My Mother's Son by David Hirshberg

Author:David Hirshberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Fig Tree Books LLC
Published: 2017-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

20.

He said it the

exact same way

that Mother said

“we’ll see,”

which meant no

“There are three ways ya can rob someone,” The Boxer told me. “First, ya can use force, so it is. Like a gun or a knife or your fists.” With the mention of each of the three means of force, he first mimicked a gun with his right hand, then made a slash with his arm, and ended with his fists clenched, which caused his biceps to bulge. “Or maybe ya just threaten the gomey,” he continued. “But ya gotta be able to back it up, ’cause a threat with nothing behind it is where the sissies get hurt. Okay now, ya can also pull an inside job. That takes time, ya gotta get to know someone who works where ya wanna steal, ya gotta make sure they don’t rat ya out, ya gotta believe they can do what ya want them to do, and ya gotta pay ’em and pay ’em enough so’s they don’t come back and do the blackmail thing.”

“What’s the third way?” I asked.

“The third way is ya get someone else to do it so ya can say to the cops, ‘Hey, I was with my oul fellaman,’ or ‘I didn’t know that’s what they’d be doin’, they just showed up with the stuff at my house, there’s no crime in being home, no way.’”

I was the third way. The Boxer told us that at noon on Saturday, Mr. Carlson would be out of the Herald Traveler office visiting with Mr. Perini at Braves Field, a meeting he’d written about in his column. Smitty, the photographer, would be on the fourth floor, probably in the darkroom. The guy who sat in the paperboy office out back would be there eating lunch. Noodge Mauer, Myandrew, Frankie, and I would show up a little before noon, wearing caps, with paper carriers slung over our shoulders. And that’s how it started, just like he said.

When we walked into the paperboy office, the guy recognized me although he didn’t say anything; his mouth was full and he had a rind of bologna stuck to his mustache. I took advantage of his mouthful and told him that Mr. Carlson asked me to haul the postcards outside so Smitty could take a picture of them.

“You can call Smitty,” I said, nodding to the phone, knowing he wouldn’t. “I brought my friends to help, the new kids with routes,” I said. We walked past him before he answered, The Boxer having told us that demonstrating confidence was an essential element in the commission of a crime. We opened the rear door and saw the postcards dumped into big canvas carts, the kind Steven and I’d seen the cleaning ladies push all over the floor in the office buildings downtown when we got there in the late afternoons on the Thursday rounds. There were thousands of postcards, perhaps even more than what Mr. Carlson had thought. We pushed the carts out to the back lot.

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