Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.
I was still staying with Corrigan. He spent a few evenings at Adelita’s place, but he never told me a word about them. I wanted to know if he’d finally been with a woman but he simply shook his head, wouldn’t say, couldn’t say. He was still in the Order after all. His vows still shackled him.
There was a night in early August when I dragged myself back on the subway, but couldn’t find a cab on the Concourse. I didn’t like the idea of walking back to Corrigan’s place at that hour. There had been beatings and random murders in the Bronx. Being held up was close to ritual. And being white was a bad idea. It was time to get a room of my own somewhere else, maybe the Village or the East Side of Manhattan. I stuck my hands in my jeans, felt the rolled- up wad of money from the bar. I had just begun walking when a whistle sounded from the other side of the Concourse. Tillie was pulling up the strap on her swimsuit. She had been kicked out of a car and her knees were scraped raw.
“Sugarplum,” she shouted as she stumbled towards me with her handbag waving above her head. She had lost her parasol. She put her arm in the crook of mine. “Whosoever brought me here is going to have to take me home.”
It was, I knew, a line from Rumi. I stood, stunned. “What’s the big deal?” she shrugged. She dragged me on. Her husband, she said, had studied Persian poetry.
“Husband?”
I stopped on the street and gaped at her. Once, as a teenager, I had examined a piece of my skin on a glass slide, staring at it through a microscope: an amplitude of ridged canals striving beneath my eye, all pure surprise.
My intense disgust—so remarkable on other days—in that single moment turned into an awe for the fact that Tillie didn’t care at all. She jiggled her breasts and told me to get a grip. It was her ex- husband anyway. Yes, he had studied Persian poetry. Big fucking deal. He used to get a suite at the Sherry- Netherlands, she said. I assumed she was high. The world seemed to grow smaller around her, shrunken to the size of her eyes, painted purple and dark with eye shadow. I suddenly wanted to kiss her. My own wild, yea- saying overburst of American joy. I leaned towards her and she laughed, pushed me away.
A long pimped- up Ford Falcon pulled up at the curb and, without turning, Tillie said: “He already paid, man.”
We continued up the street, arm in arm. Under the Deegan she nestled her head against my chest. “Didn’t you, honey?” she said. “You already paid for the goodies?” She was rubbing her hand against me and it felt good. There’s no other way to say it. That’s how it felt. Good.
“Call me SweetCakes,” she said in an accent that loitered around her.
“You’re related to Jazzlyn, aren’t you?”
“What about it?”
“You’re her mother, right?”
“Shut up and pay me,” she said, touching the side of my face. Moments later there was the surprising condolence of her warm breath against my neck.
—
the raid began in the early morning, a Tuesday in August. Still dark.
    The cops lined up the paddy wagons in the streetlight shadows near the overpass. The girls didn’t seem to care half as much as Corrigan did. One or two dropped their handbags and ran towards the intersections, arms flailing, but there were more paddy wagons waiting there, doors open. The police tightened the handcuffs and herded the girls into the well of the dark vehicles. Only then could we hear any shouting—they leaned out, looking for their lipstick or their sunglasses or their stilettos. “Hey, I dropped my keyring!” said Jazzlyn. She was being helped into the wagon by her mother. Tillie was calm, as if it happened all the time, just another rising sun. She caught my eye, gave half a wink.
    On the street, the cops sipped their coffees, smoked their cigarettes, shrugged. They called the girls by their names and nicknames. Foxy. Angie. Daisy. Raf. SweetCakes. Sugarpie. They