Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

On the days when his fingers don’t give up the ghost, Walker makes furniture to sell at a street stall: chairs, shelves, bedside tables. He gives credit to those who can’t pay up front. Days and days are spent on each intricately carved piece. Afterward he has to immerse his numb hands in warm water for relief.

Walker lets the music roam in him and shuffles to the stove to put on the kettle. Eleanor has taught him the art of making tea, the necessity of warming the pot first, drying it out, carefully apportioning the leaves, letting them stew for a minute or two. He uses a tea cosy, a foreign thing, inherited from Maura O’Leary. Walker has even acquired a taste for milk in his tea. He lingers over the saucepan, then puts a plate on it so the water boils faster. He has had to learn these little tricks of middle-aged domesticity. Like making the beds and folding the sheets back over the blankets. Or hailing the milk wagon with a high whistle from the window. Or adding a touch of vinegar to the mop water. There is no refrigerator, but Walker bought a plastic icebox from a World War Two veteran who claimed it would work as well as anything.

Bending down, he takes out the milk but it has already begun to thicken, so he shakes it with violence and pain shoots through his arm and shoulder. He is generous with the milk. It won’t last much longer. He watches the way it whirls through the dark tea.

As he sips at the drink, he prepares for Eleanor’s return, laying the cosy over the pot, putting a cube of sugar on a spoon, arranging it neatly on the counter so that all she will have to do is pour and stir. The slowness of these days. It’s almost as if he doesn’t inhabit his body but hovers somewhere beyond it, a wheel of energy watching himself beginning to break down. He likes to remain perfectly still sometimes, just standing in the kitchen with his body bent in such a way that he can no longer feel any pain. The doctor has said it will only get worse. It will gnaw at his elbows, slip into his hips. Walker was given medicine but it ran out after a month, cost too much, and the drugstore won’t give him credit.

He tries to recall his mother in Georgia. There was a plant she used to counter the rheumatism, but Walker can’t remember the name of it.

Standing by the stove, again removed, again hovering, Walker watches himself as a boy, guiding a canoe through the black swamps, alongside cypress trees stumped by lightning. He imitates the remembered swerve of the paddle, then shuffles across the room, through the whirling motes of dust in the sunlight, to the record player.

He hates to stop the great Daniel Louis Armstrong in mid-flight, but it’s better than continually rising from the couch. His hands tremble when he lifts the lid of the record player and positions the needle at the beginning. On the couch, he stretches out his feet and extends his neck to see down the street, but there is little to see, just the slide of women out from the Laundromat, a pawnshop sign flickering, and a few young men gathered around a fire hydrant, holding cigarettes, exhaling to the sky, the smoke curling out flaccidly above their heads. Three prostitutes in tight pants totter back and forth around the corner, trading insults with the men.

Walker lies back gently and blows on his tea, even though it’s already cool. The afternoon withers away.

Fastened to the skipping music, he falls asleep, and when he wakes his three teenage children are standing in front of him, home from school, laughing, having tilted the tea cosy comically upon his head.

* * *

Below them, in a room thick with marijuana smoke, Hoofer McAuliffe, a car mechanic, can be heard at all hours of the night. A tough man, his face is mutilated — one of his nostrils was bitten away in a fight, leaving his nose ruined and scabbed. McAuliffe brings whores to his room late in the evening. He guides them gently by the arm. The smell of reefer drifts up the stairs. Great gollops of laughter rise up through the floorboards. Loud slaps are heard and then the lowest of whimpers. The women slink from the room, shy and high and beaten.

One morning, as Walker accompanies his daughters downstairs on their way to school — past the rich graffiti on the stairwell wall — Hoofer McAuliffe lets a long lecherous tongue hang out from the gap in his half-open door. Walker pushes the door open and stands in front of him.

“I wouldn’t touch it anyways,” says McAuliffe. “Mixed pussy’s bad for a man.”

Walker slams McAuliffe up against the wall, shoves his knee into his crotch, presses his fingers in his throat, and watches McAuliffe slide to the floor beneath him, gasping for breath, eyes wide and white, his one nostril flaring. The morning sun concentrates the smoke in the room, makes it glide through the air. Walker counts to ten and then squeezes McAuliffe’s neck one last time and whispers, “Don’t ever look at my girls that way, hear me? Don’t ever even turn a head to them. You listening to me? You listening?”

McAuliffe nods and wriggles his head free, stumbles across the room, opens his window, and gulps down air. Walker turns around to find Clarence in the doorway, staring at him, schoolbooks in his hand.

“Y’all go to school right now and forget your eyes,” says Walker. “Forget everything y’ever saw.”

His son nods and leaves, going down the staircase slowly, books tucked under his arm.

Walker spends the rest of the day in his apartment, nursing his aching hands in ice.

* * *

On better days he rides the subway trains and looks at the curves of the tunnel walls. He stands in the front car next to the driver and stares through the window, face propped close to the glass. He shades the top of his head with newspaper to reduce the glare.

The tunnels greet him with magnificent speed. He can spot the mistakes: the too-sudden curve where an engineer miscalculated, an area likely to be flooded in the rains, a switch placed in the wrong part of the tracks. He wishes to be back down underneath, digging. To feel again the fluidity of his shovel. One, two, three, strike, return. He even made an application to become a sniffer — to walk through the subway tunnels and check for gas leaks or fires or dead animals — but the application was turned down, like all the other job applications he makes.

Still, he loves the tunnels, moving from the darkness into the bright yellow light of the stations, the slow roll into blackness once more, the screech of steel on steel, the workers shining flashlights, the elation of being slammed along on a mid-morning express, commuters shuffling their feet on platforms as he whizzes by.

On weekends he takes Clarence with him and is greeted with stares from passengers looking at the curious paler skin of his teenage child. Clarence is tall enough to have to bend at the window to see along the tunnels. He has the beginnings of a mustache around his lips but is still too embarrassed to start shaving. He stands in silence, looking out the window, his father’s hand on his shoulder.

Sometimes Walker rides all the way downtown and meets up with Vannucci and Power on the Manhattan side of the water.

The men race their pigeons back and forth across the East River. Vannucci has taken on new colors for his birds: red and white and green. In a moment of drunkenness, Power has drawn fifty tiny blue stars on one of his favorite pigeons. The men sit at the waterside and share bottles — Kentucky bourbon and grappa — palming them around in sweat-wrinkled brown bags.

As they wait for the pigeons to return, the men remember themselves when young, diving down into the alcohol with happiness and regret.

“Pass me the slop!” shouts Power. “Gotta keep on sloppin’. Sloppin’ till the end of time.”

“’Member the time me and El dunked them pigeons?” says Walker.