Confessions of a Tax Collector (15 page)

“You know, it would probably help our relationship if you didn’t refer me as ‘bastard.’ Anyway, it’s easy for you to pooh-pooh money. You don’t have to work.“

“Yes how lucky I am,” she said, referring to her dead husband. “How lucky for me he dropped dead one morning in our kitchen.”

“Why are we fighting?”

“Because you’re an asshole.”

“And a bastard.”

“You don’t have anything to prove to me,” she said.

“I know I don’t have anything to prove to you,” I answered.

After skimmers, the next level of cases was the hardships, which usually could be resolved after an interview and some background work, that is, verifying the financial statement wasn’t purely fictional. As a Grade 7 revenue officer trainee, I had my fair share of hardships. There was the quadriplegic who deadpanned, “Just the one I’m riding in,” when I asked him if he owned any vehicles. There was the out-of-work schoolteacher who failed to pay taxes on his cashed-in IRA and now worked for McDonald’s. “Do you know how humiliating that is, wearing those ridiculous polyester pants and waiting on kids who used to call me ‘sir’?” There was the agoraphobic trucker living on disability payments after he slammed his rig into an interstate overpass, emerging unscathed but sacrificing both his girlfriend’s legs in the accident. He broke down completely during the interview, confessing that she ran off with a one-armed man she had met in rehab. “I tell you, I was goddamned tempted to cut off one of my own hands to get her back.” (“Makes me want to meet the legless chick,” Culpepper remarked afterward.)

And there was the man who called himself a dirt farmer—he sold and hauled topsoil from his rural property—and his wife, who sat stoically through the first part of the interview and stared blankly at me when I asked her for her date of birth. “My wife has a plate in her head,” he informed me in an apologetic tone. “It’s all my fault. I hit her with my scoop—with the edge of my bulldozer—came right over on top of her head. They investigated me for attempted murder,” he said as he teared up. ‘I was cleared,“ he added. ”I was cleared of all charges, but she’s been Permanently—“

“Competition for
what
?”

“Promotion,” I said with Job-like patience.

“I thought the promotion was automatic once you got through the training year.”

“Not
that
promotion. The
next
promotion.”

“The next promotion,” she echoed. “Rick, I thought you just wanted a job to pay your bills until the writing takes off…”

“Well, they’re not going to promote Caroline.” I wanted to stay on the topic that was still interesting to me. “She’s a moron. And Rachel is too soft and Dee is too… well, Dee is too weird.”

“I know what ‘moron’ means, but what does ‘too soft’ mean?”

“You know, soft, touchy-feely; she wants everybody to be her friend.”

“Oh, how horrible. And Dee’s weird?”

“Well, she does have this psychology degree. I mean, she majored in
abnormal
psychology.” My face was growing hot. The last I had spoken with Dee was during basic training in Tampa, the night she had invited me up to her hotel room.

“Rick, you’re miserable. Quit.”

“I can’t quit.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Pretend I’ve forgotten.”

I said nothing. I stared into space. I had taken to staring into space, sometimes in midsentence.

“You’ll find something else.”

“I’m not going to live off anyone anymore,” I said.

“So you get a job somewhere else.”

“With a degree in English? Where else can I go and earn this much money? Even if I had a master’s, which I don’t, and could teach, I still couldn’t make nearly—”

“So that’s what it’s about, the money?”

“No, it isn’t just the money. I can’t explain it, but this is—it’s my last shot.”

“Your last shot? Dear God, you’re a melodramatic bastard.”

“You know, it would probably help our relationship if you didn’t refer woman’s florid face, bloated and blotchy from alcohol, the fresh bruises on her neck and arms, as the younger children climbed over her enormous bulk. She didn’t know nothing, she told me. Her husband was gone for weeks at a time. He made too much for them to go on welfare. I noticed he small, red, circular marks on her children’s arms and, seeing that I noticed, she burst into tears, pulling as many squirming children yowling
Mama!
into her copious lap as she could, running her hands over their dirty faces, along their skinny arms, caressing their legs, her mouth moving soundlessly as she stared at me, pleading with her eyes for me to understand the confession she could not speak.

An hour later, we emerged from the trailer, and I felt like an astronaut returning to an earth that was at once strange and familiar, the place I had left that had been changed irrevocably by my leaving.

In the car, Culpepper said, “Say nothing.”

“What?”

“If you say anything, it’s disclosure.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Disclosure. I’m talking about disclosure. You know what disclosure is, don’t you, Yancey? Didn’t anyone in Phase One say a goddamned thing about disclosure?”

“Of course I know.”

“Then why do you say ‘what?’ like that? Why do people do that? Why do they say ‘what, what?’ like that? Jesus! Listen to me. Some people might say we now have a moral obligation to report what we saw back there. How would you feel if two weeks from now you pick up the paper and find out that son of a bitch killed her or one of her kids and you told no one what was going on?”

He wasn’t looking at me. He spoke dispassionately. He might have been talking about the weather. He was strolling down the streets of Culpepperville.

“Look, Rick, you’re going to see a lot of things. Things that aren’t meant to be seen. I’ve seen things—” he trailed off. He would not tell me of the things he had seen. “We come into people’s homes for one reason. We aren’t here to save the world.”

He cleared his throat.

“Drain bamaged!” she shouted. The words were very loud in the small interview booth. “I been drain bamaged!”

“Brain damaged,” he said softly, patting her hand. “Brain damaged ”

Culpepper loved this story. He repeated it often, to anyone willing to listen, delivering a perfect imitation of this woman who looked as if she might have leapt directly from the pages of
The Grapes of Wrath.
It never failed to amuse him, to shout in a high-pitched squeal, “Drain bamaged! I been drain bamaged!” It appealed to his sense of the absurd and his sense of the cruel. One day, he asked if I had told the story to Pam.

“As a matter of fact, I have.”

“And she didn’t think it was funny.”

“No.”

“You don’t talk that much about work with her anymore, do you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

These people and the unfortunates like them troubled me during my training year. I felt horribly for them and horribly for myself for laughing at them. There was the man Allison had interviewed while he took a bath (he soaked four times a day, he explained, at nine in the morning, at noon, at four in the afternoon, and at nine in the evening, for his psoriasis— Culpepper made her rewrite her history to delete any reference to the big hairy naked man in the bathtub. Afterward, she confessed to Gina the financial statement was incomplete because she wanted to get out of there fast: the suds were dying). There was the narcoleptic who wept in our interview because it had always been his life’s ambition to be a surgeon. Almost all of these people asked if we had come to arrest them. With no lawyer or CPA shielding them, and with little education, they were certain debtor’s prison still existed or that the IRS was in the business of arresting every two-bit, self-employed schmuck who was too lazy, stupid, or broke to pay his taxes.

But nothing compared to what Culpepper referred to as the heart-breakers. My first heartbreaker lived with her six kids in a trailer on the north end of town. She had made the mistake of filing jointly with a truck driver who never made his estimated tax payments. It was, of course, only one of her mistakes, and a minor one, comparatively. It haunted me, the woman’s florid face, bloated and blotchy from alcohol, the fresh bruises on her neck and arms, as the younger children climbed over her enormous bulk. She didn’t know nothing, she told me. Her husband was gone for weeks at a time. He made too much for them to go on welfare. I noticed the small, red, circular marks on her children’s arms and, seeing that I noticed, she burst into tears, pulling as many squirming children yowling Mama! into her copious lap as she could, running her hands over their dirty faces, along their skinny arms, caressing their legs, her mouth moving soundlessly as she stared at me, pleading with her eyes for me to understand the confession she could not speak.

An hour later, we emerged from the trailer, and I felt like an astronaut returning to an earth that was at once strange and familiar, the place I had left that had been changed irrevocably by my leaving.

In the car, Culpepper said, “Say nothing.”

“What?”

“If you say anything, it’s disclosure.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Disclosure. I’m talking about disclosure. You know what disclosure is, don’t you, Yancey? Didn’t anyone in Phase One say a goddamned thing about disclosure?”

“Of course I know.”

“Then why do you say ‘what?’ like that? Why do people do that? Why do they say ‘what, what?’ like that? Jesus! Listen to me. Some people might say we now have a moral obligation to report what we saw back there. How would you feel if two weeks from now you pick up the paper and find out that son of a bitch killed her or one of her kids and you told no one what was going on?”

He wasn’t looking at me. He spoke dispassionately. He might have been talking about the weather. He was strolling down the streets of Culpepperville.

“Look, Rick, you’re going to see a lot of things. Things that aren’t meant to be seen. I’ve seen things—” he trailed off. He would not tell me of the things he had seen. “We come into people’s homes for one reason. We aren’t here to save the world.”

He cleared his throat.

“We can’t report any crime unless we walk in on it in progress. To report anything else is a disclosure of confidential taxpayer information. It will get you fired. It could also get you prosecuted. I knew this RO in Maitland who reported a taxpayer for child neglect. She lost her job and spent four months in jail.

“You’re going to see things. These things, you’ll have to find some internal way of dealing with them. We see the same things cops see, only we don’t have the luxury of taking it public. Some things you see you can put out of your mind. Other things will sink right into you as far as they’ll go, right into your fucking bones. You’ll feel them at night, crushing you, and you can’t tell anyone, except us, your brothers and sisters in the Service.”

* * *

Gina, always attuned to the psychological health of her trainees, took me into her office the next morning, for what passes as an IRS pep talk.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“I’m doing great,” I said.

“Great?”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Okay.”

“You’re okay?”

I said nothing, but gave a weak smile. I think if she had smiled back I would have burst into tears.

She asked how things were in my personal life, meaning my relationship with Pam. It was none of her business, so of course I answered immediately.

“Okay,” I lied. “We’re great.” In fact, we had barely spoken or seen each other over the past few days. Pam had taken a job at the local community theater and was gone most nights when I got home. We had begun communicating in little notes. I would come home to find one on the kitchen table, telling me when she expected to be home and I would write beneath it, “Wake me when you come in.” Sometimes she did; most of the time she did not. She had taken to overeating, and her weight was inching upward.

She poked me awake at four o’clock one morning, yelling for me to roll over, “Rick, Rick, you’re lying in the cookies.
You’re lying in the cookies.”
At over in the morning, this seems to make more sense than in the light of day I rose at six with chocolate chips embedded in my back; she had fallen sleep with a plateful of cookies on her lap. Battling the pounds had been a lifelong struggle, and she blamed me for her recent gains.

“Good,” Gina said. “That’s important.” On this day, a glittering dragonfly hovered over her left breast. Dragonflies are beneficent insects; they eat mosquitoes and other pests. Thus, I comforted myself.

“It’s important to have a life outside the office,” she added. “Any office, but particularly this office. I’m sure it’s occurred to you, Rick, that your job here is unique. It cannot be compared to anything else in the government or even to the private sector collectors. You’re charged with enforcing the most unpopular laws in the country. Everywhere you go, people hate and fear you. As a result, the tendency is to withdraw. It’s the agency’s tendency and it’s our personal tendency.”

I nodded dumbly. I had no clue where she was going with this.

“Relationships
outside
the IRS are critical. Especially now, during your training year. You’re going to feel as if there’s no one who can understand you, who can truly empathize with what you’re going through. You’ll begin to limit your socializing to people inside the Service. Your old friends will not understand the changes you’re going through.”

“I haven’t changed,” I said.

“You don’t have a choice,” she said. “I only wanted you to know that, in my opinion, there are two things you must do to succeed at this job. First, you must leave it at the office. At the end of the day, whatever is here must stay here. Do you understand what I mean?”

I gave no indication that I understood. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t nod in agreement. I simply stared at her.
Drain bamaged.

“Good,” she said. “The second thing is—and this is more important than the first thing—the second thing is you must have a life outside the IRS. Don’t let your old life die. Find ways to keep it alive. Fight for it as if your very life depended on it. As if your very soul depended on it. Does that make sense to you?”