by T. C. Boyle
“Actually, he was already in custody, arrested early this morning on a drunk and disorderly, and the tats we ran yesterday came up bingo.”
I felt my mood elevate. “So you have my car?”
There was a pause. “Unfortunately, no. The suspect—he’s known to us, minor perp, long rap sheet—admits taking the car but claims he doesn’t remember what he did with it. The golf clubs he sold to two other suspects, who tried to fence them at Herlihy’s, out by the public course?”
I tend to get wrapped up in things, I admit it. Someone else might have taken this little violation, this theft of his late mother’s and grandfather’s property, in stride, but in that moment I couldn’t let it go. I wanted my car back. My fly rod. And I wanted to see some punishment meted out too. “What’s his name?” I asked. “The car thief? Mr. Tattoo?”
“We don’t disclose that information. Not at this stage of the investigation.”
“Come on,” I said. “Sarah. Look, I’m the victim here.”
Another pause, longer this time. I listened to her breathe, pictured her caramel eyes and the eyeliner she wore on duty to emphasize the depth of them. “Reginald Peter Skloot,” she said. “A.k.a. the Reg-Dog.”
COUNTY
“County” was the diminutive people intimate with the San Roque County Jail used in a familiar way, be they inmates, gang members, jailers or attorneys, and it was the temporary residence of the man who’d stolen my car and my girlfriend’s dog and was the only link to the whereabouts of the car and the things contained in its trunk. I’d been to County once previously, in the bad old drinking days before I met Leah, to bail out a buddy who’d spent the night there on a DUI after he’d dropped me off at the apartment because I’d had my own DUI in the past and wouldn’t get behind the wheel if I’d had more than three or four drinks. And I had. And did.
At any rate, Officer Mortenson—Sarah—had warned me to stay away from the suspect, the Reg-Dog, because my talking to him would only complicate things, might endanger me in the future and would serve no good purpose. So, naturally, and without even thinking twice about it, I dropped Leah off at work two days later and drove out to County for visiting hours, thinking maybe the Reg-Dog would take pity on me and tell me what he’d done with the car, especially since I’d discovered through a lawyer friend that the Reg-Dog had some money in the bank from his insurance settlement (motorcycle, gravel) and once he was convicted—and he would be, no question there—I could put a claim in and take that money away from him. Tit for tat. Of course, there was a second reason for my driving out there—to get a look at him, at this dirtbag who’d unthinkingly reached out and inflicted damage on a total stranger, me, who’d been put through the wringer and whose live-in girlfriend had stopped speaking to him. Period. Because she couldn’t trust him anymore. And why not? Because he had bad judgment. Fatally bad. As it was, she was reconsidering their whole relationship vis-à-vis what she was giving and what she was getting back and he—I—could only thank his lucky stars that Bidderbells hadn’t been physically abused, though she saw signs, painful signs, of what the mental toll had been. The dog was eating compulsively, she was skittish, peed secretly in the closet and had gummed Leah’s best pair of Liz Claiborne pumps till they were fit for nothing but the garbage.
That was what the Reg-Dog had inflicted on me and I wanted some of my own back—or if not that, just to look at him, to see the sleaze of him and the shame in his eyes.
I wasn’t nervous, or not particularly, but as I showed my ID at the desk and stepped through the metal detector, I was afraid that maybe someone had bailed him out or that he wouldn’t bother with seeing me, because what was in it for him, but my fears were misplaced. A guard showed me to a chair set before a window in a whole line of them, and there he was, the Reg-Dog, the thief, sitting right in front of me. He was about my age or maybe a couple years younger, with the kind of electric-blue eyes that can be so arresting on people with dark hair. He was in an orange prison jumpsuit, which covered up his tattoos and somehow even managed to seem elegant on him, and he wore his hair short but with long pointed sideburns like daggers.
It took him a minute, assessing me with those jumped-up eyes, then he leaned into the speaking grate in the window that separated us and said, “Don’t tell me you’re my lawyer?”
“No,” I said, and I tried to hold steady, but had to look down finally. “I’m the victim.”
“Victim? What are you talking about? Victim of what?”
I raised my eyes, fastened on that magnetic blue gaze that must have let him get away with a whole lifetime of petty and not-so-petty crime, and said, “Of you.” I gave it a beat to let that sink in. “That was my car you stole. With my girlfriend’s dog in it?”
He just blinked at me, no apology, no shame, no recognition even. I was wound up, and I couldn’t help delivering a little lecture about what he’d cost me, emotionally and financially too, and if I went into detail about Leah and Bidderbells and my grandfather’s fly rod, I’m sorry, but in a society like ours where everything is instant gratification and nobody even knows their neighbors, somebody’s got to take responsibility for their own actions. I didn’t like what he’d done to me and I let him know it.
And here was where he surprised me. He heard me out, even nodding in agreement at one point. I’d expected he’d throw it right back at me, maybe threaten me, but he didn’t. He just bowed his head and murmured, “I’m sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking, you know?”
THE CONFESSION
“Look, since my accident? It’s like I’m just not right in the head. And tell me that doesn’t sound lame because I know it does, but it’s the truth. You want to know something? I wasn’t even stoned or boozed up or anything when I saw your car there—and I swear I didn’t know the dog was in the backseat, or not at first anyway. My father, before he killed himself, used to have a car like that, or maybe not exactly, but you know what I mean. Boom, goes my brain. Time for a ride. And you’re right, man, I wasn’t thinking about you or whoever or what kind of damage I was doing because I just kind of went off—”
“So where’s the car?”
“Truthfully? I can’t remember.”
“What if I told you I have a lawyer friend who says I can take your bank account for damages—would that help you remember?”
“Oh, man, don’t do that to me. I got my own troubles. As you can imagine. But hey, I’m straight up with you here—I just don’t have any recollection because, well, you know, forgive me, but that change and dollar bills and all you had in the glove box? I started boozing it, I’m sorry. And then somebody had some oxy—”
“So you’re really not going to tell me?”
“Uh-uh. But I’ll tell you something else—that lady cop’s really got it for you.”
MISSING LEAH
I do miss Leah, with that empty bottomless-pit kind of feeling that hits you first thing in the morning, the minute you open your eyes, and I miss Bidderbells too, because you’d have to be one cold individual to live with a dog for a whole year and not feel affection for her, even if she was the kind of animal who would gum the pillows and make her deposits on the kitchen floor so that you were all but compelled to take her to the library with you. In your car. Which just sits there in the shade waiting for somebody like Reginald Peter Skloot to come along and covet it with his burning blue-eyed gaze. But then, if it weren’t for that particular chain of events—and their aftermath—I might not have discovered just how intolerant, unfair and vindictive my live-in girlfriend really was. This is what’s called experience.
Did I ever get the car back? No. Will I ever see restitution from the Reg-Dog? That’s a question of time. Geologic time. I picture the glaciers rolling in again and my friend the lawyer (I’ll name him, Len Humphries) pulling a check out of the inner pocket of his zipped-up parka and the three of us, Len, the Reg-Dog and I, retiring to the nearest pub to tip back a celebratory glass.
The car I have now is a newer model, harder to steal, and pretty muc
h unremarkable, the kind of thing nobody would really notice even if it did have its windows cracked and a dog in the backseat. I’d just parked it the other night in front of the apartment after a trip into the Santa Ynez Valley to meet with the Escalera people when a police cruiser pulled up at the curb behind me and Officer Mortenson swung open the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, adjusting her duty belt as if she were wriggling into a girdle. I saw that her eyes were done up and that she’d changed her hair and maybe even lost a bit of weight, I couldn’t say. She said hi and then told me she was sorry to say there was nothing new to report about my car. “My guess?” she said. “They took it straight down to Tijuana. Or somebody chopped it.”
“Chopped it?”
“You know, for parts? Like auto body shops. It’s a scam. And a shame too, a real shame.”
“I see you’ve still got your vehicle,” I said, nodding at the cruiser where it sat sleek at the curb. “Crown Victoria, isn’t it?”
She gave a laugh. “Yup. All mine. Except I have to share it with about six other officers.”
There was a silence, during which the little sounds of the street came percolating up, the buzz of a distant radio, a window slamming shut, snatches of conversation drifting by like aural smoke.
“You know, did I ever tell you what I do for a living?” I asked, following her gaze down the block to where a small cadre of bums was just settling down for the night in the alcove out front of the auto parts store. I waited till she came back to me and shook her head no.
It was a golden evening, the sun just cresting the line of buildings above us to illuminate the windows up and down the far side of the street. There was a faint breeze wafting up from the sea. Birds flared in the palms like copper ingots. “Here,” I said, digging a card out of my wallet and handing it to her. “That’s me. I’m in the wine business. And you know, I wouldn’t call myself a connoisseur, or maybe I would, but I was just thinking—”
I watched her turn the card over in her hand as if it were a piece of evidence, then smile up at me.
“What I mean is, I was just wondering, do you like wine?”
SUBTRACT ONE DEATH
Riley didn’t like dogs, or not particularly. They were like children (of which he had none, thankfully), bringing dirt, confusion and unlooked-for expense into your life. But here was a dog, a darting elaborately whiskered thing in the seventy- to eighty-pound range with a walleye and one collapsed ear, barking inquisitively at him from the terminus of its chain. Behind him, in the drive, Caroline stuck her head out the car window, her face leached of color. “Don’t tell me this is the place?”
“Wait’ll you see inside,” he called over his shoulder, the dog’s explosive barks underscoring the dreariness of the day, which was gray and coldish for mid-May.
He’d rented the house for a week because the few local hotels had been booked for graduation across the river at West Point and he most emphatically did not want to go down into the city, which was what Caroline most emphatically did want but wasn’t going to get. He hated cities. Hated the seethe of people, the noise, the crush of everybody wanting everything at the same time. What he liked was this, simplicity, nature, the river spread out at his feet and his gaze carrying all the way across to the wooded mountains on the other side, which, apart from the rail line—and what was that, an oil tank?—couldn’t have looked all that much different when Henry Hudson first laid eyes on them. He felt his heart lift. All was right with the world. Except for the dog. And Caroline.
But Caroline liked dogs, and she was out of the car now, striding across the wet lawn in her heels, calling to the dog in a clucking high childish voice. “Oh, that’s a good boy, he’s a good boy, isn’t he? What a good boy,” she called until she was right there and the dog was fawning at her feet, rolling over on its back so she could apply her two-hundred-dollar manicure to its underbelly. After a minute of this—and Riley was just standing there watching, not with the proprietary pride he’d felt after their marriage four years ago but with a vague kind of quotidian interest, the same interest, dulled and flattened, that just barely got him out of bed in the mornings—she turned round to him and said girlishly, sweetly, “This must be Meg and Brian’s new dog. I wonder why they didn’t say anything? I mean, I remember the old one, when they came to visit that time? The one that died—I’m picturing German shepherd, right? Wasn’t it a German shepherd?”
He just shrugged. One dog was the same as another as far as he was concerned. Meg had said she’d be home from work by four to give him the keys to the rental, which belonged to her next-door neighbors, an older couple who were away in Tuscany for the month on some sort of culinary tour. But it was already half-past four, there were no cars in Meg’s driveway, and her house—a modest one-story place shingled in gray that had had its basement flooded twice in the past year after storms upriver—looked abandoned. Except for the dog, that is, which was clearly Meg’s, since its chain was affixed to a stake on her side of the rolling expanse of lawn the two properties shared. If Meg was home—or Brian—the dog would have been in the house.
“Give her a call, why don’t you?” he said, and watched Caroline straighten up and dig in her purse for her phone. He didn’t carry a cell phone himself—one, because he despised technology and the grip it had on the jugular of America, and two, because he didn’t want the federal stooges mapping his every move. Might as well have them attach one of those tracking devices. Like with wolves—or parolees. Or better yet, just tattoo your social security number across your forehead.
Caroline, slim still, with gym-toned legs tapering down to those glistening black patent-leather heels, had turned her back to him, as if for privacy, the phone pressed to her ear. It was a picture, her standing there framed against the river like that, and he would have snapped a photo too—if he had a cell phone. But then what was the use of pictures anyway? Nobody would ever see them. It wasn’t like the old days, when he was a kid and Polaroid was king. Then you could snap a picture, hold it in your hand, put it in a photo album. Today? All the photos were in the Cloud, ready for the NSA to download at their leisure. And pleasure.
Leisure and pleasure. He liked the sound of that and made a little chant of it while he waited for Caroline to turn round and tell him Meg wasn’t answering, or Brian either.
It began to drizzle. This had the effect of intensifying the otherworldly greenness of the place, and he liked that, liked the weather, liked the scene, but the shoulders of his new sportcoat seemed strangely sponge-like and his coiffure—the modified pompadour he still affected—was threatening to collapse across his forehead. He let out a curse. “What now?” he said. “Jesus. She did say four, didn’t she?”
There was something in his tone that got the dog barking again, which drove a fresh stake through his mood. He was about to swing round, get back in the car and go look for a bar somewhere when Meg’s generic little silver car swished into the drive next door and he moved toward her, foolishly, because that put him in range of the dog, which reared up on its hind legs to rapturously smear mud all over his white linen pants and attempt to trip him in the process. “Shit,” he cursed, shoving the dog down and trying vainly to wipe away the mud, a good portion of which transferred itself to his hands. But was it mud—or the very element he’d just named?
No matter. So what if his jacket was soaked, his pants ruined and dirt of whatever denomination worked up under his fingernails? He wasn’t here to show off his fashion sense or dine out with celebrities or sit for press interviews. No, Lester was dead. And he was here for the funeral.
One thing, among many, that Caroline didn’t know was that he’d been involved with Meg all those years ago, long before he met her—or either of his first two wives, for that matter—but if she did he suspected she wouldn’t have cared much one way or the other, except to drop the knowledge like a fragmentation device into the middle of one of their increasingly bitter squabbles, squabbles over nothing. Like whose turn it was to empty the
litter box and why they needed a litter box in the first place when the cats could just shit outside, but no, she insisted, that was the kind of thinking that was driving birds to extinction and how could he be so short-sighted, and he, in his shortsightedness, countering with What birds? There’s nothing but crows out there. Crows and more crows. And she: My point exactly. Or who’d conveniently forgotten to fill up the car or buy cheese at the market, and not blue cheese, which tasted like hand soap, but a nice Gruyère or Emmentaler? Or how you pronounced her brother Cary’s name, which he rendered as “Carry” and she as “Kierie” in her Buffalese.
And what was that all about? Boredom, he supposed, the two of them locked away in their restored eighteenth-century farmhouse in the midst of a peace so unshakable it was like living in a tomb. Which was all right with him—he was a novelist, “high midlist,” as he liked to say, bitterly, and he’d chosen to isolate himself for the sake of his writing—but after the remodel was done and she’d selected the antiques and the rugs and the fire irons and dug her flowerbeds and landscaped the front portion of their six-point-five acres, what was left for her? You choose rural, you choose isolation. And Caroline didn’t especially like isolation.
But none of that mattered now because Lester was dead and Meg was crossing the lawn to him, her eyes already full. Before he could think he was wrapping her in a full-body embrace that rocked them in each other’s orbit far too long while Caroline stood there watching and the mud staining his trousers imperceptibly worked itself into Meg’s jeans. He was feeling sorrow, a sorrow so fluent it swept him in over his head, Lester gone and Meg pressed tight to him, and it really hadn’t come home to him till now because now he was here, now it was real. He’d always suppressed his emotions in the service of cool, of being cool and detached and untouchable, but suddenly there were tears in his eyes. He might have stood there forever, clutching Meg to him, so far gone he couldn’t think beyond the three questions he and Lester used to put to each other when they were stoned (Who are we? Where are we? Why are we?), but for the fact that Brian’s car had somehow appeared in the drive, right behind Meg’s. If Caroline didn’t know how he’d once felt about Meg, Brian certainly did, and the knowledge of that—and of some of the extracurricular things Brian had said to him at a party a few years ago—made him come back to himself.