanders, which I am not one of, live typically shorter lives than righthanders. Right-handed men live ten years longer than left-handed men. You believe that?"

"We're talking this is mean life span."

"Left-handed men die typically at age, I think, sixty-five."

"Because they jerk off facing the North Pole," Bud said in a remark that Richard could not analyze for one shred of content.

He watched Bud pry nails out of the old floorboards and offered to help, looking around for a claw hammer.

"So, Richard."

"What?"

"You drove fifty miles to tell me my phone's not working."

Richard didn't know if this was a setup for a scathing type of Bud Walling remark or maybe just an ordinary thank-you.

"Forty miles, Bud."

"Well that's a relief. I'd offer you a beer, but."

"No problem."

"Maybe it's Aetna who drives fifty miles. I forget exactly."

It was not outside Bud's effective range to say something personal about his wife, maybe her sex preferences or digestive problems, and whenever he mentioned her name old Richard caught his breath, hoping and fearing something intimate was coming, and even though he knew Bud did this to shock and repel him, Richard absorbed every word and image and smell description, watching Bud's long creased face for signs of mockery.

"She'll be sorry she missed you," Bud said, looking up from the wood rot and hanging dust.

He was not left-handed but taught himself to shoot with the left hand. This is what Bud would never understand, how he had to take his feelings outside himself so's to escape his isolation. He taught himself based on the theory that if you are driving with your right hand and sitting snug to the door it is better practically speaking to keep the right hand on the wheel and project the left hand out the window, the gun hand, so you do not have to fire across your body. He could probably talk to Bud about this and Bud might understand. But he would never understand how Richard had to take everything outside, share it with others, become part of the history of others, because this was the only way to escape, to get out from under the pissant details of who he was.

Bud was saying, "So cop says, Feet together, head back, eyes shut please. Which Aetna starts to laugh when he says please. Now spread your arms wide, he says. Now bring your left hand around and touch your nose with your index finger. Which I'm standing there in sheets of rain and he's advising from the car. Touch your nose with your index finger, he tells me."

"You're a left-hander driving a car you're five times likely to die in a crash."

"Than a right-hander."

"Than a right-hander," Richard said, religiously convinced.

Bud ripped a board out of the floor.

"Not my problem." /

"Mine neither."

"I die from stress," Bud said. "I'll tell you where my stress level's at."

Richard waited for the rest. He used to sit in a glass booth at the supermarket batching personal checks and redeemed coupons and giving out rolled nickels to the checkout personnel but he seemingly messed up somehow and was out at the counters again, running items over the scanner, keying fruit and vegetables into the register, subject to the casual abuse of passing strangers in the world.

"We have to do our business outside because the toilet's not ready for human habitation. So I built a thing outside where this is the only workable method pending I figure out the toilet. And Aetna, well you can imagine."