Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,20

carcass out here and help us,” my brother said from the side of the van.

He was straining to get the old Galway woman through the door. The veins in his neck pulsed. Sheila was just a rag doll of a thing. I had a sudden recollection of our mother at the piano. Corrigan breathed heavily as he heaved her inside, arranged a series of straps around the woman’s body.

“We have to talk,” I said to him.

“Yeah, whatever, let’s just get these people in the van.”

He and the nurse glanced at each other across the rim of the seats. She had a little bead of sweat around the top of her lip and she wiped it away with the short sleeve of her uniform. As we drove off, she leaned against the ramp and lit a cigarette.

“The lovely Adelita,” he said as he turned the corner.

“That’s not what I want to talk about.”

“Well, it’s all I want to talk about,” he said. He flicked a look in the rearview mirror and said: “Right, Sheila?” He did a fake drum roll on the steering wheel.

He was back to his old singsong self. I wondered if perhaps he had shot up while inside the nursing home: from what little I knew of addiction, anything at all could happen. But he was bright and cheery and didn’t have many of the hallmarks of heroin, or at least the ones I imagined. He drove with one arm out the window, the breeze blowing back his hair.

“You’re a mystery, you are.”

“Nothing mysterious at all, brother.”

Albee piped up from the backseat: “Pussy.”

“Shaddup,” said Corrigan with a grin, his accent tinged a little by the Bronx. All he cared about was the moment he was in, the absolute now. When we had fought as children, he used to stand and take the blows—our fights had lasted as long as I punched him. It would be easy to thump him now, fling him back against the van door, rifle his pockets, take out the packets of poison that were ruining him.

“We should make a visit back, Corr.”

“Yeah,” he said absently.

“I mean to Sandymount. Just for a week or two.”

“Isn’t the house sold?”

“Yeah, but we could find somewhere to stay.”

“The palm trees,” he said, half smiling. “Strangest sight in Dublin. I try to tell people about them, but they just don’t believe me.”

“Would you go back?”

“Sometime, maybe. I might bring some people with me,” he said.

“Sure.”

He flicked a look in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to bring the old woman back to Ireland, but I was ready to let Corrigan have whatever space he needed.

At the park he wheeled them into the shadows by the wall. It was a bright day, sunny and close. Albee took out his sheaf of papers, muttering the moves to himself as he worked on his chess problems. Every time he made a good move he let the brake go on his wheelchair and rocked himself back and forth in joy. Sheila wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.

Some kids nearby had turned on a fire hydrant and were dancing in the spray. One of them had taken a kitchen tray and was using it as a surfboard. The water skimmed him along by the monkey bars, where he fell headlong, laughing, into the fence. Others clamored to use the tray. Corrigan moved over to the fence and pressed his hands against the wire diamonds. Beyond him, farther, some basketball players, sweat-soaked, driving towards the netless basket.

It seemed for a moment that Corrigan was right, that there was something here, something to be recognized and rescued, some joy. I wanted to tell him 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