No one really respects burglary as a profession anymore, one that requires ego discipline and attention to craft. The cat burglar- light, swift and discerning in their targets -has faded, even in popular culture. Over the past decades heist movies continue to show up reliably at the box office but these plots usually feature high tech rip-offs of casinos, museum galleries, Swiss safety deposit boxes, etc. In popular media by this point, the home invader is usually a heavily racialized parable about the desperate antics of addiction, with either a liberal or reactionary take on what the solutions to this social disease might be. With all the politics and abstraction involved, no one does much justice to the profession itself, which requires at least as much skill, courage, adaptability, and of course, luck, as a general surgeon specializing in the repair of hernias or a dentist who repairs catawompus molars. Even more hostile to the field of burglary is the local news, bought up and consolidated decades ago into a hardcore death drive propaganda block which devotes disproportionate coverage to drug overdoses and break-ins. The most prized story in this category is one where an heroic citizen neutralizes some dirtbag who climbed in the window of their personal castle.
Typical news item: octogenarian who lives by herself, subsisting peacefully on a fixed income, lobotomizes a home invader with a large caliber handgun. She is interviewed in a hospital bed with a comminuted fracture of her wrist and forearm immobilized in a cast. She cannot hear the interviewers questions because she did not bring her hearing aid and also the retort of the hand cannon has destroyed the last shred of her aural acuity. Unfortunately for the burglar, she shot true despite her advanced macular degeneration. Fortunately for her, her ocular disease was so advanced that she was aiming at a shadow and she did not have to see the issue of her volley in all its gruesome technicolor.
Approved by Eau Claire Police Department for immediate broadcast. [Handwritten margin note] Hell of a story, you’ve done it again Jim!
Laboratory analysis of viewers exposed to this story reveals an effect not unlike a speedball, an adrenally heightened state as they envision themselves standing victorious over the vanquished violator of their domestic tranquility, padded with subtle flows of oxytocin as the adorable meemaw smiles cheerfully in the way elderly people often do when they cannot hear an interviewer and know they have no hope of bridging that gulf of silence.
Largely as a result of such vignettes, the field of home invasion attracts many individuals with low self-esteem and low intelligence willing to take on outsized risk for typically small reward, eg a score might or might not see them through a weekend of premium drug use. There are however, a few who style themselves practitioners in that older tradition, dressed in black and padding on cushioned sneakers, surveilling their targets, soberly measuring risk and reward. Sometimes this fascination overlaps significantly with violent sexual pathology. Such characters receive an outsize share of attention, but they do make up an important minority of serious burglars.
Duncan Heidt imagined for himself a future as a professional but non-violent thief, though he had indulged a few times in some borderline deviance, rifling through underwear drawers, letting the comfy cotton drawers tumble through his fingers until he turned up a piece, frilled and uncomfortable looking, that said “special occasion,” and well, that was about as far as it got but mostly because he lacked imagination. In truth he was in great peril, in a dangerous phase of a crime career where he was riding high on a few initial successes and misattributing much of his luck to skill. This often happens to young surgeons, rock climbers, divers, and other high adrenaline practitioners with razor-like margins of error. On top of that, he had fallen into another hazard common for young men: while basically bright he thought that he was much more intelligent than he was. So far he had been lucky, but the combination of average intelligence and early success was potentially disastrous.
The first job he picked had been sensible enough, and he dove into the home of a place he had helped tile a bathroom. He knew the family was moving out, and was doing cosmetic remodeling to prepare the house for sale. He unlocked a window before leaving and around 1am that morning he gained access to the home through not that window but one closer, because he could not remember the window but the one he tried happened to be open. He went in and there were some boxes of household items. No appliances and certainly no cash. He felt no urgency to the invasion in part because he had already been invited in and did not in his gut feel as if he was trespassing. The lack of anything more expensive than curtain rods also made the invasion feel more like simple trespassing than a real burglary. He took DVDs that had been purchased for around $2000 and he was able to clear about $180 from his unwitting fence at Play It Again. The rush only came when the goods were across the counter and the money was in his hand. He had his first real score under his belt. Now on to more challenging work.
He decided to work his tile job angle again, and this time he managed to snatch a calendar off the fridge as well as unlock a basement window. He found just what he was looking for, penciled in the father’s chunky, excited block letters. “BEACH!” Family of four with two elementary aged kids, was planning to go to Sandy Shores for a little beach trip. Excellent timing. That house did have nice things and Duncan felt a hundred times more perverse in the act and thrilled to his bones by the whole penetration aspect. What made all the difference was that this house was visibly, tangibly lived in. There were dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, the shoe rack was in upheaval, a jar of peanut butter and half a loaf of bread were out on the counter, sealed but not put away. Not slovenly, but just tousled enough to suggest the occupants might come back at any moment.
Duncan cleared about $1600 worth of jewelry (purchased by its owner for about $40,000 over ten years of marriage, the missus being not even that fond of diamonds but expecting them ritualistically as a mark of devotion on a more or less biannual basis, however not of much value on the second hand market especially with the settings being tasteless at worst and dated at best and what the fuck do you mean, walking into a jewelry store and cold asking if I’m a fence? I should blow your fucking head off. Strip off the shirt, phone on the counter if you want to talk.) There was also a computer he wouldn’t be able to do anything with, a box of Pepperidge Farm Montauk cookies that he ate standing in the kitchen and let fall to the floor as a taunt to the violated family. The loot wasn’t the point. Not yet at least. He was practicing, and he was getting good. Systematic. Gain access. Identify opportunity. Then when the timing was right he had the run of the place to himself. Alarm systems noted, never anything serious. The crap they advertised on podcasts.
With his third target he committed an error of the unknown-unknown, because he had only done cursory psychological research on the homeowner. He mainly studied the dimensions and the plan of the dwelling, getting very technical and into the numbers game, which can certainly turn into a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees problem. For even a novice analyst would have profiled the proprietor as a gun owner, if not an out and out gun freak, who kept something enormous by the nightstand next to a pile of rings and loose change.
If Duncan had not lost sight of the fact that he was not just invading homes but people he would have paid attention to the lifted truck and the obvious signs that Mr. Kane L. Foster, aka Citizen Kane, aka Big Foster, aka the Pool King of Eau Clair would have had a heater close and might even be the kind of old fool that knew how to use it. Not one of those noodle necks that bought a bunch of rail mounted gimmicks off the internet and turned his wife into a sieve when she came back to the bedroom from getting a glass of water in the middle of the night. No, this was an A&M grad with a neck like a hairy coffee canister.
Perhaps if Duncan had known the community that he was trying to defile a little better he would have known Big Foster was a figure of some note, heaviest businessman in town and buying up new developments like crazy, always leaning hard on someone at town hall, just a typical suburban gangster though, nothing more complicated than tax stuff which his lawyer admitted might not even technically be illegal. Upstanding guy and a sports hero to boot. Not a real one, championship wise, but the reales of all in terms of being a guy who either had the guts or was stupid enough to play the game long after he should have stopped.
Big Foster never had any delusions of past glory about his old baseball career. It was farm league stuff, but he clawed his way up and down between single A and triple. At times he was just an injury away from the big time which is to say, someone else’s injury, a shredded elbow or shoulder. They never came though, his lucky stars, and he ground his arm down for crowds in the dozens until he ended up in a motel with his arm mummified in ice, hoping it would be intact tomorrow, hoping the seniorita from the bar would bring up some blow, because she had winked at him when he asked, do you have any coka-eenya sweetheart? Blanco? And when he answered the knock on the door two stout brown men picked him up one under each arm and put him through the wall into the bathroom, planted him in the shower and he went down all tangled in the dry rotted shower curtain and the guys turned the room upside down, found about four hundred dollars and two and a half joints, which was about all he had, and his arm, and the arm wouldn’t be better tomorrow, or ever again.
That’s when he had to call up hey buddy hey Jim… yeah the road is what it is man, I sure look forward to getting home to be honest… I think I’m done with the trail. Uh huh. Yeah it’s too much if me and Kathleen want to get serious about kids. Hey, do you still know your guy that works at the bank? Just like that he had a different life but he was far from done with hustling. He just poured out what he had into the new game and with a little seed money from Kathleen’s father he destroyed the flaky competition for pool maintenance services. He ran ten crews now, all from his phone which he kept in a vinyl and neoprene holster on his hip, wedges between his belt and the lip of his gut. He still rolled up the sleeve of his hypertrophied throwing arm. Though he was afraid the arm would be palsied after the assault he actually rehabilitated it to the point he could safely hold batting practice with the local high school for the autism fundraiser he held every spring. Now he kept a pack of gum in the sleeve because he hadn’t had a cigarette in years.
Anyway, as said, Duncan was remiss in not building a better dossier on Foster. With a little digging he might even have read a funny quote by Foster which the newspaper decided to run, and could be seen clipped out and framed at the diner he had a half stake in, the one called Fastball’s (or Fastballs— no two menus or examples of signage agreed on the apostrophe). The quote read:
“I don’t have a gun. I keep a bucket of baseballs by the bed so if a guy comes through my door he better be wearing a batting helmet because I’m throwing at his head.”
Potential, even likely, gun freak and also someone with a certain reputation to uphold in the community. If Duncan were a more seasoned cat burglar then he would have put together these clues and skipped the house. We can continue to lament his failures, but we must know his first and fatal mistake was hubris, for there is no room for arrogance in the business of home invasion in the Southeastern United States. One must embrace death. Seek it out and flirt a bit. Duncan, we must say, was a transplant from New Jersey who transferred colleges so he could live with an ailing aunt. He had a great deal of contempt for hicks, which meant practically everyone down there, and as we have mentioned he overestimated his own intellect to his mortal peril.
Moving past his poor philosophical and culture grounding, we can begin to catalog the technical errors that made his third job a disaster. First, he assumed the home was unoccupied just because the truck wasn’t at its usual station in the carport and failed to entertain a hundred scenarios where the master was at home but the vehicle elsewhere, even something so prosaic as the truck being at the shop and the owner of truck and home awaiting delivery of a rental in the morning. Neither did Duncan conceive that the master of this or any given castle might be lethally armed, thinking that was a thing for the trailer park bubbas and inner city types, despite this being the most heavily armed state in the union and it being suburban types in particular who made a hardcore throbbing fetish of firearm ownership.
Lower income households hang on to a couple of weapons, but any surplus has been pawned long ago, see, but one of these mid scale cookie cutter suburban ranch homes, where the guy like, works at a bank or whatever, has secret safes in the walls that slide open with a soft hiss at the touch of an invisible panel, to reveal a comprehensive armory with sidearms, machine pistols, every possible caliber and technique in rifling from carbine to long gun with several smooth bored examples perhaps, colonial muskets for a certain patriotic panache, a sense of sacred responsibility realized in the mere possession of these extraordinarily crafted weapons, a discharging of a filial duty to Fatherland. There were also grenade launchers, tactical shotguns with breeching rounds for what purpose it is difficult to imagine since their narrow application is situated squarely obverse to the problem of home defense.
If Duncan had not run afoul first of Big Foster he would have soon been wasted by a suburban rancher ejaculating into a pair of Tommy John underwear at the same muzzle velocity as his Beretta. This is the highest form of American perversion attainable, the collision of two pathological penetrators wherein the two suburban antiparticles annihilate in glorious mutual orgasm. But Duncan was never meant for the apotheosis, he would only accumulate and could never discharge the type of desire that erupted when a bullet righteously penetrated whatever sick villain dared disturb righteous white Christian slumber. A different sort of penance would be extracted from Duncan, but we will come to that in time.
Very early one June morning with daylight hours away, the nights still damp and cool and not yet relentlessly suffocating, he rolled quietly down the street for the last eighth of a mile, turning his lights off altogether for the last quarter mile and sitting there with his engine off for another fifteen minutes to give time for any middle-of-the-night wakers to sleepily discard the suspicion subliminally tripped by the noise of an unfamiliar engine or the bark of a dog not normally heard at that hour. Then he got out and used a trick he had practiced, of taking a spike and heavy hammer to the builder grade bolt of the door of the garage. Loud, but it only took a single blow and no one was home. He wore black nitrile gloves like tattoo artists and mechanics, really more for the aesthetics than real concern that NCIS Eau Claire would lift his prints. If he had been a little more astute he might have noticed that they came in a range of thicknesses and might not have opted for 7mil most suitable for either changing oil or working with a formalin saturated cadaver to keep the stink off your hands, stepped down to at least 4 so that he could feel his way through the dark cluttered boomer hallway where stacks of magazines, macrame hanging pots without houseplants, a stack of cookware purchased “As Seen on TV” and never used tottered ominously like temple booby traps. He had a small red lens flashlight mounted to a strap on its head but despite thousands of 4/5 star reviews it was sputtering uselessly. Then he saw the glow beneath the door of the bedroom, the flicker of a muted television, not visible in a window pane from the street for the bedroom was on the backside of the house. He stepped back and knocked over a stack of mostly empty holiday popcorn tins and immediately lost all the cool assurance, was knocked down by the sense of dread as the nocturnal trespass fantasy became a terrifying reality.
On the other side of that door Foster was sitting up in bed, wrestling heartburn. He missed Kathleen so terribly, but he did not miss her snoring. There was an irony though, that his circadians were so permanently deranged by Kathy’s log sawing that he stayed up late most nights missing her. That and he had yet to put two and two together that drinking right up until bedtime made his stomach sour, usually aborted his troubled drift into sleep with an infusion of hot acid into his trachea all the way down to the level the windpipe bifurcated. Again, just a little more consideration on Duncan’s part would have immediately profiled him for a grief-and-lifestyle-insomniac that could never be considered neutralized in the early hours. If he had paid a little more attention in his criminology courses, which first planted this antisocial seed to become a master burglar he might have some helpful situational awareness, encompassing the fact that studies reveal that 75% of interrupted home break-ins are secondary to deranged urodynamics, with the majority of those split 40/60 between strained female ligaments and ballooning prostates. He might have considered how the body seems to prod one into a fascistic hypervigilance in the sixth decade of life, sleeping few hours at a time, staying up until late nursing paranoia and then waking too late in the morning with the panic of suddenly realized vulnerability and the guilt of losing those hours that social consensus says should be productive, the discovery of treacherous new moles, a tweak in the chest that must be ignored for the alternative is to panic and waste several embarrassing hours in an overcrowded emergency department for a doctor to tell you it’s bullshit, you’re stressed.
Duncan was in his twenties and incapable of imagining any of that, much less Foster sitting up in bed wheezing slightly on his reflux, gripping a baseball in his hand and on hour two of the same ten minute reel of highlights repeated until morning sports news agreed to move past that controversial out of bounds call, the homer that the outfielder couldn’t let go hope of right up to the wall. The leather and especially the stitching connected him to another time where he was often at war with his body but not yet subdued by it. It was an easier, surrogate regret that he nursed, for missing his opportunity to go out on the mound in a Major League Baseball game, at least a few seasons he could have hacked it, but the eyes of scouts wisely saw the hitch in the arm that would shred the ligaments at a rate double that if he had not been able to smooth out that tic before it had become hopelessly engrained in the motor neurons and their corresponding units, scribbled in the margins on their clipboard, “mild abuse of oral analgesics, but more troubling of decadron shots obtained every two weeks from urgent care, deteriorating precious collagen subtypes and hastening the day of that horrible shred when the arm would hang forever more useless, ‘whiskey dick arm’ as Coolie Matherton used to call it, that bastard and his cursed longevity who managed not only to postpone the shred but to outrun it entirely, who never tore a rotator cuff at least in his professional career, and too proud to admit that the shoulder succumbed at last one frozen morning when he was dragging his trashcan to the curb.”
Foster was already addled by the inherent angst of the world pool cleaning and commercial development, unbeknownst to him also subtly poisoned by the leaky gas range in his kitchen that he didn’t even use, which helped produce increasingly paranoid fantasies of of the scout’s clipboard with the marginalia running on and on to hallucinatory specificity, detailing all his personal deficiencies including those which Kathy bore the brunt of– when she was brought into it, it defeated the whole purpose of dwelling on the career bitterness, ie to avoid thinking about her and the tremendous vacancy she had left. It was not that there was anything special about the grief and regret on the other side of that door, outside which Duncan tumbled into the pile of cans decorated with polar bears and Christmas trains. To the contrary, it was so incredibly common and he should have assumed mortal fury lurked behind any given bedroom door in America, much less this part of the country with its overpressured masculine frustration that would never find a legitimate expression unless the possessor suddenly had sanction to participate in a violent event, say in thwarting a home break-in.
So Foster was up out of his bed with a suddenly remembered athletic spring, and the baseball had already settled into his grip in the ballistically optimal rotation with his long index and ring finger stretched across the seams and his thumb resting lightly. When he flung the door open he saw a terrified little face lit digital red by the unfocused glow of the head lamp. His arm dropped behind him instinctively as he hitched his thigh up to his belt level and he hurled the ball at the face, about fifteen feet away, and he felt the shred, not the cable snap of the career peak shred but neither was it the shred of a pathetic old man trying to show out and put a little heat on it at the charity batting practice.
The pitch definitely fractured the outer rim of Duncan’s orbit but more alarmingly it lacerated his brow and caused blood to pour down into his left eye. The last thing he saw clearly was Foster bent over, following through with his heat, but already reaching up to clutch the ruined shoulder, and also turning to head back to the bedside table, where there was a .357 magnum revolver, a ridiculous gun but in Foster’s defense he didn’t have to worry about shooting another family member since his house was now empty and he was after all entitled to defend his castle in whatever style he felt like. Now he had to lift and aim that Dirty Harry cannon with his left hand, and he felt the head of his humerus slam against the loose basket of bone and ligaments, being unaccustomed to brace properly as a southpaw. Nor was he accustomed to aim lefty, and the huge gun drilled holes in the hardwood floor all around Duncan, outlining him there, stunned and bloody. After two successive clicks of the hammer falling on an empty chamber, Foster charged, now wielding the huge gun as a club, and Duncan was able to correlate the grunting, the thud of feet, and the approaching shadow through his half blood occluded vision, the red headlamp long gone, the hallway lit only by splashes of the endlessly loop of highlights that reached from the bedroom TV a bit out into the hallway.
However amateurish he was as a burglar, Duncan was light on his feet and he had found his way almost on instinct back through the maze of floor plan that was whatever the opposite of open concept would be, and back out through the ruined garage door, into his car with time to master his panic and drive away at a brisk but inconspicuous speed, flipping his lights on only when sure he was out of license plate spotting range. It seemed he might avoid complication altogether, get away completely unscathed with many lessons to reflect upon, but he found later that he could not stop the bleeding or swelling above his eye and would be forced to seek medical treatment. Now the nature of the mechanism of injury could easily be explained as a beer bottle in a bar fight, or some of the other late night delinquent nonsense Emergency Department’s honestly did enjoyed patching up provided the injured person was in a good humor, not abusive or, like, entitled, etc. The problem was there was an obvious baseball stitch right across the skin, right over the eye whose swelling now surpassed “concerning” and was just comical, the lacerations driven in by the stitches looked like an angry red centipede crawling across a big puffy egg. Whatever, he would just say his friend did it while they were clowning around and drinking, that did not stretch belief more than saying he had broken into a home and the owner had defended himself with a scorching fastball. Holding a white towel to his head, now stained a gradient from rust black to cherry red, he explained his situation to a pop-eyed registration person (it turns out she was just pop-eyed normally, not especially impressed with his wound).
He expected to be taken back right away, he was, after all bleeding, but the triage nurse helpfully pointed out that he had managed to drive his own self here and seemed to have things under at least immediate control so he went to sit down in the waiting area again, the hostilely designed lounge meant to discourage people from sitting there, to really make them question the decision to present for emergency care and at least consider abandoning their registration and waiting to see if things would mend up on their own- of course this kind of pressure is indiscriminate and often as not drives away a septic abdomen while a “toe pain for six months” toughs it out and makes it back to be seen by a resident physician who brings all their diagnostic acumen to bear on the problem then calmly explains that for this sort of thing it’s ok to follow up with a primary care doctor and doesn’t necessarily require an inpatient hospital admission. Duncan actually fit into a convenient category of “will definitely wait to be seen, needs to be seen, but is not a real emergency,” which meant he might spend hours in the lobby. He was trying to make some mental calculations based on the number he saw out here and how serious their ailments seemed to be, and he didn’t really pay attention to where he sat down and was very shocked to see he had planted himself in front of Mr. Foster who had one arm out of his flannel pajama top with several bags of ice secured around his shoulder with athletic tape. He was grinning. He had himself been ready to leave when the triage nurse asked him not to go anywhere because his cardiac enzymes were slightly abnormal and no they thought it probably was not a big deal, but they should get an EKG and he might need to come in and get that worked up but one of the residents would be with him shortly.
Destiny, Foster thought, had brought him back to this young man to whom he felt strangely grateful, for helping him live out a lifelong dream. It wasn’t so much destiny as it was the residual damage of a steady little cocaine habit, extinct for years but not before coring out a layer of subendocardium and making his heart wall thin and floppy so that the twinge of shoulder pain he felt was not from the damaged arm but rather the heart starving from oxygen in this moment of acute stress. Just like that, a man who had successfully eluded the grasp of doctors for years was about to be ensnared in the tawdry little games of Entresto, beta blockers, thiazides, spotty adherence with Guideline Directed Medical Therapy for Heart Failure With a Preserved Ejection Fraction. But not before he made a very important acquaintance with Mr. Duncan Heidt in the Emergency Department waiting area, one that would be, mostly, mutually beneficial for some years to come. For when he put it all together, he took it as a sign that change was mandatory and the plastic bolted down chairs of the waiting room at 4am was as good a place and time as any to finally embrace it, to draw a definite line and say behind this all is Past and ahead all is Future and we are now only worried about this side of the line. The pact was basically outlined and agreed upon by the sum total of Foster’s grin and Duncan’s bowed bleeding head.