Red Hook (29 page)

Now his own son was calling him a loser. And why not? He’d failed at marriage, failed at parenting, let another good woman go. And without his job, he was nothing.

He threw the half-empty bottle out into the water. He could hear his brother Petey shouting, laughing, as he swam away from these same rocks.

He rubbed his weary eyes. Didn’t he deserve to see his life go wrong? Wasn’t it in the Bible?
If a man is burdened with the blood of another, let him be a fugitive unto death. Let no one help him.

A cloud crept across the sun and its bright phosphor mirror died on the water like a fish’s scales gone gray. He stared out into the expanse of sea and sky. What difference did he make to the grand picture? He was just a speck—if he was gone, the ships would still plod out to sea. The waves would lap, the buoy would ring. Perps would still commit murder, and other detectives would catch them or not. If he removed himself from the world, who would care? If a whole neighborhood could bow out, why couldn’t he? He could do it the slow way, fall into the bottle. Or he could eat his gun—go out with a bang and a whimper. No: he’d seen too many gunshot victims to want to damage himself that way. He stood and moved to the metal railing, watched the gentle waves. Maybe drowning would be more peaceful.

He thought of the missile bay on Santiago’s son’s Navy ship, imagined an alarm sounding as the air thickened with a mist so dense a man could drown in it. Maybe it would be good to breathe it in and let everything go.

Thirty-three years before, a scared kid on a Navy ship bound for Europe, he’d looked down at the ocean and wondered what it would be like to drown. If you fell overboard in the night in the middle of the Atlantic, with thousands of miles of icy water in every direction, you were a doomed man. An old salt told him the best thing was to just give up and fill your lungs with water, but he couldn’t imagine that. He had promised himself that, if such a moment came, he’d set out swimming.

He chewed a stick of peppermint gum, hoping it would cover the alcohol on his breath. The speaker, a fat little man in a business suit, was up on stage telling a long, sad, and funny story about the disintegration of his marriage, a story that—judging from the few sentences Jack could focus on—he would normally have found compelling. In the middle of the tale, he glanced up and noticed a mirrored ball hanging from the basement ceiling; he stared at it for a while. He was exhausted but wired, as if he’d drunk a pot of bad coffee after a double tour.

Several volunteers made the trip to the front of the room. A young Irish kid said that he’d felt nothing the day his father shot himself—he’d been too drunk and stoned to care. A housewife cried when she told how she had been drunk so often that she’d missed the high points of her children’s lives.

“Would anyone else like to say anything?” a woman behind the desk asked. “Do we have anybody new to the program?”

Jack’s hand rose as if by its own accord.

The woman pointed to him and nodded. Her wan face looked kind.

And then—he didn’t remember getting up or moving forward—he was sitting in front of the group. He looked out on the rows of people sitting calmly around the room. He looked down at his lap. He was trembling so hard he couldn’t speak.

“It’s okay,” the last speaker said from her seat in the front row. “You can do it.”

He wanted desperately to get up and bolt, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He pushed his palms over his thighs as if to wipe them clean.

“My name is Jack,” he finally mumbled. When he didn’t add “And I’m an alcoholic,” he expected the group to rise up and cast him out. He hoped they would.

As one, they cheerfully called out, “Hi, Jack!”

He pinched the front of his shirt; his wet undershirt clung to his ribs.

“I don’t…I’ve never…”

He stopped and cleared his throat. A silence. He glanced at the faces in the room, recognized the woman who had spoken at that first meeting. Jill?
Janet.
And there was the kid with the gold chain whose girlfriend had ditched him when he sobered up. Their faces were sympathetic. Interested.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” he said. “I don’t know if you know Red Hook. It’s just past Carroll Gardens. Near the water. My father worked the docks. When I was little, he’d take me and my brother Peter down the docks to visit the ships. There used to be so many. That’s one reason we won the war. World War Two, I mean. We built great ships.”

He paused.

“I don’t know what I’m talking about here. I don’t…” He took a deep breath. “Things used to disappear off the ships, Your had the ILA, the longshoreman’s union, and you had the Mob down there. From every load, between the ship and the trucks, a lot of stuff disappeared. Liquor, clothes, tools, whatever. It was
normal
.”

The bourbon sat raw and fiery in his stomach. He reached out and poured himself a glass of water. “Excuse me. I guess I’m rambling. The point is, I had a brother. In nineteen sixty-five he was just thirteen years old. Petey was such a funny kid. He could imitate everybody in the neighborhood: the barbers, the longshoremen, the people in our building. He was a natural at sports. A great shortstop. People used to say he’d grow up to give PeeWee Reese a run for his money. Everybody liked him. He was such a good-natured kid. And I was…”

He stared down at the table as if hoping to find more words there. He hadn’t mentioned alcohol even once. Surely it was only a matter of time before the others caught on. Before they stopped him.

“I wasn’t as good as Petey—I used to act up. And I wasn’t as popular as him, especially with the girls. Maybe sometimes…I was a little jealous. I loved him, though. He was my only brother.

“One day in November of that year it was really warm. Indian summer. Me and Petey were playing hooky; I was going through this thing where I was trying to act like James Dean, or something. My old man insisted that we finish high school, because he never had the chance. He always said we should never end up working on the docks like him. But we didn’t give a damn about school.

“We went down to the water for a while. Chucked rocks off a pier. Stupid shit. We tried to catch a seagull. We got tired of that pretty quick—let me tell you, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never catch a seagull.”

A chuckle passed through the room. Someone shifted; their chair squeaked on the linoleum.

“We walked up Sullivan Street. Petey was singing “Help Me, Rhonda,” which was a big hit that year. He was always singing. There was a vacant lot there, with a trailer in the back. And we’re walking through the lot, and Petey’s bouncing a rubber ball. A Spaldeen, that’s what we called it in the old days. And we’re walking by, and it takes a bad bounce. Under the trailer, which was up on blocks. Petey’s digging around, searching through the weeds, and all of a sudden he stands up. ‘Jack,’ he says. ‘Get a load of this.’ And he drags out a wooden case. We crack it open and it’s filled with bottles of Scotch. We figured it was swag, boosted off some ship.”

He imagined the other people in the room telling themselves,
Aha, now we finally get to the booze.

“Normally, I would have said, ‘Don’t mess with it,’ ’cause either the longshoremen or the Mob might have been involved. Only they would never have hid it in such a stupid place—it would have been sold right away to some bar or social club. We argued about what to do with it, and finally I said, ‘Let’s take it.’ Not home—my father would have killed us—but up to Richards Street, to this friend of mine named Joe Kolchuk, who could keep it in his basement. So Petey throws his jacket over it, and we take turns carrying it up the street.”

He stopped and licked his lips. Nobody in the room moved; they didn’t even shift in their chairs. He could feel his throat tightening, feel his voice going flat. He’d told the story before, to his parents, to the police—but never the whole story.

“We were about two blocks away from Joe’s house, walking down Richards Street, when these two black guys came up behind us. They were older than us, maybe sixteen or seventeen.

“They said, ‘Hey!’

“I said, ‘Hey what?’

“‘You got something belongs to us.’

“‘Oh, yeah?’ At that point I was carrying the case. Under my breath, I told Petey to keep walking.

“‘You found that under the trailer,’ one guy said. ‘Give it up.’ He was wearing an old army jacket. Had an Afro. He was bigger than me and Petey and so was his friend.

“We could have handed it over and probably that would have ended it. But I knew they weren’t from the neighborhood, and because they were Negroes, I knew that no way were they with the Mob. And just then, about three blocks down, I saw a police car turn the corner. They were rolling right toward us. I knew all the cops on patrol in the Hook. I got cocky.

“‘Yeah?’ I said. You gonna make us?’”

“One kid grabbed Petey by the neck and slammed him up against a wall. I guess he didn’t grab me ’cause he didn’t want to risk breaking the bottles.

“Petey gave me this scared look. He said, ‘Just give it to them, Jack.’

“I held on to the case.

“‘I’m not gonna ask you again,’ the guy said.

“The patrol car was coming closer.

“I smiled. ‘Fuck you, nigger.’

“They looked like they couldn’t believe I said that, including Petey.

“‘What did you say?’ one of the guys asked me.

“I said, ‘Fuck you and your nigger friend.’ It wasn’t like I had anything against black people. I mean, I used to run with black guys from the project. Puerto Ricans, whatever…I just wanted to piss them off. And I knew that patrol car was comin’ up the street.

“The guy who had Petey up against the wall pulled out a flick knife.”

“‘
Whoa,
’ I said. ‘Look, I’m gonna hand it over.’ The whole thing was going wrong, but I saw the cops were only about a block away. I started to put the case down on the ground, and I looked up the street, and…and…”

He paused and wiped the side of his mouth. He took a deep breath and continued.

“The patrol car had stopped on a corner, outside this diner called Bud and Packy’s…I guess they went in to get a cup of coffee. Petey started to struggle. I jumped toward him, but it was too late. My brother started to throw a punch, but the guy opened the knife and stabbed him. Just once, under the ribs.”

Jack pressed his right hand to his stomach. The same spot where Tomas Berrios had been stabbed. The same exact spot.

“Petey grunted and we all stared at him. The black kid looked like he couldn’t believe what he’d just did. Petey put his hand under his shirt and it came out all covered in blood. He looked at me like he was confused, and then he fell down to his knees, fell on his side like a…like a…”

He couldn’t finish the thought. “He died almost instantly. Heart failure.”

He fell silent. Outside, a car horn bleated.

“The other guys hightailed it out of there. They never got caught. We didn’t have all the resources we have these days, the computers, the coordination…They just disappeared.

“I told everyone that we got mugged. I never mentioned the things I said. I testified that they came up to us out of the blue, jumped us for the booze.”

The room was deathly quiet. Jack took a sip of water from a glass on the table.

“After that, I was so shook up, I couldn’t stay in the neighborhood. As soon as I could, I lied about my age, joined the Army, got shipped to Germany. That was a blessing. I didn’t have to look my parents in the face anymore. Sometimes I hoped I’d get killed. I volunteered to go to Vietnam, but I got sent way behind the lines, to a supply base in the Philippines.”

His face crumpled, but he pulled himself together enough to finish.

“What can I say? It was my fault. We should have just handed it over. What was it? A goddamn case of booze. I was his big brother. I should’ve looked out for him. Protected him. But I was jealous of him. I was jealous.”

He stared down through his open hands. And then he cried.

B
EN ROSE AT MIDDAY.
He’d stayed out most of the night drinking with a couple of buddies in the East Village because he was too embarrassed to deal with his father again. When he stumbled out into the living room, he was relieved to find the old man gone.

He went back into his bedroom, changed into his most nonyuppie clothes—old jeans, a faded black T-shirt, work boots—and emptied his wallet of all but twenty bucks. Then he packed his least expensive camera and set out for the Red Hook Houses.

If anybody tried to jump him, he planned to just hand over the twenty quickly and split. His canvas shoulder bag was old and frayed; he removed anything he didn’t need. Despite these precautions, his stomach knotted as he crossed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed straight into the projects. The day was overcast and foggy.

He wasn’t sure what to expect. Kids flashing gang signs, crack dealers screeching around corners firing Mac-9s? At the least, some poor black and Latino teenagers who would not be happy to see a white guy from the other side of the tracks invading their turf.

Maybe he was secretly hoping for a little excitement. Not to get mugged, certainly, but a chance to put his photojournalistic skills to the test. A documentary report from the front lines, Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. It was hard capturing violence on film. With street trouble—a car crash, a punch-out—he usually only saw it out of the corner of his eye, a wild, jagged flash.

As it turned out, no one in the projects seemed to care much about him. People just went about their business: mothers pushed strollers, kids goofed around on bikes, men in green uniforms roamed the grounds picking up trash.

He shot a few minutes of video, but there was little to get excited about.

He wandered east toward the water. As he moved away from the projects and potential danger, his other worry was free to resurface like an ache in a back tooth. Part of him was glad that he’d managed to finally vent some deep, longstanding complaints about his father, but he couldn’t help picturing the crushed look on the old man’s face. He’d been too harsh. Maybe cruel, even. And he hadn’t even been accurate. His mom had never used the word “loser.” What was it she’d said? Something about not being sure if the man was capable of loving anybody. Was that better or worse?