Richard Price - The Whites

“Talk to me?” The front door shut with a jingle.

“Alice…”

“Talk to me ?”

“Take it easy, he’s off tonight.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, grabbing the store owner by the arm and steering him off to a neutral corner. “How can you tell?”

He sat in his den. He had a den now, damp-smelling in a way he couldn’t eradicate but a den nonetheless. He didn’t even know what a den was when he was a kid. And not just a den: he had a house, a goddamn house, was the unencumbered owner of a two-story, three-bedroom, mock mock-Tudor. Of course, the neighborhood was so shitty that he had to enclose the entire exterior in decorative iron security grilles, which made it look like a birdcage for a pterodactyl, but it was his, earned and paid for. And he had Sofia, sitting next to him now, watching, for the second evening in a row, Pocahontas . He must have seen that thing seventy-five times, Snow White, Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, and all the others at least as many times as that. But he never grew bored, because what he was really doing was watching her watch the movie.

She was built like him, like her late mother, and she came in for her share of schoolyard torture. When he had been the porker back then, the teasing had quickly ended after the ringleader lost two of his brand-new front teeth to a cross pipe on the monkey bars. But she was a girl, and he had no idea how girls were supposed to deal with that kind of cruelty and so he let her watch slim pretty young females being rescued from their tormentors by handsome boys, night after night after night. A real father of the year.

Big, fast, and devoid of mercy — ever since he was a kid, that had been the rap on him. Everyone outside his family had always been afraid of him — in school, then later on the street, then later on the Job, even though he had never provoked a fight in his life. Devoid of mercy, devoid of humor, devoid of personality. But he loved deep if not demonstrably: his mother, his two brothers, and his wife, all gone now. And this kid right here, who — fortunately, he guessed — had been an infant when her mother passed.

“Give me a sip,” she said, nodding to the glass of Yellow Chartreuse in his hand.

“Cut it out.”

“I want some,” she wheedled in a high teasing voice, the same ritual every night.

“It’s medicine, I told you that.”

“I’m sick,” dropping her forehead to his arm. “Please?”

He dipped a finger in the glass and touched it to her tongue. “It’s bedtime, go upstairs.”

“Carry me.”

“I can’t, my back hurts,” he said, wincing.

“Maybe you had too much medicine.”

Milton winced again, this time for real. “Go ahead, Marilys is waiting, I’ll come up later.”

Moving like Creeping Jesus, Sofia reluctantly headed for the stairs, placing one foot then the other on each riser, groaning like an old lady before stepping up to the next. One foot then the other, her nightly protest march.

“Go ahead now.”

Milton switched to ESPN, then reached for the lined sheet of yellow paper on the coffee table, so obsessively handled today that it was starting to blacken along the folds. He left it unopened in his lap.

He tried to concentrate on the last five minutes of the Nets-Thunder game, but his thoughts drifted, as they often did after a few shots, to Sofia’s mother, Sylvia, seven years earlier the victim of a hit-and-run driver on Bronx Park East, directly in front of the geriatric hospital where she had worked for a radiologist.

If he had to describe their eight-year marriage in two words, if he was allowed to go back in time and rescript their wedding cake, he would choose, in sky-blue icing, Good Enough, as in good enough companions, good enough lovers, good enough parents. Good Enough, as in if God or some fortune-teller had told him, early on in their relationship, that Sylvia was to be his mate until the end of his days, he wouldn’t have complained. Except the end of her days came first.

Marilys Irrizary, Milton’s housekeeper and Sofia’s five-days-a-week stand-in mother, had a distinct tread: halting and striving for cat-burglar light, as if just leaving the bedroom of a colicky baby. But she was a short, solid, broad-foot Guatemalan, and he could always hear her on the move from anywhere in the house.

She came into the den and stood directly behind where he sat on the couch.

“She’s waiting for you.”

“I’ll be up,” draining his ’Treuse without turning to look at her.

“I finished everything I could, but there’s still stuff in the dryer.”

“You’re going home?”

She leaned over his shoulder for the empty glass on the coffee table, the sweetish tang still hanging in the air.

“I could stay.”

Most witnesses at the scene of the accident, the vehicular homicide, disagreed on the make and model, let alone the color, of the car. One old guy was able to come up with a description of the plate, which he said was out of state, had a tree splitting the numbers against a blue-orange sunset.

“Or I could go.”

Visiting that half-cocked witness on the sly two days later, Milton asked him how he could possibly remember the tree splitting the digits against a blue-orange sunset yet not recall any numbers or letters off the same.

3-T-R, left side of the tree, the old man said. It had come back to him that very morning on the toilet.

Make and model?

Black maybe gray Accord or Camry, those cars to him like two peas in a pod.

The case wasn’t Milton’s, of course, the visit enough to get him suspended for hindering the investigation of the local squad, although probably not really, given the mitigating circumstances, emotional duress, extreme grief, et cetera. Nonetheless, he kept the news of the partial plate to himself.

From one flight above, the front door opened, then closed, followed by the jingle of keys in the lock, Marilys heading for home.

Three weeks after Milton’s talk with the eyewitness, a middle-aged male with a suspended driver’s license lay on his deathbed in Cherokee County Memorial Hospital after suffering grievous wounds in a car accident. Aaron Artest, an individual who lived in Queens but had unexpectedly returned to his hometown of Union, South Carolina, about the same time as Sylvia’s funeral, told investigators that an old rust-bodied sedan with heavily tinted side windows had pulled up next to his gray Accord — plate 3TR-AM7—as he was driving alone on Highway 150. The unseen driver kept apace for a minute or so, as if to make sure he had Artest’s attention, before poking a shotgun out of the passenger window, which, naturally, inspired Artest to haul ass. Then his brakes, which had been serviced not even a month before, on the day he left New York, must’ve somehow given out.

“No, he didn’t fire at me,” Artest said to the cops. Then: “It looked to be a Nova, no wait, a Caprice, hang on, hold on.” Then his dying words: “Just give me a minute.”

Milton clicked off the TV without registering the outcome, retrieved his glass, poured himself another Chartreuse, then finally unfolded the paper in his lap, the names and addresses written there writhing like eels.

Carmen Graves. RN, St. Ann’s Hospital.

Det. Sgt. William Graves, Manhattan Night Watch.

684 Tuckahoe Road, Yonkers.

Declan Ramon, 8. Carlos Eammon, 6.

Immaculate Conception Day, 24 Van der Donck Street, Yonkers.

Big, fast, and devoid of mercy.

All he could say in his defense was that his older brother had been worse.

From two floors above he finally began to hear his daughter plaintively calling out for him. He had no idea how long she’d been at it, the sleepy but insistent oscillations of her voice coming down on his ears like the offbeat siren of some alien ambulance.