cops to get out of the car, but they hit the megaphone: “Move on, faggots, move it!”
Corrigan gave a pinch of a smile as he pulled the gearshift down into drive.
“You know, I have a dream every night that I’m running my lips down along her spine, like a skiff down a river.”
He eased the van out into the street and said nothing more until he pulled in near the projects, where his hookers were. Instead of walking in among them, he waved them off and brought me across the street to where a yellow light pulsed on the corner. “What I need to do is get drunk.” He pushed open the door of a little bar, arm around my shoulder.
“Straight as a good fence the last ten years, now look at me.”
He sat at the counter, raised two fingers, ordered a couple of beers.
There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I was on the bottom bunk again, listening to his slumber verses. The flap of our childhood letter box opened. Opening the door to the spray of sea.
“You ask me if I’m using heroin, man?” He was laughing, but looking out the bar window at the rafters of the highway. “It’s worse than that, brother, much worse.”
—
IT WAS LIKE ALL the clocks agreed and the fridge was humming and the sirens outside sounded out like flutes. He had talked her free. Just mentioning her was enough for him: he became new.
For the next couple of days they saw each other as much as they could—in the nursing home mainly, where she changed her shift just to be with him. But Adelita also came to the apartment, knocked on the door, uncorked a bottle of wine, and sat across the table. She wore a ring on her right hand, twirling it absently. There was a grace and a toughness about her, entwined. They needed me there. I was hardly allowed to stand up from the table. “Sit down, sit down.” I was still the safe border between them. They weren’t ready to fully let go. Some propriety held them back, but they looked as if they wanted to leave some of their good sense behind, at least for a while.
She was the sort of woman who became more beautiful the more you watched her: the dark hair, almost blue in the light, the curve of her neck, a mole by her left eye, a perfect blemish.
I suppose, as the nights wore on, my presence made them feel that they had to entertain someone, that they were in it together, that they were more properly alone by being together.
She spoke softly to Corrigan, as if to get him to lean closer. He would look at her as if it were quite possible he wasn’t ever going to see her again. Sometimes she just sat there with her head upon his shoulder. She gazed past me. Outside, the fires of the Bronx. To them it could have been sunlight through the girders. I dragged my chair across the floor.
“Sit down, sit down.”
Adelita had a wild side that Corrigan liked but couldn’t bring himself to grin about. One night she wore a wide white off-the-shoulder blouse and orange hot pants. The blouse was modest, but the pants were tight to her thighs. We drank a little cheap wine, and Adelita was whooped up a little. She gathered her shirt and knotted it at the front, showing the brown of her stomach, stretched slightly from children. The small dip of her belly button. Corrigan was embarrassed by the cling of the pants. “Look at you, Adie,” he said, his cheeks flushing. But instead of asking her to unknot the blouse and cover herself up, he made a theater of giving her one of his own shirts to wear over her outfit. As if it were the tender thing to do. He draped it around her shoulders, kissed her cheek. It was one of his old black collarless shirts, past her thighs, almost down to her knees. He hitched it on her shoulders, half afraid that he was being a prude, the other half rocked by the sheer immensity of what was happening to him.
Adelita paraded around the apartment, doing a slight hula-hoop movement.
“I’m ready now for heaven,” she said, tugging the shirt lower still.
“Take her, Lord,” said Corrigan.
They laughed, but there