Confessions of a Tax Collector (42 page)

She was gasping for breath. I asked her if she wanted anything; I could fetch a glass of water. She shook her head.

“I’m not finished. The bank called me back. After they fired him. He blew up and said things, apparently some pretty terrible things, and one of the VPs was so concerned, she called me from the airport. She said she couldn’t get on the plane without calling first. She wouldn’t tell me what he said, but she was calling to tell me she had concerns for me. She kept saying ‘Be careful. Be careful.’”

“You should be careful,” I said.

“I’m not finished. That was him just now on the phone. He asked about the kids and he asked about me and he apologizes for all the crap he’s been putting me through and then, Rick, then he
asks me out on a date.
And I say, ‘Well, how’s the job going?’ And he says, ‘It’s going great, it’s going really great, they love me there and I love banking,’ and he’s begging to meet me for dinner… he’s begging me.”

She could contain herself no longer and began to cry. My instinct was to touch her. I sat down instead.

“He’s going to kill me.”

“No, Annie.”

“You don’t understand, Rick. I haven’t told you all of it. You would not believe what I’ve been through the past twelve years.”

“Tell me.”

“He promised he would kill me if I ever left him. ‘Because I love you so much,’ that’s what he said. Then he changed his mind. He decided if I left him, he wasn’t going to kill me; he was going to throw acid into my face. ‘One day you’ll be walking down the street and some stranger will pass you and you won’t even know who it is and the next thing you know, you’ll be blind and disfigured for life.’” She sank into her chair, overwhelmed. It struck me, in that moment, how utterly alone Annie DeFlorio was.

Immediately after she served the divorce papers on him, her husband filed for bankruptcy and took a job as a waiter in a diner. He began stalking her in earnest. He refused to pay the court-ordered interim support for his children and was thrown in jail for contempt. She laughed when she told this story. “He called me and screamed for me to come get him out of jail, ‘and when you get down here I’m gonna kill you.’”

“And you think that’s why he called you just now?”

She nodded. I stood up and took a step toward her.

“What do you want me to do?”

She looked surprised. “There’s nothing you can do, Rick.”

“Annie. Annie, listen, you gotta get a restraining order.”

She laughed. “A restraining order? I’ve had restraining orders on him before. Restraining orders are worthless, Rick.”

“There’s must be something we can do.”

“There is one thing, but I don’t know if I can do it.”

I asked her what that one thing was, but she refused to answer. Annie DeFlorio kept her own counsel.

* * *

I worked with the bird every night, but it refused to talk. It chirped when I came home from work and went berserk when I exercised, dancing on its little wooden perch, hopping from foot to foot, head feather at high mast and waving. Perhaps my nudity disturbed it, but I suspected it was the Simple Minds CD playing at high volume. It enjoyed riding on my shoulder, and I quickly learned to change into an old shirt before allowing it to come aboard. Occasionally it stretched its thin neck out and chewed affectionately on my earlobe.

I couldn’t decide on a name for it. I liked Horatio, but worried the bird was a “she” and didn’t want to humiliate it with a masculine name.

One day it exploded from my shoulder, flew crazily about the room, then banked and slammed into the window. With a cry I ran to it and scooped it off the floor.

It fussed at me, as if its accident were somehow my fault. Its flight feathers had grown back.

Annie called me into her office to review my outside work request. All employees needed management’s blessing before accepting a second job outside the Service.

“So you’ll be writing for the newspaper?”

“Theater reviews and features.”

“I knew you did some theater; I didn’t know you were a writer.”

“Not many do, sadly.”

“I loved the theater when I was in high school. My drama teacher told me I should consider an acting career. But acting wasn’t my passion at the time.”

“What was?”

“Writing.”

Her husband failed to show at the final hearing. The judge awarded Annie custody of the children and set child support at $600 per month, based on the financial statement submitted by her husband’s attorney, and despite his history of earning more than $100,000 a year as an entrepreneur during their marriage. There would be no alimony. Her lawyer told her not to fight it; it was time to cut her losses and get on with her life. To contest it might also place her in danger. He gave her one last piece of advice before submitting his bill.

Leave.

Allison brought me the news.

“Annie’s taking a hardship
[56]
to North Carolina.”

“You’re lying.”

“Go ask her.”

I rose from my desk and started for her office.

“It’s already approved, Rick,” she called after me. “She’s leaving in a month!”

I stopped outside her office. The door was closed. I walked slowly back to my desk, slamming my fist into a support beam on the way. I heard her door open, turned on my heel, and walked quickly to the side door leading to the hallway, to escape. I heard her ask, “What’s wrong with Rick?” and Allison saying in that prissy little voice, “Well, what do you think?”

* * *

That night I drove to Orlando to see a touring show
of Evita.
On the drive home, an enormous weariness overcame me. I pulled off the interstate and bought a large cup of coffee that could not have been less than six hours old. I was on International Drive, and hotels towered on both sides of the thoroughfare. I thought of my bare apartment and the nameless bird hunkered in its cage, no doubt wondering where Daddy was. I set the coffee on the hood of my brand-new car and tapped out a cigarette; I had taken a pledge not to smoke while driving. One day in the field, I dropped a lit cigarette into my lap and nearly ran up a tree while I slapped at my smoldering crotch. I had been awake since four that morning and I knew I wasn’t going to make it back to Lakeside that night.

I checked into the Hilton. In the room, I undressed and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror by the closet. There seemed nothing left to do. This body, from all angles, was perfect. I had reached the other side of something, but I wasn’t sure what that something was. I dressed, feeling more ashamed of my body than I did when I was skinny. I sat on the edge of the bed and smoked, another solitary man in a white shirt in a hotel room.

That Monday I had received my annual performance rating. In each of the critical elements of my job, I was given an overall score of “5,” the highest possible. Straight fives was practically unheard of in the Service. It left no room for improvement. Byzantium was declaring me perfect. The perfect revenue officer.

Mine was a nonsmoking room, and I tapped my ashes into an inch or tap water in one of the little plastic cups. The remote control for the television was anchored to the bedside table. The television was chained to a bolt inside the cabinet. The clock radio and the lamps—and I—were the only things not nailed down. I remembered a news show about hotels spying on their guests with hidden cameras. They hid the things in the lamps, the TV, even in the overheads in the bathroom. Somewhere in corporate headquarters, a little guy had watched me examine myself in the full-length mirror.

Annie’s parents lived in Greensboro and she needed them now. She was leaving. She had even considered leaving the Service; she had submitted applications to both senators from North Carolina. Jim Neyland had already removed her from the group; she was no longer my boss. She was no longer my boss, no longer married, and in another month, no longer in town. She would be seven hundred miles away.

I dropped the cigarette into the cup and lay back in the middle of the bed, my arms stretched out, my feet dangling over the end. I thought of my first day on the job, after taking the oath of office to protect the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic, of Toby pointing at the ceiling and flashing the sign,
they’re listening
. Of course, no one was listening then and no one was watching me now, but that was not the point. The Service’s power was not limited to its hold on the public’s imagination. It held us, too. Even those of us in the Service didn’t think of ourselves as part of it. We were not
it. It
was something outside us.
The beast,
Culpepper had called it. That was the farce I had been playing, the farce we all played: no matter how frightened our taxpayers were, we were twice as terrified, because our fear was based on the truth. We
knew
Byzantium for what it was. That night, in that hotel room, I realized something else: I knew Byzantium for what it was, and Byzantium was me.

* * *

A week later I was sitting across from her desk. Her door was closed. “There’s something I wanted to tell you, before you leave.”

“Okay.” She folded her hands on the desktop and leveled those luminous brown eyes at me.

“And I wanted to take this opportunity.” I trailed off. This was starting to sound like an acceptance speech. I cleared my throat. “I know you’re going to be busy…that you
are
busy, getting ready to move, finding a house in Greensboro, getting your kids into school, and… all that. And we’re not going to have much time to—I mean, time is getting kind of short.”

She nodded. Her phone rang. She ignored it. When it stopped ringing, she said, “If you’re worried about your departure rating…”
[57]

“I don’t. I mean, I’m not. I mean, I guess I care, but that’s not what I’m trying to say.”

“I’d be interested to hear it. What you’re trying to say.”

“I just wanted to say that I guess it isn’t much of a secret around here, to anyone, except maybe one or two, like Henry, that I… well, that over the past eighteen months I guess you’ve noticed I’ve been sitting across this desk quite a bit, and I wanted to tell you why.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay, tell me why.”

“Because I’ve… well, the truth is, I’ve grown quite… um, fond of you.”

She smiled. “Fond of me?”

“Oh,yes. Quite…fond.”

“So have I, Rick.”

Her phone rang again. This reminded her of something. She laughed, and her laughter and the ringing phone shattered the moment past retrieval.

“Well,” she said brightly. “You can always call me in Greensboro, if you want to talk.” The phone stopped ringing. “Of course, I can’t guarantee you I’ll take the call.” Again she laughed.

It was early spring, and the warm air brought the rains at dusk as I drove to the bare apartment in my spotless new car, for, as Culpepper once told me, your car is a reflection of your mind. I continued my punishing workouts, but the fierce joy was gone. At work, I picked up case files and thumbed listlessly through their pages before placing them back in the filing cabinet. Headquarters rotated a series of acting managers through the office, refusing to appoint anyone from the group to the position. Beth was livid. Jim Neyland appeared in town one morning and summoned the revenue officers into the conference room, for a private interview, with one exception: he did not talk to me. Henry, who was in the army reserves, took off for two weeks of training in the processing of battlefield casualties. “What exactly will you be studying?” Bonny had asked, to which Henry barked, “Tag-toe!” It was a favorite office anecdote. Dee transferred to the Tampa office. Day after day I sat in my little cubicle and looked out the window while my cases aged and phone calls went unreturned, letters unanswered. Bartleby had his brick wall; I had Mirror Lake. I appreciated the irony of that. Mirror Lake.

I was waiting for something.

It came on a Wednesday afternoon, on my way back to the office, tie loose, shirtsleeves rolled to my elbows, legs gelatinous with fatigue, stinking of cigarettes and stale coffee and garbage.

Normally I would not have returned to the office after a day in the field. A good revenue officer never does. But I had found something and wanted to get out a levy as soon as possible.

My discovery lay on the passenger-side floorboards: a bank statement and two statements from a Merrill Lynch money-market account, the papers stained by what appeared to be red juice, perhaps Hi-C or cranberry. They were last month’s statements; the money might still be there. I wasn’t sure if the money belonged to a protestor. The assessments I was trying to collect were over five years old. He had filed his returns for the past two years, but had been dodging me for a month, refusing to return my phone calls or appear on his summons date. He had been coded ITP five years ago, but may have had a change of heart. I would levy these accounts to find out.

He lived on the far west side of town, in a prefab unit indistinguishable from the others that lined the street. It was a dry, treeless wasteland of saw grass and sandspurs, of cracked sidewalks and fire-ant mounds that dotted the sandy front yards, of leaning mailboxes and wandering mongrel dogs marking their territory, of sullen, shirtless children riding their trikes or cutting through the yards of gnarled earth, dragging sticks in the dirt, and the hot air shimmered over the tarmac.

I pulled into his driveway and walked to the front door. I left my car door open and the engine running. I held my commission in one hand and the case file in the other. The carport was empty, the interior of the house dark. I did not leave my card. I had already left a summons, which he had ignored. I stood for a moment in the meager shade of the front stoop and looked down the street. I counted four dogs and seven children. Surely, in one of these cracker boxes, an adult was cooped.
Grab my shotgun, Ethel! Gotta Fed at the door!
I sighed, went back to the car, threw the file into the passenger seat, and backed out of the drive. I slammed on the brakes. How had I missed it? Sitting by the curb were three large black Hefty trash bags. It was garbage day.