Visitation Street

by Ivy Pochoda

  One of the queens pinches Jonathan’s ass. “Why don’t you grab us a cab?”

  “Get one of those big ones,” Dawn says. “A minivan.”

  Eventually, Jonathan hails a minivan cab. The queens beg the driver to put on KTU, the dance station from Long Island, for the short ride to Dawn’s place on Avenue A.

  Dawn’s apartment has one bedroom that she’s divided into three windowless rooms. For someone who wears six-inch heels and can apply mascara on a moving subway, she’s handy with power tools. The makeshift bedrooms are occupied by a revolving cast whose stage names blend into one long pun.

  The girls kick off their heels, put their eyelashes on the coffee table, take off their wigs, but leave their stocking caps on. They fall back on the leopard-covered futon. Maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s because the drugs are wearing off, but the energy is low.

  Jonathan wakes up feeling the stubble of Dawn’s cheeks against his lips. Her breath is hot and sour; her body has a manly odor. He tries to push her off. She presses his shoulders back and covers his mouth with hers. Her tongue is massive.

  Jonathan rolls out from under her. “What the fuck?”

  “Baby, it’s not good to be lonely all the time.”

  “I’m not that lonely.”

  Dawn raises the smudged remains of her painted eyebrows. “Girl—” she begins.

  “Forget it, Don.”

  Out on the street, joggers, dog walkers, and commuters have replaced the late-night stragglers. People are lined up behind their laptops in coffee shop windows. Jonathan decides to walk to Brooklyn, because he has no real desire to get there.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The newspaper coverage of the June Giatto story has been disappointing. Except for the free local paper, the Eagle, the story never made the front page.

  There were a few local color stories in the major papers—a brief mention of Jonathan. No criminal and no body make for no news. Even Fadi recognizes that.

  Because of the papers’ lack of coverage, Fadi’s newsletter has gained traction in a community that craves any news of June—whether rumor, gossip, or fact. Not satisfied by the police’s response to their tips, people started dropping slips of paper in Fadi’s submission box. He edits and reprints them.

  How come the 76 is only shaking down the PJs?

  The Po-Po better keep out of the Houses. We got nothing to do with this white girl business.

  The Dockyard stays open way past the city-mandated closing time. The police should interview everyone who drinks there. It’s inconceivable that none of their customers were out and about when those girls vanished.

  Was that June Giatto I saw over in Sunset Park last Friday night?

  Fadi knows that he’s simply providing a forum for residents of Red Hook to vent their frustrations. At least he’s opening a neighborhood dialogue.

  In the last couple of days, though, tips that have nothing to do with June have appeared in Fadi’s box.

  I’ve recently noticed a group of Latinos engaged in some late-night activity near Beard Street Pier. I’m wondering if anyone can tell me what they are up to?

  Yo! Someone stole my bike from 127 Dikeman. You better not be playing with me. Return that shit, you hear? No questions.

  Yet again, the Dockyard stayed open past regulation on both Friday and Saturday nights. Plus, I’ve noticed people smoking inside the bar. This is a clear violation of public ordinance. People, please!

  The cast-iron carousel horses on Van Brunt are not toys. They are art.

  A van parked on Lorraine was tagged with the letters “RFC.” This is the eighth instance of our neighborhood being vandalized with these same letters. Graffiti is a crime.

  When I go to the bar to drink, I don’t want to deal with underage girls picking out the worst songs on a great jukebox. Take your jailbait somewhere else.

  To the fool who calls himself RunDown who tagged over my piece, you better be running scared. Don’t mess with Craze.

  A lone black male was seen trespassing in the abandoned warehouse at the end of Imlay Street overlooking the water. Please advise.

  Fadi knows it’s his duty to be objective so he prints everything he receives even if he doesn’t like it. Twice a week he assembles his newsletter. The back page is always the same—June’s photo accompanied by the police tip line and Fadi’s number, as well as the stated $15,000 reward Mrs. Giatto has offered from her son’s military death benefit.

  To his dismay, people seem more interested in submitting their own complaints than paying attention to what others have to say. Fadi often finds his newsletters in the garbage can by the bus stop.

  “You advertise your store by printing trash about the neighborhood,” the Greek said when he saw Fadi peeking into the garbage. “Why don’t you write something nice? Make us feel good about this dump?”

  Fadi keeps his ears open for any leads in the June case. He leaves a notebook on the counter where he jots down the careless comments of his customers who don’t imagine that he’s listening. From this information, he crafts a biweekly column in which presents his findings and observations in an impartial manner. Rather than making assertions, he poses questions, hoping the community will draw their own conclusions and see the necessity of joining together in an effort to find June.

  He knows interviewing Valerie would be a scoop—something the major dailies didn’t even manage. He wants to know what questions the police asked her and whether they’ve been following up. But each time she comes into his store, Fadi cannot bring himself to ask her about June. He notices the way she ignores her friend’s photo on the bulletin board and never takes a copy of his newsletter. Her nervous eyes, which look at everything but June’s face, forbid inquiry.

  Despite the continued good weather, Fadi is aware of the arrival of fall. There’s a sharpness to the edge of things, lines coming back into focus, leaves beginning to curl before they crisp, shadows arriving early and sticking around.

  When Fadi arrives in Red Hook just after 5:30 A.M., he passes the Greek’s where the wino is sleeping in the doorway underneath a pile of discarded clothes. Some time during the night he painted a square of pavement Creamsicle orange and blocked it off with two lopsided sawhorses. The wino is going to catch hell from the Greek and Fadi’s sure he’s going to be listening to them all day.

  Fadi brings in the bundled dailies and frees the Post first. It’s not the main headline but a teaser on the skyline above the banner that catches his eye. “Get Fresh Brooklyn: City’s Largest Local Harvest Megamarket Headed to Red Hook.”

  Fadi flips through the Post and finds the story. The store is going to be housed in a Civil War–era warehouse at the far end of Van Brunt from Fadi’s—a dramatic setting at the edge of the waterfront. He skims the piece: water taxi accessible, organic beef cheeks, fresh shrimp, low-cost household items, citrus, gourmet chips, microbrews, microgreens, an outdoor café. A promise to hire staff from the projects and give them a discount. Local Harvest will bring healthy and exotic choices at affordable prices.

  Fadi shuts the paper. This supermarket will lure new shoppers to Red Hook—people from Brooklyn Heights and beyond who never set foot in the neighborhood before. But it may also kill his business. He tears the story from the paper so he can tape it to the plexiglass display case to the left of the register.

  Just after seven the wino appears. He’s the color of a roasted nut with a small, shriveled face and blackberry lips. His hair is the hue and texture of refined oil. He’s a tiny man, the size of an adolescent.

  Fadi used to shoo the wino away, but the wino persisted, showing up to harangue Fadi in his tangled dialect—a harsh medley of Spanish and English diluted by booze. He paced the aisle in front of the coolers, stumbling and leaving handprints on the glass fronts. It often took him twenty minutes to select a drink, but since he always had the money, Fadi eventually let him be.

  Ever since June’s disappearance the wino has been spending more time in the store. At first he
would gesture at the “missing” sign. “Seen the girl. Seen the muchacha,” he’d say. “She sleeps down at the water. Down by the fantasmas.” Then he would jab his finger at the reward.

  “Tell it to the policia,” Fadi told him.

  “No policia,” the wino said.

  Soon the wino began turning up with strange objects he’d place on the counter—a child’s pink sock, a broken barrette, a purse without a strap. “The muchacha,” he said, stabbing at the objects with a small, gritty finger. “These—the muchacha.”

  It took Fadi a while to understand that the wino claimed to be bringing him objects that had belonged to June. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply—bracelets without clasps, single earrings, grimy undershirts, a jelly sandal. He presented each object with ceremony, cupping it in his rough palms, then lowering it onto the counter. After he let it go, he would step back and cross his arms over his chest and say, “Recompensa?”

  “Come back with June, not an earring.”

  “But the muchacha by the water,” the wino insisted, pointing at the “missing” poster. “The muchacha no come back.”

  “I know,” Fadi said. “That’s what the recompensa is for.”

  Fadi usually ended up handing over a beer, a few cigarettes, or a bag of chips.

  Today the wino skips the cooler and the “missing” poster and heads for the cleaning products. He brings eight bottles of cut-rate dish soap to the counter. While Fadi’s ringing up his purchase, he says, “I see the muchacha.”

  “You want to show me?”

  The wino shakes his head, his eyes wide, his mouth shaped into an O. He crosses himself with a shaky hand.

  “No muchacha, no recompensa.” Fadi follows him outside and watches him cross back to the Greek’s.

  The wino rearranges his sawhorses, shooing away a few people waiting for the bus who have come too close to the square of painted pavement. He dumps the dish soap and a bucket of water onto the orange square, then starts scrubbing it with a broom whose bristles are covered in orange paint. In an instant the Greek is outside. He grabs the wino by the collar, lifting him off the ground, yelling in Greek and Spanish.

  A crowd gathers, shouting at the Greek, telling him to clean up his soapy orange mess. The paint is poisoning the trees and staining their shoes. It looks damn ugly, someone says. The hell you go and paint the street for?

  The wino dances around the crowd, trying to slip between them.

  By evening the Greek will have forgiven the wino and they will share a meal together. Fadi knows that the Greek believes his evening ritual is a secret. It starts the same way every night, with the Greek passing a tinfoil dish to the wino through the side door after closing. The wino lifts the lid of the dish and smells the food. Then the Greek props the side door open and eventually the wino slips inside. Fadi watches them through the small window to the kitchen, eating across from each other at a table near the stove—the Greek’s large bald head and wide shoulders towering over the wino’s slumped, child-sized frame.

  At lunchtime Fadi orders a deluxe special from the bulletproof Chinese. Their fried rice is school bus yellow and their boneless ribs leave an oily, red dye on the Styrofoam container. As he eats he watches a black kid circle the store, looping around the two aisles, pausing in front of the cleaning products and the cat food. The kid is wearing a black hoodie over a baseball cap—on a hot day, a sure sign of shoplifting. The kid looks over his shoulder now and then, checking Fadi then checking his reflection in the circular mirror angled near the ceiling of the back corner.

  Fadi tracks the kid, wondering what he’s going to try to nab. The pricey items are either impossible to lift without attracting notice—diapers and big boxes of detergent—or stowed behind the counter.

  The kid’s got the low-slung gangster slouch and the oversized duds. But his jeans, which on first glance seemed conventionally baggy, are just too big. They’re faded, a little dirty, and of no make that Fadi’s heard of. His white sneakers are chunky, more suitable for geriatric ambling than shooting hoops.

  The kid’s on his fourth circle now, staring down the deodorant and detergent, then he heads for the door. Fadi clears his throat, ready for the confrontation. “You want to show me your hands?”

  The kid turns and lifts his shoulders. He walks to the counter with sullen obedience. He withdraws his hands from his pocket and drops a crumpled Wise potato chip bag on the counter.

  The kid pokes the turquoise bag with his finger, making it wobble. “Wise’s is all.”

  “Mine?”

  “Was.”

  “Got thirty-five cents?”

  “Used to be a quarter.”

  “Got a quarter then?” Fadi puts down his fork and pushes his half-eaten lunch special to the side.

  “Twenty-five cents a bag? Shit. It don’t last more than a minute.” The kid removes his hood. His eyes are sunken, the whites a little yellowed. “Bet you didn’t even clock me eating them.”

  “You got the change or not?”

  “Take it easy, ese.”

  “Ese? The Puerto Ricans are across the street. Me, I’m Lebanese. I’m not ese. And this is not some dirty bodega where you can lift your Wise.”

  “That’s your problem, boy. Too much fancy shit.” The kid riffles the rack of potato chips with one hand, making the bags clipped to the wire display dance. “What’s this—Asia-go popcorn? What the fuck is Asia-go? Bet you don’t even know.” The kid pushes his hand into the rack, sifting through the bags. “Baked rice chips, herb flavored, low-salt kettle crisps. Fuck is all this shit? How come you don’t have fried plantains? Potato sticks? Ten cents a pop.”

  “Are you giving me the thirty-five cents or not?”

  “Man, you know what you need?” The kid pulls the Asiago popcorn from the rack and turns the bag over in his hands. “Some straight-up, motherfucking, comprehensible snacks. The kind of shit you don’t need a dictionary to consume. Ghetto up, man. Organic blue corn tortilla chips, my ass.”

  Fadi knows that his new-breed potato chips are outsold by Wise and Doritos. Even he prefers his Hostess and Entenmann’s to the stuff with the aging actor on the package. Sorbets languish in the back of the ice cream freezers, while Choco-Tacos and neon Freeze-Pops move. Still, Fadi hopes to lift his store above the other bodegas in Red Hook and bring in the newcomers.

  “You buying that, too?” Fadi says, pointing at the popcorn.

  “No, I’m cool,” the kid says. He lifts his hat, revealing a head of hair twisted into stalagmite tufts. He takes a napkin from the counter and wipes his brow. There’s a lean, wolfish look to him. He steps away from the register and clasps his hands behind his back, scanning Fadi’s news clippings. “Man, you turn your back on a neighborhood for a second and it’s getting ahead of itself. Trying to elevate. Aggrandize.”

  “You’ve been away for a while?” Fadi asks. “You don’t talk like the kids around here.”

  The boy pulls up his hood, shielding his face. “Had to get out to educate myself. Just me and my Merriam-Webster’s.” He bends forward, squinting at the newsprint. “I lived here for fourteen years and nothing changed. Disappear for six, and the shit’s pretending to be reborn. Cruise ships? Is this shit for real?”

  “It’s in the paper,” Fadi says.

  “And the papers are all about the truth?” He looks at Fadi. “Guess you’re the wrong dude to ask.” The kid plucks at a piece of Scotch tape that’s holding one of the clippings to the display case. “Back when, the Hook only made the news for criminality and such. And mostly, not even that. Shit flew under the radar. Crime was quotidian.”

  “It’s changing,” Fadi says.

  “I’m reading it, but I ain’t seeing it. Looks like the same old decrepitness to me. Poor’s still poor.”

  Fadi comes around from behind the counter with the Local Harvest article. The kid hovers at his shoulder. “That’s from today?”

  “On the cover,” Fadi says, pointing to a stack of Posts.

 
“A supermarket isn’t news.” The kid glances at Fadi’s lunch. “You done with that?” Fadi circles back around the counter and slides the Styrofoam container toward the kid. “I didn’t think you Muslims ate pork.”

  “You want it or not?” Fadi says.

  “I’m not complaining. Just observing.” He shovels a forkful of bright yellow rice into his mouth. Still eating, he wanders over to the bulletin board near the door. He zeros in on the photo of June. “Missing, bullshit. This girl’s dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ll frame some black kid for it. Just wait. I could fish that girl’s body out of the water at the end of a line and they’d tell me I killed her. Come on, man, you know the score.” He scans Fadi’s clippings again, squinting at the newsprint. “You live at the crossroads. This is ground zero, where the front meets the back. But don’t waste your time trying to negotiate a truce.”

  The kid’s right. Fadi’s bodega is one of the only places patronized by both sides of Red Hook—people from the Houses on their way to and from the bus stop and folks from the waterside looking for early-morning or late-night essentials.

  “Do you want my advice? Focus on your own shit. You got a bodega. That’s your thing. Your avocation. Leave the dead white girls to the white guys.” He saunters out the door, still working on the remains of Fadi’s lunch.

  Fadi follows the kid outside. He looks up and down the street. The strand of Christmas lights sway in the breeze. Two guys with shaggy haircuts and paint-splattered jeans walk past. They don’t return Fadi’s nod. A few of Paulie Marino’s friends are coming down Visitation. Across the street the door of Dockyard is propped open. Every once in a while the bristles of a broom pop out, sending dust and dirt into the street.

  In the last week, Fadi has helped two people from the bar find apartments and helped a kid from the projects get a dog-walking job. From where he stands he can see the water, the polite three-story houses on Visitation, the projects beyond them. He can see the bar and those who hang out there. So it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that what happened to June is discoverable right here, under his nose.