Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

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.