One Night Out Stealing (3 page)

Jeep came over with two of the five jugs to Jube and Sonny. Hey, Jube! Plonked the jugs down, shook Jube’s hand, even though they’d been drinking with him last night. Same to Sonny. Puddit here, Sonny, and ask me how I am. So how are ya, Jeep? Oh, you know, Jeep bouncing on his toes moving his shoulders from side to side. You scored good, right? Oh, you know – What, a burg? Mighta been. Well, man, I’d keep it down even in here, the walls have ears, ya know? Jube getting close to Jeep, and anyway he had to cos of the professional hanger-ons milling around, three with his jugs he didn’t grab, patting his back, hanging loose till they got more than a sniff of his evident good fortune. Jeep ignoring Jube’s advice, blurting out with it, his good fortune. Did a big house in Remmers. Just finished. He patted his pocket. Cash, boys. Heaps of it. I’m made. And Sonny saw Jube’s eyes glass over with jealousy.

Jube’s hand went out. Puddit here, Jeep. And may I be the first to offer you my congratulations. And Sonny thinking this could be a ceremony, an award-giving ceremony for burglars. So he laughed, Hey, Jeep, ask Jube where your prize is then, hahaha. Though only Jeep, not Jube, laughed.

Bell went. Session in the Tavi was ended. So where we goin, Jeep? Jube with an arm around him. Till Jeep told him, Oh I got a woman lined up. She finishes work soon. Work? You got a woman who works? Yep. Highlife massage parlour. She makes heaps
herself
. We’re gonna paint the town – by ourselves. But here, here’s twenty from me for the road. He shrugged out of Jube’s embrace, patted Sonny’s cheek, slapped Jube’s back and nipped his
darty-type
body out the door before Jube could say, Cunt. Dirty rotten lucky cunt.

They bought some cans for home with the twenty windfall plus a few more added from Jube’s pocket, since Sonny was out, to get as many as they could. Back through the bar and everyone asking where was the party action. Party at your pad, Jube and Sonny?
Nope. Nope, not tonight, Jube a bit more mellow than usual, when normally he was on for a party anywhere anytime.

Out in the canyon echo of bus terminal, Jube’s cowboy boots clacking on the tarmac they crossed; bus-catchers all around, half ofem drunk, waiting for the seven thirties and seven forty-fives home to working-class shitholes. They’re us, eh Jube? Sonny with a little gesture at the waiters. Us? Whaddaya mean us? Us, like in they come from the same, like, background.
Do
they? Jube’s question echoing. A large Polynesian woman lifted her head to stare at Jube. Them are us? Yeah, you know – aw, hey, man, are you in a pissy mood? But Jube wasn’t answering for a bit; so he was pissed off at sumpin.

Jeep. Why fucking him? Eh? Why fucking Jeep? It’s always Jeep who lucks out on a job. Us, why do we get the houses don’t have much bread? You tell me what that lil jerk’s got I – we – ain’t got? Man, I was robbing houses when he was in his fucking nappies. And as for having a massage woman as his sheila for the night – Fuck! Jube near spewing on his jealousy. Magine what sorta tricks she’ll know in the sack, Sonny. Oh, I dunno. Ya mean, ya dunno? Dunno what? That she’ll know any more than – Course she’ll know more. That’s her job, ain’t it? Her job, Sonny, is servicing clients in the sack, ya got that? Yeah, I have, but that don’t mean she – Man, are you trying to wind me up? Nope. Just trying to express an op – Well, fuck your opinion. Jeep’s a dirty rotten lucky cunt and I hate him. Stabbing his free finger at Sonny, other arm taken up with carrying the carton of beer cans, Pricks like Jeep, they fall over and it’s on a fifty-buck note – Jeezuz. What’s his fucking secret? That’s what I’d like to know.

Their shoes rubber-padding on the tarmac as they crossed and went through a narrow street to where Jube’s car was parked. Buses rumbling in and out behind them. Stars and moon clouded over and it starting to spit. Sonny’s whistled tune broken off by Jube telling him to shut it, will ya. Lights out behind em of Tavistocks on just another Wednesday evening. And Jube with an idea that they might go on the cruise tomorrow, maybe the weekend, somewhere. A cruise, man? Where to? Where to, Sonny? How about the fucking moon? Ooo, we are in a pissy. Ooo, we are in a pissy, he says – 
Who’s
in a
pissy
?
Jube stopped to stare bitterly at Sonny as he fiddled in jeans pocket for the car keys. You’re in one. You’re in one, Jube repeating Sonny again. So cruise where, man? But Jube gone
off the idea as quickly as it’d come. Dunno where. Somewhere we can score good like that fucking dead-lucky Jeep. Hefting the carton over to the back seat, climbing his tall figure in; all long legs and lean muscle and sinew. Expelling on a long sigh as he started the engine, Life, man, it fucking sucks sometimes.

Outside some takeaway joint with a name – McTucky’s –
sounding
and looking so familiar lit up in red neon blinking teasingly, cos the name was right on the tips of both their tongues, they’d guessed and guessed earlier to no avail; just this tease of brand name, it seemed, like a bell that wouldn’t quite clang.

Main street in Jube’s rear-vision mirror, and over Sonny’s left shoulder, the more since he was half faced that way, with left leg bent up on the seat, which had cigarette holes burnt in it and picked larger over the years by all the different passengers who didn’t give two stuffs about adding to the ruin of upholstery, nothin better to do with their fidgety idle hands not used to work but couldn’t stay still neither. Hicktown. Place coulda been a cowboy town from a man his days as a kid at the movies. (When he had hope, eh Sonny? Yeah well, maybe. Maybe it was sumpin I was born with.) Railway line up the street a bit, a man could easily relive the sounds of train rattling over it from his father’s job that gave him his daily booze money. Sonny could see in his mind the covered wagons with their orange canvas tarpaulins spotted over with patches. Cruising, eh? This is cruising?

Jube not responding, just staring ahead at the road, where the railway line sliced across, that headed south. At black strip and white centre line and flanked by power poles strung out with droops of wire. Couldn’t even remember the name of the town on the sign when they came in from the west. Might’ve even read Hicksville, uh Jube? Yeah, maybe.

Jube lighting up, staring his gloom into the cloud of smoke. So Sonny not so sure if he should be mentioning it, but he did anyway: So where’s these Swedish hitchhickers you were sure we were gonna pick up, man? No answer. We drive, what, four, five hours and not a
hitchy to be seen, let alone the beautiful blondes you said. Well, I heard of plenty of guys who’ve picked up Swedes and they all said the same, that they were easy meats.

Oh yeah but they would, wouldn’t they? Who would? The people we know. They’re all lying ex-cons who don’t know the difference between fact and fantasy, and you know it. The hell I know it –
you
know it, or claim you know it. Trouble with you, Sonny, is you think your brain gives you some kinda, like, licence to sum up people. Cept you’re wrong. I know plenty of ex-cons who don’t talk the crap you say they do. I – Oh yeah? Name em, Jube. Name them? Yeah, name them. Go fuck yaself. What, you a cop all of a sudden? Name them he says. Yeah, name them he says, cos I know you can’t. Name
you
in a fucking minute.

Ooo, my-my-my. Sonny chuckling. Again at Jube telling him what would he’ve done anyway they had picked up a couple hot little Swedish numbers. You wouldn’t know what to do with it, Sonny. No? No. What’s an it? Your black lil cock, that’s an it. Who said it’s little? You don’t wanna comparison, do ya? Well, I … Thought ya might dry up on that one, Maori boy. Well, size ain’t everything. Who told you that? Oh, you know, different women. They’re not women, not in our world, they’re sheilas. Fucks. Cunts. That’s what they are. Women – they’re women to me, man. Yeah, they would be, wouldn’t they, Sonny, who thinks he’s a class up from the rest of us. Hey, I never said that. Ya don’t have to – it shows. Sonny shrugging. Eyes to the outside again. Sitting there and thinking, always thinking, a man can’t help it. (And fat lotta good it does me).

Life, eh Jube? What about fucking life? Like ya said the other night, it sucks sometimes, uh? You’re telling the story. Well, it beats sitting here saying nothin. You know, I had a thought – Well, I’ll be – Come on, Jube, I’m trying to be sociable. I was thinking about when you’re – a man is sentenced, you know? You’re asking
me
? No, only saying. Ya hear your sentence being spoken by the judge, ya know? in that accent they have, like they’re English, not New Zealanders. Like them snooty upper-class English ya see on the tv crime programmes. Sonny Mahia, it is very evident you have not yet learnt your lesson, as with you, Jube McCall – Hey, what’s your real name again anyrate? Colin, Colin, that’s right – Colin McCall; the both of you are professional burglars with long histories of offending, blah-blah-blah – Hey, Son, what’s your point, man?
Gimme a chance, Jube. I have: so what’s your point? I’m coming to it. Then come. But not over the seat if you don’t mind –
HAHAHAHA
! Oh well, least we got a laugh out of you, Sonny with a shaking of head.

But you know, Jube, you have that feeling of – of kinda like powerless – no, not powerless, it’s more like you and the judge are from different worlds. And he’s sentencing you – us – from his perspective. Yet the things we do are from ours, our way of seeing the world. What I’m saying is, maybe they should have judges who’re from your own backround, who unnerstan where you’re coming from? Oh yeah, sure, Sonny. And so they give you a smack on the wrist every time; yeah, that’d be neat. Unreal but neat, ya know?

And anyway, you’re taken to the cells where ya wait all day as it fills up with other dudes got jail sentences, so eventually the cell’s like the Tavi bar cept smaller and they don’t sell beer – hahahaha – but the same shit is going down, ya know? Jobs planned for soon as the lag ends, even before it starts, and this time you’re telling each other it’s a
cinch
, it can’t miss, and ya can’t possibly get caught. Yet ya do, don’t ya, Jube? We get caught. If not on the job, then after it; cos we couldn’t hold ourselves back, had to go out and splash, like Jeep last week, then next day he’s just another name in the paper you mightn’t a picked it wasn’t for remembering his real name was Richard Fleming because you were celled up with him for a bit back in ’88. Man arrested in hotel bar with several thousand cash on his person, believed to be – Several thousand? That what it said? Several
thousand
?
Yeah, several thousand. Oh
man,
Jube groaning. Why not us? Hey, let me finish my story. Fuck your story. Was getting depressing anyway. Okay okay, just a minute more. You’re in the van and the motor-mouths are still goin on about the jobs they got planned, and you – or me, I should say – me with the miseries, with that sentence, three years, ringing in my ear in that crystal-clear voice of the judge’s. World outside through the painted slits all normal and going about its everyday straight business – Jube, I sometimes wonder why we keep on like we do, you know?

What, that was your point? Yes. Well, we go get a
job,
ya think? Sonny shrugging, Maybe. Go get one yaself. Work’s for suckers, man. Work sucks. And so does this shit town suck. And the burger, now I think of it. And we are out of here, Sonny-too-much-
the-
thinking
-Mahia. We are out of here.

Engine rumbling into life. A promise. Of mighty horsepower to come. Of Jube about to hit the road again. The road out there, up front, but first behind em as Jube suddenly accelerates as he spins the wheel and does a one eighty turn and burns rubber in a long squeal, and his self-satisfied laugh is just a bit louder than that as they take off down main street.

Sonny can hear the judge of his earlier contemplation going through his ritual, his pompous-voiced ritual of expelling him and Colin McCall, here doing his childish car thing, from the society they were never a part of in the first place or they wouldn’t be before him getting turned out. Purged. Fucked off out of their law-abiding lives because you two are menaces, to society as well, inexplicably, yourselves; So says the judge. And are you ever going to learn, he asks, and you’d like to tell him, just once tell him: When that big, troubled something inside me unlearns, sir, that’s when and only when.

But you don’t, you never will, it’d break with the ceremony of you being given over to prison authorities for the specified time in years of the judge’s ten-minute deciding. Three years was the last pronouncement, and you had turned to Colin Edward McCall, here driving you down a deserted hicktown street trying to reach the ton before the main street runs out, and told him in that bravado voice, Only a three? Hell, I spected at least a five. Though it hurt. It hurt being hurled from the collective comfort, even when you were never a part of it; it was the thought. Just as the thoughts of now got ended by the scream of Jube braking, then the world turned topsy-turvy as he manoeuvred the car in a spin back the other way. Laughing, HAHAHAHAHA! in joy at his driving skills. What it did to him.

And a funny thing, even as they roared southward again up this still-vehicleless main street of Hicktown. Sonny heard in his mind the chirrup of a cricket. Outside on the ledge, the concrete windowsill ledge of his prison cell. (Remember that, Sonny?) Of just him, lying there awake, Jube in the bunk above snoring, flipping his troubled dreaming mind back and forth in musky, sperm-stained, prison-grey blankets; the cricket outside, Sonny’s hearing locked inside. Yet shared. He and the tiny spot of loud-noising life sharing the moment. And whatever the hell it meant in its brief moment of time and placement. Cell placement.

Over the railway line, hitting the road other side in a nose dive Sonny feared would break the front axle. Jube laughing at the
sensation. Countryside quickly coming, as the day died in front of them. Sonny catching a sign that read something DISABLED, had him think immediately of Buddy, poor Buddy Edwards, spine injured in a drunken car crash, wheelchaired for life. Imagining Buddy back behind them on the road, stuck dejectedly in his wheelchair in his limbless state, his impossible-to-imagine mind, watching the red eyes of Jube’s tail-lights disappearing into the fading day going to dark. Sped off into the evening, where the clouds were a last-light glow of wispy red, and the hills humped up like dead whales.

Buddy not even able to wave goodbye, even if he wanted to, from his misery and profoundly bitter jealousy of the able. (But what able, Buddy? Is this able?) Sonny at the countryside whipping by as just an impression of near-died day. Buddy back on the road, in Sonny, his mind, staring after the disappearing tail-lights on their unusual high plane because of the fats Jube had on back. Watching them, meant to be on freedom’s highway, cruisers, like Buddy was, the same highway that turned him from able to utterly unable. Man couldn’t even wipe away his tears.

Night folded around them, wrapped em up in a big blanket of car warmth and night-black. Could be their boyhoods, two boys under a layer of blankets peering up at the stars, at a big fat yellow moon and telling spooky things to each other. And laughing.

But this was no childhood memory reawakening; it was eight roaring cylinders passing out the exhaust, designed to sound like twenty. An ugly piece of metal shaping with two adult humans inside; howling tyres, gear-slamming engine changes, creaking, straining metal being wrapped around every curve and bend. And a bad rattle in the back somewhere. The night split apart by the wide beams of Jube’s big yellow-eyed monster scything through it.
Nothing
evoking childhood here.

Every bend and curve and sweep loomed up out of the
light-sliced
dark as though it offered some mortal challenge to this
half-crazed
honky, his sense of manhood when he was behind the wheel. Or maybe his sense of manhood full stop, Sonny wasn’t sure. Just that near all of Jube was vested here, in this hotted-up machine of his tinkering, fine-tuning between drinking and stoned spells. The straight sections he simply buttoned down the pedal to the floor. The challenges in when the straights ran out – Oh, I love corners. As he took the car to its utmost limits of a propelled weight getting
its unsleek length to go round a curve. And the gear-stick middle of them was Jube’s six-shooter, he could act it out as though he was the cowboy hero stood legs astride on dusty main street, twirling, spinning, doing fancy fast tricks with his shooter. God help them that they’d reach the stated destination – Jube’s out-of-blue
Wellington
, same place they’d gone cruising to a couple of months back. Where some thieving bastard had broken into Jube’s car and
removed
the sound system. The lot: radio-cassette player and four speakers. Near broke Jube’s heart. They were gonna meet up, Jube said, with them same dudes they palled up with in that bar and ended up at their place for the night. Good guys. Thieves, like us, hahaha.

Carton of beer cans at the next town, Dannevirke, since the burgers back in the last town had settled. Lion Red cans, what else? Jube to the dude at the bottom store on another hicktown deserted night. What the rugby league players drink; right, mate? If you say so, buddy. Yeah, I say so, Jube took offence. Paid the guy then told him, I don’t like your attitude, pal. You got a problem in the attitude department. So have you, mate, and you looking to causing any trouble I’ve got half a dozen chaps in the public bar might enjoy crossing swords with you. Fuck you! Jube spat but didn’t linger. Took it out on the road instead, if such a thing was possible to add to.

Grumbling at the price of the cans anyway, They’re fucking
rip-offs
these smalltown joints. And they wonder why they get burgled, held up with shotguns? Fuckem, eh Sonny? Packa arseholes the lot of em.
Pfzzzit
of tear tab. Such a
nice
sound, don’t ya think, Sonny? Yeah. Sonny already halfway through his second while Jube was having his little moan at the world. Beer helped lessen the fear of the speed – the fear of dying in a mangle of metal collided or flipped at a hundred miles an hour.

Sonny glancing across at the profile of Jube in dashboard glow. An outline of nose eruption and underneath curve of walrus mo. The beer can lifting frequently to the profile; his guzzling long and thirsty. Mm-uh. Wiping at his moustache. Nother can please, buddy. Warming up fast, how he did with the first quickly drunk few. Sonny hoping the pattern wouldn’t follow of Jube starting to talk cars. Anything but cars. Oh, and sex. (Maybe they’re one and the same thing to him? Power, I dunno.) Passing Jube another can, breaking open another for himself. Night dissolving in the arc of light before them, and closing after. Like a curtain.

(Don’t talk cars, Jube. Please. As for being in a cell when he wants to talk cars; not as if a man could say he was going for a walk. Same in here, he could hardly go walking. These car freaks they won’t play Scrabble – too hard for em, too many words they don’t know. Yet get em onto diffs and stuff and they’re geniuses – of a fixed and simple kind. Won’t share the giant crossword – same reason: dunno many words. But gettem onto the different timings involved in engines and they’re numerical cleverdicks. Yet the same guys can never figure out, in percentage conversion terms, how much time they got left of a sentence with remission deducted. Though Jube fancied himself as a bit of numbers king.)