Red Hook Read Online Free Page B

gray hair cut close, he was around sixty-five now.
    I offered him the pack of cigarettes. He handed me his bag, took the pack and lit a cigarette with an old Zippo lighter.
    â€œVietnam,” he said. Waving the lighter, he looked up at the sky.
    â€œIt’s getting hot,” Sid said. “Cold summer, hotter now. You notice the strange little rain showers popping up all the time, dry in Manhattan some days, wet in Jersey? Apocalyptic. Makes you wonder. It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, my dad always said. He always said it. He was a very precise man the way he spoke, but he was given to clichés. His family owned newspapers all over New York and New Jersey, he was obsessed with the business, and it made him rich. I delivered papers from the time I was a tiny boy. There were always black people who read newspapers. Colored folk. Black people. Negroes. African-Americans. I’m sorry. I’m thinking aloud.”
    I wanted to get back to the city. I looked at my watch.
    â€œSid, listen, I’m here because you called me yesterday. I should have come then, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry, so I came out to see you and I got here and there was a guy trapped under a dock, dead, and you show up and say it was supposed to be you, so talk to me or let me go home. Who was he?”
    â€œForgive me. I’m rattled,” Sid said. “I had seen himaround, like I told you, he drank, people tried to help him out, but he always said, ‘Just help me get a drink.’ He told people he didn’t want to be reformed. He liked drinking. He had a room somewhere, I heard. I just want a buck for a shot, he said, and I didn’t give it to him. Poor bastard came at me with his hand out and I refused him, I just went home and then someone pushed him. Someone who thought it was me. Someone whacked him with a piece of wood, he fell into the water. That’s it.”
    â€œHe told you that? That he just liked drinking? You talked to him?”
    Sid shook his head. “Mostly I heard it from other people,” he said. “This is a tight community out here, especially this side of Red Hook on the water, a lot of artists, crafts people, writers. We know each other. We know the locals. We go to community meetings, we talk about development, we pass the time of day. Urban Pioneers, we call ourselves, we call this our frontier village, forgive the expression and my irony. People who couldn’t afford Manhattan, or got priced out of Williamsburg and DUMBO and the hipper parts of Brooklyn. People want a piece of the city before it’s all gone, so they’re finding their way to the fringes, the old industrial city.”
    I cut him off gently as I could.
    â€œWhat about you?” I said.
    â€œI just like the water,” he said. “Can you spare me half an hour more, Artie? I’d be grateful. I know I’ve messed you around, calling you. Forgive me.”
    â€œYou were scared of the homeless guy, is that it, Sid?And not because he was just a harmless drunk. You called me because you were scared of something else about him. You said someone whacked him thinking it was you. I don’t get it.”
    â€œI’d seen him, you know, and I saw him the last couple of days and he felt threatening, he seemed to be on crack or something. Last night, when I called you the last time, that’s when he really scared me. Not just because he looked crazy. I’ve known crazy people.”
    â€œThen what?”
    â€œWhen I saw him like that close-up, I felt I was looking at my own death.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œHe looked like me,” Sid said.
    We went to Sid’s place and he walked there slowly, leaning on his cane. He changed the subject. He asked if I remembered when we met, some party, he said, ten years back, maybe more.
    â€œYou asked me if I liked jazz,” he added.
    â€œGod.” I was embarrassed.
    If you grew up in Moscow like I did, loving