Thieves I've Known (9 page)

I haven't started the count yet, he says. Not even in the corner yet. You wait till five before you get up. Think about where you are, and think about what put you there. Three. You know I'll push hard now. I'm going to see what you've got left. Five.

Helen stands, punches her gloves together, hops on her toes. He is a head taller than her, wider in the chest and waist, with longer arms and better technique. Dark hair covers his chest and shoulders. He moves in and she sidesteps, takes another jab to the head but slips in one of
her own. He chooses not to cover, tries a jab and misses. She has already turned, gives him a hard shot to the ribs and then a harder one still with the other arm. Before he can wrap her up, she steps away, covers her head as she was taught, swings to the center of the ring. She hears the slap of her punches only now, seconds after they landed. Because she holds her ground, he tries a cross and it glances off the top of her skull, but he pays with two blows to his ribs, the other side this time. He steps away and circles the ring, keeps a distance from her. He notes that she has been practicing.

I'm going to knock you down now, he says, and again, he does. A flurry of hooks and crosses, most of them missing. She plants a strong jab in his gut, hears nothing, moves back, which was the mistake: he connects to the side of her head and then with the right square to the nose, her headgear saving the bone from cracking. It's only after she falls, after her feet fly from the canvas, her back slapping flat against the mat, that she hears his grunt of surprise. Not now, but from seconds before, the jab to the gut. She looks at the fluorescent lights again. She tastes the blood in her mouthpiece as he retires to the corner.

I haven't started yet, he says. The words come out without vowels. Helen shakes her head, sits up but does not rise. Two, he says. You've got me thinking now. Got me thinking this'll go an extra round. I'm not going to push it hard this time, or maybe I will. But if I'm smart I won't. Five. Stay down. I'm thinking I might not bring all I got here. So what are you going to do?

Keep you moving, she says. I'm going to move around.

Get up now, he says. And make sure you do that.

On the train, Omar, twelve, finds it hard to understand the mumbled voice of the conductor who announces the station stops. He likes to talk to his mother on the train, though she doesn't ride with him; it keeps people away. He thinks about his brother and the belt. A woman with a baby sits across from him, and a man dressed in two heavy coats. Give me your belt, his brother had said to him through the broken glass of the
warehouse window. What do you want my belt for? Just give it here. So, Omar had handed it over and watched as his brother wrapped it around his arm. The boy took out a needle from his sock.

His brother often talked as he was shooting up. Mama's too fat, his brother had said. She eats too much.

When he was younger, when he'd handed the belt over, Omar hoped he'd always live with his mother, thought about no matter how old he became, the three of them would still live in the same house. I don't want no skinny-bones mama, he'd said. She isn't a girl. I don't want to sit on the lap of no skinny-bones girl.

He takes the steps from the subway station two at a time, watches his frost breath as he comes above ground. The abandoned car in the lot near the station has a cracked windshield with blood and a few strands of hair, and in a lot not unlike this one, a month before, two kids were trapped in an abandoned refrigerator, suffocated. Omar likes the tugboats in the harbor, he can see their red running lights from the top floor of his apartment building, but to get there—to the top floor—he has to pass the steps on the sixteenth, the hallway with no lightbulbs, where, often enough, he can hear a man crying. But Omar has never seen this man, thinks he might be an old man, by the sound of the voice, takes the steps one at a time when he passes.

If he sits on the rooftop—his legs hanging over the side—at sunset, Omar can see the rats emerge from the riverbank. They look like an army of insects from where he sits. They cross the lot where the car with the cracked windshield sits, they pass over the rolls of carpets, the broken chairs and the trash and the abandoned tires.

It's the last day of the month, this day, and Omar passes his own apartment building, passes the cemetery with the broken headstones—no one has been buried there for years—passes the piles of trash in the graveyard, the oil drum filled with wood and fire, passes, for all he knows, the skeleton his friend Toomey had seen, not rising from the ground, but laid in a corner, never buried, the bones as gray as the sky. Omar keeps his eyes on the tallest building on the street, where, on the fifth floor, he hopes to find his mother. A rent party.

He thinks about the baby on the train. Its eyes closed, wrapped in a green sweater, its mother's—sister's?—enfolding arms swaying with the rhythm of the railcar. More than wanting to live with his own mother, and long before even stepping on that train, before stepping on countless trains, Omar had wanted a baby boy of his own. But only you know that.

Winston, thirteen, takes the handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the spittle from his grandfather's chin. The old man turns the key in the ignition of the truck. It's older than Winston, abandoned in their backyard for almost as long as the boy can remember. The boy had shoveled leaves and twigs—a bird's nest?—from the seats before they'd entered. The windshield is cracked in the corner—no hair or blood, simply a crack, a rock left on a road years before. Unlike his grandfather, who is gaunt, mostly bones, skeletal, Winston is a big boy, bigger than most in his school. Fat. Fat fingers, fat toes. He's only eleven but thinks as he gains age he might gain the person inside himself whom he wishes to be. The old man, his name is Winston too, coughs, and Winston wipes again with the handkerchief.

The truck is not going to turn over. The engine in the truck—the starter—is not going to turn over. Winston looks out the windshield and sees, in the distance, the sunflower fields bending with the wind. To the left he sees the lights—green and red—of the Ferris wheel of the traveling carnival. From this distance, a long distance away, it looks slow, but when he'd sat in one of the cars with his father, it had seemed fast, rising and falling above the lights of the spook house and the ticket merchants—and he hopes, if the starter turns over, that he and his grandfather might drive there. Might ride the Ferris wheel together. In his pocket he carries all the money he has to his name (seven dollars and change). But the starter won't turn. Winston, the grandson, knows little about trucks or cars, but thinks, as his grandfather turns the key, that something is being burned out. That the more the key turns, the more something is being lost.

He'd ridden the Ferris wheel only once. Had not budgeted—his father's word—correctly, and had left that seven dollars and change at
home. He'd blown most of his money on the spook house, which his father had refused to ride with him. He'd sat alone, that first time, in the front car, had screamed when the dragon had bent at the entrance, fire glowing in its belly, and had assumed (Winston) that he'd be scorched before he even got inside the house. The pirates had swiped their sabers above his head, a witch boiled the skulls of children in her cauldron, and the bony white hands of skeletons had barely reached him, clicking against the top of the rail car. The giants appeared after that. I want it to be quiet in here, the man in the car behind him had said, and it was only then that Winston could hear his own screams, had felt for a moment outside himself, had wondered, hearing that man's voice, what his classmates might think of him. I can't help it, he'd said, I'm scared. Had said that with the weight of the two dollars he'd paid for the ride. Two dollars, he felt, earned him the right to scream. More pirates had been next, and the goblins after that. Finally, the ghosts, white sheets, through which he could make out the people, and he did not feel so afraid. But he continued to scream, wanting his two dollars' worth, until the cars exited the house and he saw his father waiting near the ticket booth, arms crossed, the Ferris wheel turning in the black sky behind him.

Looks like you were scared, said his father.

No, Winston had said. I loved it.

The starter turns over. Winston looks behind him, through the glass of the rear window of the truck. A thick cloud of smoke—as big as a giant's fist—blows out into the air. Beyond, Winston can see an orange glow, not the sun, which was setting in the opposite direction, but something else, something almost as big, glowing and stretching toward the sky.

His grandfather says nothing, has said nothing for almost a week. He switches the gears into Drive, and the truck sets off across the yard, spitting a trail of white smoke and mud.

A boxer's defense is designed to prevent the jabs, hooks, and crosses of her opponent from reaching the vulnerable areas. It is also intended
to leave her in a position from which she might score with her own punches. A boxer avoids an opponent's blows by using correct techniques in blocking, parrying, ducking, and slipping.

Helen showers, dresses, ices down her left elbow where a bruise has already formed. She waits for her trainer at the ringside of the gym, watches two young men wrap each other up near the ropes. An older man separates them, gives them a silent count, steps away, and the shorter of the two men takes a shot to the head, swings wildly, and is hit again. Helen examines her cut lip in the reflection of the windows. She waits for her trainer for a half hour, watches the two men in the ring. When she gives up, she exits through the back door, walks through a cloud of cigarette smoke, the stares of the boxers, walks the long road home in the dark.

She unlocks the house quietly. Her mother is likely asleep. In the kitchen, Helen takes her brother, two years old, from his daybed, wakes him, wipes his nose with the sleeve of her shirt. She sets him on his feet, steadying him with her hands gripped beneath his arms.

Her father was a pilot when she was younger, had a prop plane that he flew out of Juneau, ferrying supplies to homesteaders, taking Helen with him on occasion. She'd sit at the window as he flew low over the inside waterway, watching for pods of orcas or the hump of gray whales against the white crests of the sea. On the brightest days, the green treetops stretched for as far as she could see, and her father, holding his hand up against the sun, blinded from the horizon, seemed to fly on instinct. When they reached the lighthouse on Hawkins Point, they turned landward, flying over the black rocks and the white dots of eagles' heads, sharp and clear in the branches of the tallest evergreens. Even then, Helen knew life would not last this way, sensed that she would always come down, knew that high expectations led to disappointment.

When she'd left him—been sent away—she sat on the bollard of the ferryboat, alone in the stern, her face wrapped in scarves, watching her breath disappear in the mist from the ship's wake. The ferryboat pitched
and rolled with the waves. Above the stern, a line of gulls stretched and dived at fish in the water.

Her baby brother neither smiles nor frowns, looks at her with great curiosity, moans for a moment, then is silent as she removes her hands, lets him stand on his own. The expression on his face changes, the first thought of doubt. His knees give way, and she catches him, leans forward and slips her hands against his ribs. On the ferryboat, she'd sat in the cabinhouse next to an old woman, had stored the woman's duffle bag in the rack above them where the woman could not reach, had stood on the armrest to pack it in. The woman had slipped her a piece of chocolate, and though Helen would have preferred to save it for later, to savor the thought of the candy waiting in her pocket, she ate it slowly, nibbling at the edges, letting the chocolate melt on her tongue. They'd played cards, she and the old woman, every afternoon on the three-day trip—gin rummy, crazy eights, and bird's cage—had eaten their soup on the starboard benches, had looked through the woman's binoculars at a sea otter, at the weekday fishermen pulling in their crab traps. She still wrote to Mrs. Lange, once each Christmas so far, and once in the summer, received letters back. Beneath the locks of gray hair, Helen had noticed the woman's ear, the top half missing, a stub on the skull, and the woman, noticing Helen's stare had said, A donkey bit that off. I got too close when I was a little girl. My father took that donkey out to the field and shot him after that.

Helen sets her brother straight again. Locks his knees into place. He continues to watch her, as if her hands, her arms, were connected to his own body. When she lets go, he watches the hands move away, his eyes begin to water. He takes a step toward her as she pulls away, keeps his feet. He wants those hands back. Takes another step, keeps his feet again, loses his balance, straightens himself, has a look of surprise for a moment, and in that moment loses his balance again. He falls back before she can snatch him up. He moves faster in that fall, it seems, than her trainer has ever moved, and before the child fully realizes
he has fallen, she has him in her arms, pushes his head against her neck, begins a song that he recognizes. His fall is forgotten, if it ever happened at all.

What is it out there that points the right way? Omar feels this, although he doesn't think it, not exactly, as he makes his way through the snow-flakes mixed with rain, his feet slipping against the sidewalk. His thoughts are on his mother. When he opens the door to the tallest apartment building, the air is only slightly warmer, and a sourly unpleasant odor drifts from the hallway. He takes the steps one at a time, knows better than to trust the railing, passes a man at the top of the stairway who mutters, Works, man, works, takes the rest of the steps, moves faster, up to the fifth floor. He passes the people, the bottles in the hallway, finds the apartment and then the bedroom.

His mother is a small circle in the center of the bed. She is alone, and for that Omar is grateful. She is no longer the fat woman that his brother had spoken of, taking the belt through the broken window. She is skin and bones. He takes a cloth from his pocket, has brought it for this very purpose, runs cold water over it in the bathroom. Returns and wipes his mother's face. Touches the sores on her lips, wipes the blood away. She stirs, opens her eyes, closes them again. A dead rat lies in the corner of the room. You're good to come get me, she says, mumbles the words to the point that he can barely make them out, but he's heard them before. Soon she'll try to convince him this is as good a place to sleep as any, will ask him to slip up next to her. Let's go Mama, he says. In the ten minutes you want to sit here, we can be home.