Visitation Street (31 page)

“If the weather was nice, I should have been out on this boat with my dad. But thanks to you that never happened,” Cree says.

“When I first got out, I just wanted to see what you looked like. That’s all. I wanted to check that you were okay, not getting into any sort of trouble. It’s fifty-fifty out here that trouble’s going to find you. I followed you around, caught wind of all your hiding spots. Then I started thinking, this boy’s looking for an escape—a reprieve. He wants an adventure but is too afraid to leave Red Hook. And that’s my fault. With your father gone, you’re frozen. Stuck in that courtyard because of what I did. You dream of getting out but you’re too scared.”

“Fuck you,” Cree says. “You don’t know the first thing about me.” But he knows it isn’t true.

“I don’t? Don’t tell me you haven’t been wanting to get that boat out on the water, go all those places your father promised to take you,” Ren says. “The boat’s ready. I had enough years of machine and shop to fix her up.”

“So then what? You thought I’d just jump on board with you? That we’d sail into the sunset? That was your plan? When were you going to tell me about what you’d done?”

“When I made it up to you as best I could.”

“You must be crazy to even think that’s possible,” Cree says.

“No,” Ren says. “You’re the crazy one planning to spend his whole life in this neighborhood. There’s no such thing as ghosts. The dead don’t come back. You just pretend they do so you don’t have to get on with it.”

“What do you know about ghosts?” Cree says.

“You want to know what ghosts are like? Try living in a dormitory full of teenage killers. You’ll see mad ghosts everywhere you look. On the faces of twelve-year-old boys who can’t forget who they killed. Who see their dead everywhere. You’ll see them in the fucking mirror when you just want to check if you’re still breathing. There wasn’t a goddamned night on the inside when I wasn’t woken by somebody haunted by the person he dropped. Ghosts aren’t the dead. They’re those the dead left behind. Stay here long enough, you’ll become one of them—another ghost haunting the Hook.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Red Hook.”

“There’s something wrong with being too afraid to see anyplace else,” Ren says. “I saw you watching those girls on the raft. I watched you watch them.”

“You what?” Cree says. He was sure he’d been alone on the pier. But there had been the shadow disappearing into the night that had made him turn from the water.

“You followed them along the pier. I was with you every step of the way. I was even close enough to touch you. You were too mesmerized to notice. You were so jealous of their adventure, you wanted to grab a piece for yourself. You followed them into the water,” Ren says. “You swam out.”

Cree shakes his head. But he remembers the strange chill at his back, the eerie sensation that Marcus had been close by, watching.

“You did,” Ren says. “But you couldn’t reach them. The current was too strong. You think I’m the only person who saw you swim out? How long do you think you’re going to keep this a secret? Red Hook only looks abandoned. But it has eyes.”

“Yeah,” Cree says. “Yours.”

“You should be thankful that I’m keeping watch over you—distracting the cops from the fact that you were in the water the night that girl drowned.”

“Drowned? How come you know that?”

“I told you. I was watching. I watched the raft flip while you were swimming out. Then I watched you struggle back onto the shore.”

“You saw what happened?” All it would have taken is a word from Ren to clear Cree of suspicion, to get the damn cops off his back. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“Like I said, I saw the raft flip,” Ren says. “And I saw you in the water with those girls. You know how many innocent kids were in juvee with me? How many of them were guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? You’re guilty of nothing but your own foolishness. Swimming out to a couple of white girls couldn’t end well. One day your friend Val will remember that you were trying to reach her. Then what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Cree says.

“You need me,” Ren says. “I know you had nothing to do with that raft. But the cops can’t wait to slap their cuffs on some black kid for this sort of crime. Even if there was no crime. They still have their eyes on you. You have to think about these things if you’re going to survive,” Ren says.

“I’m going to survive. I’m surviving.”

“You’re putting one foot in front of the other. That ain’t life.”

“What do you know about a life? You spent most of yours locked up.”

“Exactly. And so will you, one way or another. I’m not saying in jail. But I’m implying by circumstance.” Ren stands up.

“You stay away from my boat,” Cree says. “And you stay away from me. I’m not going anywhere with you. Now or ever. Keep away from me. Keep away from my mom. Keep out of anywhere you think I might be. If you see my shadow, I suggest you run.” Cree takes a deep breath. His chest feels tight. His eyes and nose sting. “If I see you again, I’m going to tell everyone who you are and what you did. The biggest mistake you made, after killing my dad, was coming back to Red Hook.”

Cree rushes away from the lot. The fucked-up thing, the really fucked-up thing, is that in the last weeks with Ren—on the boat or wherever—Cree had felt closer to Marcus. So maybe Ren’s right. Maybe the dead do cling to those who brought them down.

Cree circles the neighborhood. There is no comfort in his hideouts. The renovation of the abandoned bar is nearly complete. A sign in the window advertises an opening night party. He retreats toward the Houses. As he crosses Coffey Park, he sees his uncle Des nodding off on one of the benches. Next to him is the wino who fingered Cree for the lineup. He’s swigging wine from a bottle in a brown paper bag. Des lifts his head as Cree passes.

“Acretius,” he says.

Cree stops. “Des, ask your buddy why he’s been selling me out to the police. Greedy little shit.”

“Give me a dollar and I’ll ask him,” Des says. His voice is all rattle and rasp.

“I’ll ask him myself then,” Cree says. He approaches the bench, towering over the wino who’s trying to shrink into his filthy coat. “Yo.” He takes the bottle out of the wino’s hand and drops it in a garbage can. The shattering glass makes the wino flinch.

“Estaban,” Des says. “His name is Estaban.”

“I don’t care what his name is,” Cree says.

“
Perdoname
,” the wino says, clutching Cree’s hand. “
Perdoname. No era usted. No era usted
.”

“He says it wasn’t you,” Des says. “How about a dollar?”

“Fuck your dollar,” Cree says.

Cree stares into Des’s face, searching, as he always does, for any remnant of Marcus in his uncle’s withering skin and cloudy eyes. But there’s nothing.

The lights are out in the living room. The apartment is silent. Cree drops his keys on the kitchen table and listens to them skid across the Formica.

“Acretius?”

Cree jumps at the sound of his grandmother’s voice.

“Turn on the light, Acretius.”

Cree switches on the overhead in the kitchen. Grandma Lucy is sitting at the far end of the couch. Her hands are folded in her lap. A small valise is next to the window. “Where’s Celia?” Cree says.

“I sent her home. Everybody in this family is running from something. I’m tired of it. Sit.” She pats the spot next to her on the couch.

Cree pulls out a chair. Grandma Lucy fingers her pendulum. “Don’t think for one instant I don’t know how badly you want to talk to Marcus’s spirit. But let me tell you something. A spirit is not something you see or hear. It’s something you feel. An idea. And you can’t go looking for it. It comes to you.”

“But not to me,” Cree says.

“Is that so?” Lucy folds her arms across her chest and stares at the silent television. “Is that so?” she says again. “You have less sense than I imagined. You can switch off the light.”

Cree stands in the dark for a moment, aware of his grandmother’s irritation. He hears the knife edge of her breath. “Good night, Grandma,” Cree says, crossing to his bedroom.

“You ever think about why this boy’s come for you? You ever think about that?”

“Not until I had to,” Cree says.

“Well,” Lucy says, “if you thought about things the way I do, you might alight upon the idea that this boy is the means by which Marcus talks to you. But that is a decision you’d have to make for yourself.”

Cree hovers at the bedroom door for a moment, but Lucy is done.

In the morning when he gets up, Lucy has run Gloria’s bath, fixed coffee and toast. The two women are looking through an incense and oils catalog and don’t notice when Cree slides out the front door.

He rushes down the stairs, dashes through the courtyard, and breaks into a run on Lorraine Street. He arrives at the lot. The boat is gone.

W
hen the taxi is midway across the Brooklyn Bridge, Jonathan squints at the numbers on the meter, trying to distinguish them from the numbers on the radio and the glowing digits on the clock, which are all jumping up and down and melting into one LCD trail. His eyes swivel in their sockets. His optic nerves shake. He tries to focus on one number, but it jitters side to side, then disappears completely.

The radio is turned to KTU. Dance music is flooding the cab. Jonathan’s jaw is tense. His head, lolling against the vinyl headrest in the backseat, is velvet and heavy. He closes his eyes and the insides of his eyelids feel like satin. His stomach is melting. The window is open and one of his hands is trailing outside the cab. The air between his fingers seems mentholated.

Dawn is next to him. He rolls his head to one side to get a look at her, but he can’t focus well enough to see how disheveled her drag is. He feels her vibrating next to him, her head dropping toward his shoulder as she caresses his knee with her hand. Jonathan worries if she stops rubbing he’ll come down.

The drugs had been Dawn’s idea—one E each to celebrate a successful night during which they’d brought down the crowd with a showcase of “Patriotic Songs of War.” Dawn had worn a floor length red, white, and blue sequined dress, with a sash that read “Miss America.” She’d chosen a blond wig that reached for the stars. She topped it off with a tiara.

A week ago a man who claimed to be a talent scout from a cruise line gave them each his card. Dawn nearly shoved her tongue down his throat in appreciation. Tonight the scout was back in the audience. He told Dawn that he loved her act. “We’re going international!” she said, squeezing Jonathan’s ass.

“Yeah, I can just see myself on the lido deck,” he said. “When that ship sails, you’ll be cruising alone.”

“Don’t be a dead fish. Let’s celebrate.” She pulled a pillbox out from the crevice between her falsies. “One pill doesn’t do anything,” she said, forcing the capsule between Jonathan’s lips before their final set.

Now Jonathan’s in the cab with Dawn. He draws a deep breath, which takes forever to fill his lungs. He sits up and wills the clock on top of the Watchtower building to hold-fucking-still for a second so he can find out how late it is or how early. The suspension cables on the bridge collapse and separate.

The driver’s yelling at them over the music.

“Fuck you two say you’re going?”

Jonathan steadies himself on the divider between the front and back seats. He rests his chin on the hard metal lip. “Take the expressway,” he says. “Toward Staten Island.”

They overshoot the exit and have to double back below the expressway’s dirty underbelly. They thread their way through the projects and pull onto Van Brunt.

“You sure know how to treat a lady,” Dawn says, stepping out of the cab. Jonathan notices that she’s wearing jeans, a fur jacket, a girl’s T-shirt, and the white platforms. She’s brushed out her wig so it falls around her shoulders.

Jonathan overpays the driver and slams the door without offering to direct him back to the city.

Dawn had taken E to celebrate, but Jonathan had other reasons. He knew the drug would lift his spirits. He disregarded the inevitable comedown—the morbid Sunday of self-reproach that awaited him.

When he kissed Val in the dark corridor behind his front door, he knew he’d made a mistake. He was aware of the relief coursing through her body. So he kissed her because he believed that’s what she wanted. At least, that’s how it started.

It had been nice, Val’s mouth on his, the quick excitement of her breath giving way to the easy flow of their tongues as the kiss found its pace and rhythm. There was none of the smoky char of kissing Lil’s barrel-aged mouth—the sour aftertaste of whiskey and beer. There was nothing needy or demanding in the simple movements of Val’s lips. With Val, Jonathan realized how much he missed being kissed by someone who wanted to kiss him because he was Jonathan and not just because he was the last man standing at the end of another long night.

This was something he’d skipped in high school. He’d preferred to tangle with bad girls, the ones brave enough to talk their way into stale-smelling dive bars on Second Avenue—the ones for whom kissing was a gateway drug quickly abandoned in favor of more serious pleasures.

Jonathan had let the kiss go on too long. He’d pulled Val in tighter, as if he was trying to squeeze everything out of the moment. Because he knew when he let go, that had to be the end of it.

When he returned from the bodega, Val had made herself comfortable on his couch. There was no way for him to avoid the expectant look on her face that told him she wanted more. But he didn’t kiss her again.

All day, he consoled himself with the fact that it could have been worse. In his deep, drunken stupor, he could have rolled over and grasped her. He could have mindlessly gone through the motions, only regaining consciousness when it was too late. He couldn’t think about that. That’s what the E was for.

He and Dawn stand shivering on Van Brunt. Jonathan takes a moment to collect himself. The Dockyard’s vibrating neon signs come to a standstill. The street feels solid beneath his feet.

“Jesus,” Dawn says. “This fresh air is going to kill my high. Get a girl inside.” She heads for the door.