Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone Page A

ship riding at anchor. Three Filipino crewmen leaned against the rail, smoking, looking silently down on him. On an impulse, he brought the helm around and steered for the Kill Van Kull.
    Ahead of him in the roadway, a Moran tug was steaming unencumbered toward Port Newark. Browne fell in line behind her. When the tug peeled off into Newark Bay, Browne increased his speed, heading down Arthur Kill. The channel lights drew him on. Passing Prall’s Island, he saw a night heron take flight and sail over the oil storage tanks on the Jersey side.
    The gathered night was starless and soiled by the glow of the harbor. Red and white refinery lights dappled the surface of the water. The wind carried the stench of the Fresh Kills dump. Browne laughed to himself. He ducked below and jammed a tape into the machine. The voice of Russ Columbo wafted into the sour-smelling darkness. “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” was the song. With his tape at full volume, he eased past the Island of Meadow. His lights caught a rat running along the oily bank of the Jersey shore. Then he saw another. He shivered in the wintry breeze that had come up with darkness.
    Ahead of him were the lights of the bridge that spanned the Kill. When he saw the black derelict shapes of a salvage yard on the Staten Island shore, he turned in and cut the motor.
    In a still backwater off the Kill, ringed with lights like a prison yard, wooden tugs and ferries were scattered like a child’s toy boats. Some lay half submerged and gutted, their stacks and steam engines moldering beside them in the shallows. Others were piled on each other four and five high, in dark masses that towered above the water. Browne knew the place. It was the property of his father-in-law, Jack Campbell. The wooden boats that rotted there, floodlit and girded round with electrified fence and razor wire, had been working harbor craft eighty and ninety years before.
    Browne’s father-in-law, a Yale man, was the presiding chief of a race of water ruffians—Irish and Newfie by origin—who had lorded it over certain sections of dockland since the last century. Rich from rum-running, bootlegging and two world wars, the Campbells owned odd lots of wharfage and real estate all over the harbor.
    Parsifal
’s port float ran up the hull plates of a decaying tug, raising the shriek of fiberglass on metal. Under the awful sound, Russ Columbo’s seamless crooning sounded on. The tug lay so far over that Browne could step out onto her topsides. He threw a line around a bitt on the tug’s fo’c’sle and secured it. Then he walked along the rust-flaked hull to the wheelhouse and hunkered down to look around him. Somewhere ashore, a dog began to bark.
    On Browne’s left, the hulks lay scattered in a geometry of shadows. The busy sheer and curve of their shapes and the perfect stillness of the water made them appear held fast in some phantom disaster. Across the Kill, bulbous storage tanks, generators and floodlit power lines stretched to the end of darkness. The place was marked on the charts as Outerbridge Reach.
    In the week after their wedding, Anne had brought him to the place as a joke. “This is what comes with me,” she had said. “This is the family estate.”
    â€œWell,” he had said. “We need a picture.” So they had taken a picture of Anne’s brother Aidan in his racing coracle among the hulks. Sheltering from the wind against the pilothouse bulkhead, Browne remembered the afternoon as though it were the day before. He laughed at finding himself there again. The tape ended and the marshes of Outerbridge Reach received the soiled tide.
    He remembered scraps of the place’s history. Thousands of immigrants had died there, in shanties, of cholera, in winter far from home. It had been a place of loneliness, violence and terrible labor. It seemed to Browne that there was something about the channel he recognized