This Side of Brightness Read Online Free Page B

points toward the bulge, and Maura folds her hands across it.
    â€œThere was no time to look for Con’s body,” he says. “We believe he got stuck in a second blowout. That’s all we can say. Will a hundred dollars suffice?”
    Randall coughs and makes curlicues at the ends of his tawny mustache.
    â€œThe body might emerge; then we can pay for the funeral too. We’ll pay for the funeral anyway. Are you going to have a funeral? Ma’am? Mrs. O’Leary? I believe in looking after my workers.”
    â€œYou do?”
    â€œAlways looked after my workers.”
    â€œYou can leave now, please.”
    â€œThere’s always hope.”
    â€œI appreciate your faith, but you can leave.”
    His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. Randall mops his brow with a handkerchief. Beads of sweat reappear immediately.
    â€œI said you can leave.”
    â€œMa’am?”
    â€œLeave.”
    â€œIf that’s how you want it, ma’am.”
    Maura O’Leary watches Con’s shirtsleeves flapping in the window, greeting the snow. She runs her finger around the rim of an empty teacup, curses herself for offering Randall some tea. She says nothing more, just goes to the front door and gently pulls it open for him. She stands behind the frame. The neighbors step back and let the man pass, watching him as he lumbers down the stairs, a roll of fat wobbling at the back of his neck. The women file back into Maura’s room, half a dozen accents merging into one. The sound of a car outside drowns out the muffled clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. Children are playing baseball with hurley sticks. At the window, Maura watches the children step out of the path of Randall’s motorcar, some of the boys reaching out to touch its waxed body. Maura pulls across the lace curtain and turns away.
    The neighbors clasp their hands and hang their heads, too polite to ask what happened. Maura stands with them—nobody wants the chair—and combs a long strand of hair away from her eye. She tells her neighbors that her husband has already become a fossil and some of them wonder what the word means, but they nod their heads anyway and let it hang on the edge of their lips: fossil.
    *   *   *
    Nathan Walker repeats the word after making a brief visit to Maura’s apartment, having left an envelope full of money on the kitchen table after passing the hat among the sandhogs.
    He walks the bright winter streets toward the ferry and wipes at his eyes with an overcoat sleeve, recalling one evening last winter after work. He was coming out early from the hog-house showers and was set upon by four drunken welders. They used the handles of pickaxes as weapons. The blows rained down on the top of his skull, and he fell. One of the welders leaned over and whispered the word “nigger” in his ear, as if he had just invented it. “Hey, nigger.” Walker looked up and smashed the man’s teeth with the heel of an open palm. The pickax handles hit him again, the wood slipping on his bloody face. And then came a shout—“Jaysus Christ!”—and he recognized the voice. Con O’Leary, out from the shower, stood only in his boots and trousers. The Irishman looked flabby and gigantic in the sunlight. He began swinging with his fists. Two of the welders fell, and then police whistles were heard in the distance. The welders stumbled off, scattering in the dark streets. O’Leary knelt down on the ground and held Walker’s head against his white chest. “You’ll be all right, son,” he said.
    A patch of blood spread beneath the Irishman’s nipple. He picked up Walker’s hat from the ground. It was full of blood.
    â€œLooks to me like a bowl of tomato soup,” said O’Leary.
    The two men tried to laugh. O’Leary had said the word “tomato” as if there were a sigh in the middle of it. For weeks afterward Walker would