Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,21

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 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