Читать книгу Manhattan Voyagers - Thomas Boone's Quealy - Страница 3

The coastal seabird was perched atop a wood piling at the end of Pier 11 on Manhattan’s East River, its wings spread at awkward angles, sunning in the bright light of a pleasant day. It had dark plumage and a long bill, sharply hooked, with webbed feet and four toes. A yellow helicopter passed noisily overhead as it circled to make a landing at the Wall Street Heliport located a hundred yards south of the pier.

The bird shrieked at it. As soon as that helicopter set down on the small patch of tarmac a blue one took off and the whirling rotor blades made a grinding sound as its powerful engine strained to gain altitude. The bird looked up again and shrieked at it as well.

In the distance, more helicopters formed a disciplined line in the sky as they approached to make their scheduled landings. Some of these planes had been hired by tourists at $130 per passenger to take fifteen-minute sightseeing rides over the harbor – the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (formerly called Oyster Island) being the main attractions -- however, most were utilized by brokerage house and investment bank personnel for making quick $150 trips to the JFK and Newark airports. The forty-minute ride to East Hampton cost only $500 and was very popular with senior executives seeking to avoid the hoi polloi on the ever-jammed Long Island Expressway as they escaped to their summerhouses at the beach for the weekend. For local residents this convenience came at a high price and a steady stream of daily noise complaints were placed to the city’s 311 hotline.

Pier 11, with its bollards and cleats, also operated as a working ferry terminal. NY Waterway boats constantly dropped off and picked up business commuters, transporting them to Hoboken, Weehawken, Atlantic Highlands, Glen Cove, and Jersey City. During the summer, day-trippers were also able to take boats to the Rockaway beaches to escape New York’s humid weather. Shoppers could also take a ferry to the IKEA store in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a fare of $5.00 that was subsequently credited against any purchases they made there.

Jutting out like a slender finger into the strong current, the pier hosted a motley crew of habitues. In the mornings, solitary old men, their liver spotted hands resting on canes or clutching paper coffee cups, occupied most of the benches. They stared sphinx-like out at the water, mesmerized and hypnotized by it, though not actually seeing it, their mind’s eyes focused instead on events from their distant pasts: of family disputes and amends never made, of tender words left unspoken, of grievous errors in judgment, of close friends who had been forsaken, of painful regrets that still woke them up in the middle of the night, and of infidelities and binges that destroyed loved ones. But mostly they thought about the paths not taken in life; the great opportunities missed, and the youthful dreams never realized.

A fortunate few had come to terms with the past, or at least made an uneasy peace with it, and were able to let it go. More yearned for a chance to start over again so they could do things differently the second time around; to rectify the ancient wrongs; to make wiser decisions; to communicate better with loved ones and share their inner-most feelings; to take back the many recriminations uttered in fear or in jealousy; and to be the solid, upstanding, dependable husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons they had always meant to be.

Others were all too aware that life didn’t have a REBOOT button, and more importantly, a DELETE button. They were weary and worn down by its daily struggles; already had one foot in the grave, were in chronic pain, or worse, in abject despair, lonely and forgotten, or merely ignored; barely making ends meet by eating just one meal a day; earning a few bucks by collecting bottles and cans from the trash for the five cents deposit or by wearing sandwich boards hawking Cash-For-Gold ads on busy thoroughfares while fervently praying to a merciful God for the sublime Afterlife to begin, where all transgressions, great and small, were forgiven and they were welcomed with open arms and the jubilant sound of trumpets into the never-ending joy that is Heaven.

Before noon on weekdays, the office workers of the historic Financial District claimed the seats from the old men and they basked in the warm sunlight by the river; watching the passing boat traffic, working on their tans, listening to music on their iPods, eating their tossed salads, burgers, and falafels, smoking their cigars and cigarettes, gossiping and boasting on their smartphones, or digitally flirting with each other and finagling for a date to go for a few drinks at the end of the workday, that might, if they got lucky, lead to a one-night-stand of casual, totally meaningless sex.

In the late evening hours a very different, disheveled crew showed up -- the homeless – their pilfered supermarket shopping carts filled with all their worldly goods, vying to set up makeshift beds on those coveted benches that were shielded from the weather by the elevated structure of the FDR Drive. Some were barefoot and stunk to high heaven from not bathing for weeks on end. Many were grifters and petty thieves with rap sheets for minor offenses; a few major losers amongst them were wanted for long-ago felonies committed in faraway jurisdictions where the record-keeping was haphazard and the authorities lost track of them. And more than a few spoke in tongues and lacked the mental capacity to regret any past actions, their minds crammed instead with psychotic delusions as they shuffled slowly, but inexorably, down the treacherous path to oblivion.

Pier 11 was also an excellent spot for visitors to Downtown New York to snap photos of the Brooklyn Bridge and of the Atlantic Clipper Ships that were permanently docked as floating museums at the South Street Seaport. Just such a middle-aged couple walked out onto the pier and the seabird aggressively flapped its wings, sensing the duo intended to encroach on his territory.

The Botox-injected bleached blonde wore an expensive linen dress and a wide-brimmed hat to shade her milky white skin from the destructive rays of the sun. A $425 pair of sunglasses dangled from a silver chain round her neck. In her hands she held the latest model digital camera and her eyes scanned the maritime landscape for the best photo opportunities so she could show the pictures to Mildred and Gloria at the country club back home, and also to her 972 Facebook friends, 961 of whom she’d never met in person.

The man sauntered a few deferential paces behind her and puffed leisurely on a cigar. He had a domelike head atop a pear shaped body and stood a few inches shorter than his wife, dressed in shirtsleeves and a pair of worn jeans.

Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! Her camera panned in a 270 degree arc to take in the country greenery of Governors Island, the orange patina of the Staten Island Ferry as it neared the terminal, the giant steel gantry cranes unloading a containership on the opposite shore of the river, the aggressive seagulls pestering the commuters for food, and a red and black tugboat pushing a scow filled to the brim with scrap metal towards the Lower Bay.

“This is such a magnificent vista, Harvey, it reminds me when we were in Antwerp on the Scheldt River. Don’t you agree?”

Her husband wasn’t paying attention to the surroundings; he seemed preoccupied with the bird that was now eying the couple warily. Silhouetted against the sky as it was, the bird reminded him of a painting he’d seen at a museum somewhere in their world travels, perhaps in Alexandria or in Prague, he couldn’t recall.

“Harvey, did you hear what I said?”

“Uh-huh, I heard, I heard.”

“Well?”

He quickly glanced up and down the river. “I guess you’re right.”

“Of course, I’m right. I remember every place we’ve ever vacationed. Not like you, Harvey, you don’t remember anything. I swear, sometimes I think you have early on-set dementia.”

He winked at the bird and mumbled under his breath. “Sometimes I wish I had dementia.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, dear.”

Another helicopter roared above as it descended to land at the heliport and the bird shrieked angrily up at it.

The woman was startled and jumped away from the railing, almost dropping her expensive camera into the water. “That bird is dangerous, it frightened the living daylights out of me.”

“He hates helicopters, Gladys. They’ve probably killed quite a few of his buddies over the years.”

“Just look at it, the bird is absolutely filthy, possibly even rabid.”

“That’s not dirt or soot, Gladys, it’s his natural color.”

“I bet it carries all sorts of nasty infectious diseases, the kind that could kill a person.”

The bird swiveled its head and shrieked wildly at her.

She instinctively clutched at her throat and hastily retreated a few more steps. “It’s going to attack me, Harvey, do something!”

Her husband chuckled. “Be careful what you say, Gladys, he seems to understand English.”

“Call the police, they can shoot it.”

“Don’t be silly, it’s a Cormorant. They’re ancient birds and smart as a whip. In China and Japan, the fishermen even train them to catch fish.”

“I don’t care, it seems dangerous to me.”

“You’ll be surprised to learn this little guy can dive more than 125 feet underwater to search for fish. Imagine that, Gladys, it’s an amazing feat.”

The bird’s chest appeared to puff out with pride at the man’s flattering remark.

“I’m not impressed, not one iota.”

“And in Melville’s Paradise Lost, Satan disguised himself as a Cormorant so he could sneak into the Garden of Eden in order to tempt Eve.”

She glared at the rear of her spouse’s skull. “You store away the most useless pieces of information in that brain of yours, Harvey, stuff nobody else cares about. But when it comes to practical things, such as how to fix a leak in the kitchen sink, you haven’t got a clue.”

“Maybe I should’ve been a college professor instead of an insurance adjustor.”

“Maybe you should’ve been born with a little common sense.”

An inaudible sigh was his only retort.

“Come on, it’s time to go. We’ve got plenty of other sights to see before we go home to Denver tomorrow.” She trod determinedly towards land.

The bird fluttered its wings and flew the short distance from the piling to a position on the railing directly in front of him.

He reached out with a tentative finger and stroked the bird’s long neck.

The Cormorant made a smooshing sound.

Then he suddenly remembered where he’d seen the bird image before -- at the Vatican Museum in Rome – flying high above the fray in a gigantic 15^th. Century oil painting of the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon, the climactic struggle for ultimate domination between the forces of Good and Evil in the world. The museum docent, a retired and cantankerous professor of Art History at the University of Florence, had referred to it as The Sentinel, that ancient guard from mythology who was responsible for keeping the world safe from harm.

“Are you coming or not?” his wife yelled impatiently, already more than fifty feet away

“Don’t fall asleep on the job,” he whispered to the bird, “we’re all counting on you.” Then he scurried after his wife.

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