This Side of Brightness

by Colum McCann

  “Really?”

  “The doctors saved his ass, though.”

  “Did he have a glass eye too?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  They stop and look up at the sheet of gray concrete that coats the ceiling. Power leans on his cane and takes a flask of bourbon from his pocket. He sips at it, passes it back to Walker.

  “Unc, is the river up there?”

  “Yeah. Right above us.”

  “Wow! Can I go fishing?”

  “None of your wisecracks,” says Power. “See here? A guy called Sarantino broke his finger in the bolt fastener right there. Popped it in, almost lost the damn thing. After wiping sweat off his forehead. His finger slipped. You can’t imagine how hot it was every day.”

  “It’s cold now, Unc.”

  “I know it’s cold now, but it was hotter than hell.”

  “Can I put a penny on the tracks?”

  “Why?”

  “To make it flat when the train comes.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “When the train comes we’ll be gone.”

  “Awww.”

  “We’ll have some silence now.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Someone’s going to say a prayer.”

  “A prayer, Uncle Sean?”

  Power points at Walker. “Yeah, a prayer.”

  “The nigger?”

  “He ain’t a nigger, son, he’s a sandhog.” Power coughs. “Hush up now, son, and listen.”

  A few of the men and their families drift off and form their own prayer groups.

  “Go ahead, Nathan,” says Power. “Hit us with some holy stuff.”

  Walker clasps his hands together, asks the people to bow their heads and, instead of saying a prayer, to silently remember all the dead.

  Walker unclasps his hands and puts his fist over his heart. Vannucci stands stockstill. Power closes his eyes. A two-minute silence is interrupted only by Power’s nephew scuffing his shoes on the track until he is smacked on the head by his uncle. The boy lowers his head sheepishly.

  The remainder is like the silence of having forgotten something very important, then remembering it and reliving it all at once.

  Once the prayer is finished with a loud “Amen,” Power moves down the tunnel, sipping from the silver flask as he goes. His limp is more pronounced now as he moves, and he is happy to have the other men’s wives look at him with sympathy.

  The baseball pitching resumes. A bottle of sarsaparilla is shared among the children: a great treat, they swish it around in their mouths before swallowing. Some women place flowers at the edge of the tracks, and more candles are lit beside the bouquets. Midway in the tunnel the men shake hands, welders searching out other welders, waterboys chatting with other water-boys. The muckers know each other from the day the two halves of the tunnel met. Bottles of champagne were smashed against the Greathead Shield that day. The men share cigarettes—no compressed air now, so the smokes last a long time.

  Power’s nephew goes running up the tunnel to throw the baseball with the other boys.

  After a while the three muckers are left standing alone. At eye level in front of Walker is the spot that was once riverbed, where he was stuck before he was blown free. He reaches his hand out and tries to catch air in his palm, as if he could hold it, taste it, stop it, re-create the moment. Vannucci stands beside him. Above them somewhere, they are not sure where, is the body of Con O’Leary.

  “Wish Con could see that baseball flying,” says Power. “He sure’s hell would like that. He’d get one helluva kick from that.”

  “He sure would.”

  Another silence and they stare up at the ceiling, each of them with their hands in their pockets.

  “Y’all know why pirates used to wear gold earrings?” says Walker.

  “Why’s that?”

  “So’s they could buy a plot of land from God.”

  “That’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard,” says Power.

  “Well, be that as it is, but it’s true.”

  “I hope I don’t go to no watery grave,” says Power. “Or if I do, at least let it be bourbon.”

  Walker steps away toward the side of the tunnel, then says, “Hey, you two! Come over here.”

  As the muckers come forward, they watch Walker dig down deep in his pocket and take out a ring of hammered gold. Walker rolls the ring between his thumb and forefinger for a moment, holds it to his eye, spies the tunnel through it, and then tosses it to the side of the tracks. The three muckers watch it roll and settle in the pebbles.

  “Maura O’Leary gave me that to leave here,” says Walker.

  “She what?”

  “She wanted it left here.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” says Power. “She just gave it to you to throw away?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s hers, ain’t it?”

  “It is the ring of Maura?” asks Rhubarb, the Italian having learned some rudiments of the language since the accident.

  “Sure is. Her wedding band. She took it off her finger this morning and gave it to me. Said she didn’t have the strength to come down here herself. Asked me to do it for her. Leave it here for Con. So’s he can buy his land from God.”

  “Well, knock me over,” says Power. “That’s a fine woman.”

  “Sure as hell is.”

  “How’s what’s-her-name? The youngster?”

  “Eleanor,” says Walker. “The child’s growing like a weed.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She’ll be up and walking soon.”

  They stand complicitous in the silence and nod awkwardly, then glance away.

  “My God, look at that,” mumbles Walker.

  “What?”

  “Look at them candles,” he whispers.

  “Which candles?”

  “Look at them candles moving.”

  At the end of the tunnel, the boys have tucked away the baseball and are tossing lighted candles. One by one the lights go out and then flare again with struck matches, all throwing deep-walled shadows in the distance. Power’s nephew stretches out his arm to catch one of the candles. Walker watches as the lights dance back and forth in the distant darkness. The workers and their families are lit by the shimmers. Slowly the lights fade. Randall stands stockstill at the head of the tunnel, fuming. One of the sandhogs snips the red ribbon as he walks past. Randall reties it himself with shaking hands. The last few yellow lights wink. The final candle gets thrown and is gone. Walker grips his thighs through his threadbare pockets, coughs, and whispers to his two friends.

  “Them candles,” he says, “is about the prettiest goddamn thing I seen in my entire life.”

  * * *

  “They was just like fireflies.”

  “What’s a firefly?”

  “Y’all never seen a firefly?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “They flick like this. Ging ging.”

  Eleanor repeats the sound. “Ging ging?”

  “Well, kinda. Excepting they don’t make any noise. They just flick with light. Mostly when they’s rising up from the grass. Ya don’t much see ’em flicking when they go down. That’s just the way it is. And sometimes ya can take one and pin it on a thorn-bush, and it’ll glow there for hours.”

  “Ging ging.”

  “Ging gingaroo.”

  “You’re strange, Mister Walker.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Ging ging.”

  “Ging gingaroo.”

  * * *

  He works the various tunnels of Manhattan, sometimes digging, sometimes blasting, sometimes toiling again with underwater jobs, sometimes carting blocks or bags or cement or rubble—always the most dangerous work, at the head of a tunnel, the front hog. He works week in and week out, year after year, with a tolerable paycheck and a few dollars of danger money. No more spectacula
r resurrections and no more need of them—one life renewed, he knows, is enough. Walker’s body remains constant, the big arms, the tough rib cage, the ripple of muscle. After work, he likes to ride the subways on the way home. As always, he hangs his boots on the doorknob. He washes his clothes in whatever sink is around. Walker seldom even buys new shirts. Working boots are his only extravagance; he gets a new pair each year. Lying down on his bed, he listens to any music that comes over his wireless, rarely bothering to flip the dial unless there is the sure promise of jazz. In a decade of flappers, he doesn’t flap nor does he want to. He doesn’t search out drink when it is outlawed, but he accepts one gladly when it comes his way, mostly when he meets up with Sean Power: whiskey, grappa, apple cider, bootleg beer, tunnel gut rot.

  Happy enough, unhappy enough, lonely enough, alone enough, Walker is apt—like a man who spends a lot of time with himself—to laugh out loud for no apparent reason.

  Occasionally he ends up in a tunnel fight that is not of his making, and he only fights if he absolutely has to. Still, he flings a powerful punch, puts muscle into it. On the street, cops sometimes shake him down and he just lets it happen, knowing better than to say anything; they will beat him to a pulp if he opens his mouth. He puts money away in a Negro bank—it gains less interest, but at least it is with his own and he feels it is safe. On his twenty-fifth birthday he splurges on a Victrola in a Harlem store owned by a famous trumpet player, pays two dollars more than he would elsewhere, but no matter. Let it roll. Let it sound on out. Two years later, he buys an even finer model with a special stylus. He carts it home and winds the handle carefully. Jazz music erupts around him, and he does wild solitary dances around his room.

  Women come and go, but mostly they go—they cannot live with the idea of Walker dying in the tunnels, and besides he is shy and quiet and, although handsome, insists on wearing his ridiculous red hat and the overalls.

  Only his rooms change through the years: the hotel in Brooklyn; an attic in southern Manhattan at the edge of the old Five Points tenements, bird shit obscuring a skylight; an apartment near a slaughterhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, with taunts ringing out in brogues around him; a clapboard house off Henderson Street in Jersey City, with the smell of bootleg liquor seeping out from a shack next door; back to Manhattan, to a Colored rooming house around the corner from the Theresa Hotel bar; then further north to a cold-water room on 131st Street. The one and only constant in his life is his Sunday visits downtown to Maura and Eleanor O’Leary. Walker notes the passing of years by the way the tunnel dust settles down in his lungs; by the wrinkles that appear at Maura O’Leary’s eyes; by the deepening curiosity of Eleanor as she leans forward and touches his elbow lightly while he tells his stories.

  * * *

  “See,” he says to them. “See. They was building the very first tunnel in the city way back in the 1860s. A man by the name of Mister Alfred Ely Beach was in charge. Businessman. What’s that they calls it? Entrepreneur. Bow tie up around his neck. Fatter than Randall, even. And Mister Beach got to thinking that maybe the thing to do was to put trains underground instead of upground. No more trains in the air, only in the earth. And nobody in the city had ever thought of that before excepting this here Mister Beach. He was pretty goddamn smart—’scuse me, ma’am, but he was.”

  Walker tips at a hat that isn’t there, and the two women smile.

  “So he tried to get a permit for digging a tunnel under Broadway, down there by City Hall. Right under their noses. But he can’t get a permit no matter which way he tries, no way in hell they gonna give it to him. They’re making money from the El. They don’t wanna lose that. This is the 1860s, like I said. They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart. So he got himself some workers and they dug in secret right underneath Devlin’s clothing store down there on Murray Street. At nighttime they’d go smuggling the dirt back through the rows of clothes. Wheeled the dirt down the street while everyone else was sleeping. Nobody except the crew knew what was going on. Story is, the foreman was called the Tapeworm. They called him that ’cause he once cut out a digger’s stomach with a knife after the digger told the secret that they was building the tunnel.”

  Teacups let out steam on the kitchen table while Walker talks.

  “Anyways, they put in frescoes and tiles and all sorts of beautiful paintings and made that into the loveliest tunnel you ever did see. Just about the most gorgeous thing. That’s no lie. And right at the front they put in a fountain in the waiting room, a great big fountain with water piped up. They’d never seen nothing like it before. And ol’ Alfred Ely Beach he decided they needed a grand piano so they could welcome the customers. Just like this one here, I s’pose.”

  He nods across the room at Con O’Leary’s piano.

  “And then ol’ Alfred Ely Beach sent his first train through. It must have been a day! Story is, he hired a lady, all in fancy clothes, to come down and play the piano, and all the customers arrived and saw the fountain and heard the music and must have thought they about died and went to heaven. Anyways, they ran that train through the tunnel with pneumatic pressure, two big fans at each end pushing the train along. I don’t rightly know, but I reckon it might have been up to quarter of a mile or so. They ran it for a few years but they didn’t make no money, and ol’ Beach he was losing his shirt so he decided to close the damn thing down. So he bricked it off. Eighteen seventy-something. After a few years everyone forgot there was ever a tunnel down there in the first place. Even the men who made the maps, they forgot to put it on.”

  Walker looks in his teacup as if he’s weighing his words there.

  “Go on,” says Eleanor.

  “And this is where the strangest thing happens. It about jiggers my mind to think on it, but it’s true.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  He pauses to take a mouthful of tea and drops an extra lump of sugar in the cup.

  “True as I’m sitting here and strange as that is. Only last week I heard it. A man crossed his heart on it and ol’ Rhubarb he swears it’s true too. They were digging again under Broadway, see. Mind, now, it’s sixty years later. And everyone done forgot about that old tunnel. They’re blasting away with dynamite. Doing cut-and-cover, where they put steel sheet over the street so as none of the rock flies up in the air. So they put in the dynamite and they clear the tunnel and then one of them lights the fuse. Out they go, up on the street, and wait for the blast. Not hardly talking to each other. Tired, I s’pose. Then it goes ahead, the dynamite, and does its job. Boom!”

  Eleanor jumps back in her seat.

  Walker laughs. “And the crew they all just go back down the ladders and into the tunnel. They’re walking with their scarves over their mouths to stop the dust. And one of them engineers goes first to make sure it’s safe, make sure there’d be no rocks falling on them. Sure enough, the tunnel’s looking good, and they all start getting that rubble out of there. Five of them. Shifting the big rocks backwards. Getting ready to put in roof supports. And all of a sudden one of them ups and screams, ‘Looky here!’ And he’s standing with a piece of tile in his hands. And they’re all thinking, Goddamn. ’Scuse me. But that’s what they’re thinking. Goddamn it all to hell, where did this tile come from? And then another one of them boys picks up another tile and then a piece of a face like from a building, what you call it?”

  “Gargoyle,” says Maura.

  “Gargoyle, yeah, he picks up a piece of gargoyle, and now all of them are saying that word as loud as can be too. Goddamn. ’Scuse me, ma’am. But that’s how they musta been talking.”

  Eleanor, fourteen years old, leans forward with her elbows on the table and her face propped up in her hands.

  “Then that crew reaches in to pick off more rocks, and suddenly they hit air. Nothing there! Not a thing! So they crawl their way through that gap in the tunnel until they can stand and stretch! Now,
these men, they’re used to bending all day long and back again, and here they is, standing up! Tiles and paintings all around them and a train track at their feet! So they go, all five of them, walking along and not a one of them believing their eyes. Deeper and deeper and then they see that ol’ fountain—’course there’s not any water coming from it, but it’s there, that ol’ fountain and way behind it, still, that grand piano! No kidding. The piano! Covered in dust. Must about have given them heart attacks. And one of them workers, he lifts the lid of the piano and commences himself to playing, and all the men they gather around, holding their lanterns up above the keys. Ain’t none of them got a note in their heads, and I don’t know what song they was singing, but I s’pose it don’t matter. They stood around in that ol’ tunnel until the inspector came down and saw them shouting and laughing and singing over that piano.”

  The women sit speechless over cold cups of tea, a smile breaking at the edges of Eleanor’s mouth.

  “A piano underground?” she says. “My God.”

  “Eleanor!” says Maura. “You know I told you not to say things like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like my God.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  They sit quietly until Walker says, “But that’s something else now, ain’t it?”

  Maura nods. “It sure is.”

  “Could fool with a man’s mind if he like to let it.”

  “Sure could.”

  “An underground piano.”

  “My God Almighty,” says the girl again.

  And all three of them start laughing.

  * * *

  Eleanor writes him a note: Meet me under the billboard for Wills cigarettes at six.

  She arrives early, in a yellow muslin dress once worn by her mother. Passing men eye her long red hair. She avoids their stares and looks along the street. When Walker shows up she takes his hand, but he quickly lets it go and steps behind her at two paces, tentative and nervous, saying nothing. He walks in her shadow. The streets are grayed by fog. Motorcars throw fumes into the grayness. At the head of the tunnel the foreman—his face fretted with acne—says she shouldn’t be accompanied by a Negro into the darkness.