This Side of Brightness Read Online Free

accompanying them, planks spinning, a hydraulic jack cartwheeling, a bag of hay, an overcoat, a hat, a shirt, the most unlikely of flying things: it is morning, it is light, and they are up on a huge brown geyser, themselves and their dirt and their tunnel equipment. There are ferryboats on the water. Curious seagulls in the air. Dockside workers pointing in amazement. The three sandhogs somersault in the air above the river. The water suspends them for a moment between Brooklyn and Manhattan, a moment that the men will never lose in their memories—they have been blown upward like gods.
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    Walker’s first thought when he is rescued and dragged onto a boat, half naked, blood streaming down his face: I’m so goddamn cold y’all could skate me.
    *   *   *
    Maura O’Leary combs a single strand of hair from her cheek. Her face is lean and spare.
    Down its length the East River is quiet. She notices a few scows and barges and some bits of rafted rubbish on the water, the morning sun shining wheels of light in the flow. Some movement of workers on the piers. Mules and carts beyond the edges of the banks. And, in the river, nothing but a small gurgle, a few bubbles on the surface from the tiny, regular seepage of air from the tunnel below. Maura watches from the deck of the ferry in the freezing cold, a wool scarf around her head. Since dawn she has taken the ferry back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—it is her daily ritual. She has done it each morning since she found out she was pregnant. Her husband has allowed her the eccentricity. And, besides, the ferryman is Irish; he lets her ride for free. She is thinking of going ashore and taking a trolley home. Get the crib ready for the child, due in a month. Maybe make some potato soup for Con. Rest a little. Chat with the other women on the upstairs floor.
    She moves to go belowdeck as the river howls and erupts. A massive funnel of water greets the city on one bank and Brooklyn on the other.
    At first Maura sees only sandbags and planks of wood aloft on the geyser. She reels back, clutching at her stomach. Her feet slip on the wet deck, and she catches the railing and screams. The water keeps spurting, blowing the detritus of the tunnel twenty-five feet above the East River. Longshoremen look up from the piers, the ferryboat captain lets go of his wheel, workers on the docksides stand frozen to the vision. The sandbags crest the top of the geyser and hop around. A plank spins out from the brownburst and cartwheels down to the river. Maura watches as a bag seems to contort itself within the torrent and a curious, floppy limb emerges. She realizes that it is an arm and that a shovel is spinning away from it. A man has been blown from the tunnel! One, two, three of them! Raised from forty feet below! She sees Nathan Walker, his powerful body and the red hat that has stayed on his head like an autograph, tied under his chin with a string. But the other two bodies are hard to make out as they crest the water in their strange ascension.
    Her husband’s name—“Con!”—stretches out from her mouth, as if on elastic.
    The three men still bob on the upshoot, although the pressure begins to equalize and—almost gently—the geyser lowers them down to the river. As Walker crashes into the water, his head narrowly misses a chunk of ice. He submerges and then comes up and after a moment he begins swimming toward safety, his arms making great windmills in the river, churning a line of white.
    Vannucci and Power hold on to floating breast planks. Blood spurts from one man’s head. The other lolls as if his neck is broken.
    A scow is already heading toward them from the Brooklyn side. The ferryboat lets out short sharp emergency hornblasts. At the head of the tunnel shrill whistles are blowing, and a long rope of men uncoils to the light. The geyser dies down and becomes just a