by Peter Craig
Colette fell backward onto the bed and laughed hysterically up at the ceiling.
“Shut up,” said Kevin. “You got me those clothes—it’s your fault.”
“I didn’t tell you to skateboard in them.”
That evening when Jerry read the paper, he nodded along solemnly, then rolled the newspaper up and pointed it at Kevin as if threatening a disobedient dog. There were going to be some serious changes. No more gallivanting through Radio Shacks in that stupid Armani suit. No more IBM computer games. No more conversations about binary code with the maintenance staff. Kevin was grounded until he learned to blend into the vast Midwestern landscape of politely bland people.
With his cheeks and earlobes growing hot, Kevin argued that he was a vital part of these cons; and he threatened that if they left him alone in the motel he would rob the front desk. His panic was not simply that he had been so accurately fingered in several malls across I-70, but that for close to a month now he had felt detached from the two of them, the most useless member of the team, banished in the evenings to his own room, the television always seeming to mock him with The Love Boat theme, nothing much to clear his mind beyond his repeated efforts to break into vending or cigarette machines. He wondered if Colette had mentioned that day on Perch’s lot to his father.
He admitted that he was going through a stressful time, which Jerry might have intuited from his hobbies. Recently Kevin had learned to break into the jacks of fortress pay phones with a homemade tool somewhat like an Allen wrench, hooking up his own phone to bypass the system. On a hacker BBS he had learned to make his own blue box, and, using the toy whistle from a box of Cap’n Crunch, he could reproduce the 2600 hertz tone necessary to authorize a call. Each time he was successful, he dialed Jerry or Colette to boast about his ten-cent heist. He argued that leaving him out of the game would be a waste of his growing technical abilities, and might send him into a spiral of less healthy interests.
Jerry grabbed Kevin by the shoulders and steered him to the mirror. With a marker, he leaned over the cabinet and began tracing Kevin’s features in the glass. When he was finished, the drawing was narrow, with hooded eyes and a faint dusting of shadow under a long nose. “See! You already look like a composite sketch.”
About an hour later, while Kevin lay on his bed with a pillow over his face, Colette slipped through the adjoining door. It was the first time she had come to his room since that embarrassing day in the truck, and he sat up instantly. “I got you a present.” From a stuffed paper bag, she poured onto the comforter a torque wrench and a sampling of padlocks and doorknobs. “Listen, Kev, he just got way overboard with all of that stuff.”
“What’s this?”
“I wanted to explain to you—he didn’t mean to be so harsh. He wasn’t saying that you were ugly or anything. You’re handsome and you’re not abnormal, and someday some girl, somewhere—”
“You don’t have to apologize for my dad. I know him better than you do.”
“It’s just that you’re sort of mysterious looking. Your father has a very trustworthy face, that’s his gift. But you always seem more—how should I say it—well, you always look like you’re plotting something.”
“These are fucking awesome,” said Kevin, holding up a pin-tumbler lock. “You even got these tube-shaped ones on the vending machines.”
“Yeah, I went to a hardware store. What I’m trying to say is, when you’re nervous, you look like a kid just learning to read; you move your lips. It doesn’t mean that your ideas aren’t wonderful, Kevin. In fact, your father is getting competitive with you about some of these plans. In a way, that whole speech was a compliment.”
Kevin held up a row of long and flexible metallic strips, and asked, “What are these?”
“They’re bristles off a street cleaner. You file them into different shapes and they make the best picks.”
“How do you know that?”
“I once had a stalker who used them.”
Kevin studied her face for a sign that she was joking, but she met his eyes and didn’t budge.
“Are you serious?”
“You maniacs don’t know anything about me. As far as you’re concerned, I just materialized one day.” She retreated a few steps and hugged her lean body against the doorjamb. “Just play with your new toys, Kev. They’re a lot easier to figure out than I am.”
TEN
Paranoid about the news article, Jerry claimed to know a disbarred lawyer who could give them foolproof new identities. “If the newspaper has that kind of info, the bloodhounds are right behind us.”
But it wasn’t until summer that Jerry hunted down his old associate Army Walsh, living with his longtime wife in a house on stilts, above a tidal flat of mossy rocks off Puget Sound. Kevin, Jerry, and Colette stayed with them over the Fourth of July weekend, all sharing one cluttered room. Bowls of smoothed bottle chips, translucent Japanese fishing weights, a ship’s barometer and nautical clock, shell-studded picture frames, and candlesticks of carved driftwood, every decoration in the house seemed washed ashore. The wife moved in the jellyfish billows of a diaphanous purple dress; and Army, wearing only yellow gym shorts fraying at the waistband, his long beard dampened with beer suds, seemed not so much disbarred as shipwrecked.
The wife had known Jerry since the days when he ran a construction company as a cover operation, and Army—who barely spoke over the sound of the tide—had known him even eight years earlier, in high school, when the San Fernando Valley was filled with orange groves and Jerry was a promising young car thief with a pompadour and sideburns. He was sent off to military school by his terrified and alcoholic mother (the widow of a tail gunner), then to a juvenile detention center in some godforsaken stretch of desert, where—“What happened again?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Jerry. “I escaped off a road crew and never looked back. Except when they caught me the next time. That’s enough of memory lane—you’re making me all fucking misty-eyed.”
Three oily cats crawled around the porch and through the house. After Colette courted them with kissing sounds, she stroked the arching back of a tabby while ignoring the conversation. The woman raised her voice at Colette in the way some people blare at foreigners. The cat purred loudly; Colette didn’t respond. Jerry waited for her, then finally said, “She’s from Los Angeles too. Right, baby?”
Colette mumbled, “Just because you abducted me in L.A. doesn’t mean that’s where I’m from.”
“Okay. We don’t know where she’s from, but we know it’s not there.”
“Well, good for you,” said the woman. “One less person from California.”
Colette whispered, either to the cat or Kevin, “I’m from Michigan—and a normal boyfriend would probably know that after almost a year.”
“Kevin? Would you like to play a game, honey?” asked the woman. “We have Chinese checkers.”
“Oh, don’t get him started on something,” said Jerry. “He’ll never be able to stop. The kid’s got a screw loose. Just watch him tie his shoes—he’s the reason they invented Velcro.”
Colette cleared her throat and said, “Don’t be an asshole, Jerry. You know you’d fall apart without him.”
“See this! This is my crew here,” said Jerry. “This is every day of my life with these two.”
Jerry and Army talked briefly about business, while the woman cut up bits of cheese and placed them onto Wheat Thins. Jerry bragged that his friend, after serving sixteen months on fraud charges, had become a wizard with new identities, so determined to stay hidden that he had invented a mob of aliases to protect himself. “You’re looking at about fifteen people here.” One of his fake identities was a notary public; he had contacts within the DMV and Social Security offices. They walked around the porch, mumbling their plans, until Jerry finally returned and announced that the three of them would assume the identities of “deceased children.”
Colette’s mouth curled down in horror. “I’m not going to be a dead kid, Jer
ry!”
He refused to argue with her. They had been on the road a long time, and if she thought the Secret Service, the FBI, and the credit card bureaus weren’t closing in, she was being naive. “Let him do his work, Colette. He’ll give us three people without histories.”
“Blank slates,” Army said with a damp lisp.
Later that night, they sat around a bonfire on the rocky shore watching Seattle’s fireworks splash up from behind dark hills and radio towers, the delayed, disembodied thunder reaching them long after the fleeting sparks. Colette retreated to sit by herself on a broken slab of concrete near the top of the beach. Kevin found her, sweatshirt tucked over her bare legs, her chin on her knees.
“I am so tired of your father’s hippie underground railroad.”
Kevin said, “I bet I could forge a birth certificate. Doesn’t seem that impressive.”
As the tide rose and now sizzled at the edges of the bonfire, Jerry and his old friends reclined in the smoke eddies and laughed up toward the stars.
“I’ve never understood why people like smoking that stuff. I just get hungry and think everybody hates me.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us you were from Michigan? We were just south of there—we could have stopped, we could’ve said hello to somebody.”
“And I’m sure that would have been a magical time.”
From the raucous sound of their distant voices, Kevin could tell that his father and the couple had started recounting memories again, this time with more bluster. The ambient light was faint enough to see plummeting bats around them. Colette grunted at a moving shadow.
Quietly, Kevin asked if she’d been near his age when she ran away from home. Instead of answering him, she started making a circle of pebbles beside her. Farther down the beach, past slanted trees with exposed roots, three sparklers shed into the damp rocks. “Close. I think I was sixteen. So you’ve still got a little time.”
Somewhere a cherry bomb screeched and spat. He asked why she left home, and at first she chuckled as if she’d never confess such a thing; but something about the tone around the fire, or the way Jerry’s age became suddenly more visible by proximity to his weathered friends, made her seem lonesome. No matter how irritated she pretended to be with Kevin, he had a sense that she shouldn’t be left to herself. After a long silence, she promised to tell him everything, her whole life story if that’s what he wanted, as long as he swore not to pass anything on to his father.
Jerry stood up to go swimming, stripping to his boxer shorts in front of the smoldering fire while the others laughed that he was insane. His body was silhouetted against the flickering light, wide shoulders and broad chest, as he walked gingerly on sharp rocks. “I don’t care about any cold water, you crybabies! Colette! Let’s go swimming, baby. Let’s show these pussy little forest people what we’re made out of.” She sat still as he repeated her name, until he finally gave up with an exaggerated wave of his arm and crossed the rocky beach to the dock. As he dove into the water with a hard splash, followed by a shocked howl that echoed around the trees, Colette leaned all the way forward as if to tell Kevin a ghost story.
As a little girl she shared “a rat-hole apartment” in Saginaw, Michigan, with a mother, “who looked just like Ann-Margret,” despite her tendency to slam crystal meth and indulge a parade of jittery and abusive men. A straight-A student who skipped several grades—“I could read at like four”—Colette rode her tasseled bicycle home one day to find all of their belongings outside in the snow. For some reason, she characterized this eviction as if it were a dashing assistant deputy coming to rescue a talented child, though she did betray some shading of genuine horror when she mentioned how a social worker undressed a Barbie doll and asked if she had been touched on the plastic hinge. From the motel that night, her mother had gone out to turn a trick and get high, never returning, and at seven or eight years old, Colette had apparently lived in the room on her own for a week until the neighbors called the police.
From there she went into the sprawling system, where she solved the problems of every chaotic foster home, redecorating the squalid rooms and transforming violent orphans into lovesick admirers. In the next four years, she lived in seven different houses, “putting up with your occasional, you know, really bad apple.” Finally, when she was eleven, she landed in a foster home run by a devout Lutheran named Cassie Doerfling. Cassie made her living off foster kids and sometimes had more than fifteen or twenty in the house. “It was a scam, I guess, but she was basically an okay person—strict.” She made everyone in the house pray before bed and meals, attend church and Sunday school, study the New Testament and memorize verse; but the work seemed a small price for a woman who cooked meals and never raised her voice or fists. In the house, Colette became very attached to the younger kids, writing plays for them to perform, devising games, and sewing costumes. For a long time she described all of the toys and fairy wings she made for these girls, but mentioned only in passing the Armenian twin brothers who eventually set fire to the house.
“Then in junior high, you know, other girls can be pretty cruel—and I just didn’t have anything. I wasn’t going to be that kid in the homemade shirt, you know, who smells like mothballs. So at thirteen or fourteen, I was shoplifting everything I wore. By the time I was in high school, I dressed like a model. You should have seen me. If I stuck around, I would have been voted Most Likely to Wind Up in Paris.”
At fifteen, the end of her sophomore year (which should have been her senior year if she had really skipped grades), she had an art teacher who fell instantly in love with her. Here Kevin noticed for the first time how she spoke toward the hills and sky whenever she was exaggerating, and how she played with something on the ground beside her whenever she passed closer to the truth. As she ducked down and sorted through the pebbles, she explained that she had been caught stealing art supplies, and that the teacher had threatened to have her expelled, continually bringing it up as a mild threat during their affair, which was consummated in his Buick.
“Maybe he was a little bit of a sleazebag,” she said, “but he went crazy over me. He would call me and talk all night about how he was leaving his wife. I didn’t believe him or anything—but, I guess I just wanted to hear that kind of thing.” She was drawing with a stick in the damp sand around her. “One day his wife found some letters we’d written to each other, and he basically panicked. He said he wanted to take me out of town—he didn’t want to lose me. I don’t think he wanted to go to jail either. I was sort of depressed, because I didn’t love him; but I guess all I’d ever been waiting for was a ride.
“I called Cassie from a pay phone in Ohio, and when she picked up, I was too ashamed to say anything. She knew it was me, and she repeated my name a couple times, told me to stay safe, said Jesus was with me, and I just hung up. I don’t feel guilty about anything but that, because really, she was my mother. She raised me. Everything solid and stable in my life had come from her, and then I just left her like she was a stranger. Like somebody that rode next to me on a bus.”
She played with a thread from her cut-off jeans, coiling it around her ring finger.
The art teacher drove her all the way to the Pacific Ocean, chattering about his dreams while she watched the landscape change from galloping crop rows to scrub brush and canyons. “First thing I thought when we got to L.A.—I was amazed at how ugly palm trees really are. Big dusty brooms full of rats. We wound up at this motel on the west side. Basically he got really weird on me—a little violent—and I just started crying, kind of freaked out about the whole situation. We had a huge screaming fight and needed to change motels before the cops came. I guess we made up, temporarily. But when he was asleep, I took all his money and credit cards. I stepped right out into the night. Bought some clothes, some luggage. I had a great time, actually, all dressed up and shopping, salesladies hopping to my side when they saw I had some sugar daddy’s cards. I knew he couldn’t call the cops to report them stolen. But he cance
led them, one by one, and then the celebration sort of faded away, and I scraped by however I could. It got worse every month. Ugly shit, you don’t even want to know.”
She turned and, for the first time, seemed to acknowledge Kevin sitting beside her. Her hands were buried under her loose sleeves, but she rubbed a sweatshirt cuff along the side of his hair.
“About a year later, there you were—asleep with a fever in a motel bed, traveling with that big crazy sea monster over there. It’s fate, I guess.”
The couple was now shouting at Jerry about jellyfish as he backstroked around the dock. He blew a plume of water over his face and yelled, “Who are you people? The fucking Coast Guard? Let them take their best shot.”
Kevin asked, “Why don’t you want him to know anything?”
“What do you think we’re doing here, Kev? We’re going to trade in our whole histories. Like a set of hot speakers. He doesn’t want to know me any better than this, honey. Maybe that’s what I like about him.”
ELEVEN
Mostly by posing as a genealogist, Army had accumulated certified copies of birth certificates for practically an entire graveyard. While Colette found the process the most nauseating depth she had ever reached, Kevin couldn’t deny himself a morbid fascination in absorbing the identities of stillbirths or tragedies on rainy highways. Why should there be any disrespect? If there were organ donors, why not document donors? If anything, it gave him a feeling of determination, to live a thrilling and adventurous life as a tribute. In his most macabre fantasies at night, he imagined there would be some otherworldly communication with this graveyard sponsor, a whisper in his head or an occasional breeze that pointed him in the right direction like the tablet on a Ouija board. He hoped that his new name would come from a boy who had gone out gloriously—in a fiery plane crash or on a sinking ship, or, as he told Colette one night while they sat on the porch, torn apart by wolves. She hit him on the shoulder.