Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Some of Will’s friends at the entrance have ripped up small pieces of colored paper for confetti.

From behind, Padraic notices that Dana and Will seem joined together somehow as she wheels him along the outside ramp, the paper falling around their shoulders. “A little bit to the left,” shouts Will, “watch out for the railings!” The colored paper falls around their shoulders. A bottle of champagne gets popped, and the priest reaches forward for a plastic glass. A crowd gathers around the newlyweds, and in the throng, Dana drops her bouquet of flowers. She whispers something in Will’s ear and he gets her to spin the wheelchair around. She does it easily, calmly.

Padraic moves across to pick up the flowers, but he feels Will’s hand grasp his.

“I’m all right, man,” the veteran says.

“I’ll just grab the flowers here.”

“I’m all right,” he says again.

“You sure?”

“Got the legs back.”

“Yeah,” says Padraic, unsure of what he means.

“And a pair of eyes for her.”

“Yes, yeah.”

“Ya know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

“We’ll look after each other,” says Will.

“Yeah.”

“You know how it is.”

“I do, yeah,” says Padraic.

“All we’re looking for now is a couple of skin grafts,” says Will, gesturing toward Dana. He lets out a huge bellowing laugh. He turns around to Dana: “Did ya hear that? We’re looking for skin grafts next.”

Padraic steps back, embarrassed. He shoves his fists deep into his pockets. A flush rises up in his cheeks. He backs away from the crowd and watches as Will places the flowers back in Dana’s hands. He has never really noticed before how attractive Dana is, how her fingers run delicately into long nails, how strands of hair run amok around her neck, how her skin gains color around her eyes. The crowd moves around Will and he reaches out, shakes hands, guides Dana’s elbow toward other hands. Padraic wants to walk over to them to say something, anything, he’s not sure what, something that suggests that strange things often happen, that certain moments are all too rare to be lost. But he simply stands there, rooted to his shadow.

He finds himself thinking of the children’s home — Chocolate Charlie lounging around by the smashed stereo, balancing a soccer ball on his foot; Marcia watching the thin scab grow again on her wrist; Jimi hiding a pair of matches under his pillow. Tomorrow morning they’ll crowd around him, asking a million questions about the wedding. Toast will be thrown in the dining room. A pair of socks will be lost in the laundry. A fight will break out in the cafeteria. All the ordinary bits and pieces of seconds, minutes, hours, will clatter on, regardless.

Padraic scuffles at his shoes, noticing that he forgot to polish them. He looks for Orla in the crowd. He sees her at the edge of the church steps, two plastic glasses in her hands. He pulls his hands from his pockets and moves toward her. She raises the champagne in the air and he nods back, slowly at first, like a bird beginning to peck at a few crumbs lying on the ground.

Give life long enough and it’ll solve all your problems, even the problem of being alive. Should write that one on the stairwell, he chuckles to himself as he shuffles down the rat-gray steps of the apartment complex. He walks slowly, his big shoulders pitching back and forth in the folds of an old brown overcoat. Thick fists, blotched here and there with liver spots, pop out from the cuffs and a magenta handkerchief sprouts from the breast pocket. Beads of sweat gather beneath the peak of his flat tweed cap as he negotiates the corner on the third floor. Damn, he thinks, it’s hot under this whole rigout.

As he walks down the steps — past the familiar, rude graffiti — three teenaged boys, wearing their black baseball hats turned backward, point at him and throw their fists up at the sky. He winks at them and they laugh, then they turn away, punching each other on the shoulders and imitating his slouch. Nothing that a good clip on the ear wouldn’t solve. He smiles, takes the hanky from his pocket, and mops his brow. Farther down the stairwell an old woman with a shopping bag full of cauliflowers passes him, muttering something about the weather and the terrible things it does to vegetables. He tips his hat to her, then bows as a pretty little girl skips past him, hands clutching the bottom of her dress, carrying crayons in the upturned folds. Hope to God it’s not her that’s writing these sloppy swirls of graffiti on the walls.

He pauses on the third floor and reads: When did the black man learn to walk? Beneath it: When the white man invented the wheelbarrow. Beneath that: Eat shit, honky motherfucker. A strange one that, because surely not even the front of a wheelbarrow would be too comfortable, certainly not for a codger his age. There was, however, a rich eccentric gentleman he once heard of who was designing his garden in the dun-and-green Wicklow hills, far away. The gentleman was known to have his gardeners wheel him around in a big brown barrow, while he sat in the damn thing and drank tea. From a saucer. The excuse for the gentleman’s transport was that he was afflicted with brucelosis, gotten when he pricked his finger on a thorny rose bush, then put his hands in some composted horse manure. Deep shit, to paraphrase the graffiti.

He pauses for a moment and leans against the railing, pensive. Isn’t it a strange word that? Motherfucker. And a violent one too. Not at all poetic. Awful, in fact. But used all the time in these parts.

He himself has been called it, not in derision but in a curiously lovely way, when in the deep-shadowed corners late at night he can hear them make bets that the old Irish motherfucker could probably still throw a punch or two. And a punch or two they would deserve, but for the fact that he has been so long a part of the scenery that he understands that a motherfucker, among the black boys anyway, is a brother. The Mexicans here are quiet and furtive, the young ones standing around with hands in pockets, and they are seldom heard, in his ears anyway, to use the word. It’s the white ones — the trash, as they say — who use it most vindictively.

Mopping his brow once more, he moves away from the railing toward the second-floor steps.

Jesus, it’s a long way to the laundromat in heat like this. And longer every day, though your steps be heavy you’ll trot lightly along the way. A grand tune that. One that he used to sing long ago. A lovely melody to it. A damnsight removed from this graffiti, that’s for sure. Less imaginative every day, he rues, though he stops by his favorite aphorism, down in the alcove of the second floor, where some poor gouger has left a puddle of urine. Women of the world rise up out of the bed of your oppressors … and go make breakfast. He tips his tweed cap to that one. Sausages and rashers, please, Juanita, and throw in a dollop of that fine blood pudding you have hanging over the stove. When you’re finished the washing up, love, roll out the wheelbarrow and we’ll go for a waltz around the city where all of America sludges down to the sea. He laughs to himself. If Juanita heard him say that, she’d be outraged. She’d be on her bike, off home to Hollywood. Never in her life has she made breakfast for him. And not damn likely to either. Gorgeous as she is, Juanita is a ferocious woman. A temper on her to calm the seven seas. And a voicebox that’s been known to boom. And her, so small and sweet and delicate. Juanita. Up and away, Flaherty, me boy. No time for all this dilly-dallying.

He moves away from the puddle of pee, holding his nose — broken many times — and wonders who it was wrote the little gem of graffiti. The man who tapped his kidney? Surely not. No fountains of helicon for him. The little girl with the upturned dress full of crayons? You never know these days — he has heard that they installed metal detectors last week in what they call the junior high. An appropriate enough name since the kids around here are known to have a fondness for drugs. And guns. At the far end of the complex there is another slogan. Guns ’n Roses. For that there surely is no logic.