Red Hook by Reggie Nadelson

place as it had been. Red Hook looked ancient, suspended in time, the way it probably looked a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago, except then it had been jammed with people working the docks.
    Red Hook had been cut off from the rest of the city when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was shoved through it years ago; the underside of the BQE as I drove through it was desolate and full of garbage; the beams looked rusty.
    I drove up on to the elevated Expressway. I could see the river now. I thought about it when it was a streaming traffic lane packed with barges, tugs, freighters, steamships. Red Hook’s inlets and canals were full of abandoned boats, a paddle wheel steamer, the skeleton of a burned out Staten Island Ferry. There was still some shipping, some working dry docks in the main part ofthe Gowanus Canal, the huge inland waterway that cut into Red Hook.
    Looking down at the tangle of streets below me, I could see the warehouses, docks, narrow streets, packed in tight against the water; most of the streets were empty.
    I thought about Sid and his cousin, and Sid’s obsession with Red Hook and his own past; he had come here to escape, he had said. He didn’t like it when Earl showed up on his private turf, not the Earl who had become a homeless bum, a guy who stank.
    I knew there was still plenty Sid didn’t tell me. I didn’t know why he said there wasn’t much time for him to get away. There was nothing I could do now to help him.

7
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said, kissing Max when I met her over near West Street. “Honest to God, I’m really sorry. I had a couple of things to take care of, I’ll tell you about it later.”
    â€œDo you want to talk about it?”
    â€œI don’t know. No. Not now.”
    â€œOK,” she said.
    She had on cut-off jeans and a red shirt that left her arms and shoulders bare, and yellow flip-flops.
    â€œThat was some party last night, God, honey, it was something, my mom and her friends and my cousins will be on the phone for a month,” she said. “They think I married a very connected guy. I mean Tolya and his shoes and the Paris thing, I mean, call me Cinderella. I’m on vacation. And we’re going to the shore. And then when we get down there, we can leave the kids with my mom and we can go and eat a lot of lobster and fool around, and I wanted to surprise you, there’s this really great bed and breakfast, so I booked us in for a couple of nights, just us.”
    â€œGreat.”
    I’d come to meet Maxine straight from Brooklyn where Sid was going slowly crazy because his half brother had died trapped under a dock. Now I was in the city, a married guy, looking to buy an apartment with my wife.
    It made me content that the regular stuff never stopped, not even for death. We had talked about it, me and Max, because she saw a lot of dead people in her job, too, and she got it. I didn’t have to explain.
    You could be on some case so horrible that it made you puke, that made you drink too much, and gave you ulcers and kept you up all night. The next day, if you were lucky, you could lose yourself in stuff, good stuff— hanging out with friends, servicing your car, worrying about money, looking for an apartment, ordering breakfast from a waitress who knew that you liked your bagel really well toasted, returning calls, playing pick-up ball over near Sixth Avenue, eating a bucket of popcorn at the movies, or a pizza at Totonno’s with Maxine.
    I looked at her. She fished a pack of the mentholated smokes she loved out of her purse, then hesitated.
    â€œYou quit last week,” I said.
    â€œYeah,” she said. “Maybe I should really quit and then we could get pregnant.”
    â€œYou want that?” I was surprised. “Do you? You never said anything.”
    â€œWhat about you? Artie?”
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œYou tell me.” She sounded impatient. “I asked first.