Thirty minutes later, as he was leaving the hospital, his cell rang again: Yasmeen on the downside of a wee-hours drunk, her voice like wet flannel.
“I’m just calling you to say I’m really sorry.”
“About . . .”
“The other night, I got so drunk, you know? I didn’t even know you drove me home until Dennis told me in the morning.”
“Oh c’mon, how many times . . .”
“Denny’s a good guy, you know? He really is.”
“Well, being he’s your husband and all . . .”
The silence on the other end reeked of wrong answer.
“Anyways, it’s four-thirty in the morning, don’t you think you should . . .”
“You want to hear something?” she cut in. “Raymond Del Pino’s older sister just had her second kid, you know what she called her? Yasmeen Rose. She told me it’s because I was the only one who never gave up trying to get Eric Cortez.”
“Well good for her,” Billy said, fishing for his car keys. “And good for you.”
“Good for me,” she slurred. “I’m telling you, that baby is cursed.”
Milton Ramos
2130 Longfellow Avenue, a six-story walk-up in the still semi-shitty East Bronx, was over a hundred years old but it had been built by fresh-off-the-boat artisans, and despite the fact that by the time Milton came to be born here it was a dump—its gappy mosaic tile floor like a piss-bum’s smile, its walls festooned with wilting poker chips of plaster, and its glassed-in apartment directory listing long-dead Jewish and Puerto Rican tenants like a roll call of ghosts—it still had its touches of old-world flair. But now, as he stood in the vestibule more than twenty years after he had fled for the safety of his aunt Pauline’s apartment in Brooklyn, he was shocked by what had become of his earliest home on earth, gutted and rehabbed in the cheapest possible way, the old crowned lathe-and-plaster brown-coat walls replaced by featureless plywood, the multicolored stone floors by prefab squares of ceramic, the ancient swaybacked marble risers by painted pine, and the amber-glassed hallway sconces by overhead halos of sputtering fluorescence.
“It stinks in here,” Sofia said, standing alongside him beneath the dented aluminum mailboxes.
“Don’t say stinks, say smells,” he said, then, gesturing to the stairs with the head of his 34-inch Rawlings Pro Maple (because you never knew): “Beauty before age.”
A baseball bat is a versatile thing. As Milton learned while still a teenager, a moderate swing across the shins will get a piece-of-shit dope slinger to share with you his strategy for keeping financially afloat, which basically comes down to stiffing Peter in order to pay Paul, then stiffing Paul and finding new suppliers. Another rap will get the slinger to tell you who the most recent Peter is, who the most recent Paul. And if, a day later, you bring the butt of the bat down reasonably hard on the splayed knuckles of either Peter or Paul, both of whom wanted to kill that little rip-off artist, you will find out the names of the hitters who were sent out to consummate the deed. Now, once you get the actual hitters in an unoccupied apartment, bound hand and foot with gaffer’s tape—you won’t put another piece of tape across their mouths until they try to talk their way out of dying by telling you everything, including the truth—you can just go ahead and play home-run derby until the walls, the ceiling, and your clothes are streaked with red.
Sofia had a hard time climbing—“I like to go as high as I can,” she had once explained to him, “because then all I have left is to go down”—and by the third floor she was struggling. But he was as patient with her as he had been when climbing these same steps all through childhood with his morbidly obese mother, her trudge-mantra back then, “What a world Milton, what a world,” thrilling him with terror.
4B, Sofia announced. Who lived here?
Mrs. Sanchez, she was a very nice lady.
She was nice?
Yes.
4C. Who lived here.
The Kleins.
Were they nice?
They were old.
The apartment doors, once oak, were now all single slabs of siege-mentality sheet metal, their numbers, in his time screwed-in brass, nothing more than hardware-store decals. But he couldn’t care less about these particular outrages against memory, because in the end the information they provided was the same information as twenty years ago, and any way you cut it the doors and their numbers would always tell the same story.
4D. Who lived here?
If he let her, she would announce every apartment in the building. But in a way, that was what they were here for, Milton taking his daughter on this stations-of-the-cross pilgrimage as an inoculation against the worst parts of himself, as a living, breathing reminder of what he had to lose if he allowed himself, at this moment in time, to follow his nature.
4D. Who . . .
The Carters.
Were they nice?
They were OK. They had a son who was retarded.
What’s retarded?
Not right in the head.
What?
Stupid but not his fault.
Sofia rolled that around for a bit, then: What was his name?
Michael.
Did the kids make fun of him?
Some.
Did you?
No.
How about Uncle Edgar?
No.
How about Uncle Rudy?
He could be kind of mean, but he was a kid.
Did you and Uncle Edgar get mad at him when he did that?
He was just a kid.
Did Grandma Rose get mad at him?
She didn’t get mad at anybody.
Were there other retarded kids in the building?
No, but one boy was gay.
He kissed other boys?
I guess.
What was his name?
Victor.
Did the kids make fun of him?
Oh yeah.
Did you?
No. Actually, one time when some older guys were pushing him around outside on the street, I made sure they never did that again.
How did you do that?
Don’t worry about it.
4E. Who lived here?
Some girl, Inez. I can’t remember her last name.
Was she nice?
I guess.
Did you like her?
I didn’t hate her.
Did you want to marry her?
No.
4F. Who lived here?
Guess.
You.
And Grandma Rose and Edgar and Rudy.
Can we go inside?
There’s other people in there now.
No matter how many families had lived behind that door since the Ramos family ceased to be, no matter how often the rooms and walls had been torn up and rebuilt in the name of affordable housing, 4F would always be haunted, and he could easily imagine some of those that moved in here afterward waking up and weeping in the middle of the night for no reason they could understand.
Little Man’s death, if you wanted to look at it that way, was nothing more than a gruesome case of mistaken identity. The targeted dealer, as anyone in the building could have told the men sent to lay him out, lived in 5C.
So why, Milton just had to ask his killers that day in the empty apartment, did you go to 4F?
That’s when they talked about the sulky girl on the stoop, Miss Information.
Describe her, Edgar said.
And they did, after which the Ramos brothers stared at each other in astonishment.
That girl on three? Milton said to Edgar. Then, turning to their prisoners, hog-tied and belly-down on the floor, She said your guy lived in 4F? You’re sure?
Arching up to offer their gleaming faces, backs bowed, they swore to all the angels in heaven. How were they to know? They were sent out without the apartment.
And you told her the dealer’s name? He still couldn’t believe it.
We swear on our mothers’ eyes . . .
And she said 4F . . .
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Now they’re crying, Edgar grunted, tapping his bat against his calf.
Well, you know who else lives in 4F? Milton asked, lifting his own bat from behind his ear, the tip making small, not quite lazy circles. Us. His brothers.
Sofia walked down to the third-floor landing, Milton behind her, absently rapping the walls on his way down.
3D. Who lived here.
I don’t know.
3E. Who lived here.
I don’t know.
3F. Who lived here.
Breathe . . .
The gay kid.
Victor? Who else.
His mother.
What was her name.
Dolores.
Who else.
Breathe . . .
His sister.
What was her name.
I can’t remember.
Did you like her?
Later, after long showers, he and Edgar knocked on 3F and came face-to-face with Carmen’s mother.
Where’s she at.
The answer—Atlanta—put Milton off his game for twenty-three years. The same might have been true for Edgar, but the dead hitters had friends and his big brother lived only another week.
His mother, heart-stunned, only a week after that.
Did you want to marry her?
Unconsciously humming, Milton rested the knob of the bat against the 3F peephole: Guess who.
Dad!
What.
Did you want to marry her.
Marry who. Then: I don’t remember. Then: You know what? You’re right, it stinks in here, let’s go home.
As they started back down to the vestibule, Milton imagined his immense, huffing mother passing Carmen on the stairs at some point back then, the skinny girl with the martyred eyes most likely having to backtrack to the nearest landing in order for Mrs. Ramos to have enough room to pass, the two of them with self-conscious smiles, his mother’s tinged with humiliation.
“What’s with calling me ‘Dad,’” Milton asked as he unlocked the car door. “What happened to ‘Daddy’?”
“It’s a baby word. The kids make fun of you if you say it.”
“You got to learn to stand up for yourself, Sofia,” he snapped, “otherwise those kids are never going to stop, and that kick-me kind of mentality of yours is going to make you miserable until the day you die, you understand me?”
No response—well, what the hell was she supposed to say?
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell.”
“It’s OK,” Sofia saying it in that resigned way of hers that made him feel like tearing out his heart and feeding it to the birds.
An hour later, after dropping his kid off at her school, he sat in his car halfway down the block from the house in Yonkers, far enough away not to draw anyone’s attention but close enough to observe.
They had a house; he had a house. They had kids; he had a kid. Graves had a gold shield; well, so did he.
He was a widower, but no one here had any hand in that. So why on top of everything else, everything he had a right to feel, did he also feel, in this moment, envious? Where the hell did she get off having a normal life. What kind of ice-cold freak was she to just sail on like this, to make a go of it like anyone else.
Even before he and his brother had beaten two men to death at an age when all they should have been thinking about was sports, music, and ass, his sense of being “normal” was a tough sell in the mirror. He had always felt himself to be something of a miracle beast, trained to walk upright and mimic human speech. But after that day, a day launched by her, he never gave a moment’s thought about belonging to any species but his own.
He saw the old man come out and slowly bend to retrieve a rolled-up newspaper from the lawn, Milton gut-reading him, despite his frailty, as an old school boss, still carrying an air of sober authority. Then, an hour later, a middle-aged Indian woman, most likely his caregiver, stepped out on the porch to have a smoke. There was no sign of Carmen (probably at work), the kids (probably at school), or her husband. Knowing Graves to be in Night Watch, Milton assumed he was either in the house catching up on his sleep or—more likely, given that the sole car in the driveway was a piece-of-shit Civic definitely belonging to the caregiver—he’d gotten stuck with an early morning run.
The thing was, now that he’d finally found her after all these years, found her as sure as he’d found that Palmetto State cracker that snatched away his wife, where did he, where did they, go from here. In the past, no matter what actions he had taken on behalf of his dead, the suffering he had inflicted in return had always been of limited duration, whereas his suffering only intensified, leaving him afterward feeling more alone, more heartbroken, more subhuman than ever. For him, balancing the books had always been like bare-handedly punching to death a man whose face and body were studded with nails. And right now, at this point in his life, the thought of going through that again was unbearable, the cost, mentally if not physically, unsurvivable.
So let it go.
Can’t.
Then find another way.
Find another way.