A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  She loved books and art and music, but her greatest pleasure was in sex. I knew plenty of girls who enjoyed it but not like Brenda Marie. She had no inhibitions at all in bed, was ready to try anything. I’d never had two girls at the same time until the night she introduced a blonde friend named Candace to our sporting. She called it a special treat for me—and it damn sure was—but they had as much fun as I did, and I suspected it wasn’t the first time they’d done such things with each other. I didn’t ask her about it, though. And I never asked if she spent time with other men.

  That was what she liked best about me, she said—that I wasn’t jealous or possessive. “It’s because you’re not in love with me,” she said. “Oh, you love being with me, and I love being with you, and that’s just perfect. Only don’t fall in love with me. Men become bores when they fall in love.”

  She was preaching to the converted. Most of the love poems and stories I’d read in school, most romantic plays I’d seen and damn near every movie, presented love as either life’s greatest happiness or as some kind of thrilling adventure that was worth every minute of it even if it ended in heartache, as it so often did in novels and plays. Both notions had always struck me as a crock. From what I’d seen and heard of love in real life, whatever thrill it provided didn’t last all that long, and the aftereffects could be a whole lot worse than just a heartache. Buck was a perfect example. He’d paid a godawful price for falling in love. Brenda Marie didn’t have to fret. I wasn’t about to fall in love with her or anybody else.

  If she had other lovers, they couldn’t have been very important. Whenever I telephoned to ask if she wanted to see me, she always said yes, anytime—as long as it was at her place. The one time she’d been to my apartment had been enough for her. As for me, I’d sometimes fool around with some other girl, mainly to remind myself I was free to do it, but most evenings I was with Brenda Marie.

  I had told her I was working with my uncles, that they were breaking me in—which was true, only not as a sales representative for a tool company, which was what I told her. I might’ve picked a better bullshit occupation. She’d looked at me like she was waiting for the punchline of a joke.

  I’d known her for two weeks when they took me on my first job, a small bank in Lafayette. The thing went smooth as glass and we pulled down nearly two grand. As I drove us back to Baton Rouge to drop off the stolen Olds and retrieve Buck’s Ford, I couldn’t stop babbling about how my heart had been in my throat while I waited for them to come out of the bank, how nothing I’d ever done before—not boxing or the midnight car races on the lake shore with my school buddies or shagging girls at high noon under the boardwalk at the lake while people were strolling directly above us, nothing—had the kick of what we’d just done. Buck said if I didn’t shut up he’d give me a kick—he’d kick my ass out of the car. I sang all the way to New Orleans. I was into “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” when Russell put his hands over his ears and said, “Oh Jesus, I surrender. Take me in. Jail’s better than having to listen to this!” I just laughed and kept on singing.

  That evening Brenda Marie said she’d never seen me so “animated,” as she put it. I told her it had been a very good day on the job. She said she never would’ve guessed saleswork could be so stimulating. She was nobody’s fool, and I figured she was curious about what I was really doing with Buck and Russell, but she was too cool to press me about it. She smiled at the gusto I took in the dirty rice and étouffée we had for supper, in the high humor I found in everything even mildly funny either of us said. The sex that night was out of this world. She said if she’d known that salesmen were such Valentinos she would’ve taken up with one long before now.

  Three weeks later we hit a loan company all the way over in Mobile. Buck and Russell didn’t like to pull more than one heist every six weeks or so—they loved the action, but they also loved to take it easy and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Lately, however, they’d been getting some tips too good to pass up. Mobile was another piece of cake and good for more than a thousand.

  I’d asked if this time I could go in on the stickup and one of them do the driving, and they said hell no. “You got lots to learn yet, Sonny,” Buck said. “And until you do, you’re the driver.”

  “Of course now, if you don’t want to do the driving anymore…” Russell said with a big smile.

  “Hell yeah, I want to,” I said. “It’s just I’d like to do the stickup sometime, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, well, all in due time,” Russell said.

  I did like doing the driving—hell, I loved it. The Mobile job left me as exhilarated as the one before, as sharply alive to the taste and feel and smell of things, especially of Brenda. She still didn’t question me, but it was obvious she was getting pretty damn curious about what I’d been up to.

  She met Buck and Russell only once, when we all took supper together one night at an Italian place on Burgundy. They were at their charming best and she was delighted to discover they were fraternal twins. She said they were so young-looking to be my uncles and she laughed at Buck’s obvious pride in being the elder by four minutes. Russell had brought Charlie along and the girls seemed to like each other, though they didn’t really have much chance to get well acquainted.

  They told her stories about me when I was a boy, including the one about when I was eleven years old and the neighbor woman caught me playing with her daughter’s bare behind in the garage.

  “The woman brought him home by the ear,” Buck said, “and this rascal tells his mother they weren’t doing nothing but playing doctor. You be careful, pretty girl, he don’t talk you into letting him practice on you for his M.D.”

  Brenda Marie laughed and said it was too late, I’d already gotten away with that one.

  The next day, Charlie told me she thought Brenda was the perfect girl for me. “Not only pretty but so smart.”

  Russell hugged her from behind and said, “You’re a smart cookie yourself, girl,” and she just beamed. But he agreed that Brenda Marie was a real honey, and Buck did too. Then after Charlie left, Buck went into one of his lectures about how I best be careful not to fall in love if I knew what was good for me. As if I needed to hear it from anybody.

  The day before Memorial Day we crossed into Mississippi and hit a bank in Hattiesburg. They were in and out in seven minutes and I casually drove us away with $2, 500. It couldn’t have been easier if we’d owned the bank.

  Buck couldn’t believe how simple the last three jobs had gone. Russell said it was having me along that did it. “This Sonny’s some kind of charm,” he said.

  “Kid probably thinks they’re always this easy,” Buck said. He gave me a tap on the back of the head as I drove us along. “Listen boy, we been real lucky so far, but you never know. You have to be ready for anything, and I mean every time.”

  “I’m always ready,” I said.

  “Get a load of this guy,” Buck said. “Jesse goddam James.”

  We got back to the Quarter at sundown and I went to Brenda’s without even stopping at my place first. I tossed my Gladstone on her sofa and whirled her around the room like a ballroom dancer, then picked her up and took her to the bedroom.

  Afterward I went in the shower. When I came out she was sitting crosslegged on the bed and holding my .44 in her lap like a serious letter she’d just finished reading. The Gladstone was open at the foot of the bed.

  “I guess you need this to persuade any customer who won’t fall for the standard sales pitch, huh?”

  “It’s loaded,” I said.

  “I know it,” she said. She raised the revolver in a two-hand shooter’s grip and sighted on a ceramic ballet figurine on the dresser. “Daddy taught me to shoot. I’m pretty good. Want to see me murder that toe dancer?” She cocked the piece.

  “It’ll likely go through that wall and the next one too,” I said. “It’ll be fun explaining to the cops how you shot the neighbor lady.”

  She eased down the hammer and rested
the piece on her thigh. I’d been about to lay a line of patter on her about needing the gun as protection against hijackers as we drove from town to town on our sales routes, but the way she was looking at me made me forget what I was going to say. The way she was smiling.

  “You’re no salesman or ever will be,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation. Her eyes were all over me, like she’d never really seen me before. Her nipples were drawn tight. “You’re some kind of goddam bandit is what you are.”

  I smiled back at her.

  “Aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.’’

  “Hell, that’s probably a lie right there.” But she was still looking at me in that glint-eyed way she did when she was all heated up.

  She put the gun aside and lay back and beckoned me with all her fingers.

  I dropped my towel and went.

  Three weeks later she knew enough not to ask where I was going when I kissed her so long and said I’d be back in a few days.

  And I set out with Buck and Russell to take down the bank at Verte Rivage.

  T he Mexican’s file says he is Sebastian Tomas Carrera. Claimed birthplace Brownsville, Texas. Prior convictions—petty theft, Houston; assault and battery, Lafayette. Stabbed a white man dead in a New Iberia poolroom and drew fifty years. Had served nearly four years of his sentence at the time he escaped. Certified mute. Remnant of tongue bears evidence of nonmedical excision, years prior. Eagle tattoo covering large portion of back. Last known address in Houston. No known next of kin.

  The record on Lionel Buckman tells of no previous arrests, no official documents on file. The man figures everything in the jacket is bullshit except the photograph and physical details. He’s always believed the name was phony but it didn’t matter so long as the kid took the fall. Now the bastard is absconded and it matters plenty. He detaches the picture and puts it in his coat pocket. Then tosses both files back on the warden’s desk. The warden gawks from the files to the pocket where the man has put the photo. He looks like he’s received incorrect change for a twenty. The man’s eyes hold on his. The warden clears his throat, then smiles crookedly and resumes his discourse.

  A fact’s a fact, he says, and for a fact the trail gave out on the levee. The dogs had to turn back around to find it and then chased it into the swamp and brung down two of the sumbitches and we carried out what was left of them. As for the other two, what they obviously did was try to run the swamp, that’s what kinda fools they were. No tracking them in that water but so what? Onliest place to track them to woulda been a quicksand pit or a gator hole. Their bones are this minute buried in the muck or been made into gator shit on a bayou bottom. Now sir, everbody understands your interest in the matter even though you done retired, but you can rest easy that the sumbitch who murdered your boy has been made to pay for it, by Jesus….

  But the man is already halfway to the door and the warden finally thinks to shut up.

  II

  I n my fevered sleep I heard a deep tolling of bells and had one bad dream after another, mostly about Camp M. I saw dogs tearing at convicts like rats fighting over a garbage scrap. Headless men hacking at cane. A gang of cons with snakes hanging from their faces. Men hobbling on bare feet twisted by mutilated heelstrings. Sometimes I’d see Brenda Marie’s face over me, but never clearly. I’d hear her voice as if she were at a distance; I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Sometimes I faintly heard other female voices and high laughter.

  And then I was awake. It took me a minute to realize I was in her bed. The bells were at it again, and now I recognized them as belonging to the Catholic church down the street. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the balcony doorway. Then the bells quit their clangor and I heard a Brandenburg concerto playing low in the next room.

  I was naked under the sheet and smelling slightly sour but not too bad. My hands and arms were clean, and my whiskered face, and I knew she’d washed me. The fever had passed, but my mouth was dry, my throat scratchy. A pitcher and a tumbler stood on the bedside table. I sat up and poured a glass of water and my hand shook slightly as I brought it to my mouth. I’d never tasted anything so sweet. I wasn’t in pain but I felt like my bones had been hollowed.

  She came into the room carrying a basin of soapy water and an armful of towels and saw me sitting up and she let out a gleeful little yelp and hastened to put the things on the table and almost knocked over the water pitcher, then took my face in her hands and kissed me hard.

  “Welcome back to the world, Mr. Van Winkle.”

  Now that I was awake, she said, she could give me a proper washing. I felt fit enough to bathe myself in a tub but she said to hush and made me lean this way and that while she spread several towels under me so she could go at me with a washcloth while we talked.

  She said that at first sight she’d thought I was an Indian at her window, my face was so much darker than when she’d last seen me. The fellow I’d heard in the bedroom had helped her to get me inside and into bed. She told him I was a cousin who’d been working for an oil company in Central America, that a case of malaria I’d picked up last year must have acted up again and got me sent back to New Orleans.

  “I doubt he believed a word of it,” she said. “I mean, your clothes, for God’s sake. But he knows better than to ask me too many questions. Lift up.” She tapped my arm and I raised it so she could get at my armpit with a soapy cloth, then rinse it clean with a damp one, then dry it with a towel.

  “I have to say, sweetie, the smell of you was enough to chase him off,” she said. “He’s a violinist in the symphony orchestra—very sensitive type. Truth to tell, I thought of putting you out in the alley for the refuse wagon to pick up.” She smiled and pecked me on the lips, then started on the other underarm.

  I’d been there two nights and days. She had summoned a doctor yesterday morning, a family acquaintance of reliable discretion. He diagnosed me as a case of fevered exhaustion and gave me an injection of something and told her to give me water every hour. She’d managed a few times to get me to sip from a glass she held to my mouth, and even at some of the chicken broth she spooned for me.

  “You’d open your eyes,” she said, “but you weren’t really seeing me. You had me scared, baby.” She washed around my neck and dabbed it dry. What she wanted to know of course was what happened and where the hell I’d been all this time and why I hadn’t sent word to her.

  The trick to good lying was to tell as much of the truth as you could, only not exactly or entirely, not even to those with no tie to your doings or reason to hurt you—because you never knew who they might pass it on to, deliberately or not. We’d hit a bank in Arkansas, I told her, and the job went bad. Buck and Russell got clear but I was caught and sent up for five years. I didn’t write her because I didn’t want to think too much about her—it would’ve made things even rougher if I had. Then I finally escaped and here I was. But Buck and Russell weren’t—at least they weren’t where they used to live. Did she have any idea where they were?

  “That’s it?” she said. “Nine months and that’s your story? You went to prison and didn’t write me and now you’re back. The end?”

  “Nothing else to tell,” I said. “Take my word for it, honey, there’s nothing more boring than prison. What about Buck and Russell?”

  She stared at me a moment like she was trying to see behind my eyes, then got up and left the room. She returned with a small envelope and handed it to me. “Sonny” was scrawled on the front. The envelope had been cut open. I looked at her.

  “Hey, mister,” she said, “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive, if I’d ever see you again or what.”

  The sheet inside read, “Dolan’s,” and below that, “B.”

  Jimmyboy Dolan. I had intended to check with him anyway, but they’d wanted to be sure I did. I kept my face blank but my heart was dancing.

  “It was under my door one morning,” she said. She began laving my chest. “
About three months ago, I guess. I thought it meant you’d be showing up soon. But after a couple of months, still no you, so I took a peek. I thought maybe it’d say where you were. It’s not the most detailed letter I ever read. I know ‘B’ is Buck, but what’s Dolan’s, a speakeasy or what? Or should I say who? What’s going on?”

  “Damned if I know,” I said. I slipped the note back in the envelope and put it on the bedside table. “Strange message. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it.”

  “You’re such a liar,” she said. “What?—you think I’m going to blab it all over town? It really vexes me, Sonny, that you don’t trust me. You’ll probably think I robbed you while you were sleeping. You didn’t have but a nickel in your pockets, you know that?”

  “Christ’s sake, girl, I trust you. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Such a liar,” she said, but I could see her pique was more affected than real. She pushed the sheet down to my hips and began bathing my stomach with slow circular strokes.

  She said she’d gotten worried when I still hadn’t come back after a week, so she’d gone to my place and slid a note under the door, leaving a tiny corner of it visible. She looked every day and the note was always there. It went like that for more than a month and then one day the apartment was occupied by somebody else. She couldn’t check with Buck and Russell because I’d never told her where they lived and there was no listing for them in the directories. She scoured the newspapers every day but saw nothing about anybody who might’ve been us.

  “If you all weren’t so damned secretive about everything, I might not’ve had to fret so much.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess that fiddle player was one way to get your mind off fretting for a while.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Hey boy, it’s not the same thing and you know it. And that fiddler is my business—just like I told him you’re my business.”