“I believe it’s time,” Redman’s father announced with soft authority, “for us all to be seated.”
Junior apparently had been utterly indifferent to the notion of any kind of God, and so Pavlicek, no Bible beater himself, passed on having any kind of religious celebrant and instead turned the program over to his son’s friends, who served up half a dozen well-spoken homages, an acoustical duet on “I’ll Fly Away,” and a teary solo of “Angels Among Us,” sung by a young woman who had been the closest thing Junior had had to a girlfriend in the last year of his life.
When the woman returned to her seat, a retired detective from Bronx Homicide, not on the program, spontaneously got up and sang an a cappella version of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” which had half the room weeping like babies, including Carlos and Declan, hardly more than babies themselves. Billy didn’t know what unnerved him more, his two sons’ intuitive empathy in a room beyond their experience or the sight of Jimmy Whelan, the childless, mateless, eternally diffident ghetto harem keeper, sobbing more loudly than anyone else. As for Billy himself, the last couple of weeks had utterly tapped him out, and it would take a lot more than a sad pop tune with a painful backstory to get him weeping.
Redman Senior, seemingly singing directly to Junior’s father, closed out the concert with “The Battle Is Not Yours.”
And then it was his time, Pavlicek rising from the front row, giving his back to the room as he silently leaned over the coffin—Billy could hear him whispering something to his son, but too indistinctly for anyone to make out—then finally turning to the assembled, the expression on his face near homicidal.
“I don’t know if anyone came here to celebrate John Junior’s life, but I certainly didn’t,” he said, gripping the podium as if he wanted to crush it. “I am here before you, I am here among you, to rage and curse God for the arbitrarily murdering fuck that he is, not that I’m the first parent ever to feel that way, and to grant myself at least one afternoon where suicide would be logistically difficult.”
Tickled by the profanity, Carlos looked up at Billy and grinned.
“You know, you read the papers after a young man dies in this city, someone’s always saying, ‘He was just starting to get his life together, he was just talking about going back to school, getting his GED, getting a job, talking about being a real father to his daughter, talking about getting away from the ’hood, about enlisting, about marrying his fiancée, he was just about to do this, to do that . . .’ All these ‘just’s, whether they were true or not, because they all died young and ‘just’ was all they had, tomorrow was all they had. And the same could be said for my boy. He was ‘just’ about to finish his schooling, he was ‘just’ about to find his own way in the world, ‘just’ about to show me the man that now, now, he’ll never get to be, the man that over the years would have null-and-voided every hardship, every heartache I’ve ever endured in my life.”
Pavlicek paused, returned to the coffin as if for a quick consultation, then turned back to the seats. “You want to hear what a great kid he was? How his heart was pure gold? How he loved life, loved people, loved a challenge, all that boilerplate et cetera, et cetera? For those of you who want to hear all that, consider it said. The fact of the matter was that he was just about to be, and now he’s not.”
Looking around the room Billy noted that all three of the WGs were in tears, their faces in various states of contortion. Even Redman, king of the poker face and impresario of seventy-five to a hundred memorials like this every year, was swiping at his cheeks with those mile-long fingers of his.
They had all killed or been complicit in a killing, out of passion but clear-eyed and purposefully, but they had no problem giving in to their grief when it came to one another. He had nearly lost his mind trying to bring them to justice, turning on his longtime friends in order to do what was right, what he thought was right, and as a result his own eyes on this day were as dry as sand. Still, they had all been so tight over the last two decades, had gone through so much together, and for one mad minute, Billy’s anger at them for excluding him from their murderous plans trumped his outrage at what they had done. But instead of passing, the anger lingered, Billy wondering if this pop-up fury he was experiencing over having been shut out from this most desperate of compacts between friends hadn’t been a part of his anger at them since the beginning.
“There’s some people in this room right now,” Pavlicek said, “who gave twenty years or more to the Job, myself included. We’ve seen it all, handled it all, and when a young person dies we’ve all walked up the stairs, knocked on the doors, and delivered the news, between us, to an army of parents. We’ve caught them on their way to the floor, carried them into the bedroom or living room, then gone into their kitchens and brought them water—over the years, an ocean of water, glass by glass by glass. And so, after all that, we think we understand what it must feel like to be one of those parents, but we don’t. We can’t. I still can’t. But I’m getting there.”
Billy reflexively looked across the room at Ray Rivera, expecting him to be nodding in agreement, but instead saw a profile carved in stone.
“But so my son . . .” Pavlicek paused, looking about himself as if he had misplaced something, then seemed to give up on finding it. “I think I just want to read this,” he said, pulling an envelope out of his jacket pocket and removing a single page cut from a book. “This was handed to me today by a friend, and it’s as good a farewell to him as anything else.”
And then, after giving it one last silent read, Pavlicek began to recite, tone-deaf to the rhythm of the words:
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
It was Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “The Dead”—“The Dead (IV),” actually, Billy knowing this because his father had read it to him, more than once, when he was a kid, and when Billy became older, more than once he had read it himself.
. . . He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
At the end of the service, Pavlicek chose to stand at the head of the open coffin to once again receive mourners, the line extending from the front of the chapel to the small windowless vestibule and out into the street.
“It’s over now, right?” Pavlicek chanted to Billy. “All over but the shoutin’.”
“It’s over,” Billy said. “Everything.”
Despite his state, Pavlicek picked up on his meaning right away. “Billy. I know what I did to you. What we all did to you. And I’m sorry.”
“Not for today,” Billy said. “Today is today, all right?”
“We just knew if you ever . . .” Pavlicek began, then cut himself off, leaving Billy to wonder how he had intended to finish that sentence.
“Another day, OK?”
“All right,” Pavlicek said. “Another day.”
As Billy turned to step away, Pavlicek grabbed his wrist.
“You hear about Curtis Taft?”
“I did,” Billy said.
“I don’t know, maybe that day we gave him PTSD, maybe we drove him to that.”
“Not today, OK?”
“I mean, I sure fuckin’ hope so,” Pavlicek rasped with a kind of black glee, Billy looking into his eyes and absolutely knowing that if time ever folded in on itself and Pavlicek had it to do all over again, to put another bullet into the back of Eric Cortez’s skull, or to re-murder any of the other Whites by gun, blade, or with his bare hands, he’d go about it with joy.
Turning back to the mourners, Billy saw that Whelan, Redman, and Yasmeen, each standing in a different part of the room, had all been quietly observing the conversation, their expressions, before they one by one turned away from him, flat-eyed and alert, Billy thinking, And so would they all.
The car was parked four blocks uptown from the funeral home, and as they headed north on Adam Clayton Boulevard, the boys serpentined like loons before them, racing up every stoop and making a show of high-jumping over every minuscule bit of crap on the sidewalk.
“That poem he read?” Billy said to Carmen. “It’s from World War One. It made me think of my dad.”
“Well, it should. He gave it to me this morning to give to John.”
“My father did?”
“I was right there when he gave it to me.”
“I didn’t even know he knew about the funeral.” Then: “Why didn’t he give it to me?”
“I think he knew, he knows, what’s going on with you and the others, so he gave it to me instead.”
“And how the hell does he know that?”
“Don’t ask me,” Carmen said, “he’s your father.”
Later, as they unloaded the kids in the driveway and then entered the house, Billy remembered that he was supposed to go in tonight, his first tour back after two weeks on medical leave.
“I’m thinking about calling in sick,” he said to Carmen in the kitchen. “I don’t really want to go.”
“I think you should,” she said.
“I don’t think I’m up for it.”
“I think you should,” she repeated on her way to the freezer for the vodka, then to the cabinet for two juice glasses.
“Yeah? How about you?” Billy watching her pour out too much, a sure sign of a non-drinker, which, under normal circumstances, she was.
“I already called the hospital, told them to put me back on the schedule starting tomorrow.”
“You sure you’re up for it?”
“Keep calm and carry on,” she said, raising her glass.
“What?”
“I saw it on a refrigerator magnet,” Carmen taking a sip and making a face. “I mean Jesus, Billy, what else can we do?”
His third run that night was on Madison Avenue, a four a.m. smash-and-grab of a tiny jewelry store set inside the exterior arcade of an office building in midtown, almost all of the stock snatched out of the brick-bashed window, nothing much to see now but bare earring trees and daggers of broken glass.
At this hour, the canyoned street was a ghost town, and Billy easily spotted the late-model Nissan Pathfinder slowly approaching from three blocks south. When it finally pulled to the curb, an elderly woman sporting a high helmet of frosted tangerine hair, lipsticked and dressed in a nubby plaid skirt suit as if she had been sitting up all night waiting for the phone to ring, stepped carefully out of the passenger-side door onto Madison. The driver—her husband, Billy assumed—remained behind the wheel with the engine still running, staring straight ahead as if waiting for the light to change.
She absorbed the carnage without expression. “I been here thirty-seven years and nothing ever happened,” she said quietly, a soft thread of old Europe running through her words.
When Billy was a kid all of his aunts had filigreed birdcage hair like hers, and he could never figure out how they slept.
“How’s your insurance?”
The woman blushed. “It only covers jewelry that’s in the safe.”
“How much is in the safe?”
“I have arthritis. Every little piece, in and out, in and out, morning and night, takes me two hours, I can’t do it anymore.” She was wiped out.
“Is that your husband?” Billy asked.
She glanced at the old guy still behind the wheel but said nothing.
“And where was he tonight?” Theodore Moretti asked.
“Do I even have to answer a question like that?” The woman addressed Billy, more amazed than insulted.
He had no idea how Moretti had gotten back on the sign-up sheet after being blackballed just the month before, but he had. “I thought you were at the Three-two,” Billy snapped.
Moretti’s cell rang and he walked down the block, hissing into his shoulder.
“What happens now?” she asked, Billy picking up on that near-buried refugee inflection again, thinking, This is nothing for her.
Before he could respond, a patrol car flying the wrong way down Madison came to a rocking stop in front of the store. One of the uniforms jumped out, holding a black plastic garbage bag.
“We caught the guy running on Park,” he said, gesturing to the head-down, handcuffed thief in the backseat. “I feel like goddamn Santa Claus.”
The woman took the bag and peered inside at her life, then up at Billy.
“Who would do such a thing?”
“I hate to say it,” Billy said, “but all of this has to be vouchered as evidence.”
She looked at him blankly, Billy unable to tell whether she didn’t understand him or didn’t care; nonetheless, he decided, it was a reasonably happy ending.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My editor, John Sterling, a highly incisive and diligent master builder—and as ruthless as ever.
To all the friends and guides who have schooled me over the last few years—
First and always, John McCormack.
Irma Rivera, Barry Warhit, Richie Roberts, Rafiyq Abdellah, John McAuliffe.
And to my street-writer heroes—Michael Daly and Mark Jacobson.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Harry Brandt is the pen-name of acclaimed fiction writer Richard Price, whose eight novels include Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan and Lush Life. He is also an internationally renowned screenwriter for both film and television, having written among other works Sea of Love, Ransom, the Academy Award nominated The Color of Money and multiple episodes of The Wire. The Whites is his first straight-shot urban thriller, and his first under the name Harry Brandt. He lives in Harlem with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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