by Ivy Pochoda
This is the place that gives Cree the end of the world feeling he likes, the sense that he can go no farther and still never be found. The clang of buoys, the rustle of the water, the absence of voices and streetlights, and that hunk of moon melting all over the place are as close to the country as Cree can imagine. From here he can look back at his neighborhood, and not see it at all.
When he was younger and his father took him out in the bay, Cree often dreamed of the places the water might lead him. But recently he finds it difficult to envision the world beyond the twin Ms of the Verrazano and the single hump of the Bayonne—the two bridges that hem in his horizon.
He casts his line into the water. Out here is where he has witnessed the secret underside of Red Hook. He’s seen a flaming car pushed into the water and what he would swear was a severed arm floating by, shriveled and blue like a sea creature. He’s seen people catching fish and cooking them in a rusted trash can. He’s seen women turning tricks in the back of a rowboat, two Asian men in wet suits snorkeling with spears in their hands. He’s seen all sorts of makeshift crafts hammered together out of driftwood and debris.
Cree drags his line through the water, leading it away from a web of seaweed and trash that’s bobbing near the pier. He always tosses back his catch. But the fish are taking the night off and the water looks dirty and sluggish. Grimy foam coats the rocks at Cree’s feet. Even the tugs sound unhappy, their engines choking on the water, never settling.
But where there should have been only the noise of the water and some clatter from the tugs he hears voices. He reels in his line, imagining that somewhere nearby Val and June are teasing him. He stands up, spins once, like he’s looking for the turnaround jump shot. And then the voices vanish, leaving him gaping at the dark, wondering if he heard anything at all.
The girls choose the water between the Beard Street Pier and the rotting factory where a two-masted sailboat is taking its time sinking into the murky basin. Never mind that the water is dirty and that they aren’t the best swimmers. And never mind that they are going to have to paddle through that grimy water with their hands. They figure they’ll float around this pier and past the next two, then get out on the little beach next to Valentino Pier. Couldn’t take more than half an hour.
It’s crazy dark down by the water. Their footsteps are loud and hard, bouncing off the warehouses. Only a ten-minute walk from home, yet they’d never been to the waterfront at night. Never been to this stretch of the waterfront period. Until they got in sight of the water, they pretended their parents’ warnings were a lot of nonsense. But now there seems to be something hiding in each shadow, scattering the litter and rubble. It doesn’t seem possible that they have this place to themselves. There must be someone lurking behind the cracked windshield of a rusted-out station wagon, someone watching them from the ruins of the sugar refinery.
The waterfront creaks and resettles—the decaying groan of old wood is a ghostly moan, the rhythmic bang of a boat against the pier is the approaching of footsteps.
Something clatters down the refinery’s dilapidated chute and plunges into the water. The girls grasp hands and start singing, chanting, making a lot of noise, trying to outdo whatever fell down that chute, attempting to subdue the darkness. But the brick warehouse and the basin throw the song back, distorting their voices so they sound unfamiliar to themselves.
June points at the sugar refinery. “Heard it’s haunted. Probably someone over there right now, watching us.”
Val glances at the skeleton of the refinery.
“Ghosts better not mess with us,” June says.
“You want to go back?” Val says. There’s movement in the refinery. She’s sure of it. Something—someone—rattling in the large metal dome.
“Nah,” June says, turning her back to the building. But Val can’t take her eyes off it. She watches the chute, checking to see if it sways.
The girls turn up the volume, chanting louder.
They tiptoe onto the green-fuzzed rocks and lower the raft into the water. June stands back. “You first.”
Val shakes her head.
“Your raft. Your idea.”
Val squats down, trying to avoid touching the rocks, and falls back on the raft. It buckles under her weight and she’s swamped by the oily water. “Nasty.”
June closes her eyes and scrunches her face, then sits down behind Val. The raft submerges, soaking the girls up to their chests. “Damn that’s cold.” June shakes as if she can escape the wet and nearly knocks the girls into the drink. Then the raft adjusts to their weight, pops back up. And they float.
The water is chilly and slick. The girls paddle hard and erratically with their hands, pushing away the junk that keeps approaching the raft and trying not to look at the gloomy area underneath the crumbling sugar refinery. The raft swings close to the half-sunk sailboat and the girls kick frantically, not wanting to tempt whatever went down with it. The water smells rank.
There’s something pulling from below that makes the raft spin.
“What is that?” Val asks. She feels the raft buckle in the middle. She stops paddling and lets the pink rubber flatten out beneath them.
“It’s like a waterslide,” June says through clenched teeth.
“Yeah, just like Coney Island,” Val says. She checks the shoreline that is quickly sliding away behind them.
They clutch the raft with rigid hands. They are unwilling to let go, unable to pull themselves out of the swirling current.
“Don’t rip it with your nails,” Val says. They’re out deep now, too far from the questionable comfort of the shore. “We’ve got to paddle.”
They let go and slap the water with their hands. Finally, they get out past the pier and let their arms rest. They float into the basin where the water has a regular beat. The moon’s shining like it’s out of its mind. The raft is handed from one wave to the next. To their left Staten Island is glittering, its houses lighting up its hills with an LCD display of red, green, and white. Tankers, like shining islands, sit in the bay, heavy and motionless. Straight across, the cranes in the port of New Jersey look like some kind of Jurassic fantasyland.
A tugboat passes in front of them. The girls scream and bend forward and try to balance, so they’re not swamped in its wake. Small waves break over their legs and waists.
Floating is wilder than Val expected. The silhouettes of the city and Jersey rising on all sides, the water stretching out dark and vast. But it’s the silence—only now and then disturbed by the call of a foghorn, the crash of a wave tangling with the pylons, the rhythmic beat of a boat somewhere out there—that grabs her.
They float by the wreck of a tugboat. The moon is trapped in one of the sunken windows, its reflection struggling through the dark water. The girls grasp the edge of the raft and see the blank eyes of the portholes staring back at them. There’s a new swell in the water, a deep insistent tug. If Val could forget the bay’s depths, she would be willing to follow this current wherever it leads her.
“We could keep going forever,” Val says, looking over her shoulder at June. June is no longer clutching the raft. She’s trailing her hands in the water, small ripples receding from her fingertips.
As the raft rounds another pier, the Manhattan skyline bursts into view towering over the black hump of Governors Island. The buildings claw the sky as if they are desperate to get out. The girls are pulled forward by the fresh current of Buttermilk Channel. But it seems to them that the city is drawing them in.
“That’s where we belong,” June says. She raises her arms and snaps her fingers. “No more wasting time.”
“Stop it,” Val says. She’s not looking at the city; she’s watching its reflection stretching out into the water in front of them. “Stop.”
Cree stashes his bucket and line and begins to pick his way along the waterfront. He passes underneath the chute of the refinery where sucrose refuse was dumped into the basin. He rounds the Beard Street pier, balancing on the jagged
rocks at its short edge along the water. From the far side of the pier he can see the pink raft bobbing in the middle of the bay.
The girls’ voices carry, their laughter electrifying the lonely water. They’re taking over the gloomy basin with their dinky raft, exploring the currents and depths shut off to Cree since his father’s death. He wonders how far they dare to float.
The raft rounds another pier and bobs out of view.
Cree scrambles. He wants to keep the girls in sight. Somewhere out in the bay a foghorn cuts the silence, its low groan rolling across the water like a shudder.
There’s a rocky outcrop between the next two piers. A large warehouse blocks Cree’s view. He stumbles, gashing his knee on a cement pylon. Stagnant water is pooled between the rocks. Cree cups his hand over his wound, trying to avoid the water’s grimy foam.
He’s on the next pier now and can hear the girls again. Their words are indistinct. He catches sight of the raft bobbing in the water heading toward Manhattan. Cree turns and runs toward Valentino Pier, now a promenade for old fishermen and young couples. This late he expects to have it to himself.
He can hear the girls as the raft approaches. He crosses the small park that leads to the pier and hurries to the end of the concrete walkway. The raft is crossing in front of him—the girls, two dark silhouettes against the distant Jersey docks.
And then they are gone.
CHAPTER TWO
If asked, Jonathan Sprouse might describe his life as a landslide, a series of descents. His best year came at the age of twelve, when he was chosen for the lead in a Broadway musical—a glittery mashup of Grimms fairy tales. The show was a flop, one of those spectacular Great White Way disasters that get front-page coverage for the duration of their blink-and-you’ve-missed-it runs—when the whole city fixates on the spectacle of a show that closes before it opens.
In the year after this almost success, Jonathan went from potential Broadway star to unremarkable chorus member. Later he was demoted from Juilliard to a public high school for performing arts, from Carnegie Hall to fly-by-night practice spaces. After college he moved from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side, then from Brooklyn Heights to Red Hook—a neighborhood below sea level and sinking.
As a child, he never imagined that he wouldn’t succeed. His father, Donald Sprouse, had enough money to collect houses in all the best sea and ski locations and to scoop up Jonathan’s mother, a respected Broadway star. Eden Farrow couldn’t open a show like Bernadette Peters or Patti LuPone, but no one complained when she stepped into their shoes at the end of their runs.
The Sprouse family fortune and Eden’s moderate fame were enough to guarantee Jonathan attention from conservatories and invitations to important auditions. He had the best vocal coaches and music instructors. He turned up at auditions dressed in a sailor shirt and matching cap that his mother had hand-tailored on Lexington Avenue.
As a teenager, he was known less for his talent than for his parents’ frequent absences and their spacious apartment. The Sprouse-Farrows had a well-stocked bar and fridge and their doorman’s hand was easily greased with a C-note. Liquor for Jonathan’s underage set was delivered through the service entrance. Jonathan was one of those New York kids everyone knows. In with the Upper West elite, the Village kids, even the Harlem hoods from a couple blocks north whom Jonathan invited to the Sprouse penthouse to mix things up.
Although his short-lived Broadway career fizzled, Jonathan continued to audition in his early twenties—classical, jazz, off Broadway. He was an understudy who never got called up. He didn’t make it through conservatory. The auditions stopped. Eden’s agent dropped him. He sat in with a couple of bands, sang and played keyboard. He joined a quartet that got written up in the New Yorker. But then Eden died, or because Eden died, the quartet let him go. Jonathan fled from the spotlight that had briefly threatened to illuminate him.
After Eden’s death, Jonathan dropped her last name and reverted to Sprouse. He taught at Carnegie Hall where he’d once had lessons. He taught at a private high school in lower Manhattan. He taught spoiled kids in their homes. He taught jazz band at a public school where there weren’t enough instruments to go around.
Ever since he moved to Red Hook, Jonathan has been teaching music appreciation at St. Bernardette’s, a Catholic girls’ school just outside the neighborhood. He also has a steady gig Friday nights at a gay piano bar in the city where he hammers out show tunes accompanied by a drag queen who gets all the tips. From time to time he writes advertising jingles for cut-rate brands. He tells himself he’s a commercial success.
Old acquaintances from as far back as high school, conservatory, and Broadway sometimes come to Jonathan’s apartment. They know that out here dealers stay up late, and Jonathan has their numbers. They hang around his place, waiting for delivery and pretending it’s Jonathan they’ve come to see.
His studio apartment is upstairs from the Dockyard bar, which keeps unwholesome hours. He has a choice of listening to its noise filtered through the loose floorboards or coming downstairs and experiencing it firsthand.
Although Jonathan only meant to stop into the Dockyard for a couple of drinks, he’s slipped from a prime spot in the middle of the bar to a shadowy corner, from top-shelf whiskey to swill. He’s gone from laughing along with the regulars to being laughed at. Lil, the bartender, urges him to shut up. She’s suggested that he go home even though it’s only one A.M.
Jonathan can’t remember when the evening got away from him. Maybe he insulted Lil’s honky-tonk music. She’s a little too old to be working here. She has a toxic red dye job and faded tattoos that look like bruises. Her gray eyes tighten as the night drags on. By last call they look like the heads of two screws.
Sex with Lil was unremarkable, the kind of late-night mistake Jonathan can’t bring himself to give up. Something about the whole mess reminded him of the racetrack—the clop of Lil’s cowboy boots, the slap of his hand on her ample flank, her exhausted whinnying when the thing was over.
The Dockyard’s walls are covered with buoys and life preservers, grainy photos of steamers and tugboats. There’s coiled rope and collapsed lobster traps, as well as flies and lines, bait and tackle. The mounted trout and bass are missing eyes and shedding scales. The place is supposedly filled with nostalgia for the humming waterfront of yesteryear. But it’s really a shipwreck. Lit by strands of green Christmas lights, the bar looks as if it’s sunk into the grimy basin a couple of streets away. The busted ship’s clock helps the patrons ignore the time and keep on drinking.
Nicknames are big here. It took Jonathan a couple of weeks to sort out the crowd. There’s Guitar Mike and Biker Mike. There’s Whiskey Bill and Pirate Bill, Old Steve and New Steve. None of the women have nicknames.
Everyone calls Jonathan “Maestro,” although he suspects none of them believe he actually writes music. One day he plans to take them by surprise. His head is crammed with riffs composed from neighborhood noise. These are usually suggested by something simple—the howl of the hinges on the door to the Dockyard, the lonely twang of the telephone wires on Van Brunt Street, the uneven, metallic rattle of a bicycle with loose fenders riding over cobblestones.
Days pass in Red Hook like musical compositions. Sometimes they are fugues, sometimes sonatas. The wildest days, when a storm blows in from the Atlantic and water surges down Van Brunt, are certainly symphonies. But Jonathan doesn’t try to explain any of this to the patrons of the bar.
Lil’s playing hard to get, fiddling with her CDs and ignoring Jonathan’s signal.
“I thought you were keeping quiet tonight, Maestro,” she says, not pouring him another. “At least I was hoping.”
“Too hot to head upstairs,” he says. “I thought I’d stick around and pay you to keep me entertained.”
Lil wears a shot glass on a chain around her neck. It bumps against her breasts as she works. Instead of tipping her, patrons can buy her a shot. It’s the best way to get on her good side.
Jonathan grabs the glass. “Let me buy you one.”
Lil’s shirt is wet from wiping down the bar and rinsing glasses. She shakes free. “No thanks, mister.”
“My money’s no good?”
“Leave your money on the bar.”
He pisses Lil off a lot these days, especially when he’s trying to be charming. “I thought no one around here turned away a free drink. Booze keeps you keeping us happy.”
“You talk too much, Jonathan.”
He drops a twenty next to his glass just to show her.
The bar is full even in this heat wave. There are a few leftover locals—salty types and retired detectives. But mostly it’s a new crowd—artists, chefs, and odd craftsmen. Men in baseball caps for losing teams. Women in clogs or cowboy boots. Lots of women tonight. It’s the dead of summer, and they still wear cowboy boots. It makes Jonathan feel old watching them and he’s not even thirty.
Earlier, Jonathan tried talking to a few of these women. But now they’re keeping their distance. He’s not sure what went wrong. Maybe they were offended when he bought them a round of drinks and said that women only drink whiskey to impress men. Now they make a point of not looking his way. He’s spent a year watching, noticing their short, choppy haircuts and new tattoos. He’s watched them drink more, sleep less, and try on the tough postures of the old waterfront.
The women grow grungier and sexier the later it gets. Soon they bear no resemblance to the morning commuters who will tuck themselves into bus shelters along Van Brunt on Monday, polished and brushed and reasonably presentable to the world outside Red Hook. Nighttime abrades them, tangles their hair and chips their nails. Colors their speech. At night, the hundreds of nights they’ve passed the same way begin to show, revealed in their hollowed cheeks and rapid speech. Jonathan wonders how long it takes for their costumes to become their clothes, their tattoos their birthmarks. When will they let the outside world slip away and forget to retrieve it?