by Iain Levison
Which was pure fantasy, they all knew. It was an hour from Wilton and a trip to McDonald’s usually had all three of them checking their wallets. Eating out had become a luxury that they just read about and saw on TV. And besides, if you stole a Ferrari from a restaurant’s parking lot, it might not be a great idea to use the proceeds eating there, since that would increase the likelihood of being seen by a busboy or valet parking attendant who might have noticed you lurking around in the woods prior to the theft.
So much of their lives were made up of that kind of fantasy, Mitch thought, so much time wasted with comments like that one. We should go to dinner here. Yes, we really should. It would be awfully nice, wouldn’t it? Perhaps we should have our butlers make reservations for seven-ish. It was all part of the same brainwashing—him obsessing about paying his credit cards on time so he could one day buy a house and Kevin suggesting a dining-out experience at the priciest restaurant in their part of the state. They had eaten it up, all the shit they had been fed about having a future. Their future was to work or starve, and the work was getting harder to come by.
Kevin pulled into the parking lot, which, despite the freshness of the snowfall, had already been plowed and most likely would be again before the restaurant opened at four o’clock. They looked at the ornate woodwork on the porch, the sign with a layer of snow neatly balanced along its narrow edge. A Mexican man wearing an apron emerged from a basement door and began shoveling the snow off the steps, paying no attention to the pickup truck idling in the otherwise empty parking lot.
“That’s Jorge,” said Kevin, full of awe. “He’s the dishwasher. Jesus, I can’t believe he still works here.”
“Where else would he go?” asked Mitch, looking around at the woods and motioning toward the dying town they had driven through to get there. Kevin was still staring at the dishwasher, lost in a reverie of nostalgia. He snapped himself out of it and looked across the parking lot.
“See back there? All the way back against the tree line?” He pointed to the far end of the lot. “What we gotta do is hide in those trees over there, as far as we can from the front of the restaurant. On busy nights, they park the cars all the way back against the trees.”
“How can we be sure they’ll park the Ferrari back there?” asked Mitch.
“We can’t.”
“How do we know what nights the Ferrari will be here?” asked Doug.
“We don’t.”
There was silence. “Look, guys,” Kevin said patiently. “We’re gonna make over six grand apiece, OK? We gotta put a little bit of work in.”
“Like what? Whaddya mean, work? You mean we gotta hide in those trees in the middle of winter until a Ferrari shows up?” Mitch was getting annoyed now. He’d just spent an hour in the cramped pickup with Doug’s leg crammed against his, putting his foot to sleep, and he had the good seat. He could only imagine how uncomfortable Doug must have been, straddled over the stick shift, and now it was starting to look like the plan involved coming out here on a nightly basis for god knows how long, and lying in a snowy bush all night. He didn’t mind stealing cars. That was the fun part. But he hadn’t signed up for night after night of freezing his balls off in a forest.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” said Kevin, as if he were talking to his six-year-old daughter.
“Dude, let’s just steal the first car we see. This is fucked up.”
“I don’t mind,” said Doug quickly.
“That’s the spirit,” said Kevin. “Dude, there are like three guys who come here all the time who drive Ferraris. Seriously.”
“That was ten fucking years ago,” snapped Mitch. “They could all be dead by now.”
“OK, there’s more,” said Kevin, talking only to Doug now. “We have to wear business suits.”
“Business suits? What the fuck are you thinking?” said Mitch.
“Business suits,” said Doug thoughtfully.
“Yeah, business suits. If we get out and walk around in this parking lot the way we’re dressed right now, in jeans and these shitty jackets, the valet guys’ll be on us in a flash. They’ll start asking all kinds of questions. But if we’re wearing business suits, they’ll leave us alone.”
“So I have to squat in a bush for a week wearing a business suit,” said Mitch. “Dude, fuck this. Let’s just go rip off that doctor with a safe full of pills.”
“Pills?” asked Doug. “I hadn’t heard anything about this. What’s this about pills?”
Kevin ignored him. “Mitch, man, what the fuck is the matter with you? You won’t spend a few nights getting your precious little hands dirty for over six thousand dollars? Fine. Fuck it. Me and Doug’ll do it. That’ll be ten grand for each of us. We don’t really even need three people anyway.”
“Yo, you guys, what’s this about pills?” Doug said. “Do you know someone who can get pills?”
Surprised at how easily he was being cut out of the deal, Mitch began to backtrack. “Dude,” he said patiently, “I’m just a little surprised. I thought you knew exactly when and where we could find a Ferrari. I didn’t think it was going to involve a lot of detective work.”
Despite having run a booming pot-selling operation with Doug, Kevin wasn’t sure enough of his intelligence to go into the car-theft business with him alone and felt more comfortable about the three of them working together. He, too, began to backtrack. “Well, I can’t say for sure what night we’ll get a Ferrari,” he said, “but we’ll get one. The plan is good.”
“The plan is good,” Mitch agreed, skeptically.
“OK then,” said Kevin. “Do you guys have business suits?”
“What’s this about pills? Why won’t you guys answer my questions about pills? I know you’ve got pills,” said Doug.
“We don’t have any fucking pills,” said Mitch. “I was kidding.”
“You weren’t kidding. I distinctly heard you talking about stealing pills.”
“Well, if we’re talking about stealing them it means we don’t have them, right?”
“Do you guys own business suits?” asked Kevin again
“Yes, we have business suits,” Mitch half-shouted.
“What kind of pills?” said Doug. “OxyContin? Can you get some OxyContin? Seriously. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been able to get ahold of OxyContin?”
Kevin looked across at Mitch and rolled his eyes. Neither one of them gave Doug a straight answer as they drove back to Wilton.
ON THE DRIVE back, Kevin was thinking about a guy he had met in prison named Eddie Dars. They were in the common room one afternoon, which was really just a huge cell, and as they were the only two white men in the room at the time it was only natural that they gravitated toward one another. Eddie was playing chess by himself and had invited Kevin over and taught him some moves. Kevin had been intrigued by the game. Then the conversation had turned to sports, and they discussed the Steelers and the Dolphins in great depth. Eddie really knew his football, knew the colleges attended by the whole Steelers offensive line, the histories of the coaches. They had laughed sometimes as they talked and Kevin had gone back to his cell thinking, I’ve finally found a friend in this place.
Kevin found out later that same day that Eddie Dars had raped seventeen women. Not one, not two. Seventeen. The guy was a fucking maniac. After a week of jail, this was the first actual criminal Kevin had met and up until that moment it had not occurred to him that the prison’s ostensible reason for existence was occasionally valid. Among the black kids who had driven through white neighborhoods with bags of weed, the drunk drivers who didn’t have connections to get them out, and the junkies who had failed to show enough respect to the judges and police, there were some actual criminals mixed in. This was an eye-opener for Kevin. It turned out that Eddie Dars was only in the minimum-security prison because he was attending court dates in the county and would be headed back to maximum-security prison at the end of the month to serve out a fifty-year sentence. And Kevin had picked him
over all the others as a friend.
What did that say about him, Kevin wondered? He knew that he himself was a well-grounded fellow—normal upbringing, popular in high school. Yet in his personal choices he always seemed to gravitate toward the fringes. How else would he have wound up in a car with these two, Continually Complaining Mitch and Pillhead Doug, planning a felony? Was he just like them? He felt normal and he figured that if people saw the three of them together they would see him as an ill fit. But he did fit. He got along with them.
He knew the fact that he got along with them annoyed Linda. There was always something about his attraction to the fringes that had bugged her. He hadn’t decided to grow pot in his basement for the money, though the money it generated hadn’t hurt. He had grown the pot because he knew he would start meeting people like these guys. He had felt that he was about to sink into a middle-class hellhole, and Linda had already started going to PTA meetings. Real PTA meetings. Kevin had thought that the PTA was just a Saturday Night Live joke, a symbol of domestication and middle-class family life, like white picket fences. He hadn’t thought there was actually a PTA. But there was and Linda had found it.
So that was it; he was doomed to spend the next fifty years hanging out with married couples and going to dinner parties at other people’s houses and talking about the cost of gutter replacements and the best way to seed a lawn. Some of the people he met when he was forced to go to a dinner party and reexamine his lost youth were younger than him. One cheerful neighbor named Hank, in his early twenties and dressed in khakis and a sweater (which was almost as bad as going to a PTA meeting), had suggested that Kevin needed to aerate his lawn and spent a full half hour giving him horticulture tips. While Hank had been rambling, Kevin had decided that a little horticulture might not be a bad idea.
He had sat down at the computer the next day and bought lights and seeds online, built a partition in the basement, and told Linda that he was setting up a “workshop” for himself. Rather than buy a padlock to keep her out, he had decided to make her think that whatever he was doing in there was just so boring that she wouldn’t care to enter. She wanted him to have hobbies, so he picked the most boring hobby he could think of—sculpting—and ran with it. The space behind the partition became his “sculpting room.” Linda never asked why a sculpting room required ten kilowatts of power a day, nearly doubling their energy bill, nor why it emitted an eerie glow visible under the panels of the partition at all hours of the night, nor why fans could be heard constantly running in the sculpting room, nor why he never produced any sculptures. His lack of sculpting output could always be blamed on sculptor’s block. But finally, when he had felt it was time for him to produce something, anything, he had gone to the Asian market and bought a raw wood sculpture of an Easter Island–style mongoloid with a huge head. Linda’s comment when he showed it to her had been, “Yeah, I saw that at the Asian market.”
It had gone on that way for months. Linda never asked questions. She must have known all along what he was up to. Must have. He went to dinner parties (when forced to by Linda) and the conversation one night had turned to basement remodeling. I’m going to hook up a high-def sound system in mine; I’m going to get a weight room set up; I’m going to get a sports room/pool room/guys-only room with a bar and a Beer Meister, blah blah blah. They were all talking about brand-name appliances and how great it was going to be when their basements were all finished and how everyone was invited over, and Kevin had only one thought: you guys are never coming over to my basement, unless you want to sample some Afghan sativa hybrid under 320-watt sodium lights. The thought had made him smile to himself, which the other guys had ignored, because they were used to him smiling to himself and never saying much and they didn’t really like him anyway.
On the way home, Kevin had repeated some of the conversation to Linda, holding it up as an example of why these parties were a form of torture for him. Linda had missed the point. “Why don’t you bring them over and show them your sculpting room?” she had asked. But Kevin had detected a trace of irony in her voice, disguised as innocence. She knew. She had known along. But, he thought as he drove through the wooded, windy roads back to Wilton, she had let him do it without bothering him.
And he suddenly realized why. She had let him do it because it must have seemed to her that it was the only thing that made him happy. That’s what a miserable prick he had been. And that’s what a good wife she had been. But things had changed, Kevin knew. Linda just wasn’t that worried about his happiness anymore.
“What are you thinking about, dude?” Doug asked him. “You’re looking all deep and shit.”
“Nothing.”
“No, seriously. What are you thinking about?”
Kevin looked out the window at the fields of blue spruce, snow hanging from their drooping branches, as he took another turn at an uncomfortable speed on the icy road. Doug and Mitch said nothing, having resigned themselves to helplessness. “I’m thinking about Linda,” he said.
Doug froze. He had wanted a nice, personal conversation, something to kill the time on the ride, but he certainly didn’t want to talk about Linda. Not with Kevin. In fact, not with anyone.
Kevin misinterpreted his silence as an opening to keep talking. “I think I’ve been a shitty husband,” he said. “I wonder if it’s too late.”
Doug was staring through the windshield, eyes wide, mouth clenched shut. Kevin looked over at him and figured the expression was due to his driving.
“Dude, I’m not driving that fast. I know these roads.”
Everyone in the truck was silent. No one said another word until they reached Wilton.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Mitch walked Jeffrey the pit bull and when he got back to the client’s house, he found himself tempted by the safe. He knew how much Doug loved pills and he figured that, if there were some loose pills in there, he might grab a handful for him. Fuck it, he thought, let the guy have some pills. He’d had a shitty week, getting laid off and all. Only he’d have to make up a story about where he got the pills so Doug wouldn’t bug the crap out of him for more.
Mitch took off his shoes, stepped over the dog gate, and tiptoed carefully back into the den. The adrenaline rush from the illicit action made his hearing alert and sensitive, aware now of the steady hum of the huge house’s central heating and even the noise of his heart thumping as his unsteady fingers pulled the gilded frame of the painting forward. He looked out the window at the snow-covered front lawn, nearly a hundred yards of pristine whiteness between him and the street. Even if the doctor came home early, Mitch figured he would have plenty of time to slam the painting shut, run back to the kitchen, and put his shoes back on before the guy made it into the house.
Mitch twirled the knob to each number in the combination. On the final number, his nervousness made him turn the dial several digits too far and when he cranked the small lever, the safe didn’t open. He cursed, took a deep breath, and started over, then froze as a car turned the corner at the top of the street and drove past. Shit. He took another deep breath and started a third time. Hadn’t Kevin opened the safe? How hard could it be? This time, when he cranked the lever he heard a hydraulic hiss and the door came loose. He swung it open.
Inside were about a dozen small mailer boxes and what looked like several thousand dollars in cash. The cash was stacked in piles about six inches high. Kevin hadn’t mentioned the cash. Was the cash new or had Kevin just not mentioned it? If he asked Kevin about the cash, then he would have to admit to Kevin that he had opened the safe. Which was OK, Mitch decided, because Kevin had opened the safe. And besides, he wasn’t really stealing; he was doing a good deed for Doug. He grabbed one of the stacks of cash and looked at it. It appeared to be all twenties, not hundreds, as he had assumed. Still, it was quite a sum. Then he grabbed a mailer box and flipped it open.
It was filled with loose pills, all the same, white and round. He grabbed twenty or so and shoved them into his pocket. As he was doing this, one o
f the pills fell on the hardwood floor and bounced onto the rug. He looked down and didn’t see it. Shit, he thought. It had rolled under the desk. He shut the mailer box, put it back, and closed the safe. Then he carefully let the painting swing back in place over it and got down on his hands and knees to look around under the desk. There it was. He picked it up and stared at it, clean and white and pure and shiny, and without thinking, he popped it into his mouth and swallowed. Let’s see what Doug is always talking about, he told himself.
Mitch stood up, looked around the room to make sure nothing had been visibly disturbed, and as he was backing out of the room, he noticed two obvious impressions in the dust on the hardwood floor where his knees had been when he had knelt down to get the pill. He tiptoed back over and swirled the dust around with his sock. Then when he backed up, he saw the dust from his sock tracked on the rug. He picked up some dust lint with his hands and mussed the carpet, and this time noticed the streak marks he had left in the carpet while mussing it. Then he decided he was just being stupid; nobody examined their carpet when they came into a room. He turned and left.
Mitch ran back into the kitchen, put his shoes on, and locked the kitchen door on his way out. He waved goodbye to Jeffrey, who was huddled, freezing, in his doghouse, half-frozen snot dangling from his nose. Jeffrey stared at him forlornly as he peeled out of the driveway.
• • •
MITCH DROPPED TWO of the pills on the table in front of Doug, who was watching TV while cleaning a bong. The effect on Doug was electric, as if awakening him from slumber with a gunshot. He sat up, instantly alert, as he took the pills and examined them.
“Dude, what’re these?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”