George Pelecanos: Shoedog

Constantine settled in to the slow, easy life of the town. He rode an old bicycle for basic transportation, and to run errands to the local pharmacy. Mostly his job consisted of acting as an interpreter in the crucial first meeting between French child and English-speaking parent. He suspected that there was something a bit illegal in these transactions, and that there was much money being passed below the table. But he remained emotionally detached from the children and the dynamics of the adoption process, preferring to pursue perfection in the art of being alone. In general he stayed away from trouble, though he did steal a Citro? n one night, returning it to the unsuspecting owner’s parking spot before dawn.

One year after he had arrived in Tours, Constantine packed his Jansport and rode the train to Amsterdam with the intention of having a short holiday. Once there, he took a room at the Hotel My Home, a boarding house near the station run by a couple of humorless but kind old men. On the first night of his stay Constantine had a few genevas with beer chasers at the pub below the hotel, the CafE Simone. He was surprised to see middle-aged men smoking marijuana at the bar. Other than that the place was like any local, complete with the requisite, red-faced, cap-wearing drunk at the end of the bar doing his atonal rendition of Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” He took to Amsterdam immediately and did not return to France. A week later he took a job as a barback in a lesbian club named Homolulu’s, and a week after that he met a blonde named Petra Boone, who became his girlfriend until he left Amsterdam, quite suddenly and for no explainable reason except to travel, six months later.

He drifted south by rail into Italy, and later took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras, in Greece. A bus dropped him in Athens where Constantine checked immediately into the local hostel. Athens was no place to experiment on accommodations if one didn’t know the language. It reminded Constantine of New York City with heightened emotions.

The desk clerk at the hostel was a Greek girl named Voula, a tightly curled brunette with mahogany eyes and a small, wet mouth. The manner in which she used her hands to navigate through her broken English attracted Constantine, along with her low-stanced, hippy shape. They were friends immediately and lovers three days later, when Constantine moved into her room, the best and most private in the house.

Beyond his desk duties at the hostel, which paid his room and board, Constantine did not work during his stay in Greece. He spent his days drinking NescafE in the cafeneions and his nights in the tavernas eating rich, garlicky food washed down with Amstel and the occasional retsina. Late at night he and Voula would lie in beach chairs on the roof of the hostel, smoking cigarettes and laughing over the sounds of crazed, honking cabdrivers in the street below. He was beginning to like Greece, revising his original opinion of its people from incivility to a kind of unrestrained passion.

One day, after a rainfall, Constantine sat in the National Park Garden near Syntagma Square. He noticed a small boy crying and pointing at his tricycle, which was stuck in the middle of a large puddle on an asphalt track that surrounded a small pond. Constantine walked into the water and retrieved the bike, carrying it to the boy. The boy was wearing elastic-banded trousers and red suspenders over a striped green shirt. He said “thank you” in Greek, and receiving no response, put his arms out to hug Constantine. Constantine picked him up and held the boy to his chest, immediately feeling something that scared him, a connection to the child that brought on an odd but acutely heavy sense of loss. He realized then that the road he had taken had not been natural or right but rather the long, aimless act of a man who had no center. He realized the import of the stability mat had eluded him, and that realization frightened him. Constantine put the child down and returned to the hostel, where he loaded his pack and walked, without a good-bye to Voula, out into the street.

He drank that night, wandering from one taverna and discotheque to the next, catching an early morning cab to the airport, where he boarded a flight to New York City. Landing in JFK, the first American voice he heard was from a uniformed man who was loading luggage onto a moving belt. The voice sounded foreign to his ears.

Two weeks later he had taken a job in Annapolis, and then he had run from that, and now he was sitting next to a puckish old man in a hopped-up Mopar, cruising the interstates of Maryland. He drummed his fingers on the dash, thinking mat after seventeen years the sum of his accomplishments had been one big broken circle with a gaping dead end. But Constantine had been wrong about a lot of things, and he would be wrong about this too. Everything always added up to something, and the real trip was about to begin.

The Capital Beltway was a jumble of sooted automobiles tailgating at a steady sixty by rush hour’s ass end. The sun hung gauzy through the filmy grayness of the cloudless sky, and the air smelled of tar and exhaust. There had been a Beltway when Constantine left town in 1975, and in fact it had been in place for ten years before that. But what it had become since then-a twisted ring of stinking metal, circling the city-was madness in the mind of Constantine.

“Seventeen years, huh?” Polk said.

“That’s right.”

“Still got family here?”

Constantine shook his head, answered without thinking. “No.”

Some time later they took the exit ramp at Georgia Avenue and headed south. Polk drove into downtown Silver Spring, stopping at a red light where Route 29 crossed Georgia. Constantine looked at the tall, clean, partially unoccupied office buildings, and at the Silver Theatre, a deco house now boarded up and locked. His mother had taken him there to see Goldfinger when he was eight years old, and from it he remembered only an oriental man with a deadly iron hat, and his embarrassment at his mother’s loud, gin-fueled comments throughout the show. Later, in a conciliatory gesture, she had bought him a yellow-and-green parakeet at the wooden-floored Woolworth’s up the street. Constantine had let the bird go free that same night.

“Where we going, Polk?” Constantine said as the car lurched forward on the green.

“Charlotte lives in a rent-controlled job on Connecticut,” he said. “I’ll head west at Missouri, take Military from there.”

“Any motels along this way?” Constantine said, thinking that Military would take them along the perimeter of the old neighborhood.

“Sure, there’s one at the District line.”

Constantine said, “Drop me there.”

Polk waved his hand. “I told you, Connie, you’re with me. Charlotte’s got an extra room and an extra bed.” He smiled and winked once again. “Maybe an extra friend.”

“This is what I want, Polk. Do me a favor and don’t argue it. Drop me at the line and pick me up in the morning. Okay?”

Polk nodded. He drove under a railroad bridge and up an incline, and a little past that they crossed the line into D.C. He pulled the car to the curb in front of a motel sign advertising adult movies in each room, letting it idle as he reached into his windbreaker for a thin roll of bills. Polk unwound the rubber band that held the bills tight and began to count off some paper. Constantine put his hand over Polk’s.

“I’ve got money, Polk. It’s okay.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. Thanks.”

“I’ll pick you up at nine, all right, Connie? You’ll be here, won’t you?”

“Yeah.” Constantine opened the passenger door, reached into the backseat, retrieved his pack, and slung the strap over one shoulder. He bent down and put his head through the open window. “So long, Polk.”