Underworld

'What do you want?'

'You're a cunt, Gloria.'

'Say something nice, Nicky.'

She was smiling, he wasn't.

'You're so bad. You're really bad.'

'I'm bad? Who's bad?'

She was rolling her hips under his hands and smiling.

'Ibu're a cunt in and out and up and down. You're an all-over cunt through and through.'

'Try and say something nice for a change,' she told him.

Nick carried the last crate of empties up through the hatchway and slid it into the side of the truck. Then he sat in the truck with Muzz the driver, who had sweat running through his shirt and eating up the colors, turning the whole shirt gray.

'I say all right.'

'Let's move.'

'I say all right. But this is ridiculous,' Muzz said.

'Let's go, let's go.'

'I got up this morning. I cun't believe it. I said to myself.'

'Drive, drive, I'm dying.'

'You take your salt pills? Take your salt pills.'

When they were stopped for a light a car nudged them from behind.

Muzz looked into the side mirror.

'You hit my bumpah you fuck.'

The guy in the car said something.

'You hit my bumpah you fuck.'

The guy said something.

'You trying to do?' Muzz said.

The guy spoke into his windshield.

'Tell him,' Nick said. 'Where'd you get your license?'

Muzz put his head out the window but did not turn toward the car behind them.

'Where'd you get your license to drive that piece of shit?'

The guy said something into the windshield.

'Tell him Sears Roebuck or what?' Nick said.

Muzz looked into the mirror, his face an inch from the glass.

'Sears Roebuck you fuck?'

The light changed and people began to blow their horns,

'Get mad,' Nick told him. 'Tell him you'll ram your tire iron up his ass.'

Muzz had his face an inch from the mirror, enunciating slowly into the glass. Sweat was running along the crease in his lower back, down into his pants. They were blowing their horns back there.

The school was empty now and Sister walked the halls sometimes, looking into classrooms. Others were gone, they were spending the summer at the motherhouse or visiting relatives somewhere or doing doctoral studies on some campus, sharing pathways under the shade trees with atheists and pinks.

Sometimes it was hard, with the silent classrooms and the halls so lifeless, for Sister Edgar to know who she was. There were a couple of other nuns, they came and went, and there was the Filipino janitor, Miguel, who scrubbed the hall floors even when they were untrod upon for days, a practice Sister admired of course, because you could never clean a thing so infinitesimally that it didn't need to be cleaned again the instant you were done.

Alone in her room she wore a plain shift and read 'The Raven.' She read it many times, memorizing the lines. She wanted to recite the poem to her class when school reopened. Her namesake poet, yes, and the dark croaking poem that made her feel Edgarish again, contoured, shaped, bevoiced, in the absence of her boys and girls.

Her fan mags were stacked in the closet. There was a picture of Jesus propped on the candlestand. A small mirror used to hang above the washbasin but she took it down because it disconcerted Sister to see herself unveiled. Hair, neck, shoulders, full face-these were things she'd left behind to enter sisterhood. The shock of the body, revealed. The subsistence individual, with cropped hair and bony shoulders. This was a sight to guard against, starker, even, than the empty classrooms of summer.

She memorized the lines and worked the rhythms and repetitions. She paced the floor, organizing a system of gesture and inflection. The sixth grade was hers and she wanted to scare the kids a little. She was their nun for the year, drilling them in eight subjects. A drawing teacher came every two weeks and a music teacher likewise, with a pitch pipe and a fruity perfume. All the rest was Sister.

She even gave them marks in Health, based on days absent and late, and times requesting trips to the lavatory, and amount of dirt and grime stuck under their fingernails and squeezed into the creases of their palms.

And she wanted to teach them fear. This was the secret heart of her curriculum and it would begin with the poem, with omen, loneliness and death, and she would make them shake in their back-to-school shoes.

She paced the floor and walked the empty halls and memorized the lines. Soon they'd come back, uniforms blue and white, notebooks crisp, fountain pens filled, schoolbags swinging from their soft fists, and she would arrange them along the walls in size places and she would seat them in alphabetical order and she would inspect their hands and nails and crack their palms with a ruler when it was called for.

They would know who she was and so would she.

And she would recite the poem to them, crooking her finger at their hearts. She would become the poem and the raven both, the roman-nosed bird, gliding out of the timeless sky and diving down upon them.

These summer nights the women on the upper floors could not wash the dishes because the johnny pump was on, kids dancing under the fanned spray, and there wasn't enough pressure to move water through the building.

All movement toward the air, the night, heads sticking out windows, women eating peaches in darkened windows, laughing in the dark up there, women waiting to feel a breeze and men in undershirts down on the stoops with radios going, a ball game from breezy Cleveland.

Kids running, sweating, shirtless, a kid with a boxful of bared ribs down the front of his body. Other kids on line at the rear of the Bungalow Bar truck, fudgsicles and orange pops, and there is the kid with ink on his tongue, there is always a kid with an inky tongue. Waterman's blue-black. What does he do, drink the stuff?

Women on the porch of a private house, sitting in the dark talking.

Older kids on rented bikes, ten cents an hour, and girls riding with some of the boys, sitting sidewise on the crossbar, and the boys riding into the gushing water, making everybody happy, the stoop sitters, the window heads, the shrieking girls on the bikes and the smaller kids who separate to let the bikes pass, all happy together, and finally the kid in his brother's bathing suit who holds a coffee can at the nozzle to flare the stream of water, geyser it high and wide.

Later the young men will stand on corners smoking as the lights go out, bullshitting the night away, and people will sleep on fire escapes, here and there, because there's a breath of air outside. Finalmente. A little bitty breeze that changes everything.

Nick sat reading a magazine with the hollow knocks volleying back from the far wall, across eight lanes.

'Nicky, what's the word?'

'Hey Jack. You're a married man, I hear.'

'Went and did it. No regrets.'

'She lets you out to bowl?'

'Only to bowl,' Jack said.

Lonzo was crouched down there at the end of the alley, about the only black person you could see, regular, in a radius of five or six blocks. He was an ageless man, hard to tell if he was twenty-five or forty-five, and he worked setting up pins, just about every night, soft-footed, fine-featured and slightly out of tune. A little