Underworld (24 page)

This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.

Marvin Lundy opened the trunk.

The baseball was wrapped in tissue paper inside an old red-and-white Spalding box. There were deep stacks of photographs and correspondence and other material related to the search. Birth certificates, passports, affidavits, handwritten wills, detailed lists of people's possessions, there were bloodstained garments in Ziploc bags.

He took some still frames out of a manila envelope and showed them to Brian.

This was a sequence that involved the scramble for the ball, people in bevies, Marvin said, scratching and grabbing, and a man in the last photo standing starkly alone, white-shirted, looking down at the exit ramp, looking hard, glaring at someone, probably at the person who'd come away with the ball, but Marvin could not find a way, for all his mastery of the dots, to rotate the heads of the people on the ramp so he could see the face of the individual in question.

“But you identified the man in the white shirt.”

“From running the picture in the back of magazines where they did waterbeds and dirty personals.”

“And you went to see the wife.”

“This is many years after the game. What happened he died. The widow sits in a cold house turning a spoon in her tiny cup. I try to find out what he might have said to her about the game, the ball, anything. What game, she says. I try to explain the extenuations of the thing. But it's more than twenty years later. What game, what ball?”

A woman came down the stairs carrying coffee and cheesecake on a tray. She seemed to issue from Marvin's story, a recollected figure taking material form. Marvin shut the trunk so she could place the tray on top. She was his daughter, Clarice, determined to tend to dad whatever his objections.

“I didn't hear you come in. She comes in like she's Chinese, with muffled feet.”

“You were talking. I could be an armed robbery in progress, you wouldn't hear a thing.”

She was in her late twenties, blondish and gym-fit. She told Brian she lived ten minutes away by car and worked as a court stenographer. He thought he could easily fall in love with the sitcom tilt in her voice and the swerve of her thigh lines under the linen skirt.

“We're almost finished here, Clarice.”

“In a hundred grueling hours. Your guest may have other things he needs to do.”

“What could he have?”

“It'll be dark soon.”

“Dark, light. These are words.”

The baseball box was on its side among scattered photographs on the floor and the ball had dribbled out, still crinkled in tissue. Clarice pulled up a chair and she and Marvin finished the story, more or less, through mouthfuls of cheesecake.

“For how many years, Clarice, I'm looking for a man named Jackson or Judson?”

“Get to the point,” she said.

“Because there were roundabout hints that pointed to him as
someone I should be interested in. And the ball has a history by this time that I've been inching along, where different things match and join. But I can't locate the man or even—what?”

“Ascertain,” Brian said.

“His correct name. By this time, forget the footage—I'm using rumors and dreams. There's an ESP of baseball, an underground what, a consciousness, and I'm hearing it in my sleep.”

“Faster, daddy, faster.”

“Meanwhile there's this woman. I'm trying to find Judson Jackson Johnson and there's this woman who got my name from the memorabilia market and she's been calling me long-distance collect day and night. She says she used to own the thing I'm looking for. Mysteriously missing for years, she says, from the little locked box where she used to keep it.”

“Genevieve Rauch.”

“Whose name I can never.”

“Genevieve Rauch,” his daughter said. “And the two of them try to establish the basic, you know.”

“Indicators,” Brian said.

“That would make her baseball at least a remote possibility.”

“The marks and scratches,” Marvin said. “The trademark if it's correct. The signature of the league president who was in office at the time. Her memory is iffy. I make some leeway, then she talks about something else. This is a woman she has an extra chromosome for changing the subject. A thousand times I'm tempted to hang up the phone.”

“Then it happens,” Clarice said.

“A man in his car.”

“A man's driving along in his car, someone shoots him dead. Turns out the victim is the long-lost former husband of Genevieve Rauch. Turns out further his name is Juddy Rauch, Judson Rauch. So the two rivers meet. Took a homicide to reveal the connection.”

Marvin lowered his head to the trunk top to sip his coffee and Brian stared into the weave of his woeful toupee.

“When I had my stomach I used to eat this cheesecake unconscious.”

Clarice explained how he went to Deaf Smith County, Texas, where he hired a local lawyer on behalf of Genevieve Rauch and finally located the baseball sealed in a baggie and vouchered and numbered and stored in the property clerk's office. Impounded by the police along with the body, the car, all the things in the car, of which this was one, crammed in a cardboard box filled with junky odds and ends.

Marvin puffed on his stogie.

“I go all the way to the Bronx to buy this cheesecake. A kosher bakery that you couldn't find it if I gave you a road map, a guidebook and whatever he's called that speaks five languages.”

“An interpreter.”

“An interpreter,” Marvin said.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

“And so finally,” Brian said, “you bought the baseball.”

“And I traced it all the way back to October fourth, the day after the game, nineteen hundred and fifty-one.”

“And how did you finance this operation for so many years? The travel, the technical end, all of it.”

“I had a local chain of stores, dry cleaning, which I sold after my wife passed away because I didn't need it anymore, the aggravation.”

“Marvin the Clothes King,” his daughter said with a little affection, a little regret, some irony, a certain pride, a touch of rueful humor and so on.

She talked to her father about a doctor's appointment he had in the morning and he listened the way you listen to the TV news, staring indifferently into India. She took the tray and headed up the stairs. Brian imagined following her in his car and pulling alongside and catching her eye and then accelerating loudly and leading her to a wayside inn where they get a room and undress each other with their teeth and tongues and never say a word.

He listened to the music drifting through the house, the keyboard lament, and he finally identified the lurking presence in the story of Marvin's search, the strange secondhandedness of all that exacting work, the retouching, the enhancements—it was an eerie replay of the
investigations into the political murders of the 1960s. The attempt to reassemble a crucial moment in time out of patches and adumbrations—Marvin in his darkroom borrowing a powerful theme and using it to locate a small white innocent object bouncing around a ballpark.

Brian said, “So we know the lineage of the thing in the later stages. Rauch to Rauch to Lundy. But how did it all begin?”

“You asked so I'll tell you. With a man named Charles, let me think, Wainwright. An advertising executive. I have the complete sequence back to him. The line of ownership.”

“But not back to the game itself.”

“I don't have the last link that I can connect backwards from the Wainwright ball to the ball making contact with Bobby Thomson's bat.” He looked sourly at the scoreboard clock. “I have a certain number of missing hours I still have to find. And when you're dealing with something so many years back, you have to face the mortality rate. Wainwright passed away and his son Charles Jr. is forty-two years old now and stuck with the name Chuckie and I've been trying to talk to him for a long time. He was last seen working as an engineer on a freighter that plied—you like that word?”

“Plied.”

“The Baltic Sea,” Marvin said. “Speaking of which.”

“Yes?”

“You should train an eye on the mark on this Gorbachev's head, to see if it changes shape.”

“Changes shape? It's always been there.”

“You know this?”

“What, you think it recently appeared?”

“You know this? It's always been there?”

“It's a birthmark,” Brian said.

“Excuse me but that's the official biography. I'll tell you what I think. I think if I had a sensitive government job I would be photographing Gorbachev from outer space every minute of the day that he's not wearing a hat to check the shape of the birthmark if it's changing. Because it's Latvia right now. But it could be Siberia in the morning, where they're emptying out their jails.”

He looked at his cigar.

“Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots.”

Then he got to his feet with a certain effort.

“And when the cold war goes out of business, you won't be able to look at some woman in the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today.”

“Erotic. But what's the connection?”

“You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?”

“That's an amazing thing to say.”

“And you don't know that once this threat begins to fade?”

“What?”

“You're the lost man of history.”

It seemed the visit was done. But first the host led his guest to a shelved alcove near the stairway. This is where he kept his collection of taped ball games, radio and TV, hundreds of slotted cassettes going back to the earliest broadcasts.

“People who save these bats and balls and preserve the old stories through the spoken word and know the nicknames of a thousand players, we're here in our basements with tremendous history on our walls. And I'll tell you something, you'll see I'm right. There's men in the coming years they'll pay fortunes for these objects. They'll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking.”

Brian wished the man could be lighter and sweeter. He looked at the scoreboard one last time. He thought finally it was an impressive thing but maybe a little funereal. It had that compact quality of preservation and exact proportion and respectful history that can produce a mood of mausoleum gloom.

They went up the stairs and walked through the shadowed rooms to the front door. Marvin stood there with his dead cigar.

“Men come here to see my collection.”

“Yes.”

“They come and they don't want to leave. The phone rings, it's the family—where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men.”

“I understand.”

“What's your name?”

“Brian Glassic.”

“Nice to meet you,” Marvin said.

Brian asked about a way back to Manhattan that did not include the George Washington Bridge. There was a tunnel here and a tunnel there and Marvin gave both sets of directions with a number of choices attached to each. Brian the fool narrowed his eyes and nodded yes although he knew he would retain none of this once he was in the car.

He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays—all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.

When he went past Newark Airport he realized he'd overshot all the turnoffs and their related options. He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey edge of brine in the air and the road bent and then ended in gravel and weeds.

He got out of the car and climbed an earthen bank. The wind was stiff enough to make his eyes go moist and he looked across a narrow body of water to a terraced elevation on the other side. It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumental, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real
and it was man-made, swept by wheeling gulls, and he knew it could be only one thing—the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.

This was the reason for his trip to New York and he was scheduled to meet there with surveyors and engineers in the morning. Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter.