This Side of Brightness

  The yolk doesn’t break or spill. Hands and spatula are held over the hot grill.

  Treefrog, still wearing his tie on his forehead, rubs a bill between his fingers while he watches the cook; he got the money at Faraday’s funeral. They had been late for the mass, but a deacon told them where the interment would be. They walked to the nearby cemetery. The dead man’s father saw them approaching halfway through the service. He came over, shuffling on a cane, and offered them each ten dollars to stay away, saying “Please” as if the weight of his world depended on it. Behind him, at the graveside, the rest of the family watched. A woman—it must have been Faraday’s mother—kept dabbing at her eyes with a long black scarf. Dean demanded twenty dollars apiece, and Faraday’s father looked at him long and sad. Dean shrugged. Faraday’s father reached into his pocket and took out a wad of bills from an envelope meant for the priest. The old man removed one glove and, with shaking hands, passed around the twenty-dollar bills.

  By the time he got to Treefrog he had only a ten and one five left, but Treefrog said, “That’s okay, Mister Bedford.”

  Faraday’s father looked at him and for an instant his eyes brightened, but then he said, “Just don’t come near the graveside, okay?”

  He turned his back and walked away like a man unburdened.

  The four of them watched the rest of the service from a distant gravestone.

  “There goes Faraday,” said Elijah, as the coffin was lowered.

  “His name ain’t Faraday,” said Angela.

  “It’s Faraday to me.”

  “I shoulda got forty bucks!” said Dean. “He owed me twenty! The sonofabitch never paid!”

  “Man, look at that coffin,” whispered Angela. “Them gold handles. Goddamn. He’s stylin’.”

  “He’s stylin’ down.” Elijah laughed.

  “I bet he was rich,” said Dean.

  “No less dead if he was rich or not,” said Treefrog.

  He swivels a little on the stool at the counter, and the money is warm now in his hands.

  Watching the cook, Treefrog brings the bills to his nose and smells them. Then he folds the ten-dollar bill down until it is tiny. He checks out all the pockets in his overcoat for a good hiding place. The red lining of his coat is full of holes, but he finds a good place for the bill and punctures it with three pins to make sure he doesn’t lose it. He chuckles to see the pin go through the eye of a dead President.

  The cook flips the eggs in the air and they somersault onto a bun. Laying two slices of bacon across the eggs, he winks at Treefrog.

  Perhaps he will give the cook a tip for the show. He hasn’t tipped anyone in years, but he suddenly feels huge and magnanimous. When the plate is set down on the counter, Treefrog takes off his tie, puts it in his pocket, spins the plate twice, licks each of his fingers, and lingers over the food like a man in love.

  * * *

  A thumbnail of moon in the sky and the snow has briefly relented. He shoehorns himself through the gate and climbs up to his nest, carrying two bottles.

  From his overcoat he drops a pile of branches and splintered wood—on the walk home he found the wood beneath the overpass, the stash belonging to some topside bum living under the bridge at 96th Street. The wood was wrapped in a blanket, kept dry. No accounting for the stupidities of the ones who live topside, some of them warming themselves over steam grates, gusts of hot wind cooking the undersides of their bodies, the top half of them frozen, always rolling over like absurd pieces of toast.

  Treefrog uses his Swiss Army knife to chop some of the wood into kindling, makes a tiny lean-to of twigs, and tears a newspaper into strips. He squats over the small fire, his overcoat lifted and his ass just above the flame.

  He remains perched until the heat seeps through him, and then he throws on a few larger twigs and a black plastic bag to help the fire take quicker. As the flames jump, he goes over to his bed and lies down with his arms behind his head like a bored teenager. The smoke drifts across the tunnel and out through the grate on the opposite side.

  He kicks at the end of the blanket and sees some pellets of rat shit somersault in the air. He whistles for Castor—“Here, girl, here, girl”—but she doesn’t come.

  Opening the first bottle of gin, he sticks a dirty straw into the neck and drinks and then fumbles under his jeans and his thermal long johns, cupping his hand down by his crotch to catch the warmth.

  When the first bottle is finished he stares up at nothing. In the tunnel all is quiet. He takes the harmonica out of his pocket, but it is cold and he decides not to warm it. The train from upstate blasts its way through the tunnel, and, feeling drunk, he rises when he hears the sound of someone whistling in the distance. He looks down along the tunnel at Papa Love emerging from his shack.

  Treefrog leans far out on the catwalk to get a better view.

  Middle-aged and dreadlocked, Papa Love is swathed in clothes, only his face and fingers exposed, but he moves with fluidity. He puts wood on the fire opposite his shack and carefully arranges cans of spray paint on some old wicker chairs. Moving with slow grace, Papa Love lines the cans of paint up one by one and flaps his arms in the cold. Along the side of his shack, on top of the boards, are the words THERE IS NO SELF TO BE DISCOVERED, ONLY A SELF TO BE CREATED. Beneath this, a collage of yellow lines and a Confederate flag in African liberation colors.

  Treefrog has seldom seen Papa Love go topside, except to get food and paint. The old artist still keeps a bank account from his days as a high school art teacher—he first came down to the tunnels after his lover was hit by a bullet. It was a simple drive-by; the killers were high on amphetamines. His lover was whisked to a Manhattan hospital, but the red line of the heart machine bleeped and bottomed out. Papa Love had seen lots of men die in Vietnam, but he wasn’t prepared to watch his lover go that way. He began walking after his lover died, walked the length and breadth of the city, slept on the steps of a church, and then one summer he decided to strap his heart to a cardboard box. He found the cardboard at the bottom of a doorstep on Riverside Drive, and he carried it under his arm down into the tunnels, and he strapped his aorta on one side and his pulmonary on the other, and he tied them both very neatly together, and he strapped all his veins longways down the cardboard, and he strapped all his arteries in the opposite direction, and he weaved them together with a muscle of his heart and he felt as if his blood were exploding and he lay down on the brown sprawl and looked along the length of the dark tunnel and saw a rat moving over the tracks, and he chuckled in grief and said to himself, I have strapped my heart to a cardboard box.

  That was Papa Love’s first painting—a self-portrait of his heart tied around a sheet of cardboard—and people mistook it for a love heart and gave him his nickname, and he never corrected them.

  Once, years ago, a gallery dealer came along the tunnel and woke Papa Love, said he wanted the artist to do some work topside. Papa Love had drawn another self-portrait—as a coffee percolator, the slow downward drip of dark flesh. The gallery owner wanted him to do it on canvas. Papa Love said no and the gallery owner left the tunnel hurriedly, beads of sweat at his brow in the cold, so scared that his legs almost whipped out from underneath him. Dean brushed against the man and palmed the wallet from his pocket. It was the only time that anyone ever saw Papa Love angry. He smashed Dean’s blond head against the wall and went running topside with the gallery man’s wallet. When he came back to the tunnel he was panting, screaming for Dean, but Dean had run off. In revenge Papa Love drew Dean’s portrait under a churchlike series of grills beneath 86th, and he wrote the word PEDOPHILE in giant letters, though later that same day he felt guilty and scrubbed the letters out, left the painting, and Dean took it as a compliment, his portrait on the tunnel wall.

  From a distance, Treefrog sees that a huge area of the tunnel wall—directly across from Papa Love’s shack, lit by the fire—has already been primed with white paint, a perfect rectangle outlined in black.

  Papa Love steps up
to it and stacks four crates on top of each other to use as a ladder. He covers his mouth and nose with a red bandanna, so as not to suck the paint fumes down. An old pair of battered spectacles is placed comically over the bandanna. He stands on the crates and shakes a can of paint. Treefrog can hear the metal marble bouncing inside. Papa Love stretches out his arms and, with sudden violence, sweeps in toward the wall, moving his arms through a giant arc.

  A mist of air issues from the top of the bandanna as he steps off the crates—they begin to collapse like a house of cards—and his body travels through the darkness as if on a rope, and the paint strikes the wall as the artist travels, a big half-circular sweep; and then, almost as quickly, Papa Love is on the ground by the campfire, rubbing at his knees with the pain of having hit the tunnel floor.

  He steps back, nods at the wall, and begins to restack the crates. Standing up on the curious ladder once again, Papa Love falls in toward the wall and, in another perfect arc, sprays over the half circle a second time. His gray hair swings as he flies. The paint covers every inch of the first sweep. He lands by the campfire and then rubs his hands vigorously against the cold. He spreads the crates out, stands wide-footed—he could be the ghost of Nathan Walker; he could be digging—takes another can of paint, and jets two moons underneath the half circle. Each time he steps back he warms his fingers over the fire.

  Treefrog drops down from the catwalk and moves further up the tunnel, stands in the shadows, watching.

  Papa Love bends and draws a long straight tube emerging from the half circle. A series of striations are drawn across the tube. The center of the mural is sprayed yellow and then tinged at the edges with a cloud of red. Papa Love works furiously, the cans scattered around him on the ground. He stops every few minutes to ignite his hands with campfire warmth, then stepping upward, haunts the wall with colors using long sweeps of his arm, zeroing in afterward to draw lines emerging from the top of the circle.

  The portrait on the tunnel wall grows and a giant lightbulb appears, ten feet high. Papa Love stands by the fire and works at the nozzle of a spray can with his knife. In the high center of the lightbulb he draws two furred lines and, underneath them, ovals tinged with blue. Treefrog realizes that the old artist has drawn a pair of eyes within the lightbulb.

  Papa Love uses a paintbrush to draw circuit boards for pupils. Using only one crate now, a long swatch of nose appears beneath the eyes and then a mouth set into half a grin. Some stubble is drawn at the bottom of the bulb.

  Papa Love steps back and admires his work, hands in his dungarees.

  “Heyyo,” says Treefrog, stepping forward.

  “You go to the funeral?”

  “Yeah, we got paid. Faraday’s father gave me fifteen bucks to stay away. Rest of them got twenty.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “First funeral I ever got paid for.”

  “I’m too old for funerals now,” says Papa Love.

  Treefrog points at the mural. “It’s Faraday, huh?”

  “Gonna be. Maybe. Ain’t fully finished yet.”

  “He’s looking good.”

  “A brother in the spine,” says Papa Love.

  Treefrog shuffles in the gravel. “There’s a grave inside all of us.” And then he is embarrassed by what he has said, and he mumbles, “You think it’s ever gonna stop snowing?”

  Papa Love shrugs.

  “You think Faraday did it on purpose?” asks Treefrog.

  “I doubt it. But at least he went the way he probably would’ve liked. I mean, that’s what he probably wanted.”

  “Hey,” says Treefrog. “If you were to draw a picture of me, what’d you draw?”

  “Man, I only draw dead people.”

  “You drew yourself. And Dean.”

  “Dead people and people I want dead.”

  “Oh.” Treefrog pauses for a long time. “Say, what about Miriam Makeba?”

  “I been wishing she was dead too,” says Papa Love.

  “Why’s that?”

  “So she could come on down here and join me.”

  Treefrog laughs.

  Papa Love turns to his mural. “You like it?” he asks.

  “Yeah, man, ’course I like it. Old Faraday, man. Damn. Hate to see him go.”

  “Brother’s in the blood.”

  Papa Love shakes another can of paint.

  “You seen that Angela girl yet?” asks Treefrog.

  “Yeah,” says Papa Love. “Sister’s living with Elijah.”

  “Man, you should draw her.”

  “Last time I saw her, seemed like she was breathing pretty good.”

  “Yeah, but you should draw her anyway,” says Treefrog.

  He slaps Papa Love on the shoulder as the old man sets to work on Faraday’s chin.

  * * *

  In his notebook Treefrog writes, Back down under the earth where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong. Each letter is like a perfect mirror of the one that has gone before, his handwriting tiny and crisp and replicate. He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g—where all beginning begins and ends—and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. And then he writes: Angela. Two A’s, one at each end. Nice, that. A good name. Lovely. An elaborate pencil mark at the end, a tail fin.

  chapter 10

  1955–64

  A massive blue Buick with an exaggerated tail fin cruises the neighborhood. The driver hangs his arm out the left-hand side window, an open bottle of whiskey held at his crotch. He wears sunglasses and a shirt patterned with playing cards, open at the neck to the jack of clubs. In his breast pocket a small bag of marijuana dents the cloth.

  Hoofer McAuliffe steers with his knees, one hand tapping the dashboard and the fingers of the other drumming on the outside panel of the door. As he drives, he leans out the window to look at his brand-new set of whitewall tires, almost hypnotizing himself with their swirl. He takes his hand from the dashboard to grab the whiskey bottle and drinks long and deep. Whiskey streams down his chin, dribbling in the stubble. The car travels slowly, twenty-five miles an hour.

  On the street’s far corner, McAuliffe notices some boys out playing with a fire hydrant. Huge jets of water stream across the road. The boys are laughing as they soak each passing vehicle, and one of the kids is pointing at McAuliffe’s car. The boys punch each other with delight, the fists sliding off one another’s wet shoulders.

  McAuliffe pulls his arm in from the window, and in the quick movement of winding up the handle his whiskey bottle tumbles to the floor. He curses loud into the steering wheel and bends down to grab the bottle. He jerks the wheel and turns the car across three lanes of traffic, away from the boys. A checkered taxicab behind him blares its horn. Hoofer McAuliffe rights himself in the seat, all concentration. A man on a bicycle—salmoning his way against the traffic—swerves to avoid the Buick.

  McAuliffe slams the brake for an instant, but the boys across the street have directed the hydrant water toward him, a giant fountain making an arc in the air, and he pumps down on the accelerator once more.

  The traffic light is red and the accelerator goes deeper to the floor and the engine whines.

  He doesn’t see the woman on the crosswalk carrying the large laundry bags in her arms. She is looking over her shoulder and chuckling at the boys anointing the street with water. A roar hits her ears—“Watccchit laidyyyy!”—and she whips around, too late. The Buick crumples the woman at the hip and she is in the air, flying, half somersaulting, clothespins tumbling out of her dress pocket, her thin frame smashing against the windshield, making a spiderweb of glass, her body rolling up onto the roof, denting the metal, her green dress billowing, the street silent but for the patter of water and the screech of tires. Her bag of laundry—cloth diapers and baby clothes—gets pinned to the front of the car. She is flung to the rear, her outstretched arm slapping against the beautiful tail fin.

  She flies beyond, slamming her head on the pa
vement with such a thump that it is the only sound the passersby will later remember, the full dullness of her head against concrete and then the sight of a clothespin soaking up blood, other pins strewn around the street.

  The Buick smashes into a mailbox—pinning the bag of laundry against it—and careens out, comes to a halt, sashayed across two lanes.

  Hoofer McAuliffe is out of his car, ripping at the buttons on his shirt so that it falls open and the patterned playing cards roam to his hips. He runs back and forth between the car and the woman, beating at his head with his fists. Across the street somebody uses a wrench to turn the hydrant off. McAuliffe’s moans grow louder and he sinks down at the front of his car, on his knees, fingering the massive dents in the hood of his Buick.

  It is fifteen minutes before Clarence comes running home, shouting, “Momma’s been hit by a car!”

  Walker lunges from his seat and his leg hits against the record player and another scratch etches its way across the vinyl and the needle keeps skipping, skipping, skipping as father and son run for the door. Clarence helps shoulder his father down the stairs.

  At the street corner Hoofer McAuliffe is rubbing his fingers over the dent in his car and he shouts at Walker, “It weren’t me! The light was green! She jumped out in front of me! See!” And he points at the imprint of her body in the hood and, beneath his breath, says, “Bitch jumped out in front of me.”

  The crowd grows silent as Walker kneels on the ground and takes Eleanor’s head in his hands. The way Eleanor’s hair would touch him in moments of pleasure, like when they hunkered together over a letter and she would sweep her head sideways, the unruly red strands touching his face. Or when she drew the curtain across as the children slept and slipped in beside him in the double bed, hair mashed against the pillow. Or on the bicycle before they were married, taking her long tresses and, from the crossbar, swinging them around and giving him a red mustache, joking, “That’s what our kids’ll look like!” There were long strands of her hair left in the sink when she washed it and, as his own started to gradually peel away from his head, she would take the strands and place them on his forehead, all laughter. Brushing Deirdre’s, Maxine’s—but never enough to remove the kinks and curls. She told their daughters to be proud of the curls. The way he broke a jam jar against the wall when she came home with her locks shorn short. Eighteen months later the locks were there, long again. And once, when he mopped the floor, she came home and was so amazed that she bent her body at the waist and walked crabways across the room and let her hair trail over his work, saying that she trusted him every inch of the way. “Look!” She giggled when she got to the opposite side of the room. “Not a bit of dirt in my hair! You’re the best mopper I’ve ever seen in my life!”