The Whites: A Novel (25 page)

They had always understood each other, he and Marilys, their silences pretty companionable, neither one ever a trouble to the other, although he always felt bad about not paying her more money.

The next thought that came to Milton was so major that after reflexively grabbing for his bat, he had to step out of the car in order to clear his head.

To avenge his family, he would be destroying what was left of it. The Ramos family would go from two here to two gone, which is to say no one left. But what if instead of Ramos obliteration they—he—went the other way and doubled their number?

He couldn’t imagine what Edgar would say about this new way of thinking—his older brother was the only person he’d ever known whose darkness was blacker than his own, the only person who Milton had ever come close to fearing—but he was pretty sure that his mother would be weeping with relief.

He was still standing outside his car, bat in hand, when Carmen’s brother suddenly came out of the motel, trotted to the Range Rover, and opened the passenger door. Victor grabbed a mini-recorder from the glove box, then dropped his car keys and accidentally kicked them into the night. Using the light on his cell phone, he sank into a hunch and began duck-walking all over the lot in an effort to find them, Milton watching as Victor unwittingly came in his direction, his bowed head like an offering.

After he’d identified himself half a dozen times through the steel door of her East Harlem SRO, Marilys, wearing a polyester nightgown, cautiously opened up, the scent of her skin lotion pleasantly knocking him on his ass.

“I should have called,” he said, eyeing the steak knife in her left hand.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Nothing, can I come in?”

He had never been here before, and he was surprised by the number of plants she kept, both hanging and potted, and not so surprised by the army of religious tokens: the medallions and silver icons that festooned her walls, the plaster saints that stood on her dresser and night table, Marilys’s minuscule home like Guatemala in a box.

There was nowhere to sit but the bed.

He took the time he needed to compose what he wanted to say, but once he got good and going he doubted he had ever uttered so many continuous words in his life.

“So, after my, what happened to my family, I lived with my aunt Pauline for a few years, she got me to finish high school out by her, I can’t hardly remember any of my classes or teachers but I played a little football and I enjoyed that . . . Then after graduation, I worked construction off and on, was a bouncer in a few titty bars in Williamsburg when it was still like that, got hired as a bodyguard for Fat Assassin, which was a good gig until he wanted me to start lining up girls for him this one night in some club like I was his fucking sex gofer . . . I mean, as I look back on it, me swinging on him in front of his people wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but . . . And then so of course we wound up taking it out back, which turned out very bad for the both of us, you know, in our respective ways . . . After that I kind of lost myself for a year or two, the less said about that the better, until a girl in the neighborhood that I liked who was a police cadet started talking that up, and, at the time I figured, Well, that’s one way to keep myself out of trouble, but they rejected my application because I didn’t have any college. So I went to Medgar Evers in Brooklyn, but only for a year, reapplied, got in, graduated, got my shield, got married, had Sofia, as you know, lost my wife, as you know . . .” taking a breather, thinking, What else, what else . . . 

“With women? There was a girl, Norma, in, I think, tenth grade, that was the first time, a few one-time things, some girlfriends, but nobody for long, my wife of course, plus I wasn’t above paying for it now and then, especially at first after she died, then you, of course, you know, the way we do.”

What else . . . 

“I drink too much, as you know, and . . . I guess that’s it.”

Of course that wasn’t it, but there would be time for telling the rest later.

“So,” looking at her perched on the foot of her own bed, the hanging plants behind her head making him think of a jungle cat emerging into a clearing, “what do you think?”

When he left forty-five minutes later, she kissed him on the mouth, which made him jerk back with surprise, then avidly lean in for more.

All these firsts . . . 

Chapter 10

There’s something terrible going on the bathroom, he can hear Carmen moaning from behind the half-open door, a low animal keen, and then he hears a frantic scrabbling on the tiles as if she’s desperately trying to get away from someone. He needs to get out of bed but he’s physically paralyzed, not even able to brush away the pillow that has slipped over his face and is preventing him from drawing breath. She calls out his name in a hopeless sob, more like a farewell than a cry for help, and it’s only with the greatest effort that he can even make a responding noise, a kind of high-pitched strangled mooing that actually, finally wakes him up. But though he is wide awake now, he still can’t move or draw breath, and Carmen is still in that small room with him, and he’s killing her, and Billy just cannot breathe or move, until suddenly he can, wrenching himself free from the bedsheets and stumbling into the bathroom, but of course there’s no one there.

Sitting slumped and shaken on the edge of the bathtub, Billy wished—for the first time in nearly two decades—he desperately wished for a fat line of coke, the only thing he could think of to speed-vacuum his muzzy, terror-stricken skull.

When he finally made it downstairs, the first person he saw was his father, reading the paper in the kitchen, which was as per usual until he remembered that the old guy was supposed to be at his daughter’s house.

The slam of a car door drew Billy to the window, his sister about to back out of his driveway.

“What are you doing, Brenda?” Wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, he stood by her car door in the early morning chill.

His sister, having no intention of getting out of the car, or even turning off the engine, rolled down the driver-side window.

“I wake up this morning, I think it’s Charley laying next to me, but guess who.”

“I should have warned you about that.”

“Oh. And let me tell you about breakfast,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “We’re all sitting there, me, Dad, Charley, and my head-case mother-in-law, Rita, and all of a sudden Rita says to Dad, ‘So, Jeff, are we going to have relations tonight?’ You know what our father says? ‘Depends what time I get off.’ And Rita says back, ‘Well, call me when you know so I can cancel my game.’”

Billy took a light off Brenda’s cigarette. “OK, so he thought she was Mom.”

“Actually, he called her Irena.”

“Who’s Irena?”

Brenda put her car in gear. “Do you really want to know?” Then, reversing out of the driveway, “I can’t do it, Billy, I’m sorry.”

On his way back up to the house, Dennis Doyle called, Billy listening to him for less than a minute before jumping into his own car and taking off for the Bronx.

The first thing he noticed when he raced into the St. Ann’s ER was Carmen’s workstation chair upside down a good fifteen feet from her desk; the second was the bright red spatter of drops leading to the curtained cubicle.

At the sight of him Carmen started yelling at the Indo-Afro-Asian interns that ringed her gurney. “Jesus Christ! I specifically said do not call my husband, as in,
do not
.”

From what he could see of her partially averted face, there was a two-inch cut beneath her eye and the beginnings of a nasty shiner.

“They didn’t call him, Carm,” Dennis said. “I did.”

“What happened.” Billy wasn’t sure who he was addressing.

“I think this might require some stitches,” one of the interns said.

“What happened,” he repeated.

“Oh for Christ’s sake, it’s a goddamn black eye!” Carmen back to barking. “Ice the goddamn thing, then let me go pick up my chair and get back to work. Jesus!”

Despite her fireballing, Billy saw that she was trembling. As was he.

“You caught the guy?” he asked Dennis.

“I told you three times, yes.”

“In fact, you know what?” Carmen again. “I don’t want you to go near my face at all. Go page Kantor.”

“Where is he,” Billy asked Dennis.

“Forget it, Billy.”

“Is he still here? Where is he?”

“You know what?” Carmen said. “Screw it. Hold up a mirror for me, I’ll do it myself.”

“You have no idea what this whack’s been putting us through,” Billy said.

“What whack?” Dennis losing track.

“Dennis, I just want to lay eyes on him, I won’t even go in the room.”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about this. You don’t let me see him, I’ll walk out of here and pistol-whip the first fat-assed, do-nothing hospital guard I see.”

“Gentlemen,” an older doctor murmured as he slid past them and into the cubicle. “So, Carmen,” he said breezily, “when can we expect the lawsuit?”

“Pretend it’s my collar,” Billy pleaded, “and that’s Yasmeen on that table getting worked on.”

Dennis did a quick 360 around himself. “You are not to talk to him.”

“You got it.”

“Not a fucking word, you hear me?”

As they walked to the impromptu holding cell, an empty storage room down a long corridor, Dennis held firmly to Billy’s arm, his tense mantra every few steps “Remember what you promised me.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Who. This guy? Not that I know of.”

“Really,” Billy said lightly. “Not before, not during, not after?” Then, when Dennis tightened his grip: “I’m just curious.”

“Just remember what you promised.”

“You!” Billy shouted as he tried to leap over Dennis’s back and get to Carmen’s attacker, who, guarded by a uniform, was cuffed to a chair at the far end of the room. The grimy, blaze-eyed stick figure in scavenged clothing looked at Billy with calm eyes and total incomprehension.

“What do you want from us!” Billy railed, this time with less heat. The guy was obviously a homeless nutter off his meds, if he’d ever been prescribed them in the first place.

“You promised me,” Dennis said, his arms spread wide as he began chest-bumping Billy backward toward the door.

“Forget it,” Billy said, lightly pushing him off before turning to leave under his own steam.

“I am John,” the cuffed man abruptly announced in a voice so deep and booming they both jumped. “And I bring news of he who is to come.”

The best of Pavlicek’s offered apartments was, as Carmen had predicted, a furniture-free one-bedroom in a shittier-than-usual part of the Bronx, but Billy didn’t care. This morning’s assault had thrown him into a state of shameless hyperprotectiveness, and until their stalker was caught, they were leaving Yonkers, the hell with the goddamn designated patrols, which had done nothing last night but freak out his wife, the low voices and roving flashlight beams coming through the bedroom window at all hours making her feel like a hunted animal—which, if you thought about it, was what she felt like most of the time without any help from them.

“I was hoping so bad that was him, you know?” Billy said, perching himself on a living room windowsill that afforded him a partial view of the outfield in Yankee Stadium, one block west of the apartment. “At least it would all have been over.”

“They’ll catch him,” Pavlicek said restlessly. “She’s home now?”

“I had to drag her out of there, but yeah, she’s home.”

“Doctors and nurses, they always make the worst patients, right? They think they know everything, then when something happens to them they get all pissy and embarrassed. They’re like two-year-olds, tell me I’m wrong.”

For a man seeing a hematologist he seemed to be moving pretty good today, Billy thought, the guy roaming in a tight, repetitive circuit like a big cat in a small cage.

“All right, look, I’ll get my guys to bring some furniture in from the warehouse, but it might take a day or two. Meanwhile, I’m having my security guy come up to the house and hook you up with a CCTV.”

“John . . .”

“I can’t believe you don’t have one. In fact, it boggles my mind. First thing I did when I bought my pile was put in a system. I wouldn’t have my family set foot in there until it was wired like the Pentagon, are you kidding me? Christ, Billy, you haven’t seen enough shit in the last twenty years? You think you’re immune? No one’s immune. None of us.”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Billy said, just trying to calm him down. “Thank you.”

Pavlicek took a seat on one of the radiators, dropped his head, and ran his hands through his hair. When he looked up again it was like a sleight of hand, his expression having morphed from fiercely agitated to helplessly bewildered.

“How are you feeling these days?” Billy asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, your cholesterol.”

“My what? I’m good.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.”

“So, how are the boys,” Pavlicek said, just to say something.