I stood there, still a little swimming-pool wet from hair to feet, leaning over the lengthy meat displays, looking close to one of the many wall mirrors, pretending I was bothered by some pimple or zit on my face. All the while my roving eyes flicked across the mirrors, as I cased the joint, determining no one was on either side of me, or in the aisles behind me, whereupon I snatched two packages of the wieners, dropping them through the open collar of my shirt tucked into my shorts. Whistling casually, and bidding a “good awfternoon” to this person and that, I ambled out of there, hustled back to the hotel’s men’s room, and gobbled down one of the packs of weenies. The second package would be my transportation ticket. When I climbed aboard the bus in the rather sudden setting of sun, I pretended to shake hands with the driver, to whom I slipped the package. In a nervous attempt to show disinterest in his seeming acceptance of the bribe, I bum-cuddled myself deep into a seat. The driver merely shoved the gearshift and took off, leaving me comfortable in my seat, such that I rewarded myself with a sigh of relief.

The very next morning, when I’d just left my domain to hurry down to the market where I’d get the morning bus to Orange Street to pick up my Evening Telegram and to have my NAFEL cheques cashed at Barclay’s Bank, who should call out to me from the divine sanctuary of his yard but my oh-so-Christian neighbour. “I’m leaving early for work, Mr. Pumfray, and I’d be very happy to give you a lift down, at least as far as I’m going, sah.”

“Oh!” I was surprised, nay, shocked. “That’ll be, well, just wonderful, sir,” I said, hopping over the front fence, to meet his car backing out of the driveway.

During our course down that narrow jungle pathway, he introduced himself, advising me that he was the manager and part owner of several businesses in Kingston and elsewhere in the “Carib,” and that he’d soon be leaving for his native island for a few days, and, “I know you work for the Gleaner, where your Mr. Sealy is a wonderfully respected man, but what else do you do, sir?” And so the back-and-forthing went until, just before Half Way Tree, he swung into a busy street and into an earth-hardened parking lot. “This is where I work,” he said. “Come in and join me in a cigar before you catch your bus.”

God! My God! It was the very store I’d robbed just the day before.

But—thank God!—he didn’t know a thing about it, for he surely wouldn’t have offered me a ride. No way! Not the Unsaved Man he’d refused to speak to before. Besides, I was so careful, having looked through the surround mirrors before I’d made that wiener snatch. Nobody, but nobody had been watching, from clerk to customer. Nobody.

In his office he bade me take a chair. “Not that one, Mr. Pumfray, but that one there, where you can have a look about while I fetch our cigars, my good man, sah.”

Ah, it doesn’t get any better than this. This man is all right. I can be friends with this man, who’d so despised me until this morning. It just doesn’t get any better than this!

I’d been looking through the windows of his office, out at the customers coming and going, the checkout clerks busying themselves putting purchased goods in paper bags. I was getting ready to compliment my host on what a great place you have here, sir, when he clipped off the end of his cigar and put the stogie in his mouth, and clipped off the end of my cigar and, passing it to me, expressed the hope I would like it. It was a Cuban cigar, he said, “and there just is not any cigar anywhere bettah than a Cuban cigar!”

Suddenly I realized I was looking out at the inside of the store, through his windows. It was then I noticed the blue tint, suggesting—my Good Jazus!—that he and perhaps his staff were watching me yesterday! Watching me stand up close to the mirrored windows while faking concern with a non-existing zit, and casing the joint so I wouldn’t be caught grabbing the weenies! I hadn’t known of such a two-way mirror anywhere in the world, let alone in poor ole Kingston Town.

Uneasily I stood up, trying hard not to shake. I walked out of the office and turned to see the inside of the long, attached office, where his staff—all of them—were looking at me, some with mouths open. It was then that I was positively sure that all—all!—of them had seen me commit my crime. I went back into my neighbour’s office and sat down, my red face and sweaty forehead no doubt communicating to him upon his return that I now knew that he knew.

To prove it, to show his British culture of taking revenge without fuss, he lit his cigar and took a drag on it, and reached toward me with what I thought was his intent to flick on the lighter for me, so I put my stogie in my mouth and leaned toward him. Whereupon he put the lighter straight into his shirt pocket, and turned back on to me and my unlit stogie.

“I . . . I . . .” I stammered. “I . . . uh . . .”

I am sure that the great yawn he made, his two arms held taut upward, was a feigned yawn. Then he stood, relit his already burning cigar, and walked out of the office.

I sat there, wondering if he would return, hoping that if he did he would be alone and not with a policeman or, worse, a bouncer who’d bounce me out of the store like a basketball. I wondered if perhaps everything was just ducky, and that I was merely giving myself up to imaginings.

After waiting a respectable time, I dared peer out the mirrored window, and when I saw him talking to a clerk at a checkout, I walked down the few steps to the floor of the supermarket, went straight up the opposite aisle leading to the exit door, and went out into the blistering sun.