Theft

by BK Loren

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  author’s note

  Dedication

  one

  Willa, 1980

  Willa

  Zeb

  Willa, 1980

  Zeb

  Willa, 1980

  Willa

  Willa, 1980

  Zeb—Thanksgiving, 1980

  two

  Wolves

  Willa

  Brenda

  Raymond

  Willa

  Zeb

  Brenda

  Willa

  Zeb

  After

  three

  The Return

  resources

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  author’s note

  The land and wildlife agencies mentioned in Theft are fictional. The story of Theft intentionally expands the traditional territory of the Mexican grey wolf. Any similarities between existing people, places, and wildlife agencies and the characters, agencies, and places in Theft are purely coincidental.

  for Lisa Cech always has been, always will be

  “. . . although we’d like to believe animals relocate when their habitats are destroyed, most organisms have nowhere to go. They will die rather than move. Worse yet, these losses are usually unseen and writ large all over the world. We are truly thieves, pillaging the future.”

  —Harry Greene, Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art

  one

  Willa, 1980

  RIDING THROUGH THE tall-grass sweetness of the Colorado prairie, wheat stalks whipping my legs and the whir of insects—a high-pitched buzz buzz buzz—turning me dizzy under that white-yellow heat pouring through the blue sky. My brother Zeb, three years older than me and in high school by now, pedals while I hold tight to his belt loops. It’s my bike he’s riding, used to be his before he handed it down to me last summer. He takes us through the field and pedals into the neighborhood where the houses are tall and the lawns take up a whole block of land. He slams the brakes on the bike, hops off, lets it fall. “Come on,” he says. He stretches his arm out behind him for me to hold his hand. We walk to the side of the house, climb the stairs to the back deck, and he hands me the greasy thick gel, tells me to slather it on. “No gloves, we’re pros,” he says. We leave no prints, no evidence.

  He tells me to slip through the barely open window. I’m small enough, and my body is limber and lithe, even for a kid my age. I slip like a penny into a bank, like a rabbit into a hole, and I drop down into another world, furniture I never did see before—dark, heavy wood bed, chest of drawers, shining oak floors—and the sunlight has all day been fingering its way between the gap in the closed curtains making the wood smell the way only wood smells in the heat, something smoldering. It brims in my nostrils.

  On a stand next to a cushioned chair there’s a pair of glasses. Black rims, smudged lenses, across the back of the chair a leather belt, the third hole sticking out like a belly button, the notch there worn deep, someone’s hands cinching that belt every morning, gut hanging over, white sports shirt tucked in, I can see it all. It’s my shortcoming, says Zeb. I see the people who live in a place, not their belongings, and I’ve got no eye for stealing. But I’m learning.

  I stay put, like Zeb says. I watch him move, smooth as a fish in water, see him slinking down the long hallway, his JC Penney jeans too loose and his black T-shirt too tight, Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve, and the muscles in his bony arms tight as rubber bands. “Stay there,” he calls again. I shove my greasy hands in my pockets, and the room grows around me huge. I think of Mom. She’s the one we’re doing all this for, but she doesn’t know we’re here.

  “Hello,” I call out, just to hear my own voice echo in the space of this huge place.

  “What the hell you hollering at, Willa?” Zeb’s voice booms all the way down the long hallway.

  I listen. I hear him rummaging through the drawers and closets, careful and fast as he is, a pro. Then I hear something different, a distinct ringing. “You hear that, Zeb?” I stand stock-still, alone in the big room.

  “Didn’t hear nothing but your goddamned bellowing, Willa.”

  I know Zeb when he’s concentrating. Like I said, he’s a fish under water and he can’t hear a thing. But I know I heard something, makes my bones feel like rubber melting in hot sun, tickling from the inside out. Doesn’t matter. I stand stiff and strong, nothing showing, no fear when you look at me, but there’s a bird trapped in my body. I can feel it fluttering in my chest, batting crazy against the walls of my ribcage, caught in too small a space.

  I tiptoe over and look out the front window. It’s big enough so I can see all the way down the block. No kids playing, like where we live. No bicycles or heaps of tires on front lawns, no tag or jump rope going on in the streets. Eerie place, if you ask me, but I figure Zeb’s right. He’s usually right. There’s nothing to be afraid of, no one coming, and the ringing I heard was just fear buzzing in my head. A thief’s got no use for fear.

  I take a deep breath. I feel the bird in my chest fold its wings, rest on the branches of my lungs, quiet. Without the cage of my hollowed chest, that bird would fly. But it stays. It rests. I tuck my legs under me and I start to sit down, and just then the phone rings clear as Sunday morning bells, sends me like a pea in a slingshot back to where Zeb’s working. His backpack is stuffed full already, and the room he’s in is ransacked. Clothes torn from closets, drawers emptied, anything good selected out, the rest left to the owners.

  “What the hell, Willa?”

  “They know we’re here, Zeb.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But they’re calling.”

  Zeb walks to the phone, puts his hand on the receiver, pretends to pick it up. “Hello,” he says. “Willa Robbins? Yes, she’s right here.”

  “Zeb!”

  The phone stops ringing. Zeb laughs. “No one knows we’re here, Willa. It’s just the phone ringing.” He bends down, slips his hand into the pocket of my jeans, drops something inside. “For Mom,” he says. “Make her feel pretty.”

  I pull a gold and sapphire necklace from my pocket, and just looking at it socks me in the chest. To see Mom have a reason to wear this, a place to go where she would feel beautiful and graceful and not ugly and twisted up with Parkinson’s like she is, the thought of it weakens me. The jewels shimmer like her eyes. Zeb winks at me, then walks out. He moves fast and focused, opens the door of the next room down the hallway, and I’m alone again in this place that’s as ransacked as the old farmhouse in the field we crossed to get here. Mom was born and raised in that farmhouse, part of a homestead sometime last century, she says, and she stayed there till my grandparents died and Zeb was born. Couple years after that, Mom and Dad lost it to something they called “eminent domain,” so the City could build stores there instead of houses, and that property has been sitting with a FOR SALE billboard on it ever since. Years now and that field has never sold. “As if someone’s just going to happen by it and see it for sale out here in the middle of nowhere,” Dad says almost every time he’s home for dinner, which is not often. He’s always on the road, selling things door-to-door.

  “Going to pave that road and make it a major thoroughfare, turn our old house into a nice shopping center,” Mom says back to him every time. But neither one of them keeps that conversation going. They just keep saying those same two sentences about it, again and again.

  There are still signs of Mom’s family living in that ramshackle place, the roof all collapsed in on itself now, one of those farm houses you see that sags like a swayback mare, both of them good for nothing, people say. The windowpanes are all broken out, and there are no doors, and the walls are only half-standing, so you can just walk on in and see the cob
webbed containers still sitting there on the rotted-out remnants of the kitchen counter. There’s a rocking chair that creaks and rocks on its own, too, no one rocking it, and strands of tattered curtains blow in the breeze.

  All the kids in our neighborhood play in that old house, and me and Zeb have sworn not to tell it was where Mom lived when she was growing up, because it’s shameful, she says, to lose a place like that to eminent domain, just a fancy way of saying the place was condemned. But everyone knows anyway, even if we don’t say it out loud. We take turns walking through the empty house, see who can stay inside the longest without getting spooked by a ghost, which is usually just some crow flying through, or a field mouse scurrying past. All the same, there’s some kind of presence there, and we feel it.

  It’s like me and Zeb in this house now. Whoever lives here will feel the ghost of us when they come back, find their home torn open like a wound, their belongings no longer private. I ball my right hand into a fist, feel the weight of the sapphire necklace there. “Mom doesn’t need jewelry, Zeb. She needs to get healed,” I call down the hallway.

  “What the hell you think I’m working on, Willa?”

  “Johnny’s Pharmacy’s right up the hill from us.”

  He comes down the hallway now, leans in close to my face, and whispers, “You think I don’t know that, Willa? You think breaking into a business like that is easy? Hell, I get enough money and we can buy her the help she needs, right? We can buy it.” He huffs a little, stands up straight again. “Nothing wrong with having her feel pretty while she’s waiting to get better.”

  He heads back down the hall, and I open my palm, look at the necklace. He’s right. It would look beautiful on Mom. The decision’s tough to make, but I make it. I tuck that piece of jewelry into the gap between the mattress and headboard of the bed. It could have fallen there. That’s what the mother who lives here will think when she finds it. It must have fallen that night I was getting ready to go out. I don’t want Mom wearing it anyway, not after this other lady’s had it around her perfumed neck for so many years.

  After I hide the necklace, I hear the ringing again, fainter this time. But there’s no sense telling Zeb about it. I walk back out to the living room and wait. I stand there shivering in the smoldering heat.

  A few minutes later, Zeb walks down the hall, stands next to me. He opens his canvas knapsack, shows me the stack of green bills there—scattered tens and twenties. All that cash sitting on top of the fishing bait, the cheese balls, salmon eggs, and night crawlers. There’s a stench to the thing, let me tell you, and the house too hot and stuffy inside to begin with. The smell gets caught in the place where my nose meets my throat, sticks in that soft spot where I can’t swallow it down or make it come up.

  Zeb reaches deeper into his knapsack, pulls back the top layer of money and jewelry. He shows me a gun so small the whole thing could fit in my hand. Its snub-nosed silver barrel is engraved all the way to the place where the bullet comes out, ivory white handle engraved too.

  “You can’t take that,” I tell him.

  “Thirty-eight special, Smith and Wesson. Custom collector’s item. You bet I’m taking it. It’s what I came for.” He covers the gun back up, then hands me a ten-dollar bill and rests his hand on my shoulder. “Buy yourself something good with that, Willa.”

  “How’d you know that thing was here?”

  “I always know what I’m looking for.”

  “Yeah, but how’d you know?”

  “I knew. That’s all. Let’s go.”

  We walk out the front door, back door makes us look suspicious, Zeb says. He walks proud, like he owns this house. He hops on his bike, and I take my seat behind him, holding his waist as he pedals. I hear the sirens starting up. “Goddamnit, Zeb, they’re coming, just like I said.”

  He laughs.

  “Pedal fast,” I tell him, looking over my shoulder, waiting for the red lights to bear down on us.

  He pedals, and I feel the weight of our take in his knapsack, hear the gun clinking against the fishing bait and tackle, and I try but cannot recall a day in my life when I was not already guilty of stealing, Zeb taking me with him from day one of my thoughts.

  Pretty soon, we’re a good long way from the far side of the field, almost back to our neighborhood and the sirens are still whining, but it’s okay because now we’re not there and if they’re coming for us, we’re home safe, just two kids playing in their own neighborhood. I can hear Zeb’s friends, Billy and Levon, laughing by the fishing pond, and in the distance I see a small red dot of a cop’s light pulsing—can see it cruising between the houses across the field—and just then, Zeb swings his bike around and pedals back toward the place we just left.

  “What’re you doing, Zeb?” I think of hopping off, but Zeb pedals fast, sits halfway down on my legs, pinning me.

  “You see that cop?” he asks.

  “Yeah, I saw him.”

  “I want to see what’s going on.”

  “You know what’s going on.”

  He hikes his knapsack up tighter on his shoulders and pedals harder. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to see what the cops are doing. I gotta learn about these things.” He rips across the field, and pretty soon we’re back in the big-house neighborhood. Zeb flies off the bike, his lanky legs clearing the center bar, and I have no choice but to jump off with him, let the bike fall. He flops onto the lawn across the street from the house, bends his legs over the curb, elbows on knees, chin resting in his palms, and his eyes fixed on the scene of our crime. He’s out of breath, says, “Yeah, they’re in there, all right.”

  The door of the house we just robbed is open. Cops meander in the front yard, walk into the house with their hands on their holsters, on guard.

  “Think they’ll come over here?” Zeb says.

  I clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

  Zeb laughs a little. “What’s wrong, Willa? This is the best part.” He nudges my shoulder, and I push him away. “You want me to do the pharmacy, but you don’t want to help me learn.” His voice is a hiss.

  “All right,” I tell him. “I’m fine.”

  The tallest cop walks across the street, swinging his flashlight in one hand, though it’s broad daylight. “Look. He’s coming over here!” Zeb whispers.

  “Seen anything strange going on in that house?” the cop asks.

  Zeb’s canvas pack spews the scent of cheese balls and fish. He sits there with his neatly combed hair and his tidy T-shirt, no Marlboros wrapped in his sleeve now.

  “Seen any strangers driving around this neighborhood?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You live nearby?”

  “Not too far, sir. Just across the field. My mom’s family used to own most of that field, you know. There’s a pond there, too. Fishing.” He points.

  The officer smiles and pats Zeb right on the backpack with his huge, bare palm. Zeb smiles, keeps his eyes wide open, looking at the house with the curiosity and wonder of someone who is innocent.

  “Catch any fish there, son?”

  “Lots. Yeah. Not today but most days I catch largemouth bass.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your dad ever take you up fishing in the mountains?”

  Zeb shakes his head. “My Dad works too much for fishing.”

  “Doesn’t know what he’s missing, does he?”

  Zeb quits his yes sirs and no sirs now. He just eyes the cop and shrugs. “My dad’s always working. My mom’s sick and so he’s always working. You got just the one job?”

  “What’s that, son?”

  “My Dad works more than one job.”

  “Is that right?” the cops says. When the cop turns to me, Zeb stares at him hard. “How about you? You seen anything unusual around here?” the cop asks me. He doesn’t mean it, doesn’t think a girl like me could know anything. I can tell by the way he smiles down on me and half-chuckles his question. There’s
no need to answer.

  “All right then. You two better run along. This is no place for a couple of kids right now.”

  When the cop turns around, I scuff my tennies, hole in the toe, along the concrete gutter. I feel the blood oozing up to the surface, and it feels good. It feels certain.

  Zeb moans and straddles the bike, pats the seat for me to hop on behind him, and we ride back through the field, tall grass whipping my bare ankles, high altitude sun prickling the back of my neck.

  When we get close to our side of the field again, I hear the other kids playing. I don’t want to be with them. No one knows what me and Zeb do, and I feel their not-knowing like a fire in me. “Let me off here,” I call out, and Zeb lets the bike fall, and we both take off running different directions.

  I run toward our house, fling the door open, and stand in the threshold panting like a chased dog. I can feel fear shaking my body, so I hold myself upright, arms crossed over my chest tight, breathing smooth and quiet, and all the same, Mom, standing over her walker in her threadbare floral apron, turns from chopping vegetables in the kitchen and says, “Well, you’re all out of breath. What’ve you been up to?” She smiles. She always smiles when I walk in the room, and it’s something I can’t stand, the way her love wraps around me when I’ve been out all day stealing with Zeb. Her shaky hands offer me a knife, and I grab a bag of carrots from the fridge, start chopping right alongside her.

  “Been out with your brother today?”

  “Little bit, yeah.” I notice her perfect hands, her long, tapered fingernails, when mine are just stubby nubs. As long as her hands are doing something, they’re not as twisted up as they are when she’s doing nothing, and it makes me want her to keep moving forever. She chops vegetables like a regular mom, and once I give into it, it feels good being with her, cooking, listening to James Taylor singing on the record player. The house is stuffy inside; the air thick, clinging tight to me, feels good against my skin, the comfort of it all.