This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Page B

tunnel, the front hog. He works week in and week out, year after year, with a tolerable paycheck and a few dollars of danger money. No more spectacular resurrections and no more need of them—one life renewed, he knows, is enough. Walker’s body remains constant, the big arms, the tough rib cage, the ripple of muscle. After work, he likes to ride the subways on the way home. As always, he hangs his boots on the doorknob. He washes his clothes in whatever sink is around. Walker seldom even buys new shirts. Working boots are his only extravagance; he gets a new pair each year. Lying down on his bed, he listens to any music that comes over his wireless, rarely bothering to flip the dial unless there is the sure promise of jazz. In a decade of flappers, he doesn’t flap nor does he want to. He doesn’t search out drink when it is outlawed, but he accepts one gladly when it comes his way, mostly when he meets up with Sean Power: whiskey, grappa, apple cider, bootleg beer, tunnel gut rot.
    Happy enough, unhappy enough, lonely enough, alone enough, Walker is apt—like a man who spends a lot of time with himself—to laugh out loud for no apparent reason.
    Occasionally he ends up in a tunnel fight that is not of his making, and he only fights if he absolutely has to. Still, he flings a powerful punch, puts muscle into it. On the street, cops sometimes shake him down and he just lets it happen, knowing better than to say anything; they will beat him to a pulp if he opens his mouth. He puts money away in a Negro bank—it gains less interest, but at least it is with his own and he feels it is safe. On his twenty-fifth birthday he splurges on a Victrola in a Harlem store owned by a famous trumpet player, pays two dollars more than he would elsewhere, but no matter. Let it roll. Let it sound on out. Two years later, he buys an even finer model with a special stylus. He carts it home and winds the handle carefully. Jazz music erupts around him, and he does wild solitary dances around his room.
    Women come and go, but mostly they go—they cannot live with the idea of Walker dying in the tunnels, and besides he is shy and quiet and, although handsome, insists on wearing his ridiculous red hat and the overalls.
    Only his rooms change through the years: the hotel in Brooklyn; an attic in southern Manhattan at the edge of the old Five Points tenements, bird shit obscuring a skylight; an apartment near a slaughterhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, with taunts ringing out in brogues around him; a clapboard house off Henderson Street in Jersey City, with the smell of bootleg liquor seeping out from a shack next door; back to Manhattan, to a Colored rooming house around the corner from the Theresa Hotel bar; then further north to a cold-water room on 131st Street. The one and only constant in his life is his Sunday visits downtown to Maura and Eleanor O’Leary. Walker notes the passing of years by the way the tunnel dust settles down in his lungs; by the wrinkles that appear at Maura O’Leary’s eyes; by the deepening curiosity of Eleanor as she leans forward and touches his elbow lightly while he tells his stories.
    *   *   *
    â€œSee,” he says to them. “See. They was building the very first tunnel in the city way back in the 1860s. A man by the name of Mister Alfred Ely Beach was in charge. Businessman. What’s that they calls it? Entrepreneur. Bow tie up around his neck. Fatter than Randall, even. And Mister Beach got to thinking that maybe the thing to do was to put trains underground instead of upground. No more trains in the air, only in the earth. And nobody in the city had ever thought of that before excepting this here Mister Beach. He was pretty goddamn smart—’scuse me, ma’am, but he was.”
    Walker tips at a hat that isn’t there, and the two women smile.
    â€œSo he tried to get a permit for digging a tunnel under Broadway, down there by City