Introduction

Levison is a sly storyteller . . . by turns funny, sad, and insightful.Booklist

Plenty of humor in [Levison's] gruff caper, but he punctuates the laughs with just the right hint of sadness. . . . A lean crime story and a stark alternative to glossier capers.Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Iain Levison:

Levison is the real deal . . . bracing, hilarious, and dead on.The New York Times Book Review

?There is a naked, pitiless power in his work.??USA Today

Mr. Levison writes tight, punchy prose, with deadpan humor and a mixture of savvy about and sympathy for his fellow working stiffs.The Wall Street Journal

Exciting, funny, poignant and sociologically important.Chicago Tribune

An amusingly bleak little (im)moral fable. . . . A gleeful satire.Detroit Free Press

Loaded with hilarious deadpan humor.Dallas Morning News

In a dying Pennsylvania coal town, three firends are looking for a way out. Mitch is a rebellious malcontent whose bad attitude gets him fired from a chain big box store. Doug can identify any pill by sight and any ?80s rock song by the first three notes but doesn?t understand credit scores. Kevin got married and had a kid too soon and is now on parole after serving jail time for growing marijuana. The three of them dabble in petty crime and believe they have a talent for it. They start by stealing a high-definition TV, then set their sights on bigger scores. Soon things begin to get out of hand.

Iain Levison is the author of A Working Stiff's Manifesto, an account of his post-collegiate work experience, consisting of forty-two jobs in ten years, and of two previous novels, Since the Layoffs and Dog Eats Dog. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

MITCH WAS WATCHING a forty-two-inch plasma TV
when the woman came up behind him. She was pretty but
rough looking, hippieish, with long hair falling all around
what appeared to be a brown bedsheet. He had been staring
at the $1,799 price tag on the TV, knowing he would
never own it, not at what they paid him to manage at the
Accu-mart. He would never own it unless he stole it, and
he was wondering where they kept the inventory sheets for
the high-end electronics.
“Hi,” she said, her tone not friendly but brusque, as if
the salutation was a military call to look alert.
Mitch turned slowly from the TV. “How can I help you?”
“Are you a manager?”
Oh, Christ. One of the employees had pissed her off. It
could have been any of them; none of them gave a shit.
Any of them but Charles, the Nigerian, whom Mitch had just sent on a mission to buy an eighth of kind bud while
still on the clock.
“I am.”
“I read that all your clothes are made by political prisoners
in China. Is that true?”
She had an angelic smile on her face while she asked it,
but she had really come looking for a fight. She was holding
a candle she was going to buy, and she had to be feeling
bad about coming to a superstore, a huge corporate conglomerate,
to buy a cheap candle, and now she felt the
need to pick a fight with a manager to make herself feel
better. This way, when she told her hippie friends where
she got the candle, she could also add the story of how she
had argued with one of the corporate henchmen, which
made her a supporter of the little guy and a friend of the
environment, rather than a cheap bitch who needed a
candle and was too lazy to make one herself, like the Earth
child she was posing as would do.
“You’ll have to ask in Clothing,” Mitch said.
This happened once a week. Accu-mart was not a store
with good media coverage. Every time one opened, there
were protests. They were exploiting Third World laborers,
they were building huge parking lots which caused a runoff
of dirt and oil to enter the water supply, and they were
underpaying their employees. That last one was true enough,
Mitch knew. But people needed cheap shit, so the stores
were always packed. If people really wanted Accu-mart to go away, they could just stop shopping there, a rule which
applied to the candle-toting hippie bitch who was trying to
pick a fight.
“Nice candle,” he added pleasantly.
She put the candle down on a TV set, as if she had never
intended to buy it, had just been carrying it around in case
the lights went out. “That’s how you can sell them so cheap,
isn’t it? You don’t pay the people who make them for their
labor.”
“Ma’am, I really have no idea. This stuff just comes in on
a truck.”
“Well don’t you wonder where it came from? Who made
it? Because they’re paying your salary, you know.”
“Yeah, they are,” said Mitch. These issues had been
addressed in the training video, and Mitch knew what he
was supposed to say. Growing global economy, market
forces, people being offered jobs and earning money, as
opposed to not working and earning no money, blah blah
blah. The corporate response sounded hollow even to him,
and he didn’t care. “If someone is making money off these
people, it ain’t me.”
She stared at him.
“Lady,” he said, tired, forgetting his script. “What do
you want from me? Why don’t you go over to the coffee
shop and say something to them? You think coffee pickers
in Colombia make any money? How about the people who
make your car tires?” It was burbling forth, all the stuff he thought about while he restocked floor mats and air fresheners
and added up time cards. He knew it would only be
a few seconds before he started casually using the word
fuck, which certainly hadn’t been in the training video, and
then he would be back on the unemployment line and his
half-assed health insurance would be gone and he would be
cooking at the restaurant with his roommate, Doug. He
took a deep breath, stopped himself, and stared at her
blankly.
“You people,” she said, marveling at Mitch’s insensitivity.
“You know, that parking lot used to be a forest.” This was
clearly a first-time argument for her, and she had retreated
to the forest issue quickly. They usually put up a little more
of a fight before they started rambling about woodland
creatures and the purity of streams. “The runoff is going
into the streams and poisoning our drinking water.” She
turned to leave.
“It hasn’t been a forest since the First World War,” said
Mitch, levelheaded now, reciting the videotaped speech
word for word. “Before we paved it over, it was a dirt field
used as a junkyard by the Mulgrave Scrap Metal Company.”
But he was talking to her back now, and she was waving him
off as she walked away. She turned the corner and went
back toward housewares, probably to get another candle.
He turned his attention back to the TV, which was showing
a commercial for an acid reducer. High definition, baby.
He could see the pores in the actress’s face. It was like someone with an acidy stomach was actually in the room
with him. If he owned that TV, could life get any better?
• • •
MITCHELL ALDEN HAD been born with a number of gifts,
but overshadowing them all was the Curse of Poor Decision
Making. It was genetic. He remembered sitting in the
kitchen in the house where he grew up in Queens, listening
to his father talking to his business partner, who wanted to
get out of the indoor air-cleaning business and invest in
computers. “Dammit, I don’t know how long this computer
fad is going to last,” he remembered his dad saying, trying
to talk his partner into staying with selling Smoke-Eeters.
“But as long as I’m alive, people will be smoking in bars in
New York City.”
These words turned out to be true. Mitch’s dad died on
the Long Island Expressway, six weeks before the ban on
smoking in New York City bars went into effect, because of
another error of judgment, this one involving a tractor
trailer’s stopping distance. Mitch carried on the family tradition
by joining the army and getting kicked out six weeks
later for failing a drug test, then going to community college
and majoring in English.
Upon graduating with an associate’s degree, Mitch was
fired up to start the career for which community college had
best prepared him, which was selling kind bud for a Canadian
smuggler he had met while in jail for his second DUI. But the smuggler disappeared and was never heard from
again, and standing in the parking lot of the Wilton Community
College, the mortarboard tucked under his arm and
the tenth call to the smuggler going unanswered on his cell
phone, Mitch looked around and saw the sign at the college
job fair:
ACCU-MART! NOW HIRING MANAGERS!
Fuck it, he thought. What else am I gonna do?
• • •
MITCH DIDN’T LOVE Accu-mart, but he didn’t hate it as
much as he had expected to. He thought he’d cash the
first two paychecks from the training program and then
find a job bartending somewhere until he could hook up
with a new pot contact, but soon realized that, despite its
claims to the contrary, Accu-mart expected very little of
him. The term manager was really just an excuse not to pay
him overtime, because he was rarely required to make a
decision, and when he did, it was scrutinized and doublechecked
by everyone at the store who outranked him. The
training manual had flattered him by pointing out that he
had been selected from a huge pool of available talent,
(though Mitch had noticed that no one he had seen filling
out an application at the community college job fair was
not also present on the first day of training) and the hiring
gurus had claimed that they found him to be the one of the bright lights of his generation. Then, perhaps blinded by
the glow of his brilliance, they stuck him back in the car
accessories department to rot. A few hours of inventory
control and some restocking here and there, and the rest
of the ten-hour shift consisted basically of just being on
the premises.
Being blazingly high sometimes helped move the shift
along. Today, Mitch had smoked his last buds on the way to
work and had been dreading spending the last five hours of
the shift straight and sober, when Charles had suggested he
make a weed run for both of them. Mitch had forked over
$50, leaving himself $27 to last three more days until payday.
Now he was wondering if dreading your job so much
that you paid the last of your money to avoid working it
with all your mental faculties intact might be an indicator
that it was time to get a different one.
“I wanna go home,” whined Denise. “I’m sick.”
Denise was Mitch’s new eighteen-year-old associate. He
had won her in a poker game. The department managers
had been playing cards with the new-hire lists as a way of
determining who got assigned where. Mitch had cleaned
house and wound up taking the two Nigerians on the list
(all the Nigerians worked hard and had good weed contacts)
and the only attractive girl. The downside was that
Denise, who was still in high school, had only applied at Accumart
so she could work in the clothing department and
hang out with her friends and get them discounts. She now found herself stocking brake pads and steering wheel covers
largely out of view of the public, so she was constantly
whining.
“You can go when Charles gets back,” Mitch said.
“Nooooooo,” she whined. “You sent him to buy weed.”
She looked at him saucily. Apparently, Charles couldn’t
keep his mouth shut.
“Did you at least finish stocking the order we got in?”
“Almost,” Denise said, now chirpy and pleasant, sensing
victory, any apparent signs of illness gone. “I just left the
smelly things out. I can’t stand picking up those boxes.
They make your hands smell.” She made a gagging face.
“All right, thanks. You’ve done a good day’s work.”
“Thanks, bye,” said Denise, heading for the time cards.
“Your fifty-three minutes of service to the Accu-mart
Corporation have been invaluable . . .” he called after her,
but the swinging doors leading to the stockroom were
already banging shut, and through the circular scratched
green Plexiglas windows he could see her beautiful blonde
head bending over the time cards. Dammit. Now he was
sober, bored, and had no one to look at. Where was
Charles?
“Where’s Charles?” asked Bob Sutherland, the store’s
general manager, who had crept up unnoticed. Sutherland
gave Mitch the creeps. He could be either bossy and demanding,
constantly trying to intimidate, or jovial and overly
friendly. He was also the stupidest man Mitch had ever worked for. A few months earlier at a manager’s meeting,
Sutherland had pointed out how well the sporting goods
department at an Accu-mart in Santa Monica had done,
selling surfboards. He had recommended that the sporting
goods manager order ten surfboards, not taking into
account that it was late fall in Wilton, Pennsylvania, over
two hundred miles from any surf. The one board that had
been sold since still mystified everyone. Who was that guy
who bought a surfboard in central Pennsylvania as wintertime
approached? The other nine took up a block of racks
in the storeroom.
“I sent him to buy drugs,” Mitch said.
Sutherland laughed. Today it was Dr. Jekyll. “When he
comes back, give him these,” he said, handing Mitch two
envelopes full of forms. “There seems to be some kind of
problem with his paperwork at the INS.”
“Will do.”
“Seriously,” Sutherland said. “Where did he go?”
“Umm, I sent him to the Autocenter to pick up a case of
wiper blades. Ours didn’t come in.”
“Well, did you call the distributor? They should just
bring them over. It’s their problem, not ours.”
Fuck, now Sutherland was going to get on the phone to
the distributor and bitch at them about not dropping off
wiper blades that they had actually dropped off.
“It was really slow here,” said Mitch. “I figured it would
give him something to do.” “You could have had him clean the stockroom,” said
Sutherland, and then Charles walked through the stockroom
doors.
“Did you get the wiper blades?” Sutherland asked him.
This was turning into a disaster in a hurry.
Charles nodded and smiled. “Wiper blades,” he said
cheerfully, in heavily accented English, walking past both
of them to resume stocking the aisles. Charles’s English
was perfect, and he actually had very little accent, but he
could deflect conversations with feigned idiocy when he
wanted to. Cold air from the outside had blown in with
him, and Mitch smelled the heavy, warm scent of freshly
smoked reefer.
Sutherland turned to leave, either not smelling it or not
sure of what it was, or perhaps just anxious to go. Mitch had
developed the distinct feeling that Sutherland would leave
almost any conversation when an hourly employee showed
up, especially one who didn’t speak English as a first language.
He really didn’t like being around them. He babbled
for a few seconds on his way out about how Mitch should
make the distributors work for him, not the other way
around, and Mitch nodded dutifully, as if he was learning
something of great import from an extremely competent
man. Then thankfully, mercifully, he left.
Mitch turned to Charles. “Damn, that was nearly very
ugly,” he said. “Did you hookup?”
Charles nodded, his eyes so red they looked like he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He smiled broadly. “It’s
gooooooood,” he said.
• • •
KEVIN WOKE UP still remembering the dream. It was the
most undramatic of dreams, embarrassing in its banality,
but as with so many of his other dreams, he knew that
because of it, he would spend the day with a vague sense of
unease, of personal disappointment and dissatisfaction.
Lately he had begun to wonder if this was the only emotion
he ever felt.
In the dream, he had been standing in line in a coffee
shop with his six-year-old daughter, Ellie. All the other
people in line were young couples with children, and they
were glowing with delight at parenthood, at family, at their
place in the community. They seemed to sense Kevin’s
unease, and they regarded him with suspicion because of it.
He saw young couples sitting on the plush coffee shop
couches, looking at him and asking each other, in whispers,
who he thought he was fooling, hanging around in a coffee
shop with middle-class normal people, trying to pass himself
off as one of them. When Kevin blinked himself awake
and stared at the ceiling, he wasn’t sure if it actually had
been a dream, or if it was a memory of the last time he and
Linda and Ellie had gone to Starbuck’s.
As he felt Linda stir next to him, he reached over and
gently grabbed her ass, not as an overture of sex but more to see what she would do. Her hand shot down and pushed
him away. She had never been a morning person, but the
abruptness and finality of her movements surprised him.
“Ellie’s up,” Linda murmured angrily, her face partly
under the covers. “Could you get her breakfast started?”
Kevin hated it when Linda gave him orders disguised as
suggestions, especially when he had just been about to do
the thing she was ordering him to do. It was as if she
thought he was a small child, like Ellie. And worse, she
knew it annoyed him, so frequently she would know he was
about to do something and suggest it anyway, just to piss
him off. What was she expecting him to do? Just lie there
and let his kid go to school hungry? A deaf man would
know Ellie was up, and didn’t he get her breakfast ready
every day of the week?
As he got up, he pulled the covers aside quickly enough to
send a cold blast of air against Linda’s back. She slapped the
covers back down. Kevin shivered as he groped around in
the near darkness for his hooded sweatshirt. He could almost
see his breath in his own bedroom.
“We can’t keep the thermostat this low,” he said. “I know
it saves, like, a dollar a month, and that’s really important,
but I’d rather Ellie didn’t catch pneumonia.” Linda remained
quiet. Kevin knew he could bait her in the mornings, get
away with sarcasm and the odd dig here and there, simply
because he woke up quicker than she did. The arguing part
of her brain, which Kevin felt was most of it, warmed up slowly. It wasn’t usually until her second cup of coffee that
she started grinding away at his soul with her complaints
and observations and outright orders.
“Hey,” he said to the lump under the covers. “Doug’s
coming over this morning. I told him he could have some of
those double-A batteries we got in bulk from Accu-mart.”
“Goddammit,” said Linda, sitting up and smacking the
pillow. “Why can’t you just let me sleep for ten more minutes?
This is my one morning to sleep in . . .”
“I’m just telling you that Doug might come over,” Kevin
yelled back. “I didn’t want you to be weird if he came to the
door.” He tried storming out to end yet another conversation
with his wife by slamming a door, but one of Ellie’s toys
got caught in the doorway; he heard it cracking as he
yanked the door back open. He cursed, not out of concern
for the door, or the toy, but because the momentum of his
dramatic exit had been made laughable.
“Why do your idiot friends have to come over here?”
Linda asked as she slumped back into the pillows, almost
whining. “I don’t want them here. You spend enough time
with them in that rat hole they call an apartment.”
“It’s just Doug,” Kevin said, measured and patient, holding
the bedroom door open. He was suddenly overcome by
the urge to be nice. He wanted to go walk dogs today feeling
positive and pleasant, not worn down, with the residue
of yet another Linda argument circling around in his brain.
“He’s only coming over for a minute.”
“Why don’t you just move in with them?” Linda said,
now fully awake, eyes blazing with anger, directed straight
up at the ceiling. “You could all live together like a bunch
of animals and smoke pot all day long. That way your
daughter wouldn’t be asking me where you were all the
time—”
SLAM. There might have been more but Kevin didn’t
get a chance to hear it.
So much for having a positive and pleasant day.
• • •
“I DON’T WANT to be married to Kevin anymore,” said
Linda, as if she were mentioning that she was thinking
about changing her brand of fabric softener. Nice weather
we’re having. I have to take the car in for an oil change. I
think I’ll get rid of my husband.
She was rooting around through her junk drawer for a
pack of AA batteries, which Kevin had promised Doug he
could have if he came over. Doug had come late, and Kevin
had already gone to walk dogs. Linda had answered the
door and let Doug in, gone to get the batteries, and then
offhandedly mentioned that she was thinking about divorcing
his friend.
This was the last thing that Doug wanted to hear. He had
just smoked a fattie and was really enjoying his day off from
the restaurant. He had just come over to get the batteries so
he could fire up his remote control and spend the day baked on his couch. Though he had known Linda for years,
he thought of her as sketchy and moody and hadn’t been
pleased when she had answered the door.
He said nothing, which Linda took as a signal to continue.
“We just don’t communicate anymore.”
Doug knew that they didn’t communicate but wasn’t
sure that they ever had. Linda didn’t usually communicate
with him either, which was why it was a surprise that she
was suddenly trying to. He had been around Kevin and
Linda for four years and didn’t recall ever seeing them have
a conversation which didn’t escalate into hostility within a
few seconds, though he had noticed that lately the yelling
had stopped and the conversations had gotten shorter, the
endings now quiet snorts of disgust. He had never seen
them kiss or touch each other or say anything nice, and he
occasionally wondered to himself how Ellie, their daughter,
had ever gotten made. He had just assumed that things were
different when he wasn’t around.
“That sucks,” said Doug.
“Why does it suck?” asked Linda, lighting a cigarette,
staring at him.
He wasn’t anticipating a question, and Linda seemed almost
confrontational when she asked it. She also appeared to
have stopped looking for the batteries, which was a bad sign.
The exit was being cut off.
“Because . . . you and Kevin . . . are good people.” He
had the feeling he was being tested, and while not actually acing the test, he wasn’t failing disastrously either. He didn’t
really know if Linda was a good person. Often when he
came over to get high with Kevin, he was glad if she wasn’t
around, because it meant you could dump the bong water
into the potted plants and put your feet up on stuff without
having someone stare at you reproachfully. He thought of
her as a neat freak and a nag and was fairly sure that this was
Kevin’s opinion too.
“I think I make him unhappy,” she said. “He’s just
unhappy all the time.”
“Oh, no,” said Doug. “He’d be unhappy anyway.” The
comment slipped out. It wasn’t the supportive, wrap-everything-
up kind of sentence he was looking for, but it was
true. Ever since they had met four years ago, when Kevin
had been a waiter at the restaurant where Doug was a cook,
Doug had thought of him as a grouch. It was only because
Doug had shown an interest in selling off the weed that
Kevin was growing that they had even struck up a conversation.
Kevin, though an excellent grower, lacked the social
skills and contacts for dealing and had managed to stockpile
about four pounds of high-grade White Widow in his
basement. During a typical after-work half-drunk conversation,
they had hammered out a deal, and a friendship was
forged.
Since then, the frequency of their get-togethers had
resulted in a bond forming, a familiarity which had expanded
into all kinds of other activities, like drinking and playing pool and painting Kevin’s house and helping each other
move. Linda, though usually around, had never really
become a part of these activities.
“Why is he so unhappy?” Linda asked. She looked
around and threw up her hands. “We’ve got a nice house, a
beautiful daughter. Money’s tight always, but we get by. I
mean, why? It has to be me.”
Doug shook his head. “Some people are just unhappy,”
he said.
“Oh, bullshit,” she said, going behind the kitchen counter
and running water into the kettle. “Do you want some
coffee or tea?”
Decision time. If he said yes, the conversation could eat
up half the day. Women could talk forever. He knew that
much from hearing the waiters at the restaurant complain.
Put two of them at a table with two cups of warm liquid in
front of them, and that table was shot for the shift. But the
novelty of this situation was enough to keep it interesting.
In four years, Linda had never wanted to talk to him before
about anything, and who knew? Maybe she wasn’t so bad.
“I’m not forcing you,” she said, forcing him.
“Uhhh, coffee. No, tea. Tea. I’d definitely like a cup of tea.”
“Have a seat.” Linda went back and forth behind the
counter, putting the kettle on the stove and opening and
closing cabinets. It suddenly occurred to Doug that the
prospect of going home and watching TV all afternoon was
familiar, but had not really been exciting him, and this might not be such a bad idea after all. Hell, he thought, it
might be fun to sit and shoot the shit with Linda.
“I think he changed after he got out of jail,” she said.
“It’s like he’s been depressed. That was, what, two years ago
now? I’ve been putting up with his moods for two years.”
She put an ashtray out and carefully placed her cigarette in
it, then said, almost conspiratorially, “You know, he still
thinks you had something to do with that.”
“I know he does,” said Doug. “No matter how many
times I deny it. I mean, if you’re accused of something you
didn’t do and you can’t really prove you didn’t do it . . .”
He trailed off, hurt just thinking about it. About two and
a half years ago, when Kevin had been growing a field of
marijuana plants in his basement and Doug had been selling
the harvest for him, it had all ended suddenly. One day, cops
had come in and seized the whole lot, thousands of dollars
worth of lights and fans and fertilizer, and thrown Kevin in
jail for ninety days. Kevin’s theory was that Doug had been
busted for possession and had told the cops who was growing
the plants as a condition for immunity. Doug had, in fact,
never been busted, and the whole thing was a hurtful and
miserable episode he was always hoping was behind them
but which never actually seemed to be. Kevin would often
claim it was over, that he believed him, and then the next
time they were out drinking, after a shot of tequila or two,
Kevin would put his arm around him and say something like,
“Really, man. I won’t get mad. Just tell me what happened.”
Linda was looking at Doug, studying him, and for a
paranoid second he thought that Kevin had put Linda up to
this—have him over, make him tea, and see if he confesses.
Then he decided that the paranoia was probably just the
joint he had fired up on his way over. He doubted Kevin
and Linda ever spoke to each other long enough to hatch a
plan. But just to make sure, he added, “I didn’t do it. I
never got busted.”
“I know, sweetie,” Linda said. “I never thought you did.”
Her voice was warm and friendly, revealing a side of
her Doug had never noticed before, and she suddenly
struck him as a person, a woman, a different entity from
Kevin, with whom Doug had always associated her. It
was always Kevin and Linda. For four years, he had seen
her come and go and occasionally spoken to her, but she
hadn’t existed for him except as Kevin’s accessory, much
like his car or his sunglasses. He liked being called
sweetie too.
“Why does he think I did it? I mean, after all this time,
I’d admit it if it had ever happened. Does he really think I’d
turn him in? Dude, you know what they do to you for dealing?
It’s like a slap on the wrist. I wouldn’t ruin his life for
a slap on the wrist, you know.”
Linda looked at him thoughtfully. “You know, honestly,
I always thought of you as a waste case,” she said. “You’re
really a nice guy. I can see why Kevin likes you.”
“I always thought of you as a nag.”
There was a moment of silence, and then they both
laughed. Linda leaned across the table and said with a conspiratorial
grin, “Hey, you don’t have any smoke with you,
do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” Doug said. “Do you have any . . . like, uh
. . . fuckin’ double-A batteries?”
• • •
KEVIN WAS WALKING a pit bull in the rain. The pit bull
was named Jeffrey, and he belonged to a shifty doctor who
lived alone in a million-dollar house in Westlake. Kevin
figured the dog had not been bought for companionship,
but because the doctor was too cheap to install a security
system. Or maybe not too cheap. Maybe he liked the idea
that, instead of hearing an impotent alarm go off, a burglar
should be torn to shreds. Having been banished to the yard,
even during the harsh winters, Jeffrey was usually in a state
of physical neglect and starved of human contact, and was
always so happy to see Kevin on his daily half-hour visits
that it was often difficult to get his leash on for all the joyful
bouncing around. Eyeing the sores on the poor dog’s back
as the rain grew heavier, Kevin wondered if the alarm system
wouldn’t have been a better decision for all involved.
Kevin had started his dog-walking business two years
ago, purely by chance. Fresh from a ninety-day stint in jail
and convinced that no one would ever hire him, he had
been moping around the house when Linda had mentioned that if he wasn’t going to do anything all day, he could at
least walk Nicky Taylor’s dog around lunchtime. Nicky Taylor
was a rich divorcée who owned the dress shop where
Linda worked, and she was constantly leaving Linda alone
in the busy store so she could drive home and let her golden
retriever out. He had done it one day, just to shut Linda up,
and then the next day, then the next. Then within a week he
found himself actually looking forward to it. The dogwalking
provided an anchor to days which had become
aimless and empty, and he found himself getting attached to
the dog. Max, the retriever, was marvelously uncomplicated,
had no needs that couldn’t be easily met, and
expressed nothing but the most sincere appreciation. After
seven years of a deteriorating marriage, this was exactly the
type of relationship Kevin was looking for.
Nicky had then, without asking, compiled a list of all her
wealthy friends who also needed their dogs walked, and had
come up with a pay scale and a schedule for him. At first,
Kevin had been annoyed, picturing the two women sitting
around the dress shop planning every detail of his life.
Linda couldn’t just leave him alone, give him time to get
things figured out, get his life back together. But then he
realized that the work entailed no boss and noticed that the
pay scale Nicky had arranged was well in excess of anything
he himself would have asked for, and he couldn’t believe
that he could earn a hundred dollars a day just for showing
up at five or six houses and taking a dog out to shit. It kept Linda quiet and got him out of the house, and it brought
money in. Soon he found the postprison depression had
lifted, and he was printing up business cards and actively
pursuing clients.
The rain was turning into a downpour, which Kevin
liked. He was getting drenched and it gave him a feeling of
working, of earning money by battling the elements. Anyone
could walk dogs in the sunshine. When the sound of
the water hitting the immaculate sidewalks of Westlake
became a dull roar, Jeffrey turned around and looked at
him, as if he expected the walk to be cut short. Kevin nodded
at him to keep moving. The dog responded with a jump
of enthusiasm. Rain, shit. It wasn’t so bad. They both knew
it was better than going home.
When the rain let up, his worn jacket and pants soaked
through, Kevin’s mind wandered back to football. Specifically,
he was trying to pinpoint the moment in his own
football career when his life had completely changed tracks
without him being aware of it. Perhaps it was the day he had
started pretending that a slight bruise on his right knee was
a crippling injury, or the week he had blown off football
practice three times with a doctor’s note so he could go over
to Linda’s house while her parents were out of town.
After having spent most of his childhood and early adult
years imagining a superstar NFL career, and having been
encouraged in this by every coach and player he had met in
the high school system, it had taken only a year of playing at Western College to realize that he was, in fact, headed for
the scrap heap of broken bones and also-rans. After less
than a semester, the joy had gone out of it, and he had
begun to notice that he was more likely to wind up as the
limping assistant coach at some coal-town high school than
as the guy doing shoe commercials and holding up the
Vince Lombardi trophy on national television.
All the guys at Western thought they were going to the
big time. They were all ex–high school stars. After practice
one day, he had been looking at them, listening to their endless
chatter of self-promoting shit, and he had thought of
them as deluded. Then, in a moment of painful self-awareness,
he had seen that he fit right in. He wasn’t going to the
pros, no matter what. Western College athletes wound up
as gym teachers. Ohio State sent guys to the pros, and they
had never called him back.
After this epiphany, things went downhill quickly. He
developed a thousand-yard stare during the pregame
prayer and was often daydreaming when the coach called
him off the sidelines for a play. Despite his versatility as a
player (he could play tight end or cornerback equally
well), he found his name called less and less frequently.
Finally, during a midseason practice, after being slow to
respond to an order to get on the field, he heard one of the
coaches say to another, “Never mind. He doesn’t care.”
Then they quickly called a different play which didn’t
include him.
At the next game, when he showed up to strap on pads
and tape and cleats and rub his hands with Stickum, he realized
he didn’t care that much if Western College won or
lost. He also didn’t care if he watched from the sidelines or
played. The rah-rah sessions before the games, which featured
offensive linemen screaming “WESTEEEEEEERN!”
with a red-faced mania as they banged their helmets against
lockers, and the episodes on the team bus, when assistant
coaches would try to get the players fired up with primal
screams, made Kevin feel less like he had accepted a college
scholarship and more like he had joined a cult. After the
games, when all the players would go to the Easytown Buffet
to load up on platefuls of fried chicken and celebrate a
victory or reflect on a loss, Kevin would grab a book and
head down to the local diner and eat by himself.
Which was where he met Linda. And then he dropped out
of college and worked at a quarry so he could spend more
time with her. And now here he was, twenty-eight years old,
walking dogs in the rain. Why had that happened? Why
couldn’t he care about winning some football games for a college
that had given him a scholarship? Why did he have to be
an individual all the time? Maybe it was because he had been
lonely at college, and Linda had been the cure for it. Maybe
that was how everyone made decisions that affected the rest
of their lives, by trying to solve the problem right in front of
them. And before you knew it, life was slipping away and you
were obsessing with all your immediate problems and . . .
Stop it. Stop thinking so much. The rain had left a fresh,
crisp scent in the air which gave Kevin some energy. He
turned Jeffrey around to go back home, and the dog looked
at him with understanding. Jeffrey seemed to understand
everything, and bore it all with a grace Kevin knew he
lacked. Back to sit in the doghouse, a literal doghouse, not
the metaphorical one to which Kevin felt consigned. It was
one of the things he liked about walking dogs, that it put
everything into perspective. He got to spend time with creatures
more fucked than him.
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. How to Rob an Armored Car deals with what could be rather grim subject matter—three down-on-their-luck friends who turn to crime because they see no other way of improving their lives—but the author tells their story in a humorous way. How does the use of humor make the novel more or less effective?

2. Are the three main characters in this novel—Mitch, Kevin, and Doug—sympathetic? What is your reaction to their crimes? Which character do you find the most sympathetic of the three?

3. Mitch and Doug are stuck in dead-end jobs at the beginning of the novel, and they later become unemployed. Kevin, on the other hand, runs his own dog walking business and actually enjoys the work. Why does Kevin join in Mitch and Doug’s crimes? How are his motivations different than those of his friends?

4. Doug thinks that Linda is angry at Kevin more because she feels “left out” than because he’s been committing crimes. Do you think this is true? Why does Linda sleep with Doug, and what do you make of her relationship with Kevin?

5. Are Mitch, Doug, and Kevin correct in their belief that turning to crime is the only way they can better their financial situations? What are their other options? Are they better off at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning?

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