Samaritan

by Richard Price

“Yeah,” Ray said, encouraged. “I’m going to try to go back to it next week.”

  “For free. Motherfucker. You’re the real deal, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” Ray fought off a smile.

  “You married? Kids? What . . .”

  “Divorced.”

  “Fuck her, right?”

  “Got a daughter, just turned thirteen.” Ray usually began to glow when Ruby came up in a conversation but for some reason this time her name pulled him down like a plumb line.

  “What . . .” White Tom on it instantly.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s wrong, the kid?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the kid. Tell me.”

  Nerese was quietly listening in, her chin in her hand, a watchful tentative smile on her face. Unannounced, the Vicodin kicked in, and bookended by the two of them, by their expectant eyes, he found himself unable to keep the huskiness from his voice.

  “I don’t know, she’s going through a patch right now, and, or, you know, maybe it’s just me, I’m the one, but it’s like, I don’t know how to be with her, you know, how to be her friend.”

  “Her friend?” White Tom said in a way that made Ray flinch, made him want to take the word back.

  “Excuse me, Ray, for stepping over the line here, but let me just remind you that you’re not her friend. You’re her father.”

  “No no, I know, I know. What I meant . . .”

  “Listen to me.” He gripped Ray’s wrist. “When they’re adults there’ll be plenty of time to become friends, but not now. Right now she needs guidelines. She needs yes and no. Your displeasure has to be worth something to her, or all is lost.”

  The only thing keeping Ray from shutting out the lecture was his sense of the extraordinary effort this Tommy guy was making to slow down his racing metabolism and carefully pick his words.

  A nurse came out into the waiting room and finally called his name. Ray looked to Nerese and shook his head—forget it—Nerese opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “I just want to keep her talking to me,” Ray said.

  “Well . . .” Wincing, White Tom slowly straightened out one leg until the outline of his kneecap disappeared. “The reality of it is, at her age she’s gonna do what she’s gonna do, they’re all like that, but she needs to know that this shit is not OK with you. She needs to know that just because everybody else is doing it, it still doesn’t float under your roof, and you have to make that very clear. No waffling, no politicking, no worrying about your popularity rating. I don’t tolerate it, I don’t accept it and I don’t approve of it. It is not OK, so don’t do it.”

  “Do what,” Ray said, coming back to himself a little.

  “Drugs sex alcohol whatever. Once again, forgive me for stepping over the line with you, but if you really want to be a friend to her? Then don’t be her friend. Be her father.”

  Ray nodded as if in deep thought, restraining himself from reiterating that all he meant was what he had already said, that he increasingly did not know how to be with Ruby these days, and that he feared that this self-defeating self-consciousness was also self-perpetuating, driving an ever-widening wedge between him and Ruby that he felt helpless to arrest.

  In their first encounter after his release from the hospital, he had been so worried about her being freaked out by his appearance, he had projected so much intense anxiety toward her, that the first words out of the kid’s mouth after taking in the damage to his face had been “Dad. You’re the one who got hurt. Stop looking at me like that.”

  He restrained himself from reiterating all this now because he sensed that, given White Tom’s physical distress, the issue, the only issue in his eyes, his life, was self-destruction; and Ray just didn’t want to make the guy, or himself for that matter, feel like a fool.

  Using his cane, White Tom struggled to his feet like a man trying to hoist himself out of a pool, his forehead beading with the effort; then, turning, he dropped a hand on Ray’s shoulder. “I got to book, but very soon, you and I, we’re going to sit down and break bread like human beings, because I have a business proposition for you that’s really gonna ring your bell.”

  “OK,” Ray said neutrally.

  White Tom continued to stand there, smiling down at him from behind his shades; Ray waited.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I want to give you something. You gave to Carla, now I’m going to give to you. I’m going to teach you a trick to defeat the darkness.”

  Ray heard Nerese cough into her fist and figured she knew what was coming word for word.

  “Think of it, the darkness, as a ball, small, a golfball, a Ping-Pong ball that’s like hovering in the air right in front of your face. You defeat that fucking ball by keeping your eye on it, your mind’s eye. As long as you do that? You contain it. But the minute you take your eye off it, turn your back, indulge in a little something? You look back, that ball just got bigger. Now it’s a baseball, a tennis ball. Take your eye off it again? Indulge in another little, somethin’-somethin’? Ho-ly shit, now it’s a softball. Next time a basketball. Drop your guard enough times it becomes one of those ten-foot-high nudist colony beach balls with the happy broads hanging on it, mow you down like a bowling pin. You don’t ever take your eye off the darkness, Ray. You heard of one day at a time? I’m talking one minute at a time. You understand me?”

  Ray nodded, touched and inarticulate.

  “I’m out of here.” White Tom stooped to embrace him, then straightened up. “You’re gonna be OK, brother. I know it. You’re gonna be A-OK.”

  And then he was gone.

  Ray sat in silence with Nerese for a long moment, wondering how to word what he wanted to say.

  “So, what’s he on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Tommy? Tommy’s clean as a whistle.”

  “He’s always like this?” Ray raised his hand, made it tremble.

  “Nah,” Nerese said softly. “That was just about him being in here.”

  “Here. The hospital?”

  “He’s got a history, so it’s kind of hell on him, places like this.”

  “So what did he come in for?”

  “Because this is where you were and he wanted to see you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he loves you, Ray,” Nerese laying it on a little. “Didn’t you get that?”

  Chapter 24

  Salim—February 25

  As twilight hit the Hudson, Ray’s intercom went off, pulling him in from the terrace where he had been playing around with assignment themes for his first return class.

  “Yeah?”

  “How you doin’, Mr. Mitchell. This Salim.” The kid’s voice came through the crackle like an ancient radio signal. “I need to come up and see you.”

  “When?” Ray asked stupidly, instinctively balking at this unannounced house call.

  “Now.”

  “Now’s not . . .”

  “I got something for you,” he said. “Take like a heartbeat.”

  A moment later, Salim, his backpack hanging off one shoulder, came striding into the apartment as if there had been no one at the door to greet him.

  “Mr. Mitchell, how you doing, how you doing . . .” Smoking, pacing, eyes bouncing off surfaces, something goal-oriented in his distraction, in his reverting to Ray’s teacher name right now. “I came here the other night but your phone wasn’t working.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. I visited you in the hospital, too, but you were unconscious. How you feeling now, OK?” The words flying out of him with the impersonal pitch of an auctioneer.

  “I’m good,” Ray said at a remove, studying this new Salim. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Oh shit . . .” The kid abruptly came to a dead stop in the middle of the room, eyes lightly shut, hands up in surrender. “I can’t . . . OK, it’s like, OK last week? Michelle, has lost her job. They had like a b
udget cut? And she was a temp, so . . .”

  “I thought you said they changed her over to full-time,” he said cautiously.

  “No, no. That’s not . . . No, she’s out, she’s out. And she started drinking again.”

  “Oh no,” Ray said. He didn’t know whether to sit or stand in his own home, settled for perching on the radiator.

  “Like, OK . . . The first morning after she had got let go? Ten o’clock, she’s still layin’ in bed, she ain’t even tryin’ to hide the pint, I say, ‘’Chelle, you got to bounce back from this. You got to get up on your feet.’ She tells me to mind my own fuckin’ business, excuse my language . . .”

  “She sounds depressed.”

  “Naw, man, I’m depressed,” he said. “She’s drunk.”

  “She can’t get another job?”

  “Like that?” Salim cupped a hand under his cigarette, then brought the ashes to an open window. “Naw man, she won’t even try. Yeah, I guess she’s depressed, like you said. That job was important to her, you know, to her self-esteem.”

  Ray flinched, the buzzword putting him on even higher alert.

  “But it’s all coming right at me. And like . . . OK, the night before last? The night before last I had to go to the police. I had to have the police come over to the house.”

  “Because . . .” Ray waiting for the money touch now like waiting for a bus.

  “Because the last few days she started having her cousins come over. I don’t . . . These guys, man, For Real and Busy? I don’t . . . They’re stickup niggers, and I told her, she knows I don’t ever want to see them over my doorstep, you know, under my roof with my son there. She knows that and I think she was just doing it to get back at me, but I didn’t do nothing. All’s I’m trying to do all week is get her back on her feet, but when they left the other night? Me and her, we got into it, arguing, but just verbal, and I told her what you said to me last time, how she’s into controlling me through money, right?”

  “Whoa . . .” Ray came upright off the radiator. “Salim, that was just a conjecture. I don’t even know her.”

  “But it’s true.” He shrugged, fired up another butt. “Without her job, she ain’t got nothing over me. And now I’m back to being the breadwinner out there with the T-shirts.”

  “But you told her I said that?” Ray unconsciously palmed his injured crown.

  “Hey. True is true,” Salim missing the point here. “Next thing I know she’s coming at me with a steak knife. Look . . .”

  He raised then dropped the hem of his sweatshirt, revealing a flash of flat gut and an oblong pinkish something under the left-side ribs; Ray unable to make out what he was supposed to have seen.

  “And I don’t even hit her back. I’m like, ‘’Chelle, why you doin’ this?’ All’s I did was disarm her, you know, with a chair. She starts sayin’, ‘I’m gonna go to the cops, say you beat me, say you sellin’ drugs. I’m gonna get you violated. I’m gonna put you back in the joint.’ And she can do that. I already gone back twice on violations. It’s a sword of Damian over my head.”

  “Was Omar there?” Ray wanting to bring the boy in, make this PG.

  “Yes.” Salim jumping on that. “He was right there! Cryin’, scared. I said, ‘’Chelle! Omar’s right there!’” Offering back to Ray his own words.

  “She says, ‘This ain’t got nothing to do with him. He’s irrelevant. I’m gonna have you violated.’ So I got out of the house, go right over to the police station, file a, a domestic violence report myself. You know, to cover myself? Here . . .”

  He pulled a pale blue carbon of the report from his rear pocket and flapped it open for Ray’s perusal, Ray wondering why he felt it necessary to show it to him.

  “So then I go back to the house with two police? I show them how everything’s all thrown around, I show them the liquor bottles, my injuries . . .”

  “Was Michelle there?” Ray reached inside his shirt pocket for a Vicodin, then changed his mind.

  “Naw, she had left. She took Omar and left. Then the next morning, I go to the parole office like an hour before they opened to catch my PO coming in, tell her what happened. Then I’m supposed to see this psychologist from the state? They say even though I never used drugs, selling’s an addiction too, so I have to see this guy who doesn’t do a damn thing for me but I go see him, tell him what happened . . . It’s like, I’m making first strikes everywhere, covering my behind on all the bases against false accusations, OK?

  “But while I was out there talking to all my, my handlers? I come back to the apartment about eleven that morning, Michelle had got back in when I was gone and destroyed all my stuff. She poured soda inside the VCR, the TV, tore up the bed, the, the mattress. Stuffed up the kitchen sink with my books and drawings, turned the faucet on, water’s all, everything’s all flooded, my neighbors from downstairs start banging on the door ’cause the water’s all running down into their place, and Ray, my apartment? It ain’t even mine, it’s my mother’s, she’s in the hospital right now, but she could kick me to the curb anytime she wants, you know what I’m saying? So I’m like up to my ankles in water, fighting with my neighbors, the phone rings, it’s Michelle. She says, ‘You ain’t never gonna see Omar again. I’m gonna get For Real and Busy to come by and cap your ass and you ain’t never gonna see your son again.’”

  Salim took a breath, still leaning against the wall, smoking and staring out at the river.

  Ray had balked on taking the Vicodin in order to maintain his edge against the bullshit, but now he reluctantly decided, if not to believe Salim, to at least surrender to the emotion driving his story.

  “Then I go call my mother, you know, to tell her what happened? Michelle had already been to the hospital, told her some shit about me? My mother didn’t even want to hear my side. She’s all ‘You’re just like your father, all y’all niggers, you’re all the same, you’re this, you’re that.’ But I’m her son, you know what I’m saying?”

  Ray un-surrendered; there had to be more to it, more to all this vicious anger coming at Salim. “Tell me again. Why’s Michelle doing all this?”

  “Why? Because she’s drinking. She lost her job, started drinking, and this is what happens.” His eyes went to the river again. “But, Ray, you know what? It’s like, I lost my fiancée, my, my worldly possessions, I can lose the apartment, my son . . .” He swiped at a dry cheekbone, the tears more in his voice. “But now I have to think about myself. I have to take care of myself. I have to survive and continue because I just . . . It’s some kind of test. And I don’t even know if I’m ever gonna see my son again. I don’t . . .” His gaze shifted to Ray—“She can’t just . . .”—then back to the river. “I have to stay strong, because if I can’t stay on top of things, if I can’t maintain then I can’t do nothing for Omar. I can’t . . .” Salim dropped into a glassy silence, slowly shaking his head in awestruck disbelief at his own saga, Ray now somewhere between bored and hyperalert.

  “You want to hear something?” Salim asked more calmly. “She changed her name.”

  “You weren’t married.”

  “Her first name.”

  “Michelle?”

  “Now she’s Fire. Wants everybody to call her Fire.”

  “Fire . . .” Ray repeated, softening, thinking, He can’t be making this shit up. “You worried about For Real and Busy?”

  Salim waved off the cousins. “The only thing I’m worried about is staying positive.”

  “But the T-shirts are going well, right?”

  “Yeah OK, here’s the thing,” Salim said, and Ray had nobody to blame but himself.

  “OK, this week? Last week?” Salim counted off on his fingers, “I was out there eight, nine hours a day. I usually started out set up on the sidewalk in Journal Square over in Jersey City by the PATH trains till the police come and move me because as of yet I don’t have a vendor’s license. Rest of the day I just hit the bricks, here, there, you name it. Sold ’em right out of the backpack.

&n
bsp; “But the other morning? When she destroyed the apartment? You know what else she did? She filled up the bathtub with water, took all my shirts, all my inventory, dumped everything in the tub, took a gallon of bleach . . .”

  Salim mimed the pouring, his curled-down wrist traveling in a slow determined arc, over and over.

  “Get the fuck,” Ray sputtered, in a near panic as he desperately took stock of himself, wondering if he had it in him, for once in his life, to simply say no, to endure the disappointed reaction, the possible counter-rejection. “How many shirts . . .”

  “Nine hundred. Ruined. Now I got to start over.”

  “Start over,” Ray numbly repeated. “That was seventy-three hundred dollars I gave you.”

  “I know!” Salim sounded outraged; at Michelle, at Fire.

  “If you had nine hundred left, that means you sold what, three hundred?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe not that much.”

  “At a profit of what, nine bucks a shirt, right? I’m trying to remember.”

  Salim exhaled as if he were trying to launch a sailboat.

  “Because that should be about twenty-seven hundred dollars you’ve cleared by now.”

  “Yeah, well, you know, like I said, I don’t think I sold quite that many.”

  “Well, how many did you sell?”

  “More like ninety.”

  “Ninety?”

  “Yeah, see, I was unable to run off twelve hundred shirts, like I had originally intended, because when you gave me that money? I deposited it in my mother’s checking account for safekeeping because I didn’t have an account, myself, but as soon as I did? She withdrew fifteen hundred dollars for herself, said I owed it to her.”

  “For what,” Ray suddenly so tired, his right hand helplessly curling into itself.

  “For . . . I don’t know. Back rent, food. She just said I owed it to her.”

  “Owed it to her,” Ray repeated as if lost in thought, knowing at that moment, knowing with absolute certainty, that the remainder of Salim’s life, regardless of whatever school of spirituality or industrious free enterprise game plan he embraced, would be one long unbroken cavalcade of elaborate excuses and self-defeating con jobs, and that any continued bankrolling of this kid on his part would be the equivalent of flushing money down a toilet.