Underworld

We knocked heads one more time, one time each, and the guy stood there with the car keys, watching.

In my hotel room I looked in the mirror above the washbasin. I put both hands to the wall and leaned into the mirror and saw bruises and welts, deep discolorations, and a slash of dried blood with a winy flush around it. I used cold water to clean the wounds and then I went to bed. But I felt dizzy as soon as my head hit the pillow and I had to sit in a chair for an hour before the feeling passed.

The thing kept coming back to me and I tried to get inside it, inside the tremor, our faces sort of double- framed over the ice cubes in our drinks, flying out of focus, then in again-not to detail my own feelings but only to understand the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being.

We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not-I might have been devising my own newsreel.

everything quality that creeps into innocuous remarks and becomes the vanguard of estranged feeling.

When I shot George Manza I began to understand the nature of this kind of feeling. They put me in a radio car with a cop who smoked and they sent me eventually to a facility in upstate New York, a place that featured one of the oddities of the penal system. This was a miniature golf course, nine holes, with cartoon turrets and windmills-we were youthful offenders, you see, and maybe the guidance counselors thought we'd take snug comfort in the nursery shapes and bright colors or in the anal stuff of balls and holes. I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. But my mates and I, the D-felonies, the E-felonies, the head breakers, the thieves in the night, a mixed group as you'd imagine, with races, creeds, cries in the dark- we used to amble past the windows in the mess and look at the layout' down there with its loopedy-loops and tunnels and puddle lakes, its sward of tinsel grass, and we called it California.

Phoenix was a neater package for me. I needed a private life. How could you have a private life in a place where all your isolated feelings are out in the open, where the tension in your heart, the thing you've been able to restrict to small closed rooms is everywhere exposed to the whitish light and grown so large and firmly fixed that you can't separate it from the landscape and sky?

I walked in the door and Marian said, 'What happened to your face?'

I walk in the door and this is what I hear, children playing, radio playing, the news, the traffic, the phone is ringing, the washer is pumping through a cycle.

I smiled and kissed her and she picked up the phone. The kids were making noise out back, our kids and the neighbor's kids, a game made up by Lainie-I knew this from the quality of the shrieks. Lainie made up fiendish games, inventive shrill spectacles of torture and humiliation.

'What did you do to your hair?'

'Had it cut. You like?' she said, still on the phone with someone. 'What happened to your face?'

I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out

'What happened to your face?' Greta said to me.

I looked at Loyal work his spoon through the lumpy milk.

'Well, this is a good question actually.'

'And what is the answer?' she said.

'Well, I had a little scuffle in the elevator. It's noticeable? At my hotel. I didn't know the marks still showed. Two drunks. A white guy and a black guy.'

I could feel Sims enjoy this in his hot Reeboks.

'Nick started the fight,' he told her.

'This is true?'

She said it to me but she was looking at the child eat his breakfast. We were all looking at Loyal.

'They told him he was going a little gray and he went berserk,' Sims said.

Greta had to take the child to school and then she had to go to her own school where she taught chemistry three days a week with the ocean at her back.

Sims and I stood on our spots, drinking water.

'You two still mad?' I said.

'She's still mad. I got over it.'

'I have a plane to catch,' I told him.

He showered and dressed and took me to my hotel and I hurried through a shower and got dressed and grabbed my bag and got back in the car and there was a man on the freeway, a man on an embankment, nodding his head to drive-time radio, and he sat on the grass with an object across his knees and Sims said it was a rifle and I said it was a crutch, one of those metal crutches with a forearm brace, and it took me a couple of seconds to understand that Sims was kidding- this was just the language of the freeway.

I found southern California too interesting. The experimental aircraft, the fault systems, the inferno of cars and smog, the women from nowhere, even the street gangs that were coming into prominence at the time, adopting varsity colors. I made business trips but kept them brief and blinkered, after the first one. The place had that edge-of-ranger for a few minutes before we drifted off, one by one, although there was nothing else, essentially, to see.

I read a plaque and then watched Jeff stalk a ground squirrel. He wasn't wearing his hat but I didn't say anything, I just thought, Tough shit kid, don't say we didn't warn you. Then I relented and called him over and gave him the car keys. The effort to relent, the effort to slacken and yield, to love him in his careless slouch, this was a brutally difficult thing to do, small as it seems, small and fleeting-it was surprisingly hard. But I called him over and gave him the car keys, I knew he would like this idea, and told him to get his hat and lock the car and bring me the keys, and off he went, happy as I'd ever seen him.

I drifted back to the main structure and stood among a dozen tourists and listened to the ranger talk, a heavyset woman who scratched her elbow. No one knew the purpose of this structure, she told us, which was three stories high with a faint trace of graffiti near the top. I found I was more interested in the protective canopy than I was in the ancient structure. The ranger said the building was abandoned about a hundred years after it was built, the building and the whole settlement abandoned for no discernible reason, one of those mysteries of a whole people who disappear. But I found myself studying the protective canopy with its great canted columns, maybe seventy feet tall, and the latticed framework that supported the roof.

Lainie came and stood next to me, sort of collapsed against my haunch in a way that meant she was irreversibly bored.

The ranger listed some reasons why the people might have disappeared, the desert dwellers. She named flooding, she named drought, she named invasion, but these were only guesses, she said-no one had a clue to the real reasons.

I thought of Jesse Detwiler, the garbage archaeologist, and wondered if he might suggest that the people abandoned the settlement because they were pushed out by waste, because they had no room to live and breathe, surrounded by their own mounting garbage, and it was nice in a way to think it was true, one of those romantic desert mysteries and the answer's staring us in the face.

I was becoming Simslike, too soon, seeing garbage everywhere or reading it into a situation.

the color in the carpets, the apricots and clarets, the amazing topaz golds.

I told Marian the next night about the thing I'd done, or the night after that, the thing with Donna at Mojave Springs. I thought I had to tell her. I owed it to her. I told her for our sake, for the good of the marriage. She was in bed reading when I told her. I'd anguished about the right time to tell her and then I told her suddenly, without immediate forethought. I didn't tell her what I'd said to Donna, or why Donna was at the hotel, and she didn't ask. I stood near the armchair with my shirt in my hand and I thought she took it well. She understood it was an isolated thing with a stranger in a hotel, a brief episode, finished forever. I told her I felt compelled to speak. I told her it was hard to speak about the matter but not as hard as withholding the truth and she nodded when I said this. I thought she took it fairly well. She didn't ask me to tell her anything more than I'd told her. There was an air of tact in the room, a sensitivity to feelings. I stood by the chair and waited for her to turn the page so I could get