Fishing the Sloe-Black River

by Colum McCann

  At one point he gets so goddamn daring that he sneaks up to the back of the trailer and peeks in the window where the cops are taking photographs. Ferlinghetti don’t believe that, I can tell, but Stephen doesn’t care. He just says, what’s the point in lying? I killed the man, everybody knows that.

  So, he goes back into the forest. The sun is going down. He stays there a couple of hours, then just walks up to the police, who are all having coffee on the front steps of the trailer, and gives himself up.

  Ferlinghetti asks again, says it’s very important to him, starts giving this crap about how Stephen needs someone to respect him, that sort of thing, but Stephen still says “because.” I’m just sitting there, in the flower bed, listening to all this. Once or twice Stephen turns around and looks at me. I just look down, pretending I’m not interested.

  Later that afternoon we’re out there digging and raking a flower bed, me and Stephen. There’s some other workers there too, but they’re feeling lazy, taking a load off their feet. I’m just digging away, and Stephen, he’s sort of puttering with the rake. He’s got those long skinny arms. For some reason he’s wearing his eyeglasses, which he don’t normally do. He’s got some of that brown powder stuff on his face that the kids use to cover up their zits. He looks awful sad. It takes him a long old time to pull that rake along the ground even just a little bit.

  Kevin’s way over on the other side of the fence, near the staff houses, weed-eating. So I’m asking Stephen what he thinks of the Cowboys and the Oilers and all, except I get to thinking that I must sound like Ferlinghetti, asking all these questions, so I stop. I don’t want to sound like no shrink. I’m just turning some soil, whistling away, thinking about how that night me and Kevin are due to start work on the field. I think maybe I’ll go home and get myself a big old plate of steak, maybe some of that Gatorade that keeps you going. I’m looking at the sky and thinking it may stay clear, when Stephen turns to me. He looks straight at me.

  “I was scared of the dark,” he says.

  First thing I’m thinking he’s saying something about a darkie, which is weird since I think you only hear that word in old movies. But then I catch on. He’s still looking at me, but I have no idea why he’s telling me this. I ain’t never asked him, but maybe he saw me listening to him and Ferlinghetti, so he figures I want to know. But he’s just staring away into space. His mouth is quivering. His eyes are all red around the edges. This don’t look like a boy who put a gun in a man’s mouth and spilled his brains out on the floor, who stole them trucks, slept with that woman, all those things. He looks like an ordinary kid. He’s just standing there, with the rake in his hands, looking out over the fence.

  “I was out there in the forest and it got dark,” he says. “I’d never been in the dark like that before.”

  I took to digging a little deeper in the soil and said nothing. I thought about Ferlinghetti and what he might get out of that. Stephen was scared of nothing else—not scared of killing a man, that’s for sure, or stealing, or boning away whenever he got the chance. I knew it was weird. Guess he didn’t have his TV or nothing out there. Guess that’s what maybe he was scared of. I just nodded my head and said, I know what you mean, man, I know what you mean.

  * * *

  I’m telling Kevin all this and his face just drains. We’re putting the gas in the tractor. He’s holding the big red five-gallon can and I got the funnel. For some reason his hands start to shake like he’s got the chills and some of that gas is spilling down the side of the tractor. “Scared of the dark,” says Kevin, repeating it over and over. He puts the last drop of gas in the tank and then he tells me that he’ll be back in a moment. I see him hightail off toward my pickup and slam the door. He leaves a trail of dust on the dirt road that runs through the center of our field. I get on the tractor to fire her up, but Kevin has the keys.

  So I just sit myself down on the ground and poke a little stick in a mound of fire ants and watch the little bastards scuttle. Millions of them. Once I heard someone say that the ants can build a nest that goes fifteen feet down in the ground. They can also kill a human baby if there are enough of them. They start to crawl up my boots, so I climb up on the tractor and look out over the field.

  I’m thinking that it sure is getting late. I can see some red sky in the west. There’s even a star up there already. The last of the buzzards are in the sky. I wonder where it is they sleep at night. One thing for sure, those crickets don’t sleep. They start chirping so it sounds like a song. It’s almost fully night when I look up and there is Kevin coming down the road in the pickup truck. He has his whole family with him, the whole dadgum lot, his wife Delicia, his sons Lawrence and Myron, his girl Natalie. Then I see, sitting in the back of the truck, my Ellie and Robert. Everyone’s quiet. Normally they’re all shouting up a storm and laughing when they get together.

  Kevin gets out of the truck with this strange look on his face. He’s wearing his work shirt, and the sleeves are rolled way up on his arms. His face is full of wrinkles. His eyes all serious. He gets everyone to line up at the edge of the field behind him, in a row. Ellie’s in her night gown and slippers. Her hair is in curlers. Delicia, she’s carrying Myron in her arms because he’s so small. Lawrence has himself a football tucked under his arm. I do a little shadow boxing with Robert, but he’s quiet as a mouse. That klein grass is so big that it’s over all the kids’ heads. Nobody’s saying anything. It’s all quiet. Except for the crickets.

  Kevin gets me to stand at the end of the line and then he starts walking through the field. Everyone just steps on along behind him, but pretty soon he gets to jogging and we all jog after him, brushing away the grass with our hands, until he goes faster and faster and we’re hightailing it through that field, the grass parting in our way. I hear the kids laughing, then Delicia gives a chuckle, then Ellie hollers something crazy. I’m holding onto Robert’s hand. He’s kicking at the stalks as we go. Kevin is whooping. My own body gets kind of loose and I find myself damn near dancing through the field. I haven’t danced like that since the club in Giddings burned down.

  Well, it must have looked plumb stupid, us running through the field like that, with our kids, when we had so much work to do. But I was stumbling along, hearing everyone laughing, holding on to my little boy, when I looked up beyond the top of the grass and saw how dark the sky had gotten, how big and heavy it was, how much it had come right down on top of us. We were laughing, but I knew right there and then what Kevin was doing. He was no fool.

  STOLEN CHILD

  Padraic closes the heavy oak door of the children’s home and steps out into the Brooklyn morning light. He looks across the river to where the sun is coming up like a stabwound, leaving smudges of dirty light on the New York City skyline. He pulls up the hood of his coat and steps across the road. In the background he hears one of the boys kicking at the wooden door, a dull rhythmic thud. A young girl screams from the third-floor window. In the distance a police siren flares. Christ, he thinks, no day for a wedding.

  He pulls his dark blue anorak up around his shoulders, cups his hands, and lights the last of his cigarettes. He inhales the smoke to the bottom of his lungs, adjusts his glasses, and looks back at the home where he just clocked off the graveyard shift.

  A clutch of blind children have their heads stuck out the bars of the lower windows. One of the girls, her hair a shock of orange, is thrashing her head against the bars. The whites of her eyes loll obscenely in her head. He shrugs his shoulders to indicate to her that it’s not his fault, but, catching himself, he turns away, then pulls hard again on the cigarette. Padraic hears another shout from inside the home. He turns and watches a bread van cough along the street. The exhaust fumes languish in the air, and for a moment he thinks about letting the smoke carry him along, away down the dark puddled road, to somewhere very different.

  At ten o’clock last night, little Marcia, only fourteen years old, tried to slit her wrists with a tin mirror. She cut a narrow scar perpendic
ular to the veins while Tammy screamed over and over again that she was messing up, that the way to do it was to slice longways along the vein, rip it good and deep. When the lads in the boys’ unit found out that one of the girls had tried to do herself in, a near-riot had broken out. Jimi set fire to the couch in the living room. Chocolate Charlie put his foot through the glass case of the stereo, and two other boys had to be restrained. Nearly all the kids, those forgotten blind children, the snot rags of society, had spent the night beating their brains against the walls repeatedly—like birds with broken wings, unable to get off the ground.

  Padraic flings the cigarette butt to the ground. He walks toward the subway station, sweeping the bits and pieces of litter out of his way with his feet. In one of the houses he hears a radio burst to life. A curtain opens and a woman’s face fills a top windowpane. An old man in a mangy overcoat is out on the steps playing the Jewish harp and slurping on a bottle of Miller. He nods and offers the bottle, but Padraic gives a quick flick of the head sideways and the old man smiles.

  “Too early for the sloppin’?” he asks.

  “Too early for anything,” says Padraic.

  The steps down to the subway station smell, as usual, of stale urine, and Padraic skips down them three at a time, fishing in his pocket for a token. Nothing but loose change. He left all the tokens at home last night. He takes a quick look. Nobody in the booth and hardly anyone else around, except two young nurses shivering in the cold, a kid in a Van Halen Kicks Ass T-shirt, and a spindly little businessman reading a newspaper down at the end of the platform. He vaults the turnstile, hustles down to the platform, and waits for the wind to be sucked through the tunnel, carrying the clang of an engine.

  When the D train finally comes, it’s a local. He sits in a carriage alone, the seat bedecked with graffiti, and wonders if Orla, his wife, will be awake when he gets back to their flat. It’ll be nice to curl up beside her and let the morning pass. Or wake her to get her to massage the knots in his neck.

  In Brighton Beach he turns the key quietly in the apartment door and tiptoes into the bedroom where Orla is sleeping, a copy of Philip Larkin’s High Windows on her chest. He picks up the book and skims through it quickly, leans over her, kisses her on the cheek.

  “No day for a wedding,” he says.

  * * *

  Padraic had come far across an incomprehensible ocean, from a place called Leitrim, and when Dana first heard him talk she thought he must have swallowed a very tiny insect or bird that made his voice the way it was. He stood in the middle of the common room while the other counselors introduced him, Padraic Keegan is going to be our new social worker, now everybody say hello. She ran up to him, scouring her fingers through his wiry hair, fingering the side of his acne-creviced face, lifting his glasses and trying to touch his eyes until a counselor barked at her to stop. Later, alone, she wondered whether it was a cricket or a thrush or a praying mantis that Padraic had swallowed.

  She was sixteen, well into the awkward throes of adolescence, and she wore dresses with patterns of furious flowers flinging themselves around her waist. Her hair was the color of burned grass. She dyed it that way so that it would flare against her black skin.

  Her parents abandoned her—her father had gone out for a packet of cigarettes and never came back, her mother had taken to the little white vials. The authorities found Dana locked in a cupboard, rake-thin, blind as the mice that scuttled in nursery rhymes, while her mother sat in the corner of the room and rocked on the balls of her toes, a bouquet of crack pipes around her feet. When she saw the badges, she just shrugged. Take her, she ain’t mine no more.

  Padraic pored over her files during his first week of work—she had taken swallows from bottles of Lysol, tried to hang herself with her shoelaces, defecated on a counselor’s hairbrush, shorn off another girl’s hair. At night, he would sit and read the file over and over, trying to make sense of the legion of quick signatures that cluttered the bottom of the pages. He would watch her in the common room, fingering the curtains. Once, in the back laundry room of the home, he saw her take a can of spray paint and begin to daub another girl’s clothes. He talked to her about ordinary things—how she needed to learn to fold her towel neatly, control her temper, hold a pencil properly, stop biting her nails down to the quick. Sometimes he tried to describe colors to her, but the words broke down into a meaningless frenzy. He had a heavy caseload—seven boys and three girls—but Dana took up most of his time.

  “You know what your name means?” he asked her one evening when they sat down to dinner.

  “Nothing but a name.”

  “Well, yours is a bit different.”

  “Yeah sure.”

  “Okay,” he said. He moved the fork around his plate, made a loud noise with it.

  “No,” she said suddenly. “Tell me.”

  Late into the evening he told her about Dana, the Irish goddess who was believed to have come from North Africa in ancient times. Dana was in charge of a tribe of druids, the Tuatha de Dannan, who landed on a fair May morning and conquered the country by ousting the Firbolgs, the men with the paunchy stomachs. She had magic that could control the sea, the mist, the sun, and the very sounds and shapes of the morning. They lived in a wild country where trees ran on one another’s backs until they reached either ocean. Her tribe had made tunnels in vast mounds and built fairy forts down by the sea. They held four talismans of high power—the long sword and spear that had never been defeated, the stone of destiny, and the boiling cauldron for punishments.

  “Ya mean they boiled people?”

  “Eh, maybe.”

  “Cool.” Dana was clanging her fork. “You ain’t shittin’ me?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “She a witch, like?”

  “Not really. If you want, I’ll read you bits from a book,” said Padraic.

  “You talk funny,” she said, chuckling.

  For weeks afterward she threw questions at Padraic. How old was Dana? How did she die? Was she black? Was she blind? Did she wear colored clothes? They were questions he couldn’t answer. Sometimes she would stalk around the hallways of the home, a towel thrown around her like a shawl, bumping into the doorways and the flower stands. She listened intently to the stories that he read to her. Once, he found in her notebook a drawing of a woman with four fluid faces meshed into one another, two of them sightless, two of them mesmerized by a river of yellow hair, all of them black. Padraic was amazed that she could draw like that.

  On Saturday afternoons they walked toward the park. It was an area of furtive glances, shutters heavy over shop windows, basketball courts hemmed in with chicken wire, red brick tenement houses. They sat on wooden benches between a line of birch trees, whittling away the hours. Padraic talked to her of somewhere different, someplace where her namesake had been long ago. Dana imagined thick forests, boats made from the hides of cows, valleys where drizzling rain settled heavily on long grass.

  One afternoon, after signing a welter of day-release passes, he took Dana home to meet Orla. Orla, a music scholar, played the cello for an hour. Dana fell asleep on the sofa. Later they brought her down to the sea, where she recoiled in fear at the touch of the cold water. Back up on the boardwalk, they huddled together under a long blue scarf. Then they rode the giant wooden roller coaster at Coney Island, and afterward, Dana begged them again and again to bring her back to the edge of the waves, which they did, all of them shivering in the slicing wind.

  “How far is Ireland?” asked Dana.

  “A long swim,” he said.

  “I’ll wear a big coat,” she said, bundling herself into the blue scarf.

  * * *

  “I hate it there now,” he says to Orla as he sits on the side of the bed. “Ya should’ve seen it this morning when they heard they couldn’t go to the wedding. Howling and lashing at the doors, they were. Charlie kicked the stereo to bits. Marcia tried to slit her friggin’ wrists. Stephanie was calling me a sperm drinker.”

&nbs
p; “Good morning, and I love you too,” says Orla. “Ya big sperm drinker.”

  Padraic laughs and tugs at his shoelaces. “Some day for a wedding, huh?”

  “Ah, it’s not too bad, as far as I can see,” she says, climbing out of bed and walking over to the window to part the curtains, letting the light drone in on their tiny bedroom. “At least the sun is shining. We got married in the pissings of rain, remember?”

  “Yeah, but we were normal and that was Ireland.”

  “Since when was Ireland normal?”

  “Listen, close the curtains, would ya, love? I want to get a few hours kip. I’m knackered.”

  “Okay,” says Orla. “I’m going to practice. Don’t forget. The church at three o’clock.”

  “Last place in the world I want to be.”

  “You’re giving her away.”

  “Exactly,” he says, placing his glasses on the bedside table and pulling the sheets around his head.

  The music from Orla’s cello curls around the room and punctuates the roar of traffic outside. Padraic dozes with thoughts of Dana thundering in his head. He sees a cupboard and a little girl huddled under blankets, listening. He hears the poem that he sometimes quoted her when they walked in the park. For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. He sees the small hand lost in a huge gold wedding band. He remembers strolling in the park with the echoing mythology of Ireland. Come away, stolen child. Her tiny frame with the lopsided walk, the shock of hair, the eyes lost in her head, the quiet anger. The afternoon when she left the home comes back to him in a flood of colors—she had packed her green mascara, braille books with blue covers, flowery skirts, a blue Yankees hat. As she gathered up the bits and pieces, he tried to convince her that there was another way, though he couldn’t say what it was.

  Waking from his nap he sees Orla at the stove, cooking lunch. He comes up behind her, puts his arms around her waist, as she watches the soup boil on the old stove.