A World of Thieves

your pockets, you know that?”

“Christ’s sake, girl, I trust you. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Such a liar,” she said, but I could see her pique was more affected than real. She pushed the sheet down to my hips and began bathing my stomach with slow circular strokes.

She said she’d gotten worried when I still hadn’t come back after a week, so she’d gone to my place and slid a note under the door, leaving a tiny corner of it visible. She looked every day and the note was always there. It went like that for more than a month and then one day the apartment was occupied by somebody else. She couldn’t check with Buck and Russell because I’d never told her where they lived and there was no listing for them in the directories. She scoured the newspapers every day but saw nothing about anybody who might’ve been us.

“If you all weren’t so damned secretive about everything, I might not’ve had to fret so much.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess that fiddle player was one way to get your mind off fretting for a while.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Hey boy, it’s not the same thing and you know it. And that fiddler is my business—just like I told him you’re my business.”

I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right,” I said, and I meant it. “It was a lousy crack.”

She smiled. “All right then, you’re forgiven.” Then cut her eyes to my lower belly where she’d been stroking me with the washcloth. “Oh my,” she said. “What’s this?”

She shoved the sheet off me. “Goodness! Look at this poor rascal trying to raise up on his feet.”

“Hey girl, quit it. I’m in no condition for this.” That’s what I said—but if she’d quit it I might’ve wept.

“Shush,” she said. “Don’t scare him. All he needs is a helping hand and a big kiss of encouragement.” She bent to it, cooing, “Come here, baby, come to momma.”

And it pretty quick did.

I woke the next morning feeling grand. The room was full of soft sunlight. Brenda Marie slept snugly against me, her breath warm on my neck and her black hair draped on my chest, one long leg between mine. She smelled wonderfully of seawater and flowers. I ran my hand over her buttocks and marveled at their trim swells. She came awake without opening her eyes, smiling, pressing herself tighter against me, affecting to purr like a cat. I stroked her flank and she shifted so I could get at her breast. She worked her hand between us and chuckled lewdly on finding me ready as can be. She wriggled herself under me and I slipped in smoothly and her legs closed around me and pulled me deeper. We rocked together and she drew my face down to hers and kissed me and lightly bit my lips and I don’t think I lasted thirty seconds before letting go with a groan and collapsing on her, gasping like I’d run across town. She laughed softly and thumped me on the back and said to get off her before she smothered, then rolled with me to keep me inside her. And then we slept again.

The next time we woke up it was early afternoon and I was ravenous. We hadn’t eaten since the leftover chicken stew she’d warmed up the night before. She had an assistant she trusted to run the gallery in her absence but a collector from Houston was coming late that afternoon to see some of her new acquisitions and she had to be there. We had enough time to have a late lunch before she went.

“Well then, let’s get a move on,” I said, slapping her on the bottom and getting out of bed. She hadn’t seen the scars on my ass until then, and she said, “Oh, those bastards.” It was the nearest I’d seen her come to crying since the time I’d told her that my father, like hers, had drowned.

I’d always kept a shaving razor and change of clothes in my Gladstone in her closet. As she gave my white suit a cursory pressing she said she’d more than once thought to throw away my stuff but couldn’t bring herself to do it—it would’ve felt like giving up hope of seeing me again. What I couldn’t find in the Gladstone was a .38-caliber bulldog I’d left tucked among some undershirts. She saw me digging around in the bag and said, “Here,” and went to the bedside table and took the snubnose pistol out of the drawer and handed it to me.

“Made me feel like some kind of desperado to keep it close to hand,” she said. I checked the cylinder—five chambers loaded and an empty one under the hammer.

“Every time I’d handle it I’d think of other things of yours I’d handled,” she said. “Aren’t I just awful?”

“You’re a shameless wanton and I’ll beat purple hell out of anybody who says different.”

She laughed deep in her throat and hugged my neck and bit my ear just hard enough to make me wince. “You’re such a charmer,” she said.

She stood in the bathroom door and watched me shave. The tall bath window gave onto a cluster of banana trees mottled with sunlight, their green fronds stirring in a gentle breeze spiced with the aromas of dinner hour. A streetcar bell jangled in the distance. A produce vendor sang his wares. A neighbor’s saxophone rendered a slow and rueful version of “Blue Skies.” Angola was about 150 miles from where I was standing but seemed farther removed than the moon. I suddenly felt so free my hand shook and I nicked my chin with the straight razor.

The suit pants were a little loose in the butt and I had to cinch my belt two notches higher than before and my shirt collar felt roomier under my finger, but my jacket still hung well on my shoulders. Brenda said she liked my new leanness.

When she went to get dressed I slipped the bulldog under my waistband at my back, then stood out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette. The air rang with the afternoon church bells. Flowers bloomed in large clay pots on every balcony. A formation of yellow-head pelicans sailed over the tiled rooftops and the blarings of shiphorns carried from the river. Schoolgirls in blue-and-white uniforms came clamoring out of St. Cecelia’s, set free for the day. They passed in flocks along the lacework iron fence and I recognized their happy chatter as the voices and laughter I’d heard in my fevered sleep.

We ate at a restaurant down the street. I put away a thick steak covered with fried green peppers and onions, a bowl of red beans and rice, a platter of eggs scrambled with chopped sausage. Brenda Marie had softboiled eggs and a buttered croissant and smiled as she watched me gorge myself, at one point touching my arm and giving me a look to keep me from wolfing my food. She asked about my plans for the rest of the afternoon. I said I was going to walk around the Quarter and look at things I hadn’t seen since last summer.

Back on the sidewalk she slipped me a ten and gave me her spare keys to the outer courtyard gate and to the apartment. She kissed me full on the mouth and pressed her belly hard against me and said she’d be home around eight and for me not to overexert myself.

“At least not till I get back,” she said, licking a fingertip and putting it to my lips. She laughed and waggled her fingers at me and I watched the play of her long trim legs as she strode off down the street.

Jimmyboy Dolan had partnered with Buck and Russell for about a year. But he was a bad gambler and got in arrears for close to a thousand dollars at one of Cockeye Calder’s clubs. Cockeye wasn’t one for complex negotiations with anybody who owed him money or tried to cheat him. Everyone knew about the Memphis cardsharp who got caught doing tricks at one of Cockeye’s tables and paid for his folly with the fingers of one hand. Cockeye told Jimmyboy he had a month to pony up what he owed. He charged him a daily interest that doubled the debt the first week. Jimmyboy could’ve paid him off with his cut from a job he did with Buck and Russell a few days later but that wasn’t his way. He made a partial payment on the debt and spent the rest on good times and gambling at other clubs around town. Who knows what he was thinking. When his month was up he got a visit from a pair of Cockeye’s collectors. His tally had inflated to almost five thousand dollars by then but he could only come up with a few hundred. Their disappointment was so great they sawed off his right foot.

When Buck and Russell introduced me to him about three months later, Jimmyboy was working as a car mechanic and living in the back room of the garage and doing his best not to provoke certain kinds of people anymore. He had to give Cockeye Calder all but five dollars of his pay every week and figured to clear his debt in about five years. He wore a cumbersome prosthesis that wasn’t much more than a heavy block of wood shaped like a fat dark boot. He walked like he was dragging a ball and chain and the wood foot clumped with every step. Watching him make his way to the men’s room, Russell whispered, “I thought I had a limp.”

I found him all alone in the garage and he seemed pleased to see me. “Hey, Sonny boy!” he said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, man. Where the hell you been keeping yourself?”

I told him I’d been living with a girl in Atlanta for the past nine months and then recently got a note in the mail from Buck saying he and Russell were moving, but for some damn reason he hadn’t told me where. He only said to come see Jimmyboy. So, here I was. Where were they?

He didn’t know, but he believed they’d left town, probably left the whole damn state. They’d stopped by the garage about four months ago for just long enough to say so long.

“I figure they were feeling the heat from the Bogalusa job, don’t you?”