The Return of Jonah Gray Read online

  “He’s also obsessive-compulsive,” I said.

  “Even better.”

  “He ran a background check on me.”

  “He’s thorough,” Ricardo said. He sniffed. “Do you smell lemon?”

  I shrugged and pointed at my computer screen. “His research pulled up the site of some guy I’ve been assigned to audit. The man’s been writing about how he dreads meeting me, and imagining what I’m going to be like. In this part here, he pictures me at my desk, counting beans. And then he goes on this tangent about beans and other legumes and how they’re often maligned in speech but incredibly nutritious and easy to grow.”

  Ricardo frowned. “Is that supposed to be an insult?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But all these people on his site are up in arms on his behalf. They’re telling him that I’m awful. That I’m a monster. That I’m wicked and bound to bleed him dry. This guy Jonah, he never actually says anything bad about me, not that I’ve found, at least. He wonders and he worries, but he’s mostly just self-deprecating. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Give the guy a break. He’s being audited. He can’t know how charming you are, my little bean counter.”

  “You’re just trying to get back on my good side.”

  “How am I doing?”

  “What should I do about Jeff Hill?” I asked him.

  “Did he ask you to do anything?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then there’s no decision to be made, is there?”

  When Ricardo left, I turned to my worktable, to the tall stack of audits ahead of me. Somewhere in that pile, I would find him. Somewhere in there, Jonah Gray was waiting.

  “Gray, Gray, Gray,” I muttered as I rifled through the stack, and then, “gotcha!”

  “You okay over there?”

  “I’m fine, Cliff,” I called back. I took the file folder labeled Jonah Gray back to my desk. “So, Mr. Gray,” I murmured. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  I already knew that Jonah Gray lived in Stockton, and I wasn’t surprised. Many of my audits that year had been from Stockton, the same city my older brother Kurt had recently moved to, about an hour east of Oakland. Since we were a district office, I was often assigned returns from places I’d never been, and Stockton was one such place.

  I took note of Jonah Gray’s street address: 530 Horsehair Road. Sometimes you could tell something about a person by the street address—whether it was a small or large apartment building or something that sounded like a town-house development or even a post office box. But 530 Horsehair Road was an address that didn’t give much away. I made a mental note to ask Kurt whether he knew the street.

  I glanced at Mr. Gray’s personal information. Jonah F. Gray. Social Security number: 229—

  I stopped. Now that was a number that told me something. Told me quite a bit, actually, and got my pulse going a little faster.

  They say that most Americans live within fifty miles of the place where they were born. My experience with tax returns bore that out. Most California taxpayers offered up Social Security numbers showing allegiance to California, whether they were born there or were naturalized there. And if Jonah Gray had been from California originally, his Social would have begun with a number between 545 and 573, or else between 602 and 626.

  But Jonah Gray was not from California, not originally at least—229 came from the East Coast, from Virginia. And specifically, it came from the southwestern corner of the state, from the rolling green hills at the cusp of the Blue Ridge Mountains, almost to Tennessee but not quite. The number 229 was from Roanoke, an old Virginia city along the salty banks of the river that gave it its name. I knew this because 229 began my Social Security number, too. So, 229 meant that Jonah Gray and I were from the same place, probably the same town, perhaps even the same zip code. That wasn’t just rare—it was something I had never before seen.

  So he was a Virginian originally, but like me, he didn’t live there now. How long had he lived around Roanoke? I wondered. Had we crossed paths before? When had he left, and why? Had he been brought west by his parents, as I had been, years before? Or had he moved later, on his own volition? And how on earth did he end up in Stockton, in the agricultural belly of the San Joaquin Valley? Kurt had moved himself, his sons and his wife there to assume a tenure-track geology professorship, which he’d been torn about accepting because of its location. Stockton wasn’t commonly considered a hub of culture and industry. Indeed, it was known as a place to drive past without stopping. Then again, I realized, a lot of people might say the same about southwestern Virginia.

  My phone rang.

  “Are you busy?” Martina asked.

  “I know why I’ve been getting those calls,” I said. I told her about Gray’s Garden. “I’m only telling you his name because he’s already discussed the audit on a public Web site.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Your protocols.” On the far end of the phone, I could hear her typing. “Ah,” she said. “Huh.”

  “Huh, what?”

  “I like him. Is he single?”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked.

  “No. Is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t check?”

  “I didn’t get to that field yet. You like him?”

  “He’s got a good sense of color, for one. It’s an attractive site.”

  “So you mean you like his Web site.”

  “It’s inviting. Attractive site, attractive guy,” she said, as if I should have made the same connection.

  “That’s not a given,” I pointed out.

  “Well, he sounds appealing. If he grows plants, you’ve got to figure that he likes working with his hands. And I do like a guy with good hands. Did you check yet?”

  “He’s from Virginia,” I said.

  “So what? Oh, I forgot. You lived there, didn’t you?”

  “I’m from there,” I corrected her.

  “But you’ve been in California practically forever.”

  “But I’m from Virginia. And the same part that he’s from.” I couldn’t explain, but I felt that this was important, even though it was true that I’d spent more than three-quarters of my life elsewhere. I looked back at the first page of his return and felt a sudden flutter. I realized that I didn’t want to share the news with Martina, but I had to. She wasn’t going to forget she’d asked.

  “He’s single,” I said.

  “He is? Perfect,” she said. “Where does he live? Or maybe I should just write to him through his Web site. I’m totally going to write to him.”

  “He lives in Stockton,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

  “I’ve been assigned a lot of Stockton audits this year. It’s random. I don’t know why.”

  “Never mind then.”

  “What, just because he’s in Stockton?”

  “Geographically undesirable, my dear.”

  I felt myself smile a little.

  “So what does Mr. Stockton do anyway? No way this site is a full-time gig.”

  In his file folder, I flipped to the back of his return, to the field just below his signature. “He’s a journalist,” I told her.

  Journalists weren’t often targeted by the Service, but like a number of my assignments that August, Jonah Gray was a randomly chosen compliance audit. Every year, a sample set of taxpayers gets tagged by pure chance. I appreciated compliance audits for the challenge of not knowing what to look for, but I did sympathize with folks on the receiving end. Out of the blue, they were ordered to gather their records and justify their claims and often had to bring in a certified public accountant to weed through the process. And still, maybe half the time, the IRS wouldn’t find anything amiss. My father, an accountant for going on forty years at that point, liked to say that compliance audits were like revving a car engine once a month. You needed to do it, if only to keep things running. Then again, as a CPA, he got paid no matter
how things turned out.

  “He’s a journalist?” Martina said. “That’s like you, only cooler.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ve got to figure that auditors and journalists are opposite sides of the same coin. With auditors being the quantitative, nerdy side. No offense.”

  “How am I the flip side of a journalist? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’re both ferreters. You’re more interested in finding the truth than pulling down a high salary. Journalists are always sniffing around for a story, looking for the why and who and how. Same as you. I bet he’s actually perfect for you. Too bad he’s in Stockton.”

  “And that I’m auditing him.”

  “I know, I know. You’ve got all those rules.”

  Martina had to get off the line to take a call from her boss. After I’d hung up, I sat there, wondering if what she’d said was true. I supposed that I was a ferreter, though I’d never thought of myself in rodent terms. But she had a point. I sorted through bills and bank statements, interest income and mortgage expense and capital gains, in order to find my own version of a story. I was about to do the same with Jonah Gray’s life.

  I stared at the first page of his return, studying the way he’d printed his address, 530 Horse hair Road, all caps, in black ink. He was obedient, at least in those first few lines. The IRS requests black or blue ink, but I’d seen purple and green, too. And once, pink. You’ve got to figure a guy who fills out his tax form in pink is daring you to do something about it. In his case, actually, we did. I don’t advise people to assume that the IRS has a hearty sense of humor.

  Because Jonah Gray had handwritten his address information, I figured he’d moved to Horsehair Road within the past year, and that he’d prepared his own return. Taxpayers who’d stayed at the same address year after year are sent forms with preprinted labels. And an accountant would have printed the return straight from a computer.

  I respected a self-prepared return. It took more effort, but it meant that Jonah was someone who wanted to know where his money went. I’d seen plenty of people get into trouble by signing everything over to CPAs, though I’d have caught hell if I ever told my father that.

  So Mr. Gray was a journalist, I thought. I glanced at his W2 (stapled, as requested, to the front of his return). His employer was the Stockton Star, which a quick bit of research confirmed was Stockton’s local newspaper. But the salary he’d been paid was too low for a reporter, even at a small city rag. That meant he was part-time or that he had taken the job midway through the previous year.

  Then I noticed a second W2 stapled beneath the first. Now I was getting somewhere. Before he began working for the Stockton Star, Jonah Gray had been earning fully three times as much as a writer for the Wall Street Journal. What’s more, he’d lived in Tiburon. Tiburon—the same marina hamlet in Marin County where I was going to dock my Catalina. But why would anyone leave Tiburon and the Wall Street Journal to write for the Stockton Star?

  “What the hell is all this?” Ricardo was back, standing before my desk, his arms crossed. “I can hear it all the way over in my office. You can’t be getting any work done.” He looked toward the ceiling and shook his fist.

  Only then did I notice the construction noise that drifted and clanged down from the fifth floor. When had that begun? I worked on four, and it was rare that sound would seep up or down from the surrounding levels. Usually, my floor’s sounds were white collar—the papery flutter of returns being slipped in and out of folders; the soft metallic click of a file cabinet closing; the clitter-tick of a calculator. But now, hammering, sawing, the clamor of pipes being hit and the whir of machinery clattered around my cubicle.

  I hadn’t heard them until Ricardo came in. Had my concentration returned?

  Without waiting for an invitation, Ricardo pulled up a chair and sat down. “I thought I would hide out over here for a few minutes, but this is chaos,” he said.

  I watched a flake of ceiling tile drift like snow onto my desk.

  “That can’t be healthy,” Ricardo said.

  “Don’t you have work to do?” I asked. I liked Ricardo and his visits were usually a welcome break, but I was eager to find out more about Jonah Gray.

  “I don’t actually. My archivist is hired and the next sexual harassment seminar isn’t for a month. What are you doing?”

  “An audit.”

  “The bean guy? It’s the bean guy, isn’t it? Ol’ Beanie Beanerson.”

  “He’s a journalist,” I said. “He used to work at the Wall Street Journal, I’ll have you know.”

  “Oh Lord, really?” Ricardo sounded put out.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Journalists are so self-righteous,” Ricardo said. “It’s always, let me tell you what to think, let me tell you what to know. And financial types are the worst. Present company excluded, I mean.”

  “Maybe the journalists you’ve met, but on his Web site, he actually invites debate. About plants, at least. And fertilizer.” Before I could say anything more, Ricardo held out his hand.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Give it. Give me the return.”

  “I’m not really supposed to—”

  “Oh, please child. Hand it over.”

  I handed him the first page of Jonah Gray’s return, and Ricardo pretended to skim it.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” he clucked.

  I could tell that he wasn’t actually reading it. “What do you think being a journalist says about his personality?”

  “Since when do you care about personality?” Ricardo asked, as a particularly loud crack from above sent a piece of ceiling onto his lap. He brushed it off in disgust. Ricardo had a point. I usually focused on what an occupation said about a taxpayer’s propensity for fraud. Some, like Kevin the contractor, had greater opportunities than others. With that, I realized that I hadn’t thought about Kevin all day. Gene, either. What a relief that was.

  “He’s probably one of those earnest droners utterly devoid of humor,” Ricardo added.

  “I know for a fact that’s not true,” I said.

  “You’re defending the guy?”

  I felt my cheeks redden. “What I mean is, on his Web site, someone was asking about a plant called ‘hen and chicks.’”

  “Hen and chicks?”

  “Apparently, it’s a succulent.”

  “Succulent,” Ricardo said lasciviously.

  I ignored him. “So he writes, did you hear about the city guy who went to the country and bought fifty chicks? The next week he buys a hundred, and the week after that, two hundred. Finally, the clerk at the country store says, ‘You must be doing really well with your chicks,’ and the city guy says, ‘No. I guess I’m either planting them too deep or too far apart.’” I laughed a little. It was a silly joke.

  Ricardo didn’t crack a smile. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Oh, come on. It didn’t actually happen.”

  “Dead smothered chickens?”

  “I was just trying to make the point that he’s not humorless. I was thinking that, being a journalist, he’s probably curious, too.”

  Ricardo perked up. “Curious like bi?”

  “No.”

  “Like weird?”

  “No, curious like…curious.”

  “Like a monkey,” Ricardo said, nodding.

  “If that helps you.”

  I didn’t know what beat Jonah Gray covered for the Stockton Star, or what he’d focused on at the Journal, but on Gray’s Garden, the man seemed game for anything. One reader had recently returned from a trip to the Cook Islands and wrote of seeing a rare palm, related to the sago, only larger.

  I’ve never even heard of such a beast! Jonah Gray had replied. You must tell us more. Do you have pictures? Can we see? Do you want me to post them? Then he admitted to having spent all afternoon researching sago palms and their closer relatives.

  Someone like that was an explorer of sorts, I
thought, interested in things beyond his own experience. I don’t mean that I’d deduced from a Web site on plant maintenance that the man sought to explore faraway countries or vast oceans. But I was willing to bet that he’d be game enough to try out the new Thai place in town.

  Not everyone will. By the end of my six months with Gene, I’d noticed that he rarely agreed to try anything new. Gene worked as a mailman and loved that he could wear the same uniform and walk the same route every day. The guy knew what he knew, liked what he liked, and was content—even happy—to exist inside of such fences. He didn’t look beyond them, and he didn’t want to. Motivating him to go out was always a chore. He’d see movies, but preferred those with actors whose work he knew, and he would study the reviews and synopses beforehand, and even download the trailers. By the time we got to the theater, I felt as if I’d already seen the damn thing. Gene knew this about himself, and he explained that he found the rhythm of his methods comforting. I appreciated the guy’s self-awareness and I respected his consistency. He’d never lie and he’d never judge out of turn. All the same, in our time together, I’d grown to find his habits a little stifling.

  Ricardo yawned. “Those journalist types are always getting their panties in a lather about freedom.”

  “I think you just created a hostile work environment.”

  “You know, freedom of information. Freedom of the press. Blah blah blah,” Ricardo said, waving the first page of Jonah Gray’s return around.

  A loud bang sounded then, and Ricardo and I looked up in tandem. I could hear muffled swearing at the same moment that a drizzle of water began to seep through the ceiling at one end of my cubicle.

  “Jesus on a bike!” Ricardo shrieked. He jumped from his seat and ran into the hallway. “Grab a bucket and call security if that gets worse. I’m going to see what gives. You want to bet this is an OSHA violation?” He ran off.

  I pulled my trash can under the leak as the swearing from above grew louder. Then I hurried back to my desk. I wasn’t afraid of getting wet. The fact was, for the first time all month, I wanted to keep working. I wanted to know more about this Jonah Gray character.