A World of Thieves

by James Carlos Blake

  The kitchen. An oil lamp stood on a table set with three tin plates and forks and cups. The warmth of the black-iron stove carried to the window—and the aroma of ham frying in a skillet next to a steaming pot of coffee. An uncut loaf of bread was warming beside the stove. Chano peeked around me and turned up his palm in question. I was wondering the same thing: where in hell were they? We looked all around but there was still no sign of anybody out and about. The dogs had quit barking, which meant somebody had shut them up, which meant somebody was awake—but I didn’t care, not with the smells of that ham and coffee calling to me. I pushed up gently on the sash and it rose with a tiny creak. I gestured for Chano to give me a boost. He formed a stirrup with his hands and I put my foot in it and he hoisted me. I stepped in through the window and for a long moment stood absolutely still, listening hard but hearing nothing other than the sizzling of the ham.

  As I started to tiptoe toward the stove a man stepped into the room with an old single-barrel ten-gauge leveled squarely at my face. An old darkie with thick shoulders and white hair and bloodshot yellow eyes—and no expression on his face except a readiness to kill me if it came to that.

  “Move even a little bit I blow off your dumbshit head,” he said. The muzzle looked big as a porthole.

  I thought, Ah hell, and put my hands up.

  He gave a sidelong look to the window and I glanced over and saw Chano with his hands up, facing somebody I couldn’t see.

  “Any more you?” the old man said.

  I shook my head. “No sir.”

  He ran his eyes over my ragged skunk suit and made a face of disgust. “Don’t like convicts come in my house, stink it all up.”

  “Don’t blame you,” I said. I wasn’t close enough to even try snatching for the gun.

  “You run that old levee?” he said.

  “Tried to.”

  “Try to? You all don’t even know where you at, do you? It’s not eight miles to Baton Rouge.”

  Jesus, I thought, so damn close.

  A small boy leaned around the door and said, “You gone shoot em, Granddaddy?”

  “Hush up, John Adams,” the old man said. “Go get two pair my pants, two my shirts. And a pillowcase.” The boy scooted away.

  “There’s tote sacks in that cabinet back you,” the old man said to me. “Get you one.”

  I turned and opened the cabinet door and saw a stack of neatly folded sugar sacks, five-pound size. I took one.

  “Put you some ham in it,” the old man said. “Don’t take it all, we ain’t ate breakfast yet.”

  I stood there, not believing I’d heard him right.

  “Go ahead on,” he said.

  Well hell. I plucked a slice of ham out of the hot pan with two fingers and dropped it in the sack, then snatched out another.

  “Cut you some bread there.”

  I couldn’t keep from drooling at the smell of the ham and had to wipe the slobber off my chin. I thought I must look like one of those halfwit bums you see on the streets of New Orleans.

  The boy came back with the clothes and pillowcase and the old man said for me to hold out the pillowcase and for the boy to put the clothes in it and we both did as he said.

  “Now you get,” the old man said. “Don’t let me see either you round here no more.” He had a wide pale scar around the forward wrist and then I saw he had one on the other wrist too. Manacle scars.

  “Listen, Uncle,” I said, “I’m grateful to you for—”

  “I ain’t you uncle and don’t be talking stuff. Just get.”

  He pointed me out the door. Chano was already in front. A large colored boy of maybe sixteen was holding a double-barrel on him.

  “See them to the river,” the old man said.

  The darkness had given way to a gray dawnlight and the sun would soon be in the trees. The boy stayed well behind us as we made our way back through the woods.

  When we saw the levee up ahead, we stopped to change clothes. The old man’s khaki pants were stained with blue paint and fit me fairly well around the waist although the leg bottoms didn’t cover my ankles, and the shirt, a faded green thing covered with big yellow parrots, was only a little snug through the shoulders. There were two quarters in my skunk pants and I put them in my new pocket. Chano had to roll the bottoms of his black pants and the sleeves of his purple shirt. He looked like a walking bruise.

  We put what was left of our prison stripes in the clothes sack and I handed it to the boy. “I know your granddaddy was up the river too,” I said. “I seen his chain scars. What’d he do?”

  He stared at me hard for a moment. “His family hungry so he stole a chicken. They give him thirty damn years. Take thirty years of a man’s life for stealing a chicken. They bigger thieves than anybody.”

  “He ran this levee, didn’t he?” I said. “Long time ago.”

  He shifted his eyes from one to the other of us. “You all go on and get.”

  “He’s one of them who did it,” I said.

  You could see he wanted to keep his mouth shut but wanted to brag on it too. There was no hiding the pride in his face. He settled for saying, “You never know.”

  I couldn’t hold back a laugh. “You damn sure don’t!”

  “Go on now,” he said. He backed up into the bushes and then vanished as neatly as a stage trick.

  We gobbled down the ham and bread in huge ravenous bites we almost choked on, then scaled back up to the levee crest and got on the move again.

  I felt grand to be shed of those convict stripes—like I was somebody real again. I waved at a passing barge and the pilot waved back. I exchanged nods with a colored family fishing for bream from the bank with canepoles. I sang for a while as we went along—“Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Ain’t We Got Fun,” “Breezin’Along with the Breeze”—mixing in a few oldies for the hell of it: “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and “The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” and “Hello Ma Baby.” Chano smiled and bobbed his head in time to the tunes.

  The sun was above the trees when we heard the ringings and whistlings and clankings of trains and caught the smells of cinders and lubricating oil. A minute later we came in view of the Baton Rouge railyard. We figured to get some sleep in the nearby woods before jumping a freight for New Orleans, but almost as soon as I closed my eyes I was taken with a sharp pain in my gut, and I barely managed to keep from shitting my pants before getting them down and squatting behind a bush.

  I had to drop my pants several times over the next two hours. I didn’t know what to blame, the water or the food, but Chano didn’t have any problem. I’d heard that a Mexican stomach could stand anything and now I believed it. Naturally I didn’t get much rest between attacks, and when they finally eased off I was too wrung out to do anything but sleep.

  At some point I dreamt I was back in Camp M and hearing the morning bell, and I started awake to the clanging of a train and remembered where I was. I laughed out loud and Chano rolled over and grinned at me. He was probably feeling as goofy as I was to be free. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what he had in mind to do.

  “Know somebody in New Orleans?” I said.

  He shook his head, then jutted his chin at me in question.

  “Yeah. It’s where I’m headed. Where you going?”

  He jutted his chin to westward.

  “Texas?”

  He shrugged.

  “Mexico?”

  He shrugged again. I didn’t blame him. Never tell anybody anything you didn’t have to. In his case it was easy to keep from talking too much.

  “Good plan,” I said, and he smiled.

  Right after sundown we cut through the woods and came out by the tracks just past the railyard. I was still feeling a little peaked but at least my gut had settled. We didn’t have long to wait before the next southbound started chugging out, slowly gaining speed, and we ran to it and swung up into an empty slat-sided cattle car. I hugged myself against the chill wind as we sat with our le
gs dangling out and watched the darkening countryside go rolling by.

  Not an hour later we saw the lights of New Orleans up ahead and the train began to slow down. About fifty yards before it entered the railyard we jumped off and tumbled down the rocky bed grade and I generally banged up whatever part of me hadn’t been sore already.

  We brushed ourselves off as the rest of the cars went clacking by. If there was something to be said I was the one who’d have to say it, but I couldn’t come up with anything. He flapped a hand at the west side of the railyard and I nodded and hooked my thumb toward town. He looked at the ground around him like somebody checking to see if he’d dropped something.

  “Hey,” I said. I dug in my pocket and took out the two quarters and held one out to him. “In case you feel like buying yourself a car.”

  He looked at the two-bit piece a moment, then smiled and took it and put it in his pocket. Then raised a hand in farewell and turned and quickly crossed over the tracks and into the deeper shadows and was gone.

  T he French Quarter was as loud as usual this Saturday night. Klaxons blatting on the streets, boat horns blaring on the river. People laughing, shouting their conversations. Jazz pulsing from the clubs and all along the streets in a jangling tangle of melodies. I stood on a corner and took it all in, this swell free world I’d been away from for more than nine months.

  The sidewalks were packed with carousers, with couples and sailors and here and there some college kids, with tourists and conventioneers. Everybody happy and most of them drunk and trying hard to stay that way, passing their flasks around, Prohibition be damned. Hustlers of every stripe working the streets. Short-conners and whores, monte players, hot-stuff sellers. The rubes getting skinned by pickpockets even as they swayed to the curbside fiddlers and accordionists and popped their fingers along with the tapdancing colored boys.

  Women everywhere—sweet Christ, the women. Laughing and teasing with their beaus. Doing little dance moves as they went down the street, flashing their legs under short flouncy skirts and flapper dresses. Showing off all that skin in numbers with no back to them and necklines down to there. I was already light in the head from the aromas wafting out of the restaurants, and the nearness of so much finelooking stuff after I’d been so long without it made me even dizzier. It didn’t help that I was feeling wrung out and a fever was creeping up on me. The evening was pleasantly cool but I was soaked with sweat.

  Down the street I spotted some guys I recognized—a pair of second-story men and a fence named Pogo George, who had a store on Canal. They were arguing on the sidewalk in front of the Paris Theatre. I kept my face averted as I went by.

  We’d never pulled a job in any part of New Orleans—“You don’t shit where you eat” was Buck’s eloquent way of explaining it—and naturally we hadn’t talked about our business to anybody except those we had to deal with. But the Quarter was a compact world and word got around about everybody in it. The big guys—the Black Hands—left you alone as long as you didn’t try cutting in on any of their trade, but the place was full of smalltimers who’d rat you out in a minute if they thought they could gain by it. No telling who might catch sight of me and somehow or other know I was supposed to be in Angola and dash off to make a deal with the cops.

  As I passed the Bon Temps restaurant I caught a glimpse of a wild-haired creature in ill-fitting pants and zany shirt and took a few steps more before turning back to have a better look at my reflection in the mirrored doors. The only image I’d seen of myself since Verte Rivage was in shaving mirrors the size of my hand. I regarded a rawboned frame and a dark whiskered face of sharp angles and hot-looking eyes. It was unlikely that anyone would know me without a real careful look. A pair of young girls brushed past in the heavy sidewalk traffic and I saw the pinch of their faces, their swap of horrified looks, their gawping stares back at me, the source of such foul odor.

  As much as I wanted to avoid being spotted, what I wanted even more was a cold beer. The nearest speakeasy was in the backroom of the Anchor Café down the street and I made straight for it. I paused inside the door and peered about for familiar faces. When I didn’t spot any I went up to the bar and slapped down my quarter. I drank two beers in a row without taking the mug from my mouth each time till I’d drained it. Then let out a sequence of burps that burned my nose and made me wipe my eyes.

  “Sometimes it’s like a fire we got to put out, ain’t it?” the barkeep said. It was hard to tell if he was joking. I got my nickel in change and bummed a cigarette from the guy beside me and went out again.

  I headed for the south end of Toulouse, where Buck and Russell shared a two-bedroom apartment in a building called La Maison Dumas. A nice place but not showy. They could easily have afforded something more elegant but they didn’t want to live in any way that might raise too many questions about how they made their living.

  “On the other hand,” Russell had said to me, “there’s no need to live in a dump like yours, neither.” Actually, I liked my little place on Esplanade precisely because it was a dump. I could abandon it in a heartbeat if I had to and I’d never miss it for a minute. I only hoped Buck or Russell had gone over there and picked up my clothes before the landlord confiscated my stuff and rented the place to somebody else.

  I’d been thinking about what I’d say when they answered my knock and saw me standing there. “Got tired of waiting on you boys to bust me out so I took care of the matter myself.” Something like that.

  But the guy who came to the door was a stranger in undershirt and suspenders. He said he and his wife had been living there for more than two months. I checked with the landlady, who kept the chain on her door as she peeked out and at first didn’t recognize me. I smelled gumbo simmering in her kitchen. My uncles had moved away in a hurry, she said. She had no idea where they might have gone. And then I was staring at a shut door.

  So. Up Decatur and past the clamor of Jackson Square and the French Market and onto Ursuline. Halfway up the block was an ornate two-story apartment building with a lawn and a spiked wrought-iron fence and a locked front gate that only the residents had a key to. Some of the taller palms in the courtyard showed above the roof, their fronds lit up from below. I scaled the fence in the shadow of an oak and dropped onto the grass on the other side. The simple exertion made everything whirl for a moment and had me sucking for air and pouring sweat.

  The courtyard was illuminated by high black-iron lamps and contained a lush garden still several weeks from full flower. A redbrick walkway took me past a large goldfish fountain shadowed by palms and schefflera. I went up the stairs to the second floor. Most of the window shutters were open and as I went along the gallery I caught sight of people at their supper, conversing, listening to radios, reading, staring at nothing. In one place all the mirrors were covered with bed-sheets, a common practice in homes where someone had recently died. I stopped at the corner apartment and stared in the window at a dimly lighted, nicely appointed living room with tall shelves of books and framed art works on every wall. A radio on a side table was softly playing. “East of the Moon, West of the Stars.”

  I was about to rap on the sill when she came out of the bedroom with an empty wineglass in each hand. Barefoot, white terry robe loosely belted. She slung her black hair over her shoulder with a toss of her head and went into the kitchen and a minute later came out again with both glasses showing red wine. She set one glass down on the side table and turned up the volume on the radio. Then closed her eyes and swayed to the music. And then suddenly went still—and quickly turned and saw me. And dropped the other glass to bounce on the carpet and splash wine at her feet.

  “Brenda, sugar?” A man’s voice from the bedroom. She stared at me, a hand at the open neck of her robe.

  I felt the last of my strength draining away and I slumped against the window jamb. I tried to smile at her but couldn’t tell if I pulled it off.

  “Sonny,” she said. And came for me as I went down.

  We’d met a
year earlier, at an art exhibition sponsored by the mother of one of my schoolmates. I was just a few days graduated from Gulliver Academy and I’d had my fill of everything that smacked of academics, but my buddy said there’d be free champagne and some finelooking women, so I went. I hadn’t been there twenty minutes when we were introduced. An hour after that we were in bed at my place on Esplanade.

  Brenda Marie Matson. A year older than I, she had been managing the Fontaine Gallery on Dauphine Street since graduating from the Institute of the Magdalene, a ritzy Catholic girls’ school over near Loyola. She was smart as a whip and could’ve breezed through college, but like me she’d had enough of studies. The gallery belonged to a family friend who lived in Paris and let her run it as she saw fit. She certainly didn’t need the job—her father was founder of Matson Petroleum. He’d been a wildcatter who brought in one of the biggest gushers in Louisiana. Her mother was a woman of French Creole pedigree whose family never forgave her for marrying the son of ragamuffin Irish, his oil money be damned. Both her parents were four years dead, lost at sea when their chartered yacht sank off the Spanish coast.

  She’d won various ballet competitions and could have danced professionally if she’d wanted to. Her toes were gnarled and callused and she didn’t like for me to look at them. She told me this one night when we were naked on her bed and I was massaging her feet. I said her toes were the hard proof of her talent and something to be proud of, like a soldier’s wounds or a fencing master’s scars.

  “Oh God,” she said, “a romantic.”

  I lightly bit her big toe and said gruffly, “You better believe it, tootsie”—and she laughed and snared me with her legs and pulled me to her.