Underworld

'Why shouldn't I believe it?'

'You believe it then.'

'If that's the number, that's the number.'

'And you don't think they might be underplaying the true number.'

'Wait a minute.'

'You don't think.'

an African blackness, you know the saturate blacking of a bandwidth somewhere on the continent, some nomad swath of high desert grace and shape, but in gesture and stance, I saw, the way he tongued some spittle off his lip between riffs, a body demotic that was locally made- he was another scuffling trumpet from an inner city somewhere.

'Charlie Parker in a white suit in a club in New York,' I said.

'Now how many references to New York have I heard from you tonight?'

'And I know what kind of shoes he's wearing.'

'I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing.'

'Spectator shoes.'

'I don't care what kind of shoes he's wearing.'

'They're not saddle shoes. They're called spectator shoes.'

'I don't care what they're called.'

'Look. Here's what you do,' I told him. 'You go home, you say you're sorry, you put some fizzy stuff in your bathtub and you take a bath and go to bed.'

Ten minutes later we were standing outside the club waiting for someone to bring the car around and Sims put his hands on my shoulders and head-butted me.

I didn't know how to take this.

He gave me a tight grin and butted me high on the forehead and I didn't know if this was an impulsive gesture at the end of a long night when you're muzzy with booze and hoarse with talk and smoke, a thing that brings an evening to a formal close, or something a little more deliberate.

I pushed his arms away and butted him back, put my hands on his shoulders and butted him back and he looked at me with interest and did it again.

It hurt of course, it set off a throb, it was a monosyllabic thing, a butt, a blow, a downward driving shock that sent an electric pain through the back of the head and into the neck and shoulders.

And it was up close, eyeball tight, a combat space without maneuvering room or finer points, a certain amount of acted rancor filling the visual field, a scowl and glare, or a hooded look, a sort of sleepy killer thing, lidded and dumb.

'You and I,' I said.

'You don't think the number is underinflated by maybe forty percent.'

'We don't indulge ourselves in cheap and easy delusions, Sims.'

'Cheap and easy.'

'Am I right? You and I. We don't believe that what is behind an event is so organized and sinister that we have to make a science out of it.'

'You don't think white people gonna be so depressed, so, I hate to say it, menaced by the true number.'

He didn't hate to say it at all.

'You think the census bureau is hiding ten million black people,' I said.

'Not hiding the people. They're hiding the number. This is an easy thing to hide.'

'But a number so large. What a tremendous manipulation. And it's going on in front of our eyes. Maybe it's the mothers,' I said. 'Ten million mothers telling their kids to stay down. Stay down,' I said.

A brief smile from Big Sims, a reflex smile minus the ensuing brightness of eye.

'Face the issue,' he said.

'What's the issue?'

'We have a right to know how many of us there are.'

'But you do know.'

'We don't know. Because the number is too dangerous. How threatened do you feel by the real number? I'm talking to you. Think into your own heart.'

'All right, I'm thinking.'

'Tell me in your heart you don't think there's something genuine in what I'm saying.'

'There's genuine paranoia. That's the only genuine anything I can see here.'

He seemed to take pleasure in this. He sat back and looked off to the side, grimly happy, examining what there might be in the nature of human exchange that makes people so smoothly predictable.

I listened to the blues trumpet, a young guy in a beat-up suit, he had

'What do you hear about the body in the sludge?'

'They won't find a body The body's just another embellishment,' he said. 'The main thing is the ship itself.'

'What about it?'

'A ship being on the high seas for two years, changing names and crews-that's just a story too. The ship made one recent voyage, East Coast to West Coast. Carrying sludge to California to deliver to a composting operation. Ordinary simple shipment.'

We ran along city streets, landscaped avenues of a certain fallen aura, an out-of-timeness that was ravishing in its open regret.

'Look, Sims, here's the thing.'

'Let's run,' he said.

'I don't know. I'm a little, and I shouldn't say this, I know, to someone like you.'

'Love your kids, right?'

'Yes of course.'

'Then run,' he said.

'How close I am, some of the time, I sometimes think, as much as I love them all, to feeling like an imposter, Because it has not fucking, ever, been something I am comfortable with.'

We stood in the kitchen wasted by miles of hills and hot pavement, reluctant to move about for fear of dripping sweat on something, two men in shorts, and Greta gave us glasses of water, a brown-haired woman with long hands and a half-hidden gauntness, a sort of lean and angular suchness, an x-ray Greta that probably showed itself in argument or stress.

'You like this place?' I said.

'I think I'm at the ends of the earth. Four years we are here and I am waking up every morning and trying to remember where I am. So far from everything.'

'We are backed up,' Sims said, 'to a very big ocean.'

And the son, the five-year-old, sitting at the table with his cereal bowl and oversized spoon, Loyal Branson Biggs, a boy so softly handsome, so offhandedly blessed with expressive beauty that I could not stop looking at him, I looked at him while I spoke to his parents and they looked at him too and they looked because I was looking-I reminded them to renew their sense of amazement in the child.

I was taller than Sims but not so solid and volumed and I'd never used my head as an instrument of medieval siege.

I butted him just above the nose, driving down, and it stung him, I could tell, it sent a message unit ringing through his skull.

He jolted me good. He hit me so hard I was stunned backwards half stumbling, right out of his grip on my shoulders, and the guy showed up with the car and stood by to watch.

The pain was electric and compact, reducing everything to its own sort of benumbment, making the world beyond my head seem small and dazed.

This is what we did, we hairlined in, blocking out everything but the butting and glaring and pain.

When he butted me again I moved my head, eased back a quarter inch, trying to tone the blow a little, and he jutted his chin and glared.

Pain is just another form of information.