Thief (13 page)

As if he could read my thoughts and doubts and wanted to re-route them, Breville said, “Nice breasties.” As if he were a kid.

“I wish I could suck your nipples,” he then told me, quietly. And wasn’t such a kid.

I had that on my mind, I think, so I asked Breville to tell me what he was like as a kid.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything you want to tell me,” I said. “What did you do for fun?”

“Chased girls and raised hell. What all boys do. What were you like?”

“Oh, I was a good kid. Shy. All anyone had to do was look at me cross and I cried.”

“Tenderhearted,” Breville said.

“I think so. That’s what my mother tells me.”

“How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

“Fifteen,” I said. “When I was in the ninth grade.”

“What made you wait so long?”

“I didn’t think I did,” I said. “Besides, I was fooling around a lot before that. Why? How old were you?”

“When I lost my virginity? Eight.”

“Eight years old?”

“I couldn’t come, but that was the first time I had sex. With an older girl. My cousin, as a matter of fact. She started it.”

I didn’t know what to say to that— it shocked me and I didn’t know how to hide it. But Breville seemed to want to go on talking,
so I tried to pretend it was a regular conversation.

“You could have an erection when you were eight?”

“That’s how it got done,” Breville said. “I think I was about a year older when I came the first time.”

“That seems way too young.”

“When I used to get mad at my mom, I’d just run away. Usually I’d stay away until I got laid.”

“How old were you then?”

“Ten, eleven. Then, when I was about fourteen, this older lady took a shine to me. She was in her twenties or thirties. I’d
stay with her long enough to get what I wanted, then I’d go through her
purse when she was in the bathroom. Steal her money or her dope. What ever I could find.”

“What did she do?”

“Ahh, she got pissed off at me, of course,” Breville said. He sat up as he said that, and when he leaned back in his chair
again, he slouched down and stretched his legs on either side of mine.

“She’d try to kick me in the ass,” he said, laughing. “But I was younger and could run faster.”

After he told me that, we sat there not talking. I tried to think about what Breville had just told me, but I could barely
take in the information. At eight I was in third grade and liked playing with kittens and my doll house. What ever precociousness
I displayed by rummaging around through my father’s girlie magazines was nothing compared to Breville’s early sexual experiences,
and they threw a new light on his crime. When he raped that woman in South Minneapolis at nineteen, he did it after being
molested at eight by his twelve-year-old cousin, and after ten or eleven years of fucking. And I finally understood the thing
he’d told me the first day I came to see him: the love of his mother or grandfather could not save him from the years of underage
drinking, abuse, petty thievery, and sexual escapades. By the time he was nineteen, he’d been running wild for a lifetime.

“You’ll have to wear a short skirt one day,” Breville told me then, jarring me out of my thoughts.

When I looked across the aisle at him, slouched down in his chair, I could see something in his eyes that was soft and glittering
at the same time.

“I don’t think I have a short skirt.”

“Maybe you should buy one,” he said. “No, that’s all right. You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter.”

He looked away from me then, but when he looked back, he shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’m just happy you come see me. That you sit across from me and talk to me.”

“Maybe I could unbutton a few more buttons on one of the dresses I have.”

“Do you think you could?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll see.”

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. But then I followed his eyes down to his jeans, and I finally understood
what he was telling me.

“It’s just from talking to you, Suzanne. Do you see now?”

“I understand.”

For the rest of the visit, I don’t know what we talked about. Nothing, really. I just sat across the aisle from Breville,
between his legs, I let him sit there with his hard cock, talking to me, and when we stood inside the taped-off square, I
let him push his cock against my belly for the moment we were allowed in front of the guards.

“Sweet Suzanne,” he said into my hair.

I didn’t have time to say anything back, but when I left the prison that day, I carried all of that— on my skin and in my
hair. In me.

AFTER I INTRODUCED MYSELF
to Jacqui Breville on the phone, she sounded surprised for only a second.

“Alpha has told me what a good friend you’ve been” she said. “I’ve heard some nice things about you.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

We chatted for a moment about the weather in Rapid City, South Dakota, which was where she was living, and I told her I’d
been through Kadoka a few times.

“Then you understand,” she said. “All the kids cleared out of there as soon as they could. So did I.”

“Small-town life isn’t for everyone,” I said. “I know it wasn’t for me.”

We chatted awhile longer— about her youngest daughter, about where my family lived, about what I did for a living and how
nice it was to have summers off — and it was all so pleasant and light-hearted, I could have been talking to anyone, absolutely
anyone, except the mother of a convicted rapist in Stillwater state prison. But why would it have been otherwise? To Jacqui
Breville, I was a complete stranger. Even if she did want to fulfill her son’s request
to be friendly to me, there was no reason to discuss anything more pressing than the weather.

We kept up the patter a little longer, and then I said, “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to introduce myself
and say hello.”

“I’m glad you did,” she said. “It was nice to talk with you.”

“It was good to talk with you, too,” I said.

We were so polite it was almost funny. It wasn’t until I hung up that I thought about the phone call from her perspective.
Her in-carcerated son, whom she’d been powerless over since he was eight or nine, asked her to talk with a woman who’d been
visiting him at prison. And I could only imagine what Breville told her about me. That we were writing to each other, that
I came to visit every week, that I was lonely— I had no idea. But I figured Jacqui had seen it come and go, and if I were
in her shoes, the question I would have wanted to ask would have been,
What do you want with my son?

Or maybe Breville told her my story and tried to get her to understand we were somehow good for each other. And maybe he told
her he was falling in love with me. Or that I was falling in love with him. I believe he could have told her any number of
things— and not a single one of them would have made sense to her, or answered the question of what I wanted from her son,
which was a question not even I could answer.

But a couple of things were clear to me from my short conversation. Breville’s mother not only loved him, she actively supported
him, at least as much as she could from another state and nine hours away. If she didn’t, she never would have taken the time
to have the nebulously sweet conversation with me that she’d had. And I thought that meant the world— not to me, but to Breville.
His mother loved and supported him now during his incarceration, just as she had loved and supported him when he’d been a
hell-raising teenager. He had told me that, and I had heard in Jacqui Breville’s
voice that it was true. Because in spite of how noncommittal her conversation had been with me, it had, in fact, been an act
of kindness on her part to sound so pleasant and friendly to me. What ever else had been going on in her day— and I had reason
to believe from Breville that his mother did not have the easiest life— she had done what she could to assist her son in his
new friendship or courtship or craziness with me.

When I realized that, it humbled me. It humbled me that on a day when I had been upset and had driven to Stillwater to add
my particular sadness to Breville’s plate, he had tried to listen carefully and caringly to me, and when he still felt he
had not done enough for me, to help me through what ever pain I was going through, he had offered up the one thing he had
to offer, which was the telephone number of his mother an entire state away. He had given me what he could think to give me
on short notice, and sometime in the days after my visit and before today’s phone call, he had called his mother and told
her something— that I was going through a hard time, that I could use a friend, that he cared for me— and he had asked her
to talk to me. And she had. Perhaps all the reserve I’d heard in her voice had been a response to the reserve she’d heard
in my voice. I didn’t know.

What I did know for certain was that I felt some of the same self-consciousness I’d felt in the visiting room the day Breville
had sung to me. He’d offered up that goofy version of “Goodnight, Irene,” and the thing was so corny I almost couldn’t stand
to listen to it. But there he’d sat in the visiting room among his fellow convicts, singing to me.

It was almost more than I could bear.

THE NEXT NIGHT
I was lying in bed with Breville’s latest letter fanned out on the pillows in front of me. I’d gone for a swim for a long
time, and I felt cool in my skin and the light cotton nightgown I wore. Breville’s letter was from days ago, and I’d seen
him since I’d received it, but I still liked to have his pages in front of me. I wanted to make sure I wrote about what ever
he asked me about, and it helped me connect with him as I wrote if I saw his words in front of me.

This night I was trying to describe what my orgasms were like, but I doubted if what I wanted to say would sound compelling
to anyone but me. I figured Breville would want to hear that a good fuck made me come, but it wasn’t the truth of my life,
and it wasn’t what I wanted to write.

“The most intense orgasms I have are often the ones I have alone,” I wrote instead. “Not that I don’t come with men— I do,
especially when they go down on me, and especially when they slip a finger inside as they eat me. But for sheer intensity,
the orgasms I have when I masturbate with my vibrator win out. I have one orgasm, and if I wait a couple minutes— just long
enough for the
strongest contractions to subside, but before I come down from the mountain, so to speak— then I can have another orgasm and
an-other. It is easy to come again and again, and there is no worrying about a partner, or worrying about being selfish. Which
is not to say that I prefer being alone— I prefer being with a man and kissing and sharing all the closeness and passion.
But I know my body, and I know how to come like that, over and over.”

I was thinking what I could possibly write next when I heard someone pull into the driveway. It wasn’t a driveway, really—
just a patch of grass worn thin beside the cabin— but I heard the sound of the motor and saw the headlights shining. At first
I thought it was someone who’d gotten lost and needed a place to turn around, but the engine shut off and the lights went
out, and in the moonlight I could see the truck from the side window.

After the second knock, I opened the door of the cabin, but I kept the screen door latched.

“Can I come in?” the cowboy said.

I didn’t answer but stood there in the doorway, watching him, watching the night air around him. I didn’t turn on the light
out-side or in the kitchen. I didn’t want him to see me, and I didn’t want to see him. I just wanted to hear what he had to
say.

“I would have been here earlier,” he said. “But I forgot the way to your place. You’re a hard person to find.”

“You found me.”

“Can I come in?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You act like you don’t know me,” the cowboy said.

“I don’t.”

“But I know you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I said. “I thought you were in Wyoming.”

“I was. I came back to see you.”

“Why not tell the truth?” I said. “Did your friends get tired of you? Throw you out?”

“I told you. I went back. Look at my eyes. I’ve been driving since yesterday. I need a fucking shower. I’ve driven up and
down this road four or five times, trying to find this goddamn place.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be found.”

“Jesus Christ, Suzanne.”

“Well, at least you remember my name,” I said. But I unhooked the screen door and let the cowboy step into the kitchen. And
then I put on the light. I wanted to see exactly who was standing in front of me.

He was off crutches but still in a leg brace. Still limping. He stood, shaking his head. I just kept on looking at him.

“Here’s what I think. I think you came down here to night from Blackduck,” I said. “I think your friends finally got sick
of you and threw you out.”

“You’re pretty smart,” he said. “But you have it all wrong.”

“I’m smart enough,” I said. “What part did I get wrong?”

“All of it.”

“Okay, I don’t know where you’re living. All I know is the bars are closed now, and that’s why you decided to come out here.”

The cowboy half-stepped toward me then. And the next thing he did was slow, deliberate. I saw his arm moving, but it happened
so gradually I didn’t feel I had to move away, because I knew I could at any time. The cowboy reached toward me and slipped
a couple fingers between my legs, pushing the cotton of my night-gown back against my vulva. And he kept his fingers there.
Holding me.

“Is this bar closed?” he said. “Can I still get a drink?”

His hand felt hard, like a branch. Now that he was close, I could smell him. I didn’t smell barroom so much as I smelled him:
sweat,
dirty shirt, that pelt of jet hair. He slipped his fingers back a little farther, making the cotton tight. His thumb was at
the front of me.