“I made it,” says Angela, as she climbs across the low wall and smiles. “That’s easy.”
He swings in front of her, takes two steps, lights a candle on the bedside table.
“Wow,” she says.
“It used to be a storage room. They kept their tunnel stuff up here. I think there musta been a ladder or a stairs up to it one time, but there ain’t anymore. Hardly anybody ever been up here.”
“What the hubcaps for?”
“Plates.”
“Man,” she says. “A traffic light!”
“Faraday found that.”
“You got the electric?”
“I told you, no.”
“Wow. How big is this place?”
“Goes all the way back to a cave there at the back.”
“Treefrog the Caveman.”
“Gonna draw a petroglyph.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Listen, we gotta fix those cuts, Angela. Your eye’s bleeding.”
“It don’t hurt me none,” she says, touching her eye.
“It’s just ’cause you got your adrenaline going,” he says. “We should fix it before it begins to hurt.”
She picks her handbag off the floor. “Do I look okay, Treefy?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re lying.”
She rummages in her handbag and then she begins sobbing. “Elijah’s gonna kill us.”
“We’ll hide in the back,” he says, and he grabs a candle and they duck into the rear cave. He puts the candle on the makeshift shelf, and the light makes strange flickers against the blasted-out rock. She puts her hand to her nose.
“Man, you shit in this place,” she says.
“No, I don’t.”
“Smells like shit. I don’t like it here. I want my shoes. I want my mirror.”
“See, all my maps,” he says, pointing to a row of Ziploc bags.
“I don’t care about maps. Elijah’s gonna kill us.”
She moves out from the cave into his front room once more. There is still a tiny bit of light from the grills across the tunnel. “I ain’t staying here, no way. He’ll kill us.”
“Sit on the bed,” he says.
“No way, Treefy.”
“I won’t touch you.”
She fingers her loose front tooth. “He’ll definitely kill us.”
“You should see a doctor.”
She thumbs the tooth back and forth in her gums and whimpers, “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like doctors. Excepting Doctor Treefrog.”
He smiles and motions to the yellow canister at the foot of the bed. “I’ll boil some water, and then I’ll clean your face.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“I don’t have any drugs.”
She moves tentatively across the dirt floor to the carpet, and then she sits on the bed. Treefrog lights the remnants of the firewood and newspapers. Angela warms her hands over the fire and then fidgets with an empty cassette box that she finds on the ground. She uses the edge of the inlay card to clean the gaps in her lower teeth. She picks the plaque from the card with her fingers and flicks it away into the fire.
He moves backward, not wanting to frighten her, and sits on the floor at the foot of the bed while the water boils.
“It hurts now,” says Angela, and she climbs into his sleeping bag.
“Gonna fix you up when the water boils.”
“It really really hurts.”
“I know.” Then, after a long silence he says, “Wonder where Castor is? I haven’t seen her for a few hours.”
“How she get up here?” Angela asks.
“I have to lift her.”
She tucks herself further into the sleeping bag. “You gonna look after me, Treefy?”
And he remembers how, when Lenora was five, she got a high fever and he stayed home from the skyscrapers for a week while Dancesca worked. He bought groceries at the local supermarket. He heated cans of chicken soup on the stove. Lenora lay in the bed next to the blue plastic sheet. Father and daughter, they went through every photo in the house. She picked out the ones she liked. He got extra copies made, so Lenora could arrange them in the aquarium. When her fever climbed higher, he smoothed a damp cloth across Lenora’s brow and spooned the soup delicately, blowing on it first to make sure it wouldn’t burn her tongue.
“Treefy.”
“Huh?”
“You listening to me?”
“Huh? Yeah.”
“You gonna protect me?”
He dabs his bandanna into the boiling water, turns, and says, “Of course I’ll protect you, Angela.”
* * *
On Sundays, Walker takes a gypsy cab down from 131st Street and gets the driver to blow the horn beneath Clarence Nathan’s apartment. It’s a five-floor walk-up, no elevator, and Walker’s legs and heart rebel against the idea of climbing. Clarence Nathan and Dancesca come down the stairs with their daughter, and Clarence Nathan leans in the taxi window and pays the driver, tips him well.
He helps Walker out of the taxi and has to hold Lenora back from bowling the old man over. Walker has fashioned himself a wooden walking stick, and he leans against it. His remaining hair is herringbone-colored, and wrinkles have etched into other wrinkles.
“How’s my lil’ pumpkin?” asks Walker, bending down.
“Hi, Paw-Paw.”
Walker stretches up. “Hey there, beautiful.”
“Hey, Nathan,” says Dancesca.
“My-oh-my,” he says to her. “You’re getting finer lookin’ every day.”
The four of them descend the hill to the park with infinite slowness. Walker wears a new hat, a Hansen, with a tiny feather sticking out from the band above the brim. Lenora skips ahead of the three adults as they go over the mundanities of the previous week — baseball scores, basketball matches, the vagaries of the weather. The chat is light-humored and sometimes even turns to Walker’s ghosts. Dancesca is fond of the stories he tells about Eleanor. Clarence Nathan, who has heard the stories many times, often walks on ahead with his little girl.
They are splendid days, the finest of days.
Even if it’s raining they go down to the park and huddle beneath umbrellas. Clarence Nathan uses the flap end of a shirt to wipe the seat of the swings and occasionally Dancesca will bring a towel for her husband to slide down the chute and dry it for Lenora. Everything about the Sunday visits revolves around Lenora. The adults take turns pushing her on the swing. They gather at the end of the slide to welcome her. They lift her onto the fiberglass dinosaurs. Walker gauges her height by how she measures up against his walking stick. Sometimes he removes a bullet from his belly button, but the young girl doesn’t like the trick too much; it frightens her.
In springtime all four of them spread a blanket on the ground, sit under the cherry-blossom trees, and eat cucumber sandwiches, Walker’s favorite. When the evening sun goes down across the Hudson, they trudge to the edge of the park and Clarence Nathan hails a cab and slips his grandfather twenty dollars, and then the old man is gone.
One Sunday afternoon, when Dancesca and Lenora are visiting elsewhere, Walker takes Clarence Nathan down to the edge of a railway tunnel underneath Riverside Park. There is a gate at the tunnel entrance, but the lock is broken. The two men open the gate, slide inside, and stand on the metal staircase. Walker kicks away a bloodied hypodermic needle, and it drops to the tunnel floor. “Damn things,” he says. It is dark at first, but their eyes adjust and they see the grills in the ceiling and the murals painted below. Petals of cherry blossom fall steadily through grills. They see a figure emerging from the shadows, a man with several cans of spray paint. Grandfather and grandson look at each other, then leave the tunnel, Clarence Nathan wrapping his arm around Walker’s shoulder and helping him up the steep embankment.