by Peter Craig
In a mini-mart a few hundred yards down the slick highway, Kevin needed to hollow out a bag of dog food to buy groceries. When the bleary-eyed clerk rang up the bag, Kevin asked him about the AVS machine for swiping credit cards, claiming that he was starting his own company. The man had no idea beyond the basics, but Kevin was only trying to steal the shop’s merchant ID numbers, which he found on the underside of the machine, a different sequence for each credit card.
Kevin had been working underground, away from Colette, quietly, on a project that he believed might eventually lead to one huge payoff. In computer rooms and universities, he had at last uncovered the algorithms of several issuing banks and credit cards, meaning that he could create “well-formed” account numbers that would show up as valid to any authorization system. Leaving with his dog food bag, he called an 800 number from a pay phone and, using the shop’s merchant ID, verified a few of his fictional numbers. They would work, but the process was cumbersome: ordering goods via the phone or by mail, setting up single mail drops or delivering to motel rooms, fencing the merchandise and beginning again—it would never make a man rich. As Kevin stood there in the phone booth with the raindrops splashing all around him, he dropped his head against the glass.
Two years ago he had believed, like a religion, that if he ever made a credit card generator, he could sell it for a million dollars. A week ago, on a hacker BBS he’d seen hundreds of them for sale. Credit card numbers were bought and sold as cheaply as a dollar. With the improvement of modems, he saw no way that credit cards could even be in use much into the ’90s. He understood his father’s exhaustion; he understood the fortitude and inviolate hopefulness needed from a working con man who must adapt, year by year, to technology and new waves of younger and more resourceful thieves. The hustler’s life span is shorter than a mosquito’s. Train robbers controlled the landscape only until there were manganese vaults, then safecrackers inherited the cities. His father had grown up in an era of check forgers, advancing into white plastic, when magstripes and holograms on cards suddenly gave rise to identity theft. AT&T crumbled and the phreaker rose in the aftermath; the modem appeared and the hacker emerged; but in the end, no matter how many scavengers fought and rooted out their predecessors, nothing truly changed. The grift was a blue-collar endeavor, day by day. There was never enough money to retire, hardly enough to catch your breath, maybe, in the best times, just barely enough to dream.
Kevin was so lost in thought that he was only startled to the present because a Mack truck shined its headlights in his face as it went splashing past him. He noticed that the phone was an Echotel from the early ’80s. Overwhelmed with such nostalgia that a lump formed in his throat, he broke into the front panel and used an old blue-boxing trick to make a long-distance call. “I’m looking for prisoner number 10376-106, please.”
Jerry had made parole nine months earlier, and his most recent halfway house now had him listed at an address in Duarte, California. Kevin was thrilled that his father had received no additional time. He took down the number, then—worrying about a passing car—reassembled the phone and returned to the room.
Colette lay on the bed in satin panties and a camisole, watching a movie filled with hysterical screaming. When Kevin began taking apart the phone, she said, “I don’t want to come all this way and get arrested by phone cops the second we get into the country.”
“Right,” said Kevin. “You’d rather pay fifty dollars for a call. Okay.”
He stretched the cord as far as it would go, then sat in the hall with the door partially open. The corridor was long and gloomy and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the motel. The phone rang and then his father answered, his voice coming through crackles and the murmured conversation of a crossed line.
“You little bastard, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How the fuck are you? Did they catch you finally?”
“No, I’m in a little dive in Montana. You got my letter, right?”
“Oh, Jesus. Sure. Are you two still together?”
“Yeah, we’re still together. What is that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, don’t jump all over me. Gut reaction. I was surprised, that’s all. I figured it must have been—well, anyway, congratulations. What do you know? Two married men. We ought to get together and have some kind of … barbecue or something.”
Kevin smelled a sharp chemical, and when he looked through the crease in the door, he saw that Colette, still on the bed, had begun painting her toenails. He lowered his voice and asked, “Are you still working, Dad?”
“Hold on a second.” After a few moments of rustling, opening doors, and different textures of ambient noise, Jerry said, “Sorry. I got to be careful around the little missus nowadays. We can talk now.”
“I’m going flat broke up here, Dad.”
“Well, I can’t believe you married her, dummy. She must have tied your dick up like a fucking boat knot. Of course, you’re broke—”
“Don’t do this, okay? I don’t need you to judge me—she’s a different person now.”
“I always suspected something. I think she planted some kind of homing device in your ass.”
“If you’re not going to talk to me, I’m going to hang up. This is costing about ten dollars a minute. I just wanted to find you and ask if you’re doing any work.”
“Why aren’t you making any money? She’s the most talented bitch in the country.”
Kevin breathed out through his teeth, then spoke slowly, “She’s tired. She wants out. I don’t blame her, Dad—she’s been working hard since she was sixteen, and she’s worn out. We’re all like thoroughbreds, and you don’t have that many years on the track. I know that now. You win a few races, and then it’s the glue factory.”
“Unless you get put out to stud.”
“She wants a regular life, whatever the fuck that is. I want to know if there’s some trick to it.”
“So you called me?”
“I figured you must have some idea. You must have thought about how to call it quits.”
Jerry started laughing on the other end. “Let me tell you something, Kev. You want out of the game—you got two simple choices. First choice. You drop everything right where you are, you walk up to some foreman, say, ‘Please, sir, can I pound some nails for you,’ and you ride off in the back of his truck. He’ll pay you absolutely nothing, and you’ll look at him and think he’s lower and dirtier than the worst mugger. You’ll live on a can of corn chowder and six beers a day, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find something decent on TV before you fall asleep. You’ll scrap and save and someday you’ll find a better job. If you’re lucky, the feds won’t ever catch up to you. The statute of limitations will run out, and you’ll be your own man. You’ll have a nice little exhausting life and a woman who’s pissed because she can’t have anything nice, and maybe—if she’s tougher than I think she is—she’ll stick around and put on weight and have a couple of screaming kids. You’ll love them and you’ll do your best, and you’ll feel like crying every night at how much they have to go without—and then one day, when they’ve grown up and decided they hate you, and your wife won’t talk to you anymore, and you’re on some kind of disability because some day laborer dropped a fucking bathtub on your foot—you’ll die. Probably something to do with the liver.”
“What’s the other choice?”
“I don’t want to diminish it, kid. Because if there’s a heaven, I sure hope it’s for those fucking people. The better man goes that way. Those are the fucking heroes, the goddamn philanthropists. Those people have got my undying admiration, and luckily they don’t have credit cards—”
“Dad? Shut up. What’s the other choice?”
“Buy your way out. Grand style. Get your ass down here and go to work for me. I can use you. I got something huge and it’s watertight. You’ll make a killing and never look back.”
THIRTY-FIVE
A featureless sky, miles of unbroken fences and rolling sheep ranch
es, high valleys skirted with snow-capped mountains, they headed south through Idaho and Utah, gradually wending their way to St. George, where—after a day of arguing about Jerry and their future—they scraped together the last of the money for a motel room that overlooked a plush green golf course carved into the barren desert. He picked up the discussion with Colette while she was in the shower, then trailed her across the room as she dried herself and shook water from her ears. Each logical approach to the problem was stymied by Colette’s ambivalence about a reunion with Jerry. Kevin believed the most sensible arrangement would be for him to visit his father alone; but she was insulted by this solution, and accused him of being ashamed of her. When he countered by offering that she join him, she refused, explaining that Jerry obviously hated her far too much. Kevin sensed that there was no winning this argument, so he focused on the idea of a final scam.
“I figure to start a good respectable life, you need something in the high five figures, minimum.”
“Kevin, don’t be ridiculous,” she said, climbing into a T-shirt. “If your father is trying to get you involved in some ludicrous scheme, I guarantee you it’s a trick. I bet he just wants to get me back.”
“Get you back?”
She sat on the bed and began reeling up her jeans. “I mean, in the sense of revenge. Not the other sense.”
Neither sense sat well with Kevin, and during the final leg of the drive through Nevada and the Mojave Desert, his jaw ached from tension and his fingers hurt from gripping the wheel. An hour outside Barstow, while she was lying back in the reclined shotgun seat, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her eyes closed, Colette said, as if at the climax of a long, paranoid meditation, “Whatever happens with this, Kevin, just remember we had a wonderful year.”
Jerry had rented a bungalow outside Los Angeles, just below the smog-obscured contours of the San Gabriel Mountains.
When Kevin and Colette first arrived that warm winter night, Melody greeted them at the door. Seeing her again was dreamlike. She appeared to have aged on an accelerated timeline, a sweet shrunken-apple quality to her cheeks and her complexion now the dingy color of cigarette smoke. Her mouth had wrinkled around capped teeth, shiny and improbably white; and her carrot-colored hair was chopped into a little girl’s design, bangs framing an old face to create an effect of cheerful dementia.
Jerry was out buying groceries for a barbecue, and Melody led them into the front room. She gave Colette an emphatic Parisian kiss, then hugged Kevin, whose arms remained listless beneath the tight squeeze. They sat in an arrangement of stained white chairs around a bowl of bright orange tortilla chips, and she talked with a cult member’s voice about all of the great progress Jerry had made since his release. She seemed to have no suspicions whatsoever about his ongoing scams and no inkling of Colette’s place in the family history. Instead she talked about how Jerry was now attending church with her on Sundays, reading the New Testament, and beginning to make his own peace with God. Kevin felt the strain of performing for a mark; but Colette appeared charmed by the strange woman, as if she were a kitsch souvenir from Jerry’s travels, part trucker’s T-shirt, part Gideon’s Bible. When Melody began describing her upcoming expansion of the party favor company, branching out from piñatas to gag fortune cookies, Colette said she was happy to meet a real entrepreneur.
“I just think fortune cookies are a big waste right now,” said Melody. “I mean, that’s space that could go to use, something that everyone reads. But they’re all hogwash. It’s because there just isn’t enough incentive to say anything meaningful. So I came up with this idea to cross the cookie with a jigsaw puzzle. You take a bigger message, and you cut it up and put the pieces into a whole set of cookies. That way everybody gets involved.”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” said Colette. “If you had a big enough dinner party, you could put a whole novel in there.”
They sat together in the hot, close room, crunching chips and nodding politely, while Kevin thought that this harebrained business with the cookies must have been Jerry’s reason for staying with her, some kind of front or money laundering scheme. Melody took Colette on a tour of the bungalow’s four small rooms, while Kevin said he was happy in his chair. In the kitchen Melody claimed, “It’ll do for now—though it’s not quite ready to mass-produce.”
Jerry arrived at the front door with a bag full of clanking beer bottles, cursing the torn toe band on his foam rubber sandals. Now with a beard, mostly white, and long slate-colored hair, a tanned, leathery texture to his face, he looked as if he had been lost at sea for several years. Kevin said, “What are you, some kind of wise man now?”
“Hey—holy shit. Look at you.” He put down his groceries and they shared a brief hug, rapidly patting each other’s backs. “Where’d you get the beauty mark?”
“France.”
“Ooh la la. Melody give you the grand tour yet?”
“It’s going on right now.”
“Great. Let’s avoid that. I’ll get the grill started—come outside and we’ll talk business.”
“Dad? You want to say hi to—you know—to my wife?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ. Do I have to?”
Colette came to the threshold between rooms and tilted against the doorjamb. Although Kevin had visualized this reunion during recent restless nights, always assuming that the future would outshine the past, that a grudging forgiveness was possible and that uncomfortable memories could be stowed away, the moment he saw the real and deep antagonism on their faces, he marveled at his own powers of denial, and realized with certainty that he had just destroyed an entire volume of illusions. Jerry and Colette stared each other down like immovable foes. There was a fleeting hint of respect in Jerry’s slanted mouth, and, in Colette’s calmly blinking eyes, the resurfacing determination of a prodigal student.
“Does everybody know everybody?” asked Melody.
“It’s nice to meet you, sir,” said Colette. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
She put out her hand, and Jerry frowned at it like a wad of cash being flashed in broad daylight. Then he smiled a wide phony smile and, clasping her hand in his, replied, “Welcome to the family. Such as it is.”
A few minutes later Kevin found Jerry out on the driveway furiously squirting gasoline onto the barbecue coals. He was mumbling to himself, and when he saw Kevin approaching in the darkness, he stood up straight and lit a match. The fire spread quickly across the pile, and they both stepped back as the flames rose and twisted and shed sparks precariously close to a row of dusty cypress trees. Kevin saw the silhouette of a rat crawling along a phone wire from the house.
“I know everything is complicated, Dad.”
“Hey, if you can live with it—not my problem. I will tell you something though.” He gestured the neck of his beer at the kitchen window. “She’s the same woman. She’s going to walk off with every cent.”
“Dad, you said two words to each other. How do you know?”
“I got eyes. She’s using you. That’s just my opinion, there’s no law that says you have to listen to me.”
“How could she be using me? I don’t have anything.”
“Of course, there’s probably no law that says you’re really married either. That’s Europe—they don’t honor that shit over here.”
“I’ve been dead broke for over a year, Dad. If she was going to scam somebody, there’s a hell of a lot better catches than me.”
“She knew. No, no, no—she knew you’d come across a big score like this sooner or later. I’m just looking out for you, Kev. But forget me. I’m just your father, I’m just your old man. What the fuck do I know about anything? Sooner or later, you’ll see what I mean.”
Jerry paced over to an ice cooler by the garage, triggering a motion-sensitive light. He opened another beer and handed it to Kevin.
“Dad—about this big score. I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, what am I doing in this dump? Th
at just shows your ignorance right there. I got to keep everything quiet, man. Everything. I got my own marital situation going on in there and she’s got Jesus ganging up on me now. I’m telling you, you put enough cocaine in a decent woman’s nose and she turns into a freaking Jehovah’s Witness. You should see all the ex-crackheads wandering around this neighborhood, handing out literature.”
“Melody’s going to put it all in fortune cookies.”
As the women moved into the lighted kitchen, Jerry and Kevin watched the quiet scene: Melody was opening a bottle of wine, then elicited Colette’s help when the cork broke in half. Jerry drew a last hard swig from his beer, then he whispered for Kevin to follow him into the garage.
When he turned on a fluorescent light, something crawled away in the far corner, hiding behind a row of water heaters and stacks of cedar paneling. Jerry explained that he was turning this garage into a sauna, but he said it in an exaggerated handyman’s voice that seemed designed to fool his wife. “Anyway, she’ll never come in here. We got a little rat problem, and she’s got some kind of phobia about them.” He held his empty beer with just his finger stuck into the opening. “You need to pay attention, Kev. This job demands your expertise.” He scanned the dark opening of the garage, the waning fire and the catching coals, and he continued, “And you know what, somebody else is going to want in on this too.”
Kevin groaned and said, “No, Dad. She doesn’t want in on anything.”