Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “Buy this for me.”

  “No. Why are your pants wet?”

  “From the fountain.”

  “And where’d you get that stupid button?”

  “From the fountain. And look . . .” Dante thrust his hands into his bulging front pockets and pulled out two fistfuls of wet change. “I’m coming back here every day.”

  “Jeez,” Nelson said under his breath, turning away from his cousin.

  “Put these books back,” Ray said. “Just go back there and, whatever, OK?”

  Dante disappeared.

  Nelson eyed the piled tables, but made no move to reach for anything, see what was inside.

  “You like to read?” Ray asked.

  The kid nodded yes.

  “What kind of books?”

  Nelson shrugged.

  “In English, please?”

  “Horror.”

  “You ever read Stephen King?”

  He nodded yes.

  “Which one . . .”

  “All.”

  “All?” Ray didn’t believe it. “You read The Tommyknockers?”

  He shook his head no.

  “You read The Stand?”

  Another no.

  “You read—” Ray cut himself off. What was he doing, busting the kid like this. “Who else do you like to read?”

  “Michael Crichton?” Nelson rhyming it with bitch.

  “Really. Which book. Or all.”

  “Two,” Nelson said. He had yet to look Ray in the eye.

  “Jurassic Park?”

  Nelson nodded yes.

  “What else?”

  “Star Wars.”

  “No, I mean what other Michael Crichton.”

  “The Andromeda Strain?”

  “For real?” Ray was mildly impressed. “Good for you. You ever read any of the old-time guys?”

  Nelson shrugged, not knowing, Ray realized, who the old-time guys were.

  “You know—Poe, Wells, Lovecraft, any of those?”

  Another mute, eyes-averted no.

  “Well we have to do something about that.”

  And experiencing a little rush of largesse, he steered Nelson to the wall opposite the cash register; this was the only shelving in the store that seemed to hold books that were actually books.

  There were two smallish sections: Fiction and Literature, like a value judgment. Ray wondered who working here got to decide which book went where.

  He reached for Dracula but then balked, fretting that the kid might not have the skill or the patience to get through the pre-electronic pacing and prose. Same for Frankenstein. And anxious to hit nothing but homers here, Ray simply blew off all the favorites of his own adolescence and gathered up Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs and an abridged Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the last making him fret in the opposite direction: that in his eagerness to avoid a boring reading experience maybe he wasn’t giving Nelson enough credit.

  “I was just like you when I was your age,” Ray said. “Monsters, ghosts, vampires . . . But then I discovered girls.” He plucked Pet Sematary from the rack, added it to the pile. “Sometimes I try to get Ruby into this stuff,” Ray said, then faltered, wondering what, if anything, Nelson thought about Ruby these days, her and her rocket-ball.

  “You know, get her to read, of course, but even just to watch the old horror movies with me. But she won’t bite. She thinks they’re boring. It’s probably because they’re not in color and everybody’s talking with that perfect theater diction, you know, ‘Hello, dear,’ and ‘Oh my darling, are you all right?’ And it’s funny because she’s obsessed with Buffy and Angel, but she just doesn’t connect them to a genre.”

  “What’s a genre?” Nelson asked, finally looking directly at Ray.

  “A category. Like humor, or mystery. By the way, Ruby wanted me to apologize to you for, you know.”

  Nelson shrugged, looked away again.

  “She feels very bad about it.”

  On their way to the register, they passed the Buffy section: the novelizations, the calendars, the action figures, the fanzines, and feeling that slightly sentimental, slightly panicky yearning for his daughter—what the hell was he doing here with someone else’s kids?—he grabbed an Angel pinup calendar and a Buffy shot glass, but then just as quickly dumped them both, suddenly seized with despair, wall-eyed with it. Crap, crap, everything crap—books, videos, clothes, money, all is boredom and waiting and doing it wrong over and over and over until the day you die.

  “Hey, Nelson,” saying his name with a certain rage-born zip. “Repeat after me. Thank . . .” A cutting singsong.

  “Thank . . .” Nelson dutifully repeated, tone-perfect; but, sensing that the boy was oblivious to the courtesy infraction, and that his despair-fit had nothing to do with him in any event, Ray just let it slide.

  The three of them sat at a crumb-strewn table in the skylighted food court, Dante and Nelson working on Whoppers, Ray ignoring a white lettuce and steel-gray tomato salad.

  He had bought Dante a book of World Wrestling Federation centerfolds and was flipping through the photos himself, eyeing the impossibly inflated yet chiseled physiques.

  Nelson was sunk in Pet Sematary, holding the book in his lap beneath the table, as if guarding a straight flush.

  “Do you know who used to be a huge wrestling fan?” Ray was addressing both of them but Nelson wouldn’t lift his eyes from the book. “My grandmother. Well, me too, but she was completely around the bend with it. Like back when I was little? Every chance I’d get, I’d go over to her apartment, they still lived on Tonawanda back then, and we’d watch it on TV, and she’d get so carried away she’d almost be down on the rug with them. She completely bought it. Loved the good guys, hated the villains . . .”

  Ray began to drift, come back. “And she was not what you’d call a happy person. She was very heavy, like two hundred plus pounds, maybe five foot, five-one tops, kind of moved all stooped over, with this wild look in her eye like something was chasing her. And, my grandfather, he never came home half the time, kind of ignored her when he did . . .”

  “Get me more fries,” Dante said, his cousin cutting him a quick look then plunging back into Stephen King.

  “Anyways, with wrestling?” Ray stared at Nelson but the kid wasn’t picking up on it. “Back then, every once in a while they’d have a live card at the old Dempsy armory, maybe six, eight matches. Tag teams, women, midgets . . .”

  “Mini-Me,” Dante said.

  “And she took me one time, I was maybe nine, ten years old . . .” He reached across the table and gently removed Pet Sematary from Nelson’s lap, the kid not protesting, but unable for some reason to meet Ray’s eye.

  “And, my grandmother, all night she’s going bughouse, yelling at the villains, the ref, you know, doing her thing, and, this match comes up, features this bad guy Fritz Von Hundt, had high black boots with iron crosses on the sides, a monocle, I guess he was supposed to be some kind of half-assed Nazi. I mean in real life he was probably some meathead from Jersey City, but they play this bogus-German marching music and here he comes, goose-stepping down to the ring, and my grandmother who’s been yowling all night, all of a sudden she’s quiet and I’m thinking, What the hell, she should be doing jumping jacks for this guy . . .

  “But as he passes us, we’re sitting right on the aisle, my grandmother takes a pin, a diaper pin or something, and jabs him right in the ass.”

  “YAH!” Dante popped in his seat.

  Nelson was still avoiding Ray’s eyes, but his own had grown big and he was fighting off a grin.

  “Anyways, this Von Hundt grabs his own behind, shoots six feet in the air, wheels around.” Ray left out the explosive “Cocksucker!,” the first profanity he had ever heard from an adult. “He’s looking, looking, but my grandmother, now she’s staring straight ahead, no pin, and the guy goes into the ring.

  “See, there was this type of wrestling fan back then called a Hatpin Mary, ladies who would do this
type of thing, and man, I tell you, it scared the crap out of me, seeing her do that . . . Anyways, that match goes down, the next one’s announced, and coming down our aisle now, is this villain that I know personally my grandmother hated like the plague. Nature Boy Bobby Bragg. This Nature Boy, he had long platinum-blond hair all slicked back, and he wore a leopardskin kind of one-shoulder Tarzan outfit and he was built.”

  “Built,” Dante mimed.

  “So this Nature Boy starts down our aisle towards the ring, and the whole place is booing, cursing him out. And this guy, he’s just standing there like bathing in it, like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.’”

  Dante hopped up and mimed what Ray was describing; puffing out his chest while bobbing his head, an imperious smirk on his mug and a beckoning challenge in the come-hither flex of his fingers. The little anarchist, Ray had to admit, a genius of body-talk.

  Nelson turned to his cousin and clucked in annoyance, something protective of Ray in that.

  “Anyways, Nature Boy, he’s still a way aways from us, but I see that my grandmother has got the pin out again and that she’s waiting. Me, she does that jabbing thing on this dude, I’m running like hell. But the crowd, they saw my grandmother stick Fritz Von Hundt and they want her to do it again. So as Nature Boy gets nearer to us, this chant starts up, ‘Stick ’im, stick ’im, stick ’im . . .’

  “And it’s hot in there, Nelson,” Ray momentarily catching his eye. “August hot. No ventilation, full house, people sweating like pigs, ‘Stick ’im stick ’im stick ’im . . .’ And Nature Boy, he hears this, looks around, sees my grandmother with the pin in her hand, and what he does is, he comes right up to her seat and just stands over her in like this hands on hips, he-man pose, just stands in front of her, daring her to do it.

  “And she is paralyzed. She cannot move. The crowd’s chanting, boiler-room heat, this blond god looking into her eyes and she, this poor overweight lonely lady, she just, she can’t move.

  “You know what he does?”

  “What,” Dante asked.

  “He bends over, like, bows, takes my grandmother’s hand with the hatpin in it, says, ‘Ma-dame . . .’ and kisses it. Kisses the back of her hand. Then moves on down to the ring.

  “And my grandmother? She just sat very very quietly for the rest of the evening.

  “And for years after that, whenever we watched wrestling on the TV? No more yelling at the screen, no more rolling around the carpet. And every once in a while she’d say in this kind of drifty-dreamy voice, ‘I wonder how the Nature Boy is doing. He’s such a nice man.’”

  “Ma-dame,” Dante said, eyes wandering. “I’m going back to the fountain.”

  “Just stay for a minute,” Ray said.

  Nelson stared at the table.

  “Anyways, when I was eighteen? I had a big fight with her. I came back from college on Thanksgiving break and we got into an argument about I can’t even remember what . . . Politics, civil rights, I marched out of her house, slammed the door and never talked to her again. I mean, I would have, but two months later when I was back at school she had an embolism or a blood clot and died in her TV chair so I never got a chance. I never, I never talked to her again.”

  “Ho shit!” Dante exploded, leaping from his seat and, bug-eyed with glee, pointing at Ray. “Nelson, look! Look! He’s crying!”

  “Shut up!” Nelson hissed, grabbing for his cousin. “Just shut the fuck up!”

  Undeterred, Dante twirled out of reach.

  “Ray! Ray! You know what Nelson said last night?” His voice now a sinuous taunt. “Nelson said he luh-ves you.”

  “What?” Nelson said, a stunned exhalation, more breath than voice.

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” Dante sang triumphantly, hopping from foot to foot.

  “What’s wrong with you,” Ray said as mildly as he could. “Don’t tease people like that.”

  But Dante was already in the wind, halfway back to the money fountain, his steps as light and splashy as the sounds that drew him.

  Disoriented by Dante’s exposé, Nelson’s sudden pallor, Ray picked up Pet Sematary off the table and made a big show of reading the back cover copy.

  “Your cousin’s a little shit. You know that, right?” Ray said conspiratorially to Nelson without raising his eyes from the book. But he might was well have been talking to the salad on his plate: the kid, still abuzz with mortification, had simply turned to stone.

  Later that day, a few hours after Danielle, tense and distracted, had come back to his apartment and collected the boys, the ringing of the phone pulled Ray out of the shower.

  At first, given the operator’s brisk yet lifeless greeting, he took her for a telemarketer, but in fact, it was a collect call from Frederick Martinez at the Dempsy County Correctional Center.

  Ray stood there, the receiver cradling his jawbone as he numbly pondered accepting the charges.

  “Sir?” the operator said.

  He could hear Freddy breathing in the wings.

  “What?” Ray said, then, “Yes.”

  The two men breathed at each other for a long moment, Ray going into some kind of cerebral free fall, the smallish kitchen that enveloped him beginning to wobble and shine.

  “Do you know who I am?” Freddy finally said, his voice sober, measured, but with a slight tremor.

  “Do what?” Ray said, then, “Yes. Yes I do.”

  “Do you know why I’m calling you?”

  Ray wanted to say “Yes,” then “No,” settled on, “I’m not really sure.”

  Freddy retreated into that tense breathing again, Ray hearing in the background a cacophony of bellows and shouts, the sound of perpetually wired men in an acoustically uncushioned environment.

  “I’m getting out of here the day after tomorrow,” Freddy finally said. “And as of this moment? I would very much like to resume my life with no outside complications.”

  “OK.”

  “I have no intention of ever having to come back to a place like this.”

  “Great,” Ray said automatically.

  “On the other hand.” Freddy paused as if winded, Ray thinking, He’s scared. He’s fucking scared. Of me. “On the other hand, if a situation recommends itself? Then whatever has to happen will happen, irregardless of the consequences to me or anybody else.”

  The silence came down again, save for the brutal aviary in back of Freddy, Ray transfixed by the shimmering steel base of his dead mother’s blender, the thing levitating a little; hovering above the counter.

  “Do you understand why I’m telling you this?”

  Ray stalled, a pulse of pride trying to muscle its way through the fear.

  “Yes?” Freddy softly pressed.

  “I think so,” Ray said.

  “I think you do too. Thank you for accepting my call.”

  But before he could hang up, Ray impulsively blurted, “I just want to say, you have a great kid.”

  “Excuse me?” Freddy’s voice suddenly flat, devoid of all vibration.

  “No, I’m just saying . . .” Ray fell silent.

  And Freddy hung up.

  Ray stood leaning into the kitchen wall, his head a bowl of sonic crackle as he numbly played and replayed, word for word, everything Freddy had said, backward, forward, then reenacted his own responses, assessing their tonal heft.

  The thing about the phone call that frightened Ray the most was Freddy’s nervousness, his assumption that Ray was in possession of some kind of formidableness, physical or otherwise, that might have to be dealt with head-on; his impulsive compliment about Nelson a taunt, a challenge, a twist of the knife.

  The dead weight of his own fear and humiliation perversely forced Ray to resist reaching out to Danielle until the evening, as if he could convince himself that he wasn’t really in a panic, and that he’d get around to breaking it off with her when he got around to it; but when he did finally put through a call to Carla’s apartment, only to hear the preliminary white noise of an answering machi
ne kicking in, he hung up and then began redialing. He called every ten minutes for hours until Danielle finally picked up.

  “He called you?” she said in a tone of aggressive disbelief, Ray unable to tell whether she was joyous or outraged. “What did he say?”

  “It doesn’t make a difference what he said. The news is that you and I are over.”

  “He fucking called you?” Danielle not hearing him.

  “Look . . .”

  “I don’t believe it,” she said, more to herself than to Ray, then: “Stay right there.”

  Thirty minutes later, preceded by a storm cloud of vanilla musk, Danielle marched into his apartment.

  “OK, here’s the deal” was all Ray could get out before she peeled herself down to two strips of lace riding high over her hips and converging minutely between her legs.

  “Whoa.” Ray stepped back, his heart lurching in his chest, but grabbing his jeans by the belt buckle she pulled him out fully sprung, turned her face to the wall and put him in her ass, Ray just going along for the ride, feeling the slick cool lubricant already in place.

  Thinking, Dead Man Anyhow, he gave it his all, pushing himself into the unfamiliar tightness. And as soon as he became self-motivated she unhanded him, slamming both of her palms flat to the wall now for traction as she thrust herself backward into his rhythm.

  In a trance of ecstatic panic Ray ground it in there, slow and deliberate, the flat of his belly lifting her buttocks until, going up on her toes and locking her body into an outward thrust, she went off on trembling legs, babbling to herself in a low voice as she came, Ray helplessly going off right after her.

  They stood there for a moment, matted belly to butt, Danielle’s face pressed into the wall, her visible eye unblinking and already distant.

  Popping out of her still erect, his belly and legs beaded with sweat and lubricant, Ray searched for the words. “Danielle . . .”

  “Hey, no, I understand,” she said, bunching up her thong in her fist and wiping herself clean of him.