Burke.Word

[Click to read earlier Chapters of Losing the Bronze]

7

Let’s be straight—Amanda just took stuff. She had been doing it for a long time, and she didn’t have to be angry to put her hands on things that weren’t hers. She just had to be there when the time was right. She would tell you herself she didn’t know why it had started, or even exactly when. It felt good the first time, and the second time even better. Past the second, who was counting?

When she was growing up in Greenpoint, even her friends weren’t safe. A turning point for her came in 1983, when she was thirteen. Amanda had already been stealing for years and was at home one afternoon showing off three new sweaters she had stolen to a friend of hers from school. She wasn’t presenting them as stolen goods, just hey, check out these new sweaters, designer labels, how about the way they go with this pair of jeans or that skirt, and on and on. They were both trying them on in different combinations, putting in some serious mirror time, the way thirteen year old girls do. She wasn’t thinking about it one way or another, until she was back in her room that night and noticed that one of them was gone. She looked everywhere, was about to start losing her mind when she suddenly stopped everything, standing still in the middle of her room, gazing at nothing in particular as it came to her what had happened. At first Amanda just couldn’t believe it, but there was no other way. Her friend had managed to steal one of her already stolen sweaters, right there in the room with her while she wasn’t paying attention, because the idea would never have occurred to her. From then on, though, it occurred to her plenty.

Somewhere along the way Amanda picked up the habit of turning doorknobs and pulling on car door handles, just to see. Sometimes they opened, sometimes they didn’t. As a kid, she discovered that most unlocked doors opened into boring rooms or boring passageways leading to even more boring rooms. Every now and then, though, she got a surprise of the what the hell do you think you’re doing variety, and a few times she got very, very lucky.

The first time Amanda opened a door and knew she had stepped into a different world was one evening when she was sixteen, after she had gotten up the nerve to try the suggestive silver handle on a door hidden away near the back of her church. Stepping alone into the vestry was a sensory experience of the sort she would never forget. The rich colors of the dense, filigreed fabric of the cloths, robes, and tunics, the heavy, ornate wooden furnishings, and the impenetrable silence taken together overwhelmed her into a condition in which doing anything beyond stupefied gaping was pretty near impossible. With the distinct feeling that she could have—perhaps should have—done something more than merely stare and then slowly step away, Amanda backed out of the vestry without touching a thing and closed the door behind her. She got a chance to make up for it not long after.

Walking home from school about two months later Amanda was pulling on the doors of empty parked cars, by now an almost unconscious gesture, when the passenger door of a black, late model Cadillac opened to her touch as if it had been waiting for her. Ordinarily she just amused herself  by opening unlocked car doors and then shutting them again before walking on, but everything about this door felt different. With the sedan sitting up at a slight angle to the curb, it swung open noiselessly, solid and smooth, to reveal the interior of the car. Before Amanda had time to consider what she was doing, without the hesitation of even a quick look around, she stepped off the sidewalk, leaned in and sat down, shutting the heavy door behind her. Reminded immediately of the vestry—the absolute silence, the richness of the dark leather and wood paneling of the dashboard, even the beautiful wool coat wrapped over the middle of the seat—Amanda knew she wouldn’t be leaving without something more, and reached out to touch the coat.

Like everything else about the car, the gun under the coat seemed exotic, heavy, both threatening and inviting at the same time. For a moment she just stared at it. What did she know about guns? Beside the weapon sat a plain silver money clip, holding an inch-thick fold of bills, with the first hundred-dollar bill she had ever seen on the outside. Money, she knew about. Under them both, a single photograph, showing a man standing beside the door to a building she didn’t recognize. Leaving the gun and the photograph, Amanda lifted the money clip from the seat, opened the door and stepped easily away from the car. Later she would see hundreds number two through twenty when she got the chance to investigate her discovery a little more carefully.

[Click to read Chapter 8 of Losing the Bronze]

Losing the Bronze is Copyright ©2009 Nigel Hinshelwood