A World of Thieves

The Mexican’s file says he is Sebastian Tomas Carrera. Claimed birthplace Brownsville, Texas. Prior convictions—petty theft, Houston; assault and battery, Lafayette. Stabbed a white man dead in a New Iberia poolroom and drew fifty years. Had served nearly four years of his sentence at the time he escaped. Certified mute. Remnant of tongue bears evidence of nonmedical excision, years prior. Eagle tattoo covering large portion of back. Last known address in Houston. No known next of kin.

The record on Lionel Buckman tells of no previous arrests, no official documents on file. The man figures everything in the jacket is bullshit except the photograph and physical details. He’s always believed the name was phony but it didn’t matter so long as the kid took the fall. Now the bastard is absconded and it matters plenty. He detaches the picture and puts it in his coat pocket. Then tosses both files back on the warden’s desk. The warden gawks from the files to the pocket where the man has put the photo. He looks like he’s received incorrect change for a twenty. The man’s eyes hold on his. The warden clears his throat, then smiles crookedly and resumes his discourse.

A fact’s a fact, he says, and for a fact the trail gave out on the levee. The dogs had to turn back around to find it and then chased it into the swamp and brung down two of the sumbitches and we carried out what was left of them. As for the other two, what they obviously did was try to run the swamp, that’s what kinda fools they were. No tracking them in that water but so what? Onliest place to track them to woulda been a quicksand pit or a gator hole. Their bones are this minute buried in the muck or been made into gator shit on a bayou bottom. Now sir, everbody understands your interest in the matter even though you done retired, but you can rest easy that the sumbitch who murdered your boy has been made to pay for it, by Jesus….

But the man is already halfway to the door and the warden finally thinks to shut up.

II

In my fevered sleep I heard a deep tolling of bells and had one bad dream after another, mostly about Camp M. I saw dogs tearing at convicts like rats fighting over a garbage scrap. Headless men hacking at cane. A gang of cons with snakes hanging from their faces. Men hobbling on bare feet twisted by mutilated heelstrings. Sometimes I’d see Brenda Marie’s face over me, but never clearly. I’d hear her voice as if she were at a distance; I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Sometimes I faintly heard other female voices and high laughter.

And then I was awake. It took me a minute to realize I was in her bed. The bells were at it again, and now I recognized them as belonging to the Catholic church down the street. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted through the balcony doorway. Then the bells quit their clangor and I heard a Brandenburg concerto playing low in the next room.

I was naked under the sheet and smelling slightly sour but not too bad. My hands and arms were clean, and my whiskered face, and I knew she’d washed me. The fever had passed, but my mouth was dry, my throat scratchy. A pitcher and a tumbler stood on the bedside table. I sat up and poured a glass of water and my hand shook slightly as I brought it to my mouth. I’d never tasted anything so sweet. I wasn’t in pain but I felt like my bones had been hollowed.

She came into the room carrying a basin of soapy water and an armful of towels and saw me sitting up and she let out a gleeful little yelp and hastened to put the things on the table and almost knocked over the water pitcher, then took my face in her hands and kissed me hard.

“Welcome back to the world, Mr. Van Winkle.”

Now that I was awake, she said, she could give me a proper washing. I felt fit enough to bathe myself in a tub but she said to hush and made me lean this way and that while she spread several towels under me so she could go at me with a washcloth while we talked.

She said that at first sight she’d thought I was an Indian at her window, my face was so much darker than when she’d last seen me. The fellow I’d heard in the bedroom had helped her to get me inside and into bed. She told him I was a cousin who’d been working for an oil company in Central America, that a case of malaria I’d picked up last year must have acted up again and got me sent back to New Orleans.

“I doubt he believed a word of it,” she said. “I mean, your clothes, for God’s sake. But he knows better than to ask me too many questions. Lift up.” She tapped my arm and I raised it so she could get at my armpit with a soapy cloth, then rinse it clean with a damp one, then dry it with a towel.

“I have to say, sweetie, the smell of you was enough to chase him off,” she said. “He’s a violinist in the symphony orchestra—very sensitive type. Truth to tell, I thought of putting you out in the alley for the refuse wagon to pick up.” She smiled and pecked me on the lips, then started on the other underarm.

I’d been there two nights and days. She had summoned a doctor yesterday morning, a family acquaintance of reliable discretion. He diagnosed me as a case of fevered exhaustion and gave me an injection of something and told her to give me water every hour. She’d managed a few times to get me to sip from a glass she held to my mouth, and even at some of the chicken broth she spooned for me.

“You’d open your eyes,” she said, “but you weren’t really seeing me. You had me scared, baby.” She washed around my neck and dabbed it dry. What she wanted to know of course was what happened and where the hell I’d been all this time and why I hadn’t sent word to her.

The trick to good lying was to tell as much of the truth as you could, only not exactly or entirely, not even to those with no tie to your doings or reason to hurt you—because you never knew who they might pass it on to, deliberately or not. We’d hit a bank in Arkansas, I told her, and the job went bad. Buck and Russell got clear but I was caught and sent up for five years. I didn’t write her because I didn’t want to think too much about her—it would’ve made things even rougher if I had. Then I finally escaped and here I was. But Buck and Russell weren’t— at least they weren’t where they used to live. Did she have any idea where they were?

“That’s it?” she said. “Nine months and that’s your story? You went to prison and didn’t write me and now you’re back. The end?”

“Nothing else to tell,” I said. “Take my word for it, honey, there’s nothing more boring than prison. What about Buck and Russell?”

She stared at me a moment like she was trying to see behind my eyes, then got up and left the room. She returned with a small envelope and handed it to me. “Sonny” was scrawled on the front. The envelope had been cut open. I looked at her.

“Hey, mister,” she said, “I didn’t know if you were dead or alive, if I’d ever see you again or what.”

The sheet inside read, “Dolan’s,” and below that, “B.”

Jimmyboy Dolan. I had intended to check with him anyway, but they’d wanted to be sure I did. I kept my face blank but my heart was dancing.

“It was under my door one morning,” she said. She began laving my chest. “About three months ago, I guess. I thought it meant you’d be showing up soon. But after a couple of months, still no you, so I took a peek. I thought maybe it’d say where you were. It’s not the most detailed letter I ever read. I know ‘B’ is Buck, but what’s Dolan’s, a speakeasy or what? Or should I say who? What’s going on?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. I slipped the note back in the envelope and put it on the bedside table. “Strange message. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it.”

“You’re such a liar,” she said. “What?—you think I’m going to blab it all over town? It really vexes me, Sonny, that you don’t trust me. You’ll probably think I robbed you while you were sleeping. You didn’t have but a nickel in