Hot Plastic

by Peter Craig

  “Now I really feel like a fugitive,” she said, handing him a bottle.

  “Fugitives don’t drink fucking Beaujolais.”

  “You’re officially not allowed to criticize anything I do from now on.”

  “Every dime we live off comes from me, Colette. I don’t see any of your new shoes or underwear paying for our train tickets. I paid for this dinner as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Oh—and stale bread makes you the king. Man hunt wallet. Man get food!”

  For a while they lay on their backs, eating crust in silence. His skin warmed with fire and wine, Kevin rose and stomped a few paces to the water’s edge, where the wet sand shined like opaque glass. He started undressing. He threw his shirt into the air behind him, and when he stepped out of his jeans Colette covered her eyes and asked if he was having an episode.

  “I can’t listen to you anymore. I’m going swimming.”

  She peeked at him as he was pulling down his boxer shorts, and she squealed and buried her face under her arms. “I’m totally unprepared to see you naked right now!”

  He stepped down the slope into frigid water, his skin rippling to his neck and his muscles stiffening. Colette gave a facetious hoot from above that echoed in the cove. With a determined gasp of air, he dove forward and immersed himself in stinging water, leaping upward and shouting before finally sinking back down again to endure the chill.

  “You big baby,” she called.

  Kevin goaded her to join him, daring her with chicken noises. Rising in the flickering light, she pulled off a sweatshirt, guarded by her own long, fidgeting shadow on the uneven rocks behind her. She paced ahead to twist out of her shirt. With mermaid wiggles, she slid her skirt down her legs, seesawed ivory panties down off her hips. Her collarbone suddenly distinct in a strike of moonlight, she leaned forward to unhook the bra, then covered her breasts with her forearm, trudging awkwardly into the water with shackled footsteps. Her ribs butterflied for a scared breath and she fell forward, straining her head upward and away from the splash, breaking into a startled dog-paddle as she came toward him with tenacious puffs of water.

  “Oh, my God, that’s cold.” Her pale face bobbed ahead in darkness, teeth chattering. “You’re such a bastard. I hope a big fish comes and bites you on the pecker.”

  They swam far out into the darkness, seeing only the smudged lights of the village along the opposite shore. He offered a piggyback ride back, and when she accepted, he felt how her skin had retained more warmth than his, sliding slantwise across him, breasts on his crawling shoulder blades. Once they reached the shallows, Kevin dropped to his knees. She rushed back to the dwindling fire, and climbed into a pair of his clean boxer shorts, pulled on a sweatshirt, and cinched the hood so tightly that only a small porthole circle of her face remained exposed. She threw Kevin his jeans, covering her eyes again.

  They drank another bottle of wine and warmed themselves from the inside out; and soon, with the stars now fogged over and streaks of mist gathering on the surface of the water, they were overcome by giddy laughter. “Oh God,” she said. “Where’s Frommer anyway? Where is that five-dollar-a-day wimp?”

  They lay down with their heads on bunched clothes, facing each other, and her voice trailed off. Under the faint glow of the fire and fog, Kevin could see the spellbound look on her face, sleep having seized her like an undertow. He closed his eyes and heard a rustle of wind. He dozed and woke to the lull in the fire, the beach filled with haunted mist. Colette had burrowed into him, her elbows shielded her chest and her body clenched into a ball, her nose pushed beside his neck. So Kevin slid downward to position his cold face in the path of her warm exhales.

  He closed his eyes and woke again to nibbling kisses. Now the clouds were distinct around fissures of opening sky. The air was a cold assault around their fortified groove of beach. He tipped his nose into the shared breath between them, and they kissed in tiny sips, lingering in the humid air between mouths; and during these few unreal moments he wondered if she was awake or asleep. He paused and her eyelashes threaded open. She peered at him with slightly crossed eyes, and when he ventured another kiss, her first instinct was to give a pleased and affectionate hum. But then some other part of her consciousness woke and she bolted upright as if she’d heard a siren. “What did we just do?”

  “It’s almost morning.”

  “Did we do something? Oh no. Please, don’t say we did something, because that would be a huge mistake …”

  “You were just kissing me a little. Relax.”

  “Oh Jesus, I’m going to kill myself.”

  With a dejected voice, he replied, “It’s a good thing I’m so self-assured.”

  She dropped onto her back, hair fallen in tangled corkscrews of sand and salt. “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry if that was abrupt. I love you, Kevin—you know that. I’ve known you longer than anybody in my whole life. It’s just that this sort of thing can’t happen between us. It’s understandable: we were cold, and if a person is cold enough they’ll kiss a Saint Bernard.”

  “Just keep talking. Maybe you won’t have to kill yourself.”

  “Well, maybe I’m the Saint Bernard. Did you ever think of that? God, that wine must have been turned. I’m trying to say we can’t lose our—professionalism.”

  Kevin looked around at the scattered clumps of blowing laundry, the opened suitcases littered with kicked sand, the discarded bread bag and the empty wine bottles piled among the blackened campfire rocks, and he replied, “Yeah, that’s key.”

  “We have to promise to forget this incident, to not let it change anything. Put up your hand and repeat after me: I, Kevin Swift, do hereby swear—”

  “I’m not saying anything under oath. Quit it with that.” Kevin began piling the bottles into the grocery bag, shoveling sand onto the ashes, growing angrier as he picked up trash, until he burst out: “You love this, Colette. You were all over me, and now you’re just thrilled to sit there and condescend like this. I think you kissed me just so you could act like I made a move on you.”

  “That’s right, Kevin. I planned this whole thing. I bribed the engineer to stall the train, and I called ahead to make sure there wouldn’t be any rooms or food, and I tricked you onto the beach and got you drunk, all so I could challenge your manhood—while I have sand up my ass.”

  “Jesus. Challenging my manhood? Fucking Scheherazade over here—I forgot. Give me a break, Colette, you wouldn’t even know what to do with my manhood.” He continued over her peals of laughter. “You’re so used to crazy old men with prostates bigger than their wallets, you’d flip out. You’d run for the border. You’d run crying back to the bayou—you porn star.”

  She stopped laughing abruptly and stomped away across the beach, her black hood inflating in the wind as she climbed onto a rock in the distance. Kevin kicked more sand onto the campfire, noticing little fossilized papers that hadn’t burned; then he began folding the clothes and packing their bags meticulously, talking to himself as he organized his backpack in the ceremonial layout. He hoisted up her dress and swatted the sand off it, and when she looked at him, he draped it to his side and waved it like a matador’s muleta. He called, “I love how your tantrums always come whenever there’s work to do.”

  Once he had packed everything and buried the fire, he walked to her and was bewildered to see her face streaked with tears. “Oh, Colette. Come on. Big deal.”

  “It is a big deal. You have no respect for me. And I was stupid to think that you would understand me, because you’re exactly like he was, in every possible way—except you take an hour to pack a suitcase.”

  “What do you want from me, Colette? You came back for me, and no matter what you say now, you wanted me to come with you. Why? If you hate me so much, if you’re so disgusted by the thought, why not leave me to rot in prison?”

  “God, you’re so stupid.”

  “What did you expect from me? Huh? You wanted me to be your little mascot again, didn’t you? You wante
d me to chase you around and make big sad moon eyes at you whenever you felt bad, whenever you were really lonely. You didn’t want a partner, Colette—you wanted your fucking teddy bear.”

  “I hate you so much right now. You don’t know anything about me, Kevin. Nothing.”

  “I know everything you say is bullshit. I keep thinking there’s some kind of theorem, some formula. I’d feed into it all the crap you say, and it’d go through the formula, and come out as what you really mean—which for every single thing would be ‘Help me, I’m a miserable drama queen and I need more attention.’ ”

  She looked away and wiped her eyes with her knuckles. “I was so right.” Her face pinched up as she gritted her teeth and squeaked, “You were my only friend left in the world, and now everything is ruined.”

  “And after what we’ve done together, do you seriously think it’s because you kissed me?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “The rest of it is business. That’s the dividing line right there. And I have a curse on me. If I ever have any feelings for a man, he turns into a sociopath.”

  “I’m already a sociopath. Come on—let’s go clean this shit up and get back to work. I’m tired of being broke. We need to scam some French toast.”

  She took long, ponderous breaths, staring at the village gables and ship masts in a break of mist. “I’m an unhappy person,” she said.

  “No shit. There’s lots of unhappy people and they still manage to clean up their campsites and not leave evidence lying around. Let’s get to a city and get hooked into something. My dad was right, you’re only as good as your connections—and this fucking Let’s Go grift is a pain in the ass. We’ll get some solid new aliases and do some real work again.”

  She waited, and after a long time he climbed up onto the rock beside her. To his surprise she leaned her head against his shoulder, a gesture that seemed more than a cease-fire: it was a sign of exhausted trust. He kissed her hair, still rich with campfire smoke. She said, “Don’t be mad at me—please. I just don’t think we know how to control things once they start. Every wallet turns into a fiasco out here, and every kiss turns into a sweetheart con. Somebody always has to lose.”

  Staring ahead at streaks of light emerging onto the water, Kevin said, “You keep talking about ruining something. Why worry about that? We’ve been ruined for a long time. I’m good in the ruins; it’s my hometown. You ruined us like nothing you can imagine, and here I am. I ruined you and you came back for me. Now you’re just getting too worked up about everybody’s fucking savoir-faire over here. You’re thinking this is some ladder to sophistication. But where you see culture, I just see a different kind of trash. The tourists, trinkets, the same cheap crap spreading over the globe—the world is ruining itself faster than we could ever hope to keep up. Everybody ruins whatever they need, whatever they put their grubby hands on, year after year, until it’s so ruined that it’s a new fucking thing altogether. All we can do is ride it downhill. So please, for me, don’t think about some ceremonial friendship you have to protect like an endangered species. That’s the last straw. I’m a weed, a cockroach—you can’t kill me with a rock. And you can’t scare me about ruining us. In fact, I hope you’ll ruin me again someday, some way that makes it all new again. Gives way for a few tougher weeds to sprout up in the scorched fucking earth. But right now—forget it, we’re too broke. We follow the course. I’m learning and I’m not going to miss the big picture anymore. You either want to work with me or you don’t. I don’t trust you and you don’t trust me. But I respect you from here all the way back to that dumpy little motel in Inglewood, where you ruined me the second I laid eyes on you.”

  He stared right into the blacks of her pupils, and he saw that she was curious and amused by this speech.

  “Colette? You’re a good thief. Now stand up, forget all the crying and the kissing and the sand in your ass, and let’s go make some money again.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  That winter Kevin and Colette rented separate rooms in Paris.

  North of the Porte St.-Denis, amid the clutter of West African markets, Kevin rented a room in a boardinghouse where every curtain smelled thick with hashish. He covered the walls with wallet pictures. In a cabinet beside his camping stove, he kept fifty boxes of pancake mix, and the room was always a stale mixture of kerosene and citrus rinds. At night, he snapped awake to the sound of arguments and two-tone sirens, and again in the morning to the clatter of raised store cages and unloading trucks.

  The local authorities weren’t accustomed to pickpockets who escaped down cobblestone streets on skateboards, pulling rail slides off medieval fountains or running over the hoods and tops of cars stranded in traffic to escape down Métro tunnels. Soon every gendarme and pickpocket in town had heard of the young American who was feeding off tourists like a glutton, able to whisk off fanny packs with a deft pair of scissors or slice a camera strap without stepping off his board. Through the labyrinthine streets of the rue Mouffetard, insinuated into stone, he navigated past howling crowds and kiosks, dumping the evidence into trash cans, which he would reclaim in the first light of dawn as the green-uniformed sanitation crews worked the streets on motorcycles with tanks of soapy water. He could leave a single hotel lobby with a dozen wallets; by evening he could fill a bathtub with traveler’s checks. With a hot calling-card number and a shoulder-surfed PIN, he would call Colette to brag, “I’m a god here. I’ve got wallets from sixteen states and Manitoba.” She would tolerate his bluster, so long as he brought her an occasional peace offering of cards. He was reveling in a city with so many burrowing escape routes, so many hapless half-drunk tourists; he was an outlaw at the peak of his skills. But Kevin was far too conspicuous, and he learned quickly that the police weren’t his only concern.

  In January, after he was beaten up in a Métro tunnel by a gang of African pickpockets, he learned where to pay the requisite protection money in each arrondissement: Algerians who controlled his neighborhood, a Brazilian transvestite who oversaw the nights in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Eastern Europeans who pimped and ran strip clubs from the rue St.-Denis to the bars near Stalingrad Square.

  One morning near the carousel in the Montmartre, the cops grabbed Kevin just as he had tossed three wallets into a trash can. A German tourist had been robbed, and apparently Kevin matched the physical description, though he doubted he had hit any Germans that week. The police led him into the back of a cramped hatchback, where he was nudged in beside a young Frenchman. Dressed in a camel-hair coat, a satiny red shirt, and slacks with pinstripes, sitting nonchalantly with his legs crossed in the cramped backseat, flicking ash from his cigarette out a tiny opening in the back window flap, he looked to be the victim of some polite mugging. He was the other suspect, and Kevin wondered in what possible world they could both fit the same description. His fellow thief was tall and had a pale, almost bloodless complexion, with thin lips, prematurely thinning hair the color of dust, and, on his long, distinguished face, glasses consisting of two tiny round lenses.

  Kevin never admitted to speaking any French in these situations; but the suspect spoke English well enough to translate all of Kevin’s feigned outrage. The act amused him. When the police conferred with the German, the young Frenchman whispered, “I translated everything wrong. I said you were guilty. They will send you back to America and give you the gas chamber.”

  When the German tourist didn’t finger either of them, they were released with a warning. Kevin and the other suspect left together, chuckling, then had a drink in a bar around the corner. His name was Pierrick, and within an hour he seemed less a person than a fuming atmosphere of smoke and opinions. His bottom lip always perched outward into an expression of irritated surprise; and his voice had a suffocated quality, as if his words traveled downward in his throat.

  Kevin never would have expected them to become friends; but after their initial meeting, Pierrick found him each day, dragged him to cafés, and expounded theories of American savagery in wh
ich Kevin was both listener and proof. He would berate Kevin for an hour for his ridiculous high-top Converse sneakers or the skateboard; yet he took great offense if Kevin avoided him. Two days passed without a conversation, and on the third, he found Kevin on the steps of the rue Lepic, and petulantly said, “So you’re avoiding me again. I should have given you to the police when I had the chance.”

  Pierrick was thrilled by the prospect of having his own personal American buffoon to ridicule, to berate over international policies that Kevin didn’t know (from expansionist fast-food franchises to tariffs on moldy cheese). He loved ranting about artists Kevin didn’t know and writers Kevin hadn’t read; and when he asked if there was any education at all in America, Kevin happily replied, “Just burgers and handguns, dude.” Pierrick was delighted. Here was a perfect specimen, without shame. A cannibal. A young man who felt no remorse at eating with his fingers or chugging his wine. In fact, Kevin even played up his boorishness, as if to exert some confused sense of nationalism.

  “I keep wondering if I should explain a faux pas—or if I should let you live in your perfect blissful stupidity. I think any attempt to teach you would just corrupt you in the end. I think the jungle is all we have.”

  Financially, meeting Pierrick was a great windfall. He knew nearly every street hood from Aubervilliers to Bastille; and he bought as many passports, traveler’s checks, and ATM cards as Kevin could harvest, without even haggling, preferring instead to marvel at how Kevin could rake such profits out of the passing hordes, while seeming to understand so little of what was important. “You are Michael Zhordon,” he said to him.