Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  He talked about how eventually he melted into the community and people stopped noticing him. Two other sailors from the ship also disappeared and no one ever heard from them. He suspected they left New York on another ship, Canadian maybe; there were a lot of Russians who went up to Canada. It was cold up there. Empty. They could get a job in the oil fields up north, or head for Yellowknife where they could work in the diamond mines. Later he heard that one guy ended up in Nome, Alaska. No one except Russians would work that far north.

  Mack stayed in Brooklyn. He went to ball games at Ebbets Field. He found a girlfriend. He worked around the shipyards. For years he stayed in Red Hook; in the 1970s, when the Russians started arriving in big numbers, he drifted out to Brighton Beach and met a woman named Irina and got married and had a daughter, but Irina didn’t like America and she took the kid back to the Soviet Union.

  What about Sid? I said.

  Sid went away, he said. He went to college. Earl stayed. They were friends, Mack and Earl. They took care of each other, he said.

  “You stayed in Brooklyn for fifty years?”

  Why not, he said. Many people disappeared. Many people just disappeared into New York City all the time, just got off the boat or the airplane and walked away, no visa, nothing, just melted. He grinned. They are still doing. Is easy, he said. Very easy. Somehow Mack lit up another cigarette. In the light I saw his face; he was unafraid, of the water, the storm, the boat, me.

  I said, “But you met Sid again, didn’t you?” I was shivering.

  “You want to go inside?” He gestured to the little cabin.

  I shook my head.

  “You do not like boats?” he said in Russian.

  “You met Sid again?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am in Red Hook two years ago, and there he is Sidney McKay, professor, historian of Red Hook, philosopher, he is everywhere, making his little notes, asking people do you know this or that, do you know Russian who came on ship many years ago. You knew him well?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at me, squinting and said suddenly, “I know who you are. I saw you. I saw you go into Sidney’s place, yes?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I saw you go in Sunday morning, Monday morning also,” he said. “You don’t know about boats, do you? You don’t like boats. I can tell you don’t like this, you don’t like water.”

  “What book?”

  “Sidney is writing a book about ship. Red Dawn. Everyone knew. He wants to write history. He wants to tell story. I see him, he asks me questions, I say don’t write, please, don’t, leave history alone. Nothing comes from history except shit, I tell him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He says is all there is, history. I say for you this is writing, for me, is my life, I don’t want to be prisoner from history, please. I am not even legal, OK? You are not legal, people send you away. I know this. I leave Russia when they kill you if you break law, I say to Sid. I find Earl, I say, tell him. Tell him. Earl drinks all day, but he listens, is my friend. I say, if this comes out, they send me back. I leave Stalin time, go back Putin time. Same studio, different head, like they say Hollywood. OK?”

  Mack made the joke but in his voice I could hear the panic he felt when he thought about going back. He thought of Russia as the same place it had been when he left and Stalin was alive.

  “I do anything not to go back,” he said, yelling above the wind.

  “Earl went to see Sid? He did it for you?”

  “Yes. To make Sid stop. Make him leave me alone. Earl says, go with me, please, and I say, no, every time I see Sid he just asks me questions, what was ship like, what was Russia like, who was on ship, which other sailors, where they from, what you did all these years in Brooklyn, who you met, saw, which gangsters on waterfront, tell me about smells, sights, sounds, name ships you noticed, what kind of cheese in first sandwich you ate on American soil. What kind of cheese? Who gives one shit? He says, God in the details, and I think what does he mean, I don’t understand. So I told Earl, go, talk to Sid. Then I go, too. Is too late. Earl was drunk and sick. Sid hits him.”

  “What with? With a walking stick? A cane?”

  “I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. Or Baseball bat. Old bat he has from old days. Bat with Dodgers on it. Championship year. I watch, then I run away.” He was drinking and his eyes filled up with self-pity. “I run away, and Earl is dead.”

  “But you went back,” I said. “Why are you telling me?”

  He looked out over the water and up at the rain. There was water on the floor of the boat, and he waved his hand at it, and said, “Why not?”

  I knew then that he didn’t care if he lived or died. I wanted to say, take the fucking boat back to shore, let’s just go back; I felt that I’d do anything at all to get off the boat, but what could I do? I was with a man who didn’t care.

  I shouted, “Take the boat back.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s raining.”

  He laughed. “Is good answer.”

  Holding on to the edge of the boat, I fumbled frantically for something I could threaten him with. “Take the boat in,” I said again. “Do it. You don’t do it, I’ll make sure you go back to Russia. To jail there, you understand?”

  In the water in the bottom of the boat, the broken jar sloshed up against my ankle. I reached down and picked it up, half thinking I could use it as a weapon. I was holding the top half. A piece of the label was still stuck on the glass.

  The boat rocked furiously, and Mack did something with the steering wheel or whatever the hell you did with boats, and I thought again I was going to vomit. It was comic, me the tough cop, throwing up off a bobbing sailboat a mile from home in the middle of my own city. We came around the tip of Governor’s Island. I knew because I could just make out the ferry landing. I looked the other way, looked for the southern tip of Manhattan.

  I held the broken jar close to my face, and read the label. Borscht Works. It had contained soup.

  “So,” Mack said, face wrinkled with fear.

  “You got married?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You had a daughter?”

  “Yes, I told you that. Why?”

  “Rita is your daughter.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Rita is your daughter and she didn’t want you around, God knows why, but she didn’t, so she told me there’s an old man, she told me about you,” I said.

  I was my father’s son after all.

  “So we’ll go back to shore now,” I added softly, and got up somehow, trying to keep my balance. The edge of the glass jar cut my hand, and I could feel the blood mix with water. I threw the jar overboard. If I could get my balance, I could grab Mack. But then what?

  “I couldn’t let Sidney do that to Earl,” Mack said, almost dreamily now. “I couldn’t, and I didn’t want to be in his goddamn book. Don’t want people to know. I didn’t want to listen to all questions from the past. Do you understand?” He got up from his seat, the rain beating on him. “I killed Sidney.”

  I went for him, but he seemed to move backwards. I was falling. A wave socked me smack in the face. I couldn’t stay upright. We were in wild water again.

  “I don’t go back to Russia,” he said. “Not ever. No.”

  Over Mack’s head, I looked up, thinking I could make out the shape of the Statue of Liberty. It disappeared. The city emerged from the dark, the lighted walls, the solid buildings, but I couldn’t tell if it was real or not, then it all faded away as another wave cut into me.

  The single place on earth that I really loved, where I had felt safe, receded farther and farther from me, and I could smell the salt, and thought that we were going in the other direction, to open water, away from New York.

  For a second, trying to see through the rain, I took my eyes off Mack. When I looked back he was gone. So fast I barely saw him, he got over the edge of the boat and was in the water.

  33

 
; Sonny Lippert didn’t say anything much when he met me at the dock near Red Hook where the Coast Guard boat brought me. It was still dark, though it was almost morning and rain was pelting down solid from a pitch-black sky. I heard one of the Coast Guard guys say anyone who went out in this kind of storm was crazy. I thought about Mack. He was a sailor. He must have known it was crazy. Maybe he had done it to get rid of me. Maybe he never planned to come back. After he went over the edge of the boat, I had reached out for him. I grabbed his hand. I felt it, wet, cold; I tried to grab hold of his wrist, but he let go of me. All those years of fear, of hiding in Brooklyn, of wondering when they would send him back, he had let it go.

  Sonny offered to take me to the hospital. He offered to take me home. I said I was OK, I just needed my car and dry clothes, and he didn’t insist, just let me do what I had to and kept everyone else away.

  After one of the Coast Guard guys got my phone number and took some notes, Sonny drove me to my car. In the trunk, I found some clothes I had packed for the beach and a towel. I dried off with the towel that had red sand buckets on it, put what was left of my soaked suit in the back seat, and changed into dry stuff. In the back seat of my car was the picture of Tolya as a young rock and roll guy.

  Sonny waited near the car. I had swallowed a lot of water, but I was OK. He watched me get in my car and drive away.

  For what was maybe the twentieth time in a week, I made the trip back to the city, listened to my car bang around, knew I needed to turn it in, didn’t care, and cut across Canal Street. A Chinese woman was setting out piles of brown lychees on her stall in spite of the rain.

  The light turned red as I got to my block. I saw Lily before she saw me.

  She was in front of my building, holding an umbrella, looking up. Her bag was slung over her shoulder. She had called that morning and asked when I’d be around. She asked if she could stop by and I didn’t say no, so it wasn’t as if she was intruding. It was me.

  I looked at her. I was far enough away so she couldn’t see me, and I just sat like that for a while, didn’t know how long. I looked like an idiot. I had a kid’s beach towel wrapped around my neck. My head throbbed. My throat was sore as hell from all the salt. I was bleeding some, superficially, but bleeding, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor bastard who went over the edge of the boat, who let go of my hand. I had yelled, but there was nobody to hear. I couldn’t save him. He disappeared with his history.

  I wanted so bad to talk to Lily about it all and she was there, a few yards away. I could almost touch her. I didn’t know how long I sat there looking at her.

  I thought about all the betrayals, Sid and his half brother, and the short Russian who had swum off a freighter fifty years before. I thought about how close I’d come with Tolya. Everybody afraid. I looked at Lily one more time.

  I turned the key, started the car, put on some music, leaned back over my shoulder, backed the car up, cut across town west to the Holland Tunnel, the New Jersey shore and Maxine, and hoped like hell that she’d come home with me.

  Read on for an exclusive extract

  from Reggie Nadelson’s new

  Artie Cohen mystery,

  Fresh Kills.

  Part One

  Tuesday July 5

  1

  The steady noise of the engine above me changed, I sat up, opened my eyes, squinted into the sun. The small sightseeing plane flying low over Coney Island stuttered across the sky and I held my breath, waiting for the crash. Next to me on the beach, my nephew Billy was stretched out. One hand holding a radio tuned to a Yankees game, his big adolescent feet in black sneakers, laces trailing, propped up on an empty pizza box from Totonno’s.

  The plane disappeared behind backlit clouds, probably heading for some airstrip nearby where tourists caught sightseeing flights.

  It was Tuesday, a mild July day when only a few people, maybe a couple dozen, were stretched out on the sand near me catching some sun. Two old guys sat on low green plastic beach chairs and played gin rummy. A couple of women, their wives probably, who wore pull-on velour pants and matching windbreakers in pink and blue, sat near the men, reading Russian newspapers that rattled dryly in the breeze. Beyond them a Pakistani family ate lunch from metal containers, the compartments stacked up on each other, chatting in Urdu, probably Urdu, maybe imagining they were back home taking the afternoon off on some beach in Karachi. In Midwood, in the interior of Brooklyn around three miles from Coney Island, there was a big Pakistani community. Now, I could smell the spiciness of the food. It made me hungry.

  At the edge of the water, a chubby teenage girl with carrot-colored hair jogged heavily, her feet pulled down by damp sand. Two boys ran gracefully past her. An electric blue mermaid, also near the water, picked up her sequined blue tail, and scuttled up towards the boardwalk. The plane appeared again. Everyone on the beach looked up. No one moved now. Sun glinted off the mermaid’s blue tail.

  All this seemingly in slow motion, while music came from a boom box somewhere – Wilson Pickett’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”, which I’d always loved. I realized that the mermaid was one of the girls who dressed up every summer to march, if you could call it that, in the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

  The plane, out of control, zigzagged across the blue sky over the ocean, flew away from the beach, dipped down, one of its wings hanging loose, like a wounded insect. I got up, stumbled on the sand, found my phone in my jeans, called 911. It was too late. In a slow spiral, the plane lost altitude and then, suddenly, snagged by gravity, fell.

  In the windows I saw two faces looking down from the tumbling plane. Maybe they could see blue water coming up at them, Russians reading newspapers, a man running from Nathan’s clutching a hot dog with a wiggly line of yellow mustard on the dog. I wondered if the people in the plane could see the mustard, and what they were thinking, or if there was time. Then the plane hit the sand and broke. People on the beach backed away, expecting an explosion, smoke, fire.

  Next to me, Billy was already on his feet, rubbing his eyes. Around us, people were scrambling to their feet, grabbing their bags and towels, toys and cards, newspapers, chairs, radios, coolers, looking up, running towards the boardwalk, then stopping, unsure which way to go.

  Is it terrorists, I heard a woman say to her husband. An attack? The boom box kept playing; on it, the music changed, the Drifters singing “Up On The Roof”.

  The silvery plane lay near the edge of the water a couple of hundred yards away, crushed like a Coke can. The surf bubbled onto the beach and washed the pieces of the plane. I could just make out the bodies that were half in, half out of it, including a little girl who was maybe three years old. She didn’t move.

  “Is anyone dead? Is the little girl dead?” Billy was staring at the plane, rigid with attention.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Billy. “Come on.”

  We had come out to Coney Island because Billy said the first thing he wanted when he got home to Brooklyn was to eat a pie from Totonno’s. That and to sit in the sun and look at the ocean, and catch a few rays, he’d said, posing, his face up to the sky, hands on hips, like some guy in a TV commercial for suntan stuff.

  “Now,” I said.

  Cars and trucks were screaming in the direction of the beach, driving onto the sand, parking, emergency crews emerging. They were all over the wreck, pulling out bodies, loading them into an ambulance. I thought I recognized a detective in a red jacket I’d met someplace. Smoke trailed upwards from the wreck. I grabbed for Billy’s hand, he tossed his knapsack over his shoulder and we ran.

  “Artie?”

  “Are you OK?” I said to Billy. We were on the boardwalk, leaning against the rail, looking at the plane wreck, brushing sand off our clothes.

  “This is really weird,” he said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “You think everyone’s OK?” said Billy.

  A girl of about ten was standing near us with
her mother, crying. Billy turned to her.

  “It’ll be OK,” he said. “Hey – It’s OK. It’s over now. You all right?”

  Billy Farone, who was my half sister’s kid, was fourteen, lanky, broad shouldered, and nearly six feet tall already, as tall as me, almost. Last couple of days since we’d been together, mostly he seemed to take things as they came. For an adolescent, he was pretty easy-going. People liked him, and he was interested in what they said and how they felt, and it was disarming. He was a charming kid.

  Thick black hair fell over Billy’s forehead, the blue eyes lit up the face which, with the faint Slavic cast, cheekbones, chin, that kind of thing, reminded my of my father. Once in a while, hands shoved in his pockets, the big sneakers, the shoelaces trailing on the ground, swaying a little side to side as if he was growing too fast to keep it all together, Billy still seemed awkward, adolescent. Now, making sure the girl who’d been crying was OK, he seemed almost grown up. Black jeans, red T-shirt, a dark blue Yankees jacket, he leaned comfortably against the railing. He looked out at the water and the plane.

  “You think they’re alive?” he said. “The people in the plane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  To change the subject, I told Billy how Charles Lindbergh opened Floyd Bennett Field a few miles away, one of the first airports in the country. 1923. Over by Dead Horse Bay, which was what they called it back then when the city’s dead horses were boiled down for fat there and the stink was unbearable.

  “Who’s Lindbergh?” Billy said, and I explained about the guy who first flew the Atlantic solo, took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island by himself and how after that they called him Lucky Lindy. Billy was pretty interested in the story – he was a kid who mopped up information and paid attention to the answers when he asked you questions – but he made me stop when I him told how Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped. Case of the century, they had called it.