Lake Charles

Trish shouldn’t have tried the doorknob. Looking back on it now, I understand that her walk up the pavers that separated house from gravel drive, onto porch, settling her hand on knob, and giving that little jiggle, well, that was the thing that did us in.

The house was in a small neighborhood at the southern end of the city. Only one road led in, even though there were lots of off-shoot roads once we got in. They all dead-ended into the bayou, and this house, the one that Trish and I were standing at, it sat behind a long, high fence, at the end of a substantial gravel drive, right on the lip of the bayou.

We’d worked our way down the road that led to this driveway and this house, trying car doors without any luck. Our thought, whispered as we tucked down below the tall fence, shielding us from the street we’d just crept down, was to try the vehicles in this drive and then, if none were open, I’d try to jimmy a lock and see what we found. That’s what I was doing, too, jimmying the lock, when Trish, who was supposed to be looking for the click of a light in a window inside the house, walked over to the pavers and then to the porch and then to the front door.

What could I do? Holler her name? I hissed a whisper, but in the shush of the bayou’s water, I’m sure she didn’t hear me. So she made it to the door uninterrupted and put her hand on the knob and gave it a jiggle.

We’d been working all the south Lake Charles neighborhoods, Trish and I. In those neighborhoods, people didn’t expect their car to get broken into, not like in downtown or the garden district, so you could pretty easily find ones left unlocked or with windows cracked. For the first few weeks, we stole stereos, but then we figured out it’s hard to get several of those in a night and carry them back out, so we started looking for cash in the console, that kind of thing. You wouldn’t believe how many old people leave their cell phones in their cars overnight. People who still have a landline. They don’t think they need the cell in the evenings, I suppose, so they leave them sitting in cupholders or consoles, even on the dash sometimes. It’s stupid even beyond the danger of someone like Trish or me coming along, of course. Hot as it is here, you’re likely to fry that thing, leaving it there all night and into the morning, and I would have told them that, if there had been a way for me to do it without admitting I also stole their phones and sold them to my buddy Greg who managed his dad’s pawn shop.

Anyway, we’d been working these neighborhoods, a stretch of about three square miles that spreads out north of the airport and all around the university. We didn’t do it in order, because we didn’t want a pattern. Two or three evenings a week, I’d pull up to Trish’s house and honk my horn, and she’d come jogging out, and we’d cruise around for a while until we came to a street that looked promising, one pretty far from others we worked on.

I met Trish when we were in high school, but she says she doesn’t remember me. Can’t blame her. I was quiet then. I didn’t really loosen up until we got out of there. Something about those long gray hallways with the purple gators painted everywhere and taffeta spirit signs taped up all over and the crush of other kids, all of it was too much for me, so I kept my head down and did my work as best I could and graduated on time. My dad was always on me to get more involved, and he even offered to switch me over to the Catholic school where all the rich kids go, but I told him no, it’d be the same over there probably. He didn’t seem to get that, just shook his head and told me it was my decision.

After jiggling of handle, Trish turned from the door and slipped back down the pavers and over to me. I was squatting low alongside the car, the Slim Jim in my hand, eyes on all the windows of the house, searching for a telltale flicker of lamp or overhead. But there was nothing. We could hear the dappling water of the bayou and in a tree across the way, the hoo of an owl. No lights came on and no sounds intruded on the evening, and so after a minute I stood and began to again work the Slim Jim down into the door, trying to catch the hidden clasp to pop the lock.

I’d gotten the Slim Jim from Greg. He offered it when I told him we were just smashing windows and grabbing what we could. “Get your ass shot that way,” he said, and he slipped the thin metal from under the counter, passed it over to me. “Don’t want to go getting caught with that, now.” I watched YouTube videos on how to use it and practiced on my own car, doing it again and again until I could catch the lock and pop it in just a matter of seconds. I didn’t realize until Trish and I got out with it that first night that not all car doors work the same, and so in the intervening weeks it had been a process of discovery, figuring not just how to use the Slim Jim but also how to learn random car doors’ inner workings.

I nearly had this one. The car was old, a big boat of a Cadillac, and I’d discovered that those popped easier than newer cars. Up the gravel drive a bit was a truck, and if I could get the Cadillac taken care of, I thought I’d give the truck a try, too. I still didn’t know why Trish had gone to the door, but she was back alongside me now, her eyes peering into the car’s windows, and so it seemed a minor hiccup in an otherwise successful night.

I had the Slim Jim nearly all the way down into the door, holding just the tip of it between forefinger and thumb, when the man came from around back of the house and told us to stop and stand up and not move, his voice soft and still.

I remember meeting Trish back in high school, even if she doesn’t remember meeting me. We had history class together junior year. She sat off to the left, against the far wall, and I sat, as I always did, dead center of the classroom. There in the middle, you dodge the teacher’s gaze. It’s counterintuitive, but teachers always look to the front row for the pets or to the back to keep the rowdy kids in line or to the sides to make sure not to miss anyone, but they never look to the middle because they feel like they’re only ever looking to the middle, even when they haven’t at all.

So I sat in the middle, and she sat off to the left, and I looked toward her frequently. It was a crush, sure. Just a regular high school crush, the kind you get. I didn’t know her then. Only knew how she looked and that unlike the girls she sat with who tried desperately to seem already too old for the place, she actually exuded that aura without seeming to try. I admired that about her and admired, too, how she didn’t even bother to shoot down Mike Richard’s bullshit jokes. She just looked at him with cold eyes, and he’d shrink back away from her and her friends.

Mike tried to fuck with me once, tried to pick on the quiet kid, but I stomped quick on the inside of his foot, stepped fully into his space to keep him from hitting me with his big haymaker punches, and popped him a quick jab in the throat. He toppled, and people didn’t seem interested in messing with me after that. They more or less just ignored me, which is eventually what guys like Mike started to do with Trish. We had that in common.

*

The man held a shotgun. Big, pump action. A hunting gun. He had it leveled at us. Trish and I stood up. We didn’t raise our hands, not yet, but we did keep them at our sides, not making any sudden movements.

He was a big man, in his fifties and broad in the way that indicates a lifetime of labor that suddenly stops. “What the hell are y’all doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. 

“Like hell, nothing. Get out your wallets.”

I reached to my back pocket, pulled mine out. Trish said, “I don’t have mine with me.”

“Toss that over here, boy.” 

I threw it to the gravel at his feet. He kept the shotgun leveled at us as he squatted to retrieve the wallet. He was quick and graceful in his movements, and the gun’s barrel never wavered. His eye shifted from us to the wallet, back to us, back to the wallet, and I thought briefly of whether we could run for it, whether we could just bolt down the gravel drive. I had no doubt this man would have shot us both if we were coming into the house, but was the jiggle of the knob and finding us at his Cadillac’s door enough to drive him to kill us in our escape? I rocked up on the balls of my feet, hoping that the slight movement would clue Trish that we could run at any moment.

“Best stop that, now,” the man said. “Best keep those feet planted, because I tell you one thing, you think you’re going to run on me, I’ll fill your asses with buckshot and not think twice on it. Maybe they’ll charge me with it and maybe they won’t, but it won’t make your asses any less buckshot, and let me tell you something, it is no goddamn fun at all to be buckshot.” As he said all of this, his eyes continued to make their way over the contents of my wallet. Trish and I didn’t speak. “Got me a chunk of thigh taken out by a scattergun back in the eighties out hunting with my boys. Oldest thought he was going to swing his gun up and take aim at some ducks, but he got excited and pulled the trigger mid-swing, and about half that birdshot caught me across the top of the thigh, birdshot being the smallest, and delicatest of the shots from a scattergun, the kind meant to take down a whole covey of doves by driving itty bitty balls of metal into their breasts, but it is no goddamn fun to take it in the thigh, no goddamn fun at all, and I imagine buckshot feels a damn sight worse, especially since I’m liable to fire into your scrawny asses more than just the once if it keeps you from running back down my drive.”

What happened with Trish and me was this: I spent three years fucking around in college, coming out of my shell and discovering that I could, in fact, be around people, that I wasn’t, in fact, quiet and reserved. When eventually LSU asked that I not come back, I came home to Lake Charles, where I moved in with my father, whom I told daily I’d enroll in the local college and make something of myself. At night, I acquainted myself with all the local bars I’d never gotten to go in before.

I found Trish bartending at one of these, Pappy’s, a dive that sat across from a strip mall with a Books-a-Million, a Market Basket, and a Little Caesar’s. She didn’t remember me, even when I told her that we’d gone to high school together, but she poured my beers into frosty mugs, and I drank them and tipped well and kept coming back, and soon, we became friendly, and then, eventually, we started spending time together when she wasn’t working. Most of the rest of the clientele at Pappy’s was older, and so she’d talk and flirt with them, going through the bartending motions before cycling back around to me, where she’d pour us shots which she took surreptitiously, since she wasn’t supposed to drink on the job. After, we’d go back to her apartment and watch TV and have sex and sometimes drink more and sometimes not.

It was only after all of this happened, this slow build to routine, that the idea of car burglary came to us. It was a Thursday night. Thirsty Thursday, Pappy’s called it. You got a domestic beer and a shot of well liquor for five fifty. I’d been partaking of this, and Trish had joined me in a few shots when Sandra came in. She was an older lady. I’d seen her before, spoken with her, possibly played a late-night game of darts with her, though I couldn’t say that with any certainty. This night, she took the stool next to mine and ordered her drinks. I asked how she was, and she said fine fine fine, but then she entered into a rant about her car having been broken into the night before.

“They didn’t take nothing,” she said. “Just broke my window and riffled around through my glove box. They popped my trunk and went through that, too. I had a crate of baseballs that my grandson uses for batting practice back there. They took five or ten of those, but we found them about a hundred yards away. Guess they decided a handful of beat-up baseballs was more trouble than they were worth.”

“Why would someone do that?” I said. “Just bizarre.”

Trish, like a good bartender, said nothing, just smiled and wiped down the bar.

“I don’t know,” Sandra said. “I’ve been trying to figure it all day. I get breaking in and going through the stuff, but baseballs? I don’t understand it at all.”

All of us there agreed that it was beyond comprehending, and I bought Sandra a round and she bought me one, and then she left. Near midnight, I had a good solid buzz going, and the bar began to clear out, it being a summer Thursday. Trish leaned against the bar in front of me, a bored look on her face, and said, “I think I know why they did it.”

“Why who did what?”

“Why they took Sandra’s baseballs. It’s a thrill thing. Whoever broke in there wasn’t some hardened criminal. Probably not a teenager desperate for weed money, either. It was someone just wanted the thrill of it. And when they came to the baseballs, they thought they’d make for a nice memento. No telling why they dropped them. Maybe something spooked them, and they ran. But I get the impulse to take the balls.”

I thought about this for a while. It made a lot of sense, of course, but I tried to wrap my mind around the idea of that kind of thrill. I’d done dumb stuff just for the doing of it before, of course. Drove drunk and jumped in a pool clothed and hit on women out of my league. I’d gotten the goose of excitement from those things plenty of times, but I’d never attempted something like what Trish was describing. So I told her I thought I understood that impulse, too, and that a thing like that could be fun. And she agreed that it could be. And then, Saturday, her day off, we spoke of it more on her porch, drinking electric lemonades and watching the cars go in and out, in and out of her apartment complex parking lot. Monday was Big Ass Beer night at Pappy’s, and over my thirty-two-ounce mug of Coors, I asked if she was working the next day, and she said she was not, and I asked if I could pick her up around ten, and she said that I could. And our life of crime began.

“So there comes a time, friends,” the man said, “comes a time when you got to look in the mirror and reckon with who you find yourself to be. It’s a mysterious thing, but that don’t mean it’s got to be complicated. You can look yourself in the eye there and say ‘Yessir, I know who I am, I am a man who will do the things need doing,’ and I am here to tell you that I have looked in that mirror and I have asked myself that question, and I have found my answer. So if you’re thinking—” he flipped my wallet open and looked at my license “—of turning tail in a moment like this, you’re answering your own damned question. Your name’s Tawner?”

I nodded weakly.

“Strange name, strange name.” I knew the question he was going to ask before he asked it, had known that someone would ask it this night, either this man or the police he would inevitably call. Still, when he finally got to it, when he finally said the words I’d been waiting to hear, it didn’t make it any easier. “Billy Tawner any kin of yours?”

“He’s my father.”

The man grinned wide. He flipped my wallet closed and slipped it into his pocket. “The damned DA’s son’s out here robbing folks? You have got to be shitting me.” He started to say more, stopped himself, chuckled. He didn’t seem the type of man to be short of words, but in that moment, he couldn’t at all think of what to say. Finally, after a time, he motioned the shotgun to Trish. “You go on and go. Me and Tawner here’ll figure this out.”

I expected Trish to look at me uncertainly, to hesitate, but she turned and moved quickly down the gravel drive. I looked at the man, and he looked at me, his grin still wide. “Come on inside. We’ll call your daddy.”

A word about Trish and her place in this story: she exits the page here. I would find out later exactly what she did after he dismissed her. She walked back to my car, realized that I still had the keys in my pocket. She walked out of the neighborhood through the one road in, and she walked the quarter mile to the Shell station, where she used the phone to call a friend to pick her up. She waited for me at her apartment, waited to see if I would arrive or if she’d get a call from the jail. She says now that she was not nervous during all this, that as soon as the man told her she could go, she slipped into a deep serenity.

You might think that this story is the kind where I suddenly realized that I was enamored with childish things and that my relationship with Trish was one of those childish things. It is not that kind of story. I was enamored with childish things. Trish was, too. This night was no Rubicon, though. I didn’t stop drinking in bars, and Trish didn’t stop either. I didn’t go back to school then, and neither did Trish. We would marry eventually, and you may now be waiting for me to tell you how I cheated on her or she cheated on me, and the marriage fell apart, but this isn’t that kind of story, either.

That night, Trish waited for me, calm and clear, and when all was resolved, we moved back into the routine of our lives. We married. We bought a house. We got careers. All of these things did not happen because of that night, but they also didn’t happen independent from it. Causality is a strange thing, is what I’m saying.

The man’s kitchen was cluttered with the kinds of knick-knacks you would expect. Lots of blue and white checkered wallpaper. Lots of little wooden cut-outs of boys and girls in pantaloons and dresses. Big flowered pitchers on wooden shelves with little hearts carved into them. He sat me at his kitchen table. Across from me on the wall was a corded landline. It was the kind we’d had in my house when I was a boy.

“You should just call the police,” I said.

He snorted. “Don’t act tough, son. You don’t want me calling the police. Don’t want me calling your daddy, either.”

We looked at each other. 

“I was about your age, I found myself in the middle of Vietnam. Don’t talk about it much, but I got you over a barrel, so I can tell you this one story, make my point. We’re out on a march, moving one ville to another, and I’m talking to my buddy Steve. Now what you got to understand about Steve is that he don’t believe in anything. Don’t believe in the war nor in God a’mighty nor in the chain of command. Was the kind of guy would slip in your foxhole just to leave you a lingering fart, something to remember him by. So we’re on this little trail path, moving one spot to the next, supposed to be exercising field discipline, supposed to be nice and quiet and whispery, all raised fist and whistled warning and whatnot, but Steve, he’s chatting me up at a normal volume, which out there in the middle of nothing is about loud as a scream, and our lieutenant, he keeps glancing back over his shoulder at us glaring, and a lot of the other guys are, too, just trying to get us to shut the fuck up, but Steve’s jabbering about this or that, talking and talking, evincing a kind of lackadaisical attitude toward the day and our surroundings and the very situation of war and all of it. I’m getting a little edgy, but also I don’t want to tell Steve to shut his damned mouth because he’s my friend, my only real friend over there on account of I, also, was a fart-in-your-foxhole type guy, and so I don’t want to tell Steve nothing because I don’t want to lose the only thing I got going over there. So, I try talking back to him, but at a lower volume, hoping maybe he’ll follow my lead and lower his own voice. Years later, me and my wife’d have kids, and I tried that shit with them, too. Late night and they’re hollering their heads off, and you talk real soft and quiet and hope they’ll ratchet down like you have. Worked about as well in the kids’ bedroom as it did in Vietnam. Steve’s walking along just talking talking talking at still the steady volume, and I’m going, real whispery, ‘I know, man, I hear you, you’re right, buddy, you are fucking-a right,’ and he’s not noticing at all, and we’re just moving on, moving on, and we come to this trail junction, just two little shit dirt roads converging, and the lieutenant stops us moving. We take up position there while he figures out whether to continue on where we’ve been going or take one of the other paths, and through it all, Steve is just on and on going, just telling me all about this and that and the other, his hangnails and girlfriend’s letters and daddy’s Cadillac and all of it, and I’m whispering on back, ‘I hear you, I hear you,’ and everyone out there’s getting more and more pissed at him but at me, too, and I’m starting to wait for one of these damned guys to go ahead and squeeze a round out in our direction, make us shut the hell up the old fashioned way, but the bullet never comes. You know what ends up happening?”

I realized that my hands were folded together in my lap, that I’d dug the nails of the one into the flesh of the other as the old man talked. “Some Vietnamese attacked you?”

He laughed. “Hell no. Lieutenant figured out which path we was taking, and we got up and moved on along and Steve kept talking until we got where we were going, and I kept whispering, and that’s all that happened. I told you that story to tell you this: sometimes a thing happens and in the moment, in the damned moment, you think it’s going to set something off, trigger something to happen, change something, and even when you think back on it later, you don’t know how it didn’t cause anything like that. Sometimes that’s what happens.”

He stood from the table then, plucked his keys from a pegboard behind him. “Come on.”

We walked outside and he motioned me into his Cadillac. I got in on the passenger side. The car was spotless. All rich leather and polished dash. He cranked it, backed up quickly down the gravel drive and out into the neighborhood. We passed my car, still parked around the corner right where I’d left it, edged against the line where two yards met, so anyone from one house would assume I was there visiting the other. I started to say something, but the old man shook his head, steered us on out of the neighborhood, back onto Sale Street. He let the Cadillac glide fast, steering with a palm loose on the bottom of the wheel. In the parking lot of the Shell station, Trish would have been standing propped against a gas pump, her phone against her ear. But I didn’t see her, and we slid on down to Highway 14, and he put us heading south, out of town, into the flat lands where they farm for rice and crawfish, alternating years in their paddies. Years later, I met a man who owned one of those farms, and I walked with him out into the knee-deep water in my waders, and he showed me how the crawfish traps worked, showing me how the crawfish were smart enough to find their ways in, looking for the scrap of chicken neck, but too dumb to find their way back out again. I’d eaten crawfish all my life, been to boils many times each spring, but I’d never understood the animals until then, never thought of them or their lives beyond the moment of dropping them in the boil.

The old man pulled the Cadillac off the highway into a small trailer park. I finally got up the nerve to say, “Where are we going?”

“You’re going to do me a favor,” he said, his eyes bouncing back and forth across the dark trailers. He cruised slow all the way down to the end, turned around in a little grassy field, and aimed us back toward the entrance. About midway there, he stopped in front of a new-ish trailer, one with a freshly made porch attached to the side of it. The wood was unvarnished, fresh from the hardware store. Alongside it sat an old Ford truck.

“Go on, hop out. Under the seat of that truck, you dig around you’ll find a little twenty-two rifle. I want you to go on and fetch that for me.”

I slipped from the car, left the door standing open, moved quick to the Ford’s driver side door. I tried the handle. Locked. I realized that I’d left the Slim Jim in the Cadillac’s window. I went back around, found it still dipped down in the door, pulled it free. The old man didn’t look at me as I tucked it along my side and went back over to the truck. I dropped it down into the door through the window, and in that moment, I felt what a surgeon must feel when his fingers guide the blade precisely after so many years of practicing and trying. I caught the latch, flipped the lock, pulled the door open. The truck cab was cluttered with burger wrappers and empty Old Milwaukee cans. I reached below the big bench seat and felt for the gun. I came up with it barrel first, pulled it free, and went back to the Cadillac with it, not even bothering to shut the truck’s door.

As I slid in, I heard a voice holler from the trailer, but the old man was already driving us away, and I was already closing the door against that call.

I set the .22 across the backseat, and the man drove fast, so fast I was sure whoever was hollering would not catch us, not in that truck, and though the man was moving fast, was driving swiftly back toward town, I felt safe there in the Cadillac, lulled in its soft leather. “Who was that?” I said. “Why’d we steal his gun?”

“That,” the old man said, “was my daddy.” He didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain why he’d take me to steal a gun from his father. He didn’t tell me stories about abuse or about games that they’d play. He told me nothing, but as he drove fast back toward town, he turned to me, and in the flash and fade of the streetlights, I saw his eyes gleam with joy.