from the Chevy and saying something, his head close to the guy’s ear.
Something was going on. Jimmy watched the Chevy drive off and the kid in the doorway watching them go and then turning to look at Jimmy. The kid was big, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. His eyes were dark, with heavy lids that made him look sleepy, and when he looked into Jimmy’s face it was like there was a tunnel in the air between them so that Jimmy couldn’t turn away. But it meant something, the kid hitting him with an attitude.
Grace Lei came out then and said something to the kid so that he sneered at her, showing her the back of his hand. Jimmy couldn’t dope out the gesture, but he got that it was something disrespectful, and when the kid turned to go inside Grace gave his back the finger. There was shouting from inside and then she came all the way out and got a cigarette from a pack in her purse.
Jimmy stumbled a little getting across the sidewalk to offer her the lighter. She lit her cigarette and held the lighter out, but he waved her off.
“Keep it.”
She stuck it in her pocket without looking at it and turned back to the street.
He said, “That guy giving you a hard time?”
“Ah, never mind about him. That’s Luis. He thinks he’s a big deal because he’s friends with Tiger.” She pointed to the street.
“Tiger?”
“That Chinese boy who comes here every day.” She looked over her shoulder, lowered her voice. “He’s in a gang. They sell drugs. They’re idiots.”
Jimmy wanted to do something to the kid, but he couldn’t think of anything. He lifted his palms and looked at them, the fingers of his left hand smeared with ink from the pen. He noticed for the first time a stripe of maroon in Grace’s black hair. Was it new, or had he just never noticed?
“I like your hair.”
She shook her head and threw away her cigarette. “It’s just hair.”
“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” He figured he had about a second before she went inside.
“Go? I can’t go anywhere.”
“I see you watching the cars. Do you wish you could get away somewhere?”
She looked at him again, and her eyes were tired. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The next two days he didn’t leave to steal anything. He sat around the apartment smoking weed and waiting on the end of the day so he could go downstairs and watch. At about six the first night he went down the stairs quietly with his notebook and crossed the street. He sat with his back to a tree in the tiny park next to the fire station across the street and watched the front of the restaurant. The tree was one of those with the leaves that he thought looked tropical, like a fern or something, and it was as if he was on an island, only the island was between Ridge Avenue and Kelly Drive and instead of circling sharks there were cars running up and down the river.
He had on three cheap watches he’d stolen, two of them with the same time. When the big kid, Luis, walked out of the back with the bag and put it on the table, he wrote down the time from each of the three watches and then waited. He could see Grace inside, but she was at the counter and didn’t come out. After six minutes by the top watch (a girl’s watch with a lavender band and fake gemstones around the face), the Chevy pulled up and the Asian kid with the cap and the chains got out and grabbed the bag. He said something to Grace that made her face go tight and then walked out again and the car pulled away.
Jimmy wrote down the time again and then got up and walked the long way around the block.
No money. That was how Jimmy knew there was something going on. Luis came out and dropped the plastic bag, and not on the counter where all the other bags went, but on a table near the door. It looked like any other bag, full of food, but it wasn’t. The Asian kid came in and took it, and didn’t pay anybody. Didn’t talk to anyone except Luis, and sometimes Grace, who wouldn’t talk back, but kept her eyes down.
The next afternoon Porter came over to buy more of the stuff Jimmy had piled up around the apartment. Jimmy liked Porter because he was older, a grown-up, and still out of control, and because he had red hair that stood up on his head. Most of the adults he ran across seemed like someone had let the air out of them or something, or like they were all nearsighted and not being able to see anything made them cautious and slow. Porter charged in and threw shit around the room, did lines of coke he never thought to offer anyone else, would spend fifteen minutes beating Jimmy’s price down only to hand him more money than he’d promised. Jimmy asked Porter’s opinion about the Imperial Garden.
“Oh, that’s a fucked life, kid. They bring a hundred people at a time sealed in containers, then they owe so much money they gotta work shit jobs for years to pay off.”
“Containers?” Jimmy picturing Grace Lei in a giant shrink-wrapped plastic package, like the headphones from Best Buy he could never get open and had to saw at with a steak knife.
Most of the stuff piled up in the apartment was worthless crap. Porter never got tired of pointing this out to Jimmy, but he also went through everything meticulously; holding up and identifying each baseball, coffee mug, book, candlestick, decorative plate, and teapot Jimmy had stacked up around the apartment, and then guessing what it was worth.
“What the fuck is this?” he’d say, holding up a collectible action figure from a comic book store. “A doll?”
“It’s Wolverine. From the comic book. It’s worth like a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“To little kids. Or retards, maybe. I’ll give you ten. This?”
“It’s a fork. I think.”
“You got no eye, kid. Honest to Christ. A fork. Did you at least get the spoon?”
“Fuck you.”
“You need to start boosting jewelry.”
“That shit’s all locked up.”
“You need to put together a crew. When I was your age, I stole with five, six other guys. A girl with a cute ass. She bats her eyes, the clerk opens the case.”
“I don’t want to get put away again.”
“At your age? What’d you get, like three months? In kiddy jail. That’s nothing. That’s the cost of doing business.”
“It sucks. It’s boring. The big kids fuck with you and steal your shit. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“How old are you? Jesus Christ, you’re in the prime of life. You should be boosting everything you can get your hands on. Steal every fucking thing and run like a jackrabbit.”
“Why don’t you?”
Porter’s eyes got big. “I’d go to real jail, kid, and that’s no fucking joke. Not like Henry Avenue.”
“You think I want to go? Back to jail?”
Porter looked around, his eyes going back and forth. “Kid, I got to tell you. Living like this? In this rathole? It’s not that different than prison.”
The night he stole the bag from the Imperial he didn’t smoke, but sipped at a bottle of peach brandy that had been in the apartment when he moved in. He stood in the window a long time, looking down at the cars and the river and working himself up to it. The brandy tasted weird, and he wondered if that was how peaches tasted. He ate a cupcake he’d gotten at Major Wing Lee’s, the little store on the corner. He leaned on the window frame and looked up and down Ridge. The road was busy, and it was getting a little dark, which he liked.
He pictured how it would go, flitting through the shadows, the bag sliding across the table to him like a magic trick. Him and Grace Lei together, dumping out the money onto his mattress, maybe five or ten thousand bucks, and him seeing her smile for the first time, maybe the first time since she came to America. He cupped his hands in front of himself, mentally calculating how much might fit in the bag.
Coming out onto the street he could hear a rising scream, the siren from one of the trucks starting up across the street, and he pressed himself flat against the door like a bug caught in the light. He moved sideways, looking left and right, his back flat against the storefront of the hair place next to the restaurant. He had his watches on and looked at his wrist. Three minutes more, give or take. He stood at the edge of the window and looked in.
Grace was standing at the counter, her back to the street. He looked east up the street for the Chevy but there was a line of cars stretching away toward Philly and he couldn’t tell if it was coming. At the same moment that he
