Theft (9 page)

I smile, proud to be Zeb's sister.

He looks through the closet one more time, carefully. “Looks like I got them all.” He taps my shoulder. “We're done,” he says. He points with his head toward the door, and I lead the way out, my whole body feeling light and good.

While I walk out to pet the dog, Zeb takes care to lock up the Thatcher's house, just as it had been before we came. He wipes the door handle with his T-shirt, even though we know the Vaseline keeps the prints from taking hold. He doesn't like leaving even a thin sheen of Vaseline behind, so he wipes things clean. When he's done, he joins me by the fence, reaches through the gate as best he can, and pats the dog. “Yeah, good boy, good boy.” He points to a pile of dry food in the corner and a basin of water big enough for a horse. “They leave him that way for a week. Like food and water's all he needs. You'd like to be up there in that cabin with them, wouldn't you. Yeah boy, I know.”

LATE MORNING, AFTER THE men had been searching the backwoods for a day and a half, Zeb made his way down the side of the mountain. He passed a few neighbors' cabins nestled into the
thick evergreen woods, saw the windows glowing, and felt something like a connection to the folks living there, a bond that had happened without him noticing over time. It wasn't deep or even intimate, but it was a bond all the same, something he felt tied to.

He crossed the open field where he'd spent long summer days riding Rosalita. As connected as he felt with the families living in those cabins, it was nothing compared to what he felt with Rosalita. The joy he'd shared with that animal was something he'd never been able to achieve with humans, what with all the talk and double talk humans did. Rosalita was languageless, and his bond with her was all the stronger because of it. He didn't so much
remember
riding her across this field as he
felt
it still happening, as if the land had absorbed and retained every memory he had of the place. Just walking across the meadow brought those days back to life again. Some things can't be taken away.

It was late afternoon by the time he made his way to Gnarly's. When he arrived, the doors were unlocked, but the place was not officially open. Inside, helping himself to an early shot or two of whiskey, sat Ody, the town blacksmith and farrier, the one who had fashioned Chey and Rosalita's shoes over the years. When Zeb entered, Ody stood up and slapped him on the back. “Impressive show yesterday, my friend.” He laughed. “It was a goddamn parade of lights winding up to your place, right.” He walked to the top-shelf whiskey, selected the Buffalo Trace, and poured two shots. “On me,” he said. Zeb took a seat at the bar and Ody joined him. “Zeb Robbins. Always good for a little home entertainment.”

“Those guys had a right yesterday,” Zeb said. Ody shook his head and laughed.

There was a red and white target hand-painted on a thick piece of plywood that made up the side of one wall of the bar. Without words, with just a glance of friendly competition, the two men stood up. Hanging from Ody's belt was his weapon of choice, a hatchet, the one he used for hunting rabbits and other small game. He took it from his sheath, and Zeb walked to the target and unwedged one of four hatchets
already lodged in the wood of the target. “You couldn't hit the side of a barn,” Ody laughed.

“Yeah. Luckily, we're not aiming for the side of a barn.” Zeb laughed too. For the next half hour or so, the two men stood at an imaginary line and tossed the hatchets into the bull's-eye, shredding the wood there. It surprised Ody, who thought he had the corner on hatchet hunting, was known for being able to make a clean hit on something as small and quick as a rabbit running through heavy brush. “Shit, Zeb, you gotta come into town more often,” Ody said, after a while.

“Yeah, it's crossed my mind,” said Zeb.

Out of breath, Ody sat down at the bar again. “So what's the deal this time around? Did you break into that new health food store and reprice everything on the shelves?”

Zeb shook his head. “I never reprice everything. Just, you know, the cheese for twenty-two dollars a pound. Shit like that.” Ody laughed and Zeb smiled along with him.

Closer to opening time, Frank, the owner and bar tender, came in, saw Zeb sitting there, and smiled wide. He slapped Zeb on the back with pride. “Fuckin Zeb Robbins,” Frank said. “On the run again, my friend?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Zeb said.

“Well, we gotchya covered,” Frank said. “Everyone around here, we look after our own. Couldn't pry a speck of information out of anyone I'd allow in Gnarly's. You know that.”

“I know,” Zeb said.

Ody handed Frank some cash for the whiskey they'd drunk, and Frank walked behind the bar and started getting ready for the evening. Ginger, Nick, Thad, and Bobby came in carrying their guitars and fiddles, and Zeb and Ody helped them set up on the small stage.

“Special requests tonight?” Bobby asked.

“Something good,” Zeb said.

“Like Gram Parsons,” Ody said, and the lead singer, Ginger, barely in her twenties, shook her head at the two old men and their weary tastes. It wasn't long after that when Gnarly's started
filling up with locals, most gathering earlier than usual tonight to hear the news about what was happening up at Zeb's place. They wanted to get the true story straight from the man himself.

But Zeb had nothing to say about it. As far as he was concerned, there was no news he could tell any of the folks at Gnarly's. They'd seen the red lights streaming up the mountainside and had been telling their own stories about it all day long, none of which were true in the beginning. But they'd become true now as far as the people telling them were concerned, and there was nothing Zeb could have said that would have made their stories wrong and the story he knew right. “He was running three hundred kilos of pot in his truck,” Cullum said, and his wife, Sonya, tapped him on the arm and corrected it to two hundred fifty pounds, not kilos,” and Zeb listened and laughed.

“Your boss, Mike, tell you to run it?” someone else asked, and Zeb didn't shake his head yes and he didn't say no, but the story kept on without him. Some said the pot was stuffed inside Mexican mangoes that had come all the way from Oaxaca, and Zeb had somehow gotten past the border patrol going south and coming back into the States, who knows how. When they looked to Zeb, he just shrugged and said, “Yeah, mangoes,” and everyone laughed and said it was just like Zeb to do something like that. Whatever stories they were telling didn't matter to Zeb because all their words added up to understanding one thing: Zeb was now officially on the run, and they were all about protecting him. That was all that mattered. It was something Zeb appreciated, but did not fully understand: the way his mountain friends loved a fugitive, as if running away and not fitting in was the only way to fit in in these hills—or anywhere else for that matter, and they all played that same role together.

As the night unfolded, he listened to the music and the gossip and watched the lie that would follow him unfold into a story more appealing than the truth, woven, as it was, with the threads of people who had known him and grown to love him over the years. The delicate weight of seeing things for the last time came to him as he studied the knotty wood paneling, the names of people
he knew carved into it like some lovers carved their names into living trees, and the smell of old beer and cigarettes saturating his nostrils in the best way. He knew it would be the last time he saw this place, and he knew now that the last time he'd seen Brenda would be the last time he saw her, too, and he tried to etch her face into his memory, the turn of her head when they had met the second time, as strangers, long after their childhood days were gone, the touch of her hand when he came home before dawn and slept next to her till morning broke. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen his mother and father and sister, too, but their faces had vanished. Whoever had said “Time heals” must have been stoned out bad, he thought. Time heals nothing, except maybe a goddamn sore throat, and sometimes not even that.

If anything was going to hook him and make him turn back on the decision he'd made, remembering Brenda and hanging out here with his friends at Gnarly's should have done it. But though they hovered near him, it always felt like people were at an unreachable distance. He ached to close that gap—an ache that had been with him since he could recall, since childhood—but the anvil wedged between him and his own life sunk deeper into his gut with every sunrise and sunset.

This decision was a liberation. Frank, the quiet man who turned into a chatty bartender as the night went on, kept Zeb's beer glass filled with the best on tap and dropped shots of whiskey his way when needed. The stories of what had made the police cars wind up to Zeb's house that morning blossomed and grew more fantastic with every shot or brew ordered. “You crazy fuck!” Frank hollered out, eventually. “Hey everyone, we got crazy Zeb Robbins sitting right here in our bar!” He slapped Zeb on the back, and a few of the people cheered, and most drank up in honor of Zeb. “How'd you do it?” Frank asked. “How'd you get your crazy ass down the mountain when they were trailing you.
With dogs
?”

Zeb shrugged. “I just walked away.”

“Crazy ass, Zeb man. You're a fuckin ninja, dude.”

Zeb smiled.
Crazy ass Frank
, he thought to himself.

Frank went about his business, serving others their whiskey and beer.

Frank's wife, Shawna, sat across the bar from Zeb, wearing her tight white jeans and her bright blue ruffly cowboy shirt. Her blonde hair fell around her fragile shoulders, and she was so different from Brenda that for years everything about her had repulsed him. Her son, Tommy, was a friend to Zeb, and so was Frank, but whenever Zeb had to talk to Shawna, it was like he was talking to someone who didn't speak his own language. But tonight, something about her fascinated him. What made her dress up every damn day, what made her curl her hair just so and spray it till it shone like hard candy? What made that woman care?

A little drunker than he'd intended to be, he stood up and walked to the other side of the bar, and he took Shawna's hand. Her eyes went wide when he approached, and she made that coy little whimper that had always annoyed Zeb, but which tonight made him smile, even laugh with affection. She would never have considered touching Zeb's weathered and scraped hands in the past, but now they danced together on the well-worn wooden floor, two-stepping and line dancing. When a slow song started up, Zeb hesitated, and she ignored his awkwardness and pulled him close to her. He felt her slender body close to his as the band slipped from some new fangled tune into a soulful, gut-shredding Gram and Emmylou song. Zeb knew he had to let Shawna go after that, and he did, and he walked back to the bar where Frank had another shot waiting for him, and Ginger kept on singing another tune.

Zeb drank his beer, his back hunched low over the bar and friends from town lining up to congratulate him on his getaway that, right about then, felt nothing like a getaway at all, but a trap. He realized that he was hooked in strong to this place and these people, and even so, he could not bridge the distance he felt, the distance and the love constantly working against each other inside him. Someone called out a request for the band to play another Gram Parsons tune, and Zeb seconded that with a simple nod and a raise of his glass. “That guy got himself burned,” Zeb said to whoever was listening.

“What're you talking about?” Frank said.

“Gram Parsons. Had his roadie take his body out to Joshua Tree and burn it after he died.”

Someone in the crowd said that sort of thing was illegal, and someone else laughed because who among them had ever been stopped by something illegal when a friend was in need? Zeb continued on with the story, telling how Gram Parsons had asked his roadie to steal his body when he died and to make a huge conflagration of his flesh out in the California desert. “Not long after that, Parsons died and his roadie did exactly that,” Zeb said.

“No shit,” someone said, and the crowd kept on talking about it.

By that time, the night had worked itself around to early morning again, two o'clock, and the place was still hopping. But Zeb felt done. He asked Frank if he had a place for him to sleep. It had been a long day, and he needed someplace safe where he could hide out just for a day or two. “I'll leave without telling you when or where I'm going. You won't have any information about me that might get you involved.”

Frank turned quiet now and quit bragging about Zeb being in their presence. He said nothing, just opened a back door to a small bedroom where he let people sleep off their drink. In the small room, Zeb lay on the cot-like bed listening to the sounds of the people he'd known and loved and had shot the shit with and danced with and often avoided, even though he loved them. As the crowd thinned out and the music stopped, he finally slept. With the drink and the week's events heavy on him, he slept through most of the next day, too. He knew his mind was too muddled to make any move now, so he waited another day in Frank's small room.

But the next morning, Frank knocked on the door.

“They come asking you questions?” Zeb asked.

Frank waved him away. “Like talking to a steel trap,” Frank said. “I got nothing for them.” Zeb sat on the bed, and Frank leaned against the wall and spoke not with excitement, but with an odd sense of wonder, even confusion. “Lot of people in town following this thing,” Frank said. “You know how they are. They got their radio scanners, that sort of thing.”

Zeb nodded. Frank shifted his weight, nervous about what he was saying. “I don't know what you did. I don't know what they think they got you on this time, Zeb. But they're pretty serious about it, and—” Frank almost smiled. “And the thing is, they're bringing in a girl.”