Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

“I was out there in the forest and it got dark,” he says. “I’d never been in the dark like that before.”

I took to digging a little deeper in the soil and said nothing. I thought about Ferlinghetti and what he might get out of that. Stephen was scared of nothing else — not scared of killing a man, that’s for sure, or stealing, or boning away whenever he got the chance. I knew it was weird. Guess he didn’t have his TV or nothing out there. Guess that’s what maybe he was scared of. I just nodded my head and said, I know what you mean, man, I know what you mean.

* * *

I’m telling Kevin all this and his face just drains. We’re putting the gas in the tractor. He’s holding the big red five-gallon can and I got the funnel. For some reason his hands start to shake like he’s got the chills and some of that gas is spilling down the side of the tractor. “Scared of the dark,” says Kevin, repeating it over and over. He puts the last drop of gas in the tank and then he tells me that he’ll be back in a moment. I see him hightail off toward my pickup and slam the door. He leaves a trail of dust on the dirt road that runs through the center of our field. I get on the tractor to fire her up, but Kevin has the keys.

So I just sit myself down on the ground and poke a little stick in a mound of fire ants and watch the little bastards scuttle. Millions of them. Once I heard someone say that the ants can build a nest that goes fifteen feet down in the ground. They can also kill a human baby if there are enough of them. They start to crawl up my boots, so I climb up on the tractor and look out over the field.

I’m thinking that it sure is getting late. I can see some red sky in the west. There’s even a star up there already. The last of the buzzards are in the sky. I wonder where it is they sleep at night. One thing for sure, those crickets don’t sleep. They start chirping so it sounds like a song. It’s almost fully night when I look up and there is Kevin coming down the road in the pickup truck. He has his whole family with him, the whole dadgum lot, his wife Delicia, his sons Lawrence and Myron, his girl Natalie. Then I see, sitting in the back of the truck, my Ellie and Robert. Everyone’s quiet. Normally they’re all shouting up a storm and laughing when they get together.

Kevin gets out of the truck with this strange look on his face. He’s wearing his work shirt, and the sleeves are rolled way up on his arms. His face is full of wrinkles. His eyes all serious. He gets everyone to line up at the edge of the field behind him, in a row. Ellie’s in her night gown and slippers. Her hair is in curlers. Delicia, she’s carrying Myron in her arms because he’s so small. Lawrence has himself a football tucked under his arm. I do a little shadow boxing with Robert, but he’s quiet as a mouse. That klein grass is so big that it’s over all the kids’ heads. Nobody’s saying anything. It’s all quiet. Except for the crickets.

Kevin gets me to stand at the end of the line and then he starts walking through the field. Everyone just steps on along behind him, but pretty soon he gets to jogging and we all jog after him, brushing away the grass with our hands, until he goes faster and faster and we’re hightailing it through that field, the grass parting in our way. I hear the kids laughing, then Delicia gives a chuckle, then Ellie hollers something crazy. I’m holding onto Robert’s hand. He’s kicking at the stalks as we go. Kevin is whooping. My own body gets kind of loose and I find myself damn near dancing through the field. I haven’t danced like that since the club in Giddings burned down.

Well, it must have looked plumb stupid, us running through the field like that, with our kids, when we had so much work to do. But I was stumbling along, hearing everyone laughing, holding on to my little boy, when I looked up beyond the top of the grass and saw how dark the sky had gotten, how big and heavy it was, how much it had come right down on top of us. We were laughing, but I knew right there and then what Kevin was doing. He was no fool.

Padraic closes the heavy oak door of the children’s home and steps out into the Brooklyn morning light. He looks across the river to where the sun is coming up like a stabwound, leaving smudges of dirty light on the New York City skyline. He pulls up the hood of his coat and steps across the road. In the background he hears one of the boys kicking at the wooden door, a dull rhythmic thud. A young girl screams from the third-floor window. In the distance a police siren flares. Christ, he thinks, no day for a wedding.

He pulls his dark blue anorak up around his shoulders, cups his hands, and lights the last of his cigarettes. He inhales the smoke to the bottom of his lungs, adjusts his glasses, and looks back at the home where he just clocked off the graveyard shift.

A clutch of blind children have their heads stuck out the bars of the lower windows. One of the girls, her hair a shock of orange, is thrashing her head against the bars. The whites of her eyes loll obscenely in her head. He shrugs his shoulders to indicate to her that it’s not his fault, but, catching himself, he turns away, then pulls hard again on the cigarette. Padraic hears another shout from inside the home. He turns and watches a bread van cough along the street. The exhaust fumes languish in the air, and for a moment he thinks about letting the smoke carry him along, away down the dark puddled road, to somewhere very different.

At ten o’clock last night, little Marcia, only fourteen years old, tried to slit her wrists with a tin mirror. She cut a narrow scar perpendicular to the veins while Tammy screamed over and over again that she was messing up, that the way to do it was to slice longways along the vein, rip it good and deep. When the lads in the boys’ unit found out that one of the girls had tried to do herself in, a near-riot had broken out. Jimi set fire to the couch in the living room. Chocolate Charlie put his foot through the glass case of the stereo, and two other boys had to be restrained. Nearly all the kids, those forgotten blind children, the snot rags of society, had spent the night beating their brains against the walls repeatedly — like birds with broken wings, unable to get off the ground.

Padraic flings the cigarette butt to the ground. He walks toward the subway station, sweeping the bits and pieces of litter out of his way with his feet. In one of the houses he hears a radio burst to life. A curtain opens and a woman’s face fills a top windowpane. An old man in a mangy overcoat is out on the steps playing the Jewish harp and slurping on a bottle of Miller. He nods and offers the bottle, but Padraic gives a quick flick of the head sideways and the old man smiles.

“Too early for the sloppin’?” he asks.

“Too early for anything,” says Padraic.

The steps down to the subway station smell, as usual, of stale urine, and Padraic skips down them three at a time, fishing in his pocket for a token. Nothing but loose change. He left all the tokens at home last night. He takes a quick look. Nobody in the booth and hardly anyone else around, except two young nurses shivering in the cold, a kid in a Van Halen Kicks Ass T-shirt, and a spindly little businessman reading a newspaper down at the end of the platform. He vaults the turnstile, hustles down to the platform, and waits for the wind to be sucked through the tunnel, carrying the clang of an engine.

When the D train finally comes, it’s a local. He sits in a carriage alone, the seat bedecked with graffiti, and wonders if Orla, his wife, will be awake when he gets back to their flat. It’ll be nice to curl up beside her and let the morning pass. Or wake her to get her to massage the knots in his neck.