My car was at the curb on the other side from the church and I crossed the street and got into it, slid down into the front seat, heart pumping as I watched the man who sat on the brownstone steps.
The rest of the mourners appeared, coming out of the church, standing around on the street in little groups, heads bent forward. Alex McKay was surrounded by people, but I had stopped thinking about him. Gradually, people got into the black limos and cars, headlights on, drove away.
The short man got up, stretched and patted his pockets for cigarettes. I could see him clearly now. He was about sixty-five, the same age as Sid, more or less. He wasn’t fat, but thick, dense like the stump of a tree. The heavy double-breasted blue serge suit he wore was tight across his chest, and heavy for a summer’s day. His only suit, I thought. He unbuttoned the jacket.
He turned his head, seeming to stare at me, but then I saw he was simply looking in the direction of the church. He was still a handsome man with a high round head and thick white hair slicked down to his scalp. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but I was betting they were blue, the kind of eyes you saw in the Russian North, up in the Baltic states or around Archangel. Sea eyes, my father had called them. Sea blue. Naval blue.
Reaching into his pants pocket, the man finally found what he was looking for and extracted a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He sat down again on the brownstone steps, lit a cigarette, took a few puffs, put it on the edge of a step, then crossed one foot over his leg and removed a black shoe as if it hurt him. He examined it. He pulled up the tongue and seemed to try to stretch the shoe before he put it back on and tied the laces.
I stayed in the car. The man finished his cigarette, and leaned back against the step for a few seconds, got up and started walking, his jacket hanging open now in the warm breeze.
It was late. The music from the church—my car window was down—was still playing, an organ this time, maybe recorded.
I turned the key, started my car and, doing five miles an hour, I followed the short man. I had to get a lot closer, so I followed him, keeping back.
Clouds moved in. Rain was forecast. The hurricane was coming that night. I looked at my watch. It would be dark soon.
He was still there, in front of me, unaware I was following, walking steadily, not watching the light. The man crossed the street in front of me, ignoring the traffic. I almost ran into the curb. I followed him. He kept moving in the same plodding way, not stopping, not running, but walking like someone used to walking long distances.
From Brooklyn Heights to Cobble Hill, and then across Carroll Gardens where a few old Italian ladies still sat out on the street in the early evening, he walked.
I realized he was heading for Gowanus. The closer we got to the canal, the shabbier the streets were. The man kept going down the empty streets, night closing in, I lost my sense of direction, but I knew when he turned into 5th Street, we were near the water. Then I lost him.
I pulled up fast, parked my car, got out and jogged across a deserted playground; the empty swings banged in the gusts of wind; somewhere was a flagpole, the metal bits on the string clicking against the pole. A few spots of rain hit my face when I saw him again. The man was heading out along the pier now. I ran faster.
All I could see was a basin of some kind, a narrow body of water, some looming buildings, a few cranes maybe used for dredging. I had never been here before. I was a mile from Red Hook and I was lost. The man walked easily along the edge of the narrow basin of water until he reached a boat that was tied up to it. I could make out a few other boats. There was no one around.
I called out to him, first in English, then in Russian. He didn’t answer. It was as if he wanted me to follow him, wanted to lure me to the boat somehow. By now I knew he had seen me. He never turned around, but I knew he had sensed I was behind him.
I didn’t have a gun. I had planned to leave town after the funeral and I didn’t take a weapon with me. I looked at the boats bumping against the dock, at the black sky, at the rain that had started. I was alone.
I didn’t have a gun, I was a lousy swimmer, the good suit I had put on for the funeral was getting wet, I didn’t have any cigarettes left, and I didn’t know which was worse.
I could have turned and gone away. Just go, I thought, but I couldn’t, because of Sid and Earl. And because of Tolya Sverdloff. I didn’t know where Tolya was, but when someone looked hard at Santiago’s death, his name would come up. Maybe the short Russian could help me; maybe there was something else. I kept moving.
The narrow unpaved road alongside the basin was littered with trash from an overturned garbage can. Thunder boomed. Lightning zipped open the sky and I could see the water for an instant. Even in the protected basin, there were waves. The man jumped on to the boat.
Debris floated on the water near the boat. As far as I could make out, the boat itself wasn’t more than twenty feet long, it was painted a dull grayish brown, and an outboard motor hung over the back.
Crouching down, I tried to get a better look. I couldn’t see the guy, but I could hear him somewhere, maybe inside the low cabin at the front end. I tried to work out what I could use for a weapon if I needed one. There was an empty beer bottle on the ground and I picked it up and felt like a jerk. It was Corona Lite.
Maybe he was just an old man who had been to a funeral.
It was completely dark. The rain fell hard in slanted sheets. I grabbed hold of a piece of rope tied to a railing, tried to jump into the boat and hoped to God I didn’t end up in the water, or trapped under the dock, or dead.
32
There was a light hanging from the dashboard of the boat, and in its beam I saw the short man clearly. He sat on a seat in front of a steering wheel. Next to him was another chair; both seats were bolted to the floor of the boat. There was a dashboard that ran between the two seats, and a windshield behind it, and between the seats was a small louvered door that led to the cabin which was lit from inside.
Overhead, a piece of dirty canvas tied to a couple of poles attached to the sides of the boat made a kind of partial roof over the seats. The boat was rocking. The wind howled. I got into the chair next to the short man.
Unconcerned, he turned to me, and said, “Yes?” His eyes were dark blue. Big and dark blue, opaque like marbles. His face was heavily lined.
I said, “You were a friend of Sidney McKay?”
He nodded, and put out his hand. “Name is Mack,” he said. “People call me Mack. You? You are?” He had a heavy Russian accent.
“Your other name?”
“Mack is enough.”
I didn’t give my name but I shook his hand. He didn’t seem to recognize me, so I said, “I was also a friend of Sid’s.”
I knew who he was. I had probably known as soon as I saw him at the church in Brooklyn Heights. He was the boy in the picture I’d stolen from Sid’s apartment. He was the boy from the ship that ran aground off Red Hook in 1953. He was the sailor whose name was Meler. He had the same eyes, same thick nose. The jowls were heavier, the body was thicker, but it was him. He had been Meler. Now he was Mack. It didn’t matter. They were the same.
As I steadied myself on the seat that was made of fake leather, beer bottle still in my hand, I realized the boat was bobbing around pretty bad. I looked behind me and along the side of the boat was a canvas pocket that held fishing poles, a paddle and what looked like life jackets. I tried to get a look into the cabin through the louvered door. It contained two bunks that filled up the whole space. You couldn’t stand up in it, not even if you were as short as Mack. There was only enough room to crawl in and lie down. Mack saw me examining the boat.
“My boat,” he said in English. “I get her secondhand, five hundred bucks, I make her good.” He punched a couple of buttons on the dashboard. “I must smoke,” he said; I reached in my pocket and pulled out some cigarettes and offered them to him.
The boat bounced; I dropped my beer bottle over the side.
He took one of
my cigarettes, picked up a lighter from the dashboard, lit it, tossed the pack and the lighter back on to it where they slid from side to side slowly as the boat rocked. The windshield in front of us and the canvas overhead kept some of the rain off.
“I saw you come out of Sid McKay’s funeral,” I said.
“What?”
I talked louder over the engine and the wind. Mack pulled a pint of vodka from another canvas pocket on his side of the boat and offered it to me.
I drank. It wasn’t too bad in the little boat for now. I was OK. I drank a couple of shots to make me numb. I wasn’t big on dignity, but I didn’t want a suspect watching me puke because I couldn’t stand boats.
Mack’s face was lighted from the side by the lamp hung from the dashboard, and from below by the light coming up from the cabin. He smiled.
Was he laughing at me? Was he enjoying it? I told him in Russian that I was a policeman. For the first time I could see a faint flicker of fear.
He had grown up under Stalin. My being a cop had registered; it made him scared. We were equal now.
He knocked back some more vodka, and without any warning got up and untied the boat from the dock and pushed off. The motor whined. A gap opened between us and the safety of the dock. I could feel the water underneath us. Rain belting down on the fragile canvas roof overhead made a pounding noise. The sky was thick with cloud, the color of iron.
“Take the boat the fuck back to the dock,” I said but he ignored me, and the wind snapped my words away.
It was still OK. We were in a small basin. I could see the shape of land. Even when I realized we had moved into the Gowanus Canal itself, it wasn’t too bad. Distances were hard to judge, but I could just make out the docks, warehouses, bridges overhead. Solid land. My skin was slick with sweat and my suit was soaked.
I said, “Where the hell are we going?”
Mack, who was busy doing things with the boat, didn’t answer at first. Then he settled back on to his seat, watching me.
“Is OK,” he said.
“You knew Sidney McKay a long time ago, is that right?” I asked in Russian. “You knew him when your name was Meler.”
He reached again for his vodka, crossed one foot over the other, drank, put the bottle on the dashboard, and took hold of the steering wheel. We were still in the canal. He held the boat steady. We were moving slowly. Mack started talking.
He told me about the ship that ran aground in Red Hook when he was a sailor on it. He was fifteen years old back then, he said. February, 1953. Half the officers drunk. The pilot who came on board was drunk. The ship would have been sent back, but the papers weren’t in order.
“It was Cold War,” he said. “People speaking of spies.”
Men from Immigration came on board, Mack said. The sailors sat on the boat looking at America. When they heard that Stalin was dead, the sailors wept, terrified. They drank raw alcohol. What would life be without Stalin? No one knew a life without Stalin.
“For weeks, they keep us,” he said, remembering how the sailors stared at New York, the harbor, the Statue of Liberty. “People on shore stared at us.”
Then Mack heard about a couple of sailors who went overboard. It was easy to swim to shore, he had heard; easy to swim to America.
So he went. One night, Mack swam to shore.
People were so nice, he said to me now, softly, in Russian; they were nice. Mack remembered it in tiny details; he remembered the smell of the street when he got off the ship and it smelled like cocoa beans, and cashew nuts, which was not something he had heard of before he got to America.
Or had he? He stared at me with those opaque pop-eyes, and said he wasn’t sure because he didn’t know if cocoa beans smelled when they were stored in a warehouse or if he had read about it in a book, but he knew cocoa came in through the port.
He had been terrified. He had never been away from home, it was his first time out on a ship, he came from a village near the Baltic. People used carts and horses if they had any to take goods to market. Growing up after the war, he had barely seen any cars.
His first day in Red Hook, he was frightened of the noise, people, cars, huge trucks lumbering down the narrow streets, the ships; a wall of noise was how he remembered it. Then someone said, “You want a sandwich, kid?”
Once he started, Mack talked endlessly, as if he had to finish his story. I was aware we were moving faster, maybe towards the open water. Maybe it was my imagination. I couldn’t measure the distance in the dark. I kept my eyes on Mack. The vodka bottle on the dashboard slid from one side to the other. He grabbed it, and held it between his legs.
“Sidney’s death was suicide, right? Everybody says so,” Mack said, leaning towards me. “He feels very mad about death of this homeless guy, he can’t stand it, he feels so terrible because he kills him, right? His half brother named Earl. I knew Earl.”
“How?”
“So he kills himself by accident, this is what everyone in family saying, because is poetic and Sidney is poetic man.” He smiled. “Like Russian.”
“Like a Russian man, sure, that’s right,” I said to keep him talking. “So when did you see Sid for the last time? You saw him recently?” I said and in my wheedling, in the insistent soft tone of my voice, I could hear my father the KGB man who made people tell him things they didn’t want to tell.
“Sure.”
“Sure what? Maybe last week, maybe Tuesday morning?”
“Maybe. Yes, I tell him let’s go drink some coffee, I call him and say, I am outside of your place waiting for you, Sid, please come. I wait.”
I didn’t answer. He had called Sid. He had asked him to come out. It was that morning, Tuesday, when Sid left and didn’t come back, when he left his door open. A call from the Russian, Sid running out to meet him, forgetting to lock his door.
I said, “You invited him to come out with you, you asked him out for coffee, is that it, you were friends with Sid so you knew if you said come and have coffee and we’ll talk about old times, he’d do it?”
Mack held up the cigarettes. I shook my head. He flicked his lighter over and over. It didn’t work. He found some matches in his windbreaker, reached into the canvas pocket again and produced a glass jar, unscrewed the lip and tossed the match into it. He set it on the dashboard for an ashtray and watched the ash from his cigarette topple into the bottom.
“Sure.”
“How did you know?”
“He was always looking around for me, always asking people, I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be in his book,” he said. “I don’t want people to know my story. I don’t want them to send me back.”
“What book,” I said.
He held up his hand. It was small and thick like the rest of him. He talked mostly in Russian. He talked about the ship. He talked about Red Hook in the 1950s, and his forays into the neighborhood, where he hid, who took him in, how he got braver and started walking around Brooklyn. He walked for miles everywhere. Once, he said, he went into Manhattan. It scared him; he never went back.
Want a sandwich, kid, people would say once they got to know him. There was a bar near the docks where they gave him Coca-Cola to drink and sometimes beer, and where he ate his first hamburger.
He became a pet. A lot of people in the community were Catholic, Irish, Italian; they decided to rescue him from Communism, he said; they thought he was retarded. They thought he was simple because he didn’t speak English, didn’t speak much at all to tell the truth because he kept his mouth shut, feeling it was safer. A couple of the older women fed him and took him to church and had him baptized. When the freighter finally went back to sea, Mack—everyone called him Mack by then—wasn’t on it. He had disappeared into Red Hook.
The wave hit me from the side. I could make out the waves, ten, fifteen feet tall, black, tight, close up to me, practically on us, the wind roaring, the boat rolling up, and then down, like a plane hitting an air pocket. The water slammed me. The rain hit my face. I was so
aked now, my suit heavy as lead. Somehow I got out of the jacket. Then another wave. The piece of canvas overhead began to shred. Strips of canvas hung down from it. The wind blew one of them into my face. I clawed it away.
All I could see at first were Mack’s hands as they gripped the wheel. The glass jar on the dashboard slid off and crashed on to the deck of the boat, spilling ash. My mouth tasted like shit. I had smoked most of a pack of cigarettes. Something about the jar bothered me. I tried to focus. We were in open water. We were in the river.
In the distance there were a few faint lights.
“Red Hook,” Mack said, following my gaze.
I wondered if I could make it to shore if I had to swim. The storm roared, the outboard motor made clunking noises; Mack was silent now.
Another wave hit us. Water sloshed over the edge. The rest of the canvas blew away. Salt water filled my mouth.
When Mack started talking again, he yelled out his words over the storm and the engine. He kept the boat steady. We were in Buttermilk Channel, he said, but I had no way of knowing if it was the truth and we were heading towards the city, or moving towards open water, out to the ocean.
Mack told me he had never seen a black person until he met Sid and Earl. They were his own age. They had bicycles. Sid had a bright blue bike, very shiny, with a bell and a light. It had a license plate. Schwinn was its name. It had a flag, too, that read: Brooklyn Dodgers, World Champions, 1953.
He couldn’t read it, not at first. He could barely read Russian, much less English, but one of the boys explained what it was. Baseball, they said. We’ll teach you. We’ll bring our stuff and show you how to play, they said. Bat. This is a bat. This is the ball. This is the glove. They brought things and showed him.
The water was a little calmer now, the waves down to six feet; we were in the channel. We were close to Governor’s Island. Mack kept talking and talking, I was desperate to hear him, and scared I was going to go over the edge as the wind came in huge gusts.
Red Hook Page 28
