Visitation Street (10 page)

Since it’s daylight now, Cree knows that only one of his hideouts will provide adequate cover—the warehouse on Imlay Street at the edge of the water where no one from Red Hook can see in. He hurries through the waterside, skirting the Marinos’ house on Visitation. He keeps to the shadows as he darts down smaller, cobbled side streets. He slips through a gap in the cyclone fence that blocks entrance to the warehouse.

The building is cavernous. It takes up the entire block with various wings and sections, all of them empty. The warehouse is seven stories high, each floor with thirty-foot ceilings. Cree’s footsteps echo as he climbs the sturdy steps to his lookout where he’s installed his telescope in front of one of the giant, glassless windows. In front of the telescope is a battered, leather armchair with a split cushion and a small table, both of which Cree found on the street.

He falls into the chair and stares out over the water at the spot where he saw the girls floating on their raft. The water is calm. He trains his telescope on the bay, then sweeps it west along the waterfront, searching for a flash of pink or a suggestion of flesh. He scans the water up and over toward Governors Island, then north toward the Brooklyn Bridge. He sees nothing out of the ordinary.

Cree takes his eye from the telescope. Something is different about the warehouse. He peers under his chair. Three cigarette butts are crushed into the concrete floor. He picks them up, turning them over in his hands for a clue as to who left them.

All summer, Cree’s been under the impression that the shape of Red Hook is changing. Something about the corners, fences, alleys, and streetlamps that he’d memorized in his childhood has grown unfamiliar. The places he used to hide no longer seem comforting or secluded. Even in the darkest nook in the neighborhood, Cree feels exposed. And he can’t shake the feeling that he’s being followed, marked. A few times he’s found evidence of someone else’s presence in one of his hideouts, an empty beer can, a couple of junk food wrappers, the telescope pointing in a different direction. And now, these three butts.

He stands up and turns away from the window and staggers back a step, startled by a barrage of color on the opposite wall. He’s facing an enormous, newly painted graffiti burner, a massive mural he hadn’t noticed on his way in. The piece, framed by palm trees on both sides, is tropically colored—greens and blues, bright oranges and yellows. In the background the jagged Manhattan skyline looms. The letters that make up the body of the piece spell “RunDown” in dense, intricate script.

Cree isn’t foolish enough to imagine that no one else ever enters his secret places, but there’s other graffiti in his hideouts this summer—hints and signals that make him feel marked or watched. He noticed it first in the abandoned bar, the initials “RD” in jagged, lightning-bolt-style script above the bathroom sink where the mirror should have been. A few days later, one of the walls in the garden was hit with an “RD” in the same style. He found another “RD” next to the window where his telescope stood.

Cree checked the neighborhood for other “RD” tags. He asked his friends and his cousin Monique, who tended to know everyone’s business, if they’d heard of a tagger using “RD.” No one had.

After a few weeks, the tags grew into bolder and bigger works. In the garden, “RD” was elongated into “RunDown,” two words elided in a large piece in steel-gray and yellow bubble letters. The writing was complex but the words were clear.

After RunDown took over the large section of the narrow garden’s south-facing wall, he hit the exposed brick of the bar’s back room with a piece that featured his name in an oriental style along with the mermaid figurehead. Now he’s bombed in the warehouse, enforcing this tropical landscape on Cree’s hideout.

Staring at the piece confirms Cree’s suspicion that nowhere will ever belong to him. At home he will be harassed by the police until the missing girl is found. And now his secret places are being invaded.

Cree returns to the window and looks back at the bay. If he had reached those girls, he might have been able to save them from whatever was about to happen. Instead of feeling life closing in on him, something might have opened up.

Cree doesn’t like to encourage his mother to use her gifts but he wants to know what happened to June, whether she’s dead or simply missing, whether he’ll have to keep looking over his shoulder for the police or whether this will blow over by nightfall.

Cree leaves the warehouse and takes the subway into the heart of Brooklyn’s Caribbean neighborhood where his grandmother lives. He gets out near the museum and threads his way through a line of children wearing name cards around their necks. He passes the Botanic Garden. Its late-summer lawns are dried and brown. He hits Eastern Parkway and spies a couple of Hasidic kids sneaking cigarettes and whistling at girls. They scowl as he passes. He turns down a wide avenue dotted with real estate agents and soul food joints. He keeps walking until he hits a Jamaican bakery.

Lucy Wallace is sitting at a low pastry table folding bright orange crusts over mincemeat. Her fingertips are stained with the dye that comes off the pastry. Her wrists are ringed with flour. Lucy’s roots are from the South not Jamaica, but the neighborhood says she folds the best beef patties.

The shop is small. A glass display case of various patties and pastries takes up the entire counter. Two Crock-Pots, one with goat curry and one with lamb, sit on a table behind the register. The owner, an elderly Jamaican man with vertical wrinkles that look like pleats and watery brown eyes is on his cell phone, talking in such a thick accent Cree can barely make out a word.

“Acretius.” Cree’s grandmother looks up from her workstation. He bends down and gives her a kiss. She smells of biscuit dough and curry spice.

Grandma Lucy is a small woman, much frailer than her daughters. Her gray hair is braided and pulled into a generous bun at the top of her head. Her skin is barely lined. She claims the grease from the dough keeps her smooth.

“Get yourself a patty,” Lucy tells Cree, dusting off her hands. She disappears into the back room and returns drying her hands on a dishtowel. “I’m on a break,” she says to her boss.

Cree follows Lucy into the doorway next to the shop and up a dilapidated set of stairs to her one-room apartment. He sits on the narrow bed. Lucy takes the rust-colored velour lounger.

The apartment is dim but tidy. All the woodwork and moldings are painted blue green and the walls are baked potato brown. A blue tribal cloth hangs over half the window. The mantel is covered with religious candles to the deities of African American folk magic—High John the Conqueror, Chango Macho, Elegua. A small shrine to the deceased in Lucy’s family covers the windowsill.

Lucy kicks up the footrest on her chair and folds her hands. “Something told me you were coming,” she says. “I’m guessing this isn’t just to see your grandma.”

“No, ma’am,” Cree says.

“Turn the water on first,” Lucy says.

Cree goes over to the small cooker on a stand beside the door and turns on the flame underneath the kettle.

Lucy rubs and flexes one of her hands, massaging the spaces between her fingers. Then she takes off her necklace, a long chain with a brass ball at the bottom. She loops the chain around her fingers and soon the ball starts to rotate in close circles like a pendulum. She squints at the ball and clicks her tongue. “Hmm. So it is,” she says.

“What’s it say?” Cree asks.

“It’s telling me my business. And now you can tell me yours.”

Cree is used to his grandma’s cryptic divinations, her infuriating need to have all her questions answered by her pendulum. Not that she ever shares these questions or answers with anyone else.

They wait for the water to boil. Then Cree fills a mug for Lucy and brings it to her. She reaches into a string pouch attached to her skirt and pulls out a few sachets from which she sprinkles something that looks like burned confetti into the water. A smell like damp wood swirls up from the mug.

Lucy takes a sip. “Now tell me what’s so important that you had to take time to visit me. You haven’t applied to that college yet, have you?”

Cree’s eyes shift around the room. Grandma Lucy has none of the gentle patience of his mother and aunt. “You’ve been watching the news?”

Lucy takes a short breath, exhales through her nose, and tightens her mouth into a pucker. “You know I haven’t.”

“But you heard about that girl who disappeared in Red Hook?”

“I heard.”

“I saw her last night.”

“You came all the way out here to tell me that?”

Cree picks at the bedspread until Lucy shoos him off. “You think she’s dead?”

“It’s none of my business,” Lucy says.

“But maybe you have a hunch?” Cree looks at Lucy’s hand, but the pendulum is clenched in her palm out of sight.

“I might, but this whole thing is none of your business neither.”

“Is it my business if I could have helped her?”

“No,” Lucy says. “Let the white folks worry about the white folks. There’s plenty else you need to be doing besides bothering with someone else’s missing girl.” Lucy lowers her lips to her mug and blows, spreading the steam upward. “Acretius, is your mother still wasting her days on that bench?”

Grandma Lucy doesn’t approve of her daughters, Gloria and Celia, continuing to live in the projects when they could have lives elsewhere. She never tires of telling them that the whole reason she moved to the Houses in the first place was so that she could save up enough to live somewhere better. But her girls have attached themselves to the place in ways she can’t or won’t understand.

“Sometimes,” Cree says.

“She’s down there too much. Be thankful that your daddy’s ghost has sense enough to leave you alone. There’s a blessing in that.”

Cree takes his time getting home. By the time he reaches Red Hook, the light is draining from the sky. Coffey Park is full. Cree passes a crew who’ve taken over the benches near the basketball courts, perching on the backrests like birds on a wire. He catches sight of Monique surrounded by a bunch of older boys in oversized basketball jerseys. She holds Cree’s eye as he passes. He hurries off before she can call him out for being on his lonely.

He heads for the boat. A wind is coming off the water, lifting the litter and tangling it with the dried grass in the lot. Cree ducks and squeezes through a gap in the chicken wire fence. When he looks up, he sees someone sitting on the boat, legs dangling over the prow like a sloppy figurehead. Even though it’s a warm night, the intruder is wearing a sweatshirt with a hood that hides his face.

Cree pauses at the fence, preparing to turn around.

“You leaving because of me?” the guy on the boat says.

“Nope.”

“Good. That’s what I was hoping for.” The kid smiles and rubs his hands together, as if he’d been sitting on that damn prow just waiting for Cree to turn up.

“I just didn’t expect anyone.”

“Oh, so you think you have this place to yourself? You the proprietor?”

“Like I said, nobody comes around much,” Cree says, crossing to the middle of the lot.

“Maybe I do now.” The stranger pulls off his hood. His face is long and narrow, with drooping eyelids and a down-turned mouth. His hair sticks out in tufts and bunches. His skin is ashen black. Cree guesses the kid is a couple of years older than he is, maybe twenty or twenty-two. “Maybe I’m acclimating to the place.”

“You new in Red Hook?” Cree says.

“Been here since before you.”

“You live in the Houses?” Cree asks.

“I’m done with the Houses. I’ve got no more business there.” The kid spits to one side. He holds a lighter in one hand, scraping his thumb over the circular flint, letting the flame spark briefly.

Cree gives the kid a look, trying to figure out whether he’s messing with him. “So where you living?”

“Bones Manor mainly. Means I live nowhere.”

In all his years of wandering through Red Hook, Cree has rarely ventured into Bones Manor. The large lot, a former truck loading zone, is hidden behind a patchwork of corrugated iron fence that runs the length of the entire block. It’s a no-man’s-land for junkies, hookers, and other Red Hook irregulars. The concrete walls on the lot’s waterside are famed for their graffiti—the dopest pieces in the neighborhood it’s rumored. Sometimes the lot is empty. Sometimes it feels as if a whole damn city is thriving back there, but no matter how crowded the Manor seems, it has always felt to Cree like the loneliest place on earth.

Nature is out to reclaim Bones Manor and turn it into some sort of inner-city wetlands. A large pond of water, which the residents of the Manor call the Lake, rises and falls with the tides from Erie Basin. People in the Manor make their homes in abandoned shipping containers or the shells of old cars pushed up against the sides of the lot, all sorts of jerry-rigged shelters into which they can disappear in a flash. There’s a ghostliness to the way the wind whips from the water and gets trapped inside the place, rattling the corrugated walls, agitating the reeds, and rippling the surface of the Lake.

The kid on the boat lights a cigarette. In the lighter’s glow, Cree sees the hollows of the boy’s cheeks. “What?” the kid says. “You scared of the place? You intimidated?”

“Nothing around here scares me.”

“Not even the police? Those boys can put the fear into anyone.”

“I got nothing to fear.”

“Is that so?” The kid exhales smoke and looks Cree up and down.

Cree makes a fist and rubs it over his lips. “Truth be told, I got shook down for the first time ever today. Some nonsense I got nothing to do with. Couple of girls took a raft out in the bay. One disappeared.”

“Somebody made you a scapegoat.”

Cree shrugs, as if a small gesture could brush the whole thing off. “It’s messed up.”

“What’s your business with this boat?” the kid asks. “Seems like at the moment you should be keeping away from all thing aquatic. Don’t want to attract improper notice.”

“The boat’s mine, is all,” Cree says.

The guy lowers himself to the ground. “Doesn’t look like it belongs to you. This is one dissipated ship.”