The Whites: A Novel (10 page)

Dennis proposed to her at the bar that night when they were both blasted, the barmaids sailing unsteadily about the dim, damp room with plastic crates of free beer. At first she said no, said, Who the fuck proposes to any kind of respectable girl at some shit-face, after-hours cop bar at five in the morning? Dennis felt so bad about his terrible timing that he started to cry, and it was those idiotic tears, to Billy’s astonishment, that did it. OK, Yasmeen finally said while stroking Dennis’s hair. Sure, let’s get married. Billy saw the whole thing from the short end of the bar, and he thought it was the most pathetic proposal he’d ever witnessed—Dennis never even got off his stool.

He thought it wouldn’t last a year, but it was going on twenty and counting: two girls, a three-bedroom terraced co-op overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale, and a summer place upstate in Greenwood Lake.

“So how’s she feeling?” Billy asked Dennis, sitting across from him in the living room.

“You’re looking at it,” Dennis answered, tilting his chin toward the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall, Yasmeen’s shucked-off Tibetan hippie coat still lying in front of the door like a shaggy guard dog eighteen hours after Billy had carried her inside.

“So listen,” Dennis said, tilting forward from the edge of his couch, “I’m sorry about last night, and I thank you for bringing her home, but help me out here: what the hell happened?”

“Hey, all I can tell you was that she was two-fisted throwing them back from the door on in. I don’t know, maybe the news about Bannion got her all agitated about Cortez again.”

“Christ, I hope not. I swear to you, living with her when she’s on a Cortez tear? It’s like a reign of terror around here, yelling at the kids, at me, first she can’t go to sleep, then she can’t wake up, first she can’t eat, then she can’t stop. I try to get her to smoke a little weed, but even that doesn’t help.”

“And she’s drinking like this now?”

“She’s been going through a patch.”

“What’s a patch.”

“Two months, maybe?”

“Every night?”

Dennis opened his hands and closed them.

“That’s not a patch, that’s forty acres and a mule.”

“I’m talking to some people about it,” he said.

“But she’s off Cortez?”

Yasmeen’s White, Eric Cortez, had been—and as far as Billy knew still was—a real honey, a fully grown man who, five years earlier, had plunged a knife into the heart of thirteen-year-old Raymond Del Pino, ostensibly for talking to Cortez’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend in the junior high school cafeteria.

That alone would have been horrific enough, but Cortez had also called his young vic twenty-four hours before the deed, just to tell him what he was going to do. Yasmeen’s squad quickly learned about the call and the caller from the victim’s friends, and in order to start building their no-witness case against Cortez they needed to get their hands on his cell. But when they showed up at the murderer’s apartment with a warrant for his phone, Cortez, sprawled on his couch with his half-wit girlfriend, glanced at the writ, laughed, and said, “That’s not my number.” And it wasn’t: in her rush to get the judge to sign off on the warrant Yasmeen had accidentally transposed two of the digits. They were back in his apartment within two hours with the proper paper, but by then Cortez had ditched the object of their desire and that was the end of that, Cortez still out there doing his thing while Yasmeen, curdled with guilt, had spent the past five years banging her head against the wall searching for new ways to bring him in.

Dennis got up from the couch and pulled two legal boxes from under a small desk. The last time Billy had seen the Raymond Del Pino homicide cartons they were stuffed with case files, court docs, and note pads, just as they had been on the day she retired and finally snuck them out of the precinct, her overjoyed squad holding the doors for her all the way to the street. But now all they held were invoices, checkbooks, stationery, and stamps.

“Do you have any idea how elated I was when I saw her dump all that shit?”

“When was this?”

“A few months ago, I come out of the elevator and there she is, throwing everything down the incinerator chute. I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Dennis glanced toward the heaped coat by the door. “I was hoping that would be that.”

“Look, if it’s any consolation, she wasn’t the only freak show last night.”

“Billy, she’s not a freak.”

“No, hey, look, you know I didn’t mean . . . But I have to tell you, Pavlicek? It was like somebody was walking around inside his head with a flashlight.”

“Well, that’s understandable, given the thing with Bannion.”

“You think? Let me tell you something, if it was Curtis Taft who bought the farm instead? Are you kidding me?”

“Well, Pavlicek’s a different animal.”

“The hell he is. Did Yasmeen ever tell you about the day we came on three Ñeta Juniors tied up and head-shot in an apartment on Southern Boulevard? Scumbags, but still, they were kids. You know what Pavlicek did? He took us all out to Jimmy’s Bronx River Cafe.”

“People change.”

“If you say so.”

Behind the bedroom door, a broken-voiced Yasmeen called for her husband.

“So how’s Night Watch?” Dennis asked, trying to ignore the softly cracked wails.

“You know, quiet, busy, quiet, busy. How’s the kids?”

“Good, yours?”

“Everything’s a weapon,” Billy said as Yasmeen’s cries became more full-throated.

“Got to have girls,” Dennis grunted as he finally, reluctantly, rose for the bedroom. “The worst thing they do is exclude each other.”

Alone now, staring out the window at New Jersey across the river, Billy afforded himself the luxury of remembering Yasmeen in the days before that night in Gordon’s when Dennis had inadvertently pulled the plug on all their fun. They got along well enough over the months they were together, doing all the usual out-of-the-house dating stuff, but basically it was about the sex. They both swore to each other that they were the best fucks they’d ever been with, which wasn’t saying much when you’re both working-class Catholics in your early twenties, and Billy’s entire erotic repertoire consisted of sticking it in as fast as he could, withdrawing partially as fast as he could, and repeating if necessary. At the time, Dennis was even more of a sexual bumpkin than either one of them; at his bachelor party he confessed to Billy, his best man, that he knew Yasmeen was no virgin when he proposed, but he loved her too much not to forgive her.

Dennis came out of the bedroom looking like a surgeon with bad news. For the thousandth time in the last twenty years, Billy wondered if he knew about them and just wasn’t saying.

“Anyways . . .” Billy slowly rose and reached for his jacket.

“You sure you don’t want some coffee, a shot of something?” Dennis stood there, tilting toward the kitchen.

“I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Seriously, I got to book.”

Giving up, Dennis finally sat back on the couch. “I should have brought your shield down to you, you know?”

“No problem,” Billy said, backing toward the front door.

“I just didn’t want to leave her alone like this, you know?”

“Totally understood.”

“I just hope she doesn’t start getting crazy about Cortez all over again, you know what I’m saying?” Dennis staring right through Billy. “I just could not live with that.”

The night was nothing but softballs, the highlight being a report of two women hacking away at each other with hatchets or swords in front of an NYU dorm, which in the end turned out to be just a drunken fight between two Xenas coming out of a costume party and throwing down with their foam axes. By seven-thirty in the morning Billy was on his way home, making it nearly to his exit before he remembered the date and, with a dulling heart, dutifully hit the turnaround and headed back toward the city.

Carmen saw two therapists, one of them a stocky ex-nun who, sponsored by Local 1146 of the Home and Health Care Workers, bounced around from hospital to hospital in the Bronx like a circuit court judge. She had a makeshift office in the basement of St. Ann’s that faintly reeked of the morgue at the opposite end of the hall, an all-too-familiar odor that seemed to underscore Billy’s attitude toward his bimonthly shared sessions, especially when they were scheduled so early in the morning.

“You have to understand,” Carmen said. “Victor, when he was a kid, he couldn’t even keep his sea monkeys wet, and now he’s going to have a child? It’ll be dead in a month.”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Are you hearing yourself? That doesn’t even sound like you.”

“Can you elaborate on that, Billy?” the therapist said, her tone mildly sedating.

“Yeah, Billy, can you elaborate on that?”

“Carm, he’s your brother, why are you always so mad at him?”

“Why is he always so mad at me?”

Billy gave up.

“OK,” the therapist said, “let’s take your question first, Carmen. Why is your brother always so mad at you?”

“He isn’t,” Billy said.

“Let her talk now.”

“We went over this a million times,” Carmen said. “When he was twelve, I had to go live with my father in Atlanta and he felt like I abandoned him. One million times I have said this to you.”

“‘Had to’ implies no choice.”

“My father was
sick
.”

“He was remarried. He had a wife,” Billy said, expecting, then receiving, a warning finger from the therapist.

“His wife was borderline retarded,” Carmen said, “just like him.”

“So a fifteen-year-old girl ‘had to’ uproot her entire young life in the Bronx—mother, brother, school, friends . . .”

“I didn’t
have
any friends.”

Except Victor, Billy knew, Carmen always telling him that her younger brother back then was her only friend in the world, “like two nerds in a pod,” she called them.

“. . . and leave all those she loved in order to be with a man who walked out on her and her family so early in her childhood that she had no memory of what he even looked like?”

“There were other things going on,” Carmen said. “I told you that, too.”

“Yes, you did, but I think maybe the time has come to finally start exploring a few of those ‘other things.’”

The room descended into a tense silence, Billy avoiding his wife’s eyes, hoping that she would finally say something, anything, about what he had come to regard as the Flight to Atlanta.

“Would you feel more comfortable if your husband left the room?”

Carmen shrugged.

And so they all sat there, listening to the squeal of gurneys out in the hall for a full minute or more, until Carmen finally opened her mouth.

“I don’t like the Cymbalta you have me on. It makes me too manic, plus I think it stops me from having orgasms.”

“Jesus, Carmen.” Billy blushed, not so much embarrassed for himself as pained for his wife.

Afterward, as they walked to the St. Ann’s parking lot in silence, each to their own car, Billy remembered asking Carmen once why she hadn’t spoken to her therapist about a serious issue involving their kids. Her answer—
“Because that’s personal”
—had made him laugh so hard his eyes filled with tears.

Milton Ramos

Rose of Lima.

Daughters of Jacob.

Ten minutes in either institution made him feel like he was breathing air through a pinched straw. Visiting both in the same day left him feeling like a clubbed seal.

First that fucking school: some kind of parent/career-day event that had him standing there rocking from foot to foot like a beetle-browed dummy in front of two dozen third graders, the good-looking lay teacher in the back of the room nose-down in paperwork, not even listening or raising her eyes to him as he mumbled his way through the joys of the Job.

And those questions . . . 

Did you ever kill anybody?

No.

(One, but he had it coming.)

Can I see your gun?

I’m not carrying one.

(No, you can’t see my goddamn gun.)

Did you ever come to my
tío
’s house?

Who’s your
tío
?

Reuben Matos. He lives on Sherman Avenue.

Yeah, once.

(At least.)

How much money do you make?

Enough to pay tuition here.

Do you ever get mad at Sofia?

Never.

(Never.)

How come she’s so fat?

Milton looking to his daughter seated front and center, staring at him with resigned eyes, then back at the kid who asked the question.

How come you’re so ugly?

Is her mommy really dead?

Yes.

How did she die?

Hello? This to the head-down half-a-nun in the rear of the room. What are you doing back there, smoking crack?