Cooney In The Blue

Matt Cooney paused at the window of a three-room flat, a cluttered, disjointed space of failing plasterboard and exposed wires. He looked onto the street two floors below him. A cold day, and no one about. Papers blew through the soggy gutters, and he could sense again the near-carpet of cigarette butts and candy wrappers that coated the sidewalks there. Dingy, it was, all of it, both inside and out. Dingy, too, the man who regarded it. Cooney turned back to what passed for his kitchen, took a final sip of his morning coffee, and headed out. Nowhere, really, to go, but it was the thing to do. He would add to the clutter of the streets and leave the flat behind him to its rightful owner. Two weeks prior, on a blustery and bitter Christmas Eve, Johnny Duncan had plucked him from a storefront with a heat grate and brought him here, to this place only slightly less sad than the streets themselves. He had known Duncan as a boy, years ago, before his youth shattered in abuse, and abandonment, and petty thievery. The streets had become his home, panhandling his new profession, and failure his newest and most constant companion. Cooney had not seen Duncan in years, not since the before-time, when he had a semblance of family and neighborhood. Before his father left them and his mother drank herself into another dimension. Before the years in prison. He had known Duncan then, mostly from a distance, in the purity of boyhood. When Duncan passed him by that cold night, he did not walk on, but stopped to recognize him, and, in a gesture of grace that perhaps meant more to the donor than the recipient, took him in, just for the night, he said, and lent him the second bedroom in the small flat. Two weeks on, and nothing really had changed. Duncan made a hot breakfast the next day, Christmas. What he did not make was any suggestion that Cooney go back to the street, or stay just long enough to fit himself back together and find a place of his own, or even to help him look for space in a local shelter. Duncan said nothing of the sort, that day or any of the days that ensued, so the two of them fell, into a routine of comings and goings. Duncan drove a city bus, sometimes at odd hours, and so Cooney often had the run of the place. He did not abuse it, this special situation. He took nothing, other than the comfort of a predictably warm bed at the end of cold days. When he rose he would go back to his streets, back to the park where he would put out his paper cup and try to look both downtrodden enough to engender pity and endearing enough not to generate fear or disgust. Most days it worked, and he would come home with enough coins to make himself feel as if he were contributing to this very nontraditional household. This day, cold and lonely, Cooney took his place on the usual bench near the bust of Thomas Moore. He was not a reflective man, but today, warm enough under his thick coat, well enough fed and well enough rested, away from the immediate dangers of loss and abandonment and irrelevance, Matthew Cooney regarded this very small sliver of time, this accidental comfort against the series of failures that had deconstructed the fibers of his life. It wouldn’t last, this he knew. There would come a day, very soon no doubt, when he would take his smattering of belongings, give Johnny Duncan a firm handshake, and set again on his damaged journey. This was who he was – Matthew Cooney, architect of grand failures. He would fail again, and fail better, and he knew it to be his lot. But on this morning the sun still shone through air so brittle and cold it might break, and ducks quacked plaintively on the nearby pond, and a church bell tolled Matins. A young mother scurried by in a bundle of gloves and scarves pushing a pram with an equally bundled baby. The city breathed alive again in short and small sips. Matthew Cooney looked upward, shuffled on the bench, and looked up to the sky’s piercing blue. Failure perhaps, but Lord, wasn’t some of it grand and beautiful?