Players

friends.”

With his index finger McKechnie made a wigwag motion over the glasses. The bartender moved their way, talking to someone over his shoulder.

'You know what it all means, don't you?”

'Tell me, Frank.”

'It means they'll install one of those metal detection devices and we'll all have to walk through it every time we go on the floor. I hate those goddamn things. They can damage your bone marrow. My life is crud enough as it is.”

3

Lyle sat by a window at home, in T-shirt and jeans, barefoot, drinking Irish lager.

Pammy bought fruit at a sidewalk stand. She loved the look of fruit in crates, outdoors, tiers of peaches and grapes. Buying fresh fruit made her feel good. It was an act of moral excellence. She looked forward to taking the grapes home, putting them in a bowl and letting cold water run over the bunches. It gave her such pleasure, hefting one of the bunches in her hand, feeling the water come cooling through. Then there were peaches. The earthly merit of peaches.

Lyle remembered having seen some pennies in the bedroom. He went in there. Ten minutes later he found them, three, sitting on a copper-and-brown Kleenex box. He heard Pam take the keys out of her purse. He stacked the pennies on the dresser. Transit tokens on the right side of the dresser. Pennies on the left. He went back to the window.

Pammy had to put down the bag of fruit before she could get the door opened. She remembered what had been bothering her, the vague presence. Her life. She hated her life. It was a minor thing, though, a small bother. She tended to forget about it. When she recalled what it was that had been on her mind, she felt satisfied at having remembered and relieved that it was nothing worse. She pushed into the apartment.

'There she is.”

'Hi, you're home.”

'What's in that big wet funny bag?”

'I may not show you.”

'Fruit.”

'I got you some cantaloupe.”

'Do I like cantaloupe, he asked,' Lyle said.

'And these plums, can you believe them?”

'Who'll eat all that? You never eat any. You eat a little bit when you take it out of the bag and then that's it, Chiquita. In the fruit thing to shrivel.”

'You like plums.”

'Then you say it's for me, look what I got you, world's greatest tangerine, glom glom.”

'Well I think fruit's pretty.”

'In the fruit bin to shrivel up like fetuses.”

'Where's my beer?' she said.

He had a look on his face, supposedly an imitation of her virtuous-fruit look, that made her laugh. She moved through the apartment, taking off clothes, putting the fruit away, getting cheese and crackers. There were pieces of her everywhere. Lyle watched, humming something.

'A guy got killed today on the floor, shot.”

'What, at the Exchange?”

'Somebody shot him, out of nowhere.”

'Did you see it?”

'Ping.”

'Christ, who? Puerto Ricans again?”

He reached out when she went by. She moved into him as he rose from the chair. She felt his thumb at the small of her back, slipping inside elastic. She reached behind him to draw the curtains. He sat back down, humming something, arms raised, as she lifted the T-shirt off him.

'I wouldn't want to say porta rickens. I wouldn't want to say coloreds or any of the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle, not knowing, you see, that the capitalist system and the power structure and the pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It's not an easy matter, being the oppressor. A lot of work involved. Hard dogged unglamorous day-to-day toil. Pounding the pavement. Checking records and files. Making phone call after phone call. Successful oppression depends on this. So I would say in conclusion that they are struggling against the struggle. But I wouldn't want to say porta rickens, commanists, what-have-you. It be no bomb, remember. It be a gun, ping.”

Pammy and Lyle, undressed, were face to face on the white bed, kneeling, hands on each other's shoulders, in flat light, dimming in tenths of seconds. The room was closed off to the street's sparse evening, the hour of thoughtful noises, when everything is interim. The air conditioner labored, an uphill tone. There were intermittent lights in the distance, high-tension streaks. With each discharge a neutral tint, a residue, as of cooled ash, penetrated the room. Pammy and Lyle began to touch. They knew the shifting images of physical similarity. It was an unspoken bond, part of their shared consciousness, the mined silence between people who live together. Curling across each other's limbs and silhouettes they seemed repeat-able, daughter cells of some precise division. Their tongues drifted over wetter flesh. It was this divining of moisture, an intuition of nature submerged, that set them at each other, nipping, in eager searches. He tasted vinegar in her spinning hair. They parted a moment, touched from a studied distance, testing introspectively, a complex exchange. He left the bed to turn off the air conditioner and raise the window. Evening was recharged and fragrant. Thunder sounded right over them. The best things about summer were these storms, filling a room, almost medicinally, with weather, with variable light. Rain struck the window in pellets. They could see trees out back take the stiff winds. Lyle had gotten wet, opening the window, his hands and belly, and they waited for him to dry, talking in foreign accents about a storm they'd driven through in the Alps somewhere, laughing in 'Portuguese' and 'Dutch.' She twisted into him, their solitude become a sheltering in this rain. They lost contact for a moment. She brought him back, needing that conflict of surfaces, the palpable logic of his cock inside her. Then she was gripping hard, released to the contagion of recurring motion, rising, as they ached and played, sunny as young tigers.

It is time to 'perform,' he thought. She would have to be 'satisfied.' He would have to 'service' her. They would make efforts to 'interact.”

When he was sure they were finished he moved away, feeling the barest spray of rain after it hit the window ledge. On their backs they reorganized their breathing. She wanted pizza. It made her feel guilty not to want fruit. But she'd worked all day, taken elevators and trains. She couldn't deal with the consequences of fruit, its perishability, the duty involved in eating it. She wanted to sit in a corner, alone, and stuff herself with junk.

She is padding to the bathroom, he thought.

It grew darker. She sat at the foot of the bed, dressing. The rain slackened. She heard the Mister Softee truck down in the street. It announced itself with recorded music, a sound she hated, the same cranked-out mechanical whine every night. She couldn't hear that noise without feeling severe mental oppression. To indicate this, she made a low droning sound, the tremulous m that meant she was on the edge of something.

'There really is a Mister Softee.”

'I believe,' she said.

'He sits in the back of the truck. That's him making the noise. It's not music on a record or tape. That's his mouth. It's coming out of his mouth. That's his language. They speak that way in the back of ice cream trucks all over the city. I won't say nation yet. It hasn't spread.”

'A local phenomenon.”

'He sits back there dribbling. He's very fat and pastelike. He can't get up. His flesh doesn't have the right consistency.”