This Side of Brightness (10 page)

She shivers. “Elijah don't like cats.”

“You want some more blankets?”

“Yeah.”

“I got some extra,” says Treefrog. “Back in my place. Gimme a smoke first. A smoke for a blanket for the barter man.”

“I don't got none.”

“I saw you smoking this morning.”

“You promise you'll give me a blanket?”

“Yeah.”

He feels a cigarette land in his lap and he searches in his overcoat for a lighter, snaps it aflame, pulls the smoke down deep into his lungs, continues rocking the chair diagonally in the darkness.

“Thanks, babe.”

“Don't call me that.”

“Thanks, Angela.”

“It's Angie.”

“I like Angela better.”

“You're an asshole,” she says. “Motherfuck, it's cold. Ain't it cold? You ain't cold? I'm cold.”

He rises up from the wicker chair. “Don't go nowhere,” he says. “I'm gonna get you a blanket.”

He goes to the door and looks across the tunnel to the fading light from the grill. “It's snowing,” he says, after a moment.

“I know it's goddamn snowing.”

“I like it when it snows. The way it comes down through the grates. You seen it?”

“Man, you're crazy. It's cold. Snow is cold, that's what it is. It's cold. That's all. Cold. This is hell. This is a cold, motherfucking hell.”

“A heaven of hell,” he says.

“What you talking about now, asshole?”

“Nothing.”

He walks down the tunnel, beating his arms around himself to stave off the wind that howls down from the southern end. In his nest, he finds his extra blankets in huge blue plastic bags beside his books and maps.

Angela, he thinks, as he walks back down toward the cubicle, carrying a blanket for her. A nice name. Six letters. Good symmetry. Angela.

*   *   *

He sees her at the tunnel gate one evening, so stoned that her eyes roll around in their sockets. She tugs him by the sleeve and whispers to him that she used to dance in a club in Dayton, Ohio.

“A little shithole there, outside of town,” she says. “I used to do my face with the nicest makeup. There was two platforms. One girl on each. One night I was onstage and I look up and see my father coming in, you know; he sits himself at a table at the back of the club. My goddamn father! He orders himself a beer and then goes to giving the waitress a hard time 'cause he paid five dollars and only got a plastic glass. Sitting there, just staring up at me while I was dancing. I was scared, Treefy. I thought he was gonna get up there on the stage and hit me like he always done. I wasn't dancing, hardly, I was so scared. All these men were booing and hissing from a table. And then I look down, and my father, he's gone changed the angle of his chair; he's looking at the other platform, at the other girl. Licking his lips. So then I decided. I danced the finest dance I ever done in my life. I swear all heads were turned at me, excepting him. He's just drinking and staring at the other girl and never once looks at me. And when I go out in the parking lot he's waiting for me and he's drunk, and he says, Girl—I'm twenty-two and he's still calling me Girl—and then he asks the name of the other dancer and I says, Cindy. And he says, Thanks. And then he leaves in his old gray Plymouth and leans out the window and says to me, That Cindy girl sure can dance. That's what he said to me. That Cindy girl sure is a dancer.”

*   *   *

He dreams that night that she is standing in his liver. A red-brown wall rises in front of her. She has been given digging instructions by Con O'Leary, Rhubarb Vannucci, Sean Power, and Nathan Walker.

She knows how to stand with widespread feet, one behind the other, and how to use all the economy of her body. She chunks away at the wall of his liver, scooping and bucketing out the sickness and disease, so delicate with her shovel that he doesn't feel a thing. Angela scrapes all the residue from him, and when a spot is clean she leans across and kisses it, and it sends a shiver through the rest of his body. All the filth comes away at her feet and she buckets it out of his liver, and when she has the gland completely clean, when the buckets are empty, when he is cured, they dance around his liver together in an ecstatic twirl, their eyes closed, round and round and round, Angela with her colorful beads bobbing in her hair. Then there is a sucking sound and they are blown upward through his body and out his mouth and she stands in front of him, smiling, all the bile gone, even from beneath her fingernails, and she reaches out and touches him softly, moves along his chest, plucking at his hairs, and her fingers go down further to where she opens his fly with spectacular delicacy; there's not an ounce of pain in his liver, it's a beautiful dream. Every now and then a dream can be impeccable in the tunnel.

chapter 6

1932–45

Rhubarb Vannucci and Sean Power set up a pigeon coop on the roof of Vannucci's Lower East Side tenement building, a wooden coop with two sliding doors and a chicken-wire roof. There have been some recent robberies, so Vannucci has dipped his pigeons in vats of bright dye bought from a clothing factory. He soaks every part of the pigeons except their heads. Even the underside of the wings sucks up the dye. The birds flap, rudely orange, through the sky. Anyone in the neighborhood can instantly point out a Vannucci pigeon. They look like winging orange peels breaking the skies of Manhattan.

Sean Power decides to paint his birds bright blue. The shed feathers make a fabulous collage on the rooftop.

On a July morning the two men challenge each other to a pigeon race. They make a bet of a dollar each.

Nathan Walker and Eleanor O'Leary have agreed to carry the pigeons over the Brooklyn Bridge and release them on the far side of the river. They weave along on bicycles. Eleanor's hair flows in a stream behind her. Walker balances the pigeon cases on his bicycle basket. They move in strange tandem; there is a quality of waltz to the journey. Whenever she can, Eleanor directs her bicycle along a length of shadow, keeping the tires within its width. Walker plays the game of avoiding the same shadows. He watches as she takes both hands off the bars and stretches her arms wide, tottering slightly but still keeping her bicycle true to the long lines of dark.

When they reach the far side of the bridge, Eleanor leans her bike against Walker's. They spread a blanket on the concrete to share a picnic before they release the birds: a bottle of Coca-Cola, a bar of chocolate, some bread with cheddar cheese.

Eleanor touches Walker's wrist, points at the pigeons in the cages—one orange and one blue—and they both laugh.

Halfway through the picnic, a passing pedestrian spits in Walker's face and shouts at Eleanor, “Nigger lover!”

She thumbs her nose at the pedestrian and Walker wipes the spit away with a handkerchief. He drops the handkerchief off the bridge toward the water. They watch it spiral away. He says nothing, but they pack the last of the picnic back into the basket, take out two jars of paint, and later they release the pigeons into the air.

The couple pedal furiously back across the bridge, watching the pigeons vying for the lead.

Walker is way out in front, the empty cages still balanced on the front of the bike. “Wait for me!” shouts Eleanor. The pigeons disappear in the sky.

When the two cyclists arrive back at Vannucci's home, both of the gambling men are furious. In their hands each holds a pigeon that has been newly painted, half orange, half blue.

They are fighting over which one belongs to whom and who is the rightful owner of the two dollars. Walker and Eleanor stand on the tenement rooftop, doubled over with laughter.

The two men give the couple strange glances, then tuck the multicolored pigeons back into the coop.

“Frig me,” says Power.

“What is frig?” asks Vannucci.

“A frig is…”

And then Power, too, starts to chuckle.

“A frig,” he says, winking at Walker, “a frig is somewheres ya keep things cool.”

*   *   *

Eleanor places a picture of her mother and father on her bedside table. It was taken at a summer carnival in Brooklyn in the early years of the century, a Ferris wheel in the background static against the sky like a cheap bracelet. Con O'Leary has the beginnings of a mustache smudged above his lip. Maura's dress is buttoned high at her neck, but the third and fourth buttons have popped open, unnoticed, revealing cleavage. They are standing by the strong-arm machine. The bell on the machine is at the very top—where it says
STRONGMAN EXTRAORDINARY
!—and Eleanor is sure that her father is the one who has just slammed down the hammer. He is smiling, his belly is full and proud, and his cheeks are puffed out. Eleanor likes to think of him in that same position when she takes the subway out on weekday mornings to the Brooklyn Heights haberdashery where she works. She salutes her father's sleeping form as she travels back and forth underneath the river. She doesn't think of him as agonized or frozen in a strange ascension—rather, he is upright, proud, standing by some muck-bed strong-arm machine, held in tableau, grinning.

*   *   *

Familiar and trembling, they meet in darkness. One evening on a park bench she asks Walker to comb her hair. He steps behind the bench. Her hair is heavy, pendant. When he is finished, she turns and kneels on the wooden slats and leans toward him. In his hands he can still feel the weight of her hair. She says his name out loud: Nathan. He looks at her, and it seems to him that her voice bends back the nearby grasses.

*   *   *

Eighteen years after the blowout, Nathan Walker emerges from a railway freight tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan.

Quick clouds cast shadows, and the streets are thatched with ribbons of sunlight. There is a spring in his step, although he has been digging all day. Working the railway tunnel is easier than working underwater, although just as dangerous, men dying when boxes of dynamite explode in their fingers, their bodies ripped apart and their thumbs blown so high they could be hitching a lift to heaven. At the age of thirty-seven Walker's body has changed a little, just a slight slide out at the waist and a new scar above his left eye from a Great Depression riot when a policemen mashed a billy club into his head. He'd emerged from a diner one night into a dark sea of faces. The protesters carried placards. They were shouting about job losses and low wages. Walker had gone alongside the protesters silently and stoically. His wages had been cut too—the tunnels were full of desperate men ready to work, and he kept his job only because Sean Power was head of the union. He had moved with the flow of eyes. Screaming was heard further down the street, and then the billy club came from behind. It landed first in the soft part of his skull and then whipped around to his forehead, smashing against his eye. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the cop before he went down, and then there were horse hooves all around him. A hoof landed on his groin. Pain shot through him. Winded, Walker crawled across the street and lay under the awning of a cigar shop, feeling the blood run past his lips. At the hospital he had to wait five hours for the stitches—the doctor pried open the scab with brusque fingers—and the suture was done drunkenly, leaving a wormlike wiggle through Walker's eyebrow.

He strolls way uptown, along the landfill by Riverside Drive, past the shanties, then east toward a shop full of tuxedos.

A bell sounds at the shop door and a small black man with granite-colored hair comes from behind a curtain, a pencil at his ear. He looks down at the mud on Walker's boots, gives a derisory eye-flick at his filthy overalls and the red hat strung under his chin, and goes immediately to a row of cheap rentals, but Walker directs the clerk to the expensive rack. Under a faint yellow light he tries on a large black jacket with a shiny velvet collar. It is so long unused there is a mothball in the pocket, but it's the only one left in his size, since there's a dance in Harlem that night and a skein of men has been in and out of the shop all day. Walker counts out money for the suit rental and a new shirt.

At home he washes his body in the porcelain sink and tries on the frilly white shirt. The buttons seem tiny and foreign. Arthritis has already begun to nibble at his hands. Walker can predict a rainy day by the pain in his fingertips. He doesn't button the neck of his shirt but lets the bow tie cover the gap.

He can't help chuckling at the way the shirt frills rumple at his chin, at how exceedingly white the cloth is. “You are so goddamn handsome, Nathan Walker!” he says to the dusty mirror, and then he leaps across the room in delight and nervousness, swinging around a broken stovepipe, his knees protesting at the sudden violence of dance, a silver cross bouncing at his neck.

The cross was bought for two dollars from a woman downstairs, a fortune-teller who always wears a long red dress and two feathers in her hair. She tells the future by the pattern of spit that tobacco makes in a spittoon. Men, and women too, lean across the metal cup and spit into it, the men in big gobs, the women in shy dribbles. She stares down into the tobacco grains and prescribes remedies for future despair. Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy—it's a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain.

The cross, she has told Walker, will keep his heart from ferrying its way into his mouth when he is nervous. He must wear it against his skin all day long, no matter what.

Walker stands by the piano that has been given to him as a gift. A white ribbon has been tied around the instrument, so he doesn't open the lid. He touches the smooth ribbon, and then he rubs his fingers along the piano lid, drags a stool across, and sits—in underpants and white shirt and silver cross—pretending to play, running his fingers through the air, inventing ragtime, until he gets so sweaty he takes off the shirt. He rubs his lips together for a tune and his music grows louder and louder until he hears a foot stomping on the ceiling above him and a roar: “Shut up already, down there!”