Samaritan (9 page)

“Lined me up against the wall?” he said haltingly.

“Plus, Ray, it’s not just about you. Guys like that? This is what they do and they keep on doin’ it until they get snatched, so even if not for your own—”

“What did you mean ‘lined me up against the wall’ . . .”

“Ray,” Nerese said heavily, as she assumed the position, her hands braced against the Plexiglas partition. She twisted her face toward him. “Ring a bell?”

At first he looked nonplussed, but then as the recognition came into his eyes, she thought he would vomit.

“Ray.”

“
No.
” Looking away from her, dull with dread.

“OK. OK,” she said lightly, stepping away from the wall, afraid to push him any further on this right now.

Next to the pitcher on the night table she noticed a sheet of paper folded in the middle and propped into an A-frame.

Reaching across Ray’s body, she picked it up and saw another armed and dangerous ghetto waif, once again the legend beneath the feet, “What’s Mine Is Mine.”

“It’s a kid’s,” Ray said.

“This guy?” She produced the drawing from his apartment.

“You can just
take
shit?” Ray slowly coming back to himself, annoyed but not particularly nervous.

“Who is he?”

“Some old student.”

“He visited you here?”

“Once.”

“I thought you said nobody came but me.”

“He came
once
!” Ray barked, starting to rev it up again.

“Old student . . .” Nerese said evenly, gingerly pushing for more.

“From like twelve years ago when I was teaching in the Bronx, we keep in touch. He’s a good kid, Salim El-Amin, used to be Coley Rodgers.”

The words came out of him in a jacked gobble, but despite his returning agitation he gave up the name without blinking and Nerese, not smelling anything worth immediately pursuing here, attempted to calm him down by retreating into history. “So you started out as a teacher, huh?”

“Got to eat.”

“What, you didn’t like it?” She slipped this second drawing into her pocket along with the first, that “What’s Mine Is Mine” still bugging her a little.

“Not really.”

“I understand you quit. Took a bunch of kids from a class trip and skipped town or something.”

Ray stared at her. Nerese braced for another outburst.

“Let me tell you something,” his jaw locked at a slant again. “What I got busted for? That was the only day I enjoyed being a teacher. I took a tenth-grade English class to Central Park to see
As You Like It,
you know, ‘Hey nonny nonny.’ They were fucking bored out of their minds. I had a feeling they would be, and because I hate the idea of a captive audience? For backup I snuck a football in my bag. Sure enough, by the middle of the second act? We’re out of there. I took them over to the Sheep Meadow and we had a game, girls versus boys, I’m quarterbacking for the boys, and the kids, they were in heaven. It was like they couldn’t believe I did this for them, cut them such a break.

“I mean, neither could the school. I was sent up for review, but by that point I was like, Fuck it I quit.

“I mean, it wasn’t like I was a bad teacher or I didn’t try, or I didn’t care, or I took it out on my students. I just . . .

“I don’t know. To me, the whole point of high school is to graduate, you know, hit it and quit it. And to go back there, voluntarily, and to deal with the department heads, the senior teachers, the principal, the audits, the evaluations, it was too much like still being a student worrying about your report card, you know? It was like the same type of pissy two-bit tyrants that ruled my life from kindergarten to twelfth grade as teachers were now my bosses. Thank you, no, so . . .”

“I don’t know, Ray, me?” Nerese said easily, trying to slow him down again. “If I had to do it all over again? I’d’ve definitely been a teacher. I like working with kids, you know, as long as they don’t follow me home.”

“Yeah well, I think I’d’ve been a cop myself,” Ray said. “You guys, you got a backstage pass to the greatest show on earth.”

“No, well, you must be talking about some
other
cop. Do you know how I became a detective?” Feeling herself about to go off on a tear, Nerese tried to rein it in, but it was no use—this one always made her nuts. “I had to put in fifty-four months sitting behind a desk doing candidate evaluations for the police academy. Fifty-four months, that was the route offered to me for a gold shield.

“See, I wanted plainclothes narcotics, because that’s only fourteen months, and it’s for real, but they turned me down because of my brothers. They said, ‘What are you gonna do if you hit a place and one of your brothers is in there shootin’ up, pipin’ up? What are you gonna do if you know three hours before it goes down that your squad’s gonna hit some spot, some apartment, and there’s every chance in the world that someone in your family is working there, or scoring there. Are you gonna warn them to stay away?’

“And I’m like, ‘Hell no, nothing doing, live by the needle, die by the needle, that is strictly their own goddamn problem,’ but they didn’t want to take a chance with me so I got to ride a motherfucking desk for fifty-four months, put on an average of six pounds a year, got my gold shield, but everybody knew how I got it, what I did, didn’t do for it. And to this day I get little or no respect from other detectives because of it, no matter, no matter what I’ve done on the Job since. I’m just some high-profile black female desk jockey got the shield to make the department look good, so fuck this greatest-show-on-earth bullshit . . .” Nerese gulped some air. “Did I mention to you I’m retiring in a few months?”

“Yeah, well, still . . . You know what I really hated about teaching?” Ray just getting back into his own thing. “I hated the idea of getting older every year while the students stayed the same age or, you know, when they graduated, they were like ships sailing off for adventure and there I am waving bye-bye, stuck on the dock . . .”

Despite her awareness of his altered state, Nerese felt surprisingly wounded by Ray’s lack of response to her fifty-four-month sob story—wounded enough that she had to remind herself that what she was doing here, was working.

“Plus one other small thing?” he said. “Towards the end of my teaching career? Like, the last year or two? I was an up-and-coming cokehead. Not every day, not every night, but enough, and occasionally I’d go into class high, have a half-gram in my wallet, standing in front of thirty kids at a clip, I’m either skying or crashing, paranoid out of my ass, like, Why are they
looking
at me? Because you’re the teacher, schmuck . . . And as embarrassing as it is to tell you this? Understand, Nerese, and this in no way exonerates me or mitigates what I did, but I was also very ashamed of myself. I mean I never got caught, but I never got away with it, either.”

“But so, I don’t understand,” Nerese said. “If you hated teaching so much, why’d you go back and volunteer for more?”

“I had four really bad years on coke—teaching, driving a cab, doing polygraphs . . . I mean if someone had hooked me up to one of those machines when I was a polygrapher? The fucking stylus would have shot off into the wall. And I didn’t really stop until I got the writing deal on that TV show; then I cleaned up for good. Then about two years ago, I got nominated for an Emmy. Well, one-fifth of an Emmy, since there were four other writers of that episode. And a week after that, I get this call from one of my old teachers at the Hook, Mr. Mufson, remember him? Asks me would I like to address the graduating class, you know, local boy makes good, comes home to talk, hail the conquering hero and, Tweetie, I swear I was such a nothing student at that school, so it’s . . . How could I not?”

Tweetie again.

“So, I show up at the assembly, all the kids are in cap and gown, nine-tenths are like, ‘Who the hell’s
this
clown?’ but the teachers knew, my old bitch-ass teachers and, I’m up on the podium, I look out and there’s not one white face, you know Paulus Hook now, and because all I see are minority kids and because I’m haunted by my own drug history, I just toss my speech and go into this confessional thing about drugs, how they almost destroyed me, don’t let them destroy you, you’ve got your whole life in front of, et cetera, the world’s your oyster, et cetera. It was a pretty damn good speech, the only thing was, the school didn’t have a drug problem. I mean yeah, there’s always some kids who want to break bad, get cash money paid, but those kids are strictly interested in the business end of things. I mean, who sitting there wearing a cap and gown in that auditorium would be contemplating a career as a drug addict? These kids are graduating. Half are headed for college. My whole address was a class-action insult. But still, parents are coming up to me afterwards shaking my hand, asking me if I had written copies of what I said, my own parents are in the audience, Ruby, my old teachers, and there was something so, I don’t know, intoxicating about the whole thing, so heady . . .

“And, you know, a year later, the Towers go down, I’m back, de-gigged, money’s not a problem just then, but I need, I really need to do something with myself. And, I remembered how good, what a rush that was, that graduation-day thing, so I went and got something going for myself over there. And it was different than teaching in the Bronx because they weren’t paying me, so all they could say to me was thanks, thank you, thank you so much . . .”

“Money’s not a problem,” Nerese murmured with hammy envy. “Which reminds me. My guy who did the background check on you? He wanted to know how somebody goes from driving a cab to writing a TV show.”

Ray stared at her, absorbing “my guy,” absorbing “background check.”

“That’s for some other time,” he said flatly.

“Whatever . . . And he also asked me to ask you how the hell someone walks out on four bigs a week in order to come back to
this
toilet and work for nothing.”

Ray took a moment with that, too; Nerese knowing everything but his shoe size. And his assailant.

“Also for another time,” struggling to keep his voice on an even keel.

“Because, he had heard something about an incident, a misunderstanding . . . I can’t believe this myself, Ray, so if you say bullshit, bullshit it is, but something about something
racial
out there?”

She saw the truth of it in his face, in the immensity of his nonreaction. “Another time,” he managed to say.

Nerese gave it a minute, then began gathering herself, throwing out big deep sighs as she rose from her chair. “And no way you’re giving me a name here.”

Ray, as if lost in all his “some other times,” looked right through her.

“You’re just gonna make me bust my hump out there, old lady that I am . . .”

Nothing.

“Won’t even give me the name of that cha-cha you were seen squiring around Little Venice with.”

Carefully rolling on his side, he gave her his back.

“Well, this is intriguing, Ray, I’ll give you that.”

And having finally collected and organized herself, she turned to leave. “OK, then . . .”

“Hey Tweetie?” he said softly.

Sensing a prelude to revelation in the hesitant calling of her name, she turned expectantly.

“When I told you that was the only time I enjoyed being a teacher? You know, taking those kids AWOL? That wasn’t exactly true.”

Nerese waited.

“I pulled that AWOL shit with them every time we had a class trip. Year in, year out, my kids always counted on me for that.” Ray coughed, shot her a half-smile. “That was just the only time I ever got caught.”

Chapter 7

Classroom—January 10

“This is me and my friends at Six Flags amusement park,” the girl Dierdre read to the class from her Chinese notebook as a Polaroid was passed around the table.

“This was taken last year. We went by bus and it took so long to get there I was a old lady with six kids and eight grandchildren by the time we got there. If you want to go to Six Flags don’t ever go by bus. Otherwise I had fun.”

“OK,” Ray said, smiling. “Thank you.”

What else was there to say? She hadn’t done what he’d asked: find a photo of family before the writer’s birth and make up a story about the people in the picture—but he was grateful for the stab at humor, for her doing anything at all.

“Rashaad, what do you have . . .” nodding to the tall long-headed boy who pined for the oblivious Felicia.

“Yeah, I wrote something.” He displayed his hands palms up. “But I forgot the book at home.”

“No.” Ray shrugged. “Class can’t work that way. If you don’t bring stuff in, we have nothing to do.”

“Well, I can
tell
you it.”

“No,” Mrs. Bondo said, Ray about to say the same, resenting her butting in. “This class is a privilege,” she added, making it sound like a prison perk. “If you abuse it, it’ll be taken away.”

“OK then,” Ray said as lightly as he could. “Next victim.”

Jamaal tentatively raised a hand, then passed around an eight-by-ten color photo of a corpse.

The boys got into this one, squinting open-mouthed, Efram asking the inevitable, “He’s dead?”

The subject was a thirtyish black man laid out in a satin-lined casket, eyes lightly shut, lips infinitesimally parted, a rosary entwined in his clasped hands. Lilies peeked out from the top right corner of the frame.

Two of the girls unconsciously leaned into each other, the photo on the table between them.

When the picture was passed to Mrs. Bondo, she somehow managed to project both skeptical wariness and raw curiosity.

Once again Ray was suffused with gratitude. “Go ahead, Jamaal.”

“This is a picture of my uncle before he was buried. I never really knew him because he lived in Brooklyn but my mother told me that when he was in high school he was a starter on the basketball team and they won the city championship one year even though he was five-foot-eight. This gives me hope because even though I am five-foot-eight too next year I hope to start for Paulus Hook. Right now I’m on the JV and have the highest free-throw percentage of anybody.”

Jamaal read in a halting monotone, as if the words were listed vertically, or the handwriting unfamiliar.

“My uncle was also the class clown which I am too. It makes me sad that he died because I think he could have been a positive role model for me and a friend.

“My uncle was shot although you can’t see because it was in the back. He was minding his own business too.”

Once again, not what he had asked for, but bringing in a body like that . . .

“What was your uncle’s name?”

“Spoony.”

A few kids tittered, but Jamaal didn’t seem to mind.

“My boy died?” Rashaad said. “Got his head stuck in a elevator shaft with the elevator like smashing it into the wall? Had a close-coffin funeral.”

“Oh,” Altagracia popped. “That was Supreme, right?”

“Yeah, uh-huh . . .”

“Hang on, hang on,” Ray said, then decided to step off.

“My pastor in church?” Rashaad continued, actually rolling his face on the table as he spoke. “There was this kid, right? He got hisself all shot up the night before in the church parking lot. You know, kilt? The pastor, he said, ‘You think that boy woke up yes-tiday mornin’ sat up on his bed said to himself, “Today’s my day to
die
”? You best get right with Jesus ’cause you
never
know when your ticket’s gonna get punched.’”

“He’s right.” Efram nodded soberly, nobody laughing or cracking wise, and Ray was taken by that.

“Rashaad, I’m not going to tell you again,” Mrs. Bondo said. “Sit up.”

“Tell me again? You din’t tell me the first time.”

“A few years ago, I was walking by an old graveyard downstate near Trenton,” Ray said impulsively, “and I came across a woman’s headstone had to be from the early nineteenth century, said,

To my darling husband

and children dear, I am not dead

but sleeping here.

As I am now

you soon shall be.

Prepare for death

and follow me.”

“That’s nasty,” Altagracia said.

Both Rashaad and Efram repeated the epitaph in half-whispers, as if committing it to memory.

“Who’s next?”

Three of the four remaining students raised their hands, Myra, the
Spoon River Anthology
kid, his ace-in-the-hole kid, raising hers only slightly as if she knew she had the goods and could wait her turn.

“I’m sorry, what’s your name again?” Ray asked a tall, berry-dark girl, his voice delicate with apology.

“Mercedes,” she said. “I wasn’t here last week.”

“But you did the work anyhow?” Ray smiled. “Wow. Thank you. Please . . .” He gestured to her papers.

Her photo was of a thirtyish woman, morbidly obese, sitting on a bench in the Hopewell Houses, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Coke in the other. On one side of her sat Mercedes at half her present age, on the other side another little girl, both kids placidly resting their heads on the woman’s broad thighs.

“This is my Aunt Kim. She was a waitress in Jersey City at a restaurant until her diabetes made it too hard for her to stand all the time. The other girl is Monique who is my best friend and cousin. She is Kim’s daughter. Even though my Aunt Kim has diabetes everybody in the family makes sure she takes her shots and does what the doctor says for her to do in general.

“Besides her daughter Monique, Kim is my favorite person in my family, including my mother, her sister.”

Ray made a reflective noise, stalling, wondering if these kids even heard themselves.

“How much does that lady weigh?” Efram ventured as politely as he could, provoking a cloud of reproachful clucks from the girls, Altagracia snapping back, “How much do
you
weigh?”

“No, I’m just asking.” Efram hunched up, a mortified smile on his frozen mug.

“OK, stop,” Ray said affably, what he hoped was affably.

“I don’t want to talk about mine,” Mercedes said evenly but emphatically.

“See what you did, stupid?” Altagracia said.

“Just
stop,
” Ray barked, and they did; the momentary effectiveness of his spontaneous outburst taking him back, in not a great way, to his days as a paid teacher. “Mercedes, I would like to talk about it if, it’s OK with you,” he said placatingly, but just saying it, not really having anything on his mind.

“Unh-uh.” Mercedes shut him down, but she didn’t seem too banged up about it and he let it go.

“Felicia, right?”

The tall light-skinned girl nodded imperceptibly, shyness or fear reducing her mouth and eyes to slits as she slid a photo facedown toward him as if they were playing poker.

The black-and-white snap was of a tall well-built unsmiling black man in a double-breasted suit, standing in front of the lions’ cage in the long-gone Dempsy County zoo.

“Gimme that thing,” Rashaad said in a mock-brusque tone, snatching it away, putting on a show for his never-to-be girlfriend.

“Do you not want to be in this class, Rashaad?” Mrs. Bondo asked.

“This is my grandfather, Roy V. Smalley,” Felicia murmured.

“He is the first African-American fireman in Dempsy. He did it for one and a half year then quit because of the prejudice and work for the post office. He also was in the Army and had four kids who are my mother and uncles. This is 1948 and is in Dempsy.”

Felicia’s head seemed to retract into her high white blouse collar, the kid another vertical reader, another assignment-muffer, but the picture, the history . . . Ray pored over the photo, studying the man’s dour expression, romantically reading into it rage, dignity, doggedness, then surrender.

“Is your grandfather still alive?”

Felicia shook her head no.

“The first black fireman . . .” Ray just lofting it out there. “You kids,” he said earnestly, “you have so much to write about, you have . . .” Then, to Felicia, “What was he like?”

“Strict,” she said, staring at the table.

“You knew him?”

“No. My mother said, though.”

“Strict,” Ray repeated greedily, turning the word over like a prism. “I’ll bet.”

“Can I read now?” Altagracia waved both hands like someone flagging down a rescue boat, then spun a yellowing color photo across the table.

The subject was a frail little girl, xylophone-ribbed, wearing nothing but underpants and leaning into what Ray thought might be a banyan tree. She had large dark fever-bright eyes, and her voluminous black hair fell around her shoulders like an opera cape.

“It’s like a Gauguin,” Ray said to Mrs. Bondo, who nodded in vague acknowledgment.

It’s like a Gauguin, Ray repeated to himself mincingly. Jesus Christ. “Go ahead.”

“This is my dad in Santo Domingo,” Altagracia began.

“He almost died because of disease until my grandmother, his mother, took him to this man in the village who everybody said was a healer and was healed. He was healed by praying. That is why I love Jesus. My dad in this picture is seven years old and is leaning against the tree because the sickness was still a little bit in his legs.”

“That’s a boy?” Efram asked.

“Why was his hair so long?” Ray asked.

“Yeah, OK. My grandmother? When she prayed to Jesus? She said to him, ‘If you let him live, I won’t ever cut his hair again.’”

“Why?” Myra asked, the first word out of her all day.

“Because this way? Every time somebody sees him in the village, they look at all the hair and think about how Jesus saved him.”

“There you go,” Ray said happily.

So far not one kid had done what he’d asked. But he hadn’t exactly delivered on his own end, either—hadn’t made any comments worth a crap, no real feedback, criticism or even simple encouragement coming from him toward the kids, no teaching of any recognizable kind. But maybe, he thought, just for today it was enough to play show and tell. He’d be better in the next class.

“Efram.”

“Yeah, OK.” The chubby kid brought out a comic book cutout of Superman taped to a red piece of construction paper.

The class hung back until his opening salvo: “This is a self-portrait of me,” then started barking with glee, Efram shrugging and plowing on.

“This is a self-portrait of me which I drew and posed for at the same time. Of course I can do that because I can get in a pose then zoom to the easel so fast I can see my own pose.

“My favorite sport is basketball. I once beat Allen Iverson in a game of one-on-one so bad he started to cry and begged me never to play again so he could be the best player in the world. I felt sorry for him so I did it. I now put all my super-power energy into women.”

The class completely fell apart, everyone shouting as if in a revival tent.

Unflappable, immune to the disoriented free-for-all of derision and joy he had provoked—even Mrs. Bondo laughed out loud—Efram turned to Ray. “That’s it.”

“What the hell am I supposed to say?” Ray said, too loudly.

“You don’t have to say nothing. You can just enjoy it.”

The kid looked about two years away from body hair, Ray entranced by his cool-jerk confidence, his serene aloofness.

The other students were falling all over themselves trying to come up with the ultimate retort, but they were unmanned by the fat boy going on the offensive like that, weren’t quickwitted in that way, and the table gradually subsided into a sporadic roundelay of coos and haws, Efram bathing in it like a Buddha.

“OK, calm down, calm down,” Mrs. Bondo said gently, still smiling, the kids equally getting off on how Efram had made her laugh.

“Let’s just keep going,” Ray said, feeling now like a talk show host with a hot guest list, nodding at long last to Myra.

The girl took a minute to find her photo, another color-drained Instamatic, this one time-stamped seventeen years earlier. It was a snap of a youngish black couple standing in front of a church, the neutral-faced woman resting a hand atop her ballooning stomach.

Because she read in a thin murmurous voice and because the class was still buzzing from Efram’s Superman challenge, Myra was halfway through her recitation before anyone even noticed that she had started.

“Hang on, hang on.” Ray held up a hand. “Can you start again, please? C’mon, let’s be quiet, OK?”

“The baby is in her belly,” Myra began in a minute monotone.

“But only I can see it in this picture.

“The baby has a full set of teeth already and is mad at me even though I won’t be born for three more years.

“When I get inside my mother’s stomach, the baby has left mousetraps in there from three years ago.

“When the baby is born it lays in the crib all day but when my parents go to sleep at night it sneaks out the window to go hunting.

“Sometimes it comes into my bed, puts its face right up against mine, shows me its teeth and I am so scared I can’t move.

“The baby never grows up, it just gets bigger.

“The baby is dead.”

Silence, everyone staring at her as she returned the photo to her journal.

“What do you mean, ‘the baby’s dead.’ The baby’s
dead
?” Efram asked.

Myra shrugged; it is what it is.

“That’s like that old-time movie,
It’s Alive.
Rashaad grinned then went into voice-over mode. “There’s one thing wrong with the Robinson baby . . . It’s ali-i-ive!”

“Damn,” Altagracia snapped. “What does it take for you to shut up?”

The class then went back to watching Myra as she self-consciously fussed with her Chinese writing book; Ray thinking, The One.

In five teaching seasons there had been five kids—Sherman South, Esperanza Castro, Garcelle House, Caroline Yang and Hassan Pridgen—each kid invariably poker-faced but reached, stirred to the core by what Ray was offering. These were the kids who, in the midst of earth science, gym, algebra, cafeteria stench would manage to knock out a handwritten thirty-page story or a collection of poems, drop it on his desk at the end of class and split. There was always something furtive about his relationship with them; no smiling, no chitchat, rarely would they speak to him unless spoken to first, never would they seek him out after class, but once this One-ness was established—and these kids very quickly picked up on the fact that it had been—the air between himself and that boy or girl was always taut with anticipation. They were romances of a sort; at the time, Ray liked to imagine these kids thinking about him outside of school roughly as much as he thought about them; sometimes he would even envision them at home, around the dinner table, or in the kitchen, talking about him, or not being able to talk about him . . .