Richard Price - The Whites

Billy didn’t answer.

“Oh yes you did.”

Billy started walking to his car.

“Looking at me like you did when I came to your house…” Pavlicek called out after him, sounding both imperious and resentful. “Fucking saint that you are.”

Billy came back. “This shit is what heals your grief, John?”

Turning away, he noticed, for the first time, the Westchester Community College decal on Pavlicek’s rear window. “This is how you honor your son?”

He had no idea how he came to be lying on his back. His jaw felt as if it was now located behind his left ear. When he managed to find his feet, he was immediately thrown belly-down onto the hood of the Lexus, his kidneys being pounded from behind. By the time he rallied enough to defend himself, twisting his hips and whipping a high and ineffective elbow to the side of Pavlicek’s head, the deep one-note whoop of a patrol car brought it all to an end.

“Go ahead, tell them what’s the what,” Pavlicek wheezed. “Now’s your chance. Go on.”

Billy, gasping himself, intercepted the young cops, both Asian, as soon as they stepped out onto the street. Holding out his gold shield, he slurred, “Family feud, it’s under control.”

After the uniforms reluctantly rolled off, Billy tottered back to his sedan and drove away, Pavlicek watching him go with the scowling concentration of someone trying to memorize a license plate.

Coming home directly from the Bronx, his exploded jaw pulsing like a drum, Billy saw the red carnage on his front porch and flew into the house to check on his family, racing bedroom to bedroom, the animal priority of who he loved most coming in the order of rooms entered — Carmen before his kids, his kids before his father.

All sleeping, all breathing.

Back in the kitchen, Billy chugged down a glass of tap water, then stepped outside to verify what he thought he’d seen.

The front of the house looked like a slaughter pit, the cedar planks on the south side of the porch, the exterior wall directly behind it, and Carmen’s pink-and-blue Easter banner all peppered with blossoms of gore. A split trash bag, its guts still puddled with paint, lay between the front legs of his father’s rocking chair, looking, to anyone driving by, like a sleeping dog. But it was the scatter of children’s clothes that froze his heart: a top, a pair of jeans, another top, another pair of pants, and a slurry of underpants and socks, all so red-drenched and twisted that he had no idea whether they were for a boy or a girl.

He went into the garage, gathered up two lawn bags, a wire-whisk brush, an aerosol bottle of Strip-All, and a joint-compound bucket filled with hot water. Checking the time — six-fifteen — he quickly set to work.

It was only later, while carefully going through the paint-stiffened clothes, looking for shop labels or laundry marks and finding nothing more than the ubiquitous Gap Kids tag, that it came to him that his family’s tormentor had chosen red twice now, the porch and the children’s clothes bathed in the same arterial shade as the handprint on the back of Carlos’s jacket.

It made him think about the Jews in Egypt smearing their doors with lamb’s blood to fend off the Angel of Death — except in this case, the message seemed to be the opposite.

After dutifully driving his kids to school —Carmen before his kids— Billy sat in the kitchen on a straight-backed chair watching his wife wrap her thumbs in heavy layers of gauze, which she then secured with surgical tape.

He had told her that his dislocated jaw had come from a roll-around with a five a.m. Dusthead in the course of making an arrest, but doubted that she believed him.

“Tilt your head back and open your mouth as wide as you can.”

“This is going to hurt, right?”

“Like a bitch, but only for a second.”

When she put her thumbs in his mouth, each one settling on a back molar, and then rose up on her toes in order to put her whole body into it, he thought he would puke.

“Billy, relax.”

“I am.”

“No you’re not. I tell you what…” she said, lowering herself, then quickly rising up again and bringing her thumbs down so hard on his back teeth that he screamed.

“Fucking hurts, right?” Carmen said a moment later as she unspooled the tooth-shredded gauze from around her thumbs. He thought he had bitten them off.

“Guy wasn’t even that big,” he said, the red-hot throbbing of the last few hours miraculously down to a run-of-the-mill soreness.

“No, huh?” Avoiding his eyes.

He didn’t understand why she wasn’t pressing him for the truth, which made him even more edgy than he already was.

“I must’ve had three inches and forty pounds on him,” Billy doubling down on the story. “They should have called animal control.”

“We had a guy brought in last week?” she said, staying in the game. “He was so cranked on PCP he shattered both of his femurs just by tensing his legs. We go to lift him off his gurney, he jumps up and starts running down the hall like a track star. Didn’t feel a thing.”

Billy bent over and started to retch.

Carmen offered him an unwashed cereal bowl from the sink.

“I’m good,” he said, accepting it.

“So where are you at?” she asked.

“With what.” Billy blinked, hoping to duck the subject.

Choosing to let it be, at least for now, Carmen handed him three Advils and a glass of water.

“I want you to go over to Saint Joseph’s for an X-ray.”

“Right now I need to sleep,” he said. Then, gingerly probing his jaw: “Thank you.”

While Carmen was upstairs changing into her work whites, Redman called.

“I need to come by,” he said.

“What for?” As if he couldn’t guess.

“I need to talk to you. I’ll drive up.”

“Hang on,” Billy said, putting the receiver to his chest. He’d had enough of visitors, announced and unannounced, coming to sit or stand in his kitchen and dump all kinds of dark drama on his head.

“I tell you what,” raising a hand to Carmen as she walked out of the house, “I need to take care of something, then I’ll come down to you, how’s that sound.”

“All right,” Redman said reluctantly. “Just, until you get here? Don’t do anything.”

Billy walked out the front door a few minutes later, intending to take the paint-stiffened clothes over to the Yonkers precinct that was overseeing the directed patrols. At first he was startled to see Carmen still on the porch, then not, given her missing banner.

“I saw that when I came in,” he said as offhandedly as he could. “Some kids must’ve taken it last night.”

But rather than raise hell about it, she seemed distracted, barely acknowledging that he had said anything at all. Then he saw what she was focused on: a rivulet of red paint that he’d missed earlier had settled into the seam between house and porch, looking like a boundary line on a map.

She walked to her car, unlocked the driver’s door, then spoke to him without looking his way. “I don’t want Millie picking up the kids from school this afternoon,” she said numbly. “You do it.”

The night-vision surveillance footage from the previous evening, both chalky and luminous, was eerie enough to pass for paranormal activity. Billy watched the tape three times, the mysteriously launched garbage bag sailing as clumsily as an overweight turkey through the fuzzy air before erupting on his porch and spewing out its contents.

“Those patrols are bullshit. I want a twenty-four-hour posting in front of the house,” Billy said, regretting the “I want” as soon as it came out of his mouth.

“Not happening.” The detective, Evan Lefkowitz, shrugged.