Repo Men (3 page)

If there’s a saving grace to most of my divorces, it’s that there weren’t any kids involved. No messy custody cases, no fiery late-night battles while the boy’s in the other room with the pillow over his head wondering when Mom and Dad will finally kiss and make up.

Melinda and I, though, had Peter, and the stress of dealing with that aspect of the divorce took its toll on both of us. No doubt about it, we did a number on that kid. All we wanted to do was find a way to end something that never should have been started in the first place, but we never expected so much collateral damage.

Still, as far as I know, Peter doesn’t blame me for our treatment of him. Peter doesn’t blame me for any of his childhood traumas. Peter doesn’t blame me for avoiding his mother. Peter doesn’t blame me for our divorce. Peter doesn’t blame me for any of my trespasses against Melinda save the very last one. And I don’t blame him for blaming me.

Jake and I liked to talk about blame. About trust. About everything, I guess. We had a lot of time on our hands. We’d theorize over whether or not there was a God, and if so, what He/She might have thought of artiforgs, of addictive anti-rejection drugs like Q, of people ascribing major sports teams wins and losses to His/Her divine intervention. I can’t even claim that we were all that intellectually or spiritually curious; we were just hanging out and looking for something to chat about.

Most days, we’d roll out of bed and into work around 6 or 7
P.M.
, maybe catch a light dinner in the break room with some of the other guys. The back room of the Credit Union wasn’t much more than a couple of poker tables and some rickety folding chairs, bad wallpaper from ten years back that no one cared to change, and a giant chalkboard divided into a chart that detailed clients, artiforg, time overdue, and the repo man or men assigned. It was good for coffee, light conversation, and the occasional stripper party, but little else.

But it was our space, and we used it whenever we wanted. Most of the other repo guys, they didn’t have a whole lot of other choices when it came to socializing. It’s hard to make friends when everyone thinks you’re only waiting ’em out. Long-term commitment is tough, too. Out of the hundred or so repossession specialists I’ve known in my day, I’d wager that fewer than half were married, and less than a tenth of those stayed married for any length of time. I feel like I worked overtime in that department just to even the score for my comrades.

For me and Jake, being Level Five status had its perks—we got first dibs at the best jobs, respect from our fellow repo men worldwide, and a pay grade commensurate with our abilities. But it also meant we had to deal with a lot of whining and petty shit from our inferiors.

Bobby Romain, a perpetual Level Two, was good at his job and looked the part—six-two, whippet thin, never said much and always sprung for the first round—but was continually misplacing his scanner during jobs and begging us to score him a new one before the bosses found out.

Vicente Salazar somehow made it to Level Four despite the fact that he turned down more work than the rest of us could accept. He wouldn’t go into certain areas of town, refused to take jobs that required ether release. If the client’s last name started with a K or W, that was the end of that—Vicente wasn’t interested. The only reason he made it all the way up to Level Four was that when he deigned to actually work, he did it with a speed and accuracy seen in no one else except for me and Jake. Frank was supposedly thinking about promoting him to L5, but Jake and I put the kibosh on that one, quick. The guy can slack off all he wants, but you don’t get five bolts kicking back every weekend.

Then there was Tony Park, perpetual splinter under my fingernail. Tony Park was a beast of a man, 110 kilos of muscle and sinew. He had the forehead of a man twenty thousand years his senior, a wide expanse of bone and skin that seemed to climb for miles before reaching a shock of thick buzz-cut hair, shot through with dyed streaks of green. Against all Credit Union guidelines and the mores imposed by society, he’d chosen to have his Union tattoo engraved not on his neck like the rest of us, but smack in the middle of that mammoth noggin. Just above and between the eyes, blasting out a warning front and center to any and all unfortunate enough to see him coming. He’d seen something like it in a comic book and decided that if it was good enough for the funny pages, it was good enough for him.

In addition to questionable fashion sense, Tony had an unfortunately delicate temper. Despite what you might think, this is not an admirable quality amongst repo men. In this job, you’re bound to get yelled at, goaded, sometimes shot at and stabbed, and flying off the handle is rarely the best option. Tony must have missed this part of the training seminar.

As a result, Tony found himself in perpetual orbit, spinning around the L2 and L3 marks, repeatedly promoted and demoted as the years sped on. He’d pull down some big job, take down a nest or high-profile debtor, and just like that, he’d be flavor of the month, the next big thing, easy bump up to Level Three. A week later, he’d rip out some old lady’s spleen in the middle of her 110th birthday party at Denny’s, splattering blood and guts all over someone’s French Toast Slam, and hello Level Two, my old friend.

He was always on me about some favor or another. “Hey, my nephew wants in,” he’d say. “Give him a recommendation, get him in the program.”

“Get him in yourself, Tony.”

“I could, yeah,” he’d respond, “but I figure the word comes down from you, a Level Five…might mean a little something to the assholes upstairs.”

When I’d say no, he’d invariably slink away and hit Jake up for the same thing an hour later, like a kid trying to get his parents to let him go to the mall with his friends. Tony never stopped—it was his best asset and worst enemy.

As a result, Jake and I didn’t hang out in the back room as much as we used to. By eight, when most folks were just putting the kids to bed, we’d head into Frank’s office to grab pink sheets. Sometimes we’d still be working off the same assignment from the night before, but more often than not, there was new work waiting for us.

Frank is old school, through and through, and doesn’t waste time jabbering about the gig or the nature of what we do. He’s got a business to run, and he doesn’t understand why everyone has to
talk
about it so goddamned much. “You take all those chat shows and news reports and moralists jabbering on about the Union and put that energy into something important? Shit, we’d have jet packs and world peace by now.” That’s Frank—always thinking of his fellow man.

For whatever reason, Frank didn’t love that Jake and I hung out together as much as we did. “I respect your little friendship and all,” he’d tell us repeatedly, “but you’re my two best guys. Working the streets as a team keeps you in one place. Split up, you can cover twice the territory, get a lot more accomplished.”

“We split up all the time,” I’d tell him. “I work alone seventy, seventy-five percent of the jobs.”

“But when you partner up, it’s always the two of you. Like you’re married or something.”

Jake would scoff, “If we were married, you think we’d want to hang out with each other so much?”

Jake and my wives never got along. He always harbored resentment toward my first wife, Beth, mainly because our long-distance relationship juiced up my paranoia something fierce. The other ones were either openly antagonistic toward him, either because of the nature of our job or the nature of our relationship.

Carol (wife number four) in particular couldn’t stand the guy, and I’m pretty sure that one reason we stayed out of state was to keep me away from my best pal. Out of all of them, Wendy and Jake got along the best, even though she was the one who got me thinking about transferring over from repo to sales.

“Sales?” Jake asked when I told him one evening that I’d been considering the move. “You gotta be shitting me.”

“Wendy’s idea,” I said, “but it’s not a terrible one. I’m not getting any younger, and these fucking clients keep taking their shots. Last week I had a guy pull a goddamn bazooka on me—”

“But sales? You really think you see yourself sitting in a cubicle out in the front room?” He dropped into a clipped, high-pitched voice that he liked to do when making fun of the few salesmen we had contact with. “Mr. Johnson, we can give you this spleen at a rate that far surpasses every other corporation. You owe this to your family. You owe it to yourself.” Jake shook his head. “You might choke on your own vomit.”

“Still,” I said, “a job’s a job.”

“Fuck that. Go dig ditches, if you’re looking to get out. Go make license plates. You can’t go from repo to sales. That’s evolution in reverse. It just doesn’t work that way.”

He was right, of course. At heart, the job I was doing was the only job I was qualified for or happy to do, even if it was something that was bound to get me killed or disabled or, worse, hooked up to an artiforg. Not that
that
was ever going to happen.

By the time we hit the streets, Jake and I were usually two or three hours into a shift, having used up all of the remaining daylight hours with banter and the occasional beer. We’d roll through the streets, me driving and Jake shotgun, his scanner out, pinging the pedestrians and scaring the fuck out of most of them. There’s nothing like the sharp ping of a scanner to strike panic into the heart of a crowd, and it delighted Jake to no end.

“Ooh, check out Fatty,” he said, pointing to an obese man waddling down the street just in front of us. “You know his organs gave out a long time ago.”

“Wager?”

“Drinks,” he suggested. “Loser buys a round.”

The bet settled, Jake fingered the trigger on his scanner and the digital readout came back almost instantly:
Kenton PK–5 kidney unit, 172 days Past Due
.

“Eight days left,” Jake said, disappointed. “We should take him anyway.”

“Settle down, Hoss.” I steered the car up to the corpulent client and stuck my head out the window. “Nice night for a waddle, huh?”

The guy didn’t even look back “Fuck off.”

Rude, no? “How’s that kidney holding up?” I asked, and made sure my Union tattoo was in full view.

The guy got one look and blanched, his face draining of blood as he stumbled backward. “I—I sent the check in yesterday,” he stammered.

“You better hope you did,” I said. “Eight days, and that kidney is ours.”

It only took three seconds for the guy to spin around and hustle down the nearest alley, putting as much distance between himself and us as he could physically muster.

“Look at him go.” Jake laughed.

We pressed thumbs, as we’d done for the last ten years. “Gonna need a new heart soon as he rounds the corner.”

Jake looked at me, this strange glimmer in his eye, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was going to hit me or kiss me or both.

“What?” I asked.

“Brother,” he said, “you’ll always be repo.”

There are three little girls playing in the street five stories below me. They are jumping rope and chanting this song:

If they go on, I think I will smother them.

This is the 115th day of my fugitive status. My house, my car, my belongings have all been confiscated due to mounting interest and nonpayment penalties. Fine. The house was falling apart, the car was a death trap on long-bald tires, and my belongings were of the knickknack variety, useless to all but the most ardent of flea-market bargainers. My assets, seized from all accounts, had long since dwindled to an asymptote—five alimony checks a month will see to that in a hurry. But that’s okay. I don’t need those things anymore. All I need is my trusty shotgun and cache of assorted weaponry. And maybe a few spare wits to get me through another day.

My case number, or “client designation,” as the Credit Union so gingerly puts it, is K029J66VL. I have never seen my file, despite the so-called open credit law passed more than a decade ago. Every review application I submitted to the records clerk at the Credit Union was summarily lost, destroyed, misplaced, or mishandled, and I carry around with me the stack of crocodile-tear apologies the Union passed along in lieu of the actual documents. They are beautiful works of literature which promise that the information, though temporarily waylaid, is forthcoming. So, I am told by the man shouting outside on the street corner, is Armageddon.

Note to the custodians of my nonexistent estate: On the very strong chance that I should die at the hands of a Union Repo man, and on the equally strong chance that my body has been too mangled for proper viewing and subsequent burial, I wish to be cremated along with those official Union letters. I can think of no more fitting eternity than to merge ashes with the skillful lies of those who both gave me life and hastened my death.

No one is a Bio-Repo man by birth, no matter what the commercials and billboards say. And that slogan—“Help The World Help Themselves.” Ecch. They make it sound like everyone’s born to play the part of a killer, but that’s not so. Like any other artistic endeavor, it can be learned. Some have a natural talent, of course, and some, like Tony Park, take to it a bit too easily, but there are nuances and techniques to the job that could fill the largest of instruction manuals.

But the Union persists with the “Born To Repossess” mythos. Just yesterday I caught a glimpse of a newspaper ad that read: “Learn a Trade. Join the Union. Fulfill Your Destiny!” It actually said that: Fulfill Your Destiny. They’re always preaching halfway between the spiritual and technological, a precision religion bowing at the shrine of engineering and credit. Cheesy way to snatch recruits, but it works. Caught me. Caught Jake. Caught a lot of our pals, too. Of course, the usual codicils applied: We were young, we were foolish, we were bored after a long and overproduced war effort. We needed something different. Little did we know, we’d just be getting more of the same.