The Ethical Assassin

“Where you going?” the guy asked. His voice buckled under the weight of his syrupy accent, uniquely Florida. Half pecan pie, half key lime. We were about thirty miles outside of Jacksonville, and heavy accents were par for the course.

I’d lived in Florida since the third grade and had long been afraid of just about everyone outside a major urban center. In no way did I consider this cowardice, but common sense. Despite the popular belief that big cities like Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville and Miami were nothing but suburbs of New York or Boston, they were, in reality, dense with longtime Florida natives, a vocal minority of whom included Confederate flag wavers, “ Dixie ” hummers, and cross burners. These cities were also full of transplants from all over the country, so things balanced out reasonably well. Step out to the boonies, and the flavor became considerably less cosmopolitan.

I now stood, as far as I was concerned, in the boonies, which meant that the iridescent KICK MY JEW ASS sign on my forehead, visible only to those who preferred Hank Williams Jr. to Sr., began to throb and fire off sparks. I conjured a polite smile for the pickup driver, but the smile turned out badly, crooked and sheepish.

For an instant, I considered giving the guy my line, about how I was in the neighborhood to speak with parents about education, but I knew instantly it was a bad idea. Puffy Guy with his weird hair and his pampered pickup radiated a low tolerance for bullshit. My crew boss, Bobby, could probably get away with the pitch. Hell, Bobby would probably score off the guy, but I was not Bobby. I was good, maybe the best guy in Bobby’s crew- maybe the best guy Bobby had found in a long while. But I wasn’t Bobby.

“I’m selling,” I said with a startling realization, like the flip of a switch, that I wasn’t merely uneasy, I was afraid. Even in all that heat, I felt cold, and my muscles had begun to tense. “Door-to-door,” I added. I took the bag off my shoulder and set it down between my black dress sneakers.

The man leaned a little farther toward me and gri

“You got a permit for that?” He yanked at something between his legs and came up with a nearly full bottle of Yoo-hoo, which he put to his lips for a good ten seconds. When he set it down again, the bottle was now more than half-empty. I suppose an optimist would say it was half-full.

A permit. I’d never heard of such a thing. Did I need a permit? Bobby hadn’t said anything about it; he’d merely dropped me off and told me to hit the trailer park hard. Bobby loved trailer parks.

I had to stay focused, act confident, presume this guy wouldn’t try anything too crazy, not in the middle of the street, albeit a sinisterly deserted street. “My boss told me to sell here,” I said, looking at the pavement rather than his teeth.

“I didn’t ask who told you to do nothing,” the guy said, shaking his head with sadness at the poor state of things. “I asked if you had a permit.”

I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be so afraid. Nervous, sure. Anxious, guarded, alert- you bet. But this was like being ten years old again, caught in the nasty neighbor’s yard or messing around with your friend’s father’s power tools. “Do I need one?”

The guy in the pickup fixed his gaze on me. He curled his upper lip into a half pucker, half scowl. “Answer the question, boy. You stupid?”

I shook my head, partly in disbelief and partly in answer to his question. “I don’t have a permit,” I said. I tried to look away again, but his eyes were bearing down on me.

Then the redneck burst into a huge, crooked-tooth grin. “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t need one, then, ain’t it?”

It took me a minute to understand what had happened, and then I forced a nervous attempt at an I’m-a-good-sport laugh. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“You listen up. You best stay out of trouble. You know what happens to people caught breaking the law round here?”

“They’re asked to squeal like pigs?” I tried to keep it from coming out, but despite my fear it slipped through my grasp and got away from me. It could happen to anyone.

The redneck’s dark eyes went narrow over his long nose. “You being a smart-ass?”

What the hell kind of question was that? Could there be any explanation for what I’d said other than smart-assedness? I decided not to point that out.

When people say that they had the metallic taste of fear in their mouth, that metal is generally copper. My mouth tasted like copper. “Just keeping things light,” I managed, along with a forced expression of calm and affability.

“What’s a smart-ass like you doing out here, anyhow? Why ain’t you in your college?”

“I’m trying to earn money for college,” I told him, hoping my industry would impress him.

It didn’t. “Ain’t you something, college boy? Am I going to have to come out of here and smack you in the pussy?”

There was, of course, no dignified way to answer that question. Maybe Bobby would be able to shrug it off, crack some self-effacing joke to make the guy in the pickup like him. Next thing you know, they’d be laughing like old friends. Not me. The only thing I could think of was groveling- or to imagine an alternate universe version of me, the Lem who would walk over to the open window and pound the guy in the face until his nose burst and his stupid haircut was matted with blood. The Lem in this universe didn’t do that sort of thing, but it always seemed to me that if I could do it once, if I could be the sort of person who might beat the living shit out of a jerk giving me a hard time, then that fact would be written on my body, my face, in my walk, and I wouldn’t be, once again, under the thumb of a bully high on his own power over me.

“I don’t think so,” I said at last. “I don’t think a pussy slapping is, in the most technical sense, necessary.”

“You’re a little doofus, you know that?” the guy said, and he rolled up his window, thick arms rotating as he cranked the handle. He took a clipboard from the passenger seat and began looking over some papers. After licking his thumb and index finger as if they were lollipops, he pushed back a few sheets. His two wild front teeth protruded from his mouth and began to rake in his lower lip.

Doofus. Not the worst thing I’d ever been called, but it stung in its banality. On the positive side, however, the redneck rolled up his window, so my fear began to abate a little until it became a low throb. I had been dismissed, and it was time to get going, though the creepy redneck was still keeping an eye on me.

So I hoisted the bag back onto my shoulder and walked to the next trailer, this one gray with green trim. The lot, like all the others, was a patch of sand and grass, weeds encroaching from the far borders. A sickly-looking palm tree hunched in the front yard with a medicinal cup thrust into the trunk like an old man’s corncob pipe. The front windows had pull-down shades, like civilized people put in bedrooms, but they weren’t extended all the way down. Even from the street I could see light inside and the flicker of television.

No lawn furniture, no toys, no garish welcome mat. There was nothing moochie. That was the bookman word, the word Bobby had taught us. The bookman loves moochie. Moochie is plastic kiddie crap scattered everywhere. Moochie is garden gnomes, wind chimes, excessive and early- or late- holiday decorations, anything that suggested that here lived people who liked to spend money they didn’t have on things they didn’t need. Spending money on things their kids didn’t need- well, that was about as moochie as it got. Driving his crew around, Bobby would sometimes do a sort of seated jig when he saw a house with an aboveground plastic swimming pool with an attached plastic slide. “A blind monkey could close those guys,” he’d a