Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief

“Who am I? I live here,” Nathaniel says to the burglar. “Fuck you. This is my place.”

“Well, this place is pathetic,” the burglar mutters. “You got nothin’ to steal. Less than nothing. This stuff is all complete shit. This is what you return to the store the day after Christmas. It’s like a church basement in here. I’m wasting my valuable time.”

“I know,” Nathaniel says, sitting down. He leans his head back against the wall, feeling a kind of Buddhist indifference to everything.

“All you got is these fucking paperbacks. Books every damn where. A lamp that doesn’t work. This junk clock radio. And a fuckin’ coffeepot,” the flashlight says directly into his face. “Which is rusting. A rusting coffeepot! How come you live this way? I got it better than you. And your clothes are all wet. What’s that?”

“I’m just a graduate student.”

“You don’t even have a bike. Or a stereo.”

“So?” Nathaniel says, feeling too tired to challenge him. “I walk everywhere or take the bus,” he lies. The VW, after all, had been a grudging gift from his stepfather, and the burglar might want to steal it. But, no; once having seen its butterscotch-colored paint job, no thief would want it. Nathaniel waits. “You going to leave now? There’s nothing here for you.”

The burglar sighs. “Don’t I know it. You’re not going to attack me or nothin’?” he asks. He is young also, probably Nathaniel’s age, stoned, but — Nathaniel can see this in the semi-dark — wearing a wedding ring.

“No,” Nathaniel says. “Why would I do that?”

“Well,” the voice asks, coming out of the flashlight, “would you make me a cup of coffee, then? I don’t care if it tastes of rust. This has been an awful night.” Nathaniel reaches for the light switch, and the burglar says, “No, don’ do that. I can’t have you seein’ me.”

“Oh, okay,” Nathaniel says. So all right. So why not make a cup of coffee for a burglar? It is a revolutionary act. After going into the kitchen, he fills his coffeepot, the Mighty Midget, with Breakfast Blend and water, lets the brew percolate, and pours a cup. “Cream or sugar?” he calls out.

The burglar has nodded off on the sofa. “Cream or sugar?” Nathaniel repeats more loudly, approaching the guy, who smells of anise. Nathaniel shakes the burglar’s shoulder. The intruder still has a flashlight in one hand, a toy gun in the other, and a grocery bag at his feet.

“Aaargh,” the guy says. “No. I hate sugar. Sugar is a disguise. It’s bad for you. Gives me headaches. Black, just black, okay?”

“Okay, sure,” Nathaniel says. After returning to the kitchen, he pours the intruder and himself each a cup of coffee, goes back to the sofa, hands one of them to the guy, and sits down on the other side of the room from him.

“So,” Nathaniel says to the young man, in the near-dark, “you’re married?”

“Yuh,” the man says. “And my old lady got a baby on the way.” He sips the coffee. “Soon, too. See, I lost my job months ago. I was a janitor. Welfare’s run out and shit. She can’t work, my wife. She broke her leg in a fall she took downtown. Marble stairs, slippery, you know? Maybe we could sue. She just gimps around. Like a bug. What it is, we don’t have no parents, the two of us, like most people do.”

“Too bad.” Nathaniel waits. “Of course it doesn’t help things that you’ve got a habit. You must be a crummy thief if you shoot up before you go out to steal things.”

The man doesn’t respond to the critique of his lifestyle. “How come you live like this, man?” the burglar asks, sipping at his hot coffee, his voice calm. “This is one motherfuckin’ friendless apartment.” He pauses, contemplating it. “Are you a Spartan or something? ’Cause a lonesome soul lives here, I’ll tell you that. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Shit. I’d get me a comfortable chair, at least. And a TV set. Don’t you watch TV? Football? Johnny Carson?”

Nathaniel shakes his head. And, before dawn breaks, he tells the burglar about the entire night, about himself, his studies, his former home in Milwaukee, and how Theresa would not come home with him, which, considering the burglar’s presence, was probably a happy accident.

“You’re okay, man,” the burglar says a few minutes later, before he shakes Nathaniel’s hand to leave. “But, you know, you should get better locks on your door. You know, the dead-bolt kind? The kind you got here, they won’t stop a flea from coming in and sitting down on you.”

“Talk to my landlord,” Nathaniel instructs him, as he closes his eyes. It has been a long night. “But I don’t think he’ll listen to you, either.”

“See you around,” the burglar says, stepping quietly out. As he goes, Nathaniel has, at last, a quick look at him, and he wills himself to remember the face in case he should ever see it again.

“See you around,” Nathaniel replies as the burglar closes the door behind him. “Drop by again. Just knock next time.” He could always use another acquaintance, even one who steals. Still, he latches the door.

THE NEXT MORNINGNathaniel calls Theresa. The phone rings and rings and rings. Perhaps she is resting up after her social exertions. Or is out in the library, foraging in the stacks. Or is still actively caressing someone, somewhere — the two of them guttering and moaning into the sheets followed by sweaty laughter, the sun rising over her arched back, her fingers in someone’s mouth, her breasts damp from kisses, her thighs from semen. Ah, Nathaniel notes, yes, here it is, the poison of jealous erotic imagery, the first sign, the barbed hook in the heart. Theresa Theresa Theresa.

He drives down to the Broadway farmers’ market, buys two large bags’ worth of assorted vegetables, then takes them back to the People’s Kitchen, a little storefront co-op hunger-relief project on Allen Street. The butterscotch VW Beetle wheezes and squeaks and groans as he parks out in front, where a hapless bush occupying a small square of embattled dirt strokes the passenger-side door when he squeezes into the space. The People’s Kitchen stands next to an artist’s studio and is a block down from Mulligan’s Brick Bar. The neighborhood — Allentown — has a pleasantly lazy urban squalor. Nathaniel carries the vegetables inside, turns up the heat, causing the radiators to clank, raises the shades in the front and back, and, with the radio on, starts chopping carrots and boiling water. The poor and hungry and various assorted street people usually drop in starting around three in the afternoon for a meal. Sometimes Nathaniel serves, but today he is assigned to chop and boil and stir and clean.

In Buffalo, real estate is so cheap that almost any collective can buy or lease property, and Nathaniel has joined this one, the Allentown Artists’ & Culinary Alliance, not out of vague progressive ideals, but because he likes cooking and cleaning and serving, and because his soul has always thrived being around cast-off people — greaseballs and windbag artistes, hippies, losers, the poor and unwashed, and those with sociopolitical ambitions, the ones who forget to wear socks and who blow their noses on their shirtsleeves while making speeches. Besides, once when he was meditating over the direction of his life, the message came to him that he should do this work.

He knows about himself that all his charitable deeds are, at base, selfish. Such drudgery makes him feel better, lifting a dead weight off his soul and putting a lighter-than-air spiritual substance in its place.

Through the south-facing back kitchen window the sun shines cheerfully, an all-American sun, optimistic about everything. In Buffalo, the sun is a member in good standing of the Rotary Club. Things, the sun sings merrily, will get better better better better better better better better better. Nathaniel turns up the volume on the radio, tuned to the Buffalo NPR affiliate, in an effort to drown out the sun. They’re playing Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement, a demented scherzo of sea shanties interrupted by a sudden eerie calm evoking the approach of nothingness. Nathaniel knows his classical music: before she married Nathaniel’s stepfather, his mother played it day and night at home and in the car. Now he can recognize anything in the standard classical repertoire, and this knowledge burdens him. The sun shuts up.