Shame the Devil

SEVEN

I’ll get this,” said Bernie Walters as the waitress laid the check on the table.

Thomas Wilson put his hand over the check and slid it in front of him. “I got it, man.”

“C’mon, Thomas, you always buy.”

“That way, y’all can’t never say that a man who hauls trash for a living didn’t hold up his end.”

Walters and Wilson sat at a four-top in the Brew Hause, a glorified beer garden on 22nd, one block east of the church. The waitresses here were forced to wear ridiculous outfits, a combination of Heidi and Pippi Longstocking, and it showed on their embarrassed, overworked faces. Karras and Stephanie Maroulis had done a round and left a half hour earlier.

“So you and Charles used to hang at Fort Stevens when you were kids,” said Walters.

“Yeah. We played army, cowboys-and-indians and shit over at that fort all the time.”

“Vance always wanted to go there when he was a boy, but I never got around to taking him. Might as well add it to the list: another thing I never did with Vance.”

“You were a good father, Bern.”

“Yeah, sure.” Walters swigged beer. “Hey. I just thought of something. A company motto for your uncle’s business. Okay, you ready? ‘We don’t just talk trash. We haul trash.’ What do you think?”

“It’s good. But one of our competitors in the District uses a phrase damn near like it already. Even has it painted on the side of his pickup.”

“Maybe that’s why I thought it up. Maybe I’ve seen his truck and I didn’t remember. Like one of those subconscious things.”

“You don’t get into the city enough to have seen it.”

“The city? You can have it. I come downtown once a week for the meeting, and believe me, that’s enough. When I retire from the U.S. Postal Service, which is gonna be damn soon, I’m gonna move down to my property in St. Mary’s County and never look back.”

“What you got, some kind of Gone with the Wind thing goin’ on down there?”

“What I got temporarily is a pop-up trailer-tent with a Jiffy John beside it. Five acres of woods and a little clearing by a deep creek. You oughtta come down.”

“I love you like a brother, Bernie. To tell you the truth, though, it doesn’t sound like my thing.”

Walters stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray and patted his breast pocket, where he kept his pack.

Wilson dropped money on the table. “Hey, Bern. Dimitri and Stephanie left together again tonight. You notice that?”

“She doesn’t drive. He gives her a lift home. So what?”

“Dimitri lives down below Malcolm X Park, and she lives uptown, on Connecticut. You live out in the suburbs. If it’s just a question of a ride, make more sense for you to drop her off on your way.”

“She didn’t ask me. And besides, the two of them being Greeks and all that, they probably have a lot to talk about.”

“And Karras is a booty monger from way back.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’m tellin’ you, man, ’cause I know. One can spot another from a mile away.”

“You’re major league in that department, huh? So why is it that I never see you with a woman, Thomas?”

“Shoot, none of the frauleins in this joint are to my taste, that’s all. What you gotta do, you gotta come up around my way if you want to see me operate. ’Cause you know I like to play in the nappy dugout.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Forget it.”

“Yeah, forget it. And forget about Dimitri and Stephanie, too. Everybody’s got to grieve in their own way. You’ve got your own private way, whatever that is. Stephanie gets by on her positive attitude. I tend to lean on the good Lord. And Dimitri -”

“Likes pussy. Matter of fact, I got ten dollars right here says that Dimitri is hittin’ it right now.”

“Leave it alone, Thomas.”

“I’m just makin’ conversation.”

“Yeah, okay.” Walters drained his beer. “You ready?”

“Sure, Bernie. Let’s go.”

“So,” said Karras. “Would you like to be undressed from in front or behind tonight?”

Stephanie smiled. “Oh, I don’t know… in front, I guess.”

Moonlight and streetlight illuminated her deep brown eyes in the darkened room. Karras unbuttoned her blouse. He peeled it off her shoulders, and she slipped her arms free. He unfastened her bra and dropped it to the floor.

Karras cupped her heavy breasts, leaned in and licked a mole centered between them. His tongue flicked at her right nipple. She stroked his gray hair, and he came up and kissed her deeply on the mouth.

They moved to the bed and undressed completely. Then they were naked atop the sheets. Karras put a pillow beneath her. She was ready for him, quick of pulse and wet. Her smell was strong in the room.

“ Ella, Thimitri.”

“Not yet.”

“No, now.”

“So you’re giving the orders around here, eh?”

“C’mon.”

He penetrated her, pulled out, rubbed the head of his cock along the inside of her muscled thigh.

“Quit playin’ around.” She reached down. “Whaddya, need a map or something?”

“Careful, you’ll tear it off.”

“It feels sturdy enough.”

“Okay… okay.”

Stephanie arched her back as he walked her ribcage with his fingers. She took his hands and put them on her breasts. He buried himself inside her until there seemed no more of her. Then she adjusted her hips and he slid farther into her gloved warmth.

“There we go,” she said.

“ Opa, ” said Karras.

Karras washed himself, phoned his apartment, came back into the bedroom, and had a seat on the edge of the mattress.

Stephanie got up on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just got a message from a guy, called my place. I haven’t seen him in years. Greek guy named Nick Stefanos. My old man used to work for his grandfather a long time ago.”

“What’d he want?”

“He wants to give me a part-time job in a bar he works in, down in Southeast. Kitchen help.” Karras rubbed his cheek. “Things do come around.”

“Why’s he calling you now?”

“My friend Marcus’s wife, Elaine? She hooked it up. Elaine uses Stefanos as an investigator on some of her cases.”

“Are you going to talk to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would do you good to get out in the world a few hours a day.”

“I know it.”

“I’m serious.”

“Stephanie, I know.”

She pulled him down on the bed, her hair falling and touching his face. She smiled, looking into his eyes. “You were really ornery tonight, Dimitri.”

“Sometimes I don’t feel like talking.”

“You still come to the meetings, though.”

“I like being with you guys,” he said. “Aside from the pleasure of that, it doesn’t do much good. Look, don’t try to make me your project, Stephanie.”

“You’re not. We need each other, though. All of us, I mean. Can’t you see it?”

He kissed her cool lips and pushed back her hair.

“I need this, ” he said.

“Make no mistake,” said Stephanie. “So do I.”

Bernie Walters cracked open a can of Bud and took it downstairs to the rec room of his three-bedroom house in Wheaton, off Randolph Road. He had a seat in a leather recliner and hit the remote, which he had Velcroed to the chair.

When Vance was a teenager he was always misplacing the television’s remote. After carrying mailbags all day through Bethesda’s business district, Walters would come home with no more ambition than to put his feet up and watch a little tube. The remote always seemed to be missing when he got downstairs, and that drove him nuts.

“What’s the big deal with the remote, Dad?”

“I been on my dogs all day. The big deal is, once I get settled in my chair at night, I don’t want to get back up.”

Both Vance and Bernie got tired of that exchange. Bernie rigged up a kind of sheath for the remote and Velcroed it to the right arm of the chair.

Vance’s friends got a big charge out of it. Vance’s dad, the Vietnam vet and mail carrier – with that combo, he had to be some kind of wack job, right? – had gone and rigged a permanent remote control to his chair. Remote on the right arm, ashtray on the left. He even heard one of those friends call the recliner “the captain’s chair,” then hum a few bars of the Star Trek theme when he thought Walters wasn’t listening.

Yeah, Vance’s friends got a big laugh out of Bernie Walters. The captain’s chair, the ten-point buck’s head mounted on the wall of the rec room, the glass-doored gun case with the beautiful oiled shotguns aligned in a row, the bumper sticker on his truck that read, “Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace,” the prayers and psalms framed and hung throughout the house. It was okay by Walters for those kids to think whatever they wanted. And for the members of the group as well. He knew it made them uncomfortable to hear him talk about the Lord at the meetings. Well, they had their own way of getting through this and he had his. Because they had become his closest friends, he felt he owed it to them to talk about God’s plan. He knew that everything happened for a reason, even the bad.

As for Vance, he had never seemed to be embarrassed by his old man. Bernie had heard Vance describe him one time as a “blue-collar eccentric.”Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound bad, not the way Vance said it; by the tone of his voice, you’d almost get the impression that Vance was proud.

Vance’s friends stopped coming around when his mother, Walters’s wife, Lynne, got the cancer in both of her breasts. She’d found the lumps fairly early, but fear had made her wait too long to get herself checked. After the diagnosis she opted for the radical mastectomy, but it couldn’t save her and she went six months later, heavily doped on morphine, at home in their marriage bed.

Bernie Walters’s father died that same year, in a nursing home on East West Highway.

So it ended up just Bernie and Vance. By then Vance had entered Montgomery College, hoping to do a couple of years on the Takoma Park campus before heading for New York to attend one of the design schools in the city. At home he spent most of his time in his room, listening to CDs, studying, and talking on the phone with his friends. He worked three or four shifts a week waitering at the pizza parlor on Wisconsin, saving for his move to New York.

When Bernie wasn’t working, he liked to hang out in the rec room or the laundry room, where he had a workbench set up. During warm-weather months he would drive his pickup down to Southern Maryland and spend each weekend on his property, hunting, casting for perch and catfish, walking the woods, and drinking beer.

Walters hit the up-channel button on the remote and landed on a late-night talk show. The host with the gap-toothed grin said something, then stared unsmiling into the camera as the audience laughed. Walters shook a cigarette out of his pack and gave it a light.

Those last couple of years Vance and Bernie had pretty much led separate lives. Now he wished they’d talked more – he wished he’d said those things to Vance that he’d never said.

Vance talked to him now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance’s voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn’t stop it. He knew it was Vance’s spirit that was talking to him in his dreams. He knew.

He would tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he’d tell him when they were reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in the hands of the Lord.

Stephanie Maroulis draped an arm over the shoulder of Dimitri Karras and laid the flat of her palm on his chest. She’d go to sleep now, drawing on the warmth of his body, spooned against him in the bed.

Over the gray-haired head of Karras she could see the framed photograph of Steve set on the nightstand beside the bed. Steve was at the Preakness with his oldest friends grouped around, all of them on an afternoon beer drunk, happy, high in the sun and secure in the knowledge that it could not end. In the photo, Stephanie, smiling and smashed as the rest of them, stood behind Steve, her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing the base of his thick neck.

The photograph had been on the nightstand for seven years. It was Steve’s favorite snapshot of the two of them and his friends, and as long as she lived in this place, the one-bedroom condo they’d bought soon after they were married, she’d leave the picture where it had always been. Leaving it there after Steve’s death was an act of neither superstition nor sentiment. The photograph belonged there. She saw no reason to move it now.

“Doesn’t it make you sad?” asked Karras the week before. “I mean, to have to look at it every night before you go to sleep.”

“It makes me happy to know that Steve and I had one day as good as that one. Most people never even get that.”

“I couldn’t,” said Karras, his voice trailing off, and she’d hugged him then, the way she was hugging him now.

She stroked his chest. Karras had a decent build for a man in his late forties. Not like Steve, who’d always been on the heavy side. She used to call Steve “the Bear,” because he felt as big as one, sleeping next to her. She liked to be with a man who had some weight on him. Karras had a handsome face, a straight back, and a flat stomach. Even at his age, he was the kind women noticed, and wondered about, on the street. But Karras was always sad. He didn’t have Steve’s smile, the kind that said he appreciated the moment and the people he was sharing it with. No, Karras wasn’t Steve. But she was getting used to having him around.

Stephanie closed her eyes.

She enjoyed going to bed with Karras after the meetings and sleeping with him once a week. She needed the companionship, and she needed the sex. Their being together, it helped Dimitri, if only for the night, and she knew it helped her.

If she could have talked to Steve right then, she’d explain their relationship to him like that. And she believed he’d be happy for her, pleased that she was slowly finding her way out of the dark places she’d visited after his death.

She fell to sleep, knowing Steve would understand.

Thomas Wilson had a slow drink at the Hummingbird on Georgia Avenue and got into his Dodge Intrepid, parked out front. He turned the ignition, hit the preset button, brought up WHUR. Quiet Storm: Every city in the country with a sizable black population had the format now, but the original had been created on HUR. And here was Gladys Knight, singing “Where Peaceful Waters Flow.” You couldn’t get much more beautiful than that.

Wilson headed over to Underwood, where he lived alone in the small brick he’d grown up in. Momma had died suddenly when he was away, back in the ’80s. His uncle Lindo, who owned the hauling business, claimed it was from a broken heart.

None of the women in the bar had looked at him tonight. Seemed they never did. He wasn’t yet forty, but he looked ten years older, and he felt far away from what was hip and new. He favored the music that he had come up with. He dressed like 1989. He still wore his hair in that same tired fade.

The truth was, he didn’t have the spirit to mack the women anymore. With Bernie, it was easy to claim all that bullshit about how he, Wilson, “operated” up around the way, loved to “play in the nappy dugout” and every other tired thing you could think of. Boasting aside, after Charles had been killed there wasn’t much fun in it anymore for real. He shared with many men the secret opinion that half the fun in hitting pussy was in talking about it afterward with your boys. Charles was his main boy going back forever. So it wasn’t no surprise that Wilson’s urge to slay the freaks had died with Charles.

The glow from the dash threw greenish light on the gray leather seats of the immaculate car. He cleaned the Dodge and had it detailed regularly at the brushless place near the Maryland line.

It was a beautiful car. He was always unhappy.

The meetings were good. The meetings helped. As the session day neared he looked forward to seeing these people who had become his friends. He liked hearing their stories, and going back and forth with Karras, and the idea that his personality – always up and funny in front of them – drove the group toward some kind of better place. That his being there with them made a positive difference in their ruined lives.

But after the sessions, he couldn’t help feeling down. For various reasons, real or imagined, they all shared feelings of guilt. Wilson took solace in the belief that God and Father Time would take care of the rest of them. But he knew he’d never be healed himself. No, this sickness of his would never go away.

Dimitri Karras stared straight ahead at the items on the night-stand: the photograph of Steve and Stephanie, an old Panasonic clock radio, his Swiss Army watch, a small stack of pocket change, Stephanie’s hoop earrings. The red LED numerals changed to 2:31 on the clock. He’d been lying there, not at all tired, for the last two hours. Stephanie had fallen asleep long ago, the sound of her deep breathing filling the room. There was that other sound, too, always there at night in Karras’s head.

When Karras was a boy, he was playing by himself one summer day in the alley behind his mother’s house on Davenport. It was a still, hot day, quiet but for the drone of Mr. Scordato’s window unit next door and the occasional call of cicadas passing through the trees.

Karras had been bouncing a basketball in the alley, distracted all afternoon by a vaguely putrid smell, the source of which he could not find. And then he saw the robin, lying beneath the apple tree that grew in the small square of backyard by the alley’s edge. He found a small fallen branch, stripped it of its leaves, and went to the bird.

The smell got stronger as he approached. It was the awful smell of spoiled things, and he choked down a gag. As he reached the fallen bird and got down on his haunches, he could hear a sound, like the faraway crunch of soldiers marching on gravel, rhythmic, continuous, relentless. He leaned forward, slid the stick under the robin, and turned it on its side. Hundreds of writhing maggots were devouring the decaying bird. The sound he had heard was the sound of their feast.

Karras opened his eyes. For the past two and a half years, he had been paralyzed and haunted by grief. Staring at the photograph of a smiling Steve Maroulis, Karras wondered if Stephanie was haunted, too. If she ever pictured Steve in his coffin the way he pictured his son, lying in the dark beneath the ground in that small wooden box.

At night, when he could not sleep, Karras would see Jimmy in his coffin, rotted away and covered in maggots. And Karras would hear that steady marching sound coming from every corner of the room. He could shake the pictures from his head but not the sound. Never the sound.

“God, stop,” whispered Karras, blinking tears from his eyes. It was strange, hearing his own voice speak those words in a pleading way. Invoking the name of God, this was a ridiculous thing for him to do, nothing more than a reaction, really, a habit unbroken from a churchgoing youth. Because he didn’t believe in God, any kind of God, anymore.

Bernie Walters claimed that to live without God was to live without hope. And why, said Bernie, would anyone want to live in a world without hope?

Well, God was Bernie’s crutch, not his. Karras had his own reason for staying alive. Since Jimmy’s death, the feeling had never weakened. In fact, it grew stronger every day.