Free Underworld by Don DeLillo Page A

something he might want to throw.
    With advancing dark the field is taking on a deeper light. The grass is incandescent, it has a heat and sheen. People go running past, looking half ablaze, and Russ Hodges moves with the tentative steps of some tourist at a grand bazaar, trying to hand-shuffle through the crowd.
    Some ushers are lifting a drunk off the first-base line and the man warps himself into a baggy mass and shakes free and begins to run around the bases in his oversized raincoat with long belt trailing.
    Russ makes his way through the infield and dance-steps into an awkward jog that makes him feel ancient and extraneous and he thinks of the ballplayers of his youth, the men with redneck monickers whose endeavors he followed in the papers every day, Eppa Rixey and Hod Eller and old Ivy Wingo, and there is a silly grin pasted across his face because he is a forty-one-year-old man with a high fever and he is running across a ball field to conduct a dialogue with a pack of athletes in their underwear.
    He says to someone running near him, “I don’t believe it, I still don’t believe it.”
    Out in dead center he sees the clubhouse windows catch the trigger-glint of flashbulbs going off inside. He hears a shrill cheer and turns and sees the raincoat drunk sliding into third base. Then he realizes the man running alongside is Al Edelstein, his producer.
    Al shouts, “Do you believe it?”
    â€œI do not believe it,” says Russ.
    They shake hands on the run.
    Al says, “Look at these people.” He is shouting and gesturing, waving a Cuban cigar. “It’s like I-don’t-know-what.”
    â€œIf you don’t know what, then I don’t know what.”
    â€œSave the voice,” says Al.
    â€œThe voice is dead and buried. It went to heaven on a sunbeam.”
    â€œI’ll tell you one thing’s for certain, old pal. We’ll never forget today.”
    â€œGlad you’re with me, buddy.”
    The running men shake hands again. They are deep in the outfield now and Russ feels an ache in every joint. The clubhouse windows catch the flash of the popping bulbs inside.
    In the box seats across the field Edgar sets his hat at an angle on his head. It is a dark gray homburg that brings out the nicely sprinkled silver at his temples.
    He has the Bruegel folded neatly in his pocket and will take these pages home to study further.
    Thousands remain in the stands, not nearly ready to leave, and they watch the people on the field, aimless eddies and stirrings, single figures sprinting out of crowds. Edgar sees someone dangling from the wall in right-center field. These men who drop from the high walls like to hang for a while before letting go. They hit the ground and crumple and get up slowly. But it’s the static drama of the dangled body that Edgar finds compelling, the terror of second thoughts.
    Gleason is on his feet now, crapulous Jack all rosy and afloat, ready to lead his buddies up the aisle.
    He rails at Frank. “Nothing personal, pal, but I wonder if you realize you’re smelling up the ballpark. Talk about stinko. I can smell you even with Shor on the premises. Usually with Shor around, blind people are tapping for garbage cans in their path.”
    Shor thinks this is funny. Light comes into his eyes and his face goes crinkly. He loves the insults, the slurs and taunts, and he stands there beaming with balloonhead love. It is the highest thing that can pass between men of a certain mind—the stand-up scorn that carries their affections.
    But what about Frank? He says, “It’s not my stink. It’s your stink, pal. Just happens I am the one that’s wearing it.”
    Says Gleason, “Hey. Don’t think you’re the first friend I ever puked on. I puked on better men than you. Consider yourself honored. This is a form of flattery I extend to nearest and dearest.” Here he waves his cigarette. “But don’t think