Charlie Huston - Caught Stealing

Thanks to Maura Teitelbaum at Abrams Artists for believing in this book and hustling it to anyone and everyone. To SimonLipskar of Writers House and MarkTavani, my editor at Ballantine, for making the deal to get me published and, more importantly, for their hard work and support as the book was knocked into shape. Thanks also to Robyn Starr and Simone Elliot for the key roles they played in getting this book published. This book would not have been published without all of these people, but my greatest thanks are reserved for my friend, Johnny Lancaster, without whom none of them would ever have seen it. Thanks, J., you’re a good friend.

Above all, thank you Mom and Dad for a life of unconditional love and support.I love you more than I can ever say.

And thank you, Virginia. Wife, I am nothing without you.

My feet hurt. The nightmare still in my head, I walk across the cold wood floor, shuffling my feet in the light grit. I’m half-drunk and I have to pee. I’m not sure which woke me, the piss or the nightmare.

My john is just a bit smaller than the average port-o-potty. I sit on the pot and rest my forehead against the opposite wall. I have a pee hard-on and if I try to take a leak standing up, I’ll end up hosing the whole can. I know this from experience. Plus my feet still hurt.

It takes a while. By the time I finish I’m just about asleep again. I get up, flush, and shuffle back to bed. On the way, a last bit of piss dribbles onto my thigh. I pick up a dirty sock from the floor, wipe the urine off and toss the sock in a corner.

I crawl back under the covers and twist around a bit until I’m arranged. I start to drift back asleep and the nightmare begins to rise up again in my mind. I force myself fully awake to keep it from getting back in. I think happy thoughts. I think about a dog I used to have. I think about Yvonne. I think about baseball: long, lazy games of baseball, plastic cups of cold beer between my thighs, peanut shells crunching beneath my sneakers.Fly balls soaring over loping outfielders. The beautiful ease of the long pop fly out… No! Wrong! Baseball is a mistake and the nightmare is rushing back in. I think about home. Home does the trick and I start to ease back asleep. And only then as I finally fall asleep do I register the blood I saw on the sock when I wiped my leg, the blood from my piss. I sleep.

These things are not related: my aching feet, the nightmare, the blood. My feet have hurt for years because of the job. The nightmare has been going on for half my life. The blood in my piss is brand new, but I know exactly where I got that too.

I got the bloody piss from the beating I took from a couple of guys last night. By last night I mean a few long hours before the nightmare woke me up. And when I say I took a beating from these guys, I really mean they gave it to me. Free. I got lucky; they both had small hands. Go figure, two big guys with small hands. It happens. They didn’t want to bust up those little hands working on my face, so they gave it to my body. It didn’t take long. They put some good ones in my gut and ribs and I dropped. Then I took a couple boot shots in the kidneys. That’s where the blood is coming from.