Underworld

'I know the feeling.'

'The feeling never changes.'

'First we fuck them.'

'Then we bomb them,' Louis said.

And it wouldn't be long at all before the massive aircraft lumbered down the runway again, fatted with ordnance, every rivet straining at the takeoff, up, out, over-a mortal power in the sky.

7

NOVEMBER 9, 1965

It was a place you might wander into if you didn't know the neighborhood, a graveyard bar under a bridge approach, and you might mistake the place at a glance for one of those Eighth Avenue bars that never seem to close, the Red Rose or the White Rose or the Blarney Stone, where the pipe fitters and garment workers go, or the railbirds back from the track, or the insomniacs back from nowhere, a sandwich and a beer, or a shot and a beer, but this was another category altogether, a place practically outside time, called Frankie's Tropical Bar, on the Lower East Side, and who do I see when I walk in the door but Jeremiah Sullivan, speaking of graveyards, because he didn't look too good.

'Am I seeing right?'

I said, 'Hello, Jerry.'

'Nick Shay? Where the hell did you come from?'

I said, 'Hello, Jerry. Where are we?'

'I know where I am. Where the hell are you? I hear things every so often. California, Arizona. I saw your mother three, four years ago. It's been what? Fifteen years?'

I said, 'I'm in town for a week. Doing a research project for some outfit in the Midwest. What about you?'

'Don't be so calm. Fifteen, almost, fucking years. What are you drinking?'

'What are you drinking?'

'Don'task,'he said.

'That's what I'll have.'

He looked around for the bartender but the guy was gone. A man with a bandaged head sat at the far end of the bar trying to bounce a coin into a shot glass. And there were two women on stools not far from where Jerry was standing, a couple of local biddies you might assume, only they weren't cozy or talky or interested in other people's talk-just ancient and wasted regulars of the art.

We traded the pure facts of whereabouts and job and then Jerry supplied elaborate reports on people we'd grown up with, news he'd probably been storing for an occasion such as this, his suit pants sagging under his paunch and his tie knotted halfway down his shirt-front.

'You married, Nick?'

'No.'

'You seeing someone special?'

'No. I met a woman recently in Chicago. But no's the answer. I'm not the marrying type. I don't see myself married. I don't feel marriage bound. I don't even think about it.'

'In your wildest dreams. Me, I'm married. Two kids. I'd show you pictures but you don't want to see pictures.'

The bartender showed up and I got a stinger that overflowed the glass. It was late afternoon, in fading light, and there was a palm tree mural, unfinished, behind the bar, and a live sombrero dangling from a beam. Jerry said this used to be a jazz club that failed almost immediately and after they dropped the music and after the clientele changed he found he kept coming back. He needed an hour between the office and the family to be alone, he said, and think.

He was right, I didn't want to see pictures.

'I'm thirty,' he said. 'When my father was thirty-five he looked like an old man.'

'Only to you. You were in first grade. They all looked like old men.'

'No, he was old. He was worn down. It's good to see you, Nick. I think about you. I go back there. The place was so crowded once. Now it's empty.'

We'd gone to grammar school together, with the nuns, and then Jerry had gone to a Catholic high school and I switched to public and we saw each other only rarely, in a movie lobby maybe buying a Coke, he's with his friends, I'm with mine, and there was a curious sense of separation, not unfriendly but deep, and it was the school difference partly, the veering of habits and practices, but also something irreconcilable, the style, the friends, the future.

'You've been away a hell of a long time. A hell of a long time. Maybe you want to think about coming back,' he said.

'Live here? Forget it. No. I like it out there.'

'Out there. What's out there?'

'Everything you've never heard of.'

'If I never heard of it, how terrific can it be?' he said.

We used to call him Jumpy Jerry because he twitched and squinted and still did, I noticed, wearing glasses now and a school ring.

I didn't tell him about the Jesuits. Too interesting. He'd keep me here for hours. I told him about the project I was working on, to alter traditional methods of school instruction, and how I'd been visiting schools in ghettos and marginal parts of town, here and in Philadelphia, as a freelance associate in a behavorial research firm in Evanston, Illinois.

'And you teach.'

'I've taught, I've taught. And I'll go back to it probably,' I said, 'sooner or later. Secondary schools. Civics and English. But I want to teach Latin.'

This was also too interesting. He should have been royally amused but it was too interesting for that. Jerry had seemed for a time to be priestward bound, that was the word on him, or the Irish Christian Brothers maybe, and it put a look of total dislocation on his face, thinking of the Nicky he used to know and the one he'd hear about later, doing Latin in a classroom.

'You go see your mother?'

'Went up there yesterday,' I said.

'She still in 611?'

'Still there.'

'I like to go back,' he said. 'I go eat on Arthur Avenue. I walk all over. I take my kids to the zoo.'

'See it now. It's disappearing.'

'It used to be so crowded. Or is that just in my mind? The summer nights. Fantastic. It's great to see you, Nick. I'm having one more. Have one more.'

I wanted to finish the first one and leave, or not finish it and leave. A chance meeting like this, if you run it five minutes longer than it's worth, you ruin the night and the following day.

He kept adjusting his glasses.

A man alone at a table was moaning a bummed-out monologue that involved being followed wherever he went, and they were recording his private thoughts, and they were sending the seeing-eye blind to spy on him with their dogs and their pencils and their cups, and they were doing this on buses and subways both.

'Jerry, you ought to go home and play with your kids. When you're fifty or sixty, you can come here and think about the past.'

But he didn't want to go home. He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head. The dead, the married, the moved-to-Jersey, the kid with five sisters who became a safecracker, the handball ace who's a chiropractor, the stuck-up blond in the fifth grade who married a Puerto