He has heard the story but says, “No, sir, you didn’t.”
“Y’all promise not to give her any more money?”
“I promise.”
“Okay,” says Walker, stretching out his hand. “Pretend this is a Bible.”
Clarence Nathan lays his palm on his grandfather’s hand.
“Now swear on it.”
“I swear.”
“Swear on your life that y’ain’t gonna give her another dime.”
“I swear on it.”
“Well,” says Walker. He coughs again, feels his body snap up in sudden pain, closes his eyes. “It was the first run of the train, and the boys brought down baseballs, see.…”
* * *
In the distance Treefrog hears a loud smack of flesh on flesh and a grunt. The wind blows along the tunnel from the southern end, slamming into the nooks and crannies, ferreting its way upward through his nest. Castor sits on his lap, milk frozen to her whiskers. He breathes on her and wipes off the milk between thumb and forefinger, in case the piece of ice has affected her balance.
* * *
Clarence Nathan has often seen his grandfather rifle through his mother’s clothes, taking out small packages and flushing them down the toilet. Louisa comes home and rummages in the bowl with a bent coat hanger, finds nothing. She moves through the apartment, waving the hanger like a weapon. She threatens to leave, says the heroin comes from a treatment program; she needs to let it fade gently from her body. There is talk of South Dakota, a bus journey, a plane trip, but she only portages her bones between the street and the apartment. Her face is brown as leather, with an array of wrinkles. The only thing of color she’s seen in years is the rise of red up a plastic tube, a mistake when she draws the hypodermic needle back too far.
“I need a loan,” she says, late one night.
“No more loans, I told you.”
“I need it for groceries.”
“We got enough groceries.”
“Don’t you know I have to feed you? You know what it’s like trying to feed a family?”
“You don’t even feed yourself. Excepting that other shit.”
“Don’t say shit.” She closes her eyelids. “I need it, Claren. Please.”
“Where you gonna get medicine three in the morning?”
“It’s just a loan. Please.”
“He’ll kill me,” he says, nodding at the sleeping form of Walker.
“He doesn’t have to know.”
She takes his face in her hands and rubs her shaking fingers tenderly along his cheeks.
“No, Momma. I’m sorry.”
“It’s the last time,” she says. “I swear on the Bible.”
“Momma, don’t do this to me.”
“I’ll get a job tomorrow.”
The whites of her eyes, large and beseeching. A terrible need in the quake of her fingers. She looks at him as if he could crush her, snap her, dissolve her, create her.
“Please,” she says, putting her hands close to the whirling blade of an electric fan, no cover on the fan. “I’m begging you. Please.”
She pulls her hands back from the fan at the last minute and then she hangs her head, closes her lips, purses her mouth.
“I suppose you’d rather see me on the street.”
“Momma.”
“My own son. Putting me out on the street.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Then how am I s’posed to get medicine?”
He sighs, hangs his head.
“Did you know that the imprints of bird feet—”
“Momma.”
“—are the perfect thing for making peace symbols?”
“You’re high, Momma.”
“They are, though, they’re perfect.”
“You’re talking crazy shit, Momma.”
“You draw a little circle around them. Think about it. I’ll show you. A perfect circle. Like this.” She makes a circle with her finger against his rib cage, scrapes three lines like a bird print within the circle, cocks her head sideways, says, “Don’t put me out on the streets. Please. I know too much to be on the streets. You know how I feel about losing your father.”
Clarence Nathan reaches under the mattress where he keeps his money and palms her a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill. She smiles, shoving the bill into the opening at the breast of her blouse.
“I won’t never forget it,” she says.
She leaves after kissing him fluently on the forehead. He slams his fist into the palm of his hand.
Clarence Nathan sleeps on the fire escape; he has been told that his father used to do this. He is not bothered by the noise from below: police sirens, record players sounding out through open windows, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown. His body is squeezed up in the small space, his forearms wrapped around his knees. Sometimes the night is punctuated by gunshots. Or the blare of a musical car horn. Or couples shouting as they lean out of windows. A landscape of loving and hating. A palpable viciousness in the air. And yet a tenderness too. Something about this part of the world seems so alive that its own heart could burst from the accumulated grief. As if it all might suddenly stumble under the gravity of living. As if the city itself has given birth to the intricacies of the human heart. Veins and arteries — like his grandfather’s tunnels — tumbling with blood. And millions of men and women sloshing that blood along the streets.
Clarence Nathan has often wondered what it might be like to have acute hearing, to listen to that blood slapping against the skinbanks of bodies, that symphony of misery and love.
Down below, he can see his mother passing under the flitting light of street lamps, and she looks so thin, with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering, that her slacking flesh seems to make her retreat into the girl she must once have been.
* * *
A few weeks later he is slinging chokers on the beams, on ground level, when word comes that there’s a phone call for him near one of the ironworkers’ shanties. He walks across the site, tapping out a rhythm against his thigh.
“It’s your momma,” Walker says. “Come on back.”
The door to the apartment opens before he knocks. Clarence Nathan’s eyes dart around the room. The gutted piano sits with its lid open. The couch is propped up against the window. A few wicker chairs are forlorn in the middle of the room, their top netting unraveling. Walker rises and grabs his grandson by the lapel and punches him, a slow punch, no power. But the young man falls backward onto the floor.
“Ya didn’t keep your promise, son.”
Clarence Nathan puts a finger to his mouth.
“Take a seat,” Walker says.
“Where’s Momma?”
Walker shakes his head.
“Where is she?”
“I knew it was gonna happen,” says Walker.
“What?” The young man pulls his knees to his chest and hugs his feet. “Where is she?”
“Get up off the floor.”
The young man rises, looks around the room, begins to cry, says, “I gave her all that money.”
“It don’t matter no more. When it’s over, it’s over, ya gotta accept that. It’s over.”
“It’s over,” says Clarence Nathan, not thinking about the words.
“Come on, give me that hand of yours.”
Clarence Nathan stretches out one hand and Walker lays his own shaking hand upon it. “Let’s say us a prayer.”
After a few minutes’ silence, Walker says, “I’m sorry I hit ya, son.”
The old man adjusts himself on the couch and takes a little tobacco from the pouch around his neck, stares at it, counts the grains. “Aw, shit,” he says eventually. He wipes at his eye, tries to drink from a teacup he knows has been long empty. “I was hoping she’d give it up.”
Clarence Nathan looks out the window. “It’s my fault. I gave her the money.”
“Don’t be feeling sorry for yourself, son. She done it to herself. That’s the worst thing a man can do. Feel sorry like that.”