Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,64

a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.

The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.

Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.

The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weariness like an autograph, but there was something jumped-up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.

There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg-stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.

He didn’t have much of a temper—one of the things I still loved about him—but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.

But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.

I tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was leaning on her elbows on the counter, chatting with the men. Something about their urgency trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.

One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and gluttonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part-owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance—I didn’t, not at all—but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.

—What’s going on?

My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.

—You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.

—Shot?

—Hell, no. Resigned.

—Today?

—No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.

—’Scuse me?

She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.

—Whaddaya want?

I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.

A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine—before the drugs and the art and the Village—I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ′68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was—we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON