The Dope Thief (25 page)

The kids looked at each other, then reached for the money. Ray held out another two twenties, but when the kids reached for them, he jerked the bills back and held them high.

“This is to buy books with.”

The kids looked at each other again, the blond one, Lynch, shrugging.

“Buy,” Ray said again. He picked up the day’s paper and dropped it where they could see he had circled half a dozen ads in red. “These are garage sales. Go by these places and buy what-ever books you find. Don’t pay more than a buck a book, and don’t bring me CDs or DVDs or games or any other shit. Just books.”

The tall kid shrugged and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand.

Ray said, “Get receipts.”

He let the blond one take the money and watched it disappear into his coat and handed the tall one the newspaper. “Take that shit back where you found it and go buy me some books. Every book you bring me I’ll pay you another buck. So drive hard bargains.”

Ray watched them walk to the dark street through the front windows, heads together, talking and laughing. He saw a young blond girl come out from behind a column on the porch as if she’d been hiding there. She fell in beside the boys, and Lynch took her arm. When she turned one last time to look at the store, he saw a ring of livid purple around her right eye.

He turned to see Michelle in her coat. Her head was down.

“Okay, see you,” she said.

“Wait.”

“What?”

She looked at him and then away, and he had that feeling again of recognition he had had before on the street in August.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you, you know. Coming back?”

“Why is Theresa’s name on the store?”

“I told you I was . . . in trouble.”

“Are you in trouble now?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Why do you pay me under the table?”

“What’s going on? Isn’t that better for you?” He looked around as if there were someone else he could bring into the conversation.

“Is it? Those kids stole that stuff.”

“Yeah, but’”

“You thought it was funny or cute or something.”

He smiled, saw at once that was the wrong thing. “They’re kids, Michelle.”

“Kids like you?”

“Once, yeah.”

She was shaking her head and moving to the door. “So you’re what? The cool guy who buys stolen stuff and maybe sells you some weed?”

“Where is this coming from?”

“I see you when there are policemen on the street.”

“You see me?” He wanted to say,
I see you, too,
but wasn’t sure what it was he saw.

“You get this look. And you move away from the window. One time that cop went next door and you hid in the stockroom.”

“I didn’t hide. I had shit to do.” But he didn’t believe himself, either. He was getting angry, felt something twisting out of his hands, the desire to restrain it somehow propelling it away.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll see you, Ray.”

He grabbed his cane and started after her, but she was through the door and down the street faster than he could cross the room. He stumped out to the top of the stairs, the cold gripping at him. Watched her moving under the lights away up the street toward Main. It began to snow, white flakes sticking to his hair and his shirt like nature trying to erase him from the scene.

SHE DIDN’T COME
back the next day, or the next. He called her over the next three days, stammering vague messages to her voice mail and hanging up. He sat in the store and stared, reading the last quote she had put up over and over. “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” Rilke, one of her favorites. He got out
Letters to a Young Poet
when he was alone in the store and scoured it for traces of her, all the time willing himself to be smarter and more patient. When the store closed he sat in the light from the street and touched the pages and held it up to his face, hoping her scent would have lingered on the book.

STRANGE WEATHER MOVED
in. Hot, damp days in which the sun furiously melted the last of the snow and kids built slick gray snowmen in their shirtsleeves. Bart moved into the hospital, and Ray would go there at the end the day, so Theresa could take a break. He’d bring his father crime novels. Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake and John D. MacDonald. Bart loved anything with guys fighting over a briefcase full of money. Faithless women and smoking pistols. At first Ray would drop them on the nightstand and take the old ones, but after a week he noticed they were untouched and started reading them aloud. Bart would close his eyes and fall asleep, and Ray would stick a tongue depressor in the book and leave it on the nightstand.

One night, in the middle of
The Hunted,
during a long chase across the Negev, Bart put his hand on Ray’s arm and held it there. Ray closed the book and waited, feeling the papery skin and the rocklike bones beneath.

“I always wanted to see the desert.” Bart’s voice was like something rimed with salt, gritty and brittle.

“Me, too.”

“You should go.”

“Maybe.”

“Nah, just go. Take that girl from the store.”

Ray thought about that, and about what to say. “That would be good.”

“I never did nothing in my whole life.”

Ray looked at him, but Bart was dry- eyed, just staring as if struck by the wonder of it.

“Nothing that was worth a damn to another living soul.” Bart patted Ray’s hand. “I can’t tell you what to do. I ain’t got that right anymore.” Then his father smiled, that alien arrangement of muscles that made him unrecognizable. “But, maybe, take a lesson.”

THE NEXT SATURDAY
the kids came back, Lynch and the tall kid, who Ray found out was named Stevie. They were excited, dumping the books they’d found out on the counter, pushing them forward, Lynch talking about the ones he’d read, thumbing them open to show Ray passages he liked and that, eerily, he’d obvi-ously memorized just by glancing at them. They shifted the books into piles, claiming finds and smacking the table and saying, pay me, bitch.

The blond girl, Andrea, came up and hovered at the door this time, and Lynch would look over at her as if he were making sure she was still there or checking to see if she was okay. She was tiny, lost in a parka that looked three sizes too large, her yellow hair seeping from under a hood and curling on her red cheeks. The bruise on her face had faded, but she was silent and looked off into the corners of the room, her hands in her pockets.

Ray caught her eye and, trying to look harmless, smiled and pointed back into the store. She dropped her head and moved down the aisles fast, as if she had been slapped.

Lynch watched her go, then called to her. “Hey, he’s got some of those books, Andy.”

Ray counted money out onto the counter. “What books?”

Stevie shook his head. He dropped his head and talked into his coat. “What a fucking loser.”

“What books?”

Lynch smacked Stevie on the elbow. “Aw, man, you know. About babies and being pregnant and that shit.”

Ray lost count. “Dude, what?”

“She’s knocked up.”

Ray picked up the small pile of money, feeling ridiculous. He had been thinking about two kids getting a couple of bucks for junk food and movies. “Jesus, man. Is she . . .” He shook his head. “I mean, where is she living? Do her parents know? I mean, where the fuck do you two live, anyway?”

Smiling, Stevie snatched the money from Ray. “We’re covered, man.” Lynch went into the back and came back with Andrea, who Ray could see now was pregnant, her small belly pressing against the inside of the parka. She had two books,
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
and something called
Ten Little Fingers
with a cartoon of a baby with arms outstretched and an outsized, egglike head that made Ray wince with its fragility.

He gave them the books, gave them more money, couldn’t stop himself from shaking his head every couple of seconds. He finally made them promise to take Andy to Lilly’s, the sandwich shop around the corner, to get her something healthy to eat. On the porch Lynch turned and gave an apologetic shrug while Stevie fanned the air with dollar bills.

THE NEXT SUNDAY
morning Ray couldn’t bring himself to drive up and open the store, and instead he put a sport coat on and went to the low brick meeting house on Oakland Avenue. It was still hot, the street steaming and the lawns looking like wilted salad revealed by the melting snow.

He got there late, let himself in as quietly as he could, and sat near the door on an ancient, scarred bench half- covered with pamphlets about Darfur, capital punishment, and something called Peace Camp. It was quiet; the only sounds were passing traffic and the occasional sigh or sneeze. The room itself was plain, painted a sleep- inducing cream color and smelling faintly of wet ash, as if a fire had been put out just before he arrived. There was a mix of ages in the room, but Ray thought everyone had something indefinable in common. Expressed in uncombed hair and wrinkled clothes, maybe. Natural fibers and, he was guessing, nontoxic dyes.

In front of him two black- haired kids fidgeted next to their mother, who wore jeans and a peasant blouse. Ray realized he wore the only jacket in the room. He scanned faces but couldn’t find Michelle in the crowd at first. Finally he spotted her between a large woman in a dress that looked like it was made from pink bedsheets and a small man with a bald head who kept clicking his dentures in his sleep. Michelle’s eyes were closed.

He kept waiting for the service to begin, but it never seemed to. There would be a rustle of movement or an exhalation that he expected to signal the start of a prayer or a song, but it resolved itself into some small readjustment in the humid room. A tiny fan at the window blew a lank, tepid breeze past his face without cooling the air. A woman stood up, two rows away from him. She had short gray hair and a thickset body, and beside her sat Liz, who had sold Theresa the store and whom he hadn’t seen since the closing. The woman who stood said she had sat on her porch and watched a spider build a web, working diligently and skillfully to make this delicately beautiful thing that would last only the day and then have to be rebuilt, and that there was some kind of message in that and she was trying to be open to it. She said her friend had given up something vitally important to her that she had worked a long time to get and very hard to keep, and wasn’t there value in making something intricate and lovely, even if you knew it wasn’t going to last? That there would only be more work at the end of it?

After her question, she just shrugged and sat down. Liz, whom Ray had never seen smile, beamed and squeezed the woman’s hand, her eyes wet. Ray thought for a minute someone in authority would get up and answer her question, but there was just more silence leavened only by shifting and Quakers pinching at their damp clothes.

After another few minutes, he saw a tall gray- haired man turn and shake the hand of the person next to him, and then there was a sort of collective exhalation and everyone in the room turned and shook the hands of the people around them. The woman with the fidgety kids turned around to face him and offered him a damp red hand, and he smiled shyly and shook her fingers and nodded his head, wondering if there was some password he should know to say.

The man who had shaken the first hand stood and went to a table in the gap in the center of the room. He read some announcements. Someone named Betsy in the hospital who could use a visit, bulletins from various committees about an upcoming peace fair, a walk to protest the war, buses to a rally for Tibet.

The crowd drifted slowly toward the door. More handshaking, hugging. People catching up and remarking on the strange weather, stopping to eat gingersnaps and sip from tiny cups of cider from a table by the door. Michelle sat, not moving, her head down, though people touched her shoulder and whispered to her. Ray forced himself up and across the room and finally sat on the same bench at what he hoped was a respectful distance. When he was settled in she lifted her head but turned to watch people knotted at the door. She gave a shy wave to an older woman with a broad smile who might have been Filipino.

“Hello, Ray.”

She didn’t look at him. Her voice was low, and he moved closer and she didn’t shift away. He looked down at her knees, conscious of his own quickened pulse. She had on a long skirt and the brown sweater he had seen her in when they met. They let a minute go by as the room emptied.

She said, “I worked in a lawyer’s office in Massillon. You know where that is?” She kept her eyes on the door. “No. Anyway.” The last people drifted out the door and they were alone.

“I fell in love with one of the associates. I was twenty- two.” Empty, the room echoed with her voice. She lifted her hands and looked at them. Maybe seeing something that told her how long ago twenty- two was. “He was overwhelming. Smart, so smart. Funny and fun to be around. He took me places.” Now her eyes went down. “We did a lot of coke. At first it was just fun, made us sharper and funnier and I thought more passionate. What it looked like at the time.”

Ray was conscious of holding himself still, regulating his breathing. He waited, and she pulled her sweater around her.

“Then it became about the coke. Somehow. Everything turned on our getting high. We needed it to be together. He began to neglect everything else. Court dates, meetings. They were going to fire him.” She shook her head, smiling at the wonder of it. “Me, too. My mom got sick. Cancer. It didn’t even register. Everything sort of shrank to this point.” She made an open circle with her hands, closed it.

“ We were full of this self- righteous anger, you know, just pumped up by the blow. How could they treat him this way, and how stupid and slow they all were. Life was so unfair. So when he told me about these accounts, and how he knew how to get access to them . . . Anyway, I stole sixty- eight thousand dollars.” The smile again, a joke at her own expense. “And it was gone in, like, moments. It seems like so much money when you think of it in a pile. What you could do with it. In Massillon? But it came and went. Most of it. And it took them about a month to figure out what happened.” Her voice got flatter now. Someone else’s story. Ray took off the coat and threw it across the seat behind him, sweat in a line down his back.