by Iain Levison
“I have clothes.”
Linda laughed again. “What time do you want me to pick you up?”
“How about one . . . thirty,” he added quickly, to give himself another half hour of sleep.
“I have to pick Ellie up from school at two. How about eleven?”
“Eleven?” Shit, that was like the middle of the night.
Linda heard the dismay in his voice. “OK, eleven thirty.”
“Awright.” Linda sounded cheerful and it occurred to Doug how different that was. He spent too much of his time around cheerless people: Mitch, Kevin, the cooks at the restaurant. There was a definite need for some kind of cheer in his life, even if it involved getting up before noon.
Unable to go back to sleep, Doug grabbed a cigarette and sat on the back porch and wondered what to do with his life. The Navaho believed that your life calling just came to you. He had seen that on the Discovery Channel. Why wouldn’t his calling come to him? It sure wasn’t cooking at a corporate restaurant. He had been there four years now and his wage had only gone up two dollars and at least three other guys had been promoted to kitchen manager without a thought even being given to him. “You’re our best grill man,” his boss always told him. “We can’t afford to lose you.” He could work every station on the line blindfolded, could do all the food ordering when the kitchen managers were on vacation, but the management would fight him if he ever asked for a quarter more an hour. Doug was convinced they would move him up if he cut his hair, but that wasn’t going to happen.
The truth was, he didn’t care that much, because he knew that the restaurant wasn’t his calling. It was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It was around him; it was near; it was getting closer. He could feel a personal epiphany about to burst through, if he could only get some kind of a sign. The Navaho got their signs when they were thirteen. He was twenty-six. He should have had two already. Where the hell was it?
A traffic helicopter flew low overhead, its rotor beating like a bass drum, breaking the quiet of the morning. Maybe that was it. Maybe he should be . . . a chopper pilot. That would be cool. Wearing one of those helmets and talking into those mikes that extended out in front of your mouth, flying hot traffic reporter chicks around. Or maybe he’d be a personal chopper pilot for some billionaire and fly him down to the Bahamas a few times a year and stay in a hotel. Or maybe he could get a job with the Coast Guard, rescuing people who had taken their yachts out in bad weather. No, not the Coast Guard. They were always busting pot smugglers. And they drug tested. But still, being a chopper pilot was definitely something to think about.
He was going to look into it. And he was going to talk to the Mexican girl this week, and tell her he was going to chopper pilot school. He finished the cigarette and stubbed it into an ashtray, which was overflowing.
He could feel some weird psychic energy flowing up from somewhere, a rush of enthusiasm for a life he knew he should be having, and his brain began to whir, exploring his options. The restaurant had a program for employees who had been there over two years, in which they paid 50 percent of tuition. He could apply that to chopper pilot school. This was going to work out great. This was it. Things were about to change.
Chopper pilot. Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
BOB SUTHERLAND WAS walking around the Accu-mart at midnight, checking the displays, adjusting the vacuum cleaners on the top shelf so they faced sideways, not straight out. People wanted to know what a vacuum cleaner’s silhouette looked like, not what it looked like when it was coming at you. They bought vacuum cleaners for their clean, sleek look, not because they vacuumed floors. Why couldn’t the housewares staff recognize that? Why did he always have to walk around at midnight and shift things so they looked more . . . buyable?
It exasperated Bob Sutherland that his staff always seemed to lack that sense of what made a customer want to buy. They would come in unshaven or with their hair everywhere and stand around talking in groups until they saw him coming, and then they’d scatter like mice, off to perform some menial task, which they would halt the minute he was out of sight. They liked to complain about their wages, he knew, because he could eavesdrop on them with the surveillance cameras. They didn’t know that some of the cameras had audio. Rather than try to get better wages by showing some enthusiasm, they’d sit around and bitch about their hernia operations or having to work two jobs and how tired they were all the time, and they’d just shelve the vacuum cleaners any which way. If it wasn’t for him always walking around, checking, adjusting, fixing, the whole place would just go to hell in a few hours.
Sighing heavily, he retired to his office and slumped in his Healthy-Back office chair, watching the laser printer quietly pump out the daily sales reports. He flipped back through his caller ID and noticed a call from Washington, D.C. His brow wrinkled. Who could that be? He picked up the receiver and checked his messages.
“Mr. Sutherland, this is Ken Spargenbergerluger, the Webmaster General, here in Washington, D.C. We just wanted to let you know that if you have any problems with your Web site, you should contact your own Web administrator, not us. Please tell that to your employees. OK, dork?”
Click.
Sutherland’s heart was pounding. Had a government official just called him a dork? His hand shaking, he hung up the phone. Then he picked it up again, then put it back down. He took a few deep breaths. Think, he told himself. This might not be as serious as it first seemed. He listened to the message again, and he noticed that the voice sounded distantly familiar. He couldn’t place it, but he had the distinct feeling that perhaps, just maybe, one of his typical miserable employees might have had something to do with this.
He took the employee phone list out of the drawer and studied it. When he got to the bottom of this, he told himself, there was going to be hell to pay.
3
CHAPTER
VERY CAREFULLY, KEVIN filled the eyedropper with bleach and slipped it into his right front pocket so that the nozzle pointed out through a tiny hole he had cut. Now, with a little bit of pressure applied on his thigh, he could spray bleach out with his urine stream, right into the cup he was expected to piss into. A few drops of bleach would ruin any chance of a positive result on the drug test, but you had to be careful not to spray in too much or the urine would reek of bleach. To insure against that, he had eaten asparagus for the last two days, so the urine would definitely have some kind of weird odor, and the addition of bleach would just make the smell even odder. The more factors you could throw in, the better. Hopefully, the lab people wouldn’t know what to make of it. There goes Kevin, the guy with the weirdest smelling piss you ever encountered. Does he smoke pot? Hard to say.
For the first six months after he had been released from jail, Kevin had actually been pot-free, but then resentment rather than craving had taken over. Who were these people to tell him what he could and couldn’t do when he was alone and off of work? They had taken nearly all his money and locked him up for the whole summer, for indoor gardening. Why wasn’t that enough? Five grand for the lawyer, $2,500 for fines, $600 for court counseling. He’d even had to pay administrative fees for getting released from prison. The discharge paperwork had cost him $120, which must have meant it was either typed up by someone with a doctorate in office work, or it had been printed with solid-gold toner. But who would say no to that expense if it was all that stood between you and freedom? While paying his debt to society, he had managed to accumulate a significant debt to his credit card company.
It was, he figured, all about money. The counseling for which he paid the $600 was group therapy, in which he had been made to sit in a room with three junkies and a bored psychologist, listening to the junkies’ tales of child abuse. Whenever it was his turn to speak, Kevin would offer, “I just got busted for growing pot in my basement. I’ve never been abused.” Until, of course, the local police got their hands on him, but a mention of that would have resulted in more counseling�
��and more fees.
Kevin had realized fairly quickly that a game needed to be played. He didn’t just need to pay fines and serve time; he needed to be grateful for their help. At the end of each session, he would thank the psychologist profusely, perhaps even ask him for advice that he didn’t want. Sure enough, the psychologist pronounced him cured after only five sessions, instead of the ten the judge had assigned, though, of course, half the money was not returned.
Kevin screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle and got out of his car, dropped some quarters into the parking meter, and went into the municipal court building. Through the metal detector, past the row of young black men in orange jumpsuits chained to a bench, up the cinder block– motif stairwell, through the heavy steel door marked PAROLE AND PROBATION. The office staff was behind a window lined with chicken wire, in case any of the parolees got rowdy, though the atmosphere was never one of typical government chaos. It was subdued, polite, and quiet. These were people who had gotten out and weren’t going to jeopardize their freedom with unsightly displays of emotion before a court clerk.
Aware of the intimidation factor, the clerks were brutal. They never made eye contact with the parolees and barked orders at them through the wired glass. A heavyset, middle-aged woman with glasses and stiff black hair didn’t even look up at Kevin as she snapped, “Name?”
“Kevin Gurdy. I’m here to see—”
“Have a seat.”
Kevin sat down on the black vinyl bench with two young black men, who were staring straight ahead. After a moment, the woman lifted her head and said, “Jackson.”
Kevin and the two men looked at each other.
“Jackson,” she repeated, her voice rising with irritation at this delay. “Who’s Jackson?”
“I think he went out to go look for a water fountain,” one of the men said.
“Well, go get him. If he isn’t here in thirty seconds, I’m marking him down as absent.”
The man got up and went out into the hall to look for Jackson, returning with him inside a minute. Jackson, another young black man, who had clearly just been to the restroom, was still buckling his pants.
“Mr. Jackson,” she hissed. “‘Have a seat’ means have a seat. It doesn’t mean go wandering around the courthouse.”
“I just had to—”
“Officer Deakins is ready for you,” she interrupted, her voice high with anger, as she shoved a piece of paper through a slot in the chicken-wire window. She turned her back to Jackson as he retrieved the paper, then buzzed the door leading into the back office, which Jackson opened.
“Hunt?” she snapped.
Again no one responded. “All right,” she said, and began to fill out paperwork, dooming Mr. Hunt to a return to jail.
“Gurdy?”
Kevin stood up quickly, and she looked at him for the first time, her attitude almost imperceptibly changing as she noticed that he was white. In his months of coming to parole appointments, Kevin had detected a definite pattern of racism from the office staff. The white women were often slightly less horrible to the white parolees. The black women were equally horrible to everyone, except for the younger ones, who were sometimes civil to the young black men. They would grow out of it.
“Yes, that’s me,” said Kevin. The woman shoved a slip of paper under the glass and buzzed the door.
“Officer Poacher,” she said, as if Kevin didn’t know. He walked back through the parole office, past cubicle after cubicle of young black men sitting in rickety institutional chairs, explaining their lives to bureaucrats who were sitting, bored, behind tiny desks. Corrections Officer Poacher was one of the senior parole officers, and he had an actual office all the way in the back, a cramped mess of scattered paperwork and half-open file cabinets, forms spilling out of every drawer.
“Have a seat, Gurdy,” Poacher said when he saw Kevin.
He turned to a file cabinet behind him and pulled out Kevin’s file. “How’ve you been?”
“Fine,” Kevin said. He wondered if he was supposed to ask the question back, as one would do in any other social situation, or if it was an official question to determine Kevin’s state of mind. One had to be very careful what one said in a parole interview. To give a hint of any negativity might start the officer asking questions. If Kevin sighed and said, “OK, I guess,” Poacher would start digging around about why life wasn’t perfect and whether this meant that Kevin was going to return to his life of crime because of the stress. In a parole interview, you couldn’t have problems. As far as Poacher was concerned, Kevin’s marriage was wonderful, his dog walking business was about to get him on the cover of Money magazine, and the thought of growing or smoking marijuana was so repulsive as to make him want to vomit.
“How’re things at home?” Poacher asked, without looking up from the file.
“Great, great,” said Kevin, nodding, trying to force a smile. “My daughter just got picked for the lead in the school play.” Kevin had made that up on the spot, because he had learned that it was always good to mention Ellie. Sometimes it triggered Poacher to talk about his son, who was fourteen, and then the interview became an unfocused mess of two parents babbling about their kids for a half hour, which was what Kevin wanted. Stay away from topics like drugs, crime, and prison, have a court-mandated chat, and get the hell out of there.
“Really?” said Poacher, so brusquely that Kevin knew it wasn’t going to work this time. Actually, it hadn’t worked in over a year. Poacher had become more reluctant to discuss his son as time had passed, and Kevin had pieced together that Poacher was going through a bitter divorce and may have lost custody. In fact, Poacher’s general aura had deteriorated significantly since Kevin had been assigned to him.
Poacher flipped the file shut. “You staying off drugs?” he asked.
Kevin nodded. “Yes, absolutely.”
“Honestly?” Poacher stared into Kevin’s eyes, and it unnerved him. Did the man know something? Had he been peering through Kevin’s basement window? Was this the time to confess or to act unsure? Gut instinct told him to lie.
“Absolutely,” said Kevin. “No drugs.” He was going to add something else, but then remembered that he had recently heard on the Discovery Channel that interrogators often noticed people were lying because they overexplained. Brief answers were best. There was a silence between them, during which Kevin repeatedly stifled the urge to do just that—start babbling and overexplaining. The Discovery Channel knew its shit.
Poacher reached in a drawer, and Kevin felt certain he was going to produce one of the little clear plastic pee cups for the drug test, but instead he pulled out a form.
“I’m a busy man,” Poacher said. “I’ve got fifty-six parolees assigned just to me.”
Kevin crossed his legs, a gesture of comfort and relief at the conversation going off on this tangent.
And then it happened.
The rubber bubble at the top of the eyedropper in his pocket compressed as a result of the action, squirting bleach through the hole in Kevin’s pocket and all over his balls.
Kevin knew what had happened right away. He felt the liquid trickling through his pubic hairs, like little insects running around down there. He kept his expression frozen and remained still. For the first second, the liquid was cool. Then it began to feel warm.
“So what I’m going to do,” Poacher said, “is wrap up your parole. You seem like a good guy, a family man. I don’t really see a reason to keep making you come back in here for your monthly visits. You’ve come up clean every time we’ve tested you and . . .”
Poacher kept talking. The warmth had turned to heat, then burning. It felt like someone was holding a lit cigarette to his nut sack. Kevin tried to beam with glee at what Poacher was saying, but instead felt his face freeze in a death grimace as sweat broke out on his forehead. Then the powerful odor of bleach hit him. He and Poacher were only a few feet apart, and Kevin was sure Poacher was about to sniff the air and wonder what the smell was.
&
nbsp; Oh god, MY NUTS ARE ON FIRE. Kevin gritted his teeth. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he grabbed his balls and tried to shift them around, his eyes watering as a great rush of air came out of him, his mouth wide open as if he were singing a silent opera.
It was amazing. Poacher didn’t even seem to notice. He was still babbling about what a stand-up guy Kevin was and how it was a waste of resources to keep making him come in, how he had obviously learned his lesson. Kevin tried nodding in agreement. How could he end this? Could he claim a bout of diarrhea and run to the bathroom? Mercifully, the phone rang. As Poacher answered it, Kevin quickly signaled that he was going to the restroom, and Poacher nodded.
Reeking of bleach and grunting in pain, Kevin tried not to run past the desk staff, tried not to slam the buzzing metal door behind, doing his best to act like a guy who had decided to hit the men’s room on his way out. Once out in the corridor, he broke into a full sprint, and once inside the men’s room he ran to a sink, unzipped his jeans, and splashed handfuls of water from the running faucet over his burning nuts.
Relief. With each handful of water, the pain lessened. He became conscious of his surroundings again, suddenly aware that his jeans were now absolutely soaked, as were his shoes and socks. He didn’t care. He would just have to tell Poacher he had slipped and fell, or something. The pain had stopped.
Then he became aware of someone else in the men’s room, and looked up to see a young black man, maybe eighteen, at the next sink, staring at him.
The kid turned and took a paper towel out of the dispenser, and without looking back at Kevin, he said, “Man, you all fucked up.”
“HOW WAS YOUR parole visit?” asked Linda when he returned home. Sometimes Kevin thought she was hopeful that he would be carted off back to jail, and the house would be all hers again. There had been so many changes in the decorating scheme when he had returned from his ninety-day stint that he was unsure if he had been welcome back in his own home. Linda was sitting at her desk and going over bills, a pose in which Kevin had learned conversation was unwelcome unless she initiated it, and even then it should be kept brief.