by Iain Levison
Doug was strangely touched by the request. She must have known he hadn’t intended to.
“OK,” he said. “I promise.”
“Promise me you’ll put it on and go ask out that girl at the convenience store.”
“Awww, fuck.” He looked at her and laughed, then noticed she was about to cry, and he didn’t have any idea why. “OK, OK,” he said. “I swear.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Call me,” she said.
“OK.”
“No, really.”
“I will.” He had no idea why she wanted to spend time with him but she seemed so serious about it that it made Doug feel cheerful by contrast. He wanted to make a joke to lighten the mood but nothing funny came to mind.
“I have to go pick up Ellie,” she repeated suddenly.
“Oh . . . OK.” She’d seemed so needy a second ago and now she was throwing him out of the car. He stepped onto the sidewalk. “I’ll call you.”
“OK,” she said, as if it was his idea. She started the car again, looking out her window into the street to check if it was safe to pull back out into the street. “Bye,” she said as he shut the door and she peeled off.
Doug watched her car fly down the street.
“WHY DON’T YOU come work with me?” Kevin asked as he packed the bong. They were sitting in Doug and Mitch’s living room. Night was falling and Mitch was lying on the couch with his shoes off, staring at the ceiling. Doug had just left for work. He had ignored Kevin when he had come over, which both Mitch and Kevin had found strange.
For Mitch, the energy from the emotional turmoil of being fired had worn off and had been replaced by a vague sense of relief that he would never have to look at Bob Sutherland again. Then it had been replaced by a fear that he wouldn’t be able to come up with rent or money for the bills or gas or car insurance, that the few things he had were about to be taken away. Between bouts of relief at not having to get up and go to work the next morning, he was envisioning himself homeless, begging for change, producing a rollercoaster of emotion that he figured only a good blast of kind bud smoke could alleviate.
“Walking dogs?”
“Yeah, man. I need help. If I had help, I could expand the business. Linda’s always all over my ass to expand the business.”
Mitch thought about walking dogs for a living. He liked dogs. He liked Kevin. He sat up. “OK, I’m in.”
Kevin looked at him quizzically. “You thought this through in two seconds?”
Mitch shrugged. “Yeah. What’s to think about?”
“Well, for starters, it’s like the mail. Rain or shine or snow or hundred-degree heat. No calling out. You call out, the dog’ll piss and shit all over the floor and the people won’t want you back.”
“I don’t call out. I never called out at Fuckyoumart.”
“All right then. Why don’t you come walk a few dogs with me tomorrow morning at seven.”
“Dude, I just got fired. Gimme a day off to relax.”
“Pussy,” said Kevin. “You want to walk dogs or not?”
“Damn, you’d think a guy who just got fired might get to sleep in one fucking day.”
Kevin laughed and drew a big, gurgling hit out of the bong. “All right, man,” he said, eyes suddenly red and heavy, his speech slowed, a permagrin stuck to his face as he handed Mitch the bong. “We’ll give you a day off. Seven thirty Thursday.”
THURSDAY MORNING, KEVIN took Mitch around to each house he would be assigned, introducing him to the dog and giving him the instructions for walking and feeding and tips about the dog’s behavior. Mitch committed it all to memory: Don’t let the immaculately groomed Shih Tzu in Gatesville out through the kitchen door or he’ll crap on a $10,000 rug. Make sure Hans the dachshund get his Cose-quin tablets. Don’t play with Rex the Rottweiler, because they’re trying to train him to be more obedient. Kevin had prepared papers with each dog’s name, address, and instructions, showing an instinct for organization Mitch would never have suspected he possessed.
When they got to the house with Jeffrey the pit bull, Kevin said, “This guy’s a jerk. He leaves his dog outside in all kinds of weather, and I don’t think he feeds him regularly.” Kevin opened the gate, and Jeffrey came bounding up to him, then noticed Mitch and stopped short. Mitch looked at the dog’s powerful build and massive head, an evolutionary development that had only one purpose—to crush bone. He felt a strong urge to step back behind the gate and slam it shut, but he stood his ground and was rewarded immediately with a tail-wagging frenzy.
“He likes you,” Kevin said.
Mitch wondered what criteria the dog had used to come to that decision. It was, he thought, a system of evaluation completely different from Bob Sutherland’s, who was always looking to find fault, always studying you as if to figure out your angle. This dog just saw him with Kevin and that was it. He had passed the interview. Oh, you know Kevin? Great, you’re in the club.
They walked Jeffrey, then went inside the house to get him a bowl of food. The house was one of those old, stone mansions with a kitchen the size of Mitch’s apartment.
Mitch walked around the kitchen, admiring the granite counters, the butcher-block island, and the copper-finished pots hanging from the racks above it. So this is what a rich person’s house looks like, he thought.
“Dude, are you listening?” asked Kevin.
“Yeah. Something about water.”
“Dude, you have to take this seriously. You have to fill his water bowl before you go and he keeps the food in this closet here.”
“I’m taking it seriously,” said Mitch, and he was. Then he stepped on the lever of the garbage can to pop the lid, meaning to throw a used Kleenex away, and noticed a small piece of paper sitting atop the pile of trash. Kevin continued talking as Mitch extracted the paper from the pile and held it up, still dripping what looked like orange juice.
“What the hell are you doing?” Kevin asked.
“Dude, do you know what this is?”
Kevin came over and peered at it. “It’s a piece of paper with some letters and numbers on it. And it’s not yours. Could you stop going through this guy’s trash and listen to me for a second?”
“36-L-18-R-22-L-9-R-5,” Mitch recited. “This isn’t just letters and numbers. It’s a safe combination.”
Kevin stopped walking around the kitchen filling the dog’s bowls. “It’s a what?”
“A safe combination. Does this guy have a safe?”
“Shit, I don’t know. I’ve never been anywhere in the house except the kitchen.” Kevin walked over and looked at the paper. “OK, even if this is a safe combination, so what? It doesn’t concern us.” He tossed the slip of paper back in the trash can.
Mitch immediately picked it back up and put it in his pocket. Kevin was staring at him.
“What?” Mitch asked.
“Dude, do me a favor, OK? Don’t go wandering around this guy’s house looking for his safe.”
“I promise not to.”
“Really?”
“This week.”
“Dammit, look—”
“Kevin, man, listen. Why do you think this was in the garbage? Huh? Answer me that.”
“I don’t know. What difference does it make? I’ve been doing this shit for a year and I don’t usually go through my client’s garbage.”
“‘Client’? What are you, a lawyer?”
“That’s what I call them. They’re my clients.”
Mitch sighed. “Anyway, I figure it was in the garbage because he just had the safe installed. Has there been anyone working in the house in the last couple of days?”
Kevin thought for a second. “There was a locksmith here yesterday. He was doing some work back there in the den, or the living room, or whatever it is.” Kevin pointed to one of the opulently decorated, paneled rooms off the kitchen.
Mitch nodded. “What do you suppose he was doing back there?” There was silence for a second while Kevin looked concerned, then curious, then con
cerned again.
“Let’s at least have a look.”
Kevin finished filling Jeffrey’s bowl. “Do what you want,” he said, resigned. “But take your shoes off.”
Mitch took his shoes off and stepped over the dog gate into the den. There was a huge cherrywood desk in front of a brick fireplace, and Mitch was struck by the grandeur of the room. Persian rug, leather bound books on inlaid shelves— rich people had some really nice shit. He wondered if they ever appreciated it or if it was just meant to impress, or intimidate, the dog walkers, the maids, the locksmiths, and the plumbers. Perhaps spending gobs of money on opulent rubbish was a way of giving a straight-up middle finger to all the people like him who couldn’t afford things like wrought-iron fireplace pokers and Waterford crystal. He picked up the fireplace poker and looked at it. Probably cost hundreds, he thought. No Accu-mart crap in this house.
Most of all, though, he noticed the smell of freshly cut wood, and there were some splotches of sawdust to the right of the Persian rug. Someone had cut a wall stud right near there. He looked at the walls and saw no marks. Then he touched the gilded frame of a painting and it swung outward. He laughed. Could this shit be any more James Bond?
He was looking at the pristine stainless-steel knob of a safe. Behind him, he saw Kevin standing in the doorway of the den in his stockinged feet.
“You’re a menace,” Kevin said, but Mitch heard grudging respect in his voice.
Mitch gently pushed the painting back against the wall, aware that his heart was pounding. “Let’s go walk some more dogs,” he said.
THEY WERE IN line behind two other cars at the Accu-mart loading dock, and Doug was getting nervous.
“Dude, I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said. Kevin knew Doug thought that because he had been repeating it like a mantra since they had switched the license plate on the truck an hour earlier. The nonstop doubtful mumbling had only made Kevin want to bring him along even more, both because of a sadistic impulse to make Doug face his fears and a genuine desire not to steal the TV alone.
“Good idea or not, man, we’re doing it, OK? We’re in line.”
“It’s not too late to just pull out of the line and go back,” Doug said.
Kevin put the pickup in park. “Look,” he said, holding the invoice up in Doug’s face. “In two minutes, I’m going to hand this piece of paper to the guy on the loading dock, and we’re going to get a TV. And when I do it, the whole thing is gonna go a lot easier if the guy sitting next to me in the passenger seat isn’t covered in sweat and freaking out. OK?”
“OK,” said Doug, softly.
“Just be cool.”
“OK, I’m cool.” He seemed cool for a second, then he said, “But you’re on parole.”
“What the fuck are you bringing that up for? Besides, I’m not on parole anymore. I got released on Wednesday.” The loading dock workers waved the next car up, so that Kevin and Doug were next.
“Hey, congratulations, man. That’s cool.”
“Thank you. That’s more than Linda had to say about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bitch couldn’t even congratulate me, you know?”
Doug felt a flush of anger at hearing Linda called a bitch but stopped himself from saying something in her defense. For reasons that were not available to him, he didn’t want Kevin to know he and Linda had gone to the mall the other day, or that they had ever even spoken without Kevin around.
“Mitch congratulated me,” Kevin said.
“Mitch is crazy,” said Doug, in an effort to change the topic by bringing it to a subject they agreed upon.
“Damn, man, we were at one of my clients’ houses the other day, and—”
“Client?”
“Yeah, that’s what I call them. The people whose dogs I walk. Anyway, Mitch wanted to break into this guy’s safe.”
“Mitch can crack safes?”
“No, dumbass, Mitch can’t crack safes. He found the friggin’ combination in the trash can. The guy had just had the safe installed and he was memorizing the combination. You believe that shit?”
Doug laughed, glad to have his mind taken off what they were doing. “It’s probably less risky than this,” he said cheerfully, which was, of course, the wrong thing to say, as it reminded them they were in line to steal an $1,800 television.
It was quiet in the car. And it was their turn. The car in front of them drove off and the loading dock workers waved Mitch and Doug forward.
“Keep cool,” said Kevin, not looking at Doug. He rolled down the window and pulled up next to a well-built man in sunglasses and an Accu-mart T-shirt.
“Hi,” he said, handing the man the invoice.
“Hey. Thanks.” The man took the invoice and went up on the dock and disappeared from view.
“Shit, where’d he go?” asked Doug.
“Settle down.”
“I’m glad we’ve got that fake license plate on,” said Doug.
They were silent for a few seconds as they listened to the loading dock workers call out to each other. Then one called, “Forty-two-inch flat screen. Got it.”
Kevin and Doug looked at each other. “That’s us,” Kevin said.
Two huge doors burst open and a man wheeled a giant white box up to the edge of the loading dock. Two other muscular men hopped off the dock and put the box in the bed of Kevin’s truck. One of the men came around the side.
“It’s a big load. I don’t know if you want to tie it down or what,” he said to Kevin.
“Hey, how you doing?” Doug said, trying to be friendly and not suspicious. The dock worker gave him a strange look and then a perfunctory nod.
Kevin stifled a wince, then said to the dock worker, “I’ll fix it over there in the parking lot, thanks.”
“Sure. I just need you to sign something,” the guy said and disappeared from view again.
“Shit,” said Doug. “Where’s he gone now?”
“Dude, will you stop acting weird?”
“I’m not acting weird. Hey, don’t sign your real name.”
“I’m not an idiot. I’m not gonna sign my real name.”
“That’s how they caught the Boston Strangler. I think.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you telling me the Boston Strangler signed documents after he was done strangling people?”
“Maybe it was Ted Bundy. I dunno.” Doug was babbling nervously and it was starting to make Kevin nervous. He should have come alone. But then he’d be alone.
The guy rounded the corner bearing a clipboard, and Kevin tried to act like he wasn’t in a hurry to take it and sign and drive off.
“That sucker’s a real work of art,” the loading dock guy said, handing Kevin the clipboard. “It’s really not that heavy either. Those thin screens, they’re like eighty pounds now.
A few years ago the lightest high-def was minimum two fifty. The sound quality on it is awesome and if you hook it up to a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer you can get—”
“Hey, we gotta go,” said Doug, who was now visibly sweating. “Thanks a lot.”
The loading guy gave Doug another odd look while Kevin pretended he didn’t know he had a passenger.
“Yeah, I got a Cerwin-Vega subwoofer at home,” Kevin said, handing the dock worker the paperwork.
The guy started to ramble about subwoofers for a few more seconds, then he turned and waved to the next car behind them. “You guys have a great night.” He slapped the side of the pickup and Kevin gave the gas pedal a gentle nudge.
“Holy shit, dude, we did it.”
“We did it,” said Kevin, driving off through the parking lot. It was getting dark, just the time that Mitch had said would be best. The loading dock was busiest at around six P.M. Mitch had been right about everything. It had been so easy.
When they pulled out onto the street, Doug was becoming almost manic. “We did it! Holy shit, man, we did it!”
They high-fived and began talking excitedly.
They recounted each second of the experience they had just shared and laughed about Doug’s mention of the Boston Strangler. When they pulled into the driveway, Mitch was waiting for them, businesslike.
“Oh, man, it was so easy,” Doug yelled as he got out of the truck. It had just occurred to him that, as rent would be paid with this TV, there was no reason to pick up the dreaded Sunday brunch shift now to compensate for his buying the green shirt.
“Keep your voice down,” said Mitch. He bent down and began unscrewing the Nevada license plate which, fortunately, hadn’t gotten them pulled over. Mitch slapped Kevin’s real plate back on.
They took the TV into the cramped living room, wrestled it out of its packaging, and Doug and Kevin connected the cable. Then they all sat down and stared as the forty-two-inch screen came to life.
“Man,” Kevin said, reclining on the worn sofa in Doug and Mitch’s ratty wood-paneled apartment, with its stained, once-white carpet and its walls gray with pot smoke, “this is the life.”
“For another two days,” Doug said. “Then we gotta give it to the landlord.”
“Let’s just pretend it’s ours for forty-eight hours.”
“Cool.”
They settled back and stared at the screen.
THE NEXT MORNING, winter arrived. It was Mitch’s first full day of dog-walking by himself, and he found that the job he had imagined was hilariously easy could, if done in a blizzard, be as much of a nightmare as inventory day at Accu-mart.
His first dog of the day was a St. Bernard named Duffy who considered the blizzard a gift rather than an irritation. Two hundred pounds of playfulness, he bounced around on the icy sidewalks, chased snowflakes, and pulled Mitch into a gutter, nearly spraining his ankle. At that point, Mitch decided that, as Duffy seemed reasonably obedient, it would be safer for all concerned if he was just let off the leash and allowed to run a little by himself. Mistake number one.
The second Mitch unsnapped the leash, Duffy, who was familiar with the sound, motored off around a corner and was gone, leaving Mitch standing in the snow-covered road, leash in his hand, listening to the gentle hiss of the snowfall.
Feet crunching in the snow, Mitch walked to the corner and looked in the direction the dog had disappeared. At the far end of the block, nearly disappearing in the light fog, he could see a St. Bernard’s ass bouncing up and down as it grew steadily smaller.