Red Hook

Sitting in a bar in Five Points, an establishment so foul that even the rats turn up their noses at its mention, was Colm Cork. He was a drunk by trade, not by need, nor by habit. He drinks and fights and yells and hellraises and whores and indulges in all manner of excess simply because it was what he did, as if not doing so would result in an expulsion from a charmed life. But his life was not charmed, nor was it even pleasant. He was like the rats, only lesser, for a rat does not choose to be such, and even rats (though this fact is little known) are clean and surprisingly fastidious about personal hygiene. Colm Cork shared none of a rat’s endearing qualities, save for his flintblack eyes and verminous attraction to filth of both a literal and figurative sort. In truth, he was a mongrel—a stray—a filthy hound who came from nowhere.

He had friends, sure, but they were few in number and sat astride him on the scale of social strata, and those who disliked him were legion. He was Irish and a Catholic and so many of his fellow New Yorkers disliked him for the simple act of being born at a certain place to a certain folk. The hated Irish Catholics hate him too, because he was a lackluster representative of their kith and kin, and his propensity for violating social contracts (even in such a city as New York, even in Five Points) had done nothing but stoke the ire felt for him by his fellows.

That night, at the Local, Colm was bored which meant danger for all else. A certain familiar listlessness—a potent ennui of the spirit—had possessed him. That was not a rarity. He was often bored, and when he was bored, he became everyone else’s problem. His misanthropic behavior was not a result of nature, but was instead a lazy, brutish attempt to distract himself from circumstance. This sensation was so familiar to Colm that whenever it struck he thought himself prescient. In a sense, he was, and those debauched episodes were always hazy at the edges with deja-vu, like old photographs.

The air was thick with the stale smell of tobacco and beer, glowing partly for the gauzy veil of smoke. He saw a roach skitter across the bar and plucked the thing deftly off the sticky and scarred varnished wood. He examined it closely, its antennae probing the air as its legs kicked frantically. Its amber chitin gave slightly under the pressure of his pinched fingers. He plunked the thing in his half-finished beer and watched it scramble for purchase against the glass. He swirled the drink, watching the insect orbit its perimeter.

Colm scanned the room appraisingly, looking for his next distraction. His lids felt heavy and his head skullless. Across the bar a prostitute flirted with another patron. She was ugly, Colm thought. She had a wart on her nose and tits that would have scraped the floor without the support of her stained corset. Still, Colm thought, a lay was a lay, and he wagered that her john might object to an intrusion to the point of violence, and that, to Colm, seemed more fun than a quick hump behind the Local. He stood up, straightened his coat, and slunk doglike over to the pair.

“I wouldn’t go with this one, love,” Colm said, pushing between the woman and the john. “He’s only kissing on your neck because you look half a man, and there ain’t no boy whores here tonight. Ain’t that right?”

“Who the fuck are you?” the john asked, incredulous and irritated, shouldering Colm aside. “Fuck off, you dirty mick.”

Colm didn’t feel like waiting for further cause. He caught the john in the side of the head and kicked his stool out from under him so that he landed flat on his ass, stunned and blustering. The woman screamed at Colm. The john slowly got to his feet and punched him in the jaw and the two began to struggle in a clinch like curs after scraps. The barkeep and the bouncer soon broke them up, the bouncer then gripping Colm by the scruff and half walked, half carried him out of the bar.

“Mick faggot!” the john yelled after him. The bouncer booted Colm in the ass and sent him sprawling into the wintery night. The sound of Colm’s ejection and collapse into the city’s slushy streets startled a flock of pigeons which scattered instantly, the snap of their wings like a volley of musket fire.

Colm staggered to his feet, spat out a mix of blood and phlegm, and muttered half-hearted insults at the john and the bouncer, though they were now inside and nowhere close enough to hear. He made a lazy attempt to clean himself of dirt and grime before deciding to catch the train back to Brooklyn—to Red Hook. The night was alive with activity and the streets were filled with people rushing here and there for no reason evident to Colm other than to appear busy, industrious, and dignified. They looked like roaches fleeing from the sudden click and flash of a kitchen light.

Reaching Worth Street station, Colm settled on the mostly empty platform. He rocked nervously on the balls of his feet before he noticed a man slumped unconscious against a pillar, an empty bottle by his left toe. He stalked a few paces over to the drunk and saw a faint glint at the man’s hip—a gold pocket watch, nearly protected from view by the man’s wool overcoat save for where it bunched awkwardly at the hip. A gust of cold air whistled through the platform from outside. Colm moved closer, careful not to attract attention, and crouched down beside the unconscious drunk. He easily plucked the drunk’s watch and wallet. The drunk did not stir except to shift to a more comfortable position. He looked strangely innocent, thought Colm, like a child napping at midday, and for a moment he felt a pang of what any decent man would know as shame. Curious, Colm nudged the drunk with the toe of his boot, and when that did not wake him, he undid his fly and silenced his guilt by pissing on the man’s head. The drunk, now scarcely awake, only rolled back and forth, sputtering and squinting under the stinking yellow-brown stream. Colm chuckled and shook himself dry just as the train came roaring into the station. He looked back to the drunk, now peacefully returning to his piss-steeped stupor.

“Not my fault he can’t hold his drink,” Colm muttered to himself, then spat onto the man’s jacket.

Hissing open, the train doors parted for Colm and the other passengers, and like the jaws of a trap shut swiftly behind them as the train lurched forward. As the car jostled and rocked Colm heard the familiar sound of Gaeilge, of a soft and familiar lullaby being sung. A woman, perhaps a few years older than he, bounced a mewing baby in her arms. She cooed so softly and so sweetly and the babe in her arms cooed back, like a pair of doves. Colm recognized the song. Not because his mother had ever sung to him, but because he’d heard it sung on his way across the ocean by hopeful women such as this.

With a jolt Colm had found his face soft, relaxed, and so hardened it and began to rouse the restless impulsivity endemic to him so as to allay the metastasizing sense of melancholy blooming in his heart. The train rocked to a stop and once more the doors slid open and through them came a young woman whom Colm sensed would be his distraction. Moving quickly and predatory, shoulders high and head low, Colm made his way from the cooing mother and babe and toward the nymphic young girl. Slight and delicate, she kept her flaxen hair beneath a hat and wore a coat trimmed with fur. He stared at her obliquely through the greasy reflection of the train car window. He could tell she was a whore by her manner and dress, and he sensed that she must be a good one too, for how else could a girl so young be dressed so well? He fetched the stolen cash he found in the drunk’s wallet and held it between the knuckles of his fore and middle fingers. He slid closer to the girl, shaking the wad of cash at her like one might proffer a hand for a cat to smell.

The girl stared fixedly ahead, ignoring Colm entirely. He slumped into a chair across from her. Her eyes flickered down curiously to the cash pinched between his knuckles before quickly returning to examine the blank space before her. He knew she saw him and she knew he knew even though she continued to pretend like neither he nor his stolen billfold had ever existed. Her tongue darted out, licked her lips. Colm, aroused by her feigned ignorance, reached into his trousers and began to massage the base of his stiffening cock, licking his lips too as if to speak to her in some serpentine tongue.

Other passengers saw him and grimaced, turning their backs to him, or else tried to look casually elsewhere as if to convince themselves their eyes were mistaken. Colm continued to knead himself under his trousers until the train rocked to a stop. The hissing doors slid open and the girl, holding her chin up, made to leave. Colm slouched in his seat, watching her go, and for a moment, annoyed, relinquished the thought of pursuing the girl until he saw her chin turn ever so slightly toward him over her left shoulder. A glance, almost imperceptible, and a wink with the tail of her eye set Colm to standing. Withdrawing his hand from his pants he half swung himself toward and out of the doors using the train’s handrails. A sense of excitement had drowned the nervous, dolorous ticking of his heart, and he skipped a few steps before slowing his gait, easily catching up to the girl as she strode off the platform with the dainty trot of a greyhound.

“Sweetheart,” he crooned, matching her stride.

“Sir,” she said politely.

She was beautiful. Her gold tresses bunched neatly at the shoulder, their color reminding Colm of a woman half-remembered from his old home across the sea. She had an accent, but it was not Irish. She had a soft, round face and eyes like his—hungry and tired, but keen and alive. Her lips were full and cherubic and fixed into a sort of half smile which gave her an appearance of constant amusement. When she spoke her mouth opened to reveal a set of large white teeth. Red sores complicated the otherwise perfect smile. Suppurant pearls nestled in the glossy creases of her mouth and the hems of her lips.

Colm had a mind to ask her where she was from, but instead he asked her name.

“Eve,” she said. “And yours, sir?”

“Adam,” he replied wryly, then smirked. “Where you headed, love?”

“Home. To Red Hook.”

“That a fact? I live in Red Hook. What street?”

“Verona.”

“Where we lay our scene,” Colm said quietly. Eve looked at him quizzically, still half smiling below a furrowed brow. “That’s not so far from where I stay. I reckon I ought to make sure you get home safe.”

“I wouldn’t say no to that.” Her eyes looked down to Colm’s pockets and then back to him. He returned the gaze, a silent agreement made.

They walked together through Brooklyn. A cold wind coming off the East River brought with it the stink of fish and iron, and the mixture of the two smelled like blood in Colm’s nostrils. As they walked, Colm’s hand on the small of her back, he could hear the scuff and tap of heavy boots following behind, never more than a block back. The two continued to talk as they neared Eve’s apartment, but Colm’s sharp ears never stopped listening. Upon arriving Eve asked if Colm would like to come up for a drink, a needless attempt to maintain her demure facade. He agreed.

Ascending a flight of steep stairs the pair entered Eve’s apartment. The place stunk sweetly of mold and lavender. It consisted of only a living room, a stove, and a tiny bathroom. In the room was an old lounge chair across from a bed weathered with use and dressed lazily in stained sheets.

“Be back in a minute, baby,” Eve said before disappearing into the small bathroom.

The floorboards nearest the wall opposite of the bed were well-worn, evidence of a sentinel’s post. A sock, too large to be Eve’s, had been hastily kicked under the bed. Colm listened to the faucet run and turned to ensure the door to the bathroom was closed, then quickly withdrew most of the cash from the stolen billfold and stuffed it into his sock. Something old within him, the ancestral memories, the inherited dangersense perfected through millennia, roared and rattled in its cage within Colm’s drink-addled mind.

He had lost count of how many times he had ended up in places such as this, and he could make no guess as to how many more times he would. Common sense had never bested Colm Cork before, and he doubted it had the strength left to make the effort. Colm did not have the capacity to ask these questions of himself, for to be confronted with the knowledge that all along there were better choices to be made would be a pernicious revelation. Though he could not know the answers nor ask these questions, Colm had the idea that perhaps another version of himself would have been better for not being given to licentiousness. That other Colm, surely, would not have been there.

“Sweetheart,” the word cut him out of his brooding.

Eve stood behind him in a red slip, her fingers trailing down the door frame, and slid into the room with a bottle under her arm. She poured them each a glass of hooch, then slipped around the chair and into Colm’s lap.

Colm took the glass from her and looked into Eve’s cool, eager eyes, observing the way they flicked from the glass back up to his. It occurred to him that he could simply leave, but instead, like a bass with a hooked worm, opened his mouth and took the drink with a will. He took another drink, and another, and between swallows he planted kisses wherever he could on Eve’s body, and told jokes that made her laugh, and he did not care if she laughed in earnest or with the practiced routine of a coquette. He palmed her breasts and thighs and all the while expectantly glanced at the door every time he saw her do the same between her feigned gasps and sighs.

The drink peeled back the folds of Colm’s mind and before long he was slurring, his hands were lead, and the room swam. Eve kept him steady by holding his head in her hands until finally, predictably, the door swung open and a large man wearing heavy boots grabbed Colm by the collar, hoisting him up to his feet. Eve did not even pretend to be startled, and only watched as Colm was handled roughly and pulled out of the apartment to be flung down the stairwell.

He fell fast and hard and despite the drink he felt every splintered step and rail as his limp limbs and head slammed into them. A brief moment of blackness preceded his final landing, and when he blinked his eyes, coming to, his face was slick and warm with blood and his nose was broken. He tried to rise but the booted man kicked him, breaking ribs, and began to rifle through his pockets, taking the partly emptied billfold and stolen pocket watch. As the man turned Colm over he snapped an arm out, pulling the assailant by his jacket close for just a moment, only to be pushed away and kicked hard in the face, which turned his already broken nose to pulp. The man spat on Colm and turned, heading back and stomped back up the stairs. Colm rose slowly, dusting himself off, and wiped the blood off his face with the back of his sleeve in a feeble attempt to clean his disfigured face.

From atop the stairs Eve looked down at him. She stepped aside to allow her pimp to enter who pulled her by the arm after him, but just for a moment she met Colm’s gaze. A brief exchange, but one profound, of recognition between two dogs beaten and worn; a stray and hoary hound, robust and resourceful, and the other a racer bound for a short life defined by the limits of her small and agile body. The hound turned to go, in pursuit of its next meal, as the racer was dragged away to the kennel in preparation to once more earn her keep, desperate to outpace the inexorable march towards obsolescence.

As Colm limped away he slid the pimp’s wallet from out of his pocket, counted and extracted the cash, slid the bills into his sock with the rest of his money, and tossed the leather husk into the gutter. In a different world, were Colm not born to parents such as his, or in a time and place as he was, he might have been a better person. The city was dark now, but day would soon break on a world bleak and cruel. Meanwhile, across the five boroughs, the roaches would skitter about, convinced they were beasts of a more noble breed.