Marine Park: Stories (14 page)

When his wife let him back into the house, it was autumn. It would have been fall baseball season already. He'd missed summer football training, and you couldn't mess with a team once you'd missed summer training. He hadn't even had a landline at the hole he found in Howard Beach until he moved back in. But now it was baseball season, the high school kind. Madison had gotten to the city championship the year before, and everyone thought they should do it again. Technically, Rich was the pitching coach, not that he knew anything about pitching. He assumed they'd found a new assistant. Some recent graduate who didn't want to go into the fire department either. Fewer and fewer, it seemed to Rich, were going since 9/11. Rich didn't blame them. He remembered that morning, driving to the middle school to pick up Amanda. I can walk, Dad, she'd told him. He had opened the car door for her. Is there going to be a war? she'd asked him. He was looking down the boulevard on Quentin, watching what looked like smoke across the island. Shut up, he said. He didn't let her go outside to pick up the papers that had floated the ten miles from across the river. He didn't want her to have that memory. Rich was good for a while after that, but soon he stopped. Everyone talked about it as little as possible. It was already a long time ago.

One day, when he finally worked up the courage to go back to Madison to pick up his personals, he ended up walking down R. When he walked anywhere around Marine Park on what he called his constitutionals—They keep up my constitution, he said to his wife; Do some laundry, she said—he always walked down R. Even if he had to go out of his way to do it. It was the widest street, and it didn't have stores on it. All the houses were clean. There weren't any broken windows. There were always people sweeping in front of their steps. When he walked by Thirty-Eighth he noticed that Martin wasn't on his stoop. No sign of life in his daughter's house either. One of these days, he'd go inside.

At Madison the junior varsity was already on the turf field. The varsity wouldn't be out for another hour or so; the head coach liked it that way. Rich stood by the chain fence, and watched the middle infielders turning double plays. They were mostly bumbling, a little overweight, as junior varsity kids tended to be. A kid at third base had sweatpants on. One of the second basemen at least understood the footwork, and Rich focused entirely on him—the way you do when you're watching people dance, if someone puts a song from the jukebox on, if there's only one pretty girl in the room the entire night; the way you zero everything onto watching her. Most beautiful was the way the kid transferred ball from glove. He had good, quick hands. Rich recognized it. He'd probably start on varsity someday. It was only four years, high school, but it felt like a lifetime. You came in, you grew up, you played shortstop, you graduated.

 • • • 

That afternoon there was a freak storm in the middle of the day. It hadn't smelled like rain. If you're from Marine Park you can smell the weather coming in from the ocean, before it breaks up against the hot swell of city air. Even still, it caught everyone by surprise. Amanda and Robert were sitting in folding chairs in their backyard, listening to a Rutgers game on the radio. Amanda knew that Robert didn't like basketball, but they listened to it anyway. The old man who lived on the end was on his deck, in a folding chair, ensconced in hanging vines. The Braiker boy was on the roof, clutching a blue windbreaker that he didn't need yet, deciding whether to find the Ventrone girl. There wasn't much they could do. They could walk around the park. There was a place he knew, covered by weeping willows, where they could sit on the grass. But it was getting cold. Though he didn't expect the rain. Point is, they were all outside when the storm came rolling in.

The windbreaker, when it got torn out of the Braiker boy's hand, shot away from him toward the edge of the roof and then down, into the cavern of Avenue R, the space between the rows of houses on either side. Because of the way the air currents worked, a small vacuum effect exhibited itself, sucking the blue windbreaker up against the side of the Braiker house. It got stuck on a window, entirely covering it, so that if anyone else in the Braiker house had looked, the world outside would have been cloaked in blue. Finally one of the branches dislodged close enough to the window, and tore the jacket free. The wind-suck pulled the jacket down Avenue R, crackling as it went.

It was a sight to see that windbreaker, on its trip down the avenue. When the wind paused or circled, it would begin to fall, sometimes dropping almost all the way to the black slick pavement, but never landing, because the wind was strong enough to pick it up again. It scared the life out of the Chinese woman who collected recycled bottles, pushing her cruise-ship shopping cart of smudged and sticky multicolored plastic ahead of her. She would later, because of the incident, become far more religious than she had been. She would get all her bottles safely to where she lived, all the way down Quentin, in the basement of a house she rented from an Irish landlord, with her recently unemployed husband, who refused to work with his hands. She would believe in later days that it had been the blue flash that saved her, with the branches and leaves and house sidings falling around her. There were tornadoes in Queens, the nightly news said. They had news camera video of it, though it hadn't looked like what she'd thought tornadoes looked like—just a wide, dark skein of dirt, like it was a foggy day.

Rich stumbled back from Madison in the opposite direction of the wind. He had somebody's old varsity jacket in front of him, which he'd grabbed off the side of the fence when the team ran from the field. Two jokers tried to stay and hit each other fungoes, and no one had told them to stop, because the coaches were inside. They left when the wind began batting the ball to the ground. But Rich had already started for home. The varsity jacket smelled warm and sunny, like a piece of clothing left in the back of a pickup truck for too long, on a road trip down to Florida.

Martin was on the stoop when Rich got to Avenue R. Rich had started to jog back on Quentin, slow shuffling steps he hadn't remembered he could do. Rich paused for just a second across from Martin, and yelled hysterically for him to get out of the weather. With the wind and the leaves flying and the branches coming down, it seemed a moment fit for hysteria. Rich relished it, relished the yelling. He was happy to be appropriately excitable. Martin was cowering under some sort of jacket himself. It wasn't like he was sitting there watching the rain. He didn't have his headphones with him. Though it was barely raining at that point. Rich yelled again, more hysterical even, for Martin to get himself inside. Martin was answering, but Rich couldn't hear him, and the wind was getting even higher. Rich turned around to watch Martin as he stumbled away, but Martin didn't make any motions to get up. He walked like this, waiting for Martin to do something, until he walked into a tree, and then he turned around and ran until his wife let him back in the house.

No one really agrees how it happened. The number of stories after, you'd think everyone was watching at their windows, but how many of them could that have been? How many people actually saw Martin run into the middle of the street? Was it because the wind ripped the piano lessons sign out from the door-knocker and he was trying to get it? Did he see someone or something through the rain? It was a Sunday: he could have been planning on going to the park to rollerblade. Nobody knows. When he went into the street, in the middle, the branches falling around him, it looked through the windows like he was screaming, but how could you hear something like that? Then the rain started coming down in sheets. The fire trucks got there first. They'd been trained in emergency response to make up for cost-cutting in ambulance service. The three firemen carried him from the street into the fire truck, his body flailing wildly. His tongue was in the middle of his teeth and his arms jerking all around him. The driver put on the siren. No one went away from their windows.

The cleanup, when it happened, didn't take long. It's surprising how things get back to normal. Everyone wondered where Martin had got to. Four weeks later there was a
FOR SALE
sign up on his door. Dead, the Braiker boy heard. Hospitalized, Amanda said to the Ventrone girl waiting for the B2 bus one morning. Don't be stupid, Rich told people at the Mariners, drinking his lemonade and coffee. He moved to a condo on Kimball Street. You'd think it was a ghost story. The new inhabitants of Martin's house didn't sit on the stoop. Their children, like all children forever in Marine Park, had garage sales out there in the fall. They sat in front of the old books and toys and clothing in their brightly colored uniforms. They never got palmings, but they grew up anyway.

O
ne fall day we sat on the stoop in front of our house, waiting for people to come buy from our garage sale. It's not a garage sale, said Lorris. It's a stoop sale. But that doesn't sound as good, I said. A step sale then, he said. Fine, I said, a step sale. In the crevice from the sidewalk and the indentation that the bus made coming through every morning, there was a puddle of water, a quarter foot deep and buzzing with gnats. Lorris was picking up brick pebbles from our neighbor's unswept stoop and landing them in the puddle.

An old woman stopped and asked how much the paperbacks were.

W
e're selling them for one dollar, I said.

One dollar! That's not enough, she said. I'll give you three.

Told you, Lorris said to me.

The woman smiled fondly at Lorris. Do you like to read? she said.

Yes, said Lorris.

What's your favorite book? she said.

His head dipped down and he became less excited. He hated questions about favorites: red versus blue, Yankees or Mets, the sport that he was best at. He didn't like making choices.

He's reading Sherlock Holmes now, I said.

The old woman patted his arm and he looked carefully at her sandals.

Can you tell me the plot from one of your favorite Sherlock Holmes stories? she asked.

L
orris's face looked like when you press pause in a video game.

I'll give you an extra dollar, she said.

We'd only made six dollars all morning.

How about if your brother helps you? she said. He still looked the same way. Or any story at all. Otherwise I'm leaving. She mimed walking away.

Lorris took his hands out of his pockets and put them on my arm, like someone had pressed start.

Tell her a story about us, he said.

L
orris asked if he could get a ride home from the train station later that night somewhere in the neighborhood of three a.m. It was a Friday in December, and I hadn't left the house in a week and a half, which is what happens when you live at home. I said, What, you don't think I got plans of my own? He just stood there looking in the mirror in the living room adjusting the hat he'd borrowed from me and never returned, a little to the left, more to the right, until he got the perfect tilt he was after the whole time. It was a flat-brim, the first one I'd ever gotten, gray with the Mets logo in front. I'd never liked the color royal blue, and that's what all the other Mets caps were. But this one I'd connected with, and I used to wear it everywhere, until Lorris started asking for it and I gave it to him one birthday. People are always giving people useless things for birthdays. That's something I can't abide with.

He said, And it might be closer to four—I'm not really sure. I said, How about you give me a call and we'll see where I'm at, and if I'm in any state to drive. Really, I meant if I was awake. He said that sounded fine, and asked if I minded if he took some of the cologne Mom had gotten me for Christmas. It had a note on it that said,
Something nice for someone nice.
I told him it was in my junk drawer, which I hadn't opened in a while, but it was somewhere in there, if he wanted to dig into it and look.

 • • • 

Nights I drove around. I had a 1991 Ford Taurus that my aunt had gotten rid of when she got a new job. She didn't want to own a car that was practically twenty years old. She'd been working with Bank of America and then there was what she said they called the Little Slowdown, and she'd been out of work. Another place hired her a year later, with pay cut and demotion, but she took it, because it wasn't so easy to get jobs anymore.

It was a dirty tan car, and whenever I drove my mother to the Key Food to get groceries, she insisted we stop at the gas station and fill up the tank. I wasn't making much of an income. I worked at the cell phone place at Kings Plaza a couple days a week. That's all the time they could give me, though they said they wished it could be more. I was good with following directions, went along with the company policy of introducing yourself and asking the customer's name when they got in the store. I liked hearing the names, trying to guess what block they lived on, if they were on the right side or the left side of Flatbush. I wasn't taking any classes that year. Sometimes these things just happen.

When we hadn't gone to the grocery store in a little while or I didn't have any extra to put in the tank, I walked around. There's a painting-poster my dad has, on the wall leading up to our bedrooms, of a café somewhere with people sitting in it, the sky dark at the top and the only light coming from inside the café. He said it was Barcelona, but he'd never been. Why don't you go there and talk to someone, if you're so attached to it? he said. It's not like Marine Park had that, though it wasn't so bad. I could stand for hours looking at the Lott House, the old Dutch estate between Fillmore and S, the one that was Parks Department property and that the Brooklyn College archaeologists were doing excavations on, to find old slave quarters. I'd been on the porch once, when they decorated for Christmas. Every night, they put a candle in the top middle window, and I liked leaning on the fence looking at that and the old wood. The windows were shuttered up, and there were signs to stay off the grounds around the house. They thought the ground was unstable, because there were supposed to be Underground Railroad tunnels underneath. This had been one of the last stops. They'd get them out at night somewhere through a false plank in the kitchen floor.

 • • • 

Lorris texted the first time at midnight, said,
Place is lame, but somewhere else soon. Also, you could come, call if you want to.
He always wrote in full sentences in texts. Some girl had berated him about it once, he said. She said, You're going to Williams next year and you write like this? At first he just did it for her, but then it was easier to be right for everyone.

I was still in front of the TV at home. Mom was sitting in the kitchen, ice on her legs for the shin splints, massaging her feet. A few hours before Dad had said he was going out for a movie. Do you want to go? he asked Mom aggressively. Does it look like it? she said, pointing at her feet. She'd had the ice on since she got back from work. I told her, Mom, maybe take a day off from running once or twice, and they might feel better. She's like, I'm a school secretary. I sit at a desk all day long. You ever see a school secretary take a lunch break? she says. I have to move around a little or I'll forget how. She's scared that she'll get Alzheimer's like her mother did.

I texted Lorris back that it was nice of him, but I was a little busy at the moment. Didn't want to make something up, because you could always tell—the name of such and such club, friends that didn't live here anymore. Too easy to say too much and get caught in the lie. That would have been the embarrassing part. He couldn't even drive yet. I said,
Let me know when you do need the ride, I'll probably be OK to come get you.

We live in the worst possible place for getting anywhere. It's a twenty-five-minute walk to the subway, or a bus, the least-served area by the MTA in the whole goddamn city. I checked on a map one day. My dad always complains about the fact that Mom moved him into a two-fare zone. He means that you have to pay twice, once for the bus and once for the Q train, if you're trying to get yourself into Manhattan, or even downtown Brooklyn, where everything that's happening is. I'm pretty sure he knows that it's all one fare today, even if you have to transfer, but he's been driving so long now and takes trains so infrequently that you never know. He got mugged too many times in the eighties, even when he was on dates. That's the kind of embarrassing thing that'd drive a guy to the DMV, no problem.

At one thirty I turned off the third straight
Law & Order
and went through the kitchen out the back, past Mom, who had fallen asleep across three chairs. I could've woken her, but I don't think she really sleeps soundly until she hears Lorris back in the house. She'd go up and pretend to be in bed before we got back. I pulled out of the alleyway, quietly, then turned the music up higher. It's a five-minute drive to the station at Kings Highway, and at this time of night I found a spot half a block from the entrance. I shut the car off and waited.

 • • • 

The only time I ever remember going into the city all together by train was when we did family outings to the Met. When we were little we used to do it once a year, in the summer, at that point in July when me and Lorris were too jumpy with being out of school and Mom was tired of babysitting us. Then Dad would take a day off from work at the driver's ed place and we'd all get on the B2 bus to Kings Highway. When Dad took a day off he didn't want to drive, period. So we did it the whole way, public transportation, as if we didn't have a car.

Kings Highway, where we get the train, is the best station in the city. In the winter, it looks like one of those old Russian train stops where you can imagine people escaping wars. People with all sorts of weird belongings in canvas bags, with their babushka scarves, huddled together against the cold. At nighttime, you could see the trains far out in both directions, a B stretching in from Coney Island, doors open and the smell of the sand, or a Q coming down from the city, off the Manhattan Bridge. When you catch the Q you have to know to sit on the bench on the right side; I mean the side on your right when the Q is heading toward Manhattan. Then you're in a perfect position when it goes over the river to see all the skyline through the Brooklyn Bridge. I can't understand people who sit on the other side, looking at nothing. It's like they
don't
ride the train every day.

We couldn't go into the Met without playing in the Ancient Playground first. It was right next to the museum, with pyramids and stone temples that you could climb up, ladders on the inside. Lorris and I would time each other in a circuit down and through the tunnels. Mom and Dad sat on the street end, watching the cars and not really talking. When we had our half hour we went inside, and Dad would put four quarters down for all of us. No one was dumb enough to give him a look, but he always said he was ready for it.
The point is it's free
, he liked to say.
It's for the people. I used to leave a nickel.
I liked the part with the colonial rooms that are made just the way they used to look. God, I could look at those forever. And the big glass room with the fountain and Greek sculptures. There's one of two bears that's smooth and looks out of place; that was Lorris's favorite, but the rest are mostly people, caught in uncomfortable positions.

Few months before, I'd gone to the Met with some girl from the neighborhood. She was studying art at New Paltz. I hadn't seen her in a while and I figured I'd give her a call. She said the Met was a great idea; it was like her favorite museum ever. I picked her up in Sheepshead, and we drove in. Let me tell you, it was a good idea to go to the Met with her. She took me into rooms I didn't even know they had there. And she always knew something about what we were looking at, especially the Greek pottery, which was her specialty. When we got to the colonial rooms, she asked if I knew that most of the fireplaces came from real houses here in New York City. They packed up whole walls and trucked them over, she said, her brown hair shaking as her eyes got bigger. I said I hadn't known about that, even though of course I did, because I thought it was making her feel good to tell me things. I think it worked.

In front of the French impressionists, I had my thumb in my pocket, and she slid her hand around the little hole my arms made. “See when you step back,” she said, pointing, “it comes into even clearer focus. You have to look at a painting from different sides. Once I saw the Gertsch painting of the girl, and her eyes follow you when you change sides.” She had a poster of it up in her room; she showed me later that night. When she was in the bathroom after, I tried it, going from one side to the other, and the eyes followed sure, but even better was that the expression in her mouth changed. Pouting and sensual on one side and depressed on the other. The whole rest of the time in the museum she kept her hand around my arm there.

Lorris texted at three to say he was on his way:
Is it all right if we drop off a few of my friends on the way home? Guys from the baseball team.
I said,
Yeah, I might be a little late, but meet me a block up from the station.
I had the key in the ignition so I could listen to the radio but save the gas. You'd be surprised how much time you can waste just going through stations looking for a good song. When trains came in I turned it off and opened the windows so I could listen to everyone going by—which is what I imagine Barcelona in that painting Dad has would be like, sort of late at night but people still all around, taxis off the avenue. The taxis in Marine Park were all manned by Russian immigrants, most of whom didn't know English. They played cards in the control center right next to the station, where you could go to pick up a ride. Nights I wasn't driving—if I came back late from an outing when my boys were back from college, or hanging out after work—sometimes I got one of them to drive me back, if I couldn't stand the idea of the walk. Sometimes you could converse, if you had the right charades aptitude, and if so they'd give you a swig from the warm vodka they had in paper bags in the glove compartment. You'd offer it back to them, they'd make a fake show of looking around in the empty streets, and then laugh that big hairy laugh and have a drink and an indistinguishable toast with you.

When his train came it was crowded, and he came out of the green station doors in a cluster of his friends. They were all just graduating that year, nothing they were supposed to be doing. It wasn't like they only did this on Fridays. Every other weekday too, Lorris'd be creeping back at three or four in the morning. I didn't really mind when he asked me for a ride; it was better than waiting at home trying to stay awake longer than he was.

He opened the front door and he was still wearing my goddamn hat, the gray Mets one. He said, Hey, and put on his seat belt while his friends opened the back doors. I looked through the rearview mirror at them, all steaming from the cold even though no one had jackets on. When they closed the doors the windows immediately began to steam up. I said, Where's all the girls? and they started roaring, and that made me feel good.

How was your night? he said.

Good, I said.

Someone stole our jackets at the warehouse.

Always happens, I said. I told you not to take one.

Yeah, well, he said.

You're just lucky it's not the hat.

He took it off and held the flat brim between his fingers. He traced the
NY
, which popped up off the front. I know, he said.

 • • • 

We dropped everyone off, the hand slaps at the stoops, the car doors open and shut. The impossibility of red lights at that time of night, just look around in all directions and make sure no cops or other cars were around, and go. Treat everything like a stop sign. I knew where all the cameras were in this neighborhood, had known since I was as old as Lorris is. He never paid attention when we drove anywhere, had his eyes on his hands.

His friend Omar was last, second base to his shortstop, and they promised to see each other tomorrow. It was a few blocks from our house, and once Omar got to the door I went to put the car in drive, but Lorris put his hand on top. Let's make sure he gets in OK, he said. We watched the living room light go on, and then go off, and then an upstairs bedroom one flicker quietly. You know we can go now, Lorris said.

I checked my mirrors and there was no one and we pulled away. When I first got my license and would drive with Lorris, we used to circle the block if a good song was on the radio and we didn't want it to end. Then in the alley, he'd hop out and open the gate, and I'd pull in slowly, avoiding the garbage cans, trying to get the car in as straight as our dad does.