Read Online Clockers by Richard Price - Free Book Online

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?