Triptych (8 page)

He wanted to watch his teams play. He wanted to hold the remote in his hand and if Georgia was playing bad, which was highly likely, he wanted to be able to turn the channel and watch Florida getting its ass kicked. He wanted to watch the cheesy halftime shows, hear the stupid commentators, see Tulane at Southern Mississippi, Texas A amp;M at LSU, Army-freakin‘-Navy. Come Thanksgiving, he wanted an orgy of bowl games and then he’d switch to the big dogs: the Patriots, the Raiders, the Eagles, all leading up to that magic moment come February when John Shelley would sit in his crap room in his crap boardinghouse and watch the freaking Super Bowl all alone for the first time in his life.

Six days a week for the last two months, he had looked out the bus window and stared longingly at the Atlanta City Rent-All. The sign in the window promised “your job is your credit,” but the asterisk, so tiny it could be a squished bug, told otherwise. Thank God he had been too nervous to walk right into the store and make a fool of himself. John had stood outside the front door, his heart shaking in his chest like a dog shitting peach pits, when he noticed the fine print on the poster. Two months, the tiny type said. You had to hold down a steady job for at least two months before they would allow you the honor of paying fifty-two weekly installments of twenty dollars for a television that would retail for around three hundred bucks in a normal store.

But John wasn’t a normal person. No matter his new haircut or his close shave or his pressed chinos, people still felt that otherness about him. Even at work, a car wash where mostly transients showed up to wipe down cars and vacuum Cheerios out of the backs of SUVs, they kept their distance.

And now, two months later, John sat on the edge of his chair, trying to keep his leg from bobbing up and down, waiting for his TV. The pimply faced kid who had greeted him at the door was taking his time. He’d gotten John’s application and rushed to the back about twenty minutes ago. Application. That was another thing they hadn’t put on the sign. Street address, date of birth, social security number, place of employment, everything but his freaking underwear size.

The Atlanta City Rent-All was noisy for a Sunday afternoon. All of the televisions were on, bright images flashing from a wall of tubes, whispered undertones from nature shows, news channels and do-it-yourself programs buzzing in his ears. The noise was getting to him. Too much light was pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The televisions were too bright.

He shifted in his chair, feeling a bead of sweat roll down his back. John didn’t wear a watch, but there was a big clock on the wall. This represented poor judgment on the store planner’s part, considering the fact that all it served to do was remind people they were stuck here waiting for some kid fresh out of high school to tell the lucky customer that they had qualified for the extreme honor of paying five hundred bucks for a Simzitzu DVD player.

“Just a TV,” John whispered to himself. “Just a small TV.” His leg was bobbing up and down again and he didn’t bother to stop it. His hands were clenching and unclenching, and that was bad. He had to stop doing that. People were staring. Parents were keeping their kids close.

“Sir?” Randall, John’s own personal sales assistant, stood in front of him. He had a smile plastered onto his face that would have given a Labrador pause. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Randall reached out his hand as if John might need help up.

“It’s okay,” John said, trying not to mumble as he stood. He started looking around, wondering what was going on. The kid was being too nice to him. Had something happened? Did someone call the police?

“We can show you these sets here,” Randall offered, leading him to the back of the store where the big screens were displayed.

John stood in front of a television that looked as huge as a movie screen. The set was almost as tall as him and twice as wide.

Randall picked up a remote control the size of a book. “The Panasonic has advanced real black technology that gives you-”

“Wait a minute.” John was walking around the television. It was only a few inches thick. He saw the price tag and laughed. “I told you what I make, man.”

Randall flashed him a smile, took a step forward that made John want to take a step back. He kept his ground, though, and the kid lowered his voice, saying, “We understand when some of our customers have outside income sources they can’t list on their credit applications.”

“That right?” John asked, recognizing something illicit was happening but not quite sure what.

“Your credit report…” Randall seemed almost embarrassed. “The credit cards came up.”

“What credit cards?” John asked. He didn’t even have a damn checking account.

“Don’t worry about it.” Randall patted John on the shoulder like they were old buddies.

“What credit cards?” John repeated, the muscles in his arm aching to slap the kid’s hand away. He hated admitting he didn’t know something. Being in the dark made you vulnerable.

Randall finally dropped his hand. “Listen, guy,” he began. “No big deal, right? Just make the payments and we don’t care. We don’t report to anybody unless you stop paying.”

John crossed his arms over his chest, even though he knew it made him look bigger, more threatening, to other people. “Lookit,” he said. “I want that crappy TV up front, the twenty-two inch with the remote control. That’s all I want.”

“Dude,” Randall said, holding up his hands. “Sure. No problem. I just figured with your credit score-”

John had to ask again. “What score?”

“Your credit score,” the kid said, the tone of his voice passing incredulous and settling on plain dumbfounded. “Your credit score’s the best I’ve ever seen here. We get some people in, they’re not even breaking three hundred.”

“What was mine?”

Randall seemed startled by the question. “We’re not allowed to tell you.

John made his voice firm, let some of the gravel come out. “What was mine?”

Randall’s pimples turned white, his skin a bright red. He whispered, “Seven-ten,” glancing over his shoulder to see if his boss was watching him. “You could go to a real store, Mr. Shelley. You could walk into a Circuit City or a Best Buy-”

“Let me see it.”

“Your report?”

John closed some of the space between them. “You said there were credit cards on there. I want to know what cards.”

Randall looked over his shoulder again, but he should have been more concerned about what was in front of him.

“Stop looking behind you, kid. Look at me. Answer my question.”

Randall’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Maybe I put in your social security number wrong. The current address was different-”

“But the name?” Same name.

“Same previous address in Garden City?” Yes, sir.

He summed it up for the kid. “You think there’s another Jonathan Winston Shelley out there with my birth date and my previous address, living in Atlanta, who has a social security number that’s close to mine?”

“No-I mean, yes.” Sweat had broken out on Randall’s upper lip and his voice began to shake. “I’m sorry, mister. I could lose my job if I showed you that. You can get a copy of it yourself for free. I can give you the num-”

“Forget it,” John said, feeling like a monster for pushing the kid. The fear in his eyes cut like a piece of glass. John walked back through the store, past the television he wanted, and left before he said something he would regret.

Instead of going home, John crossed the street and sat on the bench beside the bus stop. He took one of the free community newspapers out of the stand and thumbed through it. The street had four lanes, but was pretty busy. Using the paper as a shield, he watched the store, tracking Randall and his fellow clerks as they talked people who should know better into signing away their lives.

Credit reports, credit cards, scores. Shit, he didn’t know anything about this.

A bus came, the driver glancing out the door at John. “You gettin‘ on?

“Next one,” John said. Then, “Thanks, man.” He liked the MARTA bus drivers. They didn’t seem to make snap judgments. As long as you paid your fare and didn’t make trouble, they assumed you were a good person.

Hot air hissed from the back of the bus as it pulled away. John turned to the next page in the paper, then went back to the front, realizing he hadn’t read any of it. He sat at the bus stop for two hours, then three, leaving only once to take a piss behind an abandoned building.

At eight o’clock, Randall the salesboy left the rental store. He got into a rusted Toyota, turning the key and releasing into the otherwise quiet night the most obnoxious music John had ever heard. It had been dark for at least an hour, but Randall wouldn’t have noticed John even if it had been bright as day. The kid was probably seventeen or eighteen. He had his own car, a job that paid pretty well, and not a care in the world except for the asshole with good credit who had tried to strong-arm him that afternoon.

The manager came out. At least, John guessed he was the manager: older guy, flap of hair stringing across a bald spot, yellowish skin and a round ass that came from sitting around all day telling people no.

The guy’s groan could be heard from across the street as he reached up and pulled down the chain mesh that covered the front windows of the store. He groaned again as he stooped to lock the brace, then groaned a third time as he stood. After stretching his back, he walked over to a taupe Ford Taurus and climbed in behind the wheel.

John waited as the guy slipped on his seat belt, adjusted the rearview mirror, then put the car into reverse. The Taurus backed up, white lights flashing over red, then straightened out and left the parking lot, the engine making a puttering sound like a golf cart.

Ten minutes, fifteen. Thirty minutes. John stood up, giving his own groan from the effort. His knees had popped and his ass hurt from the cold concrete bench.

He looked both ways before crossing the street and walking past the store. The chains guarding the front doors and windows were strong, but John wasn’t planning on smashing and grabbing. Instead, he went to the back of the building to the Dumpster.

The security camera behind the rental place was trained on the back door, the Dumpster free and clear. He slid open the steel door, releasing a metallic shriek into the night. The odor coming off the metal container was bad, but John had smelled worse. He started pulling out the small black kitchen garbage bags like the kind he had seen lining the trash cans in the rental store. He was careful, untying the knots instead of ripping the bags open to search them, then tying them back in the same knot before moving to the next one. After thirty minutes of going through the store’s trash, he had to laugh at the situation. There was enough information in the trash bags-social security numbers, street addresses, employment histories-to launch a major con. That wasn’t what he was looking for, though. He wasn’t a conman and he wasn’t a thief. He wanted information, but only his own, and of course he found it in the last bag he opened.

He tilted the credit report so that the security lights made it easier to read.

Same social security number. Same date of birth. Same previous address.

Jonathan Winston Shelley, age thirty-five, had two MasterCards, three Visas and a Shell gas card. His address was a post office box with a 30316 zip code, which meant he lived somewhere in southeast Atlanta- several miles from John’s current room at Chez Flop House on Ashby, just down from the Georgia state capitol.

His credit was excellent, his checking account with the local bank in good standing. Obviously, he was a pretty reliable customer and had been for about six years. But for one “slow pay” on the Shell card, all his creditors were satisfied with his prompt payments, which was kind of funny when you thought about it, because for the last twenty years, Jonathan “Winston Shelley hadn’t gotten out much. The guards at the prison tended to keep a close eye on you when you were serving twenty-two-to-life for raping and killing a fifteen-year-old girl.

CHAPTER EIGHT

John had known Mary Alice Finney all of his life. She was the good girl, the pretty cheerleader, the straight-A student, the person just about everybody in school knew and liked because she was so damn nice. Sure, there were some girls who hated her, but that’s what girls did when they felt threatened: they hated. They spread nasty rumors. They were nice to your face and then when you turned around they stuck the knife in as far as it would go and twisted it around for good measure. Even in the real world, find some woman who’s doing well for herself, being successful, and there’s always going to be a handful of other women standing around saying she’s a bitch or she slept her way to the top. That was just how the world worked, and it was no different in the microcosm of De-catur High School.

Actually, John later found that it was a hell of a lot like prison. The Shelleys lived a couple of streets over from the Finneys in one of Decatur’s nicer neighborhoods bordering Agnes Scott College. Their mothers knew each other in that circular world of the upper middle class. They had met the way doctors’ and lawyers’ wives have always met, at some fund-raiser or charity for the local high school, hospital, college- whatever institution served as an excuse to throw an elaborate party and invite strangers into their beautifully decorated homes.

Richard Shelley was an oncologist, head of the cancer treatment ward at Decatur Hospital. His wife, Emily, had at one point been a real estate agent, but she’d quit that job when Joyce, their first child, was born. John came three years later, and the Shelleys thought their world was complete.

Emily had been one of those mothers who threw herself into parenting. She was active in the PTA, sold the most Girl Scout cookies, and spent the end of most school years sewing costumes for the Quaker Friends School’s graduation gala. As her two children grew up and stopped needing her-or wanting her, for that matter-she found herself with a lot of time on her hands. By the time John was in junior high and Joyce was two years away from attending college, she had gone back to the real estate agency part-time just to give herself something to do.