Underworld

younger.'

Richard fidgeted happily in his corner. He liked the idea of being included in the female salvation of wayward men.

'Where is she?' he said.

'Working the late shift now.'

Bud's wife worked on the line at Texas Instruments, mounting microchips on circuit boards, Bud said, for the information highway. Richard thought he was half in love with Bud's wife. It was a feeling that came and went, secret and sort of semipathetic, like his heart was made of some cotton product. If Aetna ever had a clue to what he felt, what would she think? The fear this question carried made him experience actual physical symptoms, a heat, a flush across his upper back, and a tightening at the throat.

He thought of something else to say.

'Left-handers, I read this the other day.' And he paused here trying to recall the formal sentences in the narrow column of type. 'Lefthanders, which I am not one of, live typically shorter lives than righthanders. Right- handed men live ten years longer than left-handed men. You believe that?'

'We're talking this is mean life span.'

'Left-handed men die typically at age, I think, sixty-five.'

'Because they jerk off facing the North Pole,' Bud said in a remark that Richard could not analyze for one shred of content.

He watched Bud pry nails out of the old floorboards and offered to help, looking around for a claw hammer.

'So, Richard.'

'What?'

'You drove fifty miles to tell me my phone's not working.'

Richard didn't know if this was a setup for a scathing type of Bud Walling remark or maybe just an ordinary thank-you.

'Forty miles, Bud.'

'Well that's a relief. I'd offer you a beer, but.'

'No problem.'

'Maybe it's Aetna who drives fifty miles. I forget exactly.'

It was not outside Bud's effective range to say something personal about his wife, maybe her sex preferences or digestive problems, and whenever he mentioned her name old Richard caught his breath, hoping and fearing something intimate was coming, and even though he knew Bud did this to shock and repel him, Richard absorbed every word and image and smell description, watching Bud's long creased face for signs of mockery.

'She'll be sorry she missed you,' Bud said, looking up from the wood rot and hanging dust.

He was not left-handed but taught himself to shoot with the left hand. This is what Bud would never understand, how he had to take his feelings outside himself so's to escape his isolation. He taught himself based on the theory that if you are driving with your right hand and sitting snug to the door it is better practically speaking to keep the right hand on the wheel and project the left hand out the window, the gun hand, so you do not have to fire across your body. He could probably talk to Bud about this and Bud might understand. But he would never understand how Richard had to take everything outside, share it with others, become part of the history of others, because this was the only way to escape, to get out from under the pissant details of who he was.

Bud was saying, 'So cop says, Feet together, head back, eyes shut please. Which Aetna starts to laugh when he says please. Now spread your arms wide, he says. Now bring your left hand around and touch your nose with your index finger. Which I'm standing there in sheets of rain and he's advising from the car. Touch your nose with your index finger, he tells me.'

'You're a left-hander driving a car you're five times likely to die in a crash.'

'Than a right-hander.'

'Than a right-hander,' Richard said, religiously convinced.

Bud ripped a board out of the floor.

'Not my problem.' /

'Mine neither.'

'I die from stress,' Bud said. 'I'll tell you where my stress level's at.'

Richard waited for the rest. He used to sit in a glass booth at the supermarket batching personal checks and redeemed coupons and giving out rolled nickels to the checkout personnel but he seemingly messed up somehow and was out at the counters again, running items over the scanner, keying fruit and vegetables into the register, subject to the casual abuse of passing strangers in the world.

'We have to do our business outside because the toilet's not ready for human habitation. So I built a thing outside where this is the only workable method pending I figure out the toilet. And Aetna, well you can imagine.'

'Coming home from work.'

'The stress builds up real personal.'

'Driving that drive,' Richard said.

'And she has to go. And then she remembers. There's no working toilet in the house. And she looks at me outright murderous.'

They said unbelievable things, obese women in the express line, with him having two sick parents at home, or one sick and one bad-tempered, like that's sixteen cents off on the tomato paste or that's not a red pear that's a an-jew They forced him to ask across the aisle. Can't you see it's not red? He charged me for red, this here's a an-jew. He had to speak across the aisle to the other checkout, where any person on either line could hear what he said.

'For myself I don't mind,' Bud said. 'Because it makes a certain amount of sense to take your business outside. When you think about what's involved.'

They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand.

'I just noticed what it was I couldn't figure out,' Bud said.

They heard the dog barking and Richard looked through the dusty sheeting and saw the animal thrust up on hind legs at the end of its chain, dog balls taut, and he hoped it might be Aetna come home early. Aetna made a pie for them once that had a latticed crust. This was something he remembered. Seeing it wasn't her coming home but likely some critter in the woods that roused the dog, he felt a sadness out of all proportion. But then everything was out of all proportion. The wind beat at the sheeting, making it shiver and pop. Crack cocaine is supposedly the cravingest form of substance abuse, according to studies made over time.

'You're wearing a tie,' Bud said.

Richard paused, wary about how to take this, peering inwardly ahead for a setup, a possible remark.

'Well that's from work,' he said. 'I went home from work and didn't change.'

'But you wear ties? To check out groceries?'

'It's a company regulation, statewide, pretty much.'

Be calm, he thought.

'And there's the thing Aetna said, which she's right for a change. That you look like a guy that wears glasses. Except you don't. Except when she said it, we weren't sure. We said, Does he or doesn't he?'

'Never did,' Richard said.