George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

Thomas Wilson looked over at Karras, who wore a frown of agitation. Wilson believed in God himself. And he had real affection for Bernie Walters. But Bernie never had the good sense to give that bullshit a rest.

“Ah, come on,” said Karras. “God didn’t help me kick cocaine. It was the love of a woman. It was living, breathing flesh. I fell for Lisa and decided that I wanted to sleep next to her for the rest of my life. That to do that, I needed to live. And then, when Jimmy was born, there wasn’t any question. I never even thought about coke again. But God? Gimme a break.”

“Where were we?” said Walters.

Stephanie tried to catch Karras’s eye, but he was staring ahead. Picturing his son alive, Stephanie knew. She’d come to recognize that empty gaze of Karras’s face. Wilson looked at a spot on the floor between his feet and patted the shaved sides of his face.

“Smoking,” said Karras. “Tonight’s theme.”

“Right,” said Wilson. “All right, here’s something. I can remember the first time me and my boy Charles bought a pack of cigarettes. At the Geranium Market, up on the corner of Georgia and Geranium Avenue?”

“That place is still there,” said Karras.

Wilson nodded. “I don’t know who runs it now. But back then this Jewish guy had it. Man by the name of Schweitz. Yeah, kind old guy. I told Mr. Schweitz the smokes were for my moms. He was friendly with my mother and he knew my mother didn’t smoke. He sold them to us anyway, though. Probably knew we’d get turned off by it right quick. And did we ever. We took that pack of Kools – had to be double O’s ’cause we knew that all the bad brothers smoked those – over to Fort Stevens Park, and don’t you know we smoked them right after the other. I can still picture Charles, taking a pull off that stick, trying to blow rings, checking it out, lookin’ all cross-eyed and shit… Damn, what was that, almost twenty-five years ago? Anyway, right about then, both of us got sick. You should’ve seen Charlie, huggin’ one of those Civil War cannons they have over at the fort.”

“Bet you never smoked again,” said Walters.

“Charles never did. But I did. See, I was never as smart as Charles. When I came back to D.C. after being away for a few years and Charles saw me lightin’ up, he wouldn’t let up on me, calling me a fool and everything else he could think of in front of the ladies. I stopped smoking soon after.” Wilson cleared his throat. “Charles always did look out for me like that.”

“It’s good to remember it,” said Walters. “That your friend loved you, I mean.”

“Yeah, we were like kin.” Wilson sat up straight. “Bernie?”

“Let me think.” Bernie Walters tapped ash off his cigarette. “Right. The first time I caught Vance smoking was at this dance he was in charge of when he was in junior high. I don’t know what he had to do with it, exactly. He liked to put that kind of stuff on – do the promotion, decorate the gym, all that. I went to pick him up, and I saw him standing outside with a couple of his friends. They were passing a butt back and forth. I got pissed off, not because he was smoking but because of the way he looked with that cigarette. He was holding it up, pitchfork style, the way some women do. I guess he was trying to be… what do you call that, Professor?”

“Cosmopolitan,” said Karras.

“Right, like that magazine. So when I came up on the group, he knew he was busted. He took me aside and asked me not to yell at him right there in front of his friends. Well, I gave him that much. But on the way home I really let him have it. Told him he looked like a damn girl, smoking that cigarette.” Walters regarded the Marlboro between his fingers. “It was dark in that car, but I could see the tears come into his eyes. It hurt him so much for me to call him a girl. Not that he was confused. He knew who he was, even then. No, that wasn’t the problem; the problem was me. If I could have shown just a little understanding, it wouldn’t have been so rough on him, growing up the way he did. Hell, he didn’t even like cigarettes. The only reason he tried smoking at all was because I smoked. He thought… I mean, can you imagine what was going on in his head to do something like that? To smoke a cigarette to try and please your dad? You all ever hear of such a thing?”

“The two of you got a lot of things straight before he died,” said Stephanie. “Don’t forget that.”

“We got some things straight,” said Walters.

For a while no one said a thing. Then Wilson said, “Dimitri?”

“Yeah.”

“Your turn, man.”

“My son was just five years old when he was murdered,” said Karras. “So forgive me if I don’t have any smoking stories for you tonight. But if I think of any, I’ll let you know.”

Frank Farrow took the last dinner plate from a gray bus tray and used an icing wand to scrape what was left of a rich man’s lunch into the garbage receptacle by his side. He fitted the plate onto a stack of them and set the load down into the steaming hot water of the soak sink in front of him. He used the overhead hose to rinse off the bus tray and dropped the empty tray onto the floor, where the boy would come and pick it up.

Farrow had dumped silverware into a plastic container called a third. He dripped liquid detergent into the third, filled the container with hot water, and capped it tightly with a plastic lid. He shook the third vigorously for about a minute, then drained the container of suds and rinsed it out. The silverware was clean.

Farrow grabbed the bottle of Sam Adams he had placed on the ledge over the sink. Grace, the waitress with the howitzers, had brought the beer in to him after lunch, told him it was on her for the good job he had done “turning those dishes” during the rush. He watched her wiggle her ass as she walked out of the dishwasher’s room, and he whistled under his breath, because that was what she wanted him to do.

He looked into the brownish water of the sink. The plates could soak for a while. He decided to go out back and have himself a smoke.

He snatched his cigarettes off a high shelf, took his beer, and went to the doorway leading to the kitchen. Bobby, the faggoty young chef who called himself an artist, was boning a salmon on a wooden cutting block. He was gesturing broadly with his hands, describing the process to an apprentice, a kid from the local college who was struggling to stay interested. The other kitchen help, black guys from the north side of town, were walking around behind Jamie the Artist, their hands on their hips, their white hats cool-cocked on their heads, elaborately mouthing his words in mimicry, passing each other, giving each other skin.

Farrow stood in the doorway watching them with amusement. When Bobby looked up, Farrow said, “Dishes are soaking. I’ll be out back, catching a weed.”

“Okay, Larry,” said Bobby with a wave of his hand.

Larry. That’s what they called Farrow in this town.

There was a small alleyway off the back of the kitchen. The owners of the hotel had erected latticework along the edge of the alley’s red bricks. A piece of lattice above, thin with grapevine, completed the camouflage and hid the alleyway from the guests of the hotel who liked to stroll in the adjacent courtyard.

Farrow stood out here on his breaks, smoking, peering through the gaps in the lattice, watching the guests walk in the courtyard, silently laughing at them, thoroughly hating them. Well-to-do white people. There wasn’t anything more pathetic. Khaki pants, Bass Weejuns, outdoor gear, sweaters tied around the neck for those days when the weather was on the warm side but “unpredictable.” They had come down here with their spouses for an overnight at the “quaint” bed-and-breakfast. They’d go “antiquing” around the town, have a nice dinner, wrestle for a couple of minutes in the four-poster bed, go home the next day just as sad and unsatisfied as when they arrived. The point was, they could tell their friends they had spent a quiet weekend on the Eastern Shore. Farrow guessed it was all about making some kind of statement.