SCREWMITCHAND Doug, Kevin thought. Mitch had blown town and Doug was in jail, so it was easy for them to keep their promise and not spend money in Wilton for six months. It had taken Kevin just one month of having to pay alimony, child support, and a mortgage on a dog walker’s salary before he was parked across the road from the hidden bag of money with a shovel in the back of his disintegrating pickup truck.
The rain was hammering down, so anyone who passed by would be concentrating on driving, and Kevin had taken care to park back behind the trees where the pickup wouldn’t be visible from the road. Rain made people uninterested in anything except getting home safely; it also made the ground soft for digging. He stepped out of the truck and was soaked almost immediately by the near-freezing rain, making him gasp for air. Before he even reached into the back for the shovel, the water was dripping off his eyelashes, making it hard to see. He laughed.
Ducking back through the trees, he felt a sudden rush of freedom. Despite everything, he knew when he got home to his empty house, nobody would be there to ask him where he had been. Nobody would demand that he explain why he was soaked to the skin. Linda was a good person, most likely a better person than he would ever be, but Jesus H. Christ could she ask a lot of questions. Every day with her had been like a visit to the parole board. Where? Why? With whom? Now, tell me again?
He slammed the shovel into the soft earth, pleased to see that the ground where the cash had been buried didn’t look disturbed. There had been so much rain and snow in the past few weeks that not even a professional tracker would be able to see that someone had dug a hole here. Which was good, because it was deer hunting season, so most of the people likely to walk past the spot would actually be professional trackers. He was careful not to throw the dirt, laying each shovelful gently beside the hole. After about ten or twelve loads of dirt, he felt the sharp edge of the shovel drive into the trash bag. Damn, he thought, we really didn’t bury it very deep. What if animals had burrowed into it? What if a mudslide… He shrugged. Sometimes you just had to leave things to chance. He threw the shovel down and sat on a rotting log as he pulled open the bag.
Money. The first handful of cash he extracted was a wrapped brick of twenties, and as he looked at it in his lap, he was shocked to feel his eyes welling with tears. It was so unexpected that he put his head in his hands and let the money fall to the forest floor. More tears came, mixing with the freezing rain running out of his hair and down his cheeks. Within seconds, he was sobbing, so mystified by the emotion that he made no effort to stop it.
After a few moments, he became aware that even under the canopy of the trees, rainwater was dripping into the open bag of money, and he leaned over and twisted the top shut. The action allowed him to regain his breath and he looked down at the cash he had dropped on the ground. He was glad that looking at it again didn’t induce another burst of emotion. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He figured it was about three thousand dollars. He grabbed two more bricks of similar size, tied the bag closed again, and carefully replaced the dirt, making sure to scatter sticks and brush around the tamped earth. Within moments, the driving rain had made the dig marks invisible.
When he got back in the truck, he tossed the money on the seat of the pickup and stared at it. What had that been about? He hadn’t cried since he was a teenager, and a young teenager at that. What was the last thing that had made him cry? He thought back. Frustration, probably. Ever-present frustration.
Then he looked at the money on the seat, so soaked that water was dripping off it and pooling by the vinyl backrest. It was his. That was what had made him cry. He had earned it. Sure, he had stolen it, but he had done it successfully. After dropping out of college, getting kicked off the football team, failing as a husband and a father, and screwing up as a marijuana grower, he had finally, as the prison counselor had advised him, set a goal and achieved it. This dripping money on his passenger seat represented the first damned thing in his whole life that he had done right.
He was turning into a decent businessman too. The dog-walking thing was really taking off.
It was time to reward himself, Kevin decided. He hopped out of the truck, grabbed the shovel, and went back for ten thousand more. He would buy a new truck. A guy who did things right didn’t drive around in a twenty-year-old pickup truck. His life was turning around and he wasn’t going to hide it.
“MY LAWYER IS a con,” Doug said into the telephone, looking through the glass at Linda. “He served five years for attempted murder, so he knows all the COs. He’s totally hooking me up.”
“That’s nice,” said Linda. Since she had arrived for her visit, she had appeared strained, as if fighting off sobs, which was making Doug uneasy. Before Linda, Doug had just had a fifteen-minute conversation with his lawyer, who had, through code, basically implied he could get the guards to bring him pills, weed, or anything he wanted. Rather than a Harvard lawyer, Doug now understood, an inmate needed a lawyer who knew the guards.
His lawyer had studied law while he had been in prison and supposedly turned his life around. (Though not enough to refrain from suggesting that he arrange drug deals for his clients.) Pennsylvania didn’t require lawyers to go to school, a little known fact that inspired Doug to follow in his lawyer’s footsteps. His first week in prison, he had resolved to become a lawyer, then noticed that, in a building where everyone was going to trial, the law books were always checked out. The only remaining skills book he could find was on cooking. He couldn’t escape it. Maybe he would just break down and become a chef. Or a dog walker for Kevin.
Doug had the feeling that Linda really wanted to nag him, but she had figured that if you were talking to someone in an orange jumpsuit, nagging clearly wasn’t necessary. She looked so, well, sad, that it was making him feel bad. Did he look that pathetic? “When I get out, Kevin said I can walk dogs for him,” Doug said, trying to add some cheer to the mood.
“When will that be?”
“My hearing’s on Thursday. My lawyer thinks eighteen months. It was going to be five years but he said if we agree not to talk to anyone about the guard shooting the other guard, then the armored car company wouldn’t push for a stiffer sentence. Man, it’s weird. It’s like that’s all they care about. Not embarrassing themselves. That, and the money. They said I could get out next week if I told them where the money was.”
“But you’re not going to?” Linda’s voice rose in surprise. “Doug, you could be free.”
Doug leaned forward and lowered his voice as he spoke into the phone. “I’m freer in here with money than out there without any. Besides, eighteen months for sixty grand? I figured it out. That’s like three times what even a manager makes at Chicken Buckets.”
Linda laughed, despite herself. Doug liked her smile. He felt the urge to say something romantic like, I miss you, but squelched it. To squelch it further, he asked about Kevin.
“He’s fine. He’s walking dogs. Business is good, I hear. Last I saw him, he had a new truck.”
“He was supposed to wait six months before…” Doug said, then he realized that Linda might not need to know their prerobbery plan and quickly changed the subject. “You guys not getting back together?”
Linda shook her head. The buzzer went off, which Doug had learned was the signal his visit was over. Linda knew what the buzzer meant and looked around the metal- and cinder-block room as if relieved. The atmosphere in there was not inviting. Few people could tolerate more than their fifteen minutes.
“It’s not so bad in here,” Doug said cheerfully, hoping to get another smile. He got a sad one as she said goodbye. She waved as she left slowly, still looking at him, and Doug was afraid she was going to cry.
But it isn’t so bad in here, Doug thought. He wasn’t lying for her sake. He had a CO who could get him better drugs than he’d had on the outside, and he didn’t have to feel stressed about not getting on with his life. You couldn’t get on with your life in there; that was the point.
There was no pressure. That was the beautiful thing. No one expected you to make anything of yourself. A good day in jail was when you didn’t get into a fight. You actually got credit for that. How cool would life be on the outside if, every week that you didn’t get into a fight, a government official came by and complimented you, then gave you a reward? All you had to do was be nice and everyone was happy with you.
With no pressure and with his drug and alcohol counselor frequently praising him for being good-natured, Doug felt he could finally get his life back on track. He didn’t know how yet, but it would come to him. The chopper pilot thing seemed like a stretch, even to the eternally optimistic counselor, but Doug was still thinking about writing a children’s book. He was sure that he could write about a lobster who could stay off drugs and not stab anyone. Prison was the perfect writing environment. Hadn’t there been a famous novelist who wrote from prison? Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde, one of those English guys? Doug definitely remembered his English teacher in high school mentioning something about that.
Doug went back to his cell and the automatic lock closed behind him. His roommate, Mikey, who was in for “terroristic threats,” was snoring away on his cot. One of the guys in the mess hall had told Doug, in a conspiratorial whisper, that terroristic threats had nothing to do with terrorism. It was most likely a sentence for stalking a girl. It was hard for Doug to imagine Mikey doing illegal things, because he seemed like such a quiet, sleepy guy. Severely overweight and soft-spoken, Mikey liked playing chess and humming to himself. It had been Mikey who had first clued Doug in to the secret of prison-it wasn’t so bad.
Sure, there were no girls, and the black guys listened to shitty rap music all the time, but it was only for eighteen months. He could just hang out, relax, meet people. If there were some women and some Allman Brothers, Doug figured jail would be a pretty cool place.
Maybe after he got out, he’d take his sixty grand and go live somewhere like jail. And get a job as a sous-chef. Or a writer or something.
It was all cool.
POURING ROAD TAR was hot. The tar was hot; the metal machinery that heated it was hot; the tools were hot because they were always in contact with the tar or the machinery. Even the towels you had to have so you could touch the tools became hot a few hours into the shift. Mitch’s hands were covered in burn scars after only a week on the job. He was spending twenty dollars a week on skin lotion, and it wasn’t even summer yet.
Mitch had found a job working road construction in Cleveland. His plan had been to work for anyone who didn’t ask for ID and a Mexican woman at the day-labor service had told him about the road crew. She had mentioned it in passing, figuring that a white guy wouldn’t be interested, and had been surprised when Mitch enthusiastically copied down the number. He had been there a month before anyone even asked him his last name, and when they did, he lied. He got paid cash on Fridays.
As the only guy on the crew who was not Mexican, Mitch found himself learning Spanish fairly quickly. As the only guy who could read and write English, he found himself a foreman after two weeks. An illegal citizen in charge of illegal aliens. The bosses suspected something about him but he showed up on time and worked hard so they didn’t care.
Sweeping the tar smooth on an exit ramp on I-90, Mitch looked around at the brick warehouses on either side of him. The buildings were covered with decades of highway grime, most of the windows broken. Cleveland was dying but it still had some time before it reached the death spiral that had enveloped Wilton. Here there were the usual boarded-up businesses and homeless people and trash strewn streets, but there were echoes of life mixed in. There was a bar scene. There were art galleries. He didn’t go to them but they existed. It was comforting.
The tricky part had been finding a place to live. He didn’t want a roommate, because he had a duffel bag with sixty thousand dollars in it, but he had to find a place that wouldn’t do a background check. Despite his attempts to appear nonthreatening, everyone he talked to eventually asked for ID or mentioned a credit check. Mitch would say he forgot his wallet, then disappear into the ether. Just when he was about to give up and was considering hitting the road again, he saw a small ad in an independent newspaper for a room to rent.
The room was in a neighborhood called Bratenahl. Mitch knew right away it was what he wanted: Bratenahl was neither seedy nor flashy, just the kind of place you should live if you were trying not to be noticed. The door was answered by an old woman with a German shepherd, which reminded him of Ramone. For a brief moment, he was nostalgic for Wilton, for that comparatively secure life of dog-walking and pot-smoking and hanging out with Doug and Kevin. Then he remembered Accu-mart and the metal-refinishing plant. Things were better now. He had what everyone who lived a successful life had: secrets and money.
Mitch and the dog, named Lucy, hit it off right away, which turned out to be all the ID Mitch needed.
“What brings you out here?” the old lady asked as he was carrying his bags up the stairs to his room.
Mitch was going to make up a tall tale, something about a lost love or an undercover police mission, but decided to stay as close as possible to the truth. You had to be careful with old people. Some of them acted like they had no memory just to see if you were the type of person who would take advantage of someone with no memory. “I got laid off in Pittsburgh,” he said flatly. “Managed to find work here on a road crew.”
“Yes, times are tough,” the old woman agreed. “My James, when he was alive, he was a union electrician. He got laid off six times in forty-seven years. You never know.”
But when she left, she gave Mitch a look, which he understood perfectly. The look said, “I know you’ve done something and there’s some story as to why you’re renting a room in a town you’ve never been to before. But my dog likes you and that has to be worth something.”
MITCH BROUGHT HOME $320 a week for forty hours of splattering himself with boiling toxins. He didn’t really need the money, of course, and sometimes he thought he only kept the job so his landlady wouldn’t be suspicious of him. Because the money he earned was all extra, he blew it in bars, buying drinks for girls. Going out, enjoying himself, and talking to women were all things he hadn’t done in Wilton. And he owed it all to his Little Bag of Security.
“Let’s take a smoke break for a couple of minutes,” Mitch yelled to the Mexicans over the roar of the traffic. The noise was the worst part of the job. Sometimes, falling asleep in his room, he could still hear the cars whizzing by, an endless parade of traffic in his head. He liked it more when the work caused a traffic jam, because the idling, creeping cars didn’t make as much noise. But then you had to work faster, or else the people stuck in traffic would call the company and complain.
Fucking people.
The Mexicans, who were furiously sweeping the tar flat, looked over at him. They liked working with him because he took a lot of breaks. The oldest one, Jorge, who could speak good English, came over and bummed a cigarette.
“You like party?” he asked Mitch.
“Do I like to party? I think so. What exactly do you mean? ‘Party’ means different things to different people.”
“No. You like to go to party?” Jorge made dancing motions. “Fiesta.”
“Oh, fiesta. Yes, I like fiesta.”
“My wife birthday. We have a party tonight. You come?”
Well I’ll be damned. It had been a while since anyone had asked him to a party. His social calendar had been a blank slate for the last few years. Why yes, he decided, a party would be just excellent. He nodded enthusiastically at Jorge.
When a man is waiting for the statute of limitations to expire, Mitch thought, a man ought to enjoy himself.
WHEN HE FIRST got to the party, Mitch was overwhelmed by feelings of nostalgia and loss. He sat in the corner while samba music blared and thought morosely of better times. He remembered hanging out with Doug at the community-college parties they had crashed, laughing at the host’s lame CD collection, trying to spot the slutty girls with the hearts of gold whom they both openly yearned for, hoping they might take them somewhere to enjoy the White Widow that was reeking in his pocket. Now Doug was in a cage and Mitch was fresh out of English-speaking friends, a foreigner in his own country.
There were plenty of girls here, as Jorge had promised him. But as far as Mitch could tell, none of them spoke English, and on the few occasions they made eye contact with him, Mitch sensed suspicion rather than the hot-blooded Latino lust he had been hoping for. He had the vague feeling that before his arrival, his attendance had been discussed, and he imagined Jorge announcing to the crowd that a white guy was coming, and they all had to be nice. This paranoid thought, combined with the language barrier, was what was giving him his first pangs of homesickness for Wilton.
“Meesh,” Jorge yelled jovially, slapping him on the shoulder with a huge grin. “You have fun?”
Mitch had been studying some family photos on the living room mantel with far more attention than they deserved, as if he were so engrossed by the fading photo of an elderly Mexican woman that he had become unaware of the dancing and drinking all around him. As he turned to face Jorge, he got a face full of hot, tequila-laden breath
“Yeah, man,” he said, holding up a bottle of beer, as if that were all that was required for a good time.
“Come meet my uncle. He want to talk to you.”
An uncle? Mitch had been hoping for an introduction to a niece or a sister, but even an uncle was preferable to staring at more pictures of Granny. He nodded and followed Jorge through the house, past amorous dancing couples and chatting housewives, their eyes glazed over with an early evening buzz, their voices louder than usual. Some of the children turned to look at the gringo, but to the adults he was simply invisible. Outside of this house, in the streets of America, he knew, it was the other way around.
Jorge took him out into the yard, which was a few square feet of weeds and dirt with a small garage at the back with an unpainted, broken door. Jorge pushed the door open with a great deal of effort and they stepped inside. The gathering here was all men and the atmosphere was very different from the festivities and dancing going on in the house. Four young men, tattooed and aggressive-looking, were sitting around the garage on buckets and rusted metal chairs, and they stared hard at Mitch with what he felt was deep suspicion. Mitch tried to hide his unease by nodding cheerfully to everyone. No one returned his greeting.
An older man with a potbelly was sitting on a torn green vinyl couch. He stood up as Jorge closed the door behind him and unsmilingly offered Mitch his hand. “I am Armando, Jorge’s uncle. You are Meesh?”
“Yeah, hi,” Mitch said. Maybe is was just unpronounceable for these guys. Meesh would do fine.
“Jorge tells me you know banks.”
Whaaaaat? Mitch hoped his reaction didn’t show and he exhaled slowly, trying to preserve his cool. He looked quizzically at Jorge, who was looking down at his shoes. How… who? As long as he had been in Cleveland, he hadn’t mentioned a word of anything to anyone.
His shock and confusion must have been visible to Armando, because he broke into a smile, and even one of the brutal-looking tattooed young men sitting on a bucket allowed himself a flicker of amusement.
“Banks?” asked Mitch. He wanted more information before he told them anything. How had they come to this conclusion? Was his picture in the post office? He had figured that his little crime, for what it was worth, had been swept into the morass of the decaying social fabric, forgotten with yesterday’s news cycle. His current life had depended on this. How had they found out?
“Come on,” Armando said cheerfully. “Who wants to spread tar with Mexicans except a guy who’s wanted? I can tell you don’t rob liquor stores or bodegas. You’re smart. You go where the money is. You do banks.”
This logic confused Mitch. Apparently, all the time he had thought he was invisible, they had been sizing him up. He had thought his guy-who-just-got laid-off routine was working like a charm. He shook his head. “No,” he said.
There was a moment’s silence in the garage while they looked at him, disappointed either in his refusal to come clean or their own error of judgment. Mitch cleared his throat. “Armored cars,” he said finally.
“Ah hah!” roared Armando and the young men sitting around also laughed. Mitch had the feeling he was on stage and giving a killer performance. He smiled sheepishly, unused to the attention.
Armando pushed forward an overturned bucket and motioned for Mitch to sit. His demeanor was suddenly serious. Everyone had their own version of the embattled paratroop commander. “So what do you know about security systems?”
“Security systems?” Mitch shook his head. “Not much.” He sensed that he might lose the crowd with this confession and that a full explanation of his crime would provide more amusement than respect. But he wasn’t sure. Wasn’t there an element of learning to all crime? He had, after all, successfully robbed an armored car. He doubted anyone else in the room could say that.
“I don’t know anything about all that technical shit,” Mitch said. “I just know that a security system is only as good as the people who respond to it.” He sat down on the bucket and pulled it up next to Armando, surprised by his own intensity. He was realizing that he did have knowledge, and a work philosophy, and experience, all the things he had faked at Accu-mart. “It’s all about efficiency, about timing. If you can do what you have to do and get back in your car in ninety seconds, the security system doesn’t matter.”
He looked around the garage and saw expressions he wasn’t used to. Respect. People were actually interested in what he had to say. He knew enough to stop talking and sat back on his bucket, waiting for a response from one of the others.
There was a moment of silence while looks were exchanged. Then one of the tattooed men in a white T-shirt pulled his bucket up next to Mitch and glanced at Armando, as if to give approval.
“We have this thing we’re working on,” said Armando, leaning forward, his voice low to accent the gravity of his disclosure. “You might be interested?”
Mitch leaned in too, keeping his own voice low. “Yes. I might be.”