Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “Like shit,” Ray said.

  Nerese rose from her seat and began gathering herself up. “Hey, Ray?”

  “Like I’m underwater,” Ray said.

  The doctor went to work, once again testing his pupil reflex.

  “Ray, I know you’re beat, but let me just . . . You say you buried your mother through McCloskey Brothers, right?”

  The neurologist made his swamilike passes with the light.

  “Your people are Jewish. Why’d you go there?”

  He took one of his interminable pauses; then: “Dead is dead.”

  “Can you tell me where you are?” the neurologist asked in a preoccupied murmur.

  “Unfortunately,” Ray said, sounding more rueful than feisty.

  “Can you spell the word ‘world’ backwards for me?”

  “Not . . . not right now,” he said apologetically.

  “You know, Ray . . .” Nerese sweating the test, unable to leave.

  “Can you tell me who’s the President of the United States?”

  “Reagan,” Ray said.

  “Reagan?”

  “No. Bush. Bush.”

  In contrast to the day before, he was coming off as earnestly wanting to do well now. Nerese marginally wondered whether she was in some way being played here.

  “You know, Ray”—she moved closer to the bed—“I’m never the fastest horse on the track. But more often than not I wind up finishing in the money.”

  “Which one?” the neurologist asked, moving to the crook of Ray’s right elbow, the one opposite the wound site, tapping it for deep tendon reflex.

  “Which one what.” Ray’s arm jerked emphatically in response to the contact, Nerese not knowing if that was good or bad.

  “Which Bush is President?”

  Ray hesitated. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Nerese demanded. “This guy just took me down enough memory lanes to crisscross a continent.”

  “Sometimes, with a head trauma like this?” the neurologist said softly as he ran a Babinski, Ray’s toes splaying a little more than yesterday, “The mind remembers what it wants, off-loads the rest.”

  “Really.” Nerese thinking, How convenient.

  “Hey, Tweetie?” Ray said her name almost meekly. “Can I see that jacket again?”

  Fighting off a wave of irritation, Nerese once again held it up by the shoulders, the arched chamois FUBU in his face.

  “Yeah, OK, I thought so,” he said, sounding almost relieved. “It’s got two holes in it,” limply gesturing to the small of the back, a small ragged perforation there. “Turn it around again. See?” pointing to a corresponding hole at solar plexus height in front. “Did you buy it like that?”

  “I’ll have it patched,” giving him her own eye exam.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Evidence room yard sale.”

  “Evidence room. So, what . . . Those are bullet holes?”

  “I don’t know,” Nerese said brusquely, suddenly on the defensive. “What I do know is that this is something like a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar coat.”

  “For your son?”

  “I don’t know,” in that same curt sing-song. She took a deep breath.

  “You’d give your son a jacket that some other kid got shot in?” he asked without reproach.

  “I said, I don’t know.” Nerese began to plummet.

  “Jesus, Tweetie,” Ray murmured in that new flattened-out way of his. “You’re almost as bad as me.”

  Chapter 9

  Ruby and Ray—January 10

  Ray sat in his living room pretending to watch the tape of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that he had made the night before, but really just studying his daughter, cat-curled in front of the TV, the girl a graceful swirl from her folded-under legs to the long sweep of her spine to the swan arc of her neck to the slope of her profile and the smallish features there, her eyes both mournful and attentive.

  He sat there pretending to experience Buffy with her but in reality churning with frustration, unable to engage her, desperate to engage her.

  “Is Angel still a bad vampire?”

  “He’s back to good,” she said.

  “A good vampire . . .”

  For the first years of her life, before the divorce, his sense memory of her was an affectionate blur: hey there hi there and out the door to score, cash or cocaine, Ruby always quiet and around when he finally made it back home, but now that they only saw each other one night a week, minutes were like diamonds and the sensation of loss was unshakable.

  “You know, I met David Boreanaz two years before the show even started,” he said.

  “I know, you told me.”

  “You hungry, sweetie?”

  “No thank you,” delicately scratching her nose, her eyes never leaving the screen, even now, during the commercials.

  When he took over this place from his parents he hadn’t set up a bedroom for her; he was afraid that when she was back with her mother, that room would feel like a shrine, so instead she slept on the living room couch, and as a result, the entire apartment felt like a shrine.

  “I got another letter from that old student of mine who’s in jail. Do you want to see it?”

  “Mom said it was really dangerous to write to him.” She finally looked at him, face puckering. “What if he gets out of jail?”

  “Well you tell your mother . . .”

  “Will he come here when he gets out of jail?”

  “I don’t know,” happy for her concern. “He’s not a bad kid.”

  “Then why’s he in jail?”

  “He messed up,” Ray said mildly, unwilling to go into the fine points separating manslaughter from homicide. He had about as many ex-students in jail as he did in four-year colleges.

  “Will he come here?”

  “He has a home. Don’t worry about it, sweetie.”

  Buffy returned and he lost her to the screen again.

  “You know if I sat with my legs curled under me like that they’d probably snap off at the knee.”

  “Sorry . . .” she said, straightening them out.

  “No no, I didn’t mean . . .” Ray’s skull ready to pop with exasperation. “Do you ever use that camera I got for you?”

  “What?”

  “Do you ever . . .”

  “A little.”

  A little; Ray’s eyes roaming the room for a love weapon, some kind of fireworks.

  It drove him wild with despair that he felt incapable, when alone with her, of treating his daughter like anything other than an awkward first date; this self-consciousness only seeming to worsen as she got older.

  He sat through the last ten minutes of the show, some more commercials—Ray belatedly remembering that this was a tape and he could have just fast-forwarded through all the goddamn commercials—sat through next week’s teaser, then pulled a large book from the bottom shelf of the case.

  “Honey, can I show you my favorite photographer?”

  “Sure.”

  And he opened her eyes to Weegee’s World.

  “See, I love news photography, photojournalism, because every picture is like a story,” he said, his voice taking on a Mister Rogers–like inflection in keeping with the depth of his commentary.

  She sat there, the book balanced on her thighs, and began leafing through image after image of catastrophe-stunned women, eyes big as dishes; drunken diapered dwarfs; and death: sidewalk death, facedown, fedoras floating in blood, neighbors looking on death; ankles crossed, one pants leg up, one-shoe-in-the-gutter death; Ruby taking it all in slowly, solemnly, giving away nothing.

  “What’s that white stuff,” pointing to a floret of brain matter sprouting from the back of a dead bookie’s head, the body lying in the tiled vestibule of a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up.

  “I have no idea,” Ray said lightly, and casually closed the book on her.

  But inappropriate or not, he loved Weegee, those photos: gi
ve her something, show her something.

  “So how’s school?” he asked, vaguely remembering someone saying never ask “How’s school, how’s your day.”

  “Good,” a clipped nibble.

  “You getting on with your friends?”

  “You mean Hell’s Bitches?” There was a faint ring of tears in her voice.

  “Anybody in particular?”

  “It changes. Today this one’s nice, that one’s a bitch. Tomorrow that one’s nice, this one’s a bitch . . .”

  “Well look, honey, we’re talking eighth grade. They’re pretty immature . . .”

  “No,” she began in an angry singsong. “They’re mean.”

  “Jesus, Ruby. I wish I could help you,” not sorry he asked, but knowing all he could do now by pushing on this was to make her more unhappy.

  “Hey, you know this new class I’m teaching in Dempsy? The kids are like from the worst neighborhoods in the city. I think you’d enjoy it.”

  And what the hell did that mean? Give her something, show her something, the need in him chugging like a train, his daughter sitting there now quietly giving him her full attention as if waiting for him to come up with the requisite ace.

  “Dad, how did you meet David Boreanaz again?” Feeling sorry for him, helping him out.

  “It was no big deal,” he mumbled.

  The phone rang like a round-ending bell.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Ray?” The voice was rough yet tentative. “This is Carla . . .”

  “Carla . . .”

  “Carla Powell?” The woman gave it up almost wincingly.

  “Hey!”

  “I hope you’re not upset I’m calling you at home . . .”

  “Please.”

  “You said Little Venice, so I got your number from information. Ray, you asked me how I was doing earlier today, remember?”

  “Sure.” Ray wide open, something coming.

  “My son died.”

  “No . . .”

  “Yeah, last week.”

  “No . . .”

  “The thing is, I’m . . . They’re holding his body.”

  “The police?” he said unthinkingly.

  “The funeral home,” she said after a wounded pause, then quickened the pace. “We can’t bury him. We don’t have any money, and I know I just saw you for the first time since like forever, but . . .”

  “Please . . .”

  Ruby reopened the Weegee book.

  “Ray, please don’t be offended, we’re calling everybody we know. If you can lend us fifty, a hundred dollars, if you can see your way to help us out for whatever you can spare, I’ll give you a signed IOU, anything you want and you will definitely get paid back. We’re calling everybody we know, whatever you can afford . . .”

  “Carla, please . . .” he said huskily. “How much are you needing to raise?”

  “Thirty-two hundred dollars,” she said, then, “Ray, I’m so embarrassed to call you like this. Anything you could spare . . .”

  “Hang on . . .” He put the receiver to his chest, regarded his daughter poring through Weegee’s World on her own steam, asked himself, Isn’t that enough for now? answered himself: No.

  “Carla, give me your number. I’ll call you back in a minute.”

  He sat there, receiver dead in his hand, as he studied his daughter, wary of the impending elation that was welling in him, trying very hard to police his own impulses, but it was hopeless. He rang her back.

  “Carla?”

  “Yeah, Ray,” something defeated yet quick in her voice.

  “Where do you live now?”

  “In Hopewell.”

  “Still?” Ray belatedly flinched at yet another unthinking jab.

  “Still.”

  “Your mom’s apartment?”

  “It’s mine now.”

  “Can I come by?” Something proprietary in the question, something in the nature of not-quite-rightness.

  “Sure,” she said after a hesitation. “You remember our windows? Where we are?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “How long will you be.”

  “Half hour?”

  “Look for me in the window.”

  Ray hung up, thrown by the window business, and once again eyed his quiet daughter.

  “Honey? How’d you like to see where I grew up?”

  The commercial strip under the PATH tracks that ran past the Hopewell Houses wasn’t as desolate as he had anticipated; more beat-down, for sure, but if anything livelier, the Italian and Jewish stores replaced by the ubiquitous red-and-yellow awnings of bodegas and Caribbean vegetable marts, of Jamaican jerk chicken and patty shacks. The corner candy store was now a dispatch office for a dial-a-cab outfit, the movies an Iglesia Pentecostal, the florists a Church of Cherubim and Seraphim. Food Land was now the Cinderella House of Beauty, a formerly vacant lot the site of an abandoned prefab IRS annex. The German homemade-ice-cream parlor was a fire-blackened ruin, probably standing like that for God knew how long, and the bowling alley a discount carpet outlet that had gone out of business and had, Ray assumed, been preceded by half a dozen other enterprises each in its turn having gone belly-up too.

  He drove wall-eyed under the latticed shadows of the tracks, taking it all in, absorbing memory hits right and left, too full to pump a line of chatter at his daughter, who was nose-down in her homework in any event.

  The towers of Hopewell were draped over a hill, his old apartment two stories below Carla’s in one of the bottom-end corner buildings facing the elevated PATH tracks, 1949 Rocker Drive, aka Six Building.

  Rising from the car, Ray was struck by how the relatively new aluminum window frames that monotonously bordered every window of every building along Rocker picked up the color of the grit-flecked snow, the soupy driven-through slush and the dull bituminous cast of the sky. It was the monochrome of his childhood.

  Carla was leaning out of the fifth floor as promised.

  “Stay there,” she called down, yet made no move away from the window.

  The PATH train barreled overhead, the slow calliope groan of steel on steel as it veered past the windows as musically primal to him as a nursery rhyme.

  “This is my daughter,” he offered up to Carla.

  “Hi . . .” Ruby whispered, making a faint window-wiping gesture.

  “Hi, sweetheart . . .” Carla smiled, dropped a cigarette butt into the bushes below and turned back to someone in the apartment. “They’re down there now. Just go.”

  “That’s the lady that just lost her son,” he said softly.

  “OK.” Ruby readjusted her backpack.

  “We’re gonna see if we can help her out.”

  There was no one on the snowcapped bench in front of the building, no one anywhere.

  A gypsy cab glided past, disappearing into the shadows under the PATH tracks.

  Ruby readjusted her backpack.

  “Carla, are we coming up, or what.”

  “Hang on.” And as if on cue a younger sweater-clad woman exited the building, hugging herself against the cold, then carefully tiptoed her way over to them through the beaten-down snow. She was light-skinned like Carla, heavyset, but softly so, something satisfyingly complete in the fullness of her face, green eyes didn’t exactly hurt, her hair the same cinnamon tint as her skin.

  “I’m Danielle.” She smiled at him. “Carla’s my mom.”

  Ray had never known whether Carla was black, half-black, Hispanic or Italian, but her daughter’s features were definitely black. Maybe.

  “Oh my God, you’re so beautiful,” Danielle abruptly cooed at Ruby, touching her cheek, and then Ruby did something that Ray had never seen her do before, even with her mother—she reflexively leaned into this new woman as if expecting to be hugged, Danielle doing just that, and Ray, as usual hanging by a thread, choked back a sob.

  “That’s my daughter,” Carla said proudly from five floors up.

  The lobby of his old building, as he’d expect
ed, seemed smaller to him now but the smell caught him off guard: a claustrophobic stankiness—urine, old bacon grease. Half the mailboxes were dented and crowned with scorch marks.

  “You didn’t have to come down to get us,” he said to Danielle.

  “Yeah, well, this building, you never know.”

  “I’m sorry about your brother . . .”

  Danielle shrugged, her face closing up. She had a broad bold Chinese character tattooed on the right side of her neck.

  “Can you believe I lived here for eighteen years?” he asked Ruby, then froze, in no way intending a put-down of the place, but Danielle was lost in some private anger, absently and repeatedly slapping the elevator button, and Ruby seemed transfixed by a poster taped to one of the greasy lobby walls: a close-up head shot of a starkly tense black woman staring out as if having just gone blind. OUR CHILDREN ARE PRECIOUS. IF YOU CAN’T TAKE IT CALL US, and in smaller type beneath this entreaty the number of a parent hotline.

  As the three of them squeezed into the elevator, Ray was hit with another jolt of miniaturization compounded by a half-shift in odors, the ever-present alkaloid reek of urine now mingling with a moist ghost waft of Chinese takeout.

  The ascent to the fifth floor was excruciatingly slow, the car gravely clanking every ten feet up the cables.

  “Eighteen years I took this elevator,” he announced, starting to bore even himself. Ruby bugged her eyes as she stared at her shoes; Ruby-mime for Shut Up.

  “Parents . . .” Danielle smiled at her. “We’re like the worst, right?”

  “You go to school?” he asked her, his eyes helplessly straying to that tattoo again.

  “Me? I’m thirty years old.”

  “No . . .” Ray laying it on a bit, but truly surprised.

  “Thirty going on seventy,” she added. “But yeah, in fact, I do.” Then to Ruby, “How old are you, sweetheart?”

  “Twel— no, thirteen.” Ruby grinned at the mistake, eyes closed in pleasurable embarrassment. “Thirteen.”

  Carla was waiting for them in her doorway at the end of the hall. She had a cigarette in one hand, a beanbag ashtray in the other. She shifted the cigarette to her lips and affectionately palmed Ruby’s face, Ruby reflexively saying, “Thank you.”

  As they stepped into the small L-shaped living room–dining alcove, Carla’s five-ish grandson was jumping on the plastic sheathed couch, but at first sight of Ruby he stiffened mid-leap, landing spread-legged on the crackling fabric protector, and gawked at her with savage fascination.