Visitation Street

by Ivy Pochoda

  “You two know each other?” Hughes says.

  “He’s a drug buddy of my uncle’s,” Cree says.

  “No fue el,” the wino says pointing at Cree. “Fue el tio con el barco. The boat.”

  “You got a boat?” Coover asks Cree. “The girls saw you on a boat.”

  “The hell my nephew would do with a boat,” Celia says.

  “No fue el. El otro. El otro.”

  The two detectives exchange a look and take the wino by the collar and hustle him toward the door.

  Celia and Cree give them a head start. They exit the station onto Union Street. There is no relief in the fresh air.

  Cree watches Monday Night Football on mute. Without sound, there is a comical quality to the game and its presentation, as if all the players fell through the looking glass and decided to run and stop at random.

  “Yo?”

  Someone’s in the hall, calling out instead of knocking.

  “Yo?”

  The voice is low. Secretive.

  Cree stands up and goes to the door.

  Ernesto is standing outside.

  “A little late for delivery,” Cree says.

  “I got nothing for you. My man, he wants to see you.”

  “Your man?”

  “Ren.”

  “How come he doesn’t come himself?”

  “’Cause he sent me. You coming or not?”

  “Maybe I’m busy,” Cree says.

  “Ren says you aren’t. Says you barely leave the apartment. Says you need to get some fresh air.”

  Cree follows Ernesto down Lorraine Street and over to Otsego. The kid stops on the corner and points down to where the cobblestone street dissolves into darkness. “He’s over there.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Not needed.” He pulls his hood over his head and dashes back toward the Houses.

  Ren is standing next to a mid-1990s Honda Civic hatchback with the engine running. He’s still wearing the same sweatshirt and dirty jeans. His face looks fuller.

  “You couldn’t make the walk over to get me yourself?” Cree says.

  “Heard you got picked up by the police today,” Ren says. “I like to keep clear of authority. What’d they haul you in for?”

  “Nothing. That missing girl nonsense I had nothing to do with.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Ren says. “They’ll haul you in until you do. But I got it covered. It’s copacetic.”

  “You have it covered?”

  “I’m taking care of the situation,” Ren says. “First off, I made sure the other white girl, Valerie, didn’t hang around you anymore.”

  “You what?”

  “Don’t you understand how the game is played? The more you hang around that white girl with the missing friend, the more guilty you make yourself look. It’s bad enough you jumped in the water with her, got all hot and heavy for the whole neighborhood to see. That’s crazy time. One girl goes missing and you get with the other even though you know the cops are trying to finger you for it. That’s why you need me. I watch out so as you don’t get yourself in trouble for some shit you didn’t do. Your only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You ready for an expedition?” Ren nods toward the car.

  “This is yours?”

  “Call it a loan.” Ren opens the passenger door and hops in. “You drive?”

  Cree peeks into the car. The wires under the steering wheel are loose. “You can hot-wire but you can’t drive?”

  “I was indisposed during my formative years. You getting in?” Ren reclines the seat and puts on his seat belt.

  “Indisposed how?”

  “It’s no big thing. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I did the wrong thing.”

  “You were in jail.”

  Ren nods. “You driving? Or you expect this thing to drive itself.”

  Cree gets behind the wheel. Gloria paid for driving lessons for his seventeenth birthday. But since he passed his test, Cree hasn’t had many chances to test out his skills. He jerks the car over the cobblestones until they hit Van Brunt.

  “Left? Right? Where are we going?” he asks.

  “Staten Island,” Ren says. “You know how to get there?”

  Uncertain of the expressway, Cree takes the city streets. He heads over toward Park Slope, then turns up Fourth Avenue in the direction of the Verrazano Bridge, figuring if he keeps his eye on that, he’ll eventually get to the other side.

  The avenue ends in Bay Ridge. They are under the bridge. After a few wrong turns, Cree gets the car onto the ramp. Then they are hurtling across the water, leaving Brooklyn behind, sliding through the tollbooth into the smallest borough.

  “Where to?” Cree asks.

  “Keep to the water,” Ren says.

  Cree finds a road that runs parallel to the bay. One side is derelict houses, the other a wasteland strewn with garbage and scrap. Ren rolls down the window. The air smells like landfill and saltwater.

  He peers out his window. “Go slow,” he says.

  The wasteland gives way to an assortment of mismatched businesses. Between an animal feed depot and a car wash, Ren tells Cree to stop. Cree puts the car in park. Ren reaches over and fiddles with the wires, killing the engine. He hands Cree a flashlight.

  Ren leads the way, stopping at a battered Do Not Enter sign.

  “Where are we?” Cree asks.

  “Graveyard,” Ren says.

  “We have graveyards in Brooklyn.”

  “Not for ships.”

  They pick their way around a twisted fence and a maze of old shipping containers. Soon the ground grows soft, then muddy. Then they are wet to their ankles.

  Cree casts his flashlight in front of him. Its beam finds the giant husks of ferries and tugs—boats reduced to skeleton shapes, rust in place of paint. There are container ships and freighters, all sculptures of decayed iron. Smokestacks poke out of the water at odd angles that fill Cree with the same uneasiness as the sight of a broken limb. Blind portholes swallow his light. Near the shore four large fishing boats are lined up, their prows pushing in toward land, nosing the rushes. Their paint is stripped away, revealing salt-dried wood.

  “This way,” Ren says, heading along the shore toward the fishing boats. He stops in front of the boats, bouncing his flashlight off each of them in turn.

  “What are you looking for?” Cree asks.

  “Parts. For our boat. I’m getting her shipshape, ready to sail.”

  “You’re taking my boat?” Cree asks.

  “Me? Us,” Ren says. “We’re going together.” He chooses one of the four fishing boats and begins to climb aboard.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Cree says. “My ma—”

  “You’re going to spend your life in the Houses?” Ren asks.

  The deck is splintered. Through missing boards they can see into the cavernous hull. Cree’s flashlight finds a dead fish. He closes his eyes, trying to find the boat’s sway.

  Out on the boat in the dark with the water at his back, it’s easy to imagine he’s adrift with Marcus. The summer before Marcus died, he had taken Cree to Jersey City on the fishing boat. When they began the return trip, the sky had filled with heavy clouds and was nearly as black as the water. Marcus thought he could beat the storm, but the first thunder erupted five minutes from shore. The little boat pitched. Water swamped the deck. The lights of Red Hook bobbed in and out of view as the boat was rocked between the waves.

  Cree hadn’t been scared. He’d stood by his dad at the wheel, confident that Marcus would get them home. Marcus steered with one hand on Cree’s shoulder, catching him each time the boat plunged. The water was too rough for them to tie up on their illegal mooring just off the sugar refinery, so they’d dropped anchor and huddled in the tiny deckhouse, watching the blurry lights of the distant city dip and sway as the storm tossed their boat. When the weather settled, Marcus brought them into shore.

  “Fenwick Island,” Cree say
s.

  “What?” Ren is silhouetted behind him, his flashlight dancing in the remains of the cabin.

  “It’s in Delaware. That’s where my dad said we’d spent our first night on our way to Florida. He died before we made the trip.”

  “So that’s where we’ll go. First stop.”

  “What makes you so sure we’re going anywhere?”

  Ren shrugs. His flashlight rises and falls. “You got a boat. You got a first mate. Why would we stay put.”

  “You think I can just up and leave?”

  “I’m not saying relocate. I’m saying adventure.”

  Cree looks over the side of the boat, deeper into the dark water. Two months had passed since he’d seen those girls on their raft and believed adventure had been within reach.

  Ren follows Cree’s gaze. “Proactive man. That’s what we’re after.”

  Ren has Marcus’s talent for making everything sound easy—as if shipping out is no big deal. The wind gusts. The abandoned boats sway.

  “Fenwick Island,” Cree says. “And then the Keys. We were always planning to head down to the Keys. My moms would fly and meet us there for a family vacation. But the real vacation would have been the trip down.”

  They begin to move the scrap and parts. By the end of the night, both boys have an animal scent—a barnyard musk of mud and sweat as well as the murky stale odor of stagnant water. It takes them three round trips to the car to load all the materials Ren’s salvaged.

  They drive back to Brooklyn, their haul bumping and clattering in the trunk. Cree parks in front of the lot where his father’s boat is moored.

  “That was a trip,” Cree says. He and Ren bump fists. “Want to come back to mine, get cleaned up?”

  “Go on,” Ren says. “I got work to do.” He looks at the scrap at his feet. “Give me a couple of days. Then we’ll take her out for a ride. See if we can get to Jersey and back.”

  Cree wants to take Ren to a place where they can drink beer and talk girls. He wants to walk side by side into the courtyards or the park, claim one of the benches, laugh louder than necessary, prove that he’s not alone.

  He wants to hang in the pizza parlor, grab takeout from the bulletproof Chinese. He wants Ren to come with him to one of those house parties he no longer braves alone.

  But Ren seems to dodge the Houses in favor of the empty backstreets. Maybe out on the water he will shed his secrets, let them go as they pass beneath the Verrazano and head toward the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It sounds to Monique as if June is giving up. Her voice has lost some of its confidence and grown flat and robotic. Sometimes she confuses words, mispronouncing simple things, adding syllables or tripping over vowels. Kitchen. Breakfast. Pancake. Fryingpanhandle. Her memory is fading, taking with it her certainty of how and who she was.

  Hammer. Workshop. Homeworked. Noterbook.

  Even at this uncertain register, June’s voice rings in Monique’s ears. It wakes her from her dreams. It nags her during school. She skips tabernacle, worried that the congregation will suspect that she’s possessed.

  The reverend shows up at Monique and Celia’s apartment. Monique watches him through the peephole. She holds her breath. She can feel her heartbeat against the metal. The reverend’s head balloons over his foreshortened body. The distorting glass makes his eyes bulge. He leans into the door, pressing his eye to the wrong side of the peephole as if he can see in, the dark of his iris inches from Monique’s own.

  He calls her name. He bangs on the door—deep blows that vibrate in Monique’s chest. Somewhere down the hall a door opens and a voice calls out to quit his racket. He straightens his jacket and walks down the dim hall to the stairs.

  In the projects she is besieged by voices of those who died in the towers and in the courtyards. She hears the cries of old ladies who died all alone as well as the gangbangers and drug slingers caught in their own cross fire. She cups her hands over her ears, but it only makes the noise louder. She drops her hands and catches sight of a couple of kids watching her. Monique’s buggin’, one of them says. Yo, Monique, how come you’re buggin’? You smoke the bad shit?

  Her gang is in their usual place in Coffey Park clustered around two benches, making pointless trouble for anyone who passes. Shawna, Monique’s shadow, has risen in the ranks, and now sits in Monique’s place.

  Yo, girl, where you been?

  You missing out, Mo. How come you weren’t at Dee’s crib last night? That shit was phat. We look it late. Till dawn.

  Shawna got down.

  Shawna’s doing a poor job of seeming uninterested in the boys’ attention. She lets them tease her too long. She takes too many gibes and punches. She acts hungry for notice, especially at Monique’s expense.

  Didn’t know we interested you anymore, Shawna says. Thought you were hunting the rough stuff with Raneem’s boys.

  Only three weeks ago, Shawna couldn’t get her hair done without calling Monique for advice. Now she’s ribbing her. But that’s what happens—the boys tease the girls, then the girls trash the girls. It’s a drop-down system, and Monique’s fallen to the bottom.

  Monique knows how to put Shawna in her place. It would be simple to remind the crew that Shawna had accidentally gotten with a twelve-year-old at the beginning of the summer, mistaking the kid for his older brother.

  What’s the matter with her?

  She’s tripping.

  She’s high.

  She’s high on Raneem’s shit.

  Their words hardly register.

  Monique heads toward the waterside. It’s quieter on the cobbled streets. Next door to Val’s house a woman in a long purple skirt is sweeping her stoop. She looks up as Monique passes. Monique is almost at Van Brunt when she stops and backtracks to the bottom step. “Is my father shacked up here?”

  The woman leans on her broom.

  “Ray, my dad. His boys tell me he’s shacked up in this house.”

  The woman pushes up the sleeves of her white blouse, revealing slashes of black paint or pen on her forearms. Her hair—light brown turning gray—is frizzy, framing her head in a wedge. She doesn’t wear any makeup. Two small dogs are yapping in the doorway behind her, springing up and banging against the glass.

  Monique can’t believe that Ray prefers this woman to Celia. It makes her wonder what they’re preaching in his recovery meeting.

  This woman reminds Monique of the volunteers who sometimes visit her high school to teach creative writing, women who seem to pity the students for the first half of class and then spend the second half glancing at the clock.

  “Monique? I’m Maureen,” the woman says. “I was wondering when we’d meet.” She comes down the steps, places a hand on Monique’s shoulder, and draws her inside.

  The interior of the small row house is dark and smells like turpentine. Large pieces of paper with smudged charcoal drawings of women’s bodies are taped to the walls in the hallway. Women’s arms, legs, thighs, butts. Women’s breasts spilling over their prostrate figures.

  Maureen leads Monique into the living room. The walls are covered with more sketches. Women with their legs gaping open. Women crawling into bathtubs. Women considering themselves in the mirror. Women with their fingers creeping down to their privates. In the middle of the room is a large easel with a half-finished drawing of three female figures—two bursting from the body of the first.

  “You do all these?” Monique asks. She averts her eyes from the vaginas that stare at her from all sides. “You’re working on that now?” She points at the easel.

  “Those are my selves,” Maureen says.

  “Your what?”

  “The three aspects of my nature. They’re born from me.”

  The couch is covered with magazines and sketchbooks. Two hanging plants are dying in their planters, their brown tendrils curling and withering.

  “Ray’s at work,” Maureen says. “He’ll be back around five.”

  “I know what time my dad
gets off work.”

  “Of course you do.” Maureen slides art books and sketchbooks from the couch onto the floor. “Sit.”

  Monique perches on the edge of the couch with her knees together and her hands clasped. She can feel the springs poking into the backs of her thighs. She can’t imagine Ray in this place. She can’t see him without his booming TV and his animated fights with Celia.

  “So my father’s living here now? Like permanent?”

  “He and I are learning about new parts of our selves,” Maureen says.

  “So there’s more than one of him now too?”

  “This must be difficult for you,” Maureen says.

  “My father running out? It happens all the time.” Monique stands up. The voices, which had subsided when she entered the house, are starting again. She walks around the room, lifting drawings, poking through coffee cans crammed with charcoal pencils and china markers. She enters the small kitchen. Maureen’s shelves are filled with grains and beans stored in glass jars.

  From the kitchen window, Monique looks into the garden, then over the wall that divides the Marinos’ backyard from Maureen’s. She can see the top of the white-and-blue swing set Val and June would make-believe into outer space and fantastical lands Monique didn’t quite grasp. The other girls always took the lead on these imaginary adventures, bringing to life stories from books Monique hadn’t read and movies she hadn’t seen. She’d tagged along, drugged by the exotic-sounding names, the complicated rules and customs of these imaginary places.

  Rust has crept onto the swing set. The crossbar sags in the middle.

  “I don’t know anyone who has a garden,” Monique says. “It must be a trip.”

  “I don’t spend that much time out there,” Maureen says.

  “You don’t have kids?”

  Maureen shakes her head.

  “This big house and no kids? How come you don’t have kids?”

  “I never wanted them.”

  “Cramps your style, I guess,” Monique says. “So is my dad coming home or what?”