A World of Thieves

the end of my junior year I won the state middleweight title, and afterward they took me out to celebrate.

By that time they’d quit the burglary business for good. They’d never much cared for jobs that required a lot of tools or for sharing the take with fences. They still pulled gambling tricks, but their main livelihood was now armed robbery. Their longtime middleman, Bubber Vicente, was steering them to most of their jobs. They had hit their first bank only a few months before—a small one, way up in Monroe—and I’d never seen them so pleased with themselves as when they told me about it. They said two men were enough for a holdup team but a three-man team was best, so they’d taken on Jimmyboy Dolan to do the driving.

I liked hearing about the holdups they pulled. About the way they’d prepare for them and how the people’s mouths came open when they saw the guns and heard them announce the stickup. Their faces got so alive when they talked about it. Their eyes looked electric. No question about it, they were naturalborn bandits.

Me too—I just knew it. I’d felt that way since I was a kid, and I’d known it for sure the night they came back from Texas. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did, and I would be damned if I’d deny it just because I couldn’t explain it. They anyway explained it well enough one night when they were in their cups and talking about the criminal life.

“Everybody knows won money’s sweeter than earned money,” Buck said, “but stole money—especially robbed money—is the sweetest there is. All you need to win money is luck. Skill helps but ain’t necessary. But to pull a righteous stickup you need luck and skill both— and you need balls.”

It’s why cheating at a table was more exciting than playing it straight. Cheating wasn’t gambling, it was robbing, and it raised the stakes as high as they can go.

“Get caught cheating the wrong guys,” Buck said, “and it’s like to mean blood on the floor.”

Russell agreed. “Every time you do a holdup you’re risking your ass,” he said. “You never know when a guy will resist, when he’ll be somebody with a gun of his own and the sand to use it. You never know when you’ll have to get down to it with the cops.”

That’s why more people didn’t rob and steal, Buck said. “It ain’t because they’re so moral like they say. Morality’s just a excuse to hide behind. World’s full of thieves at heart who don’t steal nothing because they’re too scared to. They’re scared of the law. Scared of being punished.”

“They’re chickenshits and they know it,” Russell said. “Thump on their Bibles to try and cover it up.”

No ethics lecture I’d ever heard in school was as plain on the matter as that.

My mother had often remarked that it would be a waste of my intelligence if I didn’t go to college, and Daddy agreed, and I had allowed them to think I would. I didn’t see the need to disappoint them any sooner than necessary. I figured I’d break the news to them when the time came. But before the time came my mother died, and then ten months later—midway through my senior year, a week before Christmas and two weeks prior to my eighteenth birthday—there came a telegram to inform me that on its way back to New Orleans the Yorrike had been caught in a bad storm and foundered somewhere north of the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks in the South Atlantic. A rescue ship picked up a lifeboat with the only four survivors and none of them was my father.

The first whiskey drunk of my life lasted for all of a cold and sunless week. I sat in the apartment with a bottle at hand and Christmas carols intoning on the streets. Sometimes, asleep in the chair, I dreamt of my father on the shadowy ocean floor amid his cadavered shipmates, his skin gray as moss, his hair swaying in the current, small fish feeding in his eyeholes and passing between the bared teeth of his gaping jaws. I’d waken as wet and cold with sweat as if I’d been hauled up from those very depths.

Buck or Russell came by every day to ensure my store of whiskey. They didn’t want me out drunk on the streets, looking for more. They didn’t say much or stay long, grieving for their brother in their own way.

Some French writer once said that when a man’s father dies his only true judge is gone. Maybe so. After a week of blurred days and bad nights I cleaned myself up one morning and packed my two bags and by noon I had moved into a much smaller and cheaper apartment on Esplanade. Then I went downstairs and telephoned my uncles and arranged to meet them for an early supper at Lafitte’s.

The place was nearly empty at that hour and we sat at an isolated table way in the back. I made my pitch over mugs of beer and platters of oysters on the half shell. I gave them the whole speech without slowing down long enough to let them say no before I was finished. I could drive, I told them—I could shoot, I could fight, I wasn’t scared, I knew how they operated, and I knew the rules. I knew that if a thing went bad it was every man for himself but you never crossed a partner and if you went down you kept your mouth shut and took the fall and stayed ready for a chance to break. I had paid attention and I had learned all that.

I’d half expected them to laugh, to ask what in hell made me think a pair of pros would take on an eighteen- year-old who’d never done a crime in his life.

They didn’t even smile. “Well hell, I figured this was coming,” Buck said. “I had you pegged for a crook since you were knee high. I always known it’s in your blood, me.”

“Me too,” Russell said. “It’s a way about them, a look some kids got, and you always had it. Your momma wasn’t the sort to see it, but your daddy was. If he didn’t, it was only because he didn’t want to.”

“The thing is, Sonny,” Buck said, “we figured you for going to college, smart cookie like you. It’s anyway what your momma wanted.”

“That’s right,” Russell said. “We figured you’d end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that.”

I wasn’t sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.

“World’s full of thieves,” Buck said, “but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind.”

“And the least likely to get shot or go to jail,” Russell said.

“Here you got all this good schooling and you want to be a stickup man,” Buck said. He turned to Russell and shrugged. “Could be he ain’t as bright as we thought.”

Russell turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his head.

I kept looking from one of them to the other. “Law books?” I said. “Ledgers?”

“Hell, Sonny,” Russell said, “why go the riskier way and for less payoff? What’s the sense in that?”

“The sense?” I said. “You tell me, goddammit! Why aren’t you dealing in booze or running a gambling joint? You could be pulling in plenty of dough with a lot less risk than stickups. Why do you do it?”

Now they smiled. Buck turned to Russell and said, “See what I mean about he ought be a lawyer?”

Russell nodded. “Still, I guess the man’s got a right to make up his own mind. And we have been in need of a driver since Jimmyboy’s foot.”

I didn’t know anything about Jimmyboy’s foot, but right then I knew they were going to say yes—and my blood sped up.

Buck gave a long sigh. Then smiled. “Oh, what the hell. Who are we to say you can’t do like us?”

“May your momma’s soul rest in peace, and Lonnie’s too,” Russell said, “but since there’s neither of them here to object…”

“And bloodkin’s always better for a partner than just some pal,” Buck said.

I was grinning with them now.

But there was a catch: I’d have to finish school first. “It’s the one thing your daddy trusted us to see to,” Buck said. “We mean to keep our word to him.”

“Besides,” Russell said, “we don’t accept no uneducated dumb-shits for partners no more.”

They wouldn’t listen to a word of argument about it. “You want to leave school and get in the crook life,” Buck said, “you go ahead and do it, but it won’t be with us.”

“But if I finish at Gulliver you’ll take me on?”

“If you finish with the same good grades as always,” Russell said. “No bumming through the little bit you got left.”

“And if you still want to,” Buck said. “Hell kid, you never know. You might decide you’d rather run for Congress and be the biggest kind of thief there is.”