CHAPTER 5 Larry Underwood pulled around the corner and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun

CHAPTER 5

Larry Underwood pulled around the corner and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody's trash can that had fallen into the litter. There was something unpleasant in the trash can and Larry tried to tell himself that he really hadn't seen the Stiffening dead cat and the rat gnawing at its white-furred belly. The rat was gone so fast from the sweep of his headIights that it really might not have been there. The cat, however, was fixed in stasis. And, he supposed, killing the Z's engine, if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Didn't they say that Paris had the biggest rat population in the world? All those old sewers. But New York did well, too. And if he remembered his misspent youth well enough, not all the rats in New York City went on four legs. And what the hell was he doing parked in front of this decaying brownstone, thinking about rats anyway? Five days ago, on June 14, he had been in sunny Southern California, home of hopheads, freak religions, the only c/w nightclubs in the world with gogo dancers, and Disneyland. This morning at quarter of four he had arrived on the shore of the other ocean, paying his toll to go across the

21 Triborough Bridge. A sullen drizzle had been falling. Only in New York can an early summer drizzle seem so unrepentantly sullen. Larry could see the drops accreting on the Z's windshield now, as intimations of dawn began to creep into the eastern sky. Dear New York: I've come home. Maybe the Yankees were in town. That might make the trip worthwhile. Take the subway up to the Stadium, drink beer, eat hotdogs, and watch the Yankees wallop the piss out of Cleveland or Boston... His thoughts drifted off and when he wandered back to them he saw that the light had gotten much stronger. The dashboard clock read 6:05. He had been dozing. The rat had been real, he saw. The rat was back. The rat had dug himself quite a hole in the dead cat's guts. Larry's empty stomach did a slow forward roll. He considered beeping the horn to scare it away for good, but the sleeping brownstones with their empty garbage cans standing sentinel duty daunted him. He slouched lower in the bucket seat so he wouldn't have to watch the rat eating breakfast. Just a bite, my good man, and then back to the subway system. Going out to Yankee Stadium this evening? Perhaps I'll see you, old chum. Although I really doubt that you'll see me. The front of the building had been defaced with spray can slogans, cryptic and ominous: CHICO 116, ZORRO 93, LITTLE ABLE #1! When he had been a boy, before his father died,this had been a good neighborhood. Two stone dogs had guarded the steps leading up to the double doors. A year before he took off for the coast, vandals had demolished the one on the right from the forepaws up. Now they were both entirely gone, except for one rear paw of the left dog. The body it had been called into creation to support had entirely vanished, perhaps decorating some Puerto Rican junkie's crash-pad. Maybe ZORRO 93 or LTITLE ABIE #1! had taken it. Maybe the rats had carried it away to some deserted subway tunnel one dark night. For all he knew, maybe they had taken his mother along, too. He supposed he should at least climb the steps and make sure her name was still there under the Apartment 15 mailbox, but he was too tired. No, he would just sit here and nod off, trusting to the last residue of reds in his system to wake him up around seven. Then he would go see if his mother still lived here. Maybe it would be best if she was gone. Maybe then he wouldn't even bother with the Yankees. Maybe he would just check into the Biltmore, sleep for three days, and then head back into the golden West. In this light, in this drizzle, with his legs and head still throbbing from the bringdown, New York had all the charm of a dead whore. His mind began to drift away again, mulling over the last nine weeks or so, trying to find some sort of key that would snake everything clear and explain how you could butt yourself against stone walls for six long years, playing the clubs, making demo tapes, doing sessions, the whole bit, and then suddenly make it in nine weeks. Trying to get that straight in your mind was like trying to swallow a doorknob. There had to be an answer, he thought, an explanation that would . allow him to reject the ugly notion that the whole thing had—been a whim, a simple twist of fate, in Dylan's words. He dozed deeper, arms crossed on his chest, going over it and over it, and mixed up in all of it was this new thing, like a low and sinister counterpoint, one note at the threshold of audibility played on a synthesizer, heard in a migrainy sort of way that acted on you like a premonition: the rat, digging into the dead cat's body, munch, munch, just looking for something tasty here. It's the law of the jungle, my man, if you're in the trees you got to swing... It had really started eighteen months ago. He had been playing with the Tattered Remnants in a Berkeley club, and a man from Columbia had called. Not a. biggie, just another toiler in the vinyl vineyards. Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, a tune called "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, "Peggy Sue Got Married;" and:maybe this Larry Underwood tune. The question was, would Larry like to come up and cut a demo of the tune, then sit in an the session? Diamond wanted a second acoustic guitar,— and he liked the tune a lot. Larry said yes. The session lasted three days. It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album's inner sleeve and got paid union scale. But "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" never made the album. On the second evening of the session, Diamond had come up with a new tune of his own and that made the album instead. Well, the man from Columbia said, that's too bad. It happens. Tell you whatwhy don't you cut the demo anyway. I'll see if there's anything I can do. So Larry cut the demo and then found himself back out on the street. In L. A. times were hard. There were a few sessions, but not many. He finally got a job playing guitar in a supper club, crooning things like "Softly as I Leave You" and "Moon River" while elderly cats talked business and sucked up Italian food. He wrote the lyrics on scraps of notepaper, because otherwise he tended to mix them up or forget them altogether, chording the tune while he went "hmmnmm-hmmmm, ta-da-hmmmm," trying to look suave like

22 Tony Bennett vamping and feeling like an asshole. In elevators and supermarkets he had become morbidly aware of the low Muzak that played constantly. Then, nine weeks ago and out of the blue, the man from Columbia had called. They wanted to release his demo as a single. Could he come in and back it? Sure, Larry said. He could do that. So he had gone into Columbia's L. A. studios on a Sunday afternoon, double-tracked his own voice on "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" in about an hour, and then backed it with a song he had written for the Tattered Remnants, "Pocket Savior." The man from Columbia presented him with a check for five hundred dollars and a stinker of a contract that bound Larry to more than it did the record company. He shook Larry's hand, told him it was good to have him aboard, offered him a small, pitying smile when Larry asked him how the single would be promoted, and then took his leave. It was too late to deposit the check, so Larry ran through his repertoire at Gino's with it in his pocket. Near the end of his first set, he sang a subdued version of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" The only person who noticed was Gino's proprietor, who told him to save the nigger bebop for the cleanup crew. Seven weeks ago, the man from Columbia called again and told him to go get a copy of Billboard. Larry ran. "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was one of three hot prospects for that week. Larry called the man from Columbia back, and he had asked Larry how he would like to lunch with some of the real biggies. To discuss the album. They were all pleased with the single, which was getting airplay in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine, already. It looked as if it was going to catch. It had won a late-night Battle of the Sounds contest for four nights running on one Detroit soul station. No one seemed to know that Larry Underwood was white. He had gotten drunk at the luncheon and hardly noticed how his salmon tasted. No one seemed to mind that he had gotten loaded. One of the biggies said he wouldn't be surprised to see "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" carry off a Grammy next year. It all rang gloriously in Larry's ears. He felt like a man in a dream, and going back to his apartment he felt strangely sure that he would be hit by a truck and that would end it all. The Columbia biggies had presented him with another check, this one for $2,500. When he got home, Larry picked up the telephone and began to make calls. The first one was to Mort "Gino" Green. Larry told him he'd have to find someone else to play "Yellow Bird" while the customers ate his lousy undercooked pasta. Then he called everyone he could think of, including Barry Grieg the Remnants. Then he went out and got standing-up 'falling-down drunk. Five weeks ago the single had cracked Billboard's Hot One Hundred. Number eighty-nine. With a bullet. That was the week spring had really come to Los Angeles, and on a bright and sparkling May afternoon, with the buildings so white and the ocean so blue that they could knock your eyes 'cut and send them rolling down your cheeks like marbles, he had heard his record on the radio for the first time. Three or four friends were there, including his current girl, and they were moderately done up on cocaine. Larry was coming out of the kitchenette and into the living room with a bag of Toll House cookies when the familiar KLMT slogan-Nyoooooo .. meee-USIC!-came on. And then Larry had been transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming out of the Technics speakers:

23 uppers, and it seemed to him that he heard his song everywhere. One Saturday morning he heard it on "Soul Train" and spent the rest of the day trying to make himself believe that, yes, that had actually happened. It became suddenly hard to separate himself from Julie, the girl he had been dating since his gig at Gino's. She introduced him to all sorts of people, few of them people he really wanted to see. Her voice began to remind him of the prospective agents he heard over the telephone. In along, loud, acrimonious argument, he split with her. She had screamed at him that his head would soon be too big to fit through a recording studio door, that he owed her five hundred dollars for dope, that he was the 1990s' answer to Zagar and Evans. She had threatened to kill herself. Afterward Larry felt as if he had been through a long pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with a low- grade poison gas. They had begun cutting the album three weeks ago, and Larry had withstood most of the "for your own good" suggestions. He used what leeway the contract gave him. He got three of the Tattered Remnants-Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall-and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get. Columbia seemed to want an album based on what they thought would be a twenty-week career, beginning with "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" and ending with "Hang On, Snoopy." Larry wanted more. The album cover was a photo of Larry in an old-fashioned clawfoot tub full of suds. Written on the tiles above him in a Columbia secretary's lipstick were the words POCKET SAVIOR and LARRY UNDERWOOD. Columbia had wanted to call the album Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? but Larry absolutely balked, and they had finally settled for a CONTAINS THE HIT SINGLE sticker on the shrink-wrap. Two weeks ago the single hit number forty-seven, and the party had started. He had rented a Malibu beachhouse for a month, and after that things got a little hazy. People wandered in and out, always more of them. He knew some, but mostly they were strangers. He could remember being huckstered by even more agents who wanted to "further his great career." He could remember a girl who had bumtripped and gone screaming down the bone-white beach as naked as a nuthatch. He could remember snorting coke and chasing it with tequila. He could remember being shaken awake on Saturday morning, it must have been a week or so ago, to hear Kasey Kasem spin his record as a debut song at number thirty-six on "American Top Forty." He could remember taking a great many reds and, vaguely, dickering for the Datsun Z with a four-thousand-dollar royalty check that had come in the mail. And then it was June 13, six days ago, the day Wayne Stukey asked Larry to go for a walk with him down the beach. It had only been nine in the morning but the stereo was on, both TVs, and it sounded like an orgy was going on in the basement playroom. Larry had been sitting in an overstuffed living room chair,. wearing only underpants, and trying owlishly to get the sense from a Superboy comic book. He felt very alert, but none of the words seemed to connect . to anything. There was no gestalt. A Wagner piece was thundering from the quad speakers, and Wayne had to shout three or four times to make himself understood. Then Larry nodded. He felt as if he could walk for miles. But when the sunlight struck Larry's eyeballs like needles, he suddenly changed his mind. No walk. Uh-uh. His eyes had been turned into magnifying glasses, and soon the sun would shine through them long enough to set his brains on fire. His poor old brains felt tinder-dry. Wayne, gripping his arm firmly, insisted. They went down to the beach, over the warming sand to the darker brown hardpack, and Larry decided it had been a pretty good idea after all. The deepening sound of the breakers coming home was soothing. A gull, working to gain altitude, hung straining in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M. Wayne tugged his arm firmly. "Come on." Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in skivvies that had been fresh three days ago. "Wayne, I wanna go back." "Let's walk a little more." He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of exasperation and pity., "No, man, I only got my shorts on. I'll get picked up for indecent exposure." "On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your wingwang and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man."

24 "I'm tired," Larry said querulously. He began to feel pissed at Wayne. This was Wayne's way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears. "Come on, man," Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again. They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry's thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant. "Cramps!" he screamed. "Oh man, cramps!" Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his legs out straight. The agony hit again, and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen. Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. "Oh man," he said. "Thanks. That was... that was bad." "Sure," Wayne said, without much sympathy. "I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?" "Okay. But let's just sit, huh? Then we'll go back." "I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you." "What's that, Wayne?" He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six- word sentence. "The party's got to end, Larry." "Huh?" "The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give everybody their car keys, thank everyone for a lovely time, and see them out the front door. Get rid of them." "I can't do that!" Larry said, shocked. "You better," Wayne said. "But why? Man, this party's just getting going!" "Larry, how much has Columbia paid you up front?" "Why would you want to know?" Larry asked slyly. "Do you think I want to suck off you, Larry? Think." Larry thought, and with dawning bewilderment he realized there was no reason why Wayne Stukey would want to put the arm on him. He hadn't really made it yet, was scuffling for jobs like most of the people who had helped Larry cut the album, but unlike most of them, Wayne came from a family with money and he was on good terms with his people. Wayne's father owned half of the country's thirdlargest electronic games company, and the Stukeys had a modestly palatial home in Bel Air. Bewildered, Larry realized that his own sudden good fortune probably looked like small bananas to Wayne. "No, I guess not," he said gruffly. "I'm sorry. But it seems like every tinhorn cockroach-chaser west of Las Vegas—" "So how much?" Larry thought it over. "Seven grand up front. All told." "They're paying you quarterly royalties on the single and biannually on the album?" "Right." Wayne nodded. "They hold it until the eagle screams, the bastards. Cigarette?" Larry took one and cupped the end for a light. "Do you know how much this party's costing you?" "Sure," Larry said. "You didn't rent the house for less than a thousand." "Yeah, that's right." It had actually been $1,200 plus a $500 damage deposit. He had paid the deposit and half the month's rent, a total of $1,100 with $600 owing. "How much for dope?" Wayne asked. "Aw, man, you got to have something. It's like cheese for Ritz crackers—" "There was pot and there was coke. How much, come on?" "The fucking DA," Larry said sulkily. "Five hundred and five hundred." "And it was gone the second day." "The hell it was!" Larry said, startled. "I saw two bowls when we went out this morning, man. Most of it was gone, yeah, but ' "Man, don't you remember the Deck?" Wayne's voice suddenly dropped into an amazingly good parody of Larry's own drawling voice. "Just put it on my tab, Dewey. Keep 'em full." Larry looked at Wayne with dawning horror. He did remember a small, wiry guy with a peculiar haircut, a whiffle cut they had called it ten or fifteen years ago, a small guy with a whiffle haircut and a T-shirt reading JESUS IS COMING & IS HE PISSED. This guy seemed to have good dope

25 practically failing out of his asshole. He could even remember telling this guy, Dewey the Deck, to keep his hospitality bowls full and put it on his tab. But that had been... well, that had been days ago. Wayne said, "You're the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man." "How much is he into me for?" "Not bad on pot. Pot's cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke." For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke. He goggled silently at Wayne. He tried to speak and he could only mouth: Ninety-two hundred? "Inflation, man," Wayne said. "You want the rest?" Larry didn't want the rest, but he nodded. "There was a color TV upstairs. Someone ran a chair through it. I'd guess three hundred for repairs. The wood paneling downstairs has been gouged to hell. Four hundred. With luck. The picture window facing the beach got broken the day before yesterday. Three hundred. The shag rug in the living room is totally kaput-cigarette burns, beer, whiskey. Four hundred. I called the liquor store and they're just as happy with their tab as the Deck is with his. Six hundred." "Six hundred for booze?" Larry whispered. Blue horror had encased him up to the neck. "Be thankful most of them have been scoffing beer and wine. You've got a fourhundred-dollar tab down at the market, mostly for pizza, chips, tacos, all that good shit. But the worst is the noise. Pretty soon the cops are going to land. Les flies. Disturbing the peace. And you've got four or five heavies doing up on heroin. There's three or four ounces of Mexican brown in the place." "Is that on my tab, too?" Larry asked hoarsely. "No. The Deck doesn't mess with heroin. That's an Organization item and the Deck doesn't like the idea of cement cowboy boots. But if the cops land, you can bet the bust will go on your tab." "But I didn't know—" "Just a babe in the woods, yeah." "But—" "Your total tab for this little shindy so far comes to over twelve thousand dollars," Wayne said. "You went out and picked that Z off the lot... how much did you put down?" "Twenty-five," Larry said numbly. He felt like crying. "So what have you got until the next royalty check? Couple thousand?" "That's about right," Larry said, unable to tell Wayne he had less than that: about eight hundred, split evenly between cash and checking. "Larry, you listen to me because you're not worth telling twice. There's always a party waiting to happen. Out here the only two constants are the constant bullshitting and the constant party. They come running like dickey birds looking for bugs on a hippo's back. Now they're here. Pick them off your carcass and send them on their way." Larry thought of the dozens of people in the house. He knew maybe one person in three at this point. The thought of telling all those unknown people to leave made his throat want to close up. He would lose their good opinion. Opposing this thought came an image of Dewey Deck refilling the hospitality bowls, taking a notebook from his back pocket, and writing it all down at the bottom of his tab. Him and his whiffle haircut and his trendy T-shirt. Wayne watched him calmly as he squirmed between these two pictures. "Man, I'm gonna look like the asshole of the world," Larry said finally, hating the weak and petulant words as they fell from his mouth. "Yeah, they'll call you a lot of names. They'll say you're going Hollywood. Getting a big head. Forgetting your old friends. Except none of them are your friends, Larry. Your friends saw what was happening three days ago and split the scene. It's no fun to watch a friend who's, like, pissed his pants and doesn't even know it." "So why tell me?" Larry asked, suddenly angry. The anger was prodded out of him by the realization that all his really good friends had taken off, and in retrospect all their excuses seemed lame. Barry Grieg had taken him aside, had tried to talk to him, but Larry had been really flying, and he had just nodded and smiled indulgently at Barry. Now he wondered if Barry had been trying to lay this same rap on him. It made him embarrassed and angry to think so. "Why tell me?" he repeated. "I get the feeling you don't like me so very goddam much." "No... but I really don't dislike you, either. Beyond that, man, I couldn't say. I could have let you get your nose punched on this. Once would have been enough for you." "What do you mean?" "You'll tell them. Because there's a hard streak in you. There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil. Whatever it takes to make success, you've got it. You'll have a nice little career. Middle- of-the-road pop no one will remember in five years. The junior high boppers will collect your records. You'll make money." Larry balled his fists on his legs. He wanted to punch that calm face. Wayne was saying things that made him feel like a small pile of dogshit beside a stop sign.

26 "Go on back and pull the plug," Wayne said softly. "Then you get in that car and go. Just go, man. Stay away until you know that next royalty check is waiting for you." "But Dewey—" "I'll find a man to talk to Dewey. My pleasure, man. The guy will tell Dewey to wait for his money like a good little boy, and Dewey will be happy to oblige." He paused, watching two small children in bright bathing suits run up the beach. A dog ran-beside them, rowfing loudly and cheerily at the blue sky. Larry stood up and forced himself to say thanks. The sea breeze slipped in and out of his aging shorts. The word came out of his mouth like a brick. "You just go away somewhere and get your shit together," Wayne said, standing up beside him, still watching the children. "You've got a lot of shit to get together. What kind of manager you want, what kind of tour you want, what kind of contract you want after Pocket Savior hits. I think it will; its got that neat little beat. If you give yourself some room, you'll figure it all out. Guys like you always do." Guys like you always do. Guys like me always do. Guys like—

Somebody was tapping a finger on the window. Larry jerked, then sat up. A bolt of pain went through his neck and he winced at the dead, cramped feel of the flesh there. He had been asleep, not just dozing. Reliving California. But here and now it was gray New York daylight, and the finger tapped again. He turned his head cautiously and painfully and saw his mother, wearing a black net scarf over her hair, peering in. For a moment they just stared at each other through the glass and Larry felt curiously naked, like an animal being looked at in the zoo. Then his mouth took over, smiling, and he cranked the window down. "Mom?" "I knew it was you," she said in a queerly flat tone. "Come on out of there and let me see what you look like standing up." Both legs had gone to sleep; pins and needles tingled up from the balls of his feet as he opened the door and got out. He had never expected to meet her this way, unprepared and exposed. He felt like a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post suddenly called to attention. He had somehow expected his mother to look smaller, less sure of herself, a trick of the years that had matured him and left her just the same. But it was almost uncanny, the way she had caught him. When he was ten, she used to wake him up on Saturday mornings after she thought he had slept long enough by tapping one finger on his closed bedroom door. She had wakened him this same way fourteen years later, sleeping in his new car like a tired kid who had tried to stay up all night and got caught by the sandman in an undignified position. Now he stood before her, his hair corkscrewed, a faint and rather foolish grin on his face. Pins and needles still coursed up his legs, making him shift from foot to foot. He remembered that she always asked him if he had to go to the bathroom when he did that and now he stopped the movement and let the needles prick him at will. "Hi, Mom," he said. She looked at him without saying anything, and a dread suddenly roosted in his heart like an evil bird coming back to an old nest. It was a fear that she might turn away from him, deny him, show him the back of her cheap coat, and simply go off to the subway around the corner, leaving him. Then she sighed, the way a man will sigh before picking up a heavy bundle. And when she spoke, her voice was so natural and so mildly-rightly-pleased that he forgot his first impression. "Hi, Larry," she said. "Come on upstairs. I knew it was you when I looked out the window. I already called in sick at my building. I got sick time coming." She turned to lead him back up the steps, between the vanished stone dogs. He came three steps behind her, catching up, wincing at the pins and needles. "Mom?" She turned back to him and he hugged her. For a moment an expression of fright crossed her features, as if she expected to be mugged rather than hugged. Then it passed and she accepted his embrace and gave back her own. The smell of her sachet slipped up his nose, evoking unexpected nostalgia, fierce, sweet, and bitter. For a moment he thought he was going to cry, and was smugly sure that she would; it was A Touching Moment. Over her sloped right shoulder he could see the dead cat, lying half in and half out of the garbage can. When she pulled away, her eyes were dry. "Come on, I'll make you some breakfast. Have you been driving all night?" "Yes," he said, his voice slightly hoarse with emotion.

27 "Well, come on. Elevator's broken, but it's only two floors. It's worse for Mrs. Halsey with her arthritis. She's on five. Don't forget to wipe your feet. If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt. Dirt's his enemy, all right." They were on the stairs now. "Can you eat three eggs? I'll make toast, too, if you don't mind pumpernickel. Come on." He followed her past the vanished stone dogs and looked a little wildly at where they had been, just to reassure himself that they were really gone; that he had not shrunk two feet, that the whole decade of the 1980s had not vanished back into time. She pushed the doors open and they went in. Even the dark brown shadows and the smells of cooking were the same.

Alice Underwood fixed him three eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee. When he had finished all but the coffee, he lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table. She flashed the cigarette a disapproving look but said nothing. That restored some of his confidence—some, but not much. She had always been good at biding her time. She dropped the iron spider skillet into the gray dishwater and it hissed a little. She hadn't changed much, Larry was thinking. A little older—she would be fifty-one now-a little grayer, but there was still plenty of black left in that sensibly netted head of hair. She was wearing a plain gray dress, probably the one she worked in. Her bosom was still the same large comber blooming out of the bodice of the dress-a little larger, if anything. Mom, tell me the truth, has your bosom gotten bigger? Is that the fundamental change? He started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; she jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it had seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. She could bide her time and she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering. "So you came back," Alice said, taking a used Brillo from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. "What brought you?" Well, Ma, this friend of mine clued me in to the facts of life-the assholes travel in packs and this time they were after me. I don't know if friend is the right word for him. He respects me musically about as much as I respect The 1910 Fruitgum Company. But he got me to put on my traveling shoes and wasn't it Robert Frost who said home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in? Aloud he said, "I guess I got to missing you, Mom." She snorted. "That's why you wrote me often?" "I'm not much of a letter-writer." He pumped his cigarette slowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off. "You can say that again." Smiling, he said: "I'm not much of a letter-writer." "But you're still smart to your mother. That hasn't changed." "I'm sorry," he said. "How have you been, Mom?" She put the skillet in the-drainer, pulled the sink stopper, and wiped the lace of soapsuds from her reddened hands. "Not so bad," she said, coming over to the table and sitting down. "My back pains me some, but I got my pills. I make out all right." "You haven't thrown it out of whack since I left?" "Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it." "Mom, those Chiropractors are—" just frauds He bit his tongue. "Are what?" He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile. "You're free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine." She sighed and took a roll of wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. "I'm a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?" He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead. "You're just a girl yet," he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it brought only a ghost of a smile to her lips. "Any new men in your life?" "Several," she said. "How bout you?" "No," he said seriously. "No new men. Some girls, but no new men." He had hoped for laughter, but got only the ghost smile again. I'm troubling her, he thought. That's what it is. She doesn't know what I want here. She hasn't been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost. "Same old Larry," she said. "Never serious. You're not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?" "I play the field, Mom." "You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you'd got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I'll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite."

28 He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely. "Anyway, you're gonna learn," Alice said. "They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He's got that sidewalk-level apartment and he's always standing there, in the window, hoping for a strong breeze." Larry grunted. "I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that's my son. That's Larry. Most of them don't believe it." "You've heard it?" He wondered why she hadn't mentioned that first, instead of going into all this piddling shit. "Sure, all the time on that rock and roll station the young girls listen to. WROK." "Do you like it?" "As well as I like any of that music." She looked at him firmly. "I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd." He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. "It's just supposed to sound... passionate, Mom. That's all." His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother's kitchen, discussing passion. "The place for passion's the bedroom," she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. "Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger." "Now?" he asked, amused. "No, on the radio." "That brown soun, she sho do get aroun," Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling. "Just like that," she nodded. "When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this rap. Rap, they call it. Screaming, I call it." She looked at him grudgingly. "At least there's no screaming on your record." "I get a royalty," he said. "A certain percent of every record sold. It breaks down to—" "Oh, go on," she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. "I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?" "They haven't paid me much," he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. "I made a down payment on the car. I'm financing the rest." "Easy credit terms," she said balefully. "That's how your father ended up bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn't that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to his grave on easy credit terms." This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. At the wake, when her sister tried to comfort a woman who looked absolutely without need of comfort, Alice Underwood said it could have been worse. It could, she said, looking past her sister's shoulder and directly at her brotherin-law, have been drink. Alice brought Larry the rest of the way up on her own, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy's old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that's my mamma. "Do you want to stay here, Larry?" she asked softly. Startled, he countered, "Do you mind?" "There's room. The rollaway's still in the back bedroom. I've been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around." "All right," he said slowly. "If you're sure you don't mind. I'm only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I'd look up some of the old guys. Mark... Galen... David... Chris... those guys." She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up. "You're welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I'm not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I'm glad to see you. We didn't say goodbye very well. There were harsh words." She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. "For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways." "That's all right," he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. "Listen, I'll chip in for stuff." "You can if you want. If you don't want to, you don't have to. I'm working. Thousands aren't. You're still my son." He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his-nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An

29 unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother. She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. She could have taxed him with it, but to what end? His father had been a softie, and in her heart of hearts she knew it was that which had really sent him to the grave; Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame? His tears couldn't change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness-she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children-but Larry hadn't found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people-including himself-into jams, and when the lams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in. his eyes, read it in every line of his posture... even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did-as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would. But this was no boy in front of her; this was a grown-up man, and she feared that his days of change-the deep and fundamental sort her minister called a change of soul rather than one of heart- were behind him. There was something in Larry that gave you the bitter zing of hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart. But she loved him. She also thought there was good in Larry, great good. It was there, but this late on it would take nothing short of a catastrophe to bring it out. There was no catastrophe here; only her weeping son. "You're tired," she said. "Clean up. I'll move the boxes, then you can sleep. I guess I'll go in today after all." She went down the short hall to the back room, his old bedroom, and Larry heard her grunting and moving boxes. He wiped his eyes slowly. The sound of traffic came in the window. He tried to remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother. He thought of the dead cat. She was right. He was tired. He had never been so tired. He went to bed and slept for nearly eighteen hours.