Thieves I've Known (2 page)

“Some woman playing checkers by herself.”

“A pair of men, watching baseball, naked.”

“That's good,” said Nate. “I like that one.” He waited for the next house, tried to think up something to top it. “Somebody hiding a body.”

“A human body?”

“Yes, a human body.”

“You've done that one before.”

“All right,” he said. “Somebody chopping one up, then. Feet first.”

“Blech,” said Merrill. They rounded a corner and went up another street. She waited as they walked. It was important not to get too far ahead.

“Some child escaping a bath,” she said. “But he's not going to be able to escape it forever.”

Nate looked at the next house. It was small, and there were no lights on. The windows were all shut, but the front door was open.

“There's some parent waiting up there,” he said. “Trying to keep their kid alive.”

They listened to the dogs as Merrill considered. Above them, the moths and the night bugs hovered around the streetlamps. The next
house was all lit up, and they could see people inside, about a half dozen, more in other rooms.

“They're all waiting for some woman to make them a sandwich,” said Merrill.

They watched the people as they passed the house. It seemed as if there might be some somber occasion happening inside.

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Different kinds,” she said. “There's not enough turkey to go around, so she's using some leftover breakfast sausage. She's cutting it up into thin slices. There's also an avocado, and there's a visitor to the house who's never had an avocado. He likes it. He tries to grow avocados when he gets back home, but he's not successful. He takes it as a defect in his character.”

“He sounds like a loser,” says Nate.

Merrill shrugs. “I like him,” she says.

“Why is it the woman making the sandwiches?” says Nate. “Why can't the men make their own sandwiches?”

Merrill almost crosses her arms. But she keeps them at her sides. She rolls her eyes. “We're three houses behind.”

Nate stops. He closes his eyes. He stands military straight. He's got bad posture and is overaccounting for it. He looks like someone about to do a backflip. “In the first house there are three people watching television. It's a show about making little chairs. Little-kid chairs. The daughter, a teenager, thinks, that's what I'd like to do when I grow up, make little-kid chairs. The other two people don't take her very seriously. But she's serious. She meets a carpenter. She meets a lot of carpenters. They teach her what they know. She's not very good at first, but she gets better as she goes along. She starts making these little-kid chairs. She puts an ad in the newspaper. She'll make your kid a little chair, and she'll even paint the kid's name on the chair. But when parents arrive, there's something about the chairs that they don't like. There's something, to their surprise, a little creepy about the chairs. Something says to them,
some voice, it says, don't put your kid's name on any of these chairs. The voice seems to indicate that something really bad will happen if they do.”

Merrill breathes in deep. “You are so weird,” she says.

“I'm not done,” Nate says. His eyes are still closed. “So she's stuck with all these creepy little chairs in her house. Even she thinks they're creepy. Her boyfriend, he has a hairy back, and one day he'll be her husband. He likes the chairs, and he likes her. But she wants to be done with those chairs. She takes them out to the curb one day to get rid of them all.”

Merrill interjects. “But even the garbage men don't like the chairs.”

“Absolutely,” says Nate. “Those garbage men are scared too. They want to leave the chairs there. But they pick them up and crush them in the compactor. They smash them until those chairs can't hurt anybody anymore.”

“That's a great story,” says Merrill.

“I'm not done yet,” says Nate.

“We're going to be here all night.”

“I know for a fact you have nothing better to do.”

“Don't be so sure, but go on.”

Nate opens his eyes. “So, she gives up chair-making. She makes hats. It's a lot less work and less creepy too. She eventually starts her own business, through mail order. It's called Tippy's Hats. Though that's not her name. Tippy. It's just what she calls the business. It's a hit.”

Merrill waits. She watches him.

Nate shrugs. “That's all,” he says.

She sometimes thinks her brother is crazy, and this greatly endears him to her. She knows that she's crazy. He's her only true friend in the world.

“There's a man who owns four birds in the next house,” she says. “All day long he talks to his birds, hoping they'll talk back to him. But they're not talking birds. They're finches and canaries. They never say a word. He lives a life of great disappointment.”

Nate nods at the next house. “The woman there is in love with the bird man. She thinks it's great, how he talks to his birds. But he hardly notices her, even though she brings him tomatoes. Most weeks of every summer, she brings him a half-dozen tomatoes. To him, though, she's just the tomato lady.”

They walk on.

“This is suddenly depressing,” says Merrill.

“It's your turn,” says Nate. “Lift us up.”

She thinks about that. She hops over the lid of a garbage can.

“The husband of an astronaut lives there,” she says. “His wife is in outer space, but there's a problem with the spaceship. We're all worried about her. The Earth is. We're all worried about her and five others in the spaceship. There's some door in the spaceship that won't close, and they can't come back to Earth if that door won't close. No one wants to say it, but they're going to run out of oxygen.

“The husband,” Merrill continues, “he has a lover. It's a man. It's a man he knew when they were both in high school, and in the last year they've reconnected. The husband is surprised about all this, but when he's with his lover he's not surprised at all. On the fourth day of the crisis in space, he understands a clear truth: his wife is going to die by the end of the week. She's dying right now as he's thinking this. He's overcome with guilt. He loves her very much. And, at the same time, and he's not proud of this, he's happy. Because now he can be who he is. In fact, he already is who he is.”

Merrill looks over at her brother. He has stepped off the curb and is walking beside her now. She can tell by the way that he moves that this is the last story of the night.

“Go ahead,” Nate says. “I want to hear the finish.”

Merrill keeps walking but steps down off the curb too. “The next evening, the door closes. The door in outer space closes. One of the astronauts had a good idea. All five of them now, they're going to make it back just fine. The husband, he lies in bed with his lover. The two people that he loves most in the world are alive. This makes him feel alive. He feels
like his heart is going to jump out of his chest and burn the house to the ground. Bad times are ahead, but he's happy for the first time in his life. When his lover starts to snore, it doesn't bother the husband as much as it used to. He doesn't notice the noise so much. He notices his lover's breath moving in and out.”

Nate kicks a soda can. He puts his hands back in his pockets. Merrill has worked on that story all week. She has tried to get it just right. Having told it now, she feels like the second half started to fall apart. She should've left out the snoring part. She looks at her watch. It's almost midnight.

Nate looks ahead. There are a few more houses, though their father's trailer is still a mile past this neighborhood. Nate spits. This is a habit he has taken up recently. It annoys Merrill to no end. She suddenly shivers. It's cold out. The stories—especially the creepy chair story for some reason—had kept her warm. She feels as if a thin ghost has passed very quickly and uncomfortably through her. When she remembers this walk, years later, she'll remember Nate as the one with the shivers.

“Do you think they're watching us?” she says. “Who?”

She points up at the houses. “The people in there.”

Nate shrugs. “Why would they bother?”

“It might be interesting for them.” Merrill considers the light in the windows. “We seem as if we're just outside, but we're actually far, far away.”

Shelby woke before sunrise, dressed in her warmest clothes in the dark. In the kitchen, she packed her book bag with apples and bread, some peanut butter. She added a map of Seattle, a carton of cigarettes she'd hidden at the top of a cabinet, and then brewed some coffee on the stove. She walked barefoot in the trailer so as not to wake her sister and the boyfriend. It was still dark outside by the time she poured the coffee into her thermos, and out through the window she could see the dull yellow glow of a streetlamp at the edge of the trailer park. Rain fell in the lamp glow, and she could hear the drops clicking against the top of the trailer. She wished she were back in bed, but she'd made a promise the week before, to a boy that she was in love with, although she was not now sure if she was still in love. Lots of things—her love for the boy, her grades in school, her future, or what she hoped to be her future—were in doubt. Wisps of fog disappeared in the rain. Before leaving, and because it was her nature, she put away the beer cans and the pizza boxes from the night before, emptied the ashtrays, wiped down the counters. She slipped into her boots, pulled her woolen cap over her ears, and closed the door, quietly, on her way out.

In the puddles of mud and slush outside she caught a blurred, distant reflection of her own gaze, a reflection that she liked: dark and small, without many features, a work in progress it seemed. She stepped around the puddles when she could, leaning over them, kicking a soda bottle across the park, listening to the rattle across rocks and broken glass. Outside Phillip's trailer, she could see a light on in the kitchen. A cat, wet and muddy, eyed her from under a small porch as she made her way toward the light.

She knocked, listened to a series of loud thumps from inside the trailer, entered when no one came to the door. Inside, Phillip knelt in a corner holding a shoe above his head. A dozen or so brown splotches—roaches—were scattered on the floor around him. The kitchen smelled of mold and baked chicken.

Phillip turned as she slid a chair out from the table and sat down. His eyes were large, a little irregular, and his bony elbows and wrists seemed like knots on a straight line. He was not a good-looking boy, but Shelby—who was similarly thin, and who'd had painful acne since she was twelve—could find the beautiful parts of him when she put her mind to it. His hair, which was long and smelled of smoke and lemon soap, his lips, his neck and fingers. She liked all of these things, and liked him. Believed him to be good, if not good-looking. She felt a turn in her breathing as she sat watching his large eyes. The boy reached into his pocket, took out a roll of dollar bills, tossed them to her.

“How much?” she said.

“Enough to get us there.”

Under the streetlamp, they sat on an overturned apple crate, watched the first blue-pink rays of the sun appear from across the water. The Olympic Mountains were snow-capped and gray. A half-dozen men and one woman sat on similar crates, on seats torn from old cars. One old man drank from a coffee mug, the steam fogging the man's glasses each time he sipped. Nothing was said. They all watched the road that led from the trailer park, and those that had them shielded themselves from the rain with umbrellas. Others wore ponchos. Phillip and Shelby sat under a plastic trash bag cut lengthwise down the sides. Phillip slipped a square sheet of white paper from his pocket, unfolded it on his knee. He creased new lines as he refolded it in triangles from each corner, bent those folds inside out and down until he'd made what looked like a fisherman's rain cap. The man with the coffee mug watched him. Phillip folded two opposite corners together, and then the remaining corners up, folded what was left in half, pressed his finger against the angles to keep the creases. He set the paper right side up and placed it on Shelby's knee.

“What's that?” said the old man.

“It's a sailboat,” said Shelby.

The man squinted and looked doubtful. The woman next to him stamped her boots in the mud, for warmth it seemed, still looking down the road. Behind her, in the distance, the pine trees swayed with the wind.

Shelby placed the sailboat at the edge of one of the puddles, flicked it lightly with her finger. The paper turned back at the motion, the bow pointing up at the sky, but the vessel floated in the red water.

“Nice trick,” said the man. He pulled his poncho closer around his shoulders. “Maybe you can make a roof next.”

Shelby picked up the sailboat, shook out the water as best she could. She unfolded the sail first, watched Phillip out of the corner of her eye as he shook his head. He'd taught her the next folds the week before. She liked that about him: he knew things, even if it was only paper folding and the like. He'd made a compass from a needle and magnet, Halloween masks from feathers, glue, and cardboard. He knew how to draw well and seemed content to teach her what she could learn. She doubled the paper back, refolded the sail, and turned the bow of the boat inside itself. She took out a pen. In the center of the fold she drew a dot within a circle, added some waved lines and shading at the bird's neck.

She looked over at the man.

“A dinosaur?” he said.

“A rooster.”

“Hmm.”

In the distance, the headlights of a pickup truck appeared through the fog. The woman stood up from the crate and shook out her umbrella, but the men stayed seated, looked out through the rain. Phillip unfolded the rooster, set the paper flat on his knee again, tore slits along some of the folds. They listened to a dog bark in the distance.