Макс Коллинз - Spree

She drank the glass of Old Grand-Dad like it was soda pop and Cole grinned his pretty white grin and poured her some more.

“F-food stamps?” she managed to ask.

“Food stamps. You work in a grocery store. A little mom-and-pop affair, like in the good old days. None of this corporate horseshit.”

“Actually McFee’s is a fairly big store,” she said. “But, yes, it’s not affiliated with any major chain. That’s the problem. They can undersell us.”

“Volume,” Cole nodded. “I stopped in the place — your daddy has a right fine meat counter.”

She couldn’t quite tell if the phrase “right fine” was an affectation or if this guy really was the hick of all hicks. Despite the tacky decor around him, Cole Comfort did not seem stupid, or even naive. Maybe bad taste and stupidity didn’t necessarily go hand in hand.

“The meat is what brings in what customers we do have,” she told him. “Daddy should never have expanded.”

Cole nodded, sagely this time; lines of experience pulled at the corners of his mouth. “It’s the bane of American business. Expansion. Nobody’s satisfied with a small success. They gotta expand till they go bust.”

Bane of American business? Where was this guy coming from?

“We’re in a position to help you, little lady,” Cole said.

Little lady yet.

“How?”

“We deal in food stamps, my family does. Lyle and Cindy Lou and me.”

She had not yet met Cindy Lou, but already an image was forming somewhere between Daisy Mae and Lolita.

“What do you mean, exactly? Your family deals in food stamps?”

“The black market, girl. Wise up. Black market food stamps. We stay strict away from counterfeit.” He waved his hands like an umpire saying, OUT! “The real thing or nothin’ at all.”

“Well... uh, where do you get them?”

“How we get them ain’t your concern.”

“I don’t exactly understand what is my concern in all this...” Perhaps she shouldn’t have gulped that Old Grand-Dad.

“You’re the perfect conduit, the very conduit we been lookin’ for.”

Against her better judgment, she drank again from the Road Runner glass. Just a sip this time. To arm her against a man who said both “ain’t” and “conduit.”

“You can buy them from us at a thirty percent discount,” he said. “Seventy cents on the dollar.”

Now she got it. “And when I send them in...”

“The government gives you a dollar. That’s thirty cents you clear, each. And you don’t pay us till you get yours.”

She knew that wasn’t as small potatoes as it at first sounded; even with their limited business, their higher prices, McFee’s had several hundred dollars a month come in, in food stamps. Other stores their size — stores with chain-style discount prices — would do a land-office business in food stamps; at least ten times what her father’s store did.

Cole was patting her arm. “You could help your pa. He wouldn’t even have to know. You could feather your own nest, too. The governmental never suspect a thing. We’ll help you figger what you can get away with, a store your size.”

“I wouldn’t be your only... conduit, then?”

“No,” Comfort said, his smile cracking his leathery face, “we got one or two others. But a good conduit is hard to find.”

Sew that on a sampler.

“Where do you get the stamps, anyway?”

“Nobody suffers,” Cole said. “They can get ’em replaced, if you’re worried about poor people.”

“I just want to know how it works. I know you said it wasn’t my concern, but really it is. If I’m going to be involved in something... criminal... I want to know the extent of it.”

Cole shrugged. Then his face darkened. “I hate that nigger shit!”

He was glaring past her. She glanced in that direction, at the big-screen TV, where Tina Turner was prancing, singing, in pantomime. Cole reached for a TV Guide next to him on the couch and hurled it at Lyle; the corner of it hit Lyle in the head. The son winced but did not even glance back, and certainly didn’t change the channel. He was apparently used to this form of criticism on his father’s part.

“Anyway,” Cole said, his distaste lingering in his sour expression, “we know when the stamps go out — third of the month — and that on the fifth they’re in mailboxes. Lyle and Cindy Lou just go out and about like good little mailmen, rain nor hail nor sleet, only in reverse. Taking letters out of mailboxes, not putting in.”

“It’s that easy?” she said. Repressing, and that petty?

“Yup,” he said. “It ain’t so small-time, either,” he added, as if reading her thoughts. “There can be as much as two hundred bucks’ worth in one envelope. Also, some people sell ’em to us direct. We pay a quarter on the dollar.”

“People sell their own food stamps?”

“People got things they want to buy and not eat. Sure. And we got some bars that we do business with.”

“Bars? You can’t buy liquor and cigarettes with food stamps...”

“Of course not — not ’bove board.”

“Oh,” she said. It was easy enough for Angie to figure how that could work: a bartender letting a customer use a dollar food stamp for thirty cents or so worth of booze or smokes.

“It’s a safe way to make a little extra bread, honey,” Cole said, in his fatherly way. “You won’t get caught. You almost can’t get caught. What are you doing, except moving some paper around? It ain’t even embezzling, really.”

“It is criminal,” she said.

“Much in life is,” Cole granted.

She said she wanted to think about it, and, after a particularly slow week in her father’s store, she called Cole Comfort and said yes. She never dated Lyle again. Once a month she drove to the farmhouse and got a supply of food stamps, bringing them cash in return. The Comforts always wanted cash.

And her dad, her sweet dad, tough ex-marine that he was, was so blessedly naive. He really thought business was up.

It crushed her to have to pull the rug out.

But it was time. She’d had a call from the Department of Social Services; an investigation into food stamp abuse was under way. An appointment to “interview” her had been set up. She didn’t know what this meant exactly, but she did know it was time to get out.

She’d socked a few thousand away, and bought a few toys outright (the Mazda, for one) and got her father on his feet, even if it was only temporarily. She didn’t know where she was going, but she did know she’d been in Jefferson City long enough. With her nest egg and her college degree and her looks, she could go anywhere, if she could just weather the Department of Social Services storm.

For right now, however, she was at the Comforts’, for one last time.

She was greeted at the door by Cindy Lou, a cute curvy strawberry-blond freckle-faced sixteen-year-old in a calico halter top and short jeans and bare feet with red-painted toenails. Somewhere between Daisy Mae and Lolita.

“Daddy’s upstairs figuring the books,” Cindy Lou said, ushering her into where John Wayne and Elvis, as always, ruled. “He’ll be down in a jif.”

And he was, in his usual Hee Haw apparel and his almost seductive smile. He said to Cindy Lou, “Take the pickup and get ’er gassed.”

She clasped her hands together in front of breasts that Angie would have died for. “Can I, Daddy?”

He reached in his pocket and withdrew a twenty and, grinning shit-eatingly, said, “What’s it look like?”

She snatched it out of his hands, and he patted her round little butt in a less than paternal way as she departed. Angie wondered for a moment whether Cindy Lou was old enough to have a license, before dismissing it as a foolish question.