Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

Some afternoons his grandfather struggles up the staircase to watch the boy’s antics. Walker uses a cane, guiding himself past the reams of graffiti on the walls. His seventy-second year has given him more pain than ever before. A thin gray beard has appeared on his cheeks, his fingers no longer nimble enough to handle a razor. A tobacco pouch is slung around his neck for easy access, tied with a length of cord. It bobs above the silver cross. He labors to open the door at the top of the stairs, eventually just shoves it with his knee, and winces with discomfort.

On the rooftop Walker finds some sunlight and turns his face toward it, sees Clarence Nathan standing on the ledge.

“Mister Walker!” shouts the boy.

Walker glares at the junkies who are slumbering on the other side of the roof, melting cubes in a bucket for shooting ice water into their veins.

He sits on a shabby blue lawn chair covered with the soot of the city. He reaches up to his brow and rubs his temple cool and then nods to the boy. “Go ahead, son.”

“Which one’ll I do?”

“Any one y’all want.”

“Okay!”

“Just be careful.”

Walker settles back in the seat. He has seen it often enough that he has learned not to be afraid. The boy waves, rushes to the edge of the roof, and leaps to a nearby rooftop. In the air there is a fusion of ecstasy and danger: one leg straightened way out in front of the other, the rush of wind around him. He lands perfectly, three feet beyond the lip of the next building, looks around, and grins. He leaps back again, sticking to a curious rule he’s made for himself, landing on the alternate foot each time. He likes it this way. If he makes a mistake he goes back and forth, back and forth, to ensure balance. The soles of his sneakers are almost worn out. He tells himself that one day he will try it barefoot. Pride thumps in him as Walker gives a slow round of applause, a bit of tobacco spit escaping the old man’s mouth and dropping on his shirt. Walker rubs at it, ashamed.

“Good job, son.”

“Will I do it again?”

“Sure. Nothing too fancy though, that’s all. Go on now.”

Walker sits all afternoon, moving the lawn chair according to the swing of the sun, watching the acrobatics.

Even when the boy listens to his grandfather’s stories he perches on the ledge, putting his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth above the street.

When the sun goes down, Clarence Nathan hops from the wall and cleans the soot off the back of his grandfather’s pants. The soot billows out from the old man’s ass, and they laugh as it makes clouds in the air.

The stories continue as they make their way over patches of sticky tar and broken glass and then negotiate the staircase down. There are new faces graffitied on the stairwell wall, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wearing dashikis, their faces set between two large panthers drawn like petroglyphs. Beside that: PIGS AREN’T KOSHER. Beside that: EAT YOUR DRAFT CARD. Further down, a poster with the face of the late Martin Luther King.

There are two new locks on the apartment door. Inside, dishes are piled high in the sink. The fridge is open, nothing inside. A half-made wicker chair stands upside down, abandoned. Photos are yellowing on the walls. All the frames have gone missing.

Louisa isn’t home. She seldom is these days. Walker sits by his grandson’s bedside. There is a stale smell from the old man, something like fire smoke, but the boy listens quietly. One of his favorite stories is about his great-grandfather — Con O’Leary — who used to hide a bullet in his belly button before he was blown halfway toward heaven. Some of Eleanor’s World War Two bullets are still kept in the apartment, and the boy likes to watch his grandfather lift up his shirt and shove one in.

“Do another one.”

“I ain’t that fat!”

“Go on, try another, Mister Walker.”

“Don’t push y’alls luck, son.”

“Go on. Please.”

Walker coughs and brings up a string of black dust from his lungs, a remnant of the tunnels. He spits into a sheet of newspaper, balls the paper up, and drops it into a wastebasket. The boy sits up in bed and slaps his grandfather’s back to help him through the coughing. Walker can feel the thumps echo through him. Recently his body has given way even further, a cough growing deeper, his limbs tightening, the tobacco spit confounding him, a legacy of dribbled stains on white shirts.

After the fit of coughing, Walker straightens himself up and reaches for the second bullet. “Abracadabra,” he says.

* * *

All the taunts scribbled down in a school copybook: halfbreed, mulatto, Sambo, nigger, honky, snowboy, zebra, cracker, jungle bunny, coon, Wonderbread, Uncle Tom, Crazy Horse, spade.

* * *

Clarence Nathan takes the subway train — his grandfather has inculcated in him a love of this journey — and he emerges from the station and walks jauntily to the construction sites near Battery Bark. He has been given new sneakers for his sixteenth birthday.

He watches the choreography of commerce toward the sky.

The men who create the giant buildings are only seen as specks moving on naked beams, a series of hardhats going back and forth. They move at the rate of a floor a week. The cranes feed them steel; then the men bolt it together. When the steel is clad, the men climb higher, distancing themselves from the world below. Sometimes Clarence Nathan goes into neighboring skyscrapers, saying he’s a delivery boy, then sneaks his way to the top floor for a better view. He has bought a pair of binoculars in the pawnshop. He loves to see the men in motion on crossbeams and columns, climbing without harnesses even. The men move as if on solid ground; their feet never slip; there is no need for them to spread their arms wide for balance. Some even swing through the air on the ends of jib lines. Clarence Nathan falsifies the application forms and says he is eighteen, though it’s clear to the foremen that he hasn’t even begun shaving.

“Come back when your testicles drop,” says one of the ironworkers.

One afternoon two security guards have to drag him from a ladder twenty-three floors up an unfinished skyscraper. They grab at Clarence Nathan’s feet and are amazed at the brutal strength in his legs. He shakes free, and they watch him leap the final eight rungs to the steel decking below. He lands with knees bowed, the binoculars swinging at his neck. “You goddamn fool,” says one of the guards. He is escorted down to the street and told that if he comes back he’ll be arrested. Clarence Nathan nods gravely, leaves the site, and when he is far enough away he punches the air in euphoria. Someday he will climb and they will watch in awe. He will create his own movement in the air.

Clarence Nathan stands on top of a parking meter, balancing, until a cop shoos him away. Further down the street he tries another parking meter on the other foot.

He returns day after day to the skyscraper site, wearing his grandfather’s boots and an old flannel shirt. The ironworkers finally allow him to sling chokers on the giant steel beams on the ground as long as he promises not to climb. He attaches the short lengths of cable and watches the beams rise, lifted by the Favco cranes. Weeks later, Walker answers the door to a school official who says he hasn’t seen the boy in ages.

* * *

Angela stands up quickly when she sees Elijah’s silhouette further down the tunnel. She throws the blanket over Treefrog and kisses him on the cheek.

“See you later, Treefy,” she says.

“Stay here.”

She shakes her head. “Thanks for the picture.”

“It ain’t a picture.”

“Whatever. Hey, man. You got any money?”

“Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding.”