Electric light slips out from the smashed door.
He wonders for a moment where exactly he is — in a tunnel or a car or by a lake — and then Angela stumbles from the cubicle, pushing at the broken door, her body heaving, her breath rapid.
Elijah follows her.
“No!” she shouts.
The bare lamp in the cubicle swings.
Elijah punches the back of her head and she stumbles again, turns, spins in the light, falls.
Angela crawls to her feet, blood from her mouth and blood from her eye and blood down her cheek. Even in the patch of pendular light, Treefrog can see that her body is a sad broken mess. She limps in the gravel near the edge of the tracks, her fur coat half on, her handbag swinging in the air to keep Elijah at bay. “No!” And then Treefrog comes out from the far darkness with the spud wrench tight in his fist.
Elijah — standing back from the range of Angela’s handbag — looks across the tracks, takes down the hood of his sweatshirt, says, “Look who’s here.” He beckons Treefrog with a curled finger. “Come on, man, come on, motherfucker.”
Angela whimpers by the tracks, the bag clutched to her chest. Treefrog is aware of every step he takes, as if he is floating through the dark.
The cubicle door swings back and forth and light leaks into the tunnel, licking into the dark corners, touching Treefrog’s body, sliding off once more, until the door stops swinging and he stands in a definite circle of light.
No need for balance, the pump of certainty through him. He moves across the tracks and stops.
Elijah grins.
Treefrog grins back.
Elijah puts one foot out in front of the other, holds his fists up.
Treefrog steps closer.
Elijah makes a quick spin.
Treefrog steps back from the arc of Elijah’s kick, moves forward, ducks beneath the second kick.
Elijah’s leg slices above him as if in slow motion.
Treefrog’s body seems set on springs, and he rises from his crouch and the spud wrench swings upward and — with perfect accuracy — catches Elijah in the crotch. Elijah falls back against the cubicle, holding his balls. He cries out in agony and takes four huge gulps of breath.
Putting one hand on the ground, Elijah slowly uncoils, reaching for a knife in his back pocket.
Treefrog steps closer.
Elijah’s eyes grow wide. He prods the knife out, jabs with it.
Treefrog keeps coming.
The whites of Elijah’s eyes look huge.
The knife slices the air.
Treefrog steps aside.
Elijah’s body follows the curve of the knife.
Stepping into the created space, Treefrog grins. The swing of the spud wrench into Elijah’s elbow is swift and graceful, and the crack of bone echoes the splinter of the door, and the knife clatters to the ground.
When the spud wrench swings a second time, it catches Elijah on the shoulder and he lets out an animal howl, his face creased in terror. He totters, puts one hand to his elbow, the other to his testicles, and then the spud wrench swings again.
This time it catches Elijah’s knee, and in one smooth movement Treefrog kicks the knife away.
As Elijah falls, Treefrog plants his boot firmly into Elijah’s teeth and a monumental joy whips through him as Elijah’s head slams back against the broken door. Treefrog’s boot connects with Elijah’s crotch and the man accordions in massive pain and emits a groan that Treefrog thinks might reverberate off the walls and last forever in the tunnel.
He picks Elijah’s knife up, tucks it in his pocket, leans down, and calmly says, “Good morning, asshole.”
Elijah spits up some blood and turns his face away, coughing and moaning. Angela, watching from the tracks, pulls her hand from her ruined mouth and cheers. All the time, it feels to Treefrog that this is the first thing he has ever done in his life.
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.