Veronica Thorson | Thieves
“Is anyone looking?”
“No. Go for it. Now!” she hissed at me.
Earlier that day, an oppressively hot August day in the summer of 1993, my maternal aunt and I had conspired to steal rollerblades from a sporting goods store at the Las Caras mall. The plan, regrettably, involved the aid of my unwitting baby cousin and her expedient baby stroller. Although the perversity of using an innocent baby to commit a theft certainly pierced my conscience, I had eased into the role of cool criminal nevertheless, for it was a simple role and straightforward, as undemanding as AP Biology, my favorite subject in high school. Back then, I imagined myself a biologist or a physician someday, maybe even a brain surgeon.
I scanned the aisle up and down and drew a deep breath, attempting to collect my nerves, before grabbing one of the rollerblades and stuffing it into the bottom compartment of Chubette’s stroller. I then grabbed the second rollerblade from the box and took one more look down the aisle before reuniting it with its partner. In that moment, though I had been a virgin to theft, intuition sizzled its way through my synapses and radiated through my skin. The instinct, perhaps a residual trait persisting deep within a double helix on the X chromosome I had inherited from my mother, was primitive. I casually pushed the empty box toward the back of the shelf, where it wouldn’t be discovered until we were long gone. A few minutes earlier, pretending to try on the rollerblades, I had removed the tissue paper from the box and stored it inside another one to prevent the noise of crumpling paper when the time came to snatch them. All this I had done while sitting on the floor, and from that lower vantage point I scrutinized the stroller to make sure the rollerblades were well hidden. My baby cousin’s blanket, yellow with green turtles, discreetly concealed a hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise. I looked up at my aunt.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Fleeing the scene, I worried we would never reach the exit; the thoroughly lit sporting goods store appeared to span acres. On the way in, it had seemed more like a cubicle with five salespeople for every square foot and nowhere to hide from their unblinking eyes, but the store had mutated into a maze during the theft, the aisles into partitions, and now there were landmines and booby traps to navigate through. As we slowly traversed the acres of commercial carpeting to the distant store exit, Aunt Luz pushed the stroller while I walked beside her, nonchalantly, despite the slightly nauseating sensation of adrenaline surging through my body. Chubette stared at all the colorful objects passing through her line of vision: orange basketballs, red and blue softball bats, brown baseball mitts, lime-green tennis balls crammed inside clear plastic cylinders. Maybe she squealed as we stepped over the threshold. Perhaps I laughed in relief. Two things I remember clearly, though two decades separate me from that day: the rollerblades were a women’s size nine, and a feeling not unlike euphoria instantly washed over me. The air outside, though dry and hot, abounded with good oxygen, and the parking lot, gray and bleak with cracking pavement, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The feeling soon passed, however, and then I couldn’t escape fast enough. I felt the urge to break into a full sprint toward the car, jump in, and speed away before potential witnesses could memorize my license plate. But Luz was pushing Chubette’s stroller as if sauntering through a botanical garden, and we continued to walk, taking our time, two thieves and a baby.
I was sixteen back then. I still watched cartoons. That summer, however, especially that day, the crumbs of naiveté I had managed to preserve up to that point disappeared for good, like the genetic drift of an ill-fated trait. I spent the first part of summer practicing for my driver’s license road test. My mom had been thrifty, or cheap, as I perceived it back then, and had squirreled away enough money to buy me a well-used, cockroach-brown 1980 Buick Skylark. “You deserve this, mija,” she’d said. “Not every mom can say her kid is a straight-A student.” I named the car Minerva Mariquita de Guadalupe and self-consciously introduced her to my closest friends. When I cruised all over Las Caras with the windows rolled down because Minerva lacked air conditioning, I didn’t care that I lived in a boring, backward town with no action. I made my own action. Nor did I mind that I drove the most obnoxious car around. Minerva took me places I never imagined I could go. The remainder of the summer, a few weeks during August, I devoted to my aunt and our little excursions—“shopping trips” we called them.
When we finally reached Minerva, I envisioned myself rocketing away straight to the hospital, where the ER staff could tend to my impending apoplexy (strokes were common in my family), but there wasn’t time for such trivial matters. Aunt Luz and I had a busy schedule that day. Inside the car, she puffed on a cigarette while I drove. I hated that she smoked with Chubette in the back seat, but I would never tell her so. My aunt was an old-school chola, a female Mexican thug, or at least she had claimed that title in her youth. A teardrop tattoo punctuated the delicate skin below her right eye, and that’s probably the only tear she ever cried.
“So where does this friend of yours live?”
“By the park on Calle del Norte,” I said.
“Oh yeah, me and Joe used to get drunk at that park. One time we got busted sniffing glue, and your mom had to pick us up at the pig station.”
“Well, it’s around there,” I said, hoping to choke off the possibility of further elaboration on her exhausting war stories. Perhaps I was feeling the backlash of what we had just done, or maybe it was simply the afternoon heat making me cranky. Most likely it was the way she kept looking at her watch every few minutes, which never portended well, or the urgent look in her embittered brown eyes.
“Your mom always came through for me, Susie.”
I turned up the radio in answer. Through the rearview mirror, I could see my Chubber trying to sing along with her made-up words. I turned up the radio another few notches and started singing, too: “Sweet Little Lies” by Fleetwood Mac. I knew the lyrics of all their songs, thanks to my mom and her album collection, and I preferred listening to her favorite band rather than my aunt’s inadvertent indictments of her enablement.
“Go to Raul’s first since it’s on the way,” Luz snapped at me, interrupting our performance with her curt demand. “I’ll sell him the phone, and then we’ll drop off the rollerblades at your friend’s and get her money.”
“Okay,” I said, grateful the hint had registered and that she wasn’t expounding on the good old days, which never sounded all that good to me, even when it was my mom who was telling me about them. Neither of them ever seemed to waste an opportunity to reminisce about the past.
Like earlier that summer, when my mom—only on her fourth Bud Light—sat on the front steps with me, snacking on chips and salsa and watching the new neighbors attach skirting to their trailer. Our conversations rarely broached difficult topics, for our survival required the avoidance of pain in any of its forms, and a habit of flight over fight had been protected, perfected, and passed on in tightly curled strands of DNA through many generations of our family tree. Nevertheless, maybe because she was only sixteen when she gave birth to me, or perhaps because her buzz was starting to kick in, my mom decided to warn me about getting pregnant now that I had a boyfriend.
“Wait until you’re older, mija. Please,” she said. “You know I love mijo like a son, but the two of you are still too young.”
“I know, Mom. Don’t worry.”
“I want you to get on the pill, okay? I’ll take you.” She averted her eyes when she said it, and I simply nodded, too stunned to protest or even contemplate whether doing so would be in my best interest.
“I don’t know how I would’ve done it without your Aunt Luz,” she continued dispassionately, as if she’d just been discussing the salsa’s lack of heat. “When your dad left, I couldn’t afford daycare, but you know me, Susie. I had to work. No way would I let us go on welfare. Luz didn’t care that I couldn’t pay her.”
“I know, Mom. You’ve told me.”
“She loved taki
ng care of you. It was like you were hers. She’d put your hair in pigtails with little ribbons. She showed you off to all her little girlfriends.” My mom failed to mention, of course, that Luz’s “little girlfriends” were street-smart cholas.
“Kind of like me with Annette.”
“Yeah, like that, except you were a little older. But she loved you just as much as you love Chubette. That’s for sure.”
My mom held on so tightly to the tiny scraps of reality that that didn’t hurt, remembering the good times and extolling the virtues of Luz before she became a heroin addict. The stories she told and the photographs she preserved, fossils of a life no longer extant, are the only proof my aunt wasn’t born with a needle full of dope attached to her belly button instead of an umbilical cord. I never discounted my mom’s recollections of her sister, but I harbored other memories, like the day I first began to suspect my aunt was sick in ways I couldn’t quite name.
I was nine years old, and I remember that summer vividly because it was the year I began playing softball. I remember the day with brutal clarity because, unlike my aunt, I possessed no heroin nepenthe. My mother and I had just returned from one of my games. I had hit a homerun, my first, and felt like Ryne Sandberg. Luz had been waiting for us on the front steps of our singlewide trailer, sitting with her head in her hands, as if exhausted, but I was pulsating with energy, and I wanted to tell her all about my game, play by play.
“I hit a homer, Aunt Luz! Everyone saw me! It was the—” I stopped talking when she lifted her head. She looked like a cartoon cat that had just been drenched by a bucket of water, large eyes drooping, hair soaked. She’d been sweating profusely, more than what her body required to maintain equilibrium in the summer heat, and tendrils of clear snot snaked down from her nostrils.
“Luz,” my mom said. “You look awful. What’s wrong? Are you sick?” We both stared at my aunt, waiting for an answer.
“I just need a place to crash tonight, Sis. Are you gonna help me or what?”
My mom consented and didn’t press further. When she told Luz to help herself to my room, my aunt immediately locked herself away, but she moved slowly, as if each step sent minuscule cracks shooting up through her legs.
I slept with my mom in her room, next to the only bathroom in our trailer, so I heard Luz pacing back and forth to the toilet all night. Around 3:00 a.m., I woke to the sound of a loud crash followed by shrill voices, my mom yelling at my aunt in Spanish, my aunt screaming angrily. Groggily, I lifted myself from the soft sheets and padded down the hall to see what was going on. In my small room, which measured no more than seven by nine feet, the smell of vomit permeated the air. Orange vomit saturated my bed sheets, drenched the floor, and dripped down from the walls. My little bookshelf had been knocked over, its various items strewn on the floor in a puddle of orange liquid, and next to that chaos stood Luz, soaking wet and shaking, shivering cold in the middle of summer. I didn’t understand why my mom was yelling at Aunt Luz for throwing up in my room and wondered what had happened to my bookshelf. The vomit looked and smelled disgusting, but it could be cleaned up. I’d thrown up on my bed before.
My mom finally noticed me standing at the door when I asked what was wrong with my aunt.
“Go back to my room now, Susana Maria,” she said with a quaking voice. “Y cierra la puerta. I’m not going to tell you again.”
The next morning, I discovered that Luz had vanished with the last vestiges of night, and apparently so had my softball-team fundraiser money that I’d been collecting in the cookie jar. My room had been scrubbed clean, the sheets replaced and every item put back in its place. When I confronted my mom about the missing cash, she apologized and said that she’d lent it to Luz. I believed her, of course—I was nine years old—and I exonerated my aunt. Until the next time it happened. Until I figured out that my aunt would raid the church collection plate, literally, or rob the children’s charity fund jar from Circle K to keep from getting sick.
Before stealing the rollerblades that day, Luz had asked me to drive her to Montgomery Ward. “I just have to get something real quick. I’ll be right back,” she said, slamming my door, a sound like a paper cut. Chubette and I waited in the car, which felt like an oven by noontime in Las Caras, and not even a slight breeze was blowing through the windows. I sang nursery songs to my cousin, and the time passed soon enough. When I spotted Luz returning to the car, her form looked conspicuously bulky. I hadn’t suspected she was going in there to steal, even though I knew the day would be devoted to theft—it was my friend, after all, who wanted the rollerblades for cheap. As soon as she was in the car, Luz pulled out a beautiful brown suede leather jacket from the front of her pants and offered it to me. Even though it was August and winter thoughts were far from my mind, the stores were beginning to stock their shelves with autumn apparel. I often looked at such items with lust, knowing I could never have them, knowing that I’d never be one of those kids with a soft sweater or $100 shoes.
“Think of this as gas money,” she said.
“That’s more than a day’s worth of gas.”
“Well, mija, you’re my only niece, and I’m proud of you. I just want to give you something, okay?”
My family seemed perpetually compelled to let me know they were proud of me. Always, they were proud. And for what? Because through some aleatory inheritance of good genes I was able to ace all my classes without much effort? I wanted them to be proud of me because I did something extraordinary, not because I got lucky with some brain cells, and yet hard work repulsed me. Like my aunt, I wanted what was easy and comfortable. Luz had known that I’d been coveting a leather jacket for two years. Never mind that it was stolen. The fact was that my mom worked her butt off waiting tables at a mediocre restaurant in a crappy town just to put an aluminum roof over my head and buy me a car (ugly as it was), and though I wasn’t ashamed to grow up in a trailer park, or so I told myself, I knew there were just certain things in life I would never have—like a leather jacket—until I was on my own, after college and med school. But all of a sudden, doors opened for me because I saw what I could have if I just decided to take it. If I wanted, I could wear Nike shoes instead of Pro Wings from K-Mart, GUESS Jeans instead of Gitanos. My thoughts began to move fast like a reel on a fishing pole, my greed pulling in the line, and the big fish at the end of the hook was an image of myself in designer clothing, a vision of Minerva with a booming stereo, my bedroom with a cordless phone. Like I said before, I wasn’t exactly ashamed of my trailer-trash status—I never even had a concept of class until seventh grade—but I resented it nonetheless.
So I was moved by her gesture. Despite the dirtiness of it, I accepted my aunt’s gift, a token of her manipulation. When I drove her all over town from store to store that day, I thought of the leather jacket I’d be wearing in October. And now, of course, I understand the jacket was a bribe rather than a gift. A mere half hour after receiving it, I agreed to help my aunt steal the rollerblades.
So we drove around all morning and afternoon that Friday, and after studying my aunt and learning her methods and tricks, taking mental notes like the quick student I had always been, I was prepared to be her juvenile accomplice. We had fared rather well at the sporting goods store, and I felt proud for maintaining my composure during the entire episode, as if I had achieved some feat through great effort. I hadn’t felt calm or composed before or during the theft, but I had taken my fear and used it to control my hands as they stole. There was something about that feeling—the flipping of my stomach, the churning of its bile, the heat in my palms—that begged for repetition. In fact, that particular act of theft on a Friday in August spawned future shoplifting conquests with my friends, who would soon become my eager students, and I surmised that it was the beginning of a nascent vocation and the beginning of something else, too, some new feeling that felt like infatuation. The sweat ready to condense on hot skin, held back by sheer will; the heart on the verge of contracting into itself yet beating
on in fear; the imminent threat of discovery, its appalling thrill: these are the compulsions of a thief, and I was hooked after one dose.
After we gathered the money from our sales that day, Luz split the loot with me three ways, two thirds for herself and one for me. And that’s when we went on the real mission, of course. All day she had been anxious, fixated on one desire, one fear circling her thoughts. One motivational mantra kept her panic at bay: she needed to score before she got sick. My aunt didn’t steal because she liked the thought of herself in a leather jacket. She stole for drugs. Obviously.
Again Chubette and I waited in the car. The heat of the day was just beginning to abate, and I settled into my seat, admiring my well-earned exhaustion and noting my surroundings. A high wooden fence, gray and weathered, hid the dealer’s house from view. Strangers weren’t allowed inside the dealer’s house. Strangers weren’t allowed near the dealer’s house. I had parked around the corner so that my aunt could venture alone. Dogs yapped and growled from the direction of the gate, but Luz wasn’t afraid of the dogs. I’m pretty sure nothing scared her—except maybe the bite of withdrawal.
Looking at my baby cousin in the back seat, I couldn’t help but adore her ridiculously cute round face. Annette had these impossibly pink, chubby cheeks (hence her nickname). The daughter of a black man, lost in a big city on a binge somewhere, and a Hispanic mother, lost, Chubette had bronze skin, black hair that curled into miniature ringlets, and stunning large brown eyes that drank up the world and emitted the potential of new life. Though my aunt’s face would never surrender its round shape, Luz hadn’t been chubby for years, instead donning the typical guise of a junkie, bruised crescent moons beneath the eyes, animated solely by need, concave cheeks. Her skin looked doughy, the pores enlarged, sad green veins subsisting through her gray pallor. Annette, ever since the first day she had burst into the world with a full head of hair, had acquired the envious position of my favorite cousin—even as her mother continued to lose rank in my appraisal—and I felt responsible for her somehow. A transient spark of guilt briefly lit up the front part of my brain, the prefrontal cortex, as I would later learn, which controls impulses, but that tiny needle prick of remorse didn’t motivate me. Like a brain receptor glutted by overstimulation, my compunction was inactive.
Sitting in the car outside the dealer’s house that day in a vacant and brown, lifeless part of town, I wondered whether Annette’s life would atrophy as her mother’s had, like a shriveled, desiccated, defunct receptor—the way anyone’s life, whether by chance or by choice, can degenerate. In biology class, I had learned that generations of families inherit the same traits—pigmentation, physical similarities, the propensity for certain diseases and addictions—and I wondered whether somewhere in me there was a switch waiting to be flipped, converting me into an insatiable heroin addict like my aunt or a functional alcoholic like my mother.
When you’re sixteen, you’re curious about so many things. I had wanted to know what sex felt like, so I lost my virginity to my boyfriend a few months earlier. It was easy to see why people liked it so much. Sex. I wanted to know what was so great about heroin, too, but I wasn’t about to find that out for myself. Instead, at Peter Piper Pizza one day during the earlier part of summer, I asked my aunt about it while waiting for pizza in a booth near the game room, where Chubber could gaze at the colorful ball pit and listen to the simple melodies of the arcade. I had tried to win her a stuffed piggy with my last five bucks while waiting for the pizza but ended up empty handed. When the pizza arrived, I fed my baby cousin a slice. Her little baby mouth opened for more and more, and I realized with delight that we both really loved our pizza. As usual, Luz just sat there with a bitter smirk on her face. She never had an appetite. For food. Which got me thinking about what else heroin does to the body. What’s it like when your cells are flooded with drugs? Biology was good for intellectual knowledge, but it couldn’t tell you what anything really feels like.
“What does it feel like?” I had asked rather suddenly.
Luz just sat there, her eyes vacantly converging toward a window, where a woman sat drinking a pitcher of beer by herself, but I knew my aunt wasn’t watching her.
“Aunt Luz?”
“Huh? Yeah?”
“What does it feel like? Heroin.”
She thought about it for two seconds. “Like heaven,” she said, and it looked like maybe she had just found it there in Peter Piper Pizza. Her expression changed from vacuous to enraptured. “Your body feels so warm, like you’re taking a bath in melted chocolate.” My aunt nursed the biggest sweet tooth, appetite or no, a side effect of opiate addiction.
“Is it kind of like when you’re drunk? Like you can do anything?”
“It’s like being numb, but you can feel this warmness in your body, and you feel like you can just sit there and feel and not feel forever. Like if someone was kicking you, beating the crap out of you, you wouldn’t even care.”
“So your body could be injured, but you wouldn’t feel it? Or you wouldn’t care? Because the reason the body senses pain is to protect itself. Like when you touch a hot pan or something, the nerve endings send signals to the brain, and the brain causes the hand to instinctively move away. There’s a reason for pain, you know.”
“Look,” she said. “You asked. I told you. I don’t need no freaking lecture. What the hell do you know about pain anyway? You with your precious car, your precious mother, your good grades.”
Needless to say, we didn’t speak for the rest of lunch. I drove her and Annette home in silence. I had pissed her off, and there were no words that could mend our little rift the way heroin could make the pain of an injury obsolete. I knew she wouldn’t bother me to take her anywhere again until the next time there was no one else to ask. I’d nurtured a lot of resentment toward Luz for what seemed like a long while—because time passes so slowly at that age—but I also lived in awe of her. This was my aunt, my blood, and I knew what it felt like to want something you shouldn’t.
When my aunt returned from the dealer’s that Friday afternoon, she had metamorphosed into a brand new person with an ill-gotten smile, an ugly, in-your-face grin. I knew she’d wait until we got to her place to shoot up, so it wasn’t because she was high. It was the anticipation of the high, like the anticipation of the rush a thief experiences just before committing the crime. Luz lived in a government-subsidized two-bedroom apartment, and when we finally arrived, I carried Annette inside, where I immediately noticed the furniture had vanished. An entire phylum of living-room furnishings had become extinct: the nineteen-inch TV and lively green sofas, the entertainment center and stereo, the VCR and cordless phone. Framed photographs of my mom and me, Annette, and other family members incongruously remained on the walls; they were perfectly aligned and evenly spaced. My mom always said Luz had a knack for decorating. The thrift-store end table survived in the corner by the kitchen, but its symbiotic table lamp had disappeared. In the kitchen, I could see that the table and chairs had also survived the mass extinction, probably because Luz couldn’t get any money for them. No wonder she had bothered to educate me in the way of thieves. She had exhausted all other options. My poor baby cousin lived in an empty apartment because her mother was a heroin addict, a selfish bitch, really. And the apartment hadn’t seemed so bad before because my aunt did have a knack for decorating, but I wanted to flee from it in that moment. I wanted to abscond with Annette and leave my aunt to rot with her one true love, but something revolting and putrid kept me there, something like fascination for the morbid.
And then my aunt, who had disappeared into her bedroom, reappeared and said, “You kicked ass today, mija, just like your aunt.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Hey, you ever seen heroin?”
“No.”
“You want to? But you can’t tell your mom, okay? She’d kill me.”
“You know I won’t.”
Luz took my sleeping cousin from my arms and carried her into
the other bedroom, laying her down inside her little crib, which hadn’t been sold, and then motioned me into the compact bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, she unwrapped a piece of foil, peeling back the delicate flaps of aluminum with the precision of a jeweler.
“This is what you call black-tar heroin. There’s also powder, but this is what I like.” In her hands was a drug I had never seen. It looked like a ball of marijuana resin, sticky and dark brown.
“I’m going to cook just enough so I won’t get sick,” she said and then laid the foil down on the counter, tenderly, as if putting Annette to sleep. She took a silver heart-shaped box trimmed with pink roses from the medicine cabinet. Her hands and the undersides of her arms, which were covered in purple welts, the veins swollen and fragile, affirmed the long and angry affair she had endured, but I thought it was the kind of thing she loved herself for enduring, like the person who cuts herself to feel something and then smiles down at the new engraving, imagining how lovely the scar will be. It was romantic. She looked at her arms and shook her head, said she’d have to find a vein in her neck. I didn’t want to know, really, but I couldn’t extract myself. It was like seeing a corpse for the very first time, and I wanted to touch the cold skin, run my fingers along the embalmed torso and over the chest, as if I could find the animate and irretrievable part of that carcass. She opened the box, which contained a lighter, a spoon, and a few cotton balls, and then she pulled out the needle. The desire in her brown eyes, maybe Annette’s in twenty years, unsettled me. It was the look I would always be able to identify from that point on: the anticipation of satiety, no, of surfeit. It was love, zeal, tenderness, the ardor of the fiend preparing to fix, of the thief waiting to steal, of the glutton at the banquet table. She continued with her ritual in a trancelike manner. It was liturgical. I felt as if I were at mass, only for once I wasn’t ignoring the priest’s incantations. She set the needle aside and cleaned the spoon with alcohol. Then she used a pocket knife to divide a small fraction of heroin from the portion in the foil. Carefully, with a gracefulness I hadn’t noticed before—even during a theft—she scraped the brown substance onto the spoon. Using the needle, she squirted a small amount of water onto the spoon, and then she ignited the lighter beneath it, cooking the heroin until it liquefied.
“I’m going to draw this into the syringe,” she said. “But first I’ll put the cotton ball here, like this, so I can filter out the impurities. I wouldn’t want any shit to get in my veins.”
Engrossed in the moment, I watched her hands, the expert ease with which she drew in the liquid, the slight excretion of the liquid from the end of the needle, the nimble tap of her finger against the barrel to clear any air pockets. I knew why the pictures on her walls were all lined up and evenly spaced.
“You want to see me shoot it up?”
I did. I couldn’t. The cold skin of the corpse had burned me. It wasn’t the dead cells of the cadaver that bothered me, the breaking down of enzymes, the chemicals injected for the purpose of preservation. It was that I, with my limited human perspective, could never grasp what it had been before death, what it would never be again, and so I wanted to hurt it. But you can’t hurt something that is already dead.
“I think I’ll go check on Annette,” I said and closed the door behind me. My baby cousin napped wearily in her crib, where I watched her breathe. She had borne the brunt of a long and loathsome day, a day no toddler should ever have to endure. Dusk shrouded the room, the curtains drawn to shut out the waning sunlight. Everything in the nursery remained intact: a small dresser that someone had painted pink, a secondhand rocking chair, miscellaneous toys and stuffed animals, flower-themed wall art. All of Annette’s things, her meager possessions, objects she didn’t yet know how to desire, were in place.