The Return of Jonah Gray Read Free Page B

Europe. How can I help you, sir?” I always tried to be polite at work. During any audit, and in the necessary correspondence before and after, I strove to remain detached but formal. I called people sir and ma’am and addressed them by their salutation and last name, assuming I knew it. There were strict codes of behavior to be followed when interacting with the public, and I took a certain pride in adhering to them. People will grasp at any excuse to hate the IRS, and one of my jobs was to keep them empty-handed.
    â€œMy name’s Gordon, and I’m calling to tell you to stop what you’re doing. Just stop it! Cease and desist!”
    I glanced at the pad of paper on my desk. Earlier, I’d been doodling. Pictures of sailboats and rough waters. Pictures of trees, uprooted, leaves piling and swirling around them. “What I’m doing?” I repeated.
    â€œPestering an honest, upstanding, hardworking man,” the man named Gordon said.
    â€œDo I know you?” I asked. “Was I pestering you?”
    Gordon harrumphed into the phone. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to get your mitts on all of us. Well, you won’t. Not if I can help it,” he said.
    â€œBut—” I tried to cut in.
    â€œYou make trouble for the people who don’t deserve it and can least afford it. You dig and you pry, but for what?
    â€œSir—” I tried again.
    â€œAll you need to know is that I pay my taxes so I have as much right to say this as anyone.” Then he hung up.
    I stared at the phone as if it could explain what had just happened. The IRS receives a slew of complaints every tax season, but they’re shunted to the consumer-affairs department, not to individual auditors. Had there been a complaint about my work? Had I audited Gordon in the past? It seemed to me that he would have said as much had it been true. And I thought I would have recognized his voice. I traced back through the current tax season. What had I done that was so awful? The truth was, I’d hardly managed to do much of anything.
    â€œThat is not a happy face.”
    At the entrance to my cubicle stood Ricardo and Susan, an auditor a few years my junior.
    â€œI just got the strangest phone call,” I said, trying to shake Gordon’s voice from my head. “What are you two up to?”
    â€œWe have a question,” Susan said.
    â€œSusan didn’t believe that some people eat dirt when they’re pregnant,” Ricardo said.
    â€œDirt?” Susan asked me. “Come on.”
    â€œNot just while pregnant,” I said, “but apparently it’s more common then. Pica disorder is what it’s called. If I’m remembering right, the official diagnosis requires eating non-nutritive substances for more than a month. You know, dirt, chalk, paper—”
    â€œPaper?” Susan asked.
    â€œLegal pads?” Ricardo added, with a smirk.
    â€œAnd we’re talking about adults?” Susan went on.
    I ignored Ricardo and answered Susan. “ Pica is from the Latin for magpie, ” I said. “I guess those birds will eat anything.”
    Ricardo turned to Susan, a broad smile across his face. He held out his hand, palm up.
    â€œFine. You win,” she said.
    â€œWin what?” I asked.
    â€œI bet Susan that she could pick any topic and you would know some weird fact about it,” Ricardo said. “And I was right. You are our resident warehouse of useless information.”
    â€œPica’s not useless information,” I said. I had audited someone with the disorder a few years before. There’d been a question about whether the psychological treatment was deductible. There had also been a few chewed-up pages in the file. “No information is,” I said. “It just depends what you need it for.”
    â€œI should have asked the one about code-breaking,” Susan muttered.
    â€œLike the