George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

He’d look at the husbands, stepping out of the elevator of the Royal Hotel on their way to the dining room, their hands just touching the round backs of their shapeless, overweight wives, and he’d see boredom in their eyes, and something like contained desperation. For them, it had come down to this: They had to spend two, three hundred a night, and drive two hours from the city, just to fuck a woman they no longer desired to fuck. When all the time they’d rather be getting their dick yanked by some stocky Korean woman in a massage parlor for forty bucks.

Then there were the husbands with their trophy wives. These men thought that people looked at them with envy. But the truth was, people looked at them and imagined wrinkled, bony old men struggling to stay hard inside of luscious young women.

Well, that was their problem, not his. But it was funny just the same.

He took a swig of his beer. The day was cold but not bitter. It felt good to be away from the heat of the sink.

Here in Edwardtown he was known as slow-witted Larry. Larry with the black-framed glasses who never met their eyes. Who had gotten the job on the recommendation of Mr. Toomey, the electrician who serviced the Royal Hotel. Larry had never even filled out an employment form.

“I’ll work for half pay if you give me cash money under the table,” said Larry to his boss, Harraway. Larry looked down at his own shoes, chuckled in a humble, homespun way, and said, “Had a little trouble once with the IRS, you understand, and they’re aimin’ to take most everything I earn for the rest of my life.”

“We can do that,” said Harraway. “I’m no fan of the government myself.”

Farrow had been down here in Edwardtown, a small Maryland city thirty miles south of Delaware on the Edward River, for two and a half years. A liberal arts college sat on the northeast corner of the city limits. Outside of town, farmers rotated soybean and corn while their wives worked at the local Wal-Mart, and crabmen made a modest living on the river.

The north end of town housed blacks and poor whites. The south end – nineteenth-century clapboard row houses on narrow cobblestone streets – meant old white money clamped in rigor-mortised fists. The Royal Hotel was on High Street, one block away from the river. As in every small town in the country, High Street was the area where the landed gentry had always resided.

This was the kind of people Farrow hated most. Strange that he would be down here now, washing their dishes.

This was only temporary, though, and when he thought about it rationally, Edwardtown had been the perfect place for him to lie low. But now, he felt, it was time to make a move.

He hotboxed his smoke and dropped it on the bricks. He crushed the butt beneath his boot.

Farrow drove the hopped-up Taurus up High Street, took Kent Boulevard over along the campus, where that famous 1960s novelist had tenure. Farrow spent much of his free time in the campus library, which stocked a good deal of worthy fiction. He had read one of the famous writer’s early novels and had once seen him, a small bald man with tortoiseshell eyeglasses, crossing the library floor. He had enjoyed the man’s book but felt in the end that the writer had been holding back, had not gone far enough into that black rotted place that surely would have existed in his lead character’s mind.

In the end, the writer had been afraid. In general, thought Farrow, that was the flaw in most people, a timidity that separated them from those who were strong. They used their idea of Goodness and Love as an excuse for living a life of weakness. People were afraid to go to that black place and use it when the time came, or even admit that it was there. To be powerful and free while on this earth, and to stay alive as long as possible, these were Farrow’s goals. In death there was only the equality of failure.

Farrow hit the interstate, open country on either side. He passed farmland with flocks of gulls resting in the icy pockets of plow lines. Ahead, the straightaway lay clear and stretched for a quarter mile. He downshifted the Ford to second, redlined it, caught air at the peak of a grade, slammed the shifter into third as the wheels touched asphalt. Manuel had been right about the Ford: It could really fly.

Roman Otis stepped up onstage. There were just a few people in the late-afternoon crowd, sitting at the bar. The joint was down on the east end of Sunset, just past Fountain, one of those places that served Tex-Mex as an afterthought. The sign said El Rancho, but in his mind Otis called the place El Roacho because he had seen plenty of them crawling the brick walls. No, he’d never eat the food at El Roacho, but they did have a nice karaoke machine set up with a premium sound system, and that was why he came. Otis had slipped the owner a few bucks to buy the tapes of some of those old ballads and midtempo tunes he loved so much.

Past the stage lights that shone in his eyes, Otis could make out silhouettes at the bar, a couple of Chicanos and a woman named Darcia, nice-lookin’ woman with a fat onion on her, who had come in to hear him sing. At the end of the bar sat Gus Lavonicus, top-heavy and kind of leaning to the side, with that cinder-block-of-flesh-looking head of his. Otis would be done in a few minutes, and Gus could have waited outside in the Lincoln. But Gus was a thoughtful kind of guy who liked to support Otis whenever he performed. Otis felt it was a damn shame that his sister and Gus weren’t getting along.

The music track began. Otis closed his eyes as his cue for the first verse neared, and then he jumped in. He kept time with his hand against his thigh, kept his other hand free to gesture along with the music. He thought of it as a kind of punctuation, what he liked to call his “hand expressions.” This would have been his signature as a performer had his life gone the other way. But it hadn’t gone the other way, and to get negative about that now went against his principles of positivity. He was fulfilled, in his own small way, just singing in places like this when he got the chance.

“So very hard to go,” sang Otis, “’cause I love you sooooo…”

Yeah, this was a good one. He sounded right, stretching out and bending those vowels against the Tower of Power horn section. This here was one of his favorites, had inspired him to get the custom-made “Back to Oakland” ID bracelet he wore.

“Thanks, y’all,” said Otis as the music ended, Gus and Darcia’s applause filling the dead air. “I appreciate it. I truly do.”

Otis stepped down off the stage and went to the bar. He put his car keys down in front of Lavonicus.

“Go ahead and get the Mark warmed up, Gus,” said Otis. “I’m right behind you, man.”

“You sounded good, bro,” said Lavonicus.

Lavonicus got off his stool, uncoiling to his full seven feet. He ducked his head to avoid a Budweiser mobile suspended from the ceiling as he turned. One of the Mexicans nudged the other as Lavonicus passed.

Otis pushed his long hair back off his shoulders, rubber-banded it in a tail. He said to Darcia, “Get up, baby. Let me have a look at what you got.”

Darcia stood up, smiled shyly, struck a pose. She wore cinnamon slacks with a matching top.

“Now turn around,” said Otis, and as she did, Otis nodded his head and said, “Yeah,” and “Uh-huh.”

“You like the way I look, Roman?”

“Baby, you know I do.”

“We gonna see each other tonight?”

“Wished I could, but I can’t. Gonna be out of town for a few weeks, I expect. But when I get back we’re gonna hook up, hear? Maybe I let you cook me a nice meal. Afterwards…” He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. She giggled as he brushed a hand across her hip.