Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (61 page)

There is much resident and migratory wildlife in the marshes. The most plentiful resident species are pheasants, crows, marsh hawks, black snakes, muskrats, opossums, rabbits, rats, and field mice. There is no open season on the pheasants, and they have become so bold that the truck farmers look upon them as pests. One can walk through the pokeweed and sumac and blue-bent grass on any of the meadow islands at any time and put up pair after pair of pheasants. At the head of a snaky creek in one of the loneliest of the marshes, there is an old rickamarack of a dock that was built by rum-runners during prohibition. One morning, hiding behind this dock, waiting for some soft-shell-clam poachers to appear, Mr
Zimmer
saw a hen pheasant walk across a strip of tide flat, followed by a brood of seventeen. At times, out in the marshes, Mr Zimmer becomes depressed. The marshes are doomed. The city has begun to dump garbage on them. It has already filled in hundreds of acres with garbage. Eventually, it will fill in the whole area, and then the Department of Parks will undoubtedly build some proper parks out there, and put in some concrete highways and scatter some concrete benches about. The old south-shore secessionists – they want Staten Island to secede from New York and join New Jersey, and there are many of them – can sit on these benches and meditate and store up bile.

Mr Zimmer is a friend of mine, and I sometimes go out on patrols with him. One cold, windy, spitty morning, we made a patrol of the polluted skimmer-clam beds in the ocean off Rockaway Beach. On the way back to Staten Island, he suggested that we stop in Sheepshead Bay and get some oyster stew to warm us up. We turned in to the bay and tied the skiff to the Harbor Police float and went across the street to Lundy’s, the biggest and best of the Emmons Avenue seafood restaurants. We went into the oyster-bar side and took a table, and each of us ordered a double stew. Mr Zimmer caught sight of a bayman named Leroy Poole, who was standing at the bar, bent over some oysters on the half shell. Mr Poole is captain and owner of the party boat
Chinquapin
. Mr Zimmer went over to the bar, and he and Mr Poole shook hands and talked for a minute or two. When he returned, he said that Mr Poole would join us as soon as he’d finished his oysters. He told the waiter to set another place and add another double stew to the order. ‘Do you know Roy?’ Mr Zimmer asked me. I said that I had often seen him around the party-boat piers but that I knew him only to speak to.

‘Roy’s a south-shore boy,’ Mr Zimmer said. ‘His father was one of the biggest oyster-bedders in Prince’s Bay – lost everything when they condemned the beds, and took a bookkeeping job in Fulton Market and died of a stroke in less than a year; died on the Staten Island ferry, on the way to work. After Roy finished grade school, one of his father’s friends got him a job in the market,
and
he became a fish butcher. When the carcass of a three-or four-hundred-pound swordfish is cut into pieces that the retail trade can handle, it’s about the same as dressing a steer, and Roy had a knack for that type of work. He got to be an expert. When he cut up a swordfish, or a tuna, or a sturgeon, or a big West Coast halibut, he didn’t waste a pound. Also, he was a good fillet man, and he could bone a shad quicker and cleaner than any man in the market. He made good money, but he wasn’t happy. Every now and then, he’d quit the market for a year or so and work on one of the government dredges that dredge the sludge out of the ship channels in the harbor. He generally worked on a dredge named the
Goethals
. He made better pay in the market, but he liked to be out in the harbor. He switched back and forth between the market and the
Goethals
for years and years. Somewhere along the line, he got himself tattooed. He’s got an oyster tattooed on the muscle of his right arm. That is, an oyster shell. On his left arm, he’s got one of those tombstone tattoos – a tombstone with his initials on it and under his initials the date of his birth and under that a big blue question mark. Six or seven years ago, he turned up in Sheepshead Bay and bought the
Chinquapin
. Roy’s a good captain, and a good man, but he’s a little odd. He says so himself. He’s a harbor nut. Most of the baymen, when they’re standing around talking, they often talk about the bottom of the harbor, what’s down there, but that’s
all
Roy talks about. He’s got the bottom of the harbor on the brain.’

The waiter brought in the stews, and a moment later Mr Poole came over and sat down. He is a paunchy, red-haired, freckled man. His hair is thinning and the freckles on his scalp show through. He has drooping eyelids; they make his eyes look sleepy and sad. He remarked on the weather; he said he expected snow. Then he tasted his stew. It was too hot for him, and he put his spoon down. ‘I didn’t rest so good last night,’ he said. ‘I had a dream. In this dream, a great earthquake had shook the world and had upset the sea level, and New York Harbor had been drained as dry as a bathtub when the plug is pulled. I was down on the bottom, poking around, looking things over. There were hundreds of ships of all kinds lying on their sides in the mud, and among them were some
wormy
old wrecks that went down long years ago, and there were rusty anchors down there and dunnage and driftwood and old hawsers and tugboat bumpers and baling wire and tin cans and bottles and stranded eels and a skeleton standing waist-deep in a barrel of cement that the barrel had rotted off of. The rats had left the piers and were down on the bottom, eating the eels, and the gulls were flopping about, jerking eels away from the rats. I came across an old wooden wreck all grown over with seaweed, an old, old Dutch wreck. She had a hole in her, and I pulled the seaweed away and looked in and I saw some chests in there that had money spilling out of them, and I tried my best to crawl in. The dream was so strong that I crawled up under the headboard of the bed, trying to get my hands on the Dutch money, and I damn near scraped an ear off.’

‘Eat your stew, Roy,’ Mr Zimmer said, ‘before it gets cold.’

‘Pass me the salt,’ said Mr Poole. We ate in silence. It isn’t easy to carry on a conversation while eating oyster stew. Mr Poole finished first. He tilted his bowl and worked the last spoonful of the stew into his spoon. He swallowed it, and then he said, ‘Happy, you’ve studied the harbor charts a lot in your time. Where would you say is the deepest spot in the harbor?’

‘Offhand,’ said Mr Zimmer, ‘I just don’t know.’

‘One of the deepest spots I know is a hole in the bed of the Hudson a little bit south of the George Washington Bridge,’ said Mr Poole. ‘On the dredges, we called it the Gut. It’s half full of miscellaneous junk. The city used to dump bargeloads of boulders in there, and any kind of heavy junk that wasn’t worth salvaging. Private concerns dumped in there, too, years back, but it’s against the harbor regulations now. During the worst part of the last war, when the dredges cleaned sludge out of the ship channel in the Hudson, they had the right to dump it in the Gut – save them from taking it out to sea. The old-timers say the Gut used to go down a hundred and eighty feet. The last sounding I heard, it was around ninety feet. I know where the shallowest spot in the harbor is. I’ve sounded it myself with a boat hook. It’s a spot on Romer Shoal, out in the middle of the Lower Bay, that’s only four feet deep at low tide.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘I’ve seen it on the charts. It’s called a lump.’

‘It’s right on the edge of Ambrose Channel, the channel that the big liners use,’ continued Mr Poole. ‘I told my mate I want him to take me out there someday when the
Queen Mary
is due to come upchannel, and leave me standing there with a flag in my hand.’

‘What in hell would you do that for?’ asked Mr Zimmer.

‘I’d just like to,’ said Mr Poole. ‘I’d like to wave the flag and make the people on the
Queen Mary
wonder what I was standing on – shoulder-deep, out there in the middle of the Lower Bay. I’d wear a top hat, and I’d smoke a big cigar. I’d like to see what would happen.’

‘I’ll tell you what would happen,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘The wash from the
Queen Mary
would drown you. Did you think of that?’

‘I thought of it,’ said Mr Poole. ‘I didn’t do it, did I?’ He crumpled up his napkin and tossed it on the table. ‘Another queer spot in the harbor,’ he said, ‘is Potter’s Field. It’s in the East River, in between Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. The river makes a sharp bend there, an elbow. On an ebb tide, there’s an eddy in the elbow that picks up anything loose coming downriver, afloat or submerged, and sweeps it into a stretch of backwater on the Brooklyn side. This backwater is called Wallabout Bay on charts; the men on the dredges call it Potter’s Field. The eddy sweeps driftwood into the backwater. Also, it sweeps drownded bodies into there. As a rule, people that drown in the harbor in winter stay down until spring. When the water begins to get warm, gas forms in them and that makes them buoyant and they rise to the surface. Every year, without fail, on or about the fifteenth of April, bodies start showing up, and more of them show up in Potter’s Field than any other place. In a couple of weeks or so, the Harbor Police always finds ten to two dozen over there – suicides, bastard babies, old barge captains that lost their balance out on a sleety night attending to towropes, now and then some gangster or other. The police launch that runs out of Pier A on the Battery – Launch One – goes over and takes them out of the water with a kind of dip-net contraption that the Police Department blacksmith made
out
of tire chains. I ride the Staten Island ferry a good deal, and I’m forever hearing the tourists remark how beautiful the harbor is, and I always wish they could see Potter’s Field some mornings in April – either that or the Gowanus Canal in August, when the sludge bubbles are popping like whips; they’d get a brand-new idea how beautiful the harbor is.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘They’ve stopped dumping garbage out in the harbor approaches, where the tide washes it right back, and they’re putting in a lot of sewage-disposal plants. The water’s getting cleaner every year.’

‘I’ve read that,’ said Mr Poole, ‘and I’ve heard it. Only I don’t believe it. Did you eat any shad last spring – Staten Island shad
or
Hudson River shad? They’ve still got that kerosene taste. It was worse last spring than it ever was. Also, have you been up the Gowanus Canal lately? On the dredges, they used to say that the smell in the Gowanus would make the flag on a mast hang limp in a high wind. They used to tell about a tug that was freshly painted yellow and made a run up the Gowanus and came out painted green. I was up there last summer, and I didn’t notice any change.’

‘Seriously, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer, ‘don’t you think the water’s getting cleaner?’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Mr Poole. ‘It’s getting worse and worse.
Every
thing is getting worse
every
where. When I was young, I used to dream the time would come when we could bed oysters in the harbor again. Now I’m satisfied that that time will never come. I don’t even worry about the pollution any more. My only hope, I hope they don’t pollute the harbor with something a million times worse than pollution.’

‘Let’s don’t get on that subject,’ said Mr Zimmer.

‘Sometimes I’m walking along the street,’ continued Mr Poole, ‘and I wonder why the people don’t just stand still and throw their heads back and open their mouths and howl.’

‘Why?’ asked Mr Zimmer.

‘I’ll tell you why,’ said Mr Poole. ‘On account of the Goddamned craziness of everything.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Mr Zimmer, glancing at the empty stew bowls, ‘we can still eat.’

Mr Poole grunted. He looked at his wristwatch. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this ain’t making me any money.’ He got up and put on his hat. ‘Thanks for the stew,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it. My treat next time. Take care, all.’

‘That’s right, Roy,’ said Mr Zimmer. ‘You take care of yourself.’

‘Thanks again,’ said Mr Poole. ‘Give my regards home. Take care. Take care. Take care.’

(1951)

The Rats on the Waterfront

IN NEW YORK
city, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there still are millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. During wars, the rat populations of seaports and ships always shoot up. A steady increase in shipboard rats began to be noticed in New York Harbor in the summer of 1940, less than a year after the war started in Europe. Rats and rat fleas in many foreign ports are at times infected with the plague, an extraordinarily ugly disease that occurs in several forms, of which the bubonic, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, is the most common. Consequently, all ships that enter the harbor after touching at a foreign port are examined for rats or for signs of rat infestation by officials of the United States Public Health Service, who go out in cutters from a quarantine station on the Staten Island bank of the Narrows. If a ship appears to be excessively infested, it is anchored in one of the bays, its crew is taken off, and its holds and cabins are fumigated with a gas so poisonous that a whiff or two will quickly kill a man, let alone a rat. In 1939 the average number of rats killed in a fumigation was 12.4. In 1940 the average rose abruptly to 21, and two years later it reached 32.1. In 1943, furthermore, rats infected with the plague bacteria,
Pasteurella pestis
, were discovered in the harbor for the first time since 1900. They were taken out of an old French tramp, the
Wyoming
, in from Casablanca, where the Black Death has been intermittent for centuries.

The biggest rat colonies in the city are found in run-down structures on or near the waterfront, especially in tenements, live-poultry markets, wholesale produce markets, slaughterhouses, warehouses, stables, and garages. They also turn up in more
surprising
places. Department of Health inspectors have found their claw and tail tracks in the basements of some of the best restaurants in the city. A few weeks ago, in the basement and sub-basement of a good old hotel in the East Forties, a crew of exterminators trapped two hundred and thirty-six in three nights. Many live in crannies in the subways; in the early-morning hours, during the long lulls between trains, they climb to the platforms and forage among the candy-bar wrappers and peanut hulls. There are old rat paths beneath the benches in at least two ferry sheds. In the spring and summer, multitudes of one species, the brown rat, live in twisting, many-chambered burrows in vacant lots and parks. There are great colonies of this kind of rat in Central Park. After the first cold snap they begin to migrate, hunting for warm basements. Packs have been seen on autumn nights scuttering across the boulevards and transverses in the Park and across Fifth Avenue and across Central Park West. All through October and November, exterminating firms get frantic calls from the superintendents of many of the older apartment houses on the avenues and streets adjacent to the Park; the majority of the newer houses were ratproofed when built. The rats come out by twos and threes in some side streets in the theatrical district practically every morning around four-thirty. The scow-shaped trucks that collect kitchen scraps from restaurants, night clubs, and saloons all over Manhattan for pig farms and soap factories in New Jersey roll into these streets at that time. Shortly after the trucks have made their pick-ups, if no people are stirring, the rats appear and search for dropped scraps; they seem to pop out of the air.