In Mike We Trust

by P. E. Ryan

  “I don’t want your stinkin’ money, period,” Jackie snapped.

  “You don’t want two hundred dollars, tax free.” Mike didn’t make it a question but a statement.

  “It’s stolen.”

  “It’s not this money I’m paying you,” he said, tapping one of his stuffed pockets. “It’s money I already had before today.”

  “For all I know, you stole that money, too. I don’t want it.”

  “Well, that’s just dumb. I’m trying to give you cold, hard cash you didn’t have to work your tail off for in that hole-in-the-wall.”

  She leaned forward and tapped Garth’s shoulder, addressing him for the first time since they’d peeled out of the fairgrounds. He was dressed in his T-shirt and shorts now, the damaged costume at his feet (he’d slithered out of it as quickly as she’d slithered back into her clothes). “How about you? Did you know all this was fake?”

  The look on his face answered her question just fine.

  She huffed and said to Mike. “I tell you what, and this may be the worst thing of all—worse than stealing a dollar here and there. I think you’ve corrupted this boy.”

  “Would you just take it easy?” Mike told her. “Really. A good, deep breath right now would do you wonders.”

  “You didn’t offer it to me like what it was,” she said. “You lied.”

  “If I’d offered it to you ‘like it was,’ you wouldn’t have done it.”

  “I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never laid eyes on you!”

  “Well, since I can’t turn back time, what do you want me to do about it now?”

  “Why don’t you just apologize to her?” Garth suggested.

  Mike glared at him.

  “Just say you’re sorry for lying.”

  “Both of you,” Mike said, “breathe, and give your mouths a rest.”

  “Let me out,” Jackie said.

  “Would you just sit tight? I’ll go inside and get your pay, then drive you home. Or—assuming you’re not furious with me beyond belief—I’ll take you to dinner somewhere.”

  “Dinner?” Her mouth hung open for a moment and she gaped at him. “Who’s stupid now?”

  “Come on.” He quoted her from earlier in the day: “‘Only losers stay mad.’”

  Garth opened his door, got out, and pushed the bucket seat forward. She all but clawed her way free of the Firebird. A moment later, she poked her head back in through the open window. “Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Thank you,” Mike groaned.

  “Maybe you haven’t corrupted this boy totally. Yet,” she clarified.

  Her footsteps clopped up the sidewalk, matching the pounding in Garth’s chest.

  He left the costume in the car and walked into the apartment, heading directly to his room. Hutch followed him, and when he collapsed on his bed, the dog jumped up and lay down beside him.

  “What?” he asked the dog. “Stop staring at me.”

  Hutch held his soupy gaze another moment and then rattled his head, adjusting his collar.

  “I wish I were you. My biggest worry of the day would be how my collar fit.”

  He closed his eyes. Before long, he heard a light knock on the door.

  “I’m sleeping,” he lied.

  “You are not. Can I come in?”

  “No.”

  “I think we should touch base about today before your mom gets home. You know, compare notes.”

  Compare notes? he thought, staring up at ceiling. Okay, here are mine, Mike: You’ve messed up the one really good thing I thought I had going. Or, rather, you’ve helped me mess it up. Without you I probably never would have actually met this guy, and without you I wouldn’t want to die right now from humiliation. Thanks a lot.

  “I returned the rental car,” Mike said. And then, after a moment of silence: “Listen, I know it was weird, and I know Adam was there for the worst of it. It stinks, I get it. To be honest, I wouldn’t want to be seen by my potential…dating person…dressed like that, either. But you can throw all those costumes out now, you know? You’re done with them. No more. I promised you that, and I’ll stick to what I said.”

  Who cared about the stupid costumes at this point? Talking about them to help improve the situation was like sticking a Band-Aid on a severed jugular vein. Mike, he knew, was just worried that Garth would spill the specifics to his mom—a worry that had nothing to do with Garth and everything to do with Mike.

  “Would you say something?” Mike asked through the door. “Are you upset, or just tired?”

  “Both,” Garth called out. “But don’t worry—I won’t tell Mom about how wearing one of my old Halloween costumes to scam money nearly got my head torn off.”

  There was a long pause—broken only by Hutch rattling his head again to adjust his collar.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “Thanks for that. I appreciate it.”

  15

  Honesty.

  He wanted it. He craved it.

  He could barely remember what it was.

  Feeling so full of secrets and lies that he was either going to throw up or explode, he dragged himself to Lisa’s house, sat with her in her room, and told her everything.

  She listened to the whole spiraling confession with a look on her face that was a perfect mixture of shock and disappointment. “How could you?” she asked when he was finished.

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing for the past couple of days.”

  “How could you kidnap two dogs from the shelter?”

  Garth exhaled in frustration. “That’s not exactly the worst thing I just told you.”

  “And Hutch!” Lisa said. She was squatting down beside her desk, repeatedly pushing a button on her printer. “Hutch is, what, eleven? That’s like taking an old man out of a nursing home and making him hold up a liquor store!”

  “Nobody held up anything. The dogs didn’t even know what was going on.”

  “You’re better than that, Garth.” The power light on the printer came on, but as soon as she sat down in her desk chair, it went off again. “You care about animals more than that—or, at least, you did before this jerk showed up.”

  “I still care about animals! I care about a lot of things.”

  “Really? So, you care about dogs but you’ve been exploiting them. And you care about your mom, but you’ve been lying to her about everything.”

  “Only so that we can put money into my college fund.”

  He’d started off sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed. Halfway through the confession, his entire body had drawn up into a tight, uncomfortable knot. Now that it was all out of him the knot felt like it had been untied, but the sensation was hardly liberating; he felt more like a bundle of dirty laundry that had spilled onto her bed. He stretched out flat on his back and let his head hang over the foot of the mattress.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on?” Lisa was upside down from this perspective, making fists and gritting her teeth at the printer. She looked insane.

  “Because not telling you—and avoiding you—was easier than hearing you tell me how wrong it was. You have to admit, you can be pretty harsh.”

  “You’ve been helping that jerk steal from people! You’ve been helping him commit crimes! Of course I would have been harsh!”

  “Judgmental, I mean.”

  “I’m not judgmental. I have opinions.” She fiddled with the cable, and the printer turned on again. “Yes. Thank you,” she said to the machine. “Now stay that way and print something, for a change.” She highlighted a file on the computer screen and double-clicked on it. The cursor turned into an hourglass as she sat back and brushed her long hair away from her face with both hands. She watched him watching her.

  He reached beneath him and dug his wallet out of his back pocket. “Look at this,” he said, extracting the beat-up snapshot of his dad attempting to feed the squirrel. He held it out for her to see.

  She glanced at it. “So?”

  “It’s m
y dad. It’s a great picture, isn’t it? Mike gave us a whole box of old photos of him and my dad from when they were kids.”

  “Have you totally lost touch with reality? Why are you showing me this now?”

  “Because it’s a great picture. Because I’d give a lung to change the subject. Because I want to die.”

  “Too bad. You’re alive, we’re here, and you brought all this up.”

  “I know. And I owe you an apology.”

  “For?”

  He looked her directly in the eye. “Well, for lying to you.”

  “And for pulling away? Because you have, you know. I really thought I’d been replaced.”

  “And for pulling away, yes. God, I feel so…awful now. I feel unfixable.”

  “Don’t do that. You don’t get to be mopey, all of a sudden. And what do you mean, unfixable? You’re not broken, Garth. You just did something really, really dumb and wrong.”

  He rubbed at the dampness on his eyes and then looked directly at her—hard. “What do you get out of knowing me? I mean, why would you still even want to be my friend?”

  “What do I get? Why would you even ask me that? I get a friend who’s a guy who lets me be me. Who likes me—for me. Do you know why I go through so many boyfriends? They all want me to be somebody else. Some softer, gooier version of who I really am. All those guys? With the exception of Taylor Pruitt? They dump me, okay? I dumped Taylor Pruitt because he had chronic bad breath. Like someone stuffed a pork chop into a sneaker.”

  “You never told me that before.”

  “About Taylor’s breath? Oh my god, the worst.”

  “About guys breaking up with you.”

  “Well, why would I? It’s not exactly something I’m proud of. But my point is that I don’t get the you-need-to-change thing from you. And”—she held out both her hands in frustration, her fingers spread open wide as if she wanted to strangle the air between them—“I like you, Garth. You’re a good guy—if we erase the past few weeks. And we’ve logged some significant time together. I like being around you, okay? I like me when I’m around you. If I could wave a magic wand and make you straight—and make me attracted to you—I would. But I can’t. So you’re my best friend.”

  “You’re not attracted to me?” he asked, mustering the closest thing to humor he could manage at the moment.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You’ve got Sufjan’s sensitivity, but you’d have to pour that into, say, Billy Fillmore’s body for it to really click with me.”

  He almost felt like laughing. Almost. “What am I going to do?”

  “About your mom? Never, ever in a million years let her find out what you’ve been up to with your uncle.”

  “Really? I thought you were going to recommend full disclosure again.”

  “Earth to Criminal Behavior Boy: No way. You’ve been breaking the law. Think she’s hyperworried now? Run that past her and she’ll have a meltdown.”

  “That’s sort of what I was thinking.”

  “As for Adam—”

  “Him I don’t need advice on. I’m just going to crawl into a hole and die. That should take care of things.”

  “Or you could try and explain it to him.”

  “What?”

  “Tell him you were drawn in by your uncle’s overpowering charm.” She glanced sideways and darted her tongue out as if trying to free it from a bad taste. “Tell him you felt like you had no choice and you’ve learned your lesson. Trust me, it’ll only make you more interesting. You two will bond over it. As for the jerk—”

  “Stop calling him that, okay? He’s still my uncle.”

  “He can be your uncle and a jerk at the same time. That’s physically possible. As for him, my advice is to never have anything to do with him again. Please tell me he dangled a watch in front of your face and put you in some Patty Hearst trance, and that’s why you went along with all this.”

  “I made my own choices,” Garth said glumly.

  “Yes, but you were seduced, too.”

  “That’s disgusting. He’s a relative. He’s my dad’s identical twin, for god’s sake.”

  “I don’t mean it that way, pervert. I mean that, for some reason I can’t fathom, you were seduced by his personality, his charm.”

  “I guess I was. But, you know, aside from all the scamming and lying and humiliation…” He realized how pathetic he sounded.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “It’s been kind of nice having him around. I mean, I really miss my dad, and—”

  “There is a world—a galaxy—of difference between those two men, Garth. And if you even for a second want to justify your involvement with Mike by saying he’s a substitute for your dad, you’ve sold yourself on the biggest scam of all.”

  “All right! Enough.”

  “And what makes you think it’s over, anyway?” she added.

  “Mike said so. We’ve officially retired. No more scams.”

  “Or maybe there’s one more in the works.”

  “Nope. Not as far as I’m concerned, anyway. Mike knows how I feel.”

  She brushed her hair away from her face again and clucked her tongue. “Where’s the money?”

  “He’s been holding it for us.”

  “Till—”

  “Till we’re done. Which we are. So I guess he’s holding it till now. Ish.”

  “And you’re comfortable with that?”

  “Don’t be so negative.”

  “I’m not negative,” she said. “I observe the world around me, and I form my opinions. They may sound negative—and they may come out like judgments—but that’s only because I’m that very rare combination of both artist and realist.”

  The hourglass on the computer screen went away. The printer came to life, and a sheet of photo paper emerged inch by inch and dropped onto the tray. “Yay!” she exclaimed, and held it up for Garth to see.

  Mudpie was staring him down, scowling, her middle finger dominating the foreground.

  If he was honest with himself, Lisa’s implication wasn’t earth-shattering. It had occurred to him that Mike might be planning something underhanded (or under the underhandedness). But he didn’t want it to be true.

  His mom was at work when he got back to the apartment. Mike was washing dishes. “Big guy!” he said, rinsing a plate in the sink. “Where’d you go? I was going to cook us a nice lunch but I got too hungry waiting for you.”

  “I went for a walk,” Garth said. “Just to, you know, think.”

  “Oh. Want me to make you a sandwich?”

  “No, thanks. Listen, I need to ask you something.”

  “Sounds serious,” Mike said. “Let’s go sit down.”

  He led the way into the living room, where Hutch was stretched out in the armchair. Garth noticed what looked like a large shirt box wrapped in Christmas paper sitting on the end table next to the sofa.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sorry,” Mike said, “it was the only paper I could find—in the hall closet, behind the coats. It’s just a small token of appreciation for everything you’ve done since I got here. I know I’m not the easiest guy to put up with.”

  “Thanks,” he said hesitantly. “I’ll open it later, if that’s okay.”

  Mike sat down on the couch. “You’ll never guess what it is, and I’m not going to tell you. You couldn’t torture it out of me. And I warn you, the suspense is going to be deadly.”

  Garth nodded. He settled in alongside the sleeping Hutch and said, “Thanks,” again.

  “All right, it’s a model of the Flying Dutchman. They didn’t even carry it at the hobby shop; I had to special-order it. It looks really cool—and very complicated. Maybe a ten out of ten, on your scale.”

  Garth glanced with newfound interest at the box wrapped in repeating, smiling snowmen. But he was in no mood to receive a present—least of all from Mike. He reached down absently and stroked Hutch’s head.

  “So, you wanted to ask me a question?” Mike asked.


  “I’ve realized something,” Garth said. “A couple of things. A lot of things, really.” Coward, he thought. Spit it out. “I’m really mad at myself. And I’m really mad at you.”

  Mike blinked and focused his eyes on the opposite wall. Drawing his gaze back in to Garth, he said, “That’s not a question.”

  “No, but I needed to tell you that first.”

  “I gathered. You barely spoke to me yesterday.”

  “And I want to tell you why I’m mad,” Garth said, “because I don’t really think you know.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “What we’ve been doing is wrong. Like, awful—horrible—wrong.”

  “Okay,” Mike said.

  “Don’t just say okay. Tell me you agree. Or tell me you think it’s normal for an uncle and his nephew to be scamming innocent people in the name of fake charities, lying through our teeth—”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Mike waved his hand in front of him. “In the first place, there are no innocent people. And in the second place, while the uncle/nephew aspect of our little operation may be…refreshingly unorthodox, let’s say…the actual act itself is as old as the hills. Believe me, since the first two men stood upright, side by side, people have been greasing palms, picking pockets, and selling the Brooklyn Bridge to one another. It’s one of the facts of life that keeps it all interesting.”

  Garth wasn’t in the mood for The Philosophy of Mike 101. “I think it was awful, what you did to Jackie on Saturday.”

  “Awful. I offered to pay her. You heard me.”

  “She thought we were the real deal, when it came to the charity. She took you at your word.”

  “Well, stupid her.”

  “Stupid her? If everybody were smart, by that logic, no one would trust anyone! Everyone would be shifty and guarded and…cynical.”

  “Well, thank god for stupid people, then,” Mike said. “I don’t want everyone to be smart. What a boring world that would be. Guys like us wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Not guys like us. Guys like you.”

  “Fine. Guys like me. But do you see my point?”