Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (4 page)

Our father had died a few months before. In the middle of his university classroom, a lecture about quarks. Elementary particles. He had insisted on finishing his class while a pain shot down his left arm.
Three quarks for Muster Mark.
Thank you, class. Safe home. Good night. Byebye. I was hardly devastated, but I had left Corrigan dozens of messages, and even got through to the Bronx police, but they said there was nothing they could do.
In the graveyard I had kept turning, hoping to see him coming up the narrow laneway, maybe even in one of our father’s old suits, but he never appeared.
“Not too many people there,” I said. “Small English churchyard. A man cutting the grass. Didn’t turn the engine off for the service.” He kept tilting the teacup on his hand, as if trying to get the last drops out.
“What scriptures did they use?” he said finally.
“I can’t remember. Sorry. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What would you have used, Corr?”
“Oh, I don’t know, really. Something Old Testament, maybe. Something primal.”
“Like what, Corr?”
“Not sure exactly.”
“Go on, tell me.”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t fucking know!”
The curse stunned me. The shame flushed him red. He lowered his gaze, scrubbed the cup with the flap of his shirt. The sound of it made a high, unusual squeak and I knew then that there’d be no more talk about our father. He had closed that path down, quick and hard, made a border; do not cross here. It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way.
The silence of brothers.
He tucked the prayer kneeler at the back of his knees, like a wooden cushion, and he began mumbling.
When he stood he said: “Sorry for cursing.”
“Yeah, me too.”
At the window, he absently pulled the cord of the blinds open and shut. Down below, a woman by the underpass screamed. He parted the window blind again, with two fingers.
“Sounds like Jazz,” he said.
The orange streetlight from the window latticed him as he crossed the floor at a clip.

^{hours and hours}
of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain- link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn’t catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then they would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.

I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon of delight.

I’d been in the South Bronx a week. It was so humid, some nights, we had to shoulder the door closed. Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below. Air mail. The police came in, clubbing. Shots rang out from the rooftop. On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized. Arson on the streets. It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes. I had to get out. The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere. There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves. I found a gig as a telemarketer but I needed a dedicated phone line in Corrigan’s apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected.

Corrigan wrote out a list of things for me to see, Chumley’s bar in the Village, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park by day. But I had little money to speak of. I went to the window and watched the plot of the days unfold. The rubbish accused me. Already the smell rose up to the fifth- floor windows.

Corrigan worked as part of his Order’s ethic, made a few bob by driving a van for some old folk in the local nursing home. The bumper was tied with rusted wire. The windows were plastered with his peace stickers. The front headlights hung loose in the grille. He was gone most of the day, in charge of the ones that were infirm. What was ordeal for others was grace for him. He picked them up in the late morning in the nursing home on Cypress Avenue—mostly Irish, Italian, one old Jewish man, nicknamed Albee, in a gray suit and skullcap. “Short for Albert,” he said, “but if you call me Albert I’ll kick your ass.” I sat in with them a few afternoons, men and women—most of them white—who could have been folded up just like their wheelchairs. Corrigan drove at a snail’s pace so as not to bounce them around. “You drive like a pussy,” said Albee from the backseat. Corrigan laid his head against the steering wheel and laughed, but kept his foot on the brake.

Cars behind us beeped. A hellish ruckus of horns. The air was stifled with ruin. “Move it, man, move it!” Albee shouted. “Move the goddamn van!”

Corrigan took his foot off the brake and slowly guided the van around to the playground at St. Mary’s, where he wheeled the old folk out into whatever bits of shade he could find. “Fresh air,” he said. The men sat rooted like Larkin poems. The old women looked shaken, heads nodding in the breeze, watching the playground. It was mostly black or Hispanic kids, zooming down the slides or swinging on the monkey bars.

Albee managed to wheel himself into the corner, where he took out sheets of paper. He bent over them and said not another word, scratching on the paper with a pencil. I hunkered down beside him.

“What you doing there, friend?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Chess, is it?”
“You play?”
“Right on.”
“You rated?”
“Rated?”
“Oh, get the fuck outta here—you’re a pussy too.”
Corrigan winked at me from the edge of the playground. This was his

Lunch had been made for them in the old folks’ home, but Corrigan went across the road to the local bodega to buy them extra potato crisps, cigarettes, a cold beer for Albee. A yellow awning. A bubblegum machine sat triple- chained to the shutters. A dustbin was overturned at the corner. There had been a garbage strike earlier that spring and still it wasn’t all cleaned up. Rats ran along the street gutters. Young men in sleeveless tops stood malevolently in the doorways. They knew Corrigan, it seemed, and as he disappeared inside he gave them a series of elaborate handshakes. He spent a long time inside and came out clutching large brown paper bags. One of the hoodlums back- slapped him, grabbed his hand, drew him close.

“How d’you do that?” I asked. “How d’you get them to talk to you?” “Why wouldn’t they?”
“It just seems, I don’t know, they’re tough, y’know.”
“Far as they’re concerned, I’m just a square.”
“You’re not worried? You know, a gun, or something, a switchblade?” “Why would I be?”
Together we loaded the old folk up in the van. He revved the engine

and drove to the church. There had been a vote among the old folk, the church as opposed to the synagogue. It was daubed in graffiti—whites, yellows, reds, silvers.
TAGS
173.
GRACO
76. The stained- glass windows had been broken with small stones. Even the cross on top was tagged. “The living temple,” said Corrigan. The elderly Jewish man refused to get out. He sat, head down, saying nothing, skipping through the notes in his book. Corrigan opened the back of the van and slipped him an extra beer over the seat.

“He’s all right, our Albee,” said Corrigan as he strolled away from the back of the van. “All he does is work on those chess problems all day long. Used to be a grandmaster or something. Came from Hungary, found himself in the Bronx. He sends his games off in the post somewhere. Does about twenty games all at once. He can play blindfolded. It’s the only thing that keeps him going.”

He helped the others out of the van and we wheeled them one by one towards the entrance. “Let’s walk the plank.” There were a series of broken steps at the front but Corrigan had stashed two long pieces of wood around the side, near the sacristy. He laid the planks parallel to each other and guided the chairs up. The wood lifted in the air with the weight of the wheelchairs, and for a moment they looked like they were bound for the sky. Corrigan pushed them forward and the planks slapped back down. He had the look of a man at ease. A shine in the corners of his eyes. You could see the gone boy in him, the nine- year- old back in Sandymount.

“My favorite moment of the day, this,” he said. He crossed over into the cool dark of the church, rolled them to whatever spot they wanted, some in the rear pews, some to the sides.

An old Irish woman was brought up to the very front, where she wrapped and rewrapped her rosary beads. She had a mane of white hair, blood in the corner of her eyes, an otherworldly stare. “Meet Sheila,” said Corrigan. She could hardly speak anymore, barely able to make a sound. A cabaret singer, she had lost most of her voice to throat cancer. She had been born in Galway but emigrated just after the First World War. She was Corrigan’s favorite and he stayed near her, said the formal prayers alongside her: a decade of the Rosary. She had no idea, I’m sure, about his religious ties, but there was an energy about her in that church she didn’t have elsewhere. She and Corrigan, it was like they were praying together for a good rain.

When we got out into the street again, Albee was dozing in the van, a bit of spittle on his chin. “Goddamn it,” he muttered when the engine rumbled into life. “Pair of pussies, the two of ya.”

Corrigan pulled into the nursing home in the late afternoon, then dropped me off in front of the housing project. He had another job to do, he said; there was someone he had to see.

“It’s a little project I’m working on,” he said, over his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll see you later.”
He climbed in and touched something in the glove box of his van before he took off. “Don’t wait up for me,” he called. I watched him go, hand out the window, waving. He was holding something back, I knew.
It was pitch black when I saw him finally arriving back down among the whores alongside the Major Deegan. He gave out iced coffee from a giant silver canister that he kept in the back of the van. The girls gathered around him as he spooned ice into their cups. Jazzlyn wore a one- piece neon swimsuit. She tugged the back, snapped the elastic, edged close to him, gave the hint of a belly dance against his hip. She was tall, exotic, so very young she seemed to flutter. Playfully, she pushed him backwards. Corrigan ran a circle around her, high- stepping. A scream of laughter. She ran off when she heard a car horn blow. Around Corrigan’s feet lay a row of empty paper coffee cups.
Later he came back upstairs, thin, dark- eyed, exhausted.
“How was your meeting?”
“Oh, grand, yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
“Out tripping the light fantastic?”
“Ah, yeah, the Copacabana, you know me.”
He collapsed on the bed but was up early in the morning to a quick mug of tea. No food in the house. Just tea and sugar and milk. He said his prayers, and then touched the crucifix as he went towards the door once more.
“Down to the girls again?”
He looked at his feet. “I suppose so.”
“You think they really need you, Corr?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”
The door swung on its hinges.
I’ve never been interested in calling out the moral brigade. Not my place. Not my job. Each to his own. You get what you create. Corrigan had his reasons. But these women disturbed me. They were light- years removed from anything I’d ever known. The high of their eyes. Their heroin sway. Their swimsuits. Some of them had needle marks at the back of their knees. They were more than foreign to me.
Down in the courtyard, I walked the long way around the projects, following the broken lines in the concrete, just to avoid them.
A few days later a gentle knock sounded on the door. An older man with a single suitcase. Another monk from the Order. Corrigan rushed to embrace him. “Brother Norbert.” He had come from Switzerland. Norbert’s sad brown eyes gladdened me. He looked around the apartment, swallowed deeply, said something about the Lord Jesus and a place of deep shelter. On his second day Norbert was robbed in the lift at gunpoint. He said he had gladly given them everything, even his passport. There was a shine like pride in his eyes. The Swiss man sat in serious prayer for two solid days, not leaving the apartment. Corrigan stayed down on the streets most of the time. Norbert was too formal and correct for him. “It’s like he’s got a toothache and he wants God to cure it,” said Corrigan.
Norbert refused the couch, lay on the floor. He balked each time the door opened and the hookers came in. Jazzlyn sat in his lap, ran her fingers on the rim of his ear, messed with his orthopedic shoes, hid them behind the couch. She told him that she could be his princess. He blushed until he almost wept. Later, when she was gone, his prayers became highpitched and frantic. “The Beloved Life was spared, but not the pain, the Beloved Life was spared but not the pain.” He broke down in tears. Corrigan was able to get Norbert’s passport back and he drove him out to the airport in the brown van to get a flight to Geneva. Together they prayed and then Corrigan dispatched him. He looked at me as if he expected me to be leaving also.
“I don’t know who these people are,” he said. “They’re my brothers, but I don’t really know who they are. I’ve failed them.”
“You should leave this hole, Corr.”
“Why would I leave? My life’s here.”
“Find somewhere with a bit of sunshine. You and me together. I’ve been thinking about California or somewhere like that.”
“I’m called here.”
“You could be called anywhere.”
“This is where I am.”
“How did you get his passport back?”
“Oh, I just asked around.”
“He was robbed at gunpoint, Corr.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to get hurt.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
I went to the chair by the window and watched the large tractortrailers pulling up under the highway. The girls jostled to get at them. A single neon sign blinked in the distance: an advertisement for oatmeal.
“The edge of the world here,” said Corrigan.
“You could do something back home. In Ireland. Up north. Belfast. Something for us. Your own people.”
“I could, yeah.”
“Or shake up some campesinos in Brazil or something.”
“Yeah.”
“So why stay here?”
He smiled. Something had gone wild in his eyes. I couldn’t tell what it was. He put his hands up close to the ceiling fan, as if he were about to thrust them in there, right up into the whirling blades, leave his hands there, watch them get mangled.
—