Charming Grace (9 page)

Instead, Armand and I perfected the art of strolling uptown and filching small goods from the finer stores. Watches were our specialty. Jeremiah sold the watches and paid us twenty cents on the dollar. The income kept us in jeans and pizza. Plus we did chores and errands for the French Quarter merchants, and we got a lot of free meals from the bars and restaurants. Thanks to Armand’s charm and my polite manners, it wasn’t uncommon to find us gobbling leftover roast shrimp in the famous kitchens at Brennan’s or steaming bowls of gumbo behind Three Sisters.

But every sin has a spiritual price tag sooner or later, and even as kids we paid retail. Twice Armand got caught stealing, but talked his way out of it; I got caught once, and didn’t have the gift of gab.

“Let’s have a talk about Jesus, you little pilferin’ shit,” the big cop drawled. He dragged me down an alley and proceeded to slap me upside the head so hard I bounced off a concrete wall and chipped a tooth. Until then I’d sort of harbored a wild hope that some nice Papa Cop would whisk us home to his kindly wife, like we were abandoned puppies who deserved a good place to live. That wasn’t to be.

I thought I’d die from loneliness when a judge sent me off to a juvenile lock-up for three months of self-esteem counseling. Armand showed up at the gates twice a week trying to convince me to make a break for it. Underneath all the bullshit, my bro was scared of being alone in the world. So was I, but I went through phases where I was determined to be a good citizen. “I’ll just stick it out here,” I told him. “If I leave it’d make my self-esteem counselor feel bad about himself.”

Thanks to crazy-sweet Madame Taber and the profit-minded Jeremiah we had fake papers saying she’d adopted us, so the cops sent me back to them after I was rehabilitated. We always had a home over the
Palm It and Pawn It
, as we called the store, as long as we delivered the goods.

Armand graduated to stealing cars, and our income improved. He was fast as magic. One second a tourist’s rented sedan would be sitting on the curb, safe as a crawdad in a mud pie. The next it would be heading out of the city with Armand at the wheel. Pretty soon I graduated to cars, too, and except for that one toe-shooting incident early on, I was a natural. We delivered the heisted cars to Jeremiah’s pal, a scrawny little black guy named Titter, who operated a chop shop in a warehouse outside the city. The first time we scored a luxury model, I think it was a Caddie Seville, we celebrated by spending fifty bucks on matching alligator tattoos—mine on the right hand, Armand’s on the left. “Together we make one soul,” bro, he said. “Tough as a gator, and just as hard to kill.” I got teary, slapped him on the back, and nodded. He hugged me.

It wasn’t a good life, but we didn’t know that then. Neither one of us got so much as a day’s formal school time, and we knew more about drugs, guns, whores and gangs than any teenagers ought to know. Madame Taber was bat-brained crazy and Jeremiah stayed high and mean. He broke my nose in a cocaine funk one night. After I got up off the floor with blood all over my face I kicked him where the Jeremiah don’t shine. While he was bent over clutching his groin I put a fork to his throat. “You ever do that again, you’ll spout blood like a stuck pig,” I warned.

Thank God he was too stoned to notice I’d picked up a
plastic
fork.

“Don’t you get too good at this life, bro,” Armand would say from time to time, like a ritual to protect me. “You goin’ to college some day. Become a re-spect-able citizen and an architect,
oui
?”

“You’re goin’ to college, too,
oui
.”

He would just laugh. By the time he turned eighteen Armand was six-two and as swank as any rock singer. He already looked like he belonged in casinos and women’s beds, not a classroom. At fourteen I was a tall, lanky cowboy without a horse, all shaggy dark hair and acne. I spent my time reading and sketching things to build. I had cheap notepads full of houses, barns, skyscrapers, space stations, moon castles, you name it. Inside my head I lived a whole different life from the streets and dark back roads.

By now I had enough size and attitude and sense to be one tough dude, though gang fights and hassles with cops and stretches in kiddie lock up weren’t my idea of fun. Armand and I covered each other’s backs, stayed away from hard booze and dope, smoked expensive cigarillos and flirted with the clean, pretty daughters of the best people—as long as those people were looking the other way. Armand liked fine clothes and pinkie rings. I was a jeans and good-book man. He managed to look like a class act even when we got sucked into human cockfights out at Titter’s place.

You know, funny thing, but car thieves aren’t real nice people. They like to swing a tire chain or a wrench at their competition. They got touchy over Titter’s pay scale and the fact that he favored me and Armand. We had a real knack for fine goods—Mercedes and late-model pick-ups and even an occasional Jaguar. That caused some jealousy. We learned to handle it. I got the scars as proof.

I was just fifteen when Jeremiah beat Madame Taber to death with a baseball bat. The cops caught him before the blood was dry on her tarot-card table. “Damn, she a psychic but she didn’t see it comin’,” Titter opined. Armand and I snuck into the shop that night, collected our things, and left. Armand pried a board off a wall and yanked out a steel box full of cash and jewelry. “Stupid-ass Jeremiah never knew I saw him hide this,” Armand said, his eyes gleaming. “Bro, there’s about fifty-thousand bucks in here.”

“Good. We’ll drop off a couple thousand at the church. Father Ruble’ll bury Madame Taber in style, then.”

Armand arched a dark brow at me, assessing my charity with mild disgust. “Bro, we could bury her in gold and get the Pope to kiss her coffin, but she’s still gonna be readin’ fortunes for the roasted-and-poked crowd in Hell.”

“Maybe so, but it’s what Mama would want us to do.”

That softened him. “Okay, bro,” he said gently. “You’re right.”

We bought fake IDs and spent the next year in Las Vegas. Armand gambled at backroom crapshoots and chased strippers who thought he was at least twenty-one. I got a job working construction at the big hotels, thanks to a mob connection of Titter’s. I was big for fifteen, had a driver’s license that said I was twenty, and could dump a cement bucket or swing a hammer as good as the next guy with big shoulders. I loved it. A fat-cat developer took a liking to me when he saw me reading a book on the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. I showed him some of my sketches and he said I had talent.

“Stay on with my crew, Boone, and my draftsman will teach you to draw.” I said yes faster than an alligator snaps up a sitting duck. On top of that, the head carpenter’s college-girl daughter started making moves on me. I was just puffed up enough to make a move back. At sixteen I lost my virginity to her in her frilly pink suburban Las Vegas bedroom. I had saved myself for a sorority girl. While she slept naked in bed I stood naked by her pink desk, looking enviously at her textbooks, notepads, and calculator.

I earned my high school GED at night school and hooked up with a college counseling crew at a local church. Armand was pleased. “This is my bro, the genius who’s getting ready for college,” Armand took to saying, and he meant it. He had plans for my tuition. I had plans for his life outside crime. I would design and build houses. Lots of them. And make a fortune. And set him up as my partner. And we’d marry good-hearted girls and buy a ranch in bayou country and fill it with kids, horses, cattle, and a pony, one that reminded me of Frenchie. And Mama would be proud. Our papa, wherever he was, could go to hell.

Only one problem. Armand dreamed bigger than I did, and had a gambler’s soul.

I came back to our rent-by-the-week motel kitchenette one afternoon to find Armand stuffing our belongings in duffle bags along with wads of cash. He grinned. “Had some good luck at the tables, bro. Now let’s blow this town before that luck turns bad.”

I groaned. He’d aced the wrong suckers in a high-stakes poker game. You don’t con guys with cocaine headaches and names that sound like deli cheeses in an Italian restaurant. I was so mad I refused to talk to him on the plane ride east. He kept chit chatting but I ignored him. Finally he sank back in his seat in a bad mood. “I do things my way. You do things your way.”

“We had a chance to live clean in Vegas. I liked my job. I had a girlfriend. One who doesn’t charge by the hour.”

“You think I don’t want you to have it good? I’m doing this for
you
.”

“
Bullshit
. You love bein’ a player.”

“Yeah, I’m a player, bro. That’s my talent. That’s how I’ve taken care of
your
sorry ass
and
mine since we were kids.”

A low blow. He turned his face away, sipped a beer, flirted with a flight attendant, and looked pitiful. I caved. “How much money’d you con out of those guidos?”

He smiled. “A hundred-thousand plus change.”

I stared at him with my mouth open. He smiled broader. Armand liked to make big announcements. He dreamed big, illegal dreams. My hooked-trout expression made him throw back his head and laugh. “Call it your college fund, bro.”

Yeah, he was my brother and I loved him.

We’d go to hell together.

“Do you understand what ‘self sabotage’ means?” that self-esteem counselor said to me when I was in lock-up, as a kid.

Being a wise-ass at the time, I answered, “Yeah, but my bro says it’ll clear up my acne.”

The counselor ignored my bad attitude and told me I was letting Armand drag me into trouble. That I was finding excuses to stick with Armand even if I knew he was bad for me. That he would go down hard some day and take me with him. To which I said, “Our daddy left us. Our mama died. No one else gave a damn about us. We take care of each other. He’s not gonna take me down. I’m gonna take him
up
.”

Big talk and bullshit. As I got older I pissed away my chance to go to college because of Armand. Deep down, I was scared to try hard enough. Scared that I couldn’t do it, couldn’t be a regular citizen, couldn’t be somebody. And scared that going off to study architecture would have left Armand alone with a lot of bad ideas and the wrong friends. Believe it or not, it was me who kept him out of the worst trouble.

“The only thing that scares me is something happenin’ to you,” he’d admit once in a blue moon, when just the right combination of scotch and pot took the edge off his cocky crap. “I’m not ever gonna let you get hurt, little bro.”

“And I’m not ever gonna let you down,” I’d answer. Just myself. Let
me
down.

By the time I turned twenty I had a whole list of excuses why I’d been rejected by all the big southern universities. I told myself it was because I hadn’t spent a day in any kind of school since I was eight years old; all I had for an academic record was a night-class GED with none of the side dressing colleges look for, like a varsity letter or president of the science club or even a Boy Scout badge,
holy merde
. My SAT scores were lousy, and the Why-I-Want-To-Attend-This-Fine-Institution essay I sent with my applications probably made me look about as smart as a swamp rat. I wrote like I talked.

Education, she’s a dream of mine
.

A damned fine sentence in my opinion, but not to the college admission boards.

“Boonie, hon,” a girlfriend told me, “what do you need college for? Be like your brother. Live high on the hog with a handsome smile.”

“I’m not handsome.”

“Boonie, hon,” she cooed (Back then I had a lot of girlfriends who cooed,) “Boonie, hon, that’s all right. You’re so good you make up for being smart.”

Damned by faint praise.

“Bro, no damned college
deserves
you.” Armand was mad on my account. He couldn’t steal me a college admission, and he couldn’t buy it off the back of a truck, and he couldn’t barter for it with a gambler or charm it out of a stripper. So he decided to do an end-run around college all together.

“Screw it, bro,” he announced. “I been researching this architecture thing. Architects don’t make shit. I mean, the famous ones do, you know, the big dogs who design big office buildings or museums or something, but most architects don’t pull down the big cash.”