NEGATIVE TILT

Bobby Mathews

Corey liked the work, talking people into giving up their friends and family members, finding out where they’d moved. He’d prop one steel-toed Wellington on the bumper of his tow truck, come on with that good-old-boy attitude that it was so hard to say no to, and stay one step ahead of the skip tracers in the corporate office. Those conversations were the best part of his day, a bittersweet reminder of his old life, a life cut off with no apparent way back.

Corey spent less time in the truck than the other drivers. The big tow truck—a Dodge 4500 with a boom folded atop its foreshortened rear end like Jesus carrying a hydraulic steel cross—put people on guard. Being outside the cab made him seem harmless, like someone who could be shined on. It would only be later, after the unit had been scooped up sometime in the middle of the night, that some of them might realize the unassuming, bespectacled driver had put one over on them.

If the conversations were the best part, the constant driving was the worst. He dreaded the long stretches of highway, driving for hours at a time, like a hungry shark churning the water in search of the next meal. That was when his calves swelled painfully in his boots, constricting the blood flow until his feet began to tingle. Diabetes ran in his family, but he’d always tested negative. Now, as the years and the pounds piled up, he worried about his blood sugar as if it were an ancestral curse.

He treated this new career—he’d been doing it for more than a year now, so that counted as a new career as far as he was concerned—like his first newspaper job, working swing-shift hours so that he could talk to debtors during the day and sweep the city at night. He used the conversations like interviews, jotting down notes as soon as he got back into his own vehicle to keep his memory fresh.

That led him to his second-favorite part of the job: slipping through the deserted streets after midnight, using his GPS locator to compare addresses and locate the missing units. Professionally, they never called their prey “cars.” In the repo industry, agents always referred to cars or trucks as units—as in, find the wanted unit—in everything from official reports to casual telephone conversations. Sometime around 2 a.m. was the magic time of night for Corey, listening to podcasts and letting his mind wander. The company had six trucks working the greater Birmingham area, from Trussville down to Calera, all the way up to Cullman and Jasper.

Mostly, Corey worked southwestern Birmingham, despoiled and rotting neighborhoods like Ensley, Brighton, Midfield, Fairfield, Bessemer, and Roosevelt.

The other agents based out of his office—Corey couldn’t quite think of them as co-workers, because they never saw each other—thought he ran the most dangerous territory. But Corey didn’t care. He hadn’t cared about much at all since the old life had up and left him.

***

Buyouts, they called them. A month’s severance pay for every year a journalist had worked for the paper. For Corey, who had been there twenty-four years, it was a sizable chunk of change. He didn’t leap at the money, not at first. He thought about it for a couple of weeks, would have talked it over with Jeanne if she and the kids hadn’t already left.

Twenty-four years was a long time in any business. He was only forty-seven, in the news business for nearly half his life. If he wasn’t a journalist, what the hell was he?

Upper management increased the pressure. They wanted to hire younger people, get some of the heavier paychecks off the books for whatever merger they could finagle next. The advertising manager was the first one to go. The circulation manager got the ax when he wouldn’t take the buyout. A twenty-two-year-old kid took his place.

As the longest-tenured member of the newsroom, Corey carried a heftier salary than most. If he took the buyout, he could take a year off, work on the novel he kept telling himself he should write. He did the math, and then sent an email to the publisher.

“I can’t believe it,” Nancy Boyette told him while he boxed up the few personal items on his desk. Nancy, his direct supervisor, with her glossy black hair and piercing blue eyes and bottle of Crown Royal in the bottom left-hand drawer of her big cherry desk. She’d been with the paper for eighteen months and always looked a little lost. “I thought you were a lifer.”

But that was the problem. Newspaper work was a life sentence. It got in your blood, chasing the story down and wrestling it into print. As the deputy managing editor, he was the one who worked late and put the paper to bed. His phone was the first to ring in the morning if the shit hit the fan. The years made his skin sallow, and his hair had all but disappeared. There were lines on his face and ulcers in his stomach from the long nights and the short deadlines.

“It’s time to get out,” he told her, patting the check folded carefully in his breast pocket. “I was treading in deep water for a long time, and they finally threw me a lifeline.”

“Probably the most money anyone’s ever made from this paper,” she said. Her voice sounded wistful. “You want to go out back for one last smoke?”

“Sure,” Corey said. He left the half-filled cardboard box in his desk chair. There wasn’t much left there, anyway. Once he’d decided to take the buyout, he’d started sifting his personal stuff out of the building a little at a time, so as not to cause alarm to the reporters who worked under him.

Corey and Nancy strode back to the loading dock together. This had been an end-of-day ritual for her, and a beginning of shift ritual for him. Each day they’d meet and discuss the budget items for the evening, sketching out the front page, talking through major and minor points like which stories still needed art, or what stories might break overnight and necessitate a flash page on the paper’s website.

But that wasn’t his problem anymore.

“We’re going to miss you around here,” Nancy said. She drew hard on her cigarette, which drew the tiny vertical lines along her lips into sharp relief. The first two fingers of her right hand, the ones that held the cigarette, were slightly yellowed, stained with nicotine. When she’d come to work at the paper, her nails had been perfectly lacquered. Now, most of the time the polish was chipped and peeling, and she picked at her fingers absently while the newsroom died its slow silent death around her.

“I’ve been missing it for a while now already,” Corey said. His voice echoed around the open loading dock. When he first started, the dock was where the printers had taken the papers off of the press in freshly wrapped bundles that were warm to the touch. When Corey first started up in the newsroom on the main floor of the building, he could always tell when the press started running because the floor would vibrate softly, bringing even more life into the building. But in some buyout or other down the line, the old web press had been broken down and sold for parts. Now all that was left was the hollowed-out, oil-stained cavern where it had once been. All that is left of the dinosaurs are the bones, petrified relics of a bygone era.

***

The car was pointed nose-out down a steep driveway, a nearly new Honda Accord, hadn’t been off the lot for six months before the debtor fell behind on payments. Corey hopped out, checked the Vehicle Identification Number—a little metal plate visible on the driver’s side of the dash—to make sure he had the right vehicle. Back in the truck, the rumble of the engine under his ass, he lowered the boom. He had the newest truck in the fleet, with a hydraulic system that would drop the boom down past zero degrees—they called it negative tilt—so that it could recover units parked down steep driveways like this. Corey used the hydraulic controls to slide the boom under the Honda and lock onto the front wheels.

Corey engaged the boom and lifted the Honda so that only its rear wheels were touching the ground. He shifted the truck into drive and pulled out. No lights in the house behind him came on. No dogs barked. He’d gotten away with it again.

***

By the time the third day of unemployment rolled around, Corey knew he wasn’t going to be able to write anything. It was the noise, or the lack of it. In the newsroom, with a deadline beating down on him and the hum of other journalists doing their own work, he could pound out a thousand words in an hour. No typos. No rewrites. The first draft of history, even if that history was just a recap of a county commission meeting that ended late.

In his sunny little home office, where he’d never done much more than write out checks for the monthly bills, writing anything as vast as a novel seemed impossible. He put the TV on in the living room, just for some noise, but found it impossible to concentrate. He found himself wandering into the living room, plopping down on the couch to check out the second half of The View and staying put for the judges, Judy and Mathis. By the time Ellen DeGeneres’s show ended each afternoon, he’d be disgusted with himself for another wasted day.

He got a police scanner and placed it on his desk, hoping its familiar noise would help him find that Zen-like place in his mind where the world went away and the words came. It helped for a couple of days, and then it was just background noise. He started lurking on social media, checking out the paper’s website. He wanted to be reassured that his work there had meant something, that all of the hours he’d sacrificed, the marriage and family he’d thrown over the side, was worth it; that he was—unlike everyone else who had left—irreplaceable. To his dismay, the paper continued to publish without him.

Nancy would occasionally text, gossiping about who else had gotten the ax. She was safe, of course. She hadn’t been with the paper long enough to command a decent salary, and she was young enough that the long hours and the low pay must have seemed sort of romantic to her. But Corey could tell some cracks were appearing at the edges.

“No bonuses this quarter,” she messaged one night, out of the blue. “We’re still in austerity, whatever that means. FFS, I was counting on that money.”

As for Corey, he blew through the buyout money. It wasn’t real to him. He applied to other newspapers, but the only one that wanted to hire him was out in the Big Horn mountains of Wyoming. What the hell did he know about Wyoming? He flew out for the interview anyway—on their dime, not his—and found the little shop charming and quaint. The town, about five thousand people total, was mostly one- or two-story buildings, and the mountains surrounding the place painted a blue haze on the horizon. The high plains were scoured by constant wind, and in places bare rock was left scraped raw. The deep folds and creases in the earth looked like something Georgia O’Keefe might have imagined in her earlier and unfinished work.

The first thing he did with the publisher was to settle down on the man’s back deck with three months’ worth of newspapers and a supply of red Sharpie pens. Corey scanned the papers. He caught typos in headlines and cutlines. He questioned why certain stories got play, and why others didn’t. Instead of being embarrassed, the publisher looked eager.

“This is just what we need here,” the publisher said. “You understand local. You understand what I want.”

He brought out a bottle of Maker’s Mark and they toasted one another. Several times after that, they found reasons to lift a glass until the bottle was empty and they were not. The publisher put him on a plane back to Alabama the next day, with a promise that he’d make an offer soon. But when the offer came, Corey’s heart fell. They wanted him to work for half of what he’d been making in Birmingham.

“I can’t do it,” he finally told the publisher. His voice was calm, but tears flowed freely down his face. “I can’t figure out how to make the money work.”

***

Money. That’s what it all came down to. Eleven months after he took the buyout, Corey was out of money, so stone-broke that his debit and credit cards were declined at the convenience store where he stopped to buy a soft drink.

He began perusing job websites harder, expanding his search parameters until he found something that caught his eye. DRIVER WANTED IMMEDIATELY, it said, and listed a phone number. That was all. He called the number, and a woman’s voice answered.

“I’m calling about the job you listed,” he said, and then she cut him off.

“Can you pass a drug test?”

Corey grinned at the phone. He’d never done any kind of illegal drug—not ever—the only one of his friends from high school and college who could say that. He’d often wondered at the lure of a forbidden high. But it had simply never appealed to him, so he never did it. Peer pressure, it seemed, wasn’t so inevitable after all.

“Yes,” Corey said, and he could feel cool relief flush down his neck. “I can pass it.”

“Good,” the woman said. “The last three guys who wanted this job couldn’t.” She gave him an address in Pinson, a small town northeast of Birmingham. He read it back to her.

“All right, so you’re not illiterate,” she said. “Come in and fill out the application.”

“Wait. How much does it pay?”

There was a pause on the woman’s end.

“Hundred-and-twenty-five a car.” The line went dead. She’d hung up, or gotten cut off. Corey still didn’t understand what kind of work it was, but the promise of hundred-and-twenty-five a car rang in his ears.

That was the interview. He passed the drug screen and the background check. The woman who’d spoken to him on the phone—Bailey—ran the office for American Repossessors United. She pushed Corey’s application through, sent him for a week of training at the company headquarters just outside Memphis, Tennessee, and within two weeks he was behind the wheel of an $80,000 tow truck. He was, in fact, paid $125 for every vehicle—every unit—he repossessed, and nothing at all if he didn’t find anything. Feast or famine from the get-go.

He seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. Within the first three months on the job, he became the top agent in the Birmingham office, pulling in twenty to thirty units in a week. He ran the new accounts on his list every night, inputting updates on the laptop computer anchored to the dash of the truck while his right foot pressed the gas pedal. He used social media platforms to stalk and find debtors, and he cross-referenced license plate numbers that repeatedly showed up at addresses he was monitoring. He found that he was using the relentless approach he’d taken with journalism, spending hours upon hours behind the wheel. He was in the Dodge or in his own Toyota for sometimes twenty hours a day.

Nancy kept in touch. As the paper’s ownership kept chopping staff like loggers felling logs in a dwindling forest, she talked less about what was going on in the newsroom, and more about herself.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” she texted him one night. It was just after 11 p.m., and he assumed she’d just put the paper to bed. “It’s like a ghost town around here. Do you want to meet for a drink?”

Corey had a Tesla on the boom and an angry debtor to sooth when he got her message. He left her on read until the next morning.

“I was already in bed,” he told her. “Sorry I missed you. Maybe next time.”

***

The obscene part was that repo work paid better than newspaper work ever had or ever would. The most he’d ever made as a journalist was forty thousand dollars in a year. In six months as a repo agent, he’d passed that benchmark. But as much as he liked the money and genuinely enjoyed the investigative aspect of the job, he still hated parts of the work. He was an anomaly in this new world, college educated and soft, a man with no feel for the lockout kit, a hard plastic wedge used to pry open a unit’s window and a long metal rod with a half-hook at the end that the other agents wielded with the deft diplomacy of long use. When they saw one another, which was infrequently, the other agents teased him about his education and his political views.

“Stop being a damned liberal,” Nick would say, and laugh. Nick who was not yet thirty and sported a sleeve of tattoos from his left wrist to his shoulder, who chain-smoked Marlboros and listened to artists Corey had never heard of, who would take a shit on a debtor’s lawn if he couldn’t find the wanted unit at their address.

“Hell, he can’t help it,” Stevie might chime in, pronouncing can’t as cain’t. Stevie who wore basketball shorts and muscle shirts year-round, no matter how cold it got, who had lost the hearing in his left ear when he was nine when his brother struck him upside the head with a hard pine two-by-four, who would laugh and point at the thick rope of scar tissue that wrapped from behind the ear all the way up to the top of his closely-shorn head. “They done educated him up at that college, and then the newspaper ruined him. He’ll be aight if we can keep him in a truck for the next five years. He’ll get it outta his system.”

Javier, who was also teased by the other agents, rarely said anything either way. He just looked on in silence, sometimes laughing, sometimes watching with dark and brooding eyes that never let on what he was thinking. Javier had come to Alabama as a small child and still spoke with the melodic lilt of the Dominican Republic, even though he’d never been out of the United States. He learned the music of his country’s language at home with his mother and three sisters, and it was his dream to visit Paris one day.

“You should go,” Corey told him one day. “There’s nothing like it anywhere.”

Corey had taken his ex-wife to Paris on their honeymoon, a fact that impressed the other agents with its extravagance and romance even if the marriage itself hadn’t lasted. But Javier only shook his head sadly.

“I think I’ll stay here,” he said, casting a sidelong glance at Nick. “I think if I go overseas, they maybe don’t let me come back.”

Nick laughed.

“I knew you was illegal,” he said, his voice full of mirth. “Hey, Stevie—”

“I’m not,” Javier said, and the way he said it made the laughter in Nick’s words die. Nobody said anything for a minute, so Javier said, “I got a green card and then I got a citizenship test and then I got a Social Security card. I’m as American as you are.”

Nick, who was embarrassed that Javier hadn’t let his joke go, shook his head and said “Bullshit” in a low voice.

“Hey, fuck you,” Javier said. “I earned it. All you had to do was be born here.”

Nick threw down a half-smoked cigarette and stepped over to Javier. It might have gotten serious, but Corey and Stevie stepped between them, hustling them out of each other’s face and away toward their respective trucks.

***

Once Nancy called to pick his brain on where to go with a story a young reporter was pursuing. He was good enough to consult for free, but not good enough to pay for his years of experience. Corey was ninety-nine percent sure the consulting call hadn’t been her idea. He knew she was getting squeezed, too.

“What are you doing these days?” She asked him when they were done talking about the story.

“Oh, this and that,” he said. He didn’t know why he didn’t talk to her about the new job, the new career. Was he ashamed of it? No. Well, okay, maybe a little. But he also liked it, the silent shark thrashing through the dark waters of the Birmingham night, feasting or starving, depending on how the night went, but always swimming forward.

“I bet you’re still living high off the buyout,” she said. The jealousy in her voice was thick with pain, like a lonely child. “Jesus, it must have been like hitting the lottery.”

If it had, the lottery he’d won had been poisonous, killing off his career, his previous life, as surely as a cyanide capsule would kill the captured spy in a war movie. They hung up, and Corey felt his chest loosen like a clenched fist finally opening.

“We never got that drink,” Nancy said. It felt like an invitation.

“You buying?” He asked, hoping that she heard the smile on his face.

She snorted, a wised-up cynical veteran newspaper sound.

“We’re in austerity right now,” she said, “whatever that means. I gotta take a furlough, a whole week off without pay.”

“Well,” Corey said. “Maybe I’ll run into you soon.”

***

None of the Birmingham agents had ever been shot—not yet—but they’d all had close calls. Stevie had showed up one morning with two neat bullet holes drilled through the glass in the rear windshield of his truck and a pair of slugs buried in the dashboard.

“Probably did it himself,” Javier said, checking Stevie’s truck. “You know that cracker ain’t right in the head.”

Corey and Nick watched from a distance. Corey didn’t want to get close to the spent rounds. Just looking at the bullet holes made him feel a little weak below his belt line. Javier reached into his back pocket and brought out a heavy folding knife, which he flicked open with one hand. Peering at the dash, he worked the sharp blade carefully around in first one hole and then another until he plucked out two deformed lead mushrooms. He walked over to them and held the shrapnel in his palm for the others to see.

“Twenty-twos,” Nick said. “Well, that’s not so bad.”

“Maybe twenny-fives,” Javier said. “Probably just sting a little, you know, from a distance.”

They were straight-faced, not looking at Corey. He couldn’t tell if they were kidding or not. Probably a little of both. The job required a lot of balls, to go onto someone else’s property in the middle of the night, skulk out and pop a VIN on the dashboard with a flashlight, maybe hook up the loud and heavy hydraulic lift, and then scoot away like a thief in the night. They each walked a line somewhere between confident and cocky, but the bullet holes were a reminder of how things could go wrong, and how close Stevie had come to a bad end somewhere in Outer Bumfuck. Corey could picture it in his head, Stevie, half his head blown away, gut sagging in his sleeveless muscle shirt, basketball shorts filling with shit and piss after his bowels let go, sitting in the leather seat behind the steering wheel as the truck leaned cantilevered in a ditch somewhere.

He shook his head to clear the image and walked away. He couldn’t think about things like that and continue to do the job.

***

When her name came up on his hot list, Corey wasn’t too surprised. The GPS took him to a large apartment complex off of Highway 150 in Hoover, the largest suburb of Birmingham. The suburbs meant less security than in the city proper, and this particular complex had no gate, no guard. Easy pickings, unless she’d moved and the skip tracers were a step behind.

But he found her building, and then he found her unit, a two-year-old Mazda 3, a sporty hatchback that looked small enough to fit in his palm. But no, better to use the truck. He took the Mazda from behind, raising it up and pulling it deftly from its parking space before leaving it in the middle of the parking lot. He released the hooks and slid away from the unit, circling back around until he could lock onto it from the front, so that he wouldn’t have to throw straps over the rear wheels. He drove away with her car trailing behind him like a remora suctioned tight to the back of an apex predator.

His phone was in his lap, his text messages open to Nancy’s last missive, the one where she talked about the budget cuts that had come down the pike. The new owners were slashing newsroom salaries by fifteen percent. She was hanging in there, but just barely. In the meantime, she was looking for a new position, she said, but so far there was no good news on the horizon. Corey thought about texting her. He could tell her everything.

He could tell her about the new job, about the top-of-the-line truck with the negative tilt and the hydraulic winch. He could tell her about the money, explain the absurdity of what he did now and how the newspaper business had unexpectedly prepared him for this new life. But it was almost four in the morning, and she would know soon enough that there was no good news anywhere, not anymore.

BOBBY MATHEWS (@bamawriter) is a Derringer-nominated short story writer and journalist based in Birmingham, Alabama. His checkered past includes stints as a reporter, editor, PR flack, bartender, paralegal, and investigator. This is his first story in Rock and a Hard Place.