Drifting South

“In a couple hours, bring back a steak dinner from Merle’s, make sure it’s hot, and with whatever’s left, get yourself something but bring back a sack of biscuits and gravy and a pot of brown beans for you and your brothers. And collards, too, if they have them. I won’t be doing no cooking tonight.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re fishing down at the falls. And they better be home before dark. If they ain’t, you fetch them and tell them to hightail it back here.”

I nodded and then thought about the steak dinner. I knew it wasn’t for her and it wasn’t for me and it wasn’t for Uncle Ray. “You want anything?”

“I’ll eat in the morning,” she said.

Ma never ate while she was working, even if she had to work all day and all night with one customer. But she looked hungry so I figured I’d ask. She never looked at Uncle Ray and he never looked at her, he just kept looking out the window. Ma gave me a quick hug and yawned before she went to the icebox and fetched a bucket of beer, the only thing in it besides that jar of mustard, the pickle stub and a crock of spring water.

She then went back to her business and kept that bucket steady as she walked down the hall wearing a pair of shoes with black high heels, and didn’t spill a drop. When she opened her bedroom door to go back inside, I heard a man snoring.

After she locked the door, Uncle Ray pulled his razor back out and wiped it down with an oiled cloth he kept wrapped in wax paper in his front pocket.

“A man who keeps a keen razor and knows how to use it will never starve,” he said. “Good thing to know if times get bad, especially if the day comes that you have kids to feed and real jobs are scarce, or you need money to get out of somewhere fast and there isn’t time to hustle what you need. You’re getting at the age where you need to ponder such things. It’s misfortune you’ve passed on the real education I’ve tried to teach so you could make the way of an honest man, if you ever needed to or wanted to, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about such things—you’re not listening to a damn thing I’m saying, are you?”

I realized I wasn’t, looked at him and lied, “Yeah, I am,” I said.

He took a step closer. “Listen to me. Going through life ignorant is so far your choosing. You’re going to have to take and not give in this world to get, and sometime, someday, you may need to take with more than just your wit and that grin and good luck of yours that follows you around. One day you’ll grin at the world and it isn’t going to grin back. Mean is going to stare you dead in the face. Understand?”

I nodded.

“You will one day, I assure you. And good luck’s always too fickle to bank a future on whether you think so or not right now. You’re not always going to have a woman cooking your supper, providing a roof for you and doing your wash like your momma does, tending to you hand and foot. What I’m trying to tell you is this—you don’t know anything about pain.

“Real pain. Suffering kind of pain. Hard times.

“You’re about to become a man, and from that day on the called side of the coin will land upside only about half the time, and that’s only if you stay lucky. You don’t know anything about that kind of business, yet, and there isn’t a way for you to even understand such serious business. You don’t know anything about being a man, is what I’m telling you. Not yet. You think you do, but you don’t.”

I looked at Uncle Ray to study his face because of what he’d said toward the end of his rambling about having a woman doing stuff for you. Ma was doing those exact same things for him, but I decided to let it pass because it seemed to have passed him. That’s about all I got out of all whatever he’d just said.

He finished oiling down his razor, put it away and then he rummaged through the pantry. He wrestled those pants back out and hung them back up, then he got started again with his lesson and after each turn I made at the pants, he’d make me stitch up those britches so I could practice again.

“We’ll practice on different pockets tomorrow,” he said.

I got real good at cutting and stitching. He told me the two skills went together like cold buttermilk and cornbread.

He went on while I was slashing that if I cut a pocket right and kept walking behind a man, soon that wallet would poke out far enough to grab or plain fall out for the lazy taking. And you always took a wallet you know has something in it or you were just picking empty leather.

He told me how important it was to look for the man with a full wallet. He said it wasn’t hard because men who wore fancy hats or boots or had some gold or silver showing on them generally had something worth taking. He said it didn’t take much thinking or education to find where the money is, I just had to pay attention.

And he said money didn’t belong to any man who isn’t smart enough to keep it. The bigger wad they had on them, the more they showed it on them like decorations because most men with money like to let folks know that they have more than others do.

He said it wasn’t nothing more than human nature.

“You choose your mark by watching what a man orders for a meal and how much he leaves on his plate, how much he’ll bet at a gaming table, how much he tips the tavern help because the rich don’t tip as much as the poor, generally. And especially take note if women are interested in him, because women can smell green on a man and they attract to it like bees to wildflowers. Always watch the women,” he said.

While I’d stitch those pants up, Uncle Ray would tell me all kinds of ways to get another man’s money without them knowing it and without harming him too much.

He went on to say that sometimes a razor wasn’t the proper tool to rob a man with. He said if a man I’d marked for robbing had a wallet in a hard to reach place like a front pocket or breast pocket tight to him, it was best to have two people helping to make easy payday even though I’d have to split the loot three ways.

If I did it by myself, he said I’d generally have to hurt the feller too bad to get his money or worse, I might be the one getting hurt.

There were all kinds of ways to do the robbing, but the easiest and smartest was for one man to hit the feller in the nose hard and unexpected, another to help the feller hit get off the ground, and the third to carry on like crazy and chase the rascal who’d hit him and both would run out of sight.

“The man helping the mark up is always the best thief of the bunch,” Uncle Ray said. “He’s the one who takes the money, rings, watch, whatever he can grab without the mark knowing, as he’s just acting to be helping him up.”

Uncle Ray went on that after it was all over, the mark would get off the ground, find his hat and go about his way light in the pockets and jewelry but quick in step. He wouldn’t know he’d been lightened of his load yet.

Uncle Ray said the most important thing was, “If you have to hit a man, hit him hard. Hard enough so that his first thought is that he’d better just get to somewhere else from wherever he’s at to get his brains together before he decides to check his belongings.”

I knew that already from a couple dozen fistfights and practiced that myself whenever I had to hit somebody, but he said there was a code among professional thieves like him that you never hurt anyone too bad unless it was by accident, and you always left a little. It wasn’t just being charitable, he said, it was the proper way to do business.

A place like Shady Hollow needed people to mend up fairly easy with a dollar or two still left in their pockets, because we’d all want them to come back one day, and we needed them to come back without too many hard feelings. They’d just be more protective of their valuables next time, so all in all we were just teaching them an important lesson so they wouldn’t get robbed again so easy by nobody else, he said.

He kept going on but at some point my hands were tired from all the slashing and stitching and I couldn’t stand my empty stomach any longer, so I thanked him for the razor and whetstone, stuck both in my back pocket and the robbing lesson ended.

I took Ma’s money and headed down to Merle’s Diner, where I placed her order and counted what change was left. It wasn’t much, so I told Miss Paulene to forget the collards and instead bring me a bowl of catfish chowder.

I could have turned up the bottle of ketchup in front of me waiting on that chowder. I was wishing they’d go ahead and bring me some soda crackers to munch on when Herbert Mullins walked in, all out of breath.

Me and Herbert were good pards and had gotten in and out of all kinds of trouble for as long as I could remember. He was two years older than me, but I’d always been bigger than him. I’d always been pretty sure that I was by a far sight the smarter one between us, but Herbert would fight anybody or anything. Ma always said I was tough as a pine knot, but Herbert was a lot tougher. He loved to fistfight like some people love to gamble or fish or be lazy. Loved it. Herbert wasn’t a bully, though.

He always stood up for the runts in Shady and those who just got picked on for one peculiar reason or another, and that made him popular with those who got picked on all the time when he wasn’t around. I never saw Herbert ever pick a fight with somebody smaller than him, and that’s how we got to be friends because he loved to pick fights with boys bigger than him.

Herbert picked a fight with me for no good reason at all on the first day he showed up in Shady Hollow, except he wanted to rile me up to see if he could whup me. He knocked a pear out of my hand that I was eating and then grinned. We soon fought for two or twenty minutes until we were both so covered in mud and dust and plumb worn out, that neither one of us could swing anymore.

After that, we both stood and he tried to shake my hand wearing a big bloody smile, and he told me what his name was. I told him I’d shake his hand if he got my pear off the ground, cleaned it off and gave it back to me. And he did.

Anyway, Herbert was standing there all wild-eyed like he’d get over the smallest things, and he grabbed me by the arm out of breath. “Been looking all over for you. Come here.”

He tried to pull me off my stool, but I jerked my arm away and told him I wasn’t going anywhere until I ate my dinner. He grabbed me again but harder the second time. I saw how agitated he was and I knew if I was gonna eat in peace, I had to get up from that stool.

“You see that blue Ford parked up the street?”

I stood and nodded. You noticed cars in Shady, especially new, shiny ones. It had North Carolina plates and I wondered if it was that new pool shooter’s car. But I didn’t recollect seeing it the night before.

“A girl drove it in fifteen minutes ago. She’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen and I mean she’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen. She’s been asking around…for you.”

“For me?”

Herbert grinned.

I pulled my arm away again.

“I ain’t lying, Ben.”

“How old is she?”