Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  Once the plan moved forward, however, Kevin was livid that his father refused to make him sixteen. While Colette clearly leapfrogged several years, maybe half a decade, to become the twenty-two-year-old Esther Barrick (d. 1962, complications from pneumonia), Kevin was forced to regress a full four months in Douglas “Dougie” Herman, because Jerry claimed it was the only father-son duo he could find in Army’s ghoulish files. Kevin was further disheartened that the two had died when a fishing boat capsized, the sort of hapless vacationer’s death that made him imagine his guiding spirit in tall rubber boots and a floppy hat. “Were they at least eaten by sharks?” Kevin asked.

  “I don’t know, Kevin. It doesn’t matter.”

  Jerry, Colette, and Kevin began a long, nervous process of Social Security forms, DMV lines, and passport offices where prominent signs threatened six-year prison terms for fraudulent applications. During a driving test, Colette ran over a long stretch of pylons and jeopardized the entire scam. She was more irritable than Kevin had ever seen her, and in every new ID picture she was partially hidden under a cascade of messy hair.

  For many years Kevin had instinctively believed that morality was the symptom of a dark and mysterious disease, a kind of tremor in the soul; but while Colette’s conscience made no sense to him whatsoever, he was unable to sleep at the thought of her suffering. His efforts to comfort her seemed only to make the situation worse. One night, while she was sleeping on the couch to avoid Jerry, Kevin went to her and hovered beside her. She was awake, staring at him through threaded eyelashes. He told her that she shouldn’t worry about Cassie’s God, because to Him, an identity was little more than a bar code. “You see, it’s just hidden numbers within the stripes, which are there to help the computer isolate the actual code. It wouldn’t be hard to get some stickers and, with magnetic ink, just print a whole bunch of new bar codes. We could go put them on beluga caviar, and it could show up as gumdrops. But it wouldn’t actually be gumdrops.”

  “Kevin, go back to bed.”

  “What I’m saying is that if you’re worried about your eternal soul and that kind of stuff—it’s still the same. You’ve just got like a new sticker on the outside.”

  “Wonderful. I’m now a box of gumdrops. I feel so much better.”

  The next morning, while they waited in their car during the ferry ride, stalled in a wavering tunnel, Colette said she wanted to find the cemetery and leave flowers for her new alias. Jerry snapped, “You’re being fucking ridiculous, you know that. I’m getting really sick of these moral cramps, Colette—”

  “Oh my God. Okay, Jerry—if I don’t agree with you, it must be because I’m having my period. That’s great. Whenever a guy says that, it means he’s completely baffled by anything more complicated than a lawn mower.”

  “Listen, baby. I need you to calm down and think a little more realistically. All right? You have a very screwed-up sense about the world sometimes.”

  “Of course I do. I died of pneumonia in the sixties.”

  “It’s paperwork. If you’re going to put some kind of significance into paperwork, honey, then you should get on the next ferry to hell right now. It’s not voodoo, it’s not a volcano sacrifice: it’s red tape! Ask Kevin.”

  “Kevin doesn’t think it’s red tape. To him it’s fucking necromancy. I’m not going to ask him, he’s more twisted than you are.”

  “We steal identities every day,” said Jerry. “Why should it be different because the person is dead? Why is it okay to steal a credit card number, but not a name? You’re going to have to get this shit straight, Colette, or you don’t belong out here. Now, I don’t want to argue anymore on this tugboat, because I got nothing but coffee in me and I’m going to puke if I keep talking.”

  She was quiet for a few rolls and dips beneath them. Finally she said, “It’s just terrible to have to do something like this.”

  “Then go work for the Peace Corps. Dig latrines. You don’t get to pick and choose. You don’t get to ride somebody’s Visa card for five grand and then be Mother fucking Teresa about this.”

  “Why are you always so angry at me, Jerry? I don’t even get to say my opinion?”

  “I’m angry because I hate phony righteousness. Right now it’s all on me, and that’s fine. If we get picked up tomorrow— Colette, you’ll say you were kidnapped, and Kevin will pretend to be some idiot savant who doesn’t know anything but computers. But time will go by, and you’ll have to make some choices. You’re not thieves right now, you’re a couple of shoplifting babies. And you’re toying with all these little ideas about yourselves—‘Oh, I only rob from bad people,’ or ‘I only take what I deserve,’ ‘I’m too good to do this, but not that.’ Give me a break. If you want to live outside the rules, kids, then there’s one moral: protect yourself and your crew. That’s what I’m doing. So don’t rely on me, expect me to save your asses, cart you around, and then act like you’re better than me because I’m willing to use anything I can. So far you’ve only seen the good times. When it gets bad, and believe me, things can get motherfucking awful—then you’ll change your tune, baby. I don’t care what you believe in, I don’t care what the name on your little phony license or that little phony passport says—you’ll find out exactly who you are. Both of you. Goddamn it, I’m seasick!”

  TWELVE

  In Seattle, with the last dwindling set of cards, they rented a hitch and trailer, and filled it with fur coats, toolboxes, and, at Kevin’s request, a collection of newly unveiled Macintosh computers. The trailer rattled behind the bumper of their orange Chevy Nova, which smelled sweet from leaking antifreeze. In Deer Lodge, Montana, worried that prolonged exposure to fumes might cause brain damage to his already slaphappy crew, Jerry traded the car with a fence who claimed to need only the bell housing of its transmission.

  “In my day, when you stole a car, you used the whole car,” said Jerry. “Like the Indians did with a buffalo.”

  By then moving cash had become far more work than moving themselves. Money orders needed to be accumulated at less than three hundred dollars apiece to avoid a record with the authorities; humble bank accounts had to be constantly circulated from one to the next, a simmering pot constantly stirred. In late July, Jerry opted for an easier way to wash the money, closing out many of the accounts to buy thick booklets of traveler’s checks in his new fake name, which he could cash at any lobby or convenience store without attracting much attention. At first Kevin thought his father’s sudden proclivity for tourist sites (the soak in the Mammoth Hot Springs where Colette was a lone pink bikini in a herd of black one-pieces, or the souvenir rampage through Custer’s last stand) might be nothing more than a ploy to cash bulky checks discreetly. But as Jerry became more cavalier about hotel prices, snubbing the usual motor courts in favor of hotel compounds with squelching arcade castles under portcullis doors, indoor pools of cavernous echoes and chlorinated air, thumping cowboy bars and all-you-can-eat buffets and air conditioners as powerful as jets, Kevin began to assume that these traveler’s checks had unleashed the giddy momentum of amusement-park spending.

  With a feeling as if he were avenging the death of his alias, Kevin (a.k.a. Doug Herman) underwent a surge of new abilities like nothing he had ever experienced before. He learned to make picks with bicycle spokes and brick straps, forming the snake, the rake, and the half diamond. Closing his eyes to reconstruct the internal shape in his head, feeling the pick bounce in the keyway according to the resistance of each pin, once he learned to visualize the dark and detailed terrain, he could feel the sheer line, keeping the pressure right, applying torque and turning the plug; and when he had opened his first Ace-type tubular lock into a vending machine, dropping the back panel and loading his shirt with pretzels, gum, and wadded dollar bills, he was so proud of himself he needed to bury his face in a pillow to muffle his hollering revelry. He couldn’t contain his enthusiasm, so he refined it. Breaking through two panels into a pay phone with a homemade key, or scrubbing the padlock into a hotel
storage room, he closed his eyes and imagined Colette as a damsel-in-distress, chained to a tree with a progressively more elaborate series of disk-tumbler and pin-tumbler locks. Delirious upon each new success, he filled his pockets with jackpots of spilling quarters. Town to town, his duffel sagged under the weight of coins. At two A.M. in Sterling, Colorado, he broke into the Miss Pacman of the Ramada Inn game room, fishing out a few hundred coins and, using information off a technical manual he had stolen in Denver, resetting the high scores to confess:

  I_ _ 100000

  TOO _99999

  K_ _ _99998

  UR_ _99997

  MON _99996

  EY_ _00000

  When Jerry noticed, he only commented that Kevin’s scams weren’t very lucrative, that they netted at best a few added pounds of loose change and a trunk full of licorice. But Kevin could tell from the rolling eyes and crossed arms that Jerry mostly disapproved of the lone-wolf quality to his style, the way that he would slink out of his room past midnight to reprogram solitary pay phones along the highway, or how he thrived in the strange new frontier created by compact discs, learning to reseal shrink-wrap with an iron, so that he could buy his favorites then return them for a full refund.

  Maybe it was the focus on technology that most rankled Jerry—the “phreaking”—which appeared to a veteran con man like a form of poor sportsmanship. This new breed of grifter seemed to him like a mechanical rat living in the loose wiring and the broken-up aftermath of Ma Bell. Why rob a machine instead of a gullible clerk? If that was the goal, why not take a sledgehammer to a slot machine? After all of his rants about no morals beyond protecting his crew, Kevin began to see that his old man did have a clear ethos. He found any robbery to be unseemly if it didn’t involve a phony smile and a handshake.

  “I’m just worried you’ll electrocute yourself or something,” he said. “Salespeople have less volts running through ’em.”

  Kevin took the challenge and tried to show his father that he wasn’t entirely without “people skills.” After all, it was a season of teenagers. In every hotel there were dozens of awkward and shouting youths. Kevin stalked the pool and tried to read this landscape of wild, cannonballing adolescents. Chewing, spitting, interrupting their bragging monologues to punch a younger sister, some of them didn’t seem like real people to Kevin, but flickering carnival games of frustration and impulse. Their intimacies were startling and unpredictable. A girl from Minnesota, with a railroad of steel in her mouth, wanted to show him her appendix scar; a thirteen-year-old boy bestowed on Kevin a single M&M, like a pearl, then confessed that his mother was upstairs “porking” her new boyfriend. Most disturbing were the shrill safety-monitor types who took it upon themselves to uphold the Commandments of the Pool, some of whom were so bossy and officious that Kevin began to fear the shallow end as a hatchery for future police officers.

  Among the fifteen-year-olds, some had their own foolish ambitions to commit crimes—kicking like SWAT teams on the Plexiglas windows of soda machines, storming the hallways in paramilitary gangs to tamper with fire alarms. As if he had confronted a tribe of early humans, Kevin couldn’t help but find their ventures hopelessly unsophisticated. But he was impressed by how easily these young men could be convinced to steal from their own parents, especially if they believed a baggie of oregano was “Humboldt County” or “Acapulco Gold” (the more the name sounded like a soap opera, the higher the price). He skateboarded in the parking lot with shabby young boys who boasted about unlikely sexual conquests, fat bowls of Maui Wowie, lines of pure cocaine, or tickets to see Iron Maiden in concert; so Kevin would sell them ground-up NoDoz or forged tickets to Ratt in Grand Island, or, once, a mashed-up ball of melted Tootsie Rolls and paprika pawned off as a Thai stick.

  Colette despised anything to do with drugs, and when she learned of the scams she demanded that Jerry punish his son. Kevin argued that he wasn’t a drug-dealer, but an anti-drug-dealer. If he didn’t exist, these ragged and rebellious teens would have a far better chance of finding real drugs. His father agreed, but he also acknowledged Colette’s point that the phony drugs might serve as “gateway spices.” To contain what he saw as a growing “sibling-type rivalry” between the two junior members of his crew, he imposed a mandatory one-week break from the grift.

  Even while scrubbing locks, practicing forgery, and devising new cons, the hiatus was excruciating for all of them. Jerry needed to unwind with an evening of casual lying, claiming to be a Hollywood producer, a tennis pro, or a diplomat, sometimes all three. Colette liked to model new swimwear publicly, usually making an appearance at the prime poolside hour (right after the news). She’d adjust her bathing suit over the hollows of her flexing hip joints, strut down the diving board like a fashion runway, dive prettily into the water, then linger beneath the surface long enough to let compliments and whistles start from the men in the hot tub, who looked like pink missionaries in a boiling cauldron.

  Somehow the week of leisure gave more venom to the arguments between Jerry and Colette. Kevin would only deal with them one at a time now, for it was too much effort to read the shifting terrain between them. Argument and silence, sarcasm and hard breath. A shout, a scuffle, a breakdown. The reconciliation: kiss, nuzzle, and locked door. Kevin could never tell what caused a crisis, if it was Colette breaking the cease-fire to buy a watch with a credit card she hadn’t tested, or Jerry flirting with a waitress at the Pancake Palace. They were clearly happier when there was a common enemy, and Kevin found himself enjoying the evening when they allied to peek around opposing edges of a curtain at a police car outside. But afterward, while Jerry’s adrenaline quickly faded (he lay down shirtless with a beer on his stomach), Colette stayed charged all night, and couldn’t sleep without dancing, drinking, browsing store windows.

  One night at the end of the moratorium, she decided to go out on the town by herself, in jeans so tight they seemed bolted onto her by the brass rivets on the hips. Jerry said she was sure to win a blue ribbon tonight, ready for the big hoedown—St. Cloud, Minnesota, city of burned-out lights—where a toothless goalie was just waiting to buy her a margarita. “You know, Colette, there’s no prize for attracting the most losers.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Most of that night Kevin heard his father wander the suite, sirens on the TV, the damp syllables of opening beer cans, the ascending and finally stammering note of a peeing cascade. Kevin came out of his adjoining room and asked his father how he could let her go out like that. “Did you see how she was dressed?”

  “Give me a break, Kev. I can’t control that woman any more than I can control you. I’m too old. You kids are killing me here! I need an old woman, man—somebody as tired as I am.”

  Colette returned midway through the Carson show, mumbled, and dropped her handbag. Stepping in front of Kevin’s open door, she lobbed her stiletto sandals up to her hands with two chorus-line kicks. Sounding vindicated by the reasonable hour, Jerry said, “Didn’t stay for the double feature, I guess.”

  “Can we please stop fighting for once?”

  “You’re the one who’s fighting, Colette. I’m just watching TV. But you should have seen Kevin—he was pacing all over the place. He was worried you found somebody else to mooch off.”

  “Great, I’m surrounded. You know what’s wrong with you, Jerry? You’re cheap, you’re lazy, and you don’t respect anybody or anything but yourself.”

  “What makes you think I respect myself?” asked Jerry.

  Kevin could see her gesturing at him with the heel of her shoe. “I just went for a walk, but I realized something. My scams have made us. Everything in this room, I paid for. That lamp—mine. That shitty fucking painting—what the hell is that?—mine, I paid for it.”

  “It actually belongs to the hotel.”

  “This suite, that couch, the fucking car downstairs. Me, I paid for it. Not Kevin and his bathtub full of quarters. Not you and your stupid fucking network of prison buddies or your card catalog of dead ba
bies—me. You just sit there with a beer and point. Like a fucking caveman. You tell me what to do, and I do it. Day after goddamn miserable day. And you know what?”

  “You want some credit.”

  “Yes! I want some credit! I want you to say something—like Thank you would be a start, or Good job, Colette, or Nice going, Esther, or Barbie or Toots or whatever fucking name I have this week. Tell me something nice, Jerry. For once in your lying cheating life, give me something I can use.”

  “Come over here, Colette. I want to explain something.”

  Kevin tried to sleep with a pillow tight over his face, and he nearly suffocated himself. When he tiptoed over to close the door, they were talking in a subdued tone on the narrow couch. Colette’s bare legs were curled up on the pillows, her head riding on the camelback motion of his chest. But her eyes were open, and she looked more adrift than comforted. In a tired baritone, Jerry was talking about prison. It was a horror story—about the echoing screams of young kids and eyeballs cut open with smuggled razor blades, beginning as the usual speech about the hell he’d seen. But somehow it became a lonesome country-western love song, about how every long night of his life he had dreamed of a woman like her—quick-witted and beautiful and tenacious. It was more than Kevin expected from the man. He told her that if he could buy her safe passage out of this life, hers and Kevin’s, he would; but it was hard with a teenage son always pressing to know more and a tiring and insatiable young girlfriend who wanted to devour the world. Think of the pressure on him. “You need to know that we’re together like this partly because of you. You keep us up and running. I know it and Kevin knows it. I’m not a good person, Colette—I never claimed to be, I don’t want to be, and you can’t expect me to be. But look me in the eye and accept me as a snake, and I’ll tell you whatever you’re waiting to hear: I need you, I want you, I hurt for you, down in the dust, honey, down in the dust of my bones.”