This Side of Brightness

  Treefrog stands by the door until he hears the pipe sucked on again and—bending over at the hip a few times to calm his erection—he goes carefully along with the bag, past the row of cubicles and the giant communal area and the shacks.

  Only Dean is out, his campfire burning, yellow hair up in spikes and his hunting jacket tight around him. He stares at nothing, not even looking at the fire like any normal man would do. Dean once bit out a man’s tongue in a lovers’ quarrel. Ever since then he’s been going around with the other man’s life in his mouth. Sometimes he roars about a lawn not being cut in Connecticut, the edges of flowerbeds being way too grassy, needing to be clipped. Or the china dishes having spaghetti stains on them. Or the credit card bills not being paid.

  As he goes past, Treefrog gives a quick wave, but Dean just looks into the distance. A young boy lumbers out of Dean’s lean-to, beside the pile of garbage. The boy and Dean sit beside each other. Dean runs a finger along the inside of the boy’s thigh, and then suddenly they are standing and meshed together beside the fire—the boy is so small that his head only reaches Dean’s chest—and they are locked together in embrace by the light of the fire. Treefrog can see the boy nibbling at Dean’s neck and the slide of Dean’s hand to the small of the boy’s back.

  Treefrog shivers.

  Another hundred yards and he’s home. Before he climbs he imitates the turning of a key in the door, shouting upward to his nest, “Honey, I’m home!”

  Treefrog slips the shopping back under his coat, ties the handles of the bag to his belt loop, and climbs the catwalk, careful with the bottle. He lights some candles and places the bag on the bed beside Castor, who is curled up by the pillow. Reaching to the shelf by the Gulag, he takes down a can opener and sighs. “I’ll dance at your wedding, I’ll dance at your wedding.”

  * * *

  In the morning he practices a loop shot against the wall, and the pink handball goes high in the air, rebounds down off the stalactite, and lands perfectly for his right hand, then left. He feels good, energized, almost clean after yesterday’s shower. He closes his fist for an underhand shot, and the ball barrels out from the Melting Clock. The ritual continues until warmth floods through him. Along one part of the tunnel wall he sees a fat sheet of ice insinuating itself into existence, the drops of water coming from an overflow pipe topside as if to say, We have all been here before.

  * * *

  “Heyyo.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hey, Angela. Up here. Turn.”

  “Where?”

  “Heyyo.”

  “Goddamn. It’s you.”

  “It’s me. Where you goin’?”

  “Nowhere,” she says. “What you doin’ up there?”

  “The presidential suite. I’m putting mints on my pillows.”

  “You got any more blankets? Our goddamn electric’s still out. Heaters ain’t working. Elijah’s gone looking for that guy Edison.”

  “Faraday.”

  “Same difference.”

  “You wanna come up?” asks Treefrog. “I got a fire going.”

  “No way. If Elijah saw me up there, he’d rip your head off and shit down your throat. He says that to me all the time. He says he’ll rip my—”

  “Elijah won’t see us. He’s left the wilderness and been fed by ravens and gone off in a whirlwind.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” says Treefrog. “You kill those rats yet?”

  “No. I…” She hesitates and scratches at the side of her face. “I like the fat one,” she says. “She’s cute. She wouldn’t hurt nobody. She’s pregnant.”

  Angela stands by the tracks, wrapped in a blanket, caught in a stream of topside light with her face tilted up, sad and beautiful.

  Treefrog says to her, “You should get Papa Love to make a painting of you.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy in the shack down by the cubicles. With all the drawings on it. He never comes out except sometimes when he wants to. You should get him to make a painting of you.”

  “I don’t want no painting,” she says, but then her face brightens. “Say, has he got a heater?”

  “Yeah, but he don’t answer the door.”

  “Shit. Where the goddamn hell is Edison?”

  “Taking a dirt nap.”

  “Huh?”

  “Edison’s dead. He’s the man made the first phonograph. He’s the man gave us music. He’s the man gave us light. Edison kicked it sixty years ago. Faraday’s his name.”

  “He’s a motherfucker.”

  Treefrog laughs.

  “I had a warm house once,” says Angela, stamping her feet on the tunnel gravel, looking up at Treefrog, perched twenty feet up on his catwalk.

  “It had a wraparound porch and a feeder for birds,” she says, “and it was bright as all get out. There was trees outside, and sometimes we went climbing in the branches. I hate New York. It’s cold. Ain’t you cold?”

  “You’re high, ain’t you?”

  She ignores him. “It was cold in Iowa but we had a stovepipe, and my father, he broke it off and smashed it in my momma’s face. Left a big dent in her cheekbone. That’s what happened to the stovepipe. Big dent in the stovepipe too, after he smashed it in the wall ’cause he was sorry. Then he did it again. I hate him. He always said he’d take me to see the sea, but he never did. He just did the stovepipe thing. The doctor gave her an eyepatch. She dropped it in a well. Ever been married?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Dancesca.”

  “Did you hit her?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a liar. I know you’re a liar.”

  “No I ain’t.”

  “Ever been beaten?” asks Angela after a moment. “You get used to it; it’s like breathing. It’s like breathing underwater.”

  And for some reason he thinks she’s smiling, though her back is turned now and all he can see is her hunched figure wrapped in the blanket.

  “Angela,” he says. “Turn around. Let me see you.”

  “I bet you beat her until she couldn’t even walk no more.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “I bet you got a blue washcloth and wrapped it on your fist so the bruises wouldn’t show.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I bet you took a yellow pencil and stuck it in her ear and turned it around and around till the lead snapped and went into her brain.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I know you did.”

  He shifts on the catwalk. “I had a wife and child,” he says. “I never hit them.”

  “Sure sure sure.”

  “She left me.”

  “Sure she did.”

  “They both left me.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah. You ain’t got my sympathy.”

  And for a moment he is back in the playground near 97th Street and it is four years ago and he is with his daughter and she is on the cusp of puberty. It is a summer’s day and he is guiding her on the swing—she is too old for swings and her legs are too long so she tucks them underneath the small wooden platform but kicks them out when she rises high. He must push with both hands and she shouts with joy; this is the moment that Lenora loves the most, but she will not love it for very much longer. He pushes her in the high center of her back but one hand slips and she is in a tight T-shirt, she has been growing taller in recent months and there is not much money for clothes, he has lost his job, he has lost control of his hands, he is pushing her at the armpits now and still she is moving with joy on the swing and his fingers by mistake touch the soft swell of new flesh, with just one hand, and his head is thumping and he must equalize the pressure and his fingers stretch out and gently touch the other side of her body, and there is a shoot of something like electricity to him, and he is trembling, but it feels so soft, so lovely, it eases him for a second, all the time he is pushing her and she doesn’t even notice, his hands are at her armpits and he wishes he could lift his history out o
f her, his daughter, he is touching her and he will touch her again and he will be found out and he will come down the tunnel and he will try to murder his hands in shame.

  “They left me,” says Treefrog.

  Angela turns around and points up at him. “I bet you had a blue washcloth. I bet you had a yellow pencil. I bet you knocked their eyes back in their heads.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “I bet you twisted their arms behind their heads. I don’t got no sympathy for you. You’re only looking for a knock. That’s what you’re looking for. A knock. You want a knock? Go goddamn knock yourself.”

  “Angela,” he says.

  “You’re just like the rest. I don’t got no sympathy for you, no way. I hope you fall. I hope you fall down a goddamn well. You should cut your beard. And your hair. Then fall down a well. Get an eyepatch.”

  A vision of Lenora again flashes across his mind.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” he says.

  “Bullshit,” says Angela, the word elongated into something almost lyrical.

  Treefrog buries his head in his hands for a while and then he stands and moves along the catwalk with his arms outstretched. He disappears into the rear of his cave, knocking over the piss bottles at the end of his mattress. He reaches out to the rickety bedside table and rummages in the broken drawer. The smell of piss rises up from where the bottles have leaked across the floor. He rifles through the clothes—some of his old hand-drawn maps on graph paper are crumpled up among them—and he scatters them around until he finds a thermal shirt. He tucks it into his overcoat, stumbles over his mattress in the dark, swings his way down the two catwalks, and lands—knees bent—in front of Angela.

  She crouches and shields her eyes. “Leave me alone, motherfucker!”

  “Here.”

  “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me!”

  He shoves the thermal shirt toward her. Angela takes her arm away from her eyes and looks at him and says, “Wow.”

  “It’ll keep you warm,” says Treefrog.

  “Thanks.”

  “Put it on.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You just wanna see me naked. I seen the way you narrowed your eyes. I seen it, man.”

  “Shut up, okay? Just put it on.”

  She looks at him, shy and circumspect. “Turn away.”

  He turns and sees a clump of snow fall through the metal grill on the other side of the tunnel. She drapes the fur coat over his shoulder and when he turns around Angela is smiling, with her arms behind her head and her elbows out, like a movie star—she has put the thermal shirt over three or four blouses—but still he imagines her nipples erect in the cold and he wants to touch her, but he doesn’t, he can’t, he won’t.

  “I didn’t hurt nobody.”

  “I believe you, Treefy.”

  “You do?” he says, with sudden surprise.

  “Yeah, ’course I believe you.”

  “Thanks.”

  And then Angela reaches for the fur coat and says, “Ain’t I cute?”

  “Yeah,” he says, and he puts his arms around her.

  “You smell, man.”

  “I had a shower yesterday. In Grand Central. In the steam tunnel. You should come down there with me sometime. The water’s hot.”

  Further up the tunnel they hear a rattling at the gate.

  Angela’s eyes open, wide and startled. She unlocks herself from Treefrog’s embrace. “Elijah!” she says.

  In one swift motion Treefrog has his fingers in the handhold, and within seconds he is up in his nest. Angela puts her fur coat on, tightens it, and scuttles along the tunnel. In the distance Treefrog watches Elijah emerge through a shaft of light, carrying a heater, shouting, “Faraday! Hey, Faraday! Yo. Where the fuck is Faraday?”

  chapter 8

  1950–55

  Walker has timed it perfectly. Just before the sun rises over the roofs of 131st Street and shines through the window, his arm is raised and it shades his eyes. It is good exercise; his muscles beginning to give even more to rheumatism, the disease of tunnel men. He keeps his arm up until the sun hits the crossbeam in the window, and then he is given relief for two and a half minutes exactly.

  A shadow supplied, a shadow lost, and the forearm is lifted as the sun rises further.

  Walker likes the sofa, even though he’s confined to it two hours a day, by pain, not desire. It has shaped itself to the contours of his body, and it gives him a view of a street maddened in recent years by motorcars. He perches on a history of coins dropped beneath the cushions, and sometimes, when he wants chewing tobacco, he reaches in under the cushion, grabs a few dimes, and drops them down to his children, who, when not at school, sit on the steps below. The coins land noisily and his children scramble, then make their way down to the store.

  The stylus of the record player tumbles across an old jazz record: Louis Armstrong. The pulse of the man. The gorgeous rhythm. The syncopated slide. Walker moves his head to the beat, and the silver cross sways gently against his neck. When the record finishes he stands up from the sofa to break the cramp in his knees and stretches wide, bending the pain from his fingers. Carefully he places the needle in a groove just beyond a scratch in the vinyl. Last week the needle began to skip, but the jabs were so terrible in his knees that he just let it sound over and over and over again at the point of a shrill trumpet note—it got to the stage where he didn’t even hear it anymore, he was back underneath the river, he was digging, his friends were around him, it was the compressor sounding out—until Eleanor came home and repositioned the needle.

  She wants to buy a new copy of the record, but money is tight these days. He is long finished in the tunnels; there is no more need for diggers. Most of the family’s money comes from her job in a clothing factory—the wages are low, the hours are long. Walker has begun to do some of the housework, and the room is bright and tidy, partitioned by a curtain that hangs from the ceiling. Walker’s shovel hangs above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece, a row of photographs. By the kitchen, five chairs are ranged around a small table. There are three beds: a double for themselves, a double for the two girls, a single for Clarence. Walker made the single bed himself, strung the rope between poles, frapped and crisscrossed until taut and strong.

  On the days when his fingers don’t give up the ghost, Walker makes furniture to sell at a street stall: chairs, shelves, bedside tables. He gives credit to those who can’t pay up front. Days and days are spent on each intricately carved piece. Afterward he has to immerse his numb hands in warm water for relief.

  Walker lets the music roam in him and shuffles to the stove to put on the kettle. Eleanor has taught him the art of making tea, the necessity of warming the pot first, drying it out, carefully apportioning the leaves, letting them stew for a minute or two. He uses a tea cosy, a foreign thing, inherited from Maura O’Leary. Walker has even acquired a taste for milk in his tea. He lingers over the saucepan, then puts a plate on it so the water boils faster. He has had to learn these little tricks of middle-aged domesticity. Like making the beds and folding the sheets back over the blankets. Or hailing the milk wagon with a high whistle from the window. Or adding a touch of vinegar to the mop water. There is no refrigerator, but Walker bought a plastic icebox from a World War Two veteran who claimed it would work as well as anything.

  Bending down, he takes out the milk but it has already begun to thicken, so he shakes it with violence and pain shoots through his arm and shoulder. He is generous with the milk. It won’t last much longer. He watches the way it whirls through the dark tea.

  As he sips at the drink, he prepares for Eleanor’s return, laying the cosy over the pot, putting a cube of sugar on a spoon, arranging it neatly on the counter so that all she will have to do is pour and stir. The slowness of these days. It’s almost as if he doesn’t inhabit his body but hovers somewhere beyond it, a wheel of energy watching himself beginning to break down. He likes to remain perfectly st
ill sometimes, just standing in the kitchen with his body bent in such a way that he can no longer feel any pain. The doctor has said it will only get worse. It will gnaw at his elbows, slip into his hips. Walker was given medicine but it ran out after a month, cost too much, and the drugstore won’t give him credit.

  He tries to recall his mother in Georgia. There was a plant she used to counter the rheumatism, but Walker can’t remember the name of it.

  Standing by the stove, again removed, again hovering, Walker watches himself as a boy, guiding a canoe through the black swamps, alongside cypress trees stumped by lightning. He imitates the remembered swerve of the paddle, then shuffles across the room, through the whirling motes of dust in the sunlight, to the record player.

  He hates to stop the great Daniel Louis Armstrong in mid-flight, but it’s better than continually rising from the couch. His hands tremble when he lifts the lid of the record player and positions the needle at the beginning. On the couch, he stretches out his feet and extends his neck to see down the street, but there is little to see, just the slide of women out from the Laundromat, a pawnshop sign flickering, and a few young men gathered around a fire hydrant, holding cigarettes, exhaling to the sky, the smoke curling out flaccidly above their heads. Three prostitutes in tight pants totter back and forth around the corner, trading insults with the men.

  Walker lies back gently and blows on his tea, even though it’s already cool. The afternoon withers away.

  Fastened to the skipping music, he falls asleep, and when he wakes his three teenage children are standing in front of him, home from school, laughing, having tilted the tea cosy comically upon his head.

  * * *

  Below them, in a room thick with marijuana smoke, Hoofer McAuliffe, a car mechanic, can be heard at all hours of the night. A tough man, his face is mutilated—one of his nostrils was bitten away in a fight, leaving his nose ruined and scabbed. McAuliffe brings whores to his room late in the evening. He guides them gently by the arm. The smell of reefer drifts up the stairs. Great gollops of laughter rise up through the floorboards. Loud slaps are heard and then the lowest of whimpers. The women slink from the room, shy and high and beaten.