Visitation Street

by Ivy Pochoda

  Mikey makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “I read you,” he says. “Must be a million boys over the Houses who could have helped you out.”

  “Didn’t want to ask.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mikey says. “Trouble is, I’m not going be called out for stealing their business. So I’m not going to be able to help you. Let’s just say my hands are tied.” He holds out his palms to Monique like a supplicant.

  “Man, a joint,” Monique says. “It’s not like I’m asking you to cut me in on some business.”

  “No can do,” Mikey says. “But I gotta ask, what’s a girl like you doing getting high before church?”

  “None of your damn business,” Monique says. “Thanks for nothing.”

  “Call it a favor. I’m keeping you clean. Doing my part for the community.”

  Monique turns and heads off. She doesn’t look around when Mikey whistles long and low at her back.

  Sometimes the tougher hoods, who don’t cluster in the park for fear of being seen by the 76’s squad cars, who keep out of the courtyards until dark, hang near the abandoned lot called Bones Manor. Girls don’t go near the Manor unless they’re turning tricks, that much Monique knows. But she’s latched on to the idea of a joint, just one quick hit, something to silence June.

  It’s quiet over by the Manor. The corrugated iron fence is a patchwork of overlapping tags and pieces. There’s something grim in the graffiti—drab colors and stiff letters. Part of the iron fence is bent back. Monique peeks in as she passes, catching sight of a giant puddle of water, the size of a small pond. Shipping containers and piles of cinder blocks surround it.

  Partway up the street, she checks a group of guys, huddled with their backs to her. She knows the leader, Raneem Bennett. He’s a little older than Cree. His crew isn’t much of a gang, more like a posse of freelance criminals, every man for himself. Raneem tried to summon some notoriety for them by recruiting a few young hoods from Monique’s school, handing them each a can of spray paint, and telling them to hit Red Hook with the tag “RFC,” which he claimed stood for a new gang he’d formed called “Running From the Cops.” A few weeks later the little hoodlums found out they’d been played and had thrown up dozens of “Raneem Fan Club” tags over Red Hook.

  Monique crosses the street, passing the crew at a distance. At the corner, she crosses back, turns, and comes at them on their side.

  “S’up girl?” Raneem says, as she passes.

  “Hey yourself,” Monique says.

  “Looking for something?” Raneem says.

  “Maybe,” Monique says.

  “Bet I got what you need,” one of Raneem’s friends says, grabbing the sagging crotch of his baggy shorts.

  “I don’t need that,” Monique says.

  “How you know if you haven’t tried?”

  “So what you looking for?” Raneem says.

  “Got a little smoke?”

  “Got a little smoke?” Raneem says, making his voice girly high.

  “I don’t talk like that,” Monique says.

  “I don’t talk like that,” Raneem mimics.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.” It’s a cheap tease, but it makes his boys double over.

  “Never mind,” Monique says, turning away.

  “Not so fast,” one of Raneem’s boys says, grabbing her arm. “Where you running off to?”

  “Church.”

  He jerks Monique’s arm and yanks her so she hits the iron fence.

  “You been a bad girl? You got something to confess?” He squeezes Monique tight. In his free hand is a soda bottle. He begins to trace the bottle along her collarbone, down between her breasts, over her stomach, and onto the waistband of her shorts.

  She wriggles in his grasp. “Let me go.”

  “Let me go,” Raneem mimics.

  She tenses her body. Her limbs tingle and go numb. She fights the urge to shut her eyes, as if that could prevent what’s coming. There’s a screaming in her ears. June’s yelling at her from the inside. Her voice is panicked, frantic. Her listing is manic, places and objects tumbling one on top of the other.

  Raneem’s friend taps her elastic waistband three times with the bottle. Then he digs the cap in hard.

  “Stop,” Monique says.

  The boy with the bottle smiles. “I’m just playing.” He thrusts the bottle into her crotch and grunts. He places his crotch against the bottom of the bottle and thrusts toward Monique, driving the cap in hard. Now that he’s anchoring the bottle with his body, his hands are free. He reaches down the back of Monique’s shorts, underneath her underwear. He grabs her butt with sticky hands and pulls her toward him, grinding her into the bottle. The boy is breathing heavily, grunting and panting. His breath seems viscous. Monique feels it settle onto her collar and chin like film.

  She doubles over, folding into herself to keep him at bay. She wants to cover her ears, make June’s screaming stop. It’s all she can do to stop from shouting to cover the noise in her head. Suddenly, the boy lets go. “You see. No harm, no foul.”

  Monique rushes up the street. She’s surprised that her legs work. Her breath feels trapped. Finally it emerges in tight bursts. At the corner, she huddles in a doorway and lets herself cry.

  Ray’s out when Monique gets home. She can smell Raneem’s friend on her skin—a sour, meaty scent of stale sex and malt liquor. She takes a long shower. Her pelvic bone is sore. She can barely pass a washcloth over it.

  She wraps herself in a towel and sits on her bed. Through the window she can see into other apartments where people are gathering for Sunday meals. She knows the courtyards are filled and the park benches are getting going.

  June’s calmed down. Movie. Bus. Hot chocolate. Snow.

  Monique knows June would listen if she dared to talk. But she keeps quiet.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  For the first time in years, the shrine has been tidied. The flowers in the vases are changed every couple of days. A new photo of Marcus sits in a durable plastic frame. The bench has been painted with a coat of forest green. Small plants are arranged in the patch of soil between the bench and the concrete path. One of them has managed a small purple flower. At first Cree thought this was his mom’s doing, though he’s never known her to care about the shrine before.

  Cree puts down his community college application when he hears his mother leave the house for her afternoon shift. He goes to the window in time to see Gloria cross the courtyard and settle on the bench. She doesn’t seem surprised by the fresh bouquet of pink and blue carnations in the vase.

  School has let out. The courtyards are filled with kids slowing time until they are called in for dinner. As Cree watches, the baby-faced kid Ren pounded a few weeks back emerges from the opposite tower with one of his sidekicks. They look at their feet as they walk. The baby-faced kid is carrying a shopping bag and a two-liter bottle of Sprite. Cree tenses as they approach his mother’s bench. He tugs on the window, wrestling it up. He leans his head out and is about to call down.

  Then the baby-faced boy places the shopping bag on the ground. He hands the bottle of Sprite to his friend who uncaps it. Gloria slides down the bench a few inches. The boy with the bottle kneels and waters the plants. When he is finished, he empties the contents of the bottle into the flower vase and shuffles the flowers, withdrawing a limp carnation and placing it in the brown bag.

  While his friend is watering, the baby-faced kid takes a cloth out of the bag and wipes grit from the picture frame. He tips out the dirt that has collected in the prayer candles before lighting them. The boys pick up the paper bag and empty bottle and stand in front of Gloria. Cree can’t hear what they say to her, but she smiles and they shuffle off.

  When they are gone, Cree rushes to the bench.

  “What business do you have with those boys?” Cree asks.

  “What boys?”

  “The boys who were just messing with you.”

  “Who’s messing?”

  �
�They’re messing with me by bugging you.”

  “Baby, nobody’s messing with you. How come you’re staring at the courtyard when you should be finishing your application?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Cree sits on the bench. He looks around to see if those boys are lingering. “Marcus thinks that this maritime program is going to be the best thing for you, baby. You’re going to make him so proud,” Gloria says. She reaches into her handbag and pulls out a packet of stamps. “Mail it today. I’m going to miss you when you’re sailing up that river.”

  “Maybe I’ll get a job out of state. Maybe I’ll take you to live somewhere else.”

  “You know Marcus wants me to stay right here.”

  “You’re hearing him wrong. When I was little, he always told me that we’d go live in Florida. Take his boat down there and everything. How come he changed his mind?”

  “Your father isn’t going down to Florida. Neither am I.”

  Cree leaves Gloria on her bench. In the apartment, Celia’s suitcase is still open on the living room floor. A hot pink nightgown is draped over the arm of the couch. The cordless phone is missing from the base—probably hurled somewhere after her late-night blowup with Ray.

  Cree’s tired of this place. It’s not just the apartment that’s bugging him; it’s the entire neighborhood. It’s the cops who’ve kept their eye on him ever since June Giatto went missing. It’s the white girls who cross the street as if he might make them vanish too. It’s the hoods who cut him dead because he isn’t affiliated even though those days are over. It’s the rumors that Monique is too messed up to sing at the tabernacle. It’s the boys screwing with his mom on her bench and screwing with him at the same time.

  Cree gathers the materials for his application and seals them in an envelope. Although Kingsborough Community College is still in Brooklyn, it feels like it’s in a different world—east of the Coney Island boardwalk, surrounded by the water. But Cree worries that it’s not far enough away, that it will take him years of study to actually make it up the Hudson or out toward where the water gives way to horizon.

  He runs down the stairs and dashes through the courtyards. This envelope is too important to trust to the mailboxes near the Houses where kids drop half-empty soda cans, cigarettes, and sandwich wrappers.

  He crosses to the waterside, rushes down Visitation, forgetting to look in Val’s window. At the corner of Van Brunt, he drops the envelope into the mailbox that is in full view of the bus stop, the bar, the Greek café, and two bodegas—a mailbox he imagines no one would dare to screw with. He lets the blue metal door slam back into place. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and heads into the bodega.

  Normally, Cree doesn’t think to buy beer. It’s always been easy enough to snag a bottle from someone else’s six-pack. But now he’s got something to celebrate. Cree knows the bodega owner by sight, not by name. He used to keep the Daily News article about the small memorial held on the fifth anniversary of Marcus’s death taped to the plexiglass case filled with bread rolls. This story has now been replaced with other news.

  Cree goes to the refrigerators and stares at the beer. Because malt liquor is the last thing Cree would normally drink, he reaches for a bottle of Olde English. He takes it to the register. The man behind the counter gives Cree the once-over.

  “You of age?”

  Cree shuffles his feet.

  “You don’t want a better beer?”

  “I don’t really drink beer,” Cree says. “It’s a special occasion. Finished my application to college.”

  The bodega guy slides the bottle toward Cree. “Problem is I can’t sell this to you. Let’s just say you took it without my knowledge.”

  Cree swipes the bottle and tucks it under his arm.

  “Hold up,” the bodega guy says. He pulls a brown paper bag from beneath the counter and hands it to Cree. “Guess you don’t know the drill.”

  Cree puts the bottle in the bag. “Forgot.”

  He stands on the corner of Van Brunt and Visitation trying to decide where to take his bottle—which of his hideouts is best for an evening with a forty. At first he thinks he’ll climb the abandoned warehouse where he’s stashed his telescope. He’ll swig the forty and train his lens on the cranes over in New Jersey. But the empty longshoreman’s bar is a better place. He can choose a booth and keep company with the old-timers’ ghosts and the mermaid figurehead.

  When he gets to the bar, the door is open and there’s music inside—grinding, whiny rock. The busted furniture is cleared away. The floor is swept clean. A woman with jagged black hair is standing on one of the banquettes. She’s using a long pole with a brush on the end to whitewash Ren’s Japanese-style “RunDown” piece. A man in a paint-splattered plaid shirt is crouching on the floor with a sander.

  They’ve done a lot of work. The long mirror behind the bar reflects something besides the dust. The wooden shelves shine, as does the long brass rail that runs along the lip of the bar.

  He wonders if this couple knows how the late-afternoon light plummets in narrow columns through two holes in the roof of the porch out back, how the wooden figurehead casts a scary shadow if you sneak up on her the wrong way, that the empty liquor bottles with flaking and faded labels sometimes roll off the shelves.

  He uncaps the forty. The liquor is sweet and thick, almost syrupy. He winces as he swallows. He closes his eyes and chugs quickly so he doesn’t have to taste. His eyes water, and some of the liquor rises back up his throat. He breathes deep, urging the booze to stay down. He pounds half the bottle. The street sways and bucks. His limbs feel as if they are rising through water. Then everything settles.

  As he walks down Otsego Street, a cobbled alley with vacant lofts and abandoned lots, he feels the looseness of the evening. The hours that stretch before him feel pliant, as if they are waiting for him to shape them.

  He understands what keeps Gloria in Red Hook. It’s not what is here now, but what was here back when—the history being buffed and polished away in the longshoreman’s bar. As he crosses from this abandoned corner of the waterside back over to the Houses he becomes aware of the layers that form the Hook—the projects built over the frame houses, the pavement laid over the cobblestones, the lofts overtaking the factories, the grocery stores overlapping the warehouses. The new bars cannibalizing the old ones. The skeletons of forgotten buildings—the sugar refinery and the dry dock—surviving among the new concrete bunkers being passed off as luxury living. The living walking on top of the dead—the waterfront dead, the old mob dead, the drug war dead—everyone still there. A neighborhood of ghosts. It’s not such a bad place, Cree thinks, if you look under the surface, which is where Gloria lives.

  The courtyards and the park are only half full. Cree doesn’t recognize the kids on the benches, but he nods as he passes. They clock his bottle and nod back. He sits on a nearby bench and raises the forty in an informal salute. He drinks and listens to the conversation that never opens up to him. No one notices when he walks off.

  Cree falls asleep with the TV on and wakes up to the sound of someone knocking. The clock tells him it’s two A.M., just about the time Gloria returns from her shift. It’s too soon for his buzz to have hardened into a hangover. His brain feels melted and loose. By the blue glow of an infomercial, he stumbles toward the door expecting to find that Gloria has locked herself out.

  The baby-faced hood is standing in the hall. He jumps back when Cree opens the door.

  “Fuck do you want, little man?”

  “Ernesto,” the kid says. “My name is Ernesto.”

  “You know what time it is, Ernesto?”

  “Don’t take me for a fool.” The kid crosses his arms, cocks his head to one side.

  Cree rubs his head as if he can erase the muddy feeling in his brain.

  “It’s your ma,” Ernesto says. “She went down. Over on Van Brunt.”

  “Went down?”

  “I saw it myself. Me and my boy were tagging the mail
box by the bus stop. She came down the steps of the bus, then she froze like she’d been electrocuted or something. Next thing, she’s on the ground. Some of them white kids from that bar called an ambulance.”

  Although his heart is clenching and his breath comes short and tight, Cree doesn’t really trust this kid, this late-night messenger who’s been messing with his mother lately. Then his phone starts to buzz, the number of the hospital flashing on the screen.

  “She’s alive?”

  “Yeah,” Ernesto says.

  As he runs down the hall, Cree listens to the nurse explain that his mom is in the ICU.

  “Yo!” Ernesto calls after him. “Tell your boy, I did good by you.”

  “My boy?”

  “Ren. Tell Ren that I did you a solid.”

  He runs the two miles to the hospital, which takes less time than waiting for the bus. He’s out of breath when he places both palms on the admitting desk in the emergency room. When he asks for Gloria, the receptionist takes her time tapping the name into her computer. While the computer pulls up the record, she sorts through files lying on her desk

  “Gloria James,” Cree says. “Gloria James.”

  Just as she locates his mother’s file, Carmen, one of Gloria’s coworkers from pediatrics, appears in the emergency room and takes Cree by the arm, leading him toward the ward.

  “I was just clocking out when they brought her in,” Carmen says. “We made sure she got a room.” Carmen has a deep West Indian accent that can be harsh when she’s being authoritative or soothing when she’s patient. “It seems she’s had a stroke.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “And—”

  “They don’t know anything yet. It’s too soon. For now they have her hooked up.” Carmen pats Cree’s hand. “She can’t talk, baby. You should know.”

  His mother lies in a hospital bed. She’s hooked up to oxygen. An IV is plugged into her hand. Her face is twisted, and her mouth is partially open like a photo taken at the punch line of a joke. A team of nurses swarms past him and wheels Gloria out. One pushes the rattling gurney; two others keep pace with the IVs and oxygen.