Underworld

'You talk about the cork,' George said.

'What was the cork for?'

'We used the cork to make cages for flies. Two flat pieces of cork. Then we got straight pins from the dressmaker which were all over the floor of the shop.'

'My god you're right,' Bronzini said.

'We stuck the pins between the cork discs. One disc is the floor, one is the ceiling. The pins are the bars.'

'Then we waited for a fly to land somewhere.'

'A horsefly on a wall. You cup your hand and move it slowly along the wall and come up behind the fly.'

'Then we put the fly in the cage.'

'We put the fly in the cage. Then we put in extra pins,' George said, 'sealing the fly.'

'Then what? I don't remember.'

'We watched it buzz.'

'We watched it buzz. Very educational.'

'It buzzed until it died. If it took too long to die, somebody lit a match. Then we put the match in the cage.'

'My god what terror,' Bronzini said.

But he was delighted. He was getting George to talk. How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

Directly across the street George the Barber was sweeping the floor of his shop. Voices from Italian radio drifting faintly out the open door. Bronzini watched a man walk in, a custodian from the high school, and George put away the broom and took a fresh linen sheet out of a drawer and had it unfolded and sail-billowing, timed just right, as the man settled into the chair.

'Maybe you heard, Albert. The hunchback died, that used to carve things out of soap.'

'We're going back a few years.'

'He carved naked women out of soap. Like anatomical. The hunchback that used to sit outside the grocery.'

'Attilio. You'd give him a bar of soap, he'd carve something.'

'What's-his-name died, the softball player, the pitcher that threw windmill. He had shrapnel from the war. He had shrapnel actually in his heart from in the war. That only now killed him.'

'Jackie somebody. You and he.'

'We used to work together at the beach. But I barely knew him.'

George used to sell ice cream at the beach. Bronzini saw him many times deep-stepping through the sand with a heavy metal cooler slung over his shoulder and a pith helmet rocking on his head. And white shirt and white ducks and the day somebody got a cramp while George sold popsicles in section 10.

'Remember the drowned man?' Bronzini said.

They were playing salugi in the street. Two boys snatched a school-book belonging to one of the girls, a Catholic school girl in a blue pinafore and white blouse. They tossed the book back and forth and she ran from one boy to the other and they threw the book over her head and behind her back. The book had a thick brown kraft cover that Bronzini was sure the girl had made herself, folding and tucking the grainy paper, printing her name in blue ink on the front-name and grade and subject. Salugi, they cried, that strange word, maybe some corruption of the Italian saluto, maybe a mock salutation- hello, we've got your hat, now try and get it back. Another boy joined the game and the girl ran from one to the other, scatterhanded, after the flying book.

Or Hindi or Persian or some Northumbrian nonce word sifting down the centuries. There was so much to know that he would die not knowing.

'What about the kid?' George said. 'I'm hearing things that I don't know if it's good or what.'

'He's coming along. I'm pleased one day, exasperated the next.'

'I have respect for people that can play that game. When I think to myself this kid is how old.'

'I try not to lose sight of that very thing, George.'

'I hear he beats experienced players. This could be good or bad. Not that I'm the expert here. But I'm thinking maybe he should be in the street with these other kids.'

'The Street is not ready for Matty.'

'You should impress into him there's other things.'

'He does other things besides playing chess. He cries and screams.'

George didn't smile. He was standing off, faded into old brooding, and he sucked the last bland fumes from his cigarette. One drag too many. Then he dropped the butt and stepped on it with the tap toe of his way-weary shoe, the border of uniformed George, rutted and cut across the instep.

'Time I showed my face inside. Be good, Albert.'

'We'll talk again,' Bronzini said.

He walked across the street so he could wave to George the Barber. How children adapt, using brick walls and lampposts and fire hydrants. He watched a girl tying one end of her jump rope to a window grille and getting her little brother to turn the other end. Then she stood in the middle and jumped. No history, no future. He watched a boy playing handball against himself, hitting Chinese killers. The hi-bounce rubber ball, the pink spaldeen, rapping back from the brick facade. And the fullness of a moment in the play street. Unable to imagine you will ever advance past the pencil line on the kitchen wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.

The barber waving back. Bronzini went to the corner past a man unloading jerry cans of Bulgarian sheep cheese from the trunk of a beat-up car. He walked north again, the savor of sweet peel in his hand. He realized he was still holding the fruit rind. It made him think of Morocco. He'd never been there or much of anywhere and wondered why the frailest breath of tangerine might bring to mind a reddish sandscape flashing to infinity.

Buck buck how many horns are up?

The clear cry reached him as he tossed the skin toward some cartons stacked at a cellar entrance. They are jumping on the backs of their playpals. It is usually the fattest boy who serves as cushion, standing against a wall or pole while the boys on one team stoop head to end and their rivals run and jump one by one and come yowing down. With the stooped boys swaying under the weight, the leader of the mounted team holds fingers aloft and calls out the question. How many horns are up? Bronzini tried to recall whether the padded boy, the slapped and prodded roly-poly, the one who dribbles egg cream down his chin-is he officially called the pillow or the pillar? Bronx boys don't know from pillars, he decided. Make him the mothery casing stuffed with down.

Twenty past four. The appointment was ten minutes hence and he knew that even if he arrived after the specified time he would not be late because Father Paulus was certain to be later. Bronzini envied the blithe arrivals of life's late people. How do they manage the courage to be late, enact the rude dare repeatedly in our waiting faces? A goat and four rabbits were hung upside down in a window, trussed at the hind legs, less affectingly dead than the flounder in the market- dumb scuzzy fur with nothing to impart. Envy and admiration both. He took it that these people refuse to be mastered by the pettier claims of time and conscience.

The butcher appeared at the door of his shop, flushed and hoarse, loud, foul, happy in his unwashed apron, a man who lived urgently, something inside him pushing outward, surging against his chest wall.

'Albert, I don't see you no more.'

'You're seeing me now. You see me all the time. I bought a roast last week.'

'Don't tell me last week. What's last week?'

The butcher called to people walking by. He called across the street to insult a man or engage a particular woman with knowing references. The rasping spitty sandblast voice. Other women twisted their mouths, amused and disgusted.

'What are you feeding that genius of yours?'

'He's not mine,' Bronzini said.

'Be thankful. That was my kid I drive him out to the country and leave him on a hillside. But I wait for the dead of winter.'

'We let him chew on a crayon once a week.'