Samaritan (28 page)

“For now.”

“That was worth turning my life upside-down with two million phone calls?”

“Yup.” Nerese now having a foot in the door, an interview with the kid plus an orally documented record of events which would invariably be contradicted by both Nelson and Freddy—these things rarely matched up in the retelling—and each contradiction to come was an excuse to open the door wider and wider.

Nerese weighed asking Danielle if she could speak to Nelson tonight, right now, before she changed her mind about offering up her son like that.

“So how’s Ray doing?” Danielle asked, rearranging the contents of her book bag.

“You go see him in the hospital?”

“Not really.”

“Did you call him?”

“What are you, my mother?” Danielle snapped, but Nerese could tell she was embarrassed.

“Why not?”

“Why not?” Danielle stopped moving. “You got to be kidding, right?”

“Do you think I could talk to your son tonight?”

“Nelson?” sizing Nerese up. “Tonight’s not good.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s sick again.”

“Really. With what?”

“Not walking pneumonia. Walking something though. It’s been dragging on like forever.”

The waitress placed the check and two foil-wrapped mint balls on the table.

“Well, you know, the sooner I can speak to him, the sooner . . .”

“Give him a day or two to get back on his feet. You have a card or something?” Danielle put out her hand, Nerese trying to read a stonewall in any of this, didn’t think so. Besides, at this point if she sensed any further ducking on the part of Freddy or his family, she’d just have his PO threaten him with a revocation of parole, the POs often able to swing a heavier hammer than any cop.

“I’d very much like to talk to your son by tomorrow night,” she said, handing over her card.

“I’m in school to around eight tomorrow.”

“You want to make it nine, then?”

Danielle hesitated. “Sure.”

“Good.” Nerese laid out $8.50 on a $7.75 tab, then reluctantly added another fifty cents.

“So how’s Ray doing?” Danielle asked again, hauling the strap of her book bag over her shoulder but waiting for a response before rising to her feet.

“You know. Shaky. Better,” Nerese opting to downplay what he’d been through, not wanting to spook her with the direness of his injuries, the direness of the criminal charges.

“He was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever been around,” Danielle said. “Very unselfish. I’d go over to his place with my son and a lot of the time I’d have to study and, he’s got a terrace there, it’s like heaven for me, and he’d never complain, just hang with Nelson, have a catch, tell him stories, sometimes I’d even bring my nephew. Ray never said Boo.”

“You’d bring your
son
with you?” There was no revelation here; Nerese had known of this almost from the beginning; nonetheless, hearing about it directly from the mother made it difficult to keep her voice judgment-free.

“We weren’t
doing
anything.” Danielle darkened. “Shit, what do you take me for?”

Chapter 22

Nelson—January 27

The day had the kind of unseasonable warmth that made people fret about the greenhouse effect, sixty-one degrees in the shade; and Ray had been waiting on his terrace for the better part of an hour before Danielle finally pulled up in her Bondo-daubed Vega. The weight of her schoolbag made her stagger as she swung the strap up onto her shoulder.

Her son, Nelson, cautiously emerged from the passenger side with the self-consciously physical jerkiness of a kid crossing an empty gym floor to ask a girl to dance.

She had said that she would be bringing him; Ray thought he was prepared for that, and he was, in terms of no sex, but he was surprised to find himself oddly excited by the kid’s presence, too, in a way that was unclear but left him feeling vaguely embarrassed.

At the door Danielle and Ray avoided any physical greeting; Ray wasn’t sure if it would have been any different if the kid wasn’t present, but that was OK, he told himself, really . . .

“Check it out.” He steered her across the living room to the cement terrace, where he had set up a work station: scratch pads, pens, pencils and a spool of roll-on correction tape.

“Oh my God, this is so nice of you,” she said in that high furry tone of gratitude that had first drawn him to her at Carla’s house.

“Knock yourself out,” he said, then turned to Nelson. “You have homework, too?”

“
No,
” Danielle said sharply, as if to a puppy, not in response to Ray’s question but to her son’s getting to know Ray’s TV. “You read your book.”

“I left it in the car,” he murmured.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” she squawked, pulling a slim tangerine PC from her backpack, all the little stationery touches he had laid out for her now charmingly archaic.

“What are you reading?” he asked the kid.

Nelson murmured something indistinct.

“What?”

“
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,
” mother and son said simultaneously.

“About the black family down south? Ruby just read that.”

“Well, I’m not going back downstairs to get it,” she said.

“I’ll go,” Ray offered.

“No. Let him go.” She lugged out a huge academic-press paperback,
Collective Violence: A Roundtable.
“Everything is half-cocked with this kid.”

Ray had had a faint impression of this before, and Danielle seemed to be confirming it now; she was one of those people who equate a chronic tone of low-key reproach, of constant verbal sternness, with being a responsible parent. On the other hand, she knew what her son was reading, which, by Ray’s lights, was no small thing.

“You go down and get your book, Nelson.”

“Actually, you know what?” Ray said. “I think I have Ruby’s copy in the bedroom. Come on.” He signaled for Nelson to follow.

Danielle returned to the balcony.

Ray closed the bedroom door behind them.

He had no intention of giving Nelson Ruby’s copy of
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry:
with Danielle doing homework and this kid with his nose in a book, what the hell was
he
supposed to do? Ray scanned the room for show-and-tell, something to delight and entertain. The cards. He never got a chance to show anybody the damn cards.

“Nelson, you like baseball?”

The kid shrugged.

“Me neither,” he said, opening the bottom drawer of his dresser and pulling out a couple of three-ring binders. “But this isn’t baseball. It’s baseball
cards.
”

Sitting at the foot of his bed with the binders in his lap, he patted the mattress in invitation and opened one of the fatter books to reveal his collection of ’55 and ’56 Topps, eight clear horizontal pockets to the page.

“Beautiful, right?” He passed a hand lightly across a sheet of ’55 Tigers, the head shots all set against a reddish background, the tint building gently from a dusty rose at the bottom of the card to a bloody sunset at the top, the Detroit players all gazing skyward, whatever they were looking at up there making their lips part in wonder.

“This guy here, Ferris Fain? You know what they called him? Burrhead.”

Ray had amassed these cards, Topps from 1952 to 1958, in the months immediately after he kicked cocaine. Newly flush with TV money and desperate for a relatively harmless surrogate obsession, he had settled on retrieving material fragments of his childhood—actually, pop artifacts from the years that preceded his childhood, for some reason—first the cards, then a few years’ worth of vintage
Mad
magazines and
Playboys
, then spin-off products from early sixties TV shows: lunch boxes, board games and figurines; then mambo and cha-cha LPs, the risqué comedy albums of Belle Barth and Rusty Warren, two hundred first-edition
Classics Illustrated
comic books and a thousand paper cocktail napkins embossed with a variety of semi-dirty jokes.

He found all of this fairly embarrassing, kept most of it hidden away and eventually sold it all off—all of it, that is, except the cards.

He had never been a baseball fan, but the cards were another story. As a kid he had been a helplessly compulsive collector, and the mere sight of them thirty-five years later, even those that were manufactured before he was born, still tugged at him: Warren Spahn’s goofy grin, Wally Moon’s massive beetle brow, Hoyt Wilhelm’s pear-shaped head, the Karloffian rings around Don Mossi’s eyes, the nicknames, the flattops, the jug-handle ears, the way Bobby Richardson stared off and Junior Gilliam up—at what? And all of it set against those vivid background colors: Halloween orange, emergency yellow, hot pink, royal blue, kelly green, arterial red, all of it, even now, right now, sitting here next to a twelve-year-old stranger, the albums open on his lap, each card was as immediately and viscerally tantalizing to him as a dissolving dream.

“You have to be a four-star moron to collect this stuff at my age, don’t you think?”

Nelson shrugged, his hands twisted in a figure eight between his knees.

“Thanks for saving my feelings. You wouldn’t believe the names some of these guys had.” Ray began flipping pages, juggling albums. “Cot Deal, Coot Veal, Hank Bauer, Hank Sauer, Memo Luna, Hobie, Smoky, Pumpsie, Choo Choo, Yatcha, Schoolboy, Noodles or these . . .” His fingers flying. “Alpha Brazle, Sibby Sisti, Dee Fondy, Whammy Douglas, Suitcase Harry Simpson, Vinegar Bend Mizell and this guy here, my favorite”—opening his slim book of ’53s, again to the Detroit Tigers—“Dizzy Trout. Man among fish.”

“Huh,” Nelson managed, arching his elbows inside out, his hands still entwined between his knees.

“How old are you again?”

“Twelve.”

“See this guy?” Ray flipped to Joe Nuxhall of the 1952 series Reds, his face a little out of focus against a brilliant butter-yellow background. “He pitched his first Major League game at the age of fifteen. Lasted two-thirds of one inning, gave up two hits and five walks, didn’t throw pro again for eight years, so stay in school, OK? I don’t care
how
many millions they want to give you. Promise me you’ll do that?”

“OK,” Nelson murmured, fighting down a grin.

“Then you’re even dopier than I thought.”

A shaft of sunlight came through the bedroom window, whiting out the furniture and flashing off the plastic sheets like cold fire. Nelson’s arms were entangled between his legs up to the biceps, blue veins bulging in the inverted crooks of his elbows.

“Enough with the prelims,” Ray said, rising to his feet and lightly whacking the kid on the side of his leg. “It’s showtime, baby.”

Nelson was using Ruby’s glove, a lefty, so at first Ray thought the reason his tosses were more like shot-put heaves than throws, his attempts at catching so ineffectual and spastic, was that the kid was all inside out, but after he switched gloves, giving Nelson a righty’s mitt, his hand-eye coordination became even worse, and Ray was surprised to find himself in the company of a twelve-year-old boy who had no idea how to catch or throw a ball.

They were standing on the dead wheat-colored grass beneath his terrace, the Hudson River slapping its banks fifty feet away.

The air smelled of sea funk and overturned earth; the only thing Ray loved about living in Little Venice, the raw and heady scent made him think of new beginnings, of second and third chances to get things right.

Tossing around a softball had always been a lifesaver for him, a mode of nonverbal communication between himself and his daughter that they both had come to count on in times of awkwardness, and so he felt a little like a philanderer bringing this boy out here. But Nelson made his own laconic kid come off like a babbling brook, and he had no other idea of how to connect.

“Get over here,” Ray said briskly, the kid stepping forward. “Give me the ball.

“OK . . . Hang on, hold on . . .” Ray faltered in his demonstration; throwing a ball so second nature to him that he had to go through the motions himself just to see how it was done. “Hold on . . . OK. You’re a righty or a lefty?”

“Right.”

“Good. OK. Good.”

Ray planted his feet, discovered that you had to stand slightly sideways, the foot opposite the throwing hand a little forward. “Do this.”

Nelson took up the stance, then cut a glance at his mother up on the terrace, but Danielle was nose-down in her homework. Ray looked up there, too, then found himself fighting off a wave of frustration; she could at least
fake
an interest . . .

“OK, let’s . . . OK,” planting the ball in Nelson’s right hand. “Put your hand behind your ear, the ball behind your ear.”

Nelson held it there like a transistor radio.

“No . . . OK. Cock your . . . Bend your elbow. Get it up, elbow up, ball behind your ear, OK?”

Ray stutter-skipped backward about fifty feet, gave Nelson a target.

“OK . . . When I say? I want you to snap it. Snap your wrist and just
whip
that bad boy to me, OK? Like this . . .” miming the act, Nelson watching him with his arm frozen into the position Ray had sculpted for him. “OK? Ready? Go ahead. Take my head off. Go.”

Once again Nelson let loose with more of a heave than a throw, but less of a heave than before.

Ray tossed back the ball. “Again.”

And they worked that snap-and-release for the better part of an hour, Nelson steadily improving, not ready for the majors but less of a potential embarrassment to himself in a schoolyard.

And over the course of that time, each of them periodically looked to the terrace with the same desire for Danielle’s attention, the physical ache in Ray diminished by what he had going on with her son right now, Ray telling himself that if he couldn’t command her passion, he’d settle for her admiration.

“Nelson, you want to hear a sad story?”

Ray tucked the glove under his arm, took a seat on the ghost grass, inviting the kid to do the same.

“Seventh grade, right? My class, the boys were in an intramural softball league, each homeroom had its own team. And I had a glove,” he splayed his fingers, “it looked like an elephant fell off a skyscraper and landed on it, right? But the night before the first game? My grandmother, of all people, takes me to a sporting goods store and spends thirty bucks on a new one. And thirty bucks was some serious cheddar back then.

“But this new glove, Nelson, it was state-of-the-art. I’m talking a
dead
man could catch with that thing. You with me so far?”

Nelson bobbed his head, swallowed.

“OK . . . The next morning, I’m so excited, I get on the train to go to school, go the two stops with a million other kids, get off on the platform, train pulls out and . . . I left the goddamn glove on the train.”

Nelson just sat there, studying his sneaker.

“I wanted to die. I never left anything on a train before. I wasn’t that type of kid. Plus, I spent the whole ride showing it off to my friends and—I assume twelve-year-old boys are still like this—these guys? Nothing made them happier than one of us having some kind of disaster. So when I started freaking on the platform they were howling like hyenas. Just loved it.

“Are the boys in your class still like that? Someone rips their new jacket, everybody starts high-fiving each other?”

Nelson shrugged.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Anyways, the game was after school, indoors in the gym. And I was the first baseman, that was always my position. And I had to borrow a glove from the other team. I get one just like my old glove, looked more like leprosy than leather. Anyways, we’re playing, and this glove sucks but I’m doing OK . . . So, ninth inning. We’re ahead four to three. The other team’s up, last licks. It’s two out, bases loaded. Kid hits a dribbler right to the pitcher. Now, our pitcher, Eric Abruzzi, was a very fat kid, but very, very cool. And Eric, as a rule, would never stoop for a ball, would never commit himself to any physical act that would make him look, ungainly, or foolish. But this was the ball game right here, right? So he goes down for it, tosses it underhand to me, the toss was so soft and perfect it could’ve been a newborn baby he was throwing. And, I got this kid out by a mile. But, as this grapefruit, this
beach
ball, is coming to me, I say to myself, I’m gonna drop it. I, Raymond, Randolph Mitchell, will
not
catch this ball, and guess what . . .”

“What,” Nelson finally said.

“I dropped it. I fucking dropped it, two runs scored, and we lost, five four. How do you like them bananas . . .”

The kid looked buzzed by Ray’s profanity, half smiling, half disoriented.

“And after the game, going home? All I heard from my friends, my, my
team
mates, was ‘
Fuck
you, Mitchell, Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you.”

Nelson developed frog’s eyes, fought back a smile, fought back anarchy like a balloon rising in his gullet, Ray leaning into him, whispering, “Fuck you, Nelson. Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you.”

“
Stop
it!” Danielle barked from above, both Ray and Nelson raising their eyes to the terrace.

“You have
no
say in this!” She was fighting with someone on the phone. “You have no . . . You have . . . You respect my wishes . . . 
No
 . . . 
No
 . . . It’s
my
life. It’s . . . 
Fine.
I’ll come home and pack. I’ll come home
right
now and pack.”