Jackson

Jackson didn’t consider himself a thief. If, from time to time he took something small that wouldn’t be missed, no harm done, right? His older brother, Scott, oftentimes hid snacks in his room: honey buns, potato chips, he’d even found an entire box of candy bars once; where Scott got the money for them it never occurred to Jackson to question. He got home from school at 3:45, exactly fifteen minutes before Scott’s bus would be pulling up to the stop down the streets. Plenty of time to give Scott’s room a semi-thorough search before his brother could barge in and bust him. He supposed if he was doing something he could get “busted” for, it was wrong on some level, but the allure of something sweet before the typically underwhelming dinner their mother would throw together between her morning and night shifts was too much for a young boy to overcome. Jackson leapt off the bus and bolted down the street, the shabby neighborhood rushed past as he bounded down a few doors to his front porch, his house key put up a fight sliding through the rusty keyhole on their old doorknob but after a bit of elbow grease to coerce it, the key slid in and clicked. When Jackson got inside, he looked across their small living room to the dinner table beyond the brown, stained carpet, it ended and the tiled floor began which ran to the right, behind a wall separating the kitchen proper from his view. Already he smelled the salty aroma of what was surely cheap canned meat frying for dinner. His mother was loving and dedicated but her culinary skills left much to be desired. Jackson inched the door closed as silently as he could, it wouldn’t do to have his mother catch him rummaging through Scott’s room, least of all so that he could ruin his appetite. He tiptoed up the three stairs, passed his own room, first door on the left and into his brother’s larger room on the corner of the house in the back of the hall. Inside it was messy as always, water and soda bottles, half empty, left lying on the nightstand and dresser, clothes half hanging out of the hamper, the cracked window had something like dirt dried on the old, off-white paint of the sill. Jackson checked all the usual spots: in the pillow case, under the bed, top drawer of the dresser; he came up empty handed. This hadn’t been the first time his brother’s stash had run dry but a hunch told Jackson that something was still eluding him. On a whim, and left with no other real options, Jackson emptied the half-full hamper. He carefully piled handfuls of his brother’s sweaty shirts, skid-marked underwear and crusty socks into a neat pile next to the hamper, he would be sure to return them in the same order they had been excavated to avoid any suspicion. As he groped through the laundry his fingers touched something hard, heavy and metallic, Jackson’s heart skipped a beat, he had found something, an unopened soda, perhaps, that his brother had stashed but as he reached the bottom of the hamper, he pulled a faded and ripped pair of jeans from the pile and saw a wad of wrinkled twenty-dollar bills, slightly crushed, stuffed hastily into the bottom of the basket. Jackson stopped himself for a thought, “There’s more than a couple bills here, if I took one and went down to the corner store after dinner, I could buy myself anything I wanted! Would Scott even notice if only one of them was missing?” Jackson reached down to grasp the entire roll of bills when he dislodged a pair of dirty jeans and uncovered a pistol laying in the corner of the hamper opposite the money! Now frozen, Jackson stared at the gun in equal parts awe and caution. He felt the need to touch it, pick it up; he had sense enough to not pull the trigger but couldn’t resist aiming down the sights, picking off imaginary bad guys as he scanned the room. “Blam, blam,” he would mutter under his breath as he jerked the gun back in time, firing at the villains lurking behind the bed, the dresser and in the closet. Just then, he heard a noise outside the window, on the ground, a kind of knocking like something being laid against the side of the house; Jackson leaned over the window to see Scott on the bottom rung of a ladder directly underneath the window sill. Jackson’s heart leaped, he tossed the gun back into the hamper, grabbed one of the twenty-dollar bills and simultaneously crammed it into his pocket while hastily stuffing the discarded clothes back, he leapt to his feet and ran out the bedroom door; the second he got clear of the doorframe he heard the window slide open and the floor boards creak as Scott stepped into the room. 

*** 

Jackson’s head was buzzing as he sat down at the dinner table. He tried to keep his gaze off of Scott but he found his eyes frequently betraying him, stealing quick glances when Scott would sip his drink or check his flip phone. Their mother was regaling them with the neighborhood gossip, it was the only social interaction she got aside from taking orders at the local diner.  

“I saw the older couple down the street finally became grandparents, if only we could all grow old together like that,” she sighed, mostly to herself. Scott had become less attentive the later he got into his teens and Jackson was preoccupied with the thrill and the dread of being caught from the day’s earlier events. “I heard that Kyle Barnes boy up the road was robbed last week.” 

“He snitched?” Scott’s surprise carried a hint of anger. 

“Snitched? Scott, do you know something about this?” 

“No, I,” he stammered, “I just know you ain’t ‘posed to snitch, that’s street rules.” 

“Scott, so help me, if you have anything to do with this-” 

“I don’t and so what if I did? A man’s got to get his money!” Scott rose and made for the stairs. 

“Scott, come back here, son!” Their mother leaped after him and grabbed him by the hem of the shirt. Scott jerked away from her, cleared the short stairway in a single bound, ran down the hall and slammed his door; the lock “clicked” as the final word on their exchange. Their mother followed after and tried the handle, it only jiggled and clacked but it wouldn’t turn. She began to beat on it, “Scott you open this damn door!” After a moment, she stopped, backed up and kicked the door, it swung open and slammed, knocking a hole in the drywall. Jackson ran upstairs and stopped at the doorway as his mother sat sobbing on the bed, the window was open and Scott was gone, all the clothes had been torn from the hamper. 

*** 

Jackson sat on the bottom step, his mother had been pacing the living room, calling the neighbors for information about Scott the past few hours. “Should I tell her about the gun and the money? I’m sure it has something to do with that boy being robbed. Maybe I can figure a way out to tell her without letting her know about the money? But then she’s going to ask what I was doing playing around in a dirty clothes hamper.” Jackson agonized over his decision, the crumpled twenty in his pocket had a weight like an anchor to it, pinning his thoughts to a decision he wished he didn’t have to make. “Maybe things will work themselves out, maybe Scott will come home and ill even get to keep the money.” Jackson heard the slide of a window upstairs and faintly, sirens down the street. He rushed upstairs, his mother hadn’t seemed to notice yet, to find Scott stepping through the window, shaking, panting and with tears in his eyes. “What happened? Where did you run off to?” pleaded Jackson. 

“I tried to shut him up, his family’s got money, I thought they wouldn’t say anything when I took it. I went to shut him up but I couldn’t do it, now the cops are after me!” Scott choked back the tears of a boy in way over his head. “Don’t tell mom,” he commanded, “I’m man of the house, I can handle my own business.” 

 That moment, Jackson recalled a man on the fringes of his memory, someone he knew when he was very young, who used to say the same thing. Familiar words and feelings coursed through his mind, until, he remembered once he had been caught taking something that didn’t belong to him, the man stooped down eye level to him and said, “A person who steals is really only stealing from himself.” In this moment, though he could barely recall the man’s face, the lesson he was trying to impart clicked in Jackson's brain. He turned and ran to their mother, she was sitting with one of their dinner table chairs turned facing the rear screen door, sobbing on the phone to one of the neighbors when Jackson made it to her, he tapped her shoulder and told her about Scott’s gun, that he had found it while digging through Scott’s room, he told her about the money, how he had stolen some of it and that the police were looking for him.

 She said a hasty “Igottago,” hung the phone up, bolted upstairs and found Scott with his back against the wall, under the window sill, panicking . There was a knock at the door. “Where is the gun, Scott?” Their mother demanded. Shaking, Scott pointed a limp finger at the hamper. Their mother reached into the basket and retrieved the pistol. She put her hand under her shirt and vigorously rubbed the gun handle, the barrel and the trigger, “and the money?” 

Scott reached into his pocket, then hesitated, “It’s enough for rent for two months, mom!” Their mother reached an empty hand out, open palm, there was another knock downstairs. Slowly, Scott withdrew the large roll of bills and relinquished them to his mother. She turned and walked downstairs, taking deep breaths to calm herself as she answered the door. A police officer was waiting on the porch, his cruiser across the lawn out on the street in front of the house, lights still flashing.

“Good evening, ma’am,” he said, “we’ve had a report of a man holding someone up the street at gunpoint, said he was headed in this direction. Have you seen anything suspicious tonight?”  

“Yes, officer,” she said with a calm that masked her nervousness,” I heard some rustling outside a little while ago, thought someone must have cut through our yard, I went out to look and found these,” she held up the pistol and the roll of bills. When his eye first caught the gun, the officer instinctually reached for his holster but stopped himself, sighing with relief.

“Well, your prints will have muddied the perp’s, so we won't be able to ID him that way, but at least the family can get their money back. Thank you, ma’am.” He took the money and the wad of cash, her features relaxed, “One question, though, if you heard a noise outside, why didn’t you call us instead of going yourself?” 

“Oh,” she said, “after raising boys like these by myself, nothing scares me anymore,” she chuckled. 

The officer gave a “Hm,” and a half-smile, then turned to head back to his squad car, just then, Jackson appeared from behind his mother and stepped out onto the doorstep, “wait, mister,” he called, “she dropped this one,” Jackson said as he held out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill.