Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

He’s unloading, Benducci is passing him cardboard boxes. One rips at the top as they transfer, and he sees stacked packages of white powder. Bendy, he says, what the fuck is this? Benducci is looking out into the bay for boats. He looks at Vincent like he’s crazy. It’s for the clients, not money, he says. He takes a packet, slips it in his back pocket. On top of their bonuses. Vincent is staring at the boxes. He claws at the rip, looks at the piece of paper above the packages. WATER STREET, NEW YORK, NY, it says. And Vincent knows that he has broken his cardinal rule. Don’t look, don’t care .

Aurora parks next to the E-ZPass and starts running up the bike path, up the bridge, pulling her hood over her head. She’s cold and she has that sick feeling in her chest that means she shouldn’t be doing this right now, her lungs pumping, her feet on the pavement. She’s not sure why she’s here. She wants to tell him to leave it all alone. She’s at the top and she sees the Napoli all the way below, pulling up next to a bigger boat, and she sees Vincent. And the police cruiser, too close, trying to stay within eyesight. She has the irrational idea that Vincent will know it’s her if they see the cruiser. She almost feels his eyes staring through her. Vin! she yells. But he can’t hear her. The rain is getting in her mouth.

She sees the cop boat coming around the bend, and then she comes down back off the bridge. On the shore she’s waving her hands, her hat, and she can tell that Vin sees somebody, sees her; feels like she can feel his breath collapse as he heads to shore. She’s waving and the cop cruiser is getting closer so you can see the blue markings on the side and they must have seen it by now and the Napoli pulls onto the sand and she runs to the bow.

Vin—, she says, but he cuts her off.

The hell are you doing here? he yells. He reaches out a hand to help her get in. He’s no longer breathing right. Benducci pulls out a mobile and presses a button, yells into the phone, New location. Vinny’s. Blues. Then he hangs up. She doesn’t have time to remember that trip in Canada when Vincent used to pick her up by the crook of her knees and the meat of her back and throw her in the canoe they rented, before they pull away. Benducci is in the back, and under his arm he has a handgun. He pulls his hood over his head, and Aurora shivers down next to Vincent. The cop cruiser is getting closer, an NYPD SWAT team in black and blue. One of them is extending a finger and pointing at the Napoli .

At first Benducci doesn’t mean it. He’s holding the gun out in the rain and inspecting it when it discharges, and then he looks out to the cruiser. There are warning shots from them, and then Benducci is heaving side to side, gasping every time he pulls the trigger. He’s shooting more than the cops, who look like they’re just trying to get closer, but this is the Napoli , and she’s a fine motorboat. Vincent hears the wind of a bullet as it passes by over their stern. They spit over open water to hug the islet next to the bay, and it’s too close for the cops, who veer offshore. At some point Benducci has stopped heaving. Vincent makes a cut around the land barrier and the cruiser looks motionless, uncertain, so far behind.

At the dock, behind their white house, Aurora climbs up onto the wood. But Vincent is looking at Benducci, with his hands over the side next to the motor, one eye open and no longer breathing, his bloody mouth on the mounting bracket. Hell, he says. Shit, shit. He’s crouching in the middle of the boat, and he slams a fist on the plastic siding. Bendy, goddamn. Aurora stands on the dock, her hands on opposite shoulders. The blood is all down Benducci’s neck, and it has soaked his sweatshirt, though it’s hard to tell from the rain. In death already his face has set, and there is an ugly, wet smell.

They turn when the motion-sensor light goes on. Out of the alleyway comes Tommy, who’s holding a mobile in his hand. But then he stops.

Mom? he says.

And then they see the searchlights from the police cruiser getting closer, a quarter mile away, and Tommy says, Get inside, and then he runs to the Napoli and jams the powerhead back. The blood that dripped from Benducci’s neck is washed away by the wake of the Napoli leaving, and Vincent can see Benducci’s gruesome dead hand, hanging over the side of the white boat where he had left it, in his last moments.

As the Napoli pulls away and the drone dies down, Vincent and Aurora watch in the rain, before they go into the house. Vincent keeps opening and closing his fists, to feel them still numb. They watch from the back porch as the Napoli flees into the salt marsh, where the Lenni Lenape hunting grounds used to be, where their bones were buried and the boys used to catch tadpoles off the back of the boat, on family excursions. They can tell from the way the searchlights are flitting around and around that the cruiser is stationary, looking for the Napoli in the tall reeds and the stormy dark. But they do not know the salt marsh, and they do not enter its depths. Then the cruiser turns around and heads for Rockaway, Beach Channel, where everyone knows the Mob holes up today, at the edge of civilization. And Tommy, perhaps Tommy knows this.

They go inside. It is an old house. The tree branches are scratching against the siding. In the dark it looks run-down. It won’t be until almost morning, when the storm is spread over only half the sky, the city clearing up, that Tommy will nudge the boat back into its home slip — once the police are gone, the body disappeared and sunk in the swamp, the boat clean and empty — the motor off for the last hundred meters, like he used to cut it when he was a teenager and his parents slept. Vincent can’t imagine that time. He knows it will be upon him. It’s a funny thing, the succession of things happening. He knows that he can sit in his chair and do nothing, and still in the morning Tommy will come home, and explain himself, or else the police will come with strange, sad looks in their eyes. He knows that he has the power to wait for it, and that waiting alone is his one hopeful thing.

They have lived in this house for a long time. There is the water through the window, the rain on the deck. Inside, the table counters are dry, and the house is warm and empty. It is the type of empty that has a sound, like white noise, a soft light over the armchair. When Aurora puts two fingers on Vincent’s hand, nothing changes; the world outside rains and sleeps. Aurora leaves her fingers tentatively on Vincent’s hand, so long that sweat begins to grow between their skins. Her arm begins to feel heavy, to cramp up, and the skin hangs down as if she is old, truly old. She has a vision of it, of no longer retaining control over her body, of her mind, slowly, being the last thing, dimming in, dimming out. Finally her finger feels like one part of Vincent’s hand, and her arm is numb, and she wouldn’t dream of moving it. Vincent stares straight forward, and it is the only communication she knows she can expect from him.

But in his head he’s remembering when Tommy was a boy and he put antibiotic cream on his cut knee. How Tommy said it burned, and how he told Tommy, Stop crying. She thinks about how there was a very specific type of candy that Vin used to stock in the store, twenty years ago, but she can’t remember the name now: just the chocolate taste, the peanut tang, a blue wrapper on the floor. How they took a box of them to the lake in Canada, eating them, one by one, while the miles marched by. In that moment, in the car, she remembers thinking about dancing. Outside, it gets wetter and wetter. It is an old house. The roof sometimes leaks. The walls creak with human sounds. The children’s bedrooms are made up like they’re about to come home.