He rested with his back flat against a building, and had the sensation of lying down when he was standing up. The streets swung back and forth like a bell. No doubt about it, it was a dizzy life. Something was missing here. When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all — cash, booze, and a wife — he couldn’t be distracted from the great emptiness that was always falling through him and never hit the ground. He should have gotten a damn job in Pittsburgh! He began to cry, each sob coming up slowly like something with a hook on it. Tears on his cheeks burned in the cold wind. Rolling his head from side to side against the bricks he hollered, “I wanna meet my responsibilities!” But in the commotion of city traffic it sounded like the tiniest thing he’d ever said, and he got going down the street.
Bill Houston was trying to draw near behind two women in overcoats carrying purses. His feet were a couple of burdens he yanked along because there was no discarding them. He wasn’t ready for this move, actually, but the energy would come to him when he was near enough: reach and get a fist around each purse-strap, hold tight and bust between the two of them like a couple of swinging doors, leaving them spinning on the sidewalk while he disappeared with their purses from their lives. He trawled along behind while the rush of fear dried his mouth and straightened his head. His legs and feet were coming to life.
He stood up straight, walking like a man again, taking in all the sights along Wilson. The street was all yellow in the artificial light. People were walking up and down it like a lot of fools. It was around nine-thirty, there was a chill in the air, the wind was gentle now, and he was moving inside it like the light of love, ringing without sound, giving himself up to every vibration, totally alive inside of a crime. The women turned down Clark and the song of the thief grew slow and mellow, beating like a bass viol now because the time and place were suddenly all wrong for a purse-snatch, and the real crime was not yet revealed.
He slowed with the rhythm of it all. The two women drifted farther ahead of him. He was relaxed, letting the whole thing happen, floating into a little hardware place crammed with everything necessary for the good life, including shelves of lumber. One man behind the counter — a young gentleman wearing an orange apron — dealing with one male purchaser and the purchaser’s two children, a boy and a girl who yanked on his arms and blew large pink bubbles out of their mouths. Bill Houston drifted along each of five aisles in turn. Gleaming pastel commode seats hung from the back wall. Plumbing accessories, assorted tools, screws, and nails, metal shelves, everything burning with an inner flame. From the back of one aisle he examined the clerk, messing him over with his eyes. Young. Disgusted. Pocket full of pens in his orange apron, sideburns, heavy-framed spectacles bespeaking sincerity. Hundreds of times, almost daily, he had lived this robbery in his mind, making all the right moves, playing the hero, beating the thief senseless and shrugging it all off as the police slammed the doors of the van. Bill Houston knew him like he knew himself. In this state of things Bill Houston claimed all the power.
The people left. Nobody else in the place. Everything was as solid as a diamond.
“Whatta you need tonight?” the kid called down the aisle.
“How much is this here?” Bill Houston held up a plumber’s helper.
The kid was disgusted. “I got ten thousand a dese items in here,” he said. “You think I got every price memorized?” He came around the counter and walked down the aisle.
Bill Houston moved to meet him halfway, his finger jamming up his coat pocket. The kid looked surprised a second, and Bill Houston grabbed him by the throat with his free hand, sticking the pocket-finger into the kid’s crotch, slamming him up against the shelves. “You motherfucker!” Bill told him. “You piss-ant kike! You’re a dead motherfucker! You’ve lived the slimiest fucking life you could live and now it’s over!” He could feel each hair and pore of himself as he spoke. Every tiny thing in the place cried out with the fire of God.
The clerk had no words on this occasion. He was going limp, so Bill Houston drew out his bandaged and swollen gun-hand and slapped him a couple of times. He turned the clerk around and kicked his butt down the aisle to the cash register. “Get the fuck around there you dead motherfucker! I want every dollar you can get your hands on and I want it now! Not later. You understand, dead man?”
The kid whipped open the cash register and started laying out the contents rapidly. He was all white, and his lips were turning purple. “Go! Go! Go! I’m clocking your ass!” Bill Houston watched him move. Time to shift gears. “You’re doing fine,” Houston told him softly. “You’re gonna live through this. You’re doing just like I tell you, you’re saving your life, we’re gonna get you through this alive. One pile for the bills, that’s right, now a bag for the change. Double-bag it. Good strong bag. Good boy, good boy, good boy.”
The clerk was doing all right, but he dropped the bags trying to get one inside the other, and had to stoop down to pick one up. Bill grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. “Move! Do like I tell you! You’re dying!” The kid got a grip and did correctly with the two bags. He poured the change into them and as if in a trance picked up his stapler, folded the bags, and fastened them shut with two staples: snap, snap. Bill Houston loved it. He put the bills in his pocket:, grabbed the kid’s apron front, and threw him onto the floor. “I want you to pray,” he said softly. “Pray for your life. Pray for a long time. Pray I don’t come back.” On the floor, beside the counter, the kid looked a little confused. “Pray.” The kid took his glasses off, and looked at them. “Put your hands together and pray,” Bill told him. The kid put his hands together, holding his glasses between them. “Pray loud, so I can hear you.”
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” the kid whispered.
“Louder,” Bill Houston said, stepping out the door.
He could hear the clerk saying, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, oh, Jesus Christ, oh, Jesus Christ,” as he headed rapidly up Clark.
Ten PM, and the town of Chicago was shining. He moved up Wilson and into the El station, paid his fare and was up on the platform at the best possible moment, ducking into a train one second before the doors shut.
The lives of strangers lashed out at him through their windows as the train sailed down to the Loop. He witnessed their checkered tablecloths and the backs of their heads and the images moving on their television screens like things trapped under ice. The train was warm, the light was right.
He realized that he was the greatest thief of all time.
The knowledge seemed to rise unendurably and then break inside of him, and he sat by the train’s window inhabiting a calm open space in the night. He sat still while his heart slowed down, moving where the train moved, listening to it talk to the tracks, feeling all right, letting the love pour through him over the world.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, his bandaged left hand resting carefully on his chest, the right one wrapped around the neck of a bottle of gin. He didn’t need a map or a clock to tell him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time again. It was three AM, and he was now a resident of the senselessly named Dunes Hotel on Diversy, floor number three. When he sat up and put his feet on the cold floor, the darkness seemed to rush up suddenly against his face and stop there, palpitating rapidly like the wings of a moth. He went over by the window and sat in the wooden chair and took a look out into the street, putting the bottle’s mouth to his lips and letting the gin touch his tongue, overcome by an acute sensitivity to everything. The few colors visible on the street seemed to burn. He could feel even the ridges of his fingerprints on the lukewarm bottle. The street out there was a mess of things — trash and rust and grease — all holding still for a minute. In his mind he was wordless, knowing what the street was and who he was, the man with the fingerprints looking out at the street, one bare foot resting on a shoe and the other flat on the chilly linoleum, a drunk and deluded man without a chance. It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match — for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago.