Richard Price - The Whites

“How’s Grandpa today?”

“I don’t know,” Carlos said, then: “A teacher in my school got quit.”

“What do you mean, got quit?”

“He’s not a teacher anymore.”

“Oh yeah? What teacher.”

“Mr. Lazar.”

“Mr. Lazar quit? Or got fired?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?” He couldn’t imagine that the school would can him for being gay.

“He hurt some guy,” Carlos said.

“What do you mean, hurt. Hurt what guy?” Billy trying to remember the name of Lazar’s potential blackmailer.

“He got took away,” Carlos said.

“Lazar?”

“Mr. Lazar.”

“Who took him away?”

“The police guys at release time. I’m going to the basement. Dec said there’s a mouse.”

Billy went up to his bedroom, quietly crept past his wife, her flank beneath the sheets swelling and dipping like a chain of dunes, and stowed his weapon and handcuffs in the closet. Then, intending to call the Yonkers PD to find out about Lazar, he went back down to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, while he was still on hold with the Second Precinct Detective Squad, the doorbell began to chime. Assuming the callers were either evangelists or Con Ed, and worried that a second round of chimes would wake Carmen, he stepped briskly into the hallway and swung the door wide to see Milton Ramos standing on his doorstep, stone-faced and thick as a stump, his razored eyes staring past Billy and into the house as if he weren’t even there.

Thinking that he was probably stuporously drunk by now and angry about having been booted from Night Watch three hours earlier, Billy was about to try to talk him down when Ramos reached behind his back — Billy vaguely thinking for some kind of letter of complaint — and came out with a Glock.

“Where is she,” Ramos said.

Billy took a step outside the house, then made a big show of holding up his hands for the TARU cameras, though he had no idea whether anyone was even monitoring them.

“Where is she,” Ramos repeated, muzzle-shoving Billy back inside as far as the living room while efficiently patting him down with his free hand even though they were both still in motion.

So, not stuporously drunk.

“Ramos.” He couldn’t remember his first name. “What are you doing?”

“Where is she.”

This time Billy heard the question. “Where’s who.”

“Your wife.”

“My wife?”

“Your wife, your wife, your wife,” he said, as if fed up with a blockhead.

“Hang on, hang on, I’m the one who gave you grief.”

Done with the basement, Carlos wandered into the room and without looking at either Ramos or his father, took a seat on the couch and picked up the remote.

“Hey, buddy, not now,” Billy said, his voice starting to float. “Go outside.”

“He stays,” Ramos said, letting the kid settle in and find his show.

“Look, just say,” Billy struggling not to plead, “what do you want.”

“I told you already,” Ramos said. Then, tilting his chin to the sound of footsteps coming from above, “She’s up there? Call her down.”

“She still doesn’t recognize me.”

Ramos was addressing Billy but his eyes were on Carmen, sitting across the room from him as stiff as a pharaoh, her own gaze fixed on the floor. “How can that be.”

Carlos, absorbed in his cartoons, was sitting alongside Ramos on the couch now, the automatic hidden beneath a throw pillow between them.

“What do you need the kid for,” Billy said, striving for an offhand tone. “Just let him come to me.”

Ignoring Billy, Ramos leaned forward to get Carmen to look at him. She wouldn’t.

“But you remember Little Man, right?” he said.

“You’re Milton,” Carmen whispered dully.

“Maybe I’m Edgar.”

“Edgar’s dead,” she said in that same downcast hush.

“So you know,” he said.

Billy, barely listening, finally became aware that there was a real conversation going on, neither Ramos nor his wife raising their voices.

“My whole family, in the ground, where you put them,” Ramos said to her, “and all these years I never knew why.”

Carlos half-stood to reach for the remote again, Ramos slowly raising a hand to grab him in case he decided to bolt, but the kid fell back into the cushions on his own.

“Milton, I’m right in front of you, I’m right here,” Carmen’s voice, despite the danger, still jarringly flat. “Please don’t hurt my son.”

“He’s not going to hurt him,” Billy said lightly, his heart blowing like a bellows. “He’s got a daughter of his own, right?”

The sound of the back door opening had Ramos half-rising, the automatic now down at his side. But at the sight of Billy Senior standing in the doorway, ruffled sections of the weekend paper tucked under his arm, he eased himself back down, slipping the gun once again beneath the pillow.

“What are you coming so early for?” Billy Senior said, stepping into the den. “I’m on nights this week. Didn’t they tell you?”

“I just came by to visit your son,” Ramos said easily. “I’ll be back for you later.”

“Well, see you then, my friend.” Billy’s father gave a short wave and left the room the same way he came in.

At first Billy was baffled, but then he realized that his father had been talking to his replacement driver, and that Ramos was the one who had been torturing them for weeks.

Milton, she had called him.

There was a glass snow globe from Jiminy Peak on the windowsill, a brass candlestick on a side table, the snow globe closer but still too far away.

“Tell me why you did it,” Ramos said.

Carmen tried to raise her eyes to Carlos, couldn’t. “Milton, I’m scared to look at him. Please.”

“Carlos, buddy, come on over to me,” Billy said. “Ramos, be a good guy, just let him come.”

“Tell me why you did it.”

“I never meant to,” she said. “You have to believe that.”

“Ramos, be a good guy…”

“Why.”

“Ramos, you do something here, how much time do you think you’ll ever have to be with your daughter? She’s already lost her mother, you told me yourself.”

“Why.”

“Because he broke my heart,” Carmen said, her voice barely carrying across the room.

“He what?” Ramos cocked his head, draped an arm atop Carlos’s shoulders.

“Think it through,” Billy said, eyes back to roaming for weapons.

“Broke my heart.”

“Broke your heart,” Ramos said. “He got you pregnant?”

“No.”

“But he was fucking you.” More a question than a statement.

Carlos started to fidget under the weight of his arm, but Ramos was too absorbed to even notice.

“Be cool, buddy,” Billy said to his son.

“He never even looked at me but once,” Carmen said.

Out the window, Billy saw a fleet of patrol cars and a Yonkers ESU van rolling up to the house, their presence, prayed for earlier, now heightening his sense of danger.

“I was fifteen years old,” Carmen said heavily. “They came up to me on the stoop, he had just hurt my feelings, I was mad, and I said what I said.”

Astonishingly, understandably, Carlos fell asleep against Ramos’s shoulder.

“You were fifteen, he had just hurt your feelings… And you just said what you said,” Ramos recited to himself. “Hurt your feelings ? That’s it?”

“You want a better story?” Carmen softly crying now. “I don’t have one.”

The house phone rang; hostage negotiators for sure, Billy knew, no one making a move to answer it.

“You know something?” Ramos said to Carmen, his voice filled with wonder. “I believe you. Fifteen years old… I don’t know what I was expecting to hear all these years.”