Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

“Take her, Lord,” said Corrigan.

They laughed, but there was something in that, like Corrigan wanted his life to make sense again, that he had fallen from grace, all he had now was his old recklessness and temptation, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He looked up as if the answer might be written on the ceiling. What might happen if she tumbled short of his dreams? How much might he hate his God if he left her behind? How might he detest himself if he stuck to his Lord?

He walked her home, holding hands in the dark. When he returned to the apartment, many hours later, he hung the shirt on the edge of the mirror. “Orange hot pants,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

We sat, hunched over the bottle.

“You know what you should do?” said Corrigan. “Come work at the nursing home.”

“Need a bodyguard, is that it?”

He smiled, but I knew what he was saying. Come help me, I’m still that hopeless swimmer. He wanted someone from the past around in order to make sure that it wasn’t all just a colossal illusion. He couldn’t just be an observer: he had to get some message through. It had to make sense, if even just for me. But I got a job in Queens instead, in one of the shamrock bars I dreaded. A low ceiling. Eight stools along the formica counter. Sawdust on the floor. Pouring pale draft beer and putting my own dimes in the jukebox so I wouldn’t have to hear the same old tunes over and over. Instead of Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, and Donovan, I tried some Tom Waits instead. The single-minded drinkers groaned.

I figured I might write a play set in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left. My accent deepened. I took on different rhythms. I pretended I was from Carlow Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a “motherfucking ambulance chaser” when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home — motherfucking ambulance chasers weren’t big in the old country — but they said it as often as they could. With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left. One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains. Another had an ambulance chaser in the green fields of France.

The place grew busier as the night went on. I poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.

I was still staying with Corrigan. He spent a few evenings at Adelita’s place, but he never told me a word about them. I wanted to know if he’d finally been with a woman but he simply shook his head, wouldn’t say, couldn’t say. He was still in the Order after all. His vows still shackled him.

There was a night in early August when I dragged myself back on the subway, but couldn’t find a cab on the Concourse. I didn’t like the idea of walking back to Corrigan’s place at that hour. There had been beatings and random murders in the Bronx. Being held up was close to ritual. And being white was a bad idea. It was time to get a room of my own somewhere else, maybe the Village or the East Side of Manhattan. I stuck my hands in my jeans, felt the rolled-up wad of money from the bar. I had just begun walking when a whistle sounded from the other side of the Concourse. Tillie was pulling up the strap on her swimsuit. She had been kicked out of a car and her knees were scraped raw.

“Sugarplum,” she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her handbag waving above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook of mine. “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.”

It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. “What’s the big deal?” she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said, had studied Persian poetry.

“Husband?”

I stopped on the street and gaped at her. Once, as a teenager, I had examined a piece of my skin on a glass slide, staring at it through a microscope: an amplitude of ridged canals striving beneath my eye, all pure surprise.

My intense disgust — so remarkable on other days — in that single moment turned into an awe for the fact that Tillie didn’t care at all. She jiggled her breasts and told me to get a grip. It was her ex-husband anyway. Yes, he had studied Persian poetry. Big fucking deal. He used to get a suite at the Sherry-Netherlands, she said. I assumed she was high. The world seemed to grow smaller around her, shrunken to the size of her eyes, painted purple and dark with eye shadow. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. My own wild, yea-saying overburst of American joy. I leaned towards her and she laughed, pushed me away.

A long pimped-up Ford Falcon pulled up at the curb and, without turning, Tillie said: “He already paid, man.”

We continued up the street, arm in arm. Under the Deegan she nestled her head against my chest. “Didn’t you, honey?” she said. “You already paid for the goodies?” She was rubbing her hand against me and it felt good. There’s no other way to say it. That’s how it felt. Good.

“Call me SweetCakes,” she said in an accent that loitered around her.

“You’re related to Jazzlyn, aren’t you?”

“What about it?”

“You’re her mother, right?”

“Shut up and pay me,” she said, touching the side of my face. Moments later there was the surprising condolence of her warm breath against my neck.

THE RAID BEGAN in the early morning, a Tuesday in August. Still dark. The cops lined up the paddy wagons in the streetlight shadows near the overpass. The girls didn’t seem to care half as much as Corrigan did. One or two dropped their handbags and ran towards the intersections, arms flailing, but there were more paddy wagons waiting there, doors open. The police tightened the handcuffs and herded the girls into the well of the dark vehicles. Only then could we hear any shouting — they leaned out, looking for their lipstick or their sunglasses or their stilettos. “Hey, I dropped my keyring!” said Jazzlyn. She was being helped into the wagon by her mother. Tillie was calm, as if it happened all the time, just another rising sun. She caught my eye, gave half a wink.

On the street, the cops sipped their coffees, smoked their cigarettes, shrugged. They called the girls by their names and nicknames. Foxy. Angie. Daisy. Raf. SweetCakes. Sugarpie. They knew the girls well and the crackdown was as lethargic as the day. The girls must have heard the rumor of it beforehand, and they had gotten rid of their needles and any other drug paraphernalia, dropped them down into the gutter. There’d been raids before, but never so complete a sweep.

“I want to know what’s happening to them,” said Corrigan, going cop to cop. “Where are they going?” He spun on his heels. “What are you arresting them for?”

“Stargazing,” said a cop, bashing into Corrigan’s shoulder.

I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.

Corrigan took down a series of badge numbers. A tall female cop plucked the notebook out of his hand and shredded it slowly in front of him. “Look, you dumb Mick, they’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Where’re you taking them?”

“What’s it to you, buddy?”

“Where are you bringing them? Which station house?”

“Step back. Over there. Now.”