This Side of Brightness (32 page)

Thirty-nine days of snow and ice and ferocious cold. His feet so numb there is hardly any pain. Already the stubble beginning to darken his cheeks. But he moves quickly, with intent, solitary and sure.

At Elijah's place he stops and puts his ear to the door and is not surprised by the sound of radio music drifting underneath the giggles of Angela. With his eyes closed, he can imagine Elijah and the thump of love moving through his body, even the smashed shoulder and the shattered kneecap, and the tender way Elijah might be preparing to strike her pure and hard in the low part of her stomach. Clarence Nathan notices that the door has been fixed and that Elijah has appropriated Faraday's toilet seat. For a moment a smile flickers across his lips, until he thinks of Castor and the smile is gone, and he wants to burst in upon them, but he doesn't and he knows he won't; he never will. He will leave them to their own brutalities and all the winters yet to come.

“Angela,” he whispers. “Angie.”

He throws a shadow punch and moves on, past the pile of cans and the shopping cart and the baby carriage and the dead tree and the scent of shit and piss and every other ounce of imaginable worldly filth. He touches his fingers against the dead tree, wondering if it could someday bloom. He chuckles at the absurdity, fabulous petals erupting like the sound of some distant piano played years ago underneath the earth. There was a tree once in Harlem, the Tree of Hope—his grandfather told him—and it was chopped down when Seventh Avenue was widened. A slice of it still remains in an uptown theater.

A memory whips through Clarence Nathan as he moves through the tunnel. All that ancestry of song.
Lord, I ain't seen a sunset since I come on down.

He sticks a hand in his pocket, finds a pink handball in the depths. As he rolls the handball around in his palm he spies a movement in the shadows, and his eyes are so well trained now that he sees it is a man, long-haired, bearded, filthy, and he realizes that he is looking at Treefrog. “Heyyo,” he says, and the figure nods back and smiles. Clarence Nathan turns his back and slams the ball against the wall. The slaps on either side of his body begin to heat him and he feels the figure still staring. Clarence Nathan keeps the ball in the air, back and forth over the dead tree, and, as he plays, all inheritance moves through him: Walker in Georgia staring at a snakeskin hung on a wall, Walker putting his face to a pillow that moves in his dreams, Walker by the East River with men in their hats, Walker in joy painting halfness on pigeons, Walker with his fingers over a ribboned piano, Walker pounding his fists into an automobile, Walker by a lakeside with a tiny girl, Walker with garnet paper wrapped around a cork, Walker looking up at him from a subway track, Walker in a red hat, Walker on a massive torrent of water, what do we do now, son, now that we're happy?

The rubbery thump against the wall is the only sound in the tunnel as Clarence Nathan keeps the ball aloft.

Catching the ball in his right hand, he bites the inside of his cheeks. He looks over his shoulder and down the length of the tunnel with all the light shafts spilling through. Still in the shadows stands Treefrog, watching him. Theirs is a silent communication, a nod to each other, an understanding. Clarence Nathan flings the ball against the wall and allows himself a laugh as he catches it. He places the ball in the crook of one of the branches of the tree and walks away, toward the nest.

The stalactite has begun to drip. He stretches out a hand, just one hand, and holds the drops in his palm, scrubs his face, and his eyes shine with alacrity: Walker pressing his thumb down on the skipping needle of a phonograph, Walker driving his shovel into the brown bank, the swish of paddle as Walker sits knee-bent in a low boat of moss, Walker reading a newspaper to a tunnel ceiling, the spoke song of Walker on a bicycle with cages balanced delicately on the handlebars, Walker carving initials on a shovel.

Clarence Nathan crosses the tracks and comes to the column, grabs the handhold, and drags himself up. His body is assured, each move comes around to the same move, he could walk these columns and beams endlessly. Ten feet in the air, he knows that—even if he wanted to fall—there would be a difficulty in it, his arms would fight against memory and the limbs would catch and hold and he would be dead but his body might still be alive. The beam is still cold to the touch. Maybe his skin will stick to the beam and leave the imprint of his hand forever. He walks across the beam, not counting the steps, up along the second column, and across the final catwalk. He shunts himself fluently over the low wall, near the traffic light, and looks down at the shadow of Treefrog, alone now in the tunnel. Clarence Nathan sits for a moment with his eyes closed and then feels about on the floor for a candle, finds only one stub, which he lights. A small ring of light around him: Walker with a billy club leaving a scar on his forehead, Lenora tumbling from a tricycle, Walker in a shop full of tuxedos, Lenora coming home swinging a schoolbag, Walker with the heel of his palm smashing into the teeth of a welder, Lenora pulling her bedsheets around herself, Walker dressing himself in front of a mirror, Lenora shifting the old man's photo on a wall, Walker winded under the awning of a cigar shop, Lenora staring at pieces of a birthday cake, Walker dipping down to catch a hat, the straps of a girlhood nightdress falling, Walker guiding a canoe down the tunnel, return and collection, return and collection, Walker swiping parts of Lenora from the trees, Walker on a geyser of water, rising, rising, rising.

*   *   *

Leaning over the side of his nest, Clarence Nathan looks down into the shadows, and with half a grin he says to the darkness, “Our resurrections aren't what they used to be.”

*   *   *

It doesn't come to him like a burning bush or a pillar of light, but he grins and then he touches the end of the bedside table with his foot.

The candle wax lies in a hardened puddle on the table. He nudges the table again and watches the white lake move with the sway. Then he hits the table harder with his foot and it feels good to him, it feels right; he hits it harder so that it topples for a second and then rights itself. A morning train rushes through the tunnel, but he ignores it, steps back. He swings with just one foot and the bedside table crashes against the wall and the white lake is upside down now, and—with tremendous energy—he lifts the bedside table and smashes it against the wall, hears the crack and splinter. Reaching down for the pieces, he breaks them into different bits. He throws the pieces down from his nest to where they land in the tunnel, away from the tracks.

Clarence Nathan swings his boot at the traffic light. It vibrates against the barbed wire and hook that holds it in the wall. He takes off both his overcoats and throws them on his bed and begins wrenching at the light. The light trembles minutely, dust leaks out from the hook hole, and he keeps pulling until it frees itself. He falls backward with the light in his hands and chuckles. Lifting the traffic light—take it easy, don't crash—he puts a fist hole in each piece of glass, green first, then yellow, then red. He grins as he hefts the traffic light and throws it over the catwalk. The light spins through the air and goes down and smashes, and the colored glass shatters further and splays in the tunnel gravel.

He reaches for the line of ties strung to the ceiling, tugs it down, thinks briefly about putting one across his forehead, but there is not time to undo the knots, and he just balls the line up and flings it and watches it spin and unravel out, all its colors, until it hits the ground and bunches up. He takes his harmonica and it too is gone, sailing along, maybe some whistle of wind within the reeds before it smashes to the tunnel floor. Over the side of his nest he dumps the contents of the piss bottles in a long yellow arc. The empty bottles follow the stream. He lifts his mattress and tilts it in the air and flicks his lighter and sees the wiggle of maggots in the damp side of the bedding, but he continues searching underneath for change and tobacco, finds a few half-smoked butts and a small bottle of unopened gin. He grins and pours the gin out on the floor. Then he lashes out at the sleeping ghosts of himself and Angela, overturns the mattress once more, and drops it down from his nest.

It lands with a sad thud.

One sweep of his hand into the Gulag to make sure there is nothing left. Then the hubcaps spin away from his fingers and glide across the tunnel and make a strange high sound when they hit the wall. He kicks a rock into the fire pit and he feels alive and powerful and a million movements are within him and he steps with calculation through the nest, getting rid of everything, even some of his hair and beard that lies on the floor. When he throws it down, it makes great feathery motions on the air.

Clarence Nathan moves into the rear cave, careful not to disturb the mound where Castor lies. He moves to the shelf and pulls it down in one smooth motion.

The books are first to go; he shuffles in and out of the rear cave and throws them down from the front of his nest, most of them landing spine open on the tracks. Dean will probably come and collect them. He stares down at his maps among the frozen mud. Dozens of them. He is well aware of how they will burn and what that will mean. A dozen Ziploc bags flutter to the ground, and he is out by the fire pit and seaching for his Zippo. He crumples the maps together and—by the light of God's journey and the faces of his own—he looks around at the nest and chuckles and there is no grief in it, the maps coming down to ash, the contours consumed. The smoke drifts across the tunnel and away to the topside world: four years of maps in a single burning. He goes over to his pile of clothes and stuffs a plastic bag with the only things he might need—nothing except a couple of shirts and some pants and one pair of sneakers—and the plastic bag goes tumbling and lands near the tracks and he will pick it up later and the bag will be heavy enough to just throw away.

To desire is to not have, he thinks, remembering Lenora and the way he touched her, but there is not this hollowness anymore; he has stayed alive for the calm of this moment.

He should remain awhile and savor the empty nest, but he doesn't. He is out on the catwalk, and a small tremble runs through his calves. His elbows are held in at his sides. The twenty-foot drop beneath him is a vast chasm of blackness. The catwalk is still a little icy. A burning half cigarette is perched in the side of his mouth. He closes his eyes, smiles, and manages to turn himself a half circle on the catwalk, moving in tiny, gradual increments, clicking his tongue as he goes. The cigarette bobs up and down in his lips. His boots crunch the ice. He knows that to be blind means that everything is abrupt, that nothing announces its approach except memory. All true light recedes with the memory of light.

Halfway there, his face set in a peculiar grin, up on one leg, one arm out, then the other out, switching legs, tucking his head down to his shoulder, crane-dancing in the country below.

He sways a little, hops, and turns around, his arms out wide for balance. The idea of himself without his hair and beard is fantastic to him now, and he tells himself that if he had a mirror, which he doesn't, it is the one time he might dare to look at his shut eyes. He chuckles at the absurdity, turns on the catwalk, completes the full circle. He knows now that he will try to go see her, that he probably never will, but—when he does—he will ask for nothing but will tell her he hadn't meant what he did, he had been searching for ancestry, the gift of blood, and he will tell her that, when she was younger, he had been lifting his grandfather up, he had been lifting the shoulders of Nathan Walker up from her body.

I was lifting the shoulders of Nathan Walker out from you.

But for now he stretches both arms wide and he puts one leg out in front of him and he tucks his head into his armpit and lifts it again and, changing the structure of his body, Clarence Nathan smiles at his own ridiculousness—one, two, three, strike, return—and he says once again as he stretches his arms wide, he says, “Our resurrections aren't what they used to be.”

But he turns and he hops and he knows it might be untrue, and, landing on the ground, in the tunnel, amid the detritus of his life, knees bowed, heart thumping, he lets a word rest upon his tongue, just once, it rests there, a thing of imbalance. He moves on out through the light shafts and into the darkness, into the light shafts again, along past the cubicles, stopping for a moment to listen to the sound of Angela's breathing. He blows her a kiss and goes on, past the dead tree, beyond the murals, a great lightness to his body, not a single shadow cast in the tunnel. And at the gate he smiles, hefting the weight of the word upon his tongue, all its possibility, all its beauty, all its hope, a single word: resurrection.

Acknowledgments

Some of the incidents in this book are based on historical events—in particular the river blowout—but they have been adapted to suit the purposes of fiction.

I would like to thank sincerely the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn, for allowing me access to their archives; the Schomburg Library in Harlem; the New York Public Library; and the American-Irish Historical Society. I would like to thank the many sandhogs who gave me access to their hearts and memories. Thanks to the men and women of Harlem who gave me their time and remembered with such honesty. A very special thanks to Sean and Sally McCann, Roger and RoseMarie Hawke, Captain Bryan Henry, Barbara Warner, Ledig House, Terry Williams, Jean Stein, Christy Cahill, Darrin Lunde, Rick Ehrstin, David Bowman, Billy “The Mule” Adare, Shaun Holyfield, Shana Compton, Leslie Potter, and Ronan McCann, many of whom read the manuscript in its early stages and provided invaluable advice. Also to Arthur French, who graciously helped me with many sections of dialogue. My sincere gratitude to all and sundry at Metropolitan Books and Henry Holt and at Phoenix House. I'm blessed with two very fine editors, Riva Hocherman and Maggie McKernan.

Of course, this book would never have been written without the love, advice, and support of my wife, Allison. To her, all thanks. And for Isabella too.