Leaving the bay now, I headed up Shore Parkway, passing a sushi restaurant that had not been there before and an Irish pub that had always been there. Just under the exit ramp from Shore Parkway was a small side street, also called Shore Parkway. This was where my father had lived, all those years ago. I had spent a lot of time here. Becca didn’t come with me very often. It had been an obligation for her, but for me it had been a refuge.
The street I turned down did not match my memories. Everything looked different. Had I forgotten which block Alojzy lived on? No, this was the right address, and the exit ramp was in the right position in relation to where I stood. Alojzy’s building was gone. In its place was a new building, a box coated in lumpy plaster, with blue trim and shiny railings on the narrow balconies that faced the ramp.
I stared at the new building, half hoping that time would run backward if I waited long enough. That the new building would be torn down, my father’s old building rebuilt with a wrecking ball. I pictured the boards falling off the third-floor window and the light flicking on and off, then Alojzy pushing open the front door and inviting me in.
I remembered waking up in my father’s apartment that first morning, after I fell asleep watching TV with him, how normal it had felt. Waking up on my father’s couch in Brooklyn felt far more natural than waking up in my own bed out on Long Island.
For breakfast, my father put out slices of black bread. This bread was far denser than the bread I was used to eating, and though it seemed a little stale, he didn’t offer to toast it. I vaguely remembered eating bread like this when I was younger, but I’d grown used to eating fluffy grocery store wheat bread. I smeared on lots of butter—at home we were only allowed margarine—and used all the muscles in my throat to choke the morsels down.
When we were ready to go, Alojzy hoisted an army surplus pack full of gear onto his back, and handed me an empty cooler to carry.
“What about the rods?” I asked.
“Rods?”
“We’re going, like, fishing. Right?”
“No rods, fella. For crabs you use traps.” He tapped his pack.
We walked down the Coney Island boardwalk. I’d been there a few times with my family, but only in the afternoon. Families didn’t hang around Coney after dark back then. Now, in the early morning, it was pretty much deserted, aside from a few old Russian women who looked like they were rushing even though they were strolling, a shirtless man drinking a tall can of beer, and some homeless people who’d crawled out from under the boardwalk, squinting at the sunlight.
We turned off the boardwalk and up the T-shaped fishing pier that stretched much farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than I could swim. A pile of break rocks extended out from the shore, parallel to the pier, and we stopped just across from where they ended.
“Here,” said Al, kneeling down to reach into his backpack. He pulled out two hooped wire baskets and a greasy brown paper bag.
“What’s in there?”
“Chicken necks.” He showed me the yellow-gray mottled lump before he began fastening it to the bottom of one of the baskets with a piece of twine.
“Those are the real necks of chickens?”
“Of course.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Butcher shop. Where else? It’s good crab bait. Cheap meat. Crabs are bottom feeders. They love this kind of meat.” He scored the necks with his pocketknife, so that the yellow skin separated and the pink flesh was exposed.
“Do people eat them?”
“Sure, if they’re hungry. You eat chicken, don’t you?”
“Yeah, chicken wings. Not chicken necks. People cook them up like chicken wings?”
“No, there’s not so much meat for that. It’s more for a stew. Listen, trust me, if you’re hungry enough, you’d be happy to eat chicken-neck stew. Maybe today you’ll find this out, if we don’t catch any crabs.” My face must have betrayed my fear, because Alojzy let out a deep laugh.
He tied the baskets onto some braided lines, and tied the other ends of the line onto the railing of the pier. The rail was full of grooves worn by similar lines, which made me think that what we were doing wasn’t so strange.
Alojzy showed me how to toss the trap out over the water like a Frisbee. The baskets opened fully in the air, then fell straight into the water. We gave it a couple minutes to give the crabs time to smell the bait. When we finally pulled the baskets up, I was sure that I felt the weight of crabs in mine, but as soon as the basket rose into the air, I realized it had just been the pressure of the water.
We threw the baskets back in. In the distance was a big boat, stacked high with different-colored shipping containers. Beyond that, I could make out a distant coastline.
“What’s that out there?”
“There? A boat.”
“No, not that, the land.” I could make out a mass in the distance. “Is that New Jersey?”
“No. Staten Island. Still New York City.”
“Oh. So can you swim there?”
“Me? Sure I can.”
We pulled the traps in again, and to my delight a crab was in one of them. I hadn’t actually believed that we would catch anything. It was a terrible thing we caught, with wart-like growths and splotches of mud across its uneven shell.
“Look! Dad! I caught one!” I usually referred to him as “Alojzy,” or “my father,” but when I was speaking to him the word “Dad” came smoothly and affectionately from my lips.
“Yeah, so I see. Or maybe it caught you? But it’s just a spider crab. No good for eating.” He took the trap from me and turned it upside down, shaking it until the crab fell back into the ocean. I felt a little cheated of my catch, but at the same time was happy to see the thing gone.
Next throw, we pulled up a couple spider crabs each. Alojzy dumped them on the pier and kicked them hard, so that they skidded across to the other side. He walked over and kicked them again, booting them far out into the water. I understood why he did it. They were ugly, and deserved to be kicked.
“We don’t want them on same side as us,” he told me. “They’ll keep coming back now that they know about the bait.”
We moved farther out on the pier, and our luck changed. My father pulled in two rock crabs. They were about the same size as the smaller of the spider crabs but had smoother backs and looked altogether more sanitary. After that, we started pulling them in left and right.
“This is the spot,” my father said. We threw back four because they were too small, and one because it was pregnant. You could see its bloated egg sac hanging from its underside. In the end, we came away with thirteen crabs, five of which I had hauled in myself. Not bad.
My father had been sipping from his thermos all
