by Colum McCann
When we got out into the street again, Albee was dozing in the van, a bit of spittle on his chin. “Goddamn it,” he muttered when the engine rumbled into life. “Pair of pussies, the two of ya.”
Corrigan pulled into the nursing home in the late afternoon, then dropped me off in front of the housing project. He had another job to do, he said; there was someone he had to see.
“It’s a little project I’m working on,” he said, over his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll see you later.”
He climbed in and touched something in the glove box of his van before he took off. “Don’t wait up for me,” he called. I watched him go, hand out the window, waving. He was holding something back, I knew.
It was pitch black when I saw him finally arriving back down among the whores alongside the Major Deegan. He gave out iced coffee from a giant silver canister that he kept in the back of the van. The girls gathered around him as he spooned ice into their cups. Jazzlyn wore a one- piece neon swimsuit. She tugged the back, snapped the elastic, edged close to him, gave the hint of a belly dance against his hip. She was tall, exotic, so very young she seemed to flutter. Playfully, she pushed him backwards.
Corrigan ran a circle around her, high- stepping. A scream of laughter.
She ran off when she heard a car horn blow. Around Corrigan’s feet lay a row of empty paper coffee cups.
Later he came back upstairs, thin, dark- eyed, exhausted.
“How was your meeting?”
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“Oh, grand, yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
“Out tripping the light fantastic?”
“Ah, yeah, the Copacabana, you know me.”
He collapsed on the bed but was up early in the morning to a quick mug of tea. No food in the house. Just tea and sugar and milk. He said his prayers, and then touched the crucifix as he went towards the door once more.
“Down to the girls again?”
He looked at his feet. “I suppose so.”
“You think they really need you, Corr?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”
The door swung on its hinges.
I’ve never been interested in calling out the moral brigade. Not my place. Not my job. Each to his own. You get what you create. Corrigan had his reasons. But these women disturbed me. They were light- years removed from anything I’d ever known. The high of their eyes. Their heroin sway. Their swimsuits. Some of them had needle marks at the back of their knees. They were more than foreign to me.
Down in the courtyard, I walked the long way around the projects, following the broken lines in the concrete, just to avoid them.
A few days later a gentle knock sounded on the door. An older man with a single suitcase. Another monk from the Order. Corrigan rushed to embrace him. “Brother Norbert.” He had come from Switzerland. Norbert’s sad brown eyes gladdened me. He looked around the apartment, swallowed deeply, said something about the Lord Jesus and a place of deep shelter. On his second day Norbert was robbed in the lift at gunpoint. He said he had gladly given them everything, even his passport.
There was a shine like pride in his eyes. The Swiss man sat in serious prayer for two solid days, not leaving the apartment. Corrigan stayed down on the streets most of the time. Norbert was too formal and correct for him. “It’s like he’s got a toothache and he wants God to cure it,” said Corrigan.
Norbert refused the couch, lay on the floor. He balked each time the door opened and the hookers came in. Jazzlyn sat in his lap, ran her fingers on the rim of his ear, messed with his orthopedic shoes, hid them behind the couch. She told him that she could be his princess. He blushed McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 37
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until he almost wept. Later, when she was gone, his prayers became high-pitched and frantic. “The Beloved Life was spared, but not the pain, the Beloved Life was spared but not the pain.” He broke down in tears. Corrigan was able to get Norbert’s passport back and he drove him out to the airport in the brown van to get a flight to Geneva. Together they prayed and then Corrigan dispatched him. He looked at me as if he expected me to be leaving also.
“I don’t know who these people are,” he said. “They’re my brothers, but I don’t really know who they are. I’ve failed them.”
“You should leave this hole, Corr.”
“Why would I leave? My life’s here.”
“Find somewhere with a bit of sunshine. You and me together. I’ve been thinking about California or somewhere like that.”
“I’m called here.”
“You could be called anywhere.”
“This is where I am.”
“How did you get his passport back?”
“Oh, I just asked around.”
“He was robbed at gunpoint, Corr.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to get hurt.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
I went to the chair by the window and watched the large tractor-trailers pulling up under the highway. The girls jostled to get at them. A single neon sign blinked in the distance: an advertisement for oatmeal.
“The edge of the world here,” said Corrigan.
“You could do something back home. In Ireland. Up north. Belfast.
Something for us. Your own people.”
“I could, yeah.”
“Or shake up some campesinos in Brazil or something.”
“Yeah.”
“So why stay here?”
He smiled. Something had gone wild in his eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was. He put his hands up close to the ceiling fan, as if he were about to thrust them in there, right up into the whirling blades, leave his hands there, watch them get mangled.
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in t h e r aw of mornings the girls stretched in a line along the block, though daylight thinned them out. After his morning matins, Corrigan went down to the corner deli to buy The Catholic Worker. Through the underpass, across the road, under the awning. Old men in their undershirts sat at the door, pigeons working bread crumbs at their feet. Corrigan came out carrying the paper tucked under his arm. I could see him as he crossed back, framed through the concrete eye of the underpass. Out of the shadows, he passed the hookers and they called to him in their singsong. It hit the scale on about three different notes. Corr— i- gan.
Cor— rig- gan. Caw- rig- gun.
He passed through the gauntlet. Jazzlyn stood chatting with him, her thumb hooked under the strap of her swimsuit. She looked like an old-time cop in the wrong body, snapping the thin, lime- colored straps against her breasts. She leaned close to him again, her bare skin almost touching his lapel. He did not recoil. She was getting a charge from it all, I could tell. The lean of her young body. The hard snap of the strap. Her nipple against the fabric. Her head tilting closer and closer to him.
As cars passed, she turned to watch them, and her morning shadow lengthened. It was like she wanted to be everywhere, all at once. She leaned closer still and whispered in my brother’s ear. He nodded, turned, and went back towards the deli, came out carrying a can of Coke. Jazzlyn clapped her hands in delight, took it from him, pulled the ring off, sauntered away. A row of eighteen- wheelers was parked along the expressway.
She propped her leg on the silver grille and sipped from the can, then suddenly threw the drink on the ground and climbed up into the truck.
Halfway in the door, she was already removing her swimsuit. Corrigan turned away. The cola lay in a black puddle in the gutter beneath her.
It happened times in a row, Jazzlyn asking him for a can of Coke, then throwing it to the ground when she found a mark.
I thought I should go down to her, negotiate a price,
and treat myself to whatever trick it was she was able for, grab the back of her hair, bring her face close to mine, that sweet breath, curse her, spit on her, for wringing out my brother’s charity.
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came home. I had taken to closing the locks in the afternoon, even though they pounded on the door.
“Why don’t they piss in their own houses, Corrigan?”
“Because they don’t have houses. They have apartments.”
“Why don’t they piss in their own apartments then?”
“Because they’ve got families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sons and daughters. They don’t want their families to see them dressed like that.”
“They’ve got kids?”
“Sure.”
“Jazz, she got kids?”
“Two,” he said.
“Oh, man.”
“Tillie’s her mother.”
I turned on him. I knew how it sounded. Step into that river, you don’t step out—no return. It came out in a torrent, how disgusting they were, sucking on his blood, all of them, leaving him thin, dry, helpless, taking the life out of him, leeches, worse than leeches, bedbugs that crawled from the wallpaper; he was a fool—all his religiosity, all his pious horse-shit, it came down to nothing, the world is vicious and that’s what it amounts to, and hope is nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes.
He pulled at a small thread on the sleeve of his shirt, but I caught his elbow.
“Don’t give me your shit about the Lord upholding all that fall and raising up all that be bowed down. The Lord’s too big to fit in their miniskirts. Guess what, brother? Look at them. Look out the window. No amount of sympathy is ever going to change it. Why don’t you cop on?
You’re just placating your conscience, that’s all. God comes along and sanctifies your guilt.”
His lips broke open a little. I waited but still he did not speak. We were so close together I could see his tongue move behind his teeth, flicking up and down like something nervous. His eyes were fixed and intent.
“Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They’re not Magdalenes. You’re just a bum among them. You’re looking for the poor man within? Why don’t you humble McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 40
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yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?”
I could see the small, oblong reflection of the white door in his pupils, and I kept thinking that one of his hookers, one of his holy failures, was going to walk in and I’d see her reflection in the flicker.
“Why don’t you embarrass the rich with some of your charity? Go sit on a rich woman’s step and bring her to God? Tell me this—if the poor really are the living image of Jesus, why are they so fucking miserable?
Tell me that, Corrigan. Why are they standing out there, displaying their misery to the rest of the world? I want to know. It’s just vanity, isn’t it?
Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s rubbish. You listening? Why don’t you take all those hookers of yours and have them go sing in the choir? The Church of the High Vision. Why don’t you have them sit in the front pews? I mean, there you go on your knees to all the tramps and the lep-ers and the cripples and dopeheads. Why don’t they do something? Because they want nothing but to suck you dry, that’s why.”
Exhausted, I laid my head against the windowsill.
I kept waiting for him to give me some sort of bitter benediction—
something about being weak towards the strengthless, strong against the powerful, there is no peace save in Jesus, freedom is given, not received, some catch- all to soothe me, but instead he let it all wash over him. His face did not betray a thing. He scratched the inside of his arm and nodded.
“Just leave the door open,” he said.
He went down the stairwell, footsteps echoing, around the edge of the courtyard, disappeared into the grayness.
I ran down the slick steps of the apartment building. Huge swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass on the bottom steps. Smells of piss and puke. Through the courtyard. A man held a pit bull on a training rope. He was teaching it to bite. The dog snapped at his arm: there were huge metal bracelets strapped across the man’s wrists. The snarls rolled across the yard. Corrigan was backing up his brown van, which he’d parked on the side of the road. I slapped the windows. He didn’t turn. I suppose I thought I might knock some sense into him, but after a moment the van was out of sight.
Over my shoulder the dog was snapping again at the man’s arm, but the man was staring at me, like I was the one trying to rip his wrists. A McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 41
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half- smile crawled over his face, malevolent and pure. I thought: Nigger. I couldn’t help it, but that’s what I thought: Nigger.
This place would ruin me: how did Corrigan stand it?
I wandered the neighborhood, hands down deep in my pockets, not on the pavement, but at the edge of parked cars, an altered perspective.
Taxis brushed by, close to my hip. The wind blew the smell of the subways up through the traffic. A hard, musty waft.
I went to the church on St. Ann’s. Up the broken steps, into the vestibule, past the holy- water font, into the dark. I was half expecting to see him there, head bowed, praying, but no.
Small red electric candles could be lit at the back of the church. I dropped a quarter inside and heard the deep rattle against the emptiness. My father’s ancient voice in my ear: If you don’t want the truth, don’t ask for it.
Corrigan came home to the apartment late that night. I left the door unlocked but he came in with a screwdriver anyway, began to take all the screws from the chains and locks. “Job to do.” He was lethargic and his eyes were rolling around in his head and I should have known then, but I didn’t recognize it. He knelt on the floor, eye- level with the doorknob.
The underside of his sandals were worn down. The sole had faded away, a little bubble of flat rubber. His carpenter pants were tied around his waist with a length of cord. They wouldn’t have stayed up on his hips otherwise. The long- sleeved shirt he wore was tight to his body and the bones of his ribcage were like some odd musical instrument.
He worked intently but he was using a flathead screwdriver for a Phillips head bolt and he had to prop the screwdriver sideways and angle it into the grooves.
I had already packed my bag and was ready to go, find a room, get a bartending job, anything, just get out of there. I pulled the couch into the center of the room under the ceiling fan, folded my arms, waited. The blades couldn’t cut through the heat. For the first time ever I noticed that Corrigan had a bald spot beginning in the back of his hair. I wanted to make some crack about it being a monkish thing but there was nothing between us anymore, no words or glances. He toiled away at the locks. A couple of screws fell on the floor. I watched the beads of sweat come down the back of his neck.
He rolled up his sleeve absentmindedly, and then I knew.
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if you t h in k you know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. I suppose it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me that Corrigan was scoring heroin: he had always done what the least of them had done. It was the perverse mantra of what he believed. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. There was no getting away from it. It was what he had done in Dublin too, though a different quarry of recklessness. He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he was
n’t getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn’t cure it, he took it on. He was shooting smack because he couldn’t stand the thought of others being left alone with the same terror.
He left his sleeve rolled up for an hour or so while he dealt with the locks. The bruises inside his arm were a deep blue. When he was finished, the door didn’t even click closed, just swung on the hinges.
“There,” he said.
He went into the bathroom, where I was sure I could hear him strapping an elastic band around his arm. He came out, long- sleeved again.
“Now leave the friggin’ door alone,” he said.
He fell soundlessly into bed. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but I woke to the usual thrum of the Deegan. The outside world was dependable. Engine noise and tire song. Huge metal sheets had been laid over some potholes. They boomed deeply when a truck ran over them.
It was an easy enough choice to stay: it wasn’t as if Corrigan was ever going to ask me to leave. I was up and shaved early in the morning to accompany him on his rounds. I stirred him from the blankets. He had a faint nosebleed and the blood was dark against his stubble. He turned away. “Put on the tea, will you?” When he stretched, he touched the wooden crucifix on the wall. It swung back and forth on its nail. There was a light patch where the paint was not discolored. The faint imprint of the cross. He reached up to steady it, muttered something about God being ready to move sideways.
“Leaving today?” he asked.
The rucksack was packed on the floor.
“I was thinking I’d stay a couple more days.”
“No problem, brother.”
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He combed his hair in the fragment of broken mirror, sprayed on some deodorant. At least he was keeping up pretenses. We took the lift instead of the stairs.