This Side of Brightness

by Colum McCann

  Walker takes off his shirt and cushions his wife’s head, then stands and slowly walks over to the Buick. Tears streaming down his face, he smashes his fist down on the hood until it is collandered with ridges and hollows.

  Later that evening, Hoofer McAuliffe is on the street, casually pointing out the dents in his vehicle. The clothes and diapers that Eleanor had been washing for her grandson have already been picked up from the ground.

  * * *

  He removes the metal head from the shovel at the foot of the door and leaves a note upon it.

  I might be gone for a while, Pa. Please look after Louisa and the baby for me. I’ll be in the place you told me about when you were young. Don’t tell nobody. I’ll be back when the clouds clear.

  Tucking the shaft of wood into the inside of his overcoat, Clarence picks up his cardboard suitcase, goes down the stairs two at a time, melds into the 4 A.M. darkness, rain slanting yellow in the streetlights of Harlem.

  * * *

  The feel of the wood in his hands and the way it crushes the skull, like opening up a cantaloupe with a single blow. McAuliffe slumps down against the fender of his smashed-up Buick. Clarence pounds again with the handle of the shovel. Some blood jets out and hits the corner of his eyepatch. He says to the corpse, “We forget we have blood till it comes from us, motherfucker.”

  As he rounds a corner, running at full speed, a whistle is blown and he is knocked backward with a police nightstick. But the adrenaline is huge and unstoppable in him, and he rises from the ground with the shovel handle swinging. There is a mighty strength in his aim at the white cop’s jaw.

  Hoofer McAuliffe and the white cop, in their sudden silence, are left with the unbelieving looks of men searching for the beat of their own gone hearts.

  * * *

  Clarence rocks between the cars of a southbound train. Adrenaline still shoots through his twenty-three-year-old heart. A cooling wind brings him relief, the heat unbearable in the rear of the train. He props his sinewy arms between the carriages and goes with the sway. Looking down at the bloodstains on his shoes, Clarence spits on each, smears the blood on the back of his dungarees.

  It is morning and the world is heating up already as the train whips out of a tunnel and merges into the gray and green of New Jersey: two boys fighting on a heap of coal, ravaged cars on cinder blocks at the edge of pasturelands, warehouses, a church steeple reaching up in the distance.

  The conductor takes his ticket. “Georgia?” he asks.

  Clarence doesn’t reply.

  “Change in Washington.”

  Clarence stares at the railway man’s badge.

  “Hey,” says the conductor, staring into Clarence’s face. “The words ‘Yes sir’ mean anything to you?”

  No reply.

  “Hey, uppity nigger, I’m talking to you.”

  After a silence, he leans into Clarence’s face. “You goddamn sumbitches, all of y’all. You listening to me? You’re a goddamn uppity sumbitch. Understand?”

  And in his weariness the young man says, “Yessir.”

  When the conductor leaves, Clarence leans against the carriage, puts his cheek to the cool of the metal. He could fall right now, land on the tracks and lie there, snakelike, and wait for the segmentation of his body, let the wheels chop him into the tiniest of pieces, let his head travel a mile from his feet, slice his heart into two pumping pieces, scatter his toes to the different winds.

  Looking down at the spinning gravel at his feet, Clarence imagines his mother coming home with the laundry as she was supposed to do. In the vision, she sits on the sofa beside her grandson and jokingly puts a finger in the child’s belly button. Then she goes back across the room to the kitchen, where she removes the cosy from the pot and pours herself a cup of tea. She drops the sugar cube in and lets the spoon whirl and says, “Ahhh, now that’s the medicine.” She brings the steaming cup across the room and sits on the edge of the chair and, smelling of tea leaves, she leans over her grandson and says, “He’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Clarence lets the vision drift with the miles—grain elevators, smoke from slag heaps, whitewashed farmhouses.

  He reaches Brookwood Station in Atlanta the following day, wanders way beyond Peachtree Street. The city is a conundrum of highways and overpasses. Sapped of all energy, he stumbles along, feet slapping languidly through puddles. On the outskirts of the city, a new concrete ramp reaches out into empty air. Men work on the ramp, dangling on ropes in midair. He watches their antics in the rain, then raises his head, sees the sun break out behind dolorous clouds.

  In the afternoon he finds a Laundromat off Hunter Street, and the dark-skinned manager lets Clarence sit in the bathroom in his underwear until his clothes are ready. There is a newspaper on the floor. He picks it up. On the front page there is a report of a fourteen-year-old lynched in Greenwood, Mississippi, for whistling at a white woman. Maybe the boy whistled and maybe he didn’t. Maybe his body is still whistling. Maybe he will whistle forever. The face stares out at him from the newspaper, and Clarence’s hands shake.

  After an hour the Laundromat manager hands his clothes around the door. Clarence finds the blood stains have left small copper patches on his dungarees. Dressed, he gazes long and hard at himself in a cracked mirror, then wanders across the street to a barbershop where a red-and-white pole swirls merrily. He gets his hair shorn down to the scalp and the black barber says to him, “There ya go, bud, good as new.”

  Clarence looks at himself in the barber’s mirror. “Shave me,” he says.

  The hot wet towel is placed on his neck and the cream is lathered on. The razor feels cool against his throat. He imagines it going deeper and deeper into his neck, right down to the tendons and the veins and beyond—when the veins are open and deep, his baby boy will swim down into his bloodstream, his groin, his brain, his heart.

  The towel grows cool as the razor slides.

  “Even better’n new,” says the barber, scraping the side of the razor on the hip pocket of his apron. Clarence leaves a small tip and wanders on, looking at his reflection in shop windows, seeing a person he doesn’t want to be.

  Later that week, in the main post office on Forsyth Street, he searches for his own face on the WANTED posters but sees only the eyes of other men, all of them dark and grim, expectant of death. He walks the city streets of Atlanta, weeping.

  * * *

  Four policemen stand in Walker’s room as he sits holding Louisa’s hand. Louisa is shaking. She hugs her baby high, hiding a milk stain on her dress. Maxine and Deirdre lie sobbing on the beds.

  “So,” says one of the cops, “where d’you think he might go?”

  “No idea.”

  “He won’t get too far with one messy eye. Not too many men running around with eye patches. You listening, Walker?”

  “Mister Walker to y’all.”

  “Where is he?”

  Walker looks at the ceiling and remembers himself in the canoe when young, moving beneath the cypress trees that blocked out most of the summer light, reaching up to grab Spanish moss, his gnarled paddle making long swishes in the water, a silence to his movement, a quiet intent, a slight twist of the wrist at the end of each stroke to redirect the canoe, the paddle barely making a splash, bending himself into the work of repetition, the moss coming away softly in his fingers, the Okefenokee screaming around him.

  The cop leans over and stares in Walker’s face. “We need you to tell us where you think your son might go. He’s in a high heap of shit.”

  “Is he now?”

  “We can help him.”

  “I bet you can.”

  “You’re asking for it, old man.”

  Walker remembers rounding a corner, holding a flaming branch with the resin burning, seeing a huge sweep of white in the night air, a whole flock, and a solitary sentinel at the edge of the swamp, not moving.

  “If you find out, you better tell us. It’s for his own good.”

  “Sure it is
,” says Walker.

  “Don’t get smart with me, old man.”

  A poisoned silence floats through the room.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  “I’d say he’s probably done made his way to California. He was always talking about California. Ain’t that right, Louisa?”

  “That’s right,” she says.

  “Little town by the name of Mendicino, I believe. He was always talking about Mendicino. Don’t know what it is attracted him there. But he was always yapping on about Mendicino. Sun and waves. He was partial to the idea of sun and waves.”

  “Gonna get himself a suntan, was he?”

  “I’m not rightly sure he needs a suntan.”

  “California?”

  “That’s where he’ll be.”

  The cop moves toward the door. “I know you’re lying.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” says Walker. “If you hurt him I’ll hurt you back. That’s a promise.”

  “I’d say that’s a threat.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” Walker says again. “Please don’t hurt him.”

  * * *

  Three weeks after the cops’ visit, Walker borrows fifty dollars from Rhubarb Vannucci and takes a train down to Atlanta, where the police have found Clarence.

  Walker bends his big frame into the heat, finds himself sipping at a water fountain marked Colored. Trees are in blossom all over the city. Febrile grackles sing out loudly on the branches. Women in pastel hats shade their faces from car fumes. Just outside the train station, he sees a young boy shining shoes. The boy looks up at him and smiles. Walker tries hard to remember where he has seen the boy before, but can’t.

  He walks, swinging his shoulders solidly, unwilling to telegraph his grief.

  Mosquitoes seem to gather in prayer outside the window of his hotel room. The heat is unbearable, and he opens the window. The insects swarm in, congregate around him. He squashes a few of the mosquitoes, and a little smudge of blood is left on his fingers. A welt swells up beneath his eye. Standing at the window, his sight is fuzzy: trees make shapes and a bar sign blurs. He leaves the hotel and goes across to the bar, orders a shot of whiskey. A sultry jazz singer looks at him from a stage, moves a pink tongue around her lips salaciously. Walker all of a sudden remembers the face of the boy shining shoes at the train station and realizes that he might have been looking at himself when young. He puts his face into the cups of his hands, knocks over the full whiskey, shoves his way out into the night.

  Staggering across the street, he claps a flying moth. He flicks the remnants of dust off the palms of his hands. A threadlike antenna remains on his palm and he blows it off, remembering another moth in a different room months ago.

  In the morning he wakes to birdsong and makes his way to the mortuary. Not even the hands of the morticians can disguise the beating Clarence must have received, his jaw slopped sideways, his cheekbones bloated blue with bruises, a new eye-patch over an even deeper wound in the socket. The police tell him that Clarence was shot dead while trying to escape through a junkyard on the outskirts of the city. Clarence, they say, robbed a liquor store at knifepoint and ran into the yard to take cover, was shot as he slipped on oil drums. The knife was recovered at the scene, and Clarence’s pockets were stuffed with money.

  “That’s what happens to a cop killer,” they say.

  Walker stares at his son’s accusers.

  “You know,” says one of the cops, “I got myself one of your kind in my family tree.” He gouges at his teeth with a toothpick. “Just a swinging away from the highest branch.”

  Walker’s eyes are misty with tears. He fights them back, bites his lip.

  When he returns to his hotel room he falls on the dirty sheets, lets the evening’s mosquitoes rave around him. He doesn’t even flinch as they bite. He thinks for a moment about revisiting the Okefenokee of his boyhood but decides against it. When he boards the train to New York his face is puffy with red welts. A conductor shoves him toward the rear carriage. From the train window he watches the landscape of America flow by.

  * * *

  Back home, he sleeps in Clarence’s bed. Then he moves across and arranges the pillows beside the ghost of his wife. All three of them lie down together. The pulse of Louis Armstrong sounds out from the record player, the notes moving tenderly through his torment.

  * * *

  On a pale weekday he buries Clarence, laying him beside Eleanor in a Bronx graveyard. His daughters and Louisa stand behind him.

  Walker kneels at the stone but doesn’t say any prayers. Prayers strike him as flaccid things now—useless supplications curling out only as far as the throats of men before falling back down into their stomachs. Spiritual regurgitation. He ignores the nearby gravediggers, who stand fat and complacent over the freshly dug hole. Walker takes a shovel, throws the first clodful over his son’s coffin. He steps back and gathers his daughters in his arms, and they walk together to a waiting car.

  He has hired the car to drive his family home. The girls clamber in, but Walker decides to go alone. Dull gray birds escort him as he walks through the Bronx all the way across the bridge to his street in Harlem—a five-hour walk—where he tells himself that he will strap his body to the sofa, elbow on the armrest, for the rest of his years. Even the idea of revenge strikes him as hollow.

  Walker stares at the ceiling, his body a dark room of nothingness, empty, vacant. He recognizes the necessity of sorrow—if sorrow fades, so too does memory. He keeps the sorrow alive for the sake of memory, evoking Eleanor’s movements, rehearsing them in his brain. His head spins through their gymnastics of love. Small shocks of remembered bliss. He aggregates the beauty of their lives together, weighs it in his fingers. Even the dullest moments over teacups are replayed in his mind. He does the same with the memory of Clarence, then combines them, wife and son standing together at the piano, where he talks to them.

  “Eleanor,” he whispers, “you’re looking good.”

  “Hey, Clar, go get your momma her hairbrush.”

  “I’ve never seen you look so fine, honey.”

  “Thank you, son,” he says, reaching for a hairbrush that isn’t there. “Give us a moment together, your momma and me.”

  And, after a silence, “He’s growing up like a flower, ain’t he, El?”

  The days go by with a vicious lethargy. Even light is slow to fade. The future feels postponed by an eternal present. Walker develops a horror of time. He turns the clock face against the wall. The only day he recognizes is Sunday, because of the sight of churchgoers out the window. He resents their white teeth, their joy, the comfortable tuck of Bibles under their arms. As they walk, the gospel music seems already to be rising in them, the way they move on the tips of their toes. They will go to church and lift their voices to some useless heaven. A unified song of self-deception. God only exists in happiness, he thinks, or at least in the promise of happiness.

  Walker turns his Bible spine in against the wall, bricks it in with other books, unread. Let them go on down to their ridiculous churches. Let them sing to their ceilings. You won’t find me beseeching no Jesus. I’m finished with all that.

  He doesn’t move to the record player, just lets himself sink down into the folds of the couch. Beside him, a spittoon grows full and brown with chewing tobacco. He spits out a decayed tooth one morning, thinks nothing of it. He shoves aside plates of food. His daughters and Louisa bring him cups of tea that grow cold at his elbow. The window is shut to the sounds of the street. Walker mutters invectively to himself. Over the weeks, he grows wasted and haggard, and huge bags develop under his eyes. The spittoon overflows and stains the armrest. He shoos the preacher away from the door and asks his daughters to tell Rhubarb Vannucci that he isn’t home in case the Italian comes calling.

  He hardly even looks at his grandson in the crib; the boy is just a meaningless blur of flesh.

  At night, Louisa tries to get him to go down the hallway to the bath, to wash, but he becomes a brick in her h
ands and she gives up. He welcomes himself back to the sofa. “This is where I’ll lie,” he says. He might let his body melt into the cushions and stay there forgotten, like one of his dropped coins. He might reach down for the decayed parts of himself and throw them out the window to the ghost of Clarence below on the stoop: bits of arms, legs, fingers, and an eyeball as a currency for the gone.

  He notices that his daughters have begun to stay out late at night, but he says nothing. Louisa remains in the apartment with him, bottles of tequila in a ring around her. The alcohol lies heavy on her breath. She spends her time fashioning ancestral beads to sell at a market. Between them there is a contagion of hush.

  She has decided to call the baby Clarence Nathan, after his father and grandfather. But Walker dismissed the name with a wave of his arm, glad of the pain it brings him. “Call him whatever the hell y’all want.”

  Louisa works on a dream catcher, which she suspends above the boy’s head. The dream catcher is made with twigs in the shape of a triangle, crisscrossed with yarn; a dogtooth and beads and a feather tied onto the threads.

  “It’ll catch his dreams,” she says.

  “They’ll go nowhere else,” says Walker.

  “Don’t be so bitter. I can’t stand it.”