King Suckerman

“Go right up there,” said Vivian, and Karras turned east onto Randolph Road.

They got over to Viers Mill and made another turn, entering a neighborhood of smallish houses originally offered to World War II veterans on the GI Bill. Vivian was in the place in which she had been raised. Her anger flared.

“This is about last night, is that it?”

“What?”

“The murder last night, at Marcus’s record store. It was connected to those guys who were at Eddie’s office, right?”

Karras shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Sure you do. You’re worried about me. You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

Karras put on his shades. “I think you can take care of yourself fine. I just don’t want you around anymore, that’s all.”

Vivian dragged on her cigarette. She tapped ash onto her jeans and rubbed the ash in roughly until it disappeared. She hit her cigarette, pitched it into the wind.

“You don’t want me around.”

“That’s right.”

“Why take me home, then? Why not just let me hit the streets?”

“I pulled you out of that place. You’re my responsibility. I’m taking you home.”

Vivian chuckled. “God, you’re such a hypocrite. You wake up this morning and you decide that you want to be my daddy. But just last night you were ready to fuck me. So who are you, Dimitri? Or don’t you know?”

“Where’s your house?” said Karras.

Vivian said, “Just up ahead.”

Karras parked across the street from a boxy one-story house with peeling white paint. A young man stood on the porch reading a racing form, a short pencil wedged behind his ear. A chain-link fence ran around the house, with herb and flower gardens taking up the entire front yard. A small pond sat in the middle of the herb garden, a miniature concrete temple by its side. Lily pads floated in the copper-colored water, and large goldfish flashed beneath the pads in the sun. An old Chinaman with a face like a walnut sat in a beach chair by the pond, staring into the water, and a Chinese woman who could have been fifty or eighty tended the flower garden nearby on her hands and knees. She looked over at the Karmann Ghia, stared at Vivian for a while without expression, then pulled some weeds from alongside a ground cover of purple phlox.

“My mother,” said Vivian with contempt.

“Who’s that in the chair? Your father?”

“My mother’s father. He must be a hundred years old. My God, these people never die.”

“They will,” said Karras.

“Oh, there’ll always be someone else to replace them. All my life we had ten, fifteen people living in that house. Relatives, friends, guys who worked in the kitchen at my father’s restaurant. Sometimes I didn’t know who they belonged to. You have no idea.”

“So you had a lot of people around the house. And I bet a few of them even had the nerve to love you. Is that the worst you can say about it?”

“You don’t understand.”

The woman was looking at Vivian again from inside the fence. Vivian wiped her eyes dry with the palm of her hand.

“Go on,” said Karras.

“I’ll be out of here tomorrow. You know that, don’t you? I’ll be down on the Mall for the fireworks and I’ll see someone I know and then I’ll just be gone. I won’t come back this time, either. I don’t belong here.”

“What you do after I split is your business,” said Karras. “It makes no difference to me.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“Listen, Vivian—”

“What? You’re going to give me advice now? Jesus. Like I need advice from a guy like you.”

“You’re right. Go on, Vivian. Just go.”

Vivian got out of the car, slammed the door shut. “You know what it is? You’re old, that’s all. Tired and old.”

“I know,” said Karras, but she was already halfway across the street.

He watched her walk inside the front gate. The mother said something to her sharply in Chinese, and Vivian ridiculed her loudly as she walked by. Karras could only guess what the mother had said; walking through the garden toward the house in her paisley halter top and tight jeans, her lips painted red, Vivian looked somewhat like a fifteen-dollar whore.

As she walked on, the young man on the porch made a comment, and Vivian knocked the racing form from out of his hands. He smiled, then stopped smiling as he looked across the street at Karras, straight into his eyes. Karras had no doubt that the young man would cut him, and take pleasure in it, if he ever saw him come around again in his sporty little car. Karras put the Ghia in first and pulled away from the curb.

On the way back into town, Karras stopped at a rec center on University Boulevard and watched a pickup game being played between five young men. Karras asked if they needed a sixth man and was invited into the game. None of his shots fell, and he was used on D. By the end of the game his teammates had stopped passing him the ball. He walked back to his car with a slight limp, listening to the laughter of the players still on the court. He had turned his ankle, and his left eye throbbed where he had caught a hard ’bow from an eighteen-year-old kid.