by Peter Craig
The banter wasn’t always dirty. Apparently she read the cashier and whatever terrain of browsers, salespeople, and security personnel to decide which persona and narrative would provide the most cover. In a makeshift stall of African handbags and onyx talismans, she became a desperate and battered woman: “You can’t call the police, because he’ll kill me. He’ll do it too. Look at my eye.” She started to cry. As the staff whispered and circled at a distance, Colette broke into a coughing fit that became so hysterical she needed to hunch over and run from the store. Kevin assumed the game was over. But when he caught up to her on the bike path, she nudged him off stride and stuck out her tongue, showing him, on the tip, a tiny pair of earrings.
Amid scarves, Hacky Sacks, and incense sticks, she was an expecting mother loudly considering natural childbirth into a tub of Jell-O; and along a rack of jewelry and Vuarnet sunglasses, she was the snottiest princess on the beach, forcing a clerk to avert his eyes in fear: “Excuse me, Mr. Salesperson? A hundred dollars? You’re not honestly trying to claim this is a real emerald chip, are you? Because I happen to have a cough drop in my mouth that tastes just like it.”
Finally, in a store playing a hypnosis tape with the sound of the ocean (running slightly out of sync with the real ocean), while covering each finger with a different smoldering mood ring, she turned to Kevin and proclaimed: “I’m in love.” She started returning the rings, every third one vanishing down her sweatshirt sleeve. “It’s the first time in my pathetic life—that’s for sure. Of course, I’m a little disappointed. I always expected that when it happened, it would solve all my problems. I’d live a good life afterward, never make any mistakes, never do anything stupid. Instead I just feel completely hopeless, like I’ll have to go back to the grind in a few days and everything will be that much harder. Happiness just makes fun of people like us.” She smiled at Kevin and added, “You’re wondering—who’s the lucky bastard?”
Just then, Kevin’s shirt, which was tucked and weighted down with merchandise that had fallen to his beltline, was pulled loose by his sudden twisting motion toward her, so that two handfuls of worry beads drained onto the floor.
Colette grabbed his arm and said, “No, honey. They’re not marbles.” To the saleswoman she called, “Excuse us, he’s made a mess again. We’ll just go get a broom from the shop next door. I’m so sorry.”
The saleswoman raised her voice behind them: “Excuse me? Excuse me,” stepping out of the store and trailing them a few yards along the promenade. Colette clamped onto his arm, whispering, “Just walk, don’t run, just walk,” until the woman whistled with impressive volume and summoned two cops from beside an ice-cream stand.
Colette loosened her grip on his arm and said, “Now run.”
They dodged through pedestrian traffic, balancing along a low brick wall, racing through a pickup basketball game and back into the crowds, narrowly avoiding roller skaters, rupturing through the joined hands of strolling couples, trampling over the flattened boxes of break-dancers and piercing through tambourine-jangling clusters of Hare Krishnas. He kept track of Colette only by the waving flag of her ponytail, and once he caught up with her in an alley that smelled of Chinese food, he yanked the hood of her sweatshirt, dropping a trail of rings. She was laughing. “Pipe down,” she said. “You’re cracking under the pressure.”
When they reached the car, she couldn’t find the keys. She searched frantically through her purse full of trinkets while rhinestones fell from her sleeves and pockets, until Kevin grinned and dangled the keys in front of her eyes. She snatched them, but Kevin refused to let go until she tickled him under his extended arm.
She said, “If we’re going to have any future as a criminal duo, you’re going to need to grow up.”
FIVE
Back at the motel, Jerry came to the door wrapped in a towel, bare shoulders steaming as he bored the tip of a washcloth into his ear. “Wait, wait,” he said. “We need a drumroll. Both of you—close your eyes.”
They stepped into the room with their hands over their eyes while Jerry hopped into his pants. “All right, no peeking. Whoever peeks is going to get a foot in the ass. All right, all right—open ’em.”
In the effort to create a mood, he had tied ribbons around the room, but they drooped so lopsidedly that they instead seemed like strings on an amnesiac’s fingers. Three presents sat on the bed. He had attempted to gift-wrap them with wads of old newspapers, comprised mostly of want ads and frowning underwear models. “I can’t believe you got me a present,” said Colette, and playfully slapped his shaved cheek. He handed her the smallest package, and she perched on the edge of the bed to unfasten the corners, spreading out the smudged paper as if she might frame it, then furrowing her eyebrows at the sight of a velvet box. “Oh, no.”
“Hey, when things go well for me, they go well for everybody. That’s just the kind of snake I am.”
She eased open the box, then held up a gold chain with a sparkling droplet on the end, casting a wavering spot of refracted light onto her forehead. At first she frowned as if for an obvious fake; but then she made a stunned click with her tongue and the focus left her eyes, as if she were remembering something distant. An entire afternoon culling through storefront garbage had been overwhelmed by one tiny rock.
“It’s real,” said Jerry. “Go ahead and bite it.”
She composed herself with a quick swipe of her fingers under her eyelashes. “You don’t even know me.”
“You don’t seem very happy. If I thought you were going to be upset, I’d a’ bought you a yo-yo or something. Hey, dingo—open yours.”
“It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“You see, we’re all square. Open your presents, meatball! I started out this morning and I just knew everything was perfect. Ever have one of those days? Perfect! Ran out of gas right at the station—pulled up and bam—dead. Right at the pump. And I said, if that isn’t a good omen …”
Kevin opened the first box, clawing through the wrapping to uncover a helmet detailed with a sparkly American flag.
“There you go. Put it on. Anyway, I did everything right today. Cleaned out the last account. End of story. Hey, look at Evel Knievel.”
Kevin stood in the middle of the room with the heavy helmet over his head, muting the sound, making his neck feel thin. “What the hell is this for?”
“Open the other one, you moron.”
He tore the newspaper and dug out a skateboard from the tattered shreds.
“That’s the Cadillac of skateboards, kid. State of the art. Might as well have diamonds for wheels. I talked to every kid in the store and that is one cold-blooded board. I figure it’ll get you out of the house more often.”
Kevin was distracted by the thought that his father might be trying to get rid of him, to roll him away downhill toward a busy highway. No one was moving in the room.
“Why don’t you go practice?” said Jerry.
“Right now?”
“Yeah, sure. We’ll pack up in here. Colette will help me. Right, baby?”
Defeated and exiled, Kevin tried out the board on the long runway of the halls, speeding into the ash cans and ice machines. Because the wheels rolled too slowly on the spongy carpet, he carried it upstairs to the roof and burst out onto a flushed night sky, across an undulating terrain of tar paper around the bulkheads of elevator shafts and cooling towers, all penned in by a waist-high wall. A cool breeze smelling of rubber, soot, and palm dust swept off the low rooftops. Maybe he could get some benefit out of the stupid childhood toy. He imagined skating through the kiosks of that day, aisle to aisle, in this constant floating motion, or maybe department stores, suddenly deft enough to boost rings and real diamond necklaces while accelerating toward revolving doors.
Lost in the fantasy of weaving through display cases and escaping down escalators, Kevin began racing toward the stairs repeatedly, leaping off the board, kicking it upward into his hand and shambling downward. The moon rose higher; the traffic diminis
hed below. He skated around the roof for another try, and when he rounded a bulkhead, he saw Colette against the faint western horizon.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. Her lips sounded loose and she was sniffling in the warm wind. “Listen, I wanted to tell you how much fun I had. I got my money, so … Everything’s fine. Everything will be okay. But I’m on my way again—off into the real world. I guess our love was never meant to be.”
He pushed off harder and ignored her. Farther away on the tar paper, he could just hear the faint intonation of her voice, buried by the pestle of his wheels. He looped around her again, an elliptical orbit, and she called out, “Are you going to slow down enough to say good-bye?”
A jet ripped overhead and dissipated into a residue of thunder.
“I guess you’re in your insane practice mode again. Just nod or something. Stamp your feet on the board twice.”
“Watch this,” he said, speeding toward the stairwell.
After barreling past the open fire door in a fluid motion, he waited too long and launched over the concrete steps. For a single stalling millisecond he saw the possibility of grabbing the board to negotiate the landing below; but the board twisted out from under him, and he hit the concrete in a tangled mess of splayed legs and dog-paddling arms. Colette rushed downstairs so quickly that a platform shoe shook loose and skipped toward him like the last rock in an avalanche. “You moron! You freak!” she shouted. “What are you thinking? Oh God, sweetie—you just murdered yourself. Don’t panic. You’re going to be okay. Don’t move.”
Beached beneath the fluorescent lights, where a gray moth batted and circled, he felt almost peaceful, until, warming up like an electric blanket, he began to notice the precise spots where he’d damaged himself: wrist, ribs, hipbone, back. His father’s voice echoed from the landing below: “Kevin, you are a first-class bozo, you know that? It took you just over an hour to kill yourself with that thing. He’s all right. That’s why I got the helmet.”
“Don’t move him, Jerry! You didn’t see it. He broke every bone in his body.”
“Oh, stop. He didn’t break anything—this kid’s like a squirrel. He fell out of a tree once and he just ripped his pants a little.”
His father grabbed him beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet, and, despite the dizzy slice of pain from his ribs to his temples, Kevin was happy that his legs were intact.
“Let me carry that awful thing,” said Colette. He slid his arm around her waist and, even with his wrist thumping at her side, he liked the feeling of butterfly breaths under her new T-shirt. His father took off his helmet and ruffled his hair, and they moved as one carousing, six-legged creature onto their floor, all the way to the door of the room. The phone was ringing. Kevin sat on the closed toilet lid while Colette soaked a washcloth for his cuts. She held his wrist on her palm. “You just get set on doing something, don’t you? You forget everything else.”
In the other room, Jerry said, “Who? Who? I’m asking you who called to complain. The kid just fell down the stairs—he’s clumsy. Everything is under control up here. Oh, you got to be kidding.” He hung up so violently that the phone rang like a service bell.
At the threshold he leaned inward with both hands on the door frame above. “We have to get out of here right this second.”
“Jerry, his wrist is swollen.”
“We have to go. Now. Somebody complained to the front desk, and that jackass just called the police on us.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know, Colette—they thought we were sacrificing a goat or something. Just let’s get our shit to the car and don’t look back. If you’re going your own way, then adios. But I suggest you start running now.”
Bags over shoulders, board tucked under his arm, Jerry stumbled down the hall, through a side door, ducking his head through swatting palm fronds. Colette followed and landed with her bags in a pile at her feet, hands on her hips. After the hard dash to the car, she was panting and flushed. She parted her lips, but remained quiet, with a look of childish confusion. Jerry smiled and ran his hand over the Mercury like a salesman in a showroom.
“It’s not a white horse,” he said. “But if you’re interested, it’s a ride out of town.”
SIX
Besides his sprained wrist, which Kevin wrapped and rewrapped each night with a new collection of Ace bandages, the next few weeks became a catalog of bruises and abrasions: gouged elbows and scuffed knees, cheese-grater skin on the palms of his hands. He rolled into a cactus garden in Scottsdale, Arizona; bruised his tailbone trying to ride a low railing in Albuquerque. After a hard spill somewhere in the Texas panhandle, Colette studied his pupils with a flashlight, and swore that if he ever tried to leap off a retaining wall again, she would murder him with a shoe.
The board turned every rolling parking lot of horse trailers and Winnebagos into an amusement park, and initially Colette and Jerry had capitalized on his new hobby. Whenever they wanted time alone, the board would be sitting in the hallway, or tilted against the door like a Do Not Disturb sign with wheels; and Kevin would skate off cursing, punching vending machines and throwing himself headlong down an asphalt hill toward the parking blocks and newspaper stands in the distance. If he was bleeding badly enough, skewered on a holly bush or a cyclone fence, he would return to the room, knock on the door and claim that he needed stitches, eavesdropping on the whispered argument, until the door would open to reveal them both red-faced and hastily dressed, his father with a clenched jaw and Colette with her eyes unfocused, as if she were listening to a song in her head. “Sorry to bother you again,” Kevin would say. “But I’m losing a lot of blood here and I started to get light-headed.”
When Kevin was wrapped with gauze and surgical tape, Jerry would walk him around the motel, once fatuously claiming that he and Colette needed to take long naps because of their late-night planning sessions. Could Kevin please amuse himself in a less masochistic way? “I mean, do you ever land one of these tricks? It seems like all you do is fall down from different angles.”
So Kevin would go to his adjoining room and practice throwing soap bars into his sleeves. A month into their eastward trip, he couldn’t believe how his father and Colette had bonded, their initial maddening honeymoon segueing into an even more excruciating apprenticeship, during which, for long drives along I-40, over the Ozarks and into the Smokies, Jerry would lecture her about the fundamentals of the grift, from check kiting to white plastic to the old-fashioned pigeon drop and Jamaican switch. No matter how diligently Kevin memorized and practiced what he overheard during the long rides between motor courts and diners, where his father and Colette snuggled together in the booths and teased him about his fetishistic oranges and pancakes, Kevin still resented having been demoted to the lowliest bagman in this newly formed team. At night he would lie awake with the door partially ajar between rooms, watching their television flicker like distant heat lightning, and he would fantasize that someday he would devise his own con, some great ruse that would forever bear his name, immortalizing him like P. T. Barnum or Charles Ponzi, some heist so perfect that it would leave all the world’s greatest hustlers in an impoverished trail of love and admiration.
SEVEN
One night in the first week of December, they went Dumpster diving through a wealthy Maryland suburb of D.C., in a pickup that sounded full of crickets at each bump in the road. They cruised through a neighborhood of giant houses and vast treeless yards. Colette wore a cowboy hat slanted over her eyes; Kevin pulled the hood up on his black sweatshirt, like a monk’s cowl. The night was unseasonably cold, and just after one A.M. the air filled up with thin flurries for the season’s first snow, dusting the lawns and the long brick walkways, gathering under the feet of jockey statues and the bark-covered clearings of dormant rosebushes. The snow fell in spirals around the Doric columns of porches and past weather vanes perched like crows against faintly luminous clouds, but melted as soon as they touched the glazed street
s.
“Look at how these motherfuckers live,” said Jerry. “You could make a whole new continent out of their garbage.”
“What are you waiting for, baby?”
“Just want some damn cover. Nobody’s heard of a tree around here. All right, this is good. I’ll write the address. Now—Kevin, wake up. Not so loud this time.”
Kevin and Colette slid off the seat and ran to a trash can at the base of the driveway. The air was spun full of flakes and Colette stood a few moments trying to catch them on her tongue. Kevin swept a puddle off the tarp over the back bed and unhooked the Bungee cords; he and Colette piled the garbage bags inside and he refastened the tarp over the lumps. Back in the front cab, with the defroster cooking a rancid smell, a radio commercial murmuring like a conversation in crossed telephone lines, Colette scrubbed her hands with napkins and spit some lingering taste off her lips.
“I think those people had a dead cat in there.”
Back at the motel parking lot, in the diminishing snowfall, beside a highway of passing rigs and splashing tires, with his yellow dishwashing gloves and barbecue tongs, Kevin’s job was to sort bills, carbons, and credit card applications from the trash. When Colette came out to check on him, jumping in place in only a robe and slippers, she laughed at the way he reconstructed each household into its own representative pile. While one house had a pile of microwave dinners—fish sticks and macaroni—along with trails of discarded double-A batteries, another was mostly empty cans of fruit cocktail and peaches, spent tubes of liniment, boxes from saltine crackers and Lorna Doone cookies, and moldering jars of pickle relish.
He explained his system to Colette: “The second house is some old lady losing her mind. She’s got a bad back or something, and she probably doesn’t spend much money on anything. There’s definitely not a microwave in the house, no cable, and if there’s a Beta-Max, the clock will be flashing midnight until the end of the world.”