Avon nods. He says, “Like how when I refinanced my house to put on a new roof, they made me put up my car. It’s like a guarantee.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely. Except now the collateral is us. You, me, everybody. You follow?”
Avon is beginning to have an itchy feeling at the back of his neck. Like how all the water on the beach goes out first before the tidal wave comes.
“I think so. But how does that get me half a million bucks?”
“Because, my friend, what happens when you’re born?”
Avon shrugs.
“The government issues you a birth certificate, right? And when you look at that birth certificate, under name of the baby, you see Avon—you got a middle name?”
“Hamish.”
“You see Avon Hamish DeWitt. Except it’s written in all caps. This is how the US Government, Incorporated, creates a certificate of debt in your name. And when they do, they open a Treasury Direct Account, a bank account, right? Into which go all the funds you earn them. And that money is just sitting there. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. I heard a guy say once up to twenty goddamn million. And it’s just sitting there. But here’s the secret. You can get that money for yourself.”
“How?”
“Well, not fucking easily. But there’s a way. Certain documents filed, forms filled out with the right language. The right punctuation.”
“What’s that?”
“You know, commas and semicolons and shit. The point is, you are a prisoner.”
Avon looks around him at the bars. “No shit, Sherlock.”
“I’m saying even after you get out. Unless and until you declare yourself free.”
“And how do I do that?”
Fat Eddy smiled. “I’m gonna show you.”
*
No one is there to meet Avon when he gets out of the joint this time. Doesn’t bother him. He knows how to take a goddamn bus. He stands in the hot Florida sun as the gate slides closed behind him, breathing in the muggy calm. Then goes over and waits in the shade of the portico for the crosstown #6 to arrive. He’s been out of pocket for four months, eating soup from a hot plate and jerking off into his socks like a goddamn fifteen-year-old. He wipes his forehead with the back of his arm, thinking about the crisp nirvana of a cold beer （or twelve）。 The bus, when it comes, connects to a second bus, and then he settles back for the two hours to Jupiter with a packet of salted peanuts and a Coors Light tallboy （snagged from a corner bodega） in a paper bag. All things being equal, he’s feeling pretty good about things.
He wedges the sliding bus window open an inch, enjoying the highway breeze. When he was a kid, Avon used to sit on his dad’s lap when he drove. Still in his early twenties and rocking a caterpillar mustache, Daddy Dylan had graduated from car sales to roofing and then found a gig at the Honda plant. He was an axle man, soldering metal on metal, and his arms were polka-dotted with burns that would turn a hard white over time. He drove a 1993 Ford Mustang Cobra in reef blue with an opal-gray leather interior, bought third hand from a Black on the assembly line with credit trouble. Avon’s dad loved that car, used to wash and wax it every Saturday, parked in the driveway of the faux ranch they rented for $625 a month from Avon’s grandpa.
Dylan liked to drive with the windows down, radio going full blast, a Camel Light in his left hand, draped out the window like la dee da, sometimes a tallboy between his thighs, sweating its cold into a beer koozie with a cartoon middle finger printed on it. When Avon rode in his lap, Dylan kept the beer in the center console. He drove with the seat belt buckled behind him, to keep the cop in the dashboard from dinging. He’d steer with his right, smoke with his left. Every few minutes he’d ask Avon, six, seven, eight, to take the wheel, and he’d pick up the beer and take a sip.
“Remember this feeling, boy,” he told his son once, the wind in their faces, sun setting in the rearview as they drove along the Gulf Coast. “Freedom.”
*
It’s a ten-minute walk from the bus stop to the house Avon shares with his common-law wife, Girlie, a fifty-year-old Filipina he met at big Jim Nash’s barbecue three years back. She owns a strip mall nail salon, strictly a cash business, most of the girls under her being illegal. Girlie has been a resident of what Avon calls the United States of America, Incorporated, for twelve years. She came over with her sister, Rose, who lives in Los Angeles now, working as a live-in caretaker for an old shut-in. A real witch, is what Avon’s heard, which means something different to him than it does to your average Filipino. Those people still believe in sorcerers, for Chrissake.