Lush Life

by Richard Price

  Half-expecting to find some kind of vendetta written there, some kind of violent manifesto, he found instead a to-do list.

  Accept

  Find higher meaning

  Family

  Friends

  Prayer (??)

  Whatever strengths of character

  Don’t be second victim—vacations, hobbies etc.

  Matty reading it again: hobbies.

  “I just want . . .” Billy addressed the empty stairs, “I’m here, I am here, because, I need to get located, you know, oriented, so I can begin to . . .”

  “All right, stop,” Matty said.

  “I mean, where do I go now, what do I do with myself . . .” His face at right angles to Matty’s. “I just want to get oriented, and then—”

  “Stop.”

  And Billy finally did.

  “All right.” Matty scanned the stairway as if there were something not apparent to see. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.” Walking him down eleven flights to the lobby, then out into the street.

  The children’s bedroom was as trim and tidy as the front parlor despite the apparent crowd that slept in here. There were four twin beds mattress to mattress beneath the bald overhead light, a three- or four-year-old asleep in one, a row of battered dressers and a large wicker basket filled with the remains of dolls, remote-control cars, and some unidentifiable toy parts, not a stray bit of plastic on the floor, the room so cramped that Yolonda opted to remain in the doorway.

  The teenager sat hunched over on the foot of one of the empty beds, his apparently, and stared at air.

  “What’s your name?” Yolonda asked.

  “Tristan,” he muttered.

  “That’s what they call you?”

  “Hah?” Not looking at her.

  “Your friends.”

  “I don’t know,” that ever-popular shrugging singsong.

  Yolonda carefully made her way into the room for a more intimate talk, sat on the edge of the bed alongside him, and saw, from her new vantage point, the HOUSE RULES, written with Magic Marker on oak tag and pushpinned to the wall directly over the door:

  1. CURFEW is ten o’clock on weekdays, midnight on weekends—Sunday night is a weekday because it emptys into MONDAY MORNING

  2. School drop ofs—on TIME

  3. School pick ups—on TIME

  4. NO ONE IN HOUSE when I am at work. This includes when my wife is there but I am not

  5. LIQUOR is FORBIDEN in this house including my private stock which is OFF LIMITS

  6. NO DRUGS this should not even be necessary for me to say it

  7. No loud or PROFANITY style music and no headphones where you cant hear if theres an EMERGENCY

  8. CONTRIBUTE TO HOUSE EXPENSE one half your earnings—with FOOD and SHELTER automatically provided for you this is THE BARGAIN OF THE CENTURY

  9. DISRESPECT equals INGRADITUDE

  The handwriting was exquisite, filled with curlicues and swordlike flourishes, oppressive in its lavishness.

  “Your father write that?”

  “That’s not my father.” He kept his head down, refused to look at her.

  “Stepfather?”

  “Was.”

  “Took you off your mother’s hands?”

  “I guess.” Glaring at his high-tops.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sleep in here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You babysit the little ones.”

  “Oh yeah.” A half-dead snort.

  “And his wife out there, whenever you buck, she always takes his side, right?”

  He shrugged moodily, those sneakers on his feet so riveting.

  Yolonda inched closer. “So why . . .” Then, “What happened, your grandmother died?”

  “Uh-huh.” His narrow eyes getting a sheen.

  “And no way you can live with your mother.”

  “Ain’t nobody can no more.” Still avoiding her eyes.

  “Then what’s wrong with you.” She bumped his shoulder. “It’s his house.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You want to be homeless?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You can’t hit him.”

  “He can’t hit me neither.” His voice near inaudible.

  “He do that to you?” Eyeing his scar.

  “No.”

  Yolonda gave it a minute, the kid motionless but alert as a bird.

  “Listen to me,” she said, then startled him by taking his hand. “My father used to beat the shit out of my brothers? I had three brothers, my father’d come home drunk? The one and only time my brother Ricky hit him back, he busted his jaw and my father had him arrested. He was in Spofford for six months. It’s not fair but it is what it is.”

  He didn’t respond but Yolonda knew he heard her.

  “But you know what?” Her lips almost in his ear. “After tonight? I don’t think he’s going to hit you anymore.”

  Still studying his sneakers, he fought down a smile.

  “You’re a nice-looking kid,” she said, rising. “Don’t make me go home worrying about you, all right?”

  “Look, it’s not like I’m completely helpless,” Billy said. “You know, without resources. I’ve been reading, I mean, and, for what it’s worth, and from what I can gather, there’s basically three things I need to do to start getting through this.”

  They sat facing each other on rattan easy chairs in the otherwise deserted back room of a club on Delancey, a sub club, Chinaman’s Chance, within the larger club, Waxey’s, the two of them peering at each other through the dim light of paper lanterns, the walls and ceiling painted a flat red so that everything appeared awash in blood.

  “Three steps to grace, some state of grace,” Billy said, “the key to, to not just surviving, but having some semblance of, or, or even possibly rising to be an even better person than I was before.”

  Matty had picked this spot because Chinaman’s Chance was closed until midnight except for special friends, i.e., cops and preferred dealers, and he knew they’d have it to themselves. But Billy had gone from inarticulately distraught to talking his head off from the moment they sat down, and now Matty wasn’t sure how to play it.

  “One. Accept the fact that the murder can’t be undone. Just accept it.”

  “OK.” Matty knew pretty much what was coming, had heard variations of this spiel dozens of times before, from dozens of newly branded Billys.

  “Two, find the higher meaning in it. See the tragedy as a part of the human condition, you know, like how every event has a purpose, or, or, something worse has been averted according to God’s plan. OK? And, by the way, nothing says you can’t keep the bond with the loved one.”

  “No.”

  “I mean they’re still with you if you want them to be. In fact, maybe even more so now that they’ve been purified into spirit. And there’s no real reason to stop talking to each other just because . . .”

  “True.”

  “And of course they live on in your memories, your undying memories . . .”

  Every time, this hapless eagerness that most viscerally suggested to him the essence not of the grieving adult but of the lost child, as if the parents were unconsciously performing an impersonation of child innocence, and at least fleetingly, no matter how distant Matty tried to be, it always knocked him back.

  “And three, most importantly—”

  “That all sounds very solid there, Billy,” Matty, hunching forward, cut him off. “But I hope you know this stuff takes a long time to truly set up house in you.”

  “Yeah,” he said drily, “that was in the literature too.”

  The waitress came in from the front room with their drinks. It was Sarah Bowen of the seven dwarfs, Ike Marcus’s last hump, but Matty would keep that to himself; and on her end, sensing that Matty, an old one-night stand, was into something back here with this other guy, she refrained from acting familiar.

  S
he leaned in between them to off-load her tray, and in the few seconds it took her to straighten up again, it was like the pass of a magician’s hand, Billy coming back into Matty’s view completely transformed: dark, dull-eyed, somewhere else.

  “You OK?”

  “You want to hear something?” Billy said, stroking the sides of his throat. “When Ike was seven . . . some older kid hit him at school and he came home crying. I said to him, ‘Listen to me. You go back out there, and you don’t come back to this house until you stand up for yourself. Until you show that kid he can’t push you around, otherwise . . .’ ”

  Billy looked at Matty.

  “And he did it. He went back out there, gave and took a real beating but . . . And when he came back? I was so, so . . . Yeah!” Billy shook his fist. “You know?” Then looked away. “What was that. What the fuck was that.”

  “That’s what dads do,” Matty said carefully. “Mine too.”

  “Bullshit. It didn’t even sound like me. I’m the most frightened man I know. Always have been. I must’ve been in a panic about that other kid, that Ike would turn out . . .”

  Sarah Bowen stepped into Matty’s sight line, tilted her chin quizzically.

  He shook his head, Don’t ask, and gestured for the check.

  “So here’s . . . Did I make my son into that boy who charged a gun last week? I did, didn’t I.”

  “Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Matty said, trying to get him away from himself. “Just so you know, True Life? We found the guy. He wasn’t involved.”

  Billy raised his eyes to him at that. “So what happens now.”

  “Now? There’s a lot of stuff to be done now. On something like this there’s always a lot of stuff to be done. We have Want Cards out there, an open tipline, a seventh-day recanvass tomorrow night, but,” hunkering in, “I won’t ever be less than honest with you. What doesn’t bode well here is that we have a twenty-two-thousand-dollar reward out there and no takers. No one’s picking up a phone, and believe me, they would if they could. So, I would say that this is going to turn out to be one of those cases that’s going to take a lot of patience.”

  “Patience.”

  “Waiting for guys who wouldn’t talk to you the first time around all of a sudden getting in a jam. Cases like this always end with someone trying to get themselves out from under a rock.”

  Sarah Bowen came back with a check and her cell phone number written on a scrap of paper, Matty’s heart lifting, inspiring in him another burst of information.

  “It’s like, for example, I have this other active case, robbery-homicide from last year, Chinese guy, was shot in the vestibule of his building by two black kids, the bullet a .38, and right now I’m waiting to go upstate to talk to a guy named D-block, was part of a robbery team liked to work indoors, not the robbery team, but he never told me who his partner was, OK? But D-block’s wife was just arrested the other day, and if she goes in, Family Services will take away his kids, so now all of a sudden he’s asking for me, he’s ready to talk to keep her out of jail. All good and well, hope springs eternal and all that, but here’s what’s probably going to happen . . .”

  Matty paused to see if this was the kind of talk that would bring Billy back into the world.

  “We’ll go up there, he’ll give us his partner, we’ll pick up his partner, his partner will say D-block’s a lying motherfucker, will say, ‘Look at me. I’m two twenty-five and ripped. I never had to use a gun in my life,’ but he’ll also tell us something, like the only guy he knows uses a .38, does inside-the-building holdups, is some character, let’s call him E-Walk. OK. Let’s go find E-Walk. Problem is, E-Walk is a solo operator, but E-Walk, it’ll turn out, will know this other stickup team we never even heard of. Go track down those boneheads. Only problem with those guys once we find them is that one was locked up at the time of the homicide and the other was in the hospital. But! The one in the hospital? He’ll know a guy uses a .38, sometimes works with a partner, except that guy, it’ll turn out, is a light-skinned Dominican, looks almost white. But. But. But. The point of which is to say, Billy, that with your son, it’ll have to do with luck, and it’ll have to do with just plugging away, plugging away . . .”

  “How did you know the stickup team was two black kids?” he asked soberly.

  “A witness saw them running out of the building, but didn’t see their faces.”

  “What about the witness with Ike? That was face-to-face.”

  “Eric Cash?”

  “Was he the drunk one?”

  “No. He was the other.”

  “And?”

  “He won’t cooperate.”

  “Won’t . . . I don’t understand. Why not? He was right there.”

  “He was a little too there. If you remember—” Matty cut himself off.

  Of course the guy didn’t remember; the day had been a fever dream and there had been nothing in the paper about it because of the press gag.

  “Wait. You thought he did it?”

  “We know now he didn’t. Now. But we raked him over the coals a bit, and he did spend a few hours in the Tombs.”

  “A few hours?” Billy blinking. “And now he’s not helping?”

  “Not without written immunity, which . . . so, no.”

  “But if he didn’t do it, why would he care about immunity?”

  “That, I believe, is his lawyer’s influence.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Billy looked more bewildered than angry, but it was one of those seeds that could bloom overnight into a redwood.

  “Look, I don’t want you worrying about this. We’ll iron it out.”

  Sarah Bowen came back to pick up the check, Matty distractedly dropping dollars, worrying whether he’d just seriously messed up here. “Billy, we should go.”

  Billy just sat there, off into something.

  “Billy . . .”

  “No, I was just thinking about this other homicide you told me about, the Chinese guy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How do I make you, or anyone else, care about my son, not as a job, just as a person, as opposed to your own son, or anybody’s son. I mean, why would I care about anyone else’s son.”

  “You don’t have to make me care,” Matty said. “I work for him.”

  Billy looked at him with dog’s eyes. “You know something?” His voice turning to water. “He would have liked you. Ikey. I know it. And you would have liked him.”

  “He sounds like a great kid.”

  “He is,” Billy said, then abruptly stood up, his chair roaring backwards across the floor. “Can I show you something?”

  They went out into the front room, pulsating now with a mixture of bridge and tunnel, Eighth Squad detectives, and some of the more gussied-up locals, but tonight there seemed to be more police than usual, Matty seeing why right away, the return of Lester McConnell, a detective transferred six months ago from the Lower East Side to the Joint Terrorist Task Force and relocated to Washington, most likely here as part of an advance Dignitary Protection Unit detail for the president’s visit to the UN. Lester was big, huge, six-five, 350 pounds, standing at the bar now drinking beer, tilting his chin to the ceiling and spewing cigarette smoke like a humpback. And new guys from the squad were still coming in, leaning in to greet Lester with hard, slappy hugs; the ones who had been there awhile sitting kind of sideways on their stools, still as Buddhas, drunk out of their skulls, eyelids rising to voices in their own sweet time or staring at the cell phones clipped sideways on their belts and praying for peace on earth.

  Matty had always liked McConnell. He moved towards the bar to shake his hand on the way out.

  “So hold on,” McConnell boomed to the crowd. “This fucking idiot said what? ‘Not tonight, my man’? Jesus Christ, what else did I miss around here?”

  Matty’s gut flipped.

  Some of the cops, recognizing Billy, quickly looked away, embarrassed and angry, the conversation beneath the music dying
down to coughs and mutters. And McConnell, sensing something wrong, picked up from the expressions and the abrupt silence, from the breathless look on Billy’s face, from Matty’s proprietary hand on his shoulder, that he’d just stepped on his dick big-time. So instead of hailing Matty, he glared at him: The fuck did you just do to me.

  Matty felt lousy for both McConnell and Billy, then even worse when Billy said, no need to lower his voice under the music, “It’s not his fault. I probably shouldn’t have come here to begin with,” then led the way out onto Delancey Street.

  A few moments later they were standing before the shrine, which tonight looked more scattered than ever; Matty giving it another few days before it disappeared forevermore into the homicide trivia of the city.

  “Have you . . . You’ve had guns pointed at you somewheres along the line, yes?” Billy asked.

  “Not as much as you might think,” Matty said.

  “I did, one time, what was that, twenty years ago? I’m supervising emergency repairs on Avenue C during the blackout? I walk around the corner to a bodega about eleven at night, these two junkies pop out of the shadows, one’s got a Saturday-night special, piece of shit probably would’ve blown off his hand if he pulled the trigger. But I swear to God, someone’s pointing any kind of gun at you like that? It is paralyzing. It is there. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I couldn’t even move to give them my wallet, just told them what pocket it was in, next thing I know I’m alone, my knees are going like jackhammers. So, what Ike, what my son did? Step to a gun like that? Where did he get the guts to do that? Can you imagine that? The courage that took?”

  “What did you want to show me, Billy.”

  “I don’t give a damn. Drunk, sober, smart, stupid, staring down a barrel and making a move irregardless?” Billy suddenly twitched, a quick rippling tic. “Fucking hell.”