He let forth a rueful sigh. As if we’d been talking all the while. “God,” he said. “God I’ve an awful hunger. I’d love a nice cod pie. Wouldn’t you, little boss?”
“Fuck you,” said I, and fled.
I did eventually stop glancing over my shoulder for him—but that feeling, that strange feeling of want at the corners, it stayed. For days afterward, I would wake to whorling hunger and lie in the dark with my heart in my ears and my mouth running. As if something within was digging me up. Ordinary rations couldn’t sate it. The Coachman sat counting my spoonfuls at mealtime. “That’s enough, goddamn it,” he’d say. But it wasn’t enough—and what he berated me for was only the half of it. He wasn’t around to watch me scrounge for apples fallen from the fruitcart, or wait till the grocer’s back was turned to steal rolls. He wasn’t around, either, when the bakergirl came down the street with that basket on her arm, so huge it listed her to one side, shouting, fish pie, fish pie. Whenever someone stopped her, she flipped up a checkered napkin to reveal a mountain of doughy knots. Fish pie? she asked me, like she knew about the want going sour in me. I sank five whole pies, crouching in an alley with the laundresses shouting to each other above me, and as I ate the want grew and grew in me till it ran over, and was all gone.
I wouldn’t feel it again till years after we’d been caught. After the workhouse, after the judge passed sentence and sent the Coachman upriver and me to the railhead with six or seven other boys, westbound, with papers in my hand that read only: LURIE.
* * *
—
We were a week on the train, past farms and yellow fields and cabins smoking on gray hummocks, all the way to where the Missouri shallowed to mud. Town was a strip of stockyards and houses. The surrounding hillsides bristled with tree stumps. Wagons burdened with massive boughs harrowed the road.
They took us to a townhall that smelled of cattle and sawdust and got us up on a crateboard stage. One by one, the other boys were called down the stairs and into the dark. The old man who raised his hand for me was named Saurelle. He had frowsy ears and a hitch in his step, and a Mercantile that boasted dry goods and whiskey. His upstairs rooms were always overrun, every last soul westbound. His other hirelings were a pair of brothers: Hobb and Donovan Michael Mattie. Hobb was just a kid, four or five maybe, with a temper that could set grown men shaking in their boots. He was lightfingered, too—he could lift anything from anybody, and was pretty brazen about it. Saurelle didn’t dare lay a hand on him for fear of Donovan, some twelve years older, a man already, rangy and redheaded as a fox. The proud tender of a new little beard Hobb and I mercilessly thorned him about. Sunday afternoons, he slipped out to smash his fists against the noses of bareknuckle challengers from every corner of the state. No matter the damage to his own face, there he’d be the next morning: brewing coffee, smiling stiff. When the old man thrashed me for miscounting coin, it was Donovan who gave up his meat to cool my ruined eye; Donovan who stitched me up when yardfights went sideways; Donovan who said, “Don’t ever let nobody touch you, Lurie, no matter what.”
For two years, we shared an attic room. We scrubbed floors and ran the faro layout. We hauled freight and boiled tea to muddy Saurelle’s water into whiskey. We laughed through the gray winters, searched for privy-bound lodgers who’d blundered off in the snow. If one of us took fever, the other two followed into illness and back out again like we were going up and down stairs. In the summer of ’53, Donovan and I climbed up out of typhoid, but Hobb did not. Old man Saurelle was decent enough to pay for his casket so we wouldn’t have to make it ourselves.
Hobb didn’t come back around till a few months later. He came soundlessly and without warning. He’d lost his voice in death, it seemed, but not his itch for pickpocketing. I would roll over from wakeful dreams to find his little hand already on my shoulder and some trinket on my pillow: a needle, a thimble,