(2004) Citizen Vince (6 page)

About Kelly: she is five feet ten inches tall, a former college volleyball player, twenty-six, white. Soft clear skin. She irons creases in her tight blue jeans, and wears her long blond hair in a perfect feather, middle-parted, falling away from her face like angel wings. Tic calls her Farrah. “Oh, here comes Farrah,” he says.

Even the oldest men look up from their donuts.

“Hi, Vince.” She smiles. “Don’t tell me that’s another new book?”

He nods.

“You’re amazing.”

Smiles.

“What is it today?”

Vince holds it up and tries not to sound rehearsed. “It’s about how we create our own version of hell right here on earth.”

“Huh,” she says noncommittally, and Vince keeps going.

“For this guy, hell is Newark, New Jersey. You ever been to Newark, Kelly?”

“No,” she says. Is that distraction he reads? “I guess I haven’t.”

Vince stands. “Yeah, Newark is bad, but me, I’d put hell closer to Paterson. Compared to Paterson, Newark is Sea World.”

Yes, she is definitely distracted: smiles and nods but doesn’t laugh at his joke. “Huh,” she says again, and turns toward the donut case. That’s it? That’s all he’s getting today? He follows, crushed, puts on his apron and walks around the case. LeRoi Jones. Stupid. Vince curses himself and the bookstore clerk. I’m too far out there, he thinks, and wonders if he ought not to go to another John Nichols book. He thinks
Milagro
might be part of a loose trilogy. That seems smart: when in doubt, go with a trilogy.

“Today, I need…” and Kelly describes a dozen donuts, including five jellies.

“That’s more jellies than usual,” Vince says quietly as he fills the box. He crouches and watches her through the glass case, the symmetry of tight jeans on toned legs.
God.
As he fills the box, Vince notices a white political button pinned to Kelly’s coat. It has red and white stripes, and in blue letters:
Grebbe
and
GOP
.

He stands and faces her. “Gre-e-e-eb?”

“Greb-
eee.
Aaron Grebbe. He’s a lawyer at the firm where I work…and a friend of mine. He’s running for state legislature.”

“You gonna vote for him?”

She smiles. “Yes. I am. He’s a good man.” She looks down at the donuts.

Vince nods, seals the box, and puts it on the counter. “Then you’re a Republican?”

She flinches. “No. Well, maybe. When I was young I was a staunch Democrat. Everyone was. But now…I just think the country is so screwed up that we need a change. That’s what Aaron’s campaign is about.
Returning America to its glory.
” She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “At least that’s what Aaron always says.”

“What’s he think about the hostages?”

“He says it’s not really an issue for state legislature.”

Vince nods.

“But he wants them to come home, I’m sure.”

“Goin’ out on a limb, isn’t he?”

She laughs. “You should vote for Aaron. You’d like him. He reads a lot. Like you.”

“Yeah?”

“But he likes nonfiction, mostly. Hey, are you going to hear Reagan’s son tonight?” Kelly asks. “Aaron’s going to be there. You could meet him.”

“Yeah,” Vince says. “I was thinking about going to Reagan’s son.”

She smiles again, and in that smile Vince has visions of children and country clubs, of creases ironed into his own jeans.

“Then I’ll see you there,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, and watches her leave. He runs to the back, throws his book in his locker, grabs the newspaper and begins flipping the pages, looking for some mention of Ronald Reagan’s kid coming to town.

“
I
READ A
book one time,” Tic says as he lugs a tray of maple bars to the front. “It was called
1984
and we had to read it in school and it was by this French dude Harwell. He wrote it in, like, the 1500s and he predicted that by 1984, there wouldn’t be any football or basketball or anything. The only sport would be BMX bike racing. That’s why I ride my bike everywhere. Because when we make it back to the Olympics in ’84, that shit is going to be an Olympic sport and I’m gonna get me a fuckin’ gold medal, guaran-damn-teed. And then, when we go back to a gold standard, that medal is gonna be worth its weight in gold, man.

“This book said that bike racing will be taught like karate, in dojos. I’m gonna be sensei of my own BMX dojo, man. We’ll sleep and meditate and smoke weed and screw…everything from the seats of our bikes. People will come from miles around to learn
from the various masters. Every few months I’ll just disappear, wander the countryside, teaching and—”

Vince interrupts. “Hey, Tic? How old are you?”

Shrugs. “I don’t measure time like everyone else, Mr. Vince.”

“But you’re old enough to vote?”

“Yeah…”

Vince holds out the folded newspaper. “I need someone to go hear Reagan’s son with me and—”

“Whoa, whoa.” Tic steps away from the newspaper as if it were a bomb. “I don’t vote, Mr. Vince. That’s what they want…register your ass. So when the shit comes down, they just go to their master list and there’s Maxwell Ticman, 2718 West Sherwood Avenue, Spokane, Washington, and
bang!
First thing next morning, you got a fuckin’ homing device in your teeth.”

He walks away, leaving Vince staring at the newspaper story.

DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL
David Best comes out into the lobby, red-faced. “First of all,
do not
come in here without calling first.” David looks even older when he’s angry like this and Vince can imagine the strain on his heart filling those thick limbs with blood.

Vince throws hands up, pleads guilty to David and his receptionist. “I’m sorry.”

“What? Carlisle? Carson? What is it today?”

“No, no. I don’t want to change my name. Nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

Vince looks from David to the receptionist and back. “Don’t you think we should talk about this in private, David?”

David turns and stalks into his office. He has to raise each shoulder to hoist his haunches and legs. He edges around his desk and sits. “You don’t just drop by the office. I’ve told you that. You call, give us a number, and I’ll meet you somewhere. Anywhere you want. And if you have to come in, if it’s some kind of
emergency, you call first. You have no idea who could’ve been in my office.”

“I thought you said it doesn’t matter,” Vince says. “That I’m not worth killing.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry about that.”

“I know. I was a little crazy yesterday.” Vince laughs at himself. “I went after this kid parked in front of my house.”

“For Christ’s sake, Vince—”

“No, it’s okay. I didn’t hurt him. Nice kid, actually. Waiting for his girlfriend. She was just trying to sneak out of her house. But it made me realize that you’re right. I have been acting paranoid, like I’m living my old life. But I’m not there. I’m here. I got a new name, new life. I should be…I should be better than I was four years ago.”

David listens without judgment.

“I mean, there’s no reason I can’t…you know, be a part of things. Maybe go back to school. Or get married. Have kids. Join a country club. That kind of thing. I’m smart. I could do anything I set my mind to, right?”

David smiles. “You got a particular country club in mind?”

Vince looks at the framed picture above David’s chair. In the portrait, Jimmy Carter seems even more forlorn than he did yesterday. Vince nods at the picture. “You probably have to go with the guy in charge, huh?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The president. You’d probably get in trouble if you went with me to hear Reagan’s kid tonight.”

David looks over his shoulder, as if seeing the portrait of Carter for the first time. “I can vote however I want, Vince.”

Vince puts a newspaper clipping on David’s oak desk. A small headline reads:
REAGAN’S SON COMING TO SPOKANE
.

“It’s tonight, at nine, at Casey’s restaurant on Monroe.”

David pushes the clipping back. “I can’t go with you to this, Vince.”

“Yeah, sure.” Vince nods, folds up the clipping, and puts it back in his pocket.

“I’m sorry, but it would be—”

“No, it’s no big deal.”

“I’m glad you’re getting involved politically, though.”

Vince leans forward. “They don’t tell you about that in the program. You get your voting rights restored, but what if you’ve never—” Vince shifts his weight. “In my neighborhood only the jerks cared about this stuff. Politicians paid unions and churches to deliver neighborhoods, and the aldermen and councilmen were just two more guys with their hands in your pocket. Nobody voted. Why bother? But now—” Vince can feel his train of thought getting away. “See, what I’m tryin’ to figure out—” He leans forward. “David, how do you know who to vote for?”

David looks tired. “Go home, Vince.”

VINCE SETS
THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL
down on the counter.

Margaret, the moon-eyed clerk at The Bookend, is in her sixties, white-haired and bird thin, wearing a peasant dress and a glasses chain around her neck. She stands behind the counter—covered with slipcases and homemade bookmarks—behind her a deep, one-story room, books double-filed and stacked to the ceiling in dark rows, more books piled in every corner. Margaret looks into Vince’s eyes and seems to know it’s gone badly. She covers her heart with her hand. “Oh, no. What happened, Mr. Camden? Did we go too far with the Afro-American literature?”

“I don’t know what we did, Margaret. I just know she didn’t like this one.”

Margaret removes her big round glasses and shakes her head. “Now don’t lose heart, Mr. Camden. We’re not beaten yet. Remember: Win the mind and the heart will follow.” She comes around the counter. “Or is it the other way around?”

He follows her to the stacks of alphabetical paperbacks. “The good news is that there are more books,” she says, “always more books. Let’s start from the top, shall we?” She makes clicking noises as she looks through the bottoms of her bifocals. “Perhaps the experimental fiction was a bit of a stretch, Mr. Camden. I know just what we need—something romantic and sweeping. An epic!”

“Actually”—Vince steps in behind her—“I want something on politics. You got anything like that?”

She doesn’t turn to face him. “Oh, a political novel. Excellent. Perhaps Robert Penn Warren?”

“I was thinking nonfiction.”

This stops Margaret short. She turns. “But your girl said she likes novels.”

“It turns out she’s working for this guy’s campaign and I thought—”

“A campaign?” Margaret brightens. “Your girl is an activist? Well. A girl with a social conscience. Excellent, Mr. Camden. This girl sounds substantial.”

“She’s pretty tall.”

Margaret misses his joke as she moves down to the nonfiction stacks.

“Perhaps something on governmental theory? Electoral politics? Maybe straight reportage? Essays?”

“What do you have on presidential elections?”

“Ah, yes. Timely. Easy to talk about. Perfect entrée to a meaningful discussion. Very good, Mr. Camden. Very sly.” Margaret is not quite five feet tall and she slides a stool along as she moves through tall, narrow stacks of essays and biography. He follows her and she hands him books:
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
and
The Making of the President 1960
and
The Selling of the President 1968.

Vince looks at the books. “Which one of these will tell me who to vote for?”

Again she misses the joke, is concentrating and doesn’t answer,
just keeps handing him books. Vince considers her, dangling from the stepladder.

“Margaret, are you busy tonight?” When there is no answer he continues. “I’m going to hear Reagan’s son tonight. Do you have any interest in going to that?”

She stops and turns, comes down the steps, and hands him Arthur Schlesinger’s massive
A Thousand Days.
Then she smiles sweetly. “Reagan? Oh, God no, Mr. Camden. Those Republican snakes scare the goddamned wind right out of me.”

ABOUT THE MAILMAN:
his name is Clay Gainer. Forty-eight, black, tall and wiry, from Lamar, Texas, face framed with graying sideburns. The son of sharecroppers and the first of his family to get out of Lamar, Clay got married at sixteen, joined the military, and ended up at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, where he settled, retired, and started a second career with the post office. Vince met him at the donut shop and, after getting to know him for a few weeks, explained how it could work—Clay keeping an eye out for new credit cards going out to people, then yanking them out of his bag, giving them to Vince, who pays twenty bucks a card, unseals the envelopes, writes down the card number and name, seals them back up, and gives them back to Clay to deliver. He ran a similar operation back in the world, so he knew which cards to steal. At first Clay wanted nothing to do with it, but Vince noticed that he kept asking questions and Vince explained it slowly and clearly, how they weren’t stealing from
people,
they were stealing from
banks.
How, if they did it right, the banks would assume the numbers were being stolen by people
after
they’d been delivered, when they were used in restaurants or stores. Clay started slowly, a credit card from a jerk on his route, then from a guy who refused to shovel snow from the sidewalk. And then they moved Clay to a central processing office and he had access to all that mail, all
those new credit cards going out to all those people. And bang, they were in business.

“You being careful?” Vince asks the mailman.

“Just like you said.”

“Tell me.”

“Ah, Vince.”

“Tell me.”

Sighs and recites: “Only steal from national banks. Never take more than two pieces per zip. Never take more than five pieces a week. Never take from the same zip in the same week. Look for cards going back in the mail. If I think anyone’s watching me, stop for a month.”

“You been talking to someone at the post office?”