The Book of Lies

hobble back toward our van. From the stench on his breath, Alberto’s been drinking hard. From his fresh split lip, plus the tear in his ratty T-shirt, he’s been fighting, too. In his left hand, he clutches the dented, rusty RC Cola can that he carries everywhere.

Welcome to Fort Lauderdale beach. Just another day in paradise.

“You planning on helping here?” I call to Roosevelt, who’s reclining in the passenger seat of our dumpy white van.

“Ah’m mentoring,” Roosevelt calls back in a thick Tennessee drawl, nodding a hello to Alberto, who offers a gray-toothed smile in return.

“No, you’re sitting on your rear while I do all the work,” I point out.

“Whattya think mentoring is?” Roosevelt asks, lumbering out like an old mountain cat and slowly tugging open the side door of the van, a 1991 GMC Safari that another client christened “the White House.” (Roosevelt and Calvin in the same place? It’s downright presidential.)

“You got him?” I ask.

“Isn’t that why God put me on this planet?” Roosevelt says, his dyed-black, aging-hippie ponytail flapping in the salty ocean breeze. At forty-two, Roosevelt’s old enough to know better than the ponytail, but we all have our weaknesses. “Man, Alberto, you reek.”

To the few passing tourists still walking the beach, we probably look like mobsters. But our job’s far more dangerous than that.

“Listen, thanks for calling us instead of the cops,” I tell the restaurant manager, a middle-aged guy who looks like a ferret.

“I’m no schmuck,” he laughs, dropping his French accent. “Cops would take two hours. You take the trash out fast.”

He offers a handshake, and as I reach to take it, I spot a hundred-dollar bill in his palm. I pull back as if he’s offering a coiled snake.

“Just our way of saying thanks,” he adds, reaching out again for the handshake.

I don’t shake back. “Listen,” I insist, stepping toward him. It’s clear I’m not the most imposing figure—I slouch and have a shambling walk that’s all arms and legs and big hands—but I do have most of my dad’s height. Nearly six feet when I stand up straight. And the only time I do that is when I’m pissed. Like now. “Do you understand what I do?” I ask, my thick Adam’s apple pumping with each syllable.

“Aw, jeez, you’re gonna give me some self-important speech now, aren’t ya?”

“No speech. We take the homeless back to shelters—”

“And what? If you accept a tip it’ll make it less of a good deed? I respect that. I do. But c’mon, be fair to yourself,” he says, motioning to my faded black T-shirt, which is barely tucked in. “What’re ya, thirty years old with that baby face? You’re wearing secondhand sneakers and sweatpants. To work. When was the last time you got a haircut? And c’mon . . . your van . . .”

I glance back at the van’s peeling tinted windows and the swarm of rust along the back fender, then down at my decade-old sweatpants and my checkerboard Vans sneakers.

“Take the money, kid. If you don’t use it for yourself, at least help your organization.”

I shake my head. “You called my client trash.”

To my surprise, he doesn’t get defensive. Or mad. “You’re right—I’m sorry,” he says, still holding out the money. “Let this be my apology. Please. Don’t make it the end of the world.”

I stare at my sweatpants, calculating all of the underwear and socks I could buy for our clients with an extra hundred dollars.

“C’mon, bro . . . even Bob Dylan did an iPod commercial.”

“And once again, making the world safe for people who eat croque-monsieurs,” I say, yanking open the door of the van and climbing back behind the wheel.

“What the fudge, Cal? You didn’t take the money, did you?” Roosevelt asks with a sigh as he reaches into the brown bag on his lap and cracks open a pistachio shell. “Why you so stubborn?”

“Same reason you say dumb crap like ‘What the fudge.’ ”

“That’s different.”

“It’s not different,” I shoot back, looking down at the van’s closed ashtray. With a tug, I pull it open, spot the dozens of discarded pistachio shells he’s stuffed inside, and dump them in the empty Burger King bag between us. Roosevelt cracks another shell and leans for the ashtray. I shake the Burger King bag in front of him instead. “You were a minister, so you don’t like to curse—I get it, Roosevelt. But it’s a choice you make on principle.”

“You were a minister?” Alberto blurts from the backseat, barely picking his head up from the RC soda can with the plastic wrap on top. It took nearly six different pickups before Alberto told me that’s where he keeps his father’s ashes. I used to think he was nuts. I still do. But I appreciate the logic. I’m what my parents left behind. I understand not wanting to do the same to someone else. “I thought you were some special agent who got arrested . . .”

Twisting the ignition and hitting the gas, I don’t say a word.

“That was Cal,” Roosevelt points out as we take off down A1A, and his ponytail flaps behind him. “And we’ve talked about my ministry, Alberto.”

Alberto pauses a moment. “You’re a minister?”

“He was,” I offer. “Ask him why he left.”

“Ask Cal why he got fired,” Roosevelt says in that calm, folksy drawl that filled the church pews every Sunday and immediately has Alberto looking my way. “Losing his badge . . . y’know that’s what turned his hair white?” Roosevelt adds, pointing at my full head of thick silver hair, which is such a scraggly mess it almost covers the birthmark near my left eye.

“Nuh-uh,” Alberto says. “You didn’t get that from your momma or daddy?”

I click my front teeth together, staring out at the closed tourist T-shirt shops that line the beach. The only thing I got from my parents was a light blue government form with the charges against my father.

The prosecutor was smart: He went for manslaughter instead of murder . . . painted a picture of this six- foot-two monster purposely shoving a small, defenseless young mom . . . then for the final spit-shine added in my father yelling, “That’s it—you’re done!” (Testimony courtesy of every neighbor with an adjoining wall.)

My dad got eight years at Glades Correction Institution. The state of Florida gave me six minutes to say good-bye. I remember the room smelled like spearmint gum and hairspray. Life is filled with trapdoors. I happened to swan dive through mine when I was nine years old. That was the last time I ever saw Dad. I don’t blame him anymore, even though when he got out, he could’ve— I don’t blame him anymore.

“Gaaah,” Roosevelt shouts, his ruddy features burning bright. “You shoulda taken that restaurant money.”

“Roosevelt, the only reason he was offering that cash was so when he goes home tonight, he doesn’t feel nearly as guilty for sweeping away the homeless guy that he thought was bad for his fake French bistro business. Go pray . . . or send an e-mail to heaven . . . or do whatever you do to let your God weigh in, but I’m telling you: We’re here to help those who need it—not to give fudging penance.”

His lips purse at my use of the G-word. Roosevelt’ll joke about anything—his long hair, his obsession with early chubby Janet Jackson (so much better than the later thinner model), even his love of “Yo Momma’s So Fat” jokes as a tool for changing the subject during an awkward social situation—but he’ll never joke about God.

Staring out the side window, Roosevelt’s now the one clicking his teeth. “Making it a crusade doesn’t make it right,” he says, speaking slowly so I feel every word.

“It’s not a crusade.”

“Really? Then I suppose when you leave this job every night, your life is filled with a slew of outside interests: like that kindergarten teacher I tried to set you up with. Oh, wait—that’s right—you never called her.”

“I called her. She had to run,” I say, gripping the steering wheel and searching the passing side streets for possible clients.

“That’s why you set up a date! To make time so you can talk, or eat, or do something besides riding past mile after mile of gorgeous beach and spending all that time checking every alley for a homeless person!”