X (30 page)

“Where do we start?” Shorty asks.

“Bedrooms, probably,” I suggest. “Jewelry’s up there.”

He leads the way upstairs. A short hall branches off to six closed doors.

The master bedroom at the end of the hall is a gold mine of jewelry and fancy knickknacks.

Shorty tears open the closet. “Whoa,” he says. A soft rush of fabrics sways forth at him. He disappears into the folds.

I lift things off the end tables and dump the contents into a bag. Gold, silver — anything that looks expensive.

Shorty emerges, wrangling an armload of fur coats. I can’t help the laugh that escapes my throat. It looks like he’s wrestling a leopard.

“It’s going for the jugular!” I whisper-shout, like a warning.

He spits out a mouthful of sleeve. “Shut up. Let’s move.”

I glance out the front window. The car is still there. The girls’ silhouettes are like shadow statues in the gloom.

Shorty takes the coats downstairs. I make a circuit through the other upstairs rooms. Find a little more jewelry, but nothing like the treasure trove of the master bedroom. By the time I’m back downstairs, my sack is pretty full.

I set the bag down beside the furs, which are piled by the front door.

Shorty’s in the kitchen; from the clatter and clink, it sounds like he’s setting the table for dinner. I poke my head in and find him gathering silverware by the handful, thrusting it into his bag.

“This is good stuff,” he says without looking up. “We OK?”

“Think so.” It’s been about ten minutes, I would guess.

When we go back into the sitting room, Shorty glances wistfully at the grand piano by the front window.

“We don’t have room for that,” I quip. I’m barely certain that we have enough space for all the rest of the things we’ve gathered. “Let’s get out of here.”

Shorty goes to the piano anyway. His fingers graze the white and black keys, dipping them such that they make only the slightest noise. He’s forever sitting down at the piano in the pool hall, but it’s a small, boxy thing, always out of tune. This one must be much nicer.

The glow of oncoming headlights paints the window bright. Not from our car.

Shorty rushes toward me, startled out of whatever musical interlude was playing in his head. We peek through the curtains. Far down the road, some other car glides toward us, then turns onto a cross street. The block is dark again.

“We have to go,” I tell Shorty. “Right now.”

We’ve collected about all we can carry, but we manage it in one trip. We fill our arms and stagger out the door. Sophia leaps out to open the trunk. We stuff everything in, however it fits: jewels, furs, sacks of glittery loot.

As we jump back in the car and peel off down the street, I glance through the rear window at the house. It amazes me slightly that it looks the same as it did, though it’s been looted of so many valuable things. You wouldn’t know, to walk past that house, what it had lost. It looks as proud, and as firm, and as fancy as ever. As whole.

But it isn’t. And there’s something in that. Makes it hard to look away. I can’t look away, in fact. Until we turn off the street and the house disappears from view.

The girls insist that there’s plenty more to be had in Brookline. So the next night, we drive back. Same area, different street. Same feel to the neighborhood, different house. Whitewashed siding. One story.

Shorty and I work well together. He goes around back, lets me in. We hit the rooms. Master. Other bedrooms. Kitchen. Sitting rooms.

Jewelry. Silverware. Art. Nice stash of liquor this time around, too.

Bing, bang, boom. We’re in; we’re out. Like pros.

Stuff it in the trunk, and away we go, all of us that much richer.

As Sophia chauffeurs us away from the scene, we crack open the seal on a pilfered bottle of rich man’s Scotch whiskey. Take a healthy sip. I remind myself,
Don’t look in the rearview.
Tonight there’s no cause to linger. I’m moving forward.

My cut of the haul is over a thousand bucks. Whew. I’ve never seen such a wad of cash in my life. Not too shabby for ten minutes’ work. Counting the drive in and out, we’re looking at maybe an hour’s time expended, each day. And for this kind of coin? Heck. It makes the constant rag of the street hustle look like child’s play.

Sophia and I celebrate together. I can’t have her in my bed as often anymore, now that her husband is around. But when she’s with me, there’s no mistaking the fact that we belong together.

After we’ve worked a bunch of houses in Brookline, we move on to Newton, another suburb. In one night, we score a watch, a fancy vacuum cleaner, silver candlesticks, earrings, a gold pendant, and other small things. Always as much as we can carry.

The watch would be especially nice, except it isn’t working right. I don’t usually care about the stuff we steal, except how much we can make when we sell it. But a broken watch won’t fetch much coin, and anyway this watch is so nice that I’d rather not resell it.

I’ll get it fixed up instead. It’ll make a nice gift for one of my brothers. Philbert, I think. I won’t tell him how I got it, of course, but it’s an added bonus to gift him something I lifted, because that used to be our thing. I flash back to the necklace I stole for Sophia that helped me win her back all those years ago.

I imagine Philbert opening the mail pouch and pulling out this piece of finery, with a note from me attached. He’ll be surprised. He’ll be delighted. He’ll realize he can stop sending me lectures by mail about coming home and putting my life right. He’ll see that I’m doing just fine.

Boston, January 1946

The jewelry shop is a reasonably high-end joint, its name stenciled on the windows. Inside is not the sort of dim lighting you hope for when you want to move something hot, but I was careful to dress nice enough to look like the watch is mine.

The clerk looks me over. He takes the watch and folds it into a soft cloth. “You can pick it up in two days,” he tells me.

I come back when he said to. “I left a watch day before yesterday,” I tell him.

“I remember you,” the jeweler says. He reaches beneath the counter and extracts the soft-cloth bundle. “It’s this one, isn’t it?” He unwraps it slowly.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“All right.” He carefully smooths the cloth beneath it. “This is a very nice piece,” he adds, perhaps a bit loudly.

“Were you able to fix it?”

“Yes,” he says. “But the repair it needed was very . . . particular.” He looks at me, almost like he’s trying to tell me something.

My heart speeds up for no good reason that I can figure. “But you fixed it?”

He nods. “It’ll be twenty-two dollars.”

I pull out the cash and hand it to him. He quickly stuffs the money into his breast pocket. Strange that he doesn’t turn to the cash register. I get a sinking feeling in my belly. Like an elevator ride.

The jeweler slides the watch toward me by pushing the soft cloth across the counter. Then he looks to his right.

My gaze follows. Out of the shadows steps a cop.

I don’t know how I didn’t sense his presence before now. It fills the room, takes away all the breathable air.

The officer walks forward, cautiously approaching me. He says, “Come with me.”

I think about the gun at my waist. Close calls aside, I’ve never had to shoot anyone. Is this the moment? The cop has a gun, too. It’s holstered, but it’s there. And he’s bound to be a quick draw.

The shop door opens just then. Some random guy walks in. We all look at him. Me. The cop. The jeweler. The new customer pauses, like he knows he just walked into something. He turns around and walks out.

The split-second distraction sets me in motion. My mind flashes through the options.

Pull the gun? Get shot.

Make a run for it? Get shot.

Lie down for the law? Get fucked.

It’s no kind of decision. The kind of moment when all the horrors converge, and all you can do is stand there. I’m not even twenty-one yet, and my life is about to be over.

I raise my hands, exposing the gun tucked in my belt. The cop’s gaze drops straight to it, and he reaches out in one quick motion and scoops it away from me.

“Put your hands forward,” he says. I do it.

The cuffs come down cold on my wrists. My gaze falls on the short, dangling chain between them. Locked. Bound. Caught.

Massachusetts, 1946

It’s hard to believe it’s real. The bars and the stench of desperation, the dried sweat of the hundreds who’ve sat here before me. This unwelcome sobriety.

Lying here, I go over it and over it in my mind. There’s nothing else to do.

Thinking:
I should have shot the cop.

Thinking:
I wouldn’t have made it in time. I was cornered.

Thinking:
I should have shot him anyway. I should have died trying.

Death would be better than where I am now. Anything would be.

It was a stupid move, I can see now. Going back for the watch. Sometimes after you make your bed, you just gotta lie in it. I was trying to rewrite a song, replay a note. Something impossible.

What’s worse is they got my friends, too. Rounded up Shorty because he’s my roommate. Sophia, because of a note in my pocket with her name on it. Her sister from something after that.

I lie on the narrow cot, sober as I’ve been in what feels like a hundred years. I’m going absolutely mad with it. Crazy. Itching out of my skin.

It’s not just the arrest that’s haunting me. It’s every bad thing that’s ever happened, bubbling to the surface. No high to help me rise above it. Any of it.

Shorty and I are being charged the same, so they bring us into the courtroom together. We enter through the side doors, into a wood-paneled room — real institutional feeling, with a high seat for the judge, two long tables facing him, and several rows of chairs behind.

They walk us to the tables. Shorty looks a mess. I’ve never seen him this way, wild-eyed and flailing, like a cornered animal. Shorty’s always been so steady. He’s always been ahead of me, above. But we’re the same now. Our chains look very much the same.

Seeing how scared he looks makes me feel more scared. Maybe more scared than I’ve ever been. As scared as when I was staring down Archie — more so, because there’s no reefer high to buffer me from the fear.

They read out the charges: Carrying firearms. Larceny. Breaking and entering. Possession of stolen goods.

The lawyers take turns talking to the judge. Shorty and I sit quietly.

I’m shocked when they bring out the girls, not as defendants but as witnesses against us. My court-appointed lawyer says they’ll be facing charges, too, but what they say about us might help them get lighter sentences.

Sophia takes the stand. I try to catch her eye, but she won’t look at me. She sits up there, working her lacy handkerchief as if it’s prayer beads. A good Christian girl, who got caught up with some big, bad darkies. She pleads misunderstanding. Fat tears roll. The jury leans forward, fingers on their lips. Horrified at the very thought.

She breaks down crying, talking about how we had taken advantage of her and confused her. How I had tricked her into telling me what I needed to know to rob those houses.

Every word is like a knife to me. It’s like watching a motion picture, something you know is just made up, and yet you believe it. With every word, I feel the prison walls closing tighter around us.

“She’s lying,” I tell the lawyer. “She’s my girl. She’s my partner.”

“You had no business being with white women,” the lawyer answers. “You’ll do the ten years. Just count yourself lucky they aren’t claiming rape, or it’d be life.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I snap.

“Doesn’t matter.” The lawyer shrugs. “You were with them.”

Some kind of free lawyer. He’s not even really on our side. The whole court’s out to get us. No reason we should have to do ten years. I know enough guys who’ve gone up for burglary — the usual sentence is five, six years tops. Sometimes you even get out early.

I glance at Sophia’s husband, seated in the third row of the gallery, his steaming-hot glare pointed right at me.

I don’t need anyone to paint the picture for me. Shorty and I are going to rot in jail, and not just because of what we stole.

We’re Negroes from Roxbury. Sophia and her sister are white girls from the Hill. Oil and water. Fire and ice.

There might not be a rope, but it’s a lynching all the same.
I hear it in my ear, like a whisper. I try to brush it away with my hand, like a fly, but I’ve already heard it.

All this time, I’ve loved Sophia. Felt proud of her. I’ve wanted to squire her around. Wanted everyone to see. Now it all seems empty.

I thought Sophia loved me. But she chose her words carefully up there, never admitting that we had so much as slept together. She sold me out, sure enough. I’ve seen her cry in real life, and it doesn’t look anything like what she was doing in court. After all we’ve been through. All the times we found each other in the midst of the crazy city. All the times we fell into each other’s arms. Suddenly it means nothing. What made me think that Sophia was so much better than the other girls I’d known?