Surprisingly, the sound of Kevin’s voice did not fill him with anxiety. Instead, he found it oddly reassuring, as if the idea of Kevin were more menacing than Kevin himself. Perhaps this life of deceit that he had just embarked on would not be as terrible and karma-destroying as he had first imagined. He would do something nice for Kevin but he didn’t know what yet. Not a present though. He could take his time and figure something out. He felt himself calming down and emerged from the shower to go downstairs.
“Hey, dude. That sucks about your job,” Kevin said as he saw him coming down the stairs. “Here. Maybe this’ll help.” Kevin tossed him a dime bag of weed. “It’s mostly sticks and stems, but I thought it might ease the pain of unemployment.”
Oh Christ. Kevin had bought
“I… I can’t take this,” Doug said miserably, then thought what an idiot he sounded like. This was far more suspicious than simply saying thanks and firing up, which is what pre-sex-with-Linda Doug would have done. He shook his head and was relieved when he realized that his sheepish refusal had been interpreted as depression over losing his job.
“Hey man, it’s not a big deal,” Mitch said. “You’ll find something else real soon. Don’t worry about it. The rent’s paid because of the TV deal anyway.”
“I may already have something for you,” Kevin said slyly, sitting on the sofa and putting his feet on the coffee table. When Kevin came over, he seemed to relish the lack of tidiness, the informality. He could plunk his feet on anything and Mitch and Doug didn’t care. Or at least, Mitch didn’t. Doug was frequently scraping bits of dried mud from Kevin’s boots off the coffee table but today definitely wasn’t the day to say anything. He sat down next to Kevin and began packing a bowl.
“Have something for me? You mean dog-walking?”
“No. I already got Mitch for that and I only need one other person. This is more money less work.” Doug and Mitch leaned in and Kevin paused for a moment, enjoying their curiosity. “You guys wanna steal a Ferarri?”
Doug stared at him. “Huh?”
“I wanna steal a Ferrari,” said Mitch.
“I’m serious, man. I know this guy who’ll pay, like, twenty grand cash for a Ferrari. It should be an hour’s work. At the most.”
“Sounds good,” said Mitch. “Where do I sign up?” Ever since they had stolen the television from Accu-mart, Mitch and Kevin had developed a whole new respect for theft, which disturbed Doug. The morning after the theft, Mitch had been reading the paper and happened on an article describing the arrest of a bank robber. Mitch had held forth on the idiocy of the man’s crime, concluding that he should have robbed electronics and flogged them as they had done. Based on his one experience with crime, he seemed to have appointed himself the local criminal genius. But to be fair, Doug thought Mitch might have had a flair for it.
“I don’t know anyone who has a Ferrari,” Doug said. “And they have, like, security systems and shit.”
“How do you know this guy?” Mitch asked.
“From prison.”
“Great,” said Doug. “You can’t trust those people.”
Mitch and Kevin stared at him. “I’m one of those people,” Kevin said. “I was in prison.”
Shit. He had meant to be nice to Kevin and now he had wound up insulting him. He had insulted Kevin and
“I ran into this guy in the dog park,” Kevin said, ignoring him. “He seems to think I’m someone else, some dude who stole cars. Anyways, he put me in touch with this other guy who’ll pay twenty grand for a Ferrari. And at first I thought, what the fuck do I know about stealing cars? Then I remembered high school.”
“High school?” asked Doug, trying to sound interested but actually waiting for a good place in the conversation to point out that Kevin had gone insane. He would point it out nicely. Maybe that could be the nice thing he did for Kevin-save him from a five-year prison term for doing something stupid.
“Yeah, man. I went to high school about an hour from here. I worked weekends as a valet at this super high-end restaurant, parking cars. Dude, there were Ferraris in there every night. Rolls-Royces, all that shit. And you know what? We left the doors unlocked and we put the fucking keys under the mat. That was ten years ago but I bet they still do.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Mitch, as if they were discussing buying concert tickets or a pickup softball game. Doug winced. Did these guys not realize what they were talking about? This was a crime, punishable by years, not days, in prison. This was the last thing Doug needed. He began to shake his head, was about to beg out of the whole deal, when a sudden, horrible thought struck him. What if this was the nice thing he was supposed to do for Kevin? Not talk him out of it but participate enthusiastically. The laws of karma dictated that you scored more karma points for doing something you didn’t want to do, something repugnant to you but pleasing to the offended party. This certainly qualified.
“OK,” said Doug.
“Really?” said Kevin, who had obviously been anticipating resistance. “You’re in?”
“Yeah.” Doug looked into Kevin’s eyes and saw not suspicion or anger or betrayal, all the things Doug knew he should be feeling, but pleasure. Pleasure at having his friend Doug along for the ride, part of the team. This was it, though, Doug thought, the one thing. Once this was over, they were square.
Oh, and no more sleeping with Linda.
MITCH LIT A cigarette and looked at the snow falling over his backyard. Kevin had left and Doug had gone upstairs to be moody and depressed, so he was getting a chance to enjoy a moment of solitude amid the rusted tools and piles of broken PVC piping on his back porch. A year ago, in exchange for half a month’s free rent, Doug and Mitch had renovated the kitchen’s ailing plumbing, a job which had taken a day, but the cleanup process was in its thirteenth month. At the end of that day, Doug, flushed with the success of the home-repair job, had resolved to become a plumber.
So they were going to steal a Ferrari. Twenty grand for a day’s work. It was odd, but it seemed like a job to him. Only, unlike working at Accu-mart, this was something he could really get into. He would make decisions and be a part of a team, not a worker ant who constantly had to be reassured of his own importance with platitudes and falsehoods. There would be no motivational posters, no time cards, no uniforms. There would be no Bob Sutherland, no endless hours of boredom, no need for a lunchtime pot break. Just exciting and productive work, good pay, and the knowledge that he was one of a select few chosen to do the job, which were the only things he had ever wanted from his employment. Accu-mart had provided none of them.
He wondered if he would have a knack for it. He knew Kevin would be the perfect partner, smart and aggressive, but he was surprised that Doug seemed so interested. He would have imagined that Doug would have just shrugged the whole thing off and gone looking for another cooking job, leaving him and Kevin to split the money. Mitch thought that the fact that he had lost his job that day might have been a factor. Maybe Doug had wanted in on the job because he was worried about his bills. But that theory didn’t quite make sense, as Doug wasn’t one to really worry about his bills. Mitch usually had to remind him to pay them, and if he didn’t handle the rent, they both would have been evicted a long time ago.
“You have to pay your credit card bills every month,” Mitch remembered lecturing Doug once after discovering about five late notices stuffed into the couch. “If you don’t, it will ruin your credit score.”
“Why are they keeping score of how often I pay my bills?”
Mitch had begun to explain the system to him, incredulous that a twenty-six-year-old man didn’t already know about this. But, it turned out, he did. He had simply applied his own logic to the system and wanted an argument to test it.
“So they’re keeping score on me so if I get a high score I can buy a house?” Doug had asked.
“Yes,” Mitch had answered suspiciously.
“What if I don’t want a house?”
“Eventually, you’re going to want a house.”
Doug had shaken his head. “I’ll never have a house,” he’d said without regret. “Neither will you. We’ll never own houses. They just like to keep score on us. They keep score on all of us but we’ll never own houses.”
In truth, Mitch couldn’t help feeling Doug was right but he wasn’t willing to let go of the idea that he would one day own a house. He just knew he would, one day. He wasn’t sure how but just over the next hill there were good things waiting to happen. He was certain of it. Sure, the credit system was fucked, the credit score just a number that indicated how willing you were to participate in a rigged game, but that was no reason not to try.
So maybe Doug wasn’t worried about bills but for some reason he was finally taking some responsibility and joining up for the Ferrari mission. It seemed ironic that the first time in months that Mitch had felt respect for Doug was when the guy decided to commit a felony. Maybe Doug was changing, turning into a different person right in front of them. Maybe he was finally joining them on Planet Earth.
Good things were waiting to happen. Soon, with the proceeds from the Ferrari, he could clean up his credit, maybe even apply for a gold card. Then on to other good things. Maybe one day he would even get a nice suit and perhaps get a Ferrari legally and drive it up to his house, which he owned. He and Doug would both own houses and they would live near each other and go over to each other’s houses and smoke pot all day and play beer pong and not have to worry about anything because they were such efficient and excellent car thieves that they never needed to work crappy jobs. But they would, of course, occasionally help Kevin with his dog- walking business. Dogs were cool and how else would they explain all their money to the IRS?
The door opened and Doug peered out. He looked better, less moody, less beaten by life, as if he had had a good cry. “Hey man, you wanna play beer pong?”
Mitch got up from the worn couch and tossed his cigarette into the snow. “Sure, dude. I’m gonna kick your ass.”
CHAPTER 6
