Charming Grace Read online

  Secret agent or oil rigger, it didn’t matter. Our daddy was long gone, and now Mama was dead. We’d had a good upbringing on the big cattle ranch where she cooked and kept house for a rich old man who was retired from business. That old man would’ve let me and Armand stay on, going to school and working for him, but his fat-cat son from N’awlins called for the cops. One of the wranglers tipped Armand off. The bastard was sendin’ us to some kind of boy’s home.

  “No way,” Armand said.

  By sunset of our getaway day we rode out of the pine swamps on the edge of a pretty little farm. “Keep to the bushes,” Armand whispered. We hid behind some big camellias looking into the quiet yard of a nice house with porch swings. Bees swarmed in the heavy air. Grief and fear felt like suction cups on my skin. Armand flicked a blistered finger across the open blade of a long pocket knife. Frenchie and Go-Man snorted softly in the hot, dimming light. Under a metal awning beside the house, an old blue Chevy Impala waited.

  “We’re takin’ that car,” Armand announced. “Soon as it’s dark.”

  “We can’t steal a car.” I hunched over, bile rising in an empty stomach. Between coughs I went on, “Mama’s dead in heaven and if we steal a car we’ll go to hell!”

  Armand looked down at me with a jaunty smile. If my brother was ever afraid of anything, including Hell, he never let me know. “Nah, bro,” he drawled, “we’re going to heaven, just like Mama. Only by way of N’awlins.”

  I had never been to New Orleans. It lay on the edge of the Gulf waters like a kingdom in a fairytale. I saw it on TV, on maps; I only heard about it. “What . . . what are we gonna do in a place that big?”

  “We’re gonna find ol’ Escheline Taber.”

  “Her! But Mama says . . . ” I choked. “Mama always said that old lady’s probably dead. Mama says, said, she did voodoo. Says, said—”

  “Would you shut up?” Armand’s voice trembled. “Mama also says—” Armand halted, his throat working around the same painful mistake I kept making—“Mama said I should take care of you. You dig, little bro? I’m in charge now. And I say you and me ain’t gonna be split up and sent to no damned orphanage. We’re goin’ to N’awlins and find Miz Taber.” Armand punched me, hugged me, then took Frenchie’s reins from me. “Sorry, but we got to leave Frenchie and Go-Man here.”

  I stared at him, then at the fat gray pony I’d loved since I was old enough to climb on his back. I had two dreams in my life: To be a cowboy and an architect. I didn’t think in those lofty terms—it was more like, Build things and ride things. But I knew.

  And love things. Armand and Frenchie were all I had left.

  “He’ll get out in the road and get hit by a truck,” I moaned.

  “Nah. He’s a smart pony. He’ll go find him a pasture and a new home. Go-Man’ll take care of him.” Turning away so I couldn’t see his eyes, Armand snuffled and patted Go-Man’s nose. “Go-Man’ll lead the way. Yeah. He’s a smart guy, Go-Man.” Armand gently thumped a fist on the pony’s broad white forehead. “Smart guy. Go-Man. Go-Man.” He stepped back, chin up. “They’ll be just fine.”

  I felt like I was strangling. “But, but—”

  Armand grabbed me. “We got no fuckin’ choice.” A tear slid down his face. I knew then that he was right. If Armand cried, it was hopeless.

  We unsaddled the ponies, took off their bridles, and shooed them. Frenchie studied me with big, dark eyes. “Go on and find you some sweet grass to eat,” I told him, the words burning. “I’ll come get you later. Promise.”

  “Go on, mule head,” Armand said to Go-Man, then snuffled and looked away.

  Go-Man wandered toward a field behind some shacks. Slowly, Frenchie followed him. I’ll come back for you, I called silently. I promise. I’ll come back for goodness sake. For the goodness lost that night in my childhood and Armand’s. I believed that.

  “Now,” Armand hissed. The light had finally faded to dusk. We ran like shadows to the old car. Armand shoved me in the back seat. “Get down on the floor and stay down.”

  He vaulted into the front seat. I heard the scrape of his knife blade as he slid it into the ignition. Thanks to hanging out with the ranch’s bums and wranglers, my bro knew how to do things he shouldn’t know how to do. “Swamp cowboys got godless ideas and bad habits,” Mama liked to say, usually in French, usually while crossing herself. So did Armand, now.

  The engine cranked. We rolled out into the hot Louisiana night, eased down a back road, made our way to a main road, and got off scot free. Armand yelled—just yelled, like a wounded war cry; it put chills down my back. I climbed over the seat into the front and sank into the old sedan’s cool vinyl, trying not to cry. We cranked down the windows and let the air roar over us.

  Armand yelled above the wind, “I swear to you, little bro, I’ll buy you a hundred ponies. We’re gonna be rich. We’re gonna be somebody. You’ll see. The Noleene brothers won’t ever be kicked out of their home again! If I have to beg borrow or steal. You’ll see!”

  I said nothing, just nodded. I’d follow Armand anywhere, do anything he wanted me to do. I tried not to think about Mama, or Frenchie, or the future. I nodded again then turned my wet eyes to the N’awlins-bound wind.

  Beg, borrow, or steal.

  Steal.

  We Noleene brothers had too much pride to beg or borrow.

  Madame Taber. Palm Reading and Pawn Shop.

  “What’s a palm readin’ and pawn shop?” I whispered to Armand. Dirty, scared and worn out, we stood on a cracked New Orleans’ sidewalk at midnight. This back street of the famous French Quarter didn’t look any pretty tourist picture I’d ever seen, unless passed-out hippies and half-naked women who lolled just outside the light of the street lamps were tourists.

  Armand winced. “Keep quiet. I’ll do the talkin’.” He eased up to a peeling blue door sprinkled with shaky, hand-painted white crucifixes that looked like they were flying off in every direction, like weird birds.

  He knocked long and loud. A little red lamp, like a wavery eye, came on inside. We heard heavy footsteps coming downstairs; chains rattled, and locks pulled back. The door swung open. A big, stringy young guy thrust his face out. He smelled like beans and gin and pot. “Wha’ the fuck do you kids want?”

  Armand pushed me further behind him. “We’re lookin’ for Madame Taber. Our mama sent us.”

  “Your mama? Who the shit is yo’ mama and why would I give a—”

  “Our mama’s Gigi Noleene.”

  “Gigi! Law, Gigi!” an old-lady voice scratched out, from somewhere in the red-shaded dark behind Bean Boy. A dumpy little witch woman pushed in front of Bean Boy. Hard to say what color she was. Red nosed and yellow skinned, with black eyes and a black lady’s crinkled black hair. Mixed, I guess. Nothing new about that, where we came from. It was just the strange combination. Bean Boy—who’d we find out later was her son, Jeremiah, was potato-white with long, thin brown hair and glazed black eyes. Madame Taber cooed at us. “You Gigi’s boys?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Armand and Boone. Mama’s dead. She always spoke highly of you. We got nowhere else to go. So we thought you might help us out.”

  “Law, what handsome boys. I knowed your daddy, and you too look like him. Big man, always moving, full of charm, full of trouble. Oh, your poor mama. My poor Gigi. When I worked for her mama, I practically raised Miss Gigi. Y’all come on in here. Course you can stay. Comeon. I’ll go heat up some beans for your supper.” She shuffled away.

  Her son glared at us. “What do I need with a pair of little toad turds like y’all?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” said Armand without batting an eyelash, like his mouth was anchored to balls the size of cantaloupes. “We give us a place to sleep—you don’t give us any shit—and we’ll give you everything we find on the streets. For your pawn business.”

  “You think I take hot goods, boy?”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ about stealin’. I said what we find. Find. All these people who come here, rich
people, they drop things, you know. Wallets and watches and shit. Me and my bro, we got good eyes. We’ll just be on the look out for what people lose.”

  “You are one big-dicked piece of work.” But suddenly, he smiled. I had never seen so many gold teeth in my life. “All right. I’ll set you up sellin’ balloons down by Lafayette Square.”

  “Deal.” They shook on it.

  Later, as we bunked in a sagging bed in a hot attic upstairs, Armand said, “You’re gonna sell balloons. That’s all you’re gonna do.”

  “But…what are you gonna do?”

  “I’ll be lookin’ for tourists with lazy fingers,” Armand said. “And I intend to find plenty of ‘em. I know it’s hard to believe, little bro, but we’ll get by. And one day we’ll be rich, and we won’t ever have to ask any two-bit shit for any thing. I promise.”

  I snuggled as close to him as I could without being too sissy. He didn’t seem to mind. “I believe you,” I whispered.

  I dreamed of Mama and Frenchie that night, and of Armand crying in his sleep, like me.

  Before long Armand became the best thief in the French Quarter and I wasn’t far behind. He tried to keep me on the balloon beat but the hot air of decency wouldn’t support us. “I know you take a lot of grief from Jeremiah when you don’t find enough lost stuff,” I told Armand. “I know he threatens to smack you around. You need a partner.”

  Armand sputtered and cursed and threatened to ram my head into a wall, but I ignored him and joined our little two-man itchy-fingers business. All we had was each other, thieves or not. So there I was—former balloon huckster, now a pre-teen street thief. I never picked a tourist’s pocket, though. That was somehow mean, personal, undignified. I was still Gigi Noleene’s good Catholic boy.

  Instead, Armand and I perfected the art of strolling uptown and filching small goods from the finer stores. Watches were our specialty. Jeremiah sold the watches and paid us twenty cents on the dollar. The income kept us in jeans and pizza. Plus we did chores and errands for the French Quarter merchants, and we got a lot of free meals from the bars and restaurants. Thanks to Armand’s charm and my polite manners, it wasn’t uncommon to find us gobbling leftover roast shrimp in the famous kitchens at Brennan’s or steaming bowls of gumbo behind Three Sisters.

  But every sin has a spiritual price tag sooner or later, and even as kids we paid retail. Twice Armand got caught stealing, but talked his way out of it; I got caught once, and didn’t have the gift of gab.

  “Let’s have a talk about Jesus, you little pilferin’ shit,” the big cop drawled. He dragged me down an alley and proceeded to slap me upside the head so hard I bounced off a concrete wall and chipped a tooth. Until then I’d sort of harbored a wild hope that some nice Papa Cop would whisk us home to his kindly wife, like we were abandoned puppies who deserved a good place to live. That wasn’t to be.

  I thought I’d die from loneliness when a judge sent me off to a juvenile lock-up for three months of self-esteem counseling. Armand showed up at the gates twice a week trying to convince me to make a break for it. Underneath all the bullshit, my bro was scared of being alone in the world. So was I, but I went through phases where I was determined to be a good citizen. “I’ll just stick it out here,” I told him. “If I leave it’d make my self-esteem counselor feel bad about himself.”

  Thanks to crazy-sweet Madame Taber and the profit-minded Jeremiah we had fake papers saying she’d adopted us, so the cops sent me back to them after I was rehabilitated. We always had a home over the Palm It and Pawn It, as we called the store, as long as we delivered the goods.

  Armand graduated to stealing cars, and our income improved. He was fast as magic. One second a tourist’s rented sedan would be sitting on the curb, safe as a crawdad in a mud pie. The next it would be heading out of the city with Armand at the wheel. Pretty soon I graduated to cars, too, and except for that one toe-shooting incident early on, I was a natural. We delivered the heisted cars to Jeremiah’s pal, a scrawny little black guy named Titter, who operated a chop shop in a warehouse outside the city. The first time we scored a luxury model, I think it was a Caddie Seville, we celebrated by spending fifty bucks on matching alligator tattoos—mine on the right hand, Armand’s on the left. “Together we make one soul,” bro, he said. “Tough as a gator, and just as hard to kill.” I got teary, slapped him on the back, and nodded. He hugged me.

  It wasn’t a good life, but we didn’t know that then. Neither one of us got so much as a day’s formal school time, and we knew more about drugs, guns, whores and gangs than any teenagers ought to know. Madame Taber was bat-brained crazy and Jeremiah stayed high and mean. He broke my nose in a cocaine funk one night. After I got up off the floor with blood all over my face I kicked him where the Jeremiah don’t shine. While he was bent over clutching his groin I put a fork to his throat. “You ever do that again, you’ll spout blood like a stuck pig,” I warned.

  Thank God he was too stoned to notice I’d picked up a plastic fork.

  “Don’t you get too good at this life, bro,” Armand would say from time to time, like a ritual to protect me. “You goin’ to college some day. Become a re-spect-able citizen and an architect, oui?”

  “You’re goin’ to college, too, oui.”

  He would just laugh. By the time he turned eighteen Armand was six-two and as swank as any rock singer. He already looked like he belonged in casinos and women’s beds, not a classroom. At fourteen I was a tall, lanky cowboy without a horse, all shaggy dark hair and acne. I spent my time reading and sketching things to build. I had cheap notepads full of houses, barns, skyscrapers, space stations, moon castles, you name it. Inside my head I lived a whole different life from the streets and dark back roads.

  By now I had enough size and attitude and sense to be one tough dude, though gang fights and hassles with cops and stretches in kiddie lock up weren’t my idea of fun. Armand and I covered each other’s backs, stayed away from hard booze and dope, smoked expensive cigarillos and flirted with the clean, pretty daughters of the best people—as long as those people were looking the other way. Armand liked fine clothes and pinkie rings. I was a jeans and good-book man. He managed to look like a class act even when we got sucked into human cockfights out at Titter’s place.

  You know, funny thing, but car thieves aren’t real nice people. They like to swing a tire chain or a wrench at their competition. They got touchy over Titter’s pay scale and the fact that he favored me and Armand. We had a real knack for fine goods—Mercedes and late-model pick-ups and even an occasional Jaguar. That caused some jealousy. We learned to handle it. I got the scars as proof.

  I was just fifteen when Jeremiah beat Madame Taber to death with a baseball bat. The cops caught him before the blood was dry on her tarot-card table. “Damn, she a psychic but she didn’t see it comin’,” Titter opined. Armand and I snuck into the shop that night, collected our things, and left. Armand pried a board off a wall and yanked out a steel box full of cash and jewelry. “Stupid-ass Jeremiah never knew I saw him hide this,” Armand said, his eyes gleaming. “Bro, there’s about fifty-thousand bucks in here.”

  “Good. We’ll drop off a couple thousand at the church. Father Ruble’ll bury Madame Taber in style, then.”

  Armand arched a dark brow at me, assessing my charity with mild disgust. “Bro, we could bury her in gold and get the Pope to kiss her coffin, but she’s still gonna be readin’ fortunes for the roasted-and-poked crowd in Hell.”

  “Maybe so, but it’s what Mama would want us to do.”

  That softened him. “Okay, bro,” he said gently. “You’re right.”

  We bought fake IDs and spent the next year in Las Vegas. Armand gambled at backroom crapshoots and chased strippers who thought he was at least twenty-one. I got a job working construction at the big hotels, thanks to a mob connection of Titter’s. I was big for fifteen, had a driver’s license that said I was twenty, and could dump a cement bucket or swing a hammer as good as the next guy with big shoulders. I love
d it. A fat-cat developer took a liking to me when he saw me reading a book on the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. I showed him some of my sketches and he said I had talent.

  “Stay on with my crew, Boone, and my draftsman will teach you to draw.” I said yes faster than an alligator snaps up a sitting duck. On top of that, the head carpenter’s college-girl daughter started making moves on me. I was just puffed up enough to make a move back. At sixteen I lost my virginity to her in her frilly pink suburban Las Vegas bedroom. I had saved myself for a sorority girl. While she slept naked in bed I stood naked by her pink desk, looking enviously at her textbooks, notepads, and calculator.

  I earned my high school GED at night school and hooked up with a college counseling crew at a local church. Armand was pleased. “This is my bro, the genius who’s getting ready for college,” Armand took to saying, and he meant it. He had plans for my tuition. I had plans for his life outside crime. I would design and build houses. Lots of them. And make a fortune. And set him up as my partner. And we’d marry good-hearted girls and buy a ranch in bayou country and fill it with kids, horses, cattle, and a pony, one that reminded me of Frenchie. And Mama would be proud. Our papa, wherever he was, could go to hell.

  Only one problem. Armand dreamed bigger than I did, and had a gambler’s soul.

  I came back to our rent-by-the-week motel kitchenette one afternoon to find Armand stuffing our belongings in duffle bags along with wads of cash. He grinned. “Had some good luck at the tables, bro. Now let’s blow this town before that luck turns bad.”

  I groaned. He’d aced the wrong suckers in a high-stakes poker game. You don’t con guys with cocaine headaches and names that sound like deli cheeses in an Italian restaurant. I was so mad I refused to talk to him on the plane ride east. He kept chit chatting but I ignored him. Finally he sank back in his seat in a bad mood. “I do things my way. You do things your way.”