Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

out refuses to wear it again. So one day last month, after a year of acquiring new clothes for her, he decided to put them to some use. Give them to others who might wear them. Late one night, he furtively left his apartment with the blouse and hung it on the doorknob of Mrs. Jackson’s place. The next morning he watched the old woman come out onto the balcony. When she found the blue beauty on the doorknob, there was a smile splayed on her face that painted the whole world well.
    After Mrs. Jackson, there had been a welter of Juanita’s clothes hung out on doorknobs all over the complex. Juanita doesn’t mind. She doesn’t even know about it. Nobody knows. But people around here need them, by God. There are Maid Marians everywhere, though the forest is paved over and gray.
    â€œGood morning, Miss Jackson,” he says, nodding to the young girl with the bun—or the buns—in the oven. Both perhaps. She is suitably startled that he knows her name, and he smiles, then winks. “It’s a grand day.”
    â€œYessir,” the girl fumbles.
    â€œLovely flowers,” he says, pointing at the window.
    â€œYessir, lovely flowers.”
    Ah, but he didn’t mean to embarrass her like that, winking at a young one who’s up the Swannee. He shuffles on past the shop. Flaherty, son, keep your tongue in your mouth, you damn fool. He was always the one for embarrassing women. When he did the cabarets with Juanita in the fifties, one night they were walking down by the Liffey and saw two men huddled in the shadows of Merchant’s Arch. Dublin wasn’t renowned for its homosexuals, and he’d sung, in a gorgeous voice: In Dublin’s fair city, where the boys are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Michael Malone, where he wheels his wheelbarrow through the streets broad and narrow, crying muscle out your cockles alive-alive-o. The two men, furious at the ditty, made a move for him, their fists clenched tight. But when they saw his shoulders, and perhaps remembered his photographs in the newspapers—“the phonic pugilist” was what the Evening Mail dubbed him—the two men turned the other way. Juanita was embarrassed, as well she should have been. She said that no matter what sexual persuasion—sheep or shearers—they should be allowed to do what they want. Juanita is small and frail but has a mouth on her as sharp as a new blade of grass.
    Stopping at the traffic lights, he looks over his shoulder. The poor young girl back there by the flower shop, waiting for roses and proper pledged passions. Perhaps he’ll leave another one of Juanita’s blouses on her mother’s doorknob one of these days. One big enough for the baby, mind you. But, Jesus, aren’t wheelbarrows and roses—and even that awful thought, motherfuckers—coming up a fierce lot today? Must be the heat. Hotter than a jalapeño in hell. That’s Juanita’s phrase. She loves peppers. That it was too, hotter than a jalapeño in heaven or hell or anywhere else the night of the Caffola fight. September 9, 1938. Mustard oil.
    He can hear the roar of the traffic from the I-10 highway and the rumble of a trolley coming up Carrollton Avenue. He stands at the edge of the wide road, waiting to walk. To cross the road in this country a man needs a damn Ph.D. in civil engineering. And a body on you like a racehorse. Johnny X would do well here. He waits for the little green man—not the same one you find on a can of beans—to flash on. And remembers that he’s hungry. But onward we go. “We should go forth,” as an American poet once said, “on the shortest journey, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return.” But what would Thoreau know? He lived in a cabin by a lake all on his own. Flaherty, me boy, you’ve been reading too many books, and if you don’t get across the damn road quickly, the green man will be red and