Tiny Crimes Read online

  for there has always been a Machine and this Machine has monstrously seduced the naïve with promises of wealth and comfort. And they are torn, limb from limb, soul from body, person from community.

  I did what I had to, Maria.

  Adam Hirsch

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  yet ever since, each movement has failed us. The artists have failed us. The intellectuals have failed us. The institutions have failed us. Most of all, the government has failed us.

  Let me explain.

  I cannot know how or if my letters are , but I want to at . I was about to fly back to after speaking at the Conference in Boston. I remember that morning I was shaving in my room at the Hyatt in Cambridge, hot water steaming up from the sink. I looked in the mirror. I saw a tall man who took care of himself, strong, with thick black hair and the same olive skin of his grandfather, and the same gray eyes his mother had stared down the hate and abuse of her sonofabitch husband, . You know about him.

  I looked in the mirror, Maria, and I thought .

  But this was in New England. Snow and ice pounded the city. The phone by the bed rang. Wiped the lines of shaving cream from my jaw and ears with a towel and I picked up the phone. .

  See, I was in the mood

  Airport Paperback

  79

  all of whom fashioned themselves as capital-A Artists not writers or painters or or makers or doers, but capital-A Artists. sub the Massachusetts weather I rang up my guy DeRozan who lived in town. Hadn’t seen him for years. (Know what, you met him after the mid-term elections, went by Rose. Big guy, muscles, button nose, a sweetheart. Taught . Brilliant man, but he smelled like Tide detergent and Drakkar Noir. Remember?) Rose came and picked me up and he and I cheap red wine from coffee mugs

  Herbie Hancock, rolling spliffs and he showed me his piece, a nickel plated .45 from his friend.

  By we realized we’d lost track of time and needed to get moving the ice coming down on the roads. Rose and I walked .

  Between the weed and the chicken biryani, .

  Adam Hirsch

  80

  it happened. The manager, a short man with glasses, had a humorless demeanor. I stayed at the door. Rose spoke to him. They were talking when the power went out. the woman had tears in her eyes, gripping the parka she had on over her sari. We pushed past her and ran out.

  The money went to where it was needed.

  It was an act of love. And love is only courage in the face of death. That a death, , may result from my actions is not judgment for the robbery help . people, allegedly injured, but that my book, my crime, will reach many more. responding to it?

  You do what you can no matter the secrets or the pain, for to think is the sweetest illegality. I believe it is worth holding out against certain persuasive eventualities. History may give context (Il Grido del Popolo, right?) for human unhappiness is evidence of our own mortality, and justified deportations,

  Airport Paperback

  81

  because what good is theory in the face of survival? The one thing that is certain is that I am a criminal.

  I have to wrap it up now. I am tired. My hand aches. Tell I miss him, and to strong and I can’t because I don’t So please tell him ,please, Maria; please tell him that with all my heart I .

  Love,

  Julian Esparza

  Adam Hirsch

  82

  A Bead to String

  Michael Harris Cohen

  What do you want to hear? Should I tell you about the flowers? How they bloomed like jewels until weeds choked them. Should I tell you why weeds are superior to flowers? They’re a more honest marker. Especially in her case, on her grave, which I dug with bare hands. Yes, note that down. I want it remembered. You see, flowers try too hard. Egoists of the plant world, I never liked them. Neither did she. We had that in common. At least that. She was a woman of unusual tastes but I suppose that’s obvious. I could tell you too how she never liked handsome men. “Too easy to admire,” she said. “Ugly men try harder.” Like the weeds I suppose. Flowers need tending. They’re fussy and delicate. Weeds simply grow. They take over

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  everything. Funny. I never made the connection before. It’s the geometry of thought I suppose.

  When you leave this room you’ll pin a photo to a wall, draw a line to another photo, maybe affix a Post-it next to the line. Isn’t that how you do it? That’s how they do it on TV. Lines and photos and notes, then they step back for the big picture, take it all in, uncover the connection that eluded them. Things come together in ways we never imagined. As a child I never imagined I’d be capable of doing what I’ve done. I had pets and loved them. Did you imagine you’d be doing what you do? Did you imagine you’d be poring over pictures of skinned bodies? Or limbless ones? Did you imagine you’d spend your life with the dead instead of the living?

  The dead govern you. They summon you from bed in the middle of the night. They implore you to learn their secrets though they have none. They got their ticket punched, that’s all. Of course, even if you catch the one who punched the ticket—that dark train conductor—you never understand him. Not really. Sure, you grasp the henpecked man who shotguns his wife’s head onto the wall; the battered woman who’s had enough and immolates her husband in his bed. Those are easy “whys.” It’s the others that nag: the loving father, dressed in his perfect life, who returns from the office and drowns his six-year-old in the tub. Prom queen suicides and high school massacres. Those linger. Those inscrutabilities live in your gut. They own

  Michael Harris Cohen

  84

  you, the dead and their killers. They set the course of your life. They know what you will never know. If we’re honest—we need to be honest, right?—you’re the caboose and I’m the engineer. We’re joined but you’ll never reach me. It’s not ego or bluster. It’s fact.

  Still, I never imagined I’d be here. A failure of my imagination, perhaps, or plain old hubris. I never imagined this interview. Or is that the wrong word? “Evaluation”? “Interrogation”? How could we see this moment before it arrived. Which string of our life led us toward this?

  You must be exhausted. You look it. That’s your fourth coffee. I feel like I’ve lived and died a dozen times in this room. Though for me it’s easier. I just talk and talk. But you have to parse my words, try to fish out what lies beneath. You want reasons. Motive. History. Not just a cop, a shrink-cop. Shrink-wrapped, enfolded in a jaded and broken human. A cop draws the lines and connects the dots. His evidence is at least things he can see and touch and smell. Not you. You chase what cannot be seen or fixed. You chase the unknowable. Knock at the impenetrable. Might as well try to understand what a bird thinks when it hits a window. There’s something between us. Can’t you see it? You’re smashing your beak on it.

  You fidget with your pen, take notes, act empathetic, hope for something new to be revealed, one more fact, a bead to string, to close the circle, to lead

  A Bead to String

  85

  you back to “why.” Of course you know behind every why is another, doors that stretch back to the dawn of man, and have you ever considered that if man has a dawn doesn’t it stand to reason he also has a dusk? I think about these things.

  I don’t want to bore you. I know what you want. You want novelty or a crescendo. What if I told you there were others, that she was not the first but just another bead on my string? What if I told you she was not even the last? Did you know if you’re well dressed and white, and drive the right car, you can knock on almost any door in this state? You just look through their mail, then you put on a tie and go right up to that door and knock. When they open, you put on your biggest smile, the one without a drop of hate or guile in it. You clench it on, though it hurts your face, you reach out your hand and speak the name you just learned: “Jim (or John or Roger or Sarah), goddamn it’s been a long time. How the hell are ya? I was in the neighborhood and . . .” They’r
e more afraid of embarrassing themselves for not remembering than of inviting you inside. And once you’re inside, you’re in.

  Would it help if I told you that humans are a mistake? Or would you rather hear that her last breath, the last breath of all of them, sounded like the start of a story and not the end? I don’t mean to be obtuse. If I could explain, if I could turn my skull inside out for you, believe me I would. But we’re stuck in this

  Michael Harris Cohen

  86

  moment. Me on one side of the table, you on the other. Both handcuffed. You just can’t see yours. I see them, though. Clear as the moon. This table between us, it might as well be an ocean, swelling larger by the second. That’s how it is. That’s how it always is. And there’s not a question or an answer or a why that will ever span the distance.

  A Bead to String

  87

  The Fifth of July

  Helen Phillips

  We were sitting on folding chairs in an empty field behind a gas station to watch the county fireworks from afar. Recently one of us had almost died.

  “Hecho en México,” the broken Coca-Cola bottle bragged.

  Cigarette butts, sagebrush, bottle caps, the usual decorations.

  Among us four siblings we’d killed five (maybe seven) prairie dogs with a BB gun that day. Pest control. Local recreation.

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  We sat in a row, four folding chairs of different colors and heights, waiting for the fireworks to start. It seemed they should have started by now. Under other circumstances there would have been a kid here, a kid or two, a bit of progeny, a niece or a nephew, but there were no kids.

  We speculated about where those prairie dogs were now. What was going on with their carcasses. Like, were they lying there stiff in the tunnels below us with their little arms flung above their heads?

  One of us went inside to ask the guy in the gas station if he could maybe turn off the neon sign so there would be more darkness. He was a nice guy. His wife and kids were there to say hi on their way into town, where they were going to lie on blankets in the plaza and really see the fireworks. He seemed to have two sets of twins, if that’s possible—a pair of little boys and a pair of slightly bigger girls. Those kids! They had such clean, dark hair. He said he was sorry he couldn’t turn the sign off; maybe we should go into the plaza too? He had to work but his wife could drive in front of us and show us the exact way. It was no use explaining that the plaza (crowds, germs) wasn’t an option for us.

  Helen Phillips

  90

  All day we’d been driving around, looking for something, but we just kept passing the parking lot where the garbage trucks were parked. We couldn’t believe how many garbage trucks there were for such a small municipality. On the opposite side of town we passed a souvenir shop with the most enormous amethyst geode in the window. As though the garbage trucks were balancing one side of the scale and the geode the other.

  “The four of you should go away together somewhere for a few days. Boost each other up after all this. What are siblings for anyway. Be carefree. You’ve earned it.”

  We’d spent the whole day craving sopaipillas, but we hadn’t been able to find them anywhere. All we found was this hippie selling a garment he alleged could be made into forty-one different garments.

  “Loaves and fishes,” he kept saying, “loaves and fishes.”

  Right when the fireworks started a man in a cowboy hat came around the side of the gas station. We were scared until he stuck out his hand and went down the row and introduced himself as Jack Flores, the fellow running for coroner. He said he was en route to the plaza. He said he was

  The Fifth of July

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  responsible for a quarter of the fireworks and he hoped we enjoyed them. We told him we’d seen his campaign billboard. “Billboards,” he corrected. We didn’t tell him we weren’t from around here and had no dog in his fight. We didn’t tell him his campaign billboard scared us. That way he was smiling, as though he was trying to hide something in his mouth. We hadn’t even realized that coroners could be elected officials. It didn’t work that way where we were from, or maybe it did and we were just ignorant. “Lot of prairie dogs in this field,” Jack Flores informed us, gazing at one that had just popped up. “They carry bubonic plague, you know,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing we could try to, you know, take care of. Change somehow.”

  “Thanks,” we said, not certain what we were thanking him for. But we were glad he wouldn’t mind about the killed prairie dogs. We weren’t sure what you call a coroner—Mr. or Dr.?

  We asked Jack Flores where we could get sopaipillas. He listed four places right off the bat and then asked for our phone number, he could have his secretary call us with more information. Just then it occurred to him that if we didn’t know where sopaipillas could be acquired we must be out-of-towners with no dog in his fight, and he was already rushing off by the time one of us came up with the final digits of a fake phone number. We looked up at the fireworks.

  Helen Phillips

  92

  Dogs alerted their masters to the end of the world. Their masters ignored them, went outside to stand beneath colored bombs.

  “I used to be scared of those, you know, skeleton ladies driving the wooden carts, but now I really want one. We have to buy one before we leave, okay.”

  During the fireworks a feeling of threat arose. Was it prairie dogs or dogs or La Muerte in her cart? Whose red eyes surveyed the napes of our necks?

  We were scared but also we were bored, already numb to the fireworks.

  We were bored but mainly we were fragile. You think a brush with death is an inoculation against death?

  When we were children all four of us would try to squeeze into one twin bed. Someone always fell out but still it was a sort of comfort. In the morning our parents made fun of us for needing each other so much.

  The Fifth of July

  93

  Were the prairie dogs going to attack us or not?

  Was anything they did to us a legitimate expression of grief? The same desire for revenge we would have if the situations were reversed?

  Twenty-four hours from now we’ll be sitting in a cracked hot tub, drinking beers, gazing at a row of beer cans holed by BB guns. The scars from May, witnessed for the first time, our eyes looking and not looking. By then we’ll have done the thing we were bound to do, the thing in the parking lot, the woman in the rearview mirror, her gestures of confusion, a dent in her parked car created by the back of our car, our apparent indifference as we drove too quickly away. But we were not indifferent. Leftover fireworks going off all around town. Extravagant trash along the highway, a piece of blue-and-white cake on a red plastic plate. July Fifth.

  “Will these fireworks never end?” we asked one another on July Fourth.

  The prairie dogs stood in the field staring upward like prophets.

  Helen Phillips

  94

  Withhold the Dawn

  Richie Narvaez

  Gladys Gutierrez hated the IRS. In her mind, the IRS had destroyed her parents, crossing them out of her existence like disallowed itemized deductions. It didn’t matter to her that Mami and Papi had neglected to pay taxes for a dozen years apiece, Gladys still wanted revenge. From dawn to dusk and even in her dreams.

  To that end, she purchased—on sale!—a thirty-two-inch Summerfield Tru-Cut™ axe, drop-forged of carbon steel with an American hickory handle. “Summerfield,” the slogan went. “When you want something chop chop!”

  She never dated, never married, never held an honest job. Revenge was her only companion. Each year she

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  moved to a new town, created a new identity, sent in new tax returns. She bungled the numbers on purpose, giving herself exceedingly generous refunds. Most times, she got the money. This disappointed her. While she enjoyed the cash, the reward she craved was that neat letter in a neat envelope from the IRS. There would be
an audit. An agent would be coming by.

  In Wyoming, for example, Gladys claimed she worked as a safari guide. Two months later, an IRS agent named Steven W. Cabeza-Plana rang her doorbell.

  “Miss Theodora Ratatouille?”

  “C’est moi,” said Gladys.

  Cabeza-Plana’s hair was stuccoed in place. His teeth were bathroom tiles. Gladys disliked him immediately and offered him iced tea.

  Cabeza-Plana said, “Aces,” and asked her for her receipts. He sat down, removing neat papers from his briefcase and flicking his pen. Gladys went to her bedroom, pretending to look for receipts. But in reality, she sat on her bed and quietly sang Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Using the axe as a microphone.

  In the eight minutes and thirty-three seconds it took to finish all the verses, the anesthetic in the tea would kick in. Gladys emerged from her bed-

  room, twirling her beloved Summerfield axe and half-murmuring, “February made me shiver / With every paper I’d deliver.”