This Side of Brightness

chapter 13. where the steel hits the sky

He slings her handbag up into the nest and climbs to the first catwalk easily. Removing his gloves for a better grip, he leans down to grab her by the wrist.

She places her leg against the column, but the soles of her high heels are slippery and he must use all the strength of his forearms to haul her up. Her face is already bloated and bruised; there is blood from her mouth where a tooth has cracked; her eye is lacerated and bleeding. With one leg against the concrete column, she sobs. “Treefy.” Her arms flail and she breathes nervously. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it, Treefy.”

She seems to want to fall — it is only a few feet to the tunnel floor — but she stretches and catches hold of the crossbeam and his arms curl under her armpits. He leans dangerously over the beam and drags her up through the darkness until she is lying on the lowest beam, whimpering. He remembers lifting his daughter off the swing, and his stomach feels huge and hollow.

“Bring your legs across,” he says.

“Why don’t you—”

“Rest easy, Angela.”

“—have a goddamn ladder?”

He steps across her in one smooth movement and takes her hand in his. “I wanna get down,” she says.

“Stand up,” says Treefrog. “I got you, you won’t fall, I promise; you gotta trust me.”

“I don’t trust nobody.”

“Just try.”

“Nobody, I said.”

She remains with one leg on either side of the icy beam and her hands clasped at its edge. Her body begins quivering, so he leans down and puts his arms around her to warm her. He looks down at her high heels and says, “Wait a minute.”

And he is gone, twelve steps across, up to the next beam, into his nest and down again, holding some sneakers and three pair of socks. Treefrog hunkers down, removing Angela’s shoes.

“Here,” he says.

He flings her high heels all the way across the tracks toward the mural, and they land and roll in the patch of snow beneath the grill. “Stay still,” he says, and he pulls two sets of socks over her feet. He ties the sneakers — they are still way too big — and then tells her, “Now.”

Shoving the third set of socks into his pocket, he steps over her crouched form, stands behind her, lifts her up, and holds her waist.

“Treefy!”

“I got you.”

“It’s icy.”

This he recalls as he walks behind her: he arrives after dawn, a man in motion toward the sky. He climbs the steps from the subway station, walks down a street cantankerous with car horns. He is pinned in by businessmen and women on the way to Wall Street, but soon he joins other men, construction workers, who look as if they might have stepped out of advertisments for very strong cigarettes. Their eyes are bleary from nights of love and drink and television and cocaine. The back pockets of their jeans have taken on the logic of what they carry — the imprint of a pack of cigarettes, a small circle where tobacco tins jut, the bump of a plastic baggie of cocaine, the mark of a wallet. In the wallets they carry photos of their mothers and their wives and their girlfriends and their daughters and sometimes even their fathers and their sons. If they get hurt, it will be close to those they care about; it’s better to die close to family than to commerce. Still, death is seldom mentioned — even at funerals they say nothing about the way the dead man fell forty feet, or how the elevator shaft collapsed, or the attempted suicide that was caught by the net, or the single bolt that fell from up high and created a corridor of blood in a bricklayer’s head. Instead, they talk of women and girls and waitresses and the gentle curve of buttocks and flamboyant asses and the appearance of summer nipples and the way a shoulder is bared to sunlight.

They curse loudly as they move through the streets. They never give way. The businessmen seem small and useless and feminine around them.

Sometimes one of the workers puts a finger on one nostril and blows a stream of snot to the ground, and a businessman is disgusted and curls his upper lip, but the workers move on, indifferent, through the morning rush hour.

Clarence Nathan’s new tan construction boots have already been worn so much that rings of hair have been rubbed away where the leather uppers touch his legs. A talisman of sorts. A charm. His blue T-shirt clings tight to his torso. In the wallet in his back pocket he carries his grandfather, his dead mother, his wife, and his three-year-old daughter. His hair has fallen out of the Afro that Dancesca gave him, become long and straight once more. Up above, if he raises his head, a skeleton of his own creation rises toward a cloudless Manhattan sky. Some of his fellow workers will remain at the foot of the building, slinging chokers; others will hang clips to ropes and lean out dangerously over the middle section of steel; others will reside all day in its corridors, fixing elevator shafts, twisting electric wires, grouting, hammering, painting, sheet-rocking. But Clarence Nathan will go higher than any other walking man in Manhattan.

After coffee in the shanty, he joins the ironworkers at the elevator and they rise, aristocratic, in the air. Fourteen men, two teams of seven. The cage rocks in the wind. There are no glass panes, just bars across their knees, hips, chests. Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky.

All Clarence Nathan’s colleagues are sinewy. A couple of them are Mohawks, their blood distributed in such a way that it is balanced in all parts of their bodies: it comes from their history, it is a gift, they have pure equilibrium, the idea of falling is anathema to them. Others are from the West Indies and Grenada, and there is one Englishman, Cricket, who serves his vowels as if holding them out on a set of tongs. He is thin and blond and pockmarked and wears a lightning-bolt earring. Cricket was given his nickname for trying to teach the other workers his native game while standing at the top of a crossbeam. After shining an imaginary ball at his crotch, he put his head down, ran along the narrow beam to display the technique of bowling, making his arm spin in a giant circle. His watchers sat and stared as Cricket almost fell — there was thirty feet of space beneath him to metal decking — but he caught himself by the strength of his arms, dangled, grinned, pulled himself up, and said, “Leg before wicket, gentlemen!”

The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup, and walks across the metal decking toward two ladders that jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST, the Place of Shriveled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further.

The nimblest — Clarence Nathan and Cricket — take the ladder two rungs at a time. Their leather belts are filled with tools, and their long spud wrenches knock against their thighs. They climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. The foreman, Lafayette, in thick-rimmed spectacles, pokes his head up from the top of the ladder and says, “Another day, another dollar.”

Careful with how he steps, Lafayette walks across the loose decking. Cricket goes with him, saying, “Another day, another dolor.”

Clarence Nathan remembers his mental maps of yesterday: where certain pieces of equipment were left, where the holes in the decking might be, where on the roof he might accidentally kick over a bucket of bolts, where a can of beer might have been discarded at the end of the last shift. Radios crackle and voices babble over the airwaves. The men watch the huge yellow Favco cranes swing into action, bringing up beams and columns of steel. The metal is inched through the air. When the steel is laid on the decking, Lafayette decides in what order the men will build. The ironworkers wait and chat.

The quietest among them is Clarence Nathan. He says hardly a word, but sometimes, when the foreman is not around, he and Cricket challenge each other to walk blind across the beams. They move as if on solid ground. If they fall they will not go far, but thirty feet are as deadly as one hundred. Eyes closed, they never miss a beat.

On the decking, Clarence Nathan turns his hardhat backward, tucks his hair underneath. The signalman speaks in a language of coded radio signals to the engineer in the crane. A huge steel column is hoisted; the men jostle the column into position, and then it gets bolted in at the bottom. The column jags up against the sky. The crane swings a jib line with a spherical ball on the end of it — the men call it the headache ball. Lafayette whistles for a man, and Clarence Nathan gives him a thumbs-up. The line comes toward him.

He reaches out to grab the cable, steadies it, and, with superb insouciance, steps onto the small steel ball.

Suddenly the jib line moves and he is swinging in the air, in nothingness. He adores this feeling: alone, on steel, above the city, his colleagues below him, nothing on his mind but this swing through the air. He holds on with just one hand. The engineer in the crane is careful and brings him slowly up toward the top of the column. The headache ball swings slightly, then stops. Clarence Nathan shifts his weight and moves lightly out onto the thick steel flanges of the column — for one single second he is absolutely free of everything; it is the purest moment, just him and the air. He wraps his legs around the column. On the opposite column, Cricket is waiting. Then the Favco swings a giant steel beam toward them and it inches through the sky, carefully, methodically, and both men reach out and grab it and bring it toward them. “All right?” shouts Cricket. “Okay!” They wrestle the beam into position with brute strength, sometimes using large rubber hammers or their spud wrenches to knock it into place. The sweat rolls quickly down their torsos. They insert bolts and turn them loosely; the bolter-uppers will crimp them tight later on. And then the men unhook the chokers — the beam now sits between the two columns, and the skeleton of the building is growing. Clarence Nathan and Cricket walk along the beam and meet each other in the center. They step off into space and onto the headache ball, arms around each other, and descend to the decking, where the others wait. Sometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it, using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn’t much care for.

“All right!” Treefrog says, when he and Angela reach the end of the first beam.

Angela is breathing hard. Even in her fur coat he can see her chest rising and falling. “No way in hell you gonna get me up there!”

“It’s simple.”

“Get me down. You just wanna knock. You just like all the rest. I don’t feel good, Treefy. Oh. Treefy.”

“It just looks higher than it is, that’s all.”

“I want my shoes.”

“Just imagine you’re on the ground.”

“Well, I ain’t.”

“If you think you’re on the ground it’s easy-peasy.”

“I ain’t a child,” she says, as she wipes a stream of blood onto her fur coat.

“I never said you were.”

“I’m staying here. Get me my shoes.”

“They’re down there, goddammit.”

“I ain’t leaving till I get my shoes.”

“All right, then, stay here.”

“Don’t leave me, Treefy. Please.”

“Just watch me.”

He places his hand in the hold that he has chipped from the column and, within seconds, he is up on the second catwalk. Five feet below him, Angela still has her arms around the concrete column as if she’s bandaged there. Treefrog wraps one leg around the beam and leans down and takes her hand and — close to violence — he swings Angela through the air and grabs her at the waist and tugs her up. He expected her to shout and scream and kick, but all she says is, “Thanks, Treefy.”

Angela sits shivering on the beam. She has stopped crying and she blinks her good eye several times, wipes more blood from the other.

“I don’t feel good.”

“All you gotta do is walk across here. Relax. See? Up there. Don’t look down. Don’t look down, I said!”

“He hurt me.”

“I know.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“I want you to kill him,” says Angela. “Kill the asshole. Stuff his throat with a blue washcloth.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t kill him, Treefy.”

“All right already. Whatever.”

“You’re gonna let me fall.”

“Trust me. I worked on the ’scrapers once,” he says.

She stares at him. “I’m scared.”

“It’s okay. I promise nothing will happen to you.”

“You’re weird.”

“You ain’t exactly normal yourself.”

“I’m normal! Don’t call me disnormal.”

“All right all right all right. You’re the normalest woman I ever saw. Come on.”

“You’re cute, Treefy.”

He stands behind her and guides her across the narrow beam. Her steps are slow and precise, and he keeps his arms wrapped around her: only weather stops him — the steel becomes slippy with fog and ice and rain, and lightning is the most dangerous of all. The men have a makeshift rod at the top of the building, but at the first sign of heavy storms they are given the day off. When weather is good, they go at the rate of a floor a week. The sun bounces off the metal, but at least there is a wind to cool the ironworkers down. Although it’s against the rules, Clarence Nathan often works without a shirt. He has a body still free of stab wounds and scars. The foreman, Lafayette, talks of frozen waterfalls in Canada, of climbing on thick ice with special shoes and ropes and carabiners and ice picks, of staying in sweat lodges and incanting chants to the sky. Clarence Nathan likes the thought of it — suspending himself on a river — and he imagines himself halfway up the face of a fall, water trickling behind the ice.

On Fridays, at the end of the shift, the men drink beer together on the top beams, sit in a row, let their legs dangle over, and drop the beer cans into the nets way beneath. They like to achieve this appearance of nonchalance; nonchalance is their greatest gift. They will not be seen without it. Even if they become aware of moist cloud settling around them, they will stay and sit and talk. Beer cans pop. Hardhats are clipped onto carabiners at their waists. Many of the hats have stickers: Harley Davidson insignias, badges from the New York Mets, an emblem from Yellowstone National Park, a circular sticker from the Hard Rock Cafe, and, quite often, Canadian flags with marijuana leaves in the center. The men chat about their upcoming weekend — who they will see, how much they will spend, how many times they will get laid. Their guffaws get carried off by the wind. Only the faintest of sounds rise up from the city; an odd siren, a truck horn. They wait until Lafayette is gone and then take out bags of coke and thin red straws and sometimes a little dope. Matches flare the end of joints. Razors chop through large white grains. One man cups his arms around a fat line of coke so none of it blows away.

High on marijuana — he doesn’t snort coke — Clarence Nathan talks to the helicopters that come across from the East and Hudson rivers.

After work, he takes the train to 96th Street and walks the rest of the way home with the sun arcing downward in the west. His spud wrench hangs from his construction belt and taps in rhythm against his thigh. He still feels as if he’s up on the beams, floating, and he makes absolutely sure his feet don’t touch the cracks in the pavement. It’s a short walk home to where he lives with his family in a small apartment on West End Avenue and 101st, but he goes down to Riverside Park first, smoking as he walks. Sometimes — before he reaches the park — he stops at a parking meter and works on his old trick, balancing on top of the meter on only one foot.

He keeps his head down and counts his steps as he goes. A curious thing, he likes to land on an even number, although it’s not absolutely necessary. It is just a game of his. In the park, he often gets bothered by male hookers offering him a blow job. The park is one of their favorite haunts. “Not today,” he says, and sometimes he is whistled at; they like it when he wears sleeveless T-shirts, his arms are fretted with muscle. At the door of his apartment there is the traditional joke—“Honey, I’m home!”—and Dancesca appears as if she’s just climbed out of the television set, makeup precise, hair in beads, dark skin, white teeth, their young daughter holding on to her leg. In the hallway, Clarence Nathan takes off his shirt and Dancesca rubs her fingers over his chest and pinches him playfully. Lenora stands outside the shower room as he cleans off the day’s work. When he emerges, he lifts her and spins her in the air above his head until she says, “Daddy, I’m dizzy.” After dinner, he puts the child to bed. On her bedroom wall Lenora has tacked up a huge sheet of see-through blue plastic, which she calls her aquarium. Beneath the plastic there are cut-out photos of fish, shells, plants, people. A Polaroid of her parents, at their wedding, is positioned near the top of the aquarium where her favorite people go. Photographed outside a registry office in 1976, Clarence Nathan wears a wide brown tie and flared trousers. His hair is short. Dancesca is already in a maternity smock. They look embarrassed, bewildered. She folds her hands over the stomach bulge. He has his fingers knotted together nervously. Their shoulders barely touch. But vaguely triumphant in the background is Walker, who, without a hat, is pointing comically at his own bald crown.

There is also a black-and-white of Walker posing with other sandhogs in the mouth of a tunnel. All the other men seem stern under their large mustaches, but Walker, covered in muck, looks happy. A shovel leans against his hip, his hands are folded beneath his arms, and his muscles bulge.

Before she goes to sleep, Lenora shifts the photos around in the aquarium. Clarence Nathan sits by her bedside. When she finally nods off, he blows her a kiss from the doorway. Sometimes, for fun, he closes his eyes and walks blind through the rooms. The apartment is small and old, yet clean, with a stereo, a flowered couch, an old-fashioned television set, a kitchen full of red and white machinery. The bathtub had once been situated in the living room, but it is discarded now, filled with junk now and covered with a tarp. Along the walls there are framed sketches of New York storefronts, presents from Walker.

Popping open a beer, Clarence Nathan sits on the couch beside Dancesca and they watch television. In the late evening they make love, and Dancesca moves under him like a river. Afterward they settle into television shows once more and he likes this dullness, this rhythm. He wants his grandfather to come live with them, but Walker says he will die in Harlem; he will die in the room where he spends his days chatting with the only ghosts in the world worth their salt; he will die with a whisper for each of them: Sean Power, Rhubarb Vannucci, Con O’Leary, Maura, Clarence, Louisa Turiver, and, most of all, Eleanor, who gives him a rude and lovely smile as she adjusts her hair and shunts herself up onto the bathroom sink.

Treefrog’s foot moves forward to steady Angela as he guides her on the beam.

“Just a couple more steps,” he says to her. “A couple more and you’re there.”

Her arms flail wide, and he pins them to her body. He wraps his own arms around her and feels the warmth of her fur coat. Her feet inch along the beam, and just before they reach the low wall of his elevated nest she lunges forward and grabs it with both hands.

“I made it,” says Angela, as she climbs across the low wall and smiles. “That’s easy.”

He swings in front of her, takes two steps, lights a candle on the bedside table.

“Wow,” she says.

“It used to be a storage room. They kept their tunnel stuff up here. I think there musta been a ladder or a stairs up to it one time, but there ain’t anymore. Hardly anybody ever been up here.”

“What the hubcaps for?”

“Plates.”

“Man,” she says. “A traffic light!”

“Faraday found that.”

“You got the electric?”

“I told you, no.”

“Wow. How big is this place?”

“Goes all the way back to a cave there at the back.”

“Treefrog the Caveman.”

“Gonna draw a petroglyph.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Listen, we gotta fix those cuts, Angela. Your eye’s bleeding.”

“It don’t hurt me none,” she says, touching her eye.

“It’s just ’cause you got your adrenaline going,” he says. “We should fix it before it begins to hurt.”

She picks her handbag off the floor. “Do I look okay, Treefy?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re lying.”

She rummages in her handbag and then she begins sobbing. “Elijah’s gonna kill us.”

“We’ll hide in the back,” he says, and he grabs a candle and they duck into the rear cave. He puts the candle on the makeshift shelf, and the light makes strange flickers against the blasted-out rock. She puts her hand to her nose.

“Man, you shit in this place,” she says.

“No, I don’t.”

“Smells like shit. I don’t like it here. I want my shoes. I want my mirror.”

“See, all my maps,” he says, pointing to a row of Ziploc bags.

“I don’t care about maps. Elijah’s gonna kill us.”

She moves out from the cave into his front room once more. There is still a tiny bit of light from the grills across the tunnel. “I ain’t staying here, no way. He’ll kill us.”

“Sit on the bed,” he says.

“No way, Treefy.”

“I won’t touch you.”

She fingers her loose front tooth. “He’ll definitely kill us.”

“You should see a doctor.”

She thumbs the tooth back and forth in her gums and whimpers, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like doctors. Excepting Doctor Treefrog.”

He smiles and motions to the yellow canister at the foot of the bed. “I’ll boil some water, and then I’ll clean your face.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I don’t have any drugs.”

She moves tentatively across the dirt floor to the carpet, and then she sits on the bed. Treefrog lights the remnants of the firewood and newspapers. Angela warms her hands over the fire and then fidgets with an empty cassette box that she finds on the ground. She uses the edge of the inlay card to clean the gaps in her lower teeth. She picks the plaque from the card with her fingers and flicks it away into the fire.

He moves backward, not wanting to frighten her, and sits on the floor at the foot of the bed while the water boils.

“It hurts now,” says Angela, and she climbs into his sleeping bag.

“Gonna fix you up when the water boils.”

“It really really hurts.”

“I know.” Then, after a long silence he says, “Wonder where Castor is? I haven’t seen her for a few hours.”

“How she get up here?” Angela asks.

“I have to lift her.”

She tucks herself further into the sleeping bag. “You gonna look after me, Treefy?”

And he remembers how, when Lenora was five, she got a high fever and he stayed home from the skyscrapers for a week while Dancesca worked. He bought groceries at the local supermarket. He heated cans of chicken soup on the stove. Lenora lay in the bed next to the blue plastic sheet. Father and daughter, they went through every photo in the house. She picked out the ones she liked. He got extra copies made, so Lenora could arrange them in the aquarium. When her fever climbed higher, he smoothed a damp cloth across Lenora’s brow and spooned the soup delicately, blowing on it first to make sure it wouldn’t burn her tongue.

“Treefy.”

“Huh?”

“You listening to me?”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“You gonna protect me?”

He dabs his bandanna into the boiling water, turns, and says, “Of course I’ll protect you, Angela.”

* * *

On Sundays, Walker takes a gypsy cab down from 131st Street and gets the driver to blow the horn beneath Clarence Nathan’s apartment. It’s a five-floor walk-up, no elevator, and Walker’s legs and heart rebel against the idea of climbing. Clarence Nathan and Dancesca come down the stairs with their daughter, and Clarence Nathan leans in the taxi window and pays the driver, tips him well.

He helps Walker out of the taxi and has to hold Lenora back from bowling the old man over. Walker has fashioned himself a wooden walking stick, and he leans against it. His remaining hair is herringbone-colored, and wrinkles have etched into other wrinkles.

“How’s my lil’ pumpkin?” asks Walker, bending down.

“Hi, Paw-Paw.”

Walker stretches up. “Hey there, beautiful.”

“Hey, Nathan,” says Dancesca.

“My-oh-my,” he says to her. “You’re getting finer lookin’ every day.”

The four of them descend the hill to the park with infinite slowness. Walker wears a new hat, a Hansen, with a tiny feather sticking out from the band above the brim. Lenora skips ahead of the three adults as they go over the mundanities of the previous week — baseball scores, basketball matches, the vagaries of the weather. The chat is light-humored and sometimes even turns to Walker’s ghosts. Dancesca is fond of the stories he tells about Eleanor. Clarence Nathan, who has heard the stories many times, often walks on ahead with his little girl.

They are splendid days, the finest of days.

Even if it’s raining they go down to the park and huddle beneath umbrellas. Clarence Nathan uses the flap end of a shirt to wipe the seat of the swings and occasionally Dancesca will bring a towel for her husband to slide down the chute and dry it for Lenora. Everything about the Sunday visits revolves around Lenora. The adults take turns pushing her on the swing. They gather at the end of the slide to welcome her. They lift her onto the fiberglass dinosaurs. Walker gauges her height by how she measures up against his walking stick. Sometimes he removes a bullet from his belly button, but the young girl doesn’t like the trick too much; it frightens her.

In springtime all four of them spread a blanket on the ground, sit under the cherry-blossom trees, and eat cucumber sandwiches, Walker’s favorite. When the evening sun goes down across the Hudson, they trudge to the edge of the park and Clarence Nathan hails a cab and slips his grandfather twenty dollars, and then the old man is gone.

One Sunday afternoon, when Dancesca and Lenora are visiting elsewhere, Walker takes Clarence Nathan down to the edge of a railway tunnel underneath Riverside Park. There is a gate at the tunnel entrance, but the lock is broken. The two men open the gate, slide inside, and stand on the metal staircase. Walker kicks away a bloodied hypodermic needle, and it drops to the tunnel floor. “Damn things,” he says. It is dark at first, but their eyes adjust and they see the grills in the ceiling and the murals painted below. Petals of cherry blossom fall steadily through grills. They see a figure emerging from the shadows, a man with several cans of spray paint. Grandfather and grandson look at each other, then leave the tunnel, Clarence Nathan wrapping his arm around Walker’s shoulder and helping him up the steep embankment.

“I dug there once,” says Walker, pointing back at the tunnel. “I dug and grouted in that place.”

* * *

He cleans the cut at the side of her eye meticulously, dabbing the bandanna in the boiling water, twirling the cloth’s edge, rinsing it out in the pan until, even in the half-light, he can see that the water has turned red. What was she like as a child when the water was iron-colored and warm? Did her father take her down to the swings to play? Did she sit in the backseat of the car with her arms folded in her lap? Did she ever think there was somewhere darker than even an Iowa cornfield at night? And what sort of map could he make of her flesh if he used the tiniest of little scales and became a cartographer of the corpuscles there in the little rim of violence at her eye?

He can feel Angela’s breath at his neck as he touches the wound. Across the tunnel the morning rays shine through — light enough now for Elijah to come calling. He should have buried the spud wrench down Elijah’s throat; he should have hit him harder, like his own father did, his unknown father who buried that cop and that car mechanic. For a moment a vision flits across Treefrog’s mind and he sees a shovel handle get buried deep into a white man’s head. His father winks at him and says, It’s all right, son, I hit a homer.

Treefrog wets the clean end of the bandanna with his tongue. If he had some gin he could sterilize the cut, but no matter, it will heal soon. He folds the bandanna into a square and gently presses the cloth against the side of her cheek. Leaning across, he kisses the top of her forehead. She says to him, “You stink, man.”

“Go to sleep,” he says.

Treefrog pulls the zip of the sleeping bag, grabs a couple of blankets, and moves back to his chair. He removes the pot of bloodwater from the fire pit. As the flames jump, he warms his hands, thinks about the harmonica, but Angela’s eyes are fluttering and soon she will be off to sleep.

Tightening the blankets around himself, he lets the fire die down and listens in the silence for Castor. Angela turns a little in the sleeping bag, her lips touching against the pillow. He smiles and echoes her: “You stink, man.” Sometimes, when he lay in bed next to Dancesca, she would smell the sweat from the construction site even after he showered. She would toss away from him and say, “Traffic violation!” “Huh?” he’d ask. “Parking ticket!” “Huh?” “You smell, Clar.” “Oh.” And he would rise to bathe again, shave himself close, splash cologne around his cheeks, get back in bed, and snuggle close to her. She had grown thinner since they married. He missed the bigness, the ample bosom, but he didn’t mention it to her; he sometimes even carried the idea with pride — while other men’s wives fleshed out and away, she came in toward him.

She went with him once to Houston where he was working on a skyscraper with his crew. Lenora was left with Dancesca’s family. It was Dancesca’s first time on a plane; she loved the thin red straws in the drinks. She collected seven of them — one for each of Lenora’s years. The Texas heat was oppressive even in winter, and it weighed down on them. After a day’s work they mostly stayed in the hotel room — the good times, the best of times. The air conditioner hummed. Dancesca was fascinated by the tiny bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. The plastic glasses were sealed in Saran wrap on the bedside table and they stayed unopened. Dancesca and Clarence Nathan poured gin straight into each other’s mouths. She loved to let ice cubes melt on her belly. They wanted to send a telegram to Walker but could think of nothing to say except, “We’re in the Lone Star State.”

In a suburban bar one night, he, Dancesca, and Cricket sat drinking cocktails. The music was loud. Alcohol thumped in them. There were some oil riggers sitting at a nearby table. Cricket challenged them to walk the roof of the bar — it was, Cricket said, a question of balance. The bet was for one hundred dollars. Everyone stepped out into the night. The building was a two-story affair with a roof shaped a sharp inverted V. He and Cricket walked with their eyes closed. The nervous oil riggers stumbled behind, amazed. Back inside, he and Cricket collected their winnings, drank shots together, slapped each other’s backs. Suddenly a pool cue smashed down on the back of Clarence Nathan’s head. He fell to the floor, tried to get up, slipped in his own blood. Dancesca screamed. Cricket was set upon by a group of four. A knife slashed hotly across Clarence Nathan’s chest. He was taken to the hospital. His first scar. Dancesca stayed at his bedside and for months afterward — when they got home to New York — she attended to him with a special poultice smeared lovingly across his chest. She would rub the yellow paste over his chest, and then her fingers would meander lower to where they would pause in their ecstasy.

He opens his eyes and looks at Angela as she sleeps.

Tenderly, Treefrog touches the side of her eye where blood still oozes from the cut. He cleans it once more and then retreats back into his own pungent darkness. He blows on the fire to rekindle it. Only a small amount of rice and some cat food in the Gulag. He takes out the rice, apportions it in a cup, washes out the saucepan, and wipes it with the flap of his second shirt, the cleanest one. He stirs the rice with his finger, waits for it to cook, and then wakes Angela with a kiss to her cheek. She eats hungrily and, when finished, says, “What’re we gonna do, Treefy?”

Treefrog looks at her and shrugs.

She reaches down into her coat pocket and unfolds the piece of graph paper he has drawn of her face, and she looks at it, touches her cheek, and says, “I bet them mountains is even bigger now.”

“I could make a map of you without any bruises,” he says.

“Why d’ya make maps, man?” she asks.

“I make maps of everywhere. I even make maps of my nest.”

“Why?”

“In case God comes calling.”

“What?”

“So He can follow the contours all the way back here.”

“You a Jesus jumper or something?”

“No. It’s just so He can find me.”

She turns in the sleeping bag and sighs. “You’re weird.” Touching her loose tooth, she bites the top of a long thumbnail off with the other front tooth. She uses the slice of nail to pick out the remaining plaque in her lower teeth. “I used to have the nicest teeth,” she says. “Everyone said I had the nicest teeth.”

“You still got nice teeth.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I ain’t lying.”

He watches her through the candlelight as she spits the slice of thumbnail away. “Treefy?” she says. “I’m thirsty. I wanna get some candy.”

And all at once Treefrog knows that this will not last, that soon she will be gone, that she will not remain in his nest, that there is nothing he can do about it; she will leave as quickly as she came. Knees to his chest, he pulls the blankets tight, feels the dull thump of his heart along his kneecap. His liver gives out gentle jabs of pain. He asks her for a cigarette and she rumbles in her handbag, comes up empty-handed.

“Shit,” she says. “I’m gonna go see Elijah.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Blue washcloth,” he says.

They remain in silence for almost an hour, and he wonders if perhaps they will remain like this forever. Maybe someone will come down and find their bones, bleached high in his nest. If he had a clock he could put a value on all this silence. One cent for every twenty minutes. Three cents an hour. Seventy-two cents for a day. He could be a millionaire by the end of his life. He rocks the chair from side to side and flicks a long hair out of his eyes.

But suddenly he sits up and claps his hands together, reaches down into his pocket, and takes out his Swiss Army knife.

“Watch this,” he says to her.

Treefrog touches his beard, runs his fingers along it. He slips open the scissors, sits on the edge of the bed, and begins. He is surprised at the way the cold chews at his chin when he takes off the first chunk of beard.

Angela says, “Man, you look younger.”

He smiles and from the middle of his chin he works his way up to the left sideburn, continues on the opposite side. The hair falls down into his lap, and he looks down at the strands and says, “I remember you.” The scissors are dull; he can feel his cheeks tearing and stretching. Even so, he continues to cut the beard tight to his skin. If he had a razor he could shave even closer, get down to the very element of himself, maybe even cut all the way to the bone. As he works, he tells Angela that he sometimes carves his real name in the snow, topside, so he doesn’t forget: Clarence Nathan Walker.

His thumb and forefinger work the tiny scissors, and he doesn’t even have to switch the red-cased knife from hand to hand. When his beard is gone, he removes his wool hat and touches his hair.

“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.