Richard Price - The Whites

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.

“They’re boys,” Billy answered in kind.

“Kids. All we want in life is for them to be happy, right?”

“Sure.”

“I mean, what are we asking.”

“I know.”

“John Junior, do you remember all the grief he put me through? With the rehabs, the dealing, the graffiti collars, dropping out of school… And that fucking room of his, I’d walk in, him and all his friends reeking of skunk, looking like red-eyed morons, ‘Hey Mister P,’ sitting there with the sideways hats over their ears. ‘Hey, kids! Who knows what century it is? A hundred bucks to whoever can tell me what fucking century we’re in or even just what planet we’re on,’ they’re like, ‘Uh, duh, uh…’”

“I remember,” Billy said, recalling John Junior in his teens, an oversized bruiser like his father but in reality a sweet-tempered con artist who’d rather munch than punch.

“But I tell you, last year?” Pavlicek back to pacing. “I come home one day, he’s there, says to me, Read this, and it’s an acceptance letter from Westchester Community College. I didn’t even know he applied. He says he wants to take some business classes, then get something going for himself. I tell him, Come work for me, you’ll learn more about starting your own business than ten colleges, he says no, he wants to do it on his own. I say, If you work for me you’ll earn enough money to hit the ground running, he says, Dad, all due respect? It’s important for me to do this without help from you. Can you believe that? I was so proud of him I wanted to bust.”