He rubs the water over his upper torso, though it’s cold cold cold cold. His skin tingles and tightens and his nipples stand hard. He brings the snow to his veined forearms and underarms, thinks for a moment about venturing down to his crotch, decides against it.
Grabbing his clothes, he crosses the tracks. The tunnel, in width and height, is the size of an airplane hangar.
Treefrog jumps up a pillar and grabs a handhold that he has fashioned with a chisel, puts his foot between the pillar and the wall, heaves himself up with both hands, and he is on the first catwalk. With a lithe movement he is on the second, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, flicking one of his lighters as he goes, first with the right hand and then with the left, a huge cheap flame around him. His hair falls across his eyes so he can hardly see.
He reaches the edge of his nest — twelve steps and always twelve — and swings himself in.
At the entrance there is the carcass of a smashed traffic light, rescued once by Faraday. Treefrog has secured the light to a hook in the wall with barbed wire, but there’s no red yellow green since he doesn’t want electricity, no way; it’s better to keep the nest dark; he likes it that way.
He nods to the light and moves toward his bed.
The mattress dips in the middle from the imprint of his body and he sits, listening to the sounds of the world above him: the traffic on the West Side Highway, the high-pitched yelps of the kids tobogganing in the park, the low growls of Manhattan. Treefrog pulls some extra clothes from the sleeping bag where he has kept them warm during the night — three pairs of socks, a second coat, another pair of gloves, and an extra T-shirt, which he puts in his pocket to use as a scarf. He climbs down once more from his damp nest to the frozen mud of the tunnel floor. He likes to balance on the metal rails as he walks. Five minutes along, he passes the concrete cubicles of Dean, Elijah, Papa Love, and Faraday, but all is quiet. He moves through the shafts of light, comes to the stairwell, climbs, and then squeezes himself through the hole in the ironwork gate.
Outside, in the world, the snow is so white that it hurts his eyes. Treefrog searches through his pockets for his sunglasses.
* * *
The crane is not around when he gets to the river. The ice has insinuated itself further into the Hudson, and the place where he threw the bricks has resealed itself like a wound, just a few pieces of timber and a plastic oil container frozen at the edge now. Barges are out in the channel, where the water still flows amid occasional chunks of ice. Further south, houseboats are tethered to the docks, icicles hanging in shards off the ropes.
The snow blows along the waterfront in vicious snarls.
Treefrog wraps the extra T-shirt around his face to protect himself from the blizzard. He moves through the park, along the bend of the highway where the cars are few and slow, and up the tunnel embankment. He dodges a few snowballs from teenagers, counting his steps as he trudges through the six-inch snow. In the playground near 97th Street he spreads a blue plastic bag over a picnic table that is chained to the chicken-wire fence and sits down, far away from the swings.
A few children move delightedly through the snow. He doesn’t go nearer for fear of frightening them. Or their mothers. If they looked at him closely they might recognize him, although his hair used to be short, cropped tight to his head, and he didn’t have the beard.
From the table he can look down onto the playground: two fiberglass dinosaurs for the children to sit on, a curved silver slide, two smaller slides, some monkey bars, a swinging bridge, a suspended tire, and six swings in a perfect row, three for small kids, three for older ones.
The bitter cold chews at his body, and the wind freezes mucus to his beard.
But when he takes off his sunglasses and puts them on his head, he sees his daughter. It is summer, years ago, and she is eleven years old, wearing an orange dress, beads in her hair, and the trees are green, the light is yellow, the playground is humming, and the earth is alive — those were the good times — and she is swinging her way merrily through the air, arms outstretched, feet tucked under the swing, white sneakers, blue socks, her hem to her knees. He stands behind her and catches the swing, pushes her higher, and then his hands move slightly and he feels the familiar huge hollowness in his body and he pulls away, wincing at the vision.
A pang of hunger whistles through his stomach and rests in his liver. He needs to find some cans or bottles to redeem. Treefrog stands and billows air into the empty blue plastic bag; the cans will be heavy today with all the melted snow inside them. He should eat a sandwich, maybe. Or buy some chicken in the Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Perhaps another bottle of gin if he can afford it. He has heard that up north, in Maine, the places where you cash cans are called Redemption Centers.
At the edge of the playground, Treefrog waves through the sheets of snow to his daughter, puts his glasses back down to his nose, wipes a frosting of ice from his beard, and moves on, shivering, up 97th Street toward Broadway, where he becomes a solitary man dipping into the garbage cans of Manhattan.
chapter 4. 1916–32
Each weekday morning, when Nathan Walker descends the tunnel under the East River to continue the job of digging, he spends a moment alone and says a few words to the man coffined in the soil above him. The other sandhogs leave him be. Walker slaps his shovel against the steel ceiling, and it rings out loud and metallic.
“Hey, Con,” he says. “Hey, bud.”
He moves on to the end of the tunnel, mud splashing up to the back of his torn overalls. At the Greathead Shield the digging has just begun. Vannucci is already hard at work with two new sandhogs. Sean Power can no longer dig, his body mangled by the accident. Walker steps through the door in the shield and tips his hat to the new men. They nod back. In just two weeks they have already formed the necessary bonds of muckers. Silently, Walker begins his day’s digging, but after a while he begins to feel the rhythm seep into him and he lets his tunnel song escape his lips: Lord, I ain’t seen a sunset since I come on down; no, I ain’t seen nothing like a sunset since I come on down.
* * *
Eleanor O’Leary is born at home nineteen days after the blowout, on Maura’s thirty-fourth birthday. Carmela Vannucci is the midwife. She brings the baby out with gentle ease and whispers prayers in Italian. There is an uproar of red hair on the baby’s head.
Maura lies back in her bed — the sheets, rough to the touch, are made from bleached flour bags, still faintly fragrant of something like wheat — and she thinks of her husband and his pocket watch, wonders if it is still running in the river soil. At night Maura remembers herself to sleep and wakes to find the smell of wheat even stronger. Sometimes, in her drowsiness, she thinks she has returned to the ocher fields of Roscommon with a confetti of swans beating across the sky, but when she rises to look out the window it is the gas lamplights of Manhattan that stare back at her.
When she’s well enough to take visitors, she puts a dark dress over her nightgown, props herself up in bed, and says nothing about the dreams that she has of her husband’s watch — it is there, ticking away in his ribs, his bones are knotted together with suspenders, and the second hand is counting the drip-away of his flesh.
After a month Maura finds work in a paintbrush factory not too far from the East River. The foreman allows her to take the baby with her. She wipes a clean circle in the dusty factory window so she can look outside and imagine Con resurrecting himself upward through the water. He will fly out with his shovel in his hands and roar at the sun. The light will glint off the studs on the heels of his shoes. He will somersault through the air and then descend with the geyser, into the river, hanging on for a moment to a floating plank. He will swim to shore with a grin on his face, and she will meet him on the dockside and hug him and kiss him. He will stroke the cheek of his unseen child and say, “Jaysus, Maura, what a beauty.”