As a Thief in the Night

by Chuck Crabbe

  The two boys, with their hoodies pulled over their baseball hats, quickened their pace as they moved toward him. Ezra jumped off the side of the bleachers and started to walk toward the high school, fast. It was Sunday, no one would be at the school, the doors would be locked. His heart was pounding. He knew Alex was faster than he was. Sensing that something behind him had changed, he looked over his shoulder. They had broken into a sprint, their faces tense and angry. Ezra took off, as fast as he could, and right away wished he had not pushed himself so hard before. He tore across the pavement and felt the small stones kick up under his running shoes. Where could he go? He had to get out to the street. They wouldn't do it in front of other people. Behind him he thought he heard their footsteps closing the distance, but he did not dare look back for fear it would slow him down. To run afraid, to run for safety, is different than just running. Finally, he gave into the temptation and looked over his shoulder.

  "You're dead, you fucking rat!" Alex was only ten feet behind him, and Rick was just a little further back.

  "We're going to smash your face in!" Rick yelled.

  Ezra tore onto the street, his arms and legs pumping furiously, and almost slipped. Sweat poured down his face and the back of his neck. The market was full of people; they wouldn't go after him there. He cut through a cafe parking lot, hoping the parked cars would slow them down, and ran past the large cafe window. It was crowded with people eating breakfast, but it never occurred to him to seek safety inside. Were they still behind him? Yes, he felt it, felt the danger bearing down. Catching the light, he ran across Notre Dame St. and into the open mouth of the market.

  Still, he heard them behind him. He ran further into the crowd before he stopped to look back. Alex and Rick had come to a stop by an old man playing a flute. They looked at him viciously with all their brimming, unsatisfied violence. Keeping his eye on them he backed into the crowd around the fruit and vegetable stands, and then disappeared amongst the bodies.

  Struggling to catch his breath, he looked for something to hold on to so he would not fall. Behind him the flute player picked up his tempo. He staggered past a display of African masks. Desperately and breathlessly, he looked for a place to sit down. Suddenly, up ahead, a woman screamed. The shrill cry cut through the crowd and everyone looked around in confusion. Ezra looked down the length of the market stands to see what had happened. Whoever had caused the chaos would not be stopped and fought his way through the crowd, limbs flailing about wildly, casting aside and tearing away from anything that tried to hinder him. Everything around Ezra blurred like the work of some visionary impressionist and he stood dumb. The desperate assailant broke out from among the people trying to hold him back and, released, fell forward. He crashed headlong into Ezra, and the two of them fell to the street. Long, dirty nails dug into his skin, and the rotten smell of the man's breath assaulted him as he tried to squirm free. The writhing madman laughed wildly and tried to hold Ezra's face still, to make their eyes meet, as the crowd pulled at his clothes to try and get him off. At last, in the midst of the screaming and laughter, he succeeded in holding Ezra's eyes on his dirty face for a moment. "Now," the madman spit, "you have unchained this earth from its sun."

  Horrified, Ezra finally succeeded in freeing himself from the man's awful, bony body just as two merchants managed to restrain him. It was Jason B. Prism. He had stolen a pomegranate.

  DIONYSUS

  "There's no way in hell!"

  "It's just one summer. It's time for me to go, Elsie."

  "You have no idea what you're talking about, and no idea who he is."

  "He's my grandfather!"

  "Your grandfather...the words would stick in his throat if he tried to say them."

  "Elsie, I'm going to be seventeen. I want to know who he is, good or bad."

  "No. Especially not now. That kind of negativity is the last thing you need."

  Ezra looked away from her. "Agree or disagree, I've already decided, for myself."

  "Oh, is that so?"

  "Yes."

  "We've already seen how ready you are to make your own decisions." As soon as it came out of her mouth, she regretted saying it. He looked at her, pained.

  "Right or wrong, they are my decisions to live with."

  Elsie shook her head at herself. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

  "It's okay."

  "Your uncle and I only want what's best for you, Ezra."

  "What's best, or what's most comfortable?"

  "I'm sorry," she said, restraining her anger this time, "but you're not spending the summer there. The time may come, but as long as I'm still responsible for you, and I still am, you're not going."

  Gord did not agree with Elsie. He didn't think Ezra spending the summer on Pelee Island was such a bad idea. Harold would work the boy hard, that was for sure, and the work, and the time outside, would be good for him. Elsie was angry. Had he not listened to a single thing she had told him about her childhood with him? Gord told her that Ezra was no longer a child, and she walked away from him. That same night, in search of support, Elsie phoned her sister.

  "Jesus, Olyvia, above anyone else, I thought you would get it."

  "I do get it. You're right, the old man's a prick."

  "But..."

  "But that doesn't mean there isn't something Ezra needs out there. It's not as if he's going to be in physical danger."

  "Why would you assume that?"

  "Dad is seventy."

  "I just can't see Ezra getting anything good out of it."

  "That's always the case, in the beginning, with things that appear to be bad."

  "Don't be so abstract, Lyv."

  "I'm not talking theory, Elsie. I'm talking about myself."

  "Come on, Lyv. There's no one—not even mom—that he did more damage to than you."

  "Yes, and from a height, I see that I owe him a great deal."

  "Really! Really? So why do you refuse to speak to him?"

  "Because I don't like him."

  "That's ridiculous. You're telling me to let Ezra do something negative because, at some distant time, down the road, some good might come of it."

  "You want what's best for him?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "We always imagine, where our loved ones are concerned, that what's best for them is what is good, what is easy. We say: 'I can't believe she's with him', or, 'he shouldn't be doing that to himself'. How do we know when we can't see the whole picture? We react and judge based on the moment. But there's an entire economy of development here. Maybe what you want for Ezra isn't what he needs right now. Maybe he needs to know where he comes from, maybe he needs to struggle."

  "He knows exactly where he comes from: us...and his mother. Damn everyone else!"

  "Sister, I'm afraid Ezra's need goes much deeper into the soil than that."

  He listened to his Walkman as he did the community service work he had been sentenced to do. Elsie and Gord decided that it would be appropriate for him to complete his hours at their church, and at the Pentecostal Assembly he had stolen from. So Ezra pulled weeds, treated brick walls, polished pews, and measured and painted parking lots. He did that and listened to his tapes. Without any money of his own to buy music, he borrowed the originals from Nick Carraway, dug up old blank tapes from around the house, and dubbed them. And on one of the albums, for the first time, he heard a voice that he felt was his own. The voice and the music knew of the vacancy and pain of his father's absence, it knew of his madness and loneliness, and it kept him company like a friend he had lost, like the brother he had confided his secret thoughts to, the one that the cruel hand of God had buried in the Walpurgis cemetery. It sounded to him as if the voice had transmuted all his pain and confusion into music.

  She scratches a letter

  Into a wall, made of stone

  Maybe someday, another child

  Won't feel, as alone, as she does.

  This was the music of castaways and those who knew t
he storms of sorrow and disapproval and even evil. The shallow stadium rock of the eighties had given way to the sound, angry and free, that had been lurking in the cellars of Seattle. The dam had been broken, Orpheus had let loose his hold, and Ezra welcomed the flood. Then another voice:

  Sitting in an angry chair

  With angry walls that steal the air

  The music entered into his experience with an abandon and disregard that did not tell him to run away from the chaos and wildness he felt. If you're falling...dive! It didn't deliver the stale message of school and church and his parents. Listening became an act of surrender, surrender to his lack of control and the inadequacy of his reason in the face of the impulses he had experienced as threatening waves. A young man alone on the shore, let them crash over me then. Here he had his first experience of art's capacity for creating freedom.

  Ezra walked down the long driveway toward the big wooden shed at the end of the property by the stone pillars. It was painted brown and had a roof that was in rough shape. Elsie watched him out the window. The high, wide doors were falling off their rusty hinges and he had to lift them off the ground a bit to swing them open. The inside was a huge mess. Broken bikes, old lawnmowers, tools, and antique furniture that Elsie planned on restoring one day littered the floor and hung on the walls. But, up above, there was a small wooden platform, almost like a loft, that he had cleaned and swept off. The roof slanted up on both sides and he had to be careful of the nails coming through from the shingles. He could only stand up at the center. Upon an old mattress he laid a clean blanket so he could lie down if he wanted to. It still looked too empty though, so he struggled up the narrow stairs with one of the broken dressers and put it against the back wall. There, that's good. Then he took his stereo out of his room and set it up on the dresser.

  Upstairs in his hovel he began his first timid experiments in verse. He had read little, and he knew nothing of the great books his English teachers had forced upon him—he had never bothered with them. Most of what he wrote resembled the lyrics he admired.

  When school ended for the summer, and July had barely emerged from June, Elsie and Gord drove Ezra to the ferry station. He'd packed mostly work clothes, his tapes, and his Walkman. Elsie was still not convinced that they were doing the right thing. She had not returned to Pelee Island and her father's vineyard for twenty years, and part of her felt like she was sending Ezra to a land of ghosts. But they were her ghosts, not his, and maybe Olyvia and Gord were right, maybe the boy needed to go his own way.

  Ezra threw his backpack over his shoulder, and Gord and Elsie walked into the station with him.

  "One way on the 11:30 ferry to the island," Elsie said to the man behind the counter.

  "Not planning to come back?" he asked as he punched the numbers into his cash register.

  Elsie stepped to the side so the man could see Ezra behind her. "He's going to visit his grandfather for the summer."

  "That right?" the man asked him.

  "Yeah," Ezra said.

  "Not many folks live out there year round. Who's your grandfather?"

  "Harold Mignon." The words sounded strange coming from his mouth. Ezra had never spoken them before.

  "Harold's been out there since long before my time. Done pretty well for himself, too."

  "So I hear," Elsie said a little impatiently.

  "That'll be eleven-fifty."

  Elsie pulled the bills from her purse, flattened them out on the counter, and dug around the bottom of her large purse for the change.

  "Here," Ezra said, "I've got fifty cents," and placed it in the man's hand.

  Gord and Elsie waited until he boarded the boat and then stood on the dock as it pulled away. Ezra raced up the stairs, a strange rush of freedom in his legs and chest, and up to the top deck. As the ferry moved further into Lake Erie, he waved goodbye to his aunt and uncle. They waved back at him and Elsie made a phone with her thumb and little finger to remind him to call when he was settled. Then they turned and walked back into the ferry station together.

  Harold Mignon was not waiting at the dock when the boat arrived. Instead he sent Ruiz in the pick-up truck. Ruiz didn't even bother to get out of the truck to look for him when the ferry dropped its door and all the passengers disembarked. He sat in the truck, smoking. Ezra stood on the dock for fifteen minutes, and not seeing his grandfather anywhere, fished his phone number out of his wallet and decided to go into one of the small hotels to call him. On the way he saw the truck with a faded Mignon Vineyards logo painted on the side of it.

  "Excuse me," he said, waking the man behind the wheel from his daydream, "do you work for Harold Mignon?"

  "You must be Ezra," he said. "Get in."

  Ezra threw his pack into the truck bed and climbed inside. "Where's my grandfather?" he asked after they had pulled away. "Why didn't he come?"

  "Why," the Mexican who was in his forties, and missing teeth, grinned, "you don't like me?"

  "No," Ezra smiled back at him, "I just thought..."

  "Mr. Mignon is always busy. Always working very hard."

  "Oh."

  "Me, I am as lazy as possible. But I trick him into believing I work hard. You and I are friends now, so you can never tell him my secret."

  "Do you still keep goats?"

  "Goats? What a strange question. Or maybe you are just strange in the same way your grandfather is strange..."

  "Maybe."

  "There are no goats on the vineyard, Cabra."

  "Oh..." Ezra seemed to be gathering what had just been said. "What did you just call me?"

  "I called you Cabra."

  "What does that mean?"

  "That is another secret, a Spanish one."

  "You never told me your name."

  "My name is Ruiz, and even though I work for your grandfather, the truth is that I am a great Spanish guitarist. Have you ever heard the Spanish guitar?"

  "I think so," Ezra smiled. He thought of the song Spanish Caravan by the Doors but was not sure and so did not mention it.

  "Ah...wonderful. Wonderful!"

  They pulled into a long driveway, passed the large wooden Mignon Vineyards sign, and drove under the neatly kept, latticed entrance. Vines and clusters of small, unripe grapes twisted through and hung off of the threshold's freshly painted white wood.

  Dust came up around the pick up truck as it came to a stop in front of the stone house. It looked the same as it had in the pictures he had seen. There was a raised front porch, a large rectangular lawn behind it and then, on three sides, rows of grape vines that looked like they traveled to the horizon. All of it was very well kept.

  Ruiz brought Ezra into the house. Harold Mignon had done nothing to change the interior since his wife had died. The living room was still decorated in the style of the mid-sixties. All of the furniture and rugs were worn bare in places and all of the lights were off. Ezra wondered why things acquired the peculiar smell they did when they became old.

  "Mr. Mignon must still be out in the vineyard. He's always working. But I will send someone to get him, and he will come. Wait over there on the sofa, Ezra."

  "Alright," Ezra said, still trying to take in his surroundings.

  "Tomorrow or the next day or even the next day you will come to the workers' lodgings and listen to me play Spanish guitar. That will be something."

  "Sounds good."

  The screen door slammed shut behind Ruiz. Ezra got up off the couch and wandered around the large, strangely decorated living room. Obviously, someone had once put a lot of time and care into it. He was surprised to see pictures of himself, Layne, Little Marty, and Rebecca on the mantle. They were in cheap gold frames. Beside them there was a picture of all four of Harold Mignon's daughters, as little girls, in pretty dresses sitting on the four swings Ezra had always heard about, the same ones that Sarah had tried to hang again at her cottage. But the cottage had three, not four. Olyvia and Sarah sat on one side of the old oak's trunk, and his mother and Elsie sat on the other
side. He picked up the picture and looked closely at his mom. Sometimes he was afraid that he would forget what she looked like. He heard the door open behind him.

  "So Ruiz got you alright then, young Ezra?" Ezra turned to see his grandfather taking his gloves off and hanging up his rung of keys. He was wearing a blue work t-shirt stained through with sweat.

  "Hi, Grandpa." The words were still awkward to him. "Yeah, he got me okay."

  "Good then. Are you hungry?"

  "No, I'm okay. I ate on the boat."

  "Had a burger and fries or something, did ya?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good. I'll show you where you'll be sleeping, and you can get changed."

  "Changed?"

  "For work."

  "Oh, right."

  Ezra was led upstairs, down the hallway, through a room with an old piano in it that looked like a den, and to a doorway beside a large desk. The bedroom was long and narrow with a roof that pitched downward, the lower end right over a single bed with a sunken mattress. The only other things in the room were a dresser and a couple of artificial plants on the window sill.

  "Well, it's nothing fancy," his grandfather said.

  "No, it's great."

  "You have plenty of work clothes then?"

  "I've got lots."

  "Now you're family, Ezra, but I expect you to be working hard and earning your keep like everyone else around here."

  "I know," Ezra said, uncomfortable that the old man was being so forward.

  "These Mexicans I got working for me might not be the smartest people, but they're hard workers."

  "Will I be working with Ruiz?"

  "Ruiz thinks he's pretty tricky, but you're old grandpa is on to him. I don't know why I keep bringing him back. He's the only one with a license, though I don't know how he conned them into giving him one. But I need someone to run errands for me." Apparently, Ezra had been one of these errands. If it weren't for that, I would tell him to keep his lazy ass back in Chiapas, or wherever the hell he says he's from. Now," Harold went on, "go ahead and get changed, and I'll find some place you can be of use for the rest of the afternoon."