Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

No one knows what is happening. Someone yells, "Shark?" People are running in place, knees high in the harbor. Someone points toward the floating drunk. A sluggish swell passes through him. He hangs in a dead man's float and looks to have been decapitated. No, not him, but past him a second pair of heels breaks the surface. Someone grabs the drunk and shoves him like a piece of driftwood toward the beach. Two hookers waiting there cross their arms with sudden interest as someone goes back waist-high, reaches in and tows back the corpse and leaves it face up, half in half out of the water. Hands clawed, mouth open, it lies between two flaps of ripped red cloth like a food offering; part torment, part repose.

The hookers approach the corpse like cops, without issues. One toes the ribs. "She's pretty."

"She was."

"Know her?"

They consider her.

"Black," the first says. "Or Chicano."

"How can you tell? She's all fucked up."

A motionless string of red brake lights humps all the way to Queens over the Kosciuszko, traversing the dark below. The dashboard, blinking 5 P.m., sets an underglow off Claire Proffitt's chin as the bridge bounces disconcertingly beneath. Opposing headlights are massing for miles. An ambulance behind surges forward a few inches at a time. No one is moving, there is no place to go; the ambulance's siren falls silent, its emergency lights go dark. Ahead, a haze of yellow construction lights; Rikers Island, just a few miles away, will be an adventure.

At a full stop, Claire glances at the newspaper on the dashboard, folded back at a two-inch filler column on page seventeen:

REFUGEE BOAT SINKS; 40 DIE

A boat crammed with Dominicans trying to slip into the United States capsized and sank in icy, heavy seas, killing at least 40 people. Many more are missing and feared dead.

One survivor said 107 people were crammed aboard the Saint John, a refitted 30-foot fishing trawler, which sank five miles off Cape Engano, the easternmost point of the Dominican Republic…

Exhausted already, Claire leans over the wheel, myopic in the snow flurries, watching the blinking lights of planes gathering in their landing patterns. Planes dropping out of the darkness, gliding low overhead into LaGuardia. She is mere days from her week's vacation to-she's already forgotten the name; perhaps she never knew it, doesn't need to know it. She'd simply given her travel agent her orders: heat, loneliness, blind stupor. Picking her lane out of the sky, she again has her vision of her equatorial sea infinite and pure, the long waves marching on a white beach, crashing in clear sheets over the sand, the spent breakers racing back to do it again, while behind her, the exhilarating piles of mountain heaped on mountain-

Easing down the bridge, the four lanes of traffic pour grain by grain into a half-width of shoulder swept clear of rubble. Police cruisers and highway crews. A circle of flood-lit pavement: strewn shards of metal, a door, a wheel, bolts and screws. Cops with orange slickers and neon batons. She reaches for the tape player. Still that old tape of Nathan's,

Herbie Hancock's first album that he liked so much. The two of them together always had a soft spot for first albums, first books,first movies, the first blush, the courage and safety in anonymity, nothing but possibility and raw hope.

… Thousands of Dominicans try to enter the United States each year by crossing the turbulent 90-mile Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in rickety wooden boats. The Border Patrol has captured over 8,182 this year alone.

Through and gone, the cars cavort like liberated animals over the four empty lanes. Streets and row-houses give way to long unlit slopes peaking and rolling toward other streets, more highway, then more water. An endless clutter of headstones back to back and wing to wing, obelisks, virgin marys boxed in by com peting apostles and multiple replications of the savior Jesus Christ himself. Airborne haloes tossing in the night like legions of Frisbees. More row-houses, more foundries, more cemeteries, Jewish this time, the stones lower, roomier, less of a crowd, ironically enough less of a push. In death, she thinks, they change their tune: composed, patient, they grant everyone around them a wide berth.

An off-ramp into a street of two-family duplexes with windows flickering blue with TV light. A neighborhood of cops and firemen; of plastic-sheathed sofas bearing cats; young sons spending their lives leaning over engines and hiring themselves out to the parents' friends.

Stopped at a zebra-striped gate, a guard box beyond which a narrow causeway humps over the water to Rikers Island, Claire is recognized. The guard, a woman, looks disappointed. "You," she says, and puts her finger to her watch. "What," she asks, "is your problem? "

Claire offers her the grin of the guilty but ever-loved child, then a look of commiseration, then disbelief. "I'm backed up. I'm bored. I have no life."

Anybody with style and grace this night will get what she wants. The guard lifts her eyes toward a passing plane and summons for Claire a look of motherly aggravation. "Don't be long. Don't be outside. Something's coming. I heard it on the radio."

In the waiting room of the Rose M. Singer ward for women, a guard in blue sits investigating her long clawed fingernails painted alternately pink and indigo. Her holster is empty. Outside this cubicle, two more women armed and large peer down from an elevated watch desk behind a slab of bulletproof plexiglass. No one has moved since Claire was last here. And no man in sight. When she first left law school she thought that a plus. Women in the cells, women holding the guns, sweeping the floors, calling the shots. All around Claire nothing but women. But today she smiles stiffly, taps her toes, very nervous: the place is vibrating, teetering on the edge. The women's ward at Rikers Island looks like anyplace else-dirty and bare and hard, a laboratory of unhappiness.

In the cubicle window, Claire focuses on her own reflection, touching her cheek, her face fine and ruddy, as though permanently lashed by wind and sun, suddenly afraid, as though the voyage already has been made -

A girl enters in prison grays, blurry-eyed and groggy; coppery skin and the flat, sloped face of the interior tribes, wrapped in a shy quiet that seems to have ancient origins. Her coal black eyes never rise above knee level. And she is pregnant, well into it, and seventeen, if that.

She lifts her cigarette, inhales deeply, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

Claire lowers herself into a chair across from her. "Regina Nunez," she reads off the docket folder. "You know any English?"

The girl shrugs.

"Well I don't know Spanish. Let's see. Possession. Resisting arrest. You have court tomorrow-but no one's been ing motions. Why hasn't anyone been filing motions?"

Regina says nothing.

"Haven't you had a lawyer?"

"He don't come."

Claire sniffs. "You drunk, too?"

The girl looks at her slippers and takes a breath. "I spilled something. "

"You smell like you've been dipped in whiskey." Claire's eyes linger on the girl's swollen belly. "Maybe you shouldn't drink."

"I didn't ask for you," the girl says, and her eyes, slippery, their hold on things tentative at best, lose their grip, tracking some faroff place, not home, Claire thinks, but some place she dreams of going. Hollywood. Disneyland. Niagara Falls. The girl's eyes pool. Teary nuggets fall to her lap. Behind all this, a child.

Claire leans forward but feels no desire or need to touch her, or offer comfort. "You've been here three months. Let's at least get you to make bail."

"I don't have money," the girl says.

"It's just five hundred dollars."