Richard Price - The Whites

As he reached for his cigarettes on the dash, the pack slipped through his fingers and landed between his feet. When he bent over to retrieve them, his forehead touched the steering wheel and that was that, Billy sitting up an hour later with a pink streak above his eyes as vivid as a brand.

He checked the time: two a.m. The bedroom window was dark.

Stepping from the car, he discovered that the asphalt beneath his feet was dappled with dried paint — the leakage from the clothes bag before it had been thrown onto his porch. Whoever had done the deed last night had chosen the same observation point as he had, a spot far enough away to avoid detection but near enough to track the life of the house.

Using the Maglite he kept in his glove compartment, Billy tracked the drippings from his car toward his house until they came to a stop thirty yards out from the front porch. Here the spatter took on a roughly circular pattern, the elongated drops at the outer edges suggesting that the actor, having picked this place for a launching pad, had then gone into a hammer-throw spin to build up enough centrifugal force to hit his mark ninety feet away.

Billy sat in his father’s rocker on the porch, imagining their stalker, their Fury, whipping that goddamn bag around and around himself before letting it fly, just sat there running and rerunning the film until he found himself suddenly flooded by a powerful halo of light, the search beam of the directed patrol car coming by for its three-thirty a.m. look-see.

When Billy raised his hand, they cut the beam and slowly rolled off, but not before the driver called out, “Here, I’m full,” and then tossed something onto the lawn. Once the car was out of sight, he walked through the damp grass and found a crumpled paper bag, inside of which was a half-eaten doughnut.

When he finally entered the sleeping house, the silence was so absolute that it created its own sound, a high even hiss like static from a distant source. Walking into the kitchen, Billy decided, once he opened the freezer, that he didn’t need a drink tonight — well, maybe just a pull — wiping his lips afterward, then heading for the stairs.

Soft-stepping into the bedroom, he jumped when he saw Carmen in silhouette sitting on a chair beneath the window, her hands flat on her thighs.

“What are you doing?” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”

“I saw him,” she said.

“Saw who?” Then: “You saw him? Where.”

“In a dream.”

The evening had started out OK enough, Anita and Ray bringing Sofia and a little friend to meet him at a diner in Staten Island so that he could hand over his care package of new clothes, DVDs, and favorite animals. His daughter seemed excited to see him, crawling into his lap to eat her low-fat mock sundae, but the whole time he feared that at the end of the meal she wouldn’t ask him to take her home, not that he would have done it.

At first, Sofia’s new friend had thrown him. The kid, Jen or Jan, a scrawny little thing with no more personality than a hamster, lived two houses down the street from Anita, and the girls, once introduced, had apparently become instant blood sisters and were, in fact, having a sleepover tonight. Sofia had never had a sleepover in her life, let alone a best friend. Their caged house in the Bronx had never been a home to other kids, even for a few hours after school, and this realization made him wince.

When the bill came, Ray nearly snatched it out of the waitress’s hand. “No arguments,” he said.

“Fine with me,” Milton said.

Sofia slid off his lap and moved to the other side of the table.

“When we go home?” she said to Anita. “Can we call Marilys?” Then to her mouse of a friend: “She’s my other mom.”

“I know !” Jan or Jen said with delighted exasperation. “You tell me all the time!”

It was the third time Sofia had brought up Marilys since the waitress had taken their orders, and it would be the last.

“Listen to me,” Milton said, his sleeve sliding through the dregs of his dessert as he reached across and took her wrist. “Marilys isn’t your other mom. Marilys isn’t anything. She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t even care about you, OK?”

“Hey, Milton,” Ray said.

“Can you get that through your head?”

Sofia was too shocked to do anything other than stare at him in red-faced astonishment, but the other kid, after a breathless second, started to cry as if the world had come to an end.

Mortified, he got up from the table, walked out the door, and marched into the diner’s parking lot. Weaving his way through an army of parked cars to an unlit spot, he seethed in the dark for a few minutes, then pulled out his phone and called Marilys’s sister.

“This is Milton Ramos, you remember me?”

She said she did, but she didn’t sound too happy about it.

“I’m going to call you back in a half hour. When I do, you’re going give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everybody in your family living in New York.”

Milton stepped deeper into the shadows as Ray came out of the diner, and a moment later pulled out of the lot with a carload of mutes.

“If I call back and for any reason you don’t pick up? I’m coming back to your house. Do yourself a big favor and save me the trip.”

At eleven that evening he sat across the oilcloth-covered dinette table, glaring at Marilys and her so-called cousin Ottavio, a balding runt with amphibious eyes.

They were in Ottavio’s one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Milton’s former fiancée and her kinsman anxiously looking everywhere but at him.

“They were going to kill him,” Marilys said numbly, staring first at Milton’s hands with their paint-rimmed nails the color of blood, then at the greasy bat he had placed between them on the table.

“Who’s they,” he said. Then: “You,” making Ottavio jump. “Who’s they.”

“Some individuals I got steered to wrong.”

“They were going to kill him,” Marilys repeated, forcing herself to meet his eye.

He didn’t know what angered him more, the fact that she had so heartlessly ravaged his life for money and dismissed his daughter’s need for her like it was nothing or the fact that, despite his desire to slaughter her, she was treating him like a total stranger.

“You’re living here now?”

“Just for a little bit,” her voice down to a hush.

“You really her cousin?”

“Distant,” Ottavio said, unconsciously glancing toward the sole bedroom.

“I want my money back,” he said.

“It’s gone,” Marilys said, once again staring at his bunched hands.

Milton went off into his boiling head long enough for Marilys to add, “We can start paying you back a little each week.”

We.

And the thought of having to see her, or him, every week or month to maybe collect twenty dollars here, thirty dollars there, the excuses, the no-shows, the constant, snake-headed presence of them in his life…

“I don’t want your fucking money.”

He took up his bat and slowly got to his feet, Marilys raising her eyes and then asking in a breathless monotone, “What are you going to do.”

Nothing. Whether it was some perverse residual feelings he still had for her or just a failure of nerve on his part, he would do nothing.

He reached for his coat.

When it became apparent that she was in no physical danger this night, she added more softly, “Milton, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.” And then a PPS as he turned toward the door: “How’s Sofia?”

When Victor Acosta finally left the Bryant Motor Lodge at four o’clock in the morning, there was a three-woman, two-man smackdown going on in a corner of the parking lot and Milton, who had already been waiting on him for two hours, maybe longer, understood that he had no choice right now but to remain in his car. Which, he figured, was probably just as well, since he’d been hitting the thermos steady and was temporarily too drunk to not fuck this up.