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.
EIGHT
Nick Stefanos caught an uptown Red Line car and picked up his Dodge in Takoma Park. He slipped Lungfish’s Pass and Stow into the tape deck and headed back south via North Capitol. The band locked into a killer groove on “Terminal Crush” as Stefanos drove the Coronet 500 alongside the black iron fence of Rock Creek Cemetery.
At a stoplight just below Florida Avenue, he saw a woman pull a butcher’s knife from the trunk of her parked car and wave it wildly at a laughing man. A dozen ugly people in varying stages of decay stood outside a corner liquor store, huffing smokes and drinking from brown paper bags. Behind them, taped to the store windows, colorful posters depicted beautiful black models promoting malt liquor and menthol cigarettes. A guy with matted dreads walked toward Stefanos’s driver’s-side window, one hand slipped into a bulged jacket pocket. Stefanos locked his door.
The Capitol loomed dead ahead, crowning the street. On this particular winter day, the press and public were fixated on the alleged extramarital affairs of the sitting president and giving odds on his possible impeachment. It was the media event of the decade, the subject of sarcastic lunch conversations all across town. But few talked about the real crime of this city, not anymore: American children were undernourished, criminally undereducated, and living in a viper’s nest of drugs, violence, and despair within a mile of the Capitol dome. It should have been a national disgrace. But hunger and poverty had never been tabloid sexy. Beyond the occasional obligatory lip service, the truth was that no one in a position of power cared.
The man with the matted hair tapped on Stefanos’s window just as the light turned green. Stefanos gave the Dodge gas.
Nick Stefanos drove into Southeast and found a space on 8th Street. He walked toward the marine barracks, passing a real estate office, a women’s bar named Athena’s, an alley, and an athletic-shoe store fronted by a riot gate. He came to the Spot, a windowless, low-slung cinder-block structure in the middle of the strip. He pushed on the scarred green door and walked inside.
Hanging conical lamps and the light from a blue neon Schlitz logo colored the room. Stefanos hung his leather on a coat tree by the door and stepped off the landing into the bar area.
Ramon, the long-time busboy, was coming up from the cellar with two cases of beer cradled in his arms. Wisps of reefer smoke swirled behind him, the smell of it deep in his clothing. He was a little leering guy who wore a red bandanna on his head and scarred suede cowboy boots on his size-seven feet. Ramon stayed high throughout his shifts.
“Hey, amigo,” said Stefanos, flicking Ramon’s ear as he motored by.
“Ow. Chit, man.”
“Did that hurt?”
“ Maricon, ” said Ramon, showing capped teeth with his smile. “You lucky I got my hands full.”
“Yeah, sure. Better get those Buds in the cooler, though. Before you kick my ass, I mean.”
“I already got it all done. This beer is the last of it. The mixers, the liquor, the bev naps… everything’s all set up.”
“Thanks. I’ll get you later.”
Stefanos went toward the kitchen, passing the reach-through at the side of the bar. He could hear the radio, set on WPGC and playing the new Puff Daddy single, and the raised voices of Phil, James, and Darnell. Maria would be in there, too, making the salad special, quietly working on the presentation of the plates. Stefanos walked in under the bright fluorescents, stepping onto the thick rubber mats that covered the tile floor.