Thieves I've Known

by Tom Kealey

  “I’ve got some rules too,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  “Well let’s hear them.”

  “First,” I said. “You want to smoke, then that’s your prerogative, but there’s the issue of secondary smoke. I don’t want you bringing your cigarettes into my room, and I want the door to my room kept closed.”

  “Who says you’re getting a room?” he said.

  “I just got off a three-day bus ride. I better have a room.”

  Jake turned the wheel at exit 20 and gunned the engine up the on-ramp. Outside, the clouds had covered the sun.

  “Did you know,” I said. “A smoker can quit after seven years, and in seven more years he can have lungs that are as healthy as a person who’s never smoked.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I read it,” I said. “It doesn’t make it a fact. There are some exceptions, but for most people, that’s the case.”

  “I see.”

  “How long have you smoked for?”

  “Thirty-three years.”

  I rolled down the window to get at some air. “You’re screwed,” I said. “That makes you at least forty-eight years old.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Am I right?”

  “I’ll be fifty this December.”

  “If you make it to December,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said and flicked ashes out the window.

  “Second,” I said. “I don’t have much stuff, but what I have I don’t want you looking through. I’ve got a letter from my dad to you. I’ll give you that when we get home.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He told me if anything ever happened to him I was supposed to give it to you.”

  “And you never looked at it?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t for me, it’s for you.”

  “What do you have that you don’t want me to look at?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “What I’ve got is mostly clothes and books.”

  “I don’t read too much,” he said.

  “Then I guess it won’t be a problem.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well all right then.”

  “Okay then,” he said. “You got any more rules?”

  The cab of the truck bounced as we hit a pothole, and Mulligan placed his paw on my leg. “Not that I can think of,” I said. “But I may come up with some more later.”

  “Me too,” Jake said. “I may come up with some more later, too.”

  We turned onto a gravel driveway, covered overtop with the arching limbs of pine trees. The truck continued to bounce and lean as we made our way to the house, a wooden A-frame with a chimney, blackened at the top, and a rail-less porch on the second story. Mulligan wagged his tail and turned to look at Jake.

  “This is home,” Jake said.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  The spotlights in Memorial Stadium can be seen just over the treetops on Highway 64, right next to the scoreboard with the big sign for Coca-Cola. When I arrived in mid-season, the Morganton Knights were eleven and a half games out of first place in the South Atlantic League and not looking to move up anytime soon. I’ll say this for Jake: he kept a good field. The grass in the outfield was bright green, and he kept the baselines razor-straight, not allowing the dirt to form a lip into the infield diamond. Somehow he conned some local kids into dragging the baselines with rakes in the middle of the fifth inning, and on the nights when it rained—which was often—the Knights players themselves helped pull the light blue tarp over the dirt on the pitcher’s mound and around the base paths.

  I got ten dollars to mow the outfield three times a week, alternating between the 305 (the distance between the foul poles) and the checkerboard cut, plus another two bucks to make sure the lime was dropped on the baselines before each game.

  The second week I was there, the team mascot—some teenager dressed up in a suit of armor, no joke—passed out from heat exhaustion during the seventh-inning stretch. We could hear him clatter to the ground next to the concession stand. After the games, Jake and I dragged the infield again and he ran his hands through the grass, testing for soft spots. The night before a home stretch against Gastonia he flipped the floodlights off in the stadium and carried a lantern and a shovel in a wheelbarrow out to first base. I knelt with him in the dirt.

  “The Cougars’ve got this kid named Ellis,” he said. “He’s stolen everything this year except the catcher’s underwear, but we’re going to fix him good.”

  He pitched the shovel into the ground and scooped out the topsoil where a runner would take a lead off first base. Down in its place he put a mixture of peat moss, water, and sand. Then he covered it with a thin layer of topsoil, slapping it flat with the back of the shovel. “When your man digs his cleats in here, he’s going to sink like the Lusitania.”

  “Is this legal?” I asked.

  “If no one finds out about it.”

  “It’s cheating,” I said.

  “Well,” said Jake. “You could call it that. You could also call it ‘home-field advantage.’” For good measure he slanted the baselines around home plate so that any bunted ball would curve straight to the pitcher.

  Some nights we took turns hitting soft loopers into the outfield, with Mulligan running out into the dark to retrieve them.

  “You’re not a bad hitter,” said Jake after I slapped the ball, off a bounce, against the yellow-and-blue Denny’s sign in left field. That was weeks later, after he’d shown me how to stand in the batter’s box and dig my right foot into the dirt. “Choke up on the bat,” he said. “When you get older and your arms bulk up you can grab it at the bottom. There’s no shame in doing what works. You’re not going to be Hank Aaron in two weeks.”

  “Who’s Hank Aaron?” I said, but I knew.

  “Jesus,” said Jake, and pitched a fastball smack over home plate.

  When it was his turn to bat he could smack the ball into either corner of the field—triple territory—and a few times he’d knock it over the wall. My sense was that Jake held back some. We didn’t have too many baseballs to spare.

  If it was late enough at night, after we collected the equipment and put it away in the shed, and after Jake walked the field one last time, plugging holes in the batter’s box and pitcher’s mound with wet clay from a tin bucket, then he’d push the driver’s seat in the pickup truck forward and let me drive home. We never saw a police car on the back roads. Most nights I had to smack the starter with the hammer two or three times to get the engine to turn over, and then I’d let out the clutch gently and back out of the lot.

  “Did you get the emergency brake?” said Jake.

  “I did.”

  “I didn’t see you do it.”

  “You weren’t watching close enough.”

  The breeze slanting through the windows was cold at night, even into late July, and I kept the speedometer needle steady at forty or forty-five. After a time or two, Jake just leaned back in the passenger seat and pushed his baseball cap over his eyes. Mulligan sat across him with his head out the window. Every few minutes Jake stretched his legs out in the cab and I could hear the pop-pop of his kneecaps and hear him sigh in relief.

  “Your mom’s got my number?” said Jake.

  “She does.”

  “You told her you were staying here?”

  “I didn’t talk to her,” I said. “I told her neighbor on the phone, and he said he’d give her the message.”

  “Your mom still in that hospital?”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I don’t know anything except what your dad told me in the letter.”

  “What’d he say in the letter?”

  He flipped the cap up over his eyes and looked out the windshield. “The turn’s coming up here.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Why haven’t you asked me about the letter before now?”

>   “Because,” I said, “the letter was for you. I try to stay out of people’s business.”

  Jake nodded. “That you do.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  I glanced over at him. “Well what are you waiting for then?”

  He looked out on the road. “I’m waiting for you to make this turn up here that we’re going too fast to make.”

  I pressed down on the brake and made the turn. A sedan in the other lane stopped as I swerved over the line, and the driver shook his head. The trees overhead began to block out the stars.

  “Your dad wrote that your mom’s been in and out of Frank Wood Hospital in Phoenix, which is a mental hospital, and she may not be able to take care of you.”

  I didn’t say anything. Mulligan brought his head back inside and tried to lean across my lap. I pushed him away.

  “He said you were something special,” said Jake. “Real smart. Said you skipped the third grade when you were younger.”

  “I did,” I said.

  “He said you had a garden back home. Used to raise vegetables.”

  “I did.”

  “He said you’d be some help at the ballpark.”

  “I think I have been.”

  “Yeah,” said Jake, lighting up a cigarette. “You’ve been all right.”

  “He told me some things about you too,” I said.

  “He did, did he?”

  “He did.”

  “Like what?”

  “He said you’d drink all day if you could.”

  Jake blew smoke out the window and propped his foot up against the dashboard. “Not anymore, I wouldn’t.”

  “He said you don’t speak to your wife or kids anymore.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “You tell me,” I said. “It’s just something I heard.”

  Jake was quiet for a while. The sharp smell of pine drifted into the cab as we approached the driveway. Leaves and dust scattered across the road with the wind.

  “Your dad was a harsh man,” said Jake.

  I nodded. “He could be.”

  “He never thought I was much help to him growing up.”

  “Well,” I said. “What help were you?”

  When we came up to the house I parked the truck next to the vegetable garden, long abandoned, the grass pushing over the soil. On the house, one of the gutters leaned crooked off the roof. I switched off the motor and sat still. Jake opened the door and let Mulligan out but didn’t move from the cab. We could hear the crickets out in the woods.

  “I don’t know, Grady,” Jake finally said. “I guess I was never good for much.”

  Jake didn’t watch as much TV as he claimed, and some nights after we got back from the ballpark we’d sit in beach chairs on the second-story roof and looked at the stars. It was cold late in the evening and sometimes I’d throw a thick blanket over my legs. Jake sat next to me and dropped the ashes from his cigarettes into a can filled with topsoil. I learned that when you look straight up around midnight in late summer you can spot Vega, a blue-white star that shines bright in a cluster of other, duller stars in the constellation Lyra.

  “Most constellations don’t look anything like they’re supposed to,” said Jake. “Cassiopeia is supposed to be some lady sitting on a chair, but it looks more like the letter W, and Sagittarius is the archer, but he looks just like a teapot. See that orange star just south of Vega?”

  “No.”

  “Right there,” he said, pointing with the end of his cigarette. “Right below Vega. It’s the beginning of Scorpio, which actually does look like you’d expect it to. That arc there is the claws of the scorpion and that hook of stars just underneath it is the tail.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  “How do you know so much about this?” I said.

  He leaned forward in the chair and glanced down into the yard. A pair of groundhogs stood near the edge of the woods, silhouetted in the light of the stars. One of them bent down and dug into the grass, his front paws working like shovels. We watched them in silence for a while, until Jake got caught up in a coughing fit and the groundhogs stood listening, still as tree stumps, and then meandered into the woods. We were up high enough to see over the treetops, and up on the horizon I could see Jupiter appear, the first planet Jake had pointed out to me the week before.

  “How do you know so much about the sky?” I asked again.

  “Me and my kids used to sit up here. They learned about it at some class they took at the community center.”

  “How old are your boys?”

  “The oldest will be eighteen this year, and the younger one’s a couple years older than you.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t you ever call them?”

  He took a drag off his cigarette. “There’s not much point.”

  I picked up the binoculars and put them to my eyes. The moon that night was almost full, and it dimmed our view of a lot of the constellations. I squinted as I looked through the lenses, and then when my eyes began to adjust I could make out the giant crater on the south end of the moon, with the lunar Alps stretching out in gray and black. There was a strong breeze that night, the smell of burned wood drifting from the brush fire of one of Jake’s neighbors.

  “You must be proud of your little stunt tonight,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s just part of the job.”

  “I bet,” I said. “I bet that’s not in the job description.”

  With two outs in the fourth inning, Gastonia finally got a man on base. When he took a lead off first, digging his heels into the baseline, he sank about an inch and a half into the dirt. He tried to steal second anyway and got nailed by the catcher with a few steps to spare. The runner walked back to first and swiped his foot at the line, kicking up enough peat moss to make the umpire have a closer look. The home crowd jeered at him. After a huddle with both managers, the umpire ordered the hole to be filled in, so Jake went out with the wheelbarrow, containing mostly the same mixture we’d put in the night before, and filled it over top. Because the baseline then had a mound of sand and muck sticking up on the line, the umpire had Jake water it down, so Jake looped the hose out onto the field and sprayed it over. It all resulted in a kind of overgrown swamp area near first base.

  “I think I saw a few fish flopping around out there,” I said.

  Jake nodded. “We’ll see if we can’t catch us one or two tomorrow night.”

  The mailbox sat at the end of the gravel driveway, and every night when we returned from the ballpark Jake would walk down the road with Mulligan, returning a few minutes later, sticking his head into my room. “Nothing came,” he would say.

  “Okay.”

  My room had a banner for the Atlanta Braves and a chart of the stars on the ceiling that I began to study. A few clothes, about my size, hung on the rack in the closet—a red shirt with pineapple designs on the front, a black pair of corduroys, and two thick winter jackets with fur lining.

  I placed my books on a shelf above one of the desks and slipped my clothes into the top drawer of the dresser. I didn’t spend much time in the room because Jake and I were at the ballpark five, sometimes six days out of the week. We arrived at nine or so, after stopping at a diner on the highway for coffee and french toast. If there was a game that night, then we stayed at least until eleven o’clock, eating dinner from foil wrappers. I became pretty good at spotting sunken divots and soft spots in the outfield that we filled with dirt and soil, and the holes in the batter’s box and pitcher’s mound that we packed with clay.

  During the games I could sit in the dugout with the team if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. The players were the kind of men who held spitting contests while the sides were changing, and they told dumb stories about high school—usually involving narrow escapes from the police and strange encounters with women
from New York in the backseats of their cars. Mulligan sat in the stands with me, raising his ears at the sound of a ball struck hard or a child screaming in the family section near right field. Mostly, I just read during the games.

  I found a lot of books about vegetable gardening in the town library. The soil in the foothills of North Carolina is good for a number of food crops, particularly potatoes and soybeans, and by the end of July I’d pulled the weeds and overgrown grass out from the small garden at Jake’s house. On our day or two off I began to plant a few rows of onions, carrots, and some other winter vegetables.

  One day Jake walked out and stood over me as I knelt in the dirt. “What’d you do to my shovel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He picked it up and fingered the blade. “You cut holes in it.”

  “I made a serrated edge so I could cut back the weeds. I didn’t see a hoe anywhere.”

  “What’d you cut the holes with?”

  “The file in your toolbox.”

  “Did you blunt it?”

  I looked up at him. “Yes I blunted it, that’s what it’s there for.”

  “I was going to use that.”

  “I bet.”

  “What kind of seeds are those?” he said.

  “Leek.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like an onion.”

  He stuck the shovel into the dirt. “Nothing’s going to come up here. Winter’s going to start in a few months.”

  “They’ll be up about then.”

  “Nothing’s grown here for a while,” he said.

  “That’s because you haven’t planted anything.”

  “You sure they’re going to be up before winter?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  I stuck the trowel into the ground and scooped up the soil I’d put down the week before. I’d had to dig up the rocks and tree roots and just then was placing seeds in the ground.

  “Because if nothing comes up this year, then something will come up next year. You’ve got to make the ground think like a garden.”

  “Where’d you learn that?”