Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online

branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn’t catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then they would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.
    I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon of delight.
    I’d been in the South Bronx a week. It was so humid, some nights, we had to shoulder the door closed. Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below. Air mail. The police came in, clubbing. Shots rang out from the rooftop. On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized. Arson on the streets. It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes. I had to get out. The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere. There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves. I found a gig as a telemarketer but I needed a dedicated phone line in Corrigan’s apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected.
    Corrigan wrote out a list of things for me to see, Chumley’s bar in the Village, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park by day. But I had little money to speak of. I went to the window and watched the plot of the days unfold.
    The rubbish accused me. Already the smell rose up to the fifth- floor windows.
    Corrigan worked as part of his Order’s ethic, made a few bob by driving a van for some old folk in the local nursing home. The bumper was tied with rusted wire. The windows were plastered with his peace stickers. The front headlights hung loose in the grille. He was gone most of the day, in charge of the ones that were infirm. What was ordeal for others was grace for him. He picked them up in the late morning in the nursing home on Cypress Avenue—mostly Irish, Italian, one old Jewish McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 33
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    man, nicknamed Albee, in a gray suit and skullcap. “Short for Albert,” he said, “but if you call me Albert I’ll kick your ass.” I sat in with them a few afternoons, men and women—most of them white—who could have been folded up just like their wheelchairs. Corrigan drove at a snail’s pace so as not to bounce them around. “You drive like a pussy,” said Albee from the backseat. Corrigan laid his head against the steering wheel and laughed, but kept his foot on the brake.
    Cars behind us beeped. A hellish ruckus of horns. The air was stifled with ruin. “Move it, man, move it!” Albee shouted. “Move the goddamn van!”
    Corrigan took his foot off the brake and slowly guided the van around to the playground at St. Mary’s, where he wheeled the old folk out into whatever bits of shade he could find. “Fresh air,” he said. The men sat rooted like Larkin poems. The old women looked shaken, heads nodding in the breeze, watching the playground. It was mostly black or Hispanic kids, zooming down the slides or swinging on the monkey bars.
    Albee managed to wheel himself into the corner, where he took out sheets of paper. He bent over them and said not another word, scratching on the paper with a pencil. I hunkered down beside him.
    “What you doing there, friend?”
    “None of your goddamn business.”
    “Chess, is it?”
    “You play?”
    “Right on.”
    “You rated?”
    “Rated?”
    “Oh, get the fuck outta here—you’re a pussy too.”
    Corrigan winked at me from the edge of the playground. This was his world and he plainly loved it.
    Lunch had been made for them in the old folks’ home, but Corrigan went