Red Hook (2 page)

Red Hook was a weird fat lip of land cut off from the rest of the city by a couple of highways that had been jammed through Brooklyn. It was a square mile of what had been the biggest shipyards on earth, isolated, surrounded on three sides by water, but fifteen minutes from downtown Manhattan.

In the other direction, away from the city, was the long Brooklyn coast, the piers and warehouses and marinas that ran all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and the beaches that were the seacoast of New York. Out in the water, a yellow water taxi sped by.

Sid had been half crazy when he called me the day before. I opened my cellphone and played back the message I got this morning. On Saturday he had called me two, three times. Please come, Artie, he had said. Please can you come on out? I'd be grateful, he had said. Drop by, he said, as if it was a social invitation, then more urgent: Can you hurry? Hurry!

Where are you? I'd said. A Mexican place, he said. Over on Columbia, corner of Van Brunt, you can't miss it. I can't come, I said. I can't, Sid. I'm getting married tomorrow. I'll call someone for you. He kept calling anyway, rambling, talking about the restaurant where he was, talking about some homeless guy he was scared of. I'm afraid, he had said. I'm scared.

All that Saturday afternoon, Sid McKay sat out on the roof deck of the Mexican restaurant on Columbia Street, sipping beer as he watched the river turn to liquid tin. He had the iPod his son sent him and for a while he listened to some music, a little Mahler, some Schubert and Gershwin. Above the river, the city was stacked up on itself, like Mayan ruins.

Sid had dropped in to the bar downstairs for a beer, then come up to the deck for lunch. He sat on after everyone was gone, drinking cold beer, reading, a stack of books and newspapers and folders in front of him on the table.

No one bothers him up here. Shutting his eyes for a minute, soaking in the last of the sun, he feels at home. Sid's a regular. He knows the guy who built the place. Sid knows the bartender, the waiters. It's his
neighborhood. In some strange way, he feels altogether more at ease with himself these days, in a way he never has, not in his whole striving, ambitious, screwed-up life, though he's aware how febrile he is, how his mood can change like a fever rising, then cooling down.

Sid's wearing shorts, something he never does out of the house, but it's a hot day and he came out in khaki shorts and an old green tennis shirt. There's no one much to see him. Anyone still left in the city is heading out to the beach. You can hear the silence.

The end of summer. The city emptying out like a drain. The Republicans are coming into town for their convention. Life in the times of George W. Bush, Sid thinks. A lot of praying. Lot of propaganda in the news. The Republicans are coming. The invasion, he thinks.

He looks out at the water again. Like everyone else, Sid's eye is first caught by the vacancy in the sky. Can't help it. Like your tongue finding the missing tooth. Three years next week since the Twin Towers went down. Three years since everything changed.

He takes off his reading glasses, gets up and leans out over the railing, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Liberty in the harbor; he's still plenty sentimental about the view he's been looking at his whole life. If you go downstairs and across the street and over to the edge of the water, you can look Liberty dead in the eye. Governor's Island, too, and the Buttermilk Channel in-between.

The history of this area of Brooklyn, of the old docklands, its images occupy Sid's mind like antique woodcuts: in them he sees the ships and warehouses, the
sailors, the carts and horses, and the women who once walked the channel, muslin caps on, long dresses hitched up around their waists, carrying wooden pails of fresh milk; the channel so shallow that they could walk across it in the time it took for the milk to turn to buttermilk.

What was Brooklyn like, he always wonders, when Walt Whitman was the editor of the original
Brooklyn Eagle?
When this was a separate city, the third biggest in America, alive with people protesting slavery, abolitionists raising their fists and Whitman urging people to stand up for the “stupid and crazy”, to be invulnerable to fear. And there have always been black men in Brooklyn, men like him he thinks, too, half proud, half sardonic. Arms still on the railing of the deck, Sid polishes off his third beer.

There's even been talk of reviving the
Eagle,
the great newspaper. People talked about Pete Hamill, of course, also of Brooklyn, for editor. Once, Sid would have liked a shot at editing it himself.

Sid grew up in Brooklyn, has lived here all his life, not near the docks, of course, which were forbidden. The waterfront was dangerous when he was a kid.

It excites him, though, the way this part of Brooklyn is coming back. Out of the wreckage, he thinks. It is thrilling, people coming in, everyone wanting a piece of the action. Developers prowl Red Hook's streets these days, wanting in, and some of them call Sid because he knows his way around; they wheedle and plead for information. The historian, the philosopher, the poet of Red Hook, Sid has seen himself described in a magazine article.

Laughing to himself, leaning against the railing for support, he gathers up his books: Pushkin short stories, biographies of Walt Whitman and Paul Robeson. Real poets. Collectively, they are Sid's bible. He puts the books in the worn green book bag and tries to reclaim the scrubbed boy who bought the bag decades before as a Harvard freshman. Sid puts in the folders that are full of his own notes.

Still standing, he looks down at the street and he sees him. Sees him again. Sees the homeless man and feels panic. The sight rips into Sid's reverie. His mood changes. He grasps his cellphone.

He calls Artie Cohen again to say where he is, what he sees. Artie doesn't answer.

He's already called Artie once, or maybe twice, that morning when he saw the homeless man near his building, the man watching his windows. In spite of the heat, a chill ripples along the skin of Sid's arms. The man has been around before: a week earlier, he walked up to Sid, hand out, begging. Crossing the street, Sid pretended he was in a hurry, not giving the man a second look. I should have helped him. I should have given him a buck, he thinks now. He dials the phone again.

Artie answers. Artie? Can you come? Drop by? He makes it as casual as he can, but he's scared.

I can't come, Artie tells Sid. I'm getting married tomorrow. Sunday. I'm sorry, Sid, he says and reminds him he's invited to the party. Sunday night, he says. Tomorrow. Come on into the city.

Sid won't go to Artie's wedding, though, not a party with strangers. Once maybe, when he was a pretty
famous guy, when he worked at the
Times,
when he showed up on TV, and knew people and went to parties every night, but not now.

They were pretty close, him and Artie, and he tries not to feel resentful at his not coming to Brooklyn. When Artie worked cases that interested Sid and he was covering the city, they had seen a lot of each other. They kept in touch. They helped each other out. But Sid can't face a crowd.

I used to love it, Sid thinks; I loved parties, I went to all of them, knew everyone, always up for a good time. I was a lot younger. I'm sixty-five years old and retired, and I don't like parties much.

Sid thinks: who else can I call? He doesn't trust any other cops the way he trusts Artie Cohen.

Over the river, the sun's getting ready to slam itself down into the water in an outrageous splashy New York sunset. Sid puts some money on the table, tries to laugh, tries to feel detached, ironic, but he looks down at the sidewalk again, searching for the homeless guy.

It's getting late. It's September, the melancholy time of year he hates because it starts getting dark early. Already, though Sid has barely noticed, people are settling in at the other tables around him on the deck, inspecting menus, ordering food and drinks.

Sid picks up the cane he's been using since he hurt his ankle playing tennis, an old walking stick made out of sassafras wood, he gathers up his book bag, then begins to limp towards the stairs, still regretting he lost his favorite stick long ago, the Jimmy Carter peanut-head
stick he got when he covered Carter's presidency. He's too vain to use the aluminum cane the hospital gave him, and he knows it.

In the bar, Sid orders a last beer. He gets a pack of cigarettes, something he hasn't done for years and, bag over his shoulder, heads for the street.

Unwrapping the cellophane, feeling it crackle, smelling the tobacco, he lights up like a kid sneaking a smoke. It tastes great.

Looking up and down the street, Sid waits anxiously in the doorway of the restaurant, but the homeless guy has gone. The street lights are on. People drift into the restaurants along the block.

It's fine out, a balmy evening and Sid sets off to walk the mile or so back to his place, leaning hard on the cane, but enjoying the cigarette, the night air. He passes close to the Marine Terminal, and the vast desolate lots for impounded cars, all of it butting up against the water.

“I was a fool to be worried,” he says and realizes he's said it out loud. “Old fool.” He tosses away the cigarette.

On Coffey Street he walks across the little park and out on to the new pier. Halfway, his ankle begins to throb and Sid stops short, sits down hard on a bench. It's a few minutes from his place. Somehow he loses track of time and nods off.

A few minutes later, Sid's eyes snap open. His nerve endings feel raw. Someone close by is watching him. He gets up, brisk now, walking as fast as he can towards his building, and then realizes he's heading right for it,
whatever it is, because he can smell it. He smells the stink.

He smells the guy before he sees him, then he hears the voice, whining, asking for change. The man is in front of him, coming closer.

Change, the guy says softly, got any change? A dollar? Fifty cents? I'm hungry, man. Please.

It's the same man Sid has seen before. His own height and color. Medium brown, but ashen from booze and drugs. Inside the layers of rags and filth is a human being who looks like him. He can tell that the man knows it, too.

Eyes gluey with glaucoma, thickened by cataracts, the man peers into Sid's face. A kind of dim surprise registers. He reaches out a hand. Sid keeps moving.

See you around, the guy mumbles in a drugged daze, and looks at him again and Sid feels that in the man he can see his own death.

Stop, Sid says to himself. Cut the melodrama. Then he wishes, for the second time that night, he'd given the man some money.

Before he finally disappears, the man circles Sid one more time, leaving his stink, like an animal marking out territory.

“You have any idea what color he was, the dead guy?” I said to the detective in the red jacket who was still near the water when I got back from Sid's warehouse.

“Watch it,” she yelled and grabbed my sleeve. “Jesus, you almost fell the fuck in,” she said.

I said again, “You have any idea? His color, I mean. White? Black?”

“Black. I think someone said he was black. I heard them say. One of the guys got a look. Why?”

I felt cold. “How long is this going to take?”

“Give it half an hour. You OK?”

I passed her my cigarettes again and for a few minutes we stood and smoked and I looked across the inlet at a ten-story metal cone where sugar cane had been stored when it came off the ships. I'd read somewhere that Ferdinand Marcos owned it once, him or his cousin, or some other Filipino con man.

The place was derelict. Fire had reduced the machinery, the chutes, gears, wheels and slides that had serviced the cone, to a mass of burnt twisted metal.

The detective looked at the inlet.

“Poor bastard was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. There's not much crime around here anymore. I bet he was all boozed up and fell the fuck in.”

She said she'd lived around here her whole life and had seen plenty of crime, especially after the shipping moved out to the big container ports over in Bayonne.

“Jersey,” she added contemptuously.

She could remember when there were crack deals on every block, people squatting in abandoned buildings, using them for toilets, gunfire all night. When she was still a kid, the school principal had been gunned down in broad daylight.

“Used to be a bucket-of-blood kind of place,” she said. “People dumped their shit by the water, they even tossed out their dead cats, garbage guys would come once a week and scoop it up.”

Times were better, she added, the waterfront getting developed, a supermarket coming in, even Ikea sniffing around.

“Red Hook is now officially cool.” She grinned. “People fighting over real estate. Artists moving in. They're planting parks along here in front of the old warehouses. It's good,” she said. “It's OK. My pop would have died laughing. He was a longshoreman, old school.” She crossed herself and threw her half-smoked cigarette into the water. “You know something about the dead guy? You have an interest?”

I nodded.

A police photographer I hadn't seen before, in a vest with neon yellow stripes, darted in front of me, trying to
get a good angle on the dead man in the water. It struck me: there was a lot of manpower.

“You always get so many people out here like this?” I said.

“I was thinking the same thing. Fucking beats me how there's so much attention,” she said. “I mean the Republican convention coming to town, every fucking law enforcement person doing double, triple time getting ready for the politicians, and you get a bunch of people out by the docks in Red Hook crack of dawn Sunday? Someone with connections must have been interested.”

“Yeah.”

“Boy, I'm glad this summer is almost over, what did they call it, Summer of Risk?” She grinned sarcastically. “Now all of us are supposed to cancel our vacations, and go guard rich Republicans and the rich assholes giving them a kazillion dollars. Not to mention the fucking protestors. You ever been around one of those political events?”