Thieving Weasels

by Billy Taylor

  Then the inevitable happened.

  “Get your things together,” my mother said one Saturday morning.

  “Why?” I asked. “I don’t have school today.”

  “We’re leaving.”

  Her words were like a punch in the stomach.

  “But I have a test on Monday,” I begged. “And Mrs. Fleagler said I could sing the song from Cats in music class.”

  “You can sing in the car. Now grab your stuff and let’s go.”

  That was the day I stopped trusting my mother. After that, I was always careful not to tell her too much about school or my classmates. Is that crazy or what? If I couldn’t tell my own mother about my life, then who could I tell?

  No one, that’s who. And here’s the thing about lying: not only is it exhausting to keep a thousand stories and fabrications in your head, it’s also incredibly lonely. And I hate being alone. Not to sound overly dramatic, but I left a major chunk of my heart in that elementary school on the day we moved away. I’ve been trying to get it back ever since.

  The only positive thing about my predicament was that I got to keep my textbooks, and by the time my mother got around to enrolling me in a new school I had them memorized. Math, science, and spelling, I knew them backward and forward.

  No more classes with dumb kids for me, I told myself. This time it’s going to be different.

  And for a while it was. I made a point of not telling my mother about school, and on the rare occasions when she did ask, I was careful not to reveal too much. I’m sure my mother knew something was up, but she was a little fuzzy in the head from the grapefruit and tuna fish diet she had started the month before. My mother was always trying some crazy diet, and this one turned her into a complete space cadet. Unfortunately, she zoomed straight back to earth on the night my second grade teacher called.

  “What did she want?” I asked when my mother hung up the phone.

  “Get packing.”

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said. And if you ever do something like this again, I’ll break your arm.”

  “What did I do?” I asked as tears filled my eyes.

  “Your teacher said you were the best student she’s ever had and wants to put you in a class for gifted students.”

  “But that’s good, right?”

  “No, it’s not good. Gifted students stand out. People remember them. Use your head, Sonny. Two years from now this lady could see your picture in the paper, and we could all wind up in jail.”

  “I didn’t think about it that way.”

  “Of course you didn’t. That’s what school does—it makes you stupid. From now on you get only Cs and Bs, and the only exceptional thing I want to hear about you is that you’re exceptionally average.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Now let’s get out of here before the National Honor Society tries throwing a car wash in the living room.”

  I was thirteen years old when I finally had enough, although it wasn’t for the obvious reasons. Yes, I was sick of the lying, and the loneliness, and the constant moving around. Yes, I was sick of my mother, and my family, and the never-ending stream of disgusting apartments. Yes, I was sick of acting stupid, and conning my classmates, and throwing tests. I was sick of it all, but I would have kept on going because it was the only life I knew.

  My mother always said ordinary people were stooges—chumps and goody-goodies who slaved away at crummy jobs, had no hope, and owed their souls to the credit card companies. She said we were above all that. We lived where we wanted, did what we wanted, and took what we wanted. We were free.

  But were we really free? Between the lies, and scams, and never-ending fear of getting busted we put in as many hours as the next guy, except we had a lot less to show for our effort. Think about it. Here I was thirteen years old, and I’d never played Little League baseball. I’d never joined Boy Scouts. I’d never had a best friend, or slept on the same mattress for more than a couple of months. It was crazy. The only taste of real life I saw was in the empty apartments of the people I robbed. It was pathetic. I was pathetic, and I yearned for something better.

  The opportunity came, like everything else in my life, through a jimmied window.

  One of the most common residents in every apartment complex where Mom and I lived was the newly divorced dad. Growing up, I saw literally hundreds of them shuffling down hallways and carrying bags of Chinese takeout and convenience store beer. They rarely had anything worth stealing—alimony and child support took care of that—but I still enjoyed breaking into their apartments and pouring stale beer down the back of their TV sets. Yes, I knew this was a really mean thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself. There was something about these losers that made me so incredibly angry. It must have been because they had everything I wanted out of life—a real house, home-cooked meals, birthdays at Chuck E. Cheese—and threw it all away. It made absolutely no sense to me.

  All that changed on the afternoon I slipped into some ex-husband’s apartment and came across what can only be described as a shrine to Wheaton Preparatory Academy. I’m not exaggerating when I say the entire place was covered, floor to ceiling, with every type of pennant, banner, and poster imaginable, as well as dozens of photos of football, baseball, and lacrosse teams. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe it, and right in the middle of this sea of crimson and blue—like it was the single greatest achievement in this poor schnook’s life—was his Wheaton diploma. In eight years of breaking into apartments I’d never seen anything like it.

  My first impulse was to tear the place to shreds. Just yank every piece of Wheaton memorabilia off the walls and rip it into teeny-tiny pieces. Except I couldn’t. It would have been like cutting out the man’s heart.

  Instead, I slipped out the window (without touching the TV, I might add) and headed straight to the library to find out about this Wheaton place. It was dark outside when I was finished, and my eyes burned from having read so much, but I was sure of two things:

  1. I really wanted to go to Wheaton Academy.

  2. I’d have to run away from my family to do it.

  4

  WE WERE THIRTY MILES SOUTH OF ALBANY WHEN THE STATE trooper’s lights appeared in the rearview mirror.

  “We have a visitor,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter.

  Uncle Wonderful glanced out the back window. “So we have.”

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s our play? Is this car stolen?”

  “I can’t seem to remember.”

  “Stop messing around,” I said. “I’m using my good name here.”

  Uncle Wonderful yawned. “You’re a big boy. You figure it out.”

  This was why Uncle Wonderful had wanted me to drive, I realized. It was a test. I eased the car onto the shoulder and held out my hand.

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me your insurance card and registration, and if you try anything funny I’m telling the trooper you abducted me. I’ll say I was getting money from a cash machine, and you put a gun to my head. There are at least ten people at Wheaton who will vouch for me, and two of them are retired judges. Who’s going to vouch for you, Uncle Wonderful? Your parole officer?”

  The grin dropped from his face, and he handed over the registration and insurance card without a word. The paperwork said the car belonged to a Mr. Phillip Boylan of 421 Leprechaun Lane, Sayville, New York. The print job looked real, but the address was a joke. Leprechaun Lane? Why didn’t he just put down Impossible to Believe Lane?

  I eyed the sideview mirror as the trooper climbed out of his cruiser. Normal mothers tell their kids they have only one chance to make a first impression; weasel moms tell theirs they only have one chance to size up a mark. The trooper put on his hat, and the first thing that struck me was his air of regimented formality
. This said ex-military. More than that, his back was so straight you could have used it to draw a vector in geometry class. This said ex-Marine, and I knew my play. When the trooper got within a few feet of the car, I turned to Uncle Wonderful and yelled, “I don’t care what you say! When we get home I’m heading straight to the recruiting office and signing up!”

  It took Uncle Wonderful less than a second to catch on. “The hell you are,” he yelled back.

  “It’s what Dad would have wanted!”

  “But your dad’s not here anymore, is he?”

  I waited until the trooper was next to my window and said, “That’s right. He gave his life for this country so bums like you can criticize the people who put their very lives on the line for it.”

  “License, registration, and proof of insurance, please,” the trooper growled.

  I whipped my head around and shouted, “What?” The trooper’s eyes doubled in size, and before he could say another word I clapped a hand to my forehead. “Oh my God! I’m sorry, Officer. My uncle and I are arguing about me joining the Marines, and I kind of lost my head. Was I speeding or something?”

  “License, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

  I handed over the paperwork, and the trooper marched back to his cruiser to run it through the computer. I figured the odds were fifty-fifty I’d be eating dinner in a jail cell.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I asked.

  “You broke your mother’s heart. It’s only fair.”

  “Fair? And it’s fair that you people won’t leave me alone?”

  “You people?” he replied in disgust. “We’re your family, Skip. We’re all you’ve got.”

  I thought about Claire and the life I’d created at Wheaton and said, “No, you’re not. You’re not even close.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and tried to visualize what the trooper had seen when I handed over my license. Did he see the youngest member of a family of thieves, or just some skinny kid with a chipped front tooth and hair in need of a trim? I was hoping for the latter.

  “Who’s Phillip Boylan?” the trooper asked, returning to the window.

  “That would be me,” Uncle Wonderful replied.

  “Do you know you have a taillight out, Mr. Boylan?”

  “I’m sorry, Officer. I lent the car to my nephew here so he could drive girls around at the fancy school he goes to in Schuylerville.”

  “Wheaton Academy?”

  “That’s the one.”

  The trooper looked at my license. “Seventeen years old. That makes you, what? A senior?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And you’d rather join the Marines than graduate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked me up and down and said, “Joining the Corps is no picnic, son. It’s a major commitment.”

  “I know. My father told me all about it.”

  “Where did he serve?”

  “A bunch of places: Haiti, Honduras, Djibouti. But he died in the Korangal Valley.”

  “Afghanistan?”

  I nodded. “Five years ago next month. He was a hero.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  The trooper handed back the paperwork. “Good luck with your decision, but if you want the advice of an old Marine, I’d finish school first. The Corps will still be there in June.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glanced at Uncle Wonderful. “And you get that taillight fixed.”

  “You got it, Officer.”

  The trooper headed back to his cruiser, and Uncle Wonderful laughed. “Djibouti? Where the hell’s Djibouti?”

  “Africa.”

  “Never heard of it. How’d you know that guy was a Marine?”

  “His posture. Only Marines move like that. And ballet dancers, but he didn’t look like a ballerina to me.”

  Uncle Wonderful nodded. “You always were fast on your feet, Skip.”

  “So? Did I pass the test?”

  “With flying colors.”

  “Good.” I adjusted the rearview mirror and said, “Damn, that trooper’s coming back.”

  Uncle Wonderful turned to look and when he was halfway there I punched him in the jaw.

  “Son of a bitch!” he screamed.

  “Don’t talk that way about my mother,” I said. “And the next time you try something when I’m using my good name you’ll get a lot worse than that.”

  • • •

  So, what’s a good name? A good name is an escape hatch. An emergency exit. A ticket out. In other words, it’s the cleanest, safest, most bulletproof fake identity there is. My Grandpa Patsy used to say that if a good name came in a box there’d be a sign on the front reading, “Use only in emergencies.” But good names don’t come in boxes. In fact, good names don’t come anywhere anymore. The computer-controlled, interwoven world we live in has taken care of that, and soon the only name you’ll ever have is the name you were born with. Law enforcement types sleep well at night knowing this is the case, but I find it sad and even a little un-American. This country was founded on the possibility of new beginnings, and guys like me have been using good names since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

  My good name is Cameron Michael Smith—Cam to my friends. The real Cam Smith was born on April 26, 1995, and died nine months later from a lung infection. That would have been the end of him, but Grandpa Patsy knew a guy in the Schenectady County records office who was in charge of scanning death certificates into their fancy new computer system. For a hundred bucks and a bottle of Bushmills the guy accidentally forgot to scan Cam Smith’s death certificate, and it was like the poor kid had never died. After that, we applied for a passport and Social Security card in Cam Smith’s name, and just like that I was a whole new person. This was a very popular technique back in the day, and for years our family picnics were filled with dozens of relatives with unscanned birth certificates who were making a nice living cashing checks from every state and federal agency there was. But like I said, computerized record-keeping has put an end to all that.

  Good luck and vigilance is the key to every good name. Or, in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Smith, bad luck and vigilance. Not long after the death of their only son, the Smiths were killed in a car accident. Mrs. Smith was behind the wheel, and the police listed the cause of death as driving while intoxicated. But I think Mrs. Smith died of a broken heart. On nights at Wheaton when I couldn’t sleep, I sometimes wondered if the Smiths were looking down on me. If they were, I hoped they were proud because I was taking excellent care of their son’s legacy: I had a 3.92 GPA, averaged 1.4 points per game in lacrosse, and wrote smart and funny pieces for the Weekly Wheatonian. Plus, I’d just been accepted to Princeton University. I don’t mean to brag, but thanks to me Cam Smith had a very bright future ahead of him. Or at least he did until my family came along and messed up his life.

  Or should I say, messed up my life.

  5

  “SO, HERE’S THE DEAL,” UNCLE WONDERFUL SAID THREE hours later as we drove through the entrance to Shady Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in beautiful Amityville, Long Island. “Your mother’s here under the name Sheila O’Rourke, and I’m her brother, Phillip O’Rourke. Her husband’s dead, I’m divorced, and we’re her only family.”

  “Why are you using our real names?”

  “It’s a Medicaid deal. And remember, no matter what happens, don’t mess things up. I went through hell getting your mother into this place.”

  “Who am I supposed to be?” I asked.

  “You’re her no-good, piece-of-shit son, Skip.”

  “No, I mean for the story.”

  “You’re her no-good, piece-of-shit son, Skip.”

  I resisted the urge to punch Uncle Wonderful a second time and gazed out the window. As its name implied, Shady Oaks really was filled with
lots of shady oaks and looked like it had once been part of some grand old estate. If I squinted my eyes and ignored the freaky people wandering around like a pack of drugged-out zombies, it would have been hard to distinguish it from a small upstate college.

  I scanned the grounds for my mother, and Uncle Wonderful said, “Don’t bother. She’s not allowed outside by herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she tried to kill herself, and they don’t want her trying it again. It kind of screws up their batting average when stuff like that happens.”

  To be honest, I didn’t believe my mother tried to kill herself. I know this is a terrible thing for a son to say, but after a lifetime of cons, scams, and lies, I’d learned to be skeptical of anything my mother said or did. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a hundred times, and you’re invited to the family reunion. Still, the possibility that my mother needed to be in a mental hospital freaked me out, and on the drive down I was haunted by an image of her strapped to a steel bed and screaming her lungs out. Shady Oaks seemed like a nice place on the outside, but who knew what kind of evil lurked behind its padded walls once the sun went down. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.

  “Here we are,” Uncle Wonderful said, easing into a parking space. He reached under his seat and pulled out a carton of Camel Lights. “These are for your mother.”

  “Aren’t you coming in with me?”

  “No, I gotta go see a guy about something.”

  “You coming back?”

  “In an hour. After that, I’ll take you to the house.”

  “What house?”

  “Everything in due time, young Skipper. Now go see your mother. She’s waiting for you.”

  I climbed out of the car, and it felt like the weight of the world had descended upon my shoulders on the drive down. Maybe I was only fooling myself, but I really did believe I had escaped from my family. No more lies, no more moving around, no more checking the rearview mirror every thirty seconds. I was just plain old Cam Smith, and for the first time in my life I felt like a normal human being. Then, bam, Uncle Wonderful shows up, and I’m Skip O’Rourke, the no-good, piece-of-shit son of Sheila O’Rourke. God, I hated my family.