by Iain Levison
Dammit! What did a dog walker do in this situation? Go home and wait for the dog to return on his own? Kevin, who had left strict instructions never to let the dogs off their leashes, might not be the best person to ask. Surely Kevin would understand if Mitch told him about nearly spraining his ankle in the gutter, right? Mitch tried to imagine Kevin’s reaction to the gutter story and decided that empathy might not be Kevin’s strong suit. He began jogging after Duffy. Mistake number two.
He almost immediately slipped and fell on the ice. Powdery snow covered his face.
“Shit!” Mitch screamed. He got up and was angrily shaking himself off when his cell phone rang. It was Kevin. “Shit,” he said again, and decided not to mention Duffy’s disappearance.
“Dude, check this out,” said Kevin. “I opened the safe.”
“The safe at Jeffrey’s?” Mitch was flush with relief that Kevin hadn’t called to check that everything was going well. “What’s in it?”
“Pills, man. Boxes and boxes of pills. He’s got, like, everything. Hydrocodone, OxyContin, morphine. Shit, I’ve never seen so many pills. The guy must be a drug dealer.”
“Isn’t he a doctor? Maybe all that shit is legal.”
“Damn, man. You gotta see this safe. It sure as hell ain’t legal.”
Mitch wondered why Kevin had called about this. The other day he had seemed freaked out by the idea of even looking for the safe and here he was opening it and talking excitedly about its contents. Was he planning to become a drug dealer the week he got released from parole? For his part, Mitch didn’t really want anything to do with pills.
“Any weed in there?” he asked.
“Nah, it’s all pharmies. Nothing good.”
“Doug’ll like it. Doug likes pharmies. Give him an early birthday present.”
“I’m not going to turn him into a pill head. Besides, I’m not taking them. I just looked inside.”
Kevin had sounded almost hurt by the suggestion that he might steal the pills, but Mitch had noticed that ever since they had stolen the TV, he seemed to have developed a fascination with criminal behavior. They had gone for a ride to the store to get beer and along the way Kevin had pointed out houses that might be easy to break into, doors that didn’t look secure, mailboxes that might be full of information that could be used to steal identities or credit cards. He had even pointed out a bank and said that it was situated perfectly for a robbery, as there were streets and alleys weaving off in every direction. He had actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about and it made Mitch think that perhaps his time in prison had not been a total waste.
“Well, I’m gonna finish up here,” Mitch said. He was aware that his lack of interest was disappointing Kevin, but he was worried about how far away Duffy might be getting.
“Just thought you’d like to know,” said Kevin.
Mitch heard a thundering in the snow behind him and turned around to see that Duffy had returned and was bounding toward him. The dog jumped right into Mitch’s midsection and knocked him sprawling into the gutter, sending the cell phone sailing off into the snow.
“Goddammit!” Mitch screamed. But he’d had the presence of mind to grab the dog’s collar on his way down, so although he was lying in the snow with a minor head wound, he at least had Duffy back. Duffy thought they were playing a game and nudged Mitch back into the gutter, which was filled with icy water, every time he tried to rise, until Mitch finally started screaming straight into the dog’s friendly slobbering face. Then Duffy shook the snow off himself, his head flying back and forth, and the gobs of drool that had been dangling from his jowls went splattering into Mitch’s eyes and mouth.
The phone, which had hung up on Kevin when Duffy knocked it out of his hands, rang again. It was Doug.
“Wassup, dude?” said Mitch. “I thought you were at work?”
“Dude, I got fired.”
“What?” Doug had worked at the restaurant for four years and despite his continual claims of having goals (like becoming a chopper pilot) Mitch had thought it was Doug’s fate to work there forever. He imagined Doug at age fifty, the head grill cook at last, his pay bloated to twelve or thirteen dollars an hour, making him the highest-paid grill cook in town. Mitch pictured him wandering back and forth behind the line in late middle age, saying things like, “I’m thinking about starting night school to become a welder,” or “Soon I’ll fill out an application to learn massage therapy at the community college.”
“Well, not fired exactly, but the restaurant closed. I guess you could say ‘laid off.’”
“It closed? It’s been there for, like, twenty years.”
“I know. I just went in and it was padlocked.”
“Shit,” Mitch said in amazement. “Dude, that sucks.”
“Well, listen. I was wondering if you could ask Kevin if he had any jobs walking dogs.”
Doug had been out of work half an hour and he was already panicking. Mitch knew the feeling. The dog-walking job was taking up half as much time as Accu-mart had and was likely to earn him half as much money, too, so Mitch had problems of his own without his friend asking for half the work. If being mauled by a fun-loving St. Bernard was the best thing he had going, maybe Kevin’s enthusiasm for the safe-opening might not be a bad thing, he thought. The three of them needed to get together and talk.
“Let’s all talk tonight. At our place.”
“Sounds good,” Doug said, thinking he was being offered a dog-walking job, not a safe-cracking and drug-selling job. “And hey, man, thanks.”
“Sure.” Mistake number three.
Doug hung up the phone in a panic. He had been panicking for close to ten minutes, ever since he had pulled up outside work and seen the waiters milling around outside the chained doors. The general consensus among them had been that it was fucked up.
“This is fucked up,” one of them said.
“It’s so fucked up,” another agreed.
There was a note on the door saying that the restaurant would reopen in a few months and thanking customers for their business. There had been an employee meeting a few weeks earlier and none of the managers had bothered mentioning the fact that the restaurant was going to close, which was the most fucked up thing of all.
“I can’t believe they didn’t give us any warning,” one waiter said. “Man, that’s fucked up.”
Doug hadn’t heard the words fucked up used so much since his last appearance at traffic court, where a group of his fellow citizens had sat around in the same type of shock, thunderstruck by the realization that they were losing a lot of money and there was nothing they could do but accept it. It occurred to Doug that four days of paid vacation, along with his tuition assistance, which had been the basis for his dream of chopper school, were all gone. That was it.
No warning, just gone.
He got back in his car and watched his breath steam up the windshield for a few moments, then called Mitch, who had sounded vague and out of breath. He wasn’t sure Mitch appreciated the gravity of the situation but at least he had promised to talk about it later.
He started the car up and pulled back out onto the snow-covered road and hadn’t gone more than fifty yards before a cop car pulled up behind him.
“You know your tags have expired,” the cop said. Doug’s view of expired tags was that the little numbers in the corner of his license plate didn’t affect how well the car drove, so the tag renewal money had gone to repairing a fuel pump. Besides, the money for insurance, which the car had to have before you could get your tags renewed anyway, had gone toward new brakes, so the car could pass inspection, that is, if the inspection money hadn’t gone to repairing a cracked window so he didn’t get pulled over for driving with a cracked window.
How could Doug respond? He could say, “Yes, I know,” and get a lecture on personal responsibility, or “No, I didn’t know,” and get a lecture on vehicle awareness. It wasn’t as if the negative answer would instantly solve the problem. The cop wasn�
�t going to slap his hand to his head and say, “Oh, you didn’t know? That’s OK then. Glad I could bring it to your attention so you can get it taken care of sometime soon.” No, Doug knew a hefty fine was coming his way. He handed the cop his license and said nothing.
“Your inspection has expired and your insurance has expired,” the cop said after sitting in his car for ten minutes. He handed Doug a stack of paperwork and explained each document while Doug stared blankly, suppressing the desire to scream, which would only have made things worse. “This is for no inspection; this is for no registration; this is for no insurance.” Doug saw the numbers on the tickets and saw they added up to over $400, which was exactly the amount he had almost saved up to take care of all the problems the cop was ticketing him for. “I can’t let you drive this vehicle,” the cop finished.
“Why not?”
“It’s not legal.”
“How am I supposed to get home?”
The cop shrugged. “I can’t let you drive this vehicle.” He walked back to his car, his feet crunching in the snow, and then sat in it, idling the cruiser as if daring him to drive away.
Doug sat and stared at him in the rearview mirror. He looked down at his cell phone and thought about calling Mitch. Mitch would come and pick him up, but he doubted that Mitch had taken care of his inspection and registration, either, so calling him would be like luring him into a trap. How long was this asshole going to sit behind him? How bad could this day get? He’d had no idea when he went to work that within an hour he would have no car and no job.
Then he remembered Linda. He needed a ride but he realized that he also really wanted to talk to her. It was almost as if he had missed her the last few days, which was weird, because he had known her for years. He picked his cell phone up off the seat and dialed her number.
5
CHAPTER
WILTON, WHILE NEVER beautiful, could be at least photogenic after a snowfall. The three gray brick smokestacks of the metal-refinishing plant with the snow-covered mountains as a backdrop made a decent photograph for a freshman arts major trying to capture man’s inhumanity to nature. Over time, this had become Wilton’s purpose. Flocks of Penn State students would come down every spring to catch a black-and-white image of a strip-mined valley or a withered ex–coal miner dying of black lung disease on his disintegrating porch. From the gutted earth of the quarries just outside the town to the abandoned coal mines, some of which were permanently on fire, Wilton was a picturesque icon of poverty and environmental rape.
The citizens of Wilton had done their best to act their part as poor environmental rapists. For decades, they had lived large off the environment, until, in the late seventies, Mother Nature had run out of resources for them to plunder and given the town a big middle finger. The mines closed; the quarries filled with rainwater; and only the metal plant remained. Within a decade the town had shrunk by half and most of the downtown buildings were empty shells, giving politicians who wanted a job a chance to make some bullshit pledges about “revitalization” of Wilton’s center. Of course, these promises never amounted to anything, because nobody wanted to pour money into a half-dead coal town whose glory days were long gone and whose tax base was primarily welfare recipients, but the citizens fell for it time after time. Denial of their own hopelessness was the only bond that the community had left.
Doug remembered the excitement that had gripped the town when the Accu-mart had opened. Here it was, at last, the Great Revitalization! Other businesses were sure to follow—Best Buy, Circuit City. Soon there would be a tech-retail corridor right outside the town, drawing people from as far away as Lake Erie, the papers guessed. In fact, the only other business that had followed the Accu-mart had been a Kentucky Fried Chicken, which had been knocked down after three months of existence by a tractor trailer loaded with scrap metal sliding off an icy road. The KFC Corporation had decided not to rebuild; the Great Revitalization had officially stalled.
“I think the best thing to do is leave,” Doug said, looking out at the smokestacks from Avery Hill, where Linda had driven after she had picked him up. The vantage point was an odd choice, because Avery Hill had a reputation as a lovers’ lane, but when she had produced sandwiches and sodas and mentioned that she came out here all the time, Doug had relaxed.
Linda was eating a chicken salad sandwich on rye bread and staring through the windshield at the smokestacks and the lightly falling snow. She wordlessly offered Doug the other half of her sandwich.
“I don’t like rye. But thanks.” Doug sighed. “It’s not like this everywhere.”
“Where would you go?”
“Aspen.”
“Aspen? You mean Colorado? What would you do there?”
“Cook. They have lots of restaurants there. Or be an environmentalist.”
“An environmentalist? I thought you wanted to be a chopper pilot.”
Doug was annoyed that Linda had brought the chopper pilot idea up, because it made him seem flighty. He did want to be a chopper pilot, dammit, but how could you get people to understand that you could be more than one thing? You could be an environmentalist and a chopper pilot and a cook if you had enough money and time for training, and he was already a cook, so that was one out of three.
“The thing is,” Doug said, “that there are so many possibilities. Like, I could be a chopper pilot in Aspen, or a cook in Aspen, or a cook here, or an environmentalist in, like, Peru, or a heart surgeon. Or anything. It’s like, there are so many possibilities. If you pick one, it means you can never pick one again. You only get one shot and what if you fuck up? What if you pick heart surgeon and after three years you’re like, ‘Man, I hate hearts. I’m so sick of looking at fucking hearts,’ you know?”
“You think you could be a heart surgeon?”
“Shit, I don’t know.” He pulled a knob on the passenger seat and leaned back to see the black cloth of the SUV’s ceiling. “Why? You don’t think I’m smart enough to be a heart surgeon?”
“No, that’s not it,” Linda said so forcefully and sympathetically that Doug really believed her and really believed that she did think he was smart enough to be a heart surgeon, even though he himself knew he wasn’t. He didn’t want to be a heart surgeon anyway. But it was nice to hear her say it and he had the thought that no one else he knew would have said that to him. Mitch would have laughed at him and told him to get a job unloading trucks at the farmers’ market. Kevin would have asked him if he wanted to steal another television.
“No, it’s just that I didn’t think you ever wanted to do anything like that.” She smiled. “Don’t be so sensitive.”
Doug was warmed by the smile, which was something he didn’t see on her face very often, and was going to tell her she had a nice smile but then he thought it might sound like a come-on. By the time he had processed this thought, he realized they had been making eye contact for several seconds. The type of eye contact that happened just before a first kiss. But that wasn’t going to happen, because she was his friend’s wife and he wasn’t the type of guy who—
Linda leaned over and kissed him. He didn’t mind the chicken salad breath.
KEVIN WAS WALKING Butch Rogers at the Wilton Dog Park, a remnant of the days when Wilton had civic pride. Two decades ago, the citizens had pitched in to fund a fenced, four-acre park on the outskirts of town, which over time had become a fenced, dog shit–covered wasteland with a lone tree still standing in it. Whatever type of tree it was, Kevin thought, it must be a type that thrived on dog pee.
Butch Rogers was a spiky-haired terrier of some sort, easily terrified and desperate to please, and Kevin liked taking him to the dog park because the presence of other, bigger dogs made Butch piss himself with fear. Ostensibly, Kevin could claim to the owners that he was “conditioning” Butch, “socializing” him, or some other sort of dog psychology crap that his rich clients loved. But the truth was that Kevin found it entertaining to make the dog freak out with terror. He couldn’t help wanting to
punish the dog for being a pussy. If Butch would just stand up for himself once, Kevin had decided, the nightmarish trips to the park would come to an end. He just had to stand his ground one time in the face of an Australian shepherd or a mixed breed as scrawny as he was and it would be over; Kevin would resume walking him in the peaceful neighborhood around his home. But no. Butch saw a small child playing with a Super Ball about fifty yards away and he ran and hid behind Kevin’s legs, trembling.
“Butch, you’re a pussy,” he told the dog as he leaned down to attach the leash, ready to go home. Behind him, he heard the clink of the metal gate, indicating someone new was coming into the dog park and had most likely overheard the comment. He straightened up, looked around, and saw a man he remembered from prison standing right behind him with a Doberman pinscher.
Kevin was never sure what to say to people he recognized from prison. Usually there was a mutual decision to ignore each other and go on your way. What were you going to talk about? The toilet paper shortage of July 2005 or the time one of the inmates had found an actual turd in the meatloaf in the mess hall, resulting in the dismissal of the entire kitchen staff? This time, however, the man was filling Kevin’s whole field of vision, and they were looking right at each other, so it was too late.
“Hey,” said Kevin.
“Hey,” said the guy and unsnapped the Doberman’s leash. The dog bounded over to Butch, who cowered even lower and began to tremble even more violently as the Doberman gave him a few bored sniffs before darting off.
“How’s tricks?” asked the guy, whose name Kevin couldn’t remember. He did remember what the guy had done: some kind of computer fraud. Kevin only knew that because he had heard the guy bitching in the mess hall one day about the provisions of his sentence, which included a year of counseling and a lifetime ban on using computers, which indicated to the guy that the judge had no faith in the counseling. “If I have to pay for a year’s worth of counseling, why not take away the ban when the counseling is over?” he had complained.