Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,104

you might as well suck raindrops from a puddle.

It’s always been the older girls that work the Bronx. All except Jazzlyn. I kept Jazz around for company. She only went downtown now and then. She was the most popular girl on the stroll. Everyone else was charging twenty, but Jazzlyn could go all the way to forty, even fifty. She got the young guys. And the older guys with the real bread, the fat ones who want to feel handsome. They came on all starry-eyed with her. She had straight hair and good lips and legs that went up to her neck. Some of the guys they called her Raf, ’cause that’s what she looked like. If there’d’ve been trees under the Deegan she’d’ve been up there giraffing with her tongue.

That was one of the nicknames on her rap sheet. Raf. She was with this British guy once and he was making all these dive-bomber sounds. He was pumping away, saying shit like: “Here I am, rescue mission, Flanders one-oh-one, Flanders one-oh-one! Coming down!” When he was finished he said, “See, I rescued you.” And Jazzlyn’s like: “You rescued me, is that right?” ’Cause men like to think they can rescue you. Like you got a disease and they got the special cure just waiting for you. Come in here, honey, don’t ya want someone to understand you? Me, I understand you. I’m the only guy knows a chick like you. I got a dick as long as a Third Avenue menu but I got a heart bigger’n the Bronx. They fuck you like they’re doing you a big favor. Every man wants a whore to rescue, that’s the knockdown truth. It’s a disease in itself, you ask me. Then, when they’ve shot their wad they just zip up and go and forget about you. That’s something fucked up in the head.

Some of these assholes think you got a heart of gold. No one’s got a heart of gold. I don’t got no heart of gold, no way. Not even Corrie. Even Corrie went for that Spanish broad with the dumb little tattoo on her ankle.

—

When Jazzlyn was fourteen she came home with her first red mark on the inside of her arm. I as good as slapped the black off her, but she came back with the mark between her toes. She didn’t even smoke a cigarette and there she was, on the horse. She was running with the Immortals then. They had a beef with the Ghetto Brothers.

I tried keeping her straight by keeping her on the streets. That’s what I was thinking.

—

Big Bill Broonzy’s got a song I like, but I don’t like to listen to it: I’m down so low, baby, I declare I’m lookin’ up at down.

—

By the time she was fifteen I was watching her shoot up. I’d sit down on the pavement and think, That’s my girl. And then I’d say, Hold on a goddamn motherfucking second, is that my girl? Is that really my girl?

And then I’d think, Yeah that’s my girl, that’s my flesh ‘n’ blood, that’s her, all right.

I made that.

—

There were times I’d strap the elastic around her arm to get the vein to pop. I was keeping her safe. That’s all I was trying to do.

—

This is the house that Horse built. This is the house that Horse built.

—

Jazz came home one Friday and said: “Hey, Till, how’d you like to be a grandma?” I said, “Yeah, Grandma T, that’s me.” She started blubbering. And then she was crying on my shoulder—it woulda been nice if it weren’t for real.

I went down to Foodland but all they had was a cheap-ass Entenmann’s.

She was eating it and I looked at her and thought, That’s my baby and she’s having a baby. I didn’t even take a slice until Jazz went to bed and then I wolfed that motherfucker down, got crumbs all over the floor.

—

Second time I came a grandmother, Angie organized a party for me. She talked Corrie into borrowing a wheelchair and she wheeled me along under the Deegan. We were high on coke then, laughing our asses off.

—

Oh, but what I shoulda done—I shoulda swallowed a pair of handcuffs when Jazzlyn was in my belly. That’s what I shoulda done. Gave her a heads-up about what was coming her way. Say, Here you is, already arrested, you’re your mother and her mother before her, a long line of mothers stretching way back to Eve, french and