You can't win

by Jack Black

I never crawled into a window that I didn’t think of Smiler. I never stepped in or out of a door without thinking of old George. Yet I kept it up for years, and quit it only because I got tired of playing the peon for crooked pawnbrokers and getting “fifty fifty” from the professional “fences.” The fences’ notion of “fifty fifty” is to put a lead dollar in the Salvation Army tambourine and ask the lassie for fifty cents change.

In the midst of plenty I found myself starving, and in self-defense turned to the more direct business of highway robbery. My experience with house burglary in the small hours of the night left me a nervous wreck and an opium smoker. Almost every house prowler turns to booze or drugs. Reader, I’ll ask you if you wouldn’t take a jolt of booze or hop after an experience such as this?

You are a burglar; you have put in a week “tabbing up” a residence. You decide to “make” it; it looks all right; no children, you haven’t seen a dog. The night arrives. You jump into the yard. It’s two o’clock. You look the house over. Every door and window fastened, not even an open coalhole, no porch to go up. You go back to a kitchen window and perform a very delicate operation—taking a pane of glass out piece by piece. Then you put your hand in, release the catch, and raise the window slowly, noiselessly. You find inside on the windowsill bottles, boxes, corkscrews, can openers, and a toothbrush. These you pick up, one at a time, and place outside, below the window.

Now you are in the window, and you find that below, inside, is the kitchen sink. You get in without disturbing dishes or pans and open the kitchen door, so you will have a getaway in case anything causes you to hurry out. You have been almost an hour getting in the house and you haven’t started on the job yet.

It is very dark in the house, but you light no matches, nor do you use a flashlight; you are an expert, you know your business. Your years at this work have developed a “cat” sense in you. You can sense an object in front of you without seeing or feeling it. You feel your way slowly, silently into the dining room. Your eyes are getting accustomed to the dark and you distinguish a few objects—table, chairs, sideboard. You sit in a chair and remove your shoes, shoving them down in your back pockets, heels up.

You are going upstairs where the sleepers and valuables are. You button your coat and pull your hat down over your eyes to hide your face from the sleeper should he wake up on you and switch on a light. It takes you fifteen minutes to get up the stairs; they creak frightfully and you must find solid places to put your weight. You know your business, so you keep as close to the banister as possible, where the step boards are nailed down tight and can’t shift and creak. You know the creaking won’t wake sleeping people, but you don’t know yet whether they are asleep. If they should be lying in bed awake, they would know what the creaking meant and you might get shot.

Now you are at a bedroom door, it’s latched but not locked. You take hold of the doorknob in a certain way and turn it slowly till it won’t turn any farther. The hall you are in is dark and dead silent. You push the door open an inch and you can hear the gentle, regular up-and-down breathing of the healthy sleeper. You wait a long time, maybe five minutes, with your hand on the doorknob, listening intently. Yes, there are two sleepers in the room.

Then out of this awful silence comes a coughing from a room at the back of the hall. You stiffen and your hand goes to your coat pocket. You hear a glass clink against a pitcher, and you know that man is awake. You hear him turn over in bed, and straighten out for another sleep. You remain rigid for another five minutes and then feel your way down the dark hall to make sure he has gone back to sleep.

His door is ajar, and now he is snoring. You wish he wouldn’t snore; he might wake somebody else, he might wake himself. Snorers do wake themselves. The expert burglar doesn’t fancy the heavy snorer; he likes the sleeper that wheezes gently, softly, regularly. You feel your way back to the front room. You want that first. That’s where you have decided the best stuff is to be found. Your hand is on the doorknob again, and you open the door another inch, slowly, noiselessly.

Now something soft, yielding, obstructs it.