(2004) Citizen Vince

by Jess Walter

  “So ask for more money,” Vince says. “I’ll give you more.”

  “No, it’s too late for that. You’re out. And you can be out one of two ways. First, my way: pay me what you owe me for the last ten months. I figure fifteen thousand. Then introduce me to the mailman, give me whatever credit cards you got now, and you’re free. You can walk away. Leave town or whatever.”

  That’s typical, too. Leave town. And it’s funny; you find yourself wanting to believe: Yeah, I’ll just give them the money and the mailman and leave town. They’ll let me leave town. But you know better. You’re not a kid anymore. “What mailman?” Vince asks, his voice raspy. “What money?”

  Len rubs the bridge of his nose. “Goddamn it, Vince. Now you’re just insulting my intelligence. I know you got money stashed away. I fuckin’ know it. No way you spend all the money we’ve been makin’ on this. Now come on. I said there were two ways. You don’t want Ray’s way. Trust me—”

  Vince catches Ray’s eyes in the rearview and sees that he’s not listening to Len either. His eyes say that this has nothing to do with Len, that this is between the two of them. And that’s when Vince becomes aware of a car running outside. He looks past Len and sees a pickup truck creeping up darkly on the cross street, on the driver’s side of the car. Ten feet away the truck stops, a door opens, the high beams come on at eye level, and the radio blares (“I believe in miracles! Since ya came along, you sexy thing!”) All three men jump, instinctively cover their eyes, and turn toward the pickup truck’s lights.

  “What the—” Len starts.

  Ray speaks up from the backseat. “Uh, Len…”

  There is a light tapping on Ray’s window, a clicking, metal on glass. While they were distracted by the high beams on the driver’s side, Aaron Grebbe has gotten out of the truck and run around to the passenger side of Lenny’s car. There he stands red-faced and slick with sweat, behind the long, slender barrel of a .22 rifle, pointed into the backseat at a spot between Ray’s big eyebrows.

  “Easy, chief,” Ray says. “Easy.” Vince hears the thud of something drop on the back floorboard and Ray puts his hands up to show they’re empty. “It’s okay,” he says to his closed window. “Stop shaking before you hurt someone.” Then, to Vince: “Does your boyfriend know how to use that thing?”

  “Looks like it.” Vince opens his car door and steps out. He can’t believe how good the cold air feels on his throat. He drinks it. Grebbe is staring down the barrel of the rifle, his feet shoulder width, like someone trained to shoot in the military. Hands are steady. He wipes the sweat from his forehead to his shoulder without looking away from Ray in the backseat, illuminated by the sharp headlights from Grebbe’s truck.

  “Open the windows,” Grebbe says to Len. All four windows come down. “Now turn off the car.” The engine dies. “Now toss me the keys.”

  Len throws the keys through the open window and they hit the ground at Grebbe’s feet. Vince looks in the backseat and sees Ray’s black eyes watching Grebbe closely, to see if he bends over for the keys. He doesn’t. His chin remains above the stock of the rifle. “Vince,” he says, but Vince is already bending to grab Len’s keys. He tosses them into the vacant field. They clink in the grass.

  Grebbe gestures with the gun. “Now put your hands out the windows. Both of you. As far as they’ll go.”

  They do, their arms out the windows to the elbows. Grebbe breathes in deep pulls. “Okay. Keep your hands like that.” He glances over at Vince and begins edging back around to his car, keeping the rifle in front of him. “Let’s get out of here before I piss my pants.”

  IT TAKES VINCE only a minute to talk Grebbe out of going to the police (“You really want to go in there and explain what you were doing hanging out with gamblers and hookers at three o’clock in the morning? And why you pointed a gun at someone who’s going to say he wasn’t armed? And you want to do all of this five days before the election?”) When Grebbe finally concedes, Vince sits back in the truck seat and rubs his temples, trying to figure out what to do next.

  “I don’t want to know what you do for a living, do I, Vince?”

  “I make donuts,” Vince says.

  Grebbe drives down side roads, rubbing his jaw. “You know what the strangest part of it was?”

  “What?” Vince asks.

  “How badly I wanted to shoot that guy.” He looks over. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Vince says. “I just know he isn’t from here.”

  “It looked like he was frisking you—”

  Vince looks back at the rifle behind the bench seat, tennis balls jammed in the rack to keep it from rattling. “So you’re a hunter?”

  “Not really. I’ve been bird hunting once or twice.”

  “Could you have done it?”

  Grebbe looks back at the road. “If you had asked me before, I would’ve said no. But…yeah, I could have done it. I wanted to do it.”

  “In Vietnam? Did you ever—”

  “It’s different. You’re watching a line of trees, a puff of smoke, a rise in the ground. You fire at movement as much as people. I was only in one firefight—and it was chaos, coming from everywhere, behind you, in front of you. Tracers and smoke. It doesn’t feel like you’re firing at anyone, just like you’re contributing, like you’re…spitting into a rainstorm. People fall, but it’s not like anyone caused it. It’s like you’re all in it together, all hiding from the same rain.” He shakes his head, snaps out of it. “How about you? You ever—”

  “No,” Vince says. “Never.”

  They drive quietly again, Vince staring out the passenger window. He can’t go home, so he has Grebbe take him to Beth’s apartment in the West Central neighborhood, a few minutes from downtown. They drive in silence, Grebbe rubbing his head every few minutes. They park in front of Beth’s building and Grebbe laughs.

  “I have this terrible feeling that tomorrow I’m going to wake up and realize that was the best speech I’ll ever give.” He smiles. “For a roomful of felons.”

  “It’s too bad,” Vince says. “You had those guys.” He takes in Grebbe’s face. “Why are you doing it? Running for office?”

  Grebbe stares out the front window. “I’m sure it’s mostly ego. But you know what? I really do believe in this. It’s corny, but I wake up in the morning sometimes, and I just can’t wait to get started fixing the things I think are broken…like making a better zoo. It probably seems stupid, but you know what? A better goddamned zoo is a better goddamned zoo.”

  Vince smiles and reaches into his wallet. He hands Grebbe his crisp, new voter’s registration card. The candidate reads it, turns it over, and hands it back. “Well,” Vince says, “you got my vote.”

  “Yeah?” Grebbe tries a smile. “Lot of work for one vote.”

  HE KNOCKS LIGHTLY, with the knuckle of his middle finger. Beth’s apartment is at the bottom of a wrought-iron staircase, in the basement of a five-story brick building. The door cracks. She smiles at the ground. “Hey.”

  “I woke you.”

  “No.” She opens the door wider. She’s wearing a long white T-shirt and plaid pajama bottoms. Her hair is pulled into a ponytail. Toenails painted red.

  Vince follows her inside. Beth lives in a one-bedroom apartment, but her mother has the bedroom, so Beth and one-year-old Kenyon sleep in the living room, Beth on the foldout couch. Kenyon is asleep now, in footed pajamas, sprawled in a playpen with a stuffed dog and a foam basketball. There is a cup of tea on the table, next to a booklet: Getting the Most for Your Home.

  Vince looks down at the boy, sleeping easily, a spit of curly black hair on the top of his head. “He’s getting big.”

  “Seventy-fifth percentile,” she says.

  “Can I use your phone, Beth?”

  She grabs her tea and he follows her into the kitchen. She points to a wall phone next to the refrigerator and sits down at the kitchen table. Vince dials the donut shop, even though he knows Tic would never answer the telephone. “Come
on, pick up, Tic. Just this once.” He hangs up and dials again. Nothing. He’ll have to go down there.

  Next he tries Doug’s house. No answer. Tries again. No answer. He checks his watch. Four in the morning. No way Doug would be at work. Still, he tries Doug’s Passport Photos and Souvenirs. Nothing.

  Vince hangs up. Beth is staring at him from the kitchen table, finishing a cigarette. “Is everything okay, Vince?” She offers him the smoke.

  He doesn’t like the edgy sound of his own laughter. “Do you…” Riffles his hair. “Do you have a phone book, Beth?” He takes the cigarette, inhales it.

  She brings the phone book, and Vince looks up the taxi company. The dispatcher says that both cabs are out, but they’ll have one in about thirty minutes.

  Vince hangs up. Both cabs. Fuckin’ town. He shakes his head, sits down at the table. Beth brings him a glass of water.

  “Are you okay, Vince?”

  Vince drains the glass and considers Beth, her big, round eyes and thin features. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier. I wanted to walk you home—”

  She looks down at her own glass of water. “It’s okay. I was tired, and you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

  “Still, I could’ve walked you.”

  “I didn’t want you to. I was afraid you’d try paying me.”

  Vince doesn’t say anything.

  “And it’s just…I told everyone it was a regular date.”

  “It was a regular date.”

  “No.” She brushes a strand of hair back from her eyes. “No, it wasn’t. It might not have been the other thing, but it wasn’t a date. You know when I realized that?”

  “Beth—”

  “When I saw that girl. The blond girl?”

  “Beth—”

  “I don’t blame you. She’s pretty.”

  “Beth, there’s nothing going on.”

  Beth nods. “She’s screwing that married guy. The politician. No, it was more the way you looked at her…”

  “Beth—”

  “I realized…you could never look at me that way.”

  “Listen, Beth—”

  “No, it’s okay. But I could never be something that you wanted like that. Remember what you said last night—that it’s okay to want something better? Well, I could never be something better for you.”

  “Listen, Beth,” Vince says, “I’m leaving town for a while.”

  Her eyes shift, but otherwise nothing. “When?” she asks. Vince feels deflated by her matter-of-factness. Not that she doesn’t care, just that they’re the kind of people—sitting in her mother’s apartment at four in the morning—who don’t bat an eye at disappointment, who expect it.

  “Now. Today.”

  The strand of hair falls back in front of her eyes.

  “Are you coming back?” she asks.

  Vince reaches up to push the hair back from her face and she allows him, watching closely as his fingers brush her temple. “I don’t know.”

  She pulls away from his fingers. “You’re going to miss my open house.” Then, before he can say anything: “It’s okay.” She clears the dishes, smiles, and says, in a voice rich with delusions, the voice of real estate hookers and criminal bakers: “Well, you’ll just have to come to the next one.”

  VINCE HAS THE cabbie drive him past Sam’s Pit. Len’s Cadillac is gone. Then the cabbie drives the block behind his house, and sure enough Vince sees the Cadillac through the gaps in the trees and houses, parked in his driveway. The cab waits down the block as Vince slinks along his neighbor’s shrub line. He can see shadows behind the shades of his window, someone tossing the clothes in his dresser, another figure lifting the mattress. Vince returns to the cab and has the driver drop him two blocks from the donut shop. It’s already after five—the morning inching toward light. He works his way down the alley and doesn’t see anything. At Donut Make You Hungry, Vince peers through the small window in the back door. Tic has finished his prep work and is sitting at a table, talking to himself, arms at his sides, as if he doesn’t know what to do next. Vince opens the door and eases into the kitchen. Tic’s back is to him. Vince realizes he’s never seen Tic quiet before.

  He looks up, relieved. “Mr. Vince! You weren’t here and…I couldn’t do the maple bars and…I…I didn’t know—”

  It strikes Vince that in the two years since he finished his training as a baker, he hasn’t missed a single day at Donut Make You Hungry, Monday through Saturday, for two years. He was supposed to train Tic to work one day a week by himself, but Vince never thought the kid was ready. So six days a week, six hours a day, for close to two years, he has worked every minute of every shift. When the owners hired him, they said something about vacations, but Vince has never taken one. Where would he go?

  Tic stands up. “We can make the maple bars now, huh?”

  “No,” Vince says. “I can’t work today. I’m sorry, Tic. I have to go out of town. There’s a…funeral.”

  “That’s too bad. Somebody died?”

  Vince goes back to the broom closet, opens it, and turns a mop bucket over. “That’s generally why they have funerals, Tic.” He climbs on the overturned bucket and slides a ceiling tile from the broom closet. From there, he takes a key and an empty manila envelope. “Wait here,” he says. “I gotta go downstairs.”

  There is a trapdoor in the back. Vince lowers himself down a ladder, to a close, dark space—something between a basement and a crawl space. He pulls a string and a single bulb lights the dirt floor and foundation walls. The floor is littered with sprung rat traps, concrete bags, and old coffee cans, and in the far corner a pile of empty oil tins, flour crates, and sugar bags. Vince pushes the garbage aside until he finds an old coal chute, opens it, reaches high into it, and pulls out a metal box, the size of a small shoebox, secured with a padlock. He looks over his shoulder, then opens the lock with his key. Fifty-dollar bills are stacked sideways the length of the box. It’s been a while since he’s counted…who is he kidding: $30,550; he keeps the tally in his head. He takes out handfuls of bills and begins counting, sets them in piles of twenty, rubber bands each pile, counts out ten of those piles and then puts the money—$10,000—in the manila envelope and slides it into his waistband. Then he takes another ten fifties and puts these in his pocket. He closes the box, pushes it back into the coal chute, and covers the opening with empty bags again. Upstairs, Tic is standing in the kitchen, right where Vince left him, staring at the balls of dough and the mixing bowls of frosting.

  “Listen,” Vince says, and he steps in close to Tic’s face. “This is important. You’re going to have to make the donuts yourself today. You and Nancy. She’ll be here in a few minutes. You can do it. Right?”

  Tic nods.

  “Some guys are going to come in here later,” Vince continues, “looking for me. Don’t lie. Tell them I was here, but I left. Don’t get smart with these guys. Don’t tell stories. Just keep it simple. ‘Vince was here. He left. I don’t know where he went.’”

  “Don’t worry.” Tic’s head begins bobbing. “If those fuckers try to stop me, man…I’ll pull my balls up in my torso and do some tae kwon do on their punk asses…”

  “No. Tic. Listen to me. I need you to concentrate. No tae kwon do, no conspiracies, no balls. I need you to concentrate.”

  Tic settles down and nods earnestly. “Yeah. I’ll be cool.”

  “I know you will,” Vince says, and he pats the young man on the shoulder. “Look, I need you to do something else for me.” Vince pulls the last bundle of fifties from his waistband, peels off two. “This is for you,” he says.

  “No shit!”

  “And this”—he hands Tic the other eight fifties, four hundred bucks—“is for a friend of mine.” Vince writes the address down. “Her name is Beth Sherman. You take her this money. Okay? But you can’t tell anyone about it.”

  He walks to the back door, sticks his head out, and looks both ways.

  “You coming back, Mr. Vince?”

 
; “Sure,” Vince says. Then he looks over his shoulder and steps into the alley.

  THE LACK OF sleep shouldn’t be so powerful. It has no quality of its own; it is simply a hole, an absence, like the lack of sex or water or any other hole. Down side streets and alleys, Vince bobs in and out of cars, stopping to look both ways at every intersection. Vince wishes he could just stop and close his eyes. Sleep. Just for a minute. He looks down at the black slacks and red button shirt that he went out in last night. The math is tougher than it ought to be. Let’s see: You last went to bed Tuesday night, after the presidential debate. You woke up Wednesday morning at two. It’s now…6:40 Thursday morning. Going on twenty-seven hours without sleep.

  He’s done that a hundred times, gone a day or two without sleep. So why is he so tired? The surge and drain of adrenaline. Or something else? Vince thinks about what Beth said, the willful delusion in her voice—You’ll just have to come to the next one—and he slams his eyes open and closed as he works his way down the alley behind Sprague Avenue. He finally emerges onto Sprague and stops cold at what he sees in the parking lot of Doug’s Passport Photos and Souvenirs—two police radio cars and two detectives’ cars, plastic police tape stretched across the front of the business. He edges closer and crosses the tape to get a look at the activity behind the plate-glass storefront. Two detectives gesture with rubber-gloved hands. Vince leans forward onto the cold trunk of a patrol car.

  The car door opens. “Returning to the scene of the crime?”

  Vince straightens up. Out of the patrol car steps a skinny young guy—mid to late twenties, if he had to guess—wearing a down jacket over a shirt and tie and holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. This math is easier: Cop. Plainclothes. Detective. His hair is thin on top, but bushy in back. It curls up at the collar. He wears a friendly smile, just this side of cocky. “What did you say?” Vince asks.

  The detective champs his gum. “You know, that old saying: ‘The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.’ Doesn’t that seem stupid? I can’t imagine that really happening. Why would you come back? Nostalgia?”