A World of Thieves

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 etouffee 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.