june gloom

by Richard Grayson

By eleven-thirty the air in Red Hook had turned syrupy, the kind of heat that pushed its thumb against your chest. The sky was a hard, glaring blue. Outside P.S. 15, half a dozen neighbors were gathering the way people do when there’s both danger and uncertainty – half hoping for news, half hoping there isn’t any.

Someone said ICE was parked near the corner. Someone else said they were in an unmarked van by the park. Another swore it was just a plumbing truck. No one had seen a badge, but nobody trusted the absence of proof.

“She got a call,” said Mrs. Peña, who knew who got every call in the neighborhood. “The school told her, don’t come for the boy. Said they think ICE’s outside.”

“What’d she do?” asked a woman with a headscarf tied low against the sun.

“What you think? She’s at home, scared to open the curtains.”

“She got papers?”

“She’s got a son,” said Mrs. Peña. “Third grade. He draws volcanoes all day. What papers you need for that?”

A man in a Brooklyn Cyclones cap said, “They can’t come near schools. That’s sanctuary.”

A woman replied, “So’s church. They been snatching people outta church for years.”

No one knew where to look after that. The sidewalk was too bright to stare at, the school too quiet behind its glass doors.

Then Declan showed up, tall and sunburned, carrying a coffee that had gone the color of mud. He was new enough that the neighbors still spoke of him as the artist over by Pioneer Works. He smiled easily, though not this morning. Sweat dripped from his chin. “What’s happening?” he asked.

Mrs. Peña told him, and he listened, blinking into the glare. “You want me to go look?” he said finally, nodding toward the corner.

“What you think they’ll do to you,” said the woman with the headscarf. “They’ll wave you across the street.”

He hesitated, then shrugged, like someone volunteering for something he didn’t yet understand. He went off down the block, long-legged, almost clumsy. The neighbors watched him the whole way. He bent near the truck, peered in, came back.

“It’s the ice cream guy,” he said. “SpongeBob on the side.”

For a second everyone just stared – then they started laughing, high and nervous. “Ice cream,” said Mrs. Peña. “We out here scared of ice cream.”         

“That’s not funny,” the headscarf woman said, but she was smiling anyway.

Declan squatted on the curb, set his coffee down beside him. He felt like an intruder – both witness and useless ornament. He’d come east from the San Fernando Valley – his mother still there, in Woodland Hills, where June mornings began wrapped in fog that smelled faintly of eucalyptus and car exhaust. He used to walk to school through it, his sneakers damp, the sun a dim circle trying to push through. June gloom, she called it, saying it made the world gentle, took the edge off everything.

But Brooklyn didn’t do gentle. It pressed itself on you, hot and humming. Here, light had weight.

“What should she do?” he asked. “Come here or stay home?”

“She should stay home till Jesus calls,” said Mrs. Peña.

“But if they’re watching her house – ”

“They watch everything,” said the Cyclones cap man.

“They don’t watch you,” the woman said to Declan. “You could sit by her door.”

He didn’t answer. His face went still, as if he were being drawn instead of living.

Someone brought chairs. Someone brought lemonade. The talk circled itself: call the precinct, don’t call the precinct, the cops might be in on it, the cops might not even know. Fear made everyone polite in the wrong ways. People spoke softer, like any loud word might bring the wrong attention.

When the principal finally came out, she was fanning herself with a stack of papers. “We’ll take care of the boy,” she said. “We’ll walk him home ourselves if we have to.”

“You tell her to stay inside?” said Mrs. Peña.

“She’s barricaded the door.”

A sound of sympathy moved through the group – soft, like a sigh escaping the body of the block itself.

Declan looked up at the school windows, where faces appeared and disappeared, small and curious. He thought of the boy – how he’d one day be asked to write an essay called My Family, and what would he write? He thought of his own mother, who called every Sunday and asked if he was eating right, if New York was treating him well. He could still hear her voice, the long, Californian vowels: You know, honey, June’s been so gray it looks like the ocean forgot to leave. He’d laughed when she said it. Now he thought: she’d never understand this kind of brightness, this kind of fear living under it.

At two-forty-five, the bell rang. The teachers brought the boy out between them, his backpack almost bigger than he was. They walked him two blocks to the brick building with the drawn curtains. The mother opened the door before they knocked, reached for him, and they both vanished inside.

The neighbors stood there longer than they needed to, letting the sun finish its slow punishment. When they finally left, the street felt emptied of something – fear or grace or both.

That evening Darlene – who’d been there the whole time, quiet, her notebook tucked in her bag – met a friend at Goodiez. The air-conditioning was fierce enough to make her knees ache. The counter girls were laughing about a song on the radio.

Her friend said, “So? What happened with that ICE mess?”

“Nothing,” Darlene said. “That’s what happened. Nothing – but she’s still scared, and we’re all still jumpy.”

Her friend nodded, looking over the bright menu. “What you getting?”

Darlene studied the names of Italian ices flavors – Cappuccino Breeze, My Honey Doo, Cherry Chip Explosion – each one like an amateurish small poem pretending it had nothing to do with the real world. “Maybe the Cappuccino,” she said. “It sounds less creepy than the others.”

They sat on the stools, the spoons clinking against the paper cups. Outside, the street was lit gold by the lowering sun. Adolescent voices echoed from Coffey Park, long and fearless. Darlene thought of the boy, home behind his locked door, and of Declan, probably alone in that cavern of a studio, trying to make sense of something that didn’t want to be made into art.

When she told her friend goodnight, she said, “I’ll write about it. Not the whole thing, just the waiting part.”

“Why the waiting?” her friend asked.

“Because that’s the part that never ends.”

Photo of Richard Grayson

BIO: Richard Grayson is the author of several books of short stories, including With Hitler in New York (1979), Lincoln's Doctor's Dog (1982), I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (1983), I Survived Caracas Traffic (1996), The Silicon Valley Diet (2000), Highly Irregular Stories (2006), and And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street (2006). The recipient of three Individual Artist Fellowships in Literature from the Florida Arts Council and a New York State Council on the Arts Writer-in-Residence Award, he has also published nonfiction in The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, The Orlando Sentinel, and The Arizona Republic, and his diary entries going back to 1969 on the websites of Thought Catalog and McSweeney's.