Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (13 page)

—Exactly.
—And then I just said, Yes. That’s all I said. Smiling still. The steam hissing and burning. I said, Yes, Sergeant. And thank you. —Mercy.
—He finished his tea.
All of them looking at their cups.
—And I brought him to the door. And that was it.
—Yes.
—And Solomon took him down in the elevator. And I’ve never told anyone that story. Afterward my face hurt, I smiled so much. Isn’t that terrible?
—No, no.
—Of course not.
—It feels like I’ve waited my whole life to tell that story.
—Oh, Claire.
—I just can’t believe that I smiled.
She knows that she has not told certain things about it, that the intercom had buzzed, that the doorman had stuttered, that the wait was a stunned one, that the sound of his knocking was like that against a coffin lid, that he took off his hat and said ma’am and then sir, and that they had said, Come in, come in, that the sergeant had never seen the like of the apartment before—it was obvious just from the way he looked at the furniture that he was nervous but thrilled too.
In another time he might have found it all glamorous, Park Avenue, fancy art, candles, rituals. She had watched him as he caught a mirror glance of himself, but he turned away from his own reflection and she might have even liked him then, the way he coughed into the hollow of his rounded hand, the gentleness of it. He held his hand at his mouth and he was like a magician about to pull out a sad scarf. He looked around, as if about to leave, as if there might be all sorts of exits, but she sat him down again. She went to the kitchen and brought a slice of fruitcake for him to eat. To ease the tension. He ate it with a little flick of guilt in his eyes. The little crumbs on the floor. She could hardly bring herself to vacuum them up afterward.
Solomon wanted to know what had happened. The sergeant said that he wasn’t at liberty, but Solomon pressed and said,
None of us are at liberty, are we, really? I mean, when you think about it, Sergeant, none of us are free.
And the hat went bouncing on the military knee again.
Tell me,
said Solomon, and there was a tremble in his voice then.
Tell me or get out of my home.

The sergeant coughed into a closed fist. A liar’s gesture. They were still collecting the details, the sergeant said, but Joshua had been at a café. Sitting inside. They had been warned, all the personnel, about the cafés. He was with a group of officers. They had been to a club the night before. Must have been just blowing off steam. She couldn’t imagine that, but she didn’t say anything—her Joshua at a club? It was impossible, but she let it slide, yes, that was the word,
slide.
It was early morning, the sergeant said, Saigon time. Bright blue skies. Four grenades rolled in at their feet. He died a hero, the sergeant said. Solomon was the one who coughed at that.
You don’t die a fucking hero, man.
She had never heard Solomon curse like that before, not to a stranger. The sergeant arranged his hat on his knee. Like his leg might be the thing now that needed to tell the story. Glancing up at the prints above the couch. Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the deadest of them all?

He pulled his breath in. His throat looked corrugated.
I’m very sorry for your loss,
he said again.
When he had gone, when the night was silent, they had stood there in the room, Solomon and Claire, looking at each other, and he had said they would not crack, which they hadn’t, which she wouldn’t, no, they wouldn’t blame each other, they wouldn’t grow bitter, they’d get through it, survive, they would not allow it to become a rift between them.
—And all the time I was just smiling, see.
—You poor thing.
—That’s awful.
—But it’s understandable, Claire, it really is.
—Do you think so?
—It’s okay. Really.
—I just smiled so much, she says.
—I smiled too, Claire.
—You did?
—That’s what you do, you keep back the tears, gospel.
And then she knows now what it is about the walking man. It strikes her deep and hard and shivery. It has nothing to do with angels or devils. Nothing to do with art, or the reformed, or the intersection of a man with a vector, man beyond nature. None of that.
He was up there out of a sort of loneliness. What his mind was, what his body was: a sort of loneliness. With no thought at all for death.
Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by footsore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack- up, deathby AgentOrange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangulation, death by bowie knife, death by mescaline, death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by appeasement, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes.
A stupid, endless menu of death.
But death by tightrope?
Death by performance?
That’s what it amounted to. So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all. His little Charlie Chaplin walk, coming in like a hack on her morning. How dare he do that with his own body? Throwing his life in everyone’s face? Making her own son’s so cheap? Yes, he has intruded on her coffee morning like a hack on her code. With his hijinks above the city. Coffee and cookies and a man out there walking in the sky, munching away what should have been.
—You know what? she says, leaning into the circle of ladies.
—What?
She pauses a moment, wondering what she should say. A tremble running deep through her body.
—I like you all so much.
She is looking at Gloria when she says it, but she means it to them all, she genuinely means it. A little catch in her throat. She scans the row of faces. Gentleness and courtesy. All of them smiling at her. Come, ladies. Come. Let us while away our morning now. Let it slide. Let us forget walking men. Let us leave them high in the air. Let us sip our coffee and be thankful. Simple as that. Let’s pull back the curtains and allow light through. Let this be the first of many more. No one else will intrude. We have our boys. They are brought together. Even here. On Park Avenue. We hurt, and have one another for the healing.
She reaches for the teapot, her hands trembling. The odd sounds in the room, the lack of quiet, the rustle of bagel bags, and the peeling back of muffin wrappers.
She takes her cup and drains it. Dabs her knuckle at the side of her mouth.
Gloria’s flowers on the table, already opening. Janet picking a crumb off her plate. Jacqueline with her knee going up and down, in rhythm. Marcia looking off into space. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.
Claire stands, not shaky at all, not one bit, not now.
—Come, she says, come. Let’s go see Joshua’s room.

In any other circumstance we might have ended up at the side of the road, swapping license numbers, maybe haggling over a few dollars, even going immediately to a body shop to get the damage repaired, but it didn’t turn out that way. It was the gentlest tap. A small screech of the tires. We figured afterward that the driver must have had his foot on the brake, or his rear lights weren’t working, or maybe he had been riding the brake all along—in the sunlight we didn’t see the shine. The van was big and lazy. The rear fender was tied with wire and string. I recall seeing it like one of those old horses from my youth, a lumbering, impatient animal grown stubborn to being slapped on the rump. It was the back wheels that went first. The driver tried to correct. His elbow pulled in from the window. The van went sideways right, which is when he tried to correct again, but he pulled too hard and we felt the second jolt, like bumper cars at a fair, except we weren’t in a spin—our car was steady and straight.

Blaine had just lit a joint. It smoldered on the rim of an empty Coke can that sat between us. He had barely smoked any, one or two drags, when the van spun out, brown and horsey: the peace decals on the rear glass, the dented side panels, the windows left slightly ajar. On and on and on it spun.

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

The driver had a handsome face and his hair was peppered toward gray. There were deep, dark bags under his eyes. He was unshaven and he wore a shirt ambitiously undone at the neck, the sort of man who might have been calm at most times, but the wheel was sliding through his hands now and his mouth open wide. He looked down at us from the height of the van as if he might be freezing our faces in memory too. His mouth stretched into a further
O
and his eyes widened. I wonder now how he saw me, my fringed dress, my curved beads, my hair cut flapperstyle, my eyeliner royal blue, my eyes bleary with lack of sleep.

There were canvases in our backseat. We had tried to flog them at Max’s Kansas City the night before, but we had failed. Paintings that nobody wanted. Still, we had carefully arranged them so they wouldn’t get scratched. We had even placed bits of styrofoam between them to keep them from rubbing one another.

If only we had been so careful with ourselves.
Blaine was thirty- two. I was twenty- eight. We were two years married. Our car, an antique 1927 Pontiac Landau, gold with silver paneling, was almost older than both of us put together. We had installed an eight- track that was hidden under the dashboard. We played twenties jazz. The music filtered out over the East River. There was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise.
The van spun farther.It was almostfront- on. On the passenger side, all I could see was a pair of bare feet propped up on the dashboard. Untangling in slow motion. The bottoms of her feet were so white at the edges and so dark in their hollows that they could only have belonged to a black woman. She untucked at the ankles. The spin was slow enough. I could just see the top of her frame. She was calm. As if ready to accept. Her hair was pulled back tight off her face and bright baubles of jewelry bouncedat herneck. If I hadn’tseen her again,moments later,after she was thrown through the windshield, I might have thought she was naked, given the angle I was looking from. Younger than me, a beauty. Her eyes traveled across mine as if asking, What are you doing, you tan blond bitch in your billowy blouse and your fancy Cotton Club car?
She was gone just as quickly. The van went into a wider spin and our car kept on going straight. We passed them. The road opened like a split peach. I recall hearing the first crunch behind us, another car hitting the van, then the clatter of a grille that fell to the ground, and later on, when we went back over it all in our minds, Blaine and I, we reheard the impact of the newspaper truck as it sent them into the guardrail, a big boxy truck with the driver’s door open and the radio blaring. It hit with brute force. There never would have been a way out for them.
Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an instant until I shouted at him to stop, please stop, please. Nothing more uncluttered than these moments. Our lives in perfect clarity. You must get out. Take responsibility. Walk back to the crash. Give the girl mouth- to- mouth. Hold her bleeding head. Whisper in her ear. Warm the whites of her feet. Run to a phone. Save the crushed man.
Blaine pulled over to the side of the FDR and we stepped out. The caw of gulls from the river, breasting the wind. The dapple of light on the water. The surging currents, their spinning motions. Blaine shaded his eyes in the sunlight. He looked like an ancient explorer. A few cars had stopped in the middle of the road and the newspaper truck had come to a sideways halt, but it wasn’t one of those enormous wrecks that you sometimes hear about in rock songs, all blood and fracture and American highway; rather, it was calm with only small sprinklings of jeweled glass across the lanes, a few bundles of newspapers in a havoc on the ground, distant from the body of the young girl, who was expressing herself in a patch of blooming blood. The engine roared and steam poured out of the van. The driver’s foot must still have been on the pedal. It whined incessantly, at its highest pitch. Some doors were opening in the stalled cars behind and already some other drivers were leaning on their horns, the chorus of New York, impatient to get going again, the fuck- you shrill. We were alone, two hundred yards ahead of the clamor. The road was perfectly dry but with patches of puddled heat. Sunlight through the girdings. Gulls out over the water.
I looked across at Blaine. He wore his worsted jacket and his bow tie. He looked ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past.
—Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.
The moment he turned to check the front of the car I recall thinking that we’d never survive it, not so much the crash, or even the death of the young girl—she was so obviously dead, in a bloodied heap on the road— or the man who was slapped against the steering wheel, almost certainly ruined, his chest jammed up against the dashboard, but the fact that Blaine went around to check on the damage that was done to our car, the smashed headlight, the crumpled fender, like our years together, something broken, while behind us we could hear the sirens already on their way, and he let out a little groan of despair, and I knew it was for the car, and our unsold canvases, and what would happen to us shortly, and I said to him: Come on, let’s go, quick, get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.

^{in ’73 blaine and}
I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident. Just a one- night blowout. We’d slept in that morning, in the Chelsea Hotel, and we were returning to the old Grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies.

On the way home, silence was all we had. We ducked off the FDR, drove north, over the Willis Avenue Bridge, into the Bronx, off the highway, along the two- lane road, by the lake, down the dirt track toward home. The cabin was an hour and a half from New York City. It was set back in a grove of trees on the edge of a second, smaller lake. A pond, really. Lily pads and river plants. The cabin had been built fifty years before, in the 1920s, out of red cedar. No electricity. Water from a spring well. A woodstove, a rickety outhouse, a gravity- fed shower, a hut we used for a garage. Raspberry bushes grew up and around the back windows. You could lift the sashes to birdsong. The wind made the reeds gossip.

It was the type of place where you could easily learn to forget that we had just seen a girl killed in a highway smash, perhaps a man too—we didn’t k now.

Evening was falling when we pulled up. The sun touched the top of the trees. We saw a belted kingfisher bashing a fish upon the dock. It ate its prey and then we sat watching its wheeling flight away—something so beautiful about it. I stepped out and along the dock. Blaine took out the paintings from the backseat, propped them against the side of the hut, pulled open the huge wooden doors where we kept the Pontiac. He parked the car and locked the hut with a padlock and then swept the car tracks with a broom. Halfway through the sweeping, he looked up and gave me a wave that was also a half- shrug, and he set to sweeping again. After a while, there was no sign that we had even left the cabin.

The night was cool. A chill had silenced the insects.
Blaine sat beside me on the dock, kicked off his shoes, dangled his feet out over the water, fished in the pockets of his pleated trousers. The burned- out shadows of his eyes. He still had a three- quarter- full bag of cocaine from the night before. Forty or fifty dollars’ worth. He opened it and shoved the long thin padlock key into the coke, scooped up some powder. He cupped his hands around the key and held it to my nostril. I shook my head no.
—Just a hit, he said. Take the edge off.
It was the first snort since the night before—what we used to call the cure, the healer, the turpentine, the thing that cleaned our brushes. It kicked hard and burned straight through to the back of my throat. Like wading into snow- shocked water. He dipped into the bag and took three long snorts for himself, reared his head back, shook himself side to side, let out a long sigh, put his arm around my shoulder. I could almost smell the crash on my clothes, like I’d just crumpled my fender, sent myself spinning, about to smash into the guardrail.
—Wasn’t our fault, babe, he said.
—She was so young.
—Not our fault, sweetie, you hear me?
—Did you see her on the ground?
—I’m telling you, said Blaine, the idiot hit his brakes. Did you see him? I mean, his brake lights weren’t even working. Nothing I could do. I mean, shit, what was I supposed to do? He was driving like an idiot.
—Her feet were so white. The bottoms of them.
—Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on, babe.
—Jesus, Blaine, there was blood everywhere.
—You’ve gotta forget it.
—She was just lying there.
—You didn’t see a goddamn thing. You listening to me? We saw nothing.
—We’re driving a ’27 Pontiac. You think nobody saw us?
—Wasn’t our fault, he said again. Just forget it. What could we do? He hit his goddamn brakes. I’m telling you, he was driving that thing like it was a goddamn boat.
—D’you think he’s dead too? The driver? You think he’s dead?
—Take a hit, honey.
—What?
—You gotta forget it happened, nothing happened, not a goddamn thing.
He stuffed the small plastic bag into the inside of his jacket pocket and stuck his fingers under the shoulder of his vest. We had both been wearing old- fashioned clothes for the better part of a year. It was part of our back- to- the- twenties kick. It seemed so ridiculous now. Bit players in a bad theater. There’d been two other New York artists, Brett and Delaney, who had gone back to the forties, living the lifestyle and the clothes, and they had made a killing from it, became famous, had even hit the
New York Times
style pages.
We had gone further than Brett and Delaney, had moved out of the city, kept our prize car—our only concession—and had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cuttingedge, academic. At our core, even we knew we weren’t being original. In Max’s the night before—pumped up on ourselves—we had been stopped by the bouncers, who didn’t recognize who we were. They wouldn’t let us into the back room. A waitress pulled a curtain tight. She took pleasure in her refusal. None of our old friends were around. We spun backward, went up to the bar, the canvases in our arms. Blaine bought a bag of coke from the bartender, the only one to compliment our work. He leaned across the counter and gazed at the canvases, ten seconds, at most. Wow, he said. Wow. That’ll be sixty bucks, man. Wow. If you want some Panama Red, man, I got that too. Some Cheeba Cheeba. Wow. Just say the word. Wow.
—Get rid of the coke, I said to Blaine. Just throw it in the water. —Later, babe.
—Throw it away, please.
—Later, sweetie, okay? I’m chomping now. I mean, that guy, come on! He couldn’t drive. I mean what type of fucking idiot hits the brakes in the middle of the FDR? And you see her? She wasn’t even wearing any clothes. I mean, maybe she was blowing him or something. I bet that’s it. She was sucking him off.
—She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.
—Not my fault.
—She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel.
—You were the one told me to leave the scene. You’re the one said, Let’s go. Don’t forget it, you’re the one, you made the decision!
I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear- headed. Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.
I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.
I made my way through the dark to the kerosene lamp. Matches on the table. I flicked the lamp alive. Turned the mirror around. I didn’t want to see my face. The cocaine was still pumping through me. I turned the lamp higher and felt its heat rise. A bead of sweat at my brow. I left the dress in a puddled heap, stepped to the bed. I fell against the soft mattress, lay facedown, naked, under the sheets.
I could still see her. Most of all it was the bottoms of her feet, I had no idea why, I could see them there, against the dark of the tarmac. What is it that had made them so very white? An old song came back to me, my late grandfather singing about feet of clay. I buried my face further in the pillow.
The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling—it seemed possible to do both at once. Blaine’s footsteps sounded across the floor. His breathing was shallow. I could hear his shoes being tossed near the stove. He turned the kerosene lamp down. The wick whispered. The edges of the world got a little darker. The flame trembled and righted itself.
—Lara, he said. Sweetie.
—What is it?
—Look, I didn’t mean to shout. Really.
He came to the bed and bent down over me. I could feel his breath against my neck. It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow. I’ve got something for us, he said. He pulled the sheet down to my thighs. I could feel the cocaine being sprinkled on my back. It was what we had done together years ago. I did not move. His chin in the hollow at my low back. The bristle where he hadn’t shaved. His arm draped against my ribcage and his mouth at the center of my spine. I felt the run of his face down along the back of my body and the very touch of his lips, aloof and rootless. He sprinkled the powder again, a rough line that he licked with his tongue.
He was rampant now and had pulled the sheet fully off me. We hadn’t made love in a few days, not even in the Chelsea Hotel. He turned me over and told me not to sweat, that it would make the cocaine clump.
—Sorry, he said again, sprinkling the coke low on my stomach. I shouldn’t have shouted like that.
I pulled him down by the hair. Beyond his shoulder the faint knots in the ceiling wood looked like keyholes.
Blaine whispered in my ear: Sorry, sorry, sorry.