“What you doing there, friend?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Chess, is it?”
“You play?”
“Right on.”
“You rated?”
“Rated?”
“Oh, get the fuck outta here — you’re a pussy too.”
Corrigan winked at me from the edge of the playground. This was his world and he plainly loved it.
Lunch had been made for them in the old folks’ home, but Corrigan went across the road to the local bodega to buy them extra potato crisps, cigarettes, a cold beer for Albee. A yellow awning. A bubblegum machine sat triple-chained to the shutters. A dustbin was overturned at the corner. There had been a garbage strike earlier that spring and still it wasn’t all cleaned up. Rats ran along the street gutters. Young men in sleeveless tops stood malevolently in the doorways. They knew Corrigan, it seemed, and as he disappeared inside he gave them a series of elaborate handshakes. He spent a long time inside and came out clutching large brown paper bags. One of the hoodlums back-slapped him, grabbed his hand, drew him close.
“How d’you do that?” I asked. “How d’you get them to talk to you?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“It just seems, I don’t know, they’re tough, y’know”
“Far as they’re concerned, I’m just a square.”
“You’re not worried? You know, a gun, or something, a switchblade?”
“Why would I be?”
Together we loaded the old folk up in the van. He revved the engine and drove to the church. There had been a vote among the old folk, the church as opposed to the synagogue. It was daubed in graffiti — whites, yellows, reds, silvers. TAGS 173. GRACO 76. The stained-glass windows had been broken with small stones. Even the cross on top was tagged. “The living temple,” said Corrigan. The elderly Jewish man refused to get out. He sat, head down, saying nothing, skipping through the notes in his book. Corrigan opened the back of the van and slipped him an extra beer over the seat.
“He’s all right, our Albee,” said Corrigan as he strolled away from the back of the van. “All he does is work on those chess problems all day long. Used to be a grandmaster or something. Came from Hungary, found himself in the Bronx. He sends his games off in the post somewhere. Does about twenty games all at once. He can play blindfolded. It’s the only thing that keeps him going.”
He helped the others out of the van and we wheeled them one by one towards the entrance. “Let’s walk the plank.” There were a series of broken steps at the front but Corrigan had stashed two long pieces of wood around the side, near the sacristy. He laid the planks parallel to each other and guided the chairs up. The wood lifted in the air with the weight of the wheelchairs, and for a moment they looked like they were bound for the sky. Corrigan pushed them forward and the planks slapped back down. He had the look of a man at ease. A shine in the corners of his eyes. You could see the gone boy in him, the nine-year-old back in Sandy-mount.
He left the old folk waiting by the holy-water font, until they were all lined up, ready to go.
“My favorite moment of the day, this,” he said. He crossed over into the cool dark of the church, rolled them to whatever spot they wanted, some in the rear pews, some to the sides.
An old Irish woman was brought up to the very front, where she wrapped and rewrapped her rosary beads. She had a mane of white hair, blood in the corner of her eyes, an otherworldly stare. “Meet Sheila,” said Corrigan. She could hardly speak anymore, barely able to make a sound. A cabaret singer, she had lost most of her voice to throat cancer. She had been born in Galway but emigrated just after the First World War. She was Corrigan’s favorite and he stayed near her, said the formal prayers alongside her: a decade of the Rosary. She had no idea, I’m sure, about his religious ties, but there was an energy about her in that church she didn’t have elsewhere. She and Corrigan, it was like they were praying together for a good rain.
When we got out into the street again, Albee was dozing in the van, a bit of spittle on his chin. “Goddamn it,” he muttered when the engine rumbled into life. “Pair of pussies, the two of ya.”
Corrigan pulled into the nursing home in the late afternoon, then dropped me off in front of the housing project. He had another job to do, he said; there was someone he had to see.
“It’s a little project I’m working on,” he said, over his shoulder. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll see you later.”
He climbed in and touched something in the glove box of his van before he took off. “Don’t wait up for me,” he called. I watched him go, hand out the window, waving. He was holding something back, I knew.
It was pitch black when I saw him finally arriving back down among the whores alongside the Major Deegan. He gave out iced coffee from a giant silver canister that he kept in the back of the van. The girls gathered around him as he spooned ice into their cups. Jazzlyn wore a one-piece neon swimsuit. She tugged the back, snapped the elastic, edged close to him, gave the hint of a belly dance against his hip. She was tall, exotic, so very young she seemed to flutter. Playfully, she pushed him backwards. Corrigan ran a circle around her, high-stepping. A scream of laughter. She ran off when she heard a car horn blow. Around Corrigan’s feet lay a row of empty paper coffee cups.
Later he came back upstairs, thin, dark-eyed, exhausted.
“How was your meeting?”
“Oh, grand, yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
“Out tripping the light fantastic?”
“Ah, yeah, the Copacabana, you know me.”
He collapsed on the bed but was up early in the morning to a quick mug of tea. No food in the house. Just tea and sugar and milk. He said his prayers, and then touched the crucifix as he went towards the door once more.
“Down to the girls again?”
He looked at his feet. “I suppose so.”
“You think they really need you, Corr?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.”
The door swung on its hinges.
I’ve never been interested in calling out the moral brigade. Not my place. Not my job. Each to his own. You get what you create. Corrigan had his reasons. But these women disturbed me. They were light-years removed from anything I’d ever known. The high of their eyes. Their heroin sway. Their swimsuits. Some of them had needle marks at the back of their knees. They were more than foreign to me.
Down in the courtyard, I walked the long way around the projects, following the broken lines in the concrete, just to avoid them.
A few days later a gentle knock sounded on the door. An older man with a single suitcase. Another monk from the Order. Corrigan rushed to embrace him. “Brother Norbert.” He had come from Switzerland. Norbert’s sad brown eyes gladdened me. He looked around the apartment, swallowed deeply, said something about the Lord Jesus and a place of deep shelter. On his second day Norbert was robbed in the lift at gunpoint. He said he had gladly given them everything, even his passport. There was a shine like pride in his eyes. The Swiss man sat in serious prayer for two solid days, not leaving the apartment. Corrigan stayed down on the streets most of the time. Norbert was too formal and correct for him. “It’s like he’s got a toothache and he wants God to cure it,” said Corrigan.
Norbert refused the couch, lay on the floor. He balked each time the door opened and the hookers came in. Jazzlyn sat in his lap, ran her fingers on the rim of his ear, messed with his orthopedic shoes, hid them behind the couch. She told him that she could be his princess. He blushed until he almost wept. Later, when she was gone, his prayers became high-pitched and frantic. “The Beloved Life was spared, but not the pain, the Beloved Life was spared but not the pain.” He broke down in tears. Corrigan was able to get Norbert’s passport back and he drove him out to the airport in the brown van to get a flight to Geneva. Together they prayed and then Corrigan dispatched him. He looked at me as if he expected me to be leaving also.