by Pamela Morsi
The number nine bus pulled up to their stop. Jet scampered up the steps and then held out her little hand to help Wilma board. Dragging the stupid tank behind her was the worst. While she got herself seated, Jet dropped the correct change into the meter, managing to charm the bus driver and the other riders as well. She hurried to Wilma’s side and the bus headed up the street.
Wilma thought her prospects for employment were bad, but Ellen’s and Amber’s weren’t much better. Eight bucks an hour was the best that Amber would do until she figured out some other direction for her life. Ellen might be able to make a living as an accounting clerk, but it would be very close to the bone. Without a saleable skill the three of them combined could barely make a decent living.
Inheritance wasn’t much of a plan either. She herself was the only relative they had who was likely to die any time soon. And she didn’t have much to leave anyone.
No, Wilma thought, if this family was ever going to get on firm financial footing again, somebody was going to have to tie a really lucrative knot.
Wilma was a great believer in Holy Wedlock. She’d loved each and every man she married, at least on the day she’d married him. It was a woman’s only real chance. Two could not only live as cheaply as one, it was almost impossible to ever get ahead in the world if you were working at it all on your own.
Somebody had to get married. She would have been happy to volunteer. But she was washed up. Her life, or at least that part of it, was behind her now. Men, especially older men, did not find oxygen tanks attractive. That was understandable. Too much of a reminder of their own mortality. And how could a fellow tell if he was taking a woman’s breath away. It might just be her emphysema.
There would be no more marriages for her. But maybe she could make something happen for Amber or Ellen, or both.
The few blocks’ ride to the store was accomplished in a hurry. The walk across the street and through the parking lot took more time. Wilma was exhausted by the time they reached the front door of the store. One of the young bag boys recognized her and hurried out the door with one of their riding grocery carts.
“Morning, Mrs. Post,” he said.
She nodded and seated herself gratefully while he loaded her tank in the basket for her.
“This is my granddaughter, Jet,” she said.
“Hi, Jet,” the young guy said.
The little girl shook his hand as if meeting a social acquaintance.
“Do I get to ride in the cart with Wil-ma?” she asked.
“Sure,” the young man said. “You try to keep her from running into things, okay.”
“Okay,” Jet agreed. She scrambled up beside Wilma.
The electric grocery cart was Wilma’s preferred method of transportation. She pressed the directional button to forward and then all acceleration was done through the handlebars. No brakes were needed. When you wanted to stop you just quit tilting the levers forward.
Wilma carefully drove the cart over to the produce section. She loved the bright colors and faint fecund smell of mother earth.
She pulled the cart in front of a tower of dark, rounded tubers nearly the size of grapefruit.
“Hand me one of those, Jet,” she said.
The little girl complied.
“What is it?” Jet asked her.
“Why it’s a beet, honey,” Wilma told her. “Don’t you know beets?”
Jet looked at the huge ball in her grandmother’s hand.
“I know beets,” she said. “They’re little squares in yukky purple sauce.”
“That’s Harvard beets,” Wilma said. “And out of a can as well, I’ll bet. Of course they’re yukky. But real beets, these beets, they’re good. We’ll take this one.”
Jet put it in the basket.
“Do you like carrots?” Wilma asked her.
Jet nodded.
“Then get some of those,” she said.
“Okay.”
“They should be very orange and very straight,” Wilma told her. “And firm,” she added. “They shouldn’t have any give in them at all.”
Jet made her selection. Wilma checked it over and approved the choices, except for one that they both agreed looked like a witch’s nose.
They bought salad greens and ripe tomatoes. Golden pears and fresh raspberries. Sweet corn on the cob and baby white asparagus.
Wilma was delighted. Jet seemed to enjoy shopping as much as she did.
They finally made their way to the front to pay, but not before they had more bags than they could easily carry.
“I wish I could simply drive this little cart home,” Wilma joked with the clerk. “It’s handier than a pocket on a shirt.”
A voice spoke up from the next checkout line. “Wilma? Wilma, is that you?”
She turned to see Adele Wilson, a woman she knew rather casually. Adele had been dear friends with the late Mr. Post’s first wife.
“Adele, how are you?” Wilma asked politely.
“Oh, I’m fine, just fine. Do you need a lift? I’m driving right by your house.”
“Why, thank you,” Wilma answered. “That would be so appreciated. We’ve just bought ourselves a load to carry. It would be wonderful to get a ride.”
Adele’s expression was momentarily puzzled and then it was as if she noticed Jet for the first time.
“Is that little colored girl with you?” she asked.
Wilma was momentarily taken aback, then gave a chuckle.
“You’re showing your age, Adele,” she said. “We don’t say colored anymore, we say African-American. This is my great-granddaughter, Jet.”
With no prompting at all. Jet smiled politely and offered her hand, just as she had been taught to do.
Adele took it rather limply and asked Wilma in a whisper, “Is she adopted? An orphan from one of those desperately poor countries?”
Wilma thought the woman must be losing it.
“No, this is my granddaughter, Amber’s little girl,” Wilma told her. “I think you knew that she had a baby.”
“Well, yes, I knew she had a baby,” Adele said. “But I didn’t know…I didn’t know she was…I’m so sorry, Wilma. I didn’t know…” Her voiced lowered to a secretive whisper. “That Amber had been with a black man.”
Wilma’s back went straighter than it had been for a decade. Her mouth curved into a lovely smile that was all clenched teeth when she spoke.
“Oh, she wasn’t,” Wilma assured her. “It’s me, Jet gets that dark complexion from my folks. Didn’t you know that I’m black? From the Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., side of the family. I’m an octoroon daughter of a mammy from the old plantation.” Her voice was rising. Half the people in the building could undoubtedly hear. “We’re some of those Thomas Jefferson relations. And you know what they say, no matter how many generations you can always get a dark throwback. But don’t you worry your pretty white ass about it, Miss Adele. We done gonna walk on home in our barefeet carrying our water-melon on our heads and we ain’t never gonna bother you no more.”
Wilma gathered up the bags, slung them around her wrists, grabbed the oxygen tank handle in one hand and Jet in another and stormed out of the store.
“Of all the nerve in the whole world,” Wilma whispered to herself. “I hope she gets strangled by her own hemorrhoids.”
Jet looked puzzled, but Wilma didn’t really know exactly what to explain. The stupid, pointless prejudice of narrow-minded people was hard for anyone to understand. How could an innocent child even begin to grasp it? But Wilma always faced the world straight up. And she wanted Jet to do exactly the same.
“Have you got any questions about what just happened between me and that woman in the store?” Wilma asked.
Jet nodded.
“Then ask me and I’ll answer as best I can.”
“What’s a hemorrhoid?”
Wilma looked at her for a moment and then burst out laughing. “It’s nothing that you have to worry about, my little sugarplum. And people like
Adele, they aren’t anything you have to worry about either. With any luck at all, by the time you get grown up, the ones like her will all be dead and buried. And I vow to go to that woman’s funeral wearing only red high heels and my underslip.”
3
Ellen’s first week working for the Cowboy of Taxes was not as bad as she would have thought. The work was familiar, exacting and technical. It was the kind of thing she’d been doing all her life and there was a lot of comfort in confidence. Though any resemblance to her late husband’s business ended there.
There was no plush waiting room with a cappuccino machine and Internet access. If someone had to wait, they’d do it on the green Naugahyde couch in front of the window. And the one computer in the building, an ancient prePentium with neither broadband nor DSL, shared the phone line with Yolanda’s personal life.
The people were also a sharp contrast, their problems diverse and their money scarce. None of Max Roper’s clients were trying to have their five-acre subdivision tract listed as a wildlife refuge in order to lower their property assessments. These were working-class people, cabdrivers, waitresses, tradesmen and hair stylists. Their tax problems were more direct. They owed money they couldn’t pay, had spouses who couldn’t be located, or earned income they had never declared.
“I just lost track of time and forgot to file,” an elderly gentleman confided to Ellen one morning.
He was an amiable fellow in his mid-seventies, but he seemed to be a sharp old man. She was surprised that he’d made such an error.
“If you’re only a few months late, Mr. Payne, there may be a penalty, but I’m sure we can catch you up.”
The man eyed her for a long moment and then gave her an unexpected wink. “Well,” he admitted. “I haven’t filed in a good long while.”
Ellen raised her eyebrows.
“When was the last tax year that you were in compliance?” she asked.
Mr. Payne consulted the papers he carried with him in an old, weathered Stetson hatbox. Ellen took the opportunity to take a sip from the cup at the edge of her desk.
“Looks like the last year I got around to filling out them forms was 1986.”
Ellen inhaled her swallow of coffee, nearly choking.
This was not the sort of thing that had happened to Paul’s clients. When she related the problem to Max, he took it in stride.
“Don’t even look at any scrap of paper more than ten years old,” he told her. “If the IRS doesn’t collect in a decade they just write it off.”
“That still leaves nine full years of nonpayment,” Ellen pointed out. Max shrugged, unconcerned. “Send the IRS a check for a hundred dollars,” he said. “And indicate a willingness to set up payments.”
“But we don’t have a clue as to how much he actually owes,” Ellen pointed out.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “And probably quicker than they’ll get around to responding to us.”
“It’s hard to believe that he simply forgot for a decade and a half,” Ellen commented shaking her head.
Max chuckled. “I don’t believe he forgot about it for five minutes,” he said. “He had some scheme worked out where he thought he would never have to pay up. Now he’s decided that it’s in his interest to do so and he wants us to figure out a cheap and easy way to get back onto the tax rolls.”
“Do you really think so?”
Max leaned back in his chair, propping one cowboy-booted foot upon the edge of his desk. “I’ve known Cleo Payne for forty years,” he said. “When it comes to money, that man can squeeze the manure out of a buffalo nickel.”
“If he has been deliberately evading taxes for fifteen years, maybe he needs a lawyer more than an accountant,” Ellen pointed out.
Max nodded. “We’ll get him a lawyer if it turns out that he needs one. Right now we should take our time and sort it out. You need to write IRS a letter,” he said.
“Yes, of course,” Ellen agreed. “But how can I ever explain failure to file for sixteen years?”
Max responded thoughtfully. “The truth is, Miss Ellen, life is long.”
He hesitated there and she prompted him.
“Life is long,” he repeated. “And that’s exactly what your letter should be.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” she admitted.
“Fifteen, eighteen pages minimum,” Max told her. “Single spaced, long complex sentences. Use as much jargon as you can fit in. We’ve got to wear somebody down far enough that they’re willing to wait rather than start wading through it.”
Overwhelming officials with excuses was not exactly the kind of accounting to which Ellen was accustomed.
“The fine folks of our federal tax bureaucracy are overworked, overwhelmed and mostly over the hill,” Max said. “Experience makes up for a lot, but it doesn’t make a person all that eager to wade into sucking mud. We just have to make Payne’s taxes look like a real pain to one of those people. I’ve got every confidence that a smart gal like you can do that.”
Dutifully, Ellen agreed to pursue that direction and headed back to her office.
“Ellen, Ellen, come here,” Yolanda called out to her.
The receptionist was at the counter, talking on the phone—apparently a personal call. As Ellen walked over she continued her conversation.
“You can’t use bleach on running shoes,” she said definitively into the receiver. “It makes the rubber come unstuck. Use whitewall tire cleaner.”
Yolanda glanced up at Ellen, raising one finger as an indication to wait.
“Okay, okay,” Yolanda said into the phone. “Hold on a sec.”
She held the receiver next to her chest.
“These are clients that Max has been ducking,” she said, handing Ellen a stack of folders. “Why don’t you look them over.”
Ellen eyed the pile warily. “Why has he been ducking them?”
Yolanda glanced back toward the older man’s office and said loudly enough to be heard. “Max Roper is too lazy to live,” she declared. Then added in a whisper just for Ellen’s ears. “He hates to give these folks the really bad news. I hate to ask you, but it’s either you or me.”
Ellen looked down at the folders and then back at the open door to Max’s office. With a shrug of acceptance, she went to her tiny, windowless cell and seated herself safely behind the desk. A quick perusal indicated that Yolanda was right. The half-dozen clients represented were in for some very bad news. And many of them should have been notified months ago.
The way Max handled that was to file an extension and slap a yellow sticky on the file that read “call immediately.” Some of those yellow stickies were nearly gray with age.
Ellen adjusted her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose and began familiarizing herself with the files. Their problems were extreme, frightening, life changing.
She understood them completely.
Paul’s illness, and subsequent death, had meant total financial collapse. They had been a prosperous, upper-middle-class family with a reputable business, a nice house with a reasonable mortgage, a bright daughter and money set aside for both her education and their retirement.
Now, if it weren’t for Wilma, Ellen didn’t know what they’d do.
It had been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. She had been acutely aware of everything that happened, but there had been nothing she could do to stop it.
She imagined these people felt much the same. She started making calls.
With matter-of-fact detail and brutal honesty, Ellen clearly told the clients what they undoubtedly already knew. It was all bad news. Bad debt. Bad luck. Bad choices.
She didn’t sugar the medicine. Any other accountant would have tried to soothe the fears with optimism, temper the despair with hope. Ellen didn’t bother.
“Yes, of course, you’ll eventually get out of debt,” she assured a fifty-three-year-old businessman who’d been dipping his hand in his own company’s till for a decade. “The IRS will most li
kely garnishee twenty percent of your salary for the rest of your life. And then claim the remainder of the obligation from your heirs upon your death.”
It wasn’t a cheery thought, but at least it was a fate one could get a handle on.
The second unlucky client on her list was a young mother with a crying toddler in the background. Her husband, a personal trainer, had apparently thought income reporting rules didn’t apply to him. And his young bride, now a former wife, had trustingly signed every form.
“Bankruptcy isn’t an option,” Ellen told her. “It’s an inevitability. The sooner you accept that fact and start living accordingly, the more chance you’ll have of salvaging anything.”
By the time noontime came around, Ellen had worked up an appetite. Grateful for the company of her own thoughts, Ellen stepped outside into the warmth of midday San Antonio sunshine. Even in winter, it was the kind of place where you made a point of walking on the shady side of the street. She took a deep breath and glanced in each direction thoughtfully. There were not many eating establishments in this part of downtown. Nearer the river and the tourist hotels there was a swanky taco joint on every corner. But Ellen couldn’t afford swanky tacos anyway. Her choices were the sandwiches at the Empire Bar or the menu del día at Helgalita’s. She chose the latter, less for any particular food preference than because she didn’t want to eat with Max. Her boss had lunch at the Empire Bar every day at 12:30. He sat at the same table and had the same meal every day. Ellen admired the routine. Routine was a good thing for accountants. But the last thing she wanted was to spend one extra moment with him.
She knew Max spent a good deal of time eavesdropping on what she was doing. It was so easy to do in that office, and it was natural to do so with a new employee. Ellen didn’t mind, but she sure didn’t want to discuss it. After running Paul’s business, it was very hard to fit herself back into the position of accounting clerk.