The Last Worthless Evening (12 page)

Land Where My Fathers Died

For James Crumley

GEORGE KARAMBELAS

I
T WAS A
cold night, and I was drunk. I couldn't get a ride at Timmy's when they closed, and I had a long way to walk. It was after one o'clock, and I kept thinking of my warm bed. I could see it in front of me, like it was ahead of me on the sidewalk, like those guys in a desert that see water that isn't there. A mirage, it's called. You can see it sometimes on a highway in summer. I thought about summer.

I lost my car. It was an old Pontiac, eight years old next year, that sucked gas. First the exhaust system went, rusted out, and I paid for that. Then it was a new starter, then the carburetor had to be rebuilt and I paid for all that and was broke. Then the transmission started to go and I said fuck it and sold it for junk. Fuck them at Timmy's. Fuck Steve. Fuck Laurie. Fuck George, they say, let him walk a hundred miles in fifty below just to sleep. Well, fuck them too, I said.

Maybe out loud. I was that drunk. I wished I wasn't. I wished I had gone right home soon as I got all the dishes washed and the pots scrubbed out and hung from the beam. I still would have frozen to death walking home, but I'd be in bed. And Timmy's is on the other side of the river so it was a longer ways to walk and I had to cross the bridge going and coming back, and the bridge is long on foot, and the wind was coming down the river. It's the chill factor. You never know how cold it is. The thermometer outside the window will say nineteen, but then you go outside and the cold comes blowing and it's like twenty below. That's the story: it's nineteen but it's
like
twenty below.

I tried to walk straight, looking down at the sidewalk like it was a board over a big hole, but I was zigging and zagging from one snowbank to another. Once I slipped on ice and landed on my ass. I thought about if I had hit my head I could have stayed there and froze to death. But still I couldn't get sober. I walked through the square about a mile above the river. Even the pizza shop was closed. We got a lot of pizza shops in this little town, mostly Italian, some Greek.

When Steve gave last call at Timmy's I started asking around for a ride. Nobody going my way. Who are they shitting? A night like this you can go out of your way for somebody. Up above the square I was walking past houses. Trees were in the yards in the snow and next to the sidewalk. Face it, George, I said to myself. Nobody's ever gone your way. I didn't like hearing that. I'm twenty-three. I started thinking about people that liked me. I got back to eighth grade, there was this Irish kid, but nobody liked him either. I got very sad walking under the big trees. No girl, not ever, and I don't know why. I look in the mirror and I don't know why. I've been laid, sure, but with sluts. It's a wonder I never caught herpes or something. I saw the light on in Dr. Clark's office. I was walking past it, and it was on my right, the road on my left. Then I stopped because I saw that I was seeing the light through the window but through the door too. Hey, I looked around: up and down the street, no cars, and up and down the sidewalk, of course nobody was out. Who would be but Eskimos and a dumb Greek.

I went up his walk slow and casual, like a dude coming home. There was salt on it. I was doing everything but whistling, a Greek dishwasher coming home to sleep in a doctor's office. It was a one-story brick building set back in the trees, a small office, a one-man operation. This was a neighborhood of big old wooden houses. They were dark. At the two front steps I stopped and looked again. I went up the steps and in the door, breathing hard with the booze. Everything was hard to do. This was the waiting room, and it was dark. Or the lights were off, but I could see the desk by the office door and the chairs along the walls; because the light was coming from the office and that door was open. I could see part of his desk in there, a corner and some of the top. To this day I don't know what I had in mind. I was thinking money, but I think about money all the time. Every day, every night. I think I was hoping for drugs. But I was too drunk for any of it to make any sense and if I hadn't been drunk I would have walked right on by. If I hadn't been drunk maybe somebody would have given me a ride, maybe that's it, maybe I drink too much. But that's not it because in high school I wasn't drunk or not much of the time and it didn't matter. I'd go to the smoking area outside where the faggots made us go even if it was a blizzard and I'd look at the girls shivering around their cigarettes and they'd either look at me like the smoke made them blind or like instead of a mouth I had a boil under my nose. I'd go over to the guys and they'd start busting balls on me. Sometimes it's friendly, it depends on how you say things. Bob the chef busts them on me all the time, but it's friendly; he likes me, and he's an old man. The guys at school weren't friendly.
So George, you going to ever shave, or what? He plucks them. All three, every week
. I'd laugh with them. But I wouldn't say anything back.

I was still not walking straight. I got across the waiting room on a slant toward the door and stepped in and saw a dead man. I knew he was dead when I saw him. I've only seen my grandparents, all four, laid out in the coffins. But I knew he was dead. I think I said something out loud. I remember hearing somebody. It did not get me sober but it got me sober as I could get. He was on his back, dressed up in a suit, and there was blood dried on his mouth. It was open. I've never seen a mouth look so open, looser than somebody sleeping. His eyes were closed. One hand was resting on his belt buckle. He was not a very big man, on the thin side. I had never been to see him, we always went to Papadopoulos, our family, but I knew it was Dr. Clark. I had seen him around town in his Mercedes, and sometimes when I was washing dishes I'd look through the window to the dining room and he'd be there eating lobsters with his scrawny old lady. I started to get out of there when I saw the big pistol on the floor. It was lying right beside his face. I bent over and picked it up and I kept my eyes away from his that were shut. I put it in my coat pocket, a pea coat. A prescription pad was on his desk and I put that in the other pocket. Then I got out of there.

I turned off the light switch by his door, and the office was dark. I had to feel my way across the waiting room. I think I was walking straight then. I had my arms out in front of me and moving, like a breaststroke, like I was swimming through the dark. My hands hit the front door. I opened it a little and looked at the street. A car passed. Then it was empty, and I was gone, shutting the door, and down the steps, holding the metal rail cold under my glove. Down his walk to the sidewalk.

I didn't think about the cold anymore. I didn't feel it. I didn't see my bed either. I saw his face on the floor looking up at the ceiling except his lids were down and there was nobody behind them. I saw his hand covering his belt buckle. The pistol was heavy in my pocket, and I was weaving again. I live in an old house that used to be one family's house, all three stories, and now it is a lot of apartments. I went up to mine on the second floor and pissed, shivering, for a long time. Then I swallowed some anisette from the bottle and drank a beer while I took off my clothes. I put the coat over a chair, and left the gun in it. When I got in bed I could still see him and I was tense and breathing fast, curled up on my side under the covers, and I thought I would not sleep. Next thing I knew the sun was in the room and I had a dry mouth and a headache and I had to piss but I lay there remembering everything and thinking here I was with a dead doctor's script pad and a big pistol I didn't want to see. Then I got up and took it out of the coat pocket. It was an Army .45, and the hammer was cocked. I looked some more. The safety was off.

ARCHIMEDES NIONAKIS

Because it was probably not murder—someone hit Francis Clark on the jaw and apparently his head struck the desk as he fell—and because it seemed to involve bad luck more than volition, I sometimes thought George had done it, but it was a thought I could only hold in the abstract, for a few moments, until I imagined him in the flesh. Then I could not believe it, could not see George Karambelas punching anybody, much less a man with a loaded pistol.

Then I believed the story he had just told me. I could still smell his story as I drove back to town from the prison. My car windows were up, and my clothes smelled of George's cigarette smoke trapped in the counseling room, and also the vanished smoke, and words and breath it seemed, of the others who had sat or paced in that room with its two straight wooden chairs and old wooden desk with an ashtray long overflowed, and butts scattered on the desk top with burns at its edges where live cigarettes had lain, and burns on its top where they had been put out. I did not sit at the desk. I leaned against a wall without windows, and said: “I can't believe how dumb you are.”

“Don't say that,” he said. “You got to make the jury believe it.” He did try to smile, as he tried to be friendly, but in his circumstance it is hard to do either. I don't mean simply incarceration; or being charged with second-degree murder. George is one of those people who have nothing specific wrong with them, except that they are disliked, and it's difficult to understand why. I don't even know why I don't like him. He is not very bright, but it isn't that. So I stood breathing in that room and told him I would represent him, and that is why: I couldn't bear disliking him for no just reason, and seeing him in that room too, and imagining him in the cell where probably already his cellmates didn't like him either. I did not mention money, any more than I would look for a fish in a tree, but he said he would raise it. He did not go so far as to ask how much he ought to raise. I told him we'd talk about that when the time came. I listened to his foolish story again, and congratulated him again on at least burning the prescription pad, forced my hand into his, and fled.

In my old Volvo, once I opened the window a bit to cold air and got past the weariness I feel when I do something good that I don't want to, I was suddenly glad he had called me. This surprised me, then disturbed me, for at thirty-three I should not be able to surprise myself. But there it was: that part of me I can't silence or even fully please, that will sometimes, while I'm in bed with a woman, leave us and stand dressed in the room, laughing or scowling: the little bastard was active again. I know he's the one who makes me an insomniac, when I'm too tired to read, and have no worries about money or family: I have money because I don't have a family, and I live alone by choice so am not lonely; still he keeps me awake, feeling that I'm worrying. Though I'm not. Except about getting to sleep. Now he hoped for some complicated work. Probably, for him, there had been too many times lately when I would stop what I was doing and look around me at my life—or the little bastard would—and feel it was not enough. Not enough for what? was the question I couldn't answer, except to say it wasn't using enough of me. I run a lot.

In the detectives' office, Dom Schiavoni sat on the secretary's desk. He sat on its edge, profiled to her; in winter clothes he looked even bigger, a V-necked blue sweater pulled tight over his belly and chest, his shoulders looking squeezed into an old dark suit coat. His complexion, in winter, changed from dark to pale olive, so he always looked like a swarthy man who had just had the flu. He introduced me to the secretary, Roberta Ford, a buxom woman in her fifties with fleshy cheeks and probably arms too under the sleeves of her sweater; her hair was red and looked like it had been done by one of my brothers, who had colored it for her too. Dom introduced me, and she said: “Your brother Kosta does my hair.”

We came over on the boat when I was five, the youngest; my brothers own their shop and work very hard, from seven in the morning till six or seven at night, every day but Sunday; they tell me they could have women in the chairs at five in the morning if they wanted to start that early. There are many Greeks in beauty parlors in the Merrimack Valley; it was work they could learn quickly and could do in Greek while they were learning English, and it paid well. My brothers put me through school and every day they turn, in seriousness, to the stock-exchange section of the
Boston Globe
.

“You still running?” Dom said.

“Yes.”

“You look like it. You going to run the Marathon again?”

I told him yes and that I was representing George. I watched his mouth, waiting for the smile; but there was none in his eyes either. Then he said: “Good.”

“Why?”

“Somebody ought to.”

“You want coffee?” Roberta said.

I told her I hadn't had breakfast and would take anything.

“This is early for him,” Dom said. “Maybe there's a doughnut left.” He looked at his watch. “Nine-thirty. What's it feel like?”

“Dawn. You don't think he did it?”

Roberta gave me a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut.

“I
think
he did it. Problem is, I don't
know
he did it.”

Then he told me how it took less than forty-eight hours for the arrest because the receptionist found the doctor when she opened Thursday morning and later in the day did a quick inventory for Schiavoni and told him the gun and a prescription pad were gone. Schiavoni found the receipt for the pistol in a desk drawer, and talked to Mayfield, the narcotics officer. Mayfield started talking to punks, and on Saturday one told him who had bought a .45 Thursday.

“So we went to see the new owner. He never heard of the .45 till I told him the name of the previous owner, then he's giving me the gun, seven rounds of ammo, and the name and address of George Karambelas.”

“Who didn't even deny it.”

“No.”

Roberta shook her head, repeating the no.

“The dumb bastard,” Dom said. Roberta nodded.

“Why was Clark in his office at night? And on a Wednesday?”