Richard Price - The Whites

“Well, there you go,” wishing she’d gone and come back already.

Marilys leaned across the table and kissed him on the mouth again, which this time made him tense up given that his daughter was right there.

“Oh, Milton,” Marilys saying his name for the second time in his life.

“Oh, Milton,” Sofia aped, her eyes as lightless as pebbles.

Later that night it took him most of a bottle of Chartreuse to work up the resolve to quit drinking. He had never been anybody’s idea of a light drinker, but since the day he first saw the adult Carmen in St. Ann’s, he’d gone completely off the rails, each night worse than the last, waking up every morning on the couch wondering how the one a.m. sports recap had morphed into cartoons.

Well, no excuse for that now, Milton pouring what remained of the bottle into the sink.

Still drunk on the liquor that hadn’t gone down the drain, he took to wandering the house in order to start reassigning rooms: his first wife’s sewing nook now a nursery for his son, the sometime fuck-pad guest room — no need for that anymore — going to his mother-in-law, as well as the nearest of the three bathrooms, hers alone. What else. Divide the den and make a playroom. All the hallway closets going to all the ladies. Then, running out of steam, he finally headed off for his own bedroom, walking in and seeing it for the first time as the gray cell it had become.

A five a.m. after-hours bar shooting in Inwood kept Billy on the job until ten in the morning, and when he finally made it home at eleven, still pondering his interview with Ramlear Castro, he was startled to see TARU techs everywhere. To cover the block from intersection to intersection, they were mounting Argus cameras on telephone poles, as well as on the house itself, the buzz and whine of all this work chasing away any hope he had of immediate sleep.

Thirty minutes later, as he was standing at the kitchen counter flipping through the New York Post and sipping his morning Cape Codder, Pavlicek called. This time Billy picked up.

“You’re screening my calls?”

“What?” Billy too tired to come up with any coherent excuse.

“Look, I was just trying to reach out to apologize for getting so crazed on you yesterday. It’s just that I have so much shit raining down on my head right now I might wind up moving in there with you.”

“In where with me.” Looking out the kitchen window, Billy spotted Whelan and his sleepover date making out on the kids’ trampoline.

“Are you serious?” Pavlicek said quietly.

Christ, Billy recalling that barren, echo chamber of an apartment with the stadium view.

“Speaking of which, I talked to my guys and I can have it ready for you day after tomorrow. All you’ll need are towels and sheets.”

“‘My guys.’ You’re always talking about your guys,” Billy stalled. “The only guys I have are my kids.”

“Yeah well, you have your squad, too.”

Billy put the phone to his chest. Just say it.

“Hey, John, I’m sorry to put you through all that trouble, but I talked it over with Carmen, and we’re going to make a home stand.”

Silence on the other end, then: “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, Intel sent over a Threat Assessment Team, TARU’s out there right now putting up cameras, Yonkers PD is running directed patrols, it’s like the fortress of solitude over here. It’s nuts to pull up stakes.”

Another bloated pause. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” Billy said. “I mean, given the circumstances.”

“Because you don’t sound like you.”

“Yeah? Who do I sound like?” Then telling himself, Don’t strain for jokes.

“You’re not ticked because I lost it over Sweetpea, are you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Is that why you weren’t taking my calls?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Billy said.

Whelan and his tenant, still in a kissing clinch, came into the kitchen through the rear door.

“I mean, how hung up are you over that skell?”

“John, I’m not hung up on him, I was just curious,” Billy said carefully. “And now I’m not. Listen, I got to go feed the kids, I’ll call you later.”

“Just another Smirnoff morning,” Whelan announced, nodding to the bottle.

“It’s either that or chloroform,” Billy said.

The tenant went silently to the refrigerator, took out the milk, and poured some into a saucepan that was already sitting on a back burner.

“Hung up on who,” Whelan asked.

“What?” Billy stalling once again.

“You said, ‘I’m not hung up on him.’”

“Sweetpea Harris,” Billy said. “He’s gone AWOL, and I think he bought the farm.”

“No shit,” Whelan pouring himself a coffee. “And John’s giving you grief over that? What for?”

Billy took another sip of his drink.

“Do me a favor and tell me something,” he said. “The other day, when I asked you why you were so hung up on Pavlicek…”

“Me?” Whelan reared back.

“You never answered my question.”

“What question.”

“Why you were all over me about Pavlicek.”

“How was I all over you?”

Billy stared at him. “Jimmy, do you know something I don’t?”

“Like what?”

“Jesus Christ, look out that window,” Billy exploded, pointing to the TARUs crawling all over the front yard. “And that window, and that one,” Billy spinning like a bottle. “I’m getting shredded here, I’m juggling chain saws, so if I ask you for a straight answer on something and you start playing me like I’m some idiot?”

Whelan held up a hand. “If I tell you this, you cannot tell anyone, you understand?”

“Is it his health?”

Whelan blinked at him. “What’s wrong with his health?”

“Then just say.”

Whelan took a long pull off his coffee. “He’s trying to buy my building from the owner. But it’s kind of very delicate right now, very touch and go, and I just thought maybe he said something to you about it.”

Billy stared at him. “That’s it?”

“What do you mean, ‘That’s it.’ Are you kidding me? He swings this deal, I go from super to building manager at twice the pay. And if that works out, he’s going to throw me more buildings. I mean, you know me, I don’t need much, but I would like a little more than I got.”

One of the security cameras fell out of a tree, nearly braining a passing TARU before smashing against a lawn chair.

“Anyways, this thing with Sweetpea going off the grid?” Whelan rinsed out his cup. “You should tell Redman when you see him today.”

“Why am I seeing Redman today?”

“The funeral.”

“What funeral?”

“For your kid.”

Billy went white.

“I would go,” Whelan said, reaching for his jacket, “but I have a guy coming for the boiler.”

The tenant poured the heated milk into a glass and handed it to Billy. “Para dormir,” she said, laying her cheek on her palm and closing her eyes.

Edna Worthy was the only mourner to show up for her granddaughter Martha’s funeral service that afternoon, so the folding chairs that lined Redman’s living room — chapel were populated by a handful of last-minute stand-ins: Redman, his father, his wife, Nola, holding their son, Rafer, four of the old men who hung out every day in the windowless reception area of the parlor like it was their old-man clubhouse, two dragooned cops from the Twenty-eighth Precinct Community Affairs Unit, and Billy, who was paying for the whole thing.

“But Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven,’” the four-hundred-pound minister intoned from the pulpit before pausing to take a hit of asthma spray.