Would I have handled it differently if the possibility of winning one of Jimmy’s hand-me-downs wasn’t in the air? No! Well, okay, yes. Was that so wrong? They both had that quality I found irresistible in women—they appeared to lack better options. If I hadn’t felt their eyes on me, I probably would have shouted at Becky to call the cops, which usually lets the air out of things pretty fast because then the bouncer wins no matter how many flying kicks you land on his cranium.
Not that my victory did me any good: The girls were so unimpressed with the champion fighter of the Black Bear Bar that they seemed to have forgotten I existed. After half an hour I waved at Becky. “Can you handle it from here? I need to go home and bleed internally.”
She peered around the bar. Other than Jimmy and his new girlfriends, we had Claude and Wilma in the corner, and the remaining two construction guys were back at the pool table, staring sightlessly at the cue ball even though it had stopped rolling. “Yeah, it’s quite a crowd, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“Good night, sis.”
“See ya, hero.”
Milt’s fifteen-year-old tow truck wanted to keep sleeping, but the dual batteries methodically cranked the engine until it finally rumbled like a grouchy lion. I scraped away the ice from the windshield and eased out into the night.
It was just past twelve. Time for a physics lesson.
Out of habit I hit the repo switch as soon as I was close—dousing lights, instruments, and anything else that glowed—with one click. Milt had invented it and called it “stealth mode,” but I was pretty sure I was still visible to Russian radar. It was simply a kill switch for everything emitting light so that I could sneak up on people in the tow truck, which meant there were no brake lights as I parked about fifteen yards from Einstein’s house, sliding into a dark place under the trees where my truck would be impossible to spot on such a black night. The precipitation had let up but a light patter of meltwater falling from the branches smothered my footfalls as I approached his place.
I paused at the bottom of the driveway and reviewed my plan: (a) go up to his truck; (b) take it. A thin blade of flexible steel, notched on one end—the slim jim—would gain me access to the cab. The dent puller was a claw with a thickly threaded screw on one end. Turn the screw and the claw would pull the ignition switch right out of the steering column. Once the switch was dangling there like a loose eyeball, I’d stick a screwdriver into the contact points, twist, and the truck would hopefully start faster than mine had.
New vehicles no longer used the steering column switch, but Einstein’s Chevy was one of the last trucks built during an era when manufacturers were more considerate of car thieves and repo men.
When the engine was running I’d have to do some back and forth before I could clear the cement steps, and backing around the abrupt elbow in the driveway would be more than a little difficult, but I was betting Einstein’s Friday night had ended with him drinking all of the brothers and sisters of the beer he’d been holding in his hand when we had our productive little chat, and that he would snooze through the whole thing.
So why was I hesitating?
Being a repo man requires what Milt calls “nerves of stupidity”: I usually handled danger by not thinking about it. And I wasn’t thinking about it now. Einstein didn’t scare me, his threat to “shoot me legal” didn’t scare me, and his goose didn’t scare me. I wasn’t picturing him with a gun. I wasn’t picturing anything, but my heart was pounding and my hands shook when I tried to read my watch in the black night.
What if the dream was some sort of foreshadowing? You dream about your death and then you die trying to steal a Chevy truck out of some Einstein’s driveway.
I didn’t like this. Something was wrong—I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see anything. Then I thought about Becky needing a thousand dollars to keep the Black Bear open. I’d get $250 for this repo. I had to have it.
So okay. Still shaking a little with anxiety, I crept up the driveway, slipping a little in the wet slush. There was the truck, jammed in right where it had been earlier. A half-inch of snow covered the windshield; hopefully it wouldn’t leave a film when I wiped it off.
I took another two steps forward and nearly shouted when three large outdoor spotlights flashed on, bathing me in harsh white light. Cursing, blinded, I scrambled away and rolled into the bushes by the goose shed, hugging the mud, trying to stay low. Motion detector.
The door banged open. Einstein Croft stood on the threshold, even uglier in his boxer shorts than he had been in a lumberjack shirt, though I’m sure part of my assessment came from the objectionable presence of the deer rifle in his hands.
He swung the rifle around in a slow circle, sighting over the top of it. I pressed down into the dirt, scarcely breathing for fear the fog of my breath would give me away. My heart hammered at my chest wall and I stared at him, willing him to see me as nothing more than a shadow under his sparse shrubbery.
A full minute passed and then the lights abruptly shut off the show. Now he was illuminated from within the house, and I saw the eagerness go out of him, the barrel of his gun drooping in disappointment. He’d been hoping to bag himself a repo man.
I lay there for a full five minutes after he went back inside, willing my body to calm down. In this part of the country a lot of people own guns and I’d had a few of them pointed in my general direction, but most of the time it was just to scare me. This had been to shoot me. I thought of the nightmare, of the sensation of a rifle bullet hitting me in the back of the head, dropping me onto the forest floor. I desperately did not want that to happen in real life.
After a moment my fear bled out and left me with anger. What did that idiot think he was doing? You don’t kill someone for repossessing your pickup truck! Forget the $250; this was personal now.
I pondered my options. Home motion detectors were usually not very sensitive. If I moved slowly, chances were the lights wouldn’t pop on until I put the truck in gear. I mentally ticked off the seconds it had taken Einstein to come to full alert once the spotlights flared. What had seemed like mere moments now, on reflection, felt like maybe two minutes. If I couldn’t start a pickup and back it down the driveway in less time than that, I didn’t deserve to be a repo man.
Once I decided to try it again, the same uneasiness settled over me—a dread-filled foreboding that I couldn’t shake off. What the heck was my problem?
I was just snaking forward through the muddy snow when I felt a stabbing pain in my Achilles, like something biting me. I rolled over and there was the goose, its neck uncoiling as it delivered another attack on my leg. “Hey!” I whispered sharply. I was trying to avoid setting off the motion detectors and here was this dumb bird, well, goosing me.
It hissed, parting its ridiculous lips and sticking its tongue out at me in what I was sure was some sort of insult. I pulled my legs away. “Stop it! That really hurts!” I commanded with all the authority of being from a superior species. I slithered another few feet and the goose launched itself into the air, flapping its wings.
The night was flooded with the searing white glare from the spotlights. I flung up an arm and the goose wings pummeled me as hard as the biker from Cadillac. Where were its survival instincts? It should have been terrified of me; I eat geese!
All right, the heck with this. I sprinted down the driveway, my shoes sliding and sending me down onto my butt. I heard the back door fly open again as I tripped and fell and rolled in the slush.
“Doris!” Einstein yelled.
I made it to the bottom of the driveway and paused. Of all the insults I’d suffered that night, having Albert Einstein call me Doris was the most surprising.
“Get back in the shed, Doris, you stupid duck!” he raged.
I felt my energy drain out of me as I trudged back to my truck. I’d been outsmarted by a man who named his goose Doris and thought it was a duck. I could not have been more depressed.
By the time I got home the woodstove in my s
mall living room was down to a few coals; I stirred them and threw in some pine. My dog Jake thumped his tail at me and I bent down to scratch his head. Jake was maybe eight years old, a dog of unidentifiable and suspect DNA. His soulful eyes and floppy ears made it appear there was a basset hound on one of the lower limbs of his family tree, but from there he was fifty pounds of anyone’s guess. I’d found him in the back of a repo—not the backseat, but the trunk. We’re supposed to return all personal property from a repossession but I’d decided on the spot that Jake’s people had lost their right of ownership.
“Hey, Jake, you got any goose hunter in you?” I asked.
Jake used to ride with me on repos, but he was middle-aged when I found him and lately had decided he’d rather nap. I didn’t blame him—the second I found someone to feed me and give me treats I was going to retire, too.
“Jake, busy day today?”
Jake gave me a “you have no idea” look, rolling his big brown eyes at me.
“You need to go out?”
Jake has a dog door but more and more often was too lazy to use it unless I firmly suggested he do so. I gently tugged on his collar and he groaned to his feet, slipping outside in front of me and then giving me disgusted looks over how wet it was. He lifted his leg quickly and then briskly went back to the door, pointedly sniffing at it so I’d take the hint. We went back in and he hustled to his blanket and collapsed as if he’d spent the day mining coal.
I sang him the “good boy” song—basically me just singing “good boy” over and over, “good boy good boy g-oooo-d b-ooo-y.” Big finish. Jake didn’t applaud.
A bottle of Patrón tequila slapped into my hand with easy familiarity from its perch on the counter, and I sat down in a chair, watching the woodstove flames licking at the wood. The increasing light soon was illuminating the beer bottles on the coffee table. I stared at the reflection, taking very tiny sips from the Patrón every few minutes. The college boys who somehow found the Black Bear in the summer always poured the stuff in shot glasses and messed around with salt and lime, but my dad had taught me the way to drink tequila was from a snifter, neat, doing little more than wetting your tongue and allowing the fumes to fill your nasal cavities before you swallowed.
Over time, I’d sort of given up on the snifter.
Taking stock of my life: I was broke; I lived alone; I’d had two fights in the past couple of hours; won one, lost one (to a bird)—though both of them left me much worse off than my opponents—and I had a phone number in my pocket I somehow doubted I had the courage to ever call.
“What a dump,” the bear’s voice pronounced.
I sat stock still, turning my head to the right only after I mentally followed myself into the house, recalling locking the door before I threw on the piece of wood. No one had slipped in behind me; Jake and I were by ourselves in my home. Bob the Black Bear was, as far as I knew, still down at the bar.
Who said that? I asked within my head.
Nobody answered.
4
Repo Madness
When I opened my eyes the next morning it took me about ten minutes to do an inventory of my injuries. My ear hurt from the kick in the head, my ribs throbbed, my arms were bruised, and my shins ached from where Doris had pecked them. I staggered into the living room like a hundred-year-old man. “What a dump,” I muttered to myself. Jake sighed in agreement.
After being so severely beaten by man and fowl I would have expected to sleep easily, but I’d spent most of the night brooding over what it meant that I could hear a voice in my head. I wasn’t sure schizophrenia was the right term for it, didn’t know if there was a pill you could take or if it required surgery—I was just pretty sure that whatever was going on, it wasn’t covered by my health insurance because I didn’t have health insurance. And was it Bob the Bear? No, I’d heard it speaking here, last night. (I was careful to mentally regard the voice as an “it,” believing that calling it a “he” would somehow make it worse.)
Whatever was happening, though, I knew I had to play it cool. If I screamed in surprise every time I heard it, I’d wind up in the loony bin.
I fished around in the refrigerator for something edible and came up with the meat loaf Becky had given me a few nights before, still wrapped in foil. I cut a piece, squirted on some ketchup, poured myself a cup of instant coffee, and sat down for breakfast.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” my voice said.
Sticking with my game plan, I didn’t gasp and jerk around to see who’d spoken. “You hear that, Jake?” I asked calmly. Jake didn’t even seem to hear me. He lay motionless, not even coming over to check out the meat loaf.
“You can’t eat like that for breakfast, you’ll clog your arteries,” the voice admonished.
“So I’ve developed a split personality and it’s become a nutritionist,” I announced out loud.
“No, I’m not,” it answered defensively.
“So you’re what, a boxing manager?”
“No, I mean I’m not a split anything, I am my own person.”
“Yeah? Where are you, then?”
There was a pause. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, you sure as heck aren’t here. Unless … you’re not an eight-foot rabbit, are you?”
“I’m not Harvey. My name is Alan Lottner.”
“Alan Lottner.” I cut another slice of cold meat loaf. Play it cool, play it cool. “Uh-huh. Well, what can I do for you, Alan?”
“I’m … I’m not sure what is going on.”
“Well, I think I have a pretty good idea. I’ve been living alone for a long time now so my brain has furnished me with a friend to play with. An invisible friend who will soon start telling me it’s okay to set fires.”
There was a silence. I stopped eating and cocked my head. Maybe all I had to do was identify the problem and the neurosis would simply go away. Self-administered psychotherapy.
“I admit this is weird,” the voice stated slowly, “but somehow I am inside of you. When you look around, I can see what you see.”
“Great, I am a man trapped in a man’s body.”
Alan Lottner chuckled: I actually heard him laughing in my ear. The sound unnerved me—whatever was going on inside my head, it couldn’t be good that I could hear laughter.
“I don’t know how I got here,” he confided after a moment.
“Well, as soon as you figure it out you can leave the same way.” I was pretty pleased with how cool I was playing this—maybe he would leave.
“At first I thought it was a dream. It’s like that, because even though I can see and hear and even feel everything, I don’t have any control over my body.”
“Whose body?”
“Okay, your body … but where’s my body? What’s happening to me?”
“Sorry to have to tell you this, but I think the real concern is what’s happening to me,” I corrected. “I’m having a conversation with a voice inside my head. Clearly, the stress of living life in the fast lane in Kalkaska is getting to me.” I finished my meat loaf and tossed the aluminum foil at the trash can. It bounced off the rim and joined the pile of missed shots cluttering the floor.
“Are you going to pick that up?”
“No, it’s how I keep score,” I answered. The silence I received in reply had a huffy quality to it. Great, my voice had no sense of humor. “So Alan, why don’t you go out and do some work while I stay home and watch a little basketball?”
“I … look, is your name Ruddy?”
“Ruddy McCann.”
“I thought so, though at first I thought they were saying ‘Buddy.’ Like Buddy Hackett.”
“No, it’s Ruddy, for Ruddick. Mother’s maiden name.”
“Ah.”
I pulled on some clothes and went into the bathroom to comb my hair and brush my teeth. “Stop!” Alan commanded.
I froze, raising an eyebrow.
“This is just really strange, looking at my reflection, only having it be somebody else,�
� he told me.
“Didn’t we already have this conversation? Whose reflection is it?”
“You know what I mean. I guess I sort of halfway thought that it would be me in the mirror, and that I would find out that I had amnesia and suddenly woke up six four and three hundred pounds.”
“Six two and two-twenty. Watch it.”
“What happened to your nose?”
“Broke it. Car accident. What happened to your body?”
“I guess I lost it.”
“Tough break. Hate it when that happens.” I pulled on a jacket. “Well, I guess you might as well come along,” I told him. “Let’s go, Jake.”
Jake considered it briefly, then lowered his head back down. “Now, boy, let’s go,” I commanded sternly. He didn’t move. “Hey!” I snapped my fingers. Sometimes you have to show them who the alpha male is.
Jake closed his eyes.
“Please?”
I finally got him to move by pulling a box of dog biscuits out of the cupboard. Once up, he grudgingly allowed me to walk him around the block, lifting his leg on a few leafless shrubs out of moral obligation, but when we got back he fell on his blanket with a “thank God we got that out of our system” expression.
I drove over to Milton’s office. Milton Kramer is a short, stocky guy who wears white short-sleeved shirts every day of the year and has a head that looks like it has been waxed and buffed. His skin appeared to have never been exposed to even a moment of sunshine. Milt’s life revolves around his work—I’ve almost never seen him out with his wife, whose name isn’t Ruby but that’s always what I want to call her when they have me over to their house for dinner.
“Hey, Milt.”
“Hello there and good morning, Ruddy. Say hello to my nephew, here. Ruddy McCann, this is Kermit Kramer.”
Kermit didn’t get out of his chair, but he extended his hand with a smile. He had Milton’s pushed-in-looking nose and thick features, though his hair was dark and curly and his complexion a Mediterranean shade. “Kermit” was a good name for him; he was shaped a little like a frog, with narrow sloping shoulders and big wide hips.
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man Page 4
