Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  ***

  On the date of his birthday, the news was consumed by the story of Julie Eaton. No relation. Nearly a month earlier, on March fourteenth (or perhaps fifteenth), which placed his birthday, the first big news day, twenty-six (-five?) days later, the aforementioned Julie Eaton had received her bank statement detailing her month’s transactions and found them to be misrepresented in a most unfortunate way, with fees equaling three and five pounds, respectively, on the eighth and ninth, and yes, as she looked more closely, another on the seventh, for an incredible nine pounds. She decided to complain about it. For weeks she seethed about it to her husband (not Chris Eaton), whose allergies dried his eyes out so significantly that it gave his indifferent glances the illusion of interested stares, which was his curse. For over twenty-one days, she poured out to those thirsty eyes in increasing detail, reliving those three days as if they – the Isle of Man Bank had suddenly become a “they” – had been stalking her for months in order to determine the times when she would have been least likely to notice their subterfuge, gradually pinpointing her exact space in the world when the transactions would have gone through, like the day she must have been at tea with the ladies, or waiting in line at the grocery, until he could stand it no longer and left her a note softly urging her to take it up with someone at their branch.

  And so it was, on Chris Eaton’s birthday, a Friday, at 10:04 AM, which Julie Eaton thought might beat the rush but also would not leave her seeming desperate, or petty, rather, arguing about seventeen pounds with an undereducated and underpaid teller in her genuine red-striped Chanel jacket (with matching skirt) and replica jewelry (the genuine items located in a safety deposit box somewhere below them), that Julie Eaton entered the Isle of Man Bank in Prospect Hill, followed closely by Per-Arvid Thorsen, in a green-striped replica Abibas hoodie and, hidden in a paper bag in the front pocket, a genuine EM-GE .22-caliber WWII-era starter pistol.

  ***

  When Per-Arvid was fourteen in Denmark, he came home from swim class and dropped his gym bag behind the laundry room door. Dinner was pasta with chopped hot dogs, one of his favourites, life was good. But when his father eagled the boy’s bloodshot eyes across the dinner table, the result of overzealous pool chlorination, he accused him of smoking pot, and Per-Arvid’s mother briefly left the room. With the skin under his left eye split open by his father’s wedding ring, Per-Arvid walked to the home of another boy on his team and they immediately took him in. That night, the man he thought was the other boy’s father offered him his first joint.

  The other boy’s “parents” – his mother and her boyfriend – essentially adopted him, with both parties agreeing to say nothing to the authorities, and provided him with the first loving family he had ever had. They fed and housed him and bought him new clothes. They had everything he could ever want, including the latest gaming consoles, and the largest TV. He was happy. He respected them. For the first time in his life, he felt like he was really himself. Within a few months, he was helping his new parents out by making parcel drops and even selling directly to the other kids at his school. They loved him, they said. He was entrusted with storing most of the merchandise in his room, under his bed and in his closet, along with a small handful of semi-automatic weapons. He bragged about this much too often to the other kids, but curiously, he was first arrested for something completely unrelated, trying to saw the head off the large plastic Ronald McDonald on the bench outside the first restaurant in Odense. Because he was a minor, the police basically just threatened to tell his parents, but when he took them home to his new family they discovered everything. His new mother and father, who were well-represented legally, claimed to know nothing and successfully set him up for the fall.

  In juvenile lock-up, he learned electronics, and was beaten by the other boys fairly repeatedly, but eventually found some solace in the establishment’s boxing programme; not as a fighter, for he surely would have been pummeled even more, he was so much smaller than anyone else in his block, but as a referee. This did not earn respect from the other boys so much as concern, in that anything could get him to unfairly influence a fight. When he was released, he continued to oversee bouts with the Craidan Club in his hometown of Osterhav, near Odense, which was how the starter pistol ended up in his possession, if not how it ended up with him at the bank, on the floor, at the feet of the young security guard, Jem Kelly.

  ***

  Jenken “Jemmy Jem” Kelly – unlike Per-Arvid, who had come to the Isle of Man in the nineties as a gaffer, and then, when the global economy began to tank and both the Irish and British governments began to offer filmmakers greater incentives to shoot films featuring England and Ireland at home, had gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd yet again and begun to oversee illegal Loaghtan sheep fights – was Manx born and raised. He’d never been to a sheep fight, and quite likely didn’t even know they existed, so underground was this particular culture, but had, while recently out of high school, gone drinking with some other kids from school, consumed a bit too much, and participated in the brutal beating of a British tourist on The Strand, shattering his eye socket, breaking his nose, jaw and ribs, and collapsing one of his lungs, as Jem later read in the newspaper. Jem was never connected to the beating, but was so shaken and affected by it that he dropped out of classes at the International Business School, spent two years working at a car rental depot, and after speaking with some of the mall security guards, decided to go for a month to London (the only time he’d ever spent off-island) to complete his SIA training. It wasn’t supposed to be his shift the day Julie Eaton came in to give a piece of her mind. He had begged his co-worker to switch shifts with him because he needed some extra money to impress one of the tellers, Agneish Lobb, by inviting her out to The King Edward Bay Golf and Country Club. And this was why Agneish was talking to him at the exact moment that Per-Arvid dropped the metal cashbox he’d brought for the teller to insert the ten thousand Manx pounds he’d been hoping to steal with little-to-no fuss, reaching back into his front pouch for reassurance and mistakenly pushing the bagged starter pistol out the other side.

  ***

  Clearly to everyone but young, delusional Jem, Ms. Lobb was spoken for, with an unimaginative white gold band on her left ring finger. She was also in the earlier stages of pregnancy, although she had yet to announce it publicly because the branch was not as busy as it had been, and most of the other tellers had completed more training than she had, and she thought she might lose her job if they knew. Nor had she broken the news to her partner, because the child wasn’t his. Instead of falling in love and marrying her high school sweetheart, Agneish Lobb had done the reverse, getting engaged at the prom, registering at the Selfridge’s, inviting about a hundred immediate family members, and another hundred friends besides, honeymooning in the Maldives, and then falling in love with someone else, a man who had sent her a Nigerian lottery email. She was wise to this trick. She’d been told about it at work by someone who’d read an article in the newspaper. So she replied as a joke, to string the man along as he so obviously had planned to do to her. It would be her little revenge on the world. This is exciting, she replied. I’ve never won anything before. How do I collect my winnings? She wasn’t about to fall for the trick of providing him with her bank information. She was smarter than that. She would meet him instead. And when he replied to tell her of the ease of a simple bank transfer, she wrote that I’ve always dreamed of receiving one of those large novelty cheques, and Where can I meet you?, planning to observe him from the other end of the café, or train station, then snap his picture from afar and maybe stick it on her fridge.

  One thing led to another, and when she discovered she was pregnant with the man’s baby, she committed her first felony. The Nigerian – he was obviously not Nigerian, born and raised in Sheffield by a waitress and the television – convinced her that no one would notice if she were to shave pennies off the deposits of each person who came to her in the course of a day, then making anot
her lump sum deposit at the day’s end to make sure her till balanced out. She was good with numbers like that, able to keep track of this daily tally in her head, and before long, when no one seemed to notice, she became further emboldened and began introducing what appeared to be random user fees, once again shifting all of this money to an account in the Nigerian’s name – her own name, he suggested, would arouse too much suspicion – where he could then make honest withdrawals and stash the money in cash back at his apartment. She also transferred everything she thought she could get away with from her own joint accounts. They were sure they were going to get away with it, too. They’d already bought the plane tickets to Panama and were merely waiting for one more week of revenue before making the clean break. When the bag with the pistol fell in front of her, she smiled in that way that only bank tellers can, or flight attendants, or anyone in the service industry who has to wear a suit. Or someone newly in love who feels they have nothing to lose. And she reached down to pick it up.

  ***

  At least that was how Chris Eaton imagined it as he watched the story develop on the news, marveling at the attachment he felt to the woman who merely shared his last name. He wondered how all those people came to be in that same place at that same time; like the parking cop across the street when the gun went off, a man by the name of Wilmot Kelly (no relation to Jemmy, which was not nearly as coincidental as Chris Eaton and this woman since there were as many Kellys as mosquitoes over there), who had no doubt been referred to the job by the family’s obligatorily boring uncle, one who likely bragged at family gatherings about the freedom of his job, and how he got to work outside, and young Wilmot was the only one who decided to listen, so that, ten years later, he was dropping behind the nearest vehicle for cover, the crest of his hat peeking over the hood when Thorsen glanced out the window, convincing the Dane he was surrounded; or the primary school teacher, in the bank only because his mortgage was coming up for renewal so he’d taken the day off for some hard wrangling, who tried to yell some sense into Young Jem, now all but useless over the prone body of the adulteress Agneish Lobb, instead breaking Thorsen out of his own shock long enough to kabonk the security guard behind the ear with his empty cash box and secure another weapon; the Chief Inspector, reliving his father’s life to the note; or the negotiator; or any one of the dozen remaining employees and clients he convinced Thorsen to release, because the bank robber couldn’t possibly keep track of them all; as if they were all merely random particles bouncing around, their lives being constantly redirected by contact with other random particles until they all met in this one fatal reaction; as if that moment were the one moment for which they would always be remembered, that everything so far had just been leading up to this.

  It was the pistol, though, that Chris Eaton thought about most. In one of the electives he had taken at college, he could recall studying a Spanish entomologist who had, for a time, due to his other research on mythic bugs in Guatemala, lived for several years among an indigenous South American people called the Itza. Though it was not his prime objective, the entomologist documented his observations of the Itza in great detail, especially their peculiar interactions with inanimate objects that he described as “like those of friends and enemies,” including the story of one particular savage, named Ieao (they had no consonants in their language, reserving the tongue for bizarre feats of strength and communicating solely through variation in the duration of mouth shapes), whose mother had supposedly died during childbirth – among the Itza, a crime on the child’s head – and he had imprinted himself on the burlap sack in which he was carried to the elders for judgment. Now an elder himself, he had spent all of his adult life caring for the well-being of this sack, with all the respect due to one’s mother, as laid out in the tribe’s matriarchal culture, and while it was considered a village tragedy that she managed to outlive her son, once the old man was put to rest, the burlap sack showed near-instant deterioration and fell completely apart within two weeks.

  Here was an inanimate tool that had as large a role to play in this bank tragedy as any of the humans involved, manufactured in Germany in 1934 by Moritz & Gerstenberger, used at the Olympic level the year Per-Arvid was chosen to represent his country as a referee, stored in a box of mementoes for years, and then, after getting caught trying to fix a sheep fight or two, brought to a friend who had attempted to modify the innocent sporting tool for him into a working firearm – an experiment that failed miserably as Agneish Lobb tightened her grip around the paper bag in fear, easily recognizing the shape inside, and it went off in her hands like a grenade.

  ***

  It suddenly struck Chris Eaton that everything he was disgusted him. He did not want to be British. Or white. Or middle-aged. Or a man. He did not want to be married to a beautiful wife, or wealthy, no matter what perks this afforded him. He did not want to have people look up to him, and be responsible for those people. He did not want to be here.

  He also, to some extent, did not not want to be those things. He was quite certain others would look on his lot with envy. It just made him sick, to think that he would wake up every morning and it would always be the same, that he would be himself by default, until he died, because of decisions and actions that he or someone else had already made, as inconsequential as they might have seemed at that moment, and none of it could ever be undone.

  The question: What was that one thing he had done to set himself on this path?

  And also: What was he going to do about it?

  He ran for the school board. He ran for sheriff. He ran for Council. He ran for Senate. He ran as a Republican. He ran as a Democrat. He ran on a platform of smaller class sizes, more school funding and regular meetings with neighbourhood leaders to create a better state-backed prescription drug plan. He positioned himself as “the Green choice” (a double entendre he pushed about being environmentally friendly as well as new to the scene). Hilariously, for his Senate campaign song, he chose a tune by Stina Verda.

  From what Chris Eaton could tell, his namesake was a natural. He was charming. People wanted to like him. During the debate at the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club, he followed the Libertarian candidate with this quip: “It’s hard to follow a guy who’s going to abolish taxes. You win.” And he had them in the palm of his hand. He would eventually be backed by the St. Petersburg Times, the PCTA-PESPA (the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association – Pinellas Educational Support Professional Association), and the Sierra Club.

  But of course, he also had only $26,694 in campaign dollars to spend, compared to the incumbent’s $223,892, which meant he was fighting TV spots with appearances at the mall, and the only real opportunity he had to shine was at further debates, most of which his opponent just declined to attend. When Chris Eaton seemed to have the man cornered on the subject of his part in relaxing State environmental laws to allow tainted water to be pumped into Florida’s underground aquifer, the Republican openly questioned whether Eaton had been around for the primaries, when he’d been forced to defend the same left-wing theories of water contamination against another unsuccessful usurper.

  “Same tune, different singer,” the incumbent rustled from his podium. “But what should I expect when I’m running against a political opponent who changed his party three times!”

  He decided to take a trip. At this point in his life, he was still highly sought after for various fishing shows, not as the host, which would have taken much more conviction, not to mention a full set of teeth, but as the behind-the-scenes consultant who made sure the fish would be caught. He was skilled. He had a connection with the fish, everyone said, that nearly guaranteed a catch; that went beyond that of hunter and prey; that was almost familial; that bordered on the mystical; that no one could explain; which entirely outweighed his increasingly difficult personality. On the road, away from Julie and his daily routines and consuming massive amounts of alcohol, he had trouble sleeping, aggravated often by the remoteness of their shoots, which forced several o
f the crew to share rooms, or even bunks, in rustic log cabins, and suddenly to his ears, the sound of his own breathing was like a passing train, forcing him to lie as still as possible, so obsessed with quieting and slowing down his breathing that he couldn’t relax, eventually becoming so frustrated that he would rise to make coffee, sighing loudly until the rest of them woke and they could start working. Unfortunately, his moods had their own gravitational pulls, sucking the rest of them into states of total inactivity and loss of will, including – it seemed – the fish, until whole days could be wasted in places so beautiful he might otherwise cry. And while most people would travel to such places and return to their families or girlfriends with an indigenous craft or a remarkable stone, or even a hastily nabbed shot glass or discount chocolate from the airport, the others often returned to their home countries wondering if the trip had even happened, the work complete but nothing to really show for it, no memories, no sense of accomplishment, nothing that had changed them for the better or worse.