Free Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann Page A

plumb stupid, us running through the field like that, with our kids, when we had so much work to do. But I was stumbling along, hearing everyone laughing, holding on to my little boy, when I looked up beyond the top of the grass and saw how dark the sky had gotten, how big and heavy it was, how much it had come right down on top of us. We were laughing, but I knew right there and then what Kevin was doing. He was no fool.

STOLEN CHILD
    Padraic closes the heavy oak door of the children’s home and steps out into the Brooklyn morning light. He looks across the river to where the sun is coming up like a stabwound, leaving smudges of dirty light on the New York City skyline. He pulls up the hood of his coat and steps across the road. In the background he hears one of the boys kicking at the wooden door, a dull rhythmic thud. A young girl screams from the third-floor window. In the distance a police siren flares. Christ, he thinks, no day for a wedding.
    He pulls his dark blue anorak up around his shoulders, cups his hands, and lights the last of his cigarettes. He inhales the smoke to the bottom of his lungs, adjusts his glasses, and looks back at the home where he just clocked off the graveyard shift.
    A clutch of blind children have their heads stuck out the bars of the lower windows. One of the girls, her hair a shock of orange, is thrashing her head against the bars. The whites of her eyes loll obscenely in her head. He shrugs his shoulders to indicate to her that it’s not his fault, but, catching himself, he turns away, then pulls hard again on the cigarette. Padraic hears another shout from inside the home. He turns and watches a bread van cough along the street. The exhaust fumes languish in the air, and for a moment he thinks about letting the smoke carry him along, away down the dark puddled road, to somewhere very different.
    At ten o’clock last night, little Marcia, only fourteen years old, tried to slit her wrists with a tin mirror. She cut a narrow scar perpendicular to the veins while Tammy screamed over and over again that she was messing up, that the way to do it was to slice longways along the vein, rip it good and deep. When the lads in the boys’ unit found out that one of the girls had tried to do herself in, a near-riot had broken out. Jimi set fire to the couch in the living room. Chocolate Charlie put his foot through the glass case of the stereo, and two other boys had to be restrained. Nearly all the kids, those forgotten blind children, the snot rags of society, had spent the night beating their brains against the walls repeatedly—like birds with broken wings, unable to get off the ground.
    Padraic flings the cigarette butt to the ground. He walks toward the subway station, sweeping the bits and pieces of litter out of his way with his feet. In one of the houses he hears a radio burst to life. A curtain opens and a woman’s face fills a top windowpane. An old man in a mangy overcoat is out on the steps playing the Jewish harp and slurping on a bottle of Miller. He nods and offers the bottle, but Padraic gives a quick flick of the head sideways and the old man smiles.
    â€œToo early for the sloppin’?” he asks.
    â€œToo early for anything,” says Padraic.
    The steps down to the subway station smell, as usual, of stale urine, and Padraic skips down them three at a time, fishing in his pocket for a token. Nothing but loose change. He left all the tokens at home last night. He takes a quick look. Nobody in the booth and hardly anyone else around, except two young nurses shivering in the cold, a kid in a Van Halen Kicks Ass T-shirt, and a spindly little businessman reading a newspaper down at the end of the platform. He vaults the turnstile, hustles down to the platform, and waits for the wind to be sucked through the tunnel, carrying the clang of an engine.
    When the D train finally comes, it’s a local. He sits in a carriage alone, the seat bedecked with