This Side of Brightness

  “I’ll be bitter if I goddamn want to.”

  “I’m leaving,” she says.

  “Leave. Take your bottles. Grab y’alls beads and strings and thread and wrap ’em around your bottles and make a goddamn raft for yourself.”

  She doesn’t leave, and she watches him fade further into the couch. At times she cooks for him and works with great tenderness, even when she’s drunk—baked chicken, rice and beans, cucumber sandwiches—yet she finds herself drinking more and more. She changes the size of the bottles she buys. They make a great bulge in the grocery bags where she tries to hide them. Sometimes she drops tequila in the food just so she can smell it as she leans over the stove.

  And then one morning she emerges from the bathroom to hear Walker muttering to himself. She is surprised at the sound of his voice, clear and deep and lunatic.

  “I bet he didn’t even see them,” he says. “I bet he didn’t even see them.”

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “See what?”

  “See goddamn anything!” he shouts. “They shot him in a junkyard! He didn’t get to see all the things I told him about! A goddamn crane! He didn’t even get a chance to see a crane! That’s what I wanted for him! Ever since he was born! I wanted him to see a crane dance! Don’t look at me that way! Fuck you if you think that’s stupid! Fuck you! I wanted him to see a crane! That’s what I wanted! I never got the chance to show him even that!”

  There is a querulous rising and falling in his chest as he gasps for air. Louisa puts a hand on his shoulder and he slaps it away, letting a dribble of tobacco run down his chin.

  She moves to the kitchen and leaves him in silence, but then she turns around and stares at him and says, “I saw twenty-seven of them once.”

  Walker doesn’t reply.

  “Near the trailer house where my family lives in South Dakota.”

  He rocks gently on the couch.

  “It was on the edge of a lake,” she says. “One by one. And then the whole flock of them. On the edge of the mud. It was soft and they left their footprints. Then the sun came and baked them. The footprints were there for a whole season. I used to ride a bicycle in and out of them. I cried when the rain washed them away. My father slapped me because I wouldn’t stop crying.”

  Louisa removes the spittoon, sits on the edge of the couch.

  “They came back again the next season,” she says, “but I thought I was too old for bicycles. Besides, my brother was using the tires for slingshots. There was no way I could ride it anymore even if I wanted to.”

  “Y’all never married, did ya?”

  “We never got the chance.”

  “It means the baby’s a bastard.”

  “Never say that again. You hear me? Don’t call my son that.”

  “They beat Clarence to death,” says Walker.

  “I don’t want to think about it. There’s certain things you don’t have to remember.”

  “And certain things ya do,” says Walker. “They murdered my son. They put their-all’s gun barrels right down into his eye. They made a grave of his head.”

  “Shut up!” she says. “Shut the hell up and listen! Twenty-seven cranes. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. Back and forth. Going up in the air, wings fully spread. Around and around and around.”

  Neither of them stir, but after a moment Walker shifts on the couch and says to her, “Do it then.”

  “What?”

  “Show me.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Please. Show me.”

  “Don’t go crazy on me, Nathan.”

  “Go ahead,” he says. “If y’all remember it so well, go ahead and do it yourself.”

  “Nathan.”

  “Do it!” he shouts.

  Louisa lowers her head and pours herself a large glass of tequila. She doesn’t even wince as the alcohol hits the back of her throat. Looking at Walker, she hesitates for a moment. She closes her eyes momentarily. Then she smiles, almost derisively. She wipes her lips and puts one arm out and she chuckles and stops.

  “Go on,” says Walker.

  She starts to move: the high cheekbones, the threaded hair, the white white teeth, a gray dress, no shoes, her brown toes lyrical on the worn carpet. Walker, embarrassed, turns his head slightly, but then returns the gaze as Louisa dances, hands outstretched, arms in a whirl, feet back and forth, the most primitive of movements, dissolving the boundaries of her body. Walker feels a throbbing at his temples, a stirring of something primeval within him, a slow spread of joy rising, fanning out, warming him, supplying his flesh with goose bumps. From the couch, he continues to stare. He knows that there is alcohol coursing through Louisa, but he allows himself to forget that; he lets the movement surround him, breathe him, become him, ancestral and gorgeous. And when Louisa starts to lose her breath, Walker rises awkwardly from the couch, reaches to take her hand, and she stops dancing. He touches the side of her face. She drops her chin to her chest. They are silent for a long time, and then he whispers to her with a smile, “Ya know, ya looked ridiculous dancing like that.”

  She puts her head on his shoulder, and together they break into a long laughter, goose bumps still rising on Walker’s skin.

  “There’s something we gotta do,” he says, later in the afternoon.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “A family ritual.”

  “A ritual?”

  He is surprised at himself, his movement, a strange suppleness appearing in his knees. He beckons Louisa across the room with a crooked finger. Side by side, they bend over the crib, holding the dream catcher away, and they rehearse the words first, and say to the baby, “Clarence Nathan Walker, you are so goddamn handsome!”

  * * *

  Years later, during a time of riots and flowers and dark fists painted on walls, Walker and his grandson will sit together in the basement church in Saint Nicholas Park where Eleanor was once baptized. A new young preacher will be telling the story of an ancient Hebrew king, Hezekiah. The church will be quiet. Walker and the boy will sit with their thighs touching, unembarrassed by their closeness. It will be hot. They will pass a handkerchief back and forth. The preacher will rattle on about tolerance, the necessity of belief, the permanence of struggle.

  Grandson and grandfather will not really be listening to the sermon until the preacher mentions an old tunnel.

  Walker will nudge his grandson with his elbow and say, “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Listen up.”

  Hezekiah, the preacher will say, wanted to create a tunnel between two pools of water, Siloam and the Pool of Virgins. A team of men started on the edge of each lake and vowed to meet somewhere near the middle. Underground, the diggers worked the tunnel along, further and further. They expected to meet. But they miscalculated and the tunnels missed each other. The men shouted in anger and disappointment and then they were amazed—in their anger—to hear one another’s faint voices through the rock. Underground, the men changed direction. And so the tunnels moved again. Axes and shovels swung. The corridors of dirt bent and curved. The men followed the sound of the voices, still dull through the rock. And the voices grew louder and they moved closer until their pickaxes smashed against one another, creating sparks, and their voices met. The men swept back the rest of the rock and looked closely at one another’s tired faces. Then they reached forward and touched one another to make sure they were real. The tunnel made a giant misshapen S but, after a while—although the men had failed at first—water began to flow between the two ancient pools.

  chapter 11

  the way God supposed

  The winter sun berths itself in the sky for a day and begins to melt the snow, so that he can hear cars topside making their way sloppily through the slush. But in the tunnel the wind lashes along, carrying its insistent chill. Thirty-two days of snow and ice. The most br
utal winter he has known. Treefrog pulls the hood of the sleeping bag around his head and lays a shirt over his face, the buttons icy at his nose.

  Best to stay in bed the rest of the day, he thinks, but Castor comes up beside him and nuzzles her way under the shirt and he feels her rib cage hard against his face.

  Still in his sleeping bag, Treefrog manages to get on a few extra shirts and his gloves, then hops out and takes some milk from the Gulag, the liquid frozen solid. He stabs open the box with his knife, and a cube of milk falls into the pan. Quickly, he heats it over a small fire. Castor laps at the feast and afterward jumps onto the mattress and curls up on the blankets, white fur almost phosphorescent in the dark. Treefrog takes an old thermometer from a box of hubcaps. He rises and gauges all over: by the stalactite, at the ice wall, on the train tracks, in his back cave, by Faraday’s broken traffic light, in the Gulag, at the fire pit, and on the bedside table, where it reads only sixteen degrees Fahrenheit—cold, so goddamn cold.

  Warming the thermometer with his breath until it hits an even eighteen, he stands and urinates painfully in a piss bottle.

  Time to dump the bottles up above.

  With Castor inside his shirt, Treefrog goes outside through the tunnel gate, where the bright light stings his eyes. He puts on his sunglasses and pours his name in the whiteness near the crab-apple trees, but there is not enough to finish off the words. He breaks an icy twig off a tree and carves the remaining letters.

  Four and a half weeks of relentless ice and snow already. Maybe he should carve the days in notches by the Gulag.

  He follows the bend of the highway, walks down to the green benches at the edge of the Hudson.

  Ice still on the water and he wonders about his crane, how far it has gone toward the sea. Across the water, New Jersey catches the sunlight.

  Angela sits, alone, on the bench. Snow is bellied up around her shoes.

  “Heyyo,” he says, but she doesn’t reply.

  She has spread a blue plastic bag beneath herself so her clothes don’t soak up the wetness. Treefrog sits on the high back of the bench. He takes Castor and puts her in Angela’s lap, and the cat curls up, contented, as she strokes it.

  “Fine morning,” Treefrog says, “fine morning.”

  “No it ain’t,” says Angela.

  “What’s up?”

  “I wanna wash my hair.”

  “Let’s go to my nest. I’ll boil some water for you.”

  “No way, I ain’t climbing up there.” She pulls her scarf up around her neck. “How come it’s so cold and the sun still shining?”

  “Refraction,” he says. “The sun bounces off the snow.”

  “Oh, yeah? You’re so clever, ain’t ya? The only thing bouncing off the snow is your bullshit.” But after a moment she says, “You know what? When I lived in that house with the wraparound porch we had hot water all the time. It was red ’cause it had too much iron and I didn’t like to wash my hair ’cause it made my hair stiff and I thought the color’d be funky, but now I wish I could wash my hair in that funky warm water, I’d wash my hair in that funky warm water all day long and night too.”

  “It’d be clean, then.”

  “It’s clean now, motherfucker!”

  “I’m only saying.”

  “And I’d wash it in the afternoon too if I had the time.”

  Treefrog adjusts the glasses. “Say. Where’s Elijah?”

  “Gone to get his SSI. Five hundred bucks a month.”

  “Man,” says Treefrog. “He’s got an address?”

  “He’s got a friend with an apartment and then they get the money and then they go to the candy store. I hope he keeps me some. He said he’ll keep me some.”

  “That stuff’s bad for you,” he says.

  She chuckles and looks away.

  “Hey, Angela,” he says. “You killed them rats yet?”

  “I told you, the pregnant one is pregnant. She’s called Skagerak.”

  “Huh?”

  “Papa Love told me they’s Norway rats and I asked him for the name of a place in Norway, somewhere like the sea, and he told me Skagerak and Barents, so I called them Skagerak and Barents.”

  “You talked to Papa Love?”

  “He was out putting the finishing touches on that guy Edison.”

  “Faraday.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.”

  “And you asked him about rats?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you gave ’em names?”

  “Yeah, what’s it to you?”

  “Now I heard it all.”

  “The girl rat is nice. She comes right up beside me. Someday she’s gonna take the bread right outa my hands.”

  “Damn.”

  They sit in a long silence, him perched high on the back of the bench, watching the slumber of the water.

  “The sea looks nice,” she says.

  “That’s not the sea, that’s the Hudson. The sea’s down there.”

  She purses her lips as if about to kiss the air. “You know what? I always wanted to see the sea. When we were in Iowa, we had a car, Plymouth Volare, a dented piece of shit, you know, and me and my sisters’d be in the backseat, saying, I see the sea and the sea sees me. And my father’d say, We’re going to the sea. But then we’d always run outa gas and he’d kick that dented piece of shit and he’d say, Just a minute. He’d go down the road to get gas—he had a gas can in the trunk—but he’d stop in a bar and that was it. And we’d be in the backseat, singing that stupid song, I see the sea and the sea sees me. Once we tried to walk home through the fields, but the cornstalks were way up above our heads and we was scared and went back to the car.”

  “Nothing stopping you from going now to see it, is there?”

  “No. I s’pose.”

  “You should go see it,” he says. “Take the train to Coney Island, it’s nice out there.”

  He moves to sit down on the bench, tugs some of her plastic bag, plants himself beside her, but she looks away. “Hey,” he says, surprised.

  She shields her face. “Leave me alone.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He hit you, didn’t he?”

  “I fell, goddammit, leave me alone.”

  “When did he hit you?”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? You’re a pain in the ass bigger than any I ever seen. I’m sitting here getting some quiet, you come along, why the fuck don’t you leave me alone, huh?”

  “You should go to a shelter.”

  “Ever been in one of them places? They got women with smashed bones and bitten ears and gaps in theys teeth wide enough to drive a D-train through.”

  “Why do you stay with him?”

  Angela reaches into her pocket and takes out an empty vial with an orange cap, and she twirls it in her hands and smiles.

  “You should stay away from that shit.”

  “Yessir, Mister Treefrog Preacher, sir.” She sighs. “Elijah didn’t like me giving no name to my rats. Said it’s stupid. Said he’s gonna kill ’em. He’s gonna get some rat poison and make ’em eat it. Maybe even get hisself a cat.”

  “He don’t like cats.”

  “Now he likes ’em. They just animals like you and me.”

  And then Treefrog remembers how once, in springtime—back in the bad days, the worst days—he fell asleep with a piece of bread near his pillow. When he woke up, a rat had taken a small chunk from the top of his right ear. The blood ran down the side of his face and hardened in his beard. He chased the rat to the rear of the nest. There were small brown pellets of rodent shit all over the back of the cave. Treefrog rumbled around in the darkness, so disoriented that he scraped his ear against the wall, and then the cut was filled with black tunnel dust. He cleaned it out with water and gin for disinfectant, tore a strip from a white T-shirt for a bandage, wrapped it around his head and underneath his beard. For days his ear sent jabs of pain through him. He was afraid he might lose his bal
ance. He kept on pinching at the other ear with his fingernail, even pierced the flesh once, but it wasn’t a bad cut. He forgot to change the bandage and Papa Love called him Van Gogh for a while, but the nickname wore off when Treefrog’s ear healed. A month later he caught the rat in a trap beneath his library shelf. It wriggled and squealed under the metal bar that had trapped its body. He bashed its head in with his spud wrench and it let out one last squeal. Treefrog brought the animal topside, dug a small hole in the weed lot down by the river, and buried the rat with great ceremony, just in case it was still using the slice of his ear to listen to the secrets of his mind and body.

  “I know what you mean,” he says.

  “D’ya think it’s gonna snow again?” Angela asks. And then she looks to the river. “You know what? I had an uncle, he used be able to tell the weather. He could tell a storm from a million miles. He’d stand out in them cornfields and say, A storm’s coming. Or, Sun’s coming. Or, Tornado’s moving in. He looked like the weather. Had a face like the weather. Hey. You think I look like the weather, Treefy?”

  “You look like sunshine.”

  “You’re cute, Treefy. Excepting sunshine gives you cancer.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s a known fact.”

  “Gimme a cigarette.”

  “Them too. Sunshine and cigarettes.”

  She flips the gold clasp on her handbag and delves deep, pulls out half a flattened cigarette, rolls it in her fingers to make it cylindrical once more. He lights it for her and she blows the smoke away from him, but the wind carries it back. She takes five furious puffs, then hands the cigarette to him and Treefrog holds it like a lover. A thought strikes him deep and hard when the smoke touches his lungs.

  “I’d like to make a map of your face.”

  “What you talking about, a map of my face?”

  “Just a map.”

  “Maps for driving with, motherfucker.”

  “Come on, let’s go try it.”

  “Where?”

  “My nest.”

  “I ain’t climbing nowhere. You just want a knock.”

  “Knock knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Treefrog.”

  “Treefrog who?”