by Jess Walter
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I get to run an open house next week. Sort of a trial run. Larry’s having three, and he needs someone to run one for him. If I sell it, he’ll give me half a percent commission under the table.”
“Yeah?” Vince asks. “I’ll come by.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll even buy the house.”
“Very funny.” She squeezes his arm, does that thing with her eyes again—up and down, a flash of release—then turns to go back inside.
CARS LEER ON the street behind Vince; headlights trace his back. Who was that girl from junior high school? Got drunk with some older kids and stepped in front of a car. Angie Wolfe. Thirty-nine.
Vince’s hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker, and his shoulders are hunched up around his ears. Only six blocks to the donut shop and he likes the walk fine in the crisp cold, sun still a rumor on the Idaho border, his shadow slowing up for him as he nears the next streetlight. What about old Danello, whose body was never technically found? Doesn’t matter. That’s forty.
The donut shop is regrettably named Donut Make You Hungry, and is owned by Ted and Marcie, an old gray couple who come in for a few minutes every day to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with their old gray friends. It works fine for Vince; he gets to manage the place, and Ted and Marcie give him all the space he needs.
He approaches the building—fever-colored stucco on a busy corner a mile from downtown. Lights on inside. That’s good. Vince walks down the alley to grab the newspaper, slides the rubber band off, and stands beneath a flickering streetlight to make out the front page: Carter and Reagan in a dead heat, with the debate tonight. The Iranian parliament is meeting to look for a solution to the hostage crisis. He glances at headlines but doesn’t read stories, flips instead to the sports page. Alabama plus fifteen at Mississippi State. Seems heavy. Vince closes the paper and starts for the front door when something moves in his periphery.
He cocks his head and takes a step deeper into the alley, clutching the paper to his chest. A car starts. Cadillac. Its lights come on and Vince reflexively covers his eyes while the old voices tell him to run. But there is no place to dive in this alley, nowhere to hide, so he waits.
The burgundy Cadillac Seville inches toward him and the driver’s window sinks with a mechanical whir.
Vince bends at the waist. “Jesus, Len. What are you doing here?”
Len Huggins’s face is a conference of bad ideas: baby corn teeth, thin lips, broken nose, pocked cheeks, and two bushy black capital-L sideburns (“For Len, man! Get it? L? Len?”). Len runs a stereo store where Vince uses the phony credit cards to buy merchandise, and get cash advances. Len removes the aviator sunglasses he wears even at night, and slides them into his shirt pocket. “Vincers!” He extends his hand out the window.
“What are you doing here, Lenny?” Vince repeats.
“I came for my credit cards, man.”
“It’s Tuesday morning.”
“I know that.”
“We do this on Friday.”
“I know that, too.”
“Then why are you here on Tuesday?”
Finally, Len withdraws the unshaken hand. “So you ain’t got my credit cards, that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying it doesn’t matter what I have. We do this on Friday. I don’t understand why you’re even here.”
“I just thought you might have cards today.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Okay.” Len nods and checks his rearview mirror. “That’s cool.”
Vince straightens up and cranes his neck to see down the alley. “Why are you doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Looking down the alley.”
“What do you mean?”
“Is someone down there?”
“Where?”
Vince points down the alley. “Back there. You keep checking your rearview.”
Len puts his sunglasses back on. “You’re paranoid, Vince.”
“Yeah. I’m paranoid.” Vince starts to walk away. “I’ll see you Friday.”
“I won’t be there Friday. That’s what I had to tell you. I’m sending a new guy.”
Vince turns back—cold. “What do you mean, a new guy?”
“I mean a guy who’s new, as opposed to a guy who’s old.”
“Yeah, I got that part. Who is he?”
“Just a guy to help out on my end. His name is Ray. You’d like him.”
Vince walks back to the open car window. “Since when do you have an end, Lenny? You buy shit with my credit cards. Since when is that an end?”
“Hell’s the matter with you? Just meet with this guy, Vince. Relax.” Len presses the button to roll up his window. “You’re losing it, man.” It’s the last thing Vince hears before the Cadillac drives away. The car pauses at the corner—a wink from the brake lights—and turns, Vince alone in the alley, watching his own breath. He looks down the alley once more, then starts for the donut shop.
Vince hates alleys. Jimmy Plums got piped in an alley outside a strip club when he went off to piss. They made it look like a robbery, but everyone knew that Jimmy got taken off for a deep skim on some jukeboxes in Howard Beach. So what’s that? Forty-one? Or forty-two? Oh, great. Now you’ve lost count.
AND THE DONUTS? It works like this: Vince gets to Donut Make You Hungry at 4:45. He goes to the basement first and puts whatever side money he’s made in a lockbox he hides down there. Back upstairs, his assistant, Tic, has been at work an hour already, turning on lights, mixing up doughs according to Vince’s recipes, firing the oven and deep fryers, taking frostings out of the walk-in to thaw. Tic is eighteen or nineteen—Vince isn’t sure—with long thin hair he constantly throws back—Vince has never seen him use the big-handled comb in his back pocket—droopy eyes, and a jittery sort of energy that never seems to flag. Every night, Tic drinks and smokes pot until three in the morning, has breakfast, goes to the donut shop, finally goes to sleep when he gets off work at ten A.M., wakes up at six P.M., and starts the whole thing over.
The second Vince walks through the door, Tic starts talking.
“Love me some maple bars, Mr. Vince. Love ’em like a naughty girlfriend.”
Vince has a locker in back. Inside are his work clothes and the paperback book that he reads on his break—he’s struggling with a novel called The System of Dante’s Hell. He opens the book, reads a couple of cryptic sentences, and puts it back. Slips out of his slacks and black dress shirt and into white coveralls.
“Wanna go steady with a maple bar,” Tic is saying. “Wanna take a maple bar to the prom. Wanna take a maple bar home to meet my folks.”
Vince washes his hands.
“Wanna marry a maple bar and have little maple-bar babies and go to their little donut baseball games, have slumber parties with all their little bear-claw, cinnamon-twisty friends…”
Vince used to track Tic’s rants and even to contribute, but it only confuses and irritates Tic when someone else talks and so Vince has learned to treat his young assistant like dissonant background music.
“Hate the apple fritters. Hate the whole fuckin’ fritter family. I don’t want pesticides in my weed, and I don’t want fruit in my donuts.”
Four years ago, if someone had told Vince he’d actually enjoy the routine of a job like this, he would’ve laughed his ass off. You spend your first thirty-six years trying to avoid this kind of life. Then you find yourself plunked right down in the middle of it and it’s more than bearable—it’s thrilling in a way you could never explain to your old self. And yet Vince wonders if a person like him is capable of change—real change, the elemental parts, the hungers and biases.
The donut shop warms to morning, and at ten till six the waitress Nancy comes in without a word, spends ten minutes on the toilet, then comes out in a waitress shirt and slacks and a lit Virginia Slim and starts humming songs off-key. They are a symphony of irritation, these two. Tic brings Vince a tra
y of cinnamon rolls that Vince looks over without disrupting Tic’s newest rant, about a government program to—
“—perform experiments on monkeys and people and shit underground probably at the poles or in Canada or Greenland which is smaller than it looks on maps explain that to me Mr. Vince why they always make Greenland look bigger on maps unless they’re doing something they don’t want us to know about so you want me to frost the holes or just powder ’em?”
“Powder.”
“See with the dead humans they gotta be careful obviously so they burn the bodies to get rid of all traces of the disease and the implants and shit but do you know what they do with the monkeys, Mr. Vince? Do you? Do you? Do you know?”
Vince keeps his mouth shut.
“With the monkeys they grind ’em up and put ’em in the meat supply so you don’t even know. You get a taco at half the restaurants in this country you got any idea what you’re eating?”
Vince knows better than to answer.
“Monkey, man. Mother. Fucking. Monkey.”
SO YOU CONSTRUCT a life from what’s there. Patterns emerge—fry, frost, and fill with jelly—and comfort comes from order, especially on a day when you can’t stop counting dead people. (Ardo Ginelli. Forty-eight.) Fry, frost, and fill. No reason such a sequence should be any less satisfying than some other sequence—say, scalpel, suction, and suture. Load the cases, seal the boxes, and greet the guy from the wholesale van, who always, always says how good it smells in here, as if he’s forgotten since yesterday.
The “Open” sign comes on with a spark and then the lights in the dining room snap on white-hot. The first wave is men: garbage guys, cops, widowers, and drunks—blowing on their hands, removing knit gloves and stocking caps. Vince abides with warm fritters and maple bars and steaming black coffee and awaits the next wave of regulars—deeper sleepers: men with wives, retired guys, office workers with regular donuts and regular coffees with regular amounts of creamer and sugar, sitting in their regular spots at the Formica tables, smoking their regular cigarettes. Vince likes the sameness of their chatter even as he ignores the content, a trick he learned from his old girlfriend Tina, who was an actress when she wasn’t working as a paralegal for her brother Benny. Tina got most of her acting jobs in old rat-and-roach houses in the Village and SoHo, but one time she landed a small role in a big off-Broadway thing, in the background of a couple of scenes. Vince was so proud he went every night; loved that play more each time he saw it, loved the predictability and the small differences within the sameness—an actor might pause before a line, or change the inflection, might come in a second earlier or later. One night one of the regulars came in with a cup of prop coffee. Just like that! Coffee! And while the action unfolded (the play was about a family that owned a restaurant; there was a gay brother, a brother studying to be a priest, and a sister who was unmarried and pregnant), the extras just talked and talked, oblivious. Vince asked Tina what she and the other extras talked about when they were in the background of a particularly crowded restaurant scene. She said they were just supposed to mutter nonsense to make background noise and make their lips move. Vince’s girlfriend said, over and over, Banana, apple, strawberry. Or she changed the order: Strawberry, apple, banana.
So that’s what Vince began imagining the people on the street were saying all those years: Banana, apple, strawberry. It seemed to confirm what he’d always figured: that normal people, regular people—schoolteachers, firemen, accountants—were simply extras in the lives of guys like him. That’s what the straight life always seemed like, a collection of meaningless words and concepts: job, marriage, mortgage, orthodontist, PTA, motor home. How are you? Fine. How are you? Fine. Nice weather we’re having. Banana, apple, strawberry. Fry, frost, fill. Banana, apple, strawberry.
But today he listens to the conversations of the regulars—two guys on their way to the dump to look for a washing machine; a man advising another man to put his money in gold; a woman showing pictures of her grandchildren—and he thinks that there might be serviceable washers at the dump, that the woman’s grandchildren must be adorable, that gold is a great investment. It takes a sort of courage to live a quiet life.
There used to be an inspirational poster on the door to the library at Rikers. It showed a night sky, and across the bottom were the words: The community of men is made of a billion tiny lights.
The community of men…at night on the ward (institutional sleep is like morphine, dreamless and cold) Vince imagined a real place, a town somewhere that he could actually see, like the old TV shows Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, a 1950s city where there were always two parents and houses had picket fences, where policemen smiled and tipped their hats.
And now…here he is. Spokane, Washington.
Tic has finished the dishes and is putting them away. Vince goes to his locker and grabs his paperback book—he always reads on his coffee break—but he walks to the sink instead, sets his book down, puts one foot on a stool, and lights a smoke. Stares at his young assistant. “I ask you something, Tic?”
Attention makes Tic uneasy.
“How many dead people would you say you know?”
The young man takes a step back.
Vince shifts his weight. This is not what he meant to ask, necessarily. He takes his foot off the stool. “I don’t mean, specifically, how many dead people. What I mean is, you ever get some crazy thought stuck in your head—like today, I just kept thinking about how many dead people I know. Anything like that ever happen to you?”
Tic leans forward seriously. “Every fuckin’ day, man.”
NEVER LET YOUR job get in the way of work. That might be Vince’s motto, if he believed in mottos. By noon, he has finished his job at Donut Make You Hungry, and closes the place. Outside, in the blue cool daylight, he feels better—although he still finds himself counting. The whole thing is like some pop song he can’t get out of his head. Fifty-seven at last count (Ann Mahoney’s father). He walks south, crosses the river, and glances once more over his shoulder. Finally he steps inside a small brick storefront with a stenciled sign that reads DOUG’S PASSPORT PHOTOS AND SOUVENIRS.
A college kid is getting his picture taken. Vince sits at the counter, grabs a magazine, and waits for Doug—fat, white-bearded, and red-faced Doug, like Santa’s bad seed—to finish making the guy’s phony ID. “How she hangin’, Vince?”
Vince ignores him as he reads a story about the new Ford Escort, which is supposed to get forty-six miles to the gallon, but is roomier than the Chevette. Cars all got so small and boxy. When did that happen? They look like lunch boxes. Must be tough on car thieves. Where do you fence a four-cylinder lunch box?
Doug seals the kid’s new driver’s license, waves it in the air to cool, and hands it to him. Takes twenty bucks for his trouble. “Some bartender grabs that thing, you tell him you got it in Seattle, understand?”
The kid doesn’t look up from his new ID. Finally, he grins—all braces and dimples. When he finally leaves, Vince sets the magazine down on the counter.
“You got numbers for me?” Doug asks. He hoists his big haunches onto a stool behind the counter. Vince hands him a sheet of paper filled with names and numbers from the latest run of stolen credit cards.
Doug runs his finger down the list. “Monday okay for these?”
“Fine.”
Doug shifts his considerable weight, opens a drawer, and removes a handful of phony credit cards—made from Vince’s last batch of numbers.
“So where do you get all of these? You can’t be stealing all these credit card numbers from the donut shop.”
Vince doesn’t answer.
“Is this the way they do it Back East?”
Vince doesn’t answer.
Doug sulks as he looks over the numbers. “Shit, man, why are you so edgy?”
“I’m not edgy.”
“Then why can’t you tell me where you get the numbers?”
There is a hint of forced nonchalance in the
question. Vince takes the phony cards and hands Doug a small roll of bills.
“Come on,” Doug says as he counts. “I got a right to know.”
Vince puts the cards in his pocket.
“I mean, I got a pretty good idea how it works,” Doug says. “I haven’t been asleep the last six months, you know.”
“Okay,” Vince says. “Why don’t you tell me how it works?”
“Well, you steal these cards somewhere. You write down the numbers and then you give the cards back so the owners won’t report them stolen. I make copies of the cards. You take the cards I make you, buy shit with them, sell the shit, and then sell the cards. So you get paid twice. Am I right?”
Vince doesn’t answer. Turns to leave.
“Come on”—Doug laughs—“we’re partners. What do you think, I’m gonna go against you?”
Vince stops, turns back slowly. “Someone want you to go against me?”
Doug straightens. “What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking about anything. Jesus! Lighten up, Vince. Don’t be so paranoid.”
That word again. Vince stares at him a moment, and then walks outside. He looks back in through the front window. Doug mouths the word paranoid again.
There was this old guy named Meyers who ran a chop shop back in the world. This Meyers worked only with recent Vietnamese immigrants, because he could pay them less and, according to Meyers, they were too unsettled by America to backstab him. Used to sit in this big rocking chair while the Vietnamese kids stole cars for him, stripped them down, and hauled the parts all around New Jersey. And he paid them shit. Then, one day, Meyers just disappeared. Next day, some old Vietnamese guy is running the chop shop, sitting in that rocking chair. There’s a lesson in there—something about condescension. Or maybe rocking chairs. And what is that? Fifty-eight?
VINCE CAMDEN WALKS everywhere. In two years he still hasn’t gotten used to all of the cars; everyone drives everywhere here, even the ladies. In this town, five guys drive to a tavern in five cars, have a beer, then get in their five cars and drive three blocks to the next tavern. It’s not just wasteful. It’s uncivilized. People say it’s because of the harsh winters in Spokane, which are a cross between upstate New York and Pluto. But outside a few places in Florida and California, the weather is shitty everywhere. Every place is too hot or too cold or too humid or too something. No, even in the cold Vince prefers walking—like now, strolling away from Doug’s storefront toward downtown, which looms ahead, a couple of newer twenty-story glass-and-steel slabs surrounded by brick-and-stone stumps. He likes the cluster of buildings from a distance like this—the suggestion of cornices and pillars; imagination fills in the blanks.