Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

I don’t even care if I was crying or not, who cares. But I know I was shouting something because one of the guards slapped me in the gob and told me to shut up. Christ, she was charred black at that stage and there they were, stamping the flames out around the caboose. It’s just an awful pity that whole fucking place never caught, that’s what I say. There were some scorch marks around the floor and her big hiking boots were black as fuck, but the place was still standing when they took me away in the ambulance. They tried to get me to lie down but there was no fucking way. I was looking at the caboose out the back of the window for as long as I could, all lit up by cop cars and fire engines and all.

Here in the hospital they’ve been looking after my burns and filing all sorts of reports and all. Johnnie Logan and the greenies came in with a bunch of flowers for me, pink ones just like Ofeelia’s. Dolores brought me a few magazines, fair play to her. The cops are taking me to court next week and I’ll probably spend a couple of months in the slammer. I don’t care. I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Then when I get out I swear to God I’m going to do a number on that caboose, up and make sure those mining boys never come back, off to fucking Timbuktu with them for all I care. One good thing about it is we knocked their plans back a good few months but they need to be finished off, pronto like. Stay away from our fucking mountains, that’s what I say.

The cops and the doctors have been asking me all about it, but all I can really remember is that when they were slamming the handcuffs on me I saw a picture of Ofeelia in my mind, and when I get to thinking about it that picture always comes back to me. And it’s always the same. It isn’t the crumple on the floor or anything, or that Dunnes Stores bag lying out by the JCBs or the flower beds or anything. It isn’t even real. She doesn’t have the cigarette in her gob or matches in her hands. It’s like something in a film I suppose. The way I see it she has flowers in her hair, dozens of them, wrapped up in the curls, and she’s sitting there, bloody pink petals flying, driving that damn caboose through the universe for the last time, smiling like the clappers, going hell for leather along by the stars. And the funny thing about it is I’m right there with her, leaving a few bloody skidmarks of my own.

Fergus nudges his wheelchair up to the riverwall and watches the Liffey flow quickly along, bloated from an evening rain, a cargo of night sky and neon, all bellying down toward Dublin bay. His father once heaved a fridge into the river and he wonders what else might lie down there. Flakes of gold paint from the Guinness barges perhaps. Blackened shells from British army gunboats. Condoms and needles. Old black kettles. Pennies and prams. History books, harmonicas, fingernails, and baskets full of dead flowers. A billion cigarette butts and bottle caps. Shovels and stovepipes, coins and whistles, horseshoes and footballs. And many an old bicycle, no doubt. Down there with wheels sinking slowly in the mud, handlebars galloping with algae, gear cables rusted into the housing, tiny fish nosing around the pedals.

He adjusts the long black overcoat that hangs in anarchic folds around his legs and wipes the sweat off his forehead with his younger brother’s Shamrock Rovers scarf. Half a mile, he reckons, from his house in the Liberties, and the bicycle wheel that he carried in his lap has caused all sorts of problems — dropped to the ground as he gently tried to close the front door, smeared his old jeans with a necklace of oil as he negotiated the hill down by Christchurch, and bounced away as he tried to get over the quayside curb.

The Liffey guides a winter wind along its broad-backed banks. Fergus puts the brake on the wheelchair and lets a gob of phlegm volley out over the river, where it catches and spirals. He wonders what sort of arc the bicycle wheel will make in the air.

The fridge, all those years ago, tumbled head over heels into the water. His father, a leather-faced man with pockets always full of bottles, had taken it down to the river all on his own. He hadn’t been able to keep up the payments and wasn’t ready to hand it back to the collector. “That gouger can go for a swim if he wants his Frigidaire.” He nailed a few planks from the coal shed together, screwed some rollerskate wheels on the bottom, loaded up the fridge, and grunted down toward the quays. Fergus and his brothers tagged behind. Some of the drunks who were belching out of the pubs offered help, but Fergus’s father flung his arms in the air. “Every single one of ya is a horse of a man,” he roared, then stopped and pulled on his cigarette, “but yez can’t shit walking, so I’ll do it meself.”

Bottles clinking, he stumbled down to the river, laughing as the huge white fridge cartwheeled into the water, creating a gigantic splash.

The things that fridge must have joined, thinks Fergus. Broken toilets. Flagons of cider. Shirt buttons. High-heeled shoes. A very old pair of crutches. He shivers for a moment in the cold and runs his fingers around through his short curly hair. Or perhaps even a rotating bed, flanked with special syringes, piss bags, rubber gloves, buckets of pills, bottles of Lucozade, a dozen therapy tables, a nurse’s pencil with the ends chewed off. Holding onto the axle and the freewheel, Fergus spins the spokes around, peers through them, and listens to the rhythmic click as the river and the quays tumble into slices, then lets another volley from his throat out over the water.

* * *

Mangled by a bread truck on the Lansdowne Road, near where the Dodder negotiates low rocks. Bucketfuls of winter sun coming down as he rode back from a delivery, over the bridge by the football stadium, inventing Que Seras and Molly Malones and Ronnie Whelan hitting an eighteen-yard volley from the edge of the box. But there was only a song of tires and the poor bastard behind the wheel of the bread truck had a heart attack and was found with eclair cream on the front of his white open-neck shirt, brown loaves littered around him on the floor, slumped frontward on the truck horn, so that it sounded like the cry of a curlew, only constant, with blood in a pattern of feathers on the front windshield.

Fergus was tossed in the air like a stale crust and woke up in Our Lady of Lourdes Rehabilitation Center with the doctors in a halo around him. Collarbone broken, thirty forehead stitches, ribs cracked, and the third lumbar on the lower vertebrae smashed to hell. He was put in a ward full of rugby players and motorcycle victims. When his bed was spun he could see out the window to a ripple of trees that curtsied down to the road. Weeks rivered like months. A Cavanman in the bed beside him had a pair of scars that ran like railroad tracks when he held his wrists together. A persistent howl thudded down from the end of the ward. A carrot-haired boy from Sligo tattooed a tricolor on the top of his leg, slamming the needle down hard into a muscle that didn’t feel a thing. The months eddied carelessly into one another.

“How d’ya think I feel, I’m marvelous, just fuckin’ marvelous,” Fergus roared at the nurse one afternoon when the knowledge was settling in — no more slipstreaming the 45 bus down Pearse Street in the rain or sprinting along by the brewery, slapping at dogs with the bicycle pump, dicing the taxis, swerving the wrong way up the street, no more jokes about women sitting on things other than the crossbar— that’s not my crossbar, love, I’m only happy to see ya —or slagging matches along the quays with the truck drivers, or simply just trundling down Thomas Street for a pint of milk.

The bike was at home in the coal shed, a trophy of misery, collected by his father on the day of the accident. He had bought it for Fergus five years before, convinced that his son was good enough to race. Every payday he had rolled up his spare pound notes and stuffed them inside a Pernod bottle. He brought the bike home one Saturday night, carefully wheeling it from the shop on George’s Street. It was a red Italian model, all Camagnolo parts. Boys in the neighborhood whistled when they saw it. Once, on O’Connell Bridge, four youngsters in bomber jackets tried to knock him off and steal it, but he smacked one in the jaw with the kryptonite lock. In the messenger company he was known for the way he salmoned, leaping through the traffic the wrong way up a one-way road. In his first race, in the Wicklow Hills, two months before the accident, he had come in second place. The leather on the saddle had begun to conform to his body. He had learned how to flick it quite easily through the traffic jams up by Christchurch.