Read Online Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Colum McCann
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couple of wild dogs picked their way through the ruin. A burned neon sign stood upright. Fire trucks went by, and a couple of cop cars trailed each other for comfort. Every now and then a figure emerged from the shadows, homeless men pushing shopping trolleys piled high with copper wire. They looked like men on a westward- ho, shoving their wagons across the nightlands of America.
“Who are they?”
“They ransack the building, pull the guts of the walls out, and then they sell the copper wire,” he said. “They get a dime a pound or something.”
Corrigan pulled the van up outside a series of tenements that were abandoned but untouched by fire, yanked the gearshift on the steering column down into park.
A haze hung over the street. You could hardly see the top of the street lamps. Warning tape had been fixed over the doorways but the doors behind them had been kicked in. He drew his feet up onto the seat, so that his sandals were nestled close to his crotch. He lit a cigarette and brought it right down to the dregs, threw the butt out the window.
“Thing is, I have a mild case of a thing called TTP or something,” he said finally. “I started getting these bruises all over. Here and here. It’s worst on my legs. They’re splotchy. About a year or so ago. At first I didn’t really think anything of it, honest. I had a bit of a fever. A few dizzy spells.
“And then I was in the nursing home in February. Helping them move some furniture from the first floor to the third. Stuff too big to fit in the elevator. And it was hot as hell in there. They keep the heat turned up for all the old ones. You can’t imagine how hot, especially in the stairwell there, where the pipes were. Like Dante had furnished the place. Rough work. So I took off my shirt. Down to my string vest. You know how many years it’s been since I’ve been down to a string vest? And I was halfway up the stairs with a few lads, when one of them points to me, my arms and shoulders, and says that I must have been in some sort of fight. Truth is, I had been in a fight. The pimps were giving me a hard time for letting the girls use the bathroom. I’d been knocked around a little. Had some stitches over my eye. One of them wore cowboy boots and roughed me up good. But I didn’t give it a second thought until we got the furniture up on the third floor and Adelita was there, directing the traffic. ‘Put this here. Put that there.’ We heaved this big desk into a corner. And the lads were still giving me a hard time about being the only white bloke who still gets in fights in the neighborhood. Like I’m some throwback. Like I’m some Big Jack Doyle, you know. They’re all joking: ‘Come on Corrigan, let’s dance, man, let’s rumble!’ They say they ought to bring me to Zaire, I’m such a fighter. They don’t know I’m in the Order. Nobody knows. Not then anyway, they didn’t. And Adelita came over and just pushed her finger down hard on one of the bruises and she said something like, ‘You’ve got TTP.’ And I made some crack about DDT and she said, ‘No, I think it could be TTP.’ It turns out she’s studying at night. She wants to do medicine. She was a nurse in Guatemala in a couple of fancy hospitals. Always wanted to be a doctor, even went to university and all, but the war kicked in, and she got all caught up in it. Lost her husband. So she nurses here. They won’t take her credentials. She’s got two kids. They’ve got American accents now. Anyway she says something about low platelet counts and bleeding into the tissues and that I’ve got to get it seen to. She surprised me, brother.”
Corrigan rolled down the window of the van and sprinkled some tobacco on a thin piece of paper, lit up.
“So, fair enough, I get it seen to. And she’s bang on. I have this thing they don’t know much about. It’s idiopathic, you know, they don’t know what causes it. But they say it’s serious enough, you can get real sick from it. I
“Who are they?”
“They ransack the building, pull the guts of the walls out, and then they sell the copper wire,” he said. “They get a dime a pound or something.”
Corrigan pulled the van up outside a series of tenements that were abandoned but untouched by fire, yanked the gearshift on the steering column down into park.
A haze hung over the street. You could hardly see the top of the street lamps. Warning tape had been fixed over the doorways but the doors behind them had been kicked in. He drew his feet up onto the seat, so that his sandals were nestled close to his crotch. He lit a cigarette and brought it right down to the dregs, threw the butt out the window.
“Thing is, I have a mild case of a thing called TTP or something,” he said finally. “I started getting these bruises all over. Here and here. It’s worst on my legs. They’re splotchy. About a year or so ago. At first I didn’t really think anything of it, honest. I had a bit of a fever. A few dizzy spells.
“And then I was in the nursing home in February. Helping them move some furniture from the first floor to the third. Stuff too big to fit in the elevator. And it was hot as hell in there. They keep the heat turned up for all the old ones. You can’t imagine how hot, especially in the stairwell there, where the pipes were. Like Dante had furnished the place. Rough work. So I took off my shirt. Down to my string vest. You know how many years it’s been since I’ve been down to a string vest? And I was halfway up the stairs with a few lads, when one of them points to me, my arms and shoulders, and says that I must have been in some sort of fight. Truth is, I had been in a fight. The pimps were giving me a hard time for letting the girls use the bathroom. I’d been knocked around a little. Had some stitches over my eye. One of them wore cowboy boots and roughed me up good. But I didn’t give it a second thought until we got the furniture up on the third floor and Adelita was there, directing the traffic. ‘Put this here. Put that there.’ We heaved this big desk into a corner. And the lads were still giving me a hard time about being the only white bloke who still gets in fights in the neighborhood. Like I’m some throwback. Like I’m some Big Jack Doyle, you know. They’re all joking: ‘Come on Corrigan, let’s dance, man, let’s rumble!’ They say they ought to bring me to Zaire, I’m such a fighter. They don’t know I’m in the Order. Nobody knows. Not then anyway, they didn’t. And Adelita came over and just pushed her finger down hard on one of the bruises and she said something like, ‘You’ve got TTP.’ And I made some crack about DDT and she said, ‘No, I think it could be TTP.’ It turns out she’s studying at night. She wants to do medicine. She was a nurse in Guatemala in a couple of fancy hospitals. Always wanted to be a doctor, even went to university and all, but the war kicked in, and she got all caught up in it. Lost her husband. So she nurses here. They won’t take her credentials. She’s got two kids. They’ve got American accents now. Anyway she says something about low platelet counts and bleeding into the tissues and that I’ve got to get it seen to. She surprised me, brother.”
Corrigan rolled down the window of the van and sprinkled some tobacco on a thin piece of paper, lit up.
“So, fair enough, I get it seen to. And she’s bang on. I have this thing they don’t know much about. It’s idiopathic, you know, they don’t know what causes it. But they say it’s serious enough, you can get real sick from it. I
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