Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

Treefrog has to walk the hill four times to get an even number of steps, touching his hand against the icy trunks of the crab-apple trees each time as he goes.

“You’re a goddamn loon,” shouts Angela.

He jumps the fence and catches up with the others as they walk past the playground by 97th. A shiver runs through him as he watches a mother launching a child on a swing, the child’s feet swinging through the air. He tips his sunglasses on his head and waves goodbye to Lenora.

Between West End and Broadway, they stop at the Salvation Army store for Angela to get a scarf. She emerges with an extra pair of socks tucked under her fur coat, saying, “I think I’m about frozen.”

She pulls the socks high on her legs and steps back into her lopsided heels.

On the subway train to Brooklyn, Treefrog sits alone at the far end of the car. The others stay by the door, looking at their reflections in the dark glass. Treefrog tucks himself away in the corner seat, reaches for his Hohner, and plays softly.

* * *

In a Brooklyn diner, under a neon sign for Boar’s Head ham, the cook is so perfect at cracking eggs that he does it with his eyes closed. Treefrog’s head bobs in approval. The cook pierces the shell with one long fingernail and flips the contents out with ease, two eggs side by side.

The yolk doesn’t break or spill. Hands and spatula are held over the hot grill.

Treefrog, still wearing his tie on his forehead, rubs a bill between his fingers while he watches the cook; he got the money at Faraday’s funeral. They had been late for the mass, but a deacon told them where the interment would be. They walked to the nearby cemetery. The dead man’s father saw them approaching halfway through the service. He came over, shuffling on a cane, and offered them each ten dollars to stay away, saying “Please” as if the weight of his world depended on it. Behind him, at the graveside, the rest of the family watched. A woman — it must have been Faraday’s mother — kept dabbing at her eyes with a long black scarf. Dean demanded twenty dollars apiece, and Faraday’s father looked at him long and sad. Dean shrugged. Faraday’s father reached into his pocket and took out a wad of bills from an envelope meant for the priest. The old man removed one glove and, with shaking hands, passed around the twenty-dollar bills.

By the time he got to Treefrog he had only a ten and one five left, but Treefrog said, “That’s okay, Mister Bedford.”

Faraday’s father looked at him and for an instant his eyes brightened, but then he said, “Just don’t come near the graveside, okay?”

He turned his back and walked away like a man unburdened.

The four of them watched the rest of the service from a distant gravestone.

“There goes Faraday,” said Elijah, as the coffin was lowered.

“His name ain’t Faraday,” said Angela.

“It’s Faraday to me.”

“I shoulda got forty bucks!” said Dean. “He owed me twenty! The sonofabitch never paid!”

“Man, look at that coffin,” whispered Angela. “Them gold handles. Goddamn. He’s stylin’.”

“He’s stylin’ down.” Elijah laughed.

“I bet he was rich,” said Dean.

“No less dead if he was rich or not,” said Treefrog.

He swivels a little on the stool at the counter, and the money is warm now in his hands.

Watching the cook, Treefrog brings the bills to his nose and smells them. Then he folds the ten-dollar bill down until it is tiny. He checks out all the pockets in his overcoat for a good hiding place. The red lining of his coat is full of holes, but he finds a good place for the bill and punctures it with three pins to make sure he doesn’t lose it. He chuckles to see the pin go through the eye of a dead President.

The cook flips the eggs in the air and they somersault onto a bun. Laying two slices of bacon across the eggs, he winks at Treefrog.

Perhaps he will give the cook a tip for the show. He hasn’t tipped anyone in years, but he suddenly feels huge and magnanimous. When the plate is set down on the counter, Treefrog takes off his tie, puts it in his pocket, spins the plate twice, licks each of his fingers, and lingers over the food like a man in love.

* * *

A thumbnail of moon in the sky and the snow has briefly relented. He shoehorns himself through the gate and climbs up to his nest, carrying two bottles.

From his overcoat he drops a pile of branches and splintered wood — on the walk home he found the wood beneath the overpass, the stash belonging to some topside bum living under the bridge at 96th Street. The wood was wrapped in a blanket, kept dry. No accounting for the stupidities of the ones who live topside, some of them warming themselves over steam grates, gusts of hot wind cooking the undersides of their bodies, the top half of them frozen, always rolling over like absurd pieces of toast.

Treefrog uses his Swiss Army knife to chop some of the wood into kindling, makes a tiny lean-to of twigs, and tears a newspaper into strips. He squats over the small fire, his overcoat lifted and his ass just above the flame.

He remains perched until the heat seeps through him, and then he throws on a few larger twigs and a black plastic bag to help the fire take quicker. As the flames jump, he goes over to his bed and lies down with his arms behind his head like a bored teenager. The smoke drifts across the tunnel and out through the grate on the opposite side.

He kicks at the end of the blanket and sees some pellets of rat shit somersault in the air. He whistles for Castor—“Here, girl, here, girl”—but she doesn’t come.

Opening the first bottle of gin, he sticks a dirty straw into the neck and drinks and then fumbles under his jeans and his thermal long johns, cupping his hand down by his crotch to catch the warmth.

When the first bottle is finished he stares up at nothing. In the tunnel all is quiet. He takes the harmonica out of his pocket, but it is cold and he decides not to warm it. The train from upstate blasts its way through the tunnel, and, feeling drunk, he rises when he hears the sound of someone whistling in the distance. He looks down along the tunnel at Papa Love emerging from his shack.

Treefrog leans far out on the catwalk to get a better view.

Middle-aged and dreadlocked, Papa Love is swathed in clothes, only his face and fingers exposed, but he moves with fluidity. He puts wood on the fire opposite his shack and carefully arranges cans of spray paint on some old wicker chairs. Moving with slow grace, Papa Love lines the cans of paint up one by one and flaps his arms in the cold. Along the side of his shack, on top of the boards, are the words THERE IS NO SELF TO BE DISCOVERED, ONLY A SELF TO BE CREATED. Beneath this, a collage of yellow lines and a Confederate flag in African liberation colors.

Treefrog has seldom seen Papa Love go topside, except to get food and paint. The old artist still keeps a bank account from his days as a high school art teacher — he first came down to the tunnels after his lover was hit by a bullet. It was a simple drive-by; the killers were high on amphetamines. His lover was whisked to a Manhattan hospital, but the red line of the heart machine bleeped and bottomed out. Papa Love had seen lots of men die in Vietnam, but he wasn’t prepared to watch his lover go that way. He began walking after his lover died, walked the length and breadth of the city, slept on the steps of a church, and then one summer he decided to strap his heart to a cardboard box. He found the cardboard at the bottom of a doorstep on Riverside Drive, and he carried it under his arm down into the tunnels, and he strapped his aorta on one side and his pulmonary on the other, and he tied them both very neatly together, and he strapped all his veins longways down the cardboard, and he strapped all his arteries in the opposite direction, and he weaved them together with a muscle of his heart and he felt as if his blood were exploding and he lay down on the brown sprawl and looked along the length of the dark tunnel and saw a rat moving over the tracks, and he chuckled in grief and said to himself, I have strapped my heart to a cardboard box.