Confessions of a Tax Collector (21 page)

She was waiting for me when I returned to my desk. She had slipped on a pair of dark glasses. The lenses were large, round, and opaque, dominating her face. Her jeweled pin glittered on her chest. Ladybugs bring good luck. They save crops from aphids.

‘I hope there’s room for me in your car,“ she said. ”Culpepper’s Warned me.“

“Can you give me thirty minutes admin time to clean it out?” I asked. She laughed. It appeared she had applied a fresh coat of lipstick. I stood. I was only six feet, but I towered over her; the top of her head came to a point just under my bottom lip.

“Did you know our division chief once made everyone go to the library for a week because we didn’t have enough field time on our reports?”

“They track everything, don’t they?”

“More than you could possibly imagine.”

She sank into the passenger seat. “He’s a maniac,” she said, referring to Byron Samuels, the division chief. “I assume you met him at Phase One. Could you understand him? He always sounds to me like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather,
that whispery way of talking. Hell is Byron on a speaker-phone.” The jacked-up air conditioning blew her dark bangs from her high, rounded forehead. The bucket seat made her appear even smaller, somehow. I felt like I was driving my kid to school. In some ways, though, I was more afraid of her than I was of Culpepper. Gina was smarter than Culpepper, more subtle. She was still talking about Samuels. “He’s got a terrible temper—like most people in upper management. He was doing a manager’s op review and hurled the case files at him, screaming, ‘These cases are
fucking shit.
’”
 

She looked around the confines of my Nissan and said, “It doesn’t seem so bad to me.” And I thought of the stories about her house, stuffed to the rafters with boxes, old magazines, bags of potting soil. Would she really invite me to her house? And what should I say if she did?

It was a typical morning for that part of the world in that part of the year. A few towering clouds, bright blue sky, ferocious sun. As I navigated through the one-way streets of downtown, Gina cranked down her window and said, “You know, all a car does is circulate whatever fetid air that happens to be inside of it?” She rested her elbow on the open window. I didn’t see you write down your mileage.“

“Oh.”

I punched the button for the trip odometer, which happened to be busted. She did not appear to notice. She said, “You know, occasionally Inspection comes calling and gathers up everybody’s travel logs and com pares them to the vouchers.”

“Mine’s up-to-date,” I lied. I didn’t even know where my log book was. Travel regulations required every field officer to keep a record of the number of miles traveled on official government business. Every month we filed a voucher and were reimbursed for our mileage.

“Has Billy ever talked to you about padding your voucher?”

“I never pad my—”

She laughed. It had a certain musical quality to it, her laugh. Like the trilling of a sparrow.

“Say you’re in some outlying county and you need a map. A lot of ROs add a few extra miles to their voucher to cover the costs. Is there anything wrong with that, you think?”

Oh, she was sly. But she would have to be more sly than that. “I think you’re supposed to submit the receipt for reimbursement.”

“Some people hate the red tape.”

“I love red tape. The red tape is why I took this job.”

She trilled. She had a better sense of humor than Culpepper. I may have felt this way because she laughed at my jokes and Culpepper did not. She said, “But say you lose the receipt. Do you pad the voucher by a couple bucks or do you swallow it?”

“Swallow it,” I said.

“It’s funny, with ROs it’s one way or the other. Either they’re super-conscientious or they’re totally corrupt. Do you know, Mel would actually subtract the miles she drove if she got lost?”

“Boy, you know, I think I’ve done that. How’s Mel doing, by the way?” Melissa had recently been promoted to manager in Tampa.

“Great. Where are we going?”

“Post office. Hopefully they’ve got a forwarding address on this guy.”

“Here’s the thing about Gina,
“
Culpepper had said. ”She was a rotten RO. On a scale of ten, she was about a three. She never wrote the history until she closed the case She never kept her cases in a folder; she kept them rolled into little tubes held together by rubber bands. She would review all her new receipts and tell her manager which ones she would work and which she wouldn’t. She’d say, ‘I’m not working this piece of shit. Find somebody else.’ And her manager would, because he was afraid of her. Everyone was afraid of her, because she was smarter than they were. She was smart enough to figure out what she could get away with and what she couldn’t, which is the answer to the riddle of life, when you think about it. Then one day a new division chief comes in and looks at the stats and says, Jesus Christ, we need more female managers!‘ Because his boss in Atlanta is coming down on
him,
because Washington is coming down on
him:
We need more women in management. Promote the pussy! Promote the pussy!’ So the division chief picks up the phone and calls the branch chief and says, ‘I need a good woman to promote!’ At that time, there were maybe seven women in the whole branch. The first person he can think of is Gina because, although she’s one of the laziest goddamned ROs who ever carried a bag,
[17]
she is also the smartest. Technically, there is none better. Even I can’t touch her technically. So he calls Gina into his office and says, ’How’d you like to be a manager?‘ Well, that’s like asking the alcoholic if he’d like the keys to the liquor cabinet. And it doesn’t matter one goddamned bit that Gina is the worst motivator of people I have ever seen. That’s what the Service does: it rewards technical merit. It never occurs to them it takes an entirely separate set of skills to manage people than it does to manage an inventory.”

“Melissa went through a tough time here,” Gina said. “When she came on board, the Service was run like a gentleman’s club. Ninety-five percent of the workforce was male. You had to work damn hard—twice as hard as a man to get half the attention. Mel came on board before there was such a thing as the Outstanding Scholars Program. She started as a Grade Three clerk and worked her way up. You know, she comes from a very poor background.”

“Yes, I’d heard.”

She laughed suddenly. “She hates your guts, you know.”

“She—?”

“She’s hated you ever since the interview, when you corrected her grammar.”

“That was a mistake.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“As I was saying.”

· · ·

We arrived at the post office. I flashed my credentials at the clerk and showed him the name and address of my taxpayer. I leaned over the counter and lowered my voice so people behind us and in the next line couldn’t hear me. I asked if my taxpayer was still at that address. The clerk disappeared into the mysterious inner sanctum of his realm. He returned after a moment with the news that indeed he had moved. He wrote down the address. I thanked him and followed Gina’s bobbing black head back into the oppressive heat.

The First Protocol: Find where they are.

“I have a boyfriend now. Did you know I had a boyfriend? He’s with the Service, too. He’s a revenue agent and he lives in Fort Lauderdale. Some people tell me long-distance relationships never work, but that depends on what you want out of a relationship. He’s a nerd. I mean, he really is a nerd. Right down to the black electrical tape on the eyewear. He plays chess. He has a pet iguana. I drive down once a month to see him. Sometimes he comes up here. My ex-husband was not a nerd. He was an ex-jock, dumb as a signpost. I adored him. You may be wondering why I divorced him if I adored him. Well, he had an affair. When I confronted him about it, he called me fat. He told me I got fat, so I kicked him out. I could have forgiven him for screwing around on me, but the fat remark just crushed me. Not because I’m not fat, because I am. I am fat. I’m short, fat—and so are my chances!” She laughed. “I just couldn’t get over him thinking I was fat.”

About five miles down the interstate, heading west, I realized what I had forgotten. A map. I had removed the map from the car for a reason I could not now recall. I had no idea where this forwarding address was. I pulled off the interstate and ran inside a convenience store to buy a map. I made sure to ask for a receipt. I ducked into the bathroom and sat in the stall, smoking, pulling drags as deep as I could into my lungs, until my diaphragm ached. I splashed my face with cold water. For some reason I examined the surface of my tongue. I noticed my right eye was twitching. Most likely a reaction to the cat hair that still clung to Gina’s person; I went outside, climbed back into the car, and said, “I’m sorry, did you want anything?” I made a show of folding the receipt for my map and tucking it into my shirt pocket.

Gina said, “I’ve got some ROs who must pad their voucher by two, three hundreds dollars a month. You think I’m kidding. They think I can’t figure out how they’re paying for their new car.”

“Can’t you fire them for that?”

“What do you think?”

“Too hard to prove?”

She laughed that gentle trill. “Oh, no. It’s real easy to prove. Proving it isn’t the hard part. It’s the appeals and the countercharges of harassment or discrimination or retaliation. That’s the word you always want to remember, Rick, if you have any intention of sticking with this job, retaliation.”

I was studying my newly acquired map, trying to find the street name the post office had given me. I turned my head to one side to focus my good eye; the right had nearly closed entirely.

“Any time you get a bad review,” she continued, “or someone questions your ethics or accuses you of a code-of-conduct violation, cry ’Retaliation!‘ It’ll stop the Service every time. You know, it’s practically impossible to fire anybody in this damn organization. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“Found it!” I yelled, meaning the street.

“Mirabile dictu!” she yelled back with delight. She clapped her small hands. “For example, if I try to fire you, you can always say I’m retaliating because you refused to sit in my lap.”

I pretended not to hear her. I remembered Culpepper’s words: While you are vulnerable, you have no allies. You have no friends. You are alone.

“I’m sorry that troubled you,” she said quietly. “It was only a joke.”

I was back on the interstate, now heading east. Tractor-trailers roared past us, gliding by like behemoths of the deep ocean, rattling my little crustacean of a car. Gina reached up and grabbed the Oh, Jesus! handle, as Culpepper called it, located over her door. The wind rushed through her open window, whipping her hair into a miniature black tornado.

“Everybody’s allowed to make jokes like that—except me!” she cried against the wind.

“I’m sorry!” I shouted. I wasn’t certain what I was sorry about.

She yelled, “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!”

Neither does your store, I thought. None of us wanted to be where we were. We were all, it seemed, living defaulted lives. Plan B people. I remembered how she had laughed with delight when I said in the opening interview I had not grown up dreaming of being a revenue officer. “It’s the golden handcuffs, Rick!” she yelled. “If you had any sense at all, you’ll get out while you can!”

I eased onto the exit ramp. According to the map, we were only a couple of miles from the new address. The wind whimpered, dwindling. I said, “Where else can I take my English degree and make this kind of money?”

She made no reply. I turned right onto a tertiary road. It wound through towering pines, narrowing as it followed the slope of the earth. We were on the north side of town, the side bordering the Green Swamp. All the money in Lakeside seemed to flow uphill, from north to south. Revenue officers hated working zip codes on the north side; there simply wasn’t any collection potential. We passed ranch homes, whose better days had long since faded, and mobile homes mounted on concrete blocks with the ubiquitous pit bull chained to a nearby tree or broken-down Camaro. Gina reached into her purse and removed a canister of Mace.

“I thought we couldn’t carry that,” I said.

“We can’t. We are not allowed to carry guns, baseball bats, brass knuckles, knives, saps, pepper spray, Mace, or a pair of frigging tweezers. Have you run up against any dogs yet?”

“Guess I’ve been lucky.”

“A whole pack of them attacked my car when I was an RO. They actually ripped off my rear bumper. I didn’t mind the wild ones so much as the little yippy dogs the deadbeats would let jump into my lap. One day I went home looking like I had the measles from all the fleabites.”

She told the story of a revenue officer in Orlando who killed a dog. The dog leapt at him from its hiding place under the front porch. He reacted instinctively with an uppercut to the dog’s chin. He shattered the jaw, sending a piece of bone deep into the dog’s brain; it fell at his feet, dead before it hit the ground. The Service was sued and had to pay the costs of disposing of the animal and an undisclosed sum for the owner’s pain and suffering.

“So we levied ourselves for the money due the taxpayer. Got full-pay, too.”

“We can levy ourselves?”

“We can levy anything. Wasn’t that the address we were looking for back there?”

I made a three-point turn and returned to the address. The mailbox was leaning west as the soft ground gave way beneath it. The driveway was two ruts cut deep into the wet ground, grass growing wild between the grooves, winding through the pine trees that partially screened the house from the road.

“Well,” Gina said. “We’ve come this far.”

I turned onto the car trail, the long grass angrily rubbing the undercarriage of my Nissan. The ruts wound to the right, behind the trees. Gina clutched the can of Mace tightly in her little fist. The house slumped before us, a typical “cracker-style” Florida home, with a screened-in front porch, concrete blocks for steps, an overhang of corrugated metal attached to one side as a carport. A rusting Ford truck, a F150, sat inside the port. I stopped the car and we sat for a moment, the engine idling. It was late morning. The air outside shimmered. Dragonflies soared two feet from the ground, the sun glancing off their translucent wings. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, like sunlight glancing off the surface of the ocean. Although they are beneficent, dragonflies are predators. As are ladybugs. I waited for the pit bull to come barreling from the woods. I wasn’t sure, but I did not think I had it in me to coldcock a dog, even if its intention was to kill me.