by Colum McCann
“Sit down, sit down.”
Adelita had a wild side that Corrigan liked but couldn’t bring himself to grin about. One night she wore a wide white off- the- shoulder blouse and McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 58
58
C O L U M M c C A N N
orange hot pants. The blouse was modest, but the pants were tight to her thighs. We drank a little cheap wine, and Adelita was whooped up a little.
She gathered her shirt and knotted it at the front, showing the brown of her stomach, stretched slightly from children. The small dip of her belly button. Corrigan was embarrassed by the cling of the pants. “Look at you, Adie,” he said, his cheeks flushing. But instead of asking her to unknot the blouse and cover herself up, he made a theater of giving her one of his own shirts to wear over her outfit. As if it were the tender thing to do. He draped it around her shoulders, kissed her cheek. It was one of his old black collarless shirts, past her thighs, almost down to her knees. He hitched it on her shoulders, half afraid that he was being a prude, the other half rocked by the sheer immensity of what was happening to him.
Adelita paraded around the apartment, doing a slight hula-hoop
movement.
“I’m ready now for heaven,” she said, tugging the shirt lower still.
“Take her, Lord,” said Corrigan.
They laughed, but there was something in that, like Corrigan wanted his life to make sense again, that he had fallen from grace, all he had now was his old recklessness and temptation, and he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He looked up as if the answer might be written on the ceiling.
What might happen if she tumbled short of his dreams? How much might he hate his God if he left her behind? How might he detest himself if he stuck to his Lord?
He walked her home, holding hands in the dark. When he returned to the apartment, many hours later, he hung the shirt on the edge of the mirror. “Orange hot pants,” he said. “Can you believe it?”
We sat, hunched over the bottle.
“You know what you should do?” said Corrigan. “Come work at the nursing home.”
“Need a bodyguard, is that it?”
He smiled, but I knew what he was saying. Come help me, I’m still that hopeless swimmer. He wanted someone from the past around in order to make sure that it wasn’t all just a colossal illusion. He couldn’t just be an observer: he had to get some message through. It had to make sense, if even just for me. But I got a job in Queens instead, in one of the sham-rock bars I dreaded. A low ceiling. Eight stools along the formica counter.
Sawdust on the floor. Pouring pale draft beer and putting my own dimes McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 59
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
59
in the jukebox so I wouldn’t have to hear the same old tunes over and over. Instead of Tommy Makem, the Clancy Brothers, and Donovan, I tried some Tom Waits instead. The single- minded drinkers groaned.
I figured I might write a play set in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave.
Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left. My accent deepened. I took on different rhythms. I pretended I was from Carlow.
Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick. One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy- haired man. He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks. They clinked glasses with him and called him a “motherfucking ambulance chaser” when he went to the bathroom. It was not a series of words they would have used at home—motherfucking ambulance chasers weren’t big in the old country—but they said it as often as they could. With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left.
One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains. Another had an ambulance chaser in the green fields of France.
The place grew busier as the night went on. I poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.
I was still staying with Corrigan. He spent a few evenings at Adelita’s place, but he never told me a word about them. I wanted to know if he’d finally been with a woman but he simply shook his head, wouldn’t say, couldn’t say. He was still in the Order after all. His vows still shackled him.
There was a night in early August when I dragged myself back on the subway, but couldn’t find a cab on the Concourse. I didn’t like the idea of walking back to Corrigan’s place at that hour. There had been beatings and random murders in the Bronx. Being held up was close to ritual. And being white was a bad idea. It was time to get a room of my own somewhere else, maybe the Village or the East Side of Manhattan. I stuck my hands in my jeans, felt the rolled- up wad of money from the bar. I had just begun walking when a whistle sounded from the other side of the Concourse. Tillie was pulling up the strap on her swimsuit. She had been kicked out of a car and her knees were scraped raw.
“Sugarplum,” she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 60
60
C O L U M M c C A N N
handbag waving above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook of mine. “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.”
It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. “What’s the big deal?” she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said, had studied Persian poetry.
“Husband?”
I stopped on the street and gaped at her. Once, as a teenager, I had examined a piece of my skin on a glass slide, staring at it through a micro-scope: an amplitude of ridged canals striving beneath my eye, all pure surprise.
My intense disgust—so remarkable on other days—in that single moment turned into an awe for the fact that Tillie didn’t care at all. She jiggled her breasts and told me to get a grip. It was her ex- husband anyway.
Yes, he had studied Persian poetry. Big fucking deal. He used to get a suite at the Sherry- Netherlands, she said. I assumed she was high. The world seemed to grow smaller around her, shrunken to the size of her eyes, painted purple and dark with eye shadow. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. My own wild, yea- saying overburst of American joy. I leaned towards her and she laughed, pushed me away.
A long pimped- up Ford Falcon pulled up at the curb and, without turning, Tillie said: “He already paid, man.”
We continued up the street, arm in arm. Under the Deegan she nestled her head against my chest. “Didn’t you, honey?” she said. “You already paid for the goodies?” She was rubbing her hand against me and it felt good. There’s no other way to say it. That’s how it felt. Good.
“Call me SweetCakes,” she said in an accent that loitered around her.
“You’re related to Jazzlyn, aren’t you?”
“What about it?”
“You’re her mother, right?”
“Shut up and pay me,” she said, touching the side of my face. Moments later there was the surprising condolence of her warm breath against my neck.
—
t h e r aid b e ga n in the early morning, a Tuesday in August. Still dark.
The cops lined up the paddy wagons in the streetlight shadows near the McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 61
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
61
overpass. The girls didn’t seem to care half as much as Corrigan did. One or two dropped their handbags and ran towards the intersections, arms flailing, but there were more paddy wagons waiting there, doors open.
The police tightened the handcuffs and herded the girls into the well of the dark vehicles. Only then could we hear any shouting—they leaned out, looking for their lipstick or their sunglasses or their stilettos. “Hey, I dropped my keyring!” said Jazzlyn. She was being helped into the wagon by h
er mother. Tillie was calm, as if it happened all the time, just another rising sun. She caught my eye, gave half a wink.
On the street, the cops sipped their coffees, smoked their cigarettes, shrugged. They called the girls by their names and nicknames. Foxy.
Angie. Daisy. Raf. SweetCakes. Sugarpie. They knew the girls well and the crackdown was as lethargic as the day. The girls must have heard the rumor of it beforehand, and they had gotten rid of their needles and any other drug paraphernalia, dropped them down into the gutter. There’d been raids before, but never so complete a sweep.
“I want to know what’s happening to them,” said Corrigan, going cop to cop. “Where are they going?” He spun on his heels. “What are you arresting them for?”
“Stargazing,” said a cop, bashing into Corrigan’s shoulder.
I watched a long pink boa scarf get caught up in the wheels of a patrol car. It wrapped the wheelbase as if in affection, and bits of tufted pink spun in the air.
Corrigan took down a series of badge numbers. A tall female cop plucked the notebook out of his hand and shredded it slowly in front of him. “Look, you dumb Mick, they’ll be back soon, okay?”
“Where’re you taking them?”
“What’s it to you, buddy?”
“Where are you bringing them? Which station house?”
“Step back. Over there. Now.”
“Under what statute?” said Corrigan.
“Under the statute that I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”
“All I want is an answer.”
“The answer’s seven,” the female cop said, staring Corrigan down.
“The answer’s always seven. Get it?”
“No I don’t.”
“What are you, man, some sort of fruit or something?”
McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 62
62
C O L U M M c C A N N
One of the sergeants swaggered up and shouted: “Somebody take care of Mr. Lovey- Dovey here.” Corrigan was pushed to the side of the road and told to stand on the curb. “We’ll lock you up if you say another word.”
I guided him aside. His face was red and his fists tightened. Veins thrummed at his temple. A new splotch had appeared on his neck. “Take it easy, okay, Corr? We’ll sort it out later. They’ll be better off in a station anyway. It’s not as if you actually like them being here.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Oh, Jesus, come on,” I said. “Just trust me. We’ll get to them later.”
The paddy wagons bounced down off the curbs and all but one of the squad cars followed behind. A few onlookers gathered in clumps. Some kids rode their bicycles in circles around the empty space as if they’d found themselves a brand- new playground. Corrigan went to pick up a keyring from the gutter. It was a cheap little glass thing with a picture of a child in the center. Flipped over, there was a picture of another child.
“That’s the reason,” said Corrigan, thrusting the keyring towards me.
“They’re Jazz’s kids.”
Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home. Tillie had charged me fifteen dollars for our little tryst, patted me on the back, then said I represented the Irish quite well, a grand dollop of irony in her voice. Call me SweetCakes. She flicked the ten- dollar bill and said she knew some Khalil Gibran too—she would quote a bit or two if I wanted.
“Next time,” I said. She’d riffled through her handbag. “Are you interested in a little horse?” she asked as she buttoned me up. She said she could get some from Angie. “Not my style,” I said. She giggled and leaned closer to me. “Your style?” she said. She put her hand on my hip, laughed again. “Your style!” There was a sickening moment when I thought she had pickpocketed all my tips, but she hadn’t; she just tightened my belt and slapped me on the arse.
I was glad that I hadn’t gone with her daughter. I felt almost virtuous, as if I hadn’t been tempted at all. Tillie’s smell had lingered with me for a couple of days and it returned again now that she had been taken off and arrested.
“She’s a grandmother?”
“I told you that,” said Corrigan. He stormed towards the last remain-McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 63
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
63
ing cop car, brandishing Jazz’s key chain. “What’re you going to do about this?” he shouted. “You going to get someone to look after her kids? Is that what you’re going to do? Who’s going to look after her kids? Are you going to leave them there on the street? You’re arresting her mother and her!”
“Mister,” the cop said, “one more word from you—”
I pulled Corrigan’s elbow hard and dragged him back through the projects. For a moment the buildings seemed more sinister without the hookers outside: the territory was transformed, none of the old totems anymore.
The lift was broken again. Corrigan wheezed up the stairs. Inside, he began dialing all the community groups he knew, looking for a lawyer, and a babysitter for Jazzlyn’s kids. “I don’t even know where they’ve gone,” he screamed into the phone. “They wouldn’t tell me. Last time, the lockups were full and they got sent down to Manhattan.”
Another phone call. He turned away from me, cupped his hand around the receiver.
“Adelita?” he said.
His grip deepened around the phone as he whispered. He had spent the previous few afternoons with her, at her house, and each time he came home he was the same: roaming the room, pulling at the buttons on his shirt, muttering to himself, trying to read his Bible, looking for something that might justify himself, or maybe looking for a word to leave him even further tortured, a pain that would leave him again on edge. That, and a happiness too, an energy. I wasn’t sure what to tell him anymore. Give in to the despondency. Find a new posting. Forget her.
Move on. At least with the hookers he didn’t have time to juggle notions of love and loss—down on the street it was pure take and take. But with Adelita it was different—she wasn’t pushing any greed or climax. This is my body, it has been given up for you.
Later, around noon, I found Corrigan in the bathroom, shaving in front of the mirror. He had been down to the Bronx county courthouse, where most of the hookers had already been released on time served. But there were outstanding warrants in Manhattan for Tillie and Jazzlyn.
They had pulled some robbery together, turned on a trick. The case was old. Still, they were both going to be transported downtown. He pulled on McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 64
64
C O L U M M c C A N N
a crisp black shirt and dark trousers, went to the mirror again, pasted his long hair back with water. “Well, well,” he said. He took a small scissors to his hair and lopped off about four inches. His fringe went in three smooth snips.
“I’m going to go down to help them,” he said.
“Where?”
“The parthenon of justice.”
He looked older, more worn. With his haircut, the bald spot was more pronounced.
“They call it the Tombs. They’ll be arraigned in Centre Street. Listen, I need you to take my shift in the nursing home. I talked with Adelita.
She already knows.”
“Me? What am I going to do with them?”
“I don’t know. Take them to the beach or something.”
“I have a job in Queens.”
“Do it for me, brother, will you, please? I’ll give you a shout later on.”
He turned at the door. “And look after Adelita for me too, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Promise me.”
“Yeah, I will—now, go.”
Outside I could hear the sounds of the children following Corrigan down the stairs, laughing. It was only when the apartment had fallen into full silence did I remember that he had taken the brown van with him.
At a rental joint down in Hunts Point, I used the ve
ry last of my tips to make a deposit on a van. “Air- conditioning,” said the clerk with an idiotic grin. It was like he was explaining science. He had his badge name pasted over his heart. “Don’t run it too hard, it’s brand new.”
It was one of those days when the summer seemed to have fallen into place, not too warm, cloudy, a tranquilized sun high in the sky. On the radio a DJ played Marvin Gaye. I maneuvered around a low- slung Cadillac and onto the highway.
Adelita was waiting by the ramp of the home. She had brought her children to work—two dark beauties. The younger one tugged at her uniform and Adelita went down to eye level with her, kissed the child’s eyelids. Adelita’s hair was tied back with a long colorful scarf and her face shone.
I understood perfectly, then, what Corrigan knew: she had an interior McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 65
L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N
65
order, and for all her toughness there was a beauty that rose easily to the surface.
She smiled at the idea that we should try the beach. She said it was ambitious but impossible—no insurance, and it was against the rules.
Her kids screamed beside her, tugged on her uniform, grabbed her wrist.
“No, m’ijo, ” she said sharply to her son, and we went through the routine of loading all the wheelchairs and jamming the kids between the seats.
Litter was pinned against the railings of the park. We pulled the van in under the shade of a building. “Oh, what the hell,” said Adelita. She slid across into the driver’s seat. I rounded the back of the van. Albee was looking out at me, and he mouthed a word with a grin. No need to ask.
Adelita beeped the horn and pulled the van out into a light summer traffic. The children cheered as we merged onto the highway. In the distance, Manhattan was like something made out of play boxes.
We found ourselves snared in the Long Island traffic. Songs came from the back, the old folk teaching the kids bits and pieces of songs they couldn’t really conjure. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “You Should Never Shove Your Granny off the Bus.”
At the beach, Adelita’s kids tore down to the waterfront while we lined the wheelchairs up in the shade of the van. The van shadow grew smaller as the sun arced. Albee dropped the suspenders from his shirt and opened up his shirt buttons. His arms and neck were extraordinarily tanned but beneath the shirt his skin was translucent white. It was like watching a sculpture of two different colors, as if he were designing his body for a game of chess. “Your brother likes those hookers, huh?” he said. “You ask me, they’re a bunch of rip- off artists.” He said nothing more, just stared out at the sea.
