Collections

 
“I’m going to kill your dog and then I’m going to hunt down your family.”
        It was Eric McDonnell’s signature threat to the deadbeats from which he was wringing recompense for past debts: six months past due on Visa, a year behind on Mastercard, American Express, Verizon, ninety days on an installment for the Chevy Equinox purchased at a mutt lot in Kalamazoo on the first snowy day in October when all-wheel drive seemed like a good idea. He sucked the smoke from the Marlboro deep into his lungs and held it while he waited for the parasite at the end of the phone line to respond. Consternation always forced betrayal; Eric just needed patience.
        “I can make a partial payment,” whispered the meek voice at the end of the phone. He sounded like a forty-year-old on the down side of economic mobility, frightened and distraught. Eric looked at the file and saw he was calling Saginaw.
        He released the smoke in a long, tetchy sigh. “Partial? Nothing doing. We’ve given you every break possible. Now it’s time to pay up.”
        The voice stammered. “It’s just…”
        “Look, fuckwad,” Eric said after a long drag into his lungs. “I don’t care about your problems. Do you want to know about problems? I’ve got a pile of cases a foot high on my desk and every file is a moocher like you.”
        “Please, I haven’t been able to work since…”
        “Cry me a river. Look, guy, I got a job. Yeah, I got a job and it’s to collect delinquent debts. So pay up or do you know what I’m going to do, Mister…” He checked his file again… “Jackson? I’m going to send a couple of my boys to your house on 12th Street and they’re going to kill your dog and then go to work on you.”
        That was when the sobbing began. The louse at the end of his rope. Eric knew because as recently as three seasons past he was in the same situation: broke, in debt, and avoiding the phone with its non-stop calls from creditors demanding payment. All he had left was his dog. It was the same with the sponger at the end of the phone. All he had was his mutt, and Eric was threatening to take that away. Collecting was like chiropractic; just the right pressure and their backbone would pop.
        Eric got his big, black pit bull–Rottweiler mix he named Kane two years ago when he lived in Los Angeles. The animal was particularly good at keeping the apartment safe and it had earned the Midwesterner some respect in a neighborhood of gangstas and tattooed, indolent teens on skateboards. After moving to St. Louis, and as he sank into the role of muscle for corporate shylocks, he began training Kane to attack on command. The viciousness of the animal in assault mode could shake loose the resolve of the most determined assailant. One afternoon his girlfriend stopped by unannounced and Kane nearly ripped her arm off. Luckily, Eric’s sister was there to pay the hospital bills. Kane spent thirty days in isolation at the animal shelter to determine if he was a danger to the community. The girl left him. Good riddance. Good-bye.
        Eric took a quiet draw on his cigarette and waited. He loved Kane more than he loved any friend he had, so he knew how Jackson felt about his dog. The pressure applied, this was a moment to savor. In the background, even through the static noise of a hundred microwave towers and copper trunk lines between his cubicle in a clean suburban strip mall and the brown, industrial wastelands of Michigan, he could hear the machinations of the malingerer avoiding his debts.
        Nine months ago after the repo man took his previous truck, and Freddie Mac seized the rancher he had bought in Whitney on the eastside of Vegas, he had few options and fewer prospects. A few months later, he saw the ad for collection agents and found his calling.
        He listened closely to the breathing and muttering at the other end of the line as he inhaled another nicotine shot from the smoldering stick. He could hear it – the calculations and inventory of the impecunious remains of an economic life. “I’ll pay it,” Jackson sneered through tears of wounded pride. Ah, thought Eric, wallowing in the trough of repletion, I love the sound of a broken man.
        After a bit of paperwork, he was in the break room for a cup of Joe, spoonfuls of sugar, no cream, and another Marlboro. Mary was there. Young, petite, with long curls of deep brunette hair and blue eyes set on a face of slender, porcelain pulchritude, she was wiping the counter of some coffee slop left by an earlier patron.
        “Scored a big one,” said Eric, reaching around her shoulder while sneaking a sniff of the lilac and musk scent of her hair. “Dude owed five large on Mastercard.” He held up his hand for a high-five acknowledgment of his triumph and was met by Mary’s emotional chill. This woman, who was a distant second to Eric in collections and dripped empathy like honey for even the most insolent down-on-his-luck derelict, had no compassion for him. She rinsed the rag under the water, wrung it out, and laid it carefully over the neck of the faucet. “Catch more flies with honey, eh,” he tried once more with mock feeling and a plastic smile.
        He shrugged off the insult of her glare and immersed himself in the clover of his moxie. Five thousand and the mooch was going to pay in full, which was not bad for a morning’s work, despite the judgmental scowl from the Irish virgin of the black pool. He was good at collections and he wasn’t going to apologize for it. Many jobs had come and passed through Eric’s life: car sales, retail, advertising, tending bar, even working as a set decorator for softcore porn, but it all ended the same way – with a Jesus walk and a piss ant’s finger in his face. His insatiable appetite for drink as well as his abjure to industry would betray him as much as his lack of equanimity.
        An old flame, long married to her business partner, gave him a job at her display business. He traveled from conference center to conference center in Nevada supervising crews that set up booths for trade shows and seminars. It paid well and the work was not hard. Nevertheless, Eric could not avoid the bar nor the twitching in his pants. He made a sloppy pass at the friend who gave him the job, this one-time girlfriend from high school. Then came unemployment, and ruin.
        It was his older sister, Deb, his paladin since youth, that rescued him. He had managed to convince a drunken gambler from Des Moines to lend him his phone and he called her. With her, he could be real. With her, he could be honest. The sad state poured from him like water and flowed down his cheeks to the tourist’s smartphone. She brought him to her home in St. Louis and set him up in the single-room apartment over her garage. Deb even welcomed the dog and instructed her husband to erect a fenced cage in the back yard so the beast could get some exercise when Eric was at work. She gave him money, paid off his debts, and nursed him back to the world. His obstreperous nature combined with an abhorrent lifestyle alienated him from most of humanity but with Deb, calmness reigned and the demons rested.
        He saw the listing for the job, and with her encouragement, answered it. The interview went well. They hired him and after a few calls he began to emulate the collectors he had heard. The boss gave him stern warnings about the usury and collection laws of the United States, telling him to stay in compliance or risk dismissal and Eric felt the old tinge of failure lurking over his shoulder. Then he started closing cases and his collections picked up. By the end of the month, he was collecting more than five times his pay. Then ten times his pay. The warnings stopped.
        To hell with Miss Priss Mary, he smiled to himself. Lighting a cigarette, he waved through the wire mesh glass to the boss. The boss waved back and grinned like a Cheshire cat having swallowed a mouse. Collections were up at the center and that meant a big, fat bonus check for him. Did it matter if they had to field a few calls from the State Attorney General’s office? From the boss’s point of view, Eric was a godsend, a madman, but a godsend.
        “You think I’m despicable,” he said to Mary between his teeth.
        She glanced up from the fruit salad she was stirring in a vain attempt to keep the red grapes on top. “That’s not true.”
        “The edges of your eyes say differently.”
        “You enjoy the ugliness of the job.”
        “I get the job done,” he said with a self-satisfied smugness.
        With a shake of her head, Mary exited with a mug of coffee in one hand and the plastic cup with mixed fruit in the other. The rest of the day went well although not as productive as the morning calls. He settled a debt for 95 cents on the dollar, collected on six months in back payments for a Toyota Camry, and brought a delinquent Macy’s cardholder up to date. Overall, he had settled more debt than most of the reprobates he was calling made in six months. The clock hit six, his shift ended, and while the other “counselors” in the office were joking around and making evening plans, he was grabbing his gray hoodie and heading for the door with a cigarette already being pulled from the red and white pack.
        He was looking forward to dinner with Deb and her husband. Teddy was a good guy who accepted Eric because he loved Deb and understood her brother was part of the package. He’ll grill some salmon steaks and Deb will make cucumber salad and they’ll drink Buds, thought Eric, and he’ll listen to Teddy talk about his day. Despite his internal pride at his accomplishments, Eric would not talk about his work. Part of him thought it was a form of de-stressing, but a voice that lived behind his left ear would whisper, “self-loathing.”
        Good times would not tarry for a man like Eric. As he walked into the parking lot, he could feel the end coming soon like the thunderstorm that was lingering on the prairie west of town.
        He knew something was wrong even before he saw the blood. A crowd was standing around his car with a young woman from the call center on the first floor vomiting off to the side. Blood and bits of black fur covered the insides of his beat-up F-150. It looked as if someone had placed a black hamster in a microwave. Except it wasn’t a hamster, and there was no microwave large enough for his truck, let alone his dog. He saw carnage from extreme violence, annihilation on the wavefront of madness. Eric imagined the barehanded rage from the client, which was what they called the poor saps they harassed, and it was, in all likelihood, one of them in supreme anger that ripped his dog to shreds. He imagined the slipperiness of the perpetrator escaping across the parking lot fronting Clayton Road, covered in blood and bits of viscera.
        He glanced up at the dark clouds to the west as thunder rolled across the city like the ghosts of the old Frenchies in the hills along the river. He lifted his new phone and dialed his sister. The parking lot filled with the people from the call center, salesmen who pitched plans to clean carpets, gold bullion futures, automobile warranties, and other worthless goods across the country to overdrawn consumers. The irony was that those same people would fall behind on the crap they had bought: the Ikea tables, the iWhatevers, new cars, big screen TVs, bigger screen TVs, unlimited data plans, single cup coffee machines, and laptop computers. Lost in rapt consumerism, they would buy clothes they wouldn’t wear, gym memberships they wouldn’t use, and two-hundred-dollar meals they would shit out the following morning before breakfast, because buying was like heroin and they were addicts. All of that debt would pile up and fall in a case file on Eric’s lap.
        And he would collect.
        I’m going to kill your dog and then I’m going to hunt down your family.
        Eric looked at the screen and saw there was no answer from Deb. He checked the number and dialed again. No one was going to answer.