Underworld

When he first walked in the house and Bud barely noticed him, it was like the normalcy of dying. It was the empty hollow thing of not being here. A forty-mile drive into being transparent, awful but not unaccustomed. But now this scrutiny as to what he wears and what he looks like. A panic set in. He tried to think of what to say. There might be something he could say about the dog. He searched for a glimpse of the dog through the sheeting. How nothing gets dirtier than plastic sheeting, retaining, absorbing the dirt.

! 'Well maybe you should. Glasses give appearance to a person. Get yourself some thick dark frames that match your tie.'

He didn't know why Bud would want to talk to him this way. Bud sat cross-legged over the narrow rent in the floor. He held the hammer at rest on his shoulder and looked directly into Richard's face. Richard tried to smile, make the whole thing humorous. He felt the stupidity of the look on his face, as if a turn of the mouth can alter the outside world.

'I can think about it.'

'You do that.'

'I should probably be getting back.'

'She'll be sorry she missed you.'

'Tell her I said.'

'I'll be sure and do that.'

The only person he ever talked to from the heart was Sue Ann. She made him feel real, talking on the phone. She gave him the feeling he was taking shape as himself, coming into the shape he'd always been intended to take, the thing of who he really was. It was like filling out-did you ever feel things pouring out from the center of who you are and taking the shape of the intended person? Well that's what Sue Ann did and you can disbelieve it or disrespect it but he was never really who he was until he talked to her.

He heard Bud ripping up wood as he walked out the door to his car.

With mental killers roaming the earth, the checkout boys wear neckties.

That's what he thought Bud might say.

He made the call to Sue Ann from a house he broke and entered. Switched on the TV and called the superstation in Atlanta and touched things with a hanky and placed the voice device on the phone that he'd ordered from the back pages of a mercenary magazine. This was not a publication Richard normally perused. He was not a surveillance man or gun lover. His gun was his father's old.38. It did not have massive knockdown power and it did not shoot through concrete blocks or make fist-size holes in silhouette targets. It just killed people.

He drove out of the wooded area and into the open sky, where the road dropped down to the floodplain and he felt the true force of the wind.

He made the call and turned on the TV, or vice versa, without the sound, his hand wound in a doubled hanky, and he never felt so easy talking to someone on the phone or face-to-face or man to woman as he felt that day talking to Sue Ann. He watched her over there and talked to her over here. He saw her lips move silent in one part of the room while her words fell soft and warm on the coils of his secret ear. He talked to her on the phone and made eye contact with the TV This was the waking of the knowledge that he was real. This alien-eyed woman with raving hair sending emanations that astonished his heart. He spoke more confidently as time went on. He was coming into himself, shy but also unashamed, a little vain, even, and honest and clever, evasive when he needed to be, standing there in a stranger's house near a lamp without a shade and she listened and asked questions, watching him from the screen ten feet away. She had so much radiance she could make him real.

This was an untraveled road. Travel thirty miles on this road and you may not see another car. You see power lines extended to the limits of vision, sinking toward the earth as a matter of perspective. When the wind dies there's a suspense that falls across the land and makes you think about the hush before the Judgment.

Then they cut away to the tape. He was suspicious of the tape because it had a vista different from his experience and he kept thinking the girl was going to move the camera and get him in the picture. He'd watched the tape a dozen times sitting with his pain-racked dad and every time he watched the tape he thought he was going to turn up in his own living room, detached from who he was, peering squint-eyed over the wheel of his compact car.

He called Sue Ann twice after that but the switchboard would not put him through because many others were trying to reach her now and the switchboard was leery and abrupt and unbelieving. He needed her to keep him whole. He probably would have told her his name. She would have broken him down completely over a number of calls over a number of days, watching him from the screen. He would have surrendered to her in a blaze of lights, Richard Henry Gilkey, hustled down a hallway with Stetsoned men all around him and Sue Ann Corcoran by his side.

He drove past the flagpole with the banging halyard. The wind was banging the halyard against the pole and it made him weak somehow, the repeated meaning of this noise.

He went in the house and saw his dad twisted whole in front of the TV set. Mother was in the kitchen running a beater inside a white bowl.

'Look what got dragged in by the scruff.'

'I went out to Bud's.'

'Do we have time for you to go out to Bud's?'

'We need to give daddy his Nitrospan.'

'Well go ahead and do it.'

'Well aren't we supposed to call about the new dosage?'

'I didn't call. Did you call?' she said.

The glass booth had a talk hole where you talked. But they sent him out to the checkout and forced him to talk across the aisle.

'I'll call,' she said, 'but he's not there.'

'Irbu'll get the answering service.'

'I'll get the answering service and they'll tell me he's not there.'

'I meant to call,' he said.

'I'll call,' she said, 'and you do the ointment.'

After dinner he did the ointment on his father's chest. His father lay back on the bed with the stubbled look of an old man turning into a castaway, a reject of the islands, except for his eyes-they were moist and deep, pleading for time. Richard spread the ointment and buttoned his father's pajama tops and he thought about the time, any day now, when he would have to wipe his behind.

Pending notification of next of kin.

He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double figures.

He stood at the kitchen door watching her stir some solution for his father's first intake of the next day.

'Well you have a good night now.'

'You sleep well,' she said.

He went to his room and sat in a chair to take off his shoes. All the meaning of a given life was located in the act of leaning over to untie your shoes and set them in a designated place for the start of the following day.

He thought about the other person.

When he was stationed in the booth he had the talk hole to talk through. But when they put him back at the checkout he had to talk in the open space where anyone could hear.

He kept the gun hidden in the car and he thought about this as he drifted near sleep and he thought about the other person who'd shot a driver on one of the highways where he had shot a driver, just one day later. The so- called copycat shooting. He did not like to think about this but found it was lately more and more, a taunting presence in his mind.

He was an early riser. He heard the rain on the roof and he dressed and ate a muffin standing up, a hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. He had three and a half hours before it was time to report to work. He heard the rain dripping off the eaves and hitting the pie tin where he left food for a stray cat when he