This Side of Brightness, Page 2

  One, two, three, strike, return.

  Con O’Leary pants as he leans into the work. To his left, Sean Power sucks blood from his palm, having cut his hand on a sharp edge of the shield.

  The men are beating the river and they are happy.

  Soon the assembly gang will come along and put in a ring of steel—the pieces jammed into place by a small derrick, rotated by a powerful erector arm, then bolted on—and the tunnel will snake further toward Manhattan. The foremen will be delighted; they will rub their hands together and think of the day when trains run under the East River.

  And then, at 8:17 A.M., when Nathan Walker has his back turned to the wall of mud, Rhubarb Vannucci lets out his very first attempt at a full English sentence. His shovel is in mid-swing, one shoulder high, the other low. Unseen by Walker, a tiny hole has appeared in the tunnel wall, a weak spot in the riverbed. The pressurized air hisses out. Vannucci grabs at a bag of hay to stuff the hole, but the dirt whirls from around it and the air escapes and the hole grows wider. At first the weak spot is the size of a fist, then a heart, then a head. The Italian can only watch as the young black man is whipped backward. Walker’s feet can’t grip the soil. He slides toward the widening hole and is sucked into it, shovel first, then his outstretched arms, followed by his head, right down to his shoulders, where his body stops, a cork in the tunnel. His upper torso belongs to the soil, his legs to the tunnel. Pebbles and river dirt greet him. The escaping air pushes at his feet. The soil sucks around his legs. Vannucci steps to the blowout and grabs Walker’s ankles to try and drag the riverdigger down. As he pulls, the other two muckers come forward, and both of them hear the echo of the Italian’s sentence around them.

  “Shit! Air go out! Shit!”

  * * *

  On most afternoons before the blowout, the four men emerge from the hog-house showers, where the water jets out in irregular spurts from black hoses above their heads and the dirt makes puddles at their feet. Steam rises from beneath their overcoats when they hit the cold air outside. In the saloon off Montague Street they laugh at the sight of one another’s clean faces. For the first time all day they can see the cleft in Con O’Leary’s chin, the scars around Nathan Walker’s eyes, the rude bumps in Sean Power’s nose, and Rhubarb Vannucci’s sleek brown skin.

  It is a dark bar, all wood, no mirrors.

  The men pick sawdust from the floor and roll a few tiny pieces into their cigarettes. They sit in a corner snug, pass around a single match. Blue clouds of smoke rise above their heads. The barman, Brickbat Jones, carries a tray of eight beers toward them, his hands trembling with the weight. A garter swallows his tiny forearm.

  “What’s up, boys?”

  “Nothing much. You?”

  “Same ol’ same ol’. You boys look thirsty.”

  “I’ve a mouth as dry as a farmer’s sock!” shouts Power.

  Brickbat is the only barman around who lets black men drink in his pub. Walker once saved a hammer from splitting open Brickbat’s head. He caught the weapon mid-swing and afterward never said a word about it, simply tossing the hammer in a garbage can on the way home. From then on, Walker’s beer cost a penny less for the week and free tobacco was dropped in his overcoat pocket.

  “How’s the tunnel, boys?”

  “Halfway along.”

  “Takes a brave man,” says Brickbat.

  “Takes a stupid man,” says O’Leary.

  “Or a thirsty man!” roars Power, raising his glass.

  The men drink in big noisy gulps, no method to it, as if they were a million miles from the rhythm of the tunnel. Their words come hard and gruff at first: a dime less in last week’s pay, the grouter in the manlock cheating at cards, the shredded remains of British soldiers that they hear about at home on their wirelesses, the possibility of American troops joining the fight in Europe. But their words and their throats are soon softened by drink. They relax and laugh. Stories are summoned up and melodeons are taken from pockets. Music coughs around the bar. Different languages blend. The men arm-wrestle. Sometimes a fight erupts. Or a man pisses at the bar counter and gets thrown out. Or a whore walks by the window, all red lips and drama, decoratively lifting the hem of her dress. Wolf whistles sound out and the men stare at the passing woman, their hearts growing huge and quiescent with lust. A clock lets out a gong on the quarter hour.

  Rhubarb Vannucci is the first to leave, after two beers and four gongs, turning his overcoat collar up around his neck even before the last swallow.

  “Ciao, amici.”

  “See ya later, Ruby.”

  “Hey, Rhubarb!”

  “Sì?”

  “A word of advice.”

  “No understand.”

  “Don’t forget the custard.”

  It is Power’s joke—rhubarb with custard—but he has never explained it to the Sicilian.

  The men chuckle and order another round. Empty glasses pile up around them. Smoke swivels in the air, and the seashell ashtrays become full.

  Con O’Leary is next to leave, walking the cobbled streets toward the docks. He takes a ferry to Manhattan, stands in the cabin with the ferryman, then descends the gangplank and meanders through the darkening streets. His body is a father to his real age, rheumatism in it, feeling seventy although he’s only thirty-four. His belly jiggles as he walks. The studded heels of his boots raise sparks. Soon the tenement houses of the Lower East Side greet him. When he turns a corner he sees his wife, Maura, leaning out of a window, waving from under her umbrella of electric red hair. He waves back and she hurries to the kitchen, where she pours two mugs of tea.

  Third to leave the bar is Walker, nodding to Brickbat Jones as he goes. He shoves some chewing tobacco in his mouth at the front door and spits as he strolls the streets. Back at the Colored hotel where he lives, he hangs his boots on the doorknob so they don’t stain the carpet. The room is tiny. It smells of old shirts and socks and sadness. Walker lies down on his orange bedspread with his arms folded behind his head and drifts off to sleep, dreaming of Georgia and days when he took a boat through the swamps.

  Power is always last to go, reeling out to the wet streets at final call, lifting his cap to the moon. There are sunrises on Power’s fingers, big oval nicotine stains, and sometimes he staggers around in such a drunken stupor that there are the beginnings of sunrises in the sky too.

  * * *

  The shout rips along the tunnel, from mucker to assembly man to grouter to waterboy all the way back to the man who controls the compression machine: Blowout! Lower the pressure! Take it down! Abbassa la pressione! Obnizy cinienie! The pressure! Hey! La pressione! Lower it!

  But the shouts get twisted and distorted in the languages they pass through, and, instead of being lowered, the dial on the compression machine rises.

  With a million years of riverbed in his mouth and his shovel above his head in an attitude of ascension, Nathan Walker is trapped in blackness, his legs held down by Rhubarb Vannucci. Sand and muck and pebbles in Walker’s eyes ears mouth. Watery ooze fills up his throat. His face is ripped from thrashing around. A pebble has lacerated the base of his throat. Blood soaks into the mud. He is a stopper in the ceiling of the tunnel. The escaping air leaks in around him for an eternity of seconds until, with a slow, wormlike wiggle, Walker twists the shovel above his head to create an air pocket and the soil gives minutely.

  Vannucci attempts to pull him down again.

  Let go of my legs! thinks Walker, as he thrashes in the muck. Let go of my goddamn legs!

  He wiggles the shovel some more, and air fills up around him. He inches his head sideways in the muck, and for a second there is the ghost of his dead mother at the train station in Waycross with a blue dress on and a yellow sunflower at her breast, waving goodbye as a steam whistle blows.

  He twists the shovel more, and suddenly the air rushes and Walker is released like a spat cherry stone. Still conscious, he rises through the riverbed. Past what? Dutch ships sunken centuries before? Animal carcasses
? Arrowheads? Scalps with hair still growing? Men with concrete blocks attached to their feet? The dead from slave ships, bleached down to bone? All the time the air cushions Walker against the tremendous weight of soil and sand and silt. He is an embryo in a sac, sheltered as he is slammed upward, five feet, ten feet, through the riverbed, the air pocket cutting a path through the dirt, keeping him safe.

  The shovel is gone from his hands but it follows him like an acolyte, as does Vannucci, as does Power, with a bag of hay clutched to his chest as if in love, a roar coming from Vannucci, and all of them feeling as if their lungs are about to explode.

  And then there is water—they are rising through the river—and perhaps astonished fish, staring. Walker will remember it only as pure blackness, water blackness, not even cold at first, then a ferocious whoosh in his ears, a pounding at his skull, his eyeballs bulging behind his lids, a sudden soaking, the shock of water, struggling for breath, chest heaving, the panic of being surrounded by dark river, convinced that they will drown, they will all drown, pike and trout and dirt and pebbles will make a home in their bloated bellies, barges will scour the water for their bodies, seashells will nestle in their eyeballs.

  And then all three men erupt through the surface of the East River, their heads just missing the floes of ice, shooting out into the air with only their overalls and boots on, their chests contracting and expanding madly now; they are spewing water and muck from their mouths, gulping down oxygen, feeling their brains thump; some tools from the tunnel accompanying them, planks spinning, a hydraulic jack cartwheeling, a bag of hay, an overcoat, a hat, a shirt, the most unlikely of flying things: it is morning, it is light, and they are up on a huge brown geyser, themselves and their dirt and their tunnel equipment. There are ferryboats on the water. Curious seagulls in the air. Dockside workers pointing in amazement. The three sandhogs somersault in the air above the river. The water suspends them for a moment between Brooklyn and Manhattan, a moment that the men will never lose in their memories—they have been blown upward like gods.

  * * *

  Walker’s first thought when he is rescued and dragged onto a boat, half naked, blood streaming down his face: I’m so goddamn cold y’all could skate me.

  * * *

  Maura O’Leary combs a single strand of hair from her cheek. Her face is lean and spare.

  Down its length the East River is quiet. She notices a few scows and barges and some bits of rafted rubbish on the water, the morning sun shining wheels of light in the flow. Some movement of workers on the piers. Mules and carts beyond the edges of the banks. And, in the river, nothing but a small gurgle, a few bubbles on the surface from the tiny, regular seepage of air from the tunnel below. Maura watches from the deck of the ferry in the freezing cold, a wool scarf around her head. Since dawn she has taken the ferry back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—it is her daily ritual. She has done it each morning since she found out she was pregnant. Her husband has allowed her the eccentricity. And, besides, the ferryman is Irish; he lets her ride for free. She is thinking of going ashore and taking a trolley home. Get the crib ready for the child, due in a month. Maybe make some potato soup for Con. Rest a little. Chat with the other women on the upstairs floor.

  She moves to go belowdeck as the river howls and erupts. A massive funnel of water greets the city on one bank and Brooklyn on the other.

  At first Maura sees only sandbags and planks of wood aloft on the geyser. She reels back, clutching at her stomach. Her feet slip on the wet deck, and she catches the railing and screams. The water keeps spurting, blowing the detritus of the tunnel twenty-five feet above the East River. Longshoremen look up from the piers, the ferryboat captain lets go of his wheel, workers on the docksides stand frozen to the vision. The sandbags crest the top of the geyser and hop around. A plank spins out from the brownburst and cartwheels down to the river. Maura watches as a bag seems to contort itself within the torrent and a curious, floppy limb emerges. She realizes that it is an arm and that a shovel is spinning away from it. A man has been blown from the tunnel! One, two, three of them! Raised from forty feet below! She sees Nathan Walker, his powerful body and the red hat that has stayed on his head like an autograph, tied under his chin with a string. But the other two bodies are hard to make out as they crest the water in their strange ascension.

  Her husband’s name—“Con!”—stretches out from her mouth, as if on elastic.

  The three men still bob on the upshoot, although the pressure begins to equalize and—almost gently—the geyser lowers them down to the river. As Walker crashes into the water, his head narrowly misses a chunk of ice. He submerges and then comes up and after a moment he begins swimming toward safety, his arms making great windmills in the river, churning a line of white.

  Vannucci and Power hold on to floating breast planks. Blood spurts from one man’s head. The other lolls as if his neck is broken.

  A scow is already heading toward them from the Brooklyn side. The ferryboat lets out short sharp emergency hornblasts. At the head of the tunnel shrill whistles are blowing, and a long rope of men uncoils to the light. The geyser dies down and becomes just a murmur.

  “Con!” she screams. “Con!”

  The next morning the newspapers report that Nathan Walker swam to the scow and was dragged aboard, blood all over his face. Vannucci and Power held on to the floating planks until rescued. The three men were brought to the manlock so their bodies could decompress. Walker sat silently. Rhubarb Vannucci tried to return straight to work, but he was bleeding and was sent home after an hour. Sean Power was brought to the lock with two broken arms, a mangled leg, and a deep gash in his forehead. Tubes were put in his ears to suck out the mud. The foreman gave him whiskey, and he vomited up what looked like a beach of sand and pebbles.

  In the middle of the solid column of type—alongside an artist’s interpretation of the burst—it says that Con O’Leary, 34, from Roscommon, Ireland, is still missing, presumed dead.

  Neighbors arrive at Maura’s fourth-floor tenement flat. They spread themselves out in a nimbus in her living room, silent in black dresses. Flowers sent by Walker, Vannucci, and Power stand on a small table.

  A daguerreotype of O’Leary is being prepared for a mass card. Maura uses a kitchen knife to cut herself out of the old wedding photograph. When O’Leary is left alone, he stares up at her from the palm of her hand. She raises the image and touches it with her lips. In the photo her husband has a hard, taciturn face. The digger lived much of his life in a taciturn way, coming home, scraping mud from his boots with a knife, the slow silences at dinnertime when she would ask him to do a chore, the shrug of his shoulders, the lovely way he’d raise his chubby palms in the air and ask her, “But why?” An old white shirt of his is still hanging out the window to dry. Maura had been scrubbing the ring of dirt from around the collar. A catechism is open on the table, and Con’s baseball cards are scattered beside the book: to become an American, O’Leary had decided to fall in love with the game, following it meticulously. He knew every score, each stadium, all the managers, hitters, pitchers, catchers, and basemen.

  The gutted piano he was fixing stands in front of the fireplace, the black and white keys spread out on the floor. He had rescued it from a rubbish dump and dragged it through Manhattan with a rope, destroying the carved legs as he pulled it over cobblestones. Four men were employed to help carry it up the stairs, only for O’Leary to discover it was an imitation Steinway, worth little more than the wood it was made with. He had been filing the keys down; they’d been sticking against each other, causing notes to distort. At night they would summon up songs that she could play.

  Maura places the daguerreotype on top of the piano and turns her head as someone knocks on the door.

  A heavy man, in a suit and tie and derby hat, brushes snow off his shoulders as he enters. He asks the neighbors if they will leave.

  The women wait for Maura to nod and then file out, casting suspicious backward glances. They remain
on the stairs, straining to hear. Wide-bottomed, the man sits in the only chair. He hitches up his trousers and Maura can see—as a puddle forms around his feet—his polished shoes.

  “William Randall,” he says.

  “I know who you are.”

  “I’m deeply sorry.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” She speaks as if there were marbles in her throat.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The kettle’s on.”

  “No, ma’am, thank you.”

  And then a long silence as he remembers to take off his hat.

  “After the blowout,” Randall says, “the tunnel was flooded. The other men were lucky to survive. We had to lay a canvas sheet on the river bottom. We dropped clay on top of it. From a barge. To seal the tunnel up again. We had to do it. We will, of course, give you compensation. Ma’am? Enough for you and the child.”

  He points toward the bulge, and Maura folds her hands across it.

  “There was no time to look for Con’s body,” he says. “We believe he got stuck in a second blowout. That’s all we can say. Will a hundred dollars suffice?”

  Randall coughs and makes curlicues at the ends of his tawny mustache.

  “The body might emerge; then we can pay for the funeral too. We’ll pay for the funeral anyway. Are you going to have a funeral? Ma’am? Mrs. O’Leary? I believe in looking after my workers.”

  “You do?”

  “Always looked after my workers.”

  “You can leave now, please.”

  “There’s always hope.”

  “I appreciate your faith, but you can leave.”

  His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. Randall mops his brow with a handkerchief. Beads of sweat reappear immediately.

  “I said you can leave.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Leave.”

  “If that’s how you want it, ma’am.”

  Maura O’Leary watches Con’s shirtsleeves flapping in the window, greeting the snow. She runs her finger around the rim of an empty teacup, curses herself for offering Randall some tea. She says nothing more, just goes to the front door and gently pulls it open for him. She stands behind the frame. The neighbors step back and let the man pass, watching him as he lumbers down the stairs, a roll of fat wobbling at the back of his neck. The women file back into Maura’s room, half a dozen accents merging into one. The sound of a car outside drowns out the muffled clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. Children are playing baseball with hurley sticks. At the window, Maura watches the children step out of the path of Randall’s motorcar, some of the boys reaching out to touch its waxed body. Maura pulls across the lace curtain and turns away.