or so today, and it pays two hundred dollars. Are you interested?”
“Two hundred dollars for one day?”
“For less than one day.”
Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., a man was going to pull up to a certain tollbooth in a Volvo station wagon. He was going to say, “All I have is a Sacajawea dollar,” and I was supposed to give him a package and let him through.
The woman shut the blinds and made me put on, over my clothes, the bulky tan jumpsuit of a city maintenance worker. It was a disguise. When I walked out, nobody looked at me twice. With the package concealed in my otherwise empty toolbox, I walked out of the building and about fifty yards to my post on the highway: the sixth booth, an exact change booth, the one with the broken camera that I was supposedly there to fix.
There was a window of fog-colored acrylic on either side of the tollbooth, which meant that I had two lanes to keep my eye on. Each window was equipped with a little speaker, like at a bank, and a drawer like the one Hannibal Lecter used in Silence of the Lambs when he wanted to pass notes and stuff to Jodie Foster. The tollbooth seemed to be about the size of a coffin. In any case it had very few attractive features and did not seem like a fun place to work. It was damaged. Some of its insides seemed to have been removed. There was nowhere to sit. A red phone hung on the wall, and a shelf where you could put things. There was a wastebasket, and a cash box, and a cheap-looking plastic megaphone, and that was about it for the features of the tollbooth, except for a keypad with numbers on it.
If someone complained that the arm was jammed, I was supposed to punch in the code “1924” and it would lift up. “1924” was easy to remember because it seemed like a date when something famous might have happened, or the year an old person might have been born.
I couldn’t imagine an easier way to make two hundred dollars.
The catch was, what was in the package? Obviously it was something illegal, and possibly dangerous, or the supervisor would have handed it off herself, or she would have made one of her normal workers do it.
It was none of my business, because I had accepted the proposition and my handshake is as good as a contract. But what if the package was an explosive device designed to shut down interstate traffic, for example? I did not want any part of terrorism. That is where I draw the line.
I thought I should call Puddin’, a former professional mathematician turned park ranger. Puddin’s gig in Carlsbad Caverns only takes up three months of every year. The rest of the time she walks around in her apartment wearing nothing but a slip.
Puddin’ has a lot of interesting characteristics. She’s very small and slim and pointy all over. She is a native Hawaiian, I believe, who enjoys dyeing her hair strange colors. I like going over there and seeing her answer the door in her slip, smoking one of her cigarettes, the ones she rolls herself, a habit she acquired out west in Carlsbad Caverns. One time she was wearing a dingy white slip and a dark red pageboy haircut and she had a Band-Aid under each knee and she was standing in the doorway with her hip cocked and smoking one of her cowboy cigarettes and it was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen.
I wanted her advice about the package because according to Puddin’, the park ranger business throws her into contact with all sorts of people on the fringe of society—hippies, punk rockers, bums, and bad apples.
There is one more thing about Puddin’. I am not sure it is germane, or even polite to bring up, but I’m going to mention it because it’s so interesting. She claims to be having, or to have had already, an affair with the elderly R&B sensation Prince. The timeline is not clear.
None of us believes she knows Prince. It is obviously a huge lie. The question is, really, whether Puddin’ believes it or not.
This one guy, Ed, picks on her about it. We’ll
“Two hundred dollars for one day?”
“For less than one day.”
Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., a man was going to pull up to a certain tollbooth in a Volvo station wagon. He was going to say, “All I have is a Sacajawea dollar,” and I was supposed to give him a package and let him through.
The woman shut the blinds and made me put on, over my clothes, the bulky tan jumpsuit of a city maintenance worker. It was a disguise. When I walked out, nobody looked at me twice. With the package concealed in my otherwise empty toolbox, I walked out of the building and about fifty yards to my post on the highway: the sixth booth, an exact change booth, the one with the broken camera that I was supposedly there to fix.
There was a window of fog-colored acrylic on either side of the tollbooth, which meant that I had two lanes to keep my eye on. Each window was equipped with a little speaker, like at a bank, and a drawer like the one Hannibal Lecter used in Silence of the Lambs when he wanted to pass notes and stuff to Jodie Foster. The tollbooth seemed to be about the size of a coffin. In any case it had very few attractive features and did not seem like a fun place to work. It was damaged. Some of its insides seemed to have been removed. There was nowhere to sit. A red phone hung on the wall, and a shelf where you could put things. There was a wastebasket, and a cash box, and a cheap-looking plastic megaphone, and that was about it for the features of the tollbooth, except for a keypad with numbers on it.
If someone complained that the arm was jammed, I was supposed to punch in the code “1924” and it would lift up. “1924” was easy to remember because it seemed like a date when something famous might have happened, or the year an old person might have been born.
I couldn’t imagine an easier way to make two hundred dollars.
The catch was, what was in the package? Obviously it was something illegal, and possibly dangerous, or the supervisor would have handed it off herself, or she would have made one of her normal workers do it.
It was none of my business, because I had accepted the proposition and my handshake is as good as a contract. But what if the package was an explosive device designed to shut down interstate traffic, for example? I did not want any part of terrorism. That is where I draw the line.
I thought I should call Puddin’, a former professional mathematician turned park ranger. Puddin’s gig in Carlsbad Caverns only takes up three months of every year. The rest of the time she walks around in her apartment wearing nothing but a slip.
Puddin’ has a lot of interesting characteristics. She’s very small and slim and pointy all over. She is a native Hawaiian, I believe, who enjoys dyeing her hair strange colors. I like going over there and seeing her answer the door in her slip, smoking one of her cigarettes, the ones she rolls herself, a habit she acquired out west in Carlsbad Caverns. One time she was wearing a dingy white slip and a dark red pageboy haircut and she had a Band-Aid under each knee and she was standing in the doorway with her hip cocked and smoking one of her cowboy cigarettes and it was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen.
I wanted her advice about the package because according to Puddin’, the park ranger business throws her into contact with all sorts of people on the fringe of society—hippies, punk rockers, bums, and bad apples.
There is one more thing about Puddin’. I am not sure it is germane, or even polite to bring up, but I’m going to mention it because it’s so interesting. She claims to be having, or to have had already, an affair with the elderly R&B sensation Prince. The timeline is not clear.
None of us believes she knows Prince. It is obviously a huge lie. The question is, really, whether Puddin’ believes it or not.
This one guy, Ed, picks on her about it. We’ll
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