Visitation Street (26 page)

Shut the hell up
, is the only response.

He loses his footing on the stairs. He tumbles into a wall on one of the landings, scattering the litter that’s accumulated in the corner. He hurries down to the exit.

Gloria is halfway between the bench and the door. She’s frozen, the right side of her body lagging behind her left. From the outskirts of the courtyard people are watching her. But they keep busy with their own conversations, their own ball games. They don’t break from their midmorning rhythms to give Gloria a hand.

Cree is at his mother’s side. He takes her arm and wraps it around his waist.

“I gave it back to him,” Gloria says. “I gave it back.” With her good hand, she points toward the bench. All of Marcus’s knickknacks are scattered underneath the slats. “If your daddy’s going to leave me, he might as well take his junk.” Gloria turns, tugging on Cree’s arm, pulling him toward their building.

Cree’s feet don’t move. He knows the moment he closes their apartment door, he’ll lose everything that’s left of his father once and for all. There will be no way for him to retrieve these few mementos once they are scavenged by strangers.

He drops Gloria’s arm. She wobbles, then regains her balance.

“Cree,” she says. “Leave it.”

Before he reaches the bench, there is a disturbance in the courtyard. Conversations cease and then resume at a lower level. Three coded whistles zip from the windows. Movement at the outskirts stops. Cree knows this adjustment, the drawing back, the retreating before the arrival of the police.

He’s caught between Gloria and the bench when two detectives reach him. The air around him is still, as if everyone has drawn a breath and held it in.

“Cree James?”

Cree nods and reaches out a hand to steady his mother.

The older detective, Coover, takes the lead. “Would you mind coming with us? We’ve got an eyewitness who puts you at the scene the night June Giatto disappeared. Saw you carrying a girl from the pier.”

“The person saw me or someone like me?” Cree says.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” Hughes says. He tugs his shirt cuffs and straightens his jacket.

“I got to take my mom inside,” Cree says. “Then I’ll come.”

He keeps his head down as he takes Gloria to the door. “It’s nothing, Ma,” he says.

The detectives follow him as he helps his mother up the stairs. They wait in the hallway as Cree settles Gloria on the couch, then they lead him to an unmarked car parked on Lorraine Street. Cree feels the courtyards shift as he passes.

They drive to the 76. The radio is tuned to WFAN. Two radio jocks are tearing apart the Mets for their postseason collapse. When the call-in show reaches a frenzy, Hughes punches the radio and they continue in silence.

They take Cree in through a side entrance and leave him in a windowless room with four other black teenagers. Cree wonders if the others know that they’re only here so someone can identify him.

One of the boys is working a toothpick back and forth in his mouth. “What are we supposed to have done?” he asks.

“Kidnapping. Murder too,” a smaller boy replies. “They pay you to come in today?”

“They don’t pay me shit.” The kid spits his toothpick to the floor.

Cree sweats hot then cold. He keeps his back to the room.

The door opens and a uniformed cop enters. “Line up,” he says.

Cree takes the fourth position. He stares at his toes as he files past the one-way glass in the adjacent room.

Over an intercom someone tells the lineup to stare straight ahead. Cree catches his reflection in the two-way mirror. He’s not all that different from the kids to his left and right—boys culled from juvee or jail or rounded up from a pool of known troublemakers. He tries to stand straighter, look brighter, confident but not arrogant. But the eyes staring back at him show a panicked and uncertain teenager.

The fluorescent lights hum. Cree can hear static from the intercom. One by one the boys are asked to step forward. They are instructed to turn and stand in profile. Cree thinks about contorting his face, stiffening his jaw, altering his appearance. But when it is his turn, he is too nervous to do anything but follow orders.

The second kid in the lineup is asked to step forward again. Cree watches him turn and show his profile to the mirror. There’s a slight smile on his face—a smirk that suggests they’ve got the wrong guy.

The uniformed officer opens the door and the boys file out.

“They pick right?” boy number two asks. “Or are you all wasting everyone’s time again?”

“You can leave through the front door,” the officer says.

Celia is sitting on a bench outside the holding room. She’s wearing her CO uniform, which hugs her a little tighter than regulation.

“Cree, baby,” Celia says, standing up and taking his arm. “Gloria called and told me they scooped you up.”

“It’s nothing, Cee.”

“Yeah? What nothing are they trying to pin on you?” Celia asks. Before Cree can answer, Celia whips her head around and narrows in on the officer who’s just escorted the boys from the lineup. His eyes are dropped, fixed on her rear. “What the hell are you looking at? You’ve never seen a uniform before?”

“C’mon, Cee, let’s get going.”

“Not before you tell me why they brought you here in the first place. If you’re in trouble, you let me know about it.”

“It’s nothing. Something to do with that girl who disappeared near the pier. I don’t know what,” Cree says.

“How come you’re mixed up in that?” Celia says.

“I’m not.”

The door to the observation room opens and the two detectives who brought Cree in emerge. Between them is the wino who’s often passed out on Van Brunt. He’s a buddy of Cree’s uncle Des—the two of them haunting the methadone clinic until it opens, then flopping on the park benches, riding out their synthetic high.

Celia slides between Cree and Detective Hughes.

“You taking IDs from crackheads now?” Celia says.

“The witness says he saw a person the same age and build as this young man carrying a girl out of the water that night.”

“You mean the same color,” Celia says.

“That too,” Hughes says.

“So you’re gonna pin it on my nephew. You know how many boys his age live in Red Hook?”

“He was seen near the water that night,” Coover says.

“Near the water, not in it,” Celia says.

Cree peers over Hughes’s shoulder, trying to catch sight of the wino. He wants to see if he can read in his shriveled face whether the little man really saw him jump into the water that night or if he’s just making shit up to claim the reward. If the wino saw him swim after the girls, Cree wouldn’t put it past him to invent the rest of the story, tell the cops what they wanted to hear to close their case.

The wino steps out from behind the detective and takes Cree’s hand and shakes it. It’s his customary greeting, which precedes begging for a dollar. Cree usually crosses the street to avoid it.

“You two know each other?” Hughes says.

“He’s a drug buddy of my uncle’s,” Cree says.

“
No fue el
,” the wino says pointing at Cree. “
Fue el tio con el barco
. The boat.”

“You got a boat?” Coover asks Cree. “The girls saw you on a boat.”

“The hell my nephew would do with a boat,” Celia says.

“No fue el. El otro. El otro.”

The two detectives exchange a look and take the wino by the collar and hustle him toward the door.

Celia and Cree give them a head start. They exit the station onto Union Street. There is no relief in the fresh air.

Cree watches
Monday Night Football
on mute. Without sound, there is a comical quality to the game and its presentation, as if all the players fell through the looking glass and decided to run and stop at random.

“Yo?”

Someone’s in the hall, calling out instead of knocking.

“Yo?”

The voice is low. Secretive.

Cree stands up and goes to the door.

Ernesto is standing outside.

“A little late for delivery,” Cree says.

“I got nothing for you. My man, he wants to see you.”

“Your man?”

“Ren.”

“How come he doesn’t come himself?”

“’Cause he sent me. You coming or not?”

“Maybe I’m busy,” Cree says.

“Ren says you aren’t. Says you barely leave the apartment. Says you need to get some fresh air.”

Cree follows Ernesto down Lorraine Street and over to Otsego. The kid stops on the corner and points down to where the cobblestone street dissolves into darkness. “He’s over there.”

“You’re not coming?”

“Not needed.” He pulls his hood over his head and dashes back toward the Houses.

Ren is standing next to a mid-1990s Honda Civic hatchback with the engine running. He’s still wearing the same sweatshirt and dirty jeans. His face looks fuller.

“You couldn’t make the walk over to get me yourself?” Cree says.

“Heard you got picked up by the police today,” Ren says. “I like to keep clear of authority. What’d they haul you in for?”

“Nothing. That missing girl nonsense I had nothing to do with.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Ren says. “They’ll haul you in until you do. But I got it covered. It’s copacetic.”

“You have it covered?”

“I’m taking care of the situation,” Ren says. “First off, I made sure the other white girl, Valerie, didn’t hang around you anymore.”

“You what?”

“Don’t you understand how the game is played? The more you hang around that white girl with the missing friend, the more guilty you make yourself look. It’s bad enough you jumped in the water with her, got all hot and heavy for the whole neighborhood to see. That’s crazy time. One girl goes missing and you get with the other even though you know the cops are trying to finger you for it. That’s why you need me. I watch out so as you don’t get yourself in trouble for some shit you didn’t do. Your only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You ready for an expedition?” Ren nods toward the car.

“This is yours?”

“Call it a loan.” Ren opens the passenger door and hops in. “You drive?”

Cree peeks into the car. The wires under the steering wheel are loose. “You can hot-wire but you can’t drive?”

“I was indisposed during my formative years. You getting in?” Ren reclines the seat and puts on his seat belt.

“Indisposed how?”

“It’s no big thing. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I did the wrong thing.”

“You were in jail.”

Ren nods. “You driving? Or you expect this thing to drive itself.”

Cree gets behind the wheel. Gloria paid for driving lessons for his seventeenth birthday. But since he passed his test, Cree hasn’t had many chances to test out his skills. He jerks the car over the cobblestones until they hit Van Brunt.

“Left? Right? Where are we going?” he asks.

“Staten Island,” Ren says. “You know how to get there?”

Uncertain of the expressway, Cree takes the city streets. He heads over toward Park Slope, then turns up Fourth Avenue in the direction of the Verrazano Bridge, figuring if he keeps his eye on that, he’ll eventually get to the other side.

The avenue ends in Bay Ridge. They are under the bridge. After a few wrong turns, Cree gets the car onto the ramp. Then they are hurtling across the water, leaving Brooklyn behind, sliding through the tollbooth into the smallest borough.

“Where to?” Cree asks.

“Keep to the water,” Ren says.

Cree finds a road that runs parallel to the bay. One side is derelict houses, the other a wasteland strewn with garbage and scrap. Ren rolls down the window. The air smells like landfill and saltwater.

He peers out his window. “Go slow,” he says.

The wasteland gives way to an assortment of mismatched businesses. Between an animal feed depot and a car wash, Ren tells Cree to stop. Cree puts the car in park. Ren reaches over and fiddles with the wires, killing the engine. He hands Cree a flashlight.

Ren leads the way, stopping at a battered Do Not Enter sign.

“Where are we?” Cree asks.

“Graveyard,” Ren says.

“We have graveyards in Brooklyn.”

“Not for ships.”

They pick their way around a twisted fence and a maze of old shipping containers. Soon the ground grows soft, then muddy. Then they are wet to their ankles.

Cree casts his flashlight in front of him. Its beam finds the giant husks of ferries and tugs—boats reduced to skeleton shapes, rust in place of paint. There are container ships and freighters, all sculptures of decayed iron. Smokestacks poke out of the water at odd angles that fill Cree with the same uneasiness as the sight of a broken limb. Blind portholes swallow his light. Near the shore four large fishing boats are lined up, their prows pushing in toward land, nosing the rushes. Their paint is stripped away, revealing salt-dried wood.

“This way,” Ren says, heading along the shore toward the fishing boats. He stops in front of the boats, bouncing his flashlight off each of them in turn.

“What are you looking for?” Cree asks.

“Parts. For our boat. I’m getting her shipshape, ready to sail.”

“You’re taking my boat?” Cree asks.

“Me? Us,” Ren says. “We’re going together.” He chooses one of the four fishing boats and begins to climb aboard.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Cree says. “My ma—”

“You’re going to spend your life in the Houses?” Ren asks.

The deck is splintered. Through missing boards they can see into the cavernous hull. Cree’s flashlight finds a dead fish. He closes his eyes, trying to find the boat’s sway.

Out on the boat in the dark with the water at his back, it’s easy to imagine he’s adrift with Marcus. The summer before Marcus died, he had taken Cree to Jersey City on the fishing boat. When they began the return trip, the sky had filled with heavy clouds and was nearly as black as the water. Marcus thought he could beat the storm, but the first thunder erupted five minutes from shore. The little boat pitched. Water swamped the deck. The lights of Red Hook bobbed in and out of view as the boat was rocked between the waves.

Cree hadn’t been scared. He’d stood by his dad at the wheel, confident that Marcus would get them home. Marcus steered with one hand on Cree’s shoulder, catching him each time the boat plunged. The water was too rough for them to tie up on their illegal mooring just off the sugar refinery, so they’d dropped anchor and huddled in the tiny deckhouse, watching the blurry lights of the distant city dip and sway as the storm tossed their boat. When the weather settled, Marcus brought them into shore.