clearing by a deep creek. You oughtta come down.”
“I love you like a brother, Bernie. To tell you the truth, though, it doesn’t sound like my thing.”
Walters stabbed his cigarette into the ashtray and patted his breast pocket, where he kept his pack.
Wilson dropped money on the table. “Hey, Bern. Dimitri and Stephanie left together again tonight. You notice that?”
“She doesn’t drive. He gives her a lift home. So what?”
“Dimitri lives down below Malcolm X Park, and she lives uptown, on Connecticut. You live out in the suburbs. If it’s just a question of a ride, make more sense for you to drop her off on your way.”
“She didn’t ask me. And besides, the two of them being Greeks and all that, they probably have a lot to talk about.”
“And Karras is a booty monger from way back.”
“Cut it out.”
“I’m tellin’ you, man, ’cause I know. One can spot another from a mile away.”
“You’re major league in that department, huh? So why is it that I never see you with a woman, Thomas?”
“Shoot, none of the frauleins in this joint are to my taste, that’s all. What you gotta do, you gotta come up around my way if you want to see me operate. ’Cause you know I like to play in the nappy dugout.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Forget it.”
“Yeah, forget it. And forget about Dimitri and Stephanie, too. Everybody’s got to grieve in their own way. You’ve got your own private way, whatever that is. Stephanie gets by on her positive attitude. I tend to lean on the good Lord. And Dimitri -”
“Likes pussy. Matter of fact, I got ten dollars right here says that Dimitri is hittin’ it right now.”
“Leave it alone, Thomas.”
“I’m just makin’ conversation.”
“Yeah, okay.” Walters drained his beer. “You ready?”
“Sure, Bernie. Let’s go.”
“So,” said Karras. “Would you like to be undressed from in front or behind tonight?”
Stephanie smiled. “Oh, I don’t know… in front, I guess.”
Moonlight and streetlight illuminated her deep brown eyes in the darkened room. Karras unbuttoned her blouse. He peeled it off her shoulders, and she slipped her arms free. He unfastened her bra and dropped it to the floor.
Karras cupped her heavy breasts, leaned in and licked a mole centered between them. His tongue flicked at her right nipple. She stroked his gray hair, and he came up and kissed her deeply on the mouth.
They moved to the bed and undressed completely. Then they were naked atop the sheets. Karras put a pillow beneath her. She was ready for him, quick of pulse and wet. Her smell was strong in the room.
“ Ella, Thimitri.”
“Not yet.”
“No, now.”
“So you’re giving the orders around here, eh?”
“C’mon.”
He penetrated her, pulled out, rubbed the head of his cock along the inside of her muscled thigh.
“Quit playin’ around.” She reached down. “Whaddya, need a map or something?”
“Careful, you’ll tear it off.”
“It feels sturdy enough.”
“Okay… okay.”
Stephanie arched her back as he walked her ribcage with his fingers. She took his hands and put them on her breasts. He buried himself inside her until there seemed no more of her. Then she adjusted her hips and he slid farther into her gloved warmth.
“There we go,” she said.
“ Opa, ” said Karras.
Karras washed himself, phoned his apartment, came back into the bedroom, and had a seat on the edge of the mattress.
Stephanie got up on one elbow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just got a message from a guy, called my place. I haven’t seen him in years. Greek guy named Nick Stefanos. My old man used to work for his grandfather a long time ago.”
“What’d he want?”
“He wants to give me a part-time job in a bar he works in, down in Southeast. Kitchen help.” Karras rubbed his cheek. “Things do come around.”
“Why’s he calling you now?”
“My friend Marcus’s wife, Elaine? She hooked it up. Elaine uses Stefanos as an investigator on some of her cases.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would do you good to get out in the world a few hours a day.”
“I know it.”
“I’m serious.”
“Stephanie, I know.”
She pulled him down on the bed, her hair falling and touching his face. She smiled, looking into his eyes. “You were really ornery tonight, Dimitri.”
“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
