Crimes by Moonlight

Relief.

A man don’t get many chances to redeem himself, the little wise part of my brain said. That voice never had spoken up much, but that evening, on that road, I heard it clear and loud.

The woods was all black now, the trees melted into each other. I picked up my banjo and walked down the road, away from the strange, deserted town, trying not to think about liquor and browsing and the wise eye of the lady in the woods.

After a couple of miles, the dirt road came to one of gravel, and a farmer in an old Ford truck with shreds of hay clinging to the flatbed picked me up in his headlights.

“Where you coming from, lugging that banjo?” he asked through the side window.

“Tadesville,” I said, looking up.

“Tadesville?” He pushed open the door. “Never heard of it.”

“Strange town,” I said, climbing up. “Nobody there, except a lady that lives off in the woods.”

The driver didn’t need to talk more, and we drove in silence through the dark until he dropped me just east of Kalamazoo.

I left the banjo at my sister’s and went to sea as an oiler, thinking to put an ocean between me and liquor and any other temptations on the road to hell. But after three years of smelling bilge on one of the foulest buckets ever to bob between New York and Liverpool, all I’d done was grow a stronger thirst for drink and a bigger taste for easy. I quit the ship and thumbed through the South, stupored on woods-stilled mash, looking to work at anything that wouldn’t raise a sweat. They wasn’t hiring drunks much at the time, and mostly I did road repairs for small jails in Alabama and Georgia. Breaking and entering, public intoxication, and bad luck was what got me those road jobs, until one incident of accomplice auto theft put me inside a prison laundry for three years.

I got out at thirty years of age, vowing to get smarter. I went to my sister’s. Though she’d been the one keeping the banjo all those years, I believe now that it was waiting of its own life force.

To save me, or to be my doom, depending.

THE world I reentered was full of amazements. Astronaut men was routinely riding rockets, cars had air-conditioning, and music was coming out of radios no bigger than a pack of smokes. Most incredible to me, though, was that the five-string banjo had become stylish. Beard-and-sandal Greenwich Village nuts had brought it up North and were treating it respectful. Suddenly, every street festival, county fair, and folk-damn hootena

I wasn’t good enough for a big act, but I didn’t need to be. There was plenty of easy work playing car dealerships and warming up county fair crowds, and I traveled with pickup groups all over the Midwest. The pay was miserable, but the hours was excellent-lots of time for sour mash and cards-and there was no need to risk thieving.

I took to wearing the ring I discovered lying in my banjo case because of the sparkle it gave off. Playing under a summer sun or on a bright-lit stage, I could sweep the glint off that ring like a beacon, starting and stopping, making the crowd laugh. It pleased every act I traveled with.

Never, though, did I wonder on the ring’s origin. Any remembrance ofTadesville and the lady in the woods had long fallen out of my mind, gone like so many of my other gin-triggered hallucinations.

Until St. Louis, June of 1964.

The mandolin player and I were in a hotel room playing stud poker with some of the locals. I’d dropped my last twenty, my flask was empty, and I was getting up to leave when one of them, a short guy in a black suit who’d been wi

Quicker than a pelican diving for lunch, he snagged a jeweler’s loupe out of his vest, popped it into his eye, and leaned back under the floor lamp. “I’ll give you a thousand bucks for it,” he said after no time at all.

I’m sure my mouth fell open. In my entire misapplied life, I’d never once been packing a thousand dollars.

“A thousand bucks. Right here, right now.” The little man leaned forward. His eyes were tiny and wet, like a ferret’s.

The table went quiet.

“Family heirloom,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice my hand shaking as I reached across the table for the ring, slow, giving him time to up the offer.

“Fifteen hundred.” He closed his fist around the ring.

“Not for five thousand,” I heard my voice say.

No one breathed. The mandolin player was looking at me like I’d just landed from Mars. Night after night, he’d seen me drop the ring like junk into my banjo case, giving it no thought. That night, I’d just forgotten to take it off, was all. Now he was watching me kiss off fifteen hundred solid for it.

The little man in the black suit hesitated for a long minute, then opened his hand and pushed the ring toward the center of the table. “Not worth five grand,” he said.

The wind went out of my chest. My brain screamed to say I’d been kidding; fifteen hundred was fine. But my gut said pocket the ring, get up easy, and vamoose.

And that is what I did, not at all sure what had just happened.

That one time, my gut was right. The next day, I got thirty-two hundred for the ring from a pawnbroker. I’d started downtown first, in a fancy jewelry store just off the main drag.

“Where’d you get this?” the jeweler asked, setting the ring down on the black felt counter pad.

“Family heirloom.” It still sounded reasonable to me.

“It’s four carat, clear quality, well-faceted,” he said. He eyed my greasy suit. “If you can prove ownership, I’ll give you six thousand for it.”

“For this ring?”

“For the diamond. The setting is junk.”

But he wouldn’t spring a nickel without papers, nor would the next half-dozen jewelry stores I tried. So I went to the hockshops, and got the thirty-two hundred. Not as much as the fancy stores, but it was better than a poke in the eye.

I bought a used Pontiac ragtop, white on black with red vinyl indoors, spi

I blew through the money in days. Most of it got left on card tables, and the last three hundred was beat out of me by two guys in knit hats outside a bar. I’d been shooting off my mouth, buying drinks for the room.

Stranded, broke, without prospect of a banjo job anytime soon, I started sleeping in my car.

And I started browsing.

At first I aimed for department store jewelry counters when they was at their busiest, taking care to nip only at vodka beforehand so the only thing on my breath would be the smell of Lifesaver peppermint. I acted the confused husband, torn between so many choices spread before me on the counter, figuring the clerks, mostly teenage girls, would be too eye-rollingly bored to notice a bauble missing when I told them I needed to think and turned to leave.

But whiskey had prickled my nerves. I started sprouting tremors, and that got me beady eyes from the counter clerks. And twice, serious-looking gentlemen followed me out. Both times I slipped them, but high-tone stores had lost their potential.

I aimed lower, started browsing hardware stores and bead shops. That was slow work, usually needing a whole day to boost enough to trade for a lone pint, and green goods at that.

The last day of July was inhospitable, sixty degrees and pouring gray rain. I was huddling under the eave of the train station to catch my breath after tapping the costume jewelry store across the street for a pocketful of junk. The owner had been on to me right off, but a half-dozen teenie girls had followed me in. Chattering and giggling, they swarmed the counters like bees, giving me enough cover for a quick sweep and a fast vamoose. Still, I’d been stupid, risking a grab when I knew the owner was watching, and the episode had left me shaking.