Samaritan

by Richard Price

  Ray, as if lost in all his “some other times,” looked right through her.

  “You’re just gonna make me bust my hump out there, old lady that I am . . .”

  Nothing.

  “Won’t even give me the name of that cha-cha you were seen squiring around Little Venice with.”

  Carefully rolling on his side, he gave her his back.

  “Well, this is intriguing, Ray, I’ll give you that.”

  And having finally collected and organized herself, she turned to leave. “OK, then . . .”

  “Hey Tweetie?” he said softly.

  Sensing a prelude to revelation in the hesitant calling of her name, she turned expectantly.

  “When I told you that was the only time I enjoyed being a teacher? You know, taking those kids AWOL? That wasn’t exactly true.”

  Nerese waited.

  “I pulled that AWOL shit with them every time we had a class trip. Year in, year out, my kids always counted on me for that.” Ray coughed, shot her a half-smile. “That was just the only time I ever got caught.”

  Chapter 7

  Classroom—January 10

  “This is me and my friends at Six Flags amusement park,” the girl Dierdre read to the class from her Chinese notebook as a Polaroid was passed around the table.

  “This was taken last year. We went by bus and it took so long to get there I was a old lady with six kids and eight grandchildren by the time we got there. If you want to go to Six Flags don’t ever go by bus. Otherwise I had fun.”

  “OK,” Ray said, smiling. “Thank you.”

  What else was there to say? She hadn’t done what he’d asked: find a photo of family before the writer’s birth and make up a story about the people in the picture—but he was grateful for the stab at humor, for her doing anything at all.

  “Rashaad, what do you have . . .” nodding to the tall long-headed boy who pined for the oblivious Felicia.

  “Yeah, I wrote something.” He displayed his hands palms up. “But I forgot the book at home.”

  “No.” Ray shrugged. “Class can’t work that way. If you don’t bring stuff in, we have nothing to do.”

  “Well, I can tell you it.”

  “No,” Mrs. Bondo said, Ray about to say the same, resenting her butting in. “This class is a privilege,” she added, making it sound like a prison perk. “If you abuse it, it’ll be taken away.”

  “OK then,” Ray said as lightly as he could. “Next victim.”

  Jamaal tentatively raised a hand, then passed around an eight-by-ten color photo of a corpse.

  The boys got into this one, squinting open-mouthed, Efram asking the inevitable, “He’s dead?”

  The subject was a thirtyish black man laid out in a satin-lined casket, eyes lightly shut, lips infinitesimally parted, a rosary entwined in his clasped hands. Lilies peeked out from the top right corner of the frame.

  Two of the girls unconsciously leaned into each other, the photo on the table between them.

  When the picture was passed to Mrs. Bondo, she somehow managed to project both skeptical wariness and raw curiosity.

  Once again Ray was suffused with gratitude. “Go ahead, Jamaal.”

  “This is a picture of my uncle before he was buried. I never really knew him because he lived in Brooklyn but my mother told me that when he was in high school he was a starter on the basketball team and they won the city championship one year even though he was five-foot-eight. This gives me hope because even though I am five-foot-eight too next year I hope to start for Paulus Hook. Right now I’m on the JV and have the highest free-throw percentage of anybody.”

  Jamaal read in a halting monotone, as if the words were listed vertically, or the handwriting unfamiliar.

  “My uncle was also the class clown which I am too. It makes me sad that he died because I think he could have been a positive role model for me and a friend.

  “My uncle was shot although you can’t see because it was in the back. He was minding his own business too.”

  Once again, not what he had asked for, but bringing in a body like that . . .

  “What was your uncle’s name?”

  “Spoony.”

  A few kids tittered, but Jamaal didn’t seem to mind.

  “My boy died?” Rashaad said. “Got his head stuck in a elevator shaft with the elevator like smashing it into the wall? Had a close-coffin funeral.”

  “Oh,” Altagracia popped. “That was Supreme, right?”

  “Yeah, uh-huh . . .”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Ray said, then decided to step off.

  “My pastor in church?” Rashaad continued, actually rolling his face on the table as he spoke. “There was this kid, right? He got hisself all shot up the night before in the church parking lot. You know, kilt? The pastor, he said, ‘You think that boy woke up yes-tiday mornin’ sat up on his bed said to himself, “Today’s my day to die”? You best get right with Jesus ’cause you never know when your ticket’s gonna get punched.’”

  “He’s right.” Efram nodded soberly, nobody laughing or cracking wise, and Ray was taken by that.

  “Rashaad, I’m not going to tell you again,” Mrs. Bondo said. “Sit up.”

  “Tell me again? You din’t tell me the first time.”

  “A few years ago, I was walking by an old graveyard downstate near Trenton,” Ray said impulsively, “and I came across a woman’s headstone had to be from the early nineteenth century, said,

  To my darling husband

  and children dear, I am not dead

  but sleeping here.

  As I am now

  you soon shall be.

  Prepare for death

  and follow me.”

  “That’s nasty,” Altagracia said.

  Both Rashaad and Efram repeated the epitaph in half-whispers, as if committing it to memory.

  “Who’s next?”

  Three of the four remaining students raised their hands, Myra, the Spoon River Anthology kid, his ace-in-the-hole kid, raising hers only slightly as if she knew she had the goods and could wait her turn.

  “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?” Ray asked a tall, berry-dark girl, his voice delicate with apology.

  “Mercedes,” she said. “I wasn’t here last week.”

  “But you did the work anyhow?” Ray smiled. “Wow. Thank you. Please . . .” He gestured to her papers.

  Her photo was of a thirtyish woman, morbidly obese, sitting on a bench in the Hopewell Houses, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Coke in the other. On one side of her sat Mercedes at half her present age, on the other side another little girl, both kids placidly resting their heads on the woman’s broad thighs.

  “This is my Aunt Kim. She was a waitress in Jersey City at a restaurant until her diabetes made it too hard for her to stand all the time. The other girl is Monique who is my best friend and cousin. She is Kim’s daughter. Even though my Aunt Kim has diabetes everybody in the family makes sure she takes her shots and does what the doctor says for her to do in general.

  “Besides her daughter Monique, Kim is my favorite person in my family, including my mother, her sister.”

  Ray made a reflective noise, stalling, wondering if these kids even heard themselves.

  “How much does that lady weigh?” Efram ventured as politely as he could, provoking a cloud of reproachful clucks from the girls, Altagracia snapping back, “How much do you weigh?”

  “No, I’m just asking.” Efram hunched up, a mortified smile on his frozen mug.

  “OK, stop,” Ray said affably, what he hoped was affably.

  “I don’t want to talk about mine,” Mercedes said evenly but emphatically.

  “See what you did, stupid?” Altagracia said.

  “Just stop,” Ray barked, and they did; the momentary effectiveness of his spontaneous outburst taking him back, in not a great way, to his days as a paid teacher. “Mercedes, I would like to talk about it if, it’s OK with you,” he said placatingly, but just saying it, not re
ally having anything on his mind.

  “Unh-uh.” Mercedes shut him down, but she didn’t seem too banged up about it and he let it go.

  “Felicia, right?”

  The tall light-skinned girl nodded imperceptibly, shyness or fear reducing her mouth and eyes to slits as she slid a photo facedown toward him as if they were playing poker.

  The black-and-white snap was of a tall well-built unsmiling black man in a double-breasted suit, standing in front of the lions’ cage in the long-gone Dempsy County zoo.

  “Gimme that thing,” Rashaad said in a mock-brusque tone, snatching it away, putting on a show for his never-to-be girlfriend.

  “Do you not want to be in this class, Rashaad?” Mrs. Bondo asked.

  “This is my grandfather, Roy V. Smalley,” Felicia murmured.

  “He is the first African-American fireman in Dempsy. He did it for one and a half year then quit because of the prejudice and work for the post office. He also was in the Army and had four kids who are my mother and uncles. This is 1948 and is in Dempsy.”

  Felicia’s head seemed to retract into her high white blouse collar, the kid another vertical reader, another assignment-muffer, but the picture, the history . . . Ray pored over the photo, studying the man’s dour expression, romantically reading into it rage, dignity, doggedness, then surrender.

  “Is your grandfather still alive?”

  Felicia shook her head no.

  “The first black fireman . . .” Ray just lofting it out there. “You kids,” he said earnestly, “you have so much to write about, you have . . .” Then, to Felicia, “What was he like?”

  “Strict,” she said, staring at the table.

  “You knew him?”

  “No. My mother said, though.”

  “Strict,” Ray repeated greedily, turning the word over like a prism. “I’ll bet.”

  “Can I read now?” Altagracia waved both hands like someone flagging down a rescue boat, then spun a yellowing color photo across the table.

  The subject was a frail little girl, xylophone-ribbed, wearing nothing but underpants and leaning into what Ray thought might be a banyan tree. She had large dark fever-bright eyes, and her voluminous black hair fell around her shoulders like an opera cape.

  “It’s like a Gauguin,” Ray said to Mrs. Bondo, who nodded in vague acknowledgment.

  It’s like a Gauguin, Ray repeated to himself mincingly. Jesus Christ. “Go ahead.”

  “This is my dad in Santo Domingo,” Altagracia began.

  “He almost died because of disease until my grandmother, his mother, took him to this man in the village who everybody said was a healer and was healed. He was healed by praying. That is why I love Jesus. My dad in this picture is seven years old and is leaning against the tree because the sickness was still a little bit in his legs.”

  “That’s a boy?” Efram asked.

  “Why was his hair so long?” Ray asked.

  “Yeah, OK. My grandmother? When she prayed to Jesus? She said to him, ‘If you let him live, I won’t ever cut his hair again.’”

  “Why?” Myra asked, the first word out of her all day.

  “Because this way? Every time somebody sees him in the village, they look at all the hair and think about how Jesus saved him.”

  “There you go,” Ray said happily.

  So far not one kid had done what he’d asked. But he hadn’t exactly delivered on his own end, either—hadn’t made any comments worth a crap, no real feedback, criticism or even simple encouragement coming from him toward the kids, no teaching of any recognizable kind. But maybe, he thought, just for today it was enough to play show and tell. He’d be better in the next class.

  “Efram.”

  “Yeah, OK.” The chubby kid brought out a comic book cutout of Superman taped to a red piece of construction paper.

  The class hung back until his opening salvo: “This is a self-portrait of me,” then started barking with glee, Efram shrugging and plowing on.

  “This is a self-portrait of me which I drew and posed for at the same time. Of course I can do that because I can get in a pose then zoom to the easel so fast I can see my own pose.

  “My favorite sport is basketball. I once beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one so bad he started to cry and begged me never to play again so he could be the best player in the world. I felt sorry for him so I did it. I now put all my super-power energy into women.”

  The class completely fell apart, everyone shouting as if in a revival tent.

  Unflappable, immune to the disoriented free-for-all of derision and joy he had provoked—even Mrs. Bondo laughed out loud—Efram turned to Ray. “That’s it.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to say?” Ray said, too loudly.

  “You don’t have to say nothing. You can just enjoy it.”

  The kid looked about two years away from body hair, Ray entranced by his cool-jerk confidence, his serene aloofness.

  The other students were falling all over themselves trying to come up with the ultimate retort, but they were unmanned by the fat boy going on the offensive like that, weren’t quickwitted in that way, and the table gradually subsided into a sporadic roundelay of coos and haws, Efram bathing in it like a Buddha.

  “OK, calm down, calm down,” Mrs. Bondo said gently, still smiling, the kids equally getting off on how Efram had made her laugh.

  “Let’s just keep going,” Ray said, feeling now like a talk show host with a hot guest list, nodding at long last to Myra.

  The girl took a minute to find her photo, another color-drained Instamatic, this one time-stamped seventeen years earlier. It was a snap of a youngish black couple standing in front of a church, the neutral-faced woman resting a hand atop her ballooning stomach.

  Because she read in a thin murmurous voice and because the class was still buzzing from Efram’s Superman challenge, Myra was halfway through her recitation before anyone even noticed that she had started.

  “Hang on, hang on.” Ray held up a hand. “Can you start again, please? C’mon, let’s be quiet, OK?”

  “The baby is in her belly,” Myra began in a minute monotone.

  “But only I can see it in this picture.

  “The baby has a full set of teeth already and is mad at me even though I won’t be born for three more years.

  “When I get inside my mother’s stomach, the baby has left mousetraps in there from three years ago.

  “When the baby is born it lays in the crib all day but when my parents go to sleep at night it sneaks out the window to go hunting.

  “Sometimes it comes into my bed, puts its face right up against mine, shows me its teeth and I am so scared I can’t move.

  “The baby never grows up, it just gets bigger.

  “The baby is dead.”

  Silence, everyone staring at her as she returned the photo to her journal.

  “What do you mean, ‘the baby’s dead.’ The baby’s dead?” Efram asked.

  Myra shrugged; it is what it is.

  “That’s like that old-time movie, It’s Alive. Rashaad grinned then went into voice-over mode. “There’s one thing wrong with the Robinson baby . . . It’s ali-i-ive!”

  “Damn,” Altagracia snapped. “What does it take for you to shut up?”

  The class then went back to watching Myra as she self-consciously fussed with her Chinese writing book; Ray thinking, The One.

  In five teaching seasons there had been five kids—Sherman South, Esperanza Castro, Garcelle House, Caroline Yang and Hassan Pridgen—each kid invariably poker-faced but reached, stirred to the core by what Ray was offering. These were the kids who, in the midst of earth science, gym, algebra, cafeteria stench would manage to knock out a handwritten thirty-page story or a collection of poems, drop it on his desk at the end of class and split. There was always something furtive about his relationship with them; no smiling, no chitchat, rarely would they speak to him unless spoken to first, never would they seek him out after class, but once this One-ness wa
s established—and these kids very quickly picked up on the fact that it had been—the air between himself and that boy or girl was always taut with anticipation. They were romances of a sort; at the time, Ray liked to imagine these kids thinking about him outside of school roughly as much as he thought about them; sometimes he would even envision them at home, around the dinner table, or in the kitchen, talking about him, or not being able to talk about him . . .

  Narcissistic, self-aggrandizing—yeah, yes, guilty as charged; but, in his defense, he knew that he would have done anything for them: paid their college tuition, paid their family’s rent, hooked up their older sibs with jobs; responded to any financial or spiritual 911 they could have possibly sent his way, although none of them had ever sought him out for anything above and beyond his continued presence in class. Nor did any of them become writers, as far as he knew—but that was OK too.

  “So how’d you come to read Spoon River Anthology?” Ray asked Myra, as the kids gathered their books.

  “Mr. Barkeley said I would like it,” she answered, zipping up her backpack.

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” her voice so small, “I like olden-days stuff.”

  “Like what else?”

  “Charles Dickens?”

  “What did you read of his?”

  “Nothing yet. But I have his book at home. I’m going to read it next.”

  “Who’s Mr. Barkeley?”

  “He was the guidance counselor.”

  “Was?”

  “He left.”

  “You know your story was excellent,” Ray said, Myra looking off, fighting down a smile. True to type, she had yet to look him in the eye.

  “If I’d read it in a book . . .” he faltered, then, “I’d never have guessed it was written by a teenager. How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen. What do you want to be in life?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a shrugging singsong.

  “You keep it up like this, you’re going to be a monster writer someday,” he said, gassing her head unconscionably now. “And I’d be able to say I knew you when.”

  Myra swallowed another grin; he could see the physical struggle in her face; Ray begging himself to stop.