Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (8 page)

I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.

Corrigan took down a series of badge numbers. A tall female cop plucked the notebook out of his hand and shredded it slowly in front of him. “Look, you dumb Mick, they’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Where’re you taking them?”
“What’s it to you, buddy?”
“Where are you bringing them? Which station house?” “Step back. Over there. Now.”
“Under what statute?” said Corrigan.
“Under the statute that I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”
“All I want is an answer.”
“The answer’s seven,” the female cop said, staring Corrigan down.

“The answer’s always seven. Get it?”
“No I don’t.”
“What are you, man, some sort of fruit or something?”

One of the sergeants swaggered up and shouted: “Somebody take care of Mr. Lovey- Dovey here.” Corrigan was pushed to the side of the road and told to stand on the curb. “We’ll lock you up if you say another word.”

I guided him aside. His face was red and his fists tightened. Veins thrummed at his temple. A new splotch had appeared on his neck. “Take it easy, okay, Corr? We’ll sort it out later. They’ll be better off in a station anyway. It’s not as if you actually like them being here.”

“That’s not the point.”
“Oh, Jesus, come on,” I said. “Just trust me. We’ll get to them later.” The paddy wagons bounced down off the curbs and all but one of the

squad cars followed behind. A few onlookers gathered in clumps. Some kids rode their bicycles in circles around the empty space as if they’d found themselves a brand- new playground. Corrigan went to pick up a keyring from the gutter. It was a cheap little glass thing with a picture of a child in the center. Flipped over, there was a picture of another child.

“That’s the reason,” said Corrigan, thrusting the keyring towards me. “They’re Jazz’s kids.”
Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.
Tillie had charged me fifteen dollars for our little tryst, patted me on the back, then said I represented the Irish quite well, a grand dollop of irony in her voice.
Call me SweetCakes.
She flicked the ten- dollar bill and said she knew some Khalil Gibran too—she would quote a bit or two if I wanted. “Next time,” I said. She’d riffled through her handbag. “Are you interested in a little horse?” she asked as she buttoned me up. She said she could get some from Angie. “Not my style,” I said. She giggled and leaned closer to me. “Your style?” she said. She put her hand on my hip, laughed again. “Your style!” There was a sickening moment when I thought she had pickpocketed all my tips, but she hadn’t; she just tightened my belt and slapped me on the arse.
I was glad that I hadn’t gone with her daughter. I felt almost virtuous, as if I hadn’t been tempted at all. Tillie’s smell had lingered with me for a couple of days and it returned again now that she had been taken off and arrested.
“She’s a grandmother?”
“I told you that,” said Corrigan. He stormed towards the last remaining cop car, brandishing Jazz’s key chain. “What’re you going to do about this?” he shouted. “You going to get someone to look after her kids? Is that what you’re going to do? Who’s going to look after her kids? Are you going to leave them there on the street? You’re arresting her mother and her!”
“Mister,” the cop said, “one more word from you—”
I pulled Corrigan’s elbow hard and dragged him back through the projects. For a moment the buildings seemed more sinister without the hookers outside: the territory was transformed, none of the old totems anymore.
The lift was broken again. Corrigan wheezed up the stairs. Inside, he began dialing all the community groups he knew, looking for a lawyer, and a babysitter for Jazzlyn’s kids. “I don’t even know where they’ve gone,” he screamed into the phone. “They wouldn’t tell me. Last time, the lockups were full and they got sent down to Manhattan.” Another phone call. He turned away from me, cupped his hand around the receiver.
“Adelita?” he said.
His grip deepened around the phone as he whispered. He had spent the previous few afternoons with her, at her house, and each time he came home he was the same: roaming the room, pulling at the buttons on his shirt, muttering to himself, trying to read his Bible, looking for something that might justify himself, or maybe looking for a word to leave him even further tortured, a pain that would leave him again on edge. That, and a happiness too, an energy. I wasn’t sure what to tell him anymore. Give in to the despondency. Find a new posting. Forget her. Move on. At least with the hookers he didn’t have time to juggle notions of love and loss—down on the street it was pure take and take. But with Adelita it was different—she wasn’t pushing any greed or climax.
This is my body, it has been given up for you.
Later, around noon, I found Corrigan in the bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror. He had been down to the Bronx county courthouse, where most of the hookers had already been released on time served. But there were outstanding warrants in Manhattan for Tillie and Jazzlyn. They had pulled some robbery together, turned on a trick. The case was old. Still, they were both going to be transported downtown. He pulled on a crisp black shirt and dark trousers, went to the mirror again, pasted his long hair back with water. “Well, well,” he said. He took a small scissors to his hair and lopped off about four inches. His fringe went in three smooth snips.
“I’m going to go down to help them,” he said.
“Where?”
“The parthenon of justice.”
He looked older, more worn. With his haircut, the bald spot was more pronounced.
“They call it the Tombs. They’ll be arraigned in Centre Street. Listen, I need you to take my shift in the nursing home. I talked with Adelita. She already knows.”
“Me? What am I going to do with them?”
“I don’t know. Take them to the beach or something.”
“I have a job in Queens.”
“Do it for me, brother, will you, please? I’ll give you a shout later on.” He turned at the door. “And look after Adelita for me too, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Promise me.”
“Yeah, I will—now, go.”
Outside I could hear the sounds of the children following Corrigan down the stairs, laughing. It was only when the apartment had fallen into full silence did I remember that he had taken the brown van with him.
At a rental joint down in Hunts Point, I used the very last of my tips to make a deposit on a van. “Air- conditioning,” said the clerk with an idiotic grin. It was like he was explaining science. He had his badge name pasted over his heart. “Don’t run it too hard, it’s brand new.”
It was one of those days when the summer seemed to have fallen into place, not too warm, cloudy, a tranquilized sun high in the sky. On the radio a DJ played Marvin Gaye. I maneuvered around a low- slung Cadillac and onto the highway.
Adelita was waiting by the ramp of the home. She had brought her children to work—two dark beauties. The younger one tugged at her uniform and Adelita went down to eye level with her, kissed the child’s eyelids. Adelita’s hair was tied back with a long colorful scarf and her face shone.
I understood perfectly, then, what Corrigan knew: she had an interior order, and for all her toughness there was a beauty that rose easily to the surface.
She smiled at the idea that we should try the beach. She said it was ambitious but impossible—no insurance, and it was against the rules. Her kids screamed beside her, tugged on her uniform, grabbed her wrist. “No,
m’ijo,
” she said sharply to her son, and we went through the routine of loading all the wheelchairs and jamming the kids between the seats. Litter was pinned against the railings of the park. We pulled the van in under the shade of a building. “Oh, what the hell,” said Adelita. She slid across into the driver’s seat. I rounded the back of the van. Albee was looking out at me, and he mouthed a word with a grin. No need to ask. Adelita beeped the horn and pulled the van out into a light summer traffic. The children cheered as we merged onto the highway. In the distance, Manhattan was like something made out of play boxes.
We found ourselves snared in the Long Island traffic. Songs came from the back, the old folk teaching the kids bits and pieces of songs they couldn’t really conjure. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “You Should Never Shove Your Granny off the Bus.”
At the beach, Adelita’s kids tore down to the waterfront while we lined the wheelchairs up in the shade of the van. The van shadow grew smaller as the sun arced. Albee dropped the suspenders from his shirt and opened up his shirt buttons. His arms and neck were extraordinarily tanned but beneath the shirt his skin was translucent white. It was like watching a sculpture of two different colors, as if he were designing his body for a game of chess. “Your brother likes those hookers, huh?” he said. “You ask me, they’re a bunch of rip- off artists.” He said nothing more, just stared out at the sea.
Sheila sat with her eyes closed, smiling, her straw hat tilted down over her eyes. An old Italian whose name I didn’t know—a dapper man in perfectly pressed trousers—dented and redented his hat upon his knee and sighed. Shoes were taken off. Ankles exposed. The waves crashed along the shore and the day slipped from us, sand between our fingers.
Radios, beach umbrellas, the burn of salt air.
Adelita walked down to the waterfront, where her children were kicking happily in the low surf. She drew attention like a draft of wind. Men watched her wherever she went, the slender curve of her body against the white uniform. She sat on the sand beside me with her knees pressed against her breasts. She shifted and her skirt rose slightly: a red welt on the ankle near where her tattoo was.
“Thanks for renting the van.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“You didn’t have to do it.”
“No big deal.”
“It runs in the family?”
“Corrigan’s going to pay me back,” I said.
A bridge lay between us, composed almost entirely of my brother. She shaded her dark eyes and looked down towards the water, as if Corrigan might have been in the surf alongside her children, not in some dark courthouse arguing a series of hopeless causes.
“He will be down there for days, trying to get them out,” she said. “It’s happened before. Sometimes I think they would be better off if they learned their lesson. People get locked up for less.”
I was warming up to her, but wanted to push her, to see how far she’d go for him.
“Then he’d have nowhere to go, would he?” I asked. “At night. Nowhere to work.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“He’d have to go to you, then, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, maybe,” she said, and a little shadow of anger went across her face. “Why you ask me this?”
“I’m just saying.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” she said.
“Just don’t string him along.”
“I’m not stringing him along,” she said. “Why would I want to, as you say, string him along? ¿Por qué? Me dice que eso.”
Her accent had sharpened: the Spanish had an edge to it. She let the sand drift between her fingers and looked at me like it was the first time she’d seen me, but the silence calmed her and finally she said: “I don’t really know what to do. God is cruel, no?”
“Corrigan’s one is, that’s for sure. I don’t know about yours.”
“Mine is right beside his.”
The kids were throwing a frisbee at each other in the surf. They leaped at the flying disc and landed in the water and splashed.
“I’m terrified, you know,” she said. “I like him so much. Too much. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do, you understand? And I don’t want to stand in his way.”
“I know what I’d do. If I were him.”
“But you’re not, are you?” she said.
She turned away and whistled at the children and they came trudging up the sand. Their bodies were brown and supple. Adelita pulled Eliana close and softly blew sand off her ear. Somehow, for whatever reason, I could see Corrigan in both of them. It was like he had already entered them by osmosis. Jacobo climbed in her lap too. Adelita nipped his ear with her teeth and he squealed in delight.
She had safely surrounded herself with the children and I wondered if it was the same thing she did with Corrigan, reeling him in close enough and then shielding herself, gathering the many and making it too much. For a moment I hated her and the complications that she had brought to my brother’s life, and I felt a strange fondness for the hookers who had taken him away, to some police station, down to the very dregs, some terrible cell with iron bars and stale bread and filthy toilets. Maybe he was even in the cells alongside them. Maybe he got himself arrested just so he could be near them. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
He was at the origin of things and I now had a meaning for my brother—he was a crack of light under the door, and yet the door was shut to him. Only bits and pieces of him would leak out and he would end up barricaded behind that which he had penetrated. Maybe it was entirely his own fault. Maybe he welcomed the complications: he had created them purely because he needed them to survive.
I knew then that it would only end badly, her and Corrigan, these children. Someone or other was going to get torn asunder. And yet why shouldn’t they fall in love, if even just for a short while? Why shouldn’t Corrigan live his life in the body that was hurting him, giving up in places? Why shouldn’t he have a moment of release from this God of his? It was a torture shop for him, worrying about the world, having to deal with intricacies when what he really wanted was to be ordinary and do the simple thing.
Yet nothing was simple, certainly not simplification. Poverty, chastity, obedience—he had spent his life in fealty to them, but was unarmed when they turned against him.
I watched Adelita as she loosened an elastic band from her daughter’s hair. She tapped her on the bottom and sent her along the beach. The waves broke far out.
“What did your husband do?” I asked.
“He was in the army.”
“Do you miss him?”
She stared at me.
“Time doesn’t cure everything,” she said, looking away along the strand, “but it cures a lot. I live here now. This is my place. I won’t go back. If that’s what you’re asking me, I won’t go back.”
It was a look that suggested she was part of a mystery she wouldn’t let go of. He was hers now. She had made her declaration. There could indeed be no going back. I recalled Corrigan when he was a boy, when everything was pure and definite, when he walked along the strand in Dublin, marveling at the roughness of a shell, or the noise of a low- flying plane, or the eave of a church, the bits and pieces of what he thought was assured around him, written in the inside of that cigarette box.