Dead
Horse Bay
by
Laura Martin
The day before hurricane Sandy
hits New York I go to the beach. The subways are shut down. The mayor has
recommended evacuation of coastal areas.
The news warns of widespread blackouts and flooding. I’m already feeling
claustrophobic at the idea of days stuck inside, in the dark, the dog howling
to go out, the man I live with steadily drinking through bottles of whiskey and
gin. The beach I go to is an hour away, on the opposite end of Brooklyn from
our Bushwick apartment. Most of the drive is down Utica Avenue through the deteriorating
finery of Bedstuy: neon and iron grates effacing ornate brick facades. Then I
enter East New York: cheap vinyl siding and tall brown public housing units.
With relief I turn onto Flatbush
Avenue and enter the green expanse of overgrown runways and ivy covered
airplane hangers that was once Floyd Bennett Field. The land I’m driving over
was dredged up from the basin of nearby Jamaica Bay and used to fill in the
channels separating Barren Island from the surrounding archipelago. Eighty
years ago it was naked sand, smoothed into a runway for municipal aircraft.
Most of it is still government property. Just past the lot where I park a black
lettered sign warns against trespassing. Buses, limos with tinted windows, and
jeeps speed past, on their way to rescue stranded families and prepare for the
coming assault.
I wait for a gap in the traffic
and cross the slick street, glossy with oil and rain, to the dirt path,
unmarked but well worn. The traffic sounds fade, replaced by dry rustling and
then a thrumming motor. A helicopter curves toward me in a wide arc, hovering
directly above the path. I picture the pilot shining a big light in my eyes,
his voice, projected over the engine through a megaphone, asking what I’m doing
there, telling me to leave. Instead, after hovering a few moments, he moves on.
I step out of the trees and onto
the rocky edge of the bay. The wide, flat line of the horizon curves against
the smoke and silver hues of the sky: a spectrum of colorless ash. The beach is
to my left. There is garbage everywhere.The
waves crash over it scraping glass on bone, plastic against china. I step
carefully over the rocks toward the sand. Underfoot, shards snap and crunch.
On the sand the debris is denser.
I look for something undamaged. I find things that are close: a plate split
cleanly in two, a perfume bottle that is unbroken but clogged with sand, shells,
and rotting seaweed.
The refuse is mostly from the
thirties and forties, erupted from a broken landfill and carried, layer by
layer, back to the shore. Before the landfill, the area contained dozens of
rendering plants where old horses were sent after they could no longer function
as a means of transportation. Unable to carry passengers or pull carts full of
goods, they were stripped and boiled, their remains processed into glue and
fertilizer, their used up skeletons thrown into the bay. Piles of dismembered bones settled
into the muck. Pieces still wash ashore along with the garbage, ribs and thick
femurs.
The wind smells of mildew and old
leather and dead fish.
There are hundreds of broken
bottles. Perfume bottles, soda bottles, brown jugs that held moonshine and
whiskey. In the dull light everything looks brown and gray. I squat down to
make out the blues and greens. I look for bottles with something left inside of
them, a trace of soured whiskey, a drop of spoiled perfume, or messages—maybe
not even an old message, maybe a note left by another beach goer. But I don’t
find anything.
Between
the bottles a doll’s head, smashed in on one side, and the sole of a shoe are
trapped, tangled in seaweed and shreds of unraveling heavy fabric that may once
have been a tablecloth. It smells rotten and salty.
The most interesting objects are
deeply corroded: half an old license plate, orange and flaking, bearing the
numbers 903 and the words “NY The Empire,” a turquoise ceramic dog bowl missing
one side that reads “Man’s Best,” a hunk of china with a delicate handle
stamped “made in occupied Japan.”
I salvage a few small glass
bottles, brown and green, a clear one with ridges that remind me of the Empire
State Building, once the tallest structure in the world. They are weather worn
with damaged mouths.
There is only one other person on
the beach, a man at the far end, his face indistinguishable in the distance.
Even so, I wish he wasn’t there. I want the space to myself. His presence
inhibits me. I keep my movements small. I do not scream into the wind. I have
never done this, but I imagine it would help somehow, being able to scream.
Instead I take small, crunching steps.
The breakage here is impersonal, an
act of nature, not anger. On the beach, with space all around, I allow myself
to remember the man I live with cleaning glass out of the sink: “I didn’t throw
it at you. If I’d wanted to hit you I would have.”
I
collect bits of china with interesting patterns, the preserved cover of an out
of print novel, Enchantment by Jane
Parker, whose story I search for but never find. I don’t know why I take the
things I do. It’s illegal to remove anything from the beach even though
everything there has already been thrown away.
I find dozens of unbroken bottles
and lose my desire to have them. Someone has set up a line of them on a piece
of driftwood, a variety of shapes, artfully arranged and evenly spaced.
The trash comes in all sizes. I
encounter a large rotted-out safe, the metal corroded and fragile looking, holes
worn away, but the lock still intact, protected by an unguessable combination
of numbers. It’s taller, turned on its side, than I am. Pondering the sealed
contents, I recall a restaurant in Georgia that had once been a bank. The vault
was cut open. Inside were dozens of safety
deposit boxes. There was nothing salable. The boxes contained love letters,
cards, keys, and photographs, objects that were once treasured and then
forgotten.
As a child I kept my treasures in
a secret space under a floorboard behind an armchair in the living room. Now I
have no secrets. The man I live with knows all my passwords, has access to
every journal and notebook. Not that he reads any of it, he’s not interested, but
just knowing that he could changes the words I chose.
I am so tired of being careful.
A motorboat rumbles toward the coast where I stand, dark like the
sky and the water, hitched with one small light, steered by a man concealed in
a gray parka. It pulls in close and follows the line of the coast. I expect the
man to shine the light at me, to ask me why I am there, but again nothing
happens.
Ahead a narrow sandbar creates a
bridge to a small island covered in gulls. Near it, a dull white speedboat is
sunken into the silt, only the cabin and a bit of the nose exposed. I want to
walk out onto the island, but I’m afraid of getting trapped by the tide. I
can’t be reckless, even here on the beach at the edge of a storm.
I leave the sandbar and drift
toward the broken husks of two horseshoe crabs, their prehistoric bodies
punched in by something trying to get at their meat. I pick one up, touch its
long pointed tail and helmet shaped body. Turning it over carefully, I look at its
primitive dead eyes and I set it back on the sand.
Toward the smudgy skyline of
Brighton Beach the trash thins and I turn back. The helicopter returns,
hovering over me, out in the open, exposed against the flat plain of the beach.
Again it moves off. As the sound of the motor dissipates I notice the clinking
of a hundred tiny collisions as the waves move in and out. The sound is
surprisingly soft.
I scan the shore, trying to
focus, looking for anything unusual, a different texture or hue. I see a bit of
baby blue and reach down, pulling up a plastic spoon with a cameo on the handle.
I collect spoons, a habit I
inherited from my great grandmother. Their ornate silver bodies hang by their
heads from a wooden rack in my kitchen. The face on a cameo is supposed to
represent a Greek or Roman deity, but who knows what the face of a god looks
like. Not, I imagine, like the delicate profile attached to the spoon.
The cameo reminds me of my
favorite childhood doll, who had a brooch with a woman’s profile at the ruffled
neckline of her dress. I carried her everywhere until my brother took her and
smashed her head open on the sidewalk.
Part of the spoon’s scoop is
roughed up on one side and the plastic cameo is eroded with something that
looks like rust. I run my finger over the rough edge. It probably came from a
box, one in a dozen identical spoons, but it is the only one here, now. I tuck
it into the pocket in my sweatshirt. I hold it there, inside my pocket, feeling
it’s plastic smoothness, and small imperfections, and walk back to the trail,
moving slowly, despite the rain and the chill, not wanting to go home.
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