Confessions of a Tax Collector (14 page)

“Almost a year now,” Carrie said. “On June twelfth, it will be a year. And Billy is going to get me something really nice for our anniversary, aren’t you, Billy?”

I could guess what she wanted for her anniversary, just as I could guess what Culpepper’s answer to that wish would be. In these situations, the girl always believed her man was on the cusp of a divorce. I knew now why he had brought me here, and it wasn’t to parade this girl as a trophy before me and it wasn’t to demonstrate what my newfound status as demigod might bestow upon me. No, William Culpepper had brought me here to lay bare his weakness, his Achilles’ heel, the means by which I could destroy him. With one phone call, I could wreck his marriage and, potentially, his precious career. I could do it anonymously, so he would never know at whose hand he fell. It was the ultimate test of his power over me. He was inviting me to betray him and, by extending the invitation, creating an exit from his mad world that we both knew opened into a brick wall. The brilliance of it astounded me. It was then, with the beauty of his pristine logic making my head spin, that I realized I wanted to be just like him.

Culpepper finished the beer and declined her offer of another. “Rick has to get back to the office.” He promised to call her the next day and maybe they could do something over the weekend; his wife was going to be out of town visiting her parents.

“I want you to take me bowling,” she told him.

“I hate bowling,” he said. “I’ll take you to a Tigers game.”

“I hate baseball.”

“Well,” he said. “I’ll take you somewhere.” He made a motion with his fist as if he were delivering an uppercut to her jaw, a gesture that reminded me of Jackie Gleason in
The Honeymooners. Bang, zoom,
Alice, to the moon. It was endearing, if not vaguely sickening.

“Come out to Hooters sometime,” she said to me.

“Yancey’s too uptight for Hooters,” Culpepper said.

“Are you? Are you uptight?”

“I used to be,” I said and, taking a deep breath to screw my courage to the sticking place, added, “But Billy’s been loosening me up.”

He was silent as we weaved our way through the oily puddles in the parking lot to my car. After he shut the door, Culpepper looked out the window at Building Six and asked, “So what do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

“About Carrie.”

“She’s nice. Pretty.

“She’s an awful lay,” he said. “You know, most pretty girls are. Or did you know that?”

I started my car; some belt deep within its innards squealed, then moaned, in protest.

“One of these days this bucket is going to pop, probably while you’re doing seventy-five down I-4,” Culpepper said.

“Let’s pray you’re not with me, Billy,” I said.

“Let’s pray you never call me Billy again. That’s the second time you’ve done it and there will not be a third time. If you call me Billy again I will take your narrow little head and pop it open like an peanut shell. Do you understand?”

I told him I understood.

“I guess you want to get that Marsh history down before you go,” he said as I pulled into the parking lot. A loaded question. In fact, it wasn’t a question at all.

“It’s all right if I worked credit time?” I asked.

“Well, you could do it in the morning,” he said. “But right now it’s fresh.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I should do it now.”

I worked for the next twenty minutes at my desk. As my OJI, Culpepper would write a review of my performance based on this history. Everything came down to how you presented the case. As he explained, “Always write your histories with the assumption that one day they will be used as evidence in court, because one day they might be. Remember: your history is the official government version of what happened. If it isn’t in your history, it didn’t happen.”

I made sure to touch on all the aspects of an effective first contact: I made demand, I analyzed the facts, I weighed the taxpayer’s arguments, I documented that the proper forms had been completed and publications issued. My closing lines, translated, read, “The taxpayer has been given a deadline to make a $500 payment and get current by the end of the week. If TP cannot prove she’s current with this quarter’s deposits, will proceed with seizure action.” I reread the entire history, making sure I had covered all the bases. It was cogent, pithy, laden with devastating logic. While composing it, I tried to imagine myself as Culpepper, and in the end I was quite proud of my effort. I had, after all, graduated with honors in English. I placed the account on his desk and began to pack up my things while he read. It was ten minutes past five. I called Pam and told her I was running late but would be home soon. She was not happy. Culpepper appeared at my elbow, said softly, “Yancey,” and tore the history sheets in half. He dropped them on my desk and turned on his heel.

“Try again,” he said without looking at me. He sat at his desk, folding his hands in his lap and bowing his head, as if in prayer. I looked down at the torn pages on my desk and said, “What’s wrong?”

“You’re missing something.”

“What? What am I missing?”

“Figure it out.”

Okay. I read the history again, piecing the torn pages together, biting my lower lip until it burned. What was I missing? I issued Pub 1; I made demand; I updated the financial statement; I gave a deadline; I warned of the consequences; I decided what do with the case; and I laid the groundwork for executing my sentence. What was I missing—or was I missing anything? I glanced over at Culpepper, sitting cattycorner to me some twenty feet away, dozing or meditating. Was that a smile playing on his lips? The sadistic bastard, did he really think he could break my will? I played with my phrasing, carefully checking for any untoward editorial comments, which were anathema to a good history. I even pulled out my manual and looked up the elements of an effective first contact. After another thirty minutes I had a new history written. I carried it over to his desk and dropped it in front of him. He slowly raised his head, pulled the sheets toward him, flipped to the back page… then ripped the pages down the middle. I felt a similar tearing sensation in my stomach. He held the torn pages over his shoulder.

“Again,” he said.

“I’m still missing something?”

“You’re still missing something.”

He was trying to break me. He was goading me into losing my temper. He wanted me to scream at him or stomp out. He wanted an excuse to write me up for insubordination. He was manipulating me toward termination. Well, fuck him. He had my ire up now; I wasn’t going to let him win.

So I wrote the same history a third time. I stopped abbreviating, thinking, vainly, that he couldn’t understand what the abbreviations meant. I considered typing the whole thing; perhaps he couldn’t decipher my handwriting, which did happen to be poor. It was now five forty-five. The phone rang, but neither of us answered it. I was sure it was Pam. I was going to catch it when, or if ever, I got home. At ten to six I presented the third rewrite to Culpepper. I was actually swaying on my feet. If he tore this up, too, I was going to stab out his eyes with my government-issue ballpoint. He studied the first page for an agonizingly long time, then stacked the pages… and tore them in half.

“Jesus Christ!” I cried, losing my composure. “Can’t you give me a hint at least?”

“Okay. There’s something you’re leaving out.”

“That’s it? That’s my hint?”

“Not enough? Here’s another: it’s a moronic mistake, embarrassing, given your extraordinarily brilliant mind.” He flung the torn pages into the trash can by his desk.

“Now go write this history the way it should be written and stop your fucking whining. I’m tired and I want to go home.”

I started to say,
If you told me what was wrong with the history you could go home,
but I bit my lip, returned to my desk, and stared at the blank pad of paper before me. I dated the form and wrote,
Met with the deadbeat and told her we had decided she was too pitiful to live, that she was a dog and we were the bus, and asked if she had any last wishes before we pulled the switch…
I ripped the sheet from the pad and tore it into shreds. It would have given me some perverse comfort if Culpepper had laughed at the sound of ripping paper, but there was only silence. I wrote the history again and carried it to his desk. I was going to walk out the door before he could finish it.

I dropped it in front of him and returned to my desk and began to clean up. The sound of tearing paper was very loud in the small space. I closed my eyes and leaned on the desk. It was now six-fifteen.

A soft voice at my elbow said, “Let us reason together, Rick, shall we?”

“Nothing that’s happened to me since I came here is reasonable,” I said.

“One of the problems with this hiring program has been we’re taking people with complicated minds and expecting simple things from them.”

“Tell me what’s wrong with it, Culpepper. Please.” I was totally abject. He had beaten me. It was the moment he had been waiting for. He slid the pad in front of me.

“See the little block here at the top of the history sheet? You forgot to write the taxpayer’s name.”

I sunk into my chair. “I forgot… ?”

“Yep.”

“That’s what was missing? Her name?”

“Goes right in that little block at the top of each sheet. I’m sure you covered this in Phase One.”

“That’s all that was wrong?” I was having trouble processing the information.

“You bet. Otherwise, it’s pretty good.” He returned to his desk, whistling.

I was staring at the blank pad, shoulders bowed, hands pressed in my lap, when he called from across the room. “You see, Rick, in the real world, not the world you’re from, but in this world, it’s not so much what you say but the care you take in saying it.”

“Go to hell,” I whispered. And wrote the history again, with Laura Marsh’s name printed boldly at the top of each page.

It was six thirty-five. The sun was setting. I set the history aside and wrote my resignation on a separate piece of paper. I walked the papers over to Culpepper, history in one hand, resignation in the other. I stood for a moment, to his right and slightly behind him. He did not look up. He had assumed the same meditative position, or perhaps he had fallen asleep. I hesitated for one agonizingly long moment, then slid the history sheets in front of him. I folded the resignation and stuffed it into my pocket.

The next morning I found his review on my desk. His summary ran: “Excellent work on this case, Rick. You clearly explained the taxpayer’s rights and the government’s position that given the circumstances we would have to seize the business’s assets, including the taxpayer’s personal residence. You gave the taxpayer one last chance to get current, but given the history of this TP, the possibility seems remote at best. You then made a field call to the courthouse and completed the necessary research to effect the seizure. Keep it up!”

I had successfully set the table. It was time to feed the beast.

Within the next three weeks, I made initial contact on the remainder of my cases. About a third turned out to be what Culpepper called “skimmers,” cases that are easily closed by checking third-party sources: out-of-business accounts, taxpayers who have relocated out of our area, or obvious errors in assessment. More than once he emphasized: “Remember, there’s only five basic ways to close a case: full payment, hardship, installment agreement, transfer, or adjustment. Don’t complicate what we do. What we do is beautiful because what we do is simple.”

I told Allison about Culpepper making me write an entire history six times for forgetting to record a taxpayer’s name.

“I think he might be insane. I mean, really insane.”

“You shouldn’t say that.” After two weeks under his tutelage, Allison had fallen completely under Culpepper’s spell.

“Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Why would I tell him?” she asked innocently, which immediately convinced me that she would indeed tell him.

That night I confessed my fears to Pam.

“Why would she tell Culpepper?” she asked.

“To turn him against me.” I was growing impatient with what I perceived as her lack of subtlety. “To get me fired.”

“Why would she want to get you fired?” Because I’m her competition.“

“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.”