Richard Price - The Whites

“Hello?” she said.

“Hey. Sorry,” Billy coming all the way back, then: “Let me just ask, how good are you with hospital records?”

“Which hospital?”

“Columbia Pres.”

“I know a guy there.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“Then you’d know him too.”

“I need you to look up an outpatient for me.”

“Who.”

He hesitated. “John Pavlicek.”

“Your guy from the Geese? What’s wrong with him?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Do you know who he sees there?”

“Somebody for his cholesterol. Or so he says.”

He heard her light up, then expel that first buzzy lungful. “All right.”

“What do you charge for something like this?”

“When have I ever taken your money?”

Billy’s guilt made him wince.

“Maybe you should start.”

Thirty minutes later, as he was leaving the hospital, his cell rang again: Yasmeen on the downside of a wee-hours drunk, her voice like wet flannel.

“I’m just calling you to say I’m really sorry.”

“About…”

“The other night, I got so drunk, you know? I didn’t even know you drove me home until Dennis told me in the morning.”

“Oh c’mon, how many times…”

“Denny’s a good guy, you know? He really is.”

“Well, being he’s your husband and all…”

The silence on the other end reeked of wrong answer.

“Anyways, it’s four-thirty in the morning, don’t you think you should…”

“You want to hear something?” she cut in. “Raymond Del Pino’s older sister just had her second kid, you know what she called her? Yasmeen Rose. She told me it’s because I was the only one who never gave up trying to get Eric Cortez.”

“Well good for her,” Billy said, fishing for his car keys. “And good for you.”

“Good for me,” she slurred. “I’m telling you, that baby is cursed.”

2130 Longfellow Avenue, a six-story walk-up in the still semi-shitty East Bronx, was over a hundred years old but it had been built by fresh-off-the-boat artisans, and despite the fact that by the time Milton came to be born here it was a dump — its gappy mosaic tile floor like a piss-bum’s smile, its walls festooned with wilting poker chips of plaster, and its glassed-in apartment directory listing long-dead Jewish and Puerto Rican tenants like a roll call of ghosts — it still had its touches of old-world flair. But now, as he stood in the vestibule more than twenty years after he had fled for the safety of his aunt Pauline’s apartment in Brooklyn, he was shocked by what had become of his earliest home on earth, gutted and rehabbed in the cheapest possible way, the old crowned lathe-and-plaster brown-coat walls replaced by featureless plywood, the multicolored stone floors by prefab squares of ceramic, the ancient swaybacked marble risers by painted pine, and the amber-glassed hallway sconces by overhead halos of sputtering fluorescence.

“It stinks in here,” Sofia said, standing alongside him beneath the dented aluminum mailboxes.

“Don’t say stinks, say smells,” he said, then, gesturing to the stairs with the head of his 34-inch Rawlings Pro Maple (because you never knew): “Beauty before age.”

A baseball bat is a versatile thing. As Milton learned while still a teenager, a moderate swing across the shins will get a piece-of-shit dope slinger to share with you his strategy for keeping financially afloat, which basically comes down to stiffing Peter in order to pay Paul, then stiffing Paul and finding new suppliers. Another rap will get the slinger to tell you who the most recent Peter is, who the most recent Paul. And if, a day later, you bring the butt of the bat down reasonably hard on the splayed knuckles of either Peter or Paul, both of whom wanted to kill that little rip-off artist, you will find out the names of the hitters who were sent out to consummate the deed. Now, once you get the actual hitters in an unoccupied apartment, bound hand and foot with gaffer’s tape — you won’t put another piece of tape across their mouths until they try to talk their way out of dying by telling you everything, including the truth — you can just go ahead and play home-run derby until the walls, the ceiling, and your clothes are streaked with red.

Sofia had a hard time climbing—“I like to go as high as I can,” she had once explained to him, “because then all I have left is to go down”—and by the third floor she was struggling. But he was as patient with her as he had been when climbing these same steps all through childhood with his morbidly obese mother, her trudge-mantra back then, “What a world Milton, what a world,” thrilling him with terror.

4B, Sofia announced. Who lived here?

Mrs. Sanchez, she was a very nice lady.

She was nice?

Yes.

4C. Who lived here.

The Kleins.

Were they nice?

They were old.

The apartment doors, once oak, were now all single slabs of siege-mentality sheet metal, their numbers, in his time screwed-in brass, nothing more than hardware-store decals. But he couldn’t care less about these particular outrages against memory, because in the end the information they provided was the same information as twenty years ago, and any way you cut it the doors and their numbers would always tell the same story.

4D. Who lived here?

If he let her, she would announce every apartment in the building. But in a way, that was what they were here for, Milton taking his daughter on this stations-of-the-cross pilgrimage as an inoculation against the worst parts of himself, as a living, breathing reminder of what he had to lose if he allowed himself, at this moment in time, to follow his nature.

4D. Who…

The Carters.

Were they nice?

They were OK. They had a son who was retarded.

What’s retarded?

Not right in the head.

What?

Stupid but not his fault.

Sofia rolled that around for a bit, then: What was his name?

Michael.

Did the kids make fun of him?

Some.

Did you?

No.

How about Uncle Edgar?

No.

How about Uncle Rudy?

He could be kind of mean, but he was a kid.

Did you and Uncle Edgar get mad at him when he did that?

He was just a kid.

Did Grandma Rose get mad at him?

She didn’t get mad at anybody.

Were there other retarded kids in the building?

No, but one boy was gay.

He kissed other boys?

I guess.

What was his name?

Victor.

Did the kids make fun of him?

Oh yeah.

Did you?

No. Actually, one time when some older guys were pushing him around outside on the street, I made sure they never did that again.

How did you do that?

Don’t worry about it.

4E. Who lived here?

Some girl, Inez. I can’t remember her last name.

Was she nice?

I guess.

Did you like her?

I didn’t hate her.

Did you want to marry her?

No.

4F. Who lived here?

Guess.

You.

And Grandma Rose and Edgar and Rudy.

Can we go inside?

There’s other people in there now.

No matter how many families had lived behind that door since the Ramos family ceased to be, no matter how often the rooms and walls had been torn up and rebuilt in the name of affordable housing, 4F would always be haunted, and he could easily imagine some of those that moved in here afterward waking up and weeping in the middle of the night for no reason they could understand.

Little Man’s death, if you wanted to look at it that way, was nothing more than a gruesome case of mistaken identity. The targeted dealer, as anyone in the building could have told the men sent to lay him out, lived in 5C.