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.