by Peter Craig
With his mouth full, Kevin said, “You’re going to get killed and I’m going to wind up in some kind of boy’s farm.”
“They don’t even have those places anymore, dummy. Reagan threw all those lunatics out in the streets with the air-traffic controllers.”
“Everything fell apart at your meeting. Didn’t it?”
“Tell me something. Have you ever gone without anything in your entire life?”
“Yeah. Lots of things.”
“You might think that, but in most countries, kids would be thrilled to have what you do. Look around, man. We’re sitting on the shore, in the sunshine. Seagulls flying around. You’re having breakfast at three in the afternoon. That’s paradise to some people.”
“You’re trying to move all those credit cards,” said Kevin, sucking an orange. “It’s ridiculous to pretend like I don’t know anything. You’re not a good enough liar to hide things from me.”
“I’m the best liar in this city right now.”
“I’ll make you a bet. If I scam breakfast, I want in on it.”
“You want in on it. Are you crazy? You think I’m going to involve my son with these animals? Forget it. As far as I’m concerned you don’t know a damn thing. I don’t want any accessories here. You’re not a witness, you’re not an accomplice—you’re just a weird kid who needs a haircut.”
“That makes me a kidnapping, Dad. And it sucks. You might as well put duct tape over my mouth.”
“I’m going to put duct tape over your mouth—as soon as you get enough calories in there.”
“If I get us a free breakfast, all on my own, then you have to tell me what’s going on. I can still lie if I ever go in front of a judge. I’ll say you brainwashed me.”
“You’d sell your old man out like that?”
Kevin put the orange rind over his teeth and smiled.
“Fine,” said Jerry. “I want to see this.”
As Kevin paid for the meal, chattering away about the quality of service while the cashier hunted and pecked through register keys, he asked if he could have a ten to replace all of his crumpled singles. Cheerfully she gave him a bill while he kept counting and organizing the mess. Then he handed her back nine ones with the same ten reinserted into the bundle.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, as he started to turn away. She noticed the apparent mistake. “Wait a sec, hon. You gave me nineteen here.”
“Oh no. Did I really?” said Kevin. “I’m such an idiot. Thank you. How ’bout I just give you another one—make it easier.”
The cashier smiled and handed him a twenty-dollar bill, and Kevin pushed through the doors, past his chuckling father, into the glare outside. Snorting as if trying to contain a sneeze, Jerry walked quickly to the Mercury where he shooed away a seagull. Once they were inside the sweltering car on hot seats, he finally broke out laughing. “Did you see her lips moving while she was thinking about it? Man, I’ve never seen anybody get so confused. Fantastic, Kevin. Fantastic!”
“It’s only ten dollars.”
“It’s the easiest ten dollars I ever saw. You’ve been watching everything, haven’t you? You little shit. Roll down the window, for God’s sake—I’m roasting alive in here.”
All during that blistering afternoon Kevin waited in the car while his father ran errands, reluctantly explaining the ongoing con in the short drives between discount markets and peeling houses with bars over the windows. Apparently he needed to stock the shelves of a store that didn’t actually sell anything, “to make it look real for any goddamn bank investigators.” He ran into thrift shops and emerged with armfuls of awful pastel and lime-green clothes, leg warmers, and multicolored headbands, heaving them into the backseat. “You set up a fake business—it costs virtually nothing, and nobody ever checks the names. I’m just one guy on a team here and this isn’t supposed to be my job.”
At a ninety-nine-cent store he trundled out two shopping carts full of glass figurines, and threw them into the trunk with a shattering sound. “I was just supposed to supply the card numbers and get out of here.”
“Those credit cards don’t look like anything, Dad.”
“They don’t need to. That’s white plastic. The accounts are the only things that are real. We’ve got plenty of merchants willing to put that bullshit through; they just take a little cut themselves. You can get real cards easily, it just takes longer and it’s a pain in the ass.”
They unloaded the car at a dilapidated mini-mall by the airport, where plywooded windows were covered with graffiti and the only extant business was a nail salon where two listless women stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes. Back in the car, the sun now fallen beneath the phone wires, Jerry continued, “See, we rent this little hole-in-the-wall store, make it look halfway legit, then in the first couple days we make huge deposits off these hot account numbers. Massive. Nobody’s actually buying or selling anything, you understand—but we’re charging five grand worth of ugly shirts to Mrs. Whoever in Wherever, Illinois. Understand? The banks, you know, all the different banks in the network, they wire the money into an account long before it even shows up on a statement; we wire it around into a bunch of other, smaller accounts; then, by the end of the week, we cash out and head off for a little vacation. It’s a snap, but you need people with balls—not a bunch of crybabies.”
“What happens to the woman in Illinois?”
“What woman in Illinois? Oh, her. She won’t owe anything, kid. Just a headache and a few pennies a year in raised fees. Everybody pays a little bit, every month. It’s like tithing. We’re all part of the same big church and we’re all paying our dues, you know. Welcome to the frontier.”
Early that evening when they returned to the motel lobby, Kevin immediately noticed a woman’s bare feet sticking out from behind an arrangement of shrubbery. Black and white clogs slipped off, her toenails were sprinkled with glitter that clung like silt around the heels. Kevin cradled a grocery bag in both arms, and after several paces he could see that it was the girl from last night, her reflection warped in the dimpled copper surface of the ficus pots. While his father was checking messages at the desk, Kevin slid past the branches and leaned against the mirror across from her. She wore white pants with a few smudges of dirt around the thighs; her hair was bound into a single doorknob knot like a tango dancer’s; and in a crescent beneath her left eye, there was a thumb-sized bruise, yellow and violet. Her bottom lip was split. The rest of her face had suffered a counterstrike of makeup: a matching angry shade of purple over her eyes, and a paved layer of base.
She grimaced and commented on his sunburn, reaching forward to lift his sleeve off the sharp border of different pigments. Dropping back onto the bench, she lit a cigarette, exhaled, and watched the braided smoke rise through the leaves. Kevin said that he hadn’t remembered to ask her name.
“Colette,” she told him, with the softened note of a question in her voice.
Around the shrubbery Jerry approached carrying the rest of the groceries, and when he saw her, he made a sputtering noise. “Oh shit. It’s the six-million-dollar girl. Get away from her, Kevin—we don’t have the money.”
“We’re just talking,” she said.
“Yeah, well, stop talking. Listen, miss, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but don’t try to get to me by manipulating my son. We’re not going through this song and dance again.”
“I need to talk to you. I’m getting out of here,” she said. “Out of town. Okay? Probably out of the country. I’m being totally reasonable here. I just need the money you owe me; I need at least half—”
“I’m not listening to this.”
She followed them toward the room and Kevin felt light-headed as she approached. “You can’t treat me like this. If I wanted to make trouble, believe me, I could. You know the people I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know a damn thing.”
She met Kevin’s eyes while still speaking to his father. “I can call the police, you know. I can
tell them what you’ve got in that room. I’m not somebody you can just push around. I had to cover what you didn’t pay me last night.”
Like a jaywalker on a highway, Jerry scanned the hall before he crossed to her, then he cocked his head to project a whisper more forcefully at her lowered face. “Don’t threaten me with that kind of shit. Don’t even fucking try—”
“I just,” she said, with her voice beginning to tremble, “I owe a lot of money, all right. I did you a favor and I didn’t even know you. I need to be making money every second to keep from drowning here and I can’t do it, I can’t take it. Don’t you understand? I can’t go anywhere else. Just please listen and don’t look at me like that. If you knew me, you would be on my side. You would see how scared I am.”
Jerry closed his eyes and whispered to himself. Somehow she had stumbled upon a magic word, confusing him and loosening his fists. He studied her face. Barely opening his lips, he said, “Yeah. So you’re cornered. Everybody gets cornered sometimes. Doesn’t make it my problem.”
“Just what you owed me last night, it’s enough to get me out of here. It would take so little for you to help me. Just the slightest bit of human decency.”
“Well, right now there’s probably some old lady with her ear to the door, so let’s get out of the hall before she calls the cops on all of us.”
She waited for him to unlock the door, throw down his bags, and find the light switch. As he hooked his boot around the weighted door, he glanced back at her, his teeth resting on his lips midway between a smile and a wince. He said, “You’re right, okay: I’m the biggest son of a bitch in town. But we know that already. So come in—there’s no more surprises.”
She shrugged, then entered the room by ducking under his extended arm. Kevin had the electrified sense of a whole dangerous world in a siege outside the windows. Once his father closed the curtains, turned up the air conditioner, and threw his bag into the closet, a new plan seemed ready to unfold. Jerry spun a chair in a pirouette and mounted it backward.
“Look,” he said. “I do know what it’s like having this kind of thing hanging on you day and night. You’re either somebody’s pimp or somebody’s whore in this world, and you sure as hell don’t get a promotion from one to the other. I can’t give you the money—now wait a second, wait until I finish—because I don’t have it right this second. Ask Kevin—it’s tied up in inventory. Now just listen, don’t get all riled up again. I know you think I’m scum, but as soon as this shit comes through, I’m going to be rich. I’m not talking the kind of rich where you just worry about germs and commies, but enough to keep this kid full of pancakes for a long time. So my idea is this: lay low, hang out. Have a vacation for a couple days, you and Kevin. Go to the zoo. Whatever. Hell, the kid needs an education anyway—go see King Tut. And when I get through with this fiasco, I’ll buy you a ticket wherever you want to go. Rio, Bali, Timbuktu. I don’t give a shit. Throw a dart and see where it lands.”
“Why would you suddenly do that for me?”
“Well—sometimes people have the same enemies.”
“And that makes them friends?”
“No, friends are overrated. More like countrymen. You speak the same language.”
She flashed a smile, and then, for some reason, blushed and glanced away at the floor. Jerry lowered his head to chase her eyes, and asked, “Is that a yes?”
“You better not be lying.”
Because he said it was “the most gentlemanly thing to do” (which made Colette giggle for the first time), Jerry bought a separate room on the credit card that night. Kevin fell asleep in all his clothes, stretched diagonally across the comforter of the old room. He woke with a woman’s pea coat draped over his shoulders. Humidity from the shower still dampened the upper halves of mirrors and windows. There were new bags in the room, a purple backpack and a leopard-skin valise, and Kevin assumed that he had slept through whatever dawn rescue mission had salvaged them from her previous life. When he tried the door to the other room, it was locked. Colette slipped out, balmy with damp hair and the smell of shampoo. As if Kevin had become younger overnight, she had a new patronizing tone, explaining that Jerry needed to work all day without distractions. Gripping his wrist, she whispered, “Come on, we’re having a field trip. Don’t make me get violent.”
Jerry had loaned her the car keys for the day, and she was the worst driver Kevin had ever seen, stepping on the brake whenever she had an idea, hesitating to make a right turn into sparse boulevard traffic, and craning her neck to locate passing horns and shouts. When they finally made it safely to Venice Beach that morning, walking arm in arm past souvenir stands, street painters, and churro wagons, Kevin’s lighthearted mood seemed to come mostly from relief that he had survived the trip. They sat at a café and watched tourists stroll past with balloons and visors, rosy cheeks and sunburned kneecaps.
For a long time, she talked about how handsome she found Jerry. After Kevin had stewed awhile, he made the mistake of disagreeing, prompting her to list his father’s every attractive feature: a rugged hockey player’s nose, big hands, and the relaxed way his neck and shoulders seemed to move when he walked. She liked his blue eyes on the rough canvas of his face; and most of all, she liked something in his voice, something like a comforting whisper in a storm, bold and conspiratorial, which made her feel like any moment he might key her into all the world’s greatest secrets. Kevin stopped listening and watched her face in the changing sunlight through ruffling sycamore trees along the beach. The bruise had deepened overnight, but without makeup, her eyes seemed more thoughtful, a startling green color like a deep stretch of ocean.
“Does he make any real money?” she asked.
“My dad? Sure, all the time. We’re just laying low in that motel, you know. Usually we stay in the Grand, like—whatever. You know, a fancier place.” He slurped his drink, and added, “With a pool.”
“So according to him, this is supposed to be an educational day,” she said, stealing a bite of his pancakes. “What do you want to learn? I’m just overflowing with knowledge here. Look at me. I can’t keep it to myself any longer.”
A man was walking past, fumbling through his wallet, a streamer of toilet paper dragging from his heel. “That poor slob,” said Kevin. “I wonder how much cash you could make just off idiots like that.”
“What do you say we go shopping, darling? That’s the one area where I truly excel.”
“I don’t need to learn to shop, Colette. It’s not exactly a science.”
“It is if you’re broke.”
Her face was pink in the heat. She sipped her drink, crunching the last surviving chip of ice, and smiled at him with a closed mouth, lips stretched wide, a look so mischievous that it woke the little hairs on his arms and neck. “You don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” she whispered.
Out on the beach in the noonday sun, using a handful of stolen Sweet’N Low packets and the car keys, she showed Kevin the basic techniques of shoplifting: pick up two identical items; throw one rapidly down the unbuttoned collar of his white oxford shirt so that it landed inside the sleeve, just under the armpit—or “in a fob pocket, if you’re hopelessly traditional,” she said; then conspicuously put the matching item back into its place. She was amused by the frustrated and determined way Kevin practiced this technique for over an hour on the scorching sand. She lay back on her wadded sweatshirt and purse, having stripped down to an orange bathing suit top. Kevin kept glancing at her, and each time she would open her eyes, facing him with a squint and her flat palm blocking the sun, while he quickly returned to his insistent practicing.
“You know what, Kevin? I’ve decided that you’re a total maniac. Your father may seem crazy, but you’re actually the real nutcase in the family. You’ve been standing there for an hour and a half throwing sugar packets into your sleeve.”
“I’m a perfectionist.”
“Perfectionism is for surgeons and architects. What you’re learnin
g is something people do to avoid that kind of effort.”
“I just want to get it right, Colette. That’s the way I am. If you show me something, I’m not going to do it half-assed.”
“Well, then tuck your shirt in. That way, if it falls through, it gets hung up on the bottom. And then let’s go boost some lighters, for God’s sake. Show me what you got, little man.”
They passed in and out of kiosks along the promenade, stealing chintzy rings, dolphin pendants, and glass bangles, watching each other in the convex security mirrors. Kevin could care less what he was stealing; but between each display rack, Colette bemoaned the worsening quality of beachfront crap, saying that if they worked this strip for an entire week they might accumulate the street value of a hamburger. Kevin was rapt with the task, studying only the size and weight of the items—agate earrings and Swatch watches—becoming so charged that his fingertips were tingling.
Prowling around T-shirt racks and under jangling wind chimes, Kevin overcame his sweaty palms and stampeding heartbeat by focusing on technique, cursing himself for each miscue, whether flubbing an easy shot into his billowing sleeve or gouging himself with a Japanese throwing star. Colette, on the other hand, was festive and improvisational and, like a daredevil, seemed to attract attention on purpose. Upon entering each store, she would start in the middle of a lurid speech about her sex life. “So anyway, he’s a gunnery sergeant down in San Clemente,” she said, somehow pitching silver bracelets into her sweatshirt hood as she loudly continued, “… and the guy had a kickstand practically. I mean, I’m a young woman—and holy Moses—I didn’t think I had the equipment for that kind of ordnance, if you know what I mean.”
At first Kevin thought that she was only showing off or trying to distract him. But he soon realized that there was a method to it. Though she drew a great deal of staring and suppressed giggles as she first came into a store, detailing a date’s latex fetish or her own desire to dress up as Batwoman, eventually clerks and other shoppers looked away from her in embarrassment, covering their faces, shaking their heads, and she was ingenious about timing her thefts to the wincing reactions around her.