Colum McCann - Fishing the Sloe-Black River

After the accident the machine was a ribbon of metal. But, when his father came into the hospital, he would tower over the bed: “Before y’know it, Fergus, you’ll be on her again, and fuck all the begrudgers.” Fergus lay there, nodding.

His mother stayed upstairs in her bedroom, kneeling by red votive lamps and holy pictures. Letters were sent off to Knock and Lourdes. His younger brothers drew pictures of favorite places, Burdocks Chipper, the alleyway down by the Coombe, the front of the Stag’s Head, the new graffiti on the schoolyard wall. Fergus’s friends from the messenger service sat by the hospital bed and sometimes they’d race off together, radios crackling, come on ya tosser would ya hurry up for fuck sake. Old girlfriends wrote short poems that they found in magazines, and occasionally the nurses brought him down to Baker’s Corner for a sweet and furtive pint. But when the bed was spun the same trees curtsied down to the road. The boy with the tricolor went berserk with the pins, covering himself in small blue dots and stabbing at his eye with a needle. The Cavanman stroked his wrists. A biker from Waterford shouted that someone had left a pubic hair in the French magazine that had circulated around the ward. Oranges gathered mold on Fergus’s bedside table. The therapy room was full of bright colors and smiling nurses, but at night, back in the ward, the distant low moan wouldn’t subside — it became part of the scenery, swallowed up, a hum, a drone, a noise you couldn’t sleep without. The months flowed on.

Home from the hospital, his father wheeled him out to the coal shed. It was a Friday and fish was being cooked in the house. The smell drifted. A light drizzle was falling and pigeons were scrapping for food on the rooftops of neighboring houses. His father opened the lock of the shed slowly. Half a dozen brown boxes waited for Fergus, beside the bicycle. They’d been postmarked in England, sent by mail order. Fergus opened them slowly. “The doctors don’t know their arses from their elbows, son, go on ahead there now and get cracking.” Fergus stared at the boxes for a long time. “And they cost a lot fucking more than a miracle,” said his father, chuckling, heading out the door toward the pub, his shoulders ripping at the side of his overcoat. Fergus sat there, the smell of cooking food all around him, fingering a derailleur.

* * *

Hitching the scarf up around his neck, he looks at his watch — already three o’clock in the morning — and then lays his head back against the edge of the wheelchair for a moment to look up to the sky. Certain stars are recognizable even through the clouds and the smog. Ten years ago, when he was seven years old, he’d been caught trying to steal a Mini Clubman from outside St. Patrick’s, and his father, after walloping him, took him for a walk down the same river, pointing up at the sky. “See those stars,” he said, “let me tell ya something.” The story was that the stars were their own peculiar hell, that all the murderers went to one star where there was nobody left to murder but themselves, all the corrupt politicians went where there was no government, all the child molestors went where there were no children to molest, all the car thieves went where there were no cars, and if that wasn’t good enough deterrent for him, he’d get another wallop. Fergus rubs his hand over his chest and wonders if there’s a star full of bicycle paraphernalia.

The new parts had cost his father the best part of two wage packets. He had even gotten an extra job as a night watchman for a security firm in Tallaght. When he came home at night there wasn’t so much as a clink inside his pockets anymore — it was more a persistent clatter of dismissive humphs, an emphatic hope, a nagging insistence that Fergus would get on the bike again.

And out in the coal shed, for two months, in the wheelchair, Fergus sweated over the bicycle. He tightened the nipples of the spokes on the right hand side of the wheel to bring it to the left, took the cotter pin and tapped it until the fat leap came out of the pedals, used the third hand to hold the brakes in place, dropped in the new set of front forks, plied the thin little Phillips-head screwdriver to adjust the gears. He overlapped the tape on the handlebars, twisted the ends of the cables where they frayed, bought new decals. His brothers watched and helped. Each night his father would come out to the coal shed, slap the saddle: “Just a few weeks now, son.”

He offered the bike to his brothers, but they knew better. It was a fossil, and Fergus knew it, and the only thing it could be ridden with was a perfect cadence of the imagination.

* * *

First to go were the handlebars and they went down with a small splash. The following night the pedals, the cranks, the front chainwheel, and the ball bearings were tossed. It was a Saturday when he wandered down to jettison the brakes, the cables, the saddle, the seatpost, and the derailleur. A crowd of drunks were huffing glue down on the quays, so he sat in the gateway of the Corporation building and waited until they drifted off.

Sunday was the most difficult job of all — it had taken three hours to try and negotiate the frame, and he was about to just leave it alongside the church when a taxi driver, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, pulled alongside him and asked what the hell he was doing. “Bringing the bike for a swim,” said Fergus, and the driver just nodded, then offered to put it in the boot and drive it down to the river for him. He balanced the frame on the riverwall. “Just as well this isn’t the bleedin’ Ganges,” said the driver, and drove off. Fergus, unsure of what the taxi man meant, toppled the frame over the wall and headed home, not even waiting for the ripples to spread out over the water.

And last night, when he went to get rid of the front wheel, he woke his brother Padraic as the door of the coal shed swung too far. Padraic came downstairs in his Arsenal jersey: “Wha’ ya doin’, Ferg?” “Mind your own business.” “Where’s the rest of the bike?” Fergus said nothing. “Da’ll cream ya,” said his brother. Later, as Fergus maneuvred down the street, he saw Padraic pull back the curtains and stare. When he got home Padraic was waiting for him on the steps of the house. “Ya’ve no fucking right to do that,” Padraic said. “Da spent all his money on it.”

Fergus pushed past his brother into the house: “He’ll find out soon enough.”

Down along the quays things are still quiet. The exhaust fumes from a couple of trucks make curious shapes in the air, sometimes caught in midflight with a streak of neon from a shop or a sign. A couple of pedestrians stroll along on the opposite side of the river, huddled under anorak hoods.

He bends forward in the chair, grabs one of the spokes, and hauls the rear wheel up to his chest. He sees a smidgin of oil and dirt on the third cog of the freewheel and runs his finger along it. He daubs the oil on the inside of his jeans, staring at the small smudge the oil makes against the blue.

The water is calmer now, with bits of litter settling on its surface. He wonders if all the pieces that he has flung in over the last few days have settled in the same area of river bottom.

Perhaps one day a storm might blow the whole bike back together again, a freak of nature, the pedals locking on to the cranks, the wheel axle slipping into the frame, the handlebars dropping gently into the housing, the whole damn thing back in one piece. Maybe then he can take a dive to the bottom of the slime and ride it again, slip his feet in the toeclips, curl his fingers around the bars, lean down to touch the gears forward, then pedal all around the river bottom, amongst the ruin of things.

He heaves the wheel out over the Liffey.