(2004) Citizen Vince (4 page)

“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 easier, 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:

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.

He can’t help but wonder what it means, if there aren’t quiet omens, too.

Vince opens his wallet and slides the registration card in beside his crisp social-security card.

Next he opens the mailman’s manila envelope. The deal works like this: The mailman watches for new credit cards in the mail, and drops them in a manila envelope for Vince, who steams them open, writes down the numbers, then puts the cards back and seals the envelopes with a glue stick. The cards are delivered to their owners, and it’s usually a month or two before they realize that someone else is charging the shit out of their account. By then, Vince has dumped the cards.

This load is light: six unopened MasterCard and American Express envelopes slide out. He can feel the hard credit cards inside. Then a white folded note falls from the envelope and flutters to the table, almost the same size as his voter’s registration card. He stares at the note from the mailman. No, this isn’t right.

Dread takes up very little space.

Vince looks down at the note and has the urge to ignore it. He doesn’t need this. Not after the day he’s had. Finally, he picks it up and reads it.

No. All wrong. Vince meets the mailman on
Mondays.
They just met yesterday. He paid the mailman and gave him some cards to put back in the mail. Mondays. They’ve never met any other day. Tomorrow is Wednesday. This is wrong. And just like that, the misgiving, the fear, the paranoia—whatever it is—is back.

Maybe it’s being back in his house, where this day started with such unsettling thoughts, or maybe it’s the combination of getting the voter’s registration and the mailman’s note, but Vince can feel darkness in front of him, and he can taste the dread that he woke with this morning, and he knows with certainty: They’ve found him. They’re going to kill him.

When you’re dead, the world goes on without you, swallows you up like a stone in black water. So, there’s that.

He looks up to see a stern Barbara Walters at the debate moderators’ table, the others deferring to her huge head, which is cocked and serious:
Mr. President, the eyes of the country tonight are on the hostages in Iran. I realize this is a sensitive area, but the question of how we respond to acts of terrorism goes beyond this current crisis.

Vince thinks of Lenny—
You’re paranoid, man
—and Doug—
think I’m gonna go against you
—and David—
No one cares anymore.
They are right. All of them. He is paranoid. And they are going against him. And no one cares. Coldness moves up his ankles into his calves. Jimmy Carter bites his lip and cocks his head in sympathy.

Barbara, one of the blights on this world is the threat and the activities of terrorists…we committed ourselves to take strong action against terrorism. Airplane hijacking was one of the elements of that commitment. But ultimately, the most serious terrorist threat is if one of those radical nations like Libya or Iraq, who believe in terrorism as a policy, should have atomic weapons.

While we watch the small patterns, the big movements elude us. We are so intent on incidental waves of
news
and
memory
that we miss the larger tides of history.

Vince stands and feels his own pulse in his ears. Okay. Think.
Think.
Who is behind all of this? Who has the most to gain? The problem with conspiracies is that only crazy people can find them. That’s why conspiracies work, because they shatter the truth into
shards and only crazy people can look at shards and see the whole. And who is going to believe a crazy person, anyway? Are you losing it? Vince rubs his temple. You’re losing it, aren’t you?

Ronald Reagan can’t wait to answer:
You’ve asked that question twice. I think you ought to have at least one answer to it. I have been accused lately of having a secret plan with regard to the hostages
…
Your question is difficult to answer, because, in the situation right now, no one wants to say anything that would inadvertently delay, in any way, the return of those hostages.