Underworld

Cotter Martin is a 14-year-old Black boy who lives in New York in 1951. He attends a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. Most people who jump the turnstiles are caught, but as he leaps over, Cotter feels a surge of energy that assures him that he is “uncatchable.” As the police chase after the other men, he disappears in the crowd. Cotter sits next to Bill Waterson, an affable white businessman. The two men talk and share a pack of peanuts. Waterson buys two sodas for them, and they discuss how much they love baseball. They both hope that the Giants will win, even though the Dodgers are in the lead.

The stadium is packed with 34,000 fans, but there are 20,000 empty seats. Among the attendees are Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. An agent arrives to tell Hoover about the Soviet Union’s recent successful test detonation of a nuclear bomb at an undisclosed location. As the “absolutely deadlocked” game approaches the finale, the “uncertain” fans throw scraps of paper onto the field. Pages from Life magazine, including advertisements for consumer goods and a reprint of The Triumph of Death, a painting of “skeleton armies on the march” (41), fly through the air.