Manning boards ours. I follow. The engine is already on. The nav screen lights up.

MANNING

(to me)

The cell tower. Where is it?

7

CANARSIE

THE SKIMMERS are all black and young—fifteen at the oldest; many look eleven, ten, even younger. Plainly this is their racket. Their uniform is porkpie hats perched on outrageously oversized Afros, no shirt, torso (almost always gaunt) solid with tats, beneath which droop cargo pants lapped atop unlaced Doc Martens. Dangling from their belts are stevedore-type hooks, which the skimmers use to pop open subway and sidewalk grates.

They’re hunting for junked phones.

Here is how Manning teaches me “the street.” We drive to Canarsie, just east of Rockaway Parkway, a few miles west of JFK. We park. Manning says nothing. We watch. At least that’s what I think we’re doing. I adhere to Manning’s baseline directive, valid under all circumstances:

Watch me. Do what I do.

The neighborhood is South Brooklyn. We have come straight from the steam baths. Manning is scoping the skimmers. When these scavengers find thrown-away burner phones, which they do in quantities I could never have imagined, from dumpsters, trash cans, gutters, storm drains, etc., they collect them into black plastic trash bags. (Every skimmer carries one.)

We’re tracking one particular kid, about thirteen, with a bag as stuffed as Santa Claus. It’s not all burners. He’s got soda cans, wire hangers, metal and plastic of all kinds. Finally he hoists his bounty. Time to cash in.

Ten minutes later I’m scrambling in Manning’s wake across the flat, litter-strewn roof of a building that feels like it’s swaying with each footfall we set down. Howard Beach/East New York/Canarsie was destroyed by Superstorm Lorelei in September ’21. Entire blocks were leveled, building foundations undermined in the fourteen-foot storm surge. What derelict structures remain have been taken over as shooting galleries, or by squatters as “sit-downs” or “lay-bys.” Unpermitted sweatshops and pop-up junk stores fill in the voids.

Manning has recruited two uniformed patrol officers, twenty-two-year-old beat cops whom we have run into randomly on the street. They’re our backup. As with me, he tells them nothing, doesn’t ask their names or volunteer his. “Hey,” he says, tipping his gold shield and waving them to his side. “Learn something.”

Manning crosses the rooftop in easy, unhurried strides. He jimmies an access door. We grope down a flight of steps, Manning in the lead, me second, the uniforms in the caboose, into an unlit, debris-choked stairwell. Manning hasn’t told any of us what we’re doing or what role we’re supposed to play.

We have followed the young skimmer. He entered Building #1 via a side alley. To trail him directly would apparently give us away, so . . . up a five-story fire escape of the adjacent derelict, Building #2, across the roof, and now down.

A door.

We stop.

Voices and machinery can be heard on the far side.