Read Online Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann - Free Book Online Page A

that I was beginning to understand it, or at least get an inkling, but he called out to me and said he was running across to the bodega. “Watch Sheila for a while, will you?” he said. “Her hat’s tilted. Don’t let her get sunburned.”
A gang of youths in bandannas and tight jeans hung out in front of the bodega. They lit one another’s cigarettes importantly. They gave Corrigan the usual handslaps, then disappeared inside with him. I knew it. I could feel it welling up in me. I jogged across, my heart thumping in my cheap linen shirt. I stepped past the litter piled up outside the shop, liquor bottles, torn wrappers. A row of goldfish bowls sat in the window, the thin orange bodies spinning in aimless circles. A bell sounded. Inside, Motown came over the stereo. A couple of kids, dripping wet from the fire hydrant, stood by the ice cream vault. The older ones, in their red bandannas, were down by the beer fridges. Corrigan was at the counter, a pint of milk in his hand. He looked up, not the least bit disturbed. “I thought you were watching Sheila.”
“Is that what you thought?”
I expected some shove, a packet of heroin into his pocket, some clandestine transaction across the counter, another handslap with the gang, but there was nothing. “Just put it on my tab,” said Corrigan to the shopowner, and he tapped one of the fishbowls on the way out. The shop doorbell rang.
“They sell smack there too?” I asked as we crossed through the traffic to the park.
“You and your smack,” he said.
“Are you sure, Corr?”
“Am I sure of what?”
“You tell me, brother. You’re looking rough. One look in the mirror.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” He reared back and laughed. “Me?” he said. “Shooting smack?”
We reached the fence.
“I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” he said. His hands tightened around the wire, the tip of his knuckles white. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”
He turned to look at the short row of wheelchairs set out along the fence. Something remained fresh about him, young, even. When he was sixteen Corrigan had written, in the inside of a cigarette packet, that all the proper gospel of the world could be written in the inside of a cigarette packet—it was that simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.
“You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”
We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
“You’re having me on, right?”
“Wish I was,” he said.
“Come on now . . .”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”
He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence.
“No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”
—
    corrigan drove me through the South Bronx under the flamed- up sky. The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson. The owners of the buildings, he said, were running insurance scams. Whole streets of tenements and warehouses abandoned to smolder.
    Gangs of kids hung out on the street corners. Traffic lights were stuck on permanent red. At fire hydrants there were huge puddles of stagnant water. A building on Willis had half collapsed into the street. A