This Side of Brightness

chapter 9. back down under where you belong

Sounds of scuffling feet, and Treefrog knows there are people at the tunnel gate. Maybe some kids who have come to play Burn the Mole. Or Elijah and Angela making love again, screaming in their ecstasy and dejection. Or Dean with a bundle of boys at his hip. The voices carry, and then someone says very loudly, “Shut up, assholes.”

Flashlights illuminate the tunnel.

Treefrog climbs out of bed and puts on his overcoat, shoves his feet into his boots. He blows out all the Sabbath candles. Perfect darkness. Out on the catwalk, he tucks his overcoat beneath him, sits, leaves his legs dangling over. He sees the beams from the flashlights catch on the snow falling through the ceiling grate and he hears a voice: “Well, fuck me running backwards.”

Eight of them, some in plain clothes.

They bunch close together. The clips on their holsters have been undone. Gloved hands on their guns. They lean into radios as if telling immortal secrets. Their flashlights move frantically, catching on the dead tree planted under one of the grills, moving up and onto the murals and the same voice intoning again: “Fuck me with a bar stool, boys, they even got themselves a tree over here, fuck me.”

“Fuck you,” whispers Treefrog, “fuck you.”

The cops move along the side of the tracks and Treefrog says a little louder, though not loud enough for them to hear, “Oink, oink.”

He pulls his legs up and makes sure he is shrouded and unseen. The last time the cops came down a murdered man had been found under 103rd Street. Nobody knew him; he died with his penis erect, a necklace of bullets on his chest. Dean found the man first and nicknamed him the Boner and the cops came down, running in the darkness like Keystone fools, waving their guns at shadows. They lined everyone up against the wall—“Up against the wall, motherfuckers!”—and frisked them for weapons. There was an argument over who would search Treefrog’s nest; they were scared of the climb. Eventually they brought down a ladder. Although he stole a map that Treefrog had been creating, one of the cops tried to get Treefrog to go to a city shelter. “You live like an animal! You should get some help, man, you’re living like a goddamn rat!” But Treefrog stood impassive with his long hair around his eyes and then began chuckling. The cop slapped him with the back of his hand and told him to take the smirk off his face or he’d end up like the dead man.

“What? With a boner?” Treefrog said.

And the cop said, “Shut your mouth, man.”

They were down in the tunnel for two days, but nobody found out who the dead man was, or why he was murdered, or even if he had murdered himself.

Treefrog watches as they come to the row of cubicles and stand outside Elijah and Angela’s place. Some light leaks out from the cubicle. The cops spread back in twos, some of them crouching down by the tracks with their guns out. “Po-lice! Come out! Po-lice!” Treefrog wonders if Elijah and Angela are sucking a pipe. “Po-lice!”

One of the cops steps forward and kicks the door, and suddenly Elijah comes out of the cubicle with his arms above his head, Angela behind, pulling her fur coat over the thermal shirt, shouting, “We didn’t do nothing, we didn’t do nothing!”

“Take it easy,” says a cop.

“Don’t touch me!” shouts Angela. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”

“Stand still!”

“Leave us alone, we ain’t got no drugs.”

“Shut the fuck up, lady, okay?”

“We ain’t got nothing. We was sleeping!”

“Hey, somebody shut that bitch up, will you?”

“Who you calling bitch, motherfucker?” says Elijah.

“Jesus wept,” says a cop.

“You guys know it’s illegal to be down here?”

“I lost the key to my penthouse.”

“Funny funny.”

“Forgot the mortgage payment too.”

“I told you they all crazies down here, what did I tell you? I told you, didn’t I tell you? Moles! They’re crazy.”

“Fuck you,” says Elijah. “I ain’t a mole.”

“Why you living underground then, mole?”

“Enough!” shouts one of the cops. “You all know James Francis Bedford?”

Silence in the tunnel. Treefrog sees one of the cops go across the tracks to the dead tree and look up to the roof, with snow falling down around him in the circle of his flashlight, the cop shaking his head in amazement.

“You all ever heard of James Francis Bedford?”

“Pardon me?”

“Don’t fuck with me, answer my goddamn question!”

“Never heard of him.”

Treefrog watches as Elijah and Angela stand shivering in the cold. A flashlight swings and captures Dean’s face as he slips out from his shack. He shades his eyes with his arm. Papa Love pulls back the curtain on his cubicle door.

“Another couple of moles here!”

Papa Love stands silent, outside his shack, his gray dreadlocks slack on his shoulders. Dean bravadoes up to the cops and pulls the flap of his hunting cap up off his ears.

“You know James Francis Bedford?” says a cop.

“Who?”

“Watch my lips. James. Francis. Bedford.”

“Never heard of him.”

“White guy. Six one. Scar on his chest. Tattoo here.”

“What about him?” says Dean.

“Found him dead yesterday. Heard he lived down here.”

“Shit,” says Elijah. “Someone died?”

The cop shines the flashlight in Elijah’s eyes. “Six hundred volts. Electricity went right through the top of his head. Splattered him around a little.”

“Damn,” says Dean. “That’s Faraday.”

“Who’s Faraday?” asks the cop.

“What’s wrong with Faraday?” says Angela.

“James Francis Bedford,” says the cop.

“Goddamn. That’s Faraday. That’s his nickname.”

“White guy?”

“Yeah,” says Dean.

The cop lifts his hand in the air. “About yay tall.”

“Yeah.”

“Tattoo of a circuit board here.”

“He’s dead?”

“As a doornail, buddy.”

“They killed Faraday!” screams Angela.

“You don’t even know who Faraday is,” says Elijah.

“They killed him, killed him, killed him!” She begins sobbing into the sleeve of her coat. “I liked Faraday! I liked him!”

“Where did he live?” asks a cop.

“Why you wanna know?” says Elijah.

“His family wants his stuff.”

“His family?”

“Yeah, you know, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. Come on, no fucking around. Hey you! Dipshit! Where did he live?”

“There.”

Dean points out Faraday’s cubicle.

“He lived in that piece of shit?”

“That’s his house.”

“Goddamn. What’s the toilet seat for?”

“A doorbell.”

“I’ll be fucked.”

One of the cops jimmies open the lock, and the door to Faraday’s place swings open. They step inside and later emerge with a crate filled with a bundle of papers.

“Nothing in there excepting some books,” says a cop.

“You all know who James Francis Bedford was?”

“He was Faraday.”

“He used to be a cop.”

“Faraday? A cop?”

“He was good people,” says the cop. “Had himself an accident once. Lost his nerve. Shot someone. Never recovered. His family asked me to come down get his stuff. Good people, Bedford’s family. They was all good people. Even Bedford was good people once. Before he came down here.”

Treefrog jumps down from the catwalk and walks soundlessly through the tunnel gravel until a cop pins him with a beam of light.

“Shit, we got moles everywhere!”

They gather together outside the cubicle — Elijah, Angela, Dean, Papa Love, Treefrog — and watch the cops comb through Faraday’s shack.

“What they looking for?”

“Fucked if I know. A gun, maybe.”

“Motherfuckers,” whispers Angela.

“They prob’ly killed him,” says Elijah.

“You really think Faraday was a cop?”

“No way.”

“You think he shot someone once?”

“Maybe.”

“He owes me twenty bucks!” says Dean.

“Shut up, man.”

“Hey!” says Dean to the cops. “Leave Faraday’s shit alone! He owes me twenty bucks! Leave it alone! That’s mine!”

“Finders keepers,” whispers Angela. “They woke me first. I keep Faraday’s shit.”

“I’ll slap you, you bitch,” says Dean.

“Elijah!” she shouts. “Elijah!”

But when she turns around, Elijah is not listening. He has pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt, scrunched up his eyebrows, and tilted his face sideways. Then he scratches his head and says aloud, “Faraday? Faraday had a family?”

* * *

Faraday — they hear later — had gone fishing for electricity way downtown in the Second Avenue tunnel. He went to help someone hook up a transformer, but on the way he found a fishing rod in a Bowery dumpster. He was sprung after snorting heroin and wanted to test the rod out. Whisking it through the air, Faraday descended through the emergency manhole cover into the Second Avenue tunnel. He stood at the edge of the tracks and played riverbank with the darkness, whisked the rod like a dream above his head. The little fly hook at the end of the line went spinning out and down toward the tracks, then came up again and jiggled in the air as Faraday lassooed the rod back over his shoulder. It happened in an instant: he stumbled and fell across the tracks and touched his hand against the third rail. The current sucked him in and his body went lengthwise against the metal, and the fishing rod completed the circuit. He must have been a corpse of wild blue sparks. Every fluid in his body boiled first, all the blood and water and semen and alcohol boiling down to nothing. Six hundred volts of direct current blew a hole in the top of his head. The cops had to turn the electricity off before they could peel him from the rail. They placed a bit of his brain in a blue plastic bag, one of the cops puking up at the sight, and the people who lived in the tunnel stood around, staring, saying nothing, although one of them later ran off with the rod — Angela was sure it must have been Jigsaw — saying there were beautiful rainbow trout to be found in the puddles under the platforms, the most fabulous rainbow trout ever seen in the city.

* * *

Treefrog unloops the clothesline, takes down a dark necktie, and beats it against the wall to free it of tunnel dust. The dust slips through the candlelight and descends lazily, landing on the spider limbs of wax at the base of the candles. The tie emerges black, with a pattern of red squirrels. He has forgotten how to fix a knot and so he simply loops it under the collar of a filthy flannel shirt. He tries to run a comb through his hair, but it is too long and matted and twisted. He shoves an extra T-shirt into his overcoat pocket to use as a balaclava later, if necessary. Reaching into his bedside table drawer, he takes a sample bottle of aftershave, stolen once from a drugstore, and dabs a little high on his cheeks. It smells nauseating to him. He completes the blind ritual through his nest, touching everything with both hands, finally laying his hands on the speedometer.

While waiting for the others, Treefrog plays handball against the Melting Clock to warm himself. He is down to one handball and will have to buy another soon in case he loses it.

When Angela, Dean, and Elijah arrive he lifts up his beard and shows them the tie. They laugh at the sight of him—“Mister Treefrog Rockefeller!” says Angela — so he wraps it around his forehead and the four of them leave the tunnel together. Papa Love has decided not to go. They shove themselves through the gap in the gate and leave footprints in the snow on the steep hill up toward the park. Angela squeals as the snow touches her feet. She and Elijah are soaring on what they have smoked, and she has drenched her mouth with lipstick, looking vaguely beautiful and gaudy.

Treefrog has to walk the hill four times to get an even number of steps, touching his hand against the icy trunks of the crab-apple trees each time as he goes.

“You’re a goddamn loon,” shouts Angela.

He jumps the fence and catches up with the others as they walk past the playground by 97th. A shiver runs through him as he watches a mother launching a child on a swing, the child’s feet swinging through the air. He tips his sunglasses on his head and waves goodbye to Lenora.

Between West End and Broadway, they stop at the Salvation Army store for Angela to get a scarf. She emerges with an extra pair of socks tucked under her fur coat, saying, “I think I’m about frozen.”

She pulls the socks high on her legs and steps back into her lopsided heels.

On the subway train to Brooklyn, Treefrog sits alone at the far end of the car. The others stay by the door, looking at their reflections in the dark glass. Treefrog tucks himself away in the corner seat, reaches for his Hohner, and plays softly.

* * *

In a Brooklyn diner, under a neon sign for Boar’s Head ham, the cook is so perfect at cracking eggs that he does it with his eyes closed. Treefrog’s head bobs in approval. The cook pierces the shell with one long fingernail and flips the contents out with ease, two eggs side by side.

The yolk doesn’t break or spill. Hands and spatula are held over the hot grill.

Treefrog, still wearing his tie on his forehead, rubs a bill between his fingers while he watches the cook; he got the money at Faraday’s funeral. They had been late for the mass, but a deacon told them where the interment would be. They walked to the nearby cemetery. The dead man’s father saw them approaching halfway through the service. He came over, shuffling on a cane, and offered them each ten dollars to stay away, saying “Please” as if the weight of his world depended on it. Behind him, at the graveside, the rest of the family watched. A woman — it must have been Faraday’s mother — kept dabbing at her eyes with a long black scarf. Dean demanded twenty dollars apiece, and Faraday’s father looked at him long and sad. Dean shrugged. Faraday’s father reached into his pocket and took out a wad of bills from an envelope meant for the priest. The old man removed one glove and, with shaking hands, passed around the twenty-dollar bills.

By the time he got to Treefrog he had only a ten and one five left, but Treefrog said, “That’s okay, Mister Bedford.”

Faraday’s father looked at him and for an instant his eyes brightened, but then he said, “Just don’t come near the graveside, okay?”

He turned his back and walked away like a man unburdened.

The four of them watched the rest of the service from a distant gravestone.

“There goes Faraday,” said Elijah, as the coffin was lowered.

“His name ain’t Faraday,” said Angela.

“It’s Faraday to me.”

“I shoulda got forty bucks!” said Dean. “He owed me twenty! The sonofabitch never paid!”

“Man, look at that coffin,” whispered Angela. “Them gold handles. Goddamn. He’s stylin’.”

“He’s stylin’ down.” Elijah laughed.

“I bet he was rich,” said Dean.

“No less dead if he was rich or not,” said Treefrog.

He swivels a little on the stool at the counter, and the money is warm now in his hands.

Watching the cook, Treefrog brings the bills to his nose and smells them. Then he folds the ten-dollar bill down until it is tiny. He checks out all the pockets in his overcoat for a good hiding place. The red lining of his coat is full of holes, but he finds a good place for the bill and punctures it with three pins to make sure he doesn’t lose it. He chuckles to see the pin go through the eye of a dead President.

The cook flips the eggs in the air and they somersault onto a bun. Laying two slices of bacon across the eggs, he winks at Treefrog.

Perhaps he will give the cook a tip for the show. He hasn’t tipped anyone in years, but he suddenly feels huge and magnanimous. When the plate is set down on the counter, Treefrog takes off his tie, puts it in his pocket, spins the plate twice, licks each of his fingers, and lingers over the food like a man in love.

* * *

A thumbnail of moon in the sky and the snow has briefly relented. He shoehorns himself through the gate and climbs up to his nest, carrying two bottles.

From his overcoat he drops a pile of branches and splintered wood — on the walk home he found the wood beneath the overpass, the stash belonging to some topside bum living under the bridge at 96th Street. The wood was wrapped in a blanket, kept dry. No accounting for the stupidities of the ones who live topside, some of them warming themselves over steam grates, gusts of hot wind cooking the undersides of their bodies, the top half of them frozen, always rolling over like absurd pieces of toast.

Treefrog uses his Swiss Army knife to chop some of the wood into kindling, makes a tiny lean-to of twigs, and tears a newspaper into strips. He squats over the small fire, his overcoat lifted and his ass just above the flame.

He remains perched until the heat seeps through him, and then he throws on a few larger twigs and a black plastic bag to help the fire take quicker. As the flames jump, he goes over to his bed and lies down with his arms behind his head like a bored teenager. The smoke drifts across the tunnel and out through the grate on the opposite side.

He kicks at the end of the blanket and sees some pellets of rat shit somersault in the air. He whistles for Castor—“Here, girl, here, girl”—but she doesn’t come.

Opening the first bottle of gin, he sticks a dirty straw into the neck and drinks and then fumbles under his jeans and his thermal long johns, cupping his hand down by his crotch to catch the warmth.

When the first bottle is finished he stares up at nothing. In the tunnel all is quiet. He takes the harmonica out of his pocket, but it is cold and he decides not to warm it. The train from upstate blasts its way through the tunnel, and, feeling drunk, he rises when he hears the sound of someone whistling in the distance. He looks down along the tunnel at Papa Love emerging from his shack.

Treefrog leans far out on the catwalk to get a better view.

Middle-aged and dreadlocked, Papa Love is swathed in clothes, only his face and fingers exposed, but he moves with fluidity. He puts wood on the fire opposite his shack and carefully arranges cans of spray paint on some old wicker chairs. Moving with slow grace, Papa Love lines the cans of paint up one by one and flaps his arms in the cold. Along the side of his shack, on top of the boards, are the words THERE IS NO SELF TO BE DISCOVERED, ONLY A SELF TO BE CREATED. Beneath this, a collage of yellow lines and a Confederate flag in African liberation colors.

Treefrog has seldom seen Papa Love go topside, except to get food and paint. The old artist still keeps a bank account from his days as a high school art teacher — he first came down to the tunnels after his lover was hit by a bullet. It was a simple drive-by; the killers were high on amphetamines. His lover was whisked to a Manhattan hospital, but the red line of the heart machine bleeped and bottomed out. Papa Love had seen lots of men die in Vietnam, but he wasn’t prepared to watch his lover go that way. He began walking after his lover died, walked the length and breadth of the city, slept on the steps of a church, and then one summer he decided to strap his heart to a cardboard box. He found the cardboard at the bottom of a doorstep on Riverside Drive, and he carried it under his arm down into the tunnels, and he strapped his aorta on one side and his pulmonary on the other, and he tied them both very neatly together, and he strapped all his veins longways down the cardboard, and he strapped all his arteries in the opposite direction, and he weaved them together with a muscle of his heart and he felt as if his blood were exploding and he lay down on the brown sprawl and looked along the length of the dark tunnel and saw a rat moving over the tracks, and he chuckled in grief and said to himself, I have strapped my heart to a cardboard box.

That was Papa Love’s first painting — a self-portrait of his heart tied around a sheet of cardboard — and people mistook it for a love heart and gave him his nickname, and he never corrected them.

Once, years ago, a gallery dealer came along the tunnel and woke Papa Love, said he wanted the artist to do some work topside. Papa Love had drawn another self-portrait — as a coffee percolator, the slow downward drip of dark flesh. The gallery owner wanted him to do it on canvas. Papa Love said no and the gallery owner left the tunnel hurriedly, beads of sweat at his brow in the cold, so scared that his legs almost whipped out from underneath him. Dean brushed against the man and palmed the wallet from his pocket. It was the only time that anyone ever saw Papa Love angry. He smashed Dean’s blond head against the wall and went running topside with the gallery man’s wallet. When he came back to the tunnel he was panting, screaming for Dean, but Dean had run off. In revenge Papa Love drew Dean’s portrait under a churchlike series of grills beneath 86th, and he wrote the word PEDOPHILE in giant letters, though later that same day he felt guilty and scrubbed the letters out, left the painting, and Dean took it as a compliment, his portrait on the tunnel wall.

From a distance, Treefrog sees that a huge area of the tunnel wall — directly across from Papa Love’s shack, lit by the fire — has already been primed with white paint, a perfect rectangle outlined in black.

Papa Love steps up to it and stacks four crates on top of each other to use as a ladder. He covers his mouth and nose with a red bandanna, so as not to suck the paint fumes down. An old pair of battered spectacles is placed comically over the bandanna. He stands on the crates and shakes a can of paint. Treefrog can hear the metal marble bouncing inside. Papa Love stretches out his arms and, with sudden violence, sweeps in toward the wall, moving his arms through a giant arc.

A mist of air issues from the top of the bandanna as he steps off the crates — they begin to collapse like a house of cards — and his body travels through the darkness as if on a rope, and the paint strikes the wall as the artist travels, a big half-circular sweep; and then, almost as quickly, Papa Love is on the ground by the campfire, rubbing at his knees with the pain of having hit the tunnel floor.

He steps back, nods at the wall, and begins to restack the crates. Standing up on the curious ladder once again, Papa Love falls in toward the wall and, in another perfect arc, sprays over the half circle a second time. His gray hair swings as he flies. The paint covers every inch of the first sweep. He lands by the campfire and then rubs his hands vigorously against the cold. He spreads the crates out, stands wide-footed — he could be the ghost of Nathan Walker; he could be digging — takes another can of paint, and jets two moons underneath the half circle. Each time he steps back he warms his fingers over the fire.

Treefrog drops down from the catwalk and moves further up the tunnel, stands in the shadows, watching.

Papa Love bends and draws a long straight tube emerging from the half circle. A series of striations are drawn across the tube. The center of the mural is sprayed yellow and then tinged at the edges with a cloud of red. Papa Love works furiously, the cans scattered around him on the ground. He stops every few minutes to ignite his hands with campfire warmth, then stepping upward, haunts the wall with colors using long sweeps of his arm, zeroing in afterward to draw lines emerging from the top of the circle.

The portrait on the tunnel wall grows and a giant lightbulb appears, ten feet high. Papa Love stands by the fire and works at the nozzle of a spray can with his knife. In the high center of the lightbulb he draws two furred lines and, underneath them, ovals tinged with blue. Treefrog realizes that the old artist has drawn a pair of eyes within the lightbulb.

Papa Love uses a paintbrush to draw circuit boards for pupils. Using only one crate now, a long swatch of nose appears beneath the eyes and then a mouth set into half a grin. Some stubble is drawn at the bottom of the bulb.

Papa Love steps back and admires his work, hands in his dungarees.

“Heyyo,” says Treefrog, stepping forward.

“You go to the funeral?”

“Yeah, we got paid. Faraday’s father gave me fifteen bucks to stay away. Rest of them got twenty.”

“Bullshit.”

“First funeral I ever got paid for.”

“I’m too old for funerals now,” says Papa Love.

Treefrog points at the mural. “It’s Faraday, huh?”

“Gonna be. Maybe. Ain’t fully finished yet.”

“He’s looking good.”

“A brother in the spine,” says Papa Love.

Treefrog shuffles in the gravel. “There’s a grave inside all of us.” And then he is embarrassed by what he has said, and he mumbles, “You think it’s ever gonna stop snowing?”

Papa Love shrugs.

“You think Faraday did it on purpose?” asks Treefrog.

“I doubt it. But at least he went the way he probably would’ve liked. I mean, that’s what he probably wanted.”

“Hey,” says Treefrog. “If you were to draw a picture of me, what’d you draw?”

“Man, I only draw dead people.”

“You drew yourself. And Dean.”

“Dead people and people I want dead.”

“Oh.” Treefrog pauses for a long time. “Say, what about Miriam Makeba?”

“I been wishing she was dead too,” says Papa Love.

“Why’s that?”

“So she could come on down here and join me.”

Treefrog laughs.

Papa Love turns to his mural. “You like it?” he asks.

“Yeah, man, ’course I like it. Old Faraday, man. Damn. Hate to see him go.”

“Brother’s in the blood.”

Papa Love shakes another can of paint.

“You seen that Angela girl yet?” asks Treefrog.

“Yeah,” says Papa Love. “Sister’s living with Elijah.”

“Man, you should draw her.”

“Last time I saw her, seemed like she was breathing pretty good.”

“Yeah, but you should draw her anyway,” says Treefrog.

He slaps Papa Love on the shoulder as the old man sets to work on Faraday’s chin.

* * *

In his notebook Treefrog writes, Back down under the earth where you belong. Back down under the earth where you belong. Each letter is like a perfect mirror of the one that has gone before, his handwriting tiny and crisp and replicate. He could make a map of those words, beginning at the B and ending at the g — where all beginning begins and ends — and they would make the strangest of upground and belowground topographies. And then he writes: Angela. Two A’s, one at each end. Nice, that. A good name. Lovely. An elaborate pencil mark at the end, a tail fin.