Visitation Street (4 page)

Jonathan usually wakes up when the bar quiets down. After the noise drains slowly into the street, he knows Lil is in there alone. She lowers the music and he can hear her footsteps as she clears glasses and wipes the counters.

Lil sings after closing, a lonely performance for the half-empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. She’s got a decent voice with a rusty country twang. Jonathan imagines that she sits on the bar with her feet on a stool, serenading the yellowed nautical charts and photos of old sea captains.

She finishes her song and heads outside. She pulls down the grate. The padlock falls into place with a bang.

Jonathan sticks his head out the window. “Hey, Lil.”

“You still up?” She’s holding a bottle of whiskey.

“You want to share that with me? I need a little inspiration.”

Lil holds the bottle by the neck and waves it like a pendulum. “Well, I’m not sharing my inspiration with you.”

Jonathan watches her walk away. It’s 5:15. This is the hour when the four businesses—two bodegas, a luncheonette, and the Dockyard—on the four corners of Van Brunt and Visitation perform their daily concert of opening or closing, the grind and bang of recoiling metal welcoming another day.

The Greek is already struggling with his iron shutters. He has roused the little wino who sleeps in the luncheonette’s doorway. The wino’s shadowing him. One of the gates is stuck—the right side won’t budge higher than three feet. The Greek is tugging on it. The wino’s shuffling around, trying to help. He breaks a dead branch off a tree and offers it to the Greek.

Jonathan has never eaten at the Greek’s. The place caters to retired dockworkers, tollbooth clerks from the graveyard shift at the tunnel, and early arrivals for the methadone clinic.

The wino’s voice catches Jonathan’s ear. It’s dissonant, all flats and sharps with no clear words. He looks eager, ready to invent odd jobs so the Greek will pay him to go away. The Greek gives his shutters a final shake before going inside to heat up the grill, make coffee, display yesterday’s meatloaf.

Jonathan drops his blinds, but angles them just enough so that when daylight comes, it will descend on the diagonal.

It’s too late for sleep. The first morning bus is rattling over the bumpy street, hitting each pothole and fissure made by the new sewage pipes.

When he was eight, Jonathan spent the summer in London with Eden who was appearing in a West End revival. They rented an apartment next to a Hasidic Jew. In the evenings, after Eden had left for the theater, the Hasid would come out onto his balcony and sing as the sun set. Although Jonathan could not understand the song, there was something in his voice that sent him to sleep. For a summer Jonathan could not sleep without this song.

There is no one to sing him to sleep now. There is only the metallic grind of the morning. He peeks through the blinds. In the half-light, the wino is sweeping a single square of pavement. He’s got it blocked off with sawhorses scavenged from a ruptured manhole up Visitation. If he keeps this up, he’ll get the boot and be drunk by nine. Behind him the Greek has found a crowbar and is trying to wrench the grate up. It sounds like he’s milling steel.

To escape the commotion, Jonathan walks down to the water. Although it’s steaming out, this is not a bad hour to be awake in Red Hook—too late to encounter the all-night revelers, too early for what’s left of the local industry. The sun is beginning to rise behind him, fighting through the projects at the back of the neighborhood, promising a full-on Brooklyn bake.

The few streetlights on the side streets go out with a buzz. These blocks are quiet. The chop shops and warehouses are not open yet. The guard dogs protecting empty lots still sleep.

Jonathan turns down a cobblestone street that leads to the water—one of two decent residential blocks in Red Hook, a street filled with single-family homes in various stages of disrepair. From here he can already smell the water, its stagnant summer scent of diesel and salt.

The dark is lifting and Jonathan can make out Valentino Pier ahead stretching into the water like a long, horizontal ladder. He used to come down to the pier at sunset, but the skyline was an insult, its glittering lights a sad reminder. In the evenings, the pier itself became a trial. A place for couples. A scenic spot where the women who don’t speak to Jonathan at the Dockyard show off the neighborhood to their Manhattan friends. So he started coming down in the mornings instead. He usually has the tugboats and seabirds for company.

He crosses the small park and heads onto the pier, passing a kid dressed in a low-rent imitation of the local dealers—nondescript baggy clothes that camouflage his frame. He juke-steps as Jonathan approaches, changes direction, and darts off toward the abandoned warehouses to the left of the pier.

There’s a fog over the river hiding the skyline. It’s claimed both the Verrazano and Bayonne bridges, stolen Staten Island, and obscured most of the Jersey waterfront.

A ferry crawls into view, creeping across the flat water like a caterpillar. The buoys are calling to each other, a long low horn followed by a quick high response as if the second buoy is mocking the first.

There’s a little beach to the right of the pier, a collection of trash, sand, shale, and foam. It’s strewn with chunks of wood too splintered and waterlogged for driftwood. The logs move in and out with the modest waves. Some tangle with the pylons below the pier. They get trapped and beat against the metal supports, their rhythm welcoming the arriving day. Jonathan leans over to watch them.

A girl is lying underneath the pier, faceup, beached on the jagged shale. Jonathan grips the pier and closes his eyes. The night was too late, the morning too soon. His insomnia has conjured worse imaginings. When he looks again, she is still there. Despite the suffocating air, Jonathan feels chilled.

He climbs down to the dirty sand and is ankle deep in cold water. A film of oil coats his calves. The girl’s clothes are torn and muddy. She’s barefoot. There are small cuts on her hands and feet. Her face is unscathed. Her fingers and lips are shriveled. Even in the dismal light under the pier, Jonathan can make out the watery pallor of her skin. Her hair is spread over the rocks. It’s hard to tell whether it’s brown or blond since it’s matted and tangled with debris.

Jonathan knows that he should squat down next to her. But perhaps it would be simpler to rush off, phone for help, or even let her be someone else’s discovery. Then he kneels at her side and listens for her breath. She too smells of seagulls.

Jonathan presses an ear to her lips. They are cold and dry. At first, there is no sound. He is about to pull away, when her breath echoes in his ear. It’s short and sharp, as if catching on a pebble. Jonathan recoils, then presses his ear to listen again.

He knows that if he screams for help, the tugboats will pass in silence and the empty warehouses will turn a blind eye.

Jonathan rolls the girl’s head to one side and a foamy stream slides from her mouth. He wipes mud from her cheeks. It’s Valerie Marino, one of the few students from Red Hook who attends St. Bernardette’s.

He lifts her carefully. Her limbs are long. She is dead weight.

He presses his body into hers, trying to warm her. Her heart beats against his own chest—a faint staccato patter. He cradles her head over his shoulder and feels her clammy skin against his collarbone. It has been months since he has held anyone so close.

He makes his way up the beach, trying not to stumble over the sharp and slippery rocks. Her body is cold. Her wet clothes stick to his skin. Holding her does nothing to ward off the suffocating day.

F
adi’s late. But few will notice. On one hand he can count the people in the neighborhood who know his name.
Hey. Hey thanks. Coffee light. Coffee. The regular. The
Post.
The usual
. How do you order “the usual” from someone and not know his name?

The F train stopped on the elevated bridge just before Smith and Ninth. Fadi was stuck for twenty minutes in an un-air-conditioned subway car watching the sun’s slow climb over the Red Hook Houses. The temperature had barely dropped all night, simmering in the low nineties. The radio says it’ll crack a hundred today, menacing the power grid and threatening the neighborhood with a brownout that’ll kill Fadi’s dairy and ice.

Van Brunt is waking up slowly. The Puerto Rican place is still shuttered. But the Greek across from Fadi on Visitation is battling with his roll gate, hammering it with a crowbar. The string of Christmas lights that spans Van Brunt between the streetlight in front of Fadi’s store and the one in front of the Puerto Ricans’ sags in the heavy air. The colored bulbs hang lazy and limp, the lights hibernating until winter.

The papers are waiting outside his bodega. Both tabloids have front-page photos on cooling off. The
News
has snapped an elderly woman in the Bronx pouring a twelve-ounce bottle of water on her head. The
Post
shows a teenager jumping into the bay right off one of the piers in Red Hook.

The kid is in midflight, arms above his head, right leg extended straight, the left bent back behind. Below his feet is the inky bay. A ferry is passing beneath his legs. His arms cradle the crown and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Three of his friends are hanging from the railing, waiting to jump, heads upturned, admiring the flying boy. It looks like a perfect leap, high and clear of the railing, far beyond the pylons, into the heart of the water.

Fadi wipes his brow, unlocks the padlock, and lets the iron gate roll back revealing the cigarette ads that cover the shop’s windows and keep daylight from bleaching his stock. He shoulders the bundled newspapers and pushes his way into the bodega.

This bodega was the idea of Fadi’s father, Hafiz. While his brothers opened bakeries and restaurants on the Lebanese strip of Atlantic Avenue, Hafiz wanted something besides counters lined with sambousek, awamat, and baklawa. He believed that what Americans want is a drink that’s orange because of the dye not the fruit. They want ham and turkey breasts pressed into neat cylindrical versions of hams and turkeys.

Hafiz’s Red Hook bodega is only a twenty-five-minute walk from Atlantic Avenue, but Fadi figures his father might as well have set up shop in Staten Island for how often his uncles visit.

Even Hafiz has given up on the neighborhood. He now spends his retirement on a camp chair, watching Atlantic Avenue roll by. He’ll be awake soon, drawn into one of his brothers’ shops by strong Lebanese coffee and a favorite honey and pistachio pastry while Fadi’s out here with knock-off Maxwell House and powdered Donettes.

But Fadi still believes things are going to turn around out here, especially with the first cruise ships set to dock at the terminal at the end of Visitation in two months. Last night he gave his black-and-white linoleum an extra once-over with some premium cleaner from the shelves. His bodega shines a little brighter than the others in the neighborhood. His Puerto Rican competitors across Van Brunt have pared things down—generic beer, cigarettes, soda, chips, and only the
Post
. Fadi’s got a range of beers, from sickly sweet forties of malt liquor to microbrews with ironic names. He’s even got a kosher brand called He’Brew. He caters to everyone. But it’s getting harder to keep up with the trends. The hipsters now brown-bag Colt 45 down by the pier while old-timers from the projects cart cases of Pilsner Urquell to their barbecues.

He stacks the newspapers in their racks and brews two pots of coffee. He turns on talk radio, props the front door open with a cinder block, then peeks inside the cooler. The ham’s beginning to sweat nitrates in its plastic sheath. Fadi turns the thermostat to “cold” and checks the store to see what else might be suffering.

English muffins. Sliced bread. He stacks these in the cooler with the meat and cheese. By now much of Fadi’s inventory has found its way into this cooler, leaving portions of the shelves empty until fall. He settles behind the counter with a mug of black coffee and a Danish pastry ribboned with white icing. Most of the icing still clings to its plastic wrapping. Even made at maximum strength the coffee doesn’t come close to Lebanese brew. Twenty ounces of watery caffeine whose dregs don’t tell his fortune. His chair wobbles. He should replace it. Or maybe he should lose weight. Stop eating the junk he sells. Living on the local diet of fried chicken from the bulletproof Chinese window and greasy garlic knots from the third-rate pizza joint has helped Fadi fill out.

Fadi wears XXXL white T-shirts like the local dealers and their hangers-on. With his dark complexion and gold chain, he could easily slip into their ranks. Sometimes from the close interior of his shop he envies their lazy days, their portable business, their flexible hours. But the maniacal chatter from the bar opposite and the sallow ghosts riding the bus to the methadone clinic up the block set him straight and make him sad.

When he’s honest with himself, Fadi has to admit that, despite his improvements, he doesn’t do much better than the Puerto Ricans in their dingy store that smells of ammonia and kitty litter. Ambiance doesn’t exactly matter when you’re buying liter bottles of Coke or cigarettes.

Yet Fadi hopes that his bodega is a place for neighborhood news. A year ago, he hung a bulletin board near the door so that customers can learn about council meetings, hairstylists, dog walkers, babysitters, yoga classes, carpet cleaners, handymen, Reiki sessions, and Tarot readings. He’s a local authority on available apartments—someone people go to when they’ve been kicked out or need a change. This summer he began leaving a couple of folding chairs in the shade of his metal awning, enticing people to linger awhile, and let him treat them to a soda or beer in a paper bag.

They don’t know he reads the three major newspapers thoroughly—that he’s an expert on metropolitan news and local crime patterns through daily study of police blotters. No one would guess that the guy in the bodega can name all the members of the city council, the five borough presidents, or that he votes in every election right down to the ones for his local school board.