Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (5 page)

in the raw of mornings the girls stretched in a line along the block, though daylight thinned them out. After his morning matins, Corrigan went down to the corner deli to buy
The Catholic Worker.
Through the underpass, across the road, under the awning. Old men in their undershirts sat at the door, pigeons working bread crumbs at their feet. Corrigan came out carrying the paper tucked under his arm. I could see him as he crossed back, framed through the concrete eye of the underpass. Out of the shadows, he passed the hookers and they called to him in their singsong. It hit the scale on about three different notes. Corr— i- gan. Cor— rig- gan. Caw- rig- gun.

He passed through the gauntlet. Jazzlyn stood chatting with him, her thumb hooked under the strap of her swimsuit. She looked like an oldtime cop in the wrong body, snapping the thin, lime- colored straps against her breasts. She leaned close to him again, her bare skin almost touching his lapel. He did not recoil. She was getting a charge from it all, I could tell. The lean of her young body. The hard snap of the strap. Her nipple against the fabric. Her head tilting closer and closer to him.

As cars passed, she turned to watch them, and her morning shadow lengthened. It was like she wanted to be everywhere, all at once. She leaned closer still and whispered in my brother’s ear. He nodded, turned, and went back towards the deli, came out carrying a can of Coke. Jazzlyn clapped her hands in delight, took it from him, pulled the ring off, sauntered away. A row of eighteen- wheelers was parked along the expressway. She propped her leg on the silver grille and sipped from the can, then suddenly threw the drink on the ground and climbed up into the truck.

Halfway in the door, she was already removing her swimsuit. Corrigan turned away. The cola lay in a black puddle in the gutter beneath her.
It happened times in a row, Jazzlyn asking him for a can of Coke, then throwing it to the ground when she found a mark.
I thought I should go down to her, negotiate a price, and treat myself to whatever trick it was she was able for, grab the back of her hair, bring her face close to mine, that sweet breath, curse her, spit on her, for wringing out my brother’s charity.
“Hey, leave the door open for them, will ya?” he said to me after he came home. I had taken to closing the locks in the afternoon, even though they pounded on the door.
“Why don’t they piss in their own houses, Corrigan?”
“Because they don’t have houses. They have apartments.”
“Why don’t they piss in their own apartments then?”
“Because they’ve got families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sons and daughters. They don’t want their families to see them dressed like that.”
“They’ve got kids?”
“Sure.”
“Jazz, she got kids?”
“Two,” he said.
“Oh, man.”
“Tillie’s her mother.”
I turned on him. I knew how it sounded. Step into that river, you don’t step out—no return. It came out in a torrent, how disgusting they were, sucking on his blood, all of them, leaving him thin, dry, helpless, taking the life out of him, leeches, worse than leeches, bedbugs that crawled from the wallpaper; he was a fool—all his religiosity, all his pious horseshit, it came down to nothing, the world is vicious and that’s what it amounts to, and hope is nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes.
He pulled at a small thread on the sleeve of his shirt, but I caught his elbow.
“Don’t give me your shit about the Lord upholding all that fall and raising up all that be bowed down. The Lord’s too big to fit in their miniskirts. Guess what, brother? Look at them. Look out the window. No amount of sympathy is ever going to change it. Why don’t you cop on? You’re just placating your conscience, that’s all. God comes along and sanctifies your guilt.”
His lips broke open a little. I waited but still he did not speak. We were so close together I could see his tongue move behind his teeth, flicking up and down like something nervous. His eyes were fixed and intent.
“Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They’re not Magdalenes. You’re just a bum among them. You’re looking for the poor man within? Why don’t you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?”
I could see the small, oblong reflection of the white door in his pupils, and I kept thinking that one of his hookers, one of his holy failures, was going to walk in and I’d see her reflection in the flicker.
“Why don’t you embarrass the rich with some of your charity? Go sit on a rich woman’s step and bring her to God? Tell me this—if the poor really are the living image of Jesus, why are they so fucking miserable? Tell me that, Corrigan. Why are they standing out there, displaying their misery to the rest of the world? I want to know. It’s just vanity, isn’t it? Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s rubbish. You listening? Why don’t you take all those hookers of yours and have them go sing in the choir? The Church of the High Vision. Why don’t you have them sit in the front pews? I mean, there you go on your knees to all the tramps and the lepers and the cripples and dopeheads. Why don’t they do something? Because they want nothing but to suck you dry, that’s why.”
Exhausted, I laid my head against the windowsill.
I kept waiting for him to give me some sort of bitter benediction— something about being weak towards the strengthless, strong against the powerful, there is no peace save in Jesus, freedom is given, not received, some catch- all to soothe me, but instead he let it all wash over him. His face did not betray a thing. He scratched the inside of his arm and nodded.
“Just leave the door open,” he said.
He went down the stairwell, footsteps echoing, around the edge of the courtyard, disappeared into the grayness.
I ran down the slick steps of the apartment building. Huge swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass on the bottom steps. Smells of piss and puke. Through the courtyard. A man held a pit bull on a training rope. He was teaching it to bite. The dog snapped at his arm: there were huge metal bracelets strapped across the man’s wrists. The snarls rolled across the yard. Corrigan was backing up his brown van, which he’d parked on the side of the road. I slapped the windows. He didn’t turn. I suppose I thought I might knock some sense into him, but after a moment the van was out of sight.
Over my shoulder the dog was snapping again at the man’s arm, but the man was staring at me, like I was the one trying to rip his wrists. A half- smile crawled over his face, malevolent and pure. I thought:
Nigger.
I couldn’t help it, but that’s what I thought:
Nigger.
This place would ruin me: how did Corrigan stand it?
I wandered the neighborhood, hands down deep in my pockets, not on the pavement, but at the edge of parked cars, an altered perspective. Taxis brushed by, close to my hip. The wind blew the smell of the subways up through the traffic. A hard, musty waft.
I went to the church on St. Ann’s. Up the broken steps, into the vestibule, past the holy- water font, into the dark. I was half expecting to see him there, head bowed, praying, but no.
Small red electric candles could be lit at the back of the church. I dropped a quarter inside and heard the deep rattle against the emptiness. My father’s ancient voice in my ear:
If you don’t want the truth, don’t ask for it.
Corrigan came home to the apartment late that night. I left the door unlocked but he came in with a screwdriver anyway, began to take all the screws from the chains and locks. “Job to do.” He was lethargic and his eyes were rolling around in his head and I should have known then, but I didn’t recognize it. He knelt on the floor, eye- level with the doorknob. The underside of his sandals were worn down. The sole had faded away, a little bubble of flat rubber. His carpenter pants were tied around his waist with a length of cord. They wouldn’t have stayed up on his hips otherwise. The long- sleeved shirt he wore was tight to his body and the bones of his ribcage were like some odd musical instrument.
He worked intently but he was using a flathead screwdriver for a Phillips head bolt and he had to prop the screwdriver sideways and angle it into the grooves.
I had already packed my bag and was ready to go, find a room, get a bartending job, anything, just get out of there. I pulled the couch into the center of the room under the ceiling fan, folded my arms, waited. The blades couldn’t cut through the heat. For the first time ever I noticed that Corrigan had a bald spot beginning in the back of his hair. I wanted to make some crack about it being a monkish thing but there was nothing between us anymore, no words or glances. He toiled away at the locks. A couple of screws fell on the floor. I watched the beads of sweat come down the back of his neck.
He rolled up his sleeve absentmindedly, and then I knew. —

^{if you think you}
know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. I suppose it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me that Corrigan was scoring heroin: he had always done what the least of them had done. It was the perverse mantra of what he believed. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. There was no getting away from it. It was what he had done in Dublin too, though a different quarry of recklessness. He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn’t cure it, he took it on. He was shooting smack because he couldn’t stand the thought of others being left alone with the same terror.

He left his sleeve rolled up for an hour or so while he dealt with the locks. The bruises inside his arm were a deep blue. When he was finished, the door didn’t even click closed, just swung on the hinges.

He went into the bathroom, where I was sure I could hear him strapping an elastic band around his arm. He came out, long- sleeved again.
“Now leave the friggin’ door alone,” he said.
He fell soundlessly into bed. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but I woke to the usual thrum of the Deegan. The outside world was dependable. Engine noise and tire song. Huge metal sheets had been laid over some potholes. They boomed deeply when a truck ran over them.
It was an easy enough choice to stay: it wasn’t as if Corrigan was ever going to ask me to leave. I was up and shaved early in the morning to accompany him on his rounds. I stirred him from the blankets. He had a faint nosebleed and the blood was dark against his stubble. He turned away. “Put on the tea, will you?” When he stretched, he touched the wooden crucifix on the wall. It swung back and forth on its nail. There was a light patch where the paint was not discolored. The faint imprint of the cross. He reached up to steady it, muttered something about God being ready to move sideways.
“Leaving today?” he asked.
The rucksack was packed on the floor.
“I was thinking I’d stay a couple more days.”
“No problem, brother.”
He combed his hair in the fragment of broken mirror, sprayed on some deodorant. At least he was keeping up pretenses. We took the lift instead of the stairs.
“A miracle,” said Corrigan as the door sighed open, and the little moons of light shone on the inside panel. “It’s working.”
Outside, we crossed the small patch of grass in front of the projects, among the broken bottles. All of a sudden, being around him felt right for the first time in years. That old dream of purpose. I knew what I had to do—bring him on the long walk back towards a sensible life.
Among the early- morning hookers I felt strangely charmed. Corr- gan. Corr- i- gun. Corry—gan. It was, after all, my last name too. It was a strange taking of ease. Their bodies did not embarrass me as much as when I’d watched them from afar. Coyly, they covered their breasts with their arms. One had dyed her hair a bright red. Another wore sparkling silver eyeliner. Jazzlyn, in her neon swimsuit, positioned the strap over her nipples. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in expert streams from nose and mouth. Her skin shone. In another life she could have been aristocratic. Her eyes went to the ground as if she was looking to find something she had dropped. I felt a softening for her, a desire.
They kept up a wavery pitch of banter. My brother gazed across at me and grinned. It was like Corrigan whispering in my ear to give his approval to all I couldn’t understand.
A few cars cruised past. “Get outta here,” said Tillie. “We got business to accomplish.” She said it like it was a stock exchange transaction. She nodded to Jazzlyn. Corrigan pulled me into the shadows.
“They all use smack?” I said.
“Some of them, yeah.”
“Nasty stuff.”
“The world tries them, then shows them a little joy.”
“Who gets it for them? The smack?”
“No idea,” he said as he took a small silver pocket watch out from his carpenter pants. “Why?”
“Just wondering.”
The cars rumbled above us. He slapped my shoulder. We drove to the nursing home. A young nurse was waiting on the steps. She stood up and waved brightly as the van pulled in. She looked South American— small and beautiful with a clout of black hair and dark eyes. Something fierce shot in the air between them. He loosened around her, his body more pliable. He put his hand on the small of her back, and they both disappeared inside the electronic door.
In the glove box of the van I looked for evidence: needles, packets, drug paraphernalia, anything. It was empty except for a well- worn Bible. In the inside flap Corrigan had written scattered notes to himself:
The wish to make desire null. To be idle in the face of nature. Pursue them and beg for forgiveness. Resistance is at the heart of peace.
When he was a boy he had seldom even folded down the pages of his Bible—he had always kept it pristine. Now the days were stacked up against him. The writing was spidery and he had underlined passages in deep- black ink. I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student— thirty- six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.
I watched as the short nurse negotiated the ramp with the wheel chairs. She had a tattoo at the base of her ankle. It crossed my mind that she might be the one supplying him heroin, but she looked so cheerful in the hot slanting sun.
“Adelita,” she said, extending her hand out to me through the van window. “Corrigan’s told me all about you.”
“Hey, get your carcass out here and help us,” my brother said from the side of the van.
He was straining to get the old Galway woman through the door. The veins in his neck pulsed. Sheila was just a rag doll of a thing. I had a sudden recollection of our mother at the piano. Corrigan breathed heavily as he heaved her inside, arranged a series of straps around the woman’s body.
“We have to talk,” I said to him.
“Yeah, whatever, let’s just get these people in the van.”
He and the nurse glanced at each other across the rim of the seats. She had a little bead of sweat around the top of her lip and she wiped it away with the short sleeve of her uniform. As we drove off, she leaned against the ramp and lit a cigarette.
“The lovely Adelita,” he said as he turned the corner.
“That’s not what I want to talk about.”
“Well, it’s all I want to talk about,” he said. He flicked a look in the rearview mirror and said: “Right, Sheila?” He did a fake drum roll on the steering wheel.
He was back to his old singsong self. I wondered if perhaps he had shot up while inside the nursing home: from what little I knew of addiction, anything at all could happen. But he was bright and cheery and didn’t have many of the hallmarks of heroin, or at least the ones I imagined. He drove with one arm out the window, the breeze blowing back his hair.
“You’re a mystery, you are.”
“Nothing mysterious at all, brother.”
Albee piped up from the backseat: “Pussy.”
“Shaddup,” said Corrigan with a grin, his accent tinged a little by the Bronx. All he cared about was the moment he was in, the absolute now. When we had fought as children, he used to stand and take the blows— our fights had lasted as long as I punched him. It would be easy to thump him now, fling him back against the van door, rifle his pockets, take out the packets of poison that were ruining him.
“We should make a visit back, Corr.”
“Yeah,” he said absently.
“I mean to Sandymount. Just for a week or two.”
“Isn’t the house sold?”
“Yeah, but we could find somewhere to stay.”
“The palm trees,” he said, half smiling. “Strangest sight in Dublin. I try to tell people about them, but they just don’t believe me.”
“Would you go back?”
“Sometime, maybe. I might bring some people with me,” he said.
“Sure.”
He flicked a look in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to bring the old woman back to Ireland, but I was ready to let Corrigan have whatever space he needed.
At the park he wheeled them into the shadows by the wall. It was a bright day, sunny and close. Albee took out his sheaf of papers, muttering the moves to himself as he worked on his chess problems. Every time he made a good move he let the brake go on his wheelchair and rocked himself back and forth in joy. Sheila wore a wide- brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing homewards anyway. Some kids nearby had turned on a fire hydrant and were dancing in the spray. One of them had taken a kitchen tray and was using it as a surfboard. The water skimmed him along by the monkey bars, where he fell headlong, laughing, into the fence. Others clamored to use the tray. Corrigan moved over to the fence and pressed his hands against the wire diamonds. Beyond him, farther, some basketball players, sweat- soaked, driving towards the netless basket.
It seemed for a moment that Corrigan was right, that there was something here, something to be recognized and rescued, some joy. I wanted to tell him that I was beginning to understand it, or at least get an inkling, but he called out to me and said he was running across to the bodega. “Watch Sheila for a while, will you?” he said. “Her hat’s tilted. Don’t let her get sunburned.”
A gang of youths in bandannas and tight jeans hung out in front of the bodega. They lit one another’s cigarettes importantly. They gave Corrigan the usual handslaps, then disappeared inside with him. I knew it. I could feel it welling up in me. I jogged across, my heart thumping in my cheap linen shirt. I stepped past the litter piled up outside the shop, liquor bottles, torn wrappers. A row of goldfish bowls sat in the window, the thin orange bodies spinning in aimless circles. A bell sounded. Inside, Motown came over the stereo. A couple of kids, dripping wet from the fire hydrant, stood by the ice cream vault. The older ones, in their red bandannas, were down by the beer fridges. Corrigan was at the counter, a pint of milk in his hand. He looked up, not the least bit disturbed. “I thought you were watching Sheila.”
“Is that what you thought?”
I expected some shove, a packet of heroin into his pocket, some clandestine transaction across the counter, another handslap with the gang, but there was nothing. “Just put it on my tab,” said Corrigan to the shopowner, and he tapped one of the fishbowls on the way out. The shop doorbell rang.
“They sell smack there too?” I asked as we crossed through the traffic to the park.
“You and your smack,” he said.
“Are you sure, Corr?”
“Am I sure of what?”
“You tell me, brother. You’re looking rough. One look in the mirror.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” He reared back and laughed. “Me?” he said. “Shooting smack?”
We reached the fence.
“I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” he said. His hands tightened around the wire, the tip of his knuckles white. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”
He turned to look at the short row of wheelchairs set out along the fence. Something remained fresh about him, young, even. When he was sixteen Corrigan had written, in the inside of a cigarette packet, that all the proper gospel of the world could be written in the inside of a cigarette packet—it was that simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.
“You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”
We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
“You’re having me on, right?”
“Wish I was,” he said.
“Come on now . . .”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”
He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence.
“No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”