The Whites: A Novel (45 page)

Authors: Richard Price

BOOK: The Whites: A Novel

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“There’s some people in this room right now,” Pavlicek said, “who gave twenty years or more to the Job, myself included. We’ve seen it all, handled it all, and when a young person dies we’ve all walked up the stairs, knocked on the doors, and delivered the news, between us, to an army of parents. We’ve caught them on their way to the floor, carried them into the bedroom or living room, then gone into their kitchens and brought them water—over the years, an ocean of water, glass by glass by glass. And so, after all that, we think we understand what it must feel like to be one of those parents, but we don’t. We can’t. I still can’t. But I’m getting there.”

Billy reflexively looked across the room at Ray Rivera, expecting him to be nodding in agreement, but instead saw a profile carved in stone.

“But so my son . . .” Pavlicek paused, looking about himself as if he had misplaced something, then seemed to give up on finding it. “I think I just want to read this,” he said, pulling an envelope out of his jacket pocket and removing a single page cut from a book. “This was handed to me today by a friend, and it’s as good a farewell to him as anything else.”

And then, after giving it one last silent read, Pavlicek began to recite, tone-deaf to the rhythm of the words:

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,

Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset, and the colours of the earth.

It was Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “The Dead”—“The Dead (IV),” actually, Billy knowing this because his father had read it to him, more than once, when he was a kid, and when Billy became older, more than once he had read it himself.

. . . He leaves a white

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,

A width, a shining peace, under the night.

At the end of the service, Pavlicek chose to stand at the head of the open coffin to once again receive mourners, the line extending from the front of the chapel to the small windowless vestibule and out into the street.

“It’s over now, right?” Pavlicek chanted to Billy. “All over but the shoutin’.”

“It’s over,” Billy said. “Everything.”

Despite his state, Pavlicek picked up on his meaning right away. “Billy. I know what I did to you. What we all did to you. And I’m sorry.”

“Not for today,” Billy said. “Today is today, all right?”

“We just knew if you ever . . .” Pavlicek began, then cut himself off, leaving Billy to wonder how he had intended to finish that sentence.

“Another day, OK?”

“All right,” Pavlicek said. “Another day.”

As Billy turned to step away, Pavlicek grabbed his wrist.

“You hear about Curtis Taft?”

“I did,” Billy said.

“I don’t know, maybe that day we gave him PTSD, maybe we drove him to that.”

“Not today, OK?”

“I mean, I sure fuckin’ hope so,” Pavlicek rasped with a kind of black glee, Billy looking into his eyes and absolutely knowing that if time ever folded in on itself and Pavlicek had it to do all over again, to put another bullet into the back of Eric Cortez’s skull, or to re-murder any of the other Whites by gun, blade, or with his bare hands, he’d go about it with joy.

Turning back to the mourners, Billy saw that Whelan, Redman, and Yasmeen, each standing in a different part of the room, had all been quietly observing the conversation, their expressions, before they one by one turned away from him, flat-eyed and alert, Billy thinking, And so would they all.

The car was parked four blocks uptown from the funeral home, and as they headed north on Adam Clayton Boulevard, the boys serpentined like loons before them, racing up every stoop and making a show of high-jumping over every minuscule bit of crap on the sidewalk.

“That poem he read?” Billy said to Carmen. “It’s from World War One. It made me think of my dad.”

“Well, it should. He gave it to me this morning to give to John.”

“My father did?”

“I was right there when he gave it to me.”

“I didn’t even know he knew about the funeral.” Then: “Why didn’t he give it to me?”

“I think he knew, he knows, what’s going on with you and the others, so he gave it to me instead.”

“And how the hell does he know that?”

“Don’t ask me,” Carmen said, “he’s your father.”

Later, as they unloaded the kids in the driveway and then entered the house, Billy remembered that he was supposed to go in tonight, his first tour back after two weeks on medical leave.

“I’m thinking about calling in sick,” he said to Carmen in the kitchen. “I don’t really want to go.”

“I think you should,” she said.

“I don’t think I’m up for it.”

“I think you should,” she repeated on her way to the freezer for the vodka, then to the cabinet for two juice glasses.

“Yeah? How about you?” Billy watching her pour out too much, a sure sign of a non-drinker, which, under normal circumstances, she was.

“I already called the hospital, told them to put me back on the schedule starting tomorrow.”

“You sure you’re up for it?”

“Keep calm and carry on,” she said, raising her glass.

“What?”

“I saw it on a refrigerator magnet,” Carmen taking a sip and making a face. “I mean Jesus, Billy, what else can we do?”

His third run that night was on Madison Avenue, a four a.m. smash-and-grab of a tiny jewelry store set inside the exterior arcade of an office building in midtown, almost all of the stock snatched out of the brick-bashed window, nothing much to see now but bare earring trees and daggers of broken glass.

At this hour, the canyoned street was a ghost town, and Billy easily spotted the late-model Nissan Pathfinder slowly approaching from three blocks south. When it finally pulled to the curb, an elderly woman sporting a high helmet of frosted tangerine hair, lipsticked and dressed in a nubby plaid skirt suit as if she had been sitting up all night waiting for the phone to ring, stepped carefully out of the passenger-side door onto Madison. The driver—her husband, Billy assumed—remained behind the wheel with the engine still running, staring straight ahead as if waiting for the light to change.

She absorbed the carnage without expression. “I been here thirty-seven years and nothing ever happened,” she said quietly, a soft thread of old Europe running through her words.

When Billy was a kid all of his aunts had filigreed birdcage hair like hers, and he could never figure out how they slept.

“How’s your insurance?”

The woman blushed. “It only covers jewelry that’s in the safe.”

“How much is in the safe?”

“I have arthritis. Every little piece, in and out, in and out, morning and night, takes me two hours, I can’t do it anymore.” She was wiped out.

“Is that your husband?” Billy asked.

She glanced at the old guy still behind the wheel but said nothing.

“And where was he tonight?” Theodore Moretti asked.

“Do I even have to answer a question like that?” The woman addressed Billy, more amazed than insulted.

He had no idea how Moretti had gotten back on the sign-up sheet after being blackballed just the month before, but he had. “I thought you were at the Three-two,” Billy snapped.

Moretti’s cell rang and he walked down the block, hissing into his shoulder.

“What happens now?” she asked, Billy picking up on that near-buried refugee inflection again, thinking, This is nothing for her.

Before he could respond, a patrol car flying the wrong way down Madison came to a rocking stop in front of the store. One of the uniforms jumped out, holding a black plastic garbage bag.

“We caught the guy running on Park,” he said, gesturing to the head-down, handcuffed thief in the backseat. “I feel like goddamn Santa Claus.”

The woman took the bag and peered inside at her life, then up at Billy.

“Who would do such a thing?”

“I hate to say it,” Billy said, “but all of this has to be vouchered as evidence.”

She looked at him blankly, Billy unable to tell whether she didn’t understand him or didn’t care; nonetheless, he decided, it was a reasonably happy ending.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My editor, John Sterling, a highly incisive and diligent master builder—and as ruthless as ever.

To all the friends and guides who have schooled me over the last few years—

First and always, John McCormack.

Irma Rivera, Barry Warhit, Richie Roberts, Rafiyq Abdellah, John McAuliffe.

And to my street-writer heroes—Michael Daly and Mark Jacobson.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Harry Brandt
is the pen-name of acclaimed fiction writer
Richard Price
, whose eight novels include
Clockers
,
Freedomland
,
Samaritan
and
Lush Life
. He is also an internationally renowned screenwriter for both film and television, having written among other works
Sea of Love
,
Ransom
, the Academy Award nominated
The Color of Money
and multiple episodes of
The Wire
.
The Whites
is his first straight-shot urban thriller, and his first under the name Harry Brandt. He lives in Harlem with his wife, the novelist Lorraine Adams.