Red Hook (37 page)

“Maybe. Yes, I tell him let's go drink some coffee, I call him and say, I am outside of your place waiting for you, Sid, please come. I wait.”

I didn't answer. He had called Sid. He had asked him to come out. It was that morning, Tuesday, when Sid left and didn't come back, when he left his door open. A call from the Russian, Sid running out to meet him, forgetting to lock his door.

I said, “You invited him to come out with you, you asked him out for coffee, is that it, you were friends with Sid so you knew if you said come and have coffee and we'll talk about old times, he'd do it?”

Mack held up the cigarettes. I shook my head. He flicked his lighter over and over. It didn't work. He found some matches in his windbreaker, reached into the canvas pocket again and produced a glass jar, unscrewed the lip and tossed the match into it. He set it on the dashboard for an ashtray and watched the ash from his cigarette topple into the bottom.

“Sure.”

“How did you know?”

“He was always looking around for me, always asking people, I didn't want this. I didn't want to be in his book,” he said. “I don't want people to know my story. I don't want them to send me back.”

“What book,” I said.

He held up his hand. It was small and thick like the rest of him. He talked mostly in Russian. He talked about the ship. He talked about Red Hook in the 1950s, and his forays into the neighborhood, where he hid, who took him in, how he got braver and started walking around Brooklyn. He walked for miles everywhere. Once, he said, he went into Manhattan. It scared him; he never went back.

Want a sandwich, kid, people would say once they got to know him. There was a bar near the docks where they gave him Coca-Cola to drink and sometimes beer, and where he ate his first hamburger.

He became a pet. A lot of people in the community
were Catholic, Irish, Italian; they decided to rescue him from Communism, he said; they thought he was retarded. They thought he was simple because he didn't speak English, didn't speak much at all to tell the truth because he kept his mouth shut, feeling it was safer. A couple of the older women fed him and took him to church and had him baptized. When the freighter finally went back to sea, Mack—everyone called him Mack by then—wasn't on it. He had disappeared into Red Hook.

The wave hit me from the side. I could make out the waves, ten, fifteen feet tall, black, tight, close up to me, practically on us, the wind roaring, the boat rolling up, and then down, like a plane hitting an air pocket. The water slammed me. The rain hit my face. I was soaked now, my suit heavy as lead. Somehow I got out of the jacket. Then another wave. The piece of canvas overhead began to shred. Strips of canvas hung down from it. The wind blew one of them into my face. I clawed it away.

All I could see at first were Mack's hands as they gripped the wheel. The glass jar on the dashboard slid off and crashed on to the deck of the boat, spilling ash. My mouth tasted like shit. I had smoked most of a pack of cigarettes. Something about the jar bothered me. I tried to focus. We were in open water. We were in the river.

In the distance there were a few faint lights.

“Red Hook,” Mack said, following my gaze.

I wondered if I could make it to shore if I had to swim. The storm roared, the outboard motor made clunking noises; Mack was silent now.

Another wave hit us. Water sloshed over the edge. The rest of the canvas blew away. Salt water filled my mouth.

When Mack started talking again, he yelled out his words over the storm and the engine. He kept the boat steady. We were in Buttermilk Channel, he said, but I had no way of knowing if it was the truth and we were heading towards the city, or moving towards open water, out to the ocean.

Mack told me he had never seen a black person until he met Sid and Earl. They were his own age. They had bicycles. Sid had a bright blue bike, very shiny, with a bell and a light. It had a license plate. Schwinn was its name. It had a flag, too, that read: Brooklyn Dodgers, World Champions, 1953.

He couldn't read it, not at first. He could barely read Russian, much less English, but one of the boys explained what it was. Baseball, they said. We'll teach you. We'll bring our stuff and show you how to play, they said. Bat. This is a bat. This is the ball. This is the glove. They brought things and showed him.

The water was a little calmer now, the waves down to six feet; we were in the channel. We were close to Governor's Island. Mack kept talking and talking, I was desperate to hear him, and scared I was going to go over the edge as the wind came in huge gusts.

He talked about how eventually he melted into the community and people stopped noticing him. Two other sailors from the ship also disappeared and no one ever heard from them. He suspected they left New York
on another ship, Canadian maybe; there were a lot of Russians who went up to Canada. It was cold up there. Empty. They could get a job in the oil fields up north, or head for Yellowknife where they could work in the diamond mines. Later he heard that one guy ended up in Nome, Alaska. No one except Russians would work that far north.

Mack stayed in Brooklyn. He went to ball games at Ebbets Field. He found a girlfriend. He worked around the shipyards. For years he stayed in Red Hook; in the 1970s, when the Russians started arriving in big numbers, he drifted out to Brighton Beach and met a woman named Irina and got married and had a daughter, but Irina didn't like America and she took the kid back to the Soviet Union.

What about Sid? I said.

Sid went away, he said. He went to college. Earl stayed. They were friends, Mack and Earl. They took care of each other, he said.

“You stayed in Brooklyn for fifty years?”

Why not, he said. Many people disappeared. Many people just disappeared into New York City all the time, just got off the boat or the airplane and walked away, no visa, nothing, just melted. He grinned. They are still doing. Is easy, he said. Very easy. Somehow Mack lit up another cigarette. In the light I saw his face; he was unafraid, of the water, the storm, the boat, me.

I said, “But you met Sid again, didn't you?” I was shivering.

“You want to go inside?” He gestured to the little cabin.

I shook my head.

“You do not like boats?” he said in Russian.

“You met Sid again?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am in Red Hook two years ago, and there he is Sidney McKay, professor, historian of Red Hook, philosopher, he is everywhere, making his little notes, asking people do you know this or that, do you know Russian who came on ship many years ago. You knew him well?”

“Yes.”

He stared at me, squinting and said suddenly, “I know who you are. I saw you. I saw you go into Sidney's place, yes?”

I didn't answer.

“I saw you go in Sunday morning, Monday morning also,” he said. “You don't know about boats, do you? You don't like boats. I can tell you don't like this, you don't like water.”

“What book?”

“Sidney is writing a book about ship.
Red Dawn.
Everyone knew. He wants to write history. He wants to tell story. I see him, he asks me questions, I say don't write, please, don't, leave history alone. Nothing comes from history except shit, I tell him.”

“What did he say?”

“He says is all there is, history. I say for you this is writing, for me, is my life, I don't want to be prisoner from history, please. I am not even legal, OK? You are not legal, people send you away. I know this. I leave Russia when they kill you if you break law, I say to Sid. I find Earl, I say, tell him. Tell him. Earl drinks all day, but
he listens, is my friend. I say, if this comes out, they send me back. I leave Stalin time, go back Putin time. Same studio, different head, like they say Hollywood. OK?”

Mack made the joke but in his voice I could hear the panic he felt when he thought about going back. He thought of Russia as the same place it had been when he left and Stalin was alive.

“I do anything not to go back,” he said, yelling above the wind.

“Earl went to see Sid? He did it for you?”

“Yes. To make Sid stop. Make him leave me alone. Earl says, go with me, please, and I say, no, every time I see Sid he just asks me questions, what was ship like, what was Russia like, who was on ship, which other sailors, where they from, what you did all these years in Brooklyn, who you met, saw, which gangsters on waterfront, tell me about smells, sights, sounds, name ships you noticed, what kind of cheese in first sandwich you ate on American soil. What kind of cheese? Who gives one shit? He says, God in the details, and I think what does he mean, I don't understand. So I told Earl, go, talk to Sid. Then I go, too. Is too late. Earl was drunk and sick. Sid hits him.”

“What with? With a walking stick? A cane?”

“I don't know. Yes. Maybe. Or Baseball bat. Old bat he has from old days. Bat with Dodgers on it. Championship year. I watch, then I run away.” He was drinking and his eyes filled up with self-pity. “I run away, and Earl is dead.”

“But you went back,” I said. “Why are you telling me?”

He looked out over the water and up at the rain. There was water on the floor of the boat, and he waved his hand at it, and said, “Why not?”

I knew then that he didn't care if he lived or died. I wanted to say, take the fucking boat back to shore, let's just go back; I felt that I'd do anything at all to get off the boat, but what could I do? I was with a man who didn't care.

I shouted, “Take the boat back.”

“Why?”

“It's raining.”

He laughed. “Is good answer.”

Holding on to the edge of the boat, I fumbled frantically for something I could threaten him with. “Take the boat in,” I said again. “Do it. You don't do it, I'll make sure you go back to Russia. To jail there, you understand?”

In the water in the bottom of the boat, the broken jar sloshed up against my ankle. I reached down and picked it up, half thinking I could use it as a weapon. I was holding the top half. A piece of the label was still stuck on the glass.

The boat rocked furiously, and Mack did something with the steering wheel or whatever the hell you did with boats, and I thought again I was going to vomit. It was comic, me the tough cop, throwing up off a bobbing sailboat a mile from home in the middle of my own city. We came around the tip of Governor's Island. I knew because I could just make out the ferry landing. I looked the other way, looked for the southern tip of Manhattan.

I held the broken jar close to my face, and read the label. Borscht Works. It had contained soup.

“So,” Mack said, face wrinkled with fear.

“You got married?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You had a daughter?”

“Yes, I told you that. Why?”

“Rita is your daughter.”

He didn't answer me.

“Rita is your daughter and she didn't want you around, God knows why, but she didn't, so she told me there's an old man, she told me about you,” I said.

I was my father's son after all.

“So we'll go back to shore now,” I added softly, and got up somehow, trying to keep my balance. The edge of the glass jar cut my hand, and I could feel the blood mix with water. I threw the jar overboard. If I could get my balance, I could grab Mack. But then what?

“I couldn't let Sidney do that to Earl,” Mack said, almost dreamily now. “I couldn't, and I didn't want to be in his goddamn book. Don't want people to know. I didn't want to listen to all questions from the past. Do you understand?” He got up from his seat, the rain beating on him. “I killed Sidney.”

I went for him, but he seemed to move backwards. I was falling. A wave socked me smack in the face. I couldn't stay upright. We were in wild water again.

“I don't go back to Russia,” he said. “Not ever. No.”

Over Mack's head, I looked up, thinking I could make out the shape of the Statue of Liberty. It disappeared. The city emerged from the dark, the lighted
walls, the solid buildings, but I couldn't tell if it was real or not, then it all faded away as another wave cut into me.

The single place on earth that I really loved, where I had felt safe, receded farther and farther from me, and I could smell the salt, and thought that we were going in the other direction, to open water, away from New York.

For a second, trying to see through the rain, I took my eyes off Mack. When I looked back he was gone. So fast I barely saw him, he got over the edge of the boat and was in the water.

Sonny Lippert didn't say anything much when he met me at the dock near Red Hook where the Coast Guard boat brought me. It was still dark, though it was almost morning and rain was pelting down solid from a pitch-black sky. I heard one of the Coast Guard guys say anyone who went out in this kind of storm was crazy. I thought about Mack. He was a sailor. He must have known it was crazy. Maybe he had done it to get rid of me. Maybe he never planned to come back. After he went over the edge of the boat, I had reached out for him. I grabbed his hand. I felt it, wet, cold; I tried to grab hold of his wrist, but he let go of me. All those years of fear, of hiding in Brooklyn, of wondering when they would send him back, he had let it go.

Sonny offered to take me to the hospital. He offered to take me home. I said I was OK, I just needed my car and dry clothes, and he didn't insist, just let me do what I had to and kept everyone else away.

After one of the Coast Guard guys got my phone number and took some notes, Sonny drove me to my
car. In the trunk, I found some clothes I had packed for the beach and a towel. I dried off with the towel that had red sand buckets on it, put what was left of my soaked suit in the back seat, and changed into dry stuff. In the back seat of my car was the picture of Tolya as a young rock and roll guy.

Sonny waited near the car. I had swallowed a lot of water, but I was OK. He watched me get in my car and drive away.