“We’ll take care of it, Ernst,” said Bernie Walters.
“Ya, sure,” said Ernst, giving them a fangy smile. Clumps of gray hair grew from several large moles on his face. He was older than dirt, and it seemed an effort for him to lift his hand to wave before he walked from the room.
When he left, Thomas Wilson said, “Where’s Ernst from, with that accent of his? Anybody ever figure that out?”
“Latvia,” said Dimitri Karras.
“Where the hell is that?”
“He’s a good old bird,” said Walters, who at fifty was the senior member of the group and its unofficial leader. “Anyway… where were we?”
They started, as they always did, by getting reacquainted. They talked about the things that had happened at their jobs, what they’d done on the weekend, the trades the Skins needed to make to win next season, celebrity deaths, favorite television shows, the latest high-profile trial.
After a while they refreshed their coffee cups and came back and took their seats. Bernie Walters lit a cigarette.
“Funny how you’re the only one of us that smokes,” said Stephanie Maroulis.
“You know us veterans,” said Walters, snapping shut the hinged lid of his lighter. “Marlboro reds and Zippos. We never go anywhere without ’em.”
“ Vanity Fair did a piece on the Zippo lighter,” offered Karras, “and its place in American society relative to Vietnam.”
“Here it comes,” said Thomas Wilson. “‘Relative to Vietnam.’ Now the professor’s gonna explain to us unwashed types what it all means.”
Karras had been, among other things, an American lit instructor in his past life. He had mistakenly mentioned it to Wilson and Walters one night over beers at the Brew Hause.
“Give it a rest, guys,” said Stephanie, trying to head off the inevitable.
But Karras said, “I could bring in the magazine for you, Thomas. If you didn’t want to take the time to read it you could just, I don’t know, look at all the pretty models and dream.”
“Look at ’em and yawn, you mean. I’ve seen those gray girls you’re talking about. Clothes look like they been draped over a wire hanger and shit. Naw, you can keep your Caucasian junkies, Dimitri. And anyway, you know I prefer women with a little back on ’em.”
“Yeah, but what do they think of you?”
Karras smirked at the glimmer in Wilson’s eyes. Wilson liked to try and shock the group – play their idea of the street spade if he could get away with it. Karras didn’t let him get away with it.
Walters pushed up the bill on his faded Orioles cap – just the bird, no script – and scratched his graying beard. He was barrel-chested gone heavy, but he carried the weight on a broad back.
“So what’d the article say, Dimitri?” said Walters.
“It talked about how the soldiers used to have all these sayings engraved on their lighters.‘Born to Die,’ like that. How the GIs were very attached to those lighters.”
“I used mine,” said Walters, “to burn villages. I must have torched at least a dozen like that. You could set a really good fire to those straw roofs they had. That article say anything about that?”
“It did say something, now that you mention it.”
“Course they do know a lot about Vietnam – in New York.”
“I mentioned your smoking,” said Stephanie, “because, I don’t know, usually in these kinds of groups it seems like everybody smokes. Right, Dimitri? It’s unusual that it’s only you who lights up, Bernie.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Karras thought of his old rehab group, where he had met Lisa. “I was never a smoker myself. But I used to come out of my old group wanting to just throw my stinking clothes away.”
“The reason I thought of it,” said Stephanie, “was that my husband was in GA for a while. You know, Gamblers Anonymous. I ever tell you guys that? Steve used to come home and say that everyone there smoked but him.”
Karras shifted in his seat. This part – the first mention of the spouse, or the best friend, or the son – invariably made him uncomfortable. And Stephanie seemed to be the one who always kicked it off.
“What’d Steve like?” said Walters. “The ponies?”
“He liked any kind of action,” said Stephanie, “and May’s was a place where you could always place a bet. Numbers, the over-under, horses… Steve liked it all.”
“So what sent him into GA?” said Wilson. “Must have been one special time where he hit the bottom, right? Always is.”
Stephanie pushed a strand of her shoulder-length chestnut hair behind her ear. Karras liked to watch her do that; she was not a small woman, but her movements were graceful. And she had nice hands.
“It was this one weekend over the holidays. Must have been the Christmas of ninety-three. Steve had lost a bundle on the weekend NFL play-off games, and then a couple hundred more on some college basketball game that same day. We had a family get-together that night, Steve’s mother was there – this was the year before she passed away – and Steve got a little looped on whiskey. Steve did like his Crown Royal.”
Wilson chuckled. “Charlie used to tell me, ‘We got this bartender, every night after he closes down the place, he dims the lights and pours himself a drink – only one – out of this pretty-ass bottle he keeps up on the top shelf.”
“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.”