(2004) Citizen Vince

by Jess Walter

  VINCE CAMDEN WALKS everywhere. In two years he still hasn’t gotten used to all of the cars; everyone drives everywhere here, even the ladies. In this town, five guys drive to a tavern in five cars, have a beer, then get in their five cars and drive three blocks to the next tavern. It’s not just wasteful. It’s uncivilized. People say it’s because of the harsh winters in Spokane, which are a cross between upstate New York and Pluto. But outside a few places in Florida and California, the weather is shitty everywhere. Every place is too hot or too cold or too humid or too something. No, even in the cold Vince prefers walking—like now, strolling away from Doug’s storefront toward downtown, which looms ahead, a couple of newer twenty-story glass-and-steel slabs surrounded by brick-and-stone stumps. He likes the cluster of buildings from a distance like this—the suggestion of cornices and pillars; imagination fills in the blanks.

  Vince stops at a little diner, orders coffee, and sits alone at a table, staring out the window, chewing a thumbnail. Twice in one day: that word. Paranoid. Still, how could you possibly tell if you’re paranoid when worrying about being paranoid is a symptom of paranoia? It’s not the fact of Doug asking where he gets the credit cards, necessarily, or of Lenny showing up in the alley two days early—although either one of those things would have made him suspicious. It’s this feeling he’s slogged around with since he woke up—this sense of being herded along, that his time is coming. What if death is just out there, at some fixed point, waiting for you to walk under it like a piano suspended above the sidewalk? He feels like a chess piece, like a knight that’s come out with no support and is being chased around the board by the other side’s pawns. He can escape the pawns, but he senses other pieces, larger pieces, more significant pieces—a move, two moves, three moves away. After a minute, Vince goes to the front of the diner and drops a quarter into the pay phone. Dials.

  “Hey. Is he in?”

  Waits.

  “It’s Vince. You up for a game of chess?”

  Listens.

  “Oh, come on. Why do I gotta do it like that?”

  Listens.

  “Jesus. Okay, okay…This is twenty-four-fourteen. I need to come in. There. How’s that?”

  Listens.

  “I need to see you now. Today.”

  Listens.

  “Of course it’s an emergency. What do you think?”

  He hangs up, walks back to his table, and finishes his coffee. He zips up his windbreaker and steps outside. He walks with his head tilted forward, toward downtown. It’s cool and sunny and the combination thrills him in a way; he pulls a deep breath through his nose and takes in the bare, skeletal trees, the strip of black avenue leading downtown. It really is a beautiful city in its way. Not so much architecturally, but in contrasts: glimmers of style against those drastic hills and urban trees, and through it all the river cut—a wilderness very nearly civilized with a few tons of concrete, blacktop, and brick. A real place. He walks without looking back, uncharacteristically.

  If he did look back, he wouldn’t like what he saw. Two blocks behind him, Len Huggins’s burgundy Cadillac sits in front of Doug’s Passport Photos and Souvenirs.

  DOUG RUBS HIS jaw. “How much?”

  “He said for gratis.” Lenny takes off his sunglasses. “Means free.”

  “I know what it means. Who is this guy?”

  “Just a guy. Name’s Ray.”

  “Where’s this Ray from?”

  “Back East, like Vince. He just got into town.”

  “What’s he doin’ here?”

  “I don’t know, man. He didn’t say.”

  “But he does this for a living?”

  “Oh yeah. He pushes buttons.”

  “Buttons?”

  “That’s what they call it.”

  “Buttons?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said. He works for some serious guys back there.”

  “And you’re sure he ain’t a cop?”

  “He ain’t a cop, Doug. Not this guy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look. This guy wants to do it for gratis. How can we say no?”

  “It’s not for gratis, Len. It’s just gratis.”

  “Whatever. Look, this Ray says they do the whole credit-card thing different Back East. Vince is making a lot more money than he’s paying us. That ain’t right. And he won’t tell us where he gets the cards? That ain’t right, neither. We’re supposed to be partners and he’s holding back on us, man.”

  “It’s just…I like Vince.”

  “I like Vince, too. Everyone likes Vince. It’s got nothing to do with Vince.”

  “So what would we have to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Just show him where to point the gun.”

  WALK ANY BLOCK in Spokane and you can see in the city’s design the way it was settled—a slow, 150-year flood of homes, filling the river gorge first, west to east, and then rising onto the ledges, ridges, and hills: outward and onward, north, south, east, and generally up. The downtown, seven blocks by fifteen blocks of brick and block and terra-cotta, covers the first ledge, and beyond and above that are neighborhoods of Victorian, Tudor, and Craftsman, and beyond that Deco, cottage, and bungalow, and beyond that rambler, rancher, and split level, neighborhoods that have begun to spill over the far sides of the facing hills.

  At the center of this sprawl are the pearly waterfalls that the city oystered around, and two blocks above the falls sits the Federal Courthouse, a bland new box of a building, ten stories tall. In an office on the sixth floor, on either side of a chessboard, sit Vince Camden and a chunk of a deputy U.S. marshal named David Best. Vince has moved one pawn out, and Deputy Marshal Best has his hand on his queen’s knight and is considering putting Vince’s pawn in jeopardy. He looks all around the board, under and over his own arm, eyes darting from piece to piece.

  “You moving that horse or grooming it?”

  “Just a sec,” says David. He is fifty and looks it—overweight and gray, his cheeks and nose flushed with blood, a bald circle at the peak of his scalp. He wears wrinkled slacks, a herringbone jacket, and a thick knit tie pulled into a knot that would choke the very horse he’s contemplating moving. Finally, David brings the knight out and threatens Vince’s pawn.

  Vince quickly moves his own knight out to protect his earlier move. Slaps an imaginary chess timer. “How about Christensen?”

  “Vince Christensen?”

  “Carver?”

  “Vince Carver?”

  “Claypool?”

  David rests his hand on a pawn and takes in the entire board again, looking under his arm in both directions as he considers his move. “Look, you can’t just go changing your name every six months. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Does it work better if someone kills me?”

  “Come on. Who’s going to kill you, Vince?”

  “I told you. Camden is a city in New Jersey. Right? Vince Camden? Might as well call me Vince Capone. You don’t think they’ll figure that out?”

  David looks up from the chessboard. “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Who will figure it out? You come in here every six months thinking someone is out to get you. Last time—”

  “Yeah, but this time—”

  “Last time, you almost killed that poor guy from the phone company.”

  “He was on the pole outside my house for forty minutes! You tell me what a guy’s doing up on a phone pole for forty minutes.”

  “Fixing the phone?”

  “I’m just saying, this time—”

  “This time!” David spreads his hands. “Who are these people out to get you, Vince? I looked up your case. There’s no one after you.”

  Vince just stares at him.

  “The crew you testified against doesn’t even exist anymore. Bailey’s dead. Crapo’s dead. And the only guy who was even connected…what’s his name? The old guy, Coletti? He was nothing—a soldier. An old man. D
idn’t even do a year after his conviction. And he’s retired now. Frankly, I’m shocked they put you in the program. I don’t really see the protection part of this witness protection.” David stares at Vince, his thick nightcrawler fingers resting on the pawn.

  “You keep moving your fingers up and down on that thing, it might get excited and grow into a bishop,” Vince says.

  Finally, David moves the pawn. Sits back and pushes his glasses up on his nose.

  Vince moves a knight into position. “Just put it in your little book that I came in,” he says. “That way, when I get planted, you can explain to your bosses why you did nothing.”

  This finally pisses David off. His face goes crimson. He sits back and looks across the board unhappily. After a moment, he pushes his chair away and rises with some trouble, goes to a filing cabinet, opens a drawer, and returns with a manila folder. The file reads WITSEC. “There are thirty-two hundred people in this program, Vince. You know how many we’ve lost? How many witnesses have been killed after we relocated them?”

  Vince looks up.

  “Zero. Not one.” David opens the file. “Every month we get intelligence reports from wiretaps and informants and correspondence. Every time we get a threat, or a contract goes out, we record it. Every time one of our witnesses is mentioned, it is noted and cataloged and a report goes out to the field office. Each witness is assigned a number corresponding to this ongoing assessment of the danger they face, one to five. Know what your assessment is, Vince?”

  Shrugs.

  “Zero. No pertinent threat. You know how many times your name has come up in intelligence reports since you went into the program?”

  Looks around the office.

  “Zero. Zip. In four years: nothing. You haven’t shown up on one wiretap. Not even That guy could sure hold his beer. Vince, no one is out to kill you because no one remembers you anymore. No one cares. Frankly, to them, you’re not worth killing. They got bigger fish.” David sits back down. His chair groans and David breathes heavily.

  The room is quiet.

  “Look,” David says. “I’m sorry.”

  Vince shrugs. “Maybe you’re right. It’s just…” Lifts a pawn to move it, then picks it up and stares at it. “All day, it feels like someone’s watching me, manipulating me. You ever feel like that, David?” He cocks his head. “Like they know what you’re going to do before you do it?”

  “No. I don’t feel like that. Sane people don’t feel like that, Vince. Sane people don’t change their names because they had bad days.” David considers Vince’s face, then pushes his glasses up and leans forward. “Maybe you should see Dr. Welstrom again. Just to talk about—”

  “No.”

  “These sound like the same issues you had before, Vince, irrational fear, anxiety—”

  “David—”

  “Adjusting to a new life is not easy—”

  “No.”

  “Especially when you leave everything behind. Way of life. Friends. Your girlfriend. What was her name? She was an actress, right? Tina?”

  “Is this necessary?” Vince throws his arms in the air. “Can’t we just play chess?”

  “Okay.” David nods. “Sorry.” He looks around the board. “So how’s the job?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Because sometimes, it can be hard to give up a more interesting life for, you know…donuts. Do you see what I’m trying to tell you?”

  “That you play chess like my grandmother?”

  David smiles in spite of himself, puts his hand on his bishop, and begins looking around the board again. “Maybe you need hobbies, Vince. You should learn to play golf. What do you do with your free time, anyway?”

  “I play cards. I read some.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Beginnings of novels.”

  David looks up. “Why don’t you finish them?”

  “I don’t know,” Vince says.

  He leans back in his chair and stares over David’s head, to a portrait on the wall behind the big deputy marshal. In the portrait, President Jimmy Carter, somber in a gray suit, stares down at Vince, the president’s blond hair gone to silver, his lips pressed tight, suppressing that oft-mocked toothy smile—his face revealing a softness, a give, that wasn’t there four years ago. The most powerful man in the world?

  Vince can’t look away. There is something about Jimmy Carter’s face, the quality of an outsider lost on the inside, something familiar that Vince has never considered before—and something about this man, this president, about the limits of power and the weight of responsibility—but just as the thought is forming in his head, Vince loses it and hears David’s voice: No one cares.

  Bailey and Crapo are dead. Of course. He can still see them at trial, sort of bored, not really surprised that Vince was testifying. Not even angry. Just tired. The prosecutor: Are the men who conspired with you to use stolen credit cards to purchase this merchandise in the courtroom today? Vince pointing at Bailey, and then Crapo. Jesus, and now they’re both dead. Bailey had a heart attack. And Crapo got shivved breaking up a fight. How could he have forgotten those two? That’s sixty. And sixty-one.

  Vince looks down at the board, where David’s hand still rests on his bishop. “You planning to marry that bishop, or are you two just living together?”

  AFTER FIVE AND already getting dark when Vince gets home from the Federal Courthouse and a bowl of tavern soup. He opens the door and sees the day’s mail below the door slot, on the foyer floor in front of him. There’s a manila envelope with no return address. From the mailman. Right on time. Thank God for that at least.

  The house he rents is small and warm, a 1930s pitched-roof one-story, leaning forward over a porch the size of a casket, supported by a couple of pine four-by pillars—the whole thing a fair definition of lowered expectations. The living room is carpeted, and Vince steps out of his shoes and clicks on the TV. It fades up close on the face of President Carter, behind a podium, weary, eyes deep in sockets: The best weapons are the ones that are never fired in combat and the best soldier is one who never has to lay his life down on the field of battle. Strength is imperative for peace, but the two must go hand in hand.

  Oh yeah. The debate. Cool. Vince turns the volume up and heads for the kitchen. He sets the mail on the table and grabs an Oly from the fridge. He opens it, reads the puzzle on the bottle cap—Eye th-ink, there-4 eye yam—and takes a long pull. Then he sets the beer down on the small kitchen table next to the mail and opens the cabinet under the sink. He takes out a produce box and sets it on the table next to the beer.

  Inside the box is his latest project, the best idea he’s ever had; it has the potential to finally get him out of the credit-card business forever. Vince sets out six Kerr jelly jars, a scale, a large bucket of ash, and a cigar box filled with marijuana leaves and stems. He weighs two ounces of pot and puts it in one of the Kerr jars. Then he takes a soup spoon and fills the rest of the jar with the gray ash, packing it around the dope. When it’s full, he screws a lid on the jar and seals on a purple-and-white printed label that reads:

  MOUNT ST. JELLY

  Real Volcanic Ash from Mount St. Helens

  In a decorative jelly jar

  Packaged and shipped in Spokane, WA

  Below, in even smaller print:

  Not for consumption. A souvenir novelty item only.

  He plans to ship the volcanic ash to Boise and Portland, where two guys he knows will sift the dope out, stomp it, and sell it. Then the beauty part: they’ll actually sell the ash to tourists! That part always makes him smile. Usually you have to hire mules to drive the shit, and you just live with them undercutting you—selling some off, smoking more. And you always have to worry that they’ll get busted and give up your name. No: if you can get the U.S. government to mule it for you, it cuts your shipping costs to about eight cents per ounce of pot, which the ash more than pays for. Vince had thought about shipping his pot in smoked salmon, but this is far cheaper and easi
er, and the customers can’t complain about the fishy smell of their weed. Best of all, there is an almost endless supply of ash along the roadsides; even now, five months after the eruption of Mount St. Helens, a thousand crappy little souvenir shops sell the shit in pens and Coke bottles and ashtrays. So why not jelly jars?

  When two jars of Mount St. Jelly are full and his beer is finished, Vince goes to the fridge and gets another beer.

  He sits back at the table and looks at the television. Reagan is talking now, dark-suited, breathy, and theatrical, almost reading, but not quite: I stood in the South Bronx on the exact spot that President Carter stood on in 1977…a bombed-out city—great, gaunt skeletons of buildings. Windows smashed out, painted on one of them “Un-kept promises,” on another “Despair.” They are now charging to take tourists there to see this terrible desolation. I talked to a man just briefly there who asked me one simple question: “Do I have reason to hope that I can someday take care of my family again?”

  Do I have reason to hope? That’s good. He tries to imagine some mope from the Bronx actually saying, “Do I have reason to hope”—no fuckin’ way. Vince reaches for his mail, the manila envelope from the mailman, two bills, two campaign solicitations, and a small envelope from the county auditor. Vince opens that one first. It is empty except for a small paper card, the size of a driver’s license. On top, it reads: Certificate of Registration. Vince turns it over in his hand:

  This is to certify that Vincent J. Camden…is a registered voter in 100342.00 Precinct, Spokane County of Washington.

  The card also has the address where he’s supposed to vote, a small Catholic school near his house.

  So just like that he can vote. Or, at least, Vince Camden can vote. He sets the card down, then picks it up again. The marshals said something about getting Vince’s record cleared and his voting rights restored if he cooperated with the government. But there was so much other shit going on, and he was so worried about getting whacked, that honestly he didn’t give it a second thought. What’s voting to a guy who’s lived the life he’s lived, a guy trying to save his own skin? But now here it is, almost three years later, and he gets a voter’s registration card in the mail.