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A Short Story

by William D. Sheldon

The Way A Thief Laughs

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT two swindlers. The first worked street hustles and cons and even did jobs for the CIA. The second liked pyramid schemes and mail fraud.

The second man was in Atlanta, selling a packaged program of health tips and religious dogma, sort of a Get In Shape With God program. He advertised by mail and radio and sent out brochures and money came back to him through the mail. He knew the other man, but they were not working together at the time.

The first man, John Stone, was 32 and athletic. He was living in a shack in a small desert town in Arizona. It was there that he always returned from his work because he was comfortable and left alone. It was also in that little town that he met with his CIA contact to receive instructions or money. The office was in an industrial mall and had a sign next to the door that said Mining Insurance. At the time, he was returning to the office to be paid, but his contact had moved on. He spoke with two people in the office -- a woman who appeared to be a secretary, and the man who had taken over his contact's office. The man told John Stone that he could not pay him. He said Stone's handler was angry because the job had not been done right. Stone argued that it was not his fault the other agent had been blown. He was alive when Stone delivered the money; his mistakes were not Stone's fault.

The CIA man would not budge. Stone demanded to see his contact. The man told him the contact had moved to Washington to a very high level and Stone could not get near him. Stone stormed out of the office.

It happened that the secretary was leaving just behind Stone, and he stopped to speak with her.

"What's a nice looking woman like you doing working for these creeps?"

"What else should I do?" They fell in step together.

"You could be a model."

"Could you get me started, as a model?"

He put his arm around her. "Something could be worked out."

She pushed his arm away. "That help I don't need. Besides, what I really want to do is poetry."

"Really? You're a poet?"

"Yes."

"Tell me a poem."

She stopped and looked into his eyes. He was taller than she, poorly dressed. He smelled unwashed but the hot day did not seem to make him sweat.

"This is called 'Being Alone Means Leaving Late.'

Last night while I held the darkness
I dreamed two of my former lovers
fought over a single plate of biscuits.
My mother, sitting in a corner,
laughed at them
a jar of honey in her lap.

We're not old enough to be crabby
We're only certain of our craft
There's something here that grabs me
I knew you'd hear this one and laugh."

He laughed. She smiled and dipped her head graciously.

"That's very good, but the title sucks. It should be 'Poem To Stop The Clock.'"

"Maybe." Her eyes showed amusement. "Good-bye."

He left her and returned to his shack, but he was restless. At sunset he changed into his shorts and running shoes and went out into the desert. He ran seven miles, the first two quickly, the next four at a leisurely pace, and the final mile in alternating sprints and trots.

It was dark when he finished and he had two dollars in the pocket of his shorts. In spite of the run he was still restless. He had counted on the money from the CIA job. He needed it. He thought he wanted a woman badly. The poet would have done nicely, but he had not asked for her address or even her name.

He went to the Last Drop for a beer, still in shorts and covered with sweat-streaked dust. His dark hair was matted to his shoulders and neck.

The day's heat was trapped in the dark bar. Cold beer on a dusty tongue did him good. By the pool table there was an argument. Two men, drunk and loud from a day of drinking were fighting. Near them sat a thin, bony woman. All three were Indians, but the men had the broad flat noses and thick bodies of Papagos. The woman was just dark. She could have been Hopi or Navajo. She could have been anything. They were fighting over her. One of them had a knife, the other a pool cue. John Stone sipped his beer as he watched them fight.

When the pool cue connected with one man's head, the crack was heard over the juke box. But as he moved in to strike again, his victim placed a knife somewhere deep in his intestines.

John Stone drained his beer and stepped behind the second victim, grabbed the silent woman's hand and pulled her to her feet. They were out the door and a block away before the bartender bothered to phone the police. The two wounded Papagos were struggling against each other to get away and chase them, but neither would let the other pass.

John let go of her hand before they reached his shack. He had been pulling her along, but now she followed, half a step behind. They did not speak. She waited in the main room of the shack while he went into the bathroom, but joined him in the shower a few minutes later. For a long night they made love and he began to think of her as a wish come true. He thought she would disappear in a day or two, when the urge to go came to her.

Stone was working on a scheme. The idea had come to him in El Salvador. There he felt endless tension, the perpetual expectation of death among those he did business with and the sad, determined rebels (mostly children, adolescents and children with unreliable weapons). The fear was sickening and exhilarating. It made him think of the fat, pasty-minded people he liked most to bilk. The fearless arrogance of the uncultured rich businessmen of North America. They became so confident and extravagant when they made a million dollars. Stone had lost more than that in a single bet more than once.

He worked out the scheme as he ran. His feet pounded the desert for miles at a stretch and he mapped out the plan for his next big score. If something better didn't come along he would have to go to work in a couple of weeks. He did not like starting a scheme until it was well planned. People who did that wound up in jail or beaten to death by sore losers. Stone loved the intricate details of a plan. Planning and running were his full time job for now. At night his lovely dark friend rubbed his back and legs and sang or chanted in her own language until he dreamed. In his dreams he met many people, some of them in horrid masks. Sometimes he fought with demons. Sometimes he lost, but he never ran from battle. Often when he would win he would wake up and find her watching him in the dark. Then they made love.

One day he came to an impasse in the scheme. He ran to think, but every possible solution had too many problems and had to be rejected. He ran twice his normal distance. He ran long past the beginning of pain in his right knee. That evening it stiffened and he limped angrily around the cabin. She prepared a stew for him, but he did not want to eat, until very late when he found himself suddenly ravenous. He ate two bowls of the spicy stew and then turned his attention to lovemaking. Things were uneven between them, that night. Uncomfortable. He felt she was not interested or thinking of someone else, but whenever he looked at her eyes she was staring at him intently.

"I need a solution," he said to her or to no one. They made love without satisfaction for a long time that night and then he fell asleep. He dreamed he was living in a cave high up in the mountains and it was winter. A very cold winter boxed him in. In the daytime he went as far out into the snow as he had to find something edible, but always by the wind-ravaged, gray afternoon he was back inside. There was a demon living atop the next peak to the south. Stone could see the demon pacing about just after noon, calling up the winds and the snow. The demon laughed at Stone, the mere mortal shivering and hungry, and dared him to climb up the mountain. Stone refused day after day, but the days grew shorter and darker and colder. The demon's laughter crept into his cave at night and spoiled his sleep. Finally, the day was only an hour long and the night seemed to go on forever. Stone knew that unless he wanted to live in perpetual darkness he would have to kill the demon.

He waited in the mouth of the cave until daylight finally broke through. The sun was already in the west, barely finding a break in the deep clouds. Stone moved quickly uphill. The demon laughed and threw boulders casually down the mountainside. Stone was too cold to be nimble. Several times he was struck by a boulder. When he did reach the top he was sore and bleeding. The demon was nowhere to be seen. Stone paced around the narrow ridge atop the mountain. The wind howled and whined. Stone heard laughter behind him, but each time he turned there was nothing but a cold blast of wind. The sun set. Stone was alone, exposed on the mountain top as the night's tempest closed in around him, winds so strong it was all he could do to lie flat and hold on to the mountain. For hours the wind raged and shifted and pulled at him. He held on to the rock face as long as he could, but exhaustion set in and he fell asleep.

He slept only a moment and the wind ripped him up from the rock into the night. The demon finally appeared in front of him, cackling from the twisted mouth of its grotesque face as Stone sailed off into the night.

His own scream awoke Stone in the little hut where he clung to the sweat-soaked bed. The desert wind banged the tin roof where it was loose. His heart was pounding. She was not in the shack. He looked for her in the tiny kitchen and in the added-on bathroom, but she was gone. A spider web of pain spread out from his knee, radiating up his leg. He built a fire in the potbelly stove and sat awake the rest of the night.

She was gone for three days. He slept very little until exhaustion took him into a deep deep sleep on the third day of her absence. He awoke to her wrapping warm, wet leaves like cooked spinach around his knee. The pain left within minutes. He slept again, for most of a day, feeling the warmth of her next to him. From time to time she got up to add more warm leaves to his knee.

"Run barefoot," she told him the next morning. It seemed like a stupid idea to Stone, but he did it. The knee did not bother him. The heals of his feet hurt a great deal, but he began to fall into his best stride and his mind clicked. He worked through the dozen or so rejected options again, running faster. His bare feet bled, leaving small patches of red in his tracks in the sand. And the solution came to him. He tried it again and again to make sure, but it was a thoroughly workable formula and his plan moved ahead again.

"She grants wishes," he said as he trotted back to the shack. She had a stew and beer for him when he came in, and an herb-filled mud to pack his feet in.

On one run, feeling the earth as never before on a run, he remembered the pleasure of riding a horse. It was when riding a horse one day after his father died that he first learned to think for hours in motion. He wished for a horse.

When he returned to the shack there were two horses tied to a fence post. A tall, fine, deep auburn stallion and a brown and white spotted mare.

"I must take care of these horses," she said when he walked in. "Do you like to ride?"

"The day I met you, the two Papagos who were fighting over you, did they know?"

"Know what?" She looked into the pot where she was cooking. He stripped by the bed and walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower. She took a can of beer to him and slid out of her own shorts and t-shirt.

"You are She Who Grants Wishes." He took a swig of the beer, set the can down on the side of the tub and began to lather her dark body with sweet smelling soap.

"My grandmother's name meant She Who Listens."

"Am I right? Are you She Who--"

"Is it important, being right?"

"Not very."

She closed her eyes and smiled, faced the rushing water. He watched it stream down her face and black hair.

In the morning they rode together, bareback, deep into the desert. Before noon they came back and brushed the horses. In the afternoon he ran and at night they ate and made love. On the sixth evening after the horses had arrived, there was a man at the door. He came at sunset. He knocked, but pushed the door open without waiting for an answer.

"Stone?" He called the name as he stepped in. John Stone looked at him a moment without showing recognition, then he smiled.

"You look like trouble."

"The kind you can use," said the man. "Glad I found you here." He carried two small suitcases into the room. He was a fat little man in an expensive suit. His hair was dark and shiny. He smiled all the time. His smile disappeared for a moment when he saw She, but it came back quickly.

"Who's your friend, John?"

Stone introduced them.

"What are you doing here? I thought you had a big deal in Atlanta."

"Well, I've reaped about all I can from that field and the Lord has seen fit to direct me to other pastures."

"FBI looking for you?"

"You could say that. Smells good. I hope I haven't come too late for dinner."

The smiling man stayed with them that night. He tactfully took a long walk before retiring, but they did not make love while he was gone. When he returned he asked Stone quietly if She was to be trusted or kept out of secrets. He was a man who liked to impress women, but did not trust them. When Stone indicated his trust, the smiling man told them both of his success in Atlanta, of the vast amount of money he had siphoned off from his non-profit corporation and sent to a numbered account in Switzerland, and of an unnamed but large sum of money he had with him and would like to take quietly out of the country.

He asked Stone if his contacts could get him out through Mexico, since he could not board an airline in America for a foreign destination without upsetting a lot of people. Stone laughed. He said that in a few days there would be someone available to get him out, but for now he would have to stay calm and stay put. The little man smiled a satisfied smile.

On the second day of his visit with them, the smiling man listened to Stone's scheme. She had never heard it before and she showed no emotion as she listened. The smiling man did not speak until Stone was finished. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, 108 degrees. He drank a beer from a can and sweat profusely. Stone did not sweat visibly, nor did She Who Grants Wishes. After a few minutes the smiling man explained the problems he saw with the plan. Stone met every one of them. He had thought of each danger and arranged for it, but he listened carefully for any problem he had overlooked.

The smiling man asked Stone about laundering money. That, Stone confessed, was what he hadn't decided on. His usual techniques through Mexico and Central America were costly. He wanted something more efficient. The smiling man laughed and told She a story about a time John Stone had tried to launder a hundred and fifty thousand dollars through Los Vegas casinos by buying two or three thousand dollars worth of chips at a window, playing for an hour and then cashing in the chips minus small losses at another cashier to make sure he didn't get the same bills he'd traded in. The FBI did not catch on to him, but one very alert casino owner did. Stone wound up turning over most of his take in a late night gun-point conference in his hotel room. He was allowed to leave with five thousand dollars of new money and his life. He told more stories then, of schemes he and Stone had worked together, of a long, ironic, humorous friendship.

On the third day of his visit, the smiling man, considerably dressed down, took fifty dollars from a suitcase full of money and headed for a bar. He drank several shots of bourbon and a couple of beers and played three games of pool. He made inquiries about prostitutes and was stabbed to death and robbed in the men's room.

She learned about it that afternoon, buying groceries. The police had asked a lot of questions, a lot more than usual after a stabbing, but no one in the bar knew the man. She told John Stone that evening and he sat on the bed without speaking for hours.

The next morning they counted the money in the suitcase. It was nearly half a million dollars. Stone built a fire in the potbelly stove and fed the money in, followed by the man's clothing. Then they went riding.

In the desert that day he rode ferociously. She followed, but at a distance. He rode wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. As She often did, She stripped to the same once they were away from town. He closed his eyes as he rode, clutching the horse's mane. He felt the pounding of the horse beneath him. He could feel the strain and reaction of every muscle, every tendon. It felt like he himself had four legs, four powerful strong untiring legs thundering along the desert trail. The smell of the desert and the horse -- dusty, strong. His arms held the horse. And then they held nothing. He opened his eyes. He trotted as he thought. Trotted on four good legs. It was no surprise to him to look at himself, a man to the waist, a horse from there down. He galloped and laughed until he thought of She, because She had done this, but was he separated from her now?

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