The Whites: A Novel by Richard Price Read Free Book Online Page A

while, the two of you are like a comedy team. And you forget, I forgot, how bad it felt, I just . . .”
    Billy heard a sudden rasp of tears in Pavlicek’s voice that he had no idea how to interpret and so he held his peace until they got where they were going, twenty strained minutes later.
    The Riveras, like everyone else on City Island, lived on one of the short streets branching off the sole avenue that ran like a spine for two miles from the land bridge to the Long Island Sound. Their house, a run-down Victorian gingerbread, was at the tail end of Fordham Street, the lapping waves audible from every room. The family had two views: the Sound at a point where New York and Connecticut met underwater, and the ruins of the house directly across the way, not a hundred feet opposite, behind which the body of their son Thomas was found five years earlier, discarded and torn. The house was now in the midst of being demolished by the new owners, the walls collapsed in a violent heap, jagged spears of lumber shooting out in all directions like an abstract expression of its own notoriety.
    Ray Rivera, now sixty pounds heavier than the night his son was discovered, stood on his lawn with Billy and Pavlicek, chain-smoking and staring at the wreckage across the way. His wife, Nora, was somewhere inside their house, undoubtedly aware of the visit but declining to come out. To Billy most of Rivera’s new obesity seemed to be in his upper body and face rather than his gut, in the multi-tiered pouches under the eyes, the softening flesh of his broad chest, and the forward slump of his thick shoulders. Billy had seen this transformation before in parents who struggled daily with the violent death of a child. After a few years that emotional heaviness could visually de-sex a couple, leave them looking more like each other than if they’d lived into their nineties together.
    “You know, I have real mixed feelings about that shit pile coming down.” Rivera coughed wetly into the side of his hammy fist, took another drag. “I keep thinking, Maybe they’re destroying evidence, or maybe a shred of his soul is still in there.”
    “He’s not there anymore, Ray,” Pavlicek said. “I know you know that.”
    Billy saw movement behind a second-floor window in the Rivera house: Nora up there, hours every day looking across the street.
    “People asked us why we didn’t move away, but it would have been like abandoning him, you know?”
    Suddenly the window opened and Nora Rivera leaned out, red-faced, cawing: “Why didn’t they move away!”
    Pavlicek raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Nora.”
    The window slammed like a gunshot.
    “You know, I know people, and I could’ve made some calls, anytime I wanted. Once a guy called me. But if I wanted that Jeffrey kid dead, I would have done it myself.”
    “That’s not you, Ray.”
    “I mean, do you have any idea how many times I sat on that porch with a piece of steel in my hand? I always drank my way out of it.”
    “Is there anything you want to ask me about Jeffrey Bannion?” Billy offered.
    Rivera ignored the question. “Last year we went to the national Memory Keepers convention, Johnny here came with us,” nodding to Pavlicek. “They had a bunch of workshops and seminars, and I sat in on a support group for fathers with murdered kids.” Rivera took another moist drag on his cigarette. “And this guy, some old biker from Texas, he said he sat in on the execution of his son’s murderer in Huntsville. Said it didn’t make a difference. Called it a letdown. But I’m not so sure that would’ve been the case with me.”
    “Ray,” Pavlicek said gently, “we have to go.”
    “Our pastor says Jesus wants us to try and forgive, but I’ll tell you, these last few years? I’m all about the God of the Jews.”
    They came upon Jimmy Whelan in the lobby of the apartment house where he lived and worked as the super, a run-down prewar with a deep H-block courtyard on Fort