This Side of Brightness (15 page)

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 still 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.

One morning, as Walker accompanies his daughters downstairs on their way to school—past the rich graffiti on the stairwell wall—Hoofer McAuliffe lets a long lecherous tongue hang out from the gap in his half-open door. Walker pushes the door open and stands in front of him.

“I wouldn't touch it anyways,” says McAuliffe. “Mixed pussy's bad for a man.”

Walker slams McAuliffe up against the wall, shoves his knee into his crotch, presses his fingers in his throat, and watches McAuliffe slide to the floor beneath him, gasping for breath, eyes wide and white, his one nostril flaring. The morning sun concentrates the smoke in the room, makes it glide through the air. Walker counts to ten and then squeezes McAuliffe's neck one last time and whispers, “Don't ever look at my girls that way, hear me? Don't ever even turn a head to them. You listening to me? You listening?”

McAuliffe nods and wriggles his head free, stumbles across the room, opens his window, and gulps down air. Walker turns around to find Clarence in the doorway, staring at him, schoolbooks in his hand.

“Y'all go to school right now and forget your eyes,” says Walker. “Forget everything y'ever saw.”

His son nods and leaves, going down the staircase slowly, books tucked under his arm.

Walker spends the rest of the day in his apartment, nursing his aching hands in ice.

*   *   *

On better days he rides the subway trains and looks at the curves of the tunnel walls. He stands in the front car next to the driver and stares through the window, face propped close to the glass. He shades the top of his head with newspaper to reduce the glare.

The tunnels greet him with magnificent speed. He can spot the mistakes: the too-sudden curve where an engineer miscalculated, an area likely to be flooded in the rains, a switch placed in the wrong part of the tracks. He wishes to be back down underneath, digging. To feel again the fluidity of his shovel. One, two, three, strike, return. He even made an application to become a sniffer—to walk through the subway tunnels and check for gas leaks or fires or dead animals—but the application was turned down, like all the other job applications he makes.

Still, he loves the tunnels, moving from the darkness into the bright yellow light of the stations, the slow roll into blackness once more, the screech of steel on steel, the workers shining flashlights, the elation of being slammed along on a mid-morning express, commuters shuffling their feet on platforms as he whizzes by.

On weekends he takes Clarence with him and is greeted with stares from passengers looking at the curious paler skin of his teenage child. Clarence is tall enough to have to bend at the window to see along the tunnels. He has the beginnings of a mustache around his lips but is still too embarrassed to start shaving. He stands in silence, looking out the window, his father's hand on his shoulder.

Sometimes Walker rides all the way downtown and meets up with Vannucci and Power on the Manhattan side of the water.

The men race their pigeons back and forth across the East River. Vannucci has taken on new colors for his birds: red and white and green. In a moment of drunkenness, Power has drawn fifty tiny blue stars on one of his favorite pigeons. The men sit at the waterside and share bottles—Kentucky bourbon and grappa—palming them around in sweat-wrinkled brown bags.

As they wait for the pigeons to return, the men remember themselves when young, diving down into the alcohol with happiness and regret.

“Pass me the slop!” shouts Power. “Gotta keep on sloppin'. Sloppin' till the end of time.”

“'Member the time me and El dunked them pigeons?” says Walker.

“I shoulda kicked your ugly black ass.”

“Those were the days, huh?” says Walker.

“Weren't they just? How's that fortune-teller of yours, Nathan?”

“She says y'all'll be sloppin' till the end of time.”

“Fine by me, buddy.” Power claps his hands. “I bet that woman could suck the chrome off my fender.”

“Excepting you don't have a car!”

“That's exactly right.”

“What is the meaning, the chrome?” asks Vannucci.

“Ask your wife, Ruby. And Ruby—”

“What?”

“Don't forget to ask her about the custard.”

“I do not understand.”

“Pass me the bottle and I'll show ya!”

One afternoon they take the subway under the East River. They sit in the front carriage and ask the driver to stop the train for a moment. The driver curls his upper lip and shakes his head. “No.” “Come on, bud.” “No.” “A dollar?” “No.” “Dollar and a half?” “No.” “A thick jaw?” “Come on, you guys, quit kiddin', I said no.”

And then Power flashes his union card, along with a pair of dollar bills. The driver nods and the train comes to a halt. They crowd into the driver's cabin and spread open the sports page of the newspaper. Power leans out the window and reads Con O'Leary the baseball reports: It is June 1950 and the Brooklyn Dodgers have just gone into first place in the National League by beating the Cincinnati Reds 8–2 at Ebbets Field, Gil Hodges landing a grand slam homer in the upper deck in the third inning. “Yessir, Mister Big Gil himself,” says Power. And then Walker leans over the top of his colleague and says, “And ol' Jackie Robinson got a double, buddyblue.”

The driver grows nervous and mashes his hands together as the men shout other scores at the ceiling of the tunnel.

The afternoon surrenders control to the bottles. They switch trains back and forth between the two stations, and they grow loud and raucous until they are kicked off a train and Power shouts, “You can't kick us off, we're the Resurrection Men!”

*   *   *

Eleanor stands in the doorway and leans her head against the frame. Halfway across the room toward her, Walker sees that she is weeping. And then he realizes that Eleanor doesn't want to cross the threshold, as if something has pinned her there.

*   *   *

“I was sitting in the warehouse, Nathan. Sewing the hem on a pair of trousers. We all sit in a big long line, the Singer machines in front of us. I don't know what happened to me, Nathan. It was terrible. He was coming from school. He had his report card. He got himself an A in science. I guess he just wanted to tell me that. I guess he just wanted to tell his momma that he was doing good in school. And the other women, Nathan, they don't know a thing about me. All they know is that I live uptown. They don't even know where uptown. They don't know anything about you or the kids. It's just that—well, it's just—I don't know what it is. I'm not ashamed. It ain't that. I suppose I just didn't want them to know about me. Just to keep us all safe, you know?”

“Take it easy, El.”

“'Member I told you that the boss's name is O'Leary? Well, I told him—when I first got the job—I told him my maiden name is O'Leary too. I didn't say nothing about being a Walker. And, seeing how I'm an O'Leary, he's nice to me, doesn't shout at me if I spend too long at coffee break and all, seeing how I'm Irish. He likes me—not in that way—but he likes me. Anyway, I'm sewing the hem on those trousers when I look up and there's our Clarence up at the door of the warehouse. He's pointing at me. I put my head down, Nathan, I don't know why. I was trembling. I pretended I was concentrating on the hem, being very careful with it. I could hear the footsteps. They're the loudest footsteps I ever heard. And when I looked up again, they were both standing in front of me.”