Feast for Thieves Read Free Page B

With all the servicemen spilling home from overseas, there weren’t hardly no jobs to be had. The rare openings that came up, I was always last in line. Time after time they checked my papers and I heard the same thing: “Keep moving, boy.” I knew who I was.
    The trucker kept talking without seeking much feedback from me, and I let my mind wander. I guess I even dozed a bit because next thing I knew the sunrise was over and a city was upon us. He pulled to the side of the highway and motioned to the door with his head. “I can take you farther, but you said ‘next town.’ This is it.” He held out his hand. “You best be finding your purpose soon, friend. A man with no purpose is a man who don’t last long in this world.”
    I shook the trucker’s hand and climbed out. The truck growled and headed away down the highway. I took stock of my surroundings. Last meal I’d eaten was yesterday morning. Crazy Ake had a biscuit in his pocket and we’d split it between us. My pockets were bare of cash like usual. I hadn’t taken a dime off the loot we’d heisted. Somehow it just didn’t seem right.
    A diner sat on the edge of town and I walked around back of it and tried their garbage cans but they were empty still in the morning, so I kept walking up the road. In front of me was a bright neon sign that said “Union Gospel Mission of Texas—free meals.” I didn’t cater much to religion, but a man on the run can’t be choosy. The door listed open and I walked inside the entryway where a man behind the desk told me to sign in and join the line that was forming through the main door.
    “You gotta hear the preacher first,” the man said. “That’s rules. Breakfast is served afterward.”
    Well, that seemed like a raw deal to me, but I wasn’t arguing with my stomach growling like it was. I filed into the chapel, sat on the back bench, and leaned back with my eyes closed. I could use another thirty minutes of sleep.
    “Hear now the words of Isaiah.” The minister took his stand, flopped open his Bible on the pulpit, and cleared his throat. He was an older fella with a thin, sharp face and round wire-rimmed glasses. His suit was starched and clean-pressed and he looked to me more like a fella in an advertisement for the Arthur A. Everts jewelery company than any preacher I ever knowed.
    “‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.’” The preacher began to read. “‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’” The preacher looked up, paused for effect, and added in his own words, “I wonder if there’s a man out there this morning who knows what this passage from God’s Word means?”
    Men were still filing into the room, knocking over chairs, sitting down hard. I glanced around. Most were winos, bums who’d never seen an honest day’s work in their lives. A few of the younger men looked sober, men simply out of work like me. Most still wore bits and pieces of their war uniforms.
    “It means that God is in the business of giving men second chances,” the preacher said. “It’s true your sins are reprehensible to God. You might be an adulterer or a reprobate, a slanderer or a gossip.” He cleared his throat again. “You might even be a murderer or a thief, but God’s Word declares there isn’t any sin that can’t be forgiven.”
    Well, when he said that bit about being a thief, I was listening.
    “Isaiah continues,” the preacher said, “and he offers us this warning as well as an encouragement. ‘If ye be willing and obedient,ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.’”
    Well, now that preacher had my full attention. I was willing and obedient. I’d always been a soldier who followed orders. And there was that mention of eating from the good of the land. I wondered if that had anything to do with what the lawman beside the river shouted