He had on three cheap watches he’d stolen, two of them with the same time. When the big kid, Luis, walked out of the back with the bag and put it on the table, he wrote down the time from each of the three watches and then waited. He could see Grace inside, but she was at the counter and didn’t come out. After six minutes by the top watch (a girl’s watch with a lavender band and fake gemstones around the face), the Chevy pulled up and the Asian kid with the cap and the chains got out and grabbed the bag. He said something to Grace that made her face go tight and then walked out again and the car pulled away.
Jimmy wrote down the time again and then got up and walked the long way around the block.
No money. That was how Jimmy knew there was something going on. Luis came out and dropped the plastic bag, and not on the counter where all the other bags went, but on a table near the door. It looked like any other bag, full of food, but it wasn’t. The Asian kid came in and took it, and didn’t pay anybody. Didn’t talk to anyone except Luis, and sometimes Grace, who wouldn’t talk back, but kept her eyes down.
The next afternoon Porter came over to buy more of the stuff Jimmy had piled up around the apartment. Jimmy liked Porter because he was older, a grown-up, and still out of control, and because he had red hair that stood up on his head. Most of the adults he ran across seemed like someone had let the air out of them or something, or like they were all nearsighted and not being able to see anything made them cautious and slow. Porter charged in and threw shit around the room, did lines of coke he never thought to offer anyone else, would spend fifteen minutes beating Jimmy’s price down only to hand him more money than he’d promised. Jimmy asked Porter’s opinion about the Imperial Garden.
“Oh, that’s a fucked life, kid. They bring a hundred people at a time sealed in containers, then they owe so much money they gotta work shit jobs for years to pay off.”
“Containers?” Jimmy picturing Grace Lei in a giant shrink-wrapped plastic package, like the headphones from Best Buy he could never get open and had to saw at with a steak knife.
Most of the stuff piled up in the apartment was worthless crap. Porter never got tired of pointing this out to Jimmy, but he also went through everything meticulously; holding up and identifying each baseball, coffee mug, book, candlestick, decorative plate, and teapot Jimmy had stacked up around the apartment, and then guessing what it was worth.
“What the fuck is this?” he’d say, holding up a collectible action figure from a comic book store. “A doll?”
“It’s Wolverine. From the comic book. It’s worth like a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“To little kids. Or retards, maybe. I’ll give you ten. This?”
“It’s a fork. I think.”
“You got no eye, kid. Honest to Christ. A fork. Did you at least get the spoon?”
“Fuck you.”
“You need to start boosting jewelry.”
“That shit’s all locked up.”
“You need to put together a crew. When I was your age, I stole with five, six other guys. A girl with a cute ass. She bats her eyes, the clerk opens the case.”
“I don’t want to get put away again.”
“At your age? What’d you get, like three months? In kiddy jail. That’s nothing. That’s the cost of doing business.”
“It sucks. It’s boring. The big kids fuck with you and steal your shit. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“How old are you? Jesus Christ, you’re in the prime of life. You should be boosting everything you can get your hands on. Steal every fucking thing and run like a jackrabbit.”
“Why don’t you?”
Porter’s eyes got big. “I’d go to real jail, kid, and that’s no fucking joke. Not like Henry Avenue.”
“You think I want to go? Back to jail?”
Porter looked around, his eyes going back and forth. “Kid, I got to tell you. Living like this? In this rathole? It’s not that different than prison.”
The night he stole the bag from the Imperial he didn’t smoke, but sipped at a bottle of peach brandy that had been in the apartment when he moved in. He stood in the window a long time, looking down at the cars and the river and working himself up to it. The brandy tasted weird, and he wondered if that was how peaches tasted. He ate a cupcake he’d gotten at Major Wing Lee’s, the little store on the corner. He leaned on the window frame and looked up and down Ridge. The road was busy, and it was getting a little dark, which he liked.
He pictured how it would go, flitting through the shadows, the bag sliding across the table to him like a magic trick. Him and Grace Lei together, dumping out the money onto his mattress, maybe five or ten thousand bucks, and him seeing her smile for the first time, maybe the first time since she came to America. He cupped his hands in front of himself, mentally calculating how much might fit in the bag.
Coming out onto the street he could hear a rising scream, the siren from one of the trucks starting up across the street, and he pressed himself flat against the door like a bug caught in the light. He moved sideways, looking left and right, his back flat against the storefront of the hair place next to the restaurant. He had his watches on and looked at his wrist. Three minutes more, give or take. He stood at the edge of the window and looked in.
Grace was standing at the counter, her back to the street. He looked east up the street for the Chevy but there was a line of cars stretching away toward Philly and he couldn’t tell if it was coming. At the same moment that he saw the bright grillwork of the old Chevy, Luis came out of the back, swinging the bag. The Chevy approached, a few cars back from the light at Midvale. Jimmy’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth, while the car inched along and Luis took his fucking time getting to the front table.
Jimmy crabwalked along the front of the Gardens, his head on a swivel. Luis seemed to be looking out the front door, and Jimmy was ready to drop to his shaking knees if Luis swung his head around. The Chevy was there, three cars back from the intersection, and Luis was still standing at the door. Jimmy could see the Asian kid in the front seat, his cap bright red. Jimmy was breathing hard and mumbling under his breath, Come on, come on. There was a gap open in front of the Chevy and Luis still hadn’t dropped the goddamn bag.
The light changed, going yellow and then red, and the Chevy stopped hard. Luis opened his hand and dropped the bag, turning to the counter. Jimmy took two steps, three and stuck his head in the door. Luis was close, his back turned. There was a line of sweat baked through his massive white T-shirt and he smelled like starch and fried food. Jimmy put his hand out and touched the bag, his hand formed into a hard L shape that scooped it off the table. Luis said, “Hey,” and Jimmy looked up to see who he was talking to and it was Grace, who cocked her head as Jimmy stepped backward out the door, the bag up at his chest, and they looked at each other and she saw Jimmy plain with the bag, and her eyebrows went up but he was gone.
He walked past the bar next door and Major Wing Lee’s at the corner looking straight ahead. The Chevy must have gone by but he didn’t see it. He felt naked and cold walking down the street, the plastic bag feeling like it was melting his hands, something inside folded up the size of maybe a sandwich. The money, or the dope. He wanted to look, but he just made the turn up Midvale and then took a clumsy skip step that became an uneven lope and then he was jogging past Buckets and the little storefronts until he hit Frederick, cut left, and ran hard.
He made his way uphill to Stanton, out of breath after thirty yards. Where the road turned to the left, he jumped the low wall and tumbled down the incline to the tracks, ran half a block to the base of a high-tension tower. He dropped down onto the gravel by the tracks, spit up some peach brandy, and sat wheezing, his heart going, wiping at the sweat leeching out of his hair. He wanted to look in the bag, but instead he stuck it in his jacket and forced himself up again.