When the waitress turned away with the orders, Salim fired up a Newport, and she pulled a reluctant about-face. “I’m sorry . . .” she began.
Ray watched, waiting for some kind of blowup.
“No, I’m sorry,” Salim said, jumping up and flicking his cigarette out of the front door and into the gutter.
“You ever see anybody from the class these days?” Ray asked.
“Not, not really. I’m kind of running in different circles right now. How ’bout you, Mr. Mitchell, you been keepin’ tabs?”
“Not . . . well yeah, but just . . . Do you remember a kid, John Shaker? Maybe a year younger than you? Had rimless glasses, shaved head?”
“Yeah, Shaker. I used to hang with his brother Doobie.”
“Well, he’s a TV producer now, and I actually kind of wound up working for him out in Los Angeles for a few years, you know, writing this show.”
“No. Yeah. No. John. I remember him. He was always a pa-positive individual.” Salim foundered. “Never got into the street thing, just avoided that whole crab-cage mentality. That’s good, that he’s doing good.”
Ray had only brought up his ex-boss, ex-student’s name in order to keep the conversation moving, but he felt like an unthinking jerk for it now.
When the salads came, Salim performed what Ray assumed was a small prayer to Allah: eyes lightly shut as he whispered his grace, hands open before him, palms up in supplication, then gliding across each other as if washing, then sliding down over his face like a veil; the whole of it exquisitely delicate.
“What’s that?” Ray said.
“I was giving thanks to the animals who sacrificed their lives, the laborers who prepared this meal and to Allah, the life force, the causeless cause behind all beings.”
“For real,” Ray said, as always, genuinely moved by anyone’s unflinching commitment to anything.
“Oh no doubt,” Salim said. “But see, yeah, OK. For me? Islam? I’m not in it for the militancy, or the separatism or whatnot. Especially after, you know . . .” He tilted his chin toward what Ray assumed was New York. “I’m just . . . It keeps me from giving in to the darkness, you know what I’m saying? Like in jail, right? They can and do anything they can think of to break you, not just the so-called correction officers, but the, your fellow inmates. It’s like a sea of negativity and contempt in there and you just got to keep your eye on your aspirations or you can go down so fast and so deep you’re never gonna see the light again.”
“So that’s how you made it through?” Ray said with restrained awe.
“Yeah. Uh-huh. That and who I chose to spend my time with. Most often I was either by myself or with the old-heads. You know, read, played chess. The old guys, they even said to me, ‘Salim, you ain’t like the others. You got a mind on you.’”
“What were you in jail for initially?”
“Me? For nothing. For violating parole. OK. I was in this cab, right? I had my laptop and everything because I was heading over to have a meeting with this accountant my cousin knew? He was gonna help me get my tax ID number for the nonprofit organization I was gonna set up.
“The driver of the cab, he was from Pakistan or somewheres, can’t drive to save his life, sideswipes a car chock-full of niggers. Four jump out, everybody’s got a gun. The police roll up, alls they see is five niggers and a bunch of guns, you know, so it’s . . . We’re holding up the cabdriver, it’s a holdup. I say, ‘I ain’t with them,’ wavin’ around the laptop like, ‘Who’m I gonna rob with this?’ But they ran me through the computer, comes up that I’m on parole. So I got violated.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ray said, half-believing it. “What were you on parole for to begin with?”
“You mean what did I go to jail for before that?”
“Yeah . . .”
“Same thing. Violation of parole. OK see, I was selling T-shirts in this club? The owner liked my drawings, right? Gave me a concession. I had silk-screened up about two hundred tees with my design. Sold about seventy-five at twenty dollars each less the owner’s cut is a lot of cheese to be holding in that kind of environment, you know what I’m saying? I get outside to go home about five in the morning? Nigger steps up, puts a gun in my mug, I take it away from him, you know, just so he wouldn’t kill me, I wouldn’t kill him? It’s called Temporary Innocence of Possession but the thing went off by accident. Nobody got hurt, but everybody starts runnin’, police come around, and when I saw them? I got scared, you know, and just out of reflex I started runnin’ too, and you should never do that, run from the cops, unless you can get away, but I got caught, cuffed, thrown in the back of the police car. Then, like, at a light? I slipped the cuffs over my legs, ran off from the police car. Got caught again. Didn’t look too good, but I didn’t even get indicted ’cause the witnesses bore me out. All they had on me was violation of parole. Not supposed to be out that late without permission, not supposed to be near any scene like that club, so I had to go back in. My parole officer even said, ‘Salim, I can’t believe this is you, you were doing so good . . .’”
“OK, but before that arrest, there was . . .” Ray stopped, too tired, and shifted gears. “Tell me about your kid.”
“Yeah OK, my son.” Salim’s face lightened. “See, that’s the other thing keeps me maintaining, because he didn’t ask to be born, you know what I’m saying? So I’m beholden on his behalf to do the right thing with myself.”
“He lives with you?” Ray asked gingerly.
“He lives with me and my fiancée.”
“His mother?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” Salim swallowed a burp, even though he hadn’t touched his food. “It’s not . . . Now that’s a relationship that tries men’s souls.”
Ray was half finished eating, Salim’s untouched plate starting to make him anxious.
“See, I’m, I am trying to get something going here, and, you know, as an individual I feel strong in and of myself but as of yet I can’t contribute to my son’s upbringing on a financial basis. I’m like a hundred days out of incarceration and like I have all these ideas, but I need capital, I need time, and she’s all up in my face about not coming up with my end, gives me twenty dollars a week for myself like I was a child, but she is not supportive of me. She’s all negativity and it’s like, hey, out in the street? I can go that way, bring home in a night what she makes in a month, but I’m trying to maintain, I’m trying . . .” Salim burped again, as if trying to swallow a bubble. “Excuse me,” a hand resting on his unfed plank of a stomach.
Eyeing Salim’s untouched salad, his now-cold tea, Ray sensed the potential explosion ready to blast through his carefully constructed sentences, his delicate prayers, his inability to eat. A precise dot of white spittle marked the corner of his mouth.
He reached for another cigarette.
The waitress, sitting alone at a far table and reading The Dempsy Dispatch, caught sight of it and began to rise in order to play reluctant health cop again.
Ray quickly moved to stay Salim’s lighter, but the kid reined it in on his own.
“Something wrong with the salad?” the waitress asked with genuine concern.
“No, no, thank you. I’m sure it’s delicious.” Salim threw her another smile.
“Do you want me to bring you something else?”
“I’m OK, thank you.”
“You sure? Because . . .”
“Yeah, no, but thank you for your consideration, though.”
The waitress returned to her paper.
“I like this place,” Salim said, leaning across the table. “People treat you with respect. That’s a object in short supply in my neighborhood.”
Ray felt it lurch to life in him, the slightly suspect craving to give, to do, and attempted to police it, convert it into mere words of advice.
“To be honest, Coley . . . Salim, sorry.”
“That’s OK.”
“To be honest, right now I think you’d be getting quicker results just getting a job with somebo
dy. You know, take home a paycheck every week.”
“No doubt,” Salim said, not really hearing him.
“This entrepreneur stuff, the nonprofit . . . That’s a little dicey in terms of getting paid off it, you know? You have to start kicking in on the diapers, otherwise you’re going to blow a gasket.”
“I hear that,” Salim said automatically, touched the edge of his salad plate as if it were hot.
Ray studied the remains of his own meal, a thrum racing through him, building, irresistible.
“Let me ask you. Would a thousand dollars tide you over for a few weeks? You know, make peace in the house with you and your fiancée?”
Coley/Salim became motionless, his facial expression stiffening into a gawk as he furiously attempted to process Ray’s offer.
“I’m just trying to buy you a little grace period on the home front here. I think you need it.”
“Just a loan, right?” Salim fighting with himself, all ten fingertips touching the edge of the table.
“A whatever. Just to take the weight off. We can work it out down the line.”
“I mean I would pay you back.” His face became more fluid. “Because what I believe is, that if you give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat every day.”
“Hey, this is just to buy the fishing pole and a bucket of bait.”
“I will most definitely pay you back,” Salim all the way happy now, Ray having to fight off a worm of queasiness, of embarrassment before returning the kid’s smile.
Joy-locked, shiny-eyed, Salim took in the vintage movie posters, the vivid palette of tarts under the ice-cold case light.
“Yeah, I love this place.”
“Good,” Ray murmured, stroking his gut like a cat. “Glad to hear it.”
Chapter 16
Carla—February 18
Once again perched on a corner of that small steel desk in the processing room of Dempsy’s BCI, Nerese pored over another rap sheet, this one belonging to Salim El-Amin, formerly known as Coley Rodgers. She was just being thorough here; Ray, before the craniotomy, had given up the kid’s name easily enough, and the kid himself hadn’t really put out any kind of stress vibe when he ran into Nerese at bedside. And although Salim did have a record to be pored over, it was more sad-sack than sinister—first arrest for Possession With Intent eight years earlier, the kid considered salvageable enough at the time to receive as an alternative to jail a two-year stint at New Dawn Village, a nonresidential rehab center over in Hudson County. Hard time there, Nerese knew, was equally divided between being yelled at in group therapy sessions for four hours a day and attending classes in English and math geared toward passing the state exam for a high school equivalency diploma.
But a year after leaving New Dawn, he was busted again, same charge—no more school for you, my man—and wound up serving two years in the Dempsy County Correctional Center. And then, only six months after his release, he was back in the slammer, this time for violation of parole—a charge of resisting arrest downgraded to disorderly persons, which usually meant it was the cops that were in the wrong. He’d been remanded nonetheless at the discretion of his parole officer; another two years. And then, four months after he finished that, the same shit—a charge of assaulting an officer, downgraded to disorderly persons, the PO once again swinging the hammer. All of which told Nerese that basically the kid had one real problem: no matter what the cost to him personally, in the heat of the moment he chronically refused to go along with whatever the cops wanted him to do in order to pass muster, which in most situations usually meant submitting to a pat-down, then cooling your jets as they ran your name through a dashboard-mounted computer. Coley/Salim’s history was more that of a thin-skinned knucklehead than a hardcore criminal; the idiot managing to get himself locked up time after time basically over nothing, as if jail were the place to be.
Unfortunately, Nerese knew this type well. Her nephew Eric was like that—had been like that, that was, until the week before, when he went and killed someone. But even that homicide was pretty much the deed of a career nitwit, the kid waiting a good forty-eight hours after the provoking incident before busting a move, as if conscientiously holding off for the requisite time to pass in order to deny himself any heat-of-the-moment defense. But the bottom line for Nerese as she sat and pondered the self-defeating résumé in her lap was still Ray and Salim’s tone when speaking about each other, open and anxiety-free.
Sliding off the edge of the desk, Nerese returned Salim El-Amin’s jacket to the BCI clerk and began the three-story climb back up to the street.
She still liked Freddy Martinez for this.
Nerese sat at the small dinette table in Carla Powell’s Hopewell Houses apartment, Carla sitting across from her and scowling out the window as if the sun were in her eyes. All she had offered Nerese was the glass of cloudy tap water that sat before her.
“I don’t imagine you would remember me. Tweetie Ammons? The Ammons family from Four Building?”
“No, I don’t,” Carla said too quickly, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
“You probably remember my brothers from the benches, though. Antoine? Butchie?”
“Nope.” Another bitten-off response.
Carla tapped the ash of her cigarette into her palm, Nerese eyeing the unused ashtray sitting before her.
This whole thing was a charade from the door on in, both women knowing exactly where Nerese was headed with all the small talk. She took a sip of the furry metallic water.
“C’mon, you don’t remember Antoine?” Nerese challenged playfully, her sex cartoon of a brother back in the mid-sixties, early seventies, having been borderline unforgettable.
Carla shrugged with feigned indifference.
“Well, I have to say, I certainly remember you, though,” throwing Carla one of her world-class smiles. “I would see you leave for school in the morning? Man, you’d come out of this building in those tight skirts, mascara, hair all teased up. You looked like Miss Rheingold or Miss Subways or something. I would’ve done anything—”
“I have a doctor’s appointment,” Carla said, cutting her off.
“Well then, let’s see if I can make this quick,” Nerese said, giving up on memory lane. “Like I said, I’m sorry for your loss.”
Carla nodded, tapped another ash barrel into her palm.
“I assume you heard what happened to Ray Mitchell?”
“Yeah, I heard.” Carla studied the world outside the window.
Nerese had grown up in a building situated barely a hundred feet from this one, yet the slight change in angle of vision was enough to make her dizzy.
“I understand Ray helped you out with your son’s burial arrangements. Is that true?”
“You don’t need to ask me something you know the answer to already.”
A train racketed past at eye level, a cyclone of steel, Nerese waiting it out.
“Well, can I ask you for how much?”
“You just did,” Carla said. Then, “Thirty-two hundred dollars, three thousand two hundred dollars, and I know he doesn’t expect to get paid back, but he will, every cent.”
Nerese nodded noncommittally; she had lost count of the number of homicides she worked on that had at their source the pride of poor people.
“Can I just . . . Ray, did he offer you or give you any other money besides for the funeral? You know to maybe help out with some emergency . . .”
“He didn’t give, he didn’t offer, and I most certainly didn’t ask.”
“OK, the, for the burial . . . Did anybody else know about that money?”
“I’m not a talker, but who’s to say.”
“How about family members?”
“How about family members what.”
“Any of them know about it?”
“Hey.” Carla leaned forward, getting in Nerese’s eyes. “My surviving children work for their living. The boy in Maryland is a licensed pharmacist, own
s two drugstores, my girl holds down a nine-to-five in New York and attends college, so I don’t appreciate your insinuations. Not every family in this shithole projects is as fucked up as yours was.”
Carla immediately reared back from her own words, a small tremor blooming in her cigarette hand.
“So I guess you do remember us,” Nerese said evenly, experiencing an odd, not unpleasant sensation somewhere between confirmation and vindication.
“I’m sorry,” Carla said shakily, staring out the window again, the PATH tracks a brutal band bisecting this family’s view of the outside world.
“How did you feel about Danielle going out with Ray?” Nerese asked mildly, jumping on Carla’s momentary disorientation.
“She’s a grown woman,” not giving an inch.
“But how did you feel about it?”
“I didn’t like it,” she said, still staring out the window, Nerese intuiting that, angry, embarrassed, Carla would probably not make eye contact again.
“You didn’t like it. Why not?”
A preadolescent boy, twelve, thirteen, shambled into the living room in his underwear, eyes sleep-gummed, hair a bird’s nest.
“Hey, honey.” Nerese smiled.
“You don’t want to be having this conversation in front of him,” Carla murmured, then, “Nelson, put your pants on.”
The kid vanished.
“Grandson?”
“Yeah.”
“Danielle’s?”
Carla nodded.
“And you didn’t like her seeing Ray.”
“That’s right.”
“Why not?”
Carla shrugged.
Nerese counted to twenty; no dice. “Because he’s white?”
“No, I don’t care about that. I’m one-quarter white myself.” Carla eyed another dull red train approaching her window at an aggressive slant.
“Because she’s married?”
Carla’s gaze tracked the lead car until it shot past the kitchen window.
“Look, Carla.” Nerese reached across the table and laid a light hand on her arm, feeling the agitation still bubbling beneath the skin. “The poor guy almost died. And whether you have some kind of bone to pick with him or not, he did you a major kindness. And I just don’t understand why you won’t return the favor here.”
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