Walker struggles up, dries his eyes, crosses the room.
“We gotta go down the funeral parlor. Make arrangements to get her back to South Dakota. She needs to be near that lakeside she talked ’bout.”
Clarence Nathan closes the buttons on his grandfather’s overcoat, helps him wrap a scarf around his neck, bends down to tie the old man’s shoes. They triple-lock the door and walk together down the stairs. Clarence Nathan steadies Walker as the old man holds on to the banisters. They emerge into sunlight. Clarence Nathan, still crying, removes his baseball hat and puts it on Walker’s head so the brim shades the old man’s eyes.
* * *
In Saint Nicholas Park on a mucky day, he shows Dancesca the trick of making a symbol from the foot of a bird. “See,” he says. “See. Draw a circle here. Just like this.”
* * *
Treefrog wakes in the rear cave when a rat scuttles across his ankles. He draws his knees to his chest and whistles for Castor, but she is not around. He wonders if it is night or day, if he has been dead or if he has just been asleep, or if he has been both, and if he may be both forever, dead and sleeping.
He lights another candle and tucks his maps back into their plastic bags. Rocking back and forth in the dark dampness, he waits for the sound of a train to tell him whether it’s morning or night. No trains between midnight and seven; after that, the Amtraks come every forty minutes. He singes the bottom of his beard with the lit candle, feels the heat at his chin, and waits almost an hour, curled into himself, his stomach rumbling. Nothing, so it must be night. He drops hot wax on the back of each thumb, where it hardens quickly. Then he presses his fingers into his left side to balance the pain in his liver. He still has some money left from Faraday’s funeral and he wonders, perhaps, if he should go and buy gin.
He moves out of the cave into his front room and feels drawn by the tunnel, swings down.
No light whatsoever. The purest and pitchest of black. Treefrog passes by Dean’s pile of trash and smells the human filth, steps away so he doesn’t get shit on his shoes.
Treefrog knocks against the baby stroller, full now with garbage. He stops and stares into the carriage, reaches out, and rocks it a little from side to side: it was the summer of 1976. Lenora was just born. She was so small. Her hair was fine and thin and dark. Her skin was smooth and mahogany. Clarence Nathan felt like his world had shifted equators, given him meaning, history. He spent hours just holding her. She would lie across his stomach and kick her tiny feet in the blankets. Dancesca lay with them. There was a new quality given to time — sometimes hours would slip away in simple staring at the child. They felt whole, full, brave, assured. Lenora’s helplessness was their depth. They moved together in a trinity, he, Dancesca, Lenora. Every Sunday he paid for a taxicab so that Walker could come and visit. They sat and watched baseball games together. The child slept on a cot close by. It was a time of sweet slowness, even when Lenora fussed and cried. One Sunday, Walker lifted Lenora out of her cot. He kissed the child’s forehead. He took her into the bathroom, where he had already filled the sink with warm water. Clarence Nathan watched. The old man was going to baptize the child — a mixture of his own religion and the history of Eleanor’s. Just before he lowered the child gently down into the sink, Walker whispered something in her ear. For a moment all was silent, and he dipped the baby in the water. The child cried a little, then stopped. Walker came out from the bathroom with a warm blanket wrapped around her. Later, he said, “I’m gonna bring Lenora for a walk.” Dancesca and Clarence Nathan watched from the window as the old man stepped into the street, pushing the baby carriage. By the side of a fire hydrant, Lenora’s pacifier dropped out. Walker bent down and, with difficulty, picked it up off the ground. The rubber end was dirty. He looked around for a moment, seemed confused. Then he stuck the pacifier in his own mouth to clean it. He bent over, gently inserting the nipple in the child’s mouth, and whispered something into Lenora’s ear. From his distance, Clarence Nathan knew exactly what his grandfather was saying to the child.
Treefrog spins away from the baby carriage, moves on, balancing on a rail, left foot right foot left foot right foot. A tremendous urge within him now to speak to someone, anyone, to say anything, to simply let words come from his throat, long and slow and honest. He pauses for a moment by Papa Love’s door and then decides against waking the old artist; he wouldn’t answer the door anyway.
A mumble sounds from Elijah’s cubicle and a small spill of light comes from under the door. Elijah must have reconnected the juice. Treefrog puts his ear to the cubicle and hears Angela crying. There is a sharp thud. The sound strikes Treefrog low in the stomach and rests there, gnawing at him. He takes the spud wrench out from his pocket. His throat is dry, his feet unsteady. He wants to open the door and burst in, but he holds himself back, paralyzed by inaction. The thumping and crying continue, and he hears Angela saying, in long high pathetic gulps, “Why you hurt the ones ya love, why you hurt the ones ya love?”
Treefrog remains at the door and knocks the spud wrench rhythmically into each palm. Then he hears Elijah move.
Slithering away from the cubicle, Treefrog stands beneath the grate at the opposite side of the tunnel. He waits for Elijah to emerge, but nothing happens. And he hears the thuds again, the whimper, the intake of Angela’s breath. Treefrog lets himself slide down along the wall until he is sitting on the tunnel gravel. Slowly, he removes his gloves and takes out his penknife. He presses the blade down against the palm of his hand. All this nothingness, he thinks. This cowardice. This solitary life as an ear — listening, always listening, only listening.
With the knife, he makes a nick in his right palm, then his left, is amazed to flick his lighter and see two thin streams of blood running parallel down his raised wrists. He shoves his overcoat sleeves high on his arms, and a small globule of red collects in the crook of each elbow.
Under the grate, looking upward, watching the irrelevant stars, Treefrog knows that the light hitting his eyes left years ago; there is nothing up there but the movement of the past, things long imploded and forever gone: it was years later, a Friday, and he finished his shift at the skyscraper, descended in the elevator, showered and tucked his hair into a short ponytail, and they were waiting outside in a brand-new rental car, a Ford. Walker had insisted on an American-made car. Dancesca got in the backseat with five-year-old Lenora. Clarence Nathan drove. It took them four days to reach South Dakota. Clarence Nathan had sent on hundreds of dollars for a gravestone, a twenty-dollar bill each week, but there was nothing in the graveyard except a plain wooden cross marked TURIVER. Louisa’s family had moved. Weeds were in bloom in the old shack where she had once lived. They went down to the lakeside together, all four of them. The lake was immense, the only movement that of a speedboat out in the middle of the water. They had brought food for a picnic, and they sat in silence over soggy cucumber sandwiches. The boat threw waves and a skier tumbled. For the first time all day they laughed, watching the skier vaulting through the air. Walker’s body was just about crippled with rheumatism by then, but he took young Lenora down by the lakeside and stretched one arm out and bent a knee and toed his foot out in the air and every movement was imitated by the child, and there wasn’t a stir in the sky or mud prints in the ground. They stayed like that, dancing. Clarence Nathan touched his wife’s arm, the South Dakota sun pouring down generously around them.
Treefrog hears a sudden startling thud and he opens his eyes, gets to his feet, feels for the spud wrench. The top hinge of the cubicle door cracks and the wood splinters.