Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Can I call a cab from here? Go home. Make up with her. Don't subject the episode to ten hours of neurotic scrutiny."

"Go home."

"Go home. What are those shoes called that I'm trying to think of? Tell her you're sorry. Don't let it fester. Old-fashioned two-tone shoes."

He looked at me, measuring.

"We'll go to a ball game sometime. You're coming back in a few months, right? We'll go to a game."

"I don't want to go to a game."

"We'll go to a game," he said.

We drank up and left. In less than fifteen minutes we were in another club listening to hornplayers rake the walls, four guys in fezzes and caftans with a physical sound and a drummer who's making mostly vocal noise, off-pitch wails and cries.

We ordered drinks and listened a while and then Sims leaned in closer.

"Happen to me twice since I been out here. Pull their guns. My life held in some cop's bent finger because I resemble a suspect or my tail-light's out. And he's out of the car. And he gets me out of the car. He says, I need you to get out of the car right now. And I get out of the car. And he says, I need you to hit the roof and spread them wide. But I just look at him. And he looks at me. We look at each other with a longing to kill that's completely puzzling in one sense and completely natural in another."

I nod and wait. He sits very serious over his drink, Sims.

" You want to be my friend, you have to listen to this," he said.

The walls were decorated with old Pacific Jazz album covers and we one nostril. He had a T-shirt that read Monday Night Football at Roy Earley's Loins and Ribs. It wasn't Monday and we weren't there.

I said, "What happened?"

"What happened. What happens at home?"

"You had a fight with Greta."

"Forget it," he said. "Drink up."

"These guys ain't half bad."

"It's music. Drink up," he said.

"lour stomach's knotted up."

"The fact is we never fight."

" You never fight. Marian and I never fight. So when it happens."

"Ibu retain it in the body."

" You feel a knot, a weight."

"We never frigging fight."

"We never fight, Marian and I. Go home and make up. I'll call a cab. Can I call a cab from here?"

"You're going a little gray," he said.

"You're going a little bald."

"I'm going a lot bald. But you're going a little gray."

The tenor was hitting cubist notes and we'd had a number of half drinks and the drummer was firing rim shots or whatever they do and in the local noise and the wider dislocation of a nightscape that was unfamiliar, I tried to understand what Sims was saying.

"Seriously, go home. I'm fine. I like these guys. It's hard-driving stuff."

"It's race music," he said.

"It's hard-driving free-wheeling jazz."

"It's race music. You like it for what you want to like it for. I'll like it for what I want to like it for. I'll show you this picture I've got at home. Great photograph, circa I don't know, nineteen-fifties. Charlie Parker in a white suit in some club somewhere. Great, great, great picture."

" A club in New York."

He gave me a flat-eyed look.

"You know this?"

"Great picture," I said,

"Wait. You know this? A club in New York?"

shoes by the way. Those aren't the shoes I mean when I talk about two-tone shoes."

"It sounded like the death and burial of music."

"Jerk. You should have kept it."

"Wait. I'm a jerk?"

"Great thing to have. You keep things like that. A secondhand horn? Great thing."

"Wait."

"Big mistake, Sims."

"I'm a jerk?"

The pianist came out first, then the bass. The drummer wore a headband and dark glasses.

"The ship's back," he said. "You know that?"

"No."

"Up the coast in San Francisco."

"Who tells you these things?"

"You know how rumors work. Nobody tells you. You just hear."

"What do you hear about the cargo?"

"That's a whole other deal," Sims said, slipping into the forced-air voice of a used-car salesman, and a cracker at that, and a laugh shot out of me. "That's real innerestin. That's the sweetest deal about this whole buncha rumors."

The horn finally showed, a rangy man with a gold chain and a gap in his front teeth, wearing resort clothes and sandals.

"They said it was heroin. They said it was the CIA moving heroin to finance some covert operation. But we didn't believe this, you and I."

"Because we're responsible men."

"And we were right," Sims said. "Because it's not heroin. It's not toxic chemicals, it's not industrial ash and it's not heroin."

"What is it?"

"It's a mixup over a word. That's what it is."

"Which word?"

"You know what heroin's called. It's called scag, it's called horse, it's called H, it's called smack, it's called this, it's called that. And what else, Nick?"

"Called shit."

turned our heads toward the bandstand and felt the force of the music, a sophisticated jazz that had the texture of life-and-death argument.

I told him, "Yes." I said, "Yes, I'm going a little gray. But I don't understand why this is worse than all-out bald. Which is your own admitted destiny."

"That's the point."

"What point? A little gray is not the most ominous thing that happens to a man."

"Let's get rolling, okay?"

"Why?"

"There's a place."

"I'm enjoying this place."

"I'm showing you some things, okay? You have to accept this," he said. "I'm here, you're not."

"All right. But you ought to go home. Tell her you're sorry."

"I want you to know something about us."

"What?"

"We never fight."

"We never fight either. Our friends fight."

"That's why I'm twisted up inside."

"I hear you talking."

"Then let's roll," he said.

The next place was in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A.-the term had a secret life I couldn't clearly read. The group was between sets and a haze of ten-year-old smoke hung over the room.

"I played the horn. You know that?"

"Still play?"

"An old hockshop horn. Threw it away finally."

"But you still have it."

"Threw it away," he said.

"But you kept it. You still have it."

"Threw it away."

"Irbu didn't keep it?"

"What for? It sounded like hell."

"Great thing to have. An old trumpet? They're not called saddle

"Look. Go home, tell her you're sorry, take a bath and go to bed."

He looked at me, underlip jutting.

"There's something else."

"What's that?" I said.

"A judge issued an order, an injunction that they couldn't dump the sludge because there's a body buried there," Sims said, and took a drink, and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.

"Whose body?"

"Whose body. Whose body do you want it to be? That's whose body. Some mobster, I hear. Shot in the head execution-style."

A trio with a singer. She had streaky reddish hair and copper skin, holding the mike at her spangled thigh while the sidemen cued the next verse.

"We never fight. Our friends fight," I said.

When the set ended a fatigue passed over us, a staleness. Sims blew smoke past my shoulder. I jabbed an ice cube in my drink, poked it with a finger and watched it bob.

"There's this man I knew once. I didn't know him, I met him once. I was young," I said. "He came around the poolroom."

"You're speaking in reference to what?"

"To the body in the sludge."

"A mob figure. Who was he?"

"I was young, high-school age. I only talked to him that one time. But my father had known him years earlier, which he told me about. Badalato told me, not my father. They weren't friends, they were acquaintances. They might run into each other somewhere."

"This is Mario, you're talking about, Badalato? Who I saw one time on TV," he said, "when they're putting him in an unmarked car to take him to be arraigned and some detective places a hand on his head to keep him from bumping his head on the door frame and I sit there thinking why is it the police put so much effort into keeping these criminals from bumping their heads when they get into police cars, it's a major concern of the police, lately, this hand on the head."