Magnetic Field(s) Read online

  Albert looked at him.

  “Humph,” Jerome said. “I didn’t think you were that dumb. But maybe you have a fool’s courage, too.”

  “Look,” he went on. “You are taking a big risk any time you are breaking and entering, so you have to make that risk worthwhile. A day’s gross in a little grocery store like that is—what? One hundred, one hundred fifty dollars, tops. Do you really want to do time for seventy-five dollars?”

  “We got a TV set and jewelry, too.”

  ”Shit. You will be lucky to get fifteen, maybe twenty-five dollars for the TV, if you can find a safe place to sell it. And I’ll bet you money that the jewelry is all dime store. And where do you get this we? You went in and got it, even though you had to split the take with Lewis. See, you have not done any time in prison, but I can tell you, you do not want to take that kind of a risk for this amount of profit. It does not make sense.“

  “But there is more foolishness in this thing yet. For instance, you did not even look around behind the counter for the man’s revolver, did you? If you had gotten the piece, you would not have been able to keep from bragging about it. You did not even look around for the strongbox where they’d be sure to keep two or three days’, maybe a week’s worth of gross. That would have been in the house part, probably in a desk drawer or someplace close to a desk. You did not look around for a suitcase or satchel to carry the small stuff out in. No. You grabbed a pillowcase. If you saw someone walking down the street carrying a TV and a loaded pillowcase, what would you fucking do? But if you were carrying a suitcase— You see what I am saying?”

  “Did you think of an escape plan? If those people had come home while you were there, how would you have gotten out? Sure as hell not through the door they are standing in. Sure as hell not out through the front door of the grocery, which the old man has about seventeen locks on. You have to do some advance planning if you are going to do this seriously—and if you get caught you will find out plenty fast how seriously you should have been doing it. How much good do you think Lewis would have done you—standing around outside with his finger up his ass—if those people had come home while you were in their house? What was he supposed to do, whistle?

  “Last of all, you were probably walking around all the time you were in there on probably the only valuable thing those people have. You were probably walking around right on top of five or ten times more money than you took out of there.”

  He paused and Albert looked at him awhile before he asked, “They keep money under the floor?”

  “No, fool, the rugs. They’re Arabs. They get rugs direct from Arabia, from their folks in the old country. Don’t you know what those rugs are worth?”

  “Humph,” Albert said. “Who is going to buy a rug from me?”

  “I’ll show you,” Jerome said. “You may be a fool yet, but maybe you have a fool’s courage. I will show you how to make the most of it.”

  Jerome was smart. He had been in prison three or four times. The first thing he said was “Forget all this cat-burglar bullshit.” After dark was the worst time to get into houses. People were much more likely to be home or come home, and neighbors more likely to notice lights being turned on or a flashlight being used in a house where people were supposed to be out. Much better to go in during the daytime, when people were at work and you could see what you were doing.

  Everything had to be predicated on avoiding even being seen. But the odds all went against that, so you had to play the odds. Given that you will be spotted eventually, how do you avoid actually being taken? All you can do is be ready for it.

  “Like a fucking Boy Scout, Albert, you have to be prepared. See, if somebody comes home and suddenly finds you standing there in his living room unplugging his stereo, he’s not expecting that. He’s not ready for it. He is going to be shocked. But if you are prepared you can take advantage of that shock and get out of there even before he can recover enough to get a good enough look at you to be able to describe you to the police. ‘What did he look like, sir, tall? Short? Brown hair? Blond? Mustache?’ ‘I don’t know. It all happened so fast.’

  “First thing you do is wear a hat. Any kind of a hat, a watch cap or a baseball cap, a beret—anything that will hide your hair and maybe even part of your face. Then you want to wear a jacket. The best kind is those reversible ones, different colors inside and out. Then under that you wear some kind of a shirt that’s a different color from the jacket. A nothing-colored pair of pants and your basketball shoes: you may have to break some track records.” Albert looked at him.

  The rest of it all came out slowly over the days and weeks and months that followed, as they were doing the houses, sometimes four or five a day, and then they would lay off for a while. Always, before they went into a house, Jerome would talk to him, telling him what to expect, what to look for, the escape routes and the meet-up points. He would explain it all slowly, then go over it again as they drove past the house. Albert would nod yes. Afterward Jerome would talk to him again, explaining the reasons behind the changes, if any had been necessary, pointing out mistakes, but also telling him when he had done good. They would sit in Jerome’s kitchen with their feet up on the new TVs or stereos, drinking ice-cold beer out of the bottles, Jerome doing most of the talking, dropping his ashes on the linoleum. “What I like about this job is the hours.”

  One of those times Albert had asked, after drinking a couple of beers, “What would you do if someone came through that window right now”—All he could see through the window were the tops of the buildings across the street and, several blocks away, a billboard showing a blonde woman in a black velvet evening gown drinking a glass of whiskey. She had a broad, Swedish-looking face and wore her hair short—“and tried to take this stuff?”

  “I would walk calmly over to that drawer over there,” Jerome said, “take out my thirty-eight-caliber revolver and tell him to halt. I would aim it right at his chest and watch him wet his pants. Then I would waste the fucker’s ass. Nobody steals my goods.”

  Albert watched him pointing his gun finger at the person in the corner. He watched him flip back the thumb of the “gun” twice, firing silently, then dropping the pointing hand slowly, following the dead person as his lifeless body crumpled to the floor. Albert looked at the color TV he had his feet on. On the screen a sexy woman was talking silently about Tampax. She was wearing a tennis outfit and sitting in front of the mirror of a dressing table in a bedroom bigger than any he had ever actually seen. He looked at the corner, where the dead body would have been. He knew Jerome would do it; he had already seen him kill that little black dog, bashing out the life in its body with a brick. The body of the person lying there in the corner would also have been full of life, would have had a life of some kind. What kind? A mother who nagged him, an itch to get laid. Would also have talked about houses he’d done: “See this gold chain,” lifting it with two fingers up off his collarbone.

  “The people who owned this TV,” he told Jerome, tapping the set lightly with the back of his heel, “could have done that to you.”

  “Or you,” Jerome said, laughing and flipping his ashes on the floor.

  Jerome’s .38 had come out of an apartment Albert remembered as particularly messy—mattresses and TV on the floor, cheap stereo on an orange crate, empty six-pack cartons littering the place, wastebaskets spilling their old Kleenexes and cigarette butts and matted lumps of hair, ashtrays overflowing, drawers gaping open with various pieces of clothing hanging from them. On a sort of chipped-up nightstand next to the mattress in one of the bedrooms, still in its holster, was the revolver. It smelled of oil and was loaded.

  “Next to the bed,” Jerome had said. “This sucker would have used this on us.” He picked it up and handed it to Albert, saying, “Here, you take it. I’ll take the next one.”

  But Albert had turned it down, and it ended up in that drawer. Jerome had taken it along a couple of times, which made Albert nervous, and when he finally left it in the draw
er Albert felt better. He tried to imagine shooting somebody, an actual person. He tried to imagine the man Jerome had described standing there in the corner, backing away from him, his hands held out in front of him as if to ward off a bullet, as if they could ward off a bullet, backing away and pleading, pleading to be let to live, and then that look of panic coming into his eyes when he realized that this would be, for him, what all his life he had called “dying,” a word that up till that moment had had no meaning. It was then that the man wet his pants, peeing on himself the way an animal would that also knew its life was going to end. The man was still trying to protect himself, trying to say “No” to death—not making any sense—and when he saw the hammer start to pull back on the gun he started to turn toward the wall, looking over his shoulder at the gun, which went pop, and sent him jolting into the wall as if somebody had kicked him in the side once, one good one, and just as he was about to make a face as if to say “That hurt,” “something” kicked him again in the back, just under the shoulder blade, and he ended up lying there with one leg bent underneath him and his face against the wall. It had been hard enough killing the animals, and Albert was glad that Jerome didn’t insist on bringing the gun with them anymore.

  He had almost not been able to stand it when Jerome had killed the big black talking bird. As soon as it spotted them, it started yelling its head off, yelling, “Pirates! Mr. Bill! Pirates! Let me out of here!” and whistling these piercing shrieks. First Jerome had grabbed a big towel and covered its cage. But the bird kept on screaming—stuff you couldn’t even understand now, but still one hell of a lot of noise. That was when Jerome started to look like the “ice” man. He went over and ripped the towel off the cage, which only made the bird yell louder. He took the cage off its stand—it was huge—and carried it back into the kitchen. The bird had a yellow beak the size of a hunting knife and Albert knew that no way was Jerome going to stick his hand into that cage. He took it out to the back porch where the people had a big white freezer chest. The bird was just about breaking its wings against the cage and peeing and shitting all over itself. When Jerome closed the lid, you could still hear the bird yelling, but muffled. It almost made Albert sick to hear that animal that wanted only to live, that was now slamming its body against the bars in there in that freezing darkness, though by the time they left the house it was silent.

  Doing houses with Jerome, he made fairly good money, and Jerome taught him a lot as they went along. He learned about tools—that the police would consider even a flashlight and a screwdriver “tools” if they caught you carrying them together. You could carry just the screwdriver or a tire iron or some other kind of small crowbar by themselves, though. And you did not even need the flashlight. He learned how to check out both the house and the neighborhood. Ideally, you would have two escape routes. He learned how to get the names of people off the mailbox. Then you looked up their number and called them to make sure no one was home. If somebody answered, you just asked for Seymour or some other dumb name, and got told you had the wrong number. Sometimes, Jerome told him, you could actually go back and do the same house again. You waited two or three months, till the people had done all the insurance stuff to get the TV and stereo replaced, and then you hit them again and got brand-new stuff. “You see what I’m saying? You do a repeat performance when they least expect it—dig? When they least expect it.”

  They rode around in Jerome’s car—or the car Jerome was driving; it was a different one every few weeks, always with out-of-state plates—looking over houses and neighborhoods, Jerome doing most of the talking, telling him that he had to think all the time about how to maximize the profit and minimize the risk. Once you had broken and entered, you were in for a felony. If you had to bail out in a hurry because the people came home, you had better make sure you had made it worth your while. So the first rule was: “Get something small and valuable and get it into the car immediately.” Then even if you had to run at least you had gotten something. Then you went back in and tried to complete the job. But you always wore a watch, and you always kept track of what time you entered, and you made certain you got your ass out of there in under thirty minutes.

  In those first few months they had only two close calls, and since he and Jerome really were prepared they were able to get away clean both times. One of the rules was: “Drop the shit and run. No color TV is worth two years.” He was busy in a corner of the living room of this place, pulling the wires out of the tape deck, when he heard a car pull up outside. Jerome was actually at the front door, one hand on the knob and a box of silver under his arm. He put the box down abruptly on the floor and said, “People. Split.” They both walked quickly out the back way and kept on going, through the backyard and over the fence to the next street. As they walked back around the corner, Jerome began telling him about a movie he’d seen, interrupting the narration at times to tell him—in precisely the same tone as the movie conversation—“People who live on this street, in this neighborhood, they take it for granted. They don’t look around while they walk along. They know this street. So you want to look like you know the neighborhood as well as they do. Like you live here. So you get yourself all involved in a conversation and you can’t look suspicious.”

  Albert had been listening, and only now realized that Jerome had led him back to the car, parked right in front of the house they had just been in. Jerome quietly pressed down the trunk lid as he slid past it and got in behind the wheel. As he started the car, he was saying, “... and then the leading lady, who has tits out to here—” He put his hands on the wheel and pulled slowly out of the parking spot. Albert could not resist looking back, looking at the house. Through the front window he saw the woman, her back toward him, standing, looking at the remaining components of the stereo where he had left them lying on the floor. She had her hands on her hips. He could not see the man.

  “All you have to do,” Jerome was saying, “is keep your cool. There isn’t anyone else’s cool you’ve got to keep, and there isn’t anybody else who will keep yours.”

  The other time he was actually putting a TV into the trunk when the man drove up. Albert got into the car and started the engine, but waited till the man had pulled all the way into the driveway. Then he honked the signal and pulled away. When he got around the block to the meet-up point, there was Jerome in his jogging suit, “jogging.” He got in the car, saying, “Just keep driving slowly. Head for the freeway.” As he was talking, he was pulling off the shiny jacket.

  The trouble with doing houses with Jerome was just exactly that efficiency that made it actually profitable. They were in and out of the houses so quickly it was only in bits and pieces that Albert could taste again something of the feeling he had experienced in the Arabs’ store and apartment. Now and then there would be a moment, walking into a bedroom and realizing it was a child’s bedroom and yet standing there for a long moment, longer than he needed to, noticing a big white plastic goose standing on a shelf, and then noticing the cord that connected the goose to an outlet, and pressing the switch on the cord and being pleased to see the goose light up. A lamp in the shape of a goose. It pleased him. He thought about the child who lived its life in this room. A boy, he decided. He thought about the people going to the store and seeing that goose lamp and deciding that their child would like it. They must have talked it over. But then there was Jerome.

  Another time there was a weird thing for matches—made out of pottery—with wooden matches poking out of the top. It was sitting on a coffee table. Around the base of it was printed, in big red block letters, CASSIS QUENOT, and below that, in smaller black letters, something about Paris. These people must have brought this thing back from Paris, France. When they wanted to light a cigarette, they reached over to this thing they had brought back from Paris—with what casualness they reached out to it now—and pulled out a match. He put it in the pocket of his windbreaker. He would not bother showing it to Jerome.

  Then there was the time they did t
he condo. He had a funny feeling about the place as they walked up the sidewalk (stepping around a pile of wet dogshit). And sure enough, as they were pulling and hauling on this huge TV—they were right in the middle of the back doorway—this guy came in the front door. The guy yelled, “Hey!” his mouth going very wide just then, and began waving a very big, heavy-looking gun. Albert turned and ran but Jerome had to jump over the TV set to get out the door, and Albert heard him grunt as his feet hit the concrete and took off running, and then he heard the shots. He made it around the corner and was just grabbing the door handle of the car when he looked up to see Jerome step in the dogshit and go sprawling. His feet went out from under him and he came down hard on his tailbone. Albert was behind the wheel now, wrenching the key over in the starter. It looked like Jerome had had the wind knocked out of him: he was trying to get up and not making it past a sitting position. The man came around the corner now, still carrying that huge gun, just as Jerome got himself over on one hand and his knees. Albert heard the shot and saw Jerome’s body give a jolt at exactly the same moment, and he stepped on the gas. He thought he heard another shot after that, but he couldn’t be sure over the noise of the engine. As the car lurched into high speed, he felt a tingling in the skin of the back of his neck and scalp, his shoulders, and a vague sick sensation in his abdomen, like diarrhea.

  He never saw Jerome after that, and he laid off for more than a month. But then he saw a house that was perfect—it had a hedge that hid one of the front windows from the street—and of course he had to do it. He went over all the rules he had learned and went ahead and did the house. It was the bottom half of a clapboard duplex whose inside still smelled of fresh paint. Albert’s eyebrows went up and he felt his face spread out in a smile when he saw they had their stereo components still in their boxes.