Red Hook

by Reggie Nadelson

  I wanted to get back to the city. I looked at my watch.

  “Sid, listen, I’m here because you called me yesterday. I should have come then, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry, so I came out to see you and I got here and there was a guy trapped under a dock, dead, and you show up and say it was supposed to be you, so talk to me or let me go home. Who was he?”

  “Forgive me. I’m rattled,” Sid said. “I had seen him around, like I told you, he drank, people tried to help him out, but he always said, ‘Just help me get a drink.’ He told people he didn’t want to be reformed. He liked drinking. He had a room somewhere, I heard. I just want a buck for a shot, he said, and I didn’t give it to him. Poor bastard came at me with his hand out and I refused him, I just went home and then someone pushed him. Someone who thought it was me. Someone whacked him with a piece of wood, he fell into the water. That’s it.”

  “He told you that? That he just liked drinking? You talked to him?”

  Sid shook his head. “Mostly I heard it from other people,” he said. “This is a tight community out here, especially this side of Red Hook on the water, a lot of artists, crafts people, writers. We know each other. We know the locals. We go to community meetings, we talk about development, we pass the time of day. Urban Pioneers, we call ourselves, we call this our frontier village, forgive the expression and my irony. People who couldn’t afford Manhattan, or got priced out of Williamsburg and DUMBO and the hipper parts of Brooklyn. People want a piece of the city before it’s all gone, so they’re finding their way to the fringes, the old industrial city.”

  I cut him off gently as I could.

  “What about you?” I said.

  “I just like the water,” he said. “Can you spare me half an hour more, Artie? I’d be grateful. I know I’ve messed you around, calling you. Forgive me.”

  “You were scared of the homeless guy, is that it, Sid? And not because he was just a harmless drunk. You called me because you were scared of something else about him. You said someone whacked him thinking it was you. I don’t get it.”

  “I’d seen him, you know, and I saw him the last couple of days and he felt threatening, he seemed to be on crack or something. Last night, when I called you the last time, that’s when he really scared me. Not just because he looked crazy. I’ve known crazy people.”

  “Then what?”

  “When I saw him like that close-up, I felt I was looking at my own death.”

  “Why?”

  “He looked like me,” Sid said.

  We went to Sid’s place and he walked there slowly, leaning on his cane. He changed the subject. He asked if I remembered when we met, some party, he said, ten years back, maybe more.

  “You asked me if I liked jazz,” he added.

  “God.” I was embarrassed.

  If you grew up in Moscow like I did, loving America, loving jazz, listening to Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour on Voice of America under the covers—my father used to find me there and yell at me, but my mother liked it that I was rebellious that way—because of the music, you had all kinds of fantasies about American black people.

  Sid said, “I thought it was charming, I had been in Moscow as a reporter, and I knew that there were two kinds of Russians as far as I was concerned: the racists who were more racist than anyone I had ever met, including when I was a boy and went south to Virginia to stay with some cousins, I mean those Russians quite literally saw us as animals, a different species; and the other kind who thought we were wonderful, usually because of the music. You were the second kind. I was only insulted when you asked me if I knew Charlie Parker because you thought I was old enough. It was fine because I was obsessed with Russia, so there was a kind of quid pro quo, I wanted to talk about Pushkin and you wanted to ask me about music,” he said. “You came to the party with a very nice woman with red hair. Someone I knew a little. Lily Hanes. That’s it, wasn’t that her name? Whatever happened to Lily?”

  I didn’t answer. I could see by the way he rambled that Sid was pretty shaken up. Near the entrance to the building, he put his hand out towards me as if to steady himself.

  He looked old. Older than he was, and the flesh on his face was loose. His clothes, khaki shorts and a faded green polo shirt, were wrinkled as if he’d slept in them. I had known people like Sid whose sanity almost depended on the shell, on keeping it sharp. I looked at him again and saw a guy who was falling apart.

  I held the door, and he leaned on me. The way he looked now, Sid seemed beaten. We climbed the stairs and he unlocked the door slowly, opening it as if it was too heavy for him. We went in. He put his cane down and then put his book bag on his desk.

  I felt bad for him. I remembered how much I had always liked Sid. He was good company, smart, curious, ironic, a little mournful.

  Inside the large loft space, an old poster for a Paul Robeson concert hung behind glass on one wall. Next to it was an oil painting, an authentic piece of Soviet Realism, with a triumphant Lenin pointing to the future and a crowd of workers looking up reverently as if at God.

  Sid saw me looking and said, “I used to collect that stuff,” then led me to the far end of the loft where the big industrial windows looked out on the river.

  I glanced around. “What is this place?”

  “My office,” he said. “I run a little publishing company. One-man press, things that interest me. Also, it’s my bolt-hole. My escape hatch. End of the world, you know? See people, not see them, whatever I feel like. Sit, please, Artie.”

  “Escape what?”

  He didn’t answer, and I stayed where I was, leaning against the window.

  “Let me get this straight. The dead man was a homeless guy everyone knew, and you think someone killed him instead of you,” I said. “Is that it, Sid? Why the hell would anyone be after you? You were scared enough to call me, what two, three times yesterday at least? You thought whoever killed that poor bastard out there was coming for you, right, but you didn’t call the cops, you called me the day before I’m getting married. Come on, Sid. We’ve known each other a long time.”

  He walked over and stood next to me, face against the windowpane, closed his eyes, then opened them.

  “The last stop in America,” he said, looking out at the water. “Or the first. The edge of the world. You see all that? I look out, I see the old docks and shipyards, the warehouses and factories, the inlets and canals, a whole square mile, most of it empty now, a couple of miles from Manhattan. Red Hook’s one of the last great places in the city. Some of these buildings are a hundred and fifty years old. Civil War times, some earlier,” he said, and stretched out his arms. “The Brooklyn Shipyard. Biggest in the world, all the docks loaded with tea, cashews, mahogany, lumber, sugar, grain, all that grain coming from the Midwest, on ships through the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal to the Hudson River and down to New York. 1825, Artie. It was the opening of the canal that made this the greatest port on earth, the goods coming and going, the river running out to the Atlantic Ocean, connecting us to Europe.”

  I tried to interrupt, but Sid was on a roll and I couldn’t stop him.

  “Warehouses bursting.” He gestured to a building close by. “That one, over there, look, they had donkeys on the top floor that were whipped like crazy to work the pulley system that brought up huge bags of coffee that had been unloaded off the ships. I feel I can smell it when I’m out here, and I can hear them, the men who jammed these docks, men from Italy, Ireland, Syria, Sweden, Russia, working these ports. Can you imagine it, Artie? It was still here, some of it, when I was a boy. I used to sneak over here to look. It was forbidden, because I was a nice boy from a good family, and this was a tough neighborhood, there were rackets here, and gangsters, longshoremen who were really tough, but I loved it,” he said. “I was a child spy.”

  “What?”

  He laughed. “Not a real spy, Artie, but the kind you are when you’re a child. Let me make us some coffee,” he said, but he didn’t move. “Look at it. Think about it. Some
piece of real estate, right? A place on the water, your own boat tied up out front, great views of the city, ten minutes from Manhattan, a fast escape. Money. You could build your own little empire here. Lots of real estate. Lots of money.”

  “Escape from what?”

  “All that,” he said gesturing at the window and the faint outline of the lower Manhattan skyline.

  “All what?”

  “Fear.”

  He moved away suddenly towards the small, makeshift kitchen at the far end of the loft, and began filling a coffee pot. I followed him.

  “Do you speak Russian much these days, Artie?” Sid called out.

  “When I have to. On the job.”

  “I love your language,” he said. “I always have. I loved it. I learned it when I first heard about Paul Robeson going there. Robeson was my idol. He was a superior human being, my dad said, he played sports, he sang, he was brilliant, he ran with artists and intellectuals, black people, white people. You ever hear of Carl Van Vechten?”

  “Who?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He was close with Robeson. Robeson went to Russia, he felt that the Slavs understood Negro spirituals in their inner being, it was about soul, and it was the Russian thing that stuck with me. So odd.” Sid’s voice trailed off. “I was always happy when you let me talk Russian with you.”

  I didn’t remember Sid talking Russian to me; I didn’t remember it at all, and I wondered now if he was crazy; maybe the fear, whatever he was afraid of, had driven him nuts.

  “Is this about something Russian, the dead man? Is that why you really called me?”

  He set the coffee pot on the stove and turned on the burner.

  “I hear things. People talk to me. I go over to Brighton Beach to buy the Russian newspapers and good bread, and sometimes caviar, and I have friends there, people in bookshops, people in cafés. Some friendly, some not so friendly. They see a black man, it’s a crapshoot, you know?” He smiled. “Excuse me, Artie, I’ll just go change my clothes while the coffee boils.”

  He left me then, and went through a door that I figured led to the bathroom.

  I shifted my weight and the wide plank floor creaked. Two of the loft’s walls were jammed with bookshelves. Books leaked from the shelves. Books stood in piles on the floor, and on a large pine table under the window. There was a computer on it. Sid’s green book bag lay beside a mason jar stuffed with roses that had shed most of the petals on to the table and a neat pile of manila folders.

  An old-fashioned wooden desk chair with wheels was in front of the desk. In the corner was a round table covered with dozens of photographs, all in old silver frames. Opposite it was a worn leather couch covered with a faded blue and red kilim over it. On top were a blanket and pillow.

  Sid returned in a pressed dark blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, crisp new chinos and Topsiders on his feet. He turned off the stove, poured some coffee into mugs and handed me one. He leaned against a small table where newspapers and magazines were arranged in rows.

  “I’m a newspaper junkie,” he said. “Always have been. I read three, four of them a day. I don’t know who I am if I don’t read them.” He smiled.

  I looked around. “No TV?”

  “I hate the noise,” he said.

  “So you live here?”

  “No. This is commercial space, not residential, like I said, but I publish a few little things, arcane local history, monographs about Whitman, pieces about black newspapers. Things I love and no one else cares about.”

  I drank the coffee and got out my cellphone. It was getting late.

  “It makes me legit here, though not quite for living,” Sid said. “I have an apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and a house in Sag Harbor. A man of property, Artie.” He looked at the ceiling. “You hear the music? Cuban pottery guy. I like that, I like the sounds of other people in the building, you know?”

  I knew.

  “It keeps away the demons,” he added.

  “What demons?”

  “Loneliness,” he said.

  “You stay here nights?”

  “I don’t really sleep. I sit on the sofa and look out at the water. I bought this place to work in and because I like the water and nobody knows I have it. Hide in plain sight,” he said. “I can be here and no one cares, not the people who live at the front of Red Hook in the housing projects or the people who run little businesses, the pie-makers, the radical embroidery lady, the other one who makes kites out of silk, the glass-blowers, the painters, you know? No one minds what I do. It’s the freest you can feel in New York City. Back of beyond. It will change. It’s changing. We’re getting a supermarket. Can I offer you something more than coffee? A beer? Is it too early?”

  Behind the good manners he was strained, his face tight, the eyes distracted by some kind of inner terror. I looked at my watch. I had promised I’d be ready early; I promised.

  None of it fit: Sid wandering the waterfront at night; his sleeping in the half-furnished loft; the crumpled clothes he had been wearing. It didn’t fit with the soft formal speech, the good manners. He was scared. Something about the eyes. He had turned inward, for self-protection maybe, and part of him had disappeared from view.

  “The dead guy, Sid. You think it could have been race? You think that? The dead guy? Let’s talk about him, OK?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly. In the old days, sure. But now? Why? Ninety percent of Red Hook is Hispanic or black.” He put his mug down and sat on the edge of the desk. “I can’t stop thinking that someone got tired of me nosing around, and came for me, and got the poor bastard who’s now in pieces in a bunch of body bags, you know? I like talking to people, I like hearing the history of the docks, I like knowing what’s going on. I’m in favor of development; I like the idea of the place coming to life. There are people who don’t like it. There are people who fight over it. I thought about writing a book, I take notes. Perhaps someone thought I knew too much. Or not.”

  “Do you?”

  “What?”

  “Know too much?”

  He smiled slightly. “It depends what you mean.”

  “Maybe it was just an accident, Sid.” I waved towards the inlet where the corpse had been.

  “You think? You think someone went to the trouble of killing an old drunk accidentally?”

  “Then tell me what you really think if you want to, because I have to go.”

  He hesitated, and I knew he was reorganizing reality. He went to the sink and washed out his mug and set it on the draining board, then turned back to me.

  “You have another one of those cigarettes?” he said.

  I tossed him the pack. He lit up and smoked silently.

  I liked Sid, but it was getting late and he wasn’t talking. I couldn’t wait. I was out of the door and halfway down the first flight of stairs when I heard the door open and Sid limping behind me.

  “Can you just give me a lift?” Sid said, still following me into the street, admiring my car and putting his hand on the passenger door as I started to get in. I didn’t reply. It was bullshit, Sid’s attempt at a compliment. My old red Caddy was on its last legs; I need a new car, couldn’t afford anything I could love, so I kept it. I still loved it, though it was nothing much to look at now. I was tired of Sid’s game.

  “Please,” he said. “It won’t take a minute. Just drop me up at Van Brunt Street, would you?” he said.

  I drove.

  “You think I should hole-up in my loft, Artie? You think it’s safe now? It’s hard to know whom to trust, isn’t it? I didn’t level with you. I’m sorry. I was shook up.”

  He sat, and waited for my answer and looked out the window, then back at me, hesitant.

  “You know when I stopped caring about the news, I quit working,” Sid said. “They were glad to get rid of me. They wanted me out, to tell the truth, and I was happy to take early retirement and the money. No one wanted a grumpy old editor who cared if you faked pictures or made-up stories, and I realized I was sick
of pretending I didn’t notice, and then I stopped caring. The manipulation of the news stopped mattering. I’m sorry, I don’t suppose you know what the hell I’m talking about.”

  I knew; I had grown up in a country where there was only manipulation, where propaganda was all the news there was.

  I said, “What do you mean, safe now? There wasn’t any crime against you.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean. I understand. Thanks for humoring me. Thank you. There are times you just need someone to believe you, you know? Over there, you can drop me there, please. Nice little pub,” he said. “Good food. Nice bar.”

  I stopped, and he opened the car door, still hesitating.

  I said, “I have to go.”

  “I understand,” he said, and he shook my hand and said, “Call me one of these days, will you? Let me buy you a drink, or dinner, you and your wife, OK?” Sid got out of the car, then leaned down and peered in.

  “What the hell did you mean, safe?” I said.

  “He said he’d be back, he said he would come back for me, or someone else would. Soon,” Sid said, pulling back and standing up straight.

  Something occurred to me and I stuck my head out of the car window and called out as Sid started up the sidewalk. “How did you know someone whacked the dead guy with a piece of wood?”

  “I guess one of the detectives told me,” he answered, and I knew he was lying.

  “Weird, a dead bum getting so much attention on a Sunday morning like that, I mean when every cop in the city is doing double time on the convention. Sid?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was it you who called the cops? You dialed 911? You got through to someone about the dead man down under the dock?”