Samaritan

by Richard Price

As she stepped back into her jeans, stuffed her thong in her front pocket and walked out of his life, he was left staring at the oily palm prints shimmering on his living room wall like ectoplasm.

  “You’re just going to fucking tell him,” he said to the empty room. “Aren’t you . . . ,” his erection coming down in rigid gradations like a descending car jack.

  Chapter 29

  Pitches—February 27

  Ray arrived at Hopewell a half hour before he was to hook up with White Tom Potenza, parking near his old building again, the sight of Carla Powell’s blank windows, despite everything that had transpired, jolting him with a touch of sweet anguish. What was going on here, he helplessly recognized, was the feverish sanctification of inanimate objects: houses, windows, doors, benches, rocks, street corners, anything that a teenaged boy chose to associate with his one-way crush.

  A PATH train blasted past the building, drawing his eye to the overhead tracks. He was surprised to see how, at this particular moment in the day, those tracks had become the precise dividing line between sun and shadow; sun below, shadow above, this exactitude washing the bleak vista of Rocker Drive clean and suffusing it with a graceful loneliness so pure that he felt as if he was standing inside a painting.

  As he began to walk up the Hopewell Hill, in a reflexive act of self-protection against the cruel ghosts of his adolescent friends, Ray furtively stuffed his stricken right hand in the front pocket of his jeans.

  At the crest of the hill, taking the same path he’d taken with Ruby that first night, he cut into the heart of Hopewell, moving past the kiddie playground in which he had told her his old stories—that place was too now potent with association—and headed for Big Playground at the far end of the projects.

  With the basketball courts in sight, he walked past a tattered neon-orange strip of crime-scene tape snagged in a bush outside the entrance of Eight Building, then saw the dry brown remnants of a floral cross that hung from the battered address plaque above the recessed lobby entrance.

  In a wind-sheltered corner of the exterior vestibule, directly beneath the intercom, stood a small wooden table bearing three extinguished memorial candles, a few rain-blotched handwritten notes and, nesting inside a cloudy sandwich bag taped to the wall above the still-life, an Instamatic photograph of a young black woman holding a solemn toddler.

  In the eighteen years he had lived here, Ray could only recall one murder, no motive other than insanity, the killer a fourteen-year-old boy who had stabbed his father in bed and then went screaming naked out to the cement kiddie sprinklers in the hot August sun.

  In contrast to the rest of the projects, Big Playground was full to capacity, the chain-link fences that lined the perimeter hung with dozens of almost identical North Face puffy coats, like a rack of nylon pelts.

  All four of the handball courts had been painted over as Memorialistas, each one featuring a big-eyed kid sporting either a stubbly shaved head or a military-style buzz cut, the faces themselves flanked with splashy images of birds, winged hearts, eternal flames and the names of the surviving friends who would miss them. But the courts were still in use, four doubles games going on, the blue or pink balls alternately swallowed up then spat out by the vividly spray-painted faces.

  With a few minutes to kill before his get-together, Ray turned his attention to the basketball action—eight half-court games—and when it was finally time to move out, he was amazed at how few of the kids out there firing off three-pointers, driving to the hoop or banging under the boards were any good at all.

  White Tom Potenza was waiting for him at the corner of Hurley and Rocker, directly across the street from the giraffe-high fence that bordered Big Playground.

  In sunlight, Tom was even more blatantly a wreck, standing there slightly tilted forward on his cane, lips parted as if he were on the nod, his body both bloated and frail. His face was hidden behind shades, a Mets cap and that broad mustache, all of which, centered by his large strong nose, suggested a cheap one-piece novelty mask.

  The bodega behind him, a candy store and soda fountain back in Ray’s playground days, was now trimmed with one of the ubiquitous red-and-yellow metal awnings that punctuated the poorer street corners all over Dempsy.

  “Tom,” Ray said tentatively, the guy’s name sounding false in his mouth.

  White Tom reared back and lifted his cane like a peg-legged pirate.

  “Man’s as good as his word,” he said, then opened his arms. Ray stepped into the pulpy embrace, then quickly stepped back.

  “Listen, before I say another word I have to apologize to you for the other day.”

  “For what?” Ray said.

  “For talking to you like that. Going in there telling you how to be with your daughter, deal with the darkness, all of that. It’s none of my business. None of it.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Me going into the Medical Center is like Daniel going into the lion’s den except if God hated Daniel’s guts. That place scares the shit out of me, and when I get scared I go motor-mouth.”

  “I said don’t worry about it,” Ray shrugged, thinking, Just tell me who you are.

  “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” Tom opened his arms again, Ray having to step into another hug. “Come here, I want to show you something . . .”

  Leading the way, White Tom pushed into the bodega. The reek of the boric acid in roach powder hit Ray between the eyes three steps in from the door.

  The place was close and untidy, the aisles dark and narrow, the cash register almost obscured behind its Slim Jim– and pork rind–festooned cutout. Filmy Plexiglas food bins filled with yucca, plantain and other, hairier tubers that Ray had never seen before ran along the floor all the way to the rear wall.

  Two Hopewell women, both in curlers and kerchiefs, were at the counter buying cigarettes and lottery tickets from the owner, a slight Latino sitting on a high stool behind the register with a three-year-old girl perched on his knee. The guy was doing his transactions with one hand, the other holding aloft a half-eaten FrozFruit.

  White Tom gimped his way down the aisle farthest from the cash register to the back of the store. Before following him, Ray feigned a fist-to-mouth cough in order to pop a Vicodin, then saw that the owner was watching him. Apparently underwhelmed though, the guy soon returned his attention to the FrozFruit, alternating nibbles with his pudgy-fisted daughter.

  Tom waited for Ray alongside a picture window that looked out at the handball and basketball courts across the street, his legs planted wide and both of his hands resting on the head of his cane as if he were about to make an announcement.

  “You’re getting to the point with those where you don’t even need water?” White Tom said, nodding to the amber vial outlined in Ray’s chest pocket.

  “Change the subject,” Ray said flatly.

  Shrugging, White Tom took another step back and gestured for Ray to follow.

  “You remember this place back in the day?” he said in a half-whisper. “Remember the Mope?”

  “The Mope,” Ray murmured, recalling the heavy-faced owner from the 1960s, early ’70s; sour, slow, silent, the sleeves of his always immaculate white shirt carefully folded back to the elbows as if to purposely exhibit the tattooed numbers on the inside of one forearm. “I haven’t thought about him in a thousand years.”

  “We gave that poor bastard hell, remember? Come running in here every day, ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!’ Big joke. Even the Jewish kids did it. You did it, right? We all did it.”

  “No way,” Ray getting his ass up, then thinking, Maybe once or twice, thinking, Who is this guy . . .

  “But the Mope wouldn’t bite. We could never get a rise out of him. Come in an hour later, buy some baseball cards, a cherry Coke, the guy never said Boo. Am I right?”

  “Yeah,” Ray seeing him: gray skin, gray hair, the blurry blue digits; the seven with a European crossbar.

  “Had those pictures of food up over the counter, hamburger plat
ters, BLTs, ice-cream sodas . . . Never quite looked like that when it was in front of you, right?”

  “Yeah, no.” Ray recalled those photos, as color-doctored as old Mexican postcards.

  Despite the Vicodin, that drilling localized skull ache began to announce itself again, and Ray found himself leaning into the shelves for support. “So what’s up,” he said quickly.

  Picking up on Ray’s sudden distress, White Tom hesitated, as if weighing whether to say something about it, then got back on course.

  “This moke up front, Lazaro?” Tom full-bore whispering now. “It’s a fucking drug bazaar in here—horse, coke, crack, weed, grams, decks, eight-balls, it’s like Dope-Mart—but in a few days? He’s going down. The place is getting raided and, you know, they’ll offer him the usual, ‘Help us with the bigger fish or we’ll drop you down a hole,’ but he’s not stupid, Lazaro. Alive in jail is better than dead in the street, so he’ll say ‘Fuck yourselves,’ and they’ll padlock the joint.”

  A woman came into the store, young and pregnant, slipped behind the counter and took the kid off Lazaro’s lap.

  “How do I know this, right?”

  But Ray had no reason to doubt that White Tom was speaking the truth, and now he just stared at the family behind the counter.

  “I’ll tell you anyway . . . Are you listening to me?”

  “Yeah.” Ray couldn’t take his eyes off them.

  “I’m sober since November ’93, and I’ve been running a meeting in the basement of Immaculate Conception since ’95, and, in that time, I must’ve sponsored over a dozen cops, saw each and every one of them through the night, night after night, OK? It started out one guy came in on his own, six months later another guy in his squad is looking for help. Guy One tells him, ‘I’ll hook you up with Tommy Potenza.’ Guy Two says, ‘Potenza? White Tom? That fucking lowlife?’ Guy One says, ‘Hey, that lowlife saved my life.’ And what started out as a drop, Ray, became a stream, became a cascade, became Niagara. And now it’s like they all know, if you hit the wall, White Tom’s the guy. Shit, I get more cop calls from midnight to dawn than central dispatch. I even wound up sponsoring the last cop to lock me up. Partner comes to me, ‘Tom, Eddie’s got a problem with painkillers from when he almost broke his back chasing that Moulie down the stairs in Four Building.’ Painkillers, he says. I never knew painkillers could be snorted, you know what I mean? These guys, Ray, they’re out there dealing with the street around the clock yet they’re so naive when it comes to one of their own. I even had one guy, three years in Narcotics, talking to me about his buddy in the squad, says, ‘Tom, where would he get the stuff?’

  “So, you know how it works in this city, favors beget favors, so I know what’s gonna go down here. And I also know that once this place gets padlocked? It can be had for back taxes.”

  “Really,” Ray said mildly, thinking, Here it comes . . .

  “They got it all set up for me, it’s a done deal.”

  “Last guy to lock you up . . .” Ray stalled. “Lock you up for what?”

  “For what?” Tommy laughed. “I was a fiend, Ray. For everything. Are you kidding me? I don’t just have a record, my man, I have a fucking album.

  “But I stopped. I stopped. I had . . . I literally had some sense beat into me. October fifteen, nineteen hundred and ninety-three, me and Danny Ryan, the last two great white Hopewell heads, we’re trying to get past some Yoms hanging on the stoop of Nine Building to go up and watch the Jets game in Danny’s crib? They won’t move, won’t get out of the way. And Danny had that . . . No. No. I had the mouth, the, the rage, and, because at that moment I was feeling no pain? Feeling, above pain? I refused to do the smart thing, which was step off, go around the back of the building, come in from the super’s entrance. Make a long story short, I go and open my mouth? Out comes a Louisville, and Danny goes into the black land for good. Me? Multiple skull fractures. Bone chips in the brain. Chronic cerebral edema. No offense, but what happened to you?” White Tom perfunctorily gestured to Ray’s half-hidden hand, his burr-holed crown. “That’s nothing. I’m talking twenty-one operations. Twenty, one. They went in and replaced part of my skull with a porcelain plug because it’s porous and easy to remove.” He took off his Mets cap and bowed low. “You want to feel it?”

  “Fuck no.” Ray stepped back, his stomach dipping.

  “Some mornings I wake up with headaches so bad I start crying like a baby. I go in for CAT scans more than you go in to change the oil in your car. But you know what? It was all worth it because that beating saved my life. As soon as I got out of the hospital after the first operation I went straight into the Program. And I found my calling. Yes, I’m a drug addict. But now I’m also a healer. Me, who caused so much hurt and sadness in my life, to myself, to my family, to whoever crossed my path. I’m a healer. I have a gift for it, a hunger for it. And I remarried. A Howard Houses girl, Arletta Barnes . . . Black, beautiful, soulful strong woman. We met in the Program, and we have two boys, twins, Eric and Maceo, like God’s gift twice over. I have a third boy, Tom Junior, but he’s grown now. Lives in Cali. He might have . . . I might be a grandfather, we don’t exactly talk. Well, one thing’s for sure. He’s never touched drugs. Growing up with me, I at least gave him an allergy to that, although as you well know it could have more likely gone the other way.”

  Tom took a break, staring out the window, Ray right then breathing deep and experiencing the all too familiar urge to give something—not money to buy this shithole, but something, some gift; the feeling, for the moment at least, lifting the drill bit from his skull.

  “Anyways,” Tommy forged on. “My big boy, Tom Junior? I’m hoping to get to know him again but I understand his position, I understand. I just hope he might someday be curious to meet his new, you know, his little brothers, but I understand . . .”

  The three-year-old girl ran up the aisle to Tom and handed him the stick from her father’s FrozFruit.

  “Is this for me, sweetheart?” Tom patting her face and taking it. “Go back to your daddy.” He watched her as she ran back to the front of the store.

  Ray looked at the girl, then looked at Tom.

  “Hey, if there was anything I could do for that kid I would, but there isn’t. It’s the parents. They chose the life they live. My hands are tied. Besides, Lazaro’s got one of those big extended families. Half are scumbags so let’s hope she winds up with one of the good ones.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then she doesn’t. This is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams around here, are you kidding me? It’s all you can do to have a say in your own destiny, let alone anybody else’s. I mean, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ray said just to keep this moving.

  “In any event,” Tom continued, “I guess I would have to say things are about as good for me now as they’ve ever been. I mean, my health is for shit, high blood pressure, diabetes, liver damage, need a hip replacement, but thank God I never bought the Package—HIV-negative all the way. Or so they tell me. Shit man, you don’t know, what am I, forty-one? I had extreme unction said over me three times in the last twenty years. But I’m still here. And that’s because there’s a reason. God had a reason for not . . . See, when people talk to outsiders or new recruits about the Program, they always downplay the Higher Power thing, the God thing, they don’t want to scare people away, and it’s understandable. You have to let each individual come to terms with what it is they’re surrendering to by themselves, right? But you know something? There is a God. There is a fucking God. People say the World Trade Center, the Holocaust, the, the Rwanda thing, the Bosnians, what kind of God is this? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a God who watches. It’s a God who gives us free will, foreknowledge of our mortality, kicks back and watches. It’s up to us.”

  “You make him sound like a psychopath.” Ray’s eyes strayed to the front of the store again, to the little girl.

  “Ray, understand something. Pain is the chisel with which we scul
pt ourselves into who we become. Like, OK, off the top of my head? This is going to sound trivial, but Peter Garro . . . Remember Peter Garro? Built like a Greek god. Like a fucking Olympian. Never gave a shit about school. Didn’t have to. Gonna be a ballplayer, gonna be a ballplayer. Gets a tryout with the Cardinals. Trips coming off the plane into spring training camp, breaks his ankle, never gets a second chance. What was God thinking there, right? But then you consider what was the guy looking at . . . Realistically we’re talking three, four years of class D ball, C ball, B ball, then getting released.

  “So what’s Peter do? He goes back to school. Winds up with a master’s in social work. Today he’s running Health and Human Services for Dempsy County. Or with me. Opening my mouth that day. Twenty-one operations, but here I am. And what did I do with my life after that . . . Pain, is the chisel. We can make a mess or we can make something beautiful. It’s up to us.”

  “How about Danny Ryan’s pain?” Ray said, talk of God making him feel like he was among idiots and cavemen. “What can you sculpt when you’re dead?”

  “OK. OK.” White Tom prepared for this. “Think of God as a blackjack dealer. Guy deals you nineteen, are you going to blame him if you say ‘Hit me’ and wind up going over? Free will, Ray. Danny had come to many a crossroad before that day, don’t kid yourself. He had lots of hot tips from above. I mean if you really want to challenge me on this, I mean more to the point, you can say what about some home-battered three-year-old brought in DOA to the Medical Center, or, or some young pregnant secretary crushed in the Twin Towers, and my answer to you would be, I don’t have all the answers, I just believe what I believe and I feel what I feel.

  “Oh Ray, the shit I could tell you. My wife, Arletta? Ten years ago, beat up, fucked up, in and out of jail, hospitals, shelters, hittin’ that glass dick 24/7.

  “Been in the program, what, eight years? Now she’s working over at the Homework Club in the Armstrong Houses, you know, the after-school program? She’s got this project going on over there, to, to, well maybe ‘cure’ is the wrong word, to save these kids from the streets, from themselves, through the practice of, get this, of manners. Can you believe that? She gets them young over there in Armstrong, six, seven, eight, and she does her thing. Last year she had the kids put on a play called ‘The Kourtesy Kids Kome Korrect.’ Toured schools all over Dempsy, Jersey City, East Orange, and the kids, the teachers, they ate it up, wherever she went. She got so many thank-you letters she made a collage of them, framed it over our bed.