Shame the Devil (8 page)

“Sometimes I don’t feel like talking.”

“You still come to the meetings, though.”

“I like being with you guys,” he said. “Aside from the pleasure of that, it doesn’t do much good. Look, don’t try to make
me your project, Stephanie.”

“You’re not. We need each other, though. All of us, I mean. Can’t you see it?”

He kissed her cool lips and pushed back her hair.

“I need
this,
” he said.

“Make no mistake,” said Stephanie. “So do I.”

Bernie Walters cracked open a can of Bud and took it downstairs to the rec room of his three-bedroom house in Wheaton, off
Randolph Road. He had a seat in a leather recliner and hit the remote, which he had Velcroed to the chair.

When Vance was a teenager he was always misplacing the television’s remote. After carrying mailbags all day through Bethesda’s
business district, Walters would come home with no more ambition than to put his feet up and watch a little tube. The remote
always seemed to be missing when he got downstairs, and that drove him nuts.

“What’s the big deal with the remote, Dad?”

“I been on my dogs all day. The big deal is, once I get settled in my chair at night, I don’t want to get back up.”

Both Vance and Bernie got tired of that exchange. Bernie rigged up a kind of sheath for the remote and Velcroed it to the
right arm of the chair.

Vance’s friends got a big charge out of it.Vance’s dad, the Vietnam vet and mail carrier — with that combo, he had to be some
kind of wack job, right? — had gone and rigged a permanent remote control to his chair. Remote on the right arm, ashtray on
the left. He even heard one of those friends call the recliner “the captain’s chair,” then hum a few bars of the
Star Trek
theme when he thought Walters wasn’t listening.

Yeah, Vance’s friends got a big laugh out of Bernie Walters. The captain’s chair, the ten-point buck’s head mounted on the
wall of the rec room, the glass-doored gun case with the beautiful oiled shotguns aligned in a row, the bumper sticker on
his truck that read, “Know Jesus, Know Peace; No Jesus, No Peace,” the prayers and psalms framed and hung throughout the house.
It was okay by Walters for those kids to think whatever they wanted. And for the members of the group as well. He knew it
made them uncomfortable to hear him talk about the Lord at the meetings. Well, they had their own way of getting through this
and he had his. Because they had become his closest friends, he felt he owed it to them to talk about God’s plan. He knew
that everything happened for a reason, even the bad.

As for Vance, he had never seemed to be embarrassed by his old man. Bernie had heard Vance describe him one time as a “blue-collar
eccentric.”Whatever it meant, it didn’t sound bad, not the way Vance said it; by the tone of his voice, you’d almost get the
impression that Vance was proud.

Vance’s friends stopped coming around when his mother, Walters’s wife, Lynne, got the cancer in both of her breasts. She’d
found the lumps fairly early, but fear had made her wait too long to get herself checked. After the diagnosis she opted for
the radical mastectomy, but it couldn’t save her and she went six months later, heavily doped on morphine, at home in their
marriage bed.

Bernie Walters’s father died that same year, in a nursing home on East West Highway.

So it ended up just Bernie and Vance. By then Vance had entered Montgomery College, hoping to do a couple of years on the
Takoma Park campus before heading for New York to attend one of the design schools in the city. At home he spent most of his
time in his room, listening to CDs, studying, and talking on the phone with his friends. He worked three or four shifts a
week waitering at the pizza parlor on Wisconsin, saving for his move to New York.

When Bernie wasn’t working, he liked to hang out in the rec room or the laundry room, where he had a workbench set up. During
warm-weather months he would drive his pickup down to Southern Maryland and spend each weekend on his property, hunting, casting
for perch and catfish, walking the woods, and drinking beer.

Walters hit the up-channel button on the remote and landed on a late-night talk show. The host with the gap-toothed grin said
something, then stared unsmiling into the camera as the audience laughed. Walters shook a cigarette out of his pack and gave
it a light.

Those last couple of years Vance and Bernie had pretty much led separate lives. Now he wished they’d talked more — he wished
he’d said those things to Vance that he’d never said.

Vance talked to
him
now. In his early-morning dream time, Bernie could hear Vance’s voice as a child sometimes, calling his name. Often Vance
would be shouting, and this would scare Bernie, and sadden him. But he couldn’t stop it. He knew it was Vance’s spirit that
was talking to him in his dreams. He knew.

He
would
tell Vance those things that he had not told him before. These would be the very first things he’d tell him when they were
reunited. If he was certain of anything, it was that he and Vance and Lynne would all be together again, someday soon, in
the hands of the Lord.

Stephanie Maroulis draped an arm over the shoulder of Dimitri Karras and laid the flat of her palm on his chest. She’d go
to sleep now, drawing on the warmth of his body, spooned against him in the bed.

Over the gray-haired head of Karras she could see the framed photograph of Steve set on the nightstand beside the bed. Steve
was at the Preakness with his oldest friends grouped around, all of them on an afternoon beer drunk, happy, high in the sun
and secure in the knowledge that it could not end. In the photo, Stephanie, smiling and smashed as the rest of them, stood
behind Steve, her hand on his shoulder, her fingers brushing the base of his thick neck.

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.

At a stoplight just below Florida Avenue, he saw a woman pull a butcher’s knife from the trunk of her parked car and wave
it wildly at a laughing man. A dozen ugly people in varying stages of decay stood outside a corner liquor store, huffing smokes
and drinking from brown paper bags. Behind them, taped to the store windows, colorful posters depicted beautiful black models
promoting malt liquor and menthol cigarettes. A guy with matted dreads walked toward Stefanos’s driver’s-side window, one
hand slipped into a bulged jacket pocket. Stefanos locked his door.