This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Page A

although just as dangerous, men dying when boxes of dynamite explode in their fingers, their bodies ripped apart and their thumbs blown so high they could be hitching a lift to heaven. At the age of thirty-seven Walker’s body has changed a little, just a slight slide out at the waist and a new scar above his left eye from a Great Depression riot when a policemen mashed a billy club into his head. He’d emerged from a diner one night into a dark sea of faces. The protesters carried placards. They were shouting about job losses and low wages. Walker had gone alongside the protesters silently and stoically. His wages had been cut too—the tunnels were full of desperate men ready to work, and he kept his job only because Sean Power was head of the union. He had moved with the flow of eyes. Screaming was heard further down the street, and then the billy club came from behind. It landed first in the soft part of his skull and then whipped around to his forehead, smashing against his eye. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the cop before he went down, and then there were horse hooves all around him. A hoof landed on his groin. Pain shot through him. Winded, Walker crawled across the street and lay under the awning of a cigar shop, feeling the blood run past his lips. At the hospital he had to wait five hours for the stitches—the doctor pried open the scab with brusque fingers—and the suture was done drunkenly, leaving a wormlike wiggle through Walker’s eyebrow.
    He strolls way uptown, along the landfill by Riverside Drive, past the shanties, then east toward a shop full of tuxedos.
    A bell sounds at the shop door and a small black man with granite-colored hair comes from behind a curtain, a pencil at his ear. He looks down at the mud on Walker’s boots, gives a derisory eye-flick at his filthy overalls and the red hat strung under his chin, and goes immediately to a row of cheap rentals, but Walker directs the clerk to the expensive rack. Under a faint yellow light he tries on a large black jacket with a shiny velvet collar. It is so long unused there is a mothball in the pocket, but it’s the only one left in his size, since there’s a dance in Harlem that night and a skein of men has been in and out of the shop all day. Walker counts out money for the suit rental and a new shirt.
    At home he washes his body in the porcelain sink and tries on the frilly white shirt. The buttons seem tiny and foreign. Arthritis has already begun to nibble at his hands. Walker can predict a rainy day by the pain in his fingertips. He doesn’t button the neck of his shirt but lets the bow tie cover the gap.
    He can’t help chuckling at the way the shirt frills rumple at his chin, at how exceedingly white the cloth is. “You are so goddamn handsome, Nathan Walker!” he says to the dusty mirror, and then he leaps across the room in delight and nervousness, swinging around a broken stovepipe, his knees protesting at the sudden violence of dance, a silver cross bouncing at his neck.
    The cross was bought for two dollars from a woman downstairs, a fortune-teller who always wears a long red dress and two feathers in her hair. She tells the future by the pattern of spit that tobacco makes in a spittoon. Men, and women too, lean across the metal cup and spit into it, the men in big gobs, the women in shy dribbles. She stares down into the tobacco grains and prescribes remedies for future despair. Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy—it’s a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain.
    The cross, she has told Walker, will keep his heart from ferrying its way into his mouth when he is nervous. He must wear it against his skin all day long, no matter what.
    Walker stands by the piano that has been given to him as a gift. A white ribbon has been tied around the instrument, so he doesn’t open the lid. He touches the