by Ivy Pochoda
When Cree walks along the piers at night, he hopes to stumble on some new dimension, something to alleviate the frustration, the sense of being trapped by the only place he’d ever lived. But watching those girls, he understood that it had been a mistake to look for this at the edge of the water. Out on that raft he knew he could feel free of Red Hook yet stay close to it. It seemed that the girls had the entire city, the whole waterfront, even the distant ports of New Jersey at their disposal. They had made the city theirs. Cree couldn’t let them keep the night’s adventure to themselves.
He’s a natural at jumping the pier, accustomed to the currents and the ways of avoiding them. Marcus had taught Cree to swim young, before he let his son come out on the fishing boat. But that night when Cree hit the water, he felt an unfamiliar resistance, a forceful tidal pull. The water at the surface tugged one way and the water around his feet tugged another. His strokes were jagged and choppy as he hammered through the waves, trying to reach the raft.
He was swamped by small waves. He lost sight of his destination. He tried to bob out of the water high enough to see the girls on their raft—but it had sailed out of the moonlight. As the water grew rougher, getting to the raft became a matter of urgency. His strokes turned desperate. He could not reach the girls. Exhausted, he let the current carry him back to shore, wash him on the slimy rocks. Back on land, he’d combed the water with his eyes, searching for Val and June. But they were gone. They had taken their adventure elsewhere, leaving him landlocked.
Cree gets out of bed and opens his curtains. He tries to force the window wider. It’s stuck, making him get on his knees and stick his head out to inhale the fresh air. He’s slept late. The courtyards are already packed. Barefoot kids are running through the fountain near Lorraine Street—the slap of their feet in the puddled water echoing off the surrounding buildings.
Beneath the window is the bench where Cree’s father, Marcus, was shot six years back. At one end is a tattered memorial of sun-bleached photographs and dead flowers. During the drug years, people from the Houses got accustomed to random violence in the courtyards. But Marcus, a corrections officer, had died several years after Red Hook started settling down, setting off a communitywide mourning by people who were worried the neighborhood was backsliding. Cree’s lost track of all the folks who still add to his father’s memorial.
Cree expects to see his mother out on the bench, eyes closed, mouth shut, communicating with his dad. We talk without saying, Gloria told Cree of the hour-long sessions she spends on that bench every day. But this morning, she’s absent, which is a relief. Recently, she’s been spending too much time down there, ignoring the tangible world in favor of the ghostly.
Ever since Cree finished high school in June, time seems to be moving at a halfhearted pace. Most days he drifts from the benches to the park to the pool. He circles between the pizza joint and the bulletproof Chinese. He plays pickup basketball with a dishtowel tied around his head, waiting for evening, waiting for something to happen.
Cree plans on applying to a community college in Brooklyn with a maritime technology program. The glossy brochure sits next to his bed. But he’s delaying, hoping something will come along and take him out of the borough.
When he saw those girls on the water, he understood they’d had the guts to make something out of another do-nothing Red Hook night, transform their neighborhood with a simple raft and look at it from the outside. He wished he’d thought of that.
Cree pulls on a pair of boxer shorts and heads into the living room. He stops when he sees his mother sitting at the small kitchen table across from an elderly woman who lives in the opposite tower. Gloria’s eyes are closed. She holds the woman’s hands in hers.
The women on his mother’s side have always made extra cash communicating with the dead. There’s a sign outside his apartment, PSYCHIC CONNECTIONS $10. Someone is always knocking.
Gloria’s voice is calm, matter-of-fact. There are no candles or Tarot cards or speaking in tongues. No incense or crystals. There is only the ordinariness of the kitchen with its wire fruit basket, plastic floral tablecloth, and paper napkins flopping over their spindled holder.
As Cree watches, Gloria makes a small, satisfied noise, like a car sliding into gear. Then she opens her eyes and begins to speak.
Cree goes back to his bedroom and lies on top of the covers and struggles to summon the sense of freedom and energy captured by those girls on the water. Instead, he feels the Houses pressing in from all sides.
Marcus’s pension and Gloria’s nursing salary are enough to allow Cree and his mother to move out of the projects to a better neighborhood and a nicer apartment. But Gloria won’t leave the spot where Marcus was shot. She doesn’t want to abandon his ghost. Ghosts don’t know to pack up, move out, she says.
Gloria has given away the last of her husband’s possessions. The spirit is more powerful than this junk. And it takes up less space.
Cree visited thrift stores, trying to salvage some of his father’s belongings—his fishing paraphernalia, his shellacked driftwood clocks and seashell ashtrays, his Tiki god tumblers. He found a couple of dress shirts with Marcus’s initials stamped inside the collars in blue ink. He found an old watch with a busted crystal and a scallop shell ashtray, which he can’t actually prove belonged to his father. He retrieved his dad’s tackle box. He keeps it all in his closet. The best thing that Cree discovered was the old fishing boat that turned up in a weedy lot at the edge of the projects, dragged there by some of Marcus’s fishing buddies, then forgotten.
Marcus had promised Cree that when he finished high school, they’d take the small fishing boat down to Florida. They’d drop anchor and sleep in the cabin. They’d fish and cook their dinner over a small camp stove. But when graduation rolled around two months ago Cree and Gloria celebrated alone in a large Italian restaurant near Brooklyn’s Borough Hall.
It’s Sunday, which means in an hour his cousin Monique will be singing in the Red Hook Gospel Tabernacle choir. A couple of months ago Cree started going to the small storefront church hoping that something there would bring him closer to Marcus. He watched as members of the congregation were swept up, lifted from their seats. He watched them sway, raise their hands, throw back their heads. He hoped they would take him along. But as the faithful lost themselves, Cree only felt more earthbound.
Cree decides to go find Valerie instead. He’ll ask her what she felt out on the water. Then he’ll take her to the fishing boat and tell her about how he wants to take his mother down to Florida, relocate to a place of sea and sun. He hopes that saying these words out loud will give his plan weight and shape.
Cree lies in bed until he hears Gloria’s client leave. He waits until his mother heads off to work. Not long after she goes, someone pounds on the door. Cree pulls on a T-shirt and, carrying his shorts, shuffles through the kitchen to the hall, not all that eager to see who’s knocking. He only gets the door open a crack, when plainclothes officers jerk him into the hall. One turns him around, presses his chest against the wall, and pats him down. The officer flips Cree back so they are face-to-face.
The detective is middle aged, with the suggestion of a gut underneath his thin dress shirt. His face is flushed. Blue veins blossom at the edges of his ruddy nose. His partner is young—pink faced and raw, not much older than Cree. He throws nervous glances up and down the poorly lit hall as if he expects to be jumped.
“Cree James?” the younger officer asks.
“Too fucking dark in here,” the older officer says. “Take him down.”
They frog-march Cree into the stairwell.
Cree hears doors opening as his neighbors get in on the action. He knows what they’re thinking. He knows what they’re going to be spreading around the Houses later: Goody two-shoes finally cracked. Got shook down before lunch.
They hustle Cree down five flights and push him through the busted doorway and out into the courtyard where they back him up against the wall of his buildin
g. He covers the fly of his thin boxers with the shorts he’s holding.
“Cree James,” the older officer says, as if this might have changed on the way down.
“Yes, sir.” Marcus taught Cree what he needed to know about being polite to an officer. Cree checks his badge, another of Marcus’s lessons. “Yes, Detective Coover.”
“You know a couple of girls? Val Marino and June Giatto.”
“Yes, sir,” Cree says.
For years it was the older Marino girl, Rita, who made trouble for Cree. Her dad, Paulie, was always cracking down on him for Rita’s wildness, blaming the most visible—the most dark-skinned—companion for his twelve-year-old’s cigarettes and wine coolers. Never mind that Cree didn’t care about that stuff. He couldn’t explain to Paulie that he hung with Rita because of some promise he thought she held—a life on the waterside, not the Houses.
Even when they were twelve, Cree knew that Rita was on a fast track that didn’t interest him—a path not so different from the project girls who clustered on the outskirts of certain apartments, waiting for admission to the circle of a lawless crew. Cree suspected that Rita let him hang around because of that association with crime and drugs that tainted all the project kids.
It wasn’t Rita who Cree mourned when Paulie Marino dragged him out of their three-story brick on Visitation and gave him a tongue lashing that probably carried over to Coffey Park. As Paulie yelled, Cree looked up at Rita dangling out of her second-story bedroom window, her eyes goofy and glazed from two bottles of Bartles & James, and understood she had no plans to defend him. He walked away without selling her out.
That was the same afternoon that Marcus was shot in the courtyard. And that afternoon was the last time that the police had come calling.
“Val Marino and June Giatto,” Detective Coover repeats. “You know these girls?”
“Yes. Sort of.” Cree blinks, trying to settle his eyes in the harsh sun.
“Which is it? Yes or sort of?” the detective asks.
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen them recently?”
A group of kids are passing by on their way to the basketball courts. They stop a couple of yards behind the officers and dribble. The measured beat of their ball lets Cree know what’s going down with him is better than grabbing the court before another crew does.
“I’ve seen them,” Cree says.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“When?”
“I said—” Cree takes a breath. “Sometime before midnight. I saw them out on the river on a raft.”
A necklace of sweat blooms underneath the officer’s collar. A woman pushing a shopping cart slows to a halt. Her gaze lands on Cree. Her tongue clicks, as she dispatches him with the rest of the hoods who’ve brought her neighborhood down.
“You hang out by the water a lot?” the younger detective wants to know.
“I guess,” Cree says. “I fish and so.” He turns to the side, as if in profile he might become invisible.
“Fish?” the younger officer says. “You fucking fish?”
“Did you see what happened to those girls on the raft?” Coover asks, grabbing Cree’s wrist and pulling his hands away from his crotch.
“No, sir,” Cree says.
“Would it surprise you to learn one of them turned up under the pier unconscious while the other’s missing?” The cop loosens his grip.
“I had no idea.” Cree remembers the water’s tug, the way it gripped and released him. He wonders if Val and June had been pulled under too, fighting the tornado of currents as he struggled to reach them. He’s embarrassed he couldn’t reach them and embarrassed he tried to grab a piece of their night for himself.
“Maybe you know what happened to June, the missing girl?”
“Last I saw,” Cree says, “they were out on the water, bobbing and floating, cool as anything.”
Detective Coover sticks his hand into his holster strap. “Maybe you swam out there. Maybe you wanted to be part of the fun.”
“No, man. No, sir,” Cree says. The lie comes easy. The pier had been abandoned. No one had seen him jump into the water, not even Val and June. And no one had seen him return to the rocky beach.
“Let’s get this straight,” Coover says. “You saw them by the water or earlier?”
Cree glances up into the towers. He can make out shadows and silhouettes watching him through dirty windows. “Both. I saw them on their way down and then I saw them floating.”
“So you followed them?”
Cree takes a breath, holds it. “No. I was walking the waterfront is all.”
“See anyone else when you were walking the waterfront?” the younger detective asks.
“Nope.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Probably not.”
“You’ve had trouble with the Marinos before?” Coover says.
“I haven’t talked to anyone in that family in six years,” Cree says.
“But you’ve had trouble with them?”
“You’ll have to ask them, sir.”
“We did,” the younger detective says. He clears his throat and looks over his shoulder, making sure he has the crowd’s attention. “You like white girls?”
“No,” Cree says.
“So you don’t like white girls?” The younger officer rubs his hands together.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Let me put it another way. You like young girls?”
Cree bites his lips and exhales heavily through his nose.
“I asked you a question,” the younger officer says.
“All right,” Coover says, taking out a notepad. “The girl, Valerie, said she saw you last night.”
“So?” Cree says.
“So you’re the last person Valerie talked to before she was knocked unconscious.”
“Maybe they had an accident. Maybe the raft just flipped,” Cree says.
“Maybe,” the younger officer says. “Or maybe she came to shore safely and then she was attacked. Maybe someone carried the other girl off.”
Cree looks at his feet.
Detective Coover prods him until he looks up. “One girl is knocked unconscious. The other is missing,” he says. “This is foul play until otherwise proven. You get it?”
“But I had nothing to do with it,” Cree says.
“Let us be the judge of that.” The older officer backs off and nods to his partner. “We’re not through with you,” he says.
The younger detective shoulder checks Cree, knocking him into the wall. “Don’t think of running. And don’t even think of hiding out.” He pins him back and raises his voice. “Until the other girl turns up, our eyes are on you.” He jabs his elbow deeper and holds Cree’s gaze, challenging him to look away first.
The cops leave Cree flattened against the wall. The boys with the basketball stare and snicker, then walk off. The woman with the shopping cart mutters. Cree feels the shadows pull back from their windows.
The cops had told him not to hide, but that’s exactly what Cree plans to do. Not permanently, just until the shock wears off. He needs to figure out what he has to do to distance himself from this problem. He knows kids from the Houses who’ve been jailed for offenses less serious than proximity to a crime scene. He knows that once you’re on the 76’s radar, it’s hard to get off—that you become part of every neighborhood shakedown.
As Cree walks through the courtyards, he learns that although the police have declared June missing, the noise on the street is that she’s dead. People grumble that whenever someone from the Houses is dropped by drug violence, the neighborhood doesn’t pause. But a white girl gets herself drowned or killed, it’s news. It’ll be a good thing, people say, when the police discover that some white guy killed her. Get them off our back.
“She’s not dead,” Cree tells a group of kids sitting by the fountain.
“Hell do you know?” they say. “You swim out there like they said? Get you
rself a piece?”
Cree is wise enough not to ask too many questions and turn the spotlight back on himself. He’s noticed the appraising looks he’s caught just walking through the courtyard. He knows he needs to lie low for the rest of the day.
Cree’s an expert in the neighborhood’s contours. Ever since he was old enough to be allowed out alone at night, he’s been roaming the streets, mapping out Red Hook’s best hideouts—a secret lair in an abandoned longshoremen’s bar, a sliver of garden wedged between two tenements, a bird’s-eye lookout over the water from a towering warehouse. In these corners he indulges his fantasies of life outside of the Hook, transforms his hideaways into the places he would have visited with his father.
He cleared the trash from the empty bar, sanded the splintering wooden mermaid figurehead, and pretended he was visiting Bermuda. He found a busted plastic lounge chair and placed it in the hidden garden. Lying on the chair, squinting so he could see the sliver of the bay beyond the chicken wire fence, he almost believed he was fishing off the coast of Florida. He bought a telescope with a cracked lens from a junk shop and attached it to a tripod fashioned out of a ladder and installed it on the top floor of the abandoned warehouse overlooking the bay, turning the building into a tall ship, from which he could survey the surrounding seas.
Since it’s daylight now, Cree knows that only one of his hideouts will provide adequate cover—the warehouse on Imlay Street at the edge of the water where no one from Red Hook can see in. He hurries through the waterside, skirting the Marinos’ house on Visitation. He keeps to the shadows as he darts down smaller, cobbled side streets. He slips through a gap in the cyclone fence that blocks entrance to the warehouse.
The building is cavernous. It takes up the entire block with various wings and sections, all of them empty. The warehouse is seven stories high, each floor with thirty-foot ceilings. Cree’s footsteps echo as he climbs the sturdy steps to his lookout where he’s installed his telescope in front of one of the giant, glassless windows. In front of the telescope is a battered, leather armchair with a split cushion and a small table, both of which Cree found on the street.