This Side of Brightness

  Louisa isn’t home. She seldom is these days. Walker sits by his grandson’s bedside. There is a stale smell from the old man, something like fire smoke, but the boy listens quietly. One of his favorite stories is about his great-grandfather—Con O’Leary—who used to hide a bullet in his belly button before he was blown halfway toward heaven. Some of Eleanor’s World War Two bullets are still kept in the apartment, and the boy likes to watch his grandfather lift up his shirt and shove one in.

  “Do another one.”

  “I ain’t that fat!”

  “Go on, try another, Mister Walker.”

  “Don’t push y’alls luck, son.”

  “Go on. Please.”

  Walker coughs and brings up a string of black dust from his lungs, a remnant of the tunnels. He spits into a sheet of newspaper, balls the paper up, and drops it into a wastebasket. The boy sits up in bed and slaps his grandfather’s back to help him through the coughing. Walker can feel the thumps echo through him. Recently his body has given way even further, a cough growing deeper, his limbs tightening, the tobacco spit confounding him, a legacy of dribbled stains on white shirts.

  After the fit of coughing, Walker straightens himself up and reaches for the second bullet. “Abracadabra,” he says.

  * * *

  All the taunts scribbled down in a school copybook: halfbreed, mulatto, Sambo, nigger, honky, snowboy, zebra, cracker, jungle bunny, coon, Wonderbread, Uncle Tom, Crazy Horse, spade.

  * * *

  Clarence Nathan takes the subway train—his grandfather has inculcated in him a love of this journey—and he emerges from the station and walks jauntily to the construction sites near Battery Bark. He has been given new sneakers for his sixteenth birthday.

  He watches the choreography of commerce toward the sky.

  The men who create the giant buildings are only seen as specks moving on naked beams, a series of hardhats going back and forth. They move at the rate of a floor a week. The cranes feed them steel; then the men bolt it together. When the steel is clad, the men climb higher, distancing themselves from the world below. Sometimes Clarence Nathan goes into neighboring skyscrapers, saying he’s a delivery boy, then sneaks his way to the top floor for a better view. He has bought a pair of binoculars in the pawnshop. He loves to see the men in motion on crossbeams and columns, climbing without harnesses even. The men move as if on solid ground; their feet never slip; there is no need for them to spread their arms wide for balance. Some even swing through the air on the ends of jib lines. Clarence Nathan falsifies the application forms and says he is eighteen, though it’s clear to the foremen that he hasn’t even begun shaving.

  “Come back when your testicles drop,” says one of the ironworkers.

  One afternoon two security guards have to drag him from a ladder twenty-three floors up an unfinished skyscraper. They grab at Clarence Nathan’s feet and are amazed at the brutal strength in his legs. He shakes free, and they watch him leap the final eight rungs to the steel decking below. He lands with knees bowed, the binoculars swinging at his neck. “You goddamn fool,” says one of the guards. He is escorted down to the street and told that if he comes back he’ll be arrested. Clarence Nathan nods gravely, leaves the site, and when he is far enough away he punches the air in euphoria. Someday he will climb and they will watch in awe. He will create his own movement in the air.

  Clarence Nathan stands on top of a parking meter, balancing, until a cop shoos him away. Further down the street he tries another parking meter on the other foot.

  He returns day after day to the skyscraper site, wearing his grandfather’s boots and an old flannel shirt. The ironworkers finally allow him to sling chokers on the giant steel beams on the ground as long as he promises not to climb. He attaches the short lengths of cable and watches the beams rise, lifted by the Favco cranes. Weeks later, Walker answers the door to a school official who says he hasn’t seen the boy in ages.

  * * *

  Angela stands up quickly when she sees Elijah’s silhouette further down the tunnel. She throws the blanket over Treefrog and kisses him on the cheek.

  “See you later, Treefy,” she says.

  “Stay here.”

  She shakes her head. “Thanks for the picture.”

  “It ain’t a picture.”

  “Whatever. Hey, man. You got any money?”

  “Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding.”

  “Very funny.”

  “No,” he says, “no money.”

  She folds the graph paper carefully and tucks it in her fur coat, winks at him, and then rubs her tongue along her lips. “I’m thirsty,” she says. “Goin’ to see the candy man.”

  “Man,” he whispers after her. “Stay here.”

  He watches her figure move in and out of the light shafts until she has gone, and after a moment he hears shouting from down near Elijah’s cubicle—maybe Angela has shown Elijah the map of her face with the disappeared bruise. Treefrog tucks himself further into the tunnel wall, wondering about the ritual of love and fists—how they might square off in front of each other, distant at first, then growing closer, as if in a funnel: Angela and Elijah, slowly spinning downward, the circle between love and fists gradually becoming smaller, until a fist nears love and love nears a fist; spinning ever downward, and then a fist is love and love is a fist, and they are in the mouth of the funnel, both of them, hammering and loving each other to death.

  chapter 12

  split open with sunlight

  Moving into the back cave for silence, Treefrog lights a candle. The white wax drips down to the dirt floor.

  He takes his hand-drawn maps from their Ziploc bags—maps he has made of his nest, his tunnel, of Dancesca, of Lenora—and spreads them out at his feet. Watching them, he feels them looking up at him. He folds them all away except for Lenora and Dancesca, and on a blank sheet of paper he draws a copy of Dancesca exactly the way he remembers her, constant, unchanging. Her face with all its perfect contours. As if she could suddenly wake and rise from the paper to stand and breathe and sigh and remember. He touches her neck and then brings his fingers all the way up to her eyes. With his pencil he draws the final hollows and then tucks the new map away in the plastic bag.

  Treefrog takes another clean sheet and, looking at the old map of Lenora, he imagines the way his daughter’s face might have changed in the four years since he’s seen her. He gives her a brand-new landscape, the nose lengthened, the lips just a tiny bit fuller, a little more weight around the cheeks so the contours are pitched higher, a deeper dimple at the chin, eyebrows plucked, a longer ear with the tiniest of lakes on the earlobe, space for an earring. The map takes an hour to draw. When he is finished Treefrog holds the paper up in the air and touches it with his lips and tells her that he is sorry, all the time making absolutely sure that his hands don’t stray beneath paper where the rest of her body lies.

  * * *

  Dancesca likes the way Clarence Nathan walks the ledge. She comes up to the rooftop on summer evenings when the sun is sinking through a chemical sky, the smell of hair lotion on her hands, a recent scar on her cheek where a customer cut her after Dancesca nipped her ear—the customer grabbed the scissors and sliced them through the air. The cut was long but shallow. The doctor said it didn’t need stitches; he just pinched the cheek together and stapled it with Band-Aids. The cut left a thin creek of pale skin on her face. Dancesca wears a thick swath of makeup on the bumpy ridge.

  She sits at the end of the ledge, one foot dangling into nothingness, the other placed on the rooftop.

  “Do that little turn,” she says, the braids in her hair bobbing.

  Clarence Nathan wanders along the ledge, all concentration, his hair curled high and ridiculous. He met her first in her salon in East Harlem. She was slightly chubby, although later she would grow skinny. Brown-eyed. Gorgeous. Skin as black as riverbottom. When she looked at him in the mirror, he darted his eyes away. He felt a flush in his cheeks. When his hair was finished
, he left her an enormous tip. There were hoots of derisive laughter on the stoop of his apartment building when he came swinging home, bouncing on the balls of his toes, a comb sticking up from the frizzy outshoot. He met her again two days later in Saint Nicholas Park, and they sat on a bench while she reshaped his hair.

  He walks the roof ledge in wide-bottom jeans, so it looks as if his feet aren’t even moving, then takes Dancesca’s hand and tries to coax her to stand on the ledge. But she can’t; she can feel her knees buckling in fear.

  “All you have to do,” he says, “is forget your body even exists.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “’Course you can. It’s all about forgetting where you are. Just pretend you’re on the sidewalk.”

  “You’re a looneytune.”

  “Watch this,” he says.

  He makes his favorite move—kicking off his shoes and jumping between the buildings. Later, they take a blanket and spread it out on the roof. The pungent odor of tar rises up around them. Sitting at first on opposite ends of the blanket, they make gradual movements until they are so close she can feel his breath on her cheek. He puts a hand on her waist and they lie down together. Opening the buttons on her shirt, he feels the metal wire at the bottom of her bra. He fumbles with both hands at the back clasp, opens it, pulls one strap from her collarbone. She leans back, takes his shoulders in her arms. Lips touching, his fingers tentative, he nudges himself up against her hip. She leans further across and takes the lobe of his ear in her teeth. Earnestly, he slips inside her. When they make love, Clarence Nathan, seventeen years old, feels like he is entering his own history.

  In the morning, back alone in the apartment, he is woken by his grandfather.

  Walker has prepared a towel and shaving soap and a straight-blade razor on the bathroom counter. Laid them all out neatly in a row, even heated extra water on the stove. Walker’s gray beard has grown too long, he says; he hates the way he can grab the ends of his mustache between his teeth. He has begun to find pieces of food dried in there, and he dislikes catching a glance of himself in the mirror.

  Clarence Nathan follows his grandfather. Early morning shadows lie on the floor. When the men push open the bathroom door—the lock is broken—Louisa is sitting on the toilet seat, bent over. At first all they notice is a hunched body, but then she raises her head slowly and they see that her skirt is lifted and she is ferreting around her thighs for a new place into which to shove a needle.

  “Get out of here!” she shouts.

  Walker bangs a half-open fist against the wall. “What the hell y’all think you’re doing, woman?”

  She looks up and shoves the needle in quickly. Clarence Nathan shivers at the sight of his mother’s tired pubic hair peeping out from her white underpants.

  “I swear it’s my last one, I swear it’s the last.”

  She stands and pulls at the hem of her skirt, rubs a shirtsleeve over her eyes. She looks straight in the old man’s eyes as she passes him.

  Walker sighs and bends over the handbasin and washes his hands even though they’re already clean. Sitting on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, he says, over and over again in a mantra, “Lord.”

  His grandson takes off most of the beard with the scissors first, fingers trembling. Walker can feel the heat of the morning lying down inside his saggy cheeks, then diving further inside him—even his lungs and heart feel as if they are sweating in the disappearing landscape of his body. At the edge of the horizon, he can see a catastrophic gale heading his way: dark winds and a contagion of rain. The forecast speaks to him in his knees and shoulders and elbows. The way of weather. He feels there is not long left. Surrendering will not be difficult. Let it rain, he thinks, as water and lather slip over his cheeks. Let it pour on down. In recent months Walker has given up the trips to the doctor. Pain is his companion. He would be surprised—even lonely—if it left him. It has gathered around him for so many years, donated a necessary order to the hours, to the routine, to the watching of the street. He thinks of Eleanor, the way she once lifted her nightdress by a different bathroom sink.

  A small, rude smile appears at the edge of his lips as the beard falls away.

  Tiny moments flit back into Walker’s mind. He lingers on the rim of these memories. He has begun to say prayers again, long convoluted rhythms, though he’s not quite sure if he’s talking to himself or not. He recalls the prayer he didn’t quite speak in the tunnel, in 1917, that moment of silence before the boys began to throw candles. He can reach out his tongue and almost taste it.

  The razor is high around his gray sideburns.

  “Say, son.”

  “Yessir?”

  “I heard some rumblings on the roof last night,” says Walker. “Sounded like someone jumping around.”

  Clarence Nathan feels his cheeks flush, but his grandfather laughs long and hard.

  “That’s a nice girl. Whatshername?”

  “Dancesca.”

  “Yeah, now, she’s a catch.”

  Embarrassed, Clarence Nathan’s hands shake and he lets the razor slip and a tiny nick appears near his grandfather’s ear. He wipes the remaining soap off the old man’s face and dabs at the cut with the towel, watches the cotton soak up the blood.

  “Hold on to her,” says Walker.

  Clarence Nathan tears off a piece of newspaper, licks it, and puts it against the old man’s cut, where it dries and stays. The blood darkens the paper.

  “Sorry I cut you.”

  “Can’t feel a thing,” says Walker. Looking at his reflection in the window, he says, “Nathan Walker, you are still so goddamn handsome!”

  Chuckling, he turns to Clarence Nathan.

  “Let’s you and me go enjoy the day. Just a quick walk.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’ve got something to tell ya.”

  “Yessir.”

  The streets seem split open with sunlight, widened by heat. Walker and his grandson cross the avenues westward and up the hill toward Riverside Drive. Walker feels the silver cross flip at his neck, and the cool side lies against his skin.

  As he walks, he looks sideways at Clarence Nathan. The young man wears a dashiki. A red-green-yellow hat perched on his head. Flared green trousers. A harmonica—a present from Walker—dents one pants pocket. Clarence Nathan has gone over the lip into late adolescence: muscles rumbling under the shirt, his Adam’s apple big and prominent, a familiar swagger to the shoulders. The boy has been trying to cultivate an Afro, but mostly his hair falls quickly out of it, lying lank and black down to his collarbone.

  They sit on a park bench at the rear of Grant’s Tomb and look down through the trees along the bluff to the river flowing below. The teenager perches on the high back of the bench. Walker lifts up the flap of his tobacco pouch, puts his nose down close to the bag, drags the scent down, raises his face to the air.

  “Feels clean, don’t it?”

  “Sir?”

  “The day, it feels clean.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Whatshername again? That girl?”

  “Dancesca.”

  “Hang on to her. Did I tell ya that already?”

  “Yessir, you did.”

  After a long silence, Clarence Nathan says, “They let me go up yesterday to the forty-third floor. With the ironworkers. You can see the rivers for miles: the East, the Hudson. When it’s not hazy.”

  “Y’all making money at this job?”

  “Yessir. A little.”

  “Saving it up?”

  “Yeah, yeah, ’course.”

  “What ya spending the rest on?”

  “Bits ’n’ pieces.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “There’s two types of freedom, son. The freedom to do what ya want and the freedom to do what ya should.” And then Walker says, “Y’all’re buying your momma’s dope, right?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t lie to me, son.
Y’all’re buying her smack. I know. Ya know how I feel about lying.”

  “I never bought any drugs, never.”

  “Then y’all’re giving her money.”

  Clarence Nathan says nothing.

  “Don’t be giving her any more money.”

  The teenager lowers his head. “Yessir.”

  “I mean it. Promise me that.”

  “Yessir,” he says.

  “If ya don’t stop, there’ll be no telling what happens to her. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Ya know what she did? She took out all the keys from the piano. I lifted the lid the other day, and they were all gone.”

  “Sir?”

  “I guess she thought they were pure ivory. I guess she thought she could soak ’em. They got ivory tops, but the rest of them is wooden. They ain’t worth diddly squat.”

  Clarence Nathan stares at his fingers.

  “Listen up, son,” says Walker. He coughs and wipes a dribble of spittle from his chin. “Did I ever tell ya about the first sub-aqua pitch in the history of the world?”

  He has heard the story but says, “No, sir, you didn’t.”

  “Y’all promise not to give her any more money?”

  “I promise.”

  “Okay,” says Walker, stretching out his hand. “Pretend this is a Bible.”

  Clarence Nathan lays his palm on his grandfather’s hand.

  “Now swear on it.”

  “I swear.”

  “Swear on your life that y’ain’t gonna give her another dime.”

  “I swear on it.”

  “Well,” says Walker. He coughs again, feels his body snap up in sudden pain, closes his eyes. “It was the first run of the train, and the boys brought down baseballs, see.…”

  * * *

  In the distance Treefrog hears a loud smack of flesh on flesh and a grunt. The wind blows along the tunnel from the southern end, slamming into the nooks and crannies, ferreting its way upward through his nest. Castor sits on his lap, milk frozen to her whiskers. He breathes on her and wipes off the milk between thumb and forefinger, in case the piece of ice has affected her balance.