Don DeLillo - Underworld

And the first available Saturday, the first Saturday I didn't go to the office, we drove south with the kids to see an ancient ruin.

We had sunscreen and hats and drinking water, which was Marian's idea, the water was, because this was desert scrub and the heat was intense.

Lainie stood behind the front seat, sometimes elbowed forward between Marian and me, leaning toward the windshield, quick to point out stupid maneuvers by other drivers. She reacted angrily to this, a habit that drained my own anger, and Marian's too, and prompted us to make excuses for the stupid and dangerous moves she pointed out.

Jeff was two years younger, he was six and liked to curl in a corner of the backseat, curl and twist, slide toward the floor in an astral separation from everything around him, using his body to daydream.

Even if it wasn't a rifle, what was he doing on the freeway, on the grassy verge, sitting there with a metal crutch in his lap just yards from that madman traffic?

The ancient ruin was over six hundred years old, a single major structure with smaller scattered remains and a trace of a wall somewhere. We stood in the late morning heat and listened to a park

Marian could not even watch the detective's hand on the suspect's head, bending him into the unmarked car. It was all a violence, a damage to the spirit. But she wanted my stories, my things, the fiercer the better.

I was selfish about the past, selfish and protective. I didn't know how to bring Marian into those years. And I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

She said it was her mother, she said it was two years ago today that her mother died and I repeated it for the kids and the kids relaxed a little. I reached back and got a stick of gum from Lainie. Two years ago today and of course Marian knew this and we didn't, I didn't, I hadn't kept track, and I felt relieved and the kids did too because at least there was a reason, at least it wasn't a thing where the parents act funny and the children learn to make their faces blank.

She shone brilliantly, she glowed in her weeping, she smiled, I think-a smile that was a wince but also a real smile, with her mother in it somewhere.

After a while the kids started to sing.

And I was relieved, I was goddamn glad because I'd sat there thinking I was to blame or thinking maybe she does it all the time because how the hell do I know what goes on when I'm not home.

And the kids were singing, "Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, if one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer."

She looked at me and looked at the road and the kids kept singing, counting backwards all the way to one as Marian drove-cried and drove.

I told Lainie to go find her brother and see what he'd done with the car keys. Then we started home like a ragged band of pilgrims who'd failed to see the statue weep.

We were in the car ten minutes when Marian began to cry. She was at the wheel and her face lit up and she started crying softly. Lainie backed off from her standing station just behind us and took a seat by the window, hands folded in her lap. Jeff got interested in the scenery.

I said, "Want me to drive?"

And she shook her head no.

I said, "Let me drive, I'll drive."

And she gestured no, she preferred to drive, this is what she wanted.

We were on a back road flanked by saguaros and wildflowers, notched saguaros, pecked by birds that nested there, and then we reached the interstate and edged into the windblast of streaming traffic.

No last names, no echoing second thoughts. This is the pact of casual sex. But I told her my last name and it wasn't casual, was it? That's the odd dominant of the piece, that I wanted to reach her, still her breathing, to make her breathless, yes. There was something about Donna that untongue-tied me. Guilt later, feeling Marian next to me, asleep in the dark.

When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other's face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you've seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that's wrong-when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we'd exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn't exhausted anything really-there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian felt denied.

Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it-privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing. All the scenes she recoiled from when she watched T^ the narrative of local crime, we see the body in the street, the lament of the relatives, the suspect doubled over to conceal himself-

The super comes gimping toward him. Before he takes five steps along the street the super comes gimping toward him from a building down the block, moving with that hip-lurch of his that takes up half a sidewalk.

"Been looking for you," the man says.

Manx Martin stands with folded arms, not bothering to cock his head just yet-a little early for gestures of the superior type.

"You seen those shovels?"

"What shovels?" Manx says.

"Because they're missing out of the basement."

"Things always missing. Bought a new pair of socks missing in the wash."

"Two snow shovels from the utility room standing against the wall this morning."

"We expecting snow?" Manx says.

And he looks heavenward. Look like snow to you? Don't look like snow to me. Weatherman say snow?

Most janitors around here are floaters who work in one neighborhood and then another, come and go, staying one step ahead of something. This man's dug in like infantry.

"You and me, we're through passing the time," he says. "You show up at my door with a shovel in your right hand and a shovel in your left, then I listen to what you say."

Manx cocks his head, makes his eyes go tight in phonied concentration. He's looking to stare the man down, put the man in his place.

But the super pushes on past. Manx is leaning into the man but the man pushes on past, clumsily, every step a contortion and a labor, and Manx is fazed once more-he was just getting set to make a major statement.

He walks over toward Amsterdam Avenue. Three kids run by, going like hellfire, and he sees Franzo Cooper in a suit and tie, standing by the shoe repair.

"Who died? You're all dressed up, Franzo."

Turning as he speaks, wanting one last look at the super, he's not sure why, to shoot a beam of evil, maybe.

"You seen my brother?" Franzo says.

He's wearing a hat with a little feather in the band and his shoes have a military shine. The neon shoe is out of juice.

"I'm going to Tally's."

"You see him, tell him I need his car."

"Who died, Franzo?"

"I need to go to Jersey to see a lady. Else I die. What you doing?"

"Nothing much."

"I die of lovesick, man. Tell him to get over here with that junkheap. Be worth his while."

There's the beauty school, the shoe repair, the furnished rooms and over the door of the shoe repair there's a neon highshoe and the neon, he sees, is dark and cold, which brings him down a ways, a little sag in his mood.

The traffic stops and rolls at the corner, rolls on into the night, and a man stands by the rib joint preaching. Three or four people stop a minute and get the drift and stand another minute and go where they're going and two or three others come and listen and leave and the cars roll past and the light changes and the cars roll on.