Grief Street

the island during the Reagan years, when a tide of homeless people began washing up in New York’s streets and food had to be found for them someplace. There are now thirteen cultivated fields on the island. Lettuce, cabbage, and broccoli grow in the spring; tomatoes, eggplant, watermelon, zucchini, and pumpkin in the summer; collard greens and bell peppers in autumn.
    Inmates especially prize the Hart Island detail. Not only is this outdoors work, it is off-island work. Men who can be trusted with shovels—and the sturdier women—are loaded into a boat each morning at the eastern edge of Rikers Island, where they set off for another city-owned property in Bowery Bay. This is called Hart Island, where the unclaimed dead are buried in New York’s version of potter’s field.
    I was this Saturday en route to Rikers Island to get the drop on the guy who telephoned Ruby last Thursday and upset her about the wreathings. I could be thankful the wreaths were not made of Rikers Island rats.
    The black Chrysler with its specially coded NYPD license plates took me across the Francis Buono Memorial Bridge between Queens and Rikers Island, the only public access. Ahead of us was a blue and orange New York City Corrections Department bus, a shuttle that runs between Rikers and the Twin Donut Shop near the Queens Plaza -subway station.
    At the first guard station on the island, beyond which is a cluster of Quonset dormitories that look like airport hangars for the damned, family members piled out of the bus for ID processing, which in several cases involved body searches. Baize and I badged the man on duty and were waved onto a roadway taking us to the farthest end of the island, and the bing.
    Baize pulled up in front of the bing, where he parked and waited with the car. I walked up to the CO posted at the weapons bin and was given a receipt for my nina. I could not help notice the CO’s name plate: PANYAGUA.
    “That name—in Spanish it means bread and water,” I said, immediately regretting the remark. Panyagua nodded and smiled, like maybe he had heard this a thousand times before, which of course he had.
    I was then double-doored through the main entrance of the bing, into an airless central corridor flanked by three tiers of steel cages. A young CO by the name of Musella was my escort to D-unit, where Harry Darcy was supposed to be working.
    “It’s relatively quiet now,” Musella said as we walked over the rippled steel floor. There was a lot of thrash music playing—the kind of noise that many people on the outside listen to because they have never heard of melody, and they have been trained to believe that silence or thought, God forbid, should never be experienced during waking hours— and only the occasional scream. One or two inmates were singing, I could not hear what. I heard our steps echo, though. So this was relative quiet. Musella explained, “We just ran everybody through the monkey juice line.”
    “Methadone?” I guessed.
    “Yeah, calms them down for hours.” Musella motioned toward the overhead cells. “Look at these guys, they’ll be starting up the show pretty soon. Always a show after the monkey juice line. Some guys go through these exercise routines they invent and they grunt and groan a lot, other guys start dancing or singing songs.”
    We turned a corner, walked another fifty yards to D-unit, and there he was: Fat Buns.
    He was sitting at a little desk next to a double door, wearing his navy blue twill uniform and his CO badge and his gunbelt. There were four empty cardboard coffee cups on the desk, one of them half full of damp cigarette butts. Today’s New York Post was on the desk, too, spread open to Slattery’s story and the photo layout.
    “Fat Buns” I remembered, but not the man’s real name: Harry Darcy. After all this time, though, I recognized the pudgy kid I once swatted twenty times on the butt with a wooden paddle in Brother Earl’s gym class at Holy Cross. This was because of a little game the brother enjoyed.
    Brother Earl lived for the day when two boys acted up in his class. He would have the offenders grip an overhead ladder bar, facing each other, suspended there for as long as it took. The longer the better. The first one to fall was the loser and had to absorb his own ten swats of punishment Plus the other guy’s—pants down. The winner had to do the swatting. Brother Earl, of course, would have to make certain the swats were properly delivered. If he