The cook was sitting on a tall stool, drinking a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette. The cook’s hair was all gray, but his face was smooth and unlined. Now that Florek had a longer look, he could see that this man was much younger than he had first appeared.
“Panayoti,” said Stefanos to the cook. “I want you to meet our new counter man, Mike Florek.”
The cook got off the stool, winced a little as he stood. He took a few steps toward Florek, limping deeply. Florek looked at the cook’s left leg: even through the fabric of the trousers, he could see the bend, the awful twist at the knee. Florek stepped forward, met the man halfway, put out his hand. The cook reflexively touched at a black smudge on his face, then extended his own hand. The two of them shook.
“Mike,” said Florek.
“Pete Karras,” said the cook. “C’mon, chum, I’ll show you around.”
18
Peter Karras caught his breath sharply as his foot touched the floor. He tried to relax and let some air out, give it a few seconds to let the moment pass. Three years after the night in the alley, the mornings still gave him trouble. It was hell for Karras, getting out of bed.
After the operation, when he had been in rehabilitation for a while, the doctors told him that the knee was nearly useless, that the sack of smashed bone and cartilage that had been his left foot would never set just right. He’d have to wear a brace on his leg, they said, with the hope that maybe someday, if he was real good and lucky, he could graduate to a cane. There was also some talk of a special shoe for the foot, a Boris Karloff-looking number with a built-up sole and laces on the side. Of course, on account of the mangled knee, the bum leg would always be shorter than the other. But the Karloff shoe coupled with the cane would lessen the limp.
Karras asked the doctors if he had heard them right: that if he went along with the program, and didn’t expect a whole lot, then a lucky guy like him, he might be able to make do with a gimp’s shoe and yero’s cane. Is that what the doctor meant to say? The young doctor had laughed skittishly and made several attempts to strike a match to a cigarette.
Dimitri was crying in the second bedroom of the apartment. Drowsily calling out, “Maaama, Maaama, Maaaaaa...,” probably standing up in his crib about now, his chubby olive hands wrapped around the wood rails. Eleni would be in the kitchen, cooking some breakfast, listening to her records, playing them just loud enough that she couldn’t hear the kid. Karras figured he better get up and help the little guy out.
Those first few steps in the morning were always the worst. He always worked through it, though, like he had worked through the worst of it in the beginning, without the brace from the very start and later without the cane. As for the shoe, a cobbler in Chinatown had stretched out one of his brogues, fitted it with a couple of padded inner soles, and Karras had made do with that. He walked, and when it hurt so bad he thought he’d scream, he kept walking. Soon he learned how to keep the pain from showing on his face, so that after a while, except in the morning and on very cold days, the pain crawled away like a beaten dog to a black corner in the back of his mind. That was the mental part of it; it was the physical part he couldn’t lick. Karras knew that he would always have that damned and goddamned limp.
“Maaaaa...,” said Dimitri.
Karras got off the bed, grunted as he walked across the hardwood floor. He pulled his underpants away from his sleeper’s hard-on, scratched beneath his balls. The pain was rough this morning, rougher than most. He could take the pills he had in the bathroom, the ones he had gotten from a pharmacist on 14th and Colorado Avenue, a friend of a friend. Karras always thought it over, ended up never taking the pills. A doper was just another kind of cripple to him. Still, he kept the pills in the medicine cabinet, never considered throwing them away. It was good to know that they were there.
Out in the hall, he pushed on Dimitri’s door, opened it to a wall of heat. He had told Eleni to leave the door open at night, what with the radiator in there, but she insisted on keeping it closed. And there he was, standing in the crib, his cheeks flushed like some living Raggedy Andy doll, his black hair as damp as if he had been sleeping beside a furnace.
“Da,” said Dimitri, his eyes — the same shade of brown as Eleni’s, the same exact shape — registering mild disappointment.
“Son.”
Karras lifted him from the crib. Dimitri’s sleeping outfit, the powder blue one with the sewed-on feet, was wet around the crotch.
“Eleni!” yelled Karras.
“What?” came the weak response from the kitchen.
“The pethi is wet!”
“Then change his diaper!”
Karras looked dolefully at the stack of cloth folded neatly near the cup of safety pins on the table by the crib. A picture of a bear wearing a baseball cap had been painted on the table. Karras felt ridiculous, standing there with the kid in his arms, the cartoon bear’s eyes bugging idiotically in his direction.
“Diapers,” he said to his son. “Someone ought to let your mom in on a little secret: I don’t know how to operate these damn things.”
Dimitri pointed to the door. “Mom.”
Karras lowered the boy to the floor, steadied him on his feet, patted him on the rump.
“Yeah,” said Karras. “You go on and see Mom. Mom’ll fix you up.”
Dimitri stumbled once, regained his footing as he went giggling out the door. Two years old — Eleni always corrected Karras, had to remind him that Dimitri was “eighteen months” — and the kid was already running around, putting a few words together. Karras watched him go, a stocky, dark boy, more Triandokidis than Karras. The old man had noticed it straight off, the day Eleni and Pete had brought the infant home from the hospitaclass="underline" “He’s no Spartan, that one. Miazi ti mitera tou, aftos.” After that, Karras’s father rarely paid attention to the boy, despite the fact that Dimitri was his namesake and his blood. Peter Karras should have been angry, but oddly, he was not. The boy did favor his mother, both in looks and gesture, and given a choice, young Dimitri would run to her over him every time. From the start, Karras felt disconnected from him, wondering sometimes if a bond would ever grow between them, if he would ever really feel like a father to the boy. And then he wondered if that was what he wanted after all.
Karras went to the bathroom, pulled his softening cock from his underpants and stood over the head. His urine split and went off in two directions, some of it splashing onto the black and white tiles of the bathroom floor. His first piss of the day was always like this; and it had been that way for his old man. Karras smiled, remembering the mornings he’d stand in the door frame of his parents’ bathroom as a boy, watching the old man pissing two streams, hungover and pressing one palm flat against the wall. Back then, Karras believed that his father had more than one dick, that this was what happened when a boy became a man. He used to wonder when he would begin to grow his second one, too.
Karras washed his face, looked in the mirror. Twenty-seven years old, and all-the-way gray. His father, he had gone gray early as well. Gray or no, Karras could still get the looks, if the girls didn’t happen to catch his walk. Then they’d look away. But on good days Karras could still pass for a blue-eyed Hodiak. John Hodiak with a limp, and a full head of gray hair.
Karras found his robe hanging on a hook behind the bathroom door. He put it on and went out to the kitchen.
The sound of Betty Hutton singing “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” hit him as he walked into the room. Dimitri stood in his playpen in the middle of the living area, holding onto the netting, squatting up and down in rough cadence to the song’s beat. Personally, Karras couldn’t stand those novelty numbers, and to top it off Hutton had the hardness of a man. But the kid liked the tune, and Karras knew that Eleni had put it on for him.