“Aw, man, not your hair, I like your hair.”
“Just a minute.”
To save the blade he hacks with a different knife, a sharp kitchen knife, and throws the long tangles of hair into the fire, smells it burning. He goes at it again with the scissors, until the top of his scalp feels tight and shorn.
“Come here,” says Angela.
“Meet me,” he replies.
He goes across to the bed and nestles in beside Angela, pulls the blankets over them both. He keeps his clothes and overcoat on. She flips around to face him and her hair touches his head and he reaches his tongue out and he can taste it, all the subterranean filth, but he doesn’t mind, just keeps his tongue at her hair, and she smiles and touches the stubble on his face.
“You’re cute, Treefy, you’re really cute.”
She puts her arms around him, and he nudges up against the closed sleeping bag. Treefrog breathes in deep and makes an X of his arms across his chest and pushes his body in further. She rolls in the sleeping bag and moans. He leans down to untwist the bottom of the bag where her feet have tangled and—when her breathing eases—he moves so that the whole length of his body is against her. The tunnel is lit with the headlights of a train and his nest is flooded with the blaze of oncoming lights and he moves in cadence with the clack clack clack of carriages against the rail.
The light from the passing carriages splays out moving shadows, a webbed pulse against the wall of his nest. He coughs quietly as he hauls the scent of her down. Lifting up the flap ends of the blankets, he removes his gloves and holds the zip of the sleeping bag. She turns a little, and a dryness settles in his throat as he inches the zip down, tooth by tooth.
Opening the bag down to the high part of her stomach, he reaches, feels the warmth of Angela’s fur coat.
“Treefy,” she says.
The coat is cheap; he knows from the imitation plastic around the buttons where his hands roam. With the top three buttons open, he fingers the fourth, and then he relaxes. He opens her three blouses, spreads them out. His hand touches the thermal shirt and he is aware of the soft, beautiful roundness of her flesh underneath. He hears Angela’s hand rising—it swishes against the sleeping bag—and her hand is clasped against his and she guides his hand in under the thermal shirt and there is the shock of his hand on skin and she says, “Your hand’s cold, man.” He pulls away, warms his hand by rubbing it on his own skin, and works his way under the thermal once more. The fabric of the shirt is tight, not much room to maneuver. Angela guides his hand, and the thermal shirt rides way up her belly. She drags the shirt up over her breasts. His fingers hover close to her nipples and his hand moves as if to cup her, but he keeps it hovering above her breast, then lets it retreat to touch her belly button, and he can hear the slightest wheezing into the dirty pillow as he caresses her.
“Treefy,” she whispers again.
“Clarence Nathan,” he says.
And then she says, “Ouch” when his hands touch her ribs.
Angela keeps her hand pasted over his, high on her stomach, fingers meandering, and he can feel the pounding of her heart—she is the first woman he has touched like this in years—the zip of adrenaline through him, the lightness of thought, the levity of blood, the lavish erection. His hand makes circles to the side of her breast but he doesn’t touch it—he can’t touch it—and he leaves his hand to hover above the bumped landscape of her nipple. “Hold on, Treefy,” she whispers. She fumbles as she removes her sweatpants and underwear and lies back in the sleeping bag. Her head touches the pillow and she smiles up at him and he moves his body slightly—take it easy, don’t crash—and she clasps his hand against her breast, and for a moment Treefrog feels no need even for balance, and she doesn’t say a word, not a single word, nothing, she just takes hold of his shoulders and pulls him closer and he squeezes her breast—he has forgotten all—and then he is closer and she has unzipped him and she is warm and he moves within her and she moans in all the vast agonies of a woman on the border of both boredom and some ferocious human passion.
* * *
In the evening, Elijah shouts from beneath the catwalk and then slings a bloody plastic bag up into the nest, where it lands with a thump.
* * *
Before they leave the nest he chooses a section of floor that he hasn’t done in a long time. His hands trembling, he takes a new sheet of paper and draws a horizontal graph on one side and a long straight line below it, using the edge of a cigarette box to guide the pencil.
He walks through the nest, feeling the landscape with his boots. He shows Angela how to mark it. As he walks he calls out to her and she makes dots with the pencil where the floor of his nest rises, each half inch an increment on the graph, and she flicks the lighter and marks the paper carefully. He shuffles backward, knowing exactly what his heels will touch. He has to stoop low to step out of the cave. His feet touch against his collection of hubcaps, and Angela’s pencil traces the rim of a half circle. Toward the front of his nest, he steps on the mattress. It seems like a huge drop from the bed down to the floor once more. He feels his way with his hands over the bedside table, touches the length of a Sabbath candle, zooms down again, just misses bumping against the smashed traffic light, and comes to the end of the nest and the dropoff to the tunnel below. He returns along the same journey, making sure it is all correct, lingering over the mattress with his eyes closed.
The candle leaks down to its very last, white wax seeping into the dirt.
He finishes the graph—the cave, the bed, the Sabbath candle, the little hump of dirt where, in his grief, he just buried Castor—and, when he is done, the geography is one of massive valleys and cliffs and mountains and canyons, a difficult journey, he knows, even for God.
He winds some duct tape on his boots where a flap has come loose, swings his way onto the catwalk, and then helps Angela down to the tunnel floor. She comes tentatively, slowly. He carries blankets. “Where we going?” Angela asks. “Somewhere I been thinking about,” he replies. “I’m thirsty,” she says. And he whispers to her that they’re going to a place where she can find the candy man. She asks if he has enough money and he nods, yes. She skips across the tunnel and collects her high heels and shakes the snow out of them, and then she comes back and leans up on the tips of her toes and kisses him and says, “Come on. I hope you ain’t lyin’.”
He wipes his eyes dry. And then he says that if he sees Elijah he will kill him this time without a doubt, he will crush his skull, he will strangle him, he will mash him into the ground beside Castor’s body. But as they move along the tunnel through all the dimensions of darkness they don’t hear a soul, and when they reach topside it is cold and clear without any snow. They walk through the park and up the street and, outside an all-night store where he buys cigarettes, Angela pulls up her collar and touches the bruises on her face and then she stops for a moment, smiles—“Candy,” she says—and overdoses her mouth with lipstick in anticipation.
chapter 14
now that we’re happy
He was living up there on 131st Street. He’d got himself mostly silence for a life now. But you see I loved him more than anything else in the world, so we’d all visit much as we could. Like I told you, he’d been making furniture. But for some reason he took to deciding, right at the very end of his life, that he’d make a fiddle. And he got some wood and he carved it out and it was shaped like a fiddle—like this, ya know? Some people call it a violin. He had garnet paper, and he wrapped it around a cork and he sat out there all day, varnishing and carving and sanding. Then he got some horsehair, shit knows where, and strung his-self a bow. He said that music’d been some sort of gift in his life, there’d been this important piano and all. My grandmother even played a piano down the tunnels, but that’s something else altogether. Wrap yourself in that blanket there, sister. Anyways, yeah. So he’d be there making tea in his apartment and waiting to go down to the stoop to work on his fiddle and he had this thing, this tea cosy,
to keep the pot warm. It belonged to my grandmother’s mother, Maura O’Leary. And one day when he’s making tea he just leaves it on his head! It was something his kids did to him once. Even did it for me when I was a kid. Just cause he liked it, it was funny to him. And maybe he liked it there, on his own head, like it was keeping his memories warm or something.
And he’d go on down and sit there on 131st with his half-made fiddle and this goddamn tea cosy on his head. He got laughed at, but he didn’t care; he was dying, he allowed hisself some of that there eccentricity, ya know? I bought him a Walkman once—I had money back then—but he didn’t take no truck in those sort of things. Damn, he even got a small cosy for my Lenora, but she didn’t like to wear it, can’t rightly blame her. We was visiting lots and sitting out there with him on the stoop and those were the good days, the best of days. And we was all there—Lenora too—when he played that fiddle for the first time. Man, he played so bad, it sounded terrible, man; it was awful, right? But it was beautiful too. And he sang this song which is a blues song which don’t go with no fiddle, and it goes, Lord, I’m so lowdown I think I’m looking up at down. We was so happy sitting there on the stoop that we went changed the words, and we were singing, Lord, I’m so high up I believe I’m looking down at up. Cars going by. We even heard some gunshots far on down the street, but we didn’t pay no mind.
Which is one of the things I always do find myself thinking about. Looking up at down and looking down at up. I never heard nicer than that, no matter which way you believe it.
I know you’re cold, sister, but I’m cold too. And, man, it was the coldest day when I went to his apartment. Dancesca and Lenora, they’re making visits to her family; we all of us got two families no matter which way we think on it. Like ol’ Faraday. I went on up the stairs and I was smoking then—no, no—cigarettes; cigarettes, sister—and so I always made sure that I stubbed it out in the flowerpot just one floor down from his apartment, ’cause I told him I’d given up the smoking.
I told you. Later.
Anyways. Listen up.
Just me on my own, knocking on the door. Normally he’d be curled up on the couch or something, in some amount of pain, but this time he just opened the door for me—it was 1986 and he was eighty-nine and he was shoving close to timber. But this time he opened up the door and said, I saw you coming down the street, son. He was all done up in his overcoat and scarf and that damn stupid tea cosy. I went on in and took off my coat and sat myself down and turned on the TV and this baseball game came on, see, the Yankees and the Red Sox. He asked me who’s winning? And I told him the Yankees just scored, even though they hadn’t. He had this old friend who liked the Dodgers and the Yankees. So it made my grandaddy happy if the Yankees won. Yankees just hit a homer, I said. And then he just came on over to the couch and said, Let’s you and me take a walk. I says to him, It’s cold out, but he says, I’m feeling good today, I could walk a million miles. Let’s watch the game, I said, but then he just reached out and dragged me up from the seat—he had some power still—and we put on our overcoats and went outside. Here’s this old man with a tea cosy on his head and outside it’s colder’n fuck and the only ones about are a couple of guys selling smack and sprung.
We went on down the deli and bought ourselves a copy of the Daily News, and I never seen him with so much energy. I heard sometimes if you know you’re gonna die then you get energy.
Y’ain’t gonna die, Angela, come on.
And then, see, he shoved some tobacco in his mouth but I didn’t say nothing even though I wanted a cigarette. He always said he was old enough to be allowed a vice, said the one thing an old man regrets in his life is that he behaved hisself so well. So, anyways, we went on to the subway and changed a couple of times and went all the way down to that tunnel that he dug way way back. We went out and we was standing by the East River near a pile of rubbish by the old Customs House, when he says to me, he says, There’s a gold ring under that there river. Your own great-grandmomma’s, he says, and I says I know, ’cause he told me a million times. And then he says to me—you know what he says?—he says, I’d like to walk through that there tunnel and say hello to my old friend Con, he says, that’s what I’d like to do.
And I says, Huh?
I’d like to walk under that there river, he says.
And, course, I says, You’re crazy. And he just sighs and says, Come on, we’ll go down and just ride that train.
We can’t walk the tunnel, I says.
I said ride the train, he says. Ride, son.
So we went on down the steps—I won’t never forget it—we put in the tokens, and I helped him on down the steps. He still had his walking stick. At the edge of the platform we waited for the M train—it’s the M train, isn’t it? Yeah. And when it arrived, brakes squealing, he held me back by the elbow and stared at me in the eyes like this and said, he says, How about it? And I said, You wanna walk under the river? It’s Sunday, he said, let’s wait for the next one and see how long it takes ’tween trains. Might be much as half an hour. On Sundays they don’t run so good. I don’t know how long it took, but it was damn near thirty-five minutes and—I swear to whoever be up there, I swear—we looked at each other and laughed, my grandaddy and me. Then the door of that train closed and the platform was left empty save us. And we went nodded at each other. Right, he says, just a few short yards, that’s all. And we slapped hands. I was quick then—quicker’n now—and I vaulted on down onto the tracks and reached up to take ahold of him, help him down. We don’t have to do it, I says, and he says, I’d like to. It’s what I want to do. Just a couple of yards.
Watch out for the third rail, I says. And he’s all happy, saying, I know what the third rail is, son.
And then he asks me, Y’all got a lighter? And I asks why. And he says in case the train comes early, we can flick it so’s the driver sees us.
I gave him the lighter and asked him how long it’d take us to walk, and he says fifteen minutes give or take. And I says, We best hurry.
We moved on down a few feet beyond the platform and made our way into the dark. Darker’n any tunnel. I ain’t ashamed to say we went hand in hand.
Gimme your hand there.
I know you’re cold. Here, take my gloves.
Along the middle of the track, down the slope of the tunnel, he let go of my hand and held on to my shoulder, walked behind a pace. It was like we was blindfolded. I don’t know why we didn’t stop, but we kept on going. And all the time I’m thinking, We shoulda brought a flashlight with us. And then he’s pointing out all sorts of things in the tunnel: the strip of red and white metal on the wall, the curves, some place where a welder went on fire.
That tunnel—nobody living there, of course. Nobody could live there. Too narrow. But there’d been people through there, graffiti artists; there was that guy, COST REVS 2000, and all sorts of other graffiti, except nobody like Papa Love; ain’t nobody in the world can draw like Papa Love. We stayed close together. And I’m thinking, Up there, there’s boats on the water, and Brooklyn and Manhattan, and we’re walking under the river. We were shaking with the cold and damp. I was looking back scared over my shoulder. I was all right then. I mean, I wasn’t fucked up. I wasn’t fucked up in the head.
I know I ain’t, Angela.
Yeah, you’re cute too.
Sunshine and cigarettes.
But listen.
Just listen.
We shoulda gone back, but we didn’t. The tunnel was all curvy and quiet, and he takes the lighter and flicks it close to the ground a few times. Roundabout here, he says, is the wedding band. All I see is nothing but a pile of gravel and a few pebbles, but he looks up to the roof, the ceiling, whatever, and I asked him if he found the ring and he says, Just a minute. The top of the lighter was burning his thumb. Come on! I says. Just a minute, he says, I’m having a look here. Come on come on come on! He went closed the hood on the lighter, looks up, and says to the ceiling, Yankees are one up as we speak! I was getting
scared then, and I was feeling bad, ’cause the Yankees hadn’t hit a homer at all, but I didn’t say nothing. I’m scared. So I grab the Zippo and take ahold of his overcoat and drag him along the flat part of the tunnel. No rats, no Skagerak, no Barents, nothing—just our breath—and he says, I remember, and I says, Remember what? and he says, I disremember.
And I says, Come on.
Holy Name, he says, which is what he said sometimes.
Move it! I says. So I reach backward and drag him by the sleeve. I’m trying to keep the Zippo lit, but it keeps flaring out on me. Keeping well away from the third rail and all. Down the center of the tracks. Faster and faster, me tugging at the overcoat. He can hardly move, and, me, I’m wondering if I might have to carry him.
I’m all right, leave me alone, Angie. I’m all right.
Angie. Angela. Whatever.
Just listen.
Maybe he felt some youngness going on through him, some shit like that, eighty-nine years old but suddenly nineteen; he mighta been following himself into his past—one, two, three, strike, return—and he mighta been rising once more—through the tunnel and the river and all—but he’s not. I’m just dragging him along, and in the distance we see the lights from the subway station—they’re still a ways away—and I’m screaming now, screaming, Come on! Come on! He stops for a moment and puts his hands on his knees and bends over and says, I haven’t felt this good in years.
And then he was just standing, staring. Maybe he recognized the corner. Maybe he was remembering things. But he weren’t moving. So I tugged him harder and harder. His feet going thump-thump on the ground and I see the platform and I’m thinking, Man, we’re home free, we are home free. We get there, right? We’ve walked under the river. All the way, one side to the other. He puts his walking stick up, and then I hear the rumble and a big blast of horn explodes from a train and two headlights flare far away, and me—I’m quick—me, I’m up on the platform and reaching down to grab him, under the armpits, pull him up—lights of the train coming—and one hand slips and he grabs again and the hat falls—that’s what’s horrible, you know, it’s the tea cosy; it’s the stupidest thing in the world—and he reaches to get it, and I try to grab him, and him, he looks at me, and I swear to whatever be up there—I swear, I swear it, I loved him, I loved him, I loved him, Angie—he was looking up at me, and his face was wanting to be saying, it was like it was saying, What do we do now, son, now that we’re happy?