WHISPERS THROUGH AMERICA

Here’s the setup: two guys in a car. They rendezvous with their man on, say, a weekly basis. They get a dozen fake checks. They have to cash these checks within the week.

The guys in the car, they don’t want to go into the banks. Too risky. They’d be on the cameras, they’d have their information on the checks, they’d be a direct line to rat on the bosses if they ever got caught. So instead they cruise around the city, look for homeless guys, find one or two who seem fairly capable, but with loose morals. Homeless people tend to be that way. Desperation will do that to you.

Suppose one of the guys they pick up isn’t exactly homeless, not in that sense. Suppose he’s a dumb kid who hates himself and everything he’s ever been. Barely more than a teenager, but he’s already off the hinges. He’s quiet. He’s cold. He’s dressed in tough, black clothing. The guys in the car poke fun at him. They poke fun at his reserved personality, and his surprising boldness. Wet-eared white boy agrees to get into a blacked-out Escalade with two guys from the hood? Yeah, he’s a little crazy, but he’s cool. They respect him, and he respects them back.

They treat him well. They treat him like a friend. They talk to him like one of their own. He’s never been treated this way before. He’s been around cool people before but he never felt like an equal. This shady past, the homeless drifter thing, it’s a cloak of mystery he pulls around his shoulders and snuggles back into. It feels warm. It protects him from prying eyes, from probing questions, and from any obligations. He’s a free agent, and he’s about to use that freedom to commit a crime.

How can he ever know who he is if he’s never done anything bad in his life? How could he go through his whole existence without ever breaking the rules like that? Deliberately, carefully doing that which he knew to be wrong. Stepping out of his comfort zone meant stepping out of every single comfort zone he had ever been stuck in, even what he thought of as right and wrong. Besides, what use was morality to him anyway? He had just been thinking of ending it all. Why draw the line at anything else? At least he would be alive to do it.

They said it was a construction job, but the kid knew from that first moment that it wasn’t ever gonna be that kind of work. At some point the labor never entered the equation, just a pair of steel toed boots and a yellow vest and a go-getter attitude. The crisp checks would speak for themselves. All he had to do was act natural. This homeless kid, he isn’t stupid. They never call it robbery. They never ask if he’s comfortable with that; they never call it what it is, but he knows. He knows they’re about to do something wrong, something illegal. That’s exactly why he likes it.

He didn’t come out here to play it safe. He didn’t hit the road to say no when opportunity knocked. He didn’t come out here to be the same kind of person he always used to be.

So he stills the beating heart in his chest and he wipes the cold sweat from his forehead, and he walks into a bank, along with the other homeless guy. The other guy’s older, more experienced, and a fast talker. He’s better at acting natural, but he doesn’t have the cool that the kid has. The kid is ice. The kid is awkward, but he doesn’t even care, because this is awesome. He’s doing something that terrifies him and he’s not even stressed. He left all that stress in the car, and when he walked into the bank, he was just another citizen cashing a legitimate check.

The bank didn’t give him any trouble. Not on the first day. On the first day, they just accepted it like any other check, no questions asked. The kid got envelopes full of cash and a fat cut from the pool when they counted it all at the end of the day. The kid accepted an invitation to stay with the two guys in a cheap hotel room for the night. They got pizza. The kid was on edge that night, but he was cool. He was in. He was a partner to a couple of travelling bank robbers, and he was well fucking aware that this wasn’t a robin-hood scenario. It was more of a Billy-the-Kid thing, but he figured he was okay with that.

He pretended to sleep in a chair. He kept his eyes closed all night and listened, and breathed, and tried to relax. The morning came as a relief. They all went out again with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up too high, blasting through traffic like a demon on wheels, and goddamn – the kid wondered how these guys had never been caught.

They’d never been caught because they had a plan. One of the guys was the driver, and the other guy was the mastermind. He had the whole scenario down to a science, and he explained it with the patience of a teacher. He laid out every step and made them repeat it back to him. Every one of them knew where they were supposed to be, and when they needed to be there.

The other guy was happy as a clam. He asked the driver to pull over for a beer at a gas station, and he was happy to have the cash just to get by for the next few days. The kid wondered if he would turn out like that, too – a desperate beggar with a scraggly beard and an itch for liquor. This guy made the kid look sane by comparison. He was too friendly and too chatty most of the time, but he told them he had a pistol in his belt. The kid wondered if he was bluffing. The old guy said he wasn’t fucking around.

On that second day, the mastermind had a new plan. He turned around to talk to the backseat in the car. Today they would play it cool on the phone after a successful job. They would all say they almost got caught and they didn’t make any money, and then they would pocket the cash.

“That’s the way you gotta do it,” The mastermind explained. “You gotta finesse ‘em. You gotta take what’s yours.”

And they say there’s honor even among thieves. The kid used to hold a lot of illusions about how criminals worked. He was beginning to drop them.

The problem was, the kid didn’t make it past a single bank that day. They all said they needed to verify, and that part got scary. The kid had been told not to let them dig – if they try that shit, you take the check and get out of there. Make an excuse. Act natural. Just don’t let them figure it out.

“You just gotta finesse em,” the mastermind reassured him. “You gonna learn.”

“Just talk their ear off,” The old guy chimed in. “Don’t give ‘em time to think about things.”

But the kid was never good at running his mouth. What if he said the wrong thing? What if he made it even worse? When he tried to make conversation with the tellers about the weather or the supposed job, he felt like a robot pretending to be human.

The last bank they rolled up to, they almost got caught. The older guy protested the bank teller’s suspicion, defending his honor. He began to get loud. The kid stepped in. The new boss must have fucked up the check. Yeah, the kid said he didn’t like this job anyway, and he was gonna have some words with the boss over this. The security glared at the both of them on the way out. The kid listened for sirens as they walked out calmly.

He decided to make that his last day. All the guys in the car tried to convince him to stay two more days, to cash all the checks for the week. They said he made some mistakes, but he did good. He just needed practice and he just needed to talk more. The kid knew it was bullshit. He knew he was pushing his luck, and he knew he couldn’t pull the social skills he needed out of his ass like a magician. He knew he had to quit while he was ahead.

He stuck to that decision, and the guys respected it. The next morning, one of them gave him a ride to the bus station near the motel. He tried to give the kid another couple hundred for another motel room. The kid said he had that covered – an extremely stupid mistake. The gangster hesitated, and said shit, he thought the kid was in a bad situation out here. The kid began to sweat for the first time after the whole ordeal.

“What,” he replied, “You thought I was cashing checks without a bank account? I have a little bit left.”

He wasn’t in a good situation, that was for damn sure. He didn’t get a proper rest for a week after he was alone again. He wondered if they were looking for him. He wondered if he had a warrant. He thought about it every time a new job ran a background check on him, but nothing ever came up. Eventually he figured it must have gone under the radar. Those guys had been good, and they had gotten away with it. He must have gotten away with it, too.

How many thieves get away with the perfect crime every day? The kid wondered. How long can they keep doing that? Maybe the movies were wrong, and crime does pay, after all. The horror stories, the cautionary tales – propaganda to keep the masses in line. Maybe there was room for more than just slipping through the cracks. Maybe there was a whole dark underbelly that operated like this. The kid always thought that kind of thing was over when the major crime families all got arrested in the eighties and nineties. The kid was wrong.

He kept searching his soul for guilt, but he didn’t find a shred. He began to feel guilty over that lack of guilt itself, punishing himself in any small way he could. He consoled himself with the thought of starting over again. He was starting a new life out here every single day. The extra few hundred dollars in his pocket was nothing. He decided to give it away, and piece by piece, he did.