Samaritan (35 page)

“Anyways, this Von Hundt grabs his own behind, shoots six feet in the air, wheels around.” Ray left out the explosive “Cocksucker!,” the first profanity he had ever heard from an adult. “He’s looking, looking, but my grandmother, now she’s staring straight ahead, no pin, and the guy goes into the ring.

“See, there was this type of wrestling fan back then called a Hatpin Mary, ladies who would do this type of thing, and man, I tell you, it scared the crap out of me, seeing her do that . . . Anyways, that match goes down, the next one’s announced, and coming down our aisle now, is this villain that I know
personally
my grandmother hated like the plague. Nature Boy Bobby Bragg. This Nature Boy, he had long platinum-blond hair all slicked back, and he wore a leopardskin kind of one-shoulder Tarzan outfit and he was
built.
”

“
Built,
” Dante mimed.

“So this Nature Boy starts down our aisle towards the ring, and the whole place is booing, cursing him out. And this guy, he’s just standing there like bathing in it, like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.’”

Dante hopped up and mimed what Ray was describing; puffing out his chest while bobbing his head, an imperious smirk on his mug and a beckoning challenge in the come-hither flex of his fingers. The little anarchist, Ray had to admit, a genius of body-talk.

Nelson turned to his cousin and clucked in annoyance, something protective of Ray in that.

“Anyways, Nature Boy, he’s still a way aways from us, but I see that my grandmother has got the pin out again and that she’s waiting. Me, she does that jabbing thing on this dude, I’m running like hell. But the crowd, they saw my grandmother stick Fritz Von Hundt and they want her to do it again. So as Nature Boy gets nearer to us, this chant starts up, ‘
Stick
’im,
stick
’im,
stick
’im . . .’

“And it’s
hot
in there, Nelson,” Ray momentarily catching his eye. “August hot. No ventilation, full house, people sweating like pigs, ‘
Stick
’im
stick
’im
stick
’im . . .’ And Nature Boy, he hears this, looks around, sees my grandmother with the pin in her hand, and what he does is, he comes right up to her seat and just stands over her in like this hands on hips, he-man pose, just stands in front of her,
daring
her to do it.

“And she is paralyzed. She cannot move. The crowd’s chanting, boiler-room heat, this blond god looking into her eyes and she, this poor overweight lonely lady, she just, she can’t move.

“You know what he does?”

“What,” Dante asked.

“He bends over, like, bows, takes my grandmother’s hand with the hatpin in it, says, ‘Ma-dame . . .’ and kisses it. Kisses the back of her hand. Then moves on down to the ring.

“And my grandmother? She just sat very very quietly for the rest of the evening.

“And for
years
after that, whenever we watched wrestling on the TV? No more yelling at the screen, no more rolling around the carpet. And every once in a while she’d say in this kind of drifty-dreamy voice, ‘I wonder how the Nature Boy is doing. He’s such a nice man.’”

“Ma-dame,” Dante said, eyes wandering. “I’m going back to the fountain.”

“Just stay for a minute,” Ray said.

Nelson stared at the table.

“Anyways, when I was eighteen? I had a big fight with her. I came back from college on Thanksgiving break and we got into an argument about I can’t even remember what . . . Politics, civil rights, I marched out of her house, slammed the door and never talked to her again. I mean, I would have, but two months later when I was back at school she had an embolism or a blood clot and died in her TV chair so I never got a chance. I never, I never talked to her again.”

“Ho
shit
!” Dante exploded, leaping from his seat and, bug-eyed with glee, pointing at Ray. “Nelson, look! Look! He’s
crying
!”

“Shut up!” Nelson hissed, grabbing for his cousin. “Just shut the fuck up!”

Undeterred, Dante twirled out of reach.

“Ray! Ray! You know what Nelson said last night?” His voice now a sinuous taunt. “Nelson said he
luh-ves
you.”

“What?” Nelson said, a stunned exhalation, more breath than voice.

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” Dante sang triumphantly, hopping from foot to foot.

“What’s wrong with you,” Ray said as mildly as he could. “Don’t tease people like that.”

But Dante was already in the wind, halfway back to the money fountain, his steps as light and splashy as the sounds that drew him.

Disoriented by Dante’s exposé, Nelson’s sudden pallor, Ray picked up
Pet Sematary
off the table and made a big show of reading the back cover copy.

“Your cousin’s a little shit. You know that, right?” Ray said conspiratorially to Nelson without raising his eyes from the book. But he might was well have been talking to the salad on his plate: the kid, still abuzz with mortification, had simply turned to stone.

Later that day, a few hours after Danielle, tense and distracted, had come back to his apartment and collected the boys, the ringing of the phone pulled Ray out of the shower.

At first, given the operator’s brisk yet lifeless greeting, he took her for a telemarketer, but in fact, it was a collect call from Frederick Martinez at the Dempsy County Correctional Center.

Ray stood there, the receiver cradling his jawbone as he numbly pondered accepting the charges.

“Sir?” the operator said.

He could hear Freddy breathing in the wings.

“What?” Ray said, then, “Yes.”

The two men breathed at each other for a long moment, Ray going into some kind of cerebral free fall, the smallish kitchen that enveloped him beginning to wobble and shine.

“Do you know who I am?” Freddy finally said, his voice sober, measured, but with a slight tremor.

“Do what?” Ray said, then, “Yes. Yes I do.”

“Do you know why I’m calling you?”

Ray wanted to say “Yes,” then “No,” settled on, “I’m not really sure.”

Freddy retreated into that tense breathing again, Ray hearing in the background a cacophony of bellows and shouts, the sound of perpetually wired men in an acoustically uncushioned environment.

“I’m getting out of here the day after tomorrow,” Freddy finally said. “And as of this moment? I would very much like to resume my life with no outside complications.”

“OK.”

“I have no intention of ever having to come back to a place like this.”

“Great,” Ray said automatically.

“On the other hand.” Freddy paused as if winded, Ray thinking, He’s scared. He’s fucking scared. Of
me.
“On the other hand, if a situation recommends itself? Then whatever has to happen
will
happen, irregardless of the consequences to me or anybody else.”

The silence came down again, save for the brutal aviary in back of Freddy, Ray transfixed by the shimmering steel base of his dead mother’s blender, the thing levitating a little; hovering above the counter.

“Do you understand why I’m telling you this?”

Ray stalled, a pulse of pride trying to muscle its way through the fear.

“Yes?” Freddy softly pressed.

“I think so,” Ray said.

“I think you do too. Thank you for accepting my call.”

But before he could hang up, Ray impulsively blurted, “I just want to say, you have a great kid.”

“Excuse me?” Freddy’s voice suddenly flat, devoid of all vibration.

“No, I’m just saying . . .” Ray fell silent.

And Freddy hung up.

Ray stood leaning into the kitchen wall, his head a bowl of sonic crackle as he numbly played and replayed, word for word, everything Freddy had said, backward, forward, then reenacted his own responses, assessing their tonal heft.

The thing about the phone call that frightened Ray the most was Freddy’s nervousness, his assumption that Ray was in possession of some kind of formidableness, physical or otherwise, that might have to be dealt with head-on; his impulsive compliment about Nelson a taunt, a challenge, a twist of the knife.

The dead weight of his own fear and humiliation perversely forced Ray to resist reaching out to Danielle until the evening, as if he could convince himself that he wasn’t really in a panic, and that he’d get around to breaking it off with her when he got around to it; but when he did finally put through a call to Carla’s apartment, only to hear the preliminary white noise of an answering machine kicking in, he hung up and then began redialing. He called every ten minutes for hours until Danielle finally picked up.

“He
called
you?” she said in a tone of aggressive disbelief, Ray unable to tell whether she was joyous or outraged. “What did he say?”

“It doesn’t make a difference what he said. The news is that you and I are over.”

“He fucking
called
you?” Danielle not hearing him.

“Look . . .”

“I don’t believe it,” she said, more to herself than to Ray, then: “Stay right there.”

Thirty minutes later, preceded by a storm cloud of vanilla musk, Danielle marched into his apartment.

“OK, here’s the deal” was all Ray could get out before she peeled herself down to two strips of lace riding high over her hips and converging minutely between her legs.

“Whoa.” Ray stepped back, his heart lurching in his chest, but grabbing his jeans by the belt buckle she pulled him out fully sprung, turned her face to the wall and put him in her ass, Ray just going along for the ride, feeling the slick cool lubricant already in place.

Thinking, Dead Man Anyhow, he gave it his all, pushing himself into the unfamiliar tightness. And as soon as he became self-motivated she unhanded him, slamming both of her palms flat to the wall now for traction as she thrust herself backward into his rhythm.

In a trance of ecstatic panic Ray ground it in there, slow and deliberate, the flat of his belly lifting her buttocks until, going up on her toes and locking her body into an outward thrust, she went off on trembling legs, babbling to herself in a low voice as she came, Ray helplessly going off right after her.

They stood there for a moment, matted belly to butt, Danielle’s face pressed into the wall, her visible eye unblinking and already distant.

Popping out of her still erect, his belly and legs beaded with sweat and lubricant, Ray searched for the words. “Danielle . . .”

“Hey, no, I understand,” she said, bunching up her thong in her fist and wiping herself clean of him.

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 platters, 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
low
life 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.”