The Tools He Worked Off

Why I did not call the law

I thought about calling the sheriff. I will not pretend I did not.

Theft is theft. Six thousand dollars is six thousand dollars, and there is a part of a man that wants the clean, simple thing, the cruiser in the driveway, the report, the feeling of being in the right.

But I kept landing on the same two facts. He was twenty-nine days out of a program that was the only thing standing between him and a box in the ground. And he was Angie’s brother, which made him, whether I liked it that week or not, mine.

A charge would not get my tools back. The pawnshop had them; a police report would just mean I bought them back myself at retail while Cody sat in a cell learning nothing except that the family had finally let go of the rope.

I had seen that movie. My own cousin was in it. Nobody comes out the other end fixed. They come out harder.

So I did not call. Not because I am a soft man. Because I wanted the actual tools back and I wanted the actual kid back, and a jail cell does not hand you either one.

I just did not yet know how to get both. I found out Sunday, sitting across from him.

Sunday at the table

He came at two. He stood in the doorway like the floor might not hold him.

He had lost more weight. There was a cold sore at the corner of his mouth and his hands would not stay still, so he jammed them in his pockets, and then took them out, and then jammed them back.

“Mark,” he said. “I’m gonna pay you back. I swear to God. Every dime.”

“Sit down, Cody.”

He sat. Angie stood by the sink with a dish towel wrung in both hands.

“I messed up,” he said. “I know. I’m gonna get a job and I’m gonna pay you back, I promise, it’s just, it’s hard right now, with my record, nobody’s hiring.”

“How much did you get for them?”

He flinched. “Eleven hundred.”

“And where’s the eleven hundred?”

He looked at the table. We all knew where the eleven hundred was. The eleven hundred was in his arm, or up his nose, or in Jeff’s pocket for whatever Jeff had fronted him. The eleven hundred was gone the way it is always gone.