Paradise Alley (24 page)

He slipped into the water, holding the rope from the mast in one hand. A little canvas bag, in which he had wrapped up all the money he had saved, tied tightly around his thigh. The water surprisingly warm and gentle against his skin.

Slowly, hand over hand, he made his way up the starboard side. Cleaving to the boat, trying to make as little noise or commotion as he possibly could. Pulling the rope with him as he did, hauling his small boat slowly around and pointing it toward the current. Trying to maneuver the sail from where he was, in the water, pulling it around.

A shark zigzagged quickly past him, so close it nearly bumped his shoulder. Prowling restlessly through the sheath of the water, punctuated by more fins up and down its long, honed body. Billy froze—knowing that that wouldn't do any good if it went for him. Waiting for the first touch, the bite, wondering how much it would hurt.
Like a knife? An ax along his foot, his calf?

But there was nothing, just the warm caress of the water—and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the brig, bearing right down on him. He began to kick and paddle again, trying to make his movements as slow, as easy and natural as he could, and still stay ahead of the slaver. He was almost to the current now, he could see the flotsam floating along on its tide, all the bits of garbage glinting in the faint afternoon light.
Almost there—

Another shark swept by him, and he forced himself to be still again, watching as it flashed by. This one did not swim on, though, but circled once around his boat. He lost track of it for a few minutes, had figured it was gone—when a flicker of motion made him look down and he saw it there, growing bigger and bigger, rushing up at him from the depths.

He did not have time to react, even if he had been able to. Instead he could only watch, paralyzed, while the creature streaked up through the surface just beyond him—its ugly sharpened head near enough for him to reach out and touch. When it broke the water, it rolled over almost playfully. So close that Billy could stare right into the gaping pink mouth, and all the jagged rows of teeth there—the new ones already encroaching upon the old, as if the ancient, voracious urge that drove the creature could not still itself even for a moment.

The small, dark eye stared out indifferently at him as it swept past. Ducking back down under the next swell, as suddenly as it had surfaced, back to its ceaseless hunt.

The boat lurched ahead, nearly pulling the line from his hands—and Billy realized that he had finally reached the current. He swung himself back up over the side as fast as he could, murmuring a small, swift prayer of thanks as he did. Holding tight to the whippet mast with his bare hands. The water shooting him on ahead now, flying him in toward the shore.

He looked back and saw the brig almost seem to hesitate, the grey gaff sail fluttering loosely. It was already too late for the blackbirder to cut him off from the shore, he was certain of it. All it could do was tack and come after him, along the same current, but who knew where that led? It would be easy to run aground, so close to land. And if there were a navy cutter in whatever port Billy was being swept toward, the slaver could lose her whole cargo—

He felt the sea tickling the tops of his bare feet—and realized that the current was beginning to slow. He had been so intent on the slaver, on holding the battered mast together, that he had not realized the boat was taking on water. Quickly, his eyes swept over the little deck. The ash planks he had caulked together so carefully still held, even after the squall.

But there—
a space, no bigger than a man's finger, where the rudder had smashed against the boat. Another one directly across the deck, like a hole poked through a folded piece of paper. Desperately, he looked back over his shoulder at the slaver, which still seemed to linger by the head of the current, almost becalmed. He was in too close now, probably, for them to catch him—but they could still send a small boat out, manned with six good rowers, to run him down.

The water was almost at his ankles, the little sloop's speed slackening steadily as it settled. There was nothing he could stanch the holes with, no time to do it effectively even if there had been. Instead he simply began to bail, scooping up handful after handful of the water, dumping it over the side, wishing he still had his hat.

It was not enough. The water was still rising, close to swamping him already. The brig was still hovering by the current head, but at least the water kept carrying him in, little by little. There was a beach unfolding off to the starboard side now—a few hundred yards away,
close enough so that he could make out figures on the sand, casting into the surf.

This was it now,
he realized. This was as close to the shore as he could expect to get—though he did not know who the men there were, or where he was. There was no getting around it, though, the boat was all but sunk. He would have to try to dive as far as he could, then swim his way out of the current and to the beach. Yet there was an obvious danger here, too, if he could not fight his way out of the current; if it proved too strong for him, he would simply be swept along. Then the blackbirders could easily put out a boat, row him down before he made it to any land—

It would have to be tried. He said another swift prayer of hope and stood up—the water sloshing around his shins. After that he did not hesitate, but went to the starboard side and dived out as far as he could. The water glinting beneath him, the air ripping past his ears so that it seemed for a moment that he was propelling himself halfway to the shore.

Then he came down, still in the current. The water tugging at him at once, trying to drag him after the boat. He kicked out, and pulled for shore. He had always been a good swimmer, but the current was strong, very strong, and he felt nearly exhausted now, his ribs aching where he had been banged against the hull during the storm.

He kept kicking, kept pulling—the current yanking him down the length of the beach. It looked yellow, almost gold, from where he was, the sand mounds behind the fishing men. He kept pulling, the current slowly, grudgingly letting go, pulling loose of it like a man kicking off a tight boot. His breath rasping, pounding in his chest as he kept trying to shake it off.

Then it was gone—and all he had to contend with was the rough surf. Letting it throw him on toward the shore, barely able to lift his arms anymore, but tumbling down, sputtering and gasping as the waves tossed him about. Finally driven down into the sand by what felt like a pile driver, hearing what surely was another rib cracking. Rising up unsteadily—the next swell nearly knocking him over again. Staggering directly toward the nearest fisherman
—no chance of evading them, they were posted up and down the beach, as regular as sentinels.
Going right up to one, trying to make his face as relaxed, as accommodating and blank as he knew how from long and bitter experience.

Free or not free?

“I got swept out in marster's boat. If you be so kind—tell me how I might get back—” he croaked out—careful to keep his eyes down, looking at the sand, only darting small, surreptitious glances at the man before him.
Wondering if he could take him.
He was a little shorter than Billy, with a belly protruding through his coat, and a pair of high boots on. An unlit spray-soaked cigar clutched tightly in his teeth, his hands and his eyes still on his fishing pole while Billy tried to talk to him.

“What the hell should I care?” he snorted. “This is New Jersey! You can go to the devil, but see ya don't foul my line!”

Billy stood before him there on the beach. The yellow sand around him glinting as the clouds shifted restlessly above. Shivering a little, as he remembered how late it must be in the season, his wet, shirtless chest swelling up into goosebumps.

New Jersey. A free state—
he had made sure to learn the free ones, before he left. He looked up toward the horizon where he could just see the brig—its grey sails moving away now, making for the South. His gaze shifted, over to the speck of his own little sloop. Billy could barely make it out, but there it was, still being borne along the current. He watched as it settled into the sea, satisfied with it—with himself—for the job he had done. Never thinking, as he watched it disappear, that it would be the last boat he would ever build, the last time he would ever put hand to lumber in a shipyard.

•
28
•

By the time he made it to the Colored Orphans' Asylum, the sweat had soaked through even the thick burlap of his shirt. He turned in at the iron picket gate, past the huge weeping willow trees that stood like two enormous upturned mops in the yard. The building itself was three stories high—built like a Southern manor house, of all things, complete with a portico and six pillars over the front door. The only thing missing, the slave cabins out back—

At least the two Yankee ladies who ran it let the colored staff come up through the front, with the white schoolteachers and the philanthropic directors—

You are employees, same as the rest of us.
Stern grey eyes flashing, that unbending New England sense of justice prevailing at all times, for better or for worse.

Yet it was different this morning. He could sense it as soon as he walked through the doors, though everything looked and smelled as immaculate as ever. The bleached white halls had all been scrubbed down, and the whole building was suffused with the smell of lye, and boiled soap.

But there was something different.
Something off.
The long, echoing halls were quieter than they should be, though he could hear the children outside already, playing their usual rhyming and skipping
games. Rolling their hoops along the blue slate flagstones of the courtyard—

Just get the money. Get the money and get out. Three hours at best, the streets already crawling with drunken white men—

He went directly to the office—but both of the Yankee ladies, Miss Shotwell and Miss Murray, were already ensconced inside, the door locked and the thick green shade pulled down over the window. Billy hadn't expected this, and all he could do was to linger outside in the hall. Calculating, for lack of anything better, how much he was due, and how far it would take them.

Two weeks' wages was six dollars, plus the fifty cents they owed him for the hammer. Six dollars and fifty cents—

Even with the five that Ruth was sure to have—that she would have put away somewhere—it still would be barely enough to get them to Providence, much less Boston. Better head the other way, down to Newark. Take the ferry over from the Chambers Street slip—

And what then? How are we to live? That is the real reason why we never went before, I could not provide the means—

He looked up at the clock, above the Yankee ladies' office. It slowly ticked away the minutes, loud in the empty hall.
Just past eight now. Give them till eight-thirty, that was as long as he could risk it. No—eight-ten, with men already in the streets. With that maniac God knows where—

He would have to push his way in then, even if such impertinence cost him his position.
Why not now? Why wait at all?
He moved for the door, then stopped.
What if they refused to give him the back pay?
He could not picture the Yankee misses being so unfair—but who knew what people would do, on such a day.

He sat himself down on the little visitors' bench just outside the office, where he had seen so many of the parents come, the aunts and grandparents, older sisters and brothers. Sitting there in their best clothes, waiting to hear if the Asylum would take their child. The children themselves sitting preternaturally still, their eyes taking in everything. Aware of what was going on, not daring to speak for fear that would break some spell, the only tie they still held to their family.

Billy hated it. He hated everything about the orphanage, or at least
he told himself he did. It was the only job he had ever held in the City. He hated his dependence on it, and yet he hated to leave it, too.

When he had finally reached New York, he had gone straight to the water. He was sure that he would be able to get some kind of position, once he saw the forest of sails around the harbor. There were more ships than he had ever seen in Charleston, or Rotterdam, more ships than he had even seen in London, and his heart leaped at the sight of them.

He was sure that he would get something. Applying at all the Manhattan shipyards, busy as anthills, that ran from South Street up to East Twenty-third. There must be something for him—maybe not his old position of authority and responsibility, not right away. He was a sensible man, he knew that no one started at the top in a new place—but
something.

But there had been only white men. And when he told them what he wanted, and that he had not come to dance for pennies or sell them their lunch, they cursed him to his face and told him to leave, and threatened to call the slavecatchers out on him. He went back the next day, to another yard, but got the same answer there. It was the same again the next day, and the day after that, and not only from the Irish workers in the yards but also from the Germans and the Americans.

He tried down in Red Hook, in Brooklyn, and up the river in Greenpoint, and even over in the Hoboken yards, but it was always the same thing. At one site, a small yard by Corlears Hook named McPherson's, he had even gotten the owners to agree to hire him. In his desperation he had grabbed up a stave and shaved and planed it right there before them, so expertly and instantly that they had agreed to hire him at a new man's wage.

But as soon as he had gone down into the yard, as soon as the men realized what he was there for, each one of them put down his tools and walked out. Refusing to listen even when the owners threatened to fire them all—uttering the only thing he had heard everywhere, half law and half threat:

This is a white man's shop. This is a white man's waterfront.

Before much longer his money had run out, even in the dilapidated lodging houses for black sailors he had been able to find along Roosevelt
Street. After that he had given up on finding a position in the yards and gone looking for anything he could get. Asking for work on the construction sites that seemed to sprout up on every corner overnight. Applying to shovel coal at the huge gas works, reeking of ammonia, that loomed over Fourteenth Street—even begging to sweep the entrails and the shit and the hooves off the floor at The Place of Blood.

Yet there was nothing for him. And he began to notice that all the other black men he saw were doing no more than pushing wheelbarrows, at best, running errands, hauling sacks over their shoulders like donkeys. Nothing steady. They were not even allowed to carry hods with the lowest of the Paddy construction teams. Their black faces, nevertheless, guarded and furtive at all times. Looking away when he met their eyes, as if to protect what little they had.

Down on the docks, by the fish markets in Fulton Street, he had even seen grown black men dancing for eels. One man tapping his foot in time and flogging away at a harmonica or a banjo. His partner performing the blindingly fast steps, the aloof, loose-limbed jerks of what they called a breakdown. The white fish sellers grinning and nudging each other with delight and unable to keep their own feet from tapping. Condescending, from time to time, to throw out a still-flopping, twitching eel at the feet of the dancers.

What the white men didn't know—what Billy saw—was how the dance was really a mimicry. A subtle, mocking caricature of how the bowlegged white sailors, and the Paddy laborers, carried themselves so importantly along the dockside—especially when they encountered a black man.

A fine little joke, just between the performers, the two black men. But what did that matter to
them,
the white men watching and smirking?

Only the black sailors Billy saw around the boardinghouses seemed to him like full men. Their blue navy jackets and white pants were clean and pressed, their flat sailor hats worn at a jaunty angle. They laughed and spoke as boldly as they pleased, and he considered trying to ship out with them, bound for Brazil, or Peru; Veracruz or Santo Domingo or Havana. But when he went down to the South Street docks and
tried to talk to them, they only grinned, and spoke rapidly at him in their own tongues, and it occurred to Billy that he would have no idea what it would be like on such a ship, that he would have no idea of what might happen to him.

As opposed to this City—

He had walked on over to the bustling shipyards again. Trying not to think about how he was out of money now, or the hole in his stomach that seemed to pull his whole self down into it. Watching the carpenters and finishers, laying out the skeletons of their ships like so many fishbones. The start of something fine, that would build methodically and precisely, until it was ready to take the wind and sail around the world, holding a company of men safe against the waves.

That was when he had started. He had turned away from the yards and walked right into the first saloon he saw along Water Street, a leaning wooden shack that called itself The Sailor's Rest. He knew the chances were good that he would not be served—that he might even be robbed and beaten as soon as he set foot inside the swinging doors—but he walked in anyway. That was how desperate he had been, to spend his last nickel on something, anything, that might serve to cloud his mind.

But he hadn't been beaten, or thrown into the river, as he might have expected. He had even been granted what might have been considered a privilege, though he knew that it was not. The white men stood sucking on rubber hoses that ran up to barrels of whiskey behind the bar. But the barman had produced a glass for him—the foulest, dirtiest glass he had ever laid eyes on, to be sure—and poured his whiskey for him.

“Here!” he had barked, grinning sourly at Billy but perfectly serious. “We can't have ye drinkin' from the same hose as a white man, then.”

Billy had stood there looking at it for a moment, unsure of whether to laugh or walk out. Instead he had picked up the glass and tipped it back into his throat, swallowing the whole shot in one quick slug. It was the worst thing he had ever tasted, swelling and searing the back of his mouth and his throat, until it felt as if it would burst through his head. Yet filling him with everything he had needed, with bitterness and courage and stupid pride.

“That your last nickel?” the bartender asked knowingly.

Billy blinked dimly back at the man—already made stupid, his every reaction, even the blink of his eyes already dulled and slow.

“Course, if ye want to go to the Velvet Room, there's a whole bowl of the creature for ya. On the house.”

The bartender nodded toward a red curtain at the back of the room. God only knew what lay behind it—a covered room in a waterfront bar—but Billy actually considered it.
A whole bowl of the stuff, more than he would ever be able to afford. Already wanting so much of it—

Very slowly, with a tremendous effort, he made himself shake his head. Sensing, even instantly drunk as he was, that it would be better not to take the bartender up on his offer.
Nothing was offered for free in this City. Somebody offered you something for nothing, you had better run—

He pushed himself away from the bar. Staggering out into the fetid, running streets, the barman still calling after him, entreating him. Billy kept going, trudging through the yellowed horse manure, and falling everywhere as he walked. All his beautiful rage and bitterness and courage, falling with each step he took through the yellowed leavings, the shit-once-oats already fading and separating back to oats. Falling with each step he took away from the bar.

He stumbled back down to the wharves, walking blindly. His Dutch courage already falling, too, and only the emptiness in his stomach remaining. Wishing he had kept the nickel now, to buy a roll, a piece of fish. Begging silently for a job, any job, just out of pity. Just to sweep the shavings off the dry docks—

Something hard and wet slapped at his feet, so loud he took a jump back.
An eel.
The creature still alive, still trying to wriggle its way off the dry stones, back to water. He looked over to see a pair of red-faced, thick-armed white men, grinning expectantly, and he wanted to grab up the slimy creature and hurl it back at their heads.