Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

He shuffles down toward the ground floor through all the words. Eat the homeless. Johnny X is hung like a horse. Leroy is sprunger than a mofo. Johnny X, it seems, has no problems. But give life long enough, Leroy, and it will solve them all. These drugs, he knows, are a terrible thing. Far away, the crack is a phrase for a good time. Not here. He has seen boys in this place — boys he taught to jab at the sky — swapping food stamps for little white bags. Leroy and Johnny X might well have been among them, though the names in his head tend to collide with one another.

There had been one boy, however, who made it out of here — Tyrone Jacobs, who is due to fight in Madison Square Garden tonight. Twelve years ago he was teaching Tyrone how to punch, the boy’s bog-black skin shining with sweat day after day after day in the hot sun spitting down in the complex’s courtyard. Keep your elbows tucked, young Tyrone. Wait for the hole. Spare the right. Dance a little. Jab. Atta boy. Move away. Dance. Throw that shoulder. Fake. He pauses and wonders if Tyrone will remember the right moves, if they’ll put a prize around his rib-tight body, a belt that he himself never won in the heavyweight division. For a moment he lets himself think of the Caffola fight and mustard oil. September 9, 1938. A bitter thought. Then he lets a little jab fly at the sky and almost loses his footing on the stairs.

In a great poem there was a man who tripped lightly along the ledge of a deep ravine where passions were pledged. And isn’t that the truth? Down the steps with a sprightly leap, he emerges from the complex into the New Orleans sun. He shades his eyes with his cap and looks around. A dirge of girls, one pregnant, prop up the streetcorner flower shop. They begin to giggle when they see him. He fingers his brown belted overcoat. It’s hotter than a July bride out here, by God, but he’ll need the overcoat when he gets to the laundromat. Part of the camouflage.

He recognizes a flouncy, frilly blue blouse on the pregnant girl, a blouse that Juanita decided she didn’t like a few months ago. When Juanita — who can be awful finicky — doesn’t like a piece of clothing, she flat out refuses to wear it again. So one day last month, after a year of acquiring new clothes for her, he decided to put them to some use. Give them to others who might wear them. Late one night, he furtively left his apartment with the blouse and hung it on the doorknob of Mrs. Jackson’s place. The next morning he watched the old woman come out onto the balcony. When she found the blue beauty on the doorknob, there was a smile splayed on her face that painted the whole world well.

After Mrs. Jackson, there had been a welter of Juanita’s clothes hung out on doorknobs all over the complex. Juanita doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even know about it. Nobody knows. But people around here need them, by God. There are Maid Marians everywhere, though the forest is paved over and gray.

“Good morning, Miss Jackson,” he says, nodding to the young girl with the bun — or the buns — in the oven. Both perhaps. She is suitably startled that he knows her name, and he smiles, then winks. “It’s a grand day.”

“Yessir,” the girl fumbles.

“Lovely flowers,” he says, pointing at the window.

“Yessir, lovely flowers.”

Ah, but he didn’t mean to embarrass her like that, winking at a young one who’s up the Swannee. He shuffles on past the shop. Flaherty, son, keep your tongue in your mouth, you damn fool. He was always the one for embarrassing women. When he did the cabarets with Juanita in the fifties, one night they were walking down by the Liffey and saw two men huddled in the shadows of Merchant’s Arch. Dublin wasn’t renowned for its homosexuals, and he’d sung, in a gorgeous voice: In Dublin’s fair city, where the boys are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Michael Malone, where he wheels his wheelbarrow through the streets broad and narrow, crying muscle out your cockles alive-alive-o. The two men, furious at the ditty, made a move for him, their fists clenched tight. But when they saw his shoulders, and perhaps remembered his photographs in the newspapers—“the phonic pugilist” was what the Evening Mail dubbed him — the two men turned the other way. Juanita was embarrassed, as well she should have been. She said that no matter what sexual persuasion — sheep or shearers — they should be allowed to do what they want. Juanita is small and frail but has a mouth on her as sharp as a new blade of grass.

Stopping at the traffic lights, he looks over his shoulder. The poor young girl back there by the flower shop, waiting for roses and proper pledged passions. Perhaps he’ll leave another one of Juanita’s blouses on her mother’s doorknob one of these days. One big enough for the baby, mind you. But, Jesus, aren’t wheelbarrows and roses — and even that awful thought, motherfuckers — coming up a fierce lot today? Must be the heat. Hotter than a jalapeño in hell. That’s Juanita’s phrase. She loves peppers. That it was too, hotter than a jalapeño in heaven or hell or anywhere else the night of the Caffola fight. September 9, 1938. Mustard oil.

He can hear the roar of the traffic from the I-10 highway and the rumble of a trolley coming up Carrollton Avenue. He stands at the edge of the wide road, waiting to walk. To cross the road in this country a man needs a damn Ph.D. in civil engineering. And a body on you like a racehorse. Johnny X would do well here. He waits for the little green man — not the same one you find on a can of beans — to flash on. And remembers that he’s hungry. But onward we go. “We should go forth,” as an American poet once said, “on the shortest journey, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” But what would Thoreau know? He lived in a cabin by a lake all on his own. Flaherty, me boy, you’ve been reading too many books, and if you don’t get across the damn road quickly, the green man will be red and you’ll be dead. Good Christ. This rhyming. It must be the heat. An imaginative man would have said: wooden overcoat. And left the rhymes to reason.

He crosses the road, stops, and surveys the traffic, then breathes deeply. Not as much in the lungs as there used to be. But it isn’t too far now to the laundromat, thank Jesus. Step we gaily, on we go, heel for heel and toe for toe, arm in arm and row in row, off for Marie’s wedding. His favorite song, no matter who the hell Marie is or was. Singing, he undoes the big brown belt of his overcoat. What will Juanita like? A flowery skirt? A pink blouse with tassels? Another flouncy blue number like Miss Jackson was wearing? No. What’s in order, he thinks, is something that will fit her like the sky fits the earth. That much at least she deserves. Today is a very special anniversary — July 9th, 1992. Juanita is still as beautiful as ever, and she deserves something special.

He sees a young boy walking by the fried chicken shop, with his hair sticking up in little shafts of electrocuted pink. What in the world has become of hairstyles? When we were boys, in Lisdoonvarna, the hair gel came in two-penny bottles. We would part our hair down the middle and it would shine in the moonlight on the way home from the dancehall.

Those were the days. Indeed. He left for America on the Washington cruiser, swearing to Ireland that he would come home Heavyweight Champion of the World. Days of cowlicks and curls. It was the Great Depression, he remembers, and unemployed men hung around, warming their hands over hot barrels on the dockside in Cobh, eating pigeon sandwiches. Some among them had mouths festered from eating nettles. Hard times, and even back then, America was the place to go. Lachrymose young girls sold daffodils so they could buy tickets. Boys stood up high on the backs of dung carts, looking out to sea, dreaming. Bilious crowds watched the white of the waves while the ships foghorned a song of exile. Getting on the boat, standing on the deck, he sang Ireland, I love you, a Chusla Mo Chroí, love of my heart. As the boat pulled away he remembered his parents, who died when he was just fifteen. His mother, a hard woman, a disarray of beauty, maps of the west wrinkled on her skin. His father, an American who had come to Ireland after the agonies of the Great War, a man who learned how to farm and make soil among the barren rocks, a hard-working man, honest and doomed.