Джордж Пелеканос: King Suckerman

“What?”

“I was lookin’ at Clay just now, walkin’ out of here? That’s one big man, you know it? I never realized how big he was!”

“Up till now,” said Clarence Tate, “neither did I.”

At the top of Irving Street, on the corner of Mt. Pleasant, Dimitri Karras stood in the sun, leaning against the side of his Karmann Ghia. He checked the time on his wristwatch and saw that it was a little past eleven.

A hot wind blew trash across the street. An old man, nearly blind, stood at the bus stop and tapped his cane on the quartz-reflecting sidewalk. In the front yard of a nearby row house, a young Puerto Rican doubled over and vomited in the grass.

Karras turned his head.

A black ’69 Camaro, jacked up in the rear, approached, coming fast up Irving. Karras stepped out in the street and flagged the car down.

The driver of the Camaro pulled over to the side of the road. The driver and his passenger had a short discussion, and then the passenger door opened. Young Nick Stefanos stepped out of the car.

Stefanos walked toward Karras. Karras watched a kid with longish blond hair get out of the driver’s side and light a smoke. He tilted his chin up at Karras and smiled; Karras didn’t like the smile or the kid’s face.

“Hey,” said Stefanos.

“Hey.”

They shook hands.

“Dimitri Karras, right?”

“That’s right, yeah.”

“What’s happenin’, man?”

“Leavin’ for your trip?”

“Just said good-bye to my papou . Me and Billy are on our way to pick up the boat and head south.”

“Thought I’d catch you before you left.”

“How’d you know—”

“Irving’s one way headed east. You told me you’d be shoving off about eleven.”

“Okay,” said Stefanos, digging his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He waited for the older guy with the haunted face to speak.

Karras said, “I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”

Stefanos looked at Karras’s wrinkled Hawaiian shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, the man’s unclean face, his dirty feet. There seemed to be blood or something streaked on the man’s jeans.

“You been up all night?” said Stefanos in a friendly way.

“Up?” Karras looked down at his shirt in surprise, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “Yeah, I guess.”

Stefanos glanced over his shoulder at his smirking friend. “Listen, Billy’s in a hurry—”

“I know.”

Karras had planned to ask if Nick Stefanos knew the Castle boy. He had planned to tell him about the accident, tell him to take care. But he remembered then that the two boys had gone to different high schools. And in truth, he knew the conversation would be pointless. Stefanos was nineteen years old; he would not understand, or care to understand, the gravity of death.

“Nick,” said Karras.

“Yeah?”

“I only wanted to tell you—”

“I know. ‘Have fun.’ You told me the other day.”

Karras shifted his feet. “Look... what I really mean to say is, don’t waste your time. You think you’re just having fun and then ten years pass and you figure out that you haven’t done a goddamn thing. All you’ve been is high, and you can’t even remember what was so good about that.”

“Right.” Stefanos cocked his head and nodded slowly. “I hear you, man.”

No you don’t. Goddamnit, you don’t .

Karras bit down on his lip. He reached into his pocket, pulled free a slip of paper with a shaky hand. “Anyway. I put my address on here for you. In case you want to write. I know you won’t write your grandfather, but you can write me. A postcard’ll do it, so I can just tell the old man I heard from you and you’re okay. You can do that, can’t you?”

“Sure.” Stefanos took the slip of paper, looked at it. “Real Right Records. I bought a couple of LPs there once.”

“I work there,” said Karras. “That is, I’m going to be.”

“Cool.” Stefanos looked back at his friend once again. “Look, Dimitri, if that’s it—”

“You gotta go.”

“Yeah. I better go.”

“All right,” said Karras. “Go.”

Stefanos went to the car, dropped into the shotgun bucket. Billy Goodrich had gotten back behind the wheel.

“Who was that guy?” said Goodrich.

“A friend of my grandfather’s.”

“Your pa pa send him to talk to you?”

“ Papou .”

“Whatever. He send that guy to tell you to be careful and shit?”

“He’s just a friend.”

Goodrich smiled. “What’d he want, then, Greek?”

“I don’t know,” Stefanos said truthfully. “Come on, Billy, let’s ride.”

Goodrich cooked the 327 and pulled away from the curb. Nick Stefanos looked in the sideview mirror at Karras, still standing in the street, watching them drive away. The Camaro went over a rise and crossed 16th.

Stefanos glanced back in the mirror. Dimitri Karras was gone.

Nick Stefanos and Billy Goodrich picked up the Larson in Alexandria and put the boat on the hitch. Their next stop was a market, where they bought a cold six-pack of beer. Though it was barely noon, they grabbed two Buds out of the bag, pulled the rings, and tapped cans.

“To our trip, Greek.”

Stefanos had a swig of beer as Goodrich turned the ignition.

“We got everything?” said Stefanos.

An ounce of Mexican sat in the glove box, along with a vial filled to the top with Black Beauties and a half dozen hits of Purple Haze; a plastic grenade hung from the rearview, and a Bad Company logo was taped, facing out, to the windshield of the car. Several Marlboro hardpacks were scattered on the dash. Plastered to the rear of the Camaro was a bumper sticker that read, “Mott the Hoople: Tell Chuck Berry the news.”

“Everything that matters,” said Goodrich.

Billy Goodrich laughed and caught rubber pulling out of the lot. Stefanos slapped Sally Can’t Dance into the Pioneer eight-track deck. The druggy guitar of “Kill Your Sons” crashed from the Superthruster speakers.

They took a ramp leading to 95 South. Goodrich pinned the gas pedal, pushing the Camaro up to eighty-five. He began to talk to Stefanos about the movie they had seen together on Saturday night. But Stefanos wasn’t really listening to his friend. He couldn’t get the image of that Karras guy out of his head.

Nick Stefanos couldn’t figure out why Karras bothered him. He would never get off the track like Karras. It wasn’t like he was looking into his own future when he looked into that Karras dude’s wasted, hollowed-out eyes. What had happened to Dimitri Karras, whatever had happened, could never happen to him. He was way too smart for that. And he had so much time.

“Hey, Greek!”

“What?”

“I’m talkin’ to you, man! I was just sayin’, the movie was badder than a motherfucker, wasn’t it?”

There was little traffic on the interstate. They were on a long straightaway, the white lines bleeding into the horizon. Stefanos smiled, looking at the road ahead.

“Yeah,” said Nick Stefanos. “ King Suckerman was bad.”