Samaritan (23 page)

Danielle took a breath; Ray seized by what she was telling him and almost physically aching for more. It wasn’t only the secret history of Carla Powell that she was revealing here, or even the secret history of the Powell clan; it was the secret history of 1949 Rocker Drive, its hallways, elevators, apartments and smells; it was the secret history of his childhood world, the mouths, eyes, bodies and scents of others, of those he had brushed up against every day of his younger life, and therefore the secret history, marginally at least, of himself.

And the fact that Danielle was not only the gatekeeper of this intimate knowledge but its living offspring; not only the teller of the tale, but the tale itself made flesh—to Ray, an individual who saw personal history and anecdote and his ability to communicate through them as his lifeline to the rest of the world—his lifeline to love, expressing his love—for someone like Ray to be in the physical presence of memory incarnate, sentiment incarnate like this—intensified and complicated his hunger for her way beyond lust, which was painful enough, into something excruciatingly sublime.

“The thing is,” Danielle started up again, gazing past Ray, oblivious to the chaos she was unleashing in him, “the thing is, I
know,
right now, my mother blames herself for my brother’s death, for his life. She raised him in a dope house, then lost him to foster care for two years. Like I said, I have no memory of it, and Reggie was even younger than me, so, if any one of us was old enough to be scarred by it, it’s my older brother Harmon, who’s a pharmacist, owns two drugstores in Prince William County, Maryland, and me, I’m pretty much good to go, so Reggie . . . It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s like, whenever I try to say something to her about how she can’t blame herself? She just won’t hear it.”

Ray was tempted to say that the tattoo on her throat was there for life whether she remembered the visit to the tattoo parlor or not, but he had just enough self-control to keep his mouth shut.

“Anyways, when my father got locked up, in the two years it took for my mother to get us back from foster care? She got her GED and took a semester at Dempsy Community College—although nothing came of it, because the minute we were returned to her she had to go on public assistance. She couldn’t continue with her education or go find a job because she couldn’t afford a baby-sitter, and wouldn’t drop us off at our grandparents’ apartment because of her father.

“I mean, a few years later, two seconds after the bastard died, we moved right back in with my grandmother so my mom could finally look for a job, but it turned out she couldn’t really hack it, work, went through something like three gigs in six months, wound up on medication for depression, been battling that ever since, no wonder given her life, fighting diabetes too, a parting gift from my grandfather.

“The thing is, when we moved back into Hopewell to live with my grandmother? Nana was like my second parent. And after Nana died and my mother took over the apartment, and me and Reggie had kids? My mother’s Nelson’s second parent. Dante, David from Reggie—for them, she’s the sole parent. She embraces all the kids, never complains, never gets overwhelmed. Says it’s her second chance to get things right.

“And I say to her, ‘Mom, you did the best you could with us given the circumstances,’ but she just won’t hear it. Always says, ‘I fucked up with you.’ Gets all teary. ‘I fucked up.’ Won’t buy anything else in the store.

“And I’ll tell you one other thing she did for me, which is let me witness her life so I can say to myself, I will not have a life like that. I will be my own person, my own way, no apologies to anybody.”

“Huh,” Ray grunted; married to a dope dealer, in and out of living in that same apartment: he just could not understand how she didn’t see it, but was afraid to point it out to her, afraid of losing this woman lying in bed with him, even if she was here only for an interlude, even at the price of some kind of future beatdown or worse. Made diplomatic by desire, all he could say to relieve the pressure of his perceptions was “So your husband, he doesn’t, he never laid a hand on you, right?”

“If he had, it would be me in County right now, not him. And I’ll tell you something else. My mother, when she was a teenager, before she left and got married? She was wild, did everything there was to do. But once she got pregnant and learned what it’s like to live with a dealer? To see junkies around the clock? To have their addictions, their, their self-destructiveness to thank for putting the food on your table? She stopped cold. To this day, she doesn’t drug, she doesn’t, hasn’t had so much as a can of beer. However, she smokes like a bonfire, takes medication for depression, for diabetes, high blood pressure, insomnia, asthma . . . She’s a walking drugstore. Can’t go to sleep or get out of bed without a fistful of pills and, once again, unfortunately by negative example, I see her and say to myself, Unh-uh. No way. I don’t drink, smoke or take so much as an aspirin. Same for Nelson. I don’t know that much about Christian Science, I mean, if Nelson needed an operation or lifesaving antibiotics, yeah, of course, but otherwise our bodies are our temples and we keep them pure.”

Ray nodded approvingly, thinking, You live, with a drug dealer.

The light coming through the bedroom window abruptly changed, a flotilla of clouds drifting across the afternoon, and impulsively, using the flattening gloom as cover, he reached for the clean swoop above her hip, but oblivious to his too little, too late move, she simultaneously slid to the foot of the bed, got up and walked to the window, Ray craving and mourning, mourning and craving every inch of her; the flexed tendons at the backs of her knees, the soft inverted triangle of flesh at the base of her spine, her earlobe, throat, mouth, and when she stepped back into her jeans he experienced a sense of loss that just tore him apart.

It wasn’t love as love—he didn’t want to have a child or grow old with her—but as the combination of lust and sentiment hunkered down in him, the afternoon finally evoked a sensation that he could recognize: a long-lost misery-hunger from the time in his life when girls still got to him, when they had the power to put him in bed in the middle of the afternoon with the shades drawn so that he could be alone with his punch-drunk heart. Basically, she made him feel like he was back in Hopewell—sixteen, suffering and home.

“The thing about Freddy?” She turned to him as she pulled on her T-shirt. “Well, let me . . . My father and my grandfather? They just did what they did because that’s what they did. They didn’t, they weren’t what you would call reflective individuals. They were more like . . . See, there’s no animal on earth that ponders or analyzes their own actions. And that’s what they were, animals. But Freddy . . . Whenever Freddy pulls any kind of Freddy shit? He feels bad after, he feels remorse, he’ll talk about it, for whatever that’s worth, which as I hear myself right now, is not much . . . But the fact is, he’s thirty-three, and he’s getting to the point of no return. He’s got to start doing some serious soul searching or he’s going to wind up being who he is for the rest of his life.”

Half-listening, nodding like a bobble-head doll in response to whatever, Ray slowly sat up and began to look around the room for his pants.

The thing to do here, he knew, was to end it. To be running with this woman right now was the equivalent of willfully standing on train tracks, the train out of sight so far, but the rails beneath his feet beginning to vibrate like mad.

On the other hand, Ray thought—for boys at least, nobody went through life without getting a little bloody now and then; he’d been unnaturally lucky on that score so far. But given that as more or less an inescapable, maybe the best he could hope for was to at least choose the time and circumstance.

“What’s wrong,” she asked, cocking her head.

“What?” Ray said, startled and vaguely embarrassed. “Nothing.”

“You look like you just lost your best friend in the entire world,” she said with benign amusement, reading him like a billboard as she unsnapped the top button of her jeans again.

Part II

Blue Dempsy

Chapter 19

Home—February 23

Four days after his last surgical procedure, Ray, wearing a Dempsy PD Crime Scene Unit baseball cap supplied by Nerese to cover his shaved and resutured scalp, shakily emerged from the passenger side of her sedan, and with thick tentative fingers began fishing in his pockets for his keys.

He had escaped any serious residual damage from the assault but sustained some minor, short-term impairment—his right hand tended to curl up until his fingertips were touching the inside of his wrist, his right-foot to land inward, the heel not quite touching the ground—and she had pulled up directly in front of his apartment to minimize the distance he had to cover.

Nerese had to believe the doctors wouldn’t have released him if they felt he was still in any kind of medical jeopardy. But she knew that head injuries like Ray’s tended to revisit—if he started experiencing headaches or became faint, it might signal a new bleed, a buildup of fluid. If his right-side extremities became any floppier, it meant that rebleed was compressing nerve tissue; if he passed out, if he developed a fever, if this, if that . . . All of which had to be interpreted through the usual shakiness, soreness and knock-knee characteristic of any ambulatory post-op reacquainting himself with the outside world.

Once he was free of the car—Nerese had to lean across again and reshut the passenger door after his weak shove—she drove the hundred yards or so to the nearest Little Venice parking lot, then walked back, not all that surprised to see Ray still outside the building waiting for her, the key in the lock unturned. Not many assault victims were too keen on revisiting the scene of the crime for the first time without some company.

Following him into his apartment, she wound up stepping on his heels when he froze at the sight of the EMS debris that littered the floor tiles closest to the door.

“Shit,” he whispered.

She sidled past him into the living room, Ray stuck in the doorway, glaring at the discarded rubber gloves, torn gauze wrappers and needle-sharp shards of vase.

“That’s the one thing I hate about paramedics,” she said, gazing out at the river. “When they come and save your life? They never tidy up after themselves.”

She had left the bloody scatter as she’d found it two weeks ago, wanting him to see it first thing over the threshold.

Without a word, Ray moved off toward the rear of the apartment, came shuffling back with a small trash basket, a plastic bristle brush, a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of Tilex.

She made no move to help, just stood there leaning against the windowsill as he eased himself down and went to work.

He looked furious, tight-lipped. Nerese intuited that for Ray, the act of getting on his knees and cleaning up his own browned blood was a symbolic gesture to mark his resolve to be done with it, for now and evermore. But she had been an observer of moments like this too many times to count, and as she watched him attempt to obliterate the evidence of his own mortality, she began to speculate when the terror of being back here would truly start to kick in.

With his impatience and anxiety allowing him to do at best a half-assed job on the floor, Ray struggled to his feet, his right hand hugging his side, and began working on the black fingerprint powder that stippled his front door.

“Don’t forget those,” Nerese said, breaking the implosive silence as she gestured to the set of greasy handprints flush against the wall about ten feet down from where the forensic team had called it a day.

“Those what.” Ray swiveled, squinting, searching, then finally picking up on them, oily and luminous in the sunlight.

“What’s—” he began, then, “Oh . . . ,” turning ashen with some kind of memory hit and, forgetting about his smudged door, he set to work on the hands, going at them with a haunted determination.

Nerese imagined Ray right now reexperiencing standing there up against that wall in frisk mode, alert yet helpless, waiting for it . . .

“Seconds seemed like hours, huh?”

“What?” Ray leaned into his work, half-listening.

“That guy must’ve had you up there like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre . . . Did he give you a little speech first about fucking with OPP? Or did he just go all home-run derby on you without a word.”

Ray turned to her. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No?”

“No,” he said, then, “No.”

Nerese pushed off from the radiator she had been perched on, walked over to the wall and, locating the remains of the prints, assumed the position, twisting her head to look at Ray over her shoulder. “Man, this had to be one of the worst moments of your life.”

At first, he seemed paralyzed, gawking at the re-creation with slack-jawed distress, but then he simply walked away. Soon after Nerese heard the sound of running water from behind the bathroom door, and envisioned him in there gripping the sides of the sink, too unmanned to even splash water on his face.

And when he finally returned to the living room a few minutes later, she was set up for him on the couch facing the TV: the mug shot of Freddy Martinez, and the framed photo of Ruby playing basketball that had a place of honor on one of the bookshelves, laid out side by side on the glass coffee table.

Ray staggered back on his heels. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Nah nah, I’m never going away on this one. Don’t you get that by now?” tapping a long artificial nail on the glass table.

“Tweetie.” Ray stood there—“Tweetie . . .”—then simply gave up, dropping onto the couch next to her, pinching the flesh at the inside corners of his eyes.

“You know he killed somebody, right?” nudging Freddy’s portrait.

“What?” Ray straightened up a little. “When?”

“Two years ago. In County. Stabbed some inmate in the heart with a shank made out of a sharpened toothbrush. Grand jury no-billed, said it was self-defense, but I heard rumors that it was business-related. Three-hundred-pound man, too.”

“Fuck,” Ray hissed, his left hand starfished over his chest.

“Do you know how physically hard it is to puncture a big man’s heart with a weapon like that? How determined you have to be?”

“
Stop.
”

“What,” Nerese said blandly.

“Just . . .” Ray fanned the air between them as if erasing words on a blackboard.

“In the hospital you said to me, ‘What if I had it coming.’”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“Trust me, I was right there.”

“Hey, I had a hole in my head.” Ray shrugged, but Nerese could tell he was good and freaked by what she had told him.

“Did you talk to him yet?” he asked with strained casualness.

“Who, Freddy? Unh-uh. I just got through with Carla. Next stop’s Danielle.”

“Danielle,” he repeated.

“She’s been ducking my calls for four days now, but I have my ways.”

Ray opened his mouth, thought better of it, looked away.

Nerese picked up the photo of Ruby and the black girl simultaneously levitating off the hardwood during tip-off.

“You see her yet?”

“I called her last night from the hospital. I told her to give me a week. I’ll be in better shape in a week. The poor kid feels things deep as a river. I don’t want to shake her up unduly.”

“She’s scared for you, you know.”

“Yeah, well, thanks to you.”

They sat in silence for a moment, Nerese thinking, Let him stew over Freddy, then just start to leave, abandon him to his secrets, see what that pulls out of him.

She got up and walked to the window. “I would think you could see the World Trade Center from here.”

“Not really,” his voice more fluid now with the change of subject. “It’s too far north. At night you can see the floodlights for the cranes; sometimes you get that dense wet-ash smell if the wind is right, but that’s it.”

She watched out of the corner of her eye as Ray furtively tried to wrestle his right hand free of its shrimp-head curl.

“So what was it like being a cop around here at that time?” he asked, his face a little wooden with the strain of his efforts.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” Nerese said, walking back and retaking her seat next to him on the sofa. “You tell me why you needed to pull seventy-three hundred dollars in cash out of the bank a few weeks back and I’ll tell you what it was like around here when all hell broke loose.”

“I’m not bullshitting you, Tweetie, there’s nothing there for you. Just drop it.”

“If it’s nothing, why don’t you just tell me what it was for, get me off your back?”

“Why? Because it’s my life.”

“All right.” She shrugged, letting the marlin run.

“You know, growing up, there was this kid a year or two older than me, Franklyn Brown,” Ray said, giving up on straightening out his hand. “Had cerebral palsy, a mild case I guess, it only affected one side of his body, but he used to walk around with his hand curled up. Left hand, I think, and, being the sweethearts that we were back then, me and all my friends, we used to call him Captain Hook.” Ray looked down at himself. “It’s almost enough to make you believe in karma.”

“So what are you going to do now, Ray?” Nerese asked, angling for another way in.

“Me?” palming his chest. “Eventually I’ll probably go back to LA and start over, but not now, not yet. No more cutting and running.”

“What do you mean, ‘cutting and running’?”

“I need to see things through. You can’t not see things through,” talking to himself now more than to her.

“What things.”

“I don’t know. Certain relationships. That class at the Hook. I want to pick up where I left off with those kids. That was a good thing for me to do.”

“What relationships.”

“Ruby. Others.” He scooped up Nerese’s two-card gambit and turned it facedown on the table.

“Others like who—Danielle?” Could he
be
that stupid?

“No. No way.”

“Then who. Salim? That kid Salim?”

Ray shrugged. “Mostly I’m thinking of that class.”

“That was two hours a week.”

“So I’ll do more. I just want to make a dent while I can. And I can as long as I have enough dough not to do anything for money. When the money runs out?” He gestured with his left hand to the framed Emmy nomination on the wall. “I can always go back to that. Some dopey show or other. TV writers, we’re like baseball managers, two minutes after you get canned by one team you get picked up by another, because there’s only so many of you floating around.”

Nerese was still hung up on “certain relationships,” but she sensed that to push further right now would shut him down.

“So you won the Emmy, huh?”

“Just nominated. You ever watch the show?”

“Not all the way.”

“More power to you,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket, uncapping a vial and popping two pills without water.

“What was that?”

“Vicodin.”

“For a headache?”

“Yeah.”

“You have a headache?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not supposed to have headaches.”

“Well, I do.”

“Then you need to go back to the hospital.”

“It’s not a headache. They put a hole in my head. It
hurts.
”

“And why are they giving you painkillers for it? That could mask symptoms.”

“She’s a doctor, too.”

“And it’s addictive.”

“And a counselor.”

“Popping Vicodin,” she said out loud to herself. “Ray, don’t you see what’s happening to—” she cut herself off; enough with the ragging.

She weighed getting up to leave, decided it was neither the time nor the right note.

“So tell me about the show,” she said.

“About
Brokedown
?”

“It’s about this inner-city high school,” making a circular unfurling gesture to get him going.

“Hang on.” He struggled to his feet, walked halfway to the window, then turned to face her, drawing himself up as if he were about to deliver a recitation. “OK. Right. Inner-city high school, the trials and tribulations, like, ‘Rashaad, you have every chance of getting that scholarship, why are you wearing gang colors?’

“‘Chlorine, you’re fifteen years old. You’re too
young
to have that baby.’

“‘I don’t
know
how that gun got in my locker, Mr. Johnson! It ain’t mine, I swear!’

“‘Chamique, you did
not
get that black eye from walking into a door, and I
will
be coming to your house tonight and find out what’s going on.’ ‘Please, please, Miss Rosenberg, don’t do that! I’m clumsy! That’s all, I’m clumsy!’

“You know, one from column A, one from column B. It’s on a teen-based network, eight p.m. drama following four half-hour black comedies, and you know, every episode has its pat little lesson about tolerance or the hard-knock life or whatever. And I’m at best a run-of-the-mill writer but writing for TV is more like learning how to dance a particular dance. You can have a little variety here and there, a little quirky move now and then, but basically it’s one, two, cha-cha-cha over and over, so hey, I can do that.” He shrugged. “I mean, there’s probably a few well-trained dolphins out there that can do that.”

He closed his eyes and expelled a lungful of air, Nerese sensing a deflecting performance coming up, designed to both keep her here and keep her away.

“Anyways, like . . .” His eyes popped open. “OK, for example, the show that I worked on that got the nomination? The plot, the thing, centers around this basketball hotshot, the kid is first-team all-ghetto, has like fifty college scouts at his house, cock of the walk, banging all the cheerleaders, all the Urkels are lining up to do his homework for him, everything’s all good and well, except, five days before graduation? His English teacher realizes that the kid never handed in his paper on
The Great Gatsby
.

“Now this teacher, Mr. Montone, he’s supposed to be this old-time hard-nose dinosaur from back in the day when the school was predominantly white—and even though a lot of teachers have looked the other way as far as this kid and class requirements went, this crusty old sports-hating sonofabitch refuses to give him any kind of grade for the year unless he coughs up a paper. Not only that, but he calculates that in order for it to be a passing grade? This paper has to be worth at least a B.”