Thieves I've Known by Tom Kealey Page A

from seconds before, the jab to the gut. She looks at the fluorescent lights again. She tastes the blood in her mouthpiece as he retires to the corner.
    I haven’t started yet, he says. The words come out without vowels. Helen shakes her head, sits up but does not rise. Two, he says. You’ve got me thinking now. Got me thinking this’ll go an extra round. I’m not going to push it hard this time, or maybe I will. But if I’m smart I won’t. Five. Stay down. I’m thinking I might not bring all I got here. So what are you going to do?
    Keep you moving, she says. I’m going to move around.
    Get up now, he says. And make sure you do that.
    On the train, Omar, twelve, finds it hard to understand the mumbled voice of the conductor who announces the station stops. He likes to talk to his mother on the train, though she doesn’t ride with him; it keeps people away. He thinks about his brother and the belt. A woman with a baby sits across from him, and a man dressed in two heavy coats. Give me your belt, his brother had said to him through the broken glass of thewarehouse window. What do you want my belt for? Just give it here. So, Omar had handed it over and watched as his brother wrapped it around his arm. The boy took out a needle from his sock.
    His brother often talked as he was shooting up. Mama’s too fat, his brother had said. She eats too much.
    When he was younger, when he’d handed the belt over, Omar hoped he’d always live with his mother, thought about no matter how old he became, the three of them would still live in the same house. I don’t want no skinny-bones mama, he’d said. She isn’t a girl. I don’t want to sit on the lap of no skinny-bones girl.
    He takes the steps from the subway station two at a time, watches his frost breath as he comes above ground. The abandoned car in the lot near the station has a cracked windshield with blood and a few strands of hair, and in a lot not unlike this one, a month before, two kids were trapped in an abandoned refrigerator, suffocated. Omar likes the tugboats in the harbor, he can see their red running lights from the top floor of his apartment building, but to get there—to the top floor—he has to pass the steps on the sixteenth, the hallway with no lightbulbs, where, often enough, he can hear a man crying. But Omar has never seen this man, thinks he might be an old man, by the sound of the voice, takes the steps one at a time when he passes.
    If he sits on the rooftop—his legs hanging over the side—at sunset, Omar can see the rats emerge from the riverbank. They look like an army of insects from where he sits. They cross the lot where the car with the cracked windshield sits, they pass over the rolls of carpets, the broken chairs and the trash and the abandoned tires.
    It’s the last day of the month, this day, and Omar passes his own apartment building, passes the cemetery with the broken headstones—no one has been buried there for years—passes the piles of trash in the graveyard, the oil drum filled with wood and fire, passes, for all he knows, the skeleton his friend Toomey had seen, not rising from the ground, but laid in a corner, never buried, the bones as gray as the sky. Omar keeps his eyes on the tallest building on the street, where, on the fifth floor, he hopes to find his mother. A rent party.
    He thinks about the baby on the train. Its eyes closed, wrapped in a green sweater, its mother’s—sister’s?—enfolding arms swaying with the rhythm of the railcar. More than wanting to live with his own mother, and long before even stepping on that train, before stepping on countless trains, Omar had wanted a baby boy of his own. But only you know that.
    Winston, thirteen, takes the handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the spittle from his grandfather’s chin. The old man turns the key in the ignition of the truck. It’s older than Winston,