Authors: Richard Price
“Rocco, yesterday?” Big Chief whacked his chest to force a belch. “Thumper raced with this kid in Roosevelt, some fucking idiot named Futon.”
“What do you mean, a chase?”
“A
race.
We did a pincers on the benches there, came up empty, so we’re just sniffing around, bullshitting with the yoms, this kid Futon says to me, ‘Yo Big Chief, you-all can’t catch
me.
I’m the black Jesse Owens.’”
“The black Jesse Owens.” Rocco squinted at a plastic milk crate filled with harshly graphic porno magazines under the TV stand.
“Yeah, so him and Thumper raced. Right through the projects, Weehawken to Dumont. I told the kid, Thumper beats you, you gots to give up the stash apartment. You beat Thumper, we lay off the benches for a month.”
“So?” Rocco looked at the time again, the clock starting to feel like his enemy.
“What, are you kidding me?” Big Chief poured himself a little tonic. “The kid’s sixteen.”
“So now you’re laying off Roosevelt, right?”
“Yeah, I was hoping those humpheads would think that. We grabbed some kid there tonight, killed an hour at Juvie, released him to his aunt.” Big Chief cracked an ice tray. “War on drugs.”
“Dempsy burnin’,” Rocco said halfheartedly. He hadn’t broken into a dead run in five years, maybe eight.
An ad for the new
Batman
film came on the television, and it reminded Rocco of the sunny afternoon last month when he had taken his two-year-old daughter to her very first movie, just the two of them, some endless Disney thing with seagulls and mice. Erin had spaced out after five minutes and Rocco sat there filled with an anxious boredom, letting her toddle up and down the center aisle of the empty theater, yelling “Lights! Lights!” and putting a finger on every tiny bulb screwed into both sides of the carpet from the front row to the exit sign, each and every one, “Lights! Lights!” He had stared at the screen and fanned his knees like an insect until it was time to go home.
“You see
Batman
yet there. Rocco?”
“Nah, I’m … you know.” Rocco felt his voice go small, smaller.
“Last week I took Jeannie over to the Triplex? We go to see
Parenthood,
and
Parenthood’s
like in the middle theater.
Batman’s
on the left,
Nightmare on Elm Street, Part Sixty-two’s
on the right, right? All three movies break at the same time, it’s like an Oreo cookie coming into the lobby. All of a sudden we’re fuckin’ surrounded, every goddamn kid I ever strip searched, busted, smacked upside the head, coming out of the other two theaters, we’re in the middle with the white people? Like a wagon train. I’m thinking, Holy shit
I’m
dead, my
wife’s
dead, but they’re all around us, looking at me like…” Big Chief cocked his head and shot Rocco a goofy smile in the TV light. “You remember when you were a kid, when you would see some teacher outside of school, it was like this amazing thing? That’s how they took it, seeing me. They’re all, ‘Yo Big Chief, Big Chief, you go to movies? How you like your movie?’ This one kid from Roosevelt, Peanut? I must’ve busted him three times, Johnson-checked him a million times, I know his underpants better than my own by now, he comes up to Jeannie, he says, ‘An’ you must be the lovely
Misses
Big Chief.’”
Rocco threw him a glassy smile. Big Chief’s wife wasn’t even five feet tall, but whenever they were together Big Chief was all over her like the weather. He seemed so flustered with love when he was around her that he appeared to be standing slightly tilted in her direction, like a comic miming a drunk.
“The kid’s leaving the movie, he says, ‘Yo Big Chief, you take care a her now, I see you on Monday, OK?’”
“I love it,” Rocco said faintly. He caught the time off the wall clock and experienced a stuporous surge of anxiety: Go home.
Rocco finally walked in at two
A.M.
, knotted, loaded, hallucinating the smell of a scene on him, that sweet, husky, close smell of an indoor homicide, like watered-down Old Spice or a sweating fat lady—not altogether unpleasant, kind of intimate, the smell of a whole life opened up to him with all its embarrassments and little drawers. Of course it would have to be a relatively fresh one: last summer he had one job that had lain there over a three-day Fourth of July 95-degree weekend with the windows closed, and halfway down the hallway Rocco had to stop and strip down to his T-shirt and shorts so he wouldn’t have to burn his suit after he came out of the apartment, the body so bloated with gas that he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, white or black. He was bombed at the time, but he had saved a nice two-hundred-dollar pinstripe seersucker.
Patty was still awake. Rocco could hear the murmur of television conversation, and a bar of light beamed onto the hallway carpet from beneath the closed bedroom door. His stomach jumped with dismay: Go to sleep already, Jesus Christ. Tiptoeing into the vast living room/kitchen, he stood at the windows eleven stories over Manhattan and looked west and south across the river and into the Job. The loft had been a wedding present from his in-laws, their former New York pied-a-terre; apparently a garden apartment in Dempsy was some kind of punishment in their eyes. Rocco headed for the freezer to take a Breyer’s Pledge, aware of every creaky board, tensing for when Patty would open the bedroom door and give him hell, although technically speaking he couldn’t imagine what for.
Gazing into the freezer, he heard the baby whispering from her crib behind the sliding rice-paper partition. He exhaled through puffed cheeks, closed the freezer, eyes bulging in exasperation: What the hell
is
this, an all-night house party?
Rocco found himself thinking again about that movie outing with his daughter, how badly he had wanted to run out of there, but also how he had returned to the same theater a week later by himself to see
Predator.
He’d sat there with his popcorn, taken one look at the carpet lights and felt stabbed through the heart with longing for her, wounded by the memory of their spacey outing together seven days before.
Father and child: the image had never found an easy home in Rocco’s mind. At his wedding, his father-in-law, only four years older than Rocco, put his arm around his new son-in-law, pointed to his pregnant daughter and said, “Rocco? Until you’re the father, you’re nothing but the son.” At the time it sounded reasonable, almost memorable, but thinking on it later, Rocco had realized that although he had a hard time seeing himself as a father, he had
never
thought of himself as anyone’s son. His parents had divorced when he was eight, and nobody wanted to take him. His mother ran off somewhere with a tire salesman, and his father moved back in with his own parents. For an entire year Rocco was passed around to various relatives until his maternal grandparents took him for keeps. Even now, as a middle-aged cop, he still considered himself less an authority ‘figure than some kind of pissed-off orphan with a gun.
Sliding back the partition, he saw Erin sitting in a corner of her crib, holding a zebra in her lap. patting its head gently and muttering, “Oh, you make me so happy.”
Rocco looked down at her, outlined in silver, her hand moving steady and gentle, her voice sensual in its rhythmic reassurance—casually alert, self-contained, not even looking up at him. Two years Old, two
A.M.
“Oh, zebra.”
“Lay down, baby,” Rocco said softly, on tiptoes, rubbing his gut.
“You make me so happy.” Her voice was a groany growl.
“I’ll be right back, baby.” Rocco moved to the freezer for reinforcements. Desperate both to be there and be gone, he took out a cold quart of Stoli and positioned the ice cream so he could read the Breyer’s Pledge on the side of the carton. Raising the bottle to his mouth, he held up his left hand, palm out, as if taking an oath. He let down a thin steady stream of vodka for as long as it took to read the Declaration of Purity, all the bullshit about fresh milk and vanilla beans, from beginning to end.
A few months before, he had caught a hamster run, a black three-year-old boy hanging by his neck from a doorknob in the O’Brien projects, the face turned away from Rocco as if ashamed. The kid looked like a forgotten laundry bag, and Rocco took it home with him
that
night, going right for the freezer, not worrying about creaking boards. But then he’d overheard Erin behind the rice paper, chanting, “Poor David … It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,” and Rocco, drifting to the crib, floating on fear, had said, “Who’s David, baby?” and Erin had looked up at him, her demeanor solemn, and said, “Black David … He hurt he neck.”
That small exchange had been the closest he had ever come to experiencing the supernatural, and thinking about that night again, Rocco took a fast, unofficial non-Pledge nip, hissing against the bite and slowly recapping the bottle.
He stood above Erin, watching her scratch the side of her nose, a jarringly adult gesture. Even though he was hovering over her, face to face, somehow her eyes still casually avoided his, as if she was pointedly ignoring him.
“You want Daddy to sing ‘Michael, Row the Boat’?” Rocco felt warm with the Pledge, strong.
“No, donk you.” Her voice was low and smoky.
“‘This Old Man’?”
“No, donk you.”
Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss of this moment. He was always sliding past the nowness of being with her, throwing himself at her like a cranked-up insincere clown for an exhausting fifteen minutes a day or getting cozy with booze in order to achieve the proper mood, and from the time she was born he had felt that he was on his deathbed, remembering with regret how skittish and slippery his time with her had been.
Had
been, as if she were a hard thirty-seven and divorced instead of a two-year-old baby, as if he were eighty-six and senile instead of forty-three and slightly overweight.
“Rocco! Get in here, hurry!” Patty put a whipcrack in it from behind the door, and Rocco automatically started running down an inventory of excuses and defenses.
Patty lay in the old four-poster bed, her hair sea-fanned out on the pillow, her face all horn-rims and pearlescent skin, young immortal skin. She pointed the remote control at the TV, which was framed by the tiger maple newels at the foot of the bed.
“Lookit—that’s him, right?”
“Oh yeah,” Rocco said mildly.
Some tabloid-style newcaster was interviewing Sean Touhey, a blond, thirtyish stage actor coming off a revival of
Sweet Bird of Youth
that had drowned him in movie offers.
“I’m not really interested in entertainment per se.” Touhey paused, neck hunched, mouth slightly open, the camera quick-cutting to the middle-aged gossip journalist, the old bird nodding narrow-eyed, hamming up her fascination. “I’m interested in
info
tainment,
edu
tainment. I want both to agitate … and to heal.”
“Jesus Christ, was that what he was like?” Patty looked up to Rocco.
“He was OK.” Sean Touhey had spent three days hanging around the prosecutor’s office the week before, waiting for someone to get murdered. He was researching the role of Homicide investigator for one of the movies he’d been offered. “You know what he drove? A Volvo station wagon.”
“Wow.” Patty smirked.
“No really. You know, you might say that people are people, but that isn’t always the case.” Rocco was surprised to find himself defending the actor; he had actually found him to be a little too verbal, too fragile for his taste. But Touhey’s glamour had gotten under his skin, and for reasons he didn’t yet understand Rocco had become eager to please and even entrance the guy. In fact, he had gone borderline doggy, and when the guy disappeared without so much as a thank-you, Rocco had taken it personally. What the hell was he supposed to do, go out and cap somebody himself just to keep the guy infotained?
Rocco stared at the TV for a minute, then turned to his wife. “You knew I came in?”
“Yeah, I heard you.” Patty finger-combed out her hair, yawning.
“Well, how come you didn’t say hello?”
“How come
I
didn’t say hello?”
Rocco took in her incredulous smile: everything was so funny to her. “No, I’m just saying, you know, the baby’s up and all. You didn’t hear her?”
“No.” Patty shrugged.
“But you say you heard
me,
and like, I was
with
her, so…” Rocco began to regret starting this, but he hung in. “I don’t understand. How could you hear
me
and not hear her?”
For a second Patty looked confused. Then she curled both wrists toward him so he could clap on some cuffs. She was fighting down a smile.
“What, I’m saying something funny?” He was unable to meet her eyes now, fighting down a smile himself, feeling a sudden flush of happiness at being home. “This is not funny,” he said, clenching his teeth in order not to grin.
Rocco and Patty lay in bed, the cable box on his belly, Rocco flipping the dial,
Mighty Joe Young,
a variety show from Taiwan, Joe Franklin, Hair Club of America. Patty wasn’t wearing the right stuff for sex, any of the silky options, just an old Brooks Brothers shirt, her father’s no less.
On the nights they went to bed at the same time, Rocco would lie there and watch her go to the closet, watch her choose either silky slips or mannish shirts, like running up sex flags from across the room. Whatever the signal, Rocco would accept it: he could go from spaced-out to hard by the time she made it under the covers, or he could reach for the cable box. Either way was fine as long as she didn’t think
he
wasn’t willing, too tired or too out of shape for it.
Rocco ran his finger along the cable channels as if riding a riff on piano keys, stopping on an astrology phone-in show. He was thinking about the actor again, stuck on how burned he felt when the guy just vanished. But what had he expected, a farewell banquet? A tip? Touhey had walked around the Homicide office with a huge buttery-soft leather shoulder bag and a four-inch-thick calfskin date book—accessories from another planet, both beautiful and ridiculous.