Gregg Hurwitz: Prodigal Son

A block or two over, a car is blaring Run-DMC with the bass cranked up high. The sound fades. Tyrell’s sneaker scrapes the asphalt as he leans in even closer. “And?”

“He was built ,” Van Sciver says. “Muscles like this. And badass. Had a scar across his cheek. And a Porsche.”

The details are delicious, tantalizing. Evan’s stomach pitches with excitement, as if he’s in roller-coaster free fall.

A wino shuffles by tangentially, and Van Sciver shoots him a hostile glare. “Get the fuck outta here, Horace.” Back to his captive crowd. “This guy, he said he went to a house—best house ever. A real home. Hot meals three times a day and Nintendo and a pool. You get your own room. Said they trained him.”

“To do what?” Evan asks.

Van Sciver has to look down to meet his eyes. “No one knows.”

2Serious Business

Sixty-five motherfucking dollars.

That’s all it costs to jar your life off track. No—not just off track. Pile-driven into the side of a mountain like a locomotive blasted off the rails.

That’s why Andrew Duran was here working the midnight shift at an impound lot on the East Side, crammed into a booth not much bigger than a doghouse, breathing in the overpowering scent of Old Spice deodorant from Juan, who worked the shift before him. Minimum wage put Duran at $420 a week, but by the time federal, state, Social Security, Medicare, and wage garnishment took a bite outta him, it looked more like $300 out the back end. Which was about $500 less than what he needed to pay for child support and food and a roof over his head, but then again he could be a broke-ass beggar selling smoked-down cigarette butts in Calcutta, so he tried not to complain.

Perspective.

That’s what they talked about on all them self-help podcasts. That’s what they talked about in the meetings, too. There but for the grace of God. One day at a time. Nothing’s so bad a drink won’t make it worse .

Clichés, sure, but he’d lost enough already not heeding them. He’d lost everything.

He sighed and stared through the grease-smudged window, king of all he surveyed. Which at the moment was a labyrinth of smashed-to-hell impound vehicles—rusting VW Bugs, wrecked Ferraris, twisted American muscle. Some had blood spatter on the headrests. Others had claw marks scouring the paint jobs at the trunks where the drug dogs got after it. A few, missing wheels, had been hauled in here on the back of a trailer and left for dead.

Duran’s job was to watch over them and sign off on a confusion of forms when cops or tow-truck drivers or beleaguered owners came to claim them.

Cerebral work, this.

How he’d gotten here from owning his own home—even a shitty-ass one-bedroom in the city of El Sereno—he’d never know. Wait, scratch that. He did know.

Sixty-five motherfucking dollars.

For a motherfucking parking ticket he got in the twenty seconds when he ran inside a liquor store to get change for the meter. He’d stopped for lunch in Bakersfield on his way to visit his homey in Kern Valley State Prison eighteen months back. Twenty seconds was all it took.

Duran couldn’t pay it ’cuz he’d promised Brianna he’d hit the child-support mark that month for Sofia, who was turning eleven and needed better clothes for middle school. Which she deserved, ’cuz, shit, she drew the short straw when she got him as a daddy, so the least he could try’n do was help Bri get her some shirts from Walmart instead of the Salvation Army so the kids wouldn’t make fun of her the way he got made fun of his whole damn childhood.

So he’d spent the sixty-five bucks on his daughter instead of on the Bakersfield Department of Transportation. And a few weeks later when he was pulled over for a broke taillight ($25 fine, $2 surcharge, $35 court dismissal fee, $115 parts and labor to actually fix the piece of shit), he got another surprise when the cop ran the plates. An outstanding warrant. Turned out that Johnny Mac, Duran’s supervisor on the roof-inspection gig, had put on a half dozen parking tickets when he’d borrowed Duran’s car for lunch runs, and he’d torn up every last one like the Irish fuck he was. On top of that shit, Duran learned he’d already missed a court date he didn’t even know he had, and failure to appear was serious business, even if it was for Johnny Mac’s tickets.

The cop wrote up every last late fee, every penalty assessment, every vehicle-code infraction, the accrued fines tripling and tripling till they had more zeros than the national deficit.

Duran felt himself slumping in the driver’s seat, a punch-drunk boxer on a ring-corner stool. “This is some bullshit,” he muttered. “I was on my way to fix it.”

“You’re one of those, huh?” the cop said. “Nothing’s ever your fault?”

“Nope,” Duran said. “I make plenty of mistakes, just like everyone else. But guys like me don’t catch a break when they need it.”

The cop tore off the sheaf of tickets, handed them through the window, then breathed out a breath that smelled like Tic Tacs. “Ah,” he said, smiling with his shiny white teeth. “Lemme guess. I’m a racist, right?”

“No,” Duran said, “I’m thinking you’re enough of a asshole to do this to rich white dudes, too.”

That didn’t go over so hot.

The courtroom was packed to the gills, all body heat and working-class weariness, the judge hammering through her docket. Duran’s was the seventeenth case that hour.

He had some scrawled notes he’d prepared from late-night online searches, but ever since childhood courthouses had made him nervous. His hands were sweaty enough to make the ink run, and the judge was exhausted and impatient, and he couldn’t really blame her, ’cuz he was stuttering like a idiot and she had a million more cases to get through before lunch.

She’d imposed a civil judgment, the statute getting an upgrade from an infraction to a misdemeanor, and his only real option to clear the warrant was to go to jail. Turns out it was pay-to-stay up in those parts—$100 booking fee, $50 each day inside. A week to get out meant a fat hotel bill and enough missed appointments for Johnny Mac to fire his ass, and in the meantime them parking tickets kept gobbling up interest and penalties like Pac-Man snarfing him some dots.

When Duran hit the outside, he scrambled for work, took whatever he could find. They garnished his wages, but he swore he’d only let that eat into him and not Sofia. For the income he sublet his tiny little house in El Sereno to a Korean businessman who was barely ever in the country but whose checks never bounced. Then Duran sold his car for more cash and rented a not-to-code room above a Chinese kitchen. He mailed a check every month to Brianna with a note to use it well for his little girl.

Who he was too ashamed to see.

Living where he was in a place no social worker would approve for visitation. Dressing like he did. Smelling like he did, the stink of General Tso’s chicken seeping up through the floorboards at all hours. He could hardly stand to look in the mirror. He couldn’t imagine what he would look like to Sofia. He’d been through a lot, but he thought if his little girl looked at him with disgust—or worse, pity—it just might break him for good.

Sofia begged to see him—Bri angrily recounted every last tear for him in their monthly call. And he wanted nothing in the world more than to see her. But something stopped him. An invisible hand on his shoulder, keeping him from stepping forward. That familiar voice in his ear, whispering, You ain’t good enough .

You don’t deserve it .

Not until he paid off the last $775 he owed in fines. Till he moved back into his house like he was his own man and fixed up a proper bed for his little girl to sleep in. Till he saved enough to show up with a properly wrapped toy and take her out for a meal and not worry about if she ordered a soda or got a appetizer, too.