The Whites: A Novel Page 12

  We swear on our mothers’ eyes . . .

  And she said 4F . . .

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  Now they’re crying, Edgar grunted, tapping his bat against his calf.

  Well, you know who else lives in 4F? Milton asked, lifting his own bat from behind his ear, the tip making small, not quite lazy circles. Us. His brothers.

  Sofia walked down to the third-floor landing, Milton behind her, absently rapping the walls on his way down.

  3D. Who lived here.

  I don’t know.

  3E. Who lived here.

  I don’t know.

  3F. Who lived here.

  Breathe . . .

  The gay kid.

  Victor? Who else.

  His mother.

  What was her name.

  Dolores.

  Who else.

  Breathe . . .

  His sister.

  What was her name.

  I can’t remember.

  Did you like her?

  Later, after long showers, he and Edgar knocked on 3F and came face-to-face with Carmen’s mother.

  Where’s she at.

  The answer—Atlanta—put Milton off his game for twenty-three years. The same might have been true for Edgar, but the dead hitters had friends and his big brother lived only another week.

  His mother, heart-stunned, only a week after that.

  Did you want to marry her?

  Unconsciously humming, Milton rested the knob of the bat against the 3F peephole: Guess who.

  Dad!

  What.

  Did you want to marry her.

  Marry who. Then: I don’t remember. Then: You know what? You’re right, it stinks in here, let’s go home.

  As they started back down to the vestibule, Milton imagined his immense, huffing mother passing Carmen on the stairs at some point back then, the skinny girl with the martyred eyes most likely having to backtrack to the nearest landing in order for Mrs. Ramos to have enough room to pass, the two of them with self-conscious smiles, his mother’s tinged with humiliation.

  “What’s with calling me ‘Dad,’” Milton asked as he unlocked the car door. “What happened to ‘Daddy’?”

  “It’s a baby word. The kids make fun of you if you say it.”

  “You got to learn to stand up for yourself, Sofia,” he snapped, “otherwise those kids are never going to stop, and that kick-me kind of mentality of yours is going to make you miserable until the day you die, you understand me?”

  No response—well, what the hell was she supposed to say?

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.”

  “It’s OK,” Sofia saying it in that resigned way of hers that made him feel like tearing out his heart and feeding it to the birds.

  An hour later, after dropping his kid off at her school, he sat in his car halfway down the block from the house in Yonkers, far enough away not to draw anyone’s attention but close enough to observe.

  They had a house; he had a house. They had kids; he had a kid. Graves had a gold shield; well, so did he.

  He was a widower, but no one here had any hand in that. So why on top of everything else, everything he had a right to feel, did he also feel, in this moment, envious? Where the hell did she get off having a normal life. What kind of ice-cold freak was she to just sail on like this, to make a go of it like anyone else.

  Even before he and his brother had beaten two men to death at an age when all they should have been thinking about was sports, music, and ass, his sense of being “normal” was a tough sell in the mirror. He had always felt himself to be something of a miracle beast, trained to walk upright and mimic human speech. But after that day, a day launched by her, he never gave a moment’s thought about belonging to any species but his own.

  He saw the old man come out and slowly bend to retrieve a rolled-up newspaper from the lawn, Milton gut-reading him, despite his frailty, as an old school boss, still carrying an air of sober authority. Then, an hour later, a middle-aged Indian woman, most likely his caregiver, stepped out on the porch to have a smoke. There was no sign of Carmen (probably at work), the kids (probably at school), or her husband. Knowing Graves to be in Night Watch, Milton assumed he was either in the house catching up on his sleep or—more likely, given that the sole car in the driveway was a piece-of-shit Civic definitely belonging to the caregiver—he’d gotten stuck with an early morning run.

  The thing was, now that he’d finally found her after all these years, found her as sure as he’d found that Palmetto State cracker that snatched away his wife, where did he, where did they, go from here. In the past, no matter what actions he had taken on behalf of his dead, the suffering he had inflicted in return had always been of limited duration, whereas his suffering only intensified, leaving him afterward feeling more alone, more heartbroken, more subhuman than ever. For him, balancing the books had always been like bare-handedly punching to death a man whose face and body were studded with nails. And right now, at this point in his life, the thought of going through that again was unbearable, the cost, mentally if not physically, unsurvivable.

  So let it go.

  Can’t.

  Then find another way.

  Find another way.

  CHAPTER 6

  It should have been funny, Billy thought, but it wasn’t. Anytime you get called in to see the school therapist about your child, funny is the last thing on your mind. But still . . .

  The day before, Declan had apparently pushed a kid who had been taunting him, knocking him face-first into the edge of an open locker door. The injury was minimal—they were eight-year-olds, after all—but there was a little blood and a broken pair of glasses. And so now, he and Carmen were seated in an empty classroom talking to a young man who couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of school himself, asking whether Declan’s birth had been a difficult one, whether they “employed” any physical form of discipline at home, whether there was any history, on either side of the family, of . . .

  “How about we just get Declan to apologize to the kid and we pay for the glasses?” Billy amiably cutting him off.

  “Those would be appropriate gestures, no doubt, but I think . . .”

  “No!” the word flying out of Carmen’s mouth like a command to a wolf as she thrust herself forward in her chair. “Where the hell do you get off asking me about giving birth to him, and how dare you ask us if we smack our kids around, if we have crazies in our family. I am a nurse, I am a healer; my husband is a New York City detective, he protects people. This is who we are and this is what we can’t do today, because were stuck having this time suck of a talk with you.”

  “Carm,” Billy said uselessly.

  “And no, my son isn’t going to apologize to that little shit, and no, we’re not going pay for those glasses. But you know who should? You and this whole goddamn school, because what happened yesterday is all your fault. You put on this stupid, boring show about the planets, all these poor kids dressed up like silver-foil meatballs, ‘Hello! I am Mercury! Hello! I am Saturn!’ And you know, you know, one poor kid has to come out and say, ‘Hello! I am Uranus!’ Jesus Christ, you’re a shrink, do you know how humiliating that is? And of course he’s going to get teased and teased, and if he’s got any heart to him, like my son has, at some point he is going to push back.”

  The therapist, more bemused than intimidated, looked down at his notepad, reached for his pen, then thought better of it.

  “And if you people try to suspend him? Or even so much as lift a finger to discipline him? We’re going to go first to our lawyer and then to the papers. And how stupid will your science teachers look when the story gets out. Don’t they watch the news? Uranus isn’t even a planet anymore.”

  With that she got up and walked out, leaving Billy to placate.

  “I didn’t actually see the play?” he said mildly. “But she’s kind of got a point.”

  When Billy caught up to her in the school lot, he expected her to still be
steaming, but instead she was close to tears.

  “Tell me I didn’t just fuck up,” she pleaded, grabbing his hand. “I just get so scared for them, you know? Tell me I didn’t fuck up.”

  When Billy woke up at four, the backyard was a beehive, Declan and Carlos dueling with Wiffle bats, Millie smoking up a storm behind their one tree, and his father, oblivious to the action around him, reading a book while lounging in one of their vinyl-weave lawn chairs. After returning to his bedroom for his slippers, Billy called Carmen at the hospital to see how she was holding up, made himself coffee, threw on last night’s dress shirt against the chill, and stepped outside.

  In the time it took him to prep, the boys had switched from fencing to tossing a football, each Mighty Mouse sidearm heave ending with the passer collapsed on the ground, and each reception, no matter how high the ball, willed into a diving catch, Dec and Carlos apparently more interested in flinging themselves into the earth than making it to the NFL. And although his own young quarterbacking chops had not only afforded him a halfway decent adolescence but a free ride to a Division I school, Billy couldn’t care less if his kids became all-stars or ballerinas or computer geeks, as long as they learned the importance of never panicking when they got punched in the face.

  Setting his mug on the backyard steps, he pulled up the waist of his pajama bottoms, dragged over one of the other aluminum-framed chairs, and took a seat by his father. The old man was half-dozing now, a creased paperback of The War Poems of Thomas Hardy sliding off his lap. A number of other well-worn paperbacks were piled in the grass at his feet, Billy not even having to look at them to know what some of them were: the collected poems of Rupert Brooke, of Wilfred Owen, of W. B. Yeats, Alan Seeger, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon. Maybe Walter de la Mare.

  Billy Senior’s grandfather, a Marine, had been fatally gassed in the Battle of the Argonne Forest in 1918; for his daughter, Billy Senior’s mother, who had been nine at the time, her father’s martyred absence became a permanent, supernatural presence. As a result, for as long as Billy could remember, his own father, brought up haunted by a man he never knew, had been obsessed with the Great War, especially the literature that it produced.

  When he became head of student safety at Columbia University at the age of fifty-eight, Billy Senior, exploiting one of his job perks, immediately began to audit classes. He took basic 101s his first year, intermediate-level courses his second, advanced his third. He never participated in discussions or took exams, but he did all the required reading on his own, keeping a low profile year in, year out. Then, wanting to test himself in his fourth year, he wrote a paper on the work of soldier-poet Isaac Rosenberg and handed it in, never expecting the teacher to read it, let alone to raise it above his head in the auditorium the following week and ask, “Who’s William Graves?”

  The same professor, using his connections abroad, secured a scholarship for him to the annual three-week summer seminar on Literature and the Great War, in either Oxford or Cambridge, Billy could never remember which. That July, Billy Senior attended classes while Billy’s mother either tooled around town or took day trips to the south of England, the only time his parents had ever traveled together outside of the U.S. The summer after his mother died, his father went back to England on his own, the first of eleven solo summer pilgrimages until the time came when he was no longer able to travel by himself.

  Of all his father had accomplished after retirement from the NYPD—heading up campus security for a major university, doing the same work for Mount Sinai Hospital and for the New-York Historical Society—nothing had impressed Billy as much as watching this high-school-educated man in his fifties slip into those high-wire Ivy League classes to shadow-educate himself, Billy Senior taking to scholarship the same way many other men his age and station in life took to grandparenting and TV.

  Tossing the remainder of his coffee onto the grass, Billy leaned over and picked up the collected Yeats, slowly flipped through the book, and saw his father’s exquisite but strangely unreadable handwriting on nearly every page.

  “What you got there?” Billy Senior asked, rising up from the tar pit.

  “You used to read to me from this when I was a kid, you remember? ‘The Second Coming,’ it scared the crap out of me.”

  “How about returning the favor.”

  “Read to you?” Billy looked around the yard. “With my delivery? You might as well ask me to break-dance.”

  Billy Senior sat up a little, opened his eyes. “I remember working the Bronx for a while back in the late seventies when they started having those block parties with turntables and the disc jockeys scratching up the records, everybody spinning around on cardboard flats, spouting out these bragging rhymes . . .”

  “You should hear some of your grandson’s stylings,” Billy said.

  “. . . next thing you know every kid with a portable tape recorder’s marching up and down the streets belting out bad poetry.”

  “It’s still kind of like that out there.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to sound like some cranky old white guy and it’s not like I didn’t appreciate what that stuff was doing on the positive side in those neighborhoods, it was just, aesthetically? I hated it.”

  “Well, they can’t all be Sam Cooke.”

  “Nothing wrong with rhythm and blues, my friend. Some of those singers were true bards.”

  Billy had to smile. The designation “bard” had always been his father’s highest form of praise, synonymous with “sublime” and just a shade under “godlike.”

  “Dad, do you remember my friend Jerry Hart? After his freshman year at Fordham he came home and told his father that he wanted to be a poet. You know what Mr. Hart said to him? ‘Anybody’d write a poem would suck a dick.’ Excuse my French.”

  “Cocksucker,” Senior said without heat.

  “What?” Billy had never heard his father say anything worse than “shit,” and rarely that.

  “Cunt licker.”

  The boys stopped playing.

  “Cocksucking motherfucking kike-faced little nigger boy.” Another bland delivery.

  Billy signaled for Millie to bring the kids into the house.

  “Dad, what’s happening.”

  “Are you going to read to me?” his father said.

  “What?”

  “You said you’d read me something,” gesturing to the Yeats still in Billy’s hands.

  “What just happened.”

  “Happened with what?” Senior’s eyes remained clear and untroubled.

  Billy took a moment. “All right,” he finally said. “Hold on.”

  Flipping through the Yeats, nervously rejecting poem after poem as being either too long, too beyond his understanding, or having too much unpronounceable Gaelic, he defaulted to the horror poem of his youth. But after quickly scanning the first few lines—the wildly spiraling falcon, the blood-dimmed tide, each image troubling him more than they ever had before, and then returning to “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”—he closed the book.

  “I tell you what,” he said, rising to his feet. “How about I recite ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor.’ That one I can do from memory.”

  Somebody had angrily scrawled “dope house” with a broad Sharpie above the apartment 6G peephole in the Truman Houses.

  “The quality goes in before the name goes on,” the CSU tech standing next to Billy said before entering the scene.

  The living room was devoid of furniture, empty save for a few scattered, overfull ashtrays and some still-burning candles set in juice glasses here and there. An emaciated blond woman, looking sixty but most likely around thirty, lay star-fished face-up on the linoleum, a welt of gunpowder-stippled flesh beneath her left collarbone the only sign of violence done to her that was not self-inflicted. Another CSU tech, squatting by the body, gripped her by the jaw and rolled her head from side to side, ran his rubber-gloved fingers roughly through her lank hair, and then unbuttoned her blouse, all in search
of other entry wounds.

  Before anyone thought to stop her, another young mummy, her eyes looking awl-punched into her head, wandered in through the partly open front door, said, “I forgot my purse,” laid eyes on the dead girl, “Oh, April, you still here? I thought . . .” then swirled to the floor.

  “We was just sitting around passing the peace pipe, that’s all, nobody hurting nobody,” the revived woman, Patricia Jenkins, said through a billow of exhaled smoke to Billy and Alice Stupak as they all sat in a stairwell down the hall from the dead girl in 6G.

  “All of a sudden this boy comes in with a rifle, says for everybody to give it up, but we’re all skyin’ so nobody wanted to do that. Donna asked him if he maybe just wants to party with us instead, and he says, ‘You disease-drippin’ bitches?’ He takes all the rock we got left, then goes through everybody’s shit for money, cell phones, and whatnot.”

  She paused for another lungful of smoke, ran a shaky finger across her brow. “He already turned to go, got a hand on the damn doorknob, April says, ‘Shit, I bet that ain’t even loaded,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh God . . .’”

  Billy glanced at Stupak, neither of them wanting to distract her yet by taking notes.

  “That boy, he hears that, he just turns around slow, sticks out that rifle like stickin’ out a arm, got the bullet end almost right on her, and bang. Then he leaves like he should of done if April had kept her mouth shut. Then we all like froze until he’s gone, then we go too.”

  Still smoking, she lowered her forehead onto the heel of her palm, closed her eyes, and wept a little.

  “All right, Patricia,” Stupak began, easing out her pad, “I know you want to get this guy as badly as we do, so help us out here. The shooter, was he white, black, Hispanic . . .”

  “Lightish Dominican.”

  “Dominican. Not, say, Puerto Rican, or . . .”

  “Dominican.”

  “And when you say a kid . . .”

  “Like, high-school-dropout age.”

  The fire door to the stairwell opened, all three turning to see Gene Feeley, the elusive war horse, size up the party and then, hands in pockets, lean against a cinder-block wall directly behind Stupak’s back.