Confessions of a Tax Collector (36 page)

“Don’t tell me,” Beth said. “The car isn’t his.”

“It’s registered to his girlfriend. This is her address, too.”

“Put the house in her name?”

“It’s a rental.”

“Shame about the car. Those things sell great around here. Camaros, Trans-ams, pickup trucks. Is she the nominee?”
[47]
She was referring to the car.

“She bought it way before the tax was assessed.”

She nodded, sipped her coffee. I asked her if she minded, holding up a cigarette. She shook her head; she didn’t mind. I rolled down my window and lit up.

“You know,” she said, “I live around here.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A couple of miles that way. And my ex lives a couple of miles the other way.”

“So this guy lives in the middle.”

She laughed. “I guess.”

“He’s been driving me nuts. There’s nothing to latch onto. Soon as my levy hits he quits and finds another job.”

“You’ve followed him before?”

“No. Just worked off leads from his former employers.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Can’t go near her.”

“How come?”

“He’s been arrested twice for domestic assault.”

“But she dropped the charges.”

I nodded. “True love has no boundaries.”

“What makes you think he’s going to work this morning?”

I shrugged. “It’s near the end of the month, bills are coming due.”

Abruptly, she said, “I’m hungry. Is Pam still on that Jenny Craig thing?”

“She dropped that. Now she’s on the cabbage diet.”

“What’s the cabbage diet?”

“You eat cabbage every day. Cabbage soup, raw cabbage, cabbage sandwiches.”

“Cabbage sandwiches?”

“I’m kidding about the cabbage sandwiches.”

“I’ve never heard of the cabbage diet.”

“Neither had I.”

“Does it work?”

“No idea.”

“How was her trip to New York?”

I flicked my cigarette into the drainage ditch. “She did the usual tourist thing. Tavern On The Green, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Radio City Music Hall, Macy’s. She loved Macy’s, and Saks. She brought me a souvenir.” I showed her my new key ring: a picture of the Manhattan skyline encased in plastic.

“Wow. That must have cost her a buck fifty at the airport.”

“It’s the thought that counts.”

“You should have gone with her.”

“I wasn’t invited. It was a business trip.”

“What is her business exactly?”

“She chaperones the characters from the park around. Sort of like their handler.”

“Fascinating work.”

“If you can get it.”

The front door of the little house flew open and a tall, skinny girl with an explosion of dyed-blond hair jumped over the two concrete steps and trotted toward the car. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black boots. She walked with her arms folded over her chest, her head down; we couldn’t see her face.

“The girl exits the house,” I said. “She seems in a hurry, or upset, or both.”

The door flew open again, and he bounded down the steps after her. He

was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, cowboy boots, a greasy baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, his shoulder-length hair bouncing as he walked.

“She is followed closely by the boy. She keeps her back to him and huddles by the passenger side of the car.”

Beth asked, “What are you doing?”

“He goes to her. He is clearly upset. He jabs a finger in her face. ‘Don-cha ever run out on me agin, woman, y’understand?’ She raises her head. For a moment she is tempted to grab the finger shaking in her face and bite it off, down to the knuckle. ‘I’ll run out when I want, Ronnie. Watcha gonna do about it?’”

“Stop it,” Beth said, but she was laughing.

“He takes her by the shoulders. ‘You do it agin and I’ll rough you up, worse’n last time. You remember last time, Rondine.’”

“Rondine?”

“‘Git your stinkin’ hands offa me, you brute!’”

“‘Doncha call me a brute! I’ll show you brute!’ He goes to his side of the car. Drops his keys. Curses. ‘Look what you made me do, bitch!’ He gets in, but she hesitates. Now is her chance! Make a break for it, Rondine! You can do better! He’s a loser! Go!”

“Run,” Beth murmured. “Run, Rondine.”

I started the car. “But at last she decides, ‘What the hell, he bought me this Harley jacket, he’s cute, and I do love him. Oh, I do love him so.’”

The Camaro’s rear wheels spun in the muddy ground, throwing divots five feet into the air as Ronnie whipped the car onto the road. I pulled behind him and quickly we were matching his speed of sixty miles per hour.

“Ronnie’s in a hurry,” Beth said. “Your car sounds like it’s about to disintegrate.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve had this baby up to sixty-five before.”

We could see their heads through the rear window of the Camaro. The fight appeared to be escalating. He looked more toward her than the road, and the car was swerving over the center line, then careening toward “he right shoulder, coming dangerously close to the drainage ditch. She began to punch him in the right shoulder, her stringy blond hair whipping back and forth, and he was trying to catch her fist as it came toward him.

“This is getting bad,” Beth said.

“The dumb-ass is going to run up a light pole.”

“Oh, my God!”

The passenger door had come open. Now Ronnie was punching her in the left arm, alternating his fist with the flat of his hand; he was trying to shove her out the open door. She had opened it, of course, but apparently had changed her mind about bailing, so Ronnie decided to facilitate her original desire. My speedometer inched toward sixty-five.

“Rick, you’ve got to back off. If she comes out of that car—”

The Camero was now whipping back and forth as Ronnie employed physics to hurl his lover from the car. Beth screamed at me to slow down as the girl’s body fell out of the car, hit the right shoulder of the road, and rolled into the drainage ditch, coming to rest facedown in the four inches of standing water.

Ronnie kept going.

So did I.

* * *

I kicked open the bull-pen door; it crashed against the opposite wall. Caroline rose from her desk. Allison and Bonny appeared in the doorway of the secretary’s office. Henry looked up from the IDRS desk. Beth was close on my heels.

“She could have died, Rick!”

I flung the case file onto my desk and sat down, my back to her. Beth stood in the middle of the room and shouted at me.

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

“What happened?” Allison demanded. “What did Rick do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“That’s my point!” Beth shouted.

“Who died?” Caroline asked.

“Nobody died, for Christ sakes!”

“How do you know that, Rick?” Beth asked. “How the hell would you know what happened to her?”

“We couldn’t stop.”

“Did Rick hit someone with his car?” Caroline asked.

“And why couldn’t we?” Beth asked.

I swung my chair around to face her.

“Because it’s disclosure.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit. If you were so worried about disclosure, why didn’t you stop at a pay phone? Why didn’t you make an anonymous call to the police?”

“He’s a protestor, Beth.”

“So what?”

“So he knows the rules! He would use disclosure to get me fired!”

“You didn’t stop because you thought you might be fired?”

“No, goddamnit!” I was on my feet now, shaking with rage. I jabbed my finger toward her nose. “I didn’t stop because stopping is against the law!”

She took a deep breath, then laughed. “You’re incredible, you know that? You are absolutely—”

“I saw her in the rearview mirror, Beth. I saw her get up.”

“I didn’t see her get up.”

“Well, I did.”

“Damn it, Rick, the point isn’t whether or not she got up!”

“Then what is the point? Regardless, this would have happened, Beth. Regardless! Think about that. And the next time it happens, the next time he beats the shit out of her, where will we be? Where will
you
be?” I whirled on our audience, pointing at each of them in turn. “Or you? Or you? Or you? Or you?” I turned back to Beth. Tears were running down her cheeks. And her tears only intensified my rage. “You think any of us can do anything to stop it, this, this, this
shit?”

“He’s lost it,” Henry said.

“Dear God, for two fucking years I’ve had to wallow in it. For two fucking years I’ve been turning over rocks and wallowing in the nasty shit that lives underneath them, and there is nothing I can do about it! That’s my point, Beth. We can’t stop Ronnie if he wants to kill her; we can’t stop any of it because we’re not in it for that. We’re not in for
that.”
I waved my hand at the window beside Caroline’s desk. I grabbed a levy form from my desk and held it high. “This is what I’m in for! This is it! This is why I’m here! I’m here for this, not to pull some cheap piece of trailer trash from a drainage ditch. Whatever happens to that girl has nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me and nothing to do with you and nothing to do with any of us, and it sure as hell has nothing to do with taxes!”

“Oh, my,” Caroline whispered.

“You’re right, Rick,” Beth said quietly. “It doesn’t have anything at all to do with taxes.”

I drove home in a hard rain. My wiper blades were shot, smearing the dirt over the windshield, and between the water and the earth, I could not see.

Don’t you ever wash this bucket, Yancey?

I’m afraid to.

How come?

The dirt’s the only thing holding it together.

The traffic on Highway 92 was light, and I shifted into fifth gear and stamped my foot on the gas pedal. Sixty. Sixty-five. Sixty-eight. Racing eastward to an empty house. The shock of lightning directly overhead, raindrops hurling shadows. Seventy. Seventy-four. Let some deputy dog pull me over. I’ll get out of the car with a tire iron. She had rolled limp as a rag doll into the ditch, her body bouncing on the rocky shoulder. I saw her push herself up; I know I saw it. I could remember the water flying from the ends of her stringy blond hair as she shook her head back and forth. Eighty-two. The front tire was vibrating violently now. Before me, the flat bellies of the anvil-shaped clouds roiled, tortured shapes in the flickering explosions deep within. Thunderheads had always reminded me of great ships, with masts soaring hundreds of feet into the sky. As a child, I wondered what made them pause at a particular place and time to unleash their fury. My face was wet.

Ronnie had driven on to work. I got the name from the construction company he was working for from one of the trucks parked at the site. That wasn’t the point, though, according to Beth, who was a seasoned acolyte of Byzantium. She should know better.

The point was Ronnie went to work. And so did I.

Toby dropped the note on my desk on his way out the door. It was written on a single sheet of typing paper, folded into eighths, addressed to me and marked confidential in Toby’s neat handwriting. The bull pen was empty, but I took a furtive peek around the room anyway. I unfolded the note and read: “Meet me outside on the dock in two minutes.” I opened the desk drawer containing the day’s shredding and dropped the note inside. Almost four minutes had passed; I was already late.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked me, inscrutable behind his dark glasses. A stiff breeze from the south ruffled his pants legs, folds of material moving laterally pushed by the wind, breaking on his inseam like waves.

“You asking me on a date?”

“No bullshit. This is official Union business. Are you free tonight for a meeting?”

“Sure, I guess. What’s it about?”

“You know what it’s about.”

I didn’t reply. Of course I knew.

“Everybody’s gonna be there,” he said.

“Even Allison?”

“‘Specially Allison. Yes or no, Rick.”

“I’ll be there.”

He nodded. There was something about me that made Toby uncomfortable. I had sensed it the first day, when he had pointed at the ceiling and held up the sign that read they’re listening.

“Six o’clock, Bennigan’s on South Florida. You know where I mean?”

“Sure.”

“Six o’clock. Don’t forget.”

The conversation was over, but neither of us moved.

“I’m gonna go in first,” he said. “You stay out here and have a smoke in the alley, or whatever you do out here in the alley. Don’t come in right behind me.”

I nodded. I, too, had slipped on my dark glasses. It was a conversation suited for dark glasses. Bennigan’s was a pub styled as a restaurant or a restaurant styled as a pub, depending on the tastes of the patron, dark-paneled, smoke-filled, and intimate. In other words, the perfect place to plot an assassination.

“She gotta go,” Henry said.

We were sitting at a large round table in the back of the restaurant, the entire Lakeside group, with the exception of Bonny and, of course, Gina. Bonny, Toby felt, could not be trusted, though she was a dues-paying member. Bonny’s most admirable quality, loyalty, disqualified her, in Toby’s eyes, as a member of our conspiracy.

“We all gotta remember one thing,” Toby rumbled. “What we’re doing here is unprecedented in the history of the Service. No revenue officer group has ever presented an ultimatum to upper management.”

“Which is why ours has to be perfect,” Beth said.

“Not only perfect,” Toby said. “But we all gotta speak with one voice. So I gotta know, right now, who’s in and who’s out. If you got any reservations at all, better speak ‘em now or forever hold your peace.”

“It’s pointless if just one person drops out,” Beth said. “We can’t go forward with just three or four names. ‘No one else in the group’s complained,’ they’ll say. They’ll blow it off.”

Toby nodded. Caroline said, “They’ll blow what off?”

“Our grievance,” Toby said. As Union steward, Toby was proposing a formal allegation of contract violations that warranted immediate action on the part of management. The grievance would also contain a suggested remedy. In this case, the remedy was extreme and, as Toby said, unprecedented.

“I thought we were just going to sit down with Bob and Byron,” Caroline said.

“Sit down and what? Curl at their feet and beg for a bone? We tried all that. Me. Beth. Culpepper, when he was here. It never does any good. They nod and say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ and Byron White stomps around headquarters poundin‘ on the walls and swearing he’s gonna have her head, but what changes? Huh? What ever changes around here?”

“I just want to understand what we’re asking for,” Cindy said. “We’re asking them to fire her?”

“That’s going too far,” Beth said. “We’re asking them to remove her as our manager.”

“If we asked them to fire her, they’d tell us to take a short walk off a long pier,” Henry said.

Beth sighed. “That’s a long walk off a short pier, Henry.”

“But back to Beth’s point,” Allison said. Her voice was shrill, an indication that she was agitated. “I don’t think we should say anything else until we’ve all committed to this.”

“She’s right,” Henry said. “Maybe we all should sign something, like a pledge.”

“Maybe we should all prick our fingers and make a pinky swear,” Dee said.

“I ain’t prickin‘ nothin’,” Henry said.

“We’ll all be signing the grievance,” Toby said.

Allison shook her head violently. “No. No, tonight we’re deciding if there’s even going to be a grievance. As Beth said, if we’re not all in, then we’re all out.” She looked in my direction. I was tracing the tip of my finger in the water sweated from my glass of beer. “Let’s start with Rick.”

“I want to hear what everyone else has to say.”

“Of course you do,” she sneered. “Gina’s pet.”

“Rick ain’t nobody’s pet,” Toby said.

“Everybody knows. Gina’s not keeping it a secret. I heard she was going around Orlando, telling everybody at branch headquarters what a terrific RO Rick is. Bringing it up at branch meetings.”

“Well, at least it’s clear how Allison will vote,” I said. Two weeks before, Alison, Caroline, Dee, and I had submitted our applications for the next promotion, the sole Grade 11 that would be rewarded sometime in the spring. Although, officially, Gina was not the selecting official, a group manager’s opinion carried enormous weight with the branch chief. Never had a branch chief ignored a manager’s wishes regarding a promotion. Allison saw her only hope of defeating me in the ouster of Gina Tate as our group manager. Perhaps a new manager would favor her instead.

“Lay off Rick,” Dee said. “He can’t help it that he’s better at it than you are, Allison.”

Allison was flabbergasted. “He’s no better than me.”

“I wasn’t speaking about being a revenue officer,” Dee said. Cindy and Beth laughed. Toby frowned.

“We’re getting off track here. We’ll come back to Rick. Allison, I guess you’re in.”

“I’m in.”

Beth said, “I’m in.”

“This is fun,” Dee said. “It’s so devious and… Machiavellian. I’m in.”

“I guess I’m in,” Cindy said, and finished her piña colada in a single swallow.

“You bet your ass I’m in,” Henry said. “I’m sick to death of her shit.”

“Goes without sayin‘ where I stand,” Toby said.

It was down to Caroline and me. Caroline was clearly struggling; she had a military background and this was foreign to her. It felt like mutiny. Finally, with tears in her eyes, but with a steady voice, she said, “I’m in.”

It was my turn. I looked at Beth. I had guessed that Beth wanted Gina’s job. I wondered if she has acting on behalf of Byron White. Tonight or tomorrow morning, would she be on a pay phone to White, reporting on the progress of our conspiracy? Was White, unable to remove Gina on any procedural or ethical grounds, using the Union to place her head in his saddlebag? I wondered if Toby knew he was being used, and whether he would even care. I decided he probably wouldn’t care. He detested Gina, as did Henry. Together, they accounted for 80 percent of Gina’s withering remarks, her cruel jokes, her gleeful degradations. I remembered the day she forced Toby to read the manual section on summons enforcement. Her flippant and insensitive, to say the least, reference to Henry as “Buckwheat.” Dee probably didn’t care who her manager was; she had her own, all-consuming issues to deal with. Caroline was terrified of Gina, but not to the point of blind loyalty. She would follow the lead of the rest of us. Everything came down to manipulation. It seemed possible to me that White was manipulating Beth by subtly implying the job was hers, if only Gina could be removed. Beth could be manipulating Toby by allowing him to think the Union was wielding the power. She could also be manipulating Allison by allowing her to think she had a shot at the promotion if Beth became the manager. Allison probably pushed Caroline and Dee toward the coup with the argument that under Gina they had no chance of being promoted. I could almost hear her say it: “If Gina goes, I have no idea who’ll get the next promotion. But if she stays, I
guarantee
you it will be Rick.”

And I—how did I feel about assassinating Gina? Wasn’t it professional suicide to attack her now? Beth and Allison were close. If Gina fell, there was a real chance Beth would give the promotion to Allison and I would spend months, perhaps years, in Grade 9 purgatory. Even Henry—Henry!— was a Grade 11.

A grievance can take months. Some have even dragged on for years. If management slammed Gina, she could fight; she could file appeals that might take years to resolve—plenty of time for her to decide the next promotion. But if she didn’t fight, if she simply resigned or returned to the field, what then? What chance did I have if I backed out now that everyone had voted yes? Would Beth—or even Cindy, if she became the new manager—reward my disloyalty to the group by promoting me? As this struck me, I looked at Beth with new admiration. Even William Culpepper could not have orchestrated it better. There was only one answer I could give. Beth was already smiling. She knew. She knew what I was thinking! She nodded at me. She had been counting on me to see that this was no choice between “in” or “out.” The choice had already been made for me.

I said, “I’m in.”

Toby passed out our assignments. He and Beth would write the formal grievance to present to Bob Campbell and represent the group at the hearing. Allison and Dee would compile the individual recollections of Gina’s excesses: her personal jibes in the workplace, her harassment, her preferential treatment, her cozy relationships with powers-of-attorney and other third-parties, her tactics of intimidation, called “fostering a hostile work environment” in the contract. I would proof the final document for any factual or grammatical errors. Henry, Caroline, and Cindy were not given assignments beyond making notes of Gina’s verbal assaults upon them personally.

“We have to move fast,” Toby said. “The longer this takes, the greater the chance of leaks.”

“Speakin‘ of leaks,” Henry said, and left the table.

“I’m worried about Henry,” Allison said.

“Why?” Caroline asked. “Is he sick?”

“I’ll take care of Henry,” Toby answered.

“Okay,” Allison said. “And I’ll keep my eye on Rick.”

“Rick’s okay,” Beth said. “Rick is going to be just fine.”

When I arrived home, my head was still a little foggy from the beer. I did not hold my liquor well. Once safely there, however, I decided to have another drink. I made a gin and tonic and sipped it while I smoked on the porch. The backyard sloped a hundred feet to the shore of the small lake, and I watched the moonlight dance on the black water. A bird called from the rushes. A lone frog harrumphed.
I never thanked you for inviting me to help you with that show you wrote. It was fun. I had a really good time.
Once, during one of the latter rehearsals, I looked up from my seat in the front row and saw her standing stage right, her hands crossed primly in front of her, staring at me from the shadows.
You know she has a crush on you.
In the beginning, she counseled me to have a life outside the IRS, but she did not seem to have one. Even her boyfriend was in the Service.
I always wanted to own a bookstore! Just a little, hole-in-the-wall bookstore, and I would buy all these out-of-print books, all these obscure titles you couldn’t find anywhere else, and people would come from all over the world, because they would know if they couldn’t find a book at my store then it didn’t exist!
She was expendable now. She had failed to help Beth advance into management. She had alienated Toby and, by alienating him, alienated the Union. By making it clear that she intended to promote me, she had turned Caroline, Dee, and Allison against her. And, ironically, her favoring me gave me no choice but to join the others. Within the Service, the ultimate sin is vulnerability and only strength inspires loyalty. Gina was vulnerable because upper management had turned on her. There was no way she could survive with Byron White
and
the group against her. Revenue officers are like sharks, and when there is blood in the water we are merciless.

My drink was gone. I crunched the remaining ice. I did not believe the rumor that she was looking for a job outside the Service. Gina would never leave the Service.
Its the golden handcuffs, Rick! If you had any sense at all, you’ll get out while you can!

“It’s too late, Gina,” I said aloud. “It’s too late.”

“What’s too late?”

I yelped, jerking forward and spilling the ice into my lap.

“What are you doing out here at eleven o’clock at night talking to yourself?” Pam asked.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I fussed at her, brushing the ice from my pants. “I thought you were staying in Orlando tonight.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Checking up on me?”

“Hardly.”

“Boyfriend has other plans?”

She stared toward the lake and didn’t answer.

“We’re taking out Gina.”

She laughed. “You IRS types kill me. Talking like some B-grade gangster movie. I thought you liked Gina.”

“I do like Gina.”

“So why do you want her fired?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Too complicated for simple ol‘ me.”

“Maybe not complicated. Just a long story.”

“And telling me is not worth your time.”

“Oh, I get it now. You drove forty miles just to pick a fight with me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. The most I would drive to pick a fight with you is five, ten miles tops. Why are you drinking, anyway? You never drink.”

“That shows how little you know me, Pam. Every night I pass out in a drunken stupor.”

“Tell me, seriously, what did Gina ever do to you? Wait. Let me guess. ‘It isn’t personal; it’s just business.’”

“You know, I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this. Three years of you mocking and ridiculing and sneering at what I do.”

“What do you expect, Rick? Really. I’m supposed to be proud of you? I’m supposed to brag on you and tell you what a wonderful person you are since you became a tax collector? I hate that place. And I hate what that place has done to you. And I hate you for working there, for totally disregarding my feelings about you working there, for totally disregarding
any
of my feelings, for totally disregarding
me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I think maybe—maybe it would be best if you moved out of the house.”