“It’s nothing you have to worry about. It’s nothing that touches you. I just want it off my chest. I don’t want to bring that shit into this.”
That was how the checks began: Daughtry had used them on a trip to Carmel. He’d driven her down the coast to a restaurant with white tablecloths and a view of the ocean, where the chicken was mealy and the carrots oversweet and elevator music piped out through invisible speakers. He had insisted she taste his abalone although she nearly gagged and could not reconcile the notion that the runny meat had nestled inside the jeweled interiors of shell. He ordered champagne and blathered on about the drive.
“Those mansions on all those cliffs, dammit! Those rich people knew exactly where we would want to sightsee and now we get their walls and garages. ‘Scenic drive’ bullshit. Fucking criminals. Imagine taking your whiskey there every night, the ocean and those crazy pine trees and just watching the sun set . . . You wouldn’t have a care in the world. Who would?”
His nervous chatter was what helped her. About a lousy baseball pitcher or the shape of her face or the city degraded by the “hippie trash.” So she did not have to think or deflect anything from her mind while he spoke. She could concentrate on his deeply felt conviction in each phrase, wrap her mind around the banal images and observations, and before she knew it an hour had passed. And when his head canted and the hangdog, self-defeating look came over him at some gaffe he’d made—an expletive, an ignorance of some kind—she might even reach out and stroke his cheek.
But on the way out of the city that day Daughtry had been unusually quiet. His palm damp as he cupped her shoulder, the car door not closed all the way when he ran into the bank, so it blew rhythmically as cars barreled by on California Street.
“What’s wrong?” she’d asked. But he did not speak until they got past Daly City and then he only talked about getting out of the “rat-race city.”
It was not until after the white-tableclothed restaurant, when they had gone back to a motel on the main drag in Carmel, that Daughtry, drunk, had confessed about the checks.
“I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, it’s not that I want to do these things, but it’s always the money thing, you know. Who isn’t behind the eight ball every once in a while? You can get canned pretty easily when you’re not union, and the union scene with the dues and the fucking meetings . . . It’s just been a way to tide over. You, you don’t have to worry about stuff like that. You make their offices look good.”
She’d met Daughtry in the building where she worked. He came to their floor to fix dead lightbulbs, unclog toilets. (She once saw him huddled against a window because one of the girls lost her earring behind a heating vent.) His smile was large, his voice raspy. He was not very tall. His hair was black and thick and combed with oil and he had light green eyes. “I like your hair up that way,” he told her one day as she ate a sandwich at her desk and read her book. He had on his coveralls and was carrying a hammer; she did not know his first name. “Most men want it down all the time,” he said, “but it gives you class.” Her hair was thick and in between the wash-and-sets she pinned it up in a French twist. She thanked him and burrowed into her page, trying to ignore him as he stood there.
“You don’t look like a secretary,” he went on.
“I am a secretary,” she answered.
“But I see you read all those books.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not a secretary,” she said, and she got up and excused herself to the bathroom.
He was undeterred. The next day he found her outside on the concrete steps in the brief sun that passed between the wisps of fog, her arms goose-pimpled in her cardigan, and he told her she was too good for that office. She had gone to college, he could tell just by looking at her, been raised in a good family. She told him then she wished he would leave her alone. He nodded as if he’d known she would say it. And he did leave her alone after that, a look of melancholy on his face any time their eyes met.
But on her bus ride in the evenings through Chinatown, looking out on the mashed vegetables on the sidewalk and the Chinese rushing for home with their paper bags, only to leave new rotting vegetables on the sidewalk the next day, she thought of Daughtry. Or she remembered her musty dark apartment waiting for her, and she thought, I’ll have a drink with him. Why not? And he told her he would take her away from the city.
So they had gone to Carmel.
In the motel room, sitting on the bed, the hard grooves of his black hair coming undone, still in his leather blazer, Daughtry had cried. “You’re fancy. I wanted to do something fancy for you. But I can’t get back into the checks. I did it this one time, there’s no way they can peg the one on me. But I’m never going back to jail again.” He got up and vomited in the toilet and returned to the bed and now his hair was mopped forward, his nose red and his green eyes sallow. He stretched out on the comforter and began to tell her, although she had not asked, how it was done. She lay next to him, listening as he explained each step of the crime. “You don’t want just any account numbers, you want it from the right mailboxes, in the right zip codes . . . It’s like you and the teller are in this dance, and she takes a step and you take a step and as long as you don’t step on her toes, you’re free.”
And she realized as he spoke that the carsickness had gone away. The nausea or ringing or tightness or whatever it was that was back now worse than in the East, had momentarily disappeared. When Daughtry switched to his childhood in the Irish neighborhood with the cramped stucco houses—on and on, about the freeway cutting it up and his drunk mother—she asked him to go back to the checks.
“You like the bad-boy stuff, huh? You like to slum?” She just wanted to understand, she said. “Well, alright, baby. I do happen to have a certain style for these things . . .”
She’d listened intently to this man—to whom she was not in truth attracted, whose breath reeked of liquor and vomit, with whom she would spend the night—tell her about money he had stolen to take her to a forgettable dinner in Carmel. And she had felt better.