Free Charming Grace by Deborah Smith

They shook on it.
    Later, as we bunked in a sagging bed in a hot attic upstairs, Armand said, “You’re gonna sell balloons. That’s all you’re gonna do.”
    “But…what are you gonna do?”
    “I’ll be lookin’ for tourists with lazy fingers,” Armand said. “And I intend to find plenty of ‘em. I know it’s hard to believe, little bro, but we’ll get by. And one day we’ll be rich, and we won’t ever have to ask any two-bit shit for any thing. I promise.”
    I snuggled as close to him as I could without being too sissy. He didn’t seem to mind. “I believe you,” I whispered.
    I dreamed of Mama and Frenchie that night, and of Armand crying in his sleep, like me.

    Before long Armand became the best thief in the French Quarter and I wasn’t far behind. He tried to keep me on the balloon beat but the hot air of decency wouldn’t support us. “I know you take a lot of grief from Jeremiah when you don’t find enough lost stuff,” I told Armand. “I know he threatens to smack you around. You need a partner.”
    Armand sputtered and cursed and threatened to ram my head into a wall, but I ignored him and joined our little two-man itchy-fingers business. All we had was each other, thieves or not. So there I was—former balloon huckster, now a pre-teen street thief. I never picked a tourist’s pocket, though. That was somehow mean, personal, undignified. I was still Gigi Noleene’s good Catholic boy.
    Instead, Armand and I perfected the art of strolling uptown and filching small goods from the finer stores. Watches were our specialty. Jeremiah sold the watches and paid us twenty cents on the dollar. The income kept us in jeans and pizza. Plus we did chores and errands for the French Quarter merchants, and we got a lot of free meals from the bars and restaurants. Thanks to Armand’s charm and my polite manners, it wasn’t uncommon to find us gobbling leftover roast shrimp in the famous kitchens at Brennan’s or steaming bowls of gumbo behind Three Sisters.
    But every sin has a spiritual price tag sooner or later, and even as kids we paid retail. Twice Armand got caught stealing, but talked his way out of it; I got caught once, and didn’t have the gift of gab.
    “Let’s have a talk about Jesus, you little pilferin’ shit,” the big cop drawled. He dragged me down an alley and proceeded to slap me upside the head so hard I bounced off a concrete wall and chipped a tooth. Until then I’d sort of harbored a wild hope that some nice Papa Cop would whisk us home to his kindly wife, like we were abandoned puppies who deserved a good place to live. That wasn’t to be.
    I thought I’d die from loneliness when a judge sent me off to a juvenile lock-up for three months of self-esteem counseling. Armand showed up at the gates twice a week trying to convince me to make a break for it. Underneath all the bullshit, my bro was scared of being alone in the world. So was I, but I went through phases where I was determined to be a good citizen. “I’ll just stick it out here,” I told him. “If I leave it’d make my self-esteem counselor feel bad about himself.”
    Thanks to crazy-sweet Madame Taber and the profit-minded Jeremiah we had fake papers saying she’d adopted us, so the cops sent me back to them after I was rehabilitated. We always had a home over the Palm It and Pawn It , as we called the store, as long as we delivered the goods.
    Armand graduated to stealing cars, and our income improved. He was fast as magic. One second a tourist’s rented sedan would be sitting on the curb, safe as a crawdad in a mud pie. The next it would be heading out of the city with Armand at the wheel. Pretty soon I graduated to cars, too, and except for that one toe-shooting incident early on, I was a natural. We delivered the heisted cars to Jeremiah’s pal, a scrawny little black guy named Titter, who operated a chop shop in a warehouse outside the city. The first time we scored a luxury model, I think it was a