Fishing the Sloe-Black River

  “I really don’t want to go,” he whispers again.

  She leans her head back on his shoulder.

  “He’s a freak, for crying out loud.”

  “Maybe she loves him.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Listen, love,” says Orla. “I graduate in six months. We can leave then. Go back to Ireland. Or you can get that job in Oregon.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” he says, turning away from her. He shuffles over to the wall and stares at a print that hangs in a crooked frame. “I’m really tired of it, hon.”

  “Have a bowl of soup. You’ll feel better at the wedding.”

  “I will in me arse.”

  “There too,” she laughs.

  “To hell with the soup.…”

  “We already rented your suit.”

  “The place’ll be full of freaks.”

  “You and your freaks,” says Orla. “Would ya give it a break, for crying out loud?”

  * * *

  Dana met Will in the park. He sat in his wheelchair, wearing a long roll of gray beard that went down to his stomach, as if growing it in order to cover the place where he had no legs. He was more than twice her age. Paperback books about Vietnam curled dog-eared in his overcoat pockets. When he was eighteen his country had given him a haircut, a set of camos, a survival pack, and a machine gun and sent him off to the war. While he was in Saigon, Will’s mother sent him a postcard saying that he was safe because he came from a good Christian family and he was “washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” When he came home, in an airplane full of cripples and body bags, he wrote a note to his mother on the inside of a matchbox. He told her that, yeah, she was right but she spelled it wrong, although “Nam” just happened to rhyme.

  Dana didn’t tell Padraic about the man she met in the park. She began to get free rein and was allowed to walk down to the park on her own in the afternoons. She came back to the home, her face flushed. He wrote florid reports about her in the bottom of her file. She had begun to learn braille. He ordered books full of folklore from Ireland and read the stories. Under a special government program she learned how to walk with a guide dog. She drew more pictures of her own mythical Dana. They gained a more singular form, the colors vibrant and wild, the edges sharper, the lines less violent. Padraic began to wonder what might happen if she went to art college, and late in the evenings, he searched through brochures, flicking along through the photos of colleges smothered in autumn leaves, small New England spires rising in a background of hills, handsome men in overcoats and young women with healthy flushes in their cheeks. When he told her that he might be able to get her a scholarship, she just smiled and nodded her head.

  He was in his office when another counselor told him that Dana was going to get married. He laughed at first. He had seen Will before, recognized him from the subway cars, where he regularly rattled a tin can, negotiating his chair through the crowd. There was a ferocious sadness in the veteran’s eyes that made everyone on the carriage turn the other way while he spun along, clanging the tin can back and forth, held in gloves that had no fingers. He lived in a small hovel just down the road from the children’s home, a black hole of other refugees and veterans, a place that seemed to invite a peculiar brand of bitterness.

  When Padraic asked Dana about the wedding, she just raised her head, flung her fingers through her hair, and said that Will loved her, that nothing could stop her. They sat there, silent for a long time, the young girl fidgeting at her blouse, tears collecting at the edge of her cheeks. He went to the window, saying nothing as Dana shuffled out of the office. Later she asked him if he would give her away at the ceremony. He agreed but went for a long walk in the park and noticed for the first time how many eyes, blue and brown and green, were watching him as he threw small birch branches into the pond.

  * * *

  When Padraic and Orla arrive at the church, the pews are quite empty. Some of Will’s friends are gathered up near the altar, leaning in over the wheelchair and fixing the groom’s narrow, pale blue tie. Will is taking a furtive sip from a small bottle, wiping the sweat from his palms up and down his artificial legs. He has bought a new pair of fingerless gloves for the day. The priest seems drunk, stumbling out of the sacristy with a red stain on the front of his vestments. Vietnam vets with long hair and NO NUKE badges are running around with video cameras perched on their shoulders like rocket launchers.

  A crowd of about thirty is gathered, including six of the blind kids from the home, brought along by two of the counselors. There are four guide dogs in the aisles, and one of them is barking loudly. Somebody must have changed their mind about the rule, but Padraic notices that neither Jimi nor Marcia nor Chocolate Charlie is there—they must have been put on room restriction after last night’s fracas.

  Orla kisses Padraic gently on the cheek and takes her seat near the front. He stands at the back of the church, waiting. He nods to a few people, shoves his hands deep into his pockets, mutters under his breath, then cranes his neck around to the parking lot. Dana eventually arrives in a battered Oldsmobile, long white ribbons in a frenzy on the hood. Her wedding dress is long and drawn tightly around her waist. Makeup is smudged around her eyes. Her hair is pulled into a bun at the back of her head. She holds a small bouquet of flowers. Padraic walks to the car and guides her by the elbow toward the church steps while a few guests snap their cameras.

  “Padraic,” she says. “Do I look okay?”

  “You look great.”

  “Really?”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s always time to change your mind, you know.”

  “You’re like my father now,” says Dana, leaning close to him. “You’re not supposed to say things like that.”

  He draws her arm tightly to his. Someone plays the wedding song on a guitar, the tune high and twangy. For a moment he tries to describe the church to her, the stained-glass windows, the rows of shoulders, the guide dogs at the side of the pews, the priest swaying slightly in the center of the altar, but he knows she’s not listening. He walks slowly with Dana up the center of the aisle as heads swivel. When the priest comes to take Dana up toward the altar, the smell of alcohol wafts through the air. She moves away easily, and Padraic sits down with a hefty thump beside Orla.

  “Here we go with the show,” he says.

  He holds his wife’s hand as the ceremony begins, but it’s a twisted affair—the priest stumbling over the vows, the video cameras with their little red dots arranged like measles around the church, a dog wagging its tail gently in the aisle. The sermon is brief, the priest making a comparison to the wedding at Canaan. Will and Dana fumble with the rings, and Padraic watches as Will leans his bearded face upward toward the bride to kiss her. The guitar clangs out an old sixties hit.

  “Let’s get home,” Padraic whispers as lightbulbs flash near the altar.

  “What about the party?” whispers Orla.

  “Thunderbird and dog biscuits.”

  “Jesus Christ, have some heart, will you?”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Get off your yeah-well arse and follow her down the aisle,” she whispers, pushing at his ribcage.

  He watches Will negotiate his wheelchair along the altar ramp. The veteran’s beard has been groomed for the day. He catches Padraic’s eye and winks for some reason. Padraic nods back. Dana’s face is creased into a tremendous smile. She shuffles down the steps of the aisle with the help of the priest, then moves toward Will’s wheelchair, where he’s waiting. Instinctively she reaches out for the handles, finds them, and begins to push the chair along. The heels of Dana’s shoes catch in her dress, but she regains her footing and begins to strut along the aisle, pushing the chair. A big laugh erupts around the church as she does a strange little skip in the air while pushing the chair.

  Some of Will’s friends at the entrance have ripped up small pieces of colored paper for confetti.

  From behind, Padraic notices that Dana a
nd Will seem joined together somehow as she wheels him along the outside ramp, the paper falling around their shoulders. “A little bit to the left,” shouts Will, “watch out for the railings!” The colored paper falls around their shoulders. A bottle of champagne gets popped, and the priest reaches forward for a plastic glass. A crowd gathers around the newlyweds, and in the throng, Dana drops her bouquet of flowers. She whispers something in Will’s ear and he gets her to spin the wheelchair around. She does it easily, calmly.

  Padraic moves across to pick up the flowers, but he feels Will’s hand grasp his.

  “I’m all right, man,” the veteran says.

  “I’ll just grab the flowers here.”

  “I’m all right,” he says again.

  “You sure?”

  “Got the legs back.”

  “Yeah,” says Padraic, unsure of what he means.

  “And a pair of eyes for her.”

  “Yes, yeah.”

  “Ya know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “We’ll look after each other,” says Will.

  “Yeah.”

  “You know how it is.”

  “I do, yeah,” says Padraic.

  “All we’re looking for now is a couple of skin grafts,” says Will, gesturing toward Dana. He lets out a huge bellowing laugh. He turns around to Dana: “Did ya hear that? We’re looking for skin grafts next.”

  Padraic steps back, embarrassed. He shoves his fists deep into his pockets. A flush rises up in his cheeks. He backs away from the crowd and watches as Will places the flowers back in Dana’s hands. He has never really noticed before how attractive Dana is, how her fingers run delicately into long nails, how strands of hair run amok around her neck, how her skin gains color around her eyes. The crowd moves around Will and he reaches out, shakes hands, guides Dana’s elbow toward other hands. Padraic wants to walk over to them to say something, anything, he’s not sure what, something that suggests that strange things often happen, that certain moments are all too rare to be lost. But he simply stands there, rooted to his shadow.

  He finds himself thinking of the children’s home—Chocolate Charlie lounging around by the smashed stereo, balancing a soccer ball on his foot; Marcia watching the thin scab grow again on her wrist; Jimi hiding a pair of matches under his pillow. Tomorrow morning they’ll crowd around him, asking a million questions about the wedding. Toast will be thrown in the dining room. A pair of socks will be lost in the laundry. A fight will break out in the cafeteria. All the ordinary bits and pieces of seconds, minutes, hours, will clatter on, regardless.

  Padraic scuffles at his shoes, noticing that he forgot to polish them. He looks for Orla in the crowd. He sees her at the edge of the church steps, two plastic glasses in her hands. He pulls his hands from his pockets and moves toward her. She raises the champagne in the air and he nods back, slowly at first, like a bird beginning to peck at a few crumbs lying on the ground.

  STEP WE GAILY, ON WE GO

  Give life long enough and it’ll solve all your problems, even the problem of being alive. Should write that one on the stairwell, he chuckles to himself as he shuffles down the rat-gray steps of the apartment complex. He walks slowly, his big shoulders pitching back and forth in the folds of an old brown overcoat. Thick fists, blotched here and there with liver spots, pop out from the cuffs and a magenta handkerchief sprouts from the breast pocket. Beads of sweat gather beneath the peak of his flat tweed cap as he negotiates the corner on the third floor. Damn, he thinks, it’s hot under this whole rigout.

  As he walks down the steps—past the familiar, rude graffiti—three teenaged boys, wearing their black baseball hats turned backward, point at him and throw their fists up at the sky. He winks at them and they laugh, then they turn away, punching each other on the shoulders and imitating his slouch. Nothing that a good clip on the ear wouldn’t solve. He smiles, takes the hanky from his pocket, and mops his brow. Farther down the stairwell an old woman with a shopping bag full of cauliflowers passes him, muttering something about the weather and the terrible things it does to vegetables. He tips his hat to her, then bows as a pretty little girl skips past him, hands clutching the bottom of her dress, carrying crayons in the upturned folds. Hope to God it’s not her that’s writing these sloppy swirls of graffiti on the walls.

  He pauses on the third floor and reads: When did the black man learn to walk? Beneath it: When the white man invented the wheelbarrow. Beneath that: Eat shit, honky motherfucker. A strange one that, because surely not even the front of a wheelbarrow would be too comfortable, certainly not for a codger his age. There was, however, a rich eccentric gentleman he once heard of who was designing his garden in the dun-and-green Wicklow hills, far away. The gentleman was known to have his gardeners wheel him around in a big brown barrow, while he sat in the damn thing and drank tea. From a saucer. The excuse for the gentleman’s transport was that he was afflicted with brucelosis, gotten when he pricked his finger on a thorny rose bush, then put his hands in some composted horse manure. Deep shit, to paraphrase the graffiti.

  He pauses for a moment and leans against the railing, pensive. Isn’t it a strange word that? Motherfucker. And a violent one too. Not at all poetic. Awful, in fact. But used all the time in these parts.

  He himself has been called it, not in derision but in a curiously lovely way, when in the deep-shadowed corners late at night he can hear them make bets that the old Irish motherfucker could probably still throw a punch or two. And a punch or two they would deserve, but for the fact that he has been so long a part of the scenery that he understands that a motherfucker, among the black boys anyway, is a brother. The Mexicans here are quiet and furtive, the young ones standing around with hands in pockets, and they are seldom heard, in his ears anyway, to use the word. It’s the white ones—the trash, as they say—who use it most vindictively.

  Mopping his brow once more, he moves away from the railing toward the second-floor steps.

  Jesus, it’s a long way to the laundromat in heat like this. And longer every day, though your steps be heavy you’ll trot lightly along the way. A grand tune that. One that he used to sing long ago. A lovely melody to it. A damnsight removed from this graffiti, that’s for sure. Less imaginative every day, he rues, though he stops by his favorite aphorism, down in the alcove of the second floor, where some poor gouger has left a puddle of urine. Women of the world rise up out of the bed of your oppressors … and go make breakfast. He tips his tweed cap to that one. Sausages and rashers, please, Juanita, and throw in a dollop of that fine blood pudding you have hanging over the stove. When you’re finished the washing up, love, roll out the wheelbarrow and we’ll go for a waltz around the city where all of America sludges down to the sea. He laughs to himself. If Juanita heard him say that, she’d be outraged. She’d be on her bike, off home to Hollywood. Never in her life has she made breakfast for him. And not damn likely to either. Gorgeous as she is, Juanita is a ferocious woman. A temper on her to calm the seven seas. And a voicebox that’s been known to boom. And her, so small and sweet and delicate. Juanita. Up and away, Flaherty, me boy. No time for all this dilly-dallying.

  He moves away from the puddle of pee, holding his nose—broken many times—and wonders who it was wrote the little gem of graffiti. The man who tapped his kidney? Surely not. No fountains of helicon for him. The little girl with the upturned dress full of crayons? You never know these days—he has heard that they installed metal detectors last week in what they call the junior high. An appropriate enough name since the kids around here are known to have a fondness for drugs. And guns. At the far end of the complex there is another slogan. Guns ’n Roses. For that there surely is no logic.

  He shuffles down toward the ground floor through all the words. Eat the homeless. Johnny X is hung like a horse. Leroy is sprunger than a mofo. Johnny X, it seems, has no problems. But give life long enough, Leroy, and it will solve them all. These drugs, he knows, are a terrible thing. Far away, the crack is a
phrase for a good time. Not here. He has seen boys in this place—boys he taught to jab at the sky—swapping food stamps for little white bags. Leroy and Johnny X might well have been among them, though the names in his head tend to collide with one another.

  There had been one boy, however, who made it out of here—Tyrone Jacobs, who is due to fight in Madison Square Garden tonight. Twelve years ago he was teaching Tyrone how to punch, the boy’s bog-black skin shining with sweat day after day after day in the hot sun spitting down in the complex’s courtyard. Keep your elbows tucked, young Tyrone. Wait for the hole. Spare the right. Dance a little. Jab. Atta boy. Move away. Dance. Throw that shoulder. Fake. He pauses and wonders if Tyrone will remember the right moves, if they’ll put a prize around his rib-tight body, a belt that he himself never won in the heavyweight division. For a moment he lets himself think of the Caffola fight and mustard oil. September 9, 1938. A bitter thought. Then he lets a little jab fly at the sky and almost loses his footing on the stairs.

  In a great poem there was a man who tripped lightly along the ledge of a deep ravine where passions were pledged. And isn’t that the truth? Down the steps with a sprightly leap, he emerges from the complex into the New Orleans sun. He shades his eyes with his cap and looks around. A dirge of girls, one pregnant, prop up the streetcorner flower shop. They begin to giggle when they see him. He fingers his brown belted overcoat. It’s hotter than a July bride out here, by God, but he’ll need the overcoat when he gets to the laundromat. Part of the camouflage.

  He recognizes a flouncy, frilly blue blouse on the pregnant girl, a blouse that Juanita decided she didn’t like a few months ago. When Juanita—who can be awful finicky—doesn’t like a piece of clothing, she flat out refuses to wear it again. So one day last month, after a year of acquiring new clothes for her, he decided to put them to some use. Give them to others who might wear them. Late one night, he furtively left his apartment with the blouse and hung it on the doorknob of Mrs. Jackson’s place. The next morning he watched the old woman come out onto the balcony. When she found the blue beauty on the doorknob, there was a smile splayed on her face that painted the whole world well.