I walked back to my cabin. Somehow, while in the shadow of prison yards and guards and friends and enemies, Jack already knew who killed his grandfather.
An hour later, Pop came down to my door. “Do you think,” Pop asked me, “you could go into town and get some cigarettes and coffee and groceries — could you do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it right now.” It was my only way out.
I drove through town and kept going. Maybe they were planning my burial, too. For such big country, things had closed in on me rapidly. I needed to get out of rifle range of these people.
That fall, in one of the big shipping yards out in Grays Harbor, a guy who looked a lot like me started running a forklift and a log loader. He didn’t eat with anybody, didn’t talk to anybody. He cashed his check in the bar across the street and lived in a two-room apartment over the pool hall. He walked to work. The name he gave people was Tom Miller and he worked at the yard for six months. He didn’t miss a day.
Monday came, time to clock in, then noon, and the foreman noticed Miller’s card still in the rack. He asked around, did anybody know where Miller was? One guy said he heard Miller say he had a sister in California. He never said that to me, somebody else spoke up. Said he was from right here near Tacoma, born and raised. He didn’t want to go fishing Friday, someone said. We asked him to go fishing, said we were taking our kids and he was welcome, and he said no thanks.
I guess he quit, the foreman said when Miller hadn’t showed by the end of the day. So if anybody knows anybody looking for work and can run a loader and show up on time, the job pays four fifty a week, you do your own taxes as a subcontractor and don’t talk union here. Sitting behind his desk in his office, the foreman cut Miller’s time card in half and threw it in the garbage.
Tom Miller hadn’t quit. Somebody with sharp eyes and a long memory spotted him. The man who called himself Tom Miller couldn’t report to work because he was being held in a little room in the basement of a Seattle courthouse. Held until the investigators arrived.
After I told this whole story to the investigators, they kept me in custody for a couple of days. They told me that the man who lived with Penny Larson and her daughter was fatally shot in a hunting accident in the mountains of Northern Idaho, not far from their house, but managed to struggle into Canada before he died. The Mounties found him. They told me George Beck had been released. They told me Carl Larson was missing. They told me that Jack Cooley might be dead but that Peeler was still alive. They told me they knew I’d been Ed Snider for a while.
Then the investigators approached me about being an informant down in Oregon, on the Rogue River, where a group of white supremacists was moving meth and dogs and guns. We want you to do this, they said. Not that you have much choice. Sure, I said, I’ll do it. But all I wanted was out. The whole sky seemed covered with heavy-gauge mesh steel, one big prison. If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it. Normal men get to be things. Sons and husbands, fathers and friends. I was not any of those things. I tried, but this is me telling you I failed.
So I went in undercover, and in the middle, the fucking middle of it all, there was an hour when nobody was watching me and I had a little money and I slipped away, on the ghost train out of there.
I can’t even imagine how many people are looking for me now.
Contributors’ Notes
Karen E. Bender is the author of the novel Like Normal People. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and other magazines. They have been reprinted in the Best American and Pushcart Prize anthologies and read on the Selected Shorts program on NPR. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and is working on a collection of stories.
“Theft” began because I wanted to write something from the point of view of a swindler. Ginger was a great character to let out the id. It was fun trying to figure out how she would use people and try to figure out her own theories on how the world worked.
I chose a cruise ship because once I weirdly ended up on a cruise to Alaska, and the setting had to be used — the general sense of desperation and sequins and the constant eating opportunities, particularly the chocolate buffet, which was one of the most poignant and piggish experiences I have ever witnessed. A friend told me that he had heard of instances in which lonely people went on cruise ships to die and be found. That was incredibly powerful to me and somehow seemed to fit into Ginger’s perspective — that was the container that would hold the story. So I put that in, too, which made the story darker and sometimes hard to write, but so goes the puzzling escapade of writing fiction.
C. J. Box is the author of six novels, the most recent being In Plain Sight. He is the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 Award (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award, and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Open Season (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book and three of the novels have been Book Sense 76 picks. Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and is currently writing a stand-alone thriller called Blue Heaven.
When the editors of “Meeting Across the River” — an anthology based on the Bruce Springsteen song — approached me about submitting a story, my first thought was: I don’t do urban. Then I read the lyrics with their vague, mysterious references to planning a crime, the girl Cherry, a $2,000 score. While contemplating how to put my stamp on a story with those elements, my family vacationed in Yellowstone. As we left the park, we witnessed an unexpected and somewhat jarring scenario — dark, leather-clad, menacing Eastern Europeans loitering on the corners and sidewalks of little Gardiner, Montana. They were wildly out of place, like a pawnshop in a cow pasture. Turned out they’d come to the United States for jobs in Yellowstone but couldn’t get them. They had that look about them like they’d do just about anything for $2,000. At the time, my daughters were listening to Eminem. Suddenly, everything fit. Voila: “Pirates of Yellowstone.”
James Lee Burke was born in 1936 in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Louisiana-Texas coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now called the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and later the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he received an A.B. and M.A. in English literature.
Over the years he has published twenty-five novels and one collection of short stories. The stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, and Kenyon Review. His novels Heaven’s Prisoners and Two for Texas were adapted as motion pictures.
Burke’s work has received two Edgar Awards for best crime novel of the year. He is also a Breadloaf fellow and a Guggenheim fellow and has been a recipient of an NEA grant. He and his wife of forty-six years, Pearl Burke, have four children and divide their time between Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.
My best and oldest friend passed away three years ago, and I wrote “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” and two other stories in memory of him. The real “Nick Hauser” was a remarkable man and a great friend to have. Even though we were born in the Great Depression, the era in which we grew up was one that I do not think will come aborning again. The quiet tree-shaded street on which we lived was next to a horse pasture and a grove of live oaks that were perhaps two hundred years old. “Nick” and I had a shoeshine business, yard-service, and were masters at harvesting blackberries on property that was not ours and selling them in bell jars, door-to-door, for two-bits ajar. But our great loves were baseball and Cheerio yo-yo contests.