Samaritan

by Richard Price

  The layout of the apartment was a cookie cutter of Ray’s own childhood digs and in his excitement he did it again: “Ruby, could you believe—”

  “Please . . .” she murmured almost desperately, and he stopped.

  Besides the couch there were two plastic-covered easy chairs, a low Formica coffee table and a television. The dingy walls were the color of smoke and covered with framed graduation photos.

  “Are you hungry?” Carla gestured to the dining alcove, where the table was laid with a plug-in coffeepot, a half-gallon bottle of Coke and a deboxed supermarket cake. “That’s all I had time—”

  “Please . . .” Ray cut her off. She looked like she was having a hard time breathing, like she knew what was coming.

  “Honey?” Carla addressed Ruby, gesturing to the food, Ruby whispering her standard “No thank you.”

  “She’s just going to do homework, OK?”

  “Absolutely,” Carla said overemphatically, her chest rising and falling with each breath, Ray thinking, This is not even about her; thinking, This is fucked.

  “Let me make you some room, sweetheart.” Danielle stepped over to the table and cleared a space, Ruby quickly burying herself in her books, her hyper-alertness to her surroundings betrayed by the instantaneous ferocity of her concentration.

  The boy jumped off the couch and stood at Ruby’s elbow, staring up at her.

  “Do you want some food?” she asked him in a soft, high, self-conscious murmur.

  “David, leave her alone,” Danielle snapped and the boy assaulted the couch again.

  Another PATH train roared past, fifty yards from the building and at eye level with Carla’s windows.

  A toilet flushed in the apartment above.

  “So, Ray . . .” Carla wheezed, sitting on the couch squat as a pasha, her grandson once again bouncing next to her. She attempted to light a cigarette, the trembling match jerking in synch with the kid’s gymnastics.

  Ray perched tensely on the arm of a chair.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” Danielle gestured to the seat, then sat facing him flanking the bouncing boy on the couch.

  “I’m good. I’m good,” Ray catching Carla’s breathing disorder. “Carla . . .” He swallowed, then proceeded as if reading from a semilegible script. “Carla, I don’t think for something of this nature, you should have to call people for dribs and drabs of money, you know, for something like this. So please . . .” And, as he had envisioned himself doing over and over in the last hour, he extracted the check for thirty-two hundred dollars from his shirt pocket, and after a fleeting, almost unconscious glance at Ruby to see if she was bearing witness, launched himself off the arm of the chair, extending it to Carla in a crouched lunge.

  But he saw that Carla had caught that reflexive look to the kid in the dining alcove, and it threw her off, turned her off, just enough to miss the exchange, the check flipping and fluttering between their outstretched hands before finally swooping to rest under the coffee table.

  Shaken, glaring dumbly at Ruby, Carla made no move to retrieve it, so Ray, already torn between denying and acknowledging how quickly, how artlessly, how helplessly he had just given himself away, dropped on all fours and delivered it to her on his knees.

  Carla and Danielle, temple to temple, read the amount together, Danielle softly grunting as if a padded weight had been dropped on her chest.

  Carla, however, sat stiffly reading and rereading the amount. “You don’t—”

  “Carla, please . . .” Flush-faced, Ray cut her off.

  The grandson started jumping on the couch again, sideswiping Carla on the upstroke, the downstroke.

  “All I asked you for . . .”

  “Please, Carla . . .”

  “Mom . . .” Danielle started to argue, the grandson bouncing bouncing, until Carla abruptly reared back and swatted him hard on the arm, hissing, “Stop it!”

  The boy looked at her in astonishment, looked at her in a way that told Ray that she had never laid a chastising hand on him before, his stunned silence momentarily sucking the air out of the room, until at last he started to cry, flinging himself at Danielle’s breast.

  But she needed the money, he told himself; she has a son to bury.

  “Thank you so much,” Danielle said. “You have no idea . . .”

  Ray stole a quick glance at his daughter, his audience, his all, Ruby fiercely focused on her work, Ray telling himself again, But she has a son to bury . . .

  “How do you want us to pay it back?” Carla asked almost angrily.

  “Look, just get through it. Worry about it later. I don’t really care . . .”

  “You have no idea,” Danielle said again.

  “Have some cake,” Carla said flatly, then, turning to her daughter, “Give them some cake.”

  “No, really . . .” he began, his eyes fixed swimmingly on the framed graduation portraits, each sober head cocked at the identical angle.

  “Sweetie?” Danielle called out to Ruby at the dining table. “Sweetie, are you OK?”

  Ray turned to see Ruby blindly staring at her binder, her eyes shining like wet steel, chin trembling with the effort not to cry.

  “Ohh . . .” Danielle sighed in sympathy, her voice soft and pillowy.

  Ray knew enough not to ask Ruby what was wrong in front of strangers, but that was about all he knew, all he was good for.

  The check lay face up on the coffee table.

  “You know, we should really go.” He rose to his feet.

  “Go down with them,” Carla said quickly to Danielle, “walk them to the car.”

  “Carla, that’s OK.”

  “You don’t know this place,” she said, once again almost angrily.

  “Come on, I lived here eighteen years.”

  “Well, you don’t live here now.”

  At the door he was about to ask as tactfully as he could what her son had died of, or at least what was his name; but he shut himself down, knowing that there was absolutely no question he could ask of her that wouldn’t make her feel more profoundly humiliated and used.

  “I hope your mom’s OK with this,” Ray said to Danielle, once they were back out on the street.

  “She’s a little thunderstruck, I guess.” Danielle shrugged it off.

  “I just wanted to help,” he said, seized with the need to revise what happened up there. “I just wanted it to be OK.”

  “To be OK?” Her teeth glistened in the encroaching twilight. “You’re a godsend, how’s that?”

  Ray felt his face glow.

  “Can I ask what your brother—”

  “Died of?” she offered with perky vehemence. “Reggie, Reggie died of not wanting to deal with himself.”

  Ray didn’t know if that implied an overdose or a suicide.

  “Speaking for myself?” She touched her own chest. “I buried him years ago. My mother, she’s shook up but she knew it was coming.”

  An overdose.

  A car shot up the hill. Danielle turned her head briefly to track its progress, and Ray’s eye was drawn once again to the thick blue lines of her tattoo.

  “Ruby, check it out,” he said easily, extending his hand to Danielle’s throat and something in the way she stared at him without shying away from his almost-touch had him patting his pockets and looking about as if he had just lost his keys.

  “Cool,” Ruby murmured lightly.

  “Soon as my back’s turned, Ruby’s gonna do herself up like a comic book,” he said, a little too burbly.

  “Shut up,” Ruby murmured again, this time fighting down a smile.

  “You know what this means, sweetheart?” Danielle pulled down the neck of her sweater so Ruby could get a good look. “This means ‘The Hunter.’ See, most people when they get Chinese symbols, they go for ‘Love,’ ‘Eternity,’ ‘Hope.’ But me, I got the Hunter, because once you got a child? You got someone who’s counting on you, someone who didn’t ask to be here, and you need to be a hunter. You need to be on top of i
t. Food, shelter, education, spirit, you know, spirituality? Ask your daddy . . .”

  Ray wanted to ask about the father, the husband, but didn’t.

  Looking up to the fifth-floor windows he saw Carla’s restless silhouette.

  “OK then,” he said.

  “Where do you live, Ray, in New York?”

  “No, I live right here in Dempsy, over in Little Venice. Ruby’s mostly in New York with her mom.”

  Danielle cut loose with another soft “Ohh . . .”

  “It’s OK, we got it covered,” he said meaninglessly.

  “Come here, you.” Danielle embraced Ruby.

  “Thank you,” Ruby said.

  Danielle then embraced Ray. She was sporting some kind of vanilla-musk body spray, the scent so dense that it made him dizzy.

  “I’ve never been to Little Venice,” she said, looking right at him, then waved good-bye to Ruby and walked back into her mother’s building, Ray watching her until she was out of sight.

  For a long moment after Danielle had gone, the two of them remained standing there in the rapid winter twilight; Ray eyeing the thick mounds of snow that lay atop the chained-off bushes planted snug against the building, roughly half of them garnished with air-dropped cigarette butts.

  “Ruby, what was bugging you up there?”

  “I don’t know,” her voice rising and falling minutely.

  “C’mon, give me a break.”

  “I was just worried that everybody would think you’re conceited,” the words coming out of her in a tumble.

  “That I’m what?” Ray getting it, not getting it. “Ruby, I just saved that lady a hundred phone calls,” determined now to sell it both to himself and his daughter.

  “I know.” She shrugged.

  “Do you think I’m conceited?”

  “No.”

  “Do you love me?” he asked shamelessly.

  Ruby recoiled from the question. “Of course.”

  Something else.

  “What.” Ray braced himself.

  She gave him another shrug.

  “Ruby, I’m freezing my ass off. What.”

  “I don’t know.” She began to get teary again. “I never knew about this part of your life before and it scares me because it makes me feel like I don’t know you.” For Ruby, a major speech.

  “Whoa honey,” Ray scrambling for the right words, his old building seemingly bearing down on them, hunkering forward with its twitching TV-light eyes. “Honey, I haven’t been around here since before you were born. It’s just fun to see it again. Actually, what makes it fun is to see it with you.”

  “Do you wish you still lived here?” Her voice was freighted with worry.

  “What are you, nuts? I wouldn’t live here now if you put a gun to my head. Don’t be an idiot.”

  Ruby’s mouth twitched; Ray seeing an opening.

  “Don’t be a dipshit.”

  The twitch became a smirk; profanity, for some reason always did the trick with her, at least temporarily.

  Another train racketed by overhead, the noise making Ray blink.

  “That train? Every day, every night, that train went right past my window. When I went away to college the first year? I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Because it was too quiet?”

  Her providing the punch line like that made him ridiculously happy.

  “Let me tell you something. When I was a kid, there was a guy in the building, Eddie Paris, a black guy, he was a motorman on that train, you know, a conductor? His family lived on the top floor, and every time his train passed our building he would toot the whistle twice, like, saying Hi to his wife and kids.”

  “So cool.” Ruby was listening now, open-faced.

  “Yeah.” Ray nodded. “Ruby, you know what? I don’t feel like . . . Do you want to walk around a little?”

  He took her backpack and they began trudging up the hill, the grounds still so eerily deserted; came to the crest and cut into the heart of the projects, Ray steering her to a small playground buried in untrampled snow; Little Playground they had called it back then, monkey bars, crawl-through barrels and cement seals peeping up through the pristine crust like soldiers in a trench.

  There were four black teenaged boys huddled at one end of the single long bench, Ray hesitating for a tick before settling down with Ruby at the opposite corner.

  “You want to hear something else about Eddie Paris and his family?”

  “Sure.”

  “Eddie had two sons, Winston and Terrance. Terrance was called Prince, and Winston was called Dub, don’t ask me why.”

  “Dub?”

  “Dub. Anyways, Prince was really smart and he had this great voice—you know, singing voice—but Dub was a handful. He wasn’t dumb or a bad kid, but he was tough and he got into a lot of fights. His father did, too. In fact, Eddie Paris was like the only parent I knew back then that got into fistfights. Handsome guy, had kind of like, Old School straightened hair, mustache . . . Anyways Eddie, he was a really strict parent, brooked no bullshit from his kids, so Dub, he was kind of in and out of trouble with his dad on a steady basis.”

  “But his dad got in fights, too,” she said.

  “You’re absolutely right. Jesus, you should—” He cut himself off from saying “be a psychologist,” for once in his life not wanting to blow everything up past the moment.

  “Anyways, this one day after school, Dub goes upstairs, comes into the house, he’s got ten, twelve new comic books on him. Now, Eddie’s home and he knows something’s off. Dub can’t buy, hasn’t got the money to buy that many . . . He takes one look at Dub’s face, Dub’s like”—Ray went all pop-eyed—“Eddie’s like, ‘Where’d you steal them.’ And he starts chasing Dub around the apartment.”

  Ray paused, sensing the kids at the far end were possibly listening in, acknowledged to himself that he had been consciously talking louder than necessary, going all Danny Kaye on them. Fuck it, he liked kids. This workshop thing was the best, most honorable idea he’d had since quitting the show.

  “Anyways, next thing, Eddie’s coming out of the building with the comics in one hand, Dub’s ear in the other, like . . .”

  Ray got up wincing, head tilted sharply, and took a few mincing steps.

  “Dad . . .” Ruby furtively eyed those other kids.

  “OK.” Ray sat down. “So Dub’s being dragged out by his ear and, he’s crying. From the humiliation, I guess. And, me and my friends, we’re sitting on the bench in front of the building, and it’s like, we know if anyone makes eye contact with Dub right now he’ll come back and kill us.

  “Anyways, what happened was, Dub stole the comics off a spin-rack at this little grocery store about two blocks from here called Food Land. OK, so Eddie marches his kid all the way back to Food Land and makes Dub go in there, go up to the owner, guy’s name was Fat Sally, big Italian guy with a white mustache, makes him go up to Fat Sally, hand him back the comics, tell him that he stole them and apologize. And Dub is crying, remember?”

  “How old was he?”

  “I don’t know, fourteen? Fifteen?” aging him past his daughter.

  “Dad, do you know who steals stuff in my class?”

  “Ruby, I’m on a roll here . . .”

  “Go on.” Ruby easy about it, smiling.

  The four teenagers got up off the bench and filed out of the playground, Ray having to deal with a quick wave of disappointment.

  “OK, so Eddie plants himself in the doorway of Food Land, Dub walks in, still crying a little, pissed off, embarrassed, but he manages to mumble out what his dad told him to say, gives back the comics and leaves.”

  “What did Fat Sally do?”

  “Fat Sal? Nothing. He didn’t say anything, yell, nothing. And Dub leaves, him and his father go back home. And here, right here, is where Eddie, in my mind, does an amazing, excellent thing. They go back upstairs, him and Dub. Eddie takes out a dollar, says, ‘I want some Hostess cupcakes, go back down to Food Land and get me some.
’”

  “Why?”

  “Exactly. And Dub is like, ‘What!’ Eddie’s like, ‘Just do it. And don’t get them at the supermarket. If you do I’ll know, and then me and you are really gonna dance.’”

  “Dance?”

  “It’s an expression. So Dub goes back down, me and my friends on the bench are staring at our shoes, OK? Dub goes back to Food Land. He walks in, Fat Sally’s all alone, just him and Dub. Dub says Mumble Mumble cupcakes, Fat Sally rings up the sale, Dub’s walking out the door, Fat Sally says, ‘Hey, kid . . .’ Dub turns, Fat Sally goes, ‘I’m looking for somebody to make food deliveries for me. You feel like making some money after school?’”

  Ruby smiled; Ray’s throat tightened on him.

  “And Ruby, dig this . . . from the next day on? Dub works five afternoons a week and eight hours every Saturday. Does that all through high school. Four years. He’s working the cash register, buying groceries from the wholesaler, he becomes like Fat Sally’s right-hand man.”

  “Oh my God that’s so cool . . .” Ruby’s voice floating high.

  “But dig this . . . Dub graduates high school, Fat Sally wants to retire to Florida? Guess who he sells Food Land to.”

  “Dub.” Ruby saying it like he was an old friend of hers.

  “You got it. And guess where Dub got the money to buy the store from . . .”

  Ruby just stared, not knowing.

  “From his father.” Ray swallowed hard.

  “That’s so cool,” Ruby cooed.

  “From his . . .” Ray had to look away. “From his . . . From Eddie. As a graduation present.”

  “Dad, are you crying?” Ruby wide, wide open now, all his.

  “Absolutely not.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, Ray not oblivious to his surroundings, not a fool, but just knowing that for tonight this place was safe for them, knowing it in his bones.

  “Dad?” Ruby said. “How did you know what happened with Dub and his dad upstairs and with Fat Sally in Food Land if you were out on the bench in front of your building?”