Vlade decided to take the boys out to Coney Island on his own boat, even though the building’s boat was a bit faster, because he didn’t want this trip on the books. His boat, an eighteen-foot aluminum-hulled runabout with an electric overboard, had become somewhat of an afterthought for him, because he was always either in the Met or out doing Met business in the Metboat, but it was still there tucked in the rafters of the boathouse, and once he got it down it was a pleasure to see it again, and feel it under the tiller as they hummed out Twenty-third to the East River and headed south across Upper New York Bay. Once they were clear of the traffic channels he opened it up full throttle. The two wings of spray the boat threw to the side were modest, but the frills topping them were sparked with rainbow dots, and the mild bounce over the harbor chop gave them an extra sense of speed. Speedboat on the water! It was a very particular feel, and judging by the looks on the boys’ faces, they hadn’t often felt it.
And as always, passing through the Narrows was a thrill. Even with sea level fifty feet higher, the Verrazano Bridge still crossed the air so far above them that it was like something left over from Atlantis. It couldn’t help but make you think about the rest of the world. Vlade knew that world was out there, but he never went inland; he had never been more than five miles from the ocean in his life. To him this bay was everything, and the giant vestiges of the antediluvian world seemed magical, as from an age of gold.
After that, out to sea. The blue Atlantic! Swells rocked the boat, and Vlade had to slow down as he turned left to hug the shore, now marked by a white line of crashing breakers. For a half hour they ran southeast just offshore, until they passed Bath Beach, where Vlade headed the boat straight south to Sea Gate, the western end of Coney Island.
Then they were off Coney Island, really just a hammerhead peninsula at the south end of Brooklyn. A reef now, studded with ruins. They paralleled the old shore, humming east slowly, rocking on the incoming swells. Vlade wondered if the boys might be susceptible to seasickness, but they stood in the cockpit staring around, oblivious to the rocking, which Vlade himself found rather queasy-making.
Tide line ruins on Coney Island stuck out of the white jumble of broken waves, various stubs and blocks of wrecked buildings; they looked like gigantic pallets that had grounded here. One could watch a wave break against the first line of apartments and rooftops, then wash through them north into the scattered rooftops behind, breaking up and losing force, until some backwash slugged into the oncoming wave and turned it into a melee of loose white water a couple hundred yards broad, and extending for as far as they could see to the east. From here the coastline looked endless, though Vlade knew for a fact that Coney Island was only about four miles long. But far to the southeast one could see the whitewater at Breezy Point, marking the horizon and thus seeming many miles distant. It was an illusion but it still looked immense, as if it would take all day to motor to Breezy Point, as if they were coasting a vast land on a bigger planet. Ultimately, Vlade thought, you had to accept that the illusion was basically true: the world was huge. So maybe they were seeing it right after all.
The boys’ faces were round-eyed, awestruck. Vlade laughed to see them. “Great to be out here, right?”
They nodded.
“You ever been out here before?”
They shook their heads.
“And I thought I was local,” Vlade said. “Well, good. Here, see that barge and tug, about halfway down Coney Island? That’s where we’re going. That’s my friend Idelba doing her job.”
“Is she about halfway done with it?” Roberto asked.
“Good question. You’ll have to ask her.”
Vlade approached the barge. It was tall and long, accompanied by a tug that looked small in comparison, though the tug dwarfed Vlade’s boat as they drew alongside. There was a dock tied to the barge that Vlade could draw up to, and a crew of dockmen to grab their painter and tie them fast to dock cleats.
Vlade had called ahead, feeling more nervous than he had felt for many years, and sure enough, there was Idelba now, standing at the back of the group. She was a tall dark woman, Moroccan by birth, still rangy, still beautiful in a harsh frightening way. Vlade’s ex-wife, and the one person from his past he still thought about, the only one still alive anyway. The wildest, the smartest—the one he had loved and lost. His partner in disaster and death, his comrade in a nightmare for two. Nostalgia, the pain of the lost home. And the pain of what had happened.
Idelba led them up a metal staircase to a gap in the taffrail of the barge. From the top of the stairs they could look down into the hull of the barge and see that it was about a third full with a load of wet blond sand, a little mottled with seaweed and gray mud. Mostly it was pure wet sand. A giant tube, like a firefighter’s hose but ten times bigger around, and reinforced by internal hoops, was suspended from a crane at the far end of the barge over the open hull, and newly dredged sand, looking like wet cement, was pouring out of it into the barge. A big dull grinding roar mixed with a high whine came from the innards of the barge.
“We’re still dredging pure sand,” Idelba pointed out. “The barge is almost full. We’ll be taking this load up Ocean Parkway soon, drop the sand there at the new beach.”
“It seems like it could get a lot fuller,” Roberto said.
“True,” Idelba said. “If we were headed out to sea we could carry more, but as it is we go up canals to the high tide mark and dump it there as high as we can go, and then bulldozers will come and spread it at low tide. So we can’t ride too deep.”
“Where are you dumping it?” Vlade asked.
“Between Avenue J and Foster Avenue, these days. They tore out the ruins and bulldozed the ground. Half our sand will end up just below the low tide line, half just above. That’s the plan, anyway. Spread the sand out and hope to get some dunes at the high tide mark, and some sandbars just below the low tide mark. Those are important for catching the mulm and giving the ecosystem a chance to grow. It’s a big project, beach building. Moving sand is just part of it. In some ways it’s the easy part, although it isn’t that easy.”
“What if sea level rises again?” Stefan asked.
Idelba shrugged. “I guess they move the beach again. Or not. Meanwhile we have to act like we know what we’re doing, right?”
Vlade squinted at the sun. He had almost forgotten how Idelba said things.
“Can we go up with you and see the new beach?” Roberto asked.