Marine Park: Stories (4 page)

T
hey had lived alone together for many years, since their sons moved out to get married. It was a house on Madoc Avenue, where the backyard opened onto the water, and a wooden dock extended from the porch out into Dead Horse Bay. In the summers they left their motorboat there, the
Napoli
, and they'd take it up and down the canal, past the salt marsh, its high grass and swampy inlets, sometimes all the way out to Rockaway, under the Marine Parkway Bridge.

They weren't rich and they weren't poor, although when Vincent turned sixty-five their children, Tommy and Salvy, threw him a surprise party and sent a check for five hundred dollars. Aurora wanted to rip it up. Vincent collected Social Security and she had always saved her earnings, from working at the voting polls at PS 222 for decades. Democrat or Republican? she'd ask, and hand them a white sheet or blue sheet. This year it was Bush and Clinton. Vincent had had his candy store, but then he'd sold it to the Benduccis. At Christmas, they always had a live tree.

The house was painted white, with little flecks where tree branches had kicked off color during storms, and a flat roof that the kids liked to go onto when they were teenagers. Once Vincent found cans of PBR in the gutter when he was cleaning out the leaves, and he sat his sons down to talk to them more about their indiscretion than anything else. It surprised them, his sudden sharpness, all the more so when they found that he wasn't angry about the beer. Who hadn't tried to get away from their parents on a summer night, the breeze coming off the water, the sky clear to Manhattan, Vincent had put it. He understood. But where he was raised, in Carroll Gardens, with the Irish cops, you had to be more careful—and he wanted them to understand this, to take a certain amount of care. He didn't tell Aurora about the beer.

It was a row house, connected to other houses on the side, differentiated from a suburb, though you'd be hard-pressed for what to call it. Marine Park was the part of the city, Aurora often said, least served by the train and bus system. If the oceans rose like people said they would, this part of Brooklyn would be the first to go. It was an hour with the walk to the Q train and the ride into the city to see a Broadway play, or to go to the Museum of Natural History, which meant lower real estate prices and a bit of sleepiness. One neighbor was a drug addict, supported by unknown funds. There was the neighborhood drunk, who was in and out of the house. Across the street the eldest son of a large family—who marked his adolescent growth year after year with new tattoos, sprouting in strange places across his body, reported one after another by a gleeful Tommy, who knew him from school—was gone one day after the Fourth of July: two years in jail. Their true neighbor, just to the left, shoveled snow for them if they woke up too late in the morning. He lived alone, and needed neither conversation nor pleasantries. He'd taken in their mail when they went to Canada for a week, years before. They stayed in Montreal, and then a few days in a cabin next to Lake Oromocto, where Vincent had gone fishing in the mornings and Aurora spent a small amount of time depressed on the back porch, then getting better in the afternoons, making penne vodka and a salad. When the children were born they did not travel.

When they were younger Vincent spent most of the day at the candy shop. Aurora stayed home. Besides the poll work, she mended clothes and tailored suits. For Halloween season she made the kids' costumes from scratch. Salvy especially had liked to watch her sew, and for a while she got him interested in it, sewing his own moccasins like the Lenni Lenape Indians—who had lived right where their house was, she told him, those very blocks. They'd had a permanent settlement, and sometimes people found bits of wampum under the dirty sand by the water, and Salvy liked to dig for them and bring them back to Aurora, who had an open fascination with history and geology and the way things got buried and preserved.

Tommy was more Vincent's son, even though when he grew up he became a banker, and after school he would go straight to the candy store on Ocean and Twenty-Sixth. Tommy would scratch the top of his head against his father's lips and then hide in the comic book section. He liked to stand by the turning pedestal of greeting cards and write obscene things inside them when Vincent wasn't looking, and once this got Vincent into trouble, when a customer came back with an anniversary card in his hand and loosened his jacket to show the .22 on his belt, sticking his tongue into the corner of his lip. That was after Korea, after returning soldiers had gone to the Fire Academy or cop school and moved in droves to their neighborhood in Gerritsen Beach, and sometimes they forgot they weren't in Pusan even though it was years ago.

Tommy and Salvy still came to visit a few times a month. Tommy came every Sunday. The boys came in their sports cars with Italian bread and cookies from a bakery on Smith Street, where Aurora used to go for lemon ices. Salvy had married a Russian girl, but Vincent and Aurora didn't care, as long as the wives helped out with the dishes between courses. In the kitchen Aurora labored over sauce. Vincent had once been a heavy drinker, but now he was happy with two glasses of pinot grigio at dinner. The wine enlivened his senses a little, then dulled them. He didn't think there was anything wrong with this. From where he sat at the head of the table he could see Aurora, her hands folded in her lap if she wasn't taking bites. She cleared the table; he did the dishes. The boys and their wives left. She sat in the living room and had the TV on, though she wasn't really watching, more like meditating. The sound of the faucet drowned out the rest of the day. In the kitchen, it was Vincent's daily ritual, his back turned to the rest of the house and his attention focused on the white wall in front of him, the metal sink. He washed dishes slowly, one after the other. If he let the wine glass sit without washing it, the dry dregs grew crusted, stuck on the side of the cup.

 • • • 

One evening, not long after Vincent's sixty-fifth birthday, he got a phone call, the first of its kind in a while, late at night when Aurora was upstairs reading a biography and he was half-asleep in front of the television. It was large and monstrous, sticking out hideously into the center of the room, but the boys had bought it for them, Father's Day that year. Vincent wasn't used to how real it sounded, what a presence it was. He had thought the phone call was coming from the TV.

He walked over to the kitchen where the family phone was attached to the wall, flicked the kitchen light on, and picked up the receiver. When he did, he heard in the background the oddly amplified sound of waves lapping. Along with the static of the connection, it was strangely familiar, reminiscent of something that made Vincent's fingers start tapping on the counter.

Use the other phone, Vin, the voice said. Three minutes.

Vincent hung the phone back up on the wall and sat down slowly on one of the kitchen stools. He looked at the scratches made on the table from the bottom of the coffeemaker that they used every morning. He traced the scratches with his nails. Then he walked over to the refrigerator and poured himself orange juice.

When he finished every drop in the glass, the light coating of pulp still on the upper half, he went back into the living room and sat in his recliner, his corner of the room where Aurora never cleaned. He turned the volume on the television up. Then he reached under the seat cushion and pulled out a mobile.

Before the news went to commercial the mobile began to beep, and he pressed a button with his thumb and held the phone up to his ear.

What if Rory had picked up? he said quietly.

It's been a long time, Vin, said Benducci.

Call like that again without letting me know and I'll give you a what-for.

It's been a long time, Benducci said again.

You're telling me.

What was it, the
Maria
?

Not the
Calabrese
? I thought that was the summer before.

Good to hear your voice, Vin.

Upstairs Vincent heard the radio turn off, and he banged his elbow on the chair arm rushing to hide the phone, but brought it back up to his ear when the bedroom door didn't open.

OK? asked Benducci.

I could be talking to anyone, Vincent said. I don't talk to anyone much from before anymore.

Benducci let that rest and then said, Nice and quiet.

Not too bad.

You could use a little excitement.

Vincent laughed from his lungs and wiped the corner of his mouth. Not really, he said.

You could use a little extra money with the roof needing a fix. Vincent kept laughing. It never surprised him what type of research the capos in charge of guys like Benducci did. Or had access to, he supposed. It was the way they had liked to work. The roof
had
been leaking enough that even Vincent cleaning out the gutter hadn't helped. Benducci laughed too.

Listen, Bendy, what do you need? I think the roof'll be just fine, but if it's not a big job maybe I can help you out.

It's another boat job.

Like I know anything else? Why me?

Nobody does these anymore. The money's from Wall Street now. Nobody knows Brooklyn.

What's the bag?

Silver dollars.

As in from the infomercials?

They're twenty per.

Sounds fair.

And we bring it down to Red Hook.

While they went over the details Vincent's mind wandered. He was excited. Not excited, but a something-to-wake-up-for-in-the-morning feeling. He'd been running numbers with his little brothers since his uncle was the numbers man for South Brooklyn. Put money down on the last digit of the winnings that day at the racetrack, and adolescent Vincent would come to your house and give you your purse, or just a shake of the head. It was a living then, a way to make something on the side, and he'd always liked spending it in the candy store, chocolate or soda here and there. Eventually he started driving, and Idlewild Airport had just been finished, before it was JFK, and you could make real money driving cars and trucks parked on those lonely watery roads, heavy with cargo that disappeared from the belly of planes, down the LIE and the BQE to the warehouse sections of the borough, as long as you weren't curious enough to ask any questions. He made enough to buy the candy store. He made enough to buy the
Napoli
, and when the truck jobs became too common he was right in place to put the boat to service, hauling boxes of watches, designer jewelry, sometimes plain money, from the empty junkyards right where the runways hit the water. He never knew too much. Sometimes they didn't land, just pulled up alongside unmarked, unnamed boats, Coast Guard cruisers conspicuously absent. Once he saw a man get shot in the leg, and it was the smell of it that unnerved him. Once when he made a wise comment someone hit him in the face, and when he acted surprised, he remembered the strange look Benducci gave him, as if there was something about Vincent he couldn't understand. The black eye turned blue, then green. But he knew how to put those things out of his head. He had done fine, better than his father, who trimmed off the garbage scows leaving the Navy Yard for a dollar a day.

In the morning he'd get all his things together, the painters' gloves, the fake papers. It was just going out on the boat, and he wasn't that old that he couldn't handle the water. Everyone always said he looked fifteen years younger. Tommy and Salvy wouldn't be around for another week. Otherwise he'd be going for a long walk by the water in the morning and lying on the couch until Aurora finished making dinner. She wouldn't say a word to him until they sat at the table, when she would pleat her hands together and gesture at the plates. Now, she would say, and begin to serve. Retirement and an empty house were fine, but it was nice to do something once in a while. He sat at the kitchen counter, poured himself a finger from a bottle of white wine. He swirled, he drank.

 • • • 

Aurora was upstairs when the signal went off, silently, next to her bed lamp. It was a light plugged into the back of her wake-up clock, hidden from Vincent's side, that blinked yellow when it needed to. At first she forgot what it was, felt like she was in a dream: something you remember from a long time ago, a cousin you haven't seen in years. Watch him fall off a motorcycle in a dreamscape and break his hand, everything else miraculously fine, wake up in the morning and pick up the phone to call and ask if he's OK. Stop, she said to herself now. It can't be real.

Aurora shifted her weight from one side of the mattress to the other and looked at the light, which had already stopped blinking yellow. What was the failure rate of these lightbulbs? she thought to herself. What if it's just mechanically faulty? But she could hear the volume going up on the nightly news, the Channel 5 story of Manny the truck driver, who won the lottery this weekend by a stroke of luck. This should be around the time when Vin was falling asleep, this hour, close to it, and there was no other reason for the television to be on so loud, and her light going off, unless.

She'd been dropping a suit off in the Garment District when they approached her. In Colin's Bar and Grill they showed her the badge under the table. Told her that this was an opportunity, historic, to do something important. And Vincent didn't need to know because they weren't interested in Vincent. They knew he was a decent guy. She just had to tell them when the shipments came in, and where they were going. The airport was a leaky faucet, and for a while it had been open season from the storage facilities. When she said she'd have to think about it, the detective with the pimple under his mustache said, Think quick, because we take him in if you don't. She said, I've never heard anything about any of this. The detective scratched his pimple and waited.

At first she was angry, and she refused to cook. She told Vincent she was sick. Then she bottled it in. Everything's fine. They were young when they got married, he a few years out of high school. What did they know? She'd had one steady, Anthony Thomas, whom she'd kissed once in an alleyway. Vincent was nicer than him, spoke softer and took her to restaurants, brought her things from his uncle's candy store.