Red Hook Read Online Free Page A

1920s. Four out of ten people in the city born somewhere else. Like me. I swallowed some more coffee.
    Standing in the store, wondering, like I always did, why they bothered putting ridges in the potato chips, I half listened to a conversation between the deli guy, a squat man with a pointy nose wearing a Mets shirt, and a customer, a woman with white hair and a shopping cart.
    It surprised me that they were speaking Russian. Russians had moved out from Brighton Beach across Brooklyn, into the immense flat interior of Flatbush, like Muscovites moving out across the steppes. I didn’t think they’d moved as far as Red Hook.
    At the deli, the conversation in Russian was about how gas prices were killing everyone that summer, and even if you drove to Jersey they screwed you, and about how developers were coming into Red Hook and there would be jobs for working people like them, finally, unless the artists fucked them over.
    I finished the coffee and tossed the carton in a garbagecan, and went back to the waterfront. I hoped like hell they were finished getting the dead guy out of the water. It was almost nine.

3
    They were already loading a couple of rubbery black body bags by the time I got back to the inlet, zipping them up, piling them in an ambulance that had arrived. The corpse was gone. Disappeared into the bags. Body parts, maybe. I didn’t know. One bag for each. More respectful, I heard someone say. Each what? Arm? The rest of him? His head?
    I remembered suddenly how they bagged body parts in Israel. After every bomb blast, you saw them. The kind of blast that killed my father on a bus he took regularly to his chess games. Wrong bus. They got the wrong bus. It had been intended for a different bus on a different route. When I got there, there were limbs on the street, and the religious crews had moved in. They collected the pieces. They had special bags. Religious Jews gave body parts a burial: even if you got a limb amputated, even a little piece of finger, they gave it a funeral. Otherwise, someone told me, you’d make a lousy show in heaven or wherever the fuck people supposedly went. Which was nowhere.You didn’t go any place. You were just dead.
    In Brooklyn, in the heat, I thought I could smell the bags. It was boiling now. I was sweating.
    â€œIt was supposed to be me, I think,” a voice said and I turned around and saw Sid McKay standing at the edge of the dock, leaning on a cane with one hand, a shopping bag in the other. “You look surprised, Art. Maybe you thought it was me,” he said.
    â€œJesus, Sid, Christ, I’m glad as hell to see you, but where were you? I’ve been calling you, I’ve been at your place, where the fuck were you?”
    He held up the shopping bag. “I went out to Brighton Beach to do some shopping,” he said. “I like Russian bread. I’m always up early.”
    I said, “You know who he was?”
    â€œI’m pretty sure.”
    â€œYou got a look?”
    â€œBefore they bagged him up, yes. So you felt sad when you thought I was gone? Sorry, I don’t mean to be sarcastic, I just always wondered how people would feel when I was dead. Like the funeral scene in Huck Finn, you remember?” He looked at the cane in his hand. “I did my ankle in playing tennis. I’m too bloody old, I guess. So you felt sad?”
    â€œSure,” I said, relieved and a little pissed off because now I didn’t know if Sid was playing games, or he was relieved I was there, or what the hell was going on.
    â€œLook, I am sorry. My cellphone is all messed up. I’m not really good with technology. Artie, I apologize,” he said. “I got a little crazy yesterday, and I don’t know, I didn’t know whom to call or whom to trust. Youwouldn’t have a cigarette on you, would you? You notice that everyone’s smoking again?”
    Sid spoke impeccable old-fashioned English. Tall, thin, handsome, his