Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

“They both left me.”

“Yeah yeah yeah. You ain’t got my sympathy.”

And for a moment he is back in the playground near 97th Street and it is four years ago and he is with his daughter and she is on the cusp of puberty. It is a summer’s day and he is guiding her on the swing — she is too old for swings and her legs are too long so she tucks them underneath the small wooden platform but kicks them out when she rises high. He must push with both hands and she shouts with joy; this is the moment that Lenora loves the most, but she will not love it for very much longer. He pushes her in the high center of her back but one hand slips and she is in a tight T-shirt, she has been growing taller in recent months and there is not much money for clothes, he has lost his job, he has lost control of his hands, he is pushing her at the armpits now and still she is moving with joy on the swing and his fingers by mistake touch the soft swell of new flesh, with just one hand, and his head is thumping and he must equalize the pressure and his fingers stretch out and gently touch the other side of her body, and there is a shoot of something like electricity to him, and he is trembling, but it feels so soft, so lovely, it eases him for a second, all the time he is pushing her and she doesn’t even notice, his hands are at her armpits and he wishes he could lift his history out of her, his daughter, he is touching her and he will touch her again and he will be found out and he will come down the tunnel and he will try to murder his hands in shame.

“They left me,” says Treefrog.

Angela turns around and points up at him. “I bet you had a blue washcloth. I bet you had a yellow pencil. I bet you knocked their eyes back in their heads.”

“No I didn’t.”

“I bet you twisted their arms behind their heads. I don’t got no sympathy for you. You’re only looking for a knock. That’s what you’re looking for. A knock. You want a knock? Go goddamn knock yourself.”

“Angela,” he says.

“You’re just like the rest. I don’t got no sympathy for you, no way. I hope you fall. I hope you fall down a goddamn well. You should cut your beard. And your hair. Then fall down a well. Get an eyepatch.”

A vision of Lenora again flashes across his mind.

“I didn’t hurt her,” he says.

“Bullshit,” says Angela, the word elongated into something almost lyrical.

Treefrog buries his head in his hands for a while and then he stands and moves along the catwalk with his arms outstretched. He disappears into the rear of his cave, knocking over the piss bottles at the end of his mattress. He reaches out to the rickety bedside table and rummages in the broken drawer. The smell of piss rises up from where the bottles have leaked across the floor. He rifles through the clothes — some of his old hand-drawn maps on graph paper are crumpled up among them — and he scatters them around until he finds a thermal shirt. He tucks it into his overcoat, stumbles over his mattress in the dark, swings his way down the two catwalks, and lands — knees bent — in front of Angela.

She crouches and shields her eyes. “Leave me alone, motherfucker!”

“Here.”

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!”

He shoves the thermal shirt toward her. Angela takes her arm away from her eyes and looks at him and says, “Wow.”

“It’ll keep you warm,” says Treefrog.

“Thanks.”

“Put it on.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“You just wanna see me naked. I seen the way you narrowed your eyes. I seen it, man.”

“Shut up, okay? Just put it on.”

She looks at him, shy and circumspect. “Turn away.”

He turns and sees a clump of snow fall through the metal grill on the other side of the tunnel. She drapes the fur coat over his shoulder and when he turns around Angela is smiling, with her arms behind her head and her elbows out, like a movie star — she has put the thermal shirt over three or four blouses — but still he imagines her nipples erect in the cold and he wants to touch her, but he doesn’t, he can’t, he won’t.

“I didn’t hurt nobody.”

“I believe you, Treefy.”

“You do?” he says, with sudden surprise.

“Yeah, ’course I believe you.”

“Thanks.”

And then Angela reaches for the fur coat and says, “Ain’t I cute?”

“Yeah,” he says, and he puts his arms around her.

“You smell, man.”

“I had a shower yesterday. In Grand Central. In the steam tunnel. You should come down there with me sometime. The water’s hot.”

Further up the tunnel they hear a rattling at the gate.

Angela’s eyes open, wide and startled. She unlocks herself from Treefrog’s embrace. “Elijah!” she says.

In one swift motion Treefrog has his fingers in the handhold, and within seconds he is up in his nest. Angela puts her fur coat on, tightens it, and scuttles along the tunnel. In the distance Treefrog watches Elijah emerge through a shaft of light, carrying a heater, shouting, “Faraday! Hey, Faraday! Yo. Where the fuck is Faraday?”

Walker has timed it perfectly. Just before the sun rises over the roofs of 131st Street and shines through the window, his arm is raised and it shades his eyes. It is good exercise; his muscles beginning to give even more to rheumatism, the disease of tunnel men. He keeps his arm up until the sun hits the crossbeam in the window, and then he is given relief for two and a half minutes exactly.

A shadow supplied, a shadow lost, and the forearm is lifted as the sun rises further.

Walker likes the sofa, even though he’s confined to it two hours a day, by pain, not desire. It has shaped itself to the contours of his body, and it gives him a view of a street maddened in recent years by motorcars. He perches on a history of coins dropped beneath the cushions, and sometimes, when he wants chewing tobacco, he reaches in under the cushion, grabs a few dimes, and drops them down to his children, who, when not at school, sit on the steps below. The coins land noisily and his children scramble, then make their way down to the store.

The stylus of the record player tumbles across an old jazz record: Louis Armstrong. The pulse of the man. The gorgeous rhythm. The syncopated slide. Walker moves his head to the beat, and the silver cross sways gently against his neck. When the record finishes he stands up from the sofa to break the cramp in his knees and stretches wide, bending the pain from his fingers. Carefully he places the needle in a groove just beyond a scratch in the vinyl. Last week the needle began to skip, but the jabs were so terrible in his knees that he just let it sound over and over and over again at the point of a shrill trumpet note — it got to the stage where he didn’t even hear it anymore, he was back underneath the river, he was digging, his friends were around him, it was the compressor sounding out — until Eleanor came home and repositioned the needle.

She wants to buy a new copy of the record, but money is tight these days. He is long finished in the tunnels; there is no more need for diggers. Most of the family’s money comes from her job in a clothing factory — the wages are low, the hours are long. Walker has begun to do some of the housework, and the room is bright and tidy, partitioned by a curtain that hangs from the ceiling. Walker’s shovel hangs above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece, a row of photographs. By the kitchen, five chairs are ranged around a small table. There are three beds: a double for themselves, a double for the two girls, a single for Clarence. Walker made the single bed himself, strung the rope between poles, frapped and crisscrossed until taut and strong.