Visitation Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

the dancing cans.
    Jonathan usually wakes up when the bar quiets down. After the noise drains slowly into the street, he knows Lil is in there alone. She lowers the music and he can hear her footsteps as she clears glasses and wipes the counters.
    Lil sings after closing, a lonely performance for the half-empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. She’s got a decent voice with a rusty country twang. Jonathan imagines that she sits on the bar with her feet on a stool, serenading the yellowed nautical charts and photos of old sea captains.
    She finishes her song and heads outside. She pulls down the grate. The padlock falls into place with a bang.
    Jonathan sticks his head out the window. “Hey, Lil.”
    “You still up?” She’s holding a bottle of whiskey.
    “You want to share that with me? I need a little inspiration.”
    Lil holds the bottle by the neck and waves it like a pendulum. “Well, I’m not sharing my inspiration with you.”
    Jonathan watches her walk away. It’s 5:15. This is the hour when the four businesses—two bodegas, a luncheonette, and the Dockyard—on the four corners of Van Brunt and Visitation perform their daily concert of opening or closing, the grind and bang of recoiling metal welcoming another day.
    The Greek is already struggling with his iron shutters. He has roused the little wino who sleeps in the luncheonette’s doorway. The wino’s shadowing him. One of the gates is stuck—the right side won’t budge higher than three feet. The Greek is tugging on it. The wino’s shuffling around, trying to help. He breaks a dead branch off a tree and offers it to the Greek.
    Jonathan has never eaten at the Greek’s. The place caters to retired dockworkers, tollbooth clerks from the graveyard shift at the tunnel, and early arrivals for the methadone clinic.
    The wino’s voice catches Jonathan’s ear. It’s dissonant, all flats and sharps with no clear words. He looks eager, ready to invent odd jobs so the Greek will pay him to go away. The Greek gives his shutters a final shake before going inside to heat up the grill, make coffee, display yesterday’s meatloaf.
    Jonathan drops his blinds, but angles them just enough so that when daylight comes, it will descend on the diagonal.
    It’s too late for sleep. The first morning bus is rattling over the bumpy street, hitting each pothole and fissure made by the new sewage pipes.
    When he was eight, Jonathan spent the summer in London with Eden who was appearing in a West End revival. They rented an apartment next to a Hasidic Jew. In the evenings, after Eden had left for the theater, the Hasid would come out onto his balcony and sing as the sun set. Although Jonathan could not understand the song, there was something in his voice that sent him to sleep. For a summer Jonathan could not sleep without this song.
    There is no one to sing him to sleep now. There is only the metallic grind of the morning. He peeks through the blinds. In the half-light, the wino is sweeping a single square of pavement. He’s got it blocked off with sawhorses scavenged from a ruptured manhole up Visitation. If he keeps this up, he’ll get the boot and be drunk by nine. Behind him the Greek has found a crowbar and is trying to wrench the grate up. It sounds like he’s milling steel.
    To escape the commotion, Jonathan walks down to the water. Although it’s steaming out, this is not a bad hour to be awake in Red Hook—too late to encounter the all-night revelers, too early for what’s left of the local industry. The sun is beginning to rise behind him, fighting through the projects at the back of the neighborhood, promising a full-on Brooklyn bake.
    The few streetlights on the side streets go out with a buzz. These blocks are quiet. The chop shops and warehouses are not open yet. The guard dogs protecting empty lots still sleep.
    Jonathan turns down a cobblestone street that leads to the water—one of two decent residential blocks in Red Hook, a street filled with