Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  I used to love it, Sid thinks; I loved parties, I went to all of them, knew everyone, always up for a good time. I was a lot younger. I’m sixty-five years old and retired, and I don’t like parties much.

  Sid thinks: who else can I call? He doesn’t trust any other cops the way he trusts Artie Cohen.

  Over the river, the sun’s getting ready to slam itself down into the water in an outrageous splashy New York sunset. Sid puts some money on the table, tries to laugh, tries to feel detached, ironic, but he looks down at the sidewalk again, searching for the homeless guy.

  It’s getting late. It’s September, the melancholy time of year he hates because it starts getting dark early. Already, though Sid has barely noticed, people are settling in at the other tables around him on the deck, inspecting menus, ordering food and drinks.

  Sid picks up the cane he’s been using since he hurt his ankle playing tennis, an old walking stick made out of sassafras wood, he gathers up his book bag, then begins to limp towards the stairs, still regretting he lost his favorite stick long ago, the Jimmy Carter peanut-head stick he got when he covered Carter’s presidency. He’s too vain to use the aluminum cane the hospital gave him, and he knows it.

  In the bar, Sid orders a last beer. He gets a pack of cigarettes, something he hasn’t done for years and, bag over his shoulder, heads for the street.

  Unwrapping the cellophane, feeling it crackle, smelling the tobacco, he lights up like a kid sneaking a smoke. It tastes great.

  Looking up and down the street, Sid waits anxiously in the doorway of the restaurant, but the homeless guy has gone. The street lights are on. People drift into the restaurants along the block.

  It’s fine out, a balmy evening and Sid sets off to walk the mile or so back to his place, leaning hard on the cane, but enjoying the cigarette, the night air. He passes close to the Marine Terminal, and the vast desolate lots for impounded cars, all of it butting up against the water.

  “I was a fool to be worried,” he says and realizes he’s said it out loud. “Old fool.” He tosses away the cigarette.

  On Coffey Street he walks across the little park and out on to the new pier. Halfway, his ankle begins to throb and Sid stops short, sits down hard on a bench. It’s a few minutes from his place. Somehow he loses track of time and nods off.

  A few minutes later, Sid’s eyes snap open. His nerve endings feel raw. Someone close by is watching him. He gets up, brisk now, walking as fast as he can towards his building, and then realizes he’s heading right for it, whatever it is, because he can smell it. He smells the stink.

  He smells the guy before he sees him, then he hears the voice, whining, asking for change. The man is in front of him, coming closer.

  Change, the guy says softly, got any change? A dollar? Fifty cents? I’m hungry, man. Please.

  It’s the same man Sid has seen before. His own height and color. Medium brown, but ashen from booze and drugs. Inside the layers of rags and filth is a human being who looks like him. He can tell that the man knows it, too.

  Eyes gluey with glaucoma, thickened by cataracts, the man peers into Sid’s face. A kind of dim surprise registers. He reaches out a hand. Sid keeps moving.

  See you around, the guy mumbles in a drugged daze, and looks at him again and Sid feels that in the man he can see his own death.

  Stop, Sid says to himself. Cut the melodrama. Then he wishes, for the second time that night, he’d given the man some money.

  Before he finally disappears, the man circles Sid one more time, leaving his stink, like an animal marking out territory.

  2

  “You have any idea what color he was, the dead guy?” I said to the detective in the red jacket who was still near the water when I got back from Sid’s warehouse.

  “Watch it,” she yelled and grabbed my sleeve. “Jesus, you almost fell the fuck in,” she said.

  I said again, “You have any idea? His color, I mean. White? Black?”

  “Black. I think someone said he was black. I heard them say. One of the guys got a look. Why?”

  I felt cold. “How long is this going to take?”

  “Give it half an hour. You OK?”

  I passed her my cigarettes again and for a few minutes we stood and smoked and I looked across the inlet at a ten-story metal cone where sugar cane had been stored when it came off the ships. I’d read somewhere that Ferdinand Marcos owned it once, him or his cousin, or some other Filipino con man.

  The place was derelict. Fire had reduced the machinery, the chutes, gears, wheels and slides that had serviced the cone, to a mass of burnt twisted metal.

  The detective looked at the inlet.

  “Poor bastard was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s not much crime around here anymore. I bet he was all boozed up and fell the fuck in.”

  She said she’d lived around here her whole life and had seen plenty of crime, especially after the shipping moved out to the big container ports over in Bayonne.

  “Jersey,” she added contemptuously.

  She could remember when there were crack deals on every block, people squatting in abandoned buildings, using them for toilets, gunfire all night. When she was still a kid, the school principal had been gunned down in broad daylight.

  “Used to be a bucket-of-blood kind of place,” she said. “People dumped their shit by the water, they even tossed out their dead cats, garbage guys would come once a week and scoop it up.”

  Times were better, she added, the waterfront getting developed, a supermarket coming in, even Ikea sniffing around.

  “Red Hook is now officially cool.” She grinned. “People fighting over real estate. Artists moving in. They’re planting parks along here in front of the old warehouses. It’s good,” she said. “It’s OK. My pop would have died laughing. He was a longshoreman, old school.” She crossed herself and threw her half-smoked cigarette into the water. “You know something about the dead guy? You have an interest?”

  I nodded.

  A police photographer I hadn’t seen before, in a vest with neon yellow stripes, darted in front of me, trying to get a good angle on the dead man in the water. It struck me: there was a lot of manpower.

  “You always get so many people out here like this?” I said.

  “I was thinking the same thing. Fucking beats me how there’s so much attention,” she said. “I mean the Republican convention coming to town, every fucking law enforcement person doing double, triple time getting ready for the politicians, and you get a bunch of people out by the docks in Red Hook crack of dawn Sunday? Someone with connections must have been interested.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Boy, I’m glad this summer is almost over, what did they call it, Summer of Risk?” She grinned sarcastically. “Now all of us are supposed to cancel our vacations, and go guard rich Republicans and the rich assholes giving them a kazillion dollars. Not to mention the fucking protestors. You ever been around one of those political events?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was down in Houston once, first Bush, Bush the father, not Junior, not the shrub. I was a kid just starting college, and it was something. There was like nutjob Christians throwing plastic fetuses at people because they hate abortions and there was some really rich ladies, I never saw such big diamonds, and it was like hot, like a hundred and fifty degrees. Never mind, where was I?” she said. “We got a system where only rich people get elected, and no one even cares, you know? I mean I’m for law and order, and I’m for capital fucking punishment, and I want to kill every terrorist bastard myself, with my bare hands if I had my way, I mean I think we should just like cull them, you know? Like animals. But it doesn’t mean I like rich people stealing from me either, and I don’t like seeing American soldiers abuse prisoners in Iraq, I mean what the hell are we, you know? They keep telling us, get over it, get over it, things are better, and then they crank up the fear, and I think: what the fuck are they doing?” She shrugged. “I just wish they’d fucking let u
s alone, bastards in DC who don’t give us a nickel for security.”

  Everyone was pretty pissed off at the constant change of alert levels by Homeland Security. Red, Yellow, Orange. Everyone was fed up because New York got a lousy deal on federal dollars for security.

  I said, “Yeah, Feds.”

  She laughed. “Don’t know shit from Shinola as my grandma used to say, right? They could come to New York once in a while, but they sit on their fat asses out there in DC and we never see anything. You read that last FBI bulletin with what they call indicators associated with suicide bomb attacks?”

  Distracted, thinking about who I could call, and where the hell Sid was, I nodded. You could almost always get help from another cop in New York if you made conversation about how ludicrous the Feds were.

  She said. “I love the part about how you should look out for ‘Sweating, mumbling prayers or unusually clammy and detached behavior.’ Or wearing disguises. Or the chemical odor. Sounds like every asshole that rides the subway. Chemical odor? My kid got plenty of chemical odor, you know? It’s called weed, you know? I come home I smell chemical odor. Some War on Terror. Why don’t they take a look around the ports, you know? You could bring a radioactive elephant in and no one would notice. You need anything I can help you with, apart from waiting until they get the dead guy up?” She put up her hands, palms out, and shrugged. “Nothing’s over, you know?” she said. “Hello? You OK? You were on a different planet, man.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. How much longer until they get the body out of the water?”

  “Like I said, give it half an hour maybe.” She put her hand on my arm. “So if you wanted, one night I could take you to one of the Republican shindigs, you get tons of free drinks and food and stuff. Good stuff. I heard one place they were serving Chateau fucking Lafite and Kobe steaks, you know? I can always get assigned to this stuff, I’m a woman, I’m Hispanic, you know.” She smiled and put out her hand. Her nails were bright pink. “Clara Fuentes,” she said.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said and introduced myself. “Not this year, but thanks.”

  “You’re taken, right? I’m not surprised. Sure,” she said, then got a card out of her pocket, scribbled her home number and her cell on it, handed it to me, and added, “If ever.”

  “Thanks.” I started to turn away.

  “Hey.”

  I turned around.

  “Take it easy,” she said.

  *

  I walked along the inlet away from the corpse to where a few small boats were tied up. I didn’t like boats much. All the times I had gone fishing, I loved it, but I was always scared, so I drank plenty of beer and concentrated on the fish. Also, I was a lousy swimmer. I almost drowned off Coney Island when a girl—a sad Russian girl trying to make a life and failing—walked into the waves and I couldn’t save her.

  Trouble was that I loved being near the water. I loved the city waterfront. It was one of the things that had seduced me about New York from the beginning. But boats scared me.

  All the time I was waiting, I could see the guys down in the water now, trying to free the corpse, still setting up to chop off the dead guy’s arms, but hesitant.

  It came back to me, the little girl who was murdered out by Sheepshead Bay on a case I did. Everyone thought it was a copycat at first, a repeat of an old cold case where another little girl got cut into pieces by a monster who was still out there. I didn’t want to think about it. It wasn’t related.

  For maybe the sixth time in half an hour, I tried Sid’s phone and tried not to listen to the sound of the saw. Saw on flesh, on bone. A small whirring noise in the quiet morning when the only other sound was a lone tug that hooted out on the sun-drenched river.

  “Artie? It’s Artie, right?” It was Clara Fuentes, the detective, and she was yanking my arm. “I’m not supposed to say anything, but you obviously got an interest, and I heard someone who was down in the water say it definitely was a black guy, and also about sixty years old, maybe seventy, far as they can tell, I just heard, one of the guys went down under the pier and said best he could see was he’d been in the water, the black guy that is, a while, hours anyhow. Can’t tell if he just sucked up water, or there was booze or drugs.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  I said, “Anyone been around this morning? You notice anyone passing by? Locals?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been here all the time; except for the guy with the dog, and a couple of other residents we all know, not a lot of people coming out, and if they did we kept them way back. Who did you have in mind?”

  I thought about Sid. “It doesn’t matter. What else?”

  “You look like shit. You need to sit down? You think you knew this guy?”

  My hands were shaking. “Yeah, something like that,” I said, sure now that it was Sid. He was dead. He had called me. I didn’t go.

  “It’s the stink, you know?” she said. “Even when you can’t smell it you think you can, right?”

  I nodded and dug out my cigarettes. The pack was empty.

  I went to the deli over on Van Brunt Street where I bought a fresh pack, cracked it open, held one in my fingers while I ordered some coffee, then stood and drank it staring at bags of pork rinds and potato chips and boxes of cookies with labels in Spanish. I tried to keep calm, keep focused.

  Over the counter were a couple of signs offering specials on “Swis Chez samwiches” and “Hot Kanish”. New York English had become a different language, and I laughed, thinking of the foodies who, driven by nostalgia, thronged East Houston Street on weekends for a real knish at Yonah Schimmel’s. Me, I couldn’t stand any kind of knish.

  New York had the biggest immigrant population since the 1920s. Four out of ten people in the city born somewhere else. Like me. I swallowed some more coffee.

  Standing in the store, wondering, like I always did, why they bothered putting ridges in the potato chips, I half listened to a conversation between the deli guy, a squat man with a pointy nose wearing a Mets shirt, and a customer, a woman with white hair and a shopping cart.

  It surprised me that they were speaking Russian. Russians had moved out from Brighton Beach across Brooklyn, into the immense flat interior of Flatbush, like Muscovites moving out across the steppes. I didn’t think they’d moved as far as Red Hook.

  At the deli, the conversation in Russian was about how gas prices were killing everyone that summer, and even if you drove to Jersey they screwed you, and about how developers were coming into Red Hook and there would be jobs for working people like them, finally, unless the artists fucked them over.

  I finished the coffee and tossed the carton in a garbage can, and went back to the waterfront. I hoped like hell they were finished getting the dead guy out of the water. It was almost nine.

  3

  They were already loading a couple of rubbery black body bags by the time I got back to the inlet, zipping them up, piling them in an ambulance that had arrived. The corpse was gone. Disappeared into the bags. Body parts, maybe. I didn’t know. One bag for each. More respectful, I heard someone say. Each what? Arm? The rest of him? His head?

  I remembered suddenly how they bagged body parts in Israel. After every bomb blast, you saw them. The kind of blast that killed my father on a bus he took regularly to his chess games. Wrong bus. They got the wrong bus. It had been intended for a different bus on a different route. When I got there, there were limbs on the street, and the religious crews had moved in. They collected the pieces. They had special bags. Religious Jews gave body parts a burial: even if you got a limb amputated, even a little piece of finger, they gave it a funeral. Otherwise, someone told me, you’d make a lousy show in heaven or wherever the fuck people supposedly went. Which was nowhere. You didn’t go any place. You were just dead.

  In Brooklyn, in the heat, I thought I could smell the bags. It was boiling now. I was sweating.

  “It was supposed to be me, I think,” a voice said and I turned around
and saw Sid McKay standing at the edge of the dock, leaning on a cane with one hand, a shopping bag in the other. “You look surprised, Art. Maybe you thought it was me,” he said.

  “Jesus, Sid, Christ, I’m glad as hell to see you, but where were you? I’ve been calling you, I’ve been at your place, where the fuck were you?”

  He held up the shopping bag. “I went out to Brighton Beach to do some shopping,” he said. “I like Russian bread. I’m always up early.”

  I said, “You know who he was?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “You got a look?”

  “Before they bagged him up, yes. So you felt sad when you thought I was gone? Sorry, I don’t mean to be sarcastic, I just always wondered how people would feel when I was dead. Like the funeral scene in Huck Finn, you remember?” He looked at the cane in his hand. “I did my ankle in playing tennis. I’m too bloody old, I guess. So you felt sad?”

  “Sure,” I said, relieved and a little pissed off because now I didn’t know if Sid was playing games, or he was relieved I was there, or what the hell was going on.

  “Look, I am sorry. My cellphone is all messed up. I’m not really good with technology. Artie, I apologize,” he said. “I got a little crazy yesterday, and I don’t know, I didn’t know whom to call or whom to trust. You wouldn’t have a cigarette on you, would you? You notice that everyone’s smoking again?”

  Sid spoke impeccable old-fashioned English. Tall, thin, handsome, his gray hair cut close, he was around sixty-five now.

  I offered him the pack of cigarettes. He handed me his bag, took the pack and lit a cigarette with an old Zippo lighter.

  “Vietnam,” he said. Waving the lighter, he looked up at the sky.

  “It’s getting hot,” Sid said. “Cold summer, hotter now. You notice the strange little rain showers popping up all the time, dry in Manhattan some days, wet in Jersey? Apocalyptic. Makes you wonder. It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, my dad always said. He always said it. He was a very precise man the way he spoke, but he was given to clichés. His family owned newspapers all over New York and New Jersey, he was obsessed with the business, and it made him rich. I delivered papers from the time I was a tiny boy. There were always black people who read newspapers. Colored folk. Black people. Negroes. African-Americans. I’m sorry. I’m thinking aloud.”