This Side of Brightness (2 page)

“Touch wood, buddyblue.”

“I'm touching,” says O'Leary.

“Goddamn, even the planks done got warm.”

By the end of the day the muck behind the planks will be gone, carted out on the narrow railway track, loaded on carriages, and pulled by wheezing draft horses to a dump site in Brooklyn. Then the Greathead Shield will be pushed forward once more. Silently, the men challenge themselves to penetrate the riverbed further than ever before, maybe even twelve feet if they're lucky. They set up a platform to stand on. Walker unwinds a jack and Vannucci takes down two breast boards to create a window for their shoveling. Power and O'Leary step back and get ready to load the mud. The four will swap places throughout the day, shoveling and loading, loading and shoveling, slashing their shovels into the soil, burying the metal edges deep.

*   *   *

Nathan Walker will later sit shivering in the hospital lock and say to his friends, “If only them other guys knew how to talk American, nothing bad woulda happened, nothing at all, not a damn thing.”

*   *   *

He is the best of them, even though he's only nineteen years old. The work is brutal, but Walker is always the first to begin digging and the last to finish.

Tall and muscular, he sends ripples along his arm with just one movement of the shovel. He drenches his skin in sweat. The other riverdiggers envy his fluidity, the way the shovel seems to meld with his whole torso, the quiet mastery of his burrowing, the blade making repeated ellipses in the air: one, two, three, strike, return. He stands wide-footed on the platform, wearing blue overalls ripped at the knees, his red hat sideways on his head, a string sewn into the brim so he can tie it under his chin. Every ten seconds the oozy muck comes out from between the breast boards at hip level. Walker turns up shells as he digs, and he rubs them clean with his fingers. He would like to find a slice of bone, an arrowhead, or a piece of petrified wood, but he never does. Sometimes he imagines plants growing down there, yellow jasmine and magnolias and huckleberry bushes. The edges of the Okefenokee swamp come back to him in waves, murky brown waters that pile into the Suwanee of his home.

Walker has been digging for two years. He arrived on a train from Georgia, the steam whistle ringing high and shrill in his ears.

The steel shield extends above his head, but much of the time he has to go beyond the shield where there's no protection. None of the men wear helmets, and all that's left is just them and river soil.

Walker takes off his shirt and digs bare-chested.

Only the river's muck is cool against his skin, and at times he smears it on his body, over his dark chest and ribs. It feels good to the touch, and soon he is filthy from head to toe.

He knows that at any moment an avalanche of muck and water could sweep the men backward. They could drown with the East River going down their throats, strange fish and odd rocks in their bellies. The water could pin them against the Greathead Shield while the alarm sounds—a frantic
rat tat tat tat
of tools on steel—while the men further back in the tunnel scramble toward safety. Or escaping air could suck them against the wall, hurl them through space, shatter their spines against a breast board. Or a shovel might slip and slice a man's forehead clean open. Or fire could lick through the tunnel. Or the bends—the dreaded bends—could send nitrogen bubbles racing to their knees or shoulders or brains. Walker has seen men collapse in the tunnel, grasping at their joints, their bodies ribboned in sudden agony; it's a sandhog's disease, there is nothing anyone can do about it, and the afflicted are taken back to the manlock, where their bodies are decompressed as slowly as possible.

But these things don't scare Walker—he is alive, and in yellowy darkness he uses every ounce of his body to shove the river tunnel along.

The muckers have a special language—hydraulic jack, trench jack, excelsior, shimmy, taper rings, erector shield—but after a while their language is mostly silence. Words are precious in the compressed air. “Goddammit!” brings a bead of sweat to the men's brows. An economy of hush and striking shovels, Walker breaking it very occasionally with his own gospel song.

“Lord, I ain't seen a sunset

Since I come on down.

No, I ain't seen nothing like a sunset

since I come on down.”

As he sings, Power and Vannucci time their digging to the rhythm.

A tube sucks out the water from around their feet. The men call it the toilet, and sometimes they piss right into it so the smell doesn't hang around. Nothing worse than stale piss in the heat. They hold back their bowels so they don't have to shit, and, besides, it's difficult to shit in air that's twice its normal pressure; it all stays in the gut until later, when they hit the water of the hog-house showers. Sometimes it comes out without warning, and they yell through the mist of hot air, “Who spiked them barbecue beans?”

Two hours of work and the tunnel is three feet deeper in length than before. The excavated muck has filled many small carriages, the containers shunted back and forth on the railway track with great regularity.

Vannucci watches Walker and learns from him. The Italian has a long stringy body, with blue veins striated on his arms. For this, the men call him Rhubarb. He first came down as a dynamiter, lighting and blasting and uncoiling his way through the tunnel's opening, but the blasting was finished early and there was just pure muck left. A man can't blast muck, much as he might want to, but Rhubarb still keeps a wrapped fuse in his pocket as a talisman. He has few English words with which to talk to the other men, so he speaks in his work and they respect him for it. Rhubarb hefts another shovelful of muck, while beside him Walker grunts.

One, two, three, strike, return.

Con O'Leary pants as he leans into the work. To his left, Sean Power sucks blood from his palm, having cut his hand on a sharp edge of the shield.

The men are beating the river and they are happy.

Soon the assembly gang will come along and put in a ring of steel—the pieces jammed into place by a small derrick, rotated by a powerful erector arm, then bolted on—and the tunnel will snake further toward Manhattan. The foremen will be delighted; they will rub their hands together and think of the day when trains run under the East River.

And then, at 8:17
A.M
., when Nathan Walker has his back turned to the wall of mud, Rhubarb Vannucci lets out his very first attempt at a full English sentence. His shovel is in mid-swing, one shoulder high, the other low. Unseen by Walker, a tiny hole has appeared in the tunnel wall, a weak spot in the riverbed. The pressurized air hisses out. Vannucci grabs at a bag of hay to stuff the hole, but the dirt whirls from around it and the air escapes and the hole grows wider. At first the weak spot is the size of a fist, then a heart, then a head. The Italian can only watch as the young black man is whipped backward. Walker's feet can't grip the soil. He slides toward the widening hole and is sucked into it, shovel first, then his outstretched arms, followed by his head, right down to his shoulders, where his body stops, a cork in the tunnel. His upper torso belongs to the soil, his legs to the tunnel. Pebbles and river dirt greet him. The escaping air pushes at his feet. The soil sucks around his legs. Vannucci steps to the blowout and grabs Walker's ankles to try and drag the riverdigger down. As he pulls, the other two muckers come forward, and both of them hear the echo of the Italian's sentence around them.

“Shit! Air go out! Shit!”

*   *   *

On most afternoons before the blowout, the four men emerge from the hog-house showers, where the water jets out in irregular spurts from black hoses above their heads and the dirt makes puddles at their feet. Steam rises from beneath their overcoats when they hit the cold air outside. In the saloon off Montague Street they laugh at the sight of one another's clean faces. For the first time all day they can see the cleft in Con O'Leary's chin, the scars around Nathan Walker's eyes, the rude bumps in Sean Power's nose, and Rhubarb Vannucci's sleek brown skin.

It is a dark bar, all wood, no mirrors.

The men pick sawdust from the floor and roll a few tiny pieces into their cigarettes. They sit in a corner snug, pass around a single match. Blue clouds of smoke rise above their heads. The barman, Brickbat Jones, carries a tray of eight beers toward them, his hands trembling with the weight. A garter swallows his tiny forearm.

“What's up, boys?”

“Nothing much. You?”

“Same ol' same ol'. You boys look thirsty.”

“I've a mouth as dry as a farmer's sock!” shouts Power.

Brickbat is the only barman around who lets black men drink in his pub. Walker once saved a hammer from splitting open Brickbat's head. He caught the weapon mid-swing and afterward never said a word about it, simply tossing the hammer in a garbage can on the way home. From then on, Walker's beer cost a penny less for the week and free tobacco was dropped in his overcoat pocket.

“How's the tunnel, boys?”

“Halfway along.”

“Takes a brave man,” says Brickbat.

“Takes a stupid man,” says O'Leary.

“Or a thirsty man!” roars Power, raising his glass.

The men drink in big noisy gulps, no method to it, as if they were a million miles from the rhythm of the tunnel. Their words come hard and gruff at first: a dime less in last week's pay, the grouter in the manlock cheating at cards, the shredded remains of British soldiers that they hear about at home on their wirelesses, the possibility of American troops joining the fight in Europe. But their words and their throats are soon softened by drink. They relax and laugh. Stories are summoned up and melodeons are taken from pockets. Music coughs around the bar. Different languages blend. The men arm-wrestle. Sometimes a fight erupts. Or a man pisses at the bar counter and gets thrown out. Or a whore walks by the window, all red lips and drama, decoratively lifting the hem of her dress. Wolf whistles sound out and the men stare at the passing woman, their hearts growing huge and quiescent with lust. A clock lets out a gong on the quarter hour.

Rhubarb Vannucci is the first to leave, after two beers and four gongs, turning his overcoat collar up around his neck even before the last swallow.

“Ciao, amici.”

“See ya later, Ruby.”

“Hey, Rhubarb!”

“Sì?”

“A word of advice.”

“No understand.”

“Don't forget the custard.”

It is Power's joke—rhubarb with custard—but he has never explained it to the Sicilian.

The men chuckle and order another round. Empty glasses pile up around them. Smoke swivels in the air, and the seashell ashtrays become full.

Con O'Leary is next to leave, walking the cobbled streets toward the docks. He takes a ferry to Manhattan, stands in the cabin with the ferryman, then descends the gangplank and meanders through the darkening streets. His body is a father to his real age, rheumatism in it, feeling seventy although he's only thirty-four. His belly jiggles as he walks. The studded heels of his boots raise sparks. Soon the tenement houses of the Lower East Side greet him. When he turns a corner he sees his wife, Maura, leaning out of a window, waving from under her umbrella of electric red hair. He waves back and she hurries to the kitchen, where she pours two mugs of tea.

Third to leave the bar is Walker, nodding to Brickbat Jones as he goes. He shoves some chewing tobacco in his mouth at the front door and spits as he strolls the streets. Back at the Colored hotel where he lives, he hangs his boots on the doorknob so they don't stain the carpet. The room is tiny. It smells of old shirts and socks and sadness. Walker lies down on his orange bedspread with his arms folded behind his head and drifts off to sleep, dreaming of Georgia and days when he took a boat through the swamps.

Power is always last to go, reeling out to the wet streets at final call, lifting his cap to the moon. There are sunrises on Power's fingers, big oval nicotine stains, and sometimes he staggers around in such a drunken stupor that there are the beginnings of sunrises in the sky too.

*   *   *

The shout rips along the tunnel, from mucker to assembly man to grouter to waterboy all the way back to the man who controls the compression machine: Blowout! Lower the pressure! Take it down!
Abbassa la pressione! Obnizy
ci
nienie!
The pressure! Hey!
La pressione!
Lower it!