Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  Jay's was narrow like a tobacconist's, new-Town up front-- chrome fixtures on the counter, free coffee-- while still old-Town in back-- corkboard walls stuck with business cards and guitar lesson flyers, the ancient soap machine, and a broken wooden-bead maze table for the kids. The washing machines were lined up in back-to-back rows under a high center shelf, double-decker dryers facing them along both long walls. The newer dollar-accepting washers were up front; the older, thudding, coin-tray jalopies rattling in back.

  Doug was positioned halfway down the left lane of washers, sitting atop the last clean machine before the dials got crusty. He was feigning interest in the free Boston Phoenix, riding out his churning clothes, with Claire Keesey's loads tumbling almost directly behind him. She had been there a while now-- long enough for Doug to book home to grab up some dirty clothes, get back, follow her inside. His hamper bag lay empty on the floor now, one of the few things of his father's that Doug had held on to: a strap-tie army sack with faded black stenciling, MACRAY, D.

  Now what? He had acted on instinct, or else simple insanity, sensing opportunity but now not knowing how to follow through. He was just a few yards away from her, and they were basically alone-- the guy behind the counter rubbing his bald head and talking Greek into the phone-- yet he could think of no good way to bridge that final gap. Borrow some soap? Be that obvious? Hey, you wash your clothes here often? Sure, why not just scare her off for good?

  Even if she did happen to look over at him now and didn't immediately turn away-- even if some small smile were to appear on her face-- it was the middle of the morning: no matter what, he looked like an out-of-work Townie making a clumsy play.

  Hey, haven't I seen you at the Foodmaster?

  A brilliant, foolproof plan. Except for his clothes getting clean, this whole thing was a colossal waste of time. He imagined the others walking in and seeing him there trying to work up the courage to bump into the manager of the bank they had robbed.

  Her first load finished while he sat there berating himself. She started pulling out warm clothes one by one, folding and packing them into a custard-yellow laundry basket. Her other dryer load was nearly done, along with a pair of tennis sneakers rumbling alone in a third machine, going pum-pum-pum-pum like the drumbeat of battle.

  He closed the newspaper and threw it down, determined now, stand or fall. His boots hit the floor, hands vigorously rubbing his face to rouse himself from wussyland. What could he say here that didn't make him seem like a panty-cruising creep?

  A relevant question. Something about separating colors from whites. No-- any fucking idiot knows that. Just ask, What do I wash in cold, what do I wash in hot? Simple. Like, Feed a fever, or starve a cold?

  He quickly examined this gambit for offensiveness: Maybe there was something somehow antifeminist about assuming that women knew more than men about laundry? Then he realized that, hey, that was exactly what he assumed, and if steam blew out of the top of her head when he asked, then good, he had his answer, he could head on home.

  He shook his fists loose and cracked his neck-- even as he felt himself pussying out again. Fuck you! Thinking about the hours of agony his backing out here would cause him-- that was the only thing that started him toward her.

  He crossed the break in the rows of washers, hands stuffed unthreateningly into his pockets. She had paused in her folding, her back to him, a white blouse in her hands.

  "Uh, hey, excuse me?"

  She turned fast, startled to find him there.

  "Hi, uh, I was wondering if you knew..."

  So focused was he on his delivery that it took him until then to register the tears in her eyes. She swiped at them, fast and guilty, dismayed at having been discovered-- then tried to brush off the whole thing with a fake smile.

  Doug said, "I... oh."

  The tears reappeared and she tried to smile him off again, then gave up, turning away. She tipped her head up to the ceiling fans in an Oh, God type of gesture, then resumed her folding, faster now, as though he weren't there.

  "You okay?" said Doug, though it came out sounding wrong.

  She turned her head in profile, blinking, waiting for peace. Then she turned all the way, glaring, her quick, harsh look imploring him, Please go away.

  Which he should have done. His presence was only making her more upset. But he was stuck. If he stepped away now, it would be forever.

  She scooped out the rest of her load with him hovering at her back, dumping her clothes unfolded into her laundry basket, a tennis sock and a pair of lilac panties dropping softly to the floor. She wanted to be done, to leave. She dragged her basket of warm clothes off the washing machine and started past him, head down, rushing toward the front door-- her other load still going around the next dryer.

  "Hey," he said after her, "you forgot..."

  But she had turned out onto the sidewalk and was gone. The bald guy behind the counter craned his neck, holding the phone to his chest. A male customer balancing his checkbook looked to the door too, his girlfriend staring accusingly down the row at Doug.

  Doug turned back to the spinning dryers and the sneakers bouncing pum-pum-pum, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  * * *

  NORTH OF THE TOWN, the Malden Bridge crossed the Mystic into Everett, the sky opening up over a dire patch of industry lit like a Batman movie, road signs reading Factory Street and Chemical Lane. Main Street in West Everett drew tired multifamily homes to the sidewalks like spectators waiting half a century for a promised parade.

  Doug parked the Caprice outside a darkened funeral home and walked three blocks to a side street, a D'Angelo sandwich and a True Value Hardware plastic bag in one hand, a Valvoline carton the size of two VCRs under his arm.

  The houses at the end of the side street were single-family, postwar Capes and cottages with square yards front and back. The door he went to was unlit, and he set his things down on the step. He knocked gently before going to work on the lamp over the door, unscrewing the glass cap, brushing out the dead bugs.

  "Here I am, Douglas," sang Mrs. Seavey, unlocking the door and pulling it wide of her walker. She wore an Irish sweater buttoned over a red flannel housecoat, her gray face smiling moon-bright. She had seemed old to Doug back when she was his third-grade teacher.

  "I'm a little late," said Doug, hearing the Wheel of Fortune theme song behind her. "How's that leg? Nurse come today?"

  "Oh, yes. I think so."

  "Getting around okay?"

  With a mischievous, half-dreaming smile, she released the walker and shuffled back and forth in her foam slippers, arms out for balance, singing, "Da-daa-dee-da..."

  Doug's class had been Mrs. Seavey's last before retirement. She cleaned everything out of her legendary coatroom closet during their last week of school, offering the contents to whoever wished to carry them home. Doug claimed as many workbooks, activity packs, phonics flash cards, and dried-up markers as he could get his little hands on, so anxious was he to take home pieces of her. But the Forneys-- the foster family he was living with at the time-- had hardly any room for him and made him throw out most of it anyway. His mother had been gone two years by then, his father away on a twenty-one-month tour at MCI Concord.

  Doug opened the hardware-store bag and pulled out a package of coiled lightbulbs. "Now I bought you these fancy ones instead of the regular bulbs because they reminded me of you."

  "Aha," she tee-heed. "Screwy?"

  "Definitely that." He read from the package. " 'Low-wattage, energy-saving, extended life.' Says right here, 'Years of continuous illumination.' "

  She tittered again, then watched from inside the screen door as he traded the dead, tinkling bulb for the new coiled one. She hit the switch inside, and the light was soft but fast, riding the gas inside the tube.

  "Anything else you need done tonight?" he said.

  "No, bless you, Douglas. I'm all set, thanks be to God."

  He opened the screen door, removing a thick roll of bills
from his pocket. Nana Seavey liked fives and tens, small bills she could use at the corner store. "There's nine hundred," he said. "My next three months' rent."

  She grasped his hand over the bills, shaking it softly. "God bless you, boy," she said, the bills disappearing into her sweater pocket.

  "Now, I'll probably be out there late tonight."

  "You stay as long as you want." She waved him on like he was being bad, and he saw the sore on her wrist, brown and blue, still unhealed. "I'm off to bed."

  She gripped his fingers again, her skin papery and cool, the bones of her hand like small pencils in a bag. Doug leaned down to kiss her forehead. "You stay well, now. Be good."

  "If not," she said, shuffling backward from the door with a smile, "I'll be careful."

  He listened for the lock and waited until the light winked out, then started across the walkway to her garage. Mr. Seavey had worked and died making rubber for Goodyear, but on nights and weekends he and his brother had operated a private taxi and limousine service. Doug could still recall his last day of third grade, watching from the sidewalk outside school, Mrs. Seavey blowing him a small kiss from the backseat of a jewel-black Oldsmobile with silver window curtains.

  Mr. Seavey had an Irishman's fondness for automobiles, like a hunter's love for his dogs, and he had built himself, with help from a few drinking buddies, a barnlike, two-car garage with swing-out doors. Doug had since, with Mrs. Seavey's blessing, knocked off the outside handles so that the broad front doors could only be opened from the inside. Entry now was through a small side door just inside the low picket fence marking the edge of Mrs. Seavey's property. By the scant blue light of a plastic Virgin Mother glowing in the next backyard, Doug unlocked the padlock and threw open the top and bottom bolts, closing the door behind him before hitting the wall switch inside.

  Halogen work lights clamped to the rafters illuminated the emerald green Corvette ZR-1 in the center of the cement floor. The jewel of the price-doubling ZR-1 performance option package was its all-aluminum, 405-horse Lotus LT5 engine. Doug's was one of the last of the 448 ZR-1s built in 1995, their final production year. The car stickered at $69,553, paid in cash, papered in Krista's name in order to avoid federal tax scrutiny.

  The custom emerald finish was so creamy that running a hand along the long, sloping prow, from the solar windshield down to the retractable headlamps, was like swiping frosting off cake. The car was jacked up on blocks, Doug nearly finished installing a new stainless-steel exhaust system.

  He set his sandwich down next to the Chilton's repair manual on the workbench beneath a broad array of Mr. Seavey's old tools. The garage had been built deep to accommodate the Olds, and there was a four-foot drop in back: a dirt-floored, stone-sided storage area cluttered with ancient three-speed bicycles, push-powered grass clippers, and a monstrous electric snowblower, its rusted blades like gnashing teeth stained with dry blood.

  Doug left the Valvoline box on the edge and hopped down, lifting the heavy snowblower by its handles and boosting it away from the stone wall. The rock he wanted was ostrich-egg-sized and loose, coming away from the chipped mortar and exposing a cavity. Originally Doug had found in there, behind a row of empty Dewar's flasks, a dusty airmail letter with a 1973 postmark, written in jerky English by a Frenchwoman searching for an American soldier named Seavey who had passed through her mother's village in the winter of 1945.

  Doug lifted the newspaper-wrapped parcels out of the Valvoline box and added his cut from the BayBanks job to the rest of the odd-sized stacks of cash, then stared at his ditch-cold treasure. In the hole its value was zilch: a collection of numbered strips of fabric made up of 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, printed with green and black ink. Little rectangular rags whose unbankable mass was becoming a problem. Doug was running out of both space-- the hole had been dug as wide as it could go-- and time-- Nana Seavey being just one stumble away from a nursing home. His garage rent payment was an offering meant to bring them both three more months of good luck, because Doug had no contingency plan, either for his stash or his Vette.

  He withdrew a cold, inch-thick wad from a neat pile of already washed bills, then folded up the thick plastic wrap and fit the stone back into place, repositioning the blower and climbing back up top. The heat from the lamps was starting to warm the garage, and he unwrapped his roast beef sub and pulled a Dew out of the minifridge he kept there, switching on the portable radio. Normally the thought of grabbing tools and getting greasy underneath the ZR-1 was enough to make the anxieties of the outside world disappear. He lay back on Mr. Seavey's old "Jeepers" creeper-- "Immigrant Song" on 'ZLX following him in underneath the jacked-up car-- and though Doug never totally lost himself under there, at least for a few hours he got far enough away.

  * * *

  FROM THE STREET, DOUG heard music slamming out of Jem's. Inside, climbing the stairs, he felt the heat from the second-floor door as he passed. Inside his own apartment, the weak walls shuddered and the sagging floor thumped like drum skins. Doug's spoon quivered on his kitchen counter and one of his cabinet doors swung open on its own. That was Jem: all bass, no treble.

  Doug pulled his bed out of the sofa and sat on the end, eating a bowl of Apple Jacks, debating whether to fight this barrage with his own TV noise or just ride it out. He was too tired to go pounding on Jem's door, and more than that, too wary of getting pulled inside. He figured there was an even chance the roof was going to come down on top of them all anyway.

  Who is Doug MacRay? These are the questions sober people ask themselves over bowls of cereal at three in the morning.

  Folding her laundry for her and leaving it at the counter: big mistake. Too feminine, too puppyish and nuzzling, tail-wagging, hand-licking, proudly-pissing-on-the-newspaper eager-to-please. It was pussy.

  He lay back flat on the mattress and waited for the ceiling to fall in on him.

  * * *

  DOUG ENTERED JAY'S ON the Corner briskly, knocking on the counter-- "Hey, Virgil"-- and nodding to the bald clerk in the Rolling Stones red-tongue T-shirt, whose acquaintance Doug had since made, and whose confederacy he had purchased with a fifty-dollar bill.

  Doug moved down the left lane of washers, aware of her gaze but ignoring it. He sensed her surprise at seeing him again-- she was about a third of the way down on the right-- and then her suspicion at the coincidence.

  He opened a dryer door and lifted out a load of cool laundry. The clothes had been sitting in that machine for two days, awaiting his return, but only Virgil knew that.

  Doug went about folding the clothes like he had a lot of important things on his mind, jeans first, then shirts, beginning to think she wasn't coming over-- until he heard the voice, soft like a hand on his shoulder, turning him around.

  "Excuse me? Hi?" A nervous smile across the central double-lane of washing machines. "Hi."

  He looked blank, then let his face come to life. "Oh, hey-- how are you?"

  "Mortified." She clasped her hands together, twisting them. "In fact, I was almost too embarrassed even to come over here, but my conscience, it marched me right over to tell you thank you-- "

  "No no no."

  "I was, I guess, having a really bad... well, month, actually. I don't know why, but it all kind of hit me at once. Here, unfortunately." A forced, guilty smile, as in My bad.

  "Don't worry about it. So long as you're feeling better."

  "Much, yes," she said, still mock-formal, maybe even talking down to him a bit, putting her good manners on display. "Anyway-- thanks for pulling my clothes out. I can't believe I just abandoned them like that. And your folding them, Virgil told me you did that."

  "Oh, yeah, Virgil. Well..." As though it were supposed to have been a secret between two men. "That was nothing. So long as it was all right with you, I mean. Kind of weird, you know, folding a stranger's laundry."

  "Yeah." Smiling, but there was tension in her neck. "I guess so." She patted her flat hand against the washing machine lid, glancing away. "
So anyway-- it was really nice of you to do that, you're a nice person. And I'm sorry I ran off like that, sorry I wasn't as polite to you in return." Trailing away now, an abrupt nod punctuating her halting gratitude. "Anyway, thanks again. Thanks."

  Doug watched her retreat to her machine, nodding, wanting to say something.

  Nothing came out. He turned back to his open dryer with a harsh face. He had pushed it too far, scaring her off with folding a stranger's laundry-- idiot panty-sniffer. What was he doing here anyway, taking advantage of this emotionally confused person? Fuck. He wanted to smack himself on the head but maybe she was watching.

  He looked over and she was reading a paperback. It occurred to him then that he had forgotten to ask her name! Or offer his! That was some quick thinking there. No wonder she walked away.