At Hell's Gate

Chapter One "What's the thing you must never do, but you can't resist doing?" asks the street preacher on the loading dock. "The extra step that you can't stop from taking? The excess that brings you to Hell's Gate?" It's what I did tonight, thinks the man in the front row, sinking down, trying to hide, knowing he's chosen the wrong place.It's too light in here. Too big and empty. The men chasing me must be right outside.The street preacher wears coveralls. The eleven P.M. sermon takes place on a hot September night. The once-a-week "church" is an abandoned warehouse garage in the South Bronx. Bare bulbs illuminate folding chairs that hold a smattering of half-sprawled, half-asleep prostitutes, homeless men, and even one long-haul trucker who knows he shouldn't be here but couldn't resist looking for a certain redheaded hooker. She'll infect him with AIDS forty minutes from now.I should have just gone to work tonight. I should have driven the taxi. I should never have come to Hunts Point. Save me, anyone, prays the fugitive in the front row."For each person the temptation is different. But the result is the same." The man in the front row pulls down his Mets cap and turns to squint toward the smashed-in garage door. Three silhouettes -- large men, from the shapes -- have just materialized in the shadows back there. Their heads move side to side as they scan the audience. Their features are invisible, but the fugitive feels as if their scrutiny carries weight, and darkness, coalesced into human form, needs a few more seconds to gather power, to attack."Hell's Gate," warns the bald, bearded preacher in a soft voice, "is as small as the last digit of a phone number you know you shouldn't be dialing, as delicious as one too many sips of scotch before you drive off on an icy night. It's as logical as an urge to please someone you love: a parent, a boss, a child."The shadow men glide forward."You men! We have extra seats in the front if you'd care to sit." The attention freezes them, but they resume moving when the preacher's attention shifts to the trucker and the hooker, who are whispering together in the third row.Only a few years ago here -- before fire closed the place -- big eighteen-wheelers would back up to this dock in the Hunts Point warehouse district each night to unload fat prosciutto hams from Parma, sweet Vidalia onions from Georgia, bananas from Honduras, crates of baby peas, yellow squash, corn, black beans. Food biblical in its proportions, to feed New York. Bounty grown, manufactured, or genetically engineered from all corners of the earth."If you are here, friends, you have known temptation."Homeless men eye folding tables laden with freebie Tropicana orange juice, freebie Dunkin' Donuts. "You never dreamed you'd live in a wasteland like this."The shadow men halt in the dark areas flanking the front row; two on one side, one -- the biggest -- on the other.I never should have followed them into that bar, the man in the middle of the first row thinks. Or asked them that last question.He looks pathetic, more boy, less man. His khaki shorts are as grimy as his black Keds high-tops. His sweat-stained T-shirt swells with a pear-shaped body that's been out of shape for years. His Mets cap is pulled low over black-framed glasses. Only his biceps show muscles, as if they're the only part of him that gets exercise.He might win an arm wrestling contest. He'll never win a race.I shouldn't have asked them about their job."Hell's Gate is the name we New Yorkers call the body of water only half a mile from here," the preacher announces to the blast of a tug horn, a requiem floating over his congregation in a low F flat. "It's a ship graveyard, right in our city. Down there lies the broken sloop Irene and the schooner Diadem. The tug Vixen and the brig Guisborough.Black, Ethan is the author of 'At Hell's Gate', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743243988 and ISBN 0743243986.