“That was his routine.” Stephanie smiled. “Anyway, that night, it must have been midnight or so, Steve was really loaded. He got on the kitchen phone with his bookie and tried to place a bet, letting him know that he was good for the losses he had taken that afternoon. Well, this bookie wasn’t having any of it. Steve blew his cool, started screaming at the guy over the phone. Then Steve glanced over and saw his mother sitting at the kitchen table, looking at him with something close to disgust in her eyes. And Steve did look like hell that night — sweaty and red faced from the drink. I guess his mother shamed him with that look of hers. On Monday morning he made a phone call and got himself into GA. And he never gambled again. He was stronger than I thought he would be. He surprised me.”
“Those programs work,” said Walters, keeping it going. “Surrendering your will to a higher power. I’m telling you, it does the trick.”
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.”
FIVE
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 br
eaks, 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.
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.
SIX
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.
“For real?” she said.
“I’m gonna get a nut in you real good, baby. I wouldn’t lie.”
Otis signaled the bartender with a finger-wave over Darcia’s glass. The drinks were cheap here, cheaper still this time of day. He left dollars on the bar, kissed Darcia on the neck, and walked across the wooden floor. Wasn’t no kind of trick to gettin’ pussy when you got down to it. You just needed to know how to talk to a woman, that was all.
“Say, man,” said Otis as he scanned to 100.3, L.A.’s slow-jam station, on the radio dial.
“What,” said Lavonicus.
“You get to keep one of those red, white, and blue balls when you came out of the league?”
Lavonicus breathed through his mouth as he thought it over. He had thick red clown lips and large gapped teeth. Otis found him to be an ugly man — like that Jaws-lookin’ sucker from that bad run of Bond movies — but he understood why his sister Cissy loved him. The man was as loyal as a spinster to her vibrator.
“Naw, I didn’t keep one,” Lavonicus said, his voice monotonous and deep.
“ ’Cause I’d pay good money to have me one of those with some of your old teammates’ autographs on it. Especially Marvin Barnes and Fly Williams. Listen, I was incarcerated when y’all were playin’, and they didn’t even televise those ABA games back then. But even so, Barnes and Williams were legends in the joint. Those were two black men who took shit from no one.”
“Barnes and Williams both ended up doing time.”
“That’s what I know.”
“Barnes.” Lavonicus shook his head. “He could party all night and still play. Fly gave himself that nickname, but nobody was more fly than Marvin Barnes. The man drove a Rolls-Royce, wore a full-length mink, platform shoes… shit.”