(2004) Citizen Vince Read Free

world, baby.”
    “Smoke? You got any smoke?”
    At the door, he exchanges lifted credit cards and lids of pot forcash and fleshy hugs. Although he rejects the offers of freebies and trade-outs, he’d be lying if he didn’t admit this was his favorite part of each day, this bit of stage business outside Sam’s, when the guys envy him and the women make their plays for him and he holds them off with pinched credit cards and at-cost dope.
    When his cards and pot are gone, Vince continues out the door. Outside, he hears his name. He turns and sees Beth looking at her shoes. She glances up at Vince, all eyes, her chin still pointed down; it’s a sweet, demure move, and the fact that she has no idea she’s doing it makes it that much sweeter. “Thanks for earlier, Vince,” she says. “I don’t know why I get so…”
    “It’s okay,” Vince says. “You been studying?” As long as Vince has known her, Beth has been studying to get her real estate license. She studies, but never actually signs up to take the test.
    “Yeah.” She shrugs. “I get to run an open house next week. Sort of a trial run. Larry’s having three, and he needs someone to run one for him. If I sell it, he’ll give me half a percent commission under the table.”
    “Yeah?” Vince asks. “I’ll come by.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. Maybe I’ll even buy the house.”
    “Very funny.” She squeezes his arm, does that thing with her eyes again—up and down, a flash of release—then turns to go back inside.
     
    CARS LEER ON the street behind Vince; headlights trace his back. Who was that girl from junior high school? Got drunk with some older kids and stepped in front of a car. Angie Wolfe. Thirty-nine.
    Vince’s hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker, and his shoulders are hunched up around his ears. Only six blocks to the donut shop and he likes the walk fine in the crisp cold, sun still a rumor on the Idaho border, his shadow slowing up for him as henears the next streetlight. What about old Danello, whose body was never technically found? Doesn’t matter. That’s forty.
    The donut shop is regrettably named Donut Make You Hungry, and is owned by Ted and Marcie, an old gray couple who come in for a few minutes every day to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee with their old gray friends. It works fine for Vince; he gets to manage the place, and Ted and Marcie give him all the space he needs.
    He approaches the building—fever-colored stucco on a busy corner a mile from downtown. Lights on inside. That’s good. Vince walks down the alley to grab the newspaper, slides the rubber band off, and stands beneath a flickering streetlight to make out the front page: Carter and Reagan in a dead heat, with the debate tonight. The Iranian parliament is meeting to look for a solution to the hostage crisis. He glances at headlines but doesn’t read stories, flips instead to the sports page. Alabama plus fifteen at Mississippi State. Seems heavy. Vince closes the paper and starts for the front door when something moves in his periphery.
    He cocks his head and takes a step deeper into the alley, clutching the paper to his chest. A car starts. Cadillac. Its lights come on and Vince reflexively covers his eyes while the old voices tell him to run. But there is no place to dive in this alley, nowhere to hide, so he waits.
    The burgundy Cadillac Seville inches toward him and the driver’s window sinks with a mechanical whir.
    Vince bends at the waist. “Jesus, Len. What are you doing here?”
    Len Huggins’s face is a conference of bad ideas: baby corn teeth, thin lips, broken nose, pocked cheeks, and two bushy black capital- L sideburns (“For Len, man! Get it? L? Len?”). Len runs a stereo store where Vince uses the phony credit cards to buy merchandise, and get cash advances. Len removes the aviator sunglasses he wears even at night, and slides them into his shirt pocket. “Vincers!” He extends his hand out the window.
    “What are you doing