Theft

by Rachel Ingalls

  One of the kids called out, “What did you do to him? Are you proud of that? What did you do to that man?” Homer didn’t look around. He went back outside with his friend and came in again alone and began to clean up the floor. The kids said things to him, trying to get his temper, but he kept on cleaning, not looking at them and his face resigned, not grim like I would be. When he finished, he stood up, holding all the broken pieces.

  He said to them, “There is three men outside, your fathers or your uncles or something. They pay to get you out. They also pay for destruction of government property, for this. Men come in here and I try to make it clean as possible because it is bad enough to be in jail without the discomfort. You think I got lots of these? You think with all things going on so fast the state has time to give me supplies? No, I buy things myself and I keep the place clean myself and if I don’t, there come diseases. Now you go piss on the wall and what happens if twenty more people come here and no time to clean it up? You do not think of other people who come after you, they have to live with all the things you break and make dirty.”

  “That’s tough,” one of them said. “You’re making me cry.” And another one said, “That’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?”

  “I am pay by your fathers and uncles and the rest. They are rich and they treat me all right. When you have money, twenty years from now, you will pay me. But you will treat me like dirt. That is the difference,” he said, and went out. The man in the front cell kept sobbing and I began to feel bad and tired from all the noise. I sat down on the floor.

  “Hey,” one of them called. He was in the cell on my side. I thought it was the voice of the tanned one with the beard. He was calling to Jake. “What are you in for, brother?”

  “Brother, hell,” Jake said. “I never seen you before in my life.”

  “We’re on your side,” the voice explained. Jake didn’t answer, and the voice said again, “What are you in for?”

  “Child rape,” Jake said. A few of them laughed, and then it sounded like the laugh was dying out and they weren’t sure, because his face hadn’t changed.

  “You’re kidding,” the voice said.

  “No,” Jake told him, and turned away.

  “How about you?” another boy said from the cell that looked into mine. “What are you in for?” He smiled and I had that feeling that we were tied together, like when somebody you don’t like smiles and it’s as if you’re standing at the other end of the line, his smile jerks up one on you, and you don’t want it to happen, it makes you mad that it might respond all by itself, because you don’t like the person. I thought against it so my face didn’t move and I didn’t answer him, and turned my head to the wall like Jake.

  The man at the far end kept on sobbing. Some more of the kids tried to speak to us but I wasn’t playing. Neither would Jake, which surprised me. He knows all their ideas and the language they use. I don’t understand it and I’m damned if anybody is going to do that charity thing to me: we are sorry for you, we sympathize, we’re fighting for your betterment, stand here like a monkey and look pleased and think how good we are. Or they give you food and clothes which you’re not in a position to refuse, and when they leave they’ve robbed you of your honesty, your smile tied to the one they have that says: aren’t you grateful, don’t you like us, isn’t it a lucky thing for you that we think about you once a year. They get very uncomfortable and vexed and sometimes scared if they think you’re laughing at them behind their backs, and then they don’t come back the next year and your kids have to do without, like you.

  I heard Homer’s voice and a lot of steps coming in. The military was back. “They buy you out,” Homer says, and began to unlock the cells. One of the kids said they hadn’t asked anybody to buy them out and they were going to stay there as a protest against police brutality. The soldiers began hauling them out. The one with the hurt arm came out quiet enough, wanting to get to a doctor. Some of the others put up a fuss. The girl from the other side suddenly kicked one of the guards for no reason at all, it looked like. He swore and let go and she kicked him again. His friend who was standing next to them pulled back his fist and hit her in the breast. She screamed all the way out and was crying and saying, “You coward, you dirty coward.”

  Then they were out in the passage, the sound of them going, and it was quiet except for the man who was weeping.

  “Did you see that?” Jake said. “Got him on the shinbone twice before they ever thought of laying a hand on her, and she’ll go home and show her bruise and tell how she was roughed around by the hired imperialist thugs who’ve got nothing better to do all day than beat up women and kids.”

  “I thought you liked those kind of people, protest and rights and all.”

  “Not from them, it’s too late for it now. It was a nice gesture, very helpful in the beginning, but we don’t need them any more, they’re just in the way. Besides, it’s a kind of mental slumming for most of them. We want them out in the streets when they’re landowners and senators and running import-export businesses like their folks, when they’ve got the pull to change the laws, change everything. But I bet, I bet you anything, in twenty years when they’ve got the family holdings and the house and everything, they’ll be taking their kids on vacations to a little villa outside Rome or someplace and voting themselves tax reductions so they can keep what they got. And once in a while they’ll boast to the kids about how they went through that stage too, they were idealists and right in the middle of the violence, where the action was.”

  “Singing our songs,” he went on. “They’ve got songs of their own—why don’t they work on that? They take it from us and they’ll drop it in a few years. Retain the sympathy, of course, a lot of good that does.”

  “You’re always saying people should fight for their rights.”

  “Sure, sure. If you know what they are and know what you’re doing. I’m just sick of all this idealism running around the place. It’s like an epidemic, everybody’s got it. Trouble with idealism is it kills people. I’m not interested in motives, I just want something that works out without too much strain on everybody. Man, you talk with some of the people I know. Fanatics. Got a lot of schemes but what’s in their minds is that they want to take over the show. Just the system all over again, we’ll get on top and then we’ll stomp on you for a change. And the people who’ve really got something to cry about, can you move them? Hell no. If there’s a takeover they’ll still be at the bottom. And all the ones that complain and won’t lift a finger, think if everything was distributed equal nobody’d ever have to work again—I’m sick of all of it.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t. Have to work again.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Not what I call work, not what I been doing for the last nine years every day.”

  “That ain’t work, that’s slaving.”

  Homer came in again and started to clean out the floor of the cell and scrub the walls.

  “What about them?” he said. “Did you hear the things that girl was saying? If that’s my daughter I throw her out of the house and never come back, you bet.”

  The weeping man calmed down a little and started to moan. Every once in a while he’d break into sobbing again, but it was quieter. He had his head down on his knees and his arms around them.

  “What’s his trouble?” Jake asked.

  Homer came over and said in a low voice that the man had stabbed his wife.

  “Dead?”

  “Instant, just like that. The neighbors say they quarrel all the time, shout. He never beat her, maybe he should. This time they shout at each other across the table and there’s a knife there on top. He says he don’t mean to hurt, all he mean was to shut up the shouting so she would listen. He is heartbreaking, he loves her very much. The neighbors say is true what he says, no other man, no other woman, just being angry. Very sad. They will try it as accidental I hope. He says he wants the trial right now, wants to die.”

  “Poor
bastard, poor fool,” Jake said.

  Homer went back to scrubbing down the cells. I had to use the pot and then I thought I’d sleep. All day I usually move around, I never knew how tired you get if you stay shut in. And I was feeling the bruises and beginning to stiffen up from when they pushed me around making the arrest. They can tell who’s rich and who isn’t and who’s got friends. They never roughed Jake around unless he got in first. He looks too smart and too important.

  I stretched. Homer began to whistle and to hum. I lay down on the floor and put my head on the stone, cold and hard. Then I changed around and put my arm under my head and closed my eyes.

  I must have gone right under. When I woke up a man I’d never seen before was talking in whispers to Jake, saying goodbye. I sat up and watched him leave and saw Annie at the entrance, going out with him into the dark hallway.

  “How long was I out?” I said.

  “Not very long. She says Maddie’s coming later. Uncle Ben will walk her here, and Annie’s going to look after the kids.”

  “She still mad at you?”

  “No,” he said, “no, we made it up,” and smiled.

  “Good.”

  The man who’d killed his wife was still sobbing quietly.

  “Has he been at it all this time?”

  “No, he let up for a time. He only started again a little while back. Homer says they’re moving him on later.”

  “I hope we don’t get any more rioters.”

  “So does Homer. It cuts down on the food.”

  “That’s funny, you know, I thought it would make me feel sick. I did feel sort of unsettled, but not sick. And I’m hungry again. Already.”

  “It’s the idea. Watch out for that. You know in your mind you’d like to keep on eating all day long. But your stomach can’t take it. So take it slow.”

  “Is there any news?”

  “Not much. Not good. I got Joe to hunt out my army friends.”

  “Virgil?”

  “Him and others. They don’t know anything, don’t know where to begin. I never knew such a total breakdown of grapevines. We’ll just have to sit it out till something comes through.”

  Homer came in and unlocked the other cell by the entrance, the big one on the left.

  “Another noisy one,” he said. “I put him far away as possible.” While he was speaking four guards came in with the prisoner, squirming and writhing in his clothes like an animal in a sack, and muttering to himself. He was the strangest looking thing: all gawky, skinny as a reed and dressed in rags that were covered in dirt. His hair fell all over his eyes and below his shoulders and even from a distance I thought I could see things hopping off him. He stuck out one long bony leg while they tried to move him along, and you could see the toenails on his bare feet, longer than I imagined nails could grow, like the nails on his hands, black with dirt. And there were sores on his legs, which were the color he was all over, a kind of livery yellow.

  “Blasphemers,” he blared out in a voice like a trumpet call, but it made you want to laugh. Then it broke, and he trilled what he was saying in a high quavering voice that sounded as if it was coming from a completely different person.

  “Repent, the day is at hand. Oh ye ungodly, ye of little faith.” He screwed his head around and I stepped back farther into the cell. His face gave me the kind of sinking feeling you get when you see blood, but that kind of fascination, too. I’d never seen anybody like that, so that you felt revolted but you couldn’t take your eyes off him. They say snakes do it to birds.

  “Goddamn, we’ve got the whole works now,” Jake said. “A week in this jail and you could write a history of the world.”

  “Unrighteous and ungodly,” said the stranger. “Pharisees, Pharisees!”

  He had great blazing eyes and inside his beard a loose mouth full of rotten teeth. When he called out “Pharisees” the eyes rolled up and his face went all meek and mock-pious, so for a moment I was sure he was putting on an act for some reason.

  They shut him in the cell and Homer turned the key and stood back, brushing off his clothes. The stranger rattled the bars and sang out, “Eaters of offal, ye that persist in the ways of the ungodly, Pharisees!” He went on like that, his eyes roaming over the rest of the cells for a while, but none of us gave him a reaction, so he turned around and sat down with his back leaning against the bars, and scratched his head and muttered to himself.

  “What kind of a thing is that?”

  “Some religious nut,” Jake said. “Some kind of faith-healer probably.”

  “Why’s he in here? He looks sick.”

  “Maybe he was preaching to the multitudes or something when the riots broke out. Start screaming and kicking enough and they pull you in. Some of them do it for the food and a a place to sleep for the night.”

  Homer came up to Jake, who said to him, “I got a complaint to register about the way the tone of this place is going down. It’s turning into a regular sideshow. What’s the world coming to when a man can’t find any peace and quiet even in jail?”

  “You tell me?” Homer said. “You tell me. Food is soon.”

  “And drink?”

  “Sure, drink too. Coming soon,” he said, and went out.

  “I could do with a drink,” Jake said.

  Lots of things I could do with, I thought. The air was still heavy and thick and the place had the sense of something wild having passed through and gone, time coming back and sitting there slow. I was thinking I hoped they’d put me out to do hard labor because I couldn’t take a lot of this, being shut in. Maybe you got used to it, though. I planned the first thing I’d do when I found out how long the sentence was going to be. It would be to do what all the others do, so they tell you: find someplace where I could mark off the days one by one.

  “Goes by slow when you got to wait it out,” I said. “I wish we knew one way or the other right now without a trial, what the sentence is.”

  “I know right now. I know they aren’t going to keep me in for long. Not if I can help it. I been sentenced three times and never yet served one. Don’t let yourself slide back that way. Do you want to be cut off from the world for the next ten years?”

  “Ten years for a piece of bread?”

  “Lord, Seth. Don’t you know anything?”

  That’s what he always said when we were kids. Nobody would believe he was older because he was so small, it took a long while before he got his growth. Maybe that’s why he likes to fight, because he’s never forgotten how he used to have to. “Don’t you know anything?” he’d say, and pretty soon they weren’t laughing any more, everybody was taking orders from him.

  “Don’t you know anything? You don’t imagine they’re going to go easy on you because you give them some hard-luck story, do you?”

  “For taking a piece of bread? What do you think they’re going to do, cut my hand off or something? They couldn’t give me more than six months, could they? I never stole anything before.”

  “So you say. But wait till you hear what they say. Wait till some man stands up and says, yes that’s the one that burned down my business last year, and some woman says she’s positive you’re the one raped her grand-daughter just a week ago, she remembers your shifty eyes, and swearing up and down on oath and a dozen witnesses to prove it. Asking you where you were on such-and-such a night three years ago and looking triumphant when you say you can’t remember. Don’t you know that? If every man was just charged with the crime he’s done, everybody there is would be in jail for something. Hell no, you get arrested and you’re a representative for all the ones who never got caught out.”

  I thought it couldn’t be like he said, he was trying to scare me about it. Maybe he figured if I got too relaxed I’d drop some hint about his political doings. I wasn’t all that relaxed; my hands were sweating again.

  Homer and the four-man guard came in with the food. First they went to the cell on the right, where the man was moaning to himself about his dead wife. He didn’t
raise his head from his knees or move in any other way. Homer gave his keys to one of the others, went into the cell himself, and laid the provisions down on the floor while the ex-fighter stood behind him. He locked up again and the man still didn’t move. Then they went over to the left-hand cell and started to open up. The religious nut jumped to his feet and began chuckling to himself. “Stand back, there,” one of the guards said and he moved a little way back, but he kept pacing back and forth, making noises to himself like he was agreeing with something someone was saying to him, and holding his arms out with the fingers bent like claws.

  Homer went into the cell and was about to set the food down when the religious nut made a dash at him, knocking everything out of his hands and sending it way up into the air. The food and drink and water splashed all over the inside of the cell and on the walls and over Homer and the guard by the door. The nut shrieked out, “Get thee behind me, get thee behind me, spawn of the devil,” and began to dance around the cell. The ex-professional stepped forward and cracked him across the mouth. And he let out a yelp, not sounding like pain, sounding like some kind of a love-sound a woman might make. They closed the doors on him and Homer went out into the entranceway with the fighter, leaving the other three men behind. The religious nut capered around his cell and began to harangue them, saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” His voice kept changing, sometimes loud and strong as a whip cracking and then going all quavery and high and his face would turn back to that mealy-mouthed humble look. When he said “mouth of God” he lifted his right hand and pointed his finger up at the ceiling, throwing his eyes up dramatically.