Samaritan by Richard Price

nervous.
    “Who is he?”
    “Some old student.”
    “He visited you here?”
    “Once.”
    “I thought you said nobody came but me.”
    “He came
once
!” Ray barked, starting to rev it up again.
    “Old student . . .” Nerese said evenly, gingerly pushing for more.
    “From like twelve years ago when I was teaching in the Bronx, we keep in touch. He’s a good kid, Salim El-Amin, used to be Coley Rodgers.”
    The words came out of him in a jacked gobble, but despite his returning agitation he gave up the name without blinking and Nerese, not smelling anything worth immediately pursuing here, attempted to calm him down by retreating into history. “So you started out as a teacher, huh?”
    “Got to eat.”
    “What, you didn’t like it?” She slipped this second drawing into her pocket along with the first, that “What’s Mine Is Mine” still bugging her a little.
    “Not really.”
    “I understand you quit. Took a bunch of kids from a class trip and skipped town or something.”
    Ray stared at her. Nerese braced for another outburst.
    “Let me tell you something,” his jaw locked at a slant again. “What I got busted for? That was the only day I enjoyed being a teacher. I took a tenth-grade English class to Central Park to see
As You Like It,
you know, ‘Hey nonny nonny.’ They were fucking bored out of their minds. I had a feeling they would be, and because I hate the idea of a captive audience? For backup I snuck a football in my bag. Sure enough, by the middle of the second act? We’re out of there. I took them over to the Sheep Meadow and we had a game, girls versus boys, I’m quarterbacking for the boys, and the kids, they were in heaven. It was like they couldn’t believe I did this for them, cut them such a break.
    “I mean, neither could the school. I was sent up for review, but by that point I was like, Fuck it I quit.
    “I mean, it wasn’t like I was a bad teacher or I didn’t try, or I didn’t care, or I took it out on my students. I just . . .
    “I don’t know. To me, the whole point of high school is to graduate, you know, hit it and quit it. And to go back there, voluntarily, and to deal with the department heads, the senior teachers, the principal, the audits, the evaluations, it was too much like still being a student worrying about your report card, you know? It was like the same type of pissy two-bit tyrants that ruled my life from kindergarten to twelfth grade as teachers were now my bosses. Thank you, no, so . . .”
    “I don’t know, Ray, me?” Nerese said easily, trying to slow him down again. “If I had to do it all over again? I’d’ve definitely been a teacher. I like working with kids, you know, as long as they don’t follow me home.”
    “Yeah well, I think I’d’ve been a cop myself,” Ray said. “You guys, you got a backstage pass to the greatest show on earth.”
    “No, well, you must be talking about some
other
cop. Do you know how I became a detective?” Feeling herself about to go off on a tear, Nerese tried to rein it in, but it was no use—this one always made her nuts. “I had to put in fifty-four months sitting behind a desk doing candidate evaluations for the police academy. Fifty-four months, that was the route offered to me for a gold shield.
    “See, I wanted plainclothes narcotics, because that’s only fourteen months, and it’s for real, but they turned me down because of my brothers. They said, ‘What are you gonna do if you hit a place and one of your brothers is in there shootin’ up, pipin’ up? What are you gonna do if you know three hours before it goes down that your squad’s gonna hit some spot, some apartment, and there’s every chance in the world that someone in your family is working there, or scoring there. Are you gonna warn them to stay away?’
    “And I’m like, ‘Hell no, nothing doing, live by the needle, die by the needle, that is strictly their own goddamn problem,’ but they didn’t want to take a