Confessions of a Tax Collector (13 page)

“Doesn’t your tour end soon?” I asked meekly. A lame attempt at diversion, but it had occurred to me, as he bit into the apple with that precise, annoying delicacy of his, that his tour actually ended thirty minutes before mine.

Good point,“ he said. ”Let’s head back. I have an errand to run—and there’s something I want to show you.“

He stood up and tossed the apple underhanded across his body twenty feet into the trash can, without looking. We walked in silence to my car. As it turned out, I did not have a ticket. I had two tickets. I wondered what Culpepper would do in this situation. Would he tear up the tickets, being the complete master of his universe? Or would he walk three blocks to the Powell police department and pay them on the spot, immediately? And, what was more important at the moment, what did he expect
me
to do? I slipped the tickets into the glove box.

He said nothing for the first twenty minutes of the drive back to Lakeside. The traffic was light on Highway 98. It was mid-afternoon and the sky had gone black; though afternoon thunderstorms were common in central Florida, they were not the sort of disturbances you grew accustomed to, and you did not venture into one without good reason. My reason was very good: I wanted to get back to the office and put an end to this day. I wondered what he planned to show me and what exactly his errand was, but I did not ask. He would have considered it a show of weakness if I did.

It was not until we reached the southernmost outskirts of Lakeside, with its tired strip malls, mom-and-pop video stores, small and large engine repair shops, portable vegetable stands and the inevitable check-cashing, usurious signature-loan shop, that Culpepper abruptly said, “Slow down. Take it slow through here.”

The speed limit was forty-five. I slowed to thirty, as Culpepper pointed out the small business that he had worked for off and on for the past five years. This one’s owner borrowed from his daughter to full-pay; that one burned his store to the ground and used half the insurance proceeds to pay him, the other half to rebuild. This one owed for every quarter, but the old man would cash in bonds every time Culpepper’s shadow crossed the door. That one had a nervous breakdown and faithfully mailed her payment to him from her hospital bed. That one had been real trouble until he showed up one morning with the locks and chains and seized his prized Mercedes parked in public access. There was no hint of pride in his voice as he rattled off these anecdotal conquests. He wasn’t bragging. Culpepper never bragged. I was still too green to know that he was disclosing confidential information, a serious offense in the eyes of the Service, a cause for dismissal. Years later, I heard a story, probably apocryphal, of the mid-level manager who on a Sunday drive pointed out to his wife a house his office was considering seizing. The house happened to belong to a woman in his wife’s bridge club. The manager was subsequently fired. As Culpepper spoke, the dark canopy above us opened up and a torrential rain came down. My old wiper blades screeched in protest when I turned them on. I slowed to twenty-five as the lightning popped directly over the car and the thunder threatened to rattle the doors off their hinges.

“If this thing shakes to pieces,” Culpepper said, perfectly deadpan, referring to my Nissan, “I call divvies on the tires.” He had noticed the only decent piece of equipment on the vehicle. “Pull over.”

I obeyed at once, without the slightest protest or questioning why. I eased the car off the road into the gravel parking lot of a used-car dealership, bob’s reliable wrecks, read the plywood sign by the road. I turned off the engine, and for a moment all the world was a swirling gray mass and the sound of rain, hateful in its ferocity; we had to raise our voices slightly to be heard.

“It’s times like these when I think about the end of the world!” Culpepper shouted at me. “What do you think about?”

“I worry about my roof leaking.”

“You were pretty frustrated back there, weren’t you?” He was referring to the court records search. “It can be confusing, but at least Powell has them on microfiche. Wait till you work Hardee or one of those smaller counties, with all the filings in these big books, handwritten, fucking nineteenth century. I didn’t understand what the hell I was doing in a courthouse for my first three years.”

Across the gravel lot, in a little yellow building, through a smudged window, a portly man whose name was probably Bob was staring at my car. There were a half-dozen other cars in the lot, and mine seemed to fit right in.

“It’s a tool,” Culpepper said. “A means to an end. A necessary evil.”

I nodded, though I had no idea what he meant.

“Never lose sight of the point,” he went on. “Never forget why you’re here. That’s why I was showing you those businesses. You know, you could drive down any street in America on any given day, and I guarantee you over half of the businesses you pass would have tax trouble—whether it Cached our level or not, there would be some problem with their taxes, maybe that’s because the system’s too complex or people are stupid or a combination of both, I really don’t care. The point is, that’s why we’re here.”

“To help them,” I said, helpfully.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Oh, maybe that happens, like a happy accident, but helping people isn’t your job, Yancey. You want to help people, become a social worker. Our job is to feed the beast.”

“Feed the what?”

“The beast.”

He pulled out his pocket commission and flipped it open. I glanced over at it, then looked away. On every revenue officer’s ID, there was a drawing of the U.S. Treasury Building and, beside that, a photograph of the revenue officer. He snapped the commission closed and said, “Everything else is peripheral, even trivial. And, in order to feed the beast, Congress has given us tools that turn due process into some kind of academic exercise, like a bunch of monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Are you following this? This is very important. If you don’t get this, you’re fucking doomed. You’ll never like this job, and if you don’t want to lose it, you better learn to like it. It’s all perception, Yancey, it’s all how you see yourself. You know what you are? You know what you became when you took that oath?”

I shook my head no—I had no idea what I had become.

“A fucking demigod is what you became. You think I’m being hyperbolic? You have an English degree, right? You know what hyperbole is?”

I nodded. I knew what it was. Apparently Culpepper did too, or at least he practiced it often enough.

He said, “Think about it, Yancey. If you don’t think about anything else when you go home tonight, think about this. With a stroke of your pen, you can take away someone’s life savings. You can take their paycheck. You can take their car. You can take everything they own except the clothes on their fucking back, and sometimes you can take that, if you do it right. It’s simple: they owe taxes, you can do that. You can do all that, and on whose authority can you do that?
On your own.
Once you’re out of your training year you pretty much have carte blanche. You are the only sheriff in town, the sole cock in the fucking chicken coop. You’re like a medieval prince: you have the right to everything, because
you are the entire federal government.
So keep that in mind for the next eight months. Keep it in mind for your whole career. This job is about one thing and one thing only, and that one thing is not called ‘government service.’ You want to know what that one thing is called?”

“What?” I whispered. I didn’t know if he could hear me over the roaring rain, but I doubted it mattered. Culpepper was on a roll; his eyes were burning with the fire of his zealotry, the righteousness of his cause. It was at that moment I realized that William Culpepper might very well be insane.

“Power, Power over… everyone. Think of your inventory as your kingdom and you are lord of the fucking manor. You are a prince. This job is about power and we, you and me, we are the princes of power.”

He nodded, staring into the downpour, fists clenched on his thighs.

The merciful thing about Florida thunderstorms, like Culpepper’s monologues, is that they eventually end. I pulled out of the lot, anxious to finish this leg of my journey into the heart of darkness, but Culpepper diverted me from my chosen path yet again, directing me down a series of residential streets, looping first west, then north, then back west, then south, and finally due east, until I was hopelessly lost in my own hometown.

“Pull in here.”

I turned right into the entrance of an apartment complex called The Willows. There were no willows that I could see. The apartments occupied six buildings, all facing a common area where a fountain fitfully gurgled, its spout probably choked with algae and the remains of aquatic creatures that had the misfortune of exploring the pool’s stagnant waters. Each building was two stories and contained four apartments, two down and two up. It was to Building Six that Culpepper led me. At first, I thought he was taking me home to meet his wife, but then I remembered that he lived on the far north side of town in a new development called Deer Run Creek, where neither deer nor creek ran. So it was not his wife, but someone else he was taking me to meet. I followed him up the flight of stairs to Apartment 604 and stood two steps below him as he knocked on the door.
Rap-rap, rap-rap
—it sounded like a signal. A voice cried from within, “Who is it?” A woman’s voice.

Culpepper said, “Me,” and the door opened.

She was young, about twenty, wearing blue jean shorts and a white T-shirt. Her feet were bare, her face, arms, and legs perfectly tanned. For an absurd moment, I was absolutely convinced he had taken me here to meet his sister. She stepped back, with a smile as dazzling as the recent lightning, and he motioned me to follow him.

She stood on her tiptoes—he was four or five inches taller—and gave him a peck on the lips.

“This is an unexpected pleasure,” she said, giving his bicep a squeeze. No, definitely not his sister. My discomfort increased tenfold. She flashed a quick smile in my direction and headed for the refrigerator. Culpepper motioned to the sofa, confident I would take the hint and sit down. This, then, was his errand: a rendezvous with his girlfriend. The prince of power practicing noblesse oblige. Now, what was the point of this? A pertinent question, because I understood even at this early stage in our relationship that everything Culpepper did was calculated for effect. There was no wasted motion, no gesture not designed to manipulate or control. He was a true Zen master, applying his philosophy to every nook and cranny of his life. He had brought me here for a reason, but what was that reason? Was this a demonstration, a challenge, a threat? Or did it have anything to do with me at all? Maybe he had promised her that he would drop by for the Budweiser she now handed him. Maybe I was so insignificant in his kingdom it really didn’t matter if I knew he was cheating on his wife or that he was cheating on his government—but, no; I checked my watch: his tour of duty was over.
I
was cheating on the government.

“Carrie,” he addressed the girl. “This is Rick Yancey. He’s my new trainee.”

“Hi!” Carrie said. She knelt beside Culpepper, sitting back on her heels while he crossed his legs, very Michael Corleone-ish, in the easy chair, sipping his beer. She stroked his arm with her fingertips. The scene was so sycophantic I would have laughed if I had not been morally outraged and, if the truth were known, scared out of my wits.

“So what do you like best about the job so far?” she asked, trying to be sociable.

“The hours,” I replied.

“Billy talks about it all the time,” she said. I assumed she meant the job. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. She turned to Culpepper. “I’m glad you came by,” she said, having fulfilled her social obligation to me. “The storm knocked out my power for twenty minutes.” There was a pouting coquettishness to her voice designed to have an effect on Culpepper—or Billy-
Billy.
The name didn’t fit him. It sounded immature, soft, a squishy name, and Culpepper definitely was anything but squishy. He made no move to reassure her, as she clearly expected.

“Carrie is a student at Central Florida College,” he said to me. “Rick went to CFC for a year,” he said to Carrie.

“Really?” She couldn’t have been less interested. Her gaze—in fact, her entire being—was focused on Culpepper. She scooted closer to his legs, gripping his forearm hard. I had the impression that, if by some miracle the opportunity presented itself, she would have crawled inside his skin. I wondered if she knew he was married, then noted his wedding ring glittering on his finger. She knew, then, and it didn’t matter. My moral outrage gave way to pity, as it always does when confronted with the heartbreakingly innocent or the mentally unbalanced. Now I was in the presence of both.

“A long time ago,” I told Carrie. “Back then, students either had to live with their parents or on campus.” This was to discourage the very thing going on before my eyes: Central Florida College was a Methodist school and, like me, suffered from frequent moral outrage.

“Oh, it’s the same way now.”

Culpepper said, “The school doesn’t know she’s living here.”

“Billy and I met at Hooters,” she said, as if I had asked her where they met. “That’s where I work. My parents
hate
it that I work there.” She pulled at Culpepper’s arm urgently. “Which reminds me, the rent’s due tomorrow and I’m fifty bucks short.”

Without a word, Culpepper freed himself from her clutches and pulled out his wallet. She folded the cash he handed her and tucked it down the front of her white T-shirt.

“Pay you back later,” she said, and kissed the tip of his nose. My stomach did a slow roll. Culpepper, who had to give the office weekly pregnancy updates (his wife and he had been trying for over a year), was this girl’s sugar daddy. Dear God, I wondered, why the hell did he bring me here? It was obvious this little visit was entirely for my benefit. Culpepper was sending me a message, but what was the message?

“So how long have you two been—?” I didn’t know the correct way to put it.