The owner of the bookstore looked at us. He was reading the paper. The headline rustled into the subheadline while the owner shuffled. Is he still married? the owner asked. I said yes. The shop owner kept reading his paper.
In between two rows of books, Lorris put a hand on my shoul- der and pointed at the ground. Look, he said. I looked down. Then he reached up and slapped my ear, and it started ringing. He danced away before I could grab him, but I threw the book I was holding at his neck. He shifted and it hit his shoulder, and the pages flapped to the ground. Hey, the shop owner said, but Lorris was already laughing. He dodged out of the store, and the bell clanged over his head. I found a book of best travel destinations with a pretty woman on the cover and bought that. Lorris was standing outside, and I pushed him against a car. The sound of his body hitting the front made a satisfying thud, and then we were better. The week-old snow had left streaks of dirt and frost on the car’s window, and Lorris’s body left a print.
I wanted to get Lorris a pair of sneakers with wheels in them that you could pop out, instant rollerblades. So we went into Payless, me leading and pulling Lorris behind, his eyes closed. When I asked the salesman where to look, I did so in a whisper, so that Lorris couldn’t hear. Once I’d paid, I led him outside, and stood him there, and just looked at him for a second. He was small against the Payless window, his head only coming up a little above the display shelf of shoes. Breathing in and out, he had his hands flattened, calmly, against his side. People walking by were starting to look at us. Ready, I said.
Then Lorris said, Now it’s my turn. While I closed my eyes he turned me around, around, and around again, his head coming up only to my chin. The sounds of the world came at me, the gray snow on the sidewalk receding into nothing.
• • •
Eyes closed, I could hear my breath more rapidly. It came on alternate beats with my footsteps, the crunch on the salted cement. Lorris’s hand, never touching me, pulled at my jacket sleeve, and I stumbled forward. I could hear people shouting, though I wasn’t sure why. A truck beeped near us, and there was the slide that comes when a car pulls into a spot, just missing the curb. The tires hugged the ground. Lorris, I said. He didn’t answer. I smelled the tang of lemon, from the falafel restaurant, the burning of the legs of meat I remembered must be turning, slowly, in the window.
What happened then, I can only describe it as a vision. It appeared in my eyelids like a movie, with surround sound, circling my head. In the vision, Lorris and I were in a car, and he was driving. He didn’t feel older, he was just driving, as if he knew how and it was natural. It was an old car, the dashboard dusty and streaked with fingerprints. I was in the passenger seat, leaning back. Maybe I was teaching him—though I didn’t know how, though it felt like I did. Lorris made turn after turn. I didn’t recognize where we were, but it was a one-way street. Ahead of us, there was a speed bump, and on top of the speed bump, something small wrapped in blankets. We got closer, and I saw the blankets shift. There was the sound of the tires on the unevenly paved street, the hum. The echo of the blinker click as it shut off. Lorris was looking straight ahead. When we went over the speed bump, there was another sound. Was that—, Lorris said. No, I lied. I told him no. You’re fine. It was nothing. Lorris looked at me, pleading. The car stopped at the end of the street. He put it into park. He put his hands back on the wheel. Other cars passed us, slowed down, sped up, there were those sounds—but he wouldn’t look away. Then the vision ended, and the real Lorris was saying, in the real world, Open your eyes.
• • •
We waited for the bus for fifteen minutes. Lorris had his bags arranged on the sidewalk around him. He showed me his palms, where the stretched plastic had cut into them, leaving a deep red trench. He held them up to me and I wouldn’t answer him at first. Rub them, I said.
A pregnant woman smiled at us from two people ahead in the line. I looked down at the ground. Happy holidays, she said. I nodded. How old is he? she asked. Old enough, I said. Lorris was kneeling down, checking with one hand in each bag that everything from his packages was still there. How long is your bus ride? she asked. Five and a half minutes, Lorris said, his eyes still on his bags on the ground.
It felt wrong going up the bus steps, watching Lorris, ahead of me, using his MetroCard next to the driver. The bus felt too heavy, Lorris too close to the wheel. I closed my eyes and tried to listen. The bus engine coughed. People muttered in the front seats. I opened my eyes, and reached up toward Lorris one step above me. Let’s walk, I said. Or take the next one. Please. Lorris looked down the steps. He gave me the scathing look again, like he did when I hit him, like there was no way he could hurt. Then he turned and got on the bus. I watched him go. You coming? the bus driver asked.
The avenues began to pass by. We sat next to each other, not talking. I leaned back. The bus engine coughed and coughed. The man with the jeans reached down to scratch his leg, showed the gun. Safe, Lorris said.
• • •
This all happened and we got to the house and in half an hour both our parents would be home, having left to walk to the mall on the other side of Avenue R to buy presents for us, not holding hands but with their hands almost touching, swinging side by side. But there was no way for us to know that then, standing at the front door leaning on the bell. We could hear the sound of it echoing. The windows were all closed. The echo came back to us, like laughing. A tall man on a too-small bike came riding slowly down the sidewalk. He was careening side to side. He looked at us, kept watching us until he was all the way on the other end of the block, and then he stopped, and looked back. Let’s go, Lorris, I said.
Walking quickly, we went around through the alley to the back of the house, opened the red gate. I reached around in the plastic case over the barbecue, found the key I hid there, went to open the back door. The locks clicked. Hello? I asked the house. The basement was damp and smelled like summer. Nothing answered. I locked the door behind us.
I turned to Lorris and put one finger to my lips, and we walked up the creaking stairs. The house was quiet. One open window, off the kitchen, let some air in, and the curtain fluttered. I turned on the light, which hissed. Hello? I said again.
The bottom of the curtain was dancing. It was a dark curtain, I don’t know why we had dark curtains. It seemed heavier than it should be. I couldn’t see behind it. The curtain kept dancing. Slowly we walked toward it. I could hear everything from outside, the scrape of a door, the sound of people running, a horn beeping, twice. I raised my hands, I felt my knuckles pop. And suddenly there was a hand grabbing my arm and I turned around and swung.
It was Lorris, laughing, who ducked the punch, and ran shrieking into the living room, but I followed him, running, threw him down on the floor and hit him with both hands. His stomach, so the wind got knocked out, his shoulders, his face with my palms. He was shouting, scratching at me, my face, my mouth, my eyes. The packages were strewn around us. I pinned him, so he couldn’t move anything, and leaned my head down close to his. Close your eyes, I said. No, he said, get off me. But then I hit him again and he did. I did too. I could hear the creaking of the walls, the rush of the bus going by outside the windows. There were no leaves for the wind to rustle on the dead trees. Lorris whispered, What are you going to do?
VINCENT AND AURORA
They 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 tha
t 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.
Marine Park: Stories Page 3