Underworld

'That's the point.'

'What point? A little gray is not the most ominous thing that happens to a man.'

'Let's get rolling, okay?'

'Why?'

'There's a place.'

'I'm enjoying this place.'

'I'm showing you some things, okay? You have to accept this,' he said. 'I'm here, you're not.'

'All right. But you ought to go home. Tell her you're sorry.'

'I want you to know something about us.'

'What?'

'We never fight.'

'We never fight either. Our friends fight.'

'That's why I'm twisted up inside.'

'I hear you talking.'

'Then let's roll,' he said.

The next place was in downtown L.A. Downtown L.A.-the term had a secret life I couldn't clearly read. The group was between sets and a haze of ten-year-old smoke hung over the room.

'I played the horn. You know that?'

'Still play?'

'An old hockshop horn. Threw it away finally.'

'But you still have it.'

'Threw it away,' he said.

'But you kept it. You still have it.'

'Threw it away.'

'Irbu didn't keep it?'

'What for? It sounded like hell.'

'Great thing to have. An old trumpet? They're not called saddle

'Look. Go home, tell her you're sorry, take a bath and go to bed.'

He looked at me, underlip jutting.

'There's something else.'

'What's that?' I said.

'A judge issued an order, an injunction that they couldn't dump the sludge because there's a body buried there,' Sims said, and took a drink, and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.

'Whose body?'

'Whose body. Whose body do you want it to be? That's whose body. Some mobster, I hear. Shot in the head execution-style.'

A trio with a singer. She had streaky reddish hair and copper skin, holding the mike at her spangled thigh while the sidemen cued the next verse.

'We never fight. Our friends fight,' I said.

When the set ended a fatigue passed over us, a staleness. Sims blew smoke past my shoulder. I jabbed an ice cube in my drink, poked it with a finger and watched it bob.

'There's this man I knew once. I didn't know him, I met him once. I was young,' I said. 'He came around the poolroom.'

'You're speaking in reference to what?'

'To the body in the sludge.'

'A mob figure. Who was he?'

'I was young, high-school age. I only talked to him that one time. But my father had known him years earlier, which he told me about. Badalato told me, not my father. They weren't friends, they were acquaintances. They might run into each other somewhere.'

'This is Mario, you're talking about, Badalato? Who I saw one time on TV,' he said, 'when they're putting him in an unmarked car to take him to be arraigned and some detective places a hand on his head to keep him from bumping his head on the door frame and I sit there thinking why is it the police put so much effort into keeping these criminals from bumping their heads when they get into police cars, it's a major concern of the police, lately, this hand on the head.'

'You're talkative all of a sudden.'

'He's always being photographed on the courthouse steps. He's the king of the steps.'

'See, it's not a boatload of heroin. It's a boatload of shit.'

We were momentarily alert and uncircling. It was one of those episodes of heightened clarity in a night of talking and drinking.

'At one point, am I right, the rumor suggested it wasn't an ordinary cargo ship.'

'A sludge tanker. Turns out the rumor was correct.'

'Carrying treated human waste.'

'Port to port, it's nearly two years,' he said.

We listened to the music, a cash register ringing at the end of the bar and a trace of a radio voice, radio or TV, coming from a back room somewhere.

'Tell her you're sorry. Go home, Sims.'

'Maybe she ought to tell me.'

'Tell her first.'

'Maybe I'm not the guilty party. Ever think of that? The instigator.'

'Doesn't matter, you jerk.'

'That's the second time,' he said, showing me two fingers.

We got out of there and went somewhere else, zebra walls and small tables, a fairly crowded room with a body hum, people in aviator glasses and silver shirts.

'He's wearing a white suit.'

'Right.'

'He's playing his alto.'

'Right.'

'And he's facing out of the picture, out of the frame.'

'And he's wearing white and brown shoes. Two-tone shoes. But they're not saddle shoes.'

'I didn't ask what kind of shoes. I don't care about his shoes.'

'I'm just saying.'

'I'm not interested in his shoes.'

'They have a name I'm trying to think of.'

'Do it somewhere else.'

'In a club in New York,' I said.

'You know this? And I don't? And it's my photograph? In my house we're talking about?'

The waiter brought drinks.

not who he resembled at all. He resembled the cabdriver I'd hailed earlier in the day, or the day before, the guy who'd said, 'Light up a Lucky. It's light-up time.'

When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn't supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I'd shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent and strict, and the other thing I remember is that no one put a hand on my head and folded me into the car because evidently this was not something they did at the time, this was something they developed later, preventing the felon from bumping his head when they took him in.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I