“Anyways”—Nerese arched her back—“I got to tell you, your place, Ray?” She brought bunched fingertips to her lips and blew a kiss. “Out of sight.”
“Thanks,” he said with off-balance tentativeness, then, “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘What.’” Nerese rolled up her sleeves.
“What were you doing in my place?”
“It’s my crime scene.”
“Oh no. No way.”
“It’s my catch.”
“Tweetie,” things moving a little too fast for him now. “What the fuck, don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Actually, I don’t.” She leaned forward. “See, the department? Once you’re down to six months and a wake-up—you know, getting ready to put in your papers? They automatically reclassify you as functionally insane and yank you from the rotation. Start assigning you shit like driving blood samples to the state lab in Sea Girt, or reorganizing the filing system for the gambling squad, because they don’t want anybody out on the street who’s distracted, you know, got one eye on the clock or going through some kind of midlife identity crisis. That’s no good. That can be dangerous. And as far as my situation vis-à-vis the job right now? They have me mostly on this public school circuit, giving talks, like, the po-lice is your friend, watch out for peer pressure, don’t be a dropout, drugs are bad for you . . . You know, like there’s one kid left on the planet that hasn’t heard this shit a million times before.”
She was losing him to his discomfort, Ray licking his dry lips, eyes going wide left then wide right as if his optical stalks were hot-wired to a metronome.
“Anyways, my point being, you know, in regard to your being laid up like this? Because you don’t want to cooperate, nobody really gives a shit what happened to you. In fact, the only reason this thing isn’t dead and buried is that I personally asked to pursue it and the Job sees it as a harmless enough activity for a lame duck like me so, the answer is, No, I don’t have anything better to do.”
“They won’t even give me so much as a chip of ice,” he said, as if not having heard a word out of her mouth. “My tongue feels like the pad on a dog’s paw.”
“They usually don’t give anything oral to head traumas until they’re out of the woods,” Nerese said. “Let me ask you something. Your next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kuben? Does her place always smell like that? It’s like a five-room mothball in there.”
“Oh man, that’s nothing,” he said jaggedly. “Did you pick up on her Ziploc fetish? Anything smaller than a piano she’s got stashed in a Ziploc bag. She buys stuff in the supermarket, you know, pasta, dry cereal, sugar, takes it out of the box, throws the box away, transfers everything to labeled Baggies. My father told me he saw her sitting at her dining table tearing open little packets of Sweet’n Low, you know, however many packets come in a box? Tearing them open, and dumping them all together into a see-through sandwich bag.”
“Can I ask you something personal? Why are you living there?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said. “When the Trade Center went down I came back from LA.”
“Came back?”
“I wouldn’t have, but I couldn’t convince Claire to let Ruby come out west to me, so . . . Anyways, I’m back not even three weeks, living in a hotel in the city, bang, my mother dies.
“So I come across the river, move in with my dad, temporarily I’m thinking, make sure he’s not alone, that he’s OK . . . Two weeks after the funeral? Guess what. The guy books. He fucking books down south, and I’m standing there by myself in the middle of the living room, just standing there like an idiot. I mean, I was glad the guy had a game plan for himself, glad I didn’t have to . . . But I was just standing there and then I figure, well, I own the place, paid for it, don’t have any other address, I’m gigless, not sure what’s next, you have to lay your head down somewhere, so . . .” He trailed off.
“Anyways,” Nerese moving in. “That Mrs. Kuben? How do I say this . . . She says you got so many, let’s call ’em people of color, marching through your doors? It’s like a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
Ray stared at her, processing, then, “Fuck her. They weren’t bothering anybody.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Truly, truly, fuck her, that bougie-assed Ziploc-packing stick-your-nose-in-everybody’s . . .”
“Actually, the one I’m interested in, Ray, is the hootchie.”
“The what?” Ray needing another minute to integrate again, then, “And fuck you too.”
Nerese took it in stride, but let her face cloud over like he had just lost a friend; Ray instantly losing his bluster.
“Sorry.” He turned away, embarrassed.
“So who is she?”
“No.” Shaking his head, shutting this down.
“You know I’m gonna find out anyhow.”
“Why are you doing this, Nerese . . .”
Nerese, now.
“It’s easy to make me stop.”
“Why.” Almost shouting it.
“Why?” Nerese got up and stepped back from the bed. She had been thinking nonstop about this since the moment Mr. Egan had told her of Ray’s assault three days ago in the school auditorium, and now, right now she wanted to answer him as clearly as she could.
“Why, Ray, is because I believe in reciprocity, like I believe in God. I believe heart and soul in doing unto others as they do unto me, good or bad, and I make damn sure everybody around me knows it too, because let me tell you something: I have discovered that no matter what kind of shit I have to deal with, no matter what kind of animal behavior I have to contend with, it keeps me decent, it keeps the people around me decent, and these days, decency, simple human decency, is getting to be like hens’ teeth, OK? So if you want, I can sit here all day listening to you going on about fuck this one, fuck that one, fuck Nerese, but, you know, whether you make it hard for me or easy, the fact of the matter, like I told you the last time, is that I owe you. Sorry.”
“But I don’t want—”
“Ray Ray Ray,” drowning him out. “You don’t know what you want. Nobody . . . Hey. I walk in here yesterday you looked like someone shoved your face in a blender. I walk in here yesterday you were like two heartbeats away from slitting your wrists. And today? You look even worse. Plus now you’re bouncing off the walls, motor-mouthing, cursing people out like you’re on meth or something. I mean, whoever did this to you, it’s like they drop-kicked your brain into the Twilight Zone, so . . .”
“Forget it,” folding his arms across his chest like an Indian chief, like a child.
“Ray.” Nerese took it down a peg. “That guy came into your home, lined you up against your own living room wall and tried to take you out like your head was a piñata.”
“What?”
“How can you let someone get away with that. How can you let someone violate you like that and not try to get yours back. If you don’t stand up for yourself on this, it’s gonna eat you alive. If you don’t stand up for yourself on this, it’s gonna give you cancer.”
“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 bod
y, 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.”
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