Free Underworld by Don DeLillo

looks at the people on the field. Those who are happy and dazed. Those who run around the bases calling out the score. The ones who are so excited they won’t sleep tonight. Those whose team has lost. The ones who taunt the losers. The fathers who will hurry home and tell their sons what they have seen. The husbands who will surprise their wives with flowers and chocolate-covered cherries. The fans pressed together at the clubhouse steps chanting the players’ names. The fans having fistfights on the subway going home. The screamers and berserkers. The old friends who meet by accident out near second base. Those who will light the city with their bliss.
    Cotter walks at a normal pace in the afterschool light. He goes past rows of tenements down Eighth Avenue with a small solemn hop in his stride, a kind of endless levered up-and-down, and Bill is positioned off his shoulder maybe thirty yards back.
    He sees the Power of Prayer sign and carries the ball in his right hand and rubs it up several times and looks back and sees the collegeboy in the two-tone jacket fall in behind Bill, the guy who was involved in the early scuffle for the ball.
    Bill has lost his buckaroo grin. He barely shows an awareness that Cotter exists, a boy who walks the earth in high-top Keds. Cotter’s body wants to go. But if he starts running at this point, what we have is a black kid running in a mainly white crowd and he’s being followed by a pair of irate whites yelling thief or grief or something.
    They walk down the street, three secret members of some organized event.
    Bill calls out, “Hey Cotter buddy come on, we won this game together.”
    Many people have disappeared into cars or down the subways, they are swarming across the walkway on the bridge to the Bronx, but there are still enough bodies to disrupt traffic in the streets. The mounted police are out, high-riding and erect, appearing among the cars as levitated beings.
    â€œHey Cotter I had my hand on that ball before you did.”
    Bill says this good-natured. He laughs when he says it and Cotter begins to like the man all over again. Car horns are blowing all along the street, noises of joy and mutual salute.
    The college boy says, “I think it’s time I got in this. I’m in this too. I was the first one to grab ahold of the ball. Actually long before either one of you. Somebody hit it out of my hand. I mean if we’re talking about who was first.”
    Cotter is watching the college boy speak, looking back diagonally. He sees Bill stop, so he stops. Bill is stopping for effect. He wants to stop so he can measure the college boy, look him up and down in an itemizing way. He is taking in the two-tone jacket, the tight red hair, he is taking in the whole boy, the entire form and structure of the college boy’s status as a land animal with a major brain.
    And he says, “What?” That’s all. A hard sharp what .
    And he stands there agape, his body gone slack in a comic dumbness that’s pervaded with danger.
    He says, “Who the hell are you anyway? What are you doing here? Do I know you?”
    Cotter watches this, entertained by the look on the college boy’sface. The college boy thought he was part of a team, it’s us against him. Now his eyes don’t know where to go.
    Bill says, “This is between my buddy Cotter and me. Personal business, understand? We don’t want you here. You’re ruining our fun. And if I have to make it any plainer, there’s going to be a family sitting down to dinner tonight minus a loved one.”
    Bill resumes walking and so does Cotter. He looks back to see the college boy following Bill for a number of paces, unsurely, and then falling out of step and beginning to fade down the street and into the crowd.
    Bill looks at Cotter and grins narrowly. It is a wolfish sort of look with no mercy in it. He carries his suit jacket clutched and bunched in his hand, wadded up like