Theft

by BK Loren

  “That poor pup’s canine teeth haunt him,” Zeb says. “He was meant to be wild, like a wolf.” When we come up on the dog, he flips to all fours. “Look at that: Instinct,” Zeb says. “Beautiful.”

  “Don’t get that dog barking, Zeb.”

  “The Thatchers are gone up to their cabin. Chet’s got two homes, you know, says he’s fixing this one up to sell it so he can ‘get the hell outa dodge.’ That’s what the fucker actually said to Dad one day when he was out there watering his lawn every night like he does. Anyway, this old dog can howl at the moon if he wants, can’t you boy, yeah. No one’s coming for him.”

  The dog stretches his whole body into an arc, butt in the air, muzzle pointed toward the sky. He makes a moaning sound. “Hey boy,” says Zeb, and the dog comes wagging over, jowls loose, slobbering. I squeeze my whole hand through the diamond shaped wire of the chain-link fence. Zeb can only fit a few fingers through. But the pup leans in, and we both scrub him good behind the ears, the way he likes.

  “I’ve never heard jackass Thatcher call him by a name,” Zeb says. “Hey boy, good pup.” The dog pushes his nose through the fence, tongue working me and Zeb, chin to forehead. “Good dog, yeah, good boy.”

  The dog starts off running, runs to the other end of the short pen then back to where we’re standing, then back again to the other end, all of five strides, over and over, the pen too tight around him.

  “He’s running crazy like that damn fox. Remember that fox I told you about?”

  “Yeah, Zeb, about a million times I remember your damn fox story. You were camping in the San Juans with your Boy Scout troop when you saw him.”

  “Yeah, I was. Wish I could set this dog loose in the wild, like I should have done with that fox. I could go with him,” Zeb whispers. “He’d be better off fending for his own instead of being fed by Chet and beaten by Chet with the same regularity. They fucking beat you down, don’t they? Yeah boy, yeah.”

  Zeb looks up. “All right, we’ve got to hurry, Willa.”

  “Thought you said they were out of town?”

  “Yeah. But I made a deal with myself that if I go a week without stealing, Mom’ll get healed. Starting midnight tonight, no more stealing. It’ll all go away if I can just do that one thing.”

  “Well, I made a deal with myself that I’m not stealing anything with you, Zeb. Like I said.”

  “We’re not stealing. We’re saving the dog.”

  “Dog’s right here.”

  The dog wags his tail, stands on his hind legs, and rests his feet on the chain-link. He starts licking toward me, his tongue lapping up nothing but air. Zeb points to the Thatcher’s open window, exactly the same slim crack people always leave in their windows and I can never figure out why. It’s just a matter of closing the window an inch to keep their houses safe and tight.

  Zeb slathers the Vaseline on his hands, and I feel my body start to shake. “I told you I wasn’t swiping anything.”

  “My hands won’t fit through that opening,” he says. He jabs the Vaseline my direction. “I just need you to push it open a little bit for me. That’s all. Then you can go.”

  He’s talking all matter-of-fact, like he can’t hear a single word I say about not stealing, and then a light comes on in the Thatcher bathroom and I hit the green lawn and lay flat on my stomach, my heart beating hard enough to make my whole body throb. Zeb leans back against the windowsill, looks down at me. “What the hell, Willa?” He laughs.

  I grab his ankle and try to pull him down with me. “Light!” I whisper and point, “Light!”

  “I see the light.”

  “I’m not getting caught, Zeb. I am not getting caught and you’re a liar, you told me we weren’t stealing anything, damn it, Zeb.”

  He cranes his neck backward, eyes to the stars, shaking his head. Then he looks down at me. “You think I’d do anything to get you in trouble? I wouldn’t get you caught, no way.” He offers me a hand up. “I’d take the blame completely, Willa, you know I would. I would never do anything to hurt you.” I offer him my hand. He pulls me up. “I told you I was saving the dog, and I keep my word, don’t I? I keep my word to you.” He brushes off the front of my clothes, combs the hair back from my face with his fingertips. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  I stand there, shaking, confused.

  “Okay,” he says after a while. “All right.” He pats my bottom, something he knows I hate, and he points me toward home. “Go. I’ll figure a way on my own.”

  I walk a few steps away from him, then stop and look over my shoulder. He takes out some kind of tool from his pocket, walks toward the back door, bends down to the doorknob, begins working on it.

  “Zeb,” I whisper, just loud enough so he can hear. “How do you know they’re not home?”

  He’s absorbed, doesn’t answer, and then there’s a click, and the back door swings open. The light turns off in the bathroom, and I watch the shadow of a man pass by.

  “Shit, Zeb, no!” I run to him and grab his hand, pulling him my direction. “I saw someone Zeb! I saw someone in the bathroom!”

  “You didn’t see anyone.”

  “I was standing right there and I saw someone. Come on.” He yanks his hand from my grip, tells me to go home. He takes a step into the house, and I tug with all my weight against him.

  “Damnit, Willa, let go. There’s no one here.”

  I hear a creaking sound like wood underfoot. My eyes go wide.

  “That was me.” He points down to his feet, makes the creaking sound again.

  “But I saw someone.”

  Zeb walks into the house with me hanging from his arm, backpedaling against him. Inside, we both stop. The place is quiet. No lights anywhere.

  “What if Chet has a gun?” I ask.

  “He can’t have a gun because he is not here.” Zeb shakes his head. “Jesus, Willa, you’re acting like a regular kid. Just—git.”

  A regular kid is about the worst thing Zeb could ever call me. So I take a deep breath and steel myself against my own will. “Okay. I’m in,” I tell him.

  He looks at me for too long a time, then smiles. “What if someone’s home?”

  “There’s no one home here, Zeb. You can see, there’s no one home.” I let go of his hand and lead the way into the house, still shaking inside.

  We stand in the middle of Chet and Dolly’s living room now, inside the forbidden house with its forbidden yard. There’s something smothering here, like the air in the place is yellow and damp. The wood paneling turns the living room dark as a cave, but there’s a little scalloped wooden shelf above their curtains. It’s just a foot or so below the ceiling, and it’s jammed with stuffed animals and elves and ceramic figurines, a circus of sad, big-eyed animals glaring down from Thatcher heaven. I think they’re supposed to look playful or cute. But they look like little monsters, evil things.

  “Freaky, huh? Like little goblins,” Zeb says. He never says anything like that, and it sends a goose bump chill tickling my neck. He laughs. Just then, the automatic light timer clicks loudly, and a light comes on in the bedroom. “Oh, look, someone’s home,” he says.

  I jerk my head that direction, and he laughs again. “Come on, Zeb, cut it out!”

  He leads me down the hallway. The light is still on in the bedroom, and Zeb waits at the door. The light in the living room dims and Zeb jolts with fear, which sends my heart like a fist into my throat. He laughs so loud the dog starts barking again.

  “Shit, Zeb, I said I’m in. Quit teasing me.”

  He puts his hand on the doorknob of the bedroom, turns it slowly so it clicks real soft. He looks at me, raises his eyebrows. He still believes I think Chet and Dolly are in that room. He’s halfway right. He slaps the door open. It bangs against the wall, swings back toward us, and I gasp. He stops the door with his palm. The bed is empty, all made up and tucked in tight at the corners.

  “Like I said. They’re at the cabin.”

  It feels like cold water splashing my face
on a hot day, that feeling of fear turned to relief, the exhilarating part of stealing. I can’t help laughing with Zeb now. I trust him. I should’ve trusted him all along.

  There’s a smell in the Thatcher’s bedroom, something mustier than in most places we’ve been, even though the place looks clean. I breathe in quick little sniffs, trying to keep the stink out of my nostrils. The room is cramped but orderly, no clothes on the floor, no laundry. But the furniture is crammed into the place, making it harder for Zeb to move around. He squeezes through the tight space between the bed and chest of drawers and heads straight for the clothes closet. I stand there, still basking in that sweet exhilaration. In a minute, Zeb comes out of the closet with a hanger that holds nothing but belts. The bent part of the hanger twists through the opening in the buckles, and they’re stacked buckle-on-buckle, about half a dozen of them. One by one, he takes the belts from the hook, shoves them in his knapsack. Then he heads back into the closet, finds another hanger with two more belts on it, takes them, too.

  “Fucker,” he says. “Let his pants fall down off his fat ass. Moon the neighborhood with his fat white butt.”

  I smile, proud to be Zeb’s sister.

  He looks through the closet one more time, carefully. “Looks like I got them all.” He taps my shoulder. “We’re done,” he says. He points with his head toward the door, and I lead the way out, my whole body feeling light and good.

  While I walk out to pet the dog, Zeb takes care to lock up the Thatcher’s house, just as it had been before we came. He wipes the door handle with his T-shirt, even though we know the Vaseline keeps the prints from taking hold. He doesn’t like leaving even a thin sheen of Vaseline behind, so he wipes things clean. When he’s done, he joins me by the fence, reaches through the gate as best he can, and pats the dog. “Yeah, good boy, good boy.” He points to a pile of dry food in the corner and a basin of water big enough for a horse. “They leave him that way for a week. Like food and water’s all he needs. You’d like to be up there in that cabin with them, wouldn’t you. Yeah boy, I know.”

  Zeb

  LATE MORNING, AFTER THE men had been searching the backwoods for a day and a half, Zeb made his way down the side of the mountain. He passed a few neighbors’ cabins nestled into the thick evergreen woods, saw the windows glowing, and felt something like a connection to the folks living there, a bond that had happened without him noticing over time. It wasn’t deep or even intimate, but it was a bond all the same, something he felt tied to.

  He crossed the open field where he’d spent long summer days riding Rosalita. As connected as he felt with the families living in those cabins, it was nothing compared to what he felt with Rosalita. The joy he’d shared with that animal was something he’d never been able to achieve with humans, what with all the talk and double talk humans did. Rosalita was languageless, and his bond with her was all the stronger because of it. He didn’t so much remember riding her across this field as he felt it still happening, as if the land had absorbed and retained every memory he had of the place. Just walking across the meadow brought those days back to life again. Some things can’t be taken away.

  It was late afternoon by the time he made his way to Gnarly’s. When he arrived, the doors were unlocked, but the place was not officially open. Inside, helping himself to an early shot or two of whiskey, sat Ody, the town blacksmith and farrier, the one who had fashioned Chey and Rosalita’s shoes over the years. When Zeb entered, Ody stood up and slapped him on the back. “Impressive show yesterday, my friend.” He laughed. “It was a goddamn parade of lights winding up to your place, right.” He walked to the top-shelf whiskey, selected the Buffalo Trace, and poured two shots. “On me,” he said. Zeb took a seat at the bar and Ody joined him. “Zeb Robbins. Always good for a little home entertainment.”

  “Those guys had a right yesterday,” Zeb said. Ody shook his head and laughed.

  There was a red and white target hand-painted on a thick piece of plywood that made up the side of one wall of the bar. Without words, with just a glance of friendly competition, the two men stood up. Hanging from Ody’s belt was his weapon of choice, a hatchet, the one he used for hunting rabbits and other small game. He took it from his sheath, and Zeb walked to the target and unwedged one of four hatchets already lodged in the wood of the target. “You couldn’t hit the side of a barn,” Ody laughed.

  “Yeah. Luckily, we’re not aiming for the side of a barn.” Zeb laughed too. For the next half hour or so, the two men stood at an imaginary line and tossed the hatchets into the bull’s-eye, shredding the wood there. It surprised Ody, who thought he had the corner on hatchet hunting, was known for being able to make a clean hit on something as small and quick as a rabbit running through heavy brush. “Shit, Zeb, you gotta come into town more often,” Ody said, after a while.

  “Yeah, it’s crossed my mind,” said Zeb.

  Out of breath, Ody sat down at the bar again. “So what’s the deal this time around? Did you break into that new health food store and reprice everything on the shelves?”

  Zeb shook his head. “I never reprice everything. Just, you know, the cheese for twenty-two dollars a pound. Shit like that.” Ody laughed and Zeb smiled along with him.

  Closer to opening time, Frank, the owner and bar tender, came in, saw Zeb sitting there, and smiled wide. He slapped Zeb on the back with pride. “Fuckin Zeb Robbins,” Frank said. “On the run again, my friend?”

  “Something like that, yeah,” Zeb said.

  “Well, we gotchya covered,” Frank said. “Everyone around here, we look after our own. Couldn’t pry a speck of information out of anyone I’d allow in Gnarly’s. You know that.”

  “I know,” Zeb said.

  Ody handed Frank some cash for the whiskey they’d drunk, and Frank walked behind the bar and started getting ready for the evening. Ginger, Nick, Thad, and Bobby came in carrying their guitars and fiddles, and Zeb and Ody helped them set up on the small stage.

  “Special requests tonight?” Bobby asked.

  “Something good,” Zeb said.

  “Like Gram Parsons,” Ody said, and the lead singer, Ginger, barely in her twenties, shook her head at the two old men and their weary tastes. It wasn’t long after that when Gnarly’s started filling up with locals, most gathering earlier than usual tonight to hear the news about what was happening up at Zeb’s place. They wanted to get the true story straight from the man himself.

  But Zeb had nothing to say about it. As far as he was concerned, there was no news he could tell any of the folks at Gnarly’s. They’d seen the red lights streaming up the mountainside and had been telling their own stories about it all day long, none of which were true in the beginning. But they’d become true now as far as the people telling them were concerned, and there was nothing Zeb could have said that would have made their stories wrong and the story he knew right. “He was running three hundred kilos of pot in his truck,” Cullum said, and his wife, Sonya, tapped him on the arm and corrected it to two hundred fifty pounds, not kilos,” and Zeb listened and laughed.

  “Your boss, Mike, tell you to run it?” someone else asked, and Zeb didn’t shake his head yes and he didn’t say no, but the story kept on without him. Some said the pot was stuffed inside Mexican mangoes that had come all the way from Oaxaca, and Zeb had somehow gotten past the border patrol going south and coming back into the States, who knows how. When they looked to Zeb, he just shrugged and said, “Yeah, mangoes,” and everyone laughed and said it was just like Zeb to do something like that. Whatever stories they were telling didn’t matter to Zeb because all their words added up to understanding one thing: Zeb was now officially on the run, and they were all about protecting him. That was all that mattered. It was something Zeb appreciated, but did not fully understand: the way his mountain friends loved a fugitive, as if running away and not fitting in was the only way to fit in in these hills—or anywhere else for that matter, and they all played that same role together.

  As the night unfold
ed, he listened to the music and the gossip and watched the lie that would follow him unfold into a story more appealing than the truth, woven, as it was, with the threads of people who had known him and grown to love him over the years. The delicate weight of seeing things for the last time came to him as he studied the knotty wood paneling, the names of people he knew carved into it like some lovers carved their names into living trees, and the smell of old beer and cigarettes saturating his nostrils in the best way. He knew it would be the last time he saw this place, and he knew now that the last time he’d seen Brenda would be the last time he saw her, too, and he tried to etch her face into his memory, the turn of her head when they had met the second time, as strangers, long after their childhood days were gone, the touch of her hand when he came home before dawn and slept next to her till morning broke. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen his mother and father and sister, too, but their faces had vanished. Whoever had said “Time heals” must have been stoned out bad, he thought. Time heals nothing, except maybe a goddamn sore throat, and sometimes not even that.

  If anything was going to hook him and make him turn back on the decision he’d made, remembering Brenda and hanging out here with his friends at Gnarly’s should have done it. But though they hovered near him, it always felt like people were at an unreachable distance. He ached to close that gap—an ache that had been with him since he could recall, since childhood—but the anvil wedged between him and his own life sunk deeper into his gut with every sunrise and sunset.

  This decision was a liberation. Frank, the quiet man who turned into a chatty bartender as the night went on, kept Zeb’s beer glass filled with the best on tap and dropped shots of whiskey his way when needed. The stories of what had made the police cars wind up to Zeb’s house that morning blossomed and grew more fantastic with every shot or brew ordered. “You crazy fuck!” Frank hollered out, eventually. “Hey everyone, we got crazy Zeb Robbins sitting right here in our bar!” He slapped Zeb on the back, and a few of the people cheered, and most drank up in honor of Zeb. “How’d you do it?” Frank asked. “How’d you get your crazy ass down the mountain when they were trailing you. With dogs?”