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my words, y’know. But sometimes that’s my dilemma too, man. I’m supposed to be a man of God but I hardly ever mention Him to anyone. Not to the girls, even. I keep these thoughts to myself. For my own peace of mind. The ease of my conscience. If I started thinking them out loud all the time I think I’d go mad. But God listens back. Most of the time. He does.”
    He drained the teacup and cleaned the rim with the flap of his shirt.
    “But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled- down window.”
    Corrigan turned the teacup upside down onto his palm, balanced it there.
    “You missed the funeral,” I said.
    A little dribble of tea sat in his palm. He brought his hand to his mouth and tongued it.
    Our father had died a few months before. In the middle of his university classroom, a lecture about quarks. Elementary particles. He had insisted on finishing his class while a pain shot down his left arm. Three quarks for Muster Mark. Thank you, class. Safe home. Good night. Bye-bye. I was hardly devastated, but I had left Corrigan dozens of messages, and even got through to the Bronx police, but they said there was nothing they could do.
    In the graveyard I had kept turning, hoping to see him coming up the narrow laneway, maybe even in one of our father’s old suits, but he never appeared.
    “Not too many people there,” I said. “Small English churchyard. A man cutting the grass. Didn’t turn the engine off for the service.”
    He kept tilting the teacup on his hand, as if trying to get the last drops out.
    “What scriptures did they use?” he said finally.
    “I can’t remember. Sorry. Why?”

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    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “What would you have used, Corr?”
    “Oh, I don’t know, really. Something Old Testament, maybe. Something primal.”
    “Like what, Corr?”
    “Not sure exactly.”
    “Go on, tell me.”
    “I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t fucking know!”
    The curse stunned me. The shame flushed him red. He lowered his gaze, scrubbed the cup with the flap of his shirt. The sound of it made a high, unusual squeak and I knew then that there’d be no more talk about our father. He had closed that path down, quick and hard, made a border; do not cross here. It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way.
    The silence of brothers.
    He tucked the prayer kneeler at the back of his knees, like a wooden cushion, and he began mumbling.
    When he stood he said: “Sorry for cursing.”
    “Yeah, me too.”
    At the window, he absently pulled the cord of the blinds open and shut. Down below, a woman by the underpass screamed. He parted the window blind again, with two fingers.
    “Sounds like Jazz,” he said.
    The orange streetlight from the window latticed him as he crossed the floor at a clip.
    —
    hour s a nd hour s of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 32
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    caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain- link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree