Samaritan (26 page)

“And she’s so freaked, and everybody around us just freezes and the tears are just running and she’s just about doubled over. ‘Daddy!
Please
!’ And she
flings
away the ear studs I made her buy, and
throws
away the teen magazine and people just won’t stop staring and her eyes are like . . . she can barely open them and I just . . . I just grab her. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ve never been so miserable. I’m just holding onto her until she stops crying, and the people are like, ‘What’s he doing to her, get security, get a cop,’ and I’m like, ‘Ssh ssh ssh,’ rocking her,
I’m
crying,
she’s
crying, holding her, holding her until she starts calming down and I’m, ‘Ruby, I’m so sorry,’ she’s, ‘I don’t
want
anything, Daddy, please, please.’ And finally she gets a grip, steps away a little, embarrassed in front of all the people, and I’m, ‘Sweetie, screw it, let’s just leave the shit where you threw it,’ and then I make a big show of tossing away the belly-button rings and I’m, ‘Hey, you want to go see a movie? They have a whole multiplex on the top floor. How about it.’ And she says, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Her eyes were almost swollen shut from crying and from jet lag—I never even factored that in—although, well, fuck the jet lag. In any event, we start heading to the escalators and now that she’s kind of blown it out, aired her misery, my first instinct, in order to cheer her up is, of course, to
buy
her something . . . Which I don’t, but as we pass one of the belly-button rings on the floor, I see her kind of checking it out from the corner of her eye, so I took a chance, just picked it up, put it in my pocket, and we went to the movies.

“And for the rest of the day we had a good time. Saw the movie, went back to the hotel, ordered room service, watched TV, and when it got dark we walked down to the Santa Monica Pier where they have this half-assed amusement park set up.

“We check that out for a bit, then we walk back to the hotel along the beach, the only time she likes the beach is at night, go upstairs, watch another video selection, halfway through which she just conks out. I mean it was one hell of a day, but I’m thinking in its own way it turned out OK. Ruby got to blow some stuff out, I might or might not have gotten some insight into myself but we both hung in, went to bed reasonably happy. I mean I couldn’t even remember the pitch session I had had that morning that, you know, set everything in motion. I mean that Burbank sit-down seemed like a year ago, the day was so intense. And right before I rack out myself, I slip the new belly-button ring in the secret stash compartment of her overnight bag and then I’m out like a light, day is done, OK? Three o’clock in the morning I get woken up, Ruby’s having a nightmare and she’s screaming her head off, sitting up in bed, half in, half out of it, just shrieking. I wake her up, ‘Ruby Ruby Ruby,’ she comes to . . . You know what her nightmare was? She dreamt that we were walking around Hopewell, me and her, and I was showing her all the secret places where jewels were hidden, except that every time I opened my mouth to speak to her, blood spurted out. No words, just blood, and she was desperately trying to shut me up so that no more blood would come out and I wouldn’t bleed to death, but I just kept flapping my lips, walking and spurting blood. Nice, huh?

“So we come back to New York. The TV thing never happens, of course, and I just stop writing. But, because I’m kind of at square one again? Man, I start thinking about cocaine, having incredibly realistic cocaine dreams. I never actually
do
the cocaine in the dreams, it’s more about scoring it, figuring where I can hole up with it. But I never get around to doing it. And I know I never will in real life, either. I just won’t.

“And since then I’m trying real hard with Ruby, you know, just to be a little more relaxed. I’d like to think I’m better with her these days but probably not. And, like I told you, I volunteered to teach that class at Paulus Hook because I have to do something, everybody’s got to do something so it might as well be the
right
thing. You know, as in fight the good fight . . .

“I mean, half the time I’m teaching there I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, or
why
I’m doing it, but I get some good hits off it, click with some of the kids, you know, see them open up a little, reach for things that they normally wouldn’t have any inclination to reach for, and that kind of feeds me for now. I mean, like I said, anytime I want I can go to LA, get back in the saddle on some dopey show or other, but . . .” Ray went off somewhere, came back. “I’ll tell you Tweetie, do you know what I’m really doing these days? I’m waiting . . .

“Some days, I feel this, this
thing,
this great, thing inside me, I can’t . . . It’s like a welling sensation. How can I . . .

“OK. For example. Back in that mall in LA? After me and Ruby go to the multiplex we go down to the food court, get a table. Ruby had this homework assignment for English. She had to write, just sit somewheres and write about the life around her, mankind or whatever.

“So, we’re sitting there, she’s pretty much OK by now, still had that splotch-mask a little from crying, but she’s settling into it and I’m watching her, her posture, her repose. She’s got these long arms and she’s got her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, very, she’s elegant, everything’s so,
long
on her, you know, arms, fingers, neck, and I just watch her settle into this rhythm of jotting stuff in her journal, stops, looks around, focuses on this or that person, kind of holds them in her gaze then drops her eyes to the page, jots a little, looks up, observes . . . It’s like I’m watching her mind work—writing, looking, writing, and all of a sudden I get hit with this feeling, and I can never nail it, what it is, but it’s regarding something I’m about to
become
or
do,
I don’t know which, but it feels gigantic, and at the same time it feels very very fragile, and when it comes down on me I always wind up getting teary because, because there’s a
goodness
in it, this thing, like, a passing on to others, from me to them, so like I’m both the source and the receiver of something. But I can’t, I can’t really describe or articulate . . .” Ray’s voice finally trailed off.

“Maybe it’s just feeling good about being with your daughter,” Nerese said, carefully. “You know, a nice quiet moment together. Maybe it’s just that.”

“Yeah, well, no, there’s that, of course . . .” Ray laughed it off but she could sense his embarrassment. “So what’s your deal. Come on. How the hell did you become police . . .”

Now that he had come to the end of his string of stories, she could sense the fear coming back on him, hear it in his voice.

“I don’t think so, Ray.” The world outside had fallen into the tail end of twilight, and Nerese, getting back with the program, finally struggled to her feet.

“Jesus.” He started pacing again. “So you’re just going to leave?”

“Hey, give me what I want and I’ll camp out on your couch all night,” Nerese offering that rather than an exchange of autobiographies; something indefinable in the texture of his history—the racial stuff wasn’t it—made her want to safeguard the details of her own transformation from disaffected kid to police officer for at least another conversation or two. Or possibly indefinitely.

“Going once,” she said, gathering her things. “Going twice . . .”

“No. OK. You just don’t . . .” Then, “Fine.” And once again she lost him, the fear of coming forward on this and finally giving up Freddy’s name apparently still greater than the fear of being left alone with the hovering smell of his own blood.

If fear, in fact, was the operative emotion here.

“Take care now,” she said.

“Hey, before you go. How’s your guy doing?” Ray grabbing at straws.

“My guy?” Nerese was thrown. “I don’t
have
a guy.”

“I meant your son.”

“Darren? Darren’s good,” she said quickly, to be done with it.

“I thought he was going to come see me or call me about colleges.”

“He didn’t call you yet?” She froze in a posture of astonishment. “Man, I have been on his case to reach out to you for a solid week now.” A straight-out lie.

In addition to her usual ban on bringing Darren into work conversations, she discovered that the same elusive instinct that made her balk at telling Ray her own life story inclined her to keep her son out of his orbit too, ban or no ban, and that this protective wariness about Ray would probably hold sway even if the circumstances were purely social.

“All right, let me go home and have a conversation with his ass,” Nerese said, once again turning for the door.

“Tweetie.” Ray stood there in the middle of the room, his right hand curled into itself, a deer hoof. “No. OK. No. If you have to go, you have to go.”

Nerese made it to the door and, despite everything, faltered, not having the heart to just walk out on him like this without giving him something.

“Do you remember a Hopewell guy, Tommy Potenza?”

“Potenza?” Ray shrugged. “Not . . . No.”

“Well, he remembers you and he wanted me to ask you if you were game for hooking up with him. I took the liberty of saying you were.”

Ray shrugged, then said almost shyly, “Whatever. Sure.”

“Good. I’ll set it up,” reaching for the door again but then still feeling guilty. “Actually, you know what? Give me your phone. I’ll call him right now.”

Ray stepped to the portable sitting on the end table among the surviving vases, but found only the base there. He spent a moment scanning the room for the receiver, then pressed the locator button. The high-pitched beeps came from under the dining table nearly twenty feet away, and he had to get down on all fours to retrieve it.

“Battery’s dead,” he said from his knees.

“What’s it doing under the table?”

“I don’t know.” He said, looking off.

“Battery’s dead. So it must’ve been laying there since . . .”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, cutting her off, suddenly as eager to see her leave as he had been for her to stay, and by the time Nerese had made it to the street, she had already contracted Bobby Sugar to lift Ray’s phone records, incoming and outgoing, for the last month, up to and including the day of the assault.

Although it was only seven in the evening, as she walked to the parking lot Nerese was enveloped by the stillness of the place, the sound of her own footsteps seemingly louder than they should be, until a solitary figure stepped into a cone of streetlight from out of the darkness, heading toward her, Nerese’s right hand instinctively dropping to thumb-graze her sidearm.

“Hey, how you doin’.” Salim El-Amin, smoking a cigarette and sporting a backpack, casually raised a hand in greeting, then just kept trucking past her toward Ray’s building.

“Hang on,” Nerese called after him, Salim wheeling to face her. “You going to see Ray?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” He stepped on his cigarette butt.

“Where you coming from?”

“Out there,” pointing to the unbroken darkness, the lights of downtown Dempsy and the Gothic spires of the hospital center.

“Out there
where.
” Nerese squinted at him. “How’d you get here?”

“I took the bus to the front gate then I walked,” Salim said, looking antsy now.

“The guard just let you in?”

“I din’t see no guard.” He pulled a loose Newport from his jacket and fired up as if settling in for a long interrogation.

“Is Ray expecting you?” Nerese asked.

“Me?” He touched his own chest. “Not like,
expecting
expecting. I tried to call, but nobody answered so I thought I’d just, you know . . .”

“What.” Nerese cocked her head.

“See how he’s doing.”

“Nobody answers the phone, so that’s a sign to you he’s home?”

“I don’t know.” Salim briskly rubbed his temples. “I thought maybe the phone’s broke.”

“What time did you try to call?”

“A hour ago?” Looking away.

“I was up there an hour ago. The phone never rang.”

“Yeah well, see? That’s what I’m saying.” He shuffled in place. “Maybe it’s broke.”

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t; Nerese not knowing if the other extensions in the apartment were affected by the dead portable under the dining table, but she said nothing, letting a silence come down between them, an awkward half-grin on Salim’s face the only sign of resistance to her overwhelming authority in this and in all future encounters.

“Well, Ray’s sleeping now,” she finally said.

“OK.” Salim still not looking at her.

“Anything
I
can help you with?”

“Not, not really.” He stepped on the second cigarette, Nerese for a fleeting beat thinking the kid was actually going to take her up on her offer.

“Where do you live?”

“On Tonawanda? I don’t live there per se, it’s my mother’s apartment but I’m staying there at the moment, allegedly with my fiancée, until I can get myself fully composed.”

“I’ll give you a ride home,” she said.

“Nah, that’s OK. I’ll take the bus.” Salim was finally on the move, backstepping in the direction of the gate, half a mile down the road.

“I’ll drive you to the bus.” Nerese was on the move too, now.

“Nah. I like walking around here. It’s peaceful, you know what I’m saying?” Salim called back to her as, slim as a blade, he passed through the solitary cone of streetlight again. “But thank you for your consideration.”

Chapter 20

Salim—January 26

In the midst of a pallidly sunny winter afternoon, Salim entered Ray’s apartment lugging a yard-square portfolio with one hand and gently pushing his son ahead of him with the other. The boy, maybe three years old, had luminous gray eyes and wore his hair in tightly braided furrows that were pinned straight back on his scalp like ram horns.

“How you doin’, Ray!” Salim sounded downright joyous. “This is my son, Omar.”

“He’s so . . . 
Look
at this guy,” Ray said with a forced cheeriness, feeling awkward, watching the kid as if he were being watched himself.

Omar was dressed head to toe in denim: jeans, jacket, flop hat and tiny backpack.

“Can you say hello, Boo Boo?” Salim spoke loudly and slowly as if the boy were in shock.

“Hel-lo,” Omar said in a surprisingly deep singsong, then made a beeline for the television, gluing his body spread-eagle to the bottom of the wide screen like a press-on Garfield.

“No TV, Boo Boo.”

“Hel-lo,” the kid said again, shrugged, tossing his head from shoulder to shoulder as if working out neck kinks, and marched out of the room.

“He’s a pisser,” Ray said.

“Yeah, uh-huh. His name is Omar but I call him Boo Boo.”

Being able to present his son like this, to display his boy in all his effortless three-year-old glory, seemed to put Salim in a state of near euphoria; and Ray loved him for that.

“Boo Boo!” Salim called after him. “Come here, Boo Boo!”

The kid marched back into the room.

“Count to fifteen, Boo Boo.”

Omar just stared at his father with those cat’s eyes.

“C’mon, Boo Boo,
one
 . . .”

“One . . .” the kid said.

“Two . . .” Salim said.

“Two . . .” Staring at his father.

“Three . . .”

“Three . . .” Staring, waiting.

“See, he usually just does this on his own. He might be shy today.”

“No, he’s great.”

Salim, despite his hyper-pride, didn’t seem overly anxious about his son’s performance; this impressed Ray no end.

“Can I get him something?”

“Boo Boo, you want some juice?” Salim near shouting again.

The kid made a blur of his hand, rejecting the offer.

“Do you want anything?” Ray asked.

“Nah, I’m good.” Salim touched his gut. “Here.” He untied the black carrying case, revealing maybe a dozen drawings in there, then finger-walked the edges until he found the one he was looking for.

“Yeah, here.” He handed it over to Ray. “This is for your daughter.”

It was a seventies stylized odalisque, a long, curvy black woman lying on her side in a leopardskin string bikini. She had a high Kathleen Cleaver Afro and heavy-lidded, almost Asian eyes, like a calendar girl for a malt liquor distributor.

Ray knew he was being buttered up for something but he was touched nonetheless.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, striving for a tone of awe.

“Yeah,” Salim said. “That money you gave me? I gave five hundred to my fiancée, you know, for future house contributions? Took three fifty and opened a checking account, took the rest and went and bought art supplies over in New York. Like here . . .” He squatted alongside his portfolio and started laying out his sketches on the black-and-white tiled floor. Half of them were studies of Bambi-eyed ragamuffins brandishing automatic weapons—a marriage of Japanese animé and Keane orphan; the others were portraits of Deco-style black men, street people angularized almost to pure geometry, every one of them either on his knees and in chains, or with arms outspread crucifixion style.

“Beautiful,” Ray said again.

“Yeah,” Salim purred. “You really got me going again with my art. You saved my life the other day.”

“Why are all these kids packin’?” Ray asked, to deflect the flattery.

“Yeah, OK. The reason they all got guns? It ain’t to rob nobody or hurt nobody. It’s for protection, you know, protecting what’s theirs because that’s the way it is.”

Omar stepped on one of his father’s drawings. “Take care, Boo Boo,” Salim said gently, pushing his son backward off the matting. “OK, but now here’s the one I really want you to see.”

Salim singled out another ghetto waif with a Glock-19. The kid, sporting comically oversize hand-me-downs and a sideways baseball cap, was pointing his hand-cannon at the viewer, squinting one-eyed to draw a bead, the tip of his tongue peeking out in concentration.

“What’s Mine Is Mine” ran in bold letters beneath his sneakered feet.

“It’s strong,” Ray said.

“Yeah. That’s what I think, too. It’s gonna be my new logo.”

“Logo for what?”

“Yeah, OK. This is what I want to talk to you about.”

“OK,” Ray said, thinking, Shit . . . 

“I got a business proposition for you. See, the other day, like I said, you really got me going about my future, and look . . .” Salim produced the slim catalogue of a sportswear wholesaler; page after page of item codes and order forms, Ray’s eyes getting heavier than lead.

“OK, this here?” Salim touched his new logo. “It’s gonna cost me seventy-five dollars to make a silk screen, OK? Now I can handle that off my savings. But here . . .” He ran a finger down one of the stock lists. “I can get me a dozen T-shirts white or black for like twenty-five dollars, OK? I order say, fifty dozen? That’s fifty times twenty-five is like twelve hundred and fifty dollars, or a hundred dozen, that’s . . .”

Salim extracted a slip from his jeans pocket; Ray saying, “Twenty-five hundred.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. Now. Those hundred dozen I just bought? I take them to this printer with my silk-screen? That’s like four dollars a shirt for the ‘What’s Mine Is Mine’ logo to go on, OK? So that’s like four times twelve hundred shirts is forty-eight hundred dollars plus the twenty-five hundred dollars for the shirts themselves is like a seventy-three-hundred-dollar investment, breaks down to a little over six dollars per shirt except for I am
selling
these shirts for fifteen dollars each, which is like a nine-dollar profit or a ten-thousand-seven-hundred-dollar profit on the whole thing minus five hundred for a vendor’s license which is still over ten Bigs free and clear, no overhead, no store rent, no nothing, just me and a folding table right on the street, or hey, I don’t even
need
a folding table, I’ll sell ’em on the hoof straight out the backpack ’cause I love to walk and I ain’t
never
been afraid to meet the people. I’m telling you, Ray, Mr. Mitchell, I’ll be paying you back in like three weeks, reinvest the rest in more shirts and I’m off to the races.”

“Seventy-three hundred . . . Jesus, Salim.”

“OK, OK . . .” Salim grinned, prepared for this. “See, you talk about John Shaker, how he’s a prominent television personality now and that’s great because he never took his eye off the prize and he got what’s his . . . But like, that’s just inspiration for
me
because I
know
what it took to be a focused individual in that school, how hard that was back then. See, W.E.B. Du Bois in
The Souls of Black Folk,
he called it the crab-cage effect, how if one crab starts trying to climb out of the bucket the others by reflex pull him down, but Shaker got out irregardless and more power to him but see, I’m in that same crab bucket still and you know, back then I didn’t even know enough to try to climb out. I mean, back then I was all about the street, being a kingpin on the street, and we all know where
that
leads, right? And that day you took me to the advertising agency? And then I was supposed to go right away to the art school and I didn’t? You was trying to hoist me out of the bucket but I was too naive to know that, my vision was too limited to see that, and I blew it. I disappointed you, I disappointed myself . . . But whatever has been done to me since then . . . I got shot,” showing Ray a starred scar on his shoulder, “stabbed,” raising his shirt to reveal a whitish keloid on his rib cage, “got incarcerated three times,
two
times for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing more, been in the joint like, six years altogether but here I am, you know what I’m saying? I’m still here, I don’t eat meat, I don’t drink, I don’t use profanity, I read everything I can get my hands on, I’m observing the, the
tenets
of my religion, get up five o’clock every morning to perform my prayers. I got my son, my health, and now,
right
now I’m finally about crawling up and out of that crab bucket and yeah, seventy-three hundred dollars is a lot of cheese, and there may be a few other people I can try and touch for it like my mother, who frankly has been in contempt for me since the day I was born or one or two others that in terms of my legal and spiritual well-being I don’t even want to associate with no more let alone be in
debt
to, but I’m coming to
you
for it, because ever since I blew off the art school thing? I need for you to be proud of me. I need for you to see your faith in me was not unabated.”

Salim delivered all this while balanced on his hams, surrounded by his artwork in the middle of the floor, Ray uncomfortably standing over him, remembering one of his mother’s favorite sayings: On your back can be a very effective fighting position.

“Are we talking fifty dozen or a hundred,” Ray dropping to one knee in order to achieve psychic balance. “Because you started out talking fifty.”

“I’ll leave that up to you.”

“Because fifty dozen is half that amount.”

“No, I hear you.”

Omar had found a pen and squatting splay-footed started scribbling lines across one of his father’s drawings, long flattened interconnected Z’s, like the polygraph readout of a liar.

“Watch it, honey,” Ray said, then repeated to himself, Honey.

But Salim simply turned the drawing over, tapped the blank back and said in that overloud voice, “Draw a picture for Ray, Boo Boo. Draw.”

“Jaw,” the kid said, once again delicately squatting, and continued his back-and-forth lines.

“Make a face, Boo Boo.”

As Ray crouched there, squirming over Salim’s pitch, Omar drew two wobbly circles inside a larger circle, like two eggs in a frying pan.

“See, all this I’m talking about with you?” Salim bounced to take the burn out of his knees. “I mean it’s for me, yeah sure, but mainly it’s for my son, you know what I’m saying? I mean, I’m not gonna be one of these no-show fathers. I’m determined on that.”

“No, I hear you,” Ray said faintly.

“OK, then,” Salim said, then, gingerly duck-walking toward Ray, embraced him in a light hug, Ray staring at Omar over his father’s shoulder, the boy untroubled, one eye shut in a luxuriously feline yawn; Ray thinking, Fifty dozen and be done with it.

Both men rose to their feet, Ray self-consciously brushing the knees of his jeans.

“Hey, Mr. Mitchell?” Salim began, his voice suddenly awkward. “Can I ask your advice on something?”

And with that simple vague pre-request, something in the tone of it, the genuine tentativeness of it, Ray completely melted, suddenly found himself more at Salim’s disposal than he had been at any other point in this visit.

“I have got to tell you, I’m like almost thirty years old, right? And you won’t find many African-American men admitting to this, but I don’t understand jack about women, I really don’t.”

“I’m divorced myself,” Ray said easily, this flip self-effacement masking an eagerness to successfully field whatever was coming his way.

“See, my fiancée, Michelle, right? She works in Jersey City, is like the receptionist for this stockbrokerage company on Exchange Place? Started out as a office temp after Omar was born, they liked her so much they gave her the job full-time, OK? And she brings home three hundred and ninety-two dollars at the end of the week and I told you how she had me on this allowance, was breaking my back about me not being able to contribute to Omar’s upbringing, the house maintenance and everything else, right? OK. So. The other day I come in with the five hundred of the money you gave me to finally pitch in, there you go, right?”

Ray knew exactly what was coming now, and almost physically flexed for it.

“So I give her the cash, right? She’s like, ‘Why’d that guy give you this money. What’s he want you to do for it. What are you into,’ all bitching me out. And I’m, ‘What the hell, ’Chelle, you always complaining about me not holding up my end around here, coming through around here, the man’s my old teacher, has been trying to get me to believe in myself since the dinosaur days, what is your
problem
?’ And Ray”—Salim reached out, touched the back of his hand—“when I was in jail? She’d come every week to visit. Always had a smile on her face, always brought the baby, food, cigarettes, books. Whatever I asked for, and she never missed a visiting day. And you know, just because I wasn’t bringing in money, that didn’t mean I wasn’t partaking in the house, you know what I’m saying? When I first met her, she had a alcohol problem. Nineteen years old with a alcohol problem. Pint bottles of Hennessey in the hamper, under the bed, behind the couch, and I helped her clean up. I was like a bombardment of positivism. I went to meetings with her and everything. I couldn’t bring her into my religion, she’s still Christian, but she ain’t had a drink for five years.
I
did that.
Me.
But now here’s the thing . . . I’m
free.
I’m on the brink of making it all happen for myself, for
us,
I ain’t
never
been in better shape physically, mentally, spiritually, I walk in the door for the first time in
years
with money for the table?” He reached out and touched Ray again. “Mr. Mitchell. She won’t
talk
to me, be in
bed
with me, look me in the eye . . . What’s it
about.
”

“Look, Salim,” Ray began, almost incandescent with goodwill. “Now that you’re finally out, she’s probably having a delayed reaction to your going in to begin with. That being said, and I’m just speculating here, so don’t . . . But there are some people, they piss and moan about having to carry you, about how everything’s always on them, blah blah blah. But what they get in exchange for that is total control over you. And, I don’t know your fiancée, but for a lot of people, being on top like that is well worth the carrying charge, do you understand what I’m saying?”