by Colum McCann
* * *
Clarence Nathan has often seen his grandfather rifle through his mother’s clothes, taking out small packages and flushing them down the toilet. Louisa comes home and rummages in the bowl with a bent coat hanger, finds nothing. She moves through the apartment, waving the hanger like a weapon. She threatens to leave, says the heroin comes from a treatment program; she needs to let it fade gently from her body. There is talk of South Dakota, a bus journey, a plane trip, but she only portages her bones between the street and the apartment. Her face is brown as leather, with an array of wrinkles. The only thing of color she’s seen in years is the rise of red up a plastic tube, a mistake when she draws the hypodermic needle back too far.
“I need a loan,” she says, late one night.
“No more loans, I told you.”
“I need it for groceries.”
“We got enough groceries.”
“Don’t you know I have to feed you? You know what it’s like trying to feed a family?”
“You don’t even feed yourself. Excepting that other shit.”
“Don’t say shit.” She closes her eyelids. “I need it, Claren. Please.”
“Where you gonna get medicine three in the morning?”
“It’s just a loan. Please.”
“He’ll kill me,” he says, nodding at the sleeping form of Walker.
“He doesn’t have to know.”
She takes his face in her hands and rubs her shaking fingers tenderly along his cheeks.
“No, Momma. I’m sorry.”
“It’s the last time,” she says. “I swear on the Bible.”
“Momma, don’t do this to me.”
“I’ll get a job tomorrow.”
The whites of her eyes, large and beseeching. A terrible need in the quake of her fingers. She looks at him as if he could crush her, snap her, dissolve her, create her.
“Please,” she says, putting her hands close to the whirling blade of an electric fan, no cover on the fan. “I’m begging you. Please.”
She pulls her hands back from the fan at the last minute and then she hangs her head, closes her lips, purses her mouth.
“I suppose you’d rather see me on the street.”
“Momma.”
“My own son. Putting me out on the street.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Then how am I s’posed to get medicine?”
He sighs, hangs his head.
“Did you know that the imprints of bird feet—”
“Momma.”
“—are the perfect thing for making peace symbols?”
“You’re high, Momma.”
“They are, though, they’re perfect.”
“You’re talking crazy shit, Momma.”
“You draw a little circle around them. Think about it. I’ll show you. A perfect circle. Like this.” She makes a circle with her finger against his rib cage, scrapes three lines like a bird print within the circle, cocks her head sideways, says, “Don’t put me out on the streets. Please. I know too much to be on the streets. You know how I feel about losing your father.”
Clarence Nathan reaches under the mattress where he keeps his money and palms her a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill. She smiles, shoving the bill into the opening at the breast of her blouse.
“I won’t never forget it,” she says.
She leaves after kissing him fluently on the forehead. He slams his fist into the palm of his hand.
Clarence Nathan sleeps on the fire escape; he has been told that his father used to do this. He is not bothered by the noise from below: police sirens, record players sounding out through open windows, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown. His body is squeezed up in the small space, his forearms wrapped around his knees. Sometimes the night is punctuated by gunshots. Or the blare of a musical car horn. Or couples shouting as they lean out of windows. A landscape of loving and hating. A palpable viciousness in the air. And yet a tenderness too. Something about this part of the world seems so alive that its own heart could burst from the accumulated grief. As if it all might suddenly stumble under the gravity of living. As if the city itself has given birth to the intricacies of the human heart. Veins and arteries—like his grandfather’s tunnels—tumbling with blood. And millions of men and women sloshing that blood along the streets.
Clarence Nathan has often wondered what it might be like to have acute hearing, to listen to that blood slapping against the skinbanks of bodies, that symphony of misery and love.
Down below, he can see his mother passing under the flitting light of street lamps, and she looks so thin, with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering, that her slacking flesh seems to make her retreat into the girl she must once have been.
* * *
A few weeks later he is slinging chokers on the beams, on ground level, when word comes that there’s a phone call for him near one of the ironworkers’ shanties. He walks across the site, tapping out a rhythm against his thigh.
“It’s your momma,” Walker says. “Come on back.”
The door to the apartment opens before he knocks. Clarence Nathan’s eyes dart around the room. The gutted piano sits with its lid open. The couch is propped up against the window. A few wicker chairs are forlorn in the middle of the room, their top netting unraveling. Walker rises and grabs his grandson by the lapel and punches him, a slow punch, no power. But the young man falls backward onto the floor.
“Ya didn’t keep your promise, son.”
Clarence Nathan puts a finger to his mouth.
“Take a seat,” Walker says.
“Where’s Momma?”
Walker shakes his head.
“Where is she?”
“I knew it was gonna happen,” says Walker.
“What?” The young man pulls his knees to his chest and hugs his feet. “Where is she?”
“Get up off the floor.”
The young man rises, looks around the room, begins to cry, says, “I gave her all that money.”
“It don’t matter no more. When it’s over, it’s over, ya gotta accept that. It’s over.”
“It’s over,” says Clarence Nathan, not thinking about the words.
“Come on, give me that hand of yours.”
Clarence Nathan stretches out one hand and Walker lays his own shaking hand upon it. “Let’s say us a prayer.”
After a few minutes’ silence, Walker says, “I’m sorry I hit ya, son.”
The old man adjusts himself on the couch and takes a little tobacco from the pouch around his neck, stares at it, counts the grains. “Aw, shit,” he says eventually. He wipes at his eye, tries to drink from a teacup he knows has been long empty. “I was hoping she’d give it up.”
Clarence Nathan looks out the window. “It’s my fault. I gave her the money.”
“Don’t be feeling sorry for yourself, son. She done it to herself. That’s the worst thing a man can do. Feel sorry like that.”
Walker struggles up, dries his eyes, crosses the room.
“We gotta go down the funeral parlor. Make arrangements to get her back to South Dakota. She needs to be near that lakeside she talked ’bout.”
Clarence Nathan closes the buttons on his grandfather’s overcoat, helps him wrap a scarf around his neck, bends down to tie the old man’s shoes. They triple-lock the door and walk together down the stairs. Clarence Nathan steadies Walker as the old man holds on to the banisters. They emerge into sunlight. Clarence Nathan, still crying, removes his baseball hat and puts it on Walker’s head so the brim shades the old man’s eyes.
* * *
In Saint Nicholas Park on a mucky day, he shows Dancesca the trick of making a symbol from the foot of a bird. “See,” he says. “See. Draw a circle here. Just like this.”
* * *
Treefrog wakes in the rear cave when a rat scuttles across his ankles. He draws his knees to his chest and whistles for Castor, but she is not around. He wonders if it is night or day, if he has been dead or if he has just been asl
eep, or if he has been both, and if he may be both forever, dead and sleeping.
He lights another candle and tucks his maps back into their plastic bags. Rocking back and forth in the dark dampness, he waits for the sound of a train to tell him whether it’s morning or night. No trains between midnight and seven; after that, the Amtraks come every forty minutes. He singes the bottom of his beard with the lit candle, feels the heat at his chin, and waits almost an hour, curled into himself, his stomach rumbling. Nothing, so it must be night. He drops hot wax on the back of each thumb, where it hardens quickly. Then he presses his fingers into his left side to balance the pain in his liver. He still has some money left from Faraday’s funeral and he wonders, perhaps, if he should go and buy gin.
He moves out of the cave into his front room and feels drawn by the tunnel, swings down.
No light whatsoever. The purest and pitchest of black. Treefrog passes by Dean’s pile of trash and smells the human filth, steps away so he doesn’t get shit on his shoes.
Treefrog knocks against the baby stroller, full now with garbage. He stops and stares into the carriage, reaches out, and rocks it a little from side to side: it was the summer of 1976. Lenora was just born. She was so small. Her hair was fine and thin and dark. Her skin was smooth and mahogany. Clarence Nathan felt like his world had shifted equators, given him meaning, history. He spent hours just holding her. She would lie across his stomach and kick her tiny feet in the blankets. Dancesca lay with them. There was a new quality given to time—sometimes hours would slip away in simple staring at the child. They felt whole, full, brave, assured. Lenora’s helplessness was their depth. They moved together in a trinity, he, Dancesca, Lenora. Every Sunday he paid for a taxicab so that Walker could come and visit. They sat and watched baseball games together. The child slept on a cot close by. It was a time of sweet slowness, even when Lenora fussed and cried. One Sunday, Walker lifted Lenora out of her cot. He kissed the child’s forehead. He took her into the bathroom, where he had already filled the sink with warm water. Clarence Nathan watched. The old man was going to baptize the child—a mixture of his own religion and the history of Eleanor’s. Just before he lowered the child gently down into the sink, Walker whispered something in her ear. For a moment all was silent, and he dipped the baby in the water. The child cried a little, then stopped. Walker came out from the bathroom with a warm blanket wrapped around her. Later, he said, “I’m gonna bring Lenora for a walk.” Dancesca and Clarence Nathan watched from the window as the old man stepped into the street, pushing the baby carriage. By the side of a fire hydrant, Lenora’s pacifier dropped out. Walker bent down and, with difficulty, picked it up off the ground. The rubber end was dirty. He looked around for a moment, seemed confused. Then he stuck the pacifier in his own mouth to clean it. He bent over, gently inserting the nipple in the child’s mouth, and whispered something into Lenora’s ear. From his distance, Clarence Nathan knew exactly what his grandfather was saying to the child.
Treefrog spins away from the baby carriage, moves on, balancing on a rail, left foot right foot left foot right foot. A tremendous urge within him now to speak to someone, anyone, to say anything, to simply let words come from his throat, long and slow and honest. He pauses for a moment by Papa Love’s door and then decides against waking the old artist; he wouldn’t answer the door anyway.
A mumble sounds from Elijah’s cubicle and a small spill of light comes from under the door. Elijah must have reconnected the juice. Treefrog puts his ear to the cubicle and hears Angela crying. There is a sharp thud. The sound strikes Treefrog low in the stomach and rests there, gnawing at him. He takes the spud wrench out from his pocket. His throat is dry, his feet unsteady. He wants to open the door and burst in, but he holds himself back, paralyzed by inaction. The thumping and crying continue, and he hears Angela saying, in long high pathetic gulps, “Why you hurt the ones ya love, why you hurt the ones ya love?”
Treefrog remains at the door and knocks the spud wrench rhythmically into each palm. Then he hears Elijah move.
Slithering away from the cubicle, Treefrog stands beneath the grate at the opposite side of the tunnel. He waits for Elijah to emerge, but nothing happens. And he hears the thuds again, the whimper, the intake of Angela’s breath. Treefrog lets himself slide down along the wall until he is sitting on the tunnel gravel. Slowly, he removes his gloves and takes out his penknife. He presses the blade down against the palm of his hand. All this nothingness, he thinks. This cowardice. This solitary life as an ear—listening, always listening, only listening.
With the knife, he makes a nick in his right palm, then his left, is amazed to flick his lighter and see two thin streams of blood running parallel down his raised wrists. He shoves his overcoat sleeves high on his arms, and a small globule of red collects in the crook of each elbow.
Under the grate, looking upward, watching the irrelevant stars, Treefrog knows that the light hitting his eyes left years ago; there is nothing up there but the movement of the past, things long imploded and forever gone: it was years later, a Friday, and he finished his shift at the skyscraper, descended in the elevator, showered and tucked his hair into a short ponytail, and they were waiting outside in a brand-new rental car, a Ford. Walker had insisted on an American-made car. Dancesca got in the backseat with five-year-old Lenora. Clarence Nathan drove. It took them four days to reach South Dakota. Clarence Nathan had sent on hundreds of dollars for a gravestone, a twenty-dollar bill each week, but there was nothing in the graveyard except a plain wooden cross marked TURIVER. Louisa’s family had moved. Weeds were in bloom in the old shack where she had once lived. They went down to the lakeside together, all four of them. The lake was immense, the only movement that of a speedboat out in the middle of the water. They had brought food for a picnic, and they sat in silence over soggy cucumber sandwiches. The boat threw waves and a skier tumbled. For the first time all day they laughed, watching the skier vaulting through the air. Walker’s body was just about crippled with rheumatism by then, but he took young Lenora down by the lakeside and stretched one arm out and bent a knee and toed his foot out in the air and every movement was imitated by the child, and there wasn’t a stir in the sky or mud prints in the ground. They stayed like that, dancing. Clarence Nathan touched his wife’s arm, the South Dakota sun pouring down generously around them.
Treefrog hears a sudden startling thud and he opens his eyes, gets to his feet, feels for the spud wrench. The top hinge of the cubicle door cracks and the wood splinters.
Electric light slips out from the smashed door.
He wonders for a moment where exactly he is—in a tunnel or a car or by a lake—and then Angela stumbles from the cubicle, pushing at the broken door, her body heaving, her breath rapid.
Elijah follows her.
“No!” she shouts.
The bare lamp in the cubicle swings.
Elijah punches the back of her head and she stumbles again, turns, spins in the light, falls.
Angela crawls to her feet, blood from her mouth and blood from her eye and blood down her cheek. Even in the patch of pendular light, Treefrog can see that her body is a sad broken mess. She limps in the gravel near the edge of the tracks, her fur coat half on, her handbag swinging in the air to keep Elijah at bay. “No!” And then Treefrog comes out from the far darkness with the spud wrench tight in his fist.
Elijah—standing back from the range of Angela’s handbag—looks across the tracks, takes down the hood of his sweatshirt, says, “Look who’s here.” He beckons Treefrog with a curled finger. “Come on, man, come on, motherfucker.”
Angela whimpers by the tracks, the bag clutched to her chest. Treefrog is aware of every step he takes, as if he is floating through the dark.
The cubicle door swings back and forth and light leaks into the tunnel, licking into the dark corners, touching Treefrog’s body, sliding off once more, until the door stops swinging and he stands in a definite circle of light.
No need for balance, the pump
of certainty through him. He moves across the tracks and stops.
Elijah grins.
Treefrog grins back.
Elijah puts one foot out in front of the other, holds his fists up.
Treefrog steps closer.
Elijah makes a quick spin.
Treefrog steps back from the arc of Elijah’s kick, moves forward, ducks beneath the second kick.
Elijah’s leg slices above him as if in slow motion.
Treefrog’s body seems set on springs, and he rises from his crouch and the spud wrench swings upward and—with perfect accuracy—catches Elijah in the crotch. Elijah falls back against the cubicle, holding his balls. He cries out in agony and takes four huge gulps of breath.
Putting one hand on the ground, Elijah slowly uncoils, reaching for a knife in his back pocket.
Treefrog steps closer.
Elijah’s eyes grow wide. He prods the knife out, jabs with it.
Treefrog keeps coming.
The whites of Elijah’s eyes look huge.
The knife slices the air.
Treefrog steps aside.
Elijah’s body follows the curve of the knife.
Stepping into the created space, Treefrog grins. The swing of the spud wrench into Elijah’s elbow is swift and graceful, and the crack of bone echoes the splinter of the door, and the knife clatters to the ground.
When the spud wrench swings a second time, it catches Elijah on the shoulder and he lets out an animal howl, his face creased in terror. He totters, puts one hand to his elbow, the other to his testicles, and then the spud wrench swings again.
This time it catches Elijah’s knee, and in one smooth movement Treefrog kicks the knife away.
As Elijah falls, Treefrog plants his boot firmly into Elijah’s teeth and a monumental joy whips through him as Elijah’s head slams back against the broken door. Treefrog’s boot connects with Elijah’s crotch and the man accordions in massive pain and emits a groan that Treefrog thinks might reverberate off the walls and last forever in the tunnel.