Father-and-Son Business
Bill Roberts
I admit I truly admired the father-and-son
pickpocket team that worked
the subway system in New York,
their pleasant faces usually beaming below
the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights,
the unknowing mistaking them for adoring
father and slow-witted, innocently smiling
son,
who might have been eight and anything but
slow-witted and innocent, more
deft-fingered
and treacherous, lifting wallets from back
pockets so swiftly the untrained eye
missed it,
like most slapshots in hockey, zipping
into the net, sliding into the hand, and
dropping
into a cloth satchel the father carried
with,
I presume, other wallets including mine,
which I intended them to have, although
I wondered if they’d use their
ill-gained fortune
in Monopoly money to buy Park Place or
pass Go, moving to another subway landing
to conduct their father-and-son
enterprise.
