Red Hook (18 page)

The bartender shrugged. “He’ll live if he can make it past the hangover. He’s in here.”

Way in the back, between stacked cases of Rolling Rock and Schmidt’s, three steps led up to a little door.

“If he was a stranger, we would have tossed him out, but you father’s a friend.” The bartender stooped as he passed through the door. Wincing, Ben followed.

A bare bulb illuminated a storeroom packed with cases of beer and industrial-size boxes of pretzels. His father sat on a couple of cases, slumped over a card table. Ben could smell the liquor on him from six feet away. Hard liquor, whiskey or Scotch. He was shocked—he could never have imagined his dad like this. A little old man who looked like a garden gnome sat on a case next to him, evidently making sure he was okay.

“This is the son,” the bartender told the old man. He turned to Ben. “Just so you know, he never drinks like this. He nurses one or two beers for an hour, then he goes home.”

His father’s head rested on his arms. He muttered something.

“What did he say?” Ben asked the old man.

“He’s a cop, right?”

Ben nodded.

“He keeps talking about the PD.”

Jack Leightner’s head rolled back. He raised it a few inches off the table, but he didn’t see his son. He had the ugly, twisted face of a man who wants to cry, but can’t. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled to no one in the room. “Jesus, Petey, I’m so goddamn sorry.”

A
NEED TO PEE
woke Ben early in the morning. Squinting, he got up and plodded into the bathroom. When he came out, he headed back toward his bedroom, but stopped in the hall. Listened.

Snoring.

He tiptoed toward the front room. His father was curled up on the futon couch. The sheet that Ben had spread over him the night before was clenched under his chin. His head was smushed down into the pillow and his hair was so cow-licked up that Ben grinned. He held his breath and watched for a moment. The old man didn’t look like the tough cop—he looked like a little kid. Ben had always imagined his father as a take-charge guy, surrounded by cop buddies. Giving people orders.

It occurred to him now that maybe his father was lonely too. Living alone. Having a beer after work in an old-man bar.

He went back to bed, but lay awake for a while, puzzling out a new emotion. For the first time in his life, he felt sorry for his father.

Bright light beyond his eyelids called Jack awake. He cracked an eye to sunlight jabbing in through a window, direct to a pain center in his brain. He pressed his eyes shut, then opened them abruptly. He didn’t recognize the window. Groaning with the effort, he lifted his head a few inches off a soggy spot on the pillow—he didn’t recognize the room either. He had no idea how he’d gotten there.

He was lying on a sort of couch that felt like it was stuffed full of sand. He looked down, distressed to see that he was wearing all of his clothes from the day before. His watch told him that it was seven-thirty. A.M., evidently.

He pressed his palms against his eyes. He’d been in a bar the night before. Monsalvo’s. Christ, he hadn’t been drunk in years, and here he was hung over for the second morning in a row. He couldn’t remember how the night had ended, but the events of the previous day started coming back. The shock of discovering Mr. Gardner. The guilt he’d felt when he called the old man’s son to break the news. He almost never drank on the job, but by the end of the afternoon he’d needed a quick one before his shift.

His shift.
He groaned again, and reached down to his belt. His beeper was there, but at some point early in the night he must have turned it off. He had never simply not showed up to work—Sergeant Tanney must be going crazy. He had to get up and find a phone—it would help if he knew where he was.

The room was a mess, cluttered with stacks of books and piles of magazines. It seemed like every inch of wall space was covered with pictures. Paintings, album covers, postcards, photos. Two big film posters dominated the far wall: one for a movie he recognized,
Raging Bull
, and one for a picture he’d never heard of called
The Scent of Green Papaya.

The posters did it: he’d just realized that he must be in his son’s apartment when a phone rang on the desk. Ben emerged from a doorway, bleary-eyed, in his underwear. The last time Jack had seen him walking around like that, his son had been eight.

“Good morning,” Ben said, noticing his father lying awake on the sofa. He picked up the phone. “Yeah?…What do you mean? Nobody told me we were working today…No, she didn’t call me. Are you sure you told her to?…Right now?…Fuck. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He hung up, then stood awkwardly, staring at his father. “You alive?”

Jack nodded, embarrassed. He ran a hand over his head, smoothing down his unruly hair.

“That was my boss,” the kid said. “I have to rush in to work.”

“What kind of a sofa is this supposed to be?”

“It’s a futon.”

“
This
is a futon? I always wondered what the hell those things were.”

“Dad, are you okay?”

Jack pushed an old blue blanket off himself and gingerly sat up. He considered how to explain.

“My landlord almost died yesterday.”

“
You
guys were that close?”

He grimaced, “You have any aspirin?”

“It’s in the bathroom, down the hall. Listen, I’m sorry, but I have to run off to work. There’s eggs in the fridge and some bread. You can let yourself out; the door’ll lock behind you.”

“Do you have a shirt I can borrow?”

“I guess.”

“A nice one. I have to go to work.”

“I don’t own too many business-type shirts, but you can check my closet. Most of the stuff is Salvation Army, but you’ll probably find something. I’ve gotta jump in the shower. Hey, Dad?”

“What?”

“You gonna be okay? I mean, what happened?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to be late for work. Tell you what—I’ll call you later.”

Ben turned to leave, but stopped in the doorway. “Do you remember what you were saying last night?” He shook his head warily.

“I know you don’t like to talk about this, but…what happened with Uncle Peter?”

Jack blanched. “What did I say?”

“Nothing, really. You just kept saying his name.”

“This is not the time. You’re going to be late.”

“I know. I was just wondering…I know a whole lot about Mom’s family, but hardly anything about yours.”

“Why do you need to know?”

“I don’t
need
to know. I just figured it’s important to learn about the past. Your history is part of my history, you know?”

“Sometimes it’s better to just let things be.”

“Maybe, but I think it’s weird not knowing anything—”

“Just drop it, goddammit!” He looked up at his son’s face and knew he’d spoken too harshly. He was hung over; he’d slept in his clothes, said things he couldn’t even remember the next day. Now he was barking at his son…He sounded like his own father. If there was any point to life, he should be doing a better job of parenting than the old man.

“Look, I’m sorry, kiddo, I’m just not feeling so great right now. We can talk about this some other time, okay?” His son looked disappointed, but he nodded. Jack rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Uh, there’s one other thing. I might need a place to stay for a couple of days.”

Yesterday, after Mr. Gardner’s son had visited the hospital, he’d come back to the house to talk. Jack didn’t know Neil Gardner well; they’d only met in passing when Jack visited the Sixty-first Precinct, or on the rare occasions when the clerk paid a visit to his father. Neil was a small-shouldered guy who wore big suits, who teased and patted his black curly hair into a strange puffy unit in an attempt to make it look straight.

They sat in Jack’s kitchen, drinking instant coffee.

“How’s he doing?” Jack asked. “When I was at the hospital, they said it was hard to guess how much damage the stroke had done.”

He’d spent the afternoon in the miserable waiting room of a city hospital while doctors ran a battery of tests on Mr. Gardner. In one corner a homeless man rocked silently back and forth, his rotting body entirely covered in a sheet. Two rows back, a Korean woman held her aching stomach, singing some sort of lullabye over and over for hours in an attempt to soothe her pain.

“We still don’t know. It looks like he’s gonna have to stay there for a while.”

“And then?”

“They said he might never fully recover. It looks like a nursing home will be the best option.”

Jack took a sip of his coffee. He squinted, not because of the hot liquid, but what he feared was coming.

“Listen,” Neil said. “I don’t have a lot of time, because I have important things to take care of. I was looking through my dad’s papers upstairs and I didn’t see a lease for your apartment.”

“We didn’t have a lease. We were friends, you know. I just paid him every month and it worked out pretty well.”

“Oh,” Neil said. “Listen, since you found him and everything…I was wondering: if he had the stroke late at night, like they suppose—why do you think he was on the floor instead of in bed?”

Jack scratched the side of his mouth, shrugged.

“He was able to talk a little bit,” Neil said. “It was hard to understand him, but…”

“He told you about the party?”

“
Yeah.
Sounds like you all had a pretty good time. Like you gave him quite a bit of alcohol.”

“I didn’t
give
him any alcohol. I mean, he wanted it.” That didn’t sound much better.

Neil Gardner stood up. “When I told you about this apartment, I didn’t expect you to take care of my father, but this is ridiculous.
You
should have used better judgment. The man is
eighty-six years old
.”

Jack, still hung over, was in no mood for a lecture. “He’s a grown man. He had a right to have a little fun, for once.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Neil snapped.

Jack took one look at Neil’s face and regretted the comment—the guy obviously felt guilty about never coming around to visit. “All I meant was, he doesn’t have a chance to get out much.”

Neil pointed at Jack. “Getting out?
You
give my father a stroke and you call that
getting out
?”

“Whoa,”
Jack said, his patience run out and his own guilt feeding his irritation. “I’ve had just about enough of that. All I gave the man is a happy few hours, which is more than you can say.”

Neil Gardner drew himself up, livid. “I’ll tell you what, Leightner. I want you out of here.
Immediately
.”

“He can’t just kick you out like that,” Ben said. “Without a lease, he can do whatever he wants.”

“Isn’t there a whole eviction process? Doesn’t that take a lot of time?”

“I don’t know. I think I better just stay out of his way for a few days, and hope the old man gets better.”

Jack could have prevailed on a colleague from the task force for a bed for a few nights, or he could have gone to a motel, but he figured this might be an opportunity to finally get to know his son.

Ben chewed on his lower lip. “So you want to stay here?”

“If that’s okay with you.”

His son scratched his armpit. He didn’t answer for a moment. “Well…I guess I could clear away some space in here. I think I’ve got an extra key somewhere.” He turned away abruptly. “I better take a shower.” He disappeared down the hallway.

Jack got up and stepped over several piles of books on his way to the phone. He called the squad room, praying Sergeant Tanney wouldn’t pick up. He was relieved to hear his fellow detective Carl Santiago on the other line.

“Leightner, that you?” It’s me.

“Man, where the hell you been? The sarge’s been going apeshit. You okay?”

“I’m fine. I had…a personal problem. Everything okay at the squad?”

“Yeah. It was slow yesterday. You coming in?”

“I’ll be there.”

He hung up. Pressing his fingers against his temples, he made his way across the cluttered room and looked out the window. Down below, the backyards of the block formed a green courtyard. The sky was a hazy white. On top of a chain-link fence separating two of the yards, a gray cat moved stealthily forward. It stretched out a paw and placed it carefully, as if testing thin ice, sending Jack back to a snow-covered lake and a December day in 1961.

Christmas was just over. He and his father and Petey crunched through the snowy woods, carrying borrowed skis. The lake was frozen and they were going to glide across it.

The boys walked in their father’s footsteps, where he had packed down the snow with his huge oiled leather boots. Petey, husky even at nine, went second, and Jack brought up the rear, stumbling in the deep snow. His stomach was full of delicious slices of glazed ham, fried to a crisp in an iron skillet, and mashed potatoes, and lima beans he ate without protest, not wanting to spoil the unusual peace of the day. They were only staying in the little Catskills cabin for a weekend, but his father was proud that he had been able to bring his family upstate for their first real vacation—in fact, it was the first time they had ever left the city. He was proud that he had learned how to ski cross-country as a boy in Russia, and now he would have the chance to pass this knowledge on to his sons.

The day was chill, but there was no wind and not a cloud in sight. A branch cracked and the sound traveled across the flat white surface of the lake, ricocheted back like a rifle shot.

Petey was singing Buddy Holly’s song ‘That’ll Be The Day.’ He’d been singing those two lines over and over for the past three days, driving everyone in the cabin nuts.

At the edge of the lake, they stopped to put on their skis. Across the way, above the rough beard stubble of the winter trees, a plume of smoke uncoiled from the chimney of a neighbor’s cabin into the perfect blue of the sky. The snow on the lake was shiny with a frozen crust. Jack and his brother started to argue about who got to wear which skis, but they were stilled by a look from their father. They didn’t want to disturb this cheerful mood he was in, heading out with his sons into the wilderness. They clamped on their skis in silence, fingers pink from the cold. Their father took off his red-and-black-checkered jacket and tied the sleeves around his waist. His bushy eyebrows stuck out from under the brim of a thick wool hat.