Marine Park(49)

            It got so bad one summer, when he’d been looking particularly boozy and blotchy for days, he told everyone that he had cancer. Not everyone at first; first just the men at the Mariners Inn. Which was the incredible thing about that place, that they kept it to themselves. Nobody liked to talk about things like that. But then he started saying it to everyone, whenever he could. You know Rich has cancer, Big Bailey’s wife said to Big Bailey one day. I heard about that, he said. He was stopping people on street corners, telling them, reeking. What could you say?

            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.