This Side of Brightness

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 brutal 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 balance. 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?”

“Treefrog screw you.”

“That ain’t even funny,” she says.

“It weren’t meant to be funny. Come on. I’ll show you.”

He passes the cigarette, and she drags hard even though the filter is burning. “Maps?” she says.

“I keep maps. Sometimes I make maps.”

“What the hell you make maps for? It’s not as if you’re going anywheres.”

* * *

In the darkness, beneath his nest — she will not climb — he closes his eyes and touches the side of her face. She shivers for a moment, but he lets his fingers rest until her body stops quaking and she relaxes and says, “This is stupid.”

The movement of his fingers is slow and precise. He will trace a line across from ear to nose, a perfectly straight line; otherwise the translation will be inaccurate. He begins at the outer edge of her ear — he has removed his gloves for exactness, spat on his fingers to clean off the tunnel dust, dried them on his overcoat. He moves from the top of her ear to the under-hang of flesh, and he gauges the tiny distance along the top of his forefinger. The distance decided, Treefrog opens his eyes and reaches into his overcoat pocket for a piece of graph paper and a pencil. On the graph paper he draws two lines, one vertical, one horizontal, meeting at an axis, fixed and finite in the center of the paper. Elevation on the vertical, distance on the horizontal. He flicks the lighter with one hand, then the other, and marks the elevation of her ear, the tip and the underhang: two small dots of pencil on the graph paper.

He must be careful; the eraser is down to a stub, and he doesn’t want to make a mistake. Closing his eyes once more, he feels his way along her ear — it is full of rumples and ridges — and she says, “Ohhhh.”

The tunnel is achingly quiet, only the zip of cars above, a sound so constant that it is swallowed. He remains with his fingers tentative at the center of her ear, near the well of her eardrum, and he can feel the nervousness tremble through her.

“I don’t like you touching me there,” Angela says, but he tells her that it will look like a miniature lake. Some other time, he thinks, he will begin from a different point, maybe at the lobe where the missing earring will make a sinkhole of sorts. Angela shifts and lights another cigarette. He doesn’t want to feel her face while she smokes; he says it will give a false reading, the suck-in of cheeks when she draws on the filter. She smokes it down to the quick and then Treefrog crushes it underfoot.

He snaps his eyes shut and moves across the ear until his finger touches the side of her face at the soft point just at the top of her jawbone.

“You sure your fingers is clean?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he whispers.

There is a tiny ridge at the bone and he marks it on his graph. Angela is quiet now, and she too closes her eyes. Treefrog pecks at the air with his head and he is sure that he can smell the lovely mustiness of her, but then she winces when he touches the bruise on the middle of her cheek — the topography of violence — and he tries to skim the very edge of her skin where it must be colored blue.

“That hurts.”

“Sorry.”

If she cries, he wonders, will he be able to stop the water with his fingers so that the tense molecules might be arrested for a single second, become forever a part of her face? But she doesn’t cry, and his fingers move a little more quickly now, away from the bruise. Her skin makes a little bump toward the side of her nose where it flares out.

“You got a nice nose,” he says to her, as his fingers begin the rise to a bone that feels as if it has been broken many times. He touches her nostril and comes to the very center of her face, smooths his fingers along her cheek.

“You done yet, asshole?”

“I have to do the other side.”

“Why?”

“’Cause you can’t have half a face.”

“What if Elijah sees us?”

“I’ll make a map of his fist. It’ll look like a ridge with a big knob on the end.”

She chuckles.

“Stand still, goddammit.”

Treefrog reaches up with the left hand and strokes her right ear, remembering the exact movements of his fingers on the opposite side of her face. It is vital that each hand do an equal amount of touching. His fingers move across her cheekbone — no bruises on this side — and with infinite tenderness he maps the geography of Angela. When he is done, he climbs up to his nest, brings down four blankets, and they sit in the tunnel by the Melting Clock mural. A train whizzes past not ten feet away. He joins the dots together on the graph paper, licking the lead end of the pencil so that the joining line is dark and prominent.

He works with great care, making sure that the lines are consistent, uniform, unwavering, that a gentle curve appears between dots, that the graph doesn’t become jittery or messy. He never once uses the eraser. The lighter and the pencil are switched from hand to hand, his fingers shaking in the cold. Angela looks over his shoulder, her chin on his overcoat, saying, “This is about the stupidest thing I ever seen.”

When Treefrog is finished, he holds the paper up and shows Angela the rise and curl of her face — the canyons and ridges and riverbeds and hanging valleys that she has become.

“Heyyo,” he says to the paper.

“That’s me?”

“There’s your ears, that’s your nose, that’s your cheek.”

“Looks bumpy.”

“I can change the scale,” says Treefrog.

“Do me a favor, Treefy?”

“Yeah.”

“Get rid of the bruise there,” she says.

He looks at her and smiles.

Scraping his fingernails along the top of the eraser to make sure it doesn’t leave black smudges on the graph paper, he scrubs out the hillock where the bruise was. She kisses him on the cheek and softly says, “Doctor Treefrog.”

“If I take readings of everywhere I could make a map of the rest of your face. I’d have all these contours and your face’d look like this.” He draws a series of distorted circles. “Your nose’d be like this. And your ear’d be like this. And your lips, they’d be weird. Like this.”

“Where d’ya learn to do this?”

“I taught myself. I been making maps for a long time.”

“You ever do it for anyone else?”

“I did it for Dancesca.”

“Who’s she?”

“I told you about her. And Lenora too. My little girl.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows where I is either,” says Angela.

* * *

Walker sits by the window. The apartment has been remodeled to twice its former size, the landlord stung for housing violations. The view from the window has changed in recent years — the sunlight is blocked out by large housing projects that step their way across the city. Giant gray and brown buildings, they frown against the skyline. Washing flutters out from balconies. Boys chat through adjacent windows, using tin cans and string. Suicides are heard for the length of their screams.

Only Louisa and the boy remain in the apartment with him. Both Walker’s daughters have left to get married, Deirdre to a steamfitter in the Texas oilfields, Maxine to a welder from Philadelphia. Slowly the girls have faded from his life. Photographs of their children sometimes arrive late, as if they’ve suddenly been born at the age of one or two. Walker often thinks of making a trip to see them, but it never happens; his bank account will not allow it.

Most of his time is spent sitting by the window, watching his ten-year-old grandson, Clarence Nathan, playing alone in an empty lot across the street.

Sometimes, in the apartment, Louisa dances. Walker turns the couch to face the center of the room, tightens a blanket over his legs, balances a teacup on the arm of the couch. Clarence Nathan also watches — his mother’s arms stretched out to an unvoiced song and her feet going back and forth delicately as Walker’s big guffaws mix in with the city’s sirens. She tucks her head to her chest, as if into a wingpit. Lifts it up again. Arms moving up against a heavy air, she seems ready for the sky, a chimera of movement and geometry. But Walker has noticed changes in the rhythms in recent years. From his position on the soft cushions, he has seen Louisa’s movements clang toward a certain jerkiness, a loss of control. Tall and long-legged, she has developed the look of something wounded. Her arms don’t quite stretch out as they used to. Her feet are not as lyrical. Her breathing is jerky. The primitive rawness is less than it once was, and she has lost something in the way she spins; there is often a temporary stumble on the lip of the carpet, as if her fluidity has siphoned itself down into the tequila, where Louisa searches for it. A bottle and a half a day. In the morning she stumbles out of bed and goes straight to the cupboard, doesn’t even wince at the first sip. She loves to peel the labels halfway off, scraping them with her fingernails. Sometimes she hides in the bathroom for hours, comes out with the bottle empty.

Louisa wears a row of seashells at her neck, strung together on a piece of white twine. The shells jangle when she moves. She always says she feels a little dizzy, that a doctor has given her pills to help cure the problem. She swallows the pills in handfuls and they keep her awake for long stretches. She goes to late-night clubs, arrives home frenzied, her hair unthreading as she tosses in the single bed beside her son. In the afternoons, she wakes only to give a cursory kiss to the boy, then falls back silent on the bed.

A litany of men calls at the door and Walker has noticed — with a thickening sense of shame — the rise of her skirts high on her thighs.

Things have begun to go missing from the apartment: a vase, a soupspoon, a picture frame but not the picture.

“Y’all seen Clarence’s frame?” Walker asks her. “He looks mighty naked without it.”

“Haven’t seen it anywhere,” she says.

“Wouldn’t happen to be in the pawnshop?”

“’Course not. What you think I am, a thief?”

“Take it easy, girl. Y’all know I don’t think that.”

“You saying I soaked his frame?”

“’Course not,” says Walker. “I’m sorry. Just shooting my mouth off. Don’t mind me.”

“After all I do around here? Cook and clean. Keep you near your grandson. You know, I could live anywhere I want. And you tell me I’m a thief?”

“I was just wondering about the frame.”

“Well, don’t wonder.”

“Hey,” says Walker after a moment, “d’y’all ever think about what might be growing in the place of Clarence’s eyeball?”

“What?”

“His eyeball. I mean, what sort of plant? In Korea. I mean, that’s what he said long ago, wasn’t it? That something might grow there in that place.”

“You got a fever or something, Nathan? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. All I hear from you these days is things that don’t make any goddamn sense.”

“Don’t cuss in front of the boy.”

“I’ll curse if I want.”

“Sometimes I think it may be a big American oak.”

“No such thing as an American oak,” she says.

“Or a chestnut tree or something.”

“No chestnuts in Korea.”

“Maybe a maple.”

She turns away. “I’m going out for a while.”

“Where you going to now?”

“Just out.”

“Watch that skirt don’t disappear altogether. You’ll be whistling down the street. They’ll hear you coming around the corner.”

“Funny funny.” And then she sighs. “Will you look after Claren?”

“Holy Name,” says Walker.

“Well?”

“Y’all know I always look after the boy.”

“Thanks,” she says, landing a brusque kiss on Clarence Nathan’s forehead.

“Lord,” Walker says, as she leaves.

One evening Louisa comes home and wakes Walker, and — with her pupils swimming up near her eyelids — she insists on dancing while the boy is asleep. She puts a finger to her mouth for silence and stands in the center of the room. The seashell necklace lies white against her brown skin. She has wrapped a thin blue scarf around her head. Four other scarves hang from it, down to the small of her back, rippling in with her hair, which is filthy. She spins and whirls and throws out her arms and Walker is temporarily enraptured until — suddenly — she loses control, falls, and, as if in slow motion, one foot goes high in the air, her arms make half windmills, her elbow grazes the floor, and she collapses against the cupboard. Her head slices against a metal handle.

Walker, in his pajamas, struggles up and lifts her from the ground. He leans close and notices a trace of vomit on her breath. He is thankful to see there is no blood, just a scrape on her forehead.

He opens the buttons on the sleeve of her blouse to check her pulse and sees the bracelet of tiny track marks on the inside of her wrist.

“Go back to bed,” he tells his grandson, who is awake and standing beside him.

“What’s wrong, Mister Walker?”

“Go on now. Your momma’s just taken a little turn.”

Walker is glad to find the faintest of pulses — like the distant memory of a canoe turning a corner — and he lifts Louisa to a sitting position, gently slapping her face to waken her.

* * *

“The thing about a crane, son, is that when it swallows a fish it takes it down headfirst. Any sort of fish y’all want. The tail never goes down the throat first. If it did, the scales would rip her throat. So she eats it headfirst, and it goes down all nice and smooth. That’s a known fact. They just do it by nature. They’re no fools. They just do things the way God supposed them to do. I seen that happen.”

* * *

Balance is the boy’s inheritance. While his mother is strung out on a tide of chemicals and his grandfather is strapped to the couch with pain, he likes to go up to the rooftop and look out beyond the architecture of Harlem — past the projects and the red-brick churches and the funeral homes and the intricate plasterwork and the empty lots and the parks — to the skyscrapers leaping across Manhattan.

Heroin deals take place on the rooftop, wads of money changing fists, but the junkies leave Clarence Nathan alone. When they get high they like to watch him walk the edge of the wall, acrobatically, above a seventy-foot drop to the street below. They urge him to go faster, to run along the thin ledge.

The boy moves like a morphine vision, full of potential. His feet never go astray and he can even do a handstand, a slight quiver to his arms as he looks upside down at the sky.

He never thinks of the danger. His heart is steady anywhere. The blood flows equally to each part of his body.

Once he went to his school gymnasium, climbed the rope from floor to ceiling, and hung upside down — a teacher saw him, dangling in the air with the rope wrapped around his foot, knotted at the ankle. He remained still; his body didn’t even sway. The teacher recognized him from other incidents — he’d been cornered at school many times, beaten up by other boys. For a moment he thought Clarence Nathan had strung himself up, but the boy let out a yelp, curled his body, unknotted his foot, slipped down the rope, and dropped to the ground.

Some afternoons his grandfather struggles up the staircase to watch the boy’s antics. Walker uses a cane, guiding himself past the reams of graffiti on the walls. His seventy-second year has given him more pain than ever before. A thin gray beard has appeared on his cheeks, his fingers no longer nimble enough to handle a razor. A tobacco pouch is slung around his neck for easy access, tied with a length of cord. It bobs above the silver cross. He labors to open the door at the top of the stairs, eventually just shoves it with his knee, and winces with discomfort.

On the rooftop Walker finds some sunlight and turns his face toward it, sees Clarence Nathan standing on the ledge.

“Mister Walker!” shouts the boy.

Walker glares at the junkies who are slumbering on the other side of the roof, melting cubes in a bucket for shooting ice water into their veins.

He sits on a shabby blue lawn chair covered with the soot of the city. He reaches up to his brow and rubs his temple cool and then nods to the boy. “Go ahead, son.”

“Which one’ll I do?”

“Any one y’all want.”

“Okay!”

“Just be careful.”

Walker settles back in the seat. He has seen it often enough that he has learned not to be afraid. The boy waves, rushes to the edge of the roof, and leaps to a nearby rooftop. In the air there is a fusion of ecstasy and danger: one leg straightened way out in front of the other, the rush of wind around him. He lands perfectly, three feet beyond the lip of the next building, looks around, and grins. He leaps back again, sticking to a curious rule he’s made for himself, landing on the alternate foot each time. He likes it this way. If he makes a mistake he goes back and forth, back and forth, to ensure balance. The soles of his sneakers are almost worn out. He tells himself that one day he will try it barefoot. Pride thumps in him as Walker gives a slow round of applause, a bit of tobacco spit escaping the old man’s mouth and dropping on his shirt. Walker rubs at it, ashamed.

“Good job, son.”

“Will I do it again?”

“Sure. Nothing too fancy though, that’s all. Go on now.”

Walker sits all afternoon, moving the lawn chair according to the swing of the sun, watching the acrobatics.

Even when the boy listens to his grandfather’s stories he perches on the ledge, putting his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth above the street.

When the sun goes down, Clarence Nathan hops from the wall and cleans the soot off the back of his grandfather’s pants. The soot billows out from the old man’s ass, and they laugh as it makes clouds in the air.

The stories continue as they make their way over patches of sticky tar and broken glass and then negotiate the staircase down. There are new faces graffitied on the stairwell wall, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wearing dashikis, their faces set between two large panthers drawn like petroglyphs. Beside that: PIGS AREN’T KOSHER. Beside that: EAT YOUR DRAFT CARD. Further down, a poster with the face of the late Martin Luther King.

There are two new locks on the apartment door. Inside, dishes are piled high in the sink. The fridge is open, nothing inside. A half-made wicker chair stands upside down, abandoned. Photos are yellowing on the walls. All the frames have gone missing.

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.