George Pelecanos - Shame the Devil

The photograph had been on the nightstand for seven years. It was Steve’s favorite snapshot of the two of them and his friends, and as long as she lived in this place, the one-bedroom condo they’d bought soon after they were married, she’d leave the picture where it had always been. Leaving it there after Steve’s death was an act of neither superstition nor sentiment. The photograph belonged there. She saw no reason to move it now.

“Doesn’t it make you sad?” asked Karras the week before. “I mean, to have to look at it every night before you go to sleep.”

“It makes me happy to know that Steve and I had one day as good as that one. Most people never even get that.”

“I couldn’t,” said Karras, his voice trailing off, and she’d hugged him then, the way she was hugging him now.

She stroked his chest. Karras had a decent build for a man in his late forties. Not like Steve, who’d always been on the heavy side. She used to call Steve “the Bear,” because he felt as big as one, sleeping next to her. She liked to be with a man who had some weight on him. Karras had a handsome face, a straight back, and a flat stomach. Even at his age, he was the kind women noticed, and wondered about, on the street. But Karras was always sad. He didn’t have Steve’s smile, the kind that said he appreciated the moment and the people he was sharing it with. No, Karras wasn’t Steve. But she was getting used to having him around.

Stephanie closed her eyes.

She enjoyed going to bed with Karras after the meetings and sleeping with him once a week. She needed the companionship, and she needed the sex. Their being together, it helped Dimitri, if only for the night, and she knew it helped her.

If she could have talked to Steve right then, she’d explain their relationship to him like that. And she believed he’d be happy for her, pleased that she was slowly finding her way out of the dark places she’d visited after his death.

She fell to sleep, knowing Steve would understand.

Thomas Wilson had a slow drink at the Hummingbird on Georgia Avenue and got into his Dodge Intrepid, parked out front. He turned the ignition, hit the preset button, brought up WHUR. Quiet Storm: Every city in the country with a sizable black population had the format now, but the original had been created on HUR. And here was Gladys Knight, singing “Where Peaceful Waters Flow.” You couldn’t get much more beautiful than that.

Wilson headed over to Underwood, where he lived alone in the small brick he’d grown up in. Momma had died suddenly when he was away, back in the ’80s. His uncle Lindo, who owned the hauling business, claimed it was from a broken heart.

None of the women in the bar had looked at him tonight. Seemed they never did. He wasn’t yet forty, but he looked ten years older, and he felt far away from what was hip and new. He favored the music that he had come up with. He dressed like 1989. He still wore his hair in that same tired fade.

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.

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.