“No kidding?”
“She’ll be up and walking soon.”
They stand complicitous in the silence and nod awkwardly, then glance away.
“My God, look at that,” mumbles Walker.
“What?”
“Look at them candles,” he whispers.
“Which candles?”
“Look at them candles moving.”
At the end of the tunnel, the boys have tucked away the baseball and are tossing lighted candles. One by one the lights go out and then flare again with struck matches, all throwing deep-walled shadows in the distance. Power’s nephew stretches out his arm to catch one of the candles. Walker watches as the lights dance back and forth in the distant darkness. The workers and their families are lit by the shimmers. Slowly the lights fade. Randall stands stockstill at the head of the tunnel, fuming. One of the sandhogs snips the red ribbon as he walks past. Randall reties it himself with shaking hands. The last few yellow lights wink. The final candle gets thrown and is gone. Walker grips his thighs through his threadbare pockets, coughs, and whispers to his two friends.
“Them candles,” he says, “is about the prettiest goddamn thing I seen in my entire life.”
* * *
“They was just like fireflies.”
“What’s a firefly?”
“Y’all never seen a firefly?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll be.”
“What do they look like?”
“They flick like this. Ging ging.”
Eleanor repeats the sound. “Ging ging?”
“Well, kinda. Excepting they don’t make any noise. They just flick with light. Mostly when they’s rising up from the grass. Ya don’t much see ’em flicking when they go down. That’s just the way it is. And sometimes ya can take one and pin it on a thorn-bush, and it’ll glow there for hours.”
“Ging ging.”
“Ging gingaroo.”
“You’re strange, Mister Walker.”
“Why, thank you.”
“Ging ging.”
“Ging gingaroo.”
* * *
He works the various tunnels of Manhattan, sometimes digging, sometimes blasting, sometimes toiling again with underwater jobs, sometimes carting blocks or bags or cement or rubble — always the most dangerous work, at the head of a tunnel, the front hog. He works week in and week out, year after year, with a tolerable paycheck and a few dollars of danger money. No more spectacular resurrections and no more need of them — one life renewed, he knows, is enough. Walker’s body remains constant, the big arms, the tough rib cage, the ripple of muscle. After work, he likes to ride the subways on the way home. As always, he hangs his boots on the doorknob. He washes his clothes in whatever sink is around. Walker seldom even buys new shirts. Working boots are his only extravagance; he gets a new pair each year. Lying down on his bed, he listens to any music that comes over his wireless, rarely bothering to flip the dial unless there is the sure promise of jazz. In a decade of flappers, he doesn’t flap nor does he want to. He doesn’t search out drink when it is outlawed, but he accepts one gladly when it comes his way, mostly when he meets up with Sean Power: whiskey, grappa, apple cider, bootleg beer, tunnel gut rot.
Happy enough, unhappy enough, lonely enough, alone enough, Walker is apt — like a man who spends a lot of time with himself — to laugh out loud for no apparent reason.
Occasionally he ends up in a tunnel fight that is not of his making, and he only fights if he absolutely has to. Still, he flings a powerful punch, puts muscle into it. On the street, cops sometimes shake him down and he just lets it happen, knowing better than to say anything; they will beat him to a pulp if he opens his mouth. He puts money away in a Negro bank — it gains less interest, but at least it is with his own and he feels it is safe. On his twenty-fifth birthday he splurges on a Victrola in a Harlem store owned by a famous trumpet player, pays two dollars more than he would elsewhere, but no matter. Let it roll. Let it sound on out. Two years later, he buys an even finer model with a special stylus. He carts it home and winds the handle carefully. Jazz music erupts around him, and he does wild solitary dances around his room.
Women come and go, but mostly they go — they cannot live with the idea of Walker dying in the tunnels, and besides he is shy and quiet and, although handsome, insists on wearing his ridiculous red hat and the overalls.
Only his rooms change through the years: the hotel in Brooklyn; an attic in southern Manhattan at the edge of the old Five Points tenements, bird shit obscuring a skylight; an apartment near a slaughterhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, with taunts ringing out in brogues around him; a clapboard house off Henderson Street in Jersey City, with the smell of bootleg liquor seeping out from a shack next door; back to Manhattan, to a Colored rooming house around the corner from the Theresa Hotel bar; then further north to a cold-water room on 131st Street. The one and only constant in his life is his Sunday visits downtown to Maura and Eleanor O’Leary. Walker notes the passing of years by the way the tunnel dust settles down in his lungs; by the wrinkles that appear at Maura O’Leary’s eyes; by the deepening curiosity of Eleanor as she leans forward and touches his elbow lightly while he tells his stories.
* * *
“See,” he says to them. “See. They was building the very first tunnel in the city way back in the 1860s. A man by the name of Mister Alfred Ely Beach was in charge. Businessman. What’s that they calls it? Entrepreneur. Bow tie up around his neck. Fatter than Randall, even. And Mister Beach got to thinking that maybe the thing to do was to put trains underground instead of upground. No more trains in the air, only in the earth. And nobody in the city had ever thought of that before excepting this here Mister Beach. He was pretty goddamn smart—’scuse me, ma’am, but he was.”
Walker tips at a hat that isn’t there, and the two women smile.
“So he tried to get a permit for digging a tunnel under Broadway, down there by City Hall. Right under their noses. But he can’t get a permit no matter which way he tries, no way in hell they gonna give it to him. They’re making money from the El. They don’t wanna lose that. This is the 1860s, like I said. They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart. So he got himself some workers and they dug in secret right underneath Devlin’s clothing store down there on Murray Street. At nighttime they’d go smuggling the dirt back through the rows of clothes. Wheeled the dirt down the street while everyone else was sleeping. Nobody except the crew knew what was going on. Story is, the foreman was called the Tapeworm. They called him that ’cause he once cut out a digger’s stomach with a knife after the digger told the secret that they was building the tunnel.”
Teacups let out steam on the kitchen table while Walker talks.
“Anyways, they put in frescoes and tiles and all sorts of beautiful paintings and made that into the loveliest tunnel you ever did see. Just about the most gorgeous thing. That’s no lie. And right at the front they put in a fountain in the waiting room, a great big fountain with water piped up. They’d never seen nothing like it before. And ol’ Alfred Ely Beach he decided they needed a grand piano so they could welcome the customers. Just like this one here, I s’pose.”
He nods across the room at Con O’Leary’s piano.
“And then ol’ Alfred Ely Beach sent his first train through. It must have been a day! Story is, he hired a lady, all in fancy clothes, to come down and play the piano, and all the customers arrived and saw the fountain and heard the music and must have thought they about died and went to heaven. Anyways, they ran that train through the tunnel with pneumatic pressure, two big fans at each end pushing the train along. I don’t rightly know, but I reckon it might have been up to quarter of a mile or so. They ran it for a few years but they didn’t make no money, and ol’ Beach he was losing his shirt so he decided to close the damn thing down. So he bricked it off. Eighteen seventy-something. After a few years everyone forgot there was ever a tunnel down there in the first place. Even the men who made the maps, they forgot to put it on.”