Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

“Treefy.”

“Huh?”

“You listening to me?”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“You gonna protect me?”

He dabs his bandanna into the boiling water, turns, and says, “Of course I’ll protect you, Angela.”

* * *

On Sundays, Walker takes a gypsy cab down from 131st Street and gets the driver to blow the horn beneath Clarence Nathan’s apartment. It’s a five-floor walk-up, no elevator, and Walker’s legs and heart rebel against the idea of climbing. Clarence Nathan and Dancesca come down the stairs with their daughter, and Clarence Nathan leans in the taxi window and pays the driver, tips him well.

He helps Walker out of the taxi and has to hold Lenora back from bowling the old man over. Walker has fashioned himself a wooden walking stick, and he leans against it. His remaining hair is herringbone-colored, and wrinkles have etched into other wrinkles.

“How’s my lil’ pumpkin?” asks Walker, bending down.

“Hi, Paw-Paw.”

Walker stretches up. “Hey there, beautiful.”

“Hey, Nathan,” says Dancesca.

“My-oh-my,” he says to her. “You’re getting finer lookin’ every day.”

The four of them descend the hill to the park with infinite slowness. Walker wears a new hat, a Hansen, with a tiny feather sticking out from the band above the brim. Lenora skips ahead of the three adults as they go over the mundanities of the previous week — baseball scores, basketball matches, the vagaries of the weather. The chat is light-humored and sometimes even turns to Walker’s ghosts. Dancesca is fond of the stories he tells about Eleanor. Clarence Nathan, who has heard the stories many times, often walks on ahead with his little girl.

They are splendid days, the finest of days.

Even if it’s raining they go down to the park and huddle beneath umbrellas. Clarence Nathan uses the flap end of a shirt to wipe the seat of the swings and occasionally Dancesca will bring a towel for her husband to slide down the chute and dry it for Lenora. Everything about the Sunday visits revolves around Lenora. The adults take turns pushing her on the swing. They gather at the end of the slide to welcome her. They lift her onto the fiberglass dinosaurs. Walker gauges her height by how she measures up against his walking stick. Sometimes he removes a bullet from his belly button, but the young girl doesn’t like the trick too much; it frightens her.

In springtime all four of them spread a blanket on the ground, sit under the cherry-blossom trees, and eat cucumber sandwiches, Walker’s favorite. When the evening sun goes down across the Hudson, they trudge to the edge of the park and Clarence Nathan hails a cab and slips his grandfather twenty dollars, and then the old man is gone.

One Sunday afternoon, when Dancesca and Lenora are visiting elsewhere, Walker takes Clarence Nathan down to the edge of a railway tunnel underneath Riverside Park. There is a gate at the tunnel entrance, but the lock is broken. The two men open the gate, slide inside, and stand on the metal staircase. Walker kicks away a bloodied hypodermic needle, and it drops to the tunnel floor. “Damn things,” he says. It is dark at first, but their eyes adjust and they see the grills in the ceiling and the murals painted below. Petals of cherry blossom fall steadily through grills. They see a figure emerging from the shadows, a man with several cans of spray paint. Grandfather and grandson look at each other, then leave the tunnel, Clarence Nathan wrapping his arm around Walker’s shoulder and helping him up the steep embankment.

“I dug there once,” says Walker, pointing back at the tunnel. “I dug and grouted in that place.”

* * *

He cleans the cut at the side of her eye meticulously, dabbing the bandanna in the boiling water, twirling the cloth’s edge, rinsing it out in the pan until, even in the half-light, he can see that the water has turned red. What was she like as a child when the water was iron-colored and warm? Did her father take her down to the swings to play? Did she sit in the backseat of the car with her arms folded in her lap? Did she ever think there was somewhere darker than even an Iowa cornfield at night? And what sort of map could he make of her flesh if he used the tiniest of little scales and became a cartographer of the corpuscles there in the little rim of violence at her eye?

He can feel Angela’s breath at his neck as he touches the wound. Across the tunnel the morning rays shine through — light enough now for Elijah to come calling. He should have buried the spud wrench down Elijah’s throat; he should have hit him harder, like his own father did, his unknown father who buried that cop and that car mechanic. For a moment a vision flits across Treefrog’s mind and he sees a shovel handle get buried deep into a white man’s head. His father winks at him and says, It’s all right, son, I hit a homer.

Treefrog wets the clean end of the bandanna with his tongue. If he had some gin he could sterilize the cut, but no matter, it will heal soon. He folds the bandanna into a square and gently presses the cloth against the side of her cheek. Leaning across, he kisses the top of her forehead. She says to him, “You stink, man.”

“Go to sleep,” he says.

Treefrog pulls the zip of the sleeping bag, grabs a couple of blankets, and moves back to his chair. He removes the pot of bloodwater from the fire pit. As the flames jump, he warms his hands, thinks about the harmonica, but Angela’s eyes are fluttering and soon she will be off to sleep.

Tightening the blankets around himself, he lets the fire die down and listens in the silence for Castor. Angela turns a little in the sleeping bag, her lips touching against the pillow. He smiles and echoes her: “You stink, man.” Sometimes, when he lay in bed next to Dancesca, she would smell the sweat from the construction site even after he showered. She would toss away from him and say, “Traffic violation!” “Huh?” he’d ask. “Parking ticket!” “Huh?” “You smell, Clar.” “Oh.” And he would rise to bathe again, shave himself close, splash cologne around his cheeks, get back in bed, and snuggle close to her. She had grown thinner since they married. He missed the bigness, the ample bosom, but he didn’t mention it to her; he sometimes even carried the idea with pride — while other men’s wives fleshed out and away, she came in toward him.

She went with him once to Houston where he was working on a skyscraper with his crew. Lenora was left with Dancesca’s family. It was Dancesca’s first time on a plane; she loved the thin red straws in the drinks. She collected seven of them — one for each of Lenora’s years. The Texas heat was oppressive even in winter, and it weighed down on them. After a day’s work they mostly stayed in the hotel room — the good times, the best of times. The air conditioner hummed. Dancesca was fascinated by the tiny bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. The plastic glasses were sealed in Saran wrap on the bedside table and they stayed unopened. Dancesca and Clarence Nathan poured gin straight into each other’s mouths. She loved to let ice cubes melt on her belly. They wanted to send a telegram to Walker but could think of nothing to say except, “We’re in the Lone Star State.”

In a suburban bar one night, he, Dancesca, and Cricket sat drinking cocktails. The music was loud. Alcohol thumped in them. There were some oil riggers sitting at a nearby table. Cricket challenged them to walk the roof of the bar — it was, Cricket said, a question of balance. The bet was for one hundred dollars. Everyone stepped out into the night. The building was a two-story affair with a roof shaped a sharp inverted V. He and Cricket walked with their eyes closed. The nervous oil riggers stumbled behind, amazed. Back inside, he and Cricket collected their winnings, drank shots together, slapped each other’s backs. Suddenly a pool cue smashed down on the back of Clarence Nathan’s head. He fell to the floor, tried to get up, slipped in his own blood. Dancesca screamed. Cricket was set upon by a group of four. A knife slashed hotly across Clarence Nathan’s chest. He was taken to the hospital. His first scar. Dancesca stayed at his bedside and for months afterward — when they got home to New York — she attended to him with a special poultice smeared lovingly across his chest. She would rub the yellow paste over his chest, and then her fingers would meander lower to where they would pause in their ecstasy.