Samaritan (30 page)

“So what did he come in for?”

“Because this is where you were and he wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“Because he loves you, Ray,” Nerese laying it on a little. “Didn’t you get that?”

Chapter 24

Salim—February 25

As twilight hit the Hudson, Ray’s intercom went off, pulling him in from the terrace where he had been playing around with assignment themes for his first return class.

“Yeah?”

“How you doin’, Mr. Mitchell. This Salim.” The kid’s voice came through the crackle like an ancient radio signal. “I need to come up and see you.”

“When?” Ray asked stupidly, instinctively balking at this unannounced house call.

“Now.”

“Now’s not . . .”

“I got something for you,” he said. “Take like a heartbeat.”

A moment later, Salim, his backpack hanging off one shoulder, came striding into the apartment as if there had been no one at the door to greet him.

“Mr. Mitchell, how you doing, how you doing . . .” Smoking, pacing, eyes bouncing off surfaces, something goal-oriented in his distraction, in his reverting to Ray’s teacher name right now. “I came here the other night but your phone wasn’t working.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I visited you in the hospital, too, but you were unconscious. How you feeling now, OK?” The words flying out of him with the impersonal pitch of an auctioneer.

“I’m good,” Ray said at a remove, studying this new Salim. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Oh shit . . .” The kid abruptly came to a dead stop in the middle of the room, eyes lightly shut, hands up in surrender. “I can’t . . . OK, it’s like, OK last week? Michelle, has lost her job. They had like a budget cut? And she was a temp, so . . .”

“I thought you said they changed her over to full-time,” he said cautiously.

“No, no. That’s not . . . No, she’s out, she’s out. And she started drinking again.”

“Oh no,” Ray said. He didn’t know whether to sit or stand in his own home, settled for perching on the radiator.

“Like, OK . . . The first morning after she had got let go? Ten o’clock, she’s still layin’ in bed, she ain’t even tryin’ to hide the pint, I say, ‘’Chelle, you got to bounce back from this. You got to get up on your feet.’ She tells me to mind my own fuckin’ business, excuse my language . . .”

“She sounds depressed.”

“Naw, man,
I’m
depressed,” he said. “She’s
drunk.
”

“She can’t get another job?”

“Like
that
?” Salim cupped a hand under his cigarette, then brought the ashes to an open window. “Naw man, she won’t even try. Yeah, I guess she’s depressed, like you said. That job was important to her, you know, to her self-esteem.”

Ray flinched, the buzzword putting him on even higher alert.

“But it’s all coming right at
me.
And like . . . OK, the night before last? The night before last I had to go to the police. I had to have the police come over to the house.”

“Because . . .” Ray waiting for the money touch now like waiting for a bus.

“Because the last few days she started having her cousins come over. I don’t . . . These guys, man, For Real and Busy? I don’t . . . They’re stickup niggers, and I
told
her, she
knows
I don’t ever want to see them over my doorstep, you know, under my roof with my son there. She
knows
that and I think she was just doing it to get back at me, but I didn’t
do
nothing. All’s I’m trying to do all week is get her back on her feet, but when they left the other night? Me and her, we got into it, arguing, but just verbal, and I told her what you said to me last time, how she’s into controlling me through money, right?”

“Whoa . . .” Ray came upright off the radiator. “Salim, that was just a conjecture. I don’t even
know
her.”

“But it’s true.” He shrugged, fired up another butt. “Without her job, she ain’t got nothing over me. And now I’m back to being the breadwinner out there with the T-shirts.”

“But you told her
I
said that?” Ray unconsciously palmed his injured crown.

“Hey. True is true,” Salim missing the point here. “Next thing I know she’s coming at me with a steak knife. Look . . .”

He raised then dropped the hem of his sweatshirt, revealing a flash of flat gut and an oblong pinkish something under the left-side ribs; Ray unable to make out what he was supposed to have seen.

“And I don’t even hit her back. I’m like, ‘’Chelle, why you doin’ this?’ All’s I did was disarm her, you know, with a chair. She starts sayin’, ‘I’m gonna go to the cops, say you beat me, say you sellin’ drugs. I’m gonna get you violated. I’m gonna put you back in the
joint.
’ And she can do that. I already gone back twice on violations. It’s a sword of Damian over my head.”

“Was Omar there?” Ray wanting to bring the boy in, make this PG.

“
Yes.
” Salim jumping on that. “He was right there! Cryin’, scared. I said, ‘’Chelle! Omar’s right there!’” Offering back to Ray his own words.

“She says, ‘This ain’t got nothing to do with him. He’s ir
rel
evant. I’m gonna have you violated.’ So I got out of the house, go right over to the police station, file a, a domestic violence report myself. You know, to cover myself? Here . . .”

He pulled a pale blue carbon of the report from his rear pocket and flapped it open for Ray’s perusal, Ray wondering why he felt it necessary to show it to him.

“So then I go back to the house with two police? I show them how everything’s all thrown around, I show them the liquor bottles, my injuries . . .”

“Was Michelle there?” Ray reached inside his shirt pocket for a Vicodin, then changed his mind.

“Naw, she had left. She took Omar and left. Then the next morning, I go to the parole office like an hour before they opened to catch my PO coming in, tell
her
what happened. Then I’m supposed to see this psychologist from the state? They say even though I never used drugs, selling’s an addiction too, so I have to see this guy who doesn’t do a damn thing for me but I go see
him,
tell
him
what happened . . . It’s like, I’m making first strikes everywhere, covering my behind on all the bases against false accusations, OK?

“But while I was out there talking to all my, my handlers? I come back to the apartment about eleven that morning, Michelle had got back in when I was gone and destroyed all my stuff. She poured soda inside the VCR, the TV, tore up the bed, the, the mattress. Stuffed up the kitchen sink with my books and drawings, turned the faucet on, water’s all, everything’s all flooded, my neighbors from downstairs start banging on the door ’cause the water’s all running down into their place, and Ray, my apartment? It ain’t even mine, it’s my mother’s, she’s in the hospital right now, but she could kick me to the curb anytime she wants, you know what I’m saying? So I’m like up to my ankles in water, fighting with my neighbors, the phone rings, it’s Michelle. She says, ‘You ain’t never gonna see Omar again. I’m gonna get For Real and Busy to come by and
cap
your ass and you ain’t
never
gonna see your son again.’”

Salim took a breath, still leaning against the wall, smoking and staring out at the river.

Ray had balked on taking the Vicodin in order to maintain his edge against the bullshit, but now he reluctantly decided, if not to believe Salim, to at least surrender to the emotion driving his story.

“Then I go call my mother, you know, to tell her what happened? Michelle had already been to the hospital, told her some shit about me? My mother didn’t even want to hear
my
side. She’s all ‘You’re just like your father, all y’all niggers, you’re all the same, you’re this, you’re that.’ But I’m her
son,
you know what I’m saying?”

Ray un-surrendered; there had to be more to it, more to all this vicious anger coming at Salim. “Tell me again. Why’s Michelle doing all this?”

“
Why
? Because she’s drinking. She lost her job, started drinking, and this is what happens.” His eyes went to the river again. “But, Ray, you know what? It’s like, I lost my fiancée, my, my worldly possessions, I can lose the apartment, my
son
 . . .” He swiped at a dry cheekbone, the tears more in his voice. “But now I have to think about myself. I have to take care of myself. I have to survive and continue because I just . . . It’s some kind of test. And I don’t even know if I’m ever gonna see my son again. I don’t . . .” His gaze shifted to Ray—“She can’t just . . .”—then back to the river. “I have to stay strong, because if I can’t stay on top of things, if I can’t maintain then I can’t do nothing for Omar. I can’t . . .” Salim dropped into a glassy silence, slowly shaking his head in awestruck disbelief at his own saga, Ray now somewhere between bored and hyperalert.

“You want to hear something?” Salim asked more calmly. “She changed her name.”

“You weren’t married.”

“Her first name.”

“Michelle?”

“Now she’s Fire. Wants everybody to call her Fire.”

“Fire . . .” Ray repeated, softening, thinking, He can’t be making this shit up. “You worried about For Real and Busy?”

Salim waved off the cousins. “The only thing I’m worried about is staying positive.”

“But the T-shirts are going well, right?”

“Yeah OK, here’s the thing,” Salim said, and Ray had nobody to blame but himself.

“OK, this week? Last week?” Salim counted off on his fingers, “I was out there eight, nine hours a day. I usually started out set up on the sidewalk in Journal Square over in Jersey City by the PATH trains till the police come and move me because as of yet I don’t have a vendor’s license. Rest of the day I just hit the bricks, here, there, you name it. Sold ’em right out of the backpack.

“But the other morning? When she destroyed the apartment? You know what else she did? She filled up the bathtub with water, took all my shirts, all my inventory, dumped everything in the tub, took a gallon of bleach . . .”

Salim mimed the pouring, his curled-down wrist traveling in a slow determined arc, over and over.

“Get the fuck,” Ray sputtered, in a near panic as he desperately took stock of himself, wondering if he had it in him, for once in his life, to simply say no, to endure the disappointed reaction, the possible counter-rejection. “How many shirts . . .”

“Nine hundred. Ruined. Now I got to start over.”

“Start over,” Ray numbly repeated. “That was seventy-three hundred dollars I gave you.”

“I know!” Salim sounded outraged; at Michelle, at Fire.

“If you had nine hundred left, that means you sold what, three hundred?”

“Yeah, well, maybe not that much.”

“At a profit of what, nine bucks a shirt, right? I’m trying to remember.”

Salim exhaled as if he were trying to launch a sailboat.

“Because that should be about twenty-seven hundred dollars you’ve cleared by now.”

“Yeah, well, you know, like I said, I don’t think I sold quite that many.”

“Well, how many
did
you sell?”

“More like ninety.”

“
Ninety
?”

“Yeah, see, I was unable to run off twelve hundred shirts, like I had originally intended, because when you gave me that money? I deposited it in my mother’s checking account for safekeeping because I didn’t have an account, myself, but as soon as I did? She withdrew fifteen hundred dollars for herself, said I owed it to her.”

“For
what,
” Ray suddenly so tired, his right hand helplessly curling into itself.

“For . . . I don’t know. Back rent, food. She just said I owed it to her.”

“Owed it to her,” Ray repeated as if lost in thought, knowing at that moment, knowing with absolute certainty, that the remainder of Salim’s life, regardless of whatever school of spirituality or industrious free enterprise game plan he embraced, would be one long unbroken cavalcade of elaborate excuses and self-defeating con jobs, and that any continued bankrolling of this kid on his part would be the equivalent of flushing money down a toilet.

Sighing, Salim lit another cigarette, stared out at the river again. “See, I should’ve
knew
better that my mother would’ve done something like that because she has always had a survival-of-the-fittest mentality, you know what I’m saying? Like a cougar eating its own young, but I keep wanting to believe that blood is thicker than water, so . . .”

“So what did you do with the money you made from the shirts you did sell?”

“What didn’t go from hand to mouth is in here.”

Salim lurched off the wall and pulled an ATM card from the same rear pocket that held the blue carbon of the domestic violence report.

He handed the card to Ray. SALIM EL-AMIN was embossed in the lower left corner.

“I look at this ten times a day,” coming around behind Ray and leaning over his shoulder as if they were looking at baby pictures. “I can’t believe I finally have one of these. I never thought . . .”

“I’m not going to refinance you for nine hundred T-shirts, Salim.” Ray instantly regretted stating the quantity, as if a lesser number could be acceptable.

“Hey, I didn’t even come here for that. I just needed to talk to somebody and I didn’t know where else to go.”

“In fact, I think the sooner money’s not a part of the deal between us, the more clearheaded we can be with each other, you know, relate to each other.”

“Michelle, can she just . . . She can’t just take my son away, can she?” Ignoring Ray’s last statement.

“I don’t know,” Ray said dejectedly. “Maybe she just needs to calm down, sober up or something.”

“Because I already have one child I don’t see, but that was for the good of that child,” Salim said.

“OK . . .” Ray refusing to follow up on that one. “You know where she is right now?” keeping it to Q and A.

“She’s probably at her mother’s house, but I hear she’s going to Atlanta next week, moving down there back in with her first boyfriend or her aunt or somebody. And, you know, with parole I can’t leave the state. I can’t even go through the tunnel to New York, so if she takes Omar . . .”

Again Salim sighed, his chest rising and falling once, a momentary silence coming down like snow.

“And Ray, half the time she don’t even
like
Omar; he’s like a obstacle for her. The only thing she likes with him is fixing his hair, that’s about it. And I don’t know how to do that.”