Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  He had followed his father’s guidelines. He visited Army Walsh and his doting, sympathetic wife on Vashon Island in Seattle; he accumulated documents from the easiest first (the state ID) to the riskiest (the passport). But with paperwork fit for a high-class fugitive, he sank penitently into a landscape of Greyhound terminals and runaways. He fell in love with panhandlers. By summer, he had moved the length of the West Coast, San Diego to Seattle, eight times, leaving a city whenever the police seemed to recognize him. With an apostate sadness, Kevin didn’t run any of his old scams. He lived in exile among the other travelers, shivering until welcomed into the sleeping bag of a ripe and drunk and luxuriously warm girl under the concrete pillars of the Willamette Bridge; scavenging crates of free just-expired groceries along the slick cobblestones of Pike Street; sleeping and sharing cigarettes in flophouses full of dirty backpacks and spilling laundry and a lone kitchenette with a boiling cauldron of instant noodles. They slept outside, barricaded within backpacks, in chains of interlocked legs in Golden Gate Park, guarded by a single scrawny dog in a bandanna who growled at every squirrel. They hovered in lines outside clubs and listened to the rhythmic collapsing sound of drums inside, negotiating their way in to fight in mosh pits and pop amyl nitrite in the bathroom. There were rarely any good drugs; more often a kid would deaden his face with airplane glue, hover over the fumes of gasoline until he puked and his eyes grayed. Kevin never touched the stuff, and he had a reputation for being abnormally clean—at least, among the abnormally filthy.

  In late June, Kevin called the L.A. County jail to learn that his father had been transferred to the Lompoc Penitentiary. He was rattled by the thought that his father might have gone through the trial and been sentenced already while Kevin was in some time warp of hopping trains, fistfights, and sex in sleeping bags. On a southbound bus he tilted against the window and slept through passing stripes of light and shade. He woke to see ruffled veils of blown rain, loamy pastures of mud and green, where fat droplets spotted the window. There was a sublime desolation, so vast and beautiful at times that it could refashion loneliness into a feeling of sudden liberation. Over the Cascades, through the forests and a passing storm; through the vineyards at night, where the shifting brush strokes of sky faded into pyrite stars, his life reduced to nothing more than weather and traffic and conversations with people he’d never see again.

  It took him a week in Lompoc to devise a suitable cover for visiting his father, for he worried that a seventeen-year-old son might become either a key witness or a ward of the state. Instead he was Quentin Casellas, a young journalism student at Fresno State. When Jerry stepped into the visiting room in an orange jumpsuit, sporting a new handlebar mustache of blond and gray, something in his abstracted eyes made it clear that he was prepared to meet a stranger.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “It was a disaster, man. I’m glad you weren’t around to witness it. I fired two lawyers and I thought about defending myself.” Across a layer of thick Plexiglas, streaked with the same grease rainbows that covered his glasses, Jerry talked into a phone with crackling reception. “Every one of them was whistling the same tune, and then the third lawyer gave me the exact same advice as the other two, and I took it. Copped a plea. Might’ve faced a nickel otherwise. I’m glad you got a haircut, Kev, but other than that, you don’t look so good.”

  There was a faint bruised coloring on the loose skin under his father’s eyes. The forked tails of two new tattoos emerged from under rolled-up sleeves, the same faint blue as the veins on the pale underside of his arm.

  “And how’s Melody dealing with the strain?”

  “Hey, don’t do that. Sure, she gave a statement against me to get herself off with just probation. I don’t blame her. At least she sends me naked Polaroids.”

  “I don’t want to hear about that, Dad.” As the guard paced behind Jerry, Kevin changed his tone, saying, “No, sir, it’s more of an article on the kind of environment that produces a man like yourself.”

  Once the guard was out of earshot, Jerry chuckled and said, “What the fuck was that? You pulling some kind of con like that up north?”

  “Actually, I’ve had kind of a bad period, Dad. I just—I guess I’m trying to stay clean, you know?”

  “That’s okay. You mean like a regular job?”

  “Well, no. I mean—some panhandling, and just—traveling—” He couldn’t face his father’s disappointed eyes as he spoke. “You know, just moving around. Maybe a little shoplifting, I guess. Misdemeanors mostly.”

  “What the hell is the matter with you, Kevin? I’m the one in jail. If you were talking about getting a job as some kind of computer genius, you know, then that’s different.”

  “I’m not going to get a job as a computer genius, Dad, just because I can tamper with shit.”

  The handlebar mustache seemed designed to frame a new, drooping shape to his mouth. There was a stranded and lethargic quality to Jerry that seemed like the culmination of a year on Melody’s couch, and it reminded Kevin of the way the biggest and most ferocious animals in the zoo stare out of the shadows with something eerily close to human desperation.

  Jerry said, “Kevin? I fucked up. You didn’t. You don’t have to go live like some kind of castaway. Look, Kevin—you’re going to be eighteen in what? March?”

  “That was the old alias, Dad. My real birthday is in December.”

  “My point is, I was on my own at eighteen. I went and joined the army, but that counts.”

  “You were in the army?”

  “Yeah, yeah. There wasn’t a war or anything—I just farted around in Germany playing cards. Hustling. What I’m trying to say is, you got to grow up here. The army gave me a real sense of, you know, discipline. Shit like that. You got to get tough. I don’t want to hear about my son panhandling—that shit’s for junkies. Besides, there’s a lot of good con men in the army. It’s just like prison, but they give you a gun.”

  He looked down at his hands: they were like separate embattled creatures, cuts and scabs on his knuckles, shop grease like sediment down in the lines of his palms. Two fingers looked broken, swollen and curled, as if refusing to unlock from a fist.

  Kevin had chewed the cuticle around his thumbnail down to the blood, which he tasted as he looked up to meet his father’s gaze.

  “I don’t want to join the army, Dad.”

  “Then at least toughen up. I’m going to be pissed off if I got to hear about you begging money on a street corner. You were raised better than that. You got first-class skills, kid. You can do shit that nobody knows how to do—except maybe a few gypsies. And the Nigerians—they’re always ahead of us. This isn’t you, Kev, bumming cigarettes under an overpass.”

  Jerry shook his head and closed his eyes, reloading, and then he leaned closer to the glass, which pulled him away from the mouthpiece and made him more difficult to hear. “Kevin? The world is yours: don’t be a pussy. Now, with that out of the way, I need a favor.”

  With ten minutes left to talk, Jerry shifted tone completely. He was serving time for lending institution fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, document forgery, and other offenses. “But there’s a few accounts and safe deposit boxes still out there. If the feds start finding accounts and old mailboxes out on the East Coast and in the Midwest, man, I’m looking at a long drop in here. Most of that was under a different name, and I’m sure they’re still piecing that together. Money sits in limbo too long and the paper trail just gets hotter.”

  Kevin asked, “Which accounts are we talking about?”

  “Everything we did, all across the whole Midwest, out to the coast—you remember. With you-know-who. Whatever she didn’t get to.”

  “Right. Her.”

  “The person whose name we don’t ever say out loud.”

  “Got it.”

  “Because we don’t want to invoke her fucking evil bitch spirit—”

  “I remember, Dad. Jesus.”

  “So for your article, right, I was basically born
rotten …”

  Kevin was confused by the shift in tone, until the guard crossed behind his father, glancing down. Jerry waited, then continued, “Now, quick—listen up. Those accounts are still open, Kevin. Like little wounds. The FBI starts piecing those together, I’m looking at a whole new ball game. I mean, we ran up a fortune out there. I don’t know if you were old enough to realize the kind of volume we were turning over.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Close them down. Stop the bleeding. You do that for me, you can keep half of whatever’s left.”

  “Half?”

  “Don’t try to negotiate, you little street monkey. I’m still your father. I got a lot of information put together, and I’m finishing it up now. Get a mail drop and I’ll send it to you. Everything from those days. Will you just be a pal and help out your old man? However bad you think it is in here, it’s about a hundred times worse.”

  He smiled and for the first time Kevin noticed the missing tooth beside the canine.

  “Don’t fight too much in there, Dad.”

  “Me? I’m an elder statesman. I’m a mentor. Take sixty percent.”

  “I’ll do it, and I’ll keep whatever I find.”

  They glowered at each other through the smudged barrier.

  “You must really think you got me over a barrel,” said Jerry.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The image of his father’s crooked fingers stayed in Kevin’s mind, and seemed with their bent paralysis to point him onward. In Grand Junction, Colorado, the mail drops contained nothing more than credit card offers, sweepstakes offers, and flyers about missing children; in Wall, South Dakota (home of a large pharmacy that served an excellent twenty-four-hour breakfast), Kevin found a pile of coupon booklets and an unused two-year-old MasterCard, with a few months left before its expiration. Staying in roadside dives that advertised color TV and air-conditioning, Kevin spent his long, lonely hours working over a reassembled card swiper, stealing the three-tiered magnetic codes of every extant card, and rewriting them on the magstripes of hotel key cards. Night after night he would scan numbers and plumb the mysterious depths for four-digit PIN numbers, each card a new puzzle, and when he succeeded, he would take cash from ATM machines, which were beginning to process credit advances as shared networks spread across the country. In Kearney, Nebraska, along a stretch of sagging wires and fast-food chains, he unlocked a long-forgotten postbox to find six different sets of promotional checks from Visa, all of which he forged and cashed in nearby liquor stores.

  He lived in such a perpetual state of concentration that time seemed to fall past him, the sun wheeling overhead through hot skies and cirrus clouds, miles of landscape passing during a nap on a Greyhound bus, day and night becoming irrelevant, sleep seizing him when his focus lapsed. He fell so headlong into the process, invigorated by the idea of redoing all the old cons in his own way, that he scarcely noticed how his superstitions and rituals were growing wild and extreme and overpowering. He no longer trusted motel beds, but lay in his sleeping bag on the floor beside them, with his own air mattress that took a meditative hour to inflate. In his backpack lay a precise internal layout of clothes, incriminating cards, cash and equipment, oranges, a portable cooking stove (upon which he made breakfast in bathrooms amid all the accoutrements of a chemistry lab), and pictures—hundreds of stolen wallet pictures—that he would place across the untouched bedspread to study each night, staring down at the souvenirs from each pickpocketing, a crowd of tiny smiling faces. He would hover over them, feel the weight of so many people and so much stolen credit; and he would say, depending on his spirits, as if to a cheering crowd of benefactors or an angry jury, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,” to every unsuspecting face.

  Some curse was released from those mailboxes; at each stop he was reacquainted with the frustration from his days on the road, with his father and “her.” In the rare moments that he stopped working, he felt the old pining, that breed of intense loneliness that recalls smells and expressions from missing people. But he was always angry with her for his loneliness. Several times, his longing became so intense that he mimicked his father. He threw himself at a truck stop waitress who, surprisingly, seemed to like anyone with “nice eyes” and both of their front teeth. He went to a strip club and made himself a spectacle, sliding five crisp hundred-dollar bills into the G-string of a gyrating farm girl. He lingered in a department store, touring the bedroom and dinette displays like a childhood home, then offering to pay for the armfuls of clothing held by a chatting pair of young women and a beleaguered but attractive mother of two. “And that lady with the screaming kids over there,” he said to the cashier. “I want to pick up the tab for her too.” The shoppers themselves were baffled, and looked as if the gesture might be a prelude to some parking lot abduction; but the cashier, who obviously had enough downtime to imagine fairy-tale princes among the aisles, was charmed by the game.

  In Madison, he felt betrayed by every familiar store and street corner. He closed a small checking account with a slapdash letter of information from Esther Barrick and a mediocre forgery of her signature. He didn’t even care about the remaining few thousand dollars. He had it sent as a cashier’s check to another mail drop; and after cashing it at a shady hardware store in Milwaukee, he pitched every dollar into the cups and boxes of panhandlers.

  “You’re an angel,” said a stooped old woman.

  “Don’t say that,” Kevin called, walking away backward. “It’s just Reaganomics, ma’am.”

  In Minneapolis, he returned to the joint account that Colette had created for Douglas Herman, Esther Barrick as custodian. He found a cheap motel and hunkered down for a long ordeal of paperwork in a city where every alley and store window felt like a traumatic memory.

  On the phone, Jerry sounded as if his mouth were swollen. His words mashed together and he whistled faintly while he talked. Kevin asked him about the sound, and he shouted, “Whatever. I broke a tooth on a meatball.”

  “Is there a dentist you could see?”

  “Hey—it’s hell to get quality phone time in here, so don’t waste it talking about this shit.”

  “I’m just having some minor problems. I’m coming across all the accounts that she started. Tons, in fact. I need Douglas’s papers back. Is there anything Melody kept?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line, filled with echoes. “You got to use that high school. They’ll have everything.”

  “You-know-who left a bigger trail than I expected out here, Dad. By the way, how is Melody?”

  “Sends her love.”

  In the background there was a man screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Taking care of yourself?”

  “Shit yeah. Got a conjugal visit last week. Mel wore a negligee under a trench coat.”

  “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “And she did everything I told her,” he said, whispering. “Boofed in a dozen joints like a goddamn mule. That’s first class, man.”

  “Dad, I’m kind of nauseous.”

  “My advice to you, if you ever get pinched, have some weed where nobody can find it. It’s gold in here, man.”

  It took Kevin three weeks to replace Douglas Herman’s key documents, by pretending to enroll in a community college, prompting his high school to send mimeographed copies of every old ID and record. After a long stay in a St. Paul dive, he was relieved to think that this scavenger hunt would finally end. Here was the last hurdle, the final pittance of stranded cash, but the night before the final withdrawal he had a sinking, desolate feeling, as if he feared losing something for good.

  That morning, he thought the teller was wearing Colette’s perfume. He watched the twitches on her face while she typed and read the screen. She filed the copies of his new Social Security card, Hennepin County driver’s license (a ten-day ordeal), and a counterfeit birth certificate copy, notarized by a ghost, the signature with the bogus medallion stamp. She found the
account and swiveled the computer monitor toward him on a hinge, so that Kevin could see rows of green digits. At first, he was so startled that they looked only like a chaotic chain of hieroglyphs. He tried to maintain his composure. He reread the names: Douglas Herman and Esther Barrick. The account balance:

  67,155.96

  “Would you like to make a withdrawal, Mr. Herman?”

  As if he were staring at a magnificent portrait, he felt a swell of pride and affection for Colette. “No,” he said, surprised by the laughing sound in his voice. “I’d like a summary of all the account’s activity, please. As far back as you can go.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The pattern of deposits showed that Colette gravitated toward old-money towns and resorts in the East. For a few weeks in Newport, Rhode Island, the deposits were a steady one thousand twenty dollars a week under the alias of Sheila Bath (which had a biblical ring when inverted on documents). In East Hampton, she made two wire transfers a week at nine hundred fifty-two dollars, from a trinity of names: Mary Beale, Molly Defoe, and Violet Beauregard. She was a hydra of aliases. Each time one was severed, two would immediately spring into its place; and by the second page of this printout, it appeared to him that she created names exclusively to feed this account. He researched each name, for he believed they might have a message embedded in them. Augusta Gordon, for instance, turned out to be Lord Byron’s half sister, with whom he had fallen madly in love; and Evelyn Rafter, once he had whispered it to himself a thousand times, seemed to him a twisted, fairy-tale pun. Whoever and wherever the benefactress, the deposits and wire transfers remained for almost six months in a specific pattern between $1,020 and $952. She floated around Boston for a few months, vacationed for two weeks in southern Maine, only to return for a determined stint in Manhattan, with over twenty names and fifty ATM locations, before suddenly fleeing north and making an abrupt numerical shift: a deposit of $1,067 through a mall in Plattsburgh, New York.