Richard Price - The Whites

Rolling onto his own street after a four-thirty a.m. police shooting in Herald Square had extended his tour nearly until noon, Billy was so jacked from all the liquid speed he had ingested that he clipped a neighbor’s garbage can and then just kept on driving, his house at the end of the curved block shimmering like a mirage. Oddly enough, the sight of Pavlicek’s Lexus parked in his driveway settled him down rather than sending him over the edge, artificial adrenaline, in the end, no friend to genuine alertness.

They were having coffee in the kitchen, Carmen in her nursing whites, Pavlicek in dry-cleaned jeans and a sport jacket.

“I didn’t know Carmen went to Monroe,” Pavlicek said as if Billy had been sitting with them all along. “Did you know that?”

“Well, yeah, she’s my wife,” he said carefully, looking to her for a read on the situation.

“My parents went there in the sixties, they met in tenth-grade journalism class,” looking past Billy into the living room. “How’s that for staying power.”

“Must have been a whole different school in those days,” Billy said, still trying to catch Carmen’s eye.

“No, they told me it was crap back then too.”

“He was asking me if I remembered any of the teachers,” Carmen said. “I told him I didn’t even remember going there.”

“Yeah, you never talk about it,” Billy too tense to take a seat in his own kitchen. “So, John, to what do we owe the honor?”

“Hey, look at this guy,” Pavlicek beaming as Declan wandered into the kitchen, then pulling the boy close. “How old are you, now?”

“Eight.” Always a sucker for adult attention, Declan didn’t resist, standing there between Pavlicek’s legs, an expectant half-smile on his face.

Billy finally caught his wife’s eye: What gives? Carmen, thrown by the query, just shrugged.

“You got a girlfriend yet?” Pavlicek asked.

“I hate girls,” Declan said, stating a fact.

“Yeah? What’s your favorite team?”

“The Rangers.”

“Baseball Rangers or hockey Rangers.”

“Hockey. I hate the baseball Rangers.”

“My boy’s sport was football.”

“I like football. I’m on a team,” Declan said, then walked out of the room.

“What a guy you have there,” Pavlicek said to the space between the parents.

“Well, yours is no slouch,” Carmen said.

“Yeah,” Pavlicek said faintly, smiling down at his coffee.

Billy finally took a seat. “So, John, what’s up?”

Pavlicek took a breath, then folded his hands on the table. “Do you remember that Memory Keepers national convention Ray Rivera was talking about that time on City Island?”

“I know that group,” Carmen said. “We give them a conference room for their meetings. So sad, you know?”

“Well, I went there as a guest of the Bronx-Westchester chapter, the one that meets at St. Ann’s,” nodding to Carmen. “It was in a Marriott outside of St. Louis and the first night they had a ceremony in this huge banquet hall, fifty, sixty tables, maybe five hundred parents from all the local chapters coast to coast. And, once everyone got settled, they passed out these cheap see-through plastic roses attached to batteries, one to a family, then they turned out all the lights in the hall and started to project a slide show onto a movie screen up front, sort of a death carousel. Each slide was a photo of someone’s murdered child, could be anywheres from an infant to a forty-year-old, with name, birth date, then the ‘murdered’ date, printed below. ‘Murdered,’ not died, not killed. They’d hold the photo for twenty seconds or so, and when you saw your son’s or daughter’s face up there, your grandchild’s, you turned on your battery-powered rose. One by one, those roses going on in the dark, here, over there, in the corner, in the back, and all the while they’re playing this sappy theme music over the sound system, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, the Carpenters, Whitney Houston, roses clicking on for infants, gangbangers, little girls, teenage boys, grown women, black, white, Chinese, “You Light Up My Life,” murder date, rose, “Memories,” murder date, rose, “Close to You,” murder date, rose, “I Will Always Love You,” murder date, rose, murder date, rose… And people for the most part were pretty composed, but every once in a while a face would come up on the screen and you’d hear somebody gasping in the dark or moaning, then race-walking out of the room. I think they had an understanding, if you’re going to lose it, you need to leave, because it could create a chain reaction… So, the ceremony is going on and on, more and more roses lighting up this huge grief cave, and by the end of the slide show the whole room was, like, blazing with roses, I mean that fucking slide show went on for something like an hour and a half — twenty seconds a life, you do the math.”

A silence came down, everyone staring at the table until Billy couldn’t take it anymore.

“John, what’s wrong with you.”

“I lost you,” Pavlicek blinking at him.

“I’m right here.”

“Then be more specific.”

“The hematologist.”

Carmen looked from one to the other.

“I know you’re seeing him.”

“Me? No.”

“John Pavlicek,” Billy said. “I’m sorry, but I have the records.”

“Junior.”

“What?”

“That would be John Pavlicek Jr.,” Pavlicek said. “It’s called T-cell prolymphocytic leukemia, no one beats it, and it’s fast. Six months at the outside.”

“No!” Carmen’s voice fluty with shock.

“Are you sure?”

“I come back from a two-week business trip four months ago, December sixteenth, I hear him in his bedroom, I walk in there,” looking directly at Billy now. “I thought he had got stomped by a gang. Rings around his eyes, lumps and bruises all over his body, he can barely move, raise his eyes to me.”

“Wait,” Billy’s hand out like a stop sign, “hold on, you told me…”

“I know what I told you,” he said flatly.

Carmen started to cry, the sight of a weeping nurse bringing home the death sentence for Billy.

“So,” Pavlicek sighed, “you ask around to Yasmeen, to Whelan, to Redman, do you know what happened to this animal, to that animal, do you think Pavlicek caught some kind of disease and lost his mind, do you think…”

“John, you have to understand…”

“Who the fuck cares, Billy. I mean, where’s the scales, where’s the justice in it?”

Billy closed his eyes, dreamed of sleep. “Are you telling me something?”

“I’m asking you something.” Pavlicek leaned across the table and touched the back of his hand. “Because from where I’m sitting? If God or whoever else could just point a finger at a kid like John Junior, then all bets are off, because no one’s minding the store. So, someone like me, what you do is, you take care of all your unfinished business, you do what you have to do to balance the books, so that maybe, just maybe, when the time comes, you might manage not to jump in the grave with him.”

“Sometimes with that kind of leukemia…” Carmen began, then faded.

“My boy will be rotting in the earth while Jeffrey Bannion is getting laid? I don’t think so. While Eric Cortez is going to a Yankees game? While Sweetpea Harris is becoming a father?”

“What are you telling me,” Billy repeated numbly.

“You’re a detective,” Pavlicek said. “You figure it out.”

Billy went away again, came back. “John, I swear to God, you know how much I love you, and I’m devastated for your son, but if you killed any of those…”

“You’ll what, you’ll lock me up?” Pavlicek finished his coffee and got to his feet. “You want to hear the worst, the very worst about this fucking type of leukemia he’s got?” Looking around the kitchen as if trying to decide what to smash first. “The median age at onset is sixty-five. Imagine that.”