This Side of Brightness (27 page)

Before she goes to sleep, Lenora shifts the photos around in the aquarium. Clarence Nathan sits by her bedside. When she finally nods off, he blows her a kiss from the doorway. Sometimes, for fun, he closes his eyes and walks blind through the rooms. The apartment is small and old, yet clean, with a stereo, a flowered couch, an old-fashioned television set, a kitchen full of red and white machinery. The bathtub had once been situated in the living room, but it is discarded now, filled with junk now and covered with a tarp. Along the walls there are framed sketches of New York storefronts, presents from Walker.

Popping open a beer, Clarence Nathan sits on the couch beside Dancesca and they watch television. In the late evening they make love, and Dancesca moves under him like a river. Afterward they settle into television shows once more and he likes this dullness, this rhythm. He wants his grandfather to come live with them, but Walker says he will die in Harlem; he will die in the room where he spends his days chatting with the only ghosts in the world worth their salt; he will die with a whisper for each of them: Sean Power, Rhubarb Vannucci, Con O'Leary, Maura, Clarence, Louisa Turiver, and, most of all, Eleanor, who gives him a rude and lovely smile as she adjusts her hair and shunts herself up onto the bathroom sink.

Treefrog's foot moves forward to steady Angela as he guides her on the beam.

“Just a couple more steps,” he says to her. “A couple more and you're there.”

Her arms flail wide, and he pins them to her body. He wraps his own arms around her and feels the warmth of her fur coat. Her feet inch along the beam, and just before they reach the low wall of his elevated nest she lunges forward and grabs it with both hands.

“I made it,” says Angela, as she climbs across the low wall and smiles. “That's easy.”

He swings in front of her, takes two steps, lights a candle on the bedside table.

“Wow,” she says.

“It used to be a storage room. They kept their tunnel stuff up here. I think there musta been a ladder or a stairs up to it one time, but there ain't anymore. Hardly anybody ever been up here.”

“What the hubcaps for?”

“Plates.”

“Man,” she says. “A traffic light!”

“Faraday found that.”

“You got the electric?”

“I told you, no.”

“Wow. How big is this place?”

“Goes all the way back to a cave there at the back.”

“Treefrog the Caveman.”

“Gonna draw a petroglyph.”

“What's that?”

“Nothing. Listen, we gotta fix those cuts, Angela. Your eye's bleeding.”

“It don't hurt me none,” she says, touching her eye.

“It's just 'cause you got your adrenaline going,” he says. “We should fix it before it begins to hurt.”

She picks her handbag off the floor. “Do I look okay, Treefy?”

“Yeah.”

“You're lying.”

She rummages in her handbag and then she begins sobbing. “Elijah's gonna kill us.”

“We'll hide in the back,” he says, and he grabs a candle and they duck into the rear cave. He puts the candle on the makeshift shelf, and the light makes strange flickers against the blasted-out rock. She puts her hand to her nose.

“Man, you shit in this place,” she says.

“No, I don't.”

“Smells like shit. I don't like it here. I want my shoes. I want my mirror.”

“See, all my maps,” he says, pointing to a row of Ziploc bags.

“I don't care about maps. Elijah's gonna kill us.”

She moves out from the cave into his front room once more. There is still a tiny bit of light from the grills across the tunnel. “I ain't staying here, no way. He'll kill us.”

“Sit on the bed,” he says.

“No way, Treefy.”

“I won't touch you.”

She fingers her loose front tooth. “He'll definitely kill us.”

“You should see a doctor.”

She thumbs the tooth back and forth in her gums and whimpers, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't like doctors. Excepting Doctor Treefrog.”

He smiles and motions to the yellow canister at the foot of the bed. “I'll boil some water, and then I'll clean your face.”

“I'm thirsty.”

“I don't have any drugs.”

She moves tentatively across the dirt floor to the carpet, and then she sits on the bed. Treefrog lights the remnants of the firewood and newspapers. Angela warms her hands over the fire and then fidgets with an empty cassette box that she finds on the ground. She uses the edge of the inlay card to clean the gaps in her lower teeth. She picks the plaque from the card with her fingers and flicks it away into the fire.

He moves backward, not wanting to frighten her, and sits on the floor at the foot of the bed while the water boils.

“It hurts now,” says Angela, and she climbs into his sleeping bag.

“Gonna fix you up when the water boils.”

“It really really hurts.”

“I know.” Then, after a long silence he says, “Wonder where Castor is? I haven't seen her for a few hours.”

“How she get up here?” Angela asks.

“I have to lift her.”

She tucks herself further into the sleeping bag. “You gonna look after me, Treefy?”

And he remembers how, when Lenora was five, she got a high fever and he stayed home from the skyscrapers for a week while Dancesca worked. He bought groceries at the local supermarket. He heated cans of chicken soup on the stove. Lenora lay in the bed next to the blue plastic sheet. Father and daughter, they went through every photo in the house. She picked out the ones she liked. He got extra copies made, so Lenora could arrange them in the aquarium. When her fever climbed higher, he smoothed a damp cloth across Lenora's brow and spooned the soup delicately, blowing on it first to make sure it wouldn't burn her tongue.

“Treefy.”

“Huh?”

“You listening to me?”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“You gonna protect me?”

He dabs his bandanna into the boiling water, turns, and says, “Of course I'll protect you, Angela.”

*   *   *

On Sundays, Walker takes a gypsy cab down from 131st Street and gets the driver to blow the horn beneath Clarence Nathan's apartment. It's a five-floor walk-up, no elevator, and Walker's legs and heart rebel against the idea of climbing. Clarence Nathan and Dancesca come down the stairs with their daughter, and Clarence Nathan leans in the taxi window and pays the driver, tips him well.

He helps Walker out of the taxi and has to hold Lenora back from bowling the old man over. Walker has fashioned himself a wooden walking stick, and he leans against it. His remaining hair is herringbone-colored, and wrinkles have etched into other wrinkles.

“How's my lil' pumpkin?” asks Walker, bending down.

“Hi, Paw-Paw.”

Walker stretches up. “Hey there, beautiful.”

“Hey, Nathan,” says Dancesca.

“My-oh-my,” he says to her. “You're getting finer lookin' every day.”

The four of them descend the hill to the park with infinite slowness. Walker wears a new hat, a Hansen, with a tiny feather sticking out from the band above the brim. Lenora skips ahead of the three adults as they go over the mundanities of the previous week—baseball scores, basketball matches, the vagaries of the weather. The chat is light-humored and sometimes even turns to Walker's ghosts. Dancesca is fond of the stories he tells about Eleanor. Clarence Nathan, who has heard the stories many times, often walks on ahead with his little girl.

They are splendid days, the finest of days.

Even if it's raining they go down to the park and huddle beneath umbrellas. Clarence Nathan uses the flap end of a shirt to wipe the seat of the swings and occasionally Dancesca will bring a towel for her husband to slide down the chute and dry it for Lenora. Everything about the Sunday visits revolves around Lenora. The adults take turns pushing her on the swing. They gather at the end of the slide to welcome her. They lift her onto the fiberglass dinosaurs. Walker gauges her height by how she measures up against his walking stick. Sometimes he removes a bullet from his belly button, but the young girl doesn't like the trick too much; it frightens her.

In springtime all four of them spread a blanket on the ground, sit under the cherry-blossom trees, and eat cucumber sandwiches, Walker's favorite. When the evening sun goes down across the Hudson, they trudge to the edge of the park and Clarence Nathan hails a cab and slips his grandfather twenty dollars, and then the old man is gone.

One Sunday afternoon, when Dancesca and Lenora are visiting elsewhere, Walker takes Clarence Nathan down to the edge of a railway tunnel underneath Riverside Park. There is a gate at the tunnel entrance, but the lock is broken. The two men open the gate, slide inside, and stand on the metal staircase. Walker kicks away a bloodied hypodermic needle, and it drops to the tunnel floor. “Damn things,” he says. It is dark at first, but their eyes adjust and they see the grills in the ceiling and the murals painted below. Petals of cherry blossom fall steadily through grills. They see a figure emerging from the shadows, a man with several cans of spray paint. Grandfather and grandson look at each other, then leave the tunnel, Clarence Nathan wrapping his arm around Walker's shoulder and helping him up the steep embankment.

“I dug there once,” says Walker, pointing back at the tunnel. “I dug and grouted in that place.”

*   *   *

He cleans the cut at the side of her eye meticulously, dabbing the bandanna in the boiling water, twirling the cloth's edge, rinsing it out in the pan until, even in the half-light, he can see that the water has turned red. What was she like as a child when the water was iron-colored and warm? Did her father take her down to the swings to play? Did she sit in the backseat of the car with her arms folded in her lap? Did she ever think there was somewhere darker than even an Iowa cornfield at night? And what sort of map could he make of her flesh if he used the tiniest of little scales and became a cartographer of the corpuscles there in the little rim of violence at her eye?

He can feel Angela's breath at his neck as he touches the wound. Across the tunnel the morning rays shine through—light enough now for Elijah to come calling. He should have buried the spud wrench down Elijah's throat; he should have hit him harder, like his own father did, his unknown father who buried that cop and that car mechanic. For a moment a vision flits across Treefrog's mind and he sees a shovel handle get buried deep into a white man's head. His father winks at him and says, It's all right, son, I hit a homer.

Treefrog wets the clean end of the bandanna with his tongue. If he had some gin he could sterilize the cut, but no matter, it will heal soon. He folds the bandanna into a square and gently presses the cloth against the side of her cheek. Leaning across, he kisses the top of her forehead. She says to him, “You stink, man.”

“Go to sleep,” he says.

Treefrog pulls the zip of the sleeping bag, grabs a couple of blankets, and moves back to his chair. He removes the pot of bloodwater from the fire pit. As the flames jump, he warms his hands, thinks about the harmonica, but Angela's eyes are fluttering and soon she will be off to sleep.

Tightening the blankets around himself, he lets the fire die down and listens in the silence for Castor. Angela turns a little in the sleeping bag, her lips touching against the pillow. He smiles and echoes her: “You stink, man.” Sometimes, when he lay in bed next to Dancesca, she would smell the sweat from the construction site even after he showered. She would toss away from him and say, “Traffic violation!” “Huh?” he'd ask. “Parking ticket!” “Huh?” “You smell, Clar.” “Oh.” And he would rise to bathe again, shave himself close, splash cologne around his cheeks, get back in bed, and snuggle close to her. She had grown thinner since they married. He missed the bigness, the ample bosom, but he didn't mention it to her; he sometimes even carried the idea with pride—while other men's wives fleshed out and away, she came in toward him.

She went with him once to Houston where he was working on a skyscraper with his crew. Lenora was left with Dancesca's family. It was Dancesca's first time on a plane; she loved the thin red straws in the drinks. She collected seven of them—one for each of Lenora's years. The Texas heat was oppressive even in winter, and it weighed down on them. After a day's work they mostly stayed in the hotel room—the good times, the best of times. The air conditioner hummed. Dancesca was fascinated by the tiny bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. The plastic glasses were sealed in Saran wrap on the bedside table and they stayed unopened. Dancesca and Clarence Nathan poured gin straight into each other's mouths. She loved to let ice cubes melt on her belly. They wanted to send a telegram to Walker but could think of nothing to say except, “We're in the Lone Star State.”

In a suburban bar one night, he, Dancesca, and Cricket sat drinking cocktails. The music was loud. Alcohol thumped in them. There were some oil riggers sitting at a nearby table. Cricket challenged them to walk the roof of the bar—it was, Cricket said, a question of balance. The bet was for one hundred dollars. Everyone stepped out into the night. The building was a two-story affair with a roof shaped a sharp inverted V. He and Cricket walked with their eyes closed. The nervous oil riggers stumbled behind, amazed. Back inside, he and Cricket collected their winnings, drank shots together, slapped each other's backs. Suddenly a pool cue smashed down on the back of Clarence Nathan's head. He fell to the floor, tried to get up, slipped in his own blood. Dancesca screamed. Cricket was set upon by a group of four. A knife slashed hotly across Clarence Nathan's chest. He was taken to the hospital. His first scar. Dancesca stayed at his bedside and for months afterward—when they got home to New York—she attended to him with a special poultice smeared lovingly across his chest. She would rub the yellow paste over his chest, and then her fingers would meander lower to where they would pause in their ecstasy.