Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “See, but I don’t say any of that. The man’s old and scared, and God doesn’t give us any more than he thinks we can handle and I am truly, truly blessed. However, that’s a typical day off for me, Ray, so who broke that vase over your head, just give me the name so I can lock his ass up, go home, get in bed and watch ER like everybody else. What do you say, huh?” She touched her scarred eyebrow. “C’mon. I owe you one . . .”

  Chapter 4

  Classroom—January 7

  A moment after the eerie electronic boop that signaled the beginning of class, Principal Egan finally, finally, after three days of false starts, herded seven students into the faculty lounge, the kids all flat-faced, eyes averted, not a smile in the bunch. There were four girls, two black, one Latina, one who could’ve been either, all with hair shellacked into frozen flips and waves, all sporting huge gold earrings, two with crucifixes on chains, the girls looking good; and three boys, two black, both of them in long-sleeved white shirts, cuffs buttoned above bony wrists, their ties askew, and a chubby, prepubescent Latino kid with a short inarticulate haircut, this boy also sporting a crucifix, which on him Ray found both off-putting and reassuring.

  Unable to look them in the eye as they scraped back their chairs before settling in at the long table, he directed his attention to the principal.

  “Seven?” speaking over their heads as if they were refrigerators or air conditioners.

  “Hey,” Egan shrugged, “be thankful for that many.”

  “No no no, that’s fine, that’s fine.”

  “They’re good kids.” Egan turned to them. “Right?” Then left the room.

  Ray sat there in this new silence, trying to smile, but it was a rictus grin, so he stopped, buried his nose in his one page of notes, then went at it again.

  “How you doin’,” his voice too Bowery Boy, but before he could reinvent himself, another blast from the PA invaded the room from the small loudspeaker mounted above the blackboard.

  “Mr. Moffat, please come to the Resource Room, Mr. Moffat . . .” in a dead Dempsy drawl.

  “What is this, the Medical Center?”

  Nothing; two of the girls exchanging glances, playing with the stiff collars of their blouses; all the others fascinated by their own nails, the wood grain of the table; the air suffused with wariness.

  “OK,” he began again, and again was interrupted, this time by a stocky skirt-suited woman bustling into the lounge, black-eyed, black-haired, all manila folders and eyeglass chains, the students sagging with recognition.

  “Hi,” addressing Ray as she scraped up a seat. “I’m Mrs. Bondo and I’ll be sitting in.”

  “For today?” Ray not liking this.

  “For a while.” Then, “Can you sit up, Rashaad?”

  “OK.” He finally plunged in. “My name is Ray Mitchell, this is the writers’ workshop. Show up every week, do the requested work and I’ll throw you an A.”

  “They’re not receiving grades for this, just extra credit,” Mrs. Bondo said.

  “OK. Show up, do the work, I’ll throw you twenty dollars.”

  Two of the girls exchanged “This man he crazy” looks; the long bony boy Rashaad saying, “Dag, I’ll take it.”

  Ray wasn’t displeased with this reaction until he checked out Mrs. Bondo; the woman smiling but not amused. Ray was becoming more and more focused on her and, losing some of his gun-shyness around the kids, he gave them his first clear-eyed look.

  “You guys seem young for high school.”

  “They’re all ninth-graders,” Mrs. Bondo said.

  “Ninth?” Ray repeated, then got it; none of these kids were from the bunch that had stood him up for the last three days running; Egan had most likely jettisoned that whole crew and shanghaied a batch of more malleable freshmen, those less savvy to the ways of the Hook, less sure of how to get out of things. Fine with him.

  “Ninth grade. Great. So, OK. I’m going to tell you who I am, what I’m doing here, and then we’ll go around the horn and give names, whatever else you want to say, OK?”

  Nothing.

  “First off. Everybody knows this class is creative writing, right?”

  Two hands went up.

  “Yes, you know, or . . .”

  “I thought this was supposed to be a club,” the Latino boy said. He wore gold-framed glasses and had a pretty good likeness of The Rock drawn in ballpoint on the cover of his three-ring binder.

  “It’s a class, it’s a club. OK, it’s a club. Next week I’ll give out membership cards and teach you the secret handshake.”

  Unable to read this manic spritzing, the kids looked at him, then at each other, Ray telling himself, Slow down, slow down.

  “In any event, my name is Ray Mitchell. I grew up across the street in Hopewell just like some of you.”

  “For real?” one of the girls drawled.

  “For real. You heard of back in the day? I was there in back of in back in the day. Sixties, early seventies. I went to this school right here, not a great student, went to college, taught high school for a while, quit”—leaving out why—“and started driving a cab. And I drove that cab for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was because I wanted to be a writer and I figured that’s where the stories were, in the backseats of taxis. But unfortunately that’s not exactly how it works, so I must have put a million miles on that thing without ever really writing anything worth killing a tree for.” That one went over everyone’s head including Mrs. Bondo’s, the “Mrs.” already set in his mind as hard and fast as if he were a ninth-grader himself. “Then I became a . . . Does anybody here know what a polygraph is?”

  “Algebra?” the chubby kid ventured.

  “Not, no . . .” His voice hanging.

  “Lie detector.” One of the black girls, dark black with big Bo Diddly–framed eyeglasses, the lacquered waves of her hair arranged in a sequence of arches like the roof of the Sydney Opera House.

  “Exactly. Thank you. I worked for a small outfit which gave lie detector tests to people looking for low-end jobs which required them to be around money or merchandise.” Ray gave that girl a second look; the way she had calmly given the answer, no “Ooh-ooh” with her hand in the air.

  “And let me tell you, if you’re a big fan of weird in this life, tying people up with rubber tubing eight hours a day, then scaring them into ratting themselves out, is definitely a way to go.”

  Off-balance blankness all around the table. Ray wondered how he had ever done this full-time for five years without getting fired—recalled, then, that he sort of had . . .

  “Anyways, after that I went back to driving a cab, and then through a series of circumstances, mostly embarrassing, I finally became a writer—but not the way I envisioned it. I got a writing job, wrote for a TV show, which is to say, I went from driving a hack, to being one.”

  Stares and more stares; Ray once again telling himself, Calm. Down.

  “Well, in any event, I became one of the writers on Brokedown High.”

  “The TV show?” the Latina girl said, the table slightly coming to life.

  “The TV show.”

  “You wrote that?”

  “Myself and others.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yes, I’d have to say, that was fairly phat of me.”

  Mrs. Bondo threw him another restrained smile that made him want to end this as quickly as possible; drop the one-fifth of an Emmy nomination altogether.

  “In any event . . .”

  There was another electronic shout-out. “Mr. Cromartie? Mr. Cromartie, please come to the principal’s office. Mr. Cromartie?”

  He restrained himself from another wisecrack, infinitesimally but with great effort attempting to close down his nightclub approach to education; every positive change in his life, every minute increment in character, acquired more or less through shame.

  “OK, so, who are you guys?” Nodding to the chubby kid with the wrestler drawn on his binder.

  “Efram,” he said,
sinking into his shirt collar.

  “Efram . . .” Ray waiting.

  “They know,” he shrugged.

  “Efram They Know.”

  “Last name too, Efram,” Mrs. Bondo said.

  “Bello.”

  “Efram Bello,” Ray said. “OK, so if Mrs. Bondo married Efram Bello, her name would become Mrs. Bondo-Bello, right?”

  Hands flew to mouths all around the table, stifled sniggers and gasps, the kids going all big-eyed, Ray thinking how odd it was that these projects kids, witness all their lives to such extremes in human behavior, would be so easily shocked by the slightest breach of teacher decorum. It didn’t take a genius to explain this paradox, but he was way too percolated to think about it beyond his initial observation.

  “OK, you there, young sir . . .”

  “Rashaad,” the boy said, then added, after glancing at Mrs. Bondo, “Macbeth.”

  “Rashaad Macbeth?”

  The boy’s long narrow face, high forehead, slightly bulging eyes and small startled mouth made Ray think of a newborn giraffe.

  Then the other five: Dierdre, Felicia, Myra, Jamaal and Altagracia; each name given quietly, no tongue-clucking, no peripheral eyeballing, no playing for the back rows; Ray so far having braced himself for nothing. The sobriety of the roll call could have been due to the close quarters of the seminar table, the presence of Mrs. Bondo, the unknown subject, or more astonishingly to Ray, they could simply be a bunch of nice fourteen-year-old kids.

  “OK. Let me ask you—this is creative writing. This is voluntary. Somebody tell me why you’re here.”

  “’Cause I got stories,” said Rashaad, his hand half-raised.

  “Yes,” Ray said almost gratefully. “‘I got stories.’ You all have stories, whether you know it or not. And here, right here, is where you’re going to give them up.”

  He reached into the shopping bag at his feet, pulled out seven of the ten red-and-black writing journals he had bought for them across the river in Chinatown and dealt them out like playing cards.

  “‘But Officer, I don’t have any stories.’ ‘Oh ho, indeed you do, my dear,’” Ray backsliding, doing voices once again, trying to get them to laugh, although he was too jazzed now to care if they did or didn’t. “You have crazy mad stories, all of you. Everybody here, if I go around the table and squeeze you a little? Each and every one of you can give me six great stories. That’s six times seven kids equals forty-two plus fourteen between me and Mrs. Bondo equals fifty-four . . .”

  “Fifty-six,” said Efram.

  “Fifty-six, thank you, stories. They’re about your friends, your neighbors, your families, most definitely your families . . . And these are very very important stories to you. Stories you’ve grown up with. The time my uncle got so angry that . . . The, the day my grandmother left her house thinking that . . . My parents, the first time they met, they . . . My brother, just ’cause that other kid dared him, I couldn’t believe it when he . . . Oh man, my mother, I’ve never seen her like that when she . . .

  “And all these stories, they’re up here,” touching his temple, “and in here,” touching his heart, corny but what the hell. “And we love them, because they’re ours. Because even if they’re not true, and believe me, at least half of these stories are not, they’ve set up house in us, they’re part of us, they are us . . .

  “Yeah, OK,” talking to himself now more than to them. “This is great. OK, this class? Forget it. OK? Don’t even think of it as creative writing. It’s just stories. The writing assignments? Stories, telling stories . . . Can somebody wake this guy up?”

  One of the girls punched the boy Jamaal, whose forehead was resting on the table; Ray so happy now, stories his lifelong lifeline; to Ruby, to romance, to himself; stories the ballast, the crash cart, the air.

  “And the thing is, what are you, Hopewell kids? Neighborhood kids? Oh man, nobody out there knows what you know . . . And what you may think of as, as, everyday? As boring? That’s like . . . No. That’s . . . Me? When I want to read something, a book, a story, a newspaper article, I’m thinking, Time is tight, why should I read this? What does this individual have to tell to me that I don’t already know?”

  Then checking himself, something off in the message.

  “Not that what you write has to be a show-stopper, mind-boggling or, you know, ‘Can you top this?’ All I am saying, is, believe me, you’re all so much more interesting, so much more special than you might think.

  “So, every week, you’re going to write me a few pages, doesn’t have to have a beginning or an end, just some kind of snapshot, word picture, bring it in and read it to the class or I’ll read it for you and we’ll talk. Questions?”

  Jamaal, the sleeper, raised his hand. “Does spelling count?”

  The girl with the big-framed glasses, Myra, clucked her tongue in irritation.

  “Spelling is good. It’s good to have spelling.” His disappointment in the question was neutralized by this Myra; something cooking there.

  “Can we write in pencil?”

  “Pencil, pen, blood, as long as I can decipher it.”

  “Do they have to be true?”

  “Fool me. OK. You know what? What do we have left, twenty minutes? Does anybody want to kick it off and give up a story right now?”

  The immediate reaction was unilateral silence, frowny and tense.

  “Just verbal, any story.” Then, “Anything. A dream, a joke . . .”

  Not one of them would so much as meet his eye; Ray quickly coming to understand that he wouldn’t be able to pry loose a volunteer from this crew right now with blasting caps.

  “C’mon, one brave soul.”

  He gave it a perfunctory ten count, then flopped his hands onto the table. “OK, then,” his voice heavy with surrender. “You leave me no choice but to give you one of my own.”

  Off the hook for now, the class settled into their spines.

  And in this first moment of relaxed surrender to him, Ray learned something: Rashaad Macbeth loved Felicia Stevenson, the tall butterscotch-colored girl who sat directly across the table from him, but sad to say, Ray positive about this, this love was a one-way deal.

  Since the beginning of class the boy had been alternating deep scrutiny of his pen tip with throwing her quick furtive glances; thirty seconds for the pen, two seconds for Felicia; thirty and two, thirty and two, but the girl hadn’t glanced his way even once.

  “OK,” Ray began. “Here we go. Growing up, I had a cousin Jackie, my grandmother’s sister’s son, about ten years older than me. Now Jackie’s dad—his name was Stubby—was a really short guy, five-three, five-four, and Stubby had a very dark complexion and very dark eyes because he was half Russian Jew, half Guatemalan Indian, which is a whole other story in itself. Now Jackie’s older brother, Benny? He looked just like Stubby—dark skin, eyes, five foot three. The problem was that Jackie had yellow-blond hair, and by the time he was eleven? Was very close to six feet tall, and, even though Jackie’s mother was fair-skinned, Stubby had decided that the kid wasn’t his, that his wife had gotten pregnant by some other man and, that was that. And the way he dealt with it, was to freeze Jackie out. He wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t touch him, wouldn’t look at him; this little boy just didn’t exist for him. I mean this, this Stubby, he was one of those angry shrimps who go into the Golden Gloves; mean pissed-off midgets, just want to punch out the world because they’re so short. You know, the worst kind of bullies . . .

  “And to be honest, Jackie might not have been his. His mother, my great-aunt, I don’t know, she was kind of there, not there, did have boyfriends, eventually flew the coop, so . . .”

  Ray checked on Bondo, who seemed to be holding herself off.

  “In any event, by the time Jackie was your age, younger even, he was a severely abused child, you know, psychologically.

  “And, my grandmother, Jackie’s mother’s sister, her name was Ceil, she told me that when Jackie was little she’d hear him down in the
street calling up, ‘Aunt Ceil, Aunt Ceil,’ you know, down there by himself, this was on Tonawanda Avenue back in the early fifties, my whole family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, they all lived in three, four different walk-ups on Tonawanda . . . Anyways, my grandmother, later on she’d tell me, ‘Ray, I’m ashamed of myself to the day I die but whenever I’d hear Jackie down there calling up to me, I’d never go to the window, I’d never invite him to come up because I was afraid of Stubby.’”

  “Guy’s like five-three?” Rashaad reared back in disdain.

  “I know, but sometimes rage has a way of blowing people up.”

  “Five-three.” Rashaad shot a quick glance at Felicia.

  “Anyways, Jackie, by the time he was thirteen, was pretty much an alley cat, a street kid, and by the time he was fifteen? He was shooting heroin.”

  Mrs. Bondo shifted like a mountain, exhaled heavily through her nose, and Ray froze: what the hell he was doing, telling this story—trying to establish his down credentials? Get over as an honorary hard-knock homie? But he was hip-deep in it, and thinking it would be pointless to stop right now, he forged on.

  “To tell you the truth, I never really knew my cousin Jackie, there was too much of an age difference, but what I think I remember, was a very sweet guy, very friendly, kind of gabby, and big. Huge. I’m talking six-four, well over two hundred pounds, plus he was a weight lifter. I mean, from what I was told, if you didn’t know that he was a drug addict, you could never have guessed it.”

  Ray faltered again, trying to figure out how to race through the rest; couldn’t, and decided to continue at the pace he needed despite his fear of getting panned or reproached.

  “Anyways, by the time Jackie was in his mid-twenties, he’d been struggling with his addiction close to ten years. His mom had split when he was sixteen, so it was just him, his brother Benny and Stubby. And, he’d be out there in the street running with the wolves—ripping people off, getting high, arrested, going to jail, ripping people off, getting high, arrested, going to jail . . . And, the closest thing he had to a guardian angel, a friend, a father figure back then was this guy who lived down the street, Jack Zullo, who was a highly decorated and highly connected Dempsy detective. And unlike everybody in my hear-no-evil, see-no-evil family, Jack Zullo had seen and heard it all, every type of grief and human misery out there, and he always felt sorry for Jackie, hated Stubby and did what he could to help my cousin out, which pretty much boiled down to fixing it so that he would skate now and then when he came before a judge. Now, you have to remember that this was the early 1960s, and at that time, rehab, therapy, any kind of positive-oriented drug treatment was pretty much unheard of in this city. Basically drug addicts were seen as evil degenerate criminals.”