Sean was fed up with his job as an assistant manager at the local Dinostop service station. He stared through the window at the big purple dinosaur statue in the yard next to the gas pumps. His boss was skimming money from the safe every morning and doctoring the paperwork to make it look like the assistant managers were always coming up short on their daily balances. To make matters worse, the customers were rude, manipulative, and dangerous. He had already been robbed twice during graveyard shifts, both times at gunpoint.
The rest of his life wasn’t any better. His sometime girlfriend Gloria showed no real interest in building a long-term relationship. Sean didn’t really care. She smoked pot all day and did a terrible job of raising a little boy who used to tell Sean, “You’ll never be my daddy.” Sean’s one mediocre semester in community college hadn’t served any useful purpose. In his spare time, his drinking and drugging buddies drained him and got him into trouble. Family didn’t count anymore, either. Most of them hated themselves, which means they hated each other. And through all of this, nothing happened in Sean’s town without someone finding out about it.
It was time to reinvent himself. Over the course of his shift that day, instead of placing the cash drops in the safe, Sean stashed them in his backpack. A half an hour before the next manager was scheduled to relieve him, he pocketed what was left in the cash register. He threw on his backpack and told the customer across the counter, “Talk whatever you want, lady. It’s all free. Have fun. Life’s short.” Then he walked out of the store, leaving everything wide open and unattended. He spit on the head of the big purple dinosaur statue as he passed it. Heading out of town felt good. He doubted he would ever be back.
Between the $3,500 he had stolen from the store and the $5,000 he had managed to save over the past few years, he figured he could disappear somewhere into the American landscape and live well enough for a while. He had deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts months ago and destroyed any hard-copy pictures of himself he could find. He had also paid off his bills, cut his credit cards into pieces and melted them into tiny plastic mounds, and buried his mementos in the local landfill. He even gave most of his clothes to charities to erase traces of his past that someone might come looking for in the near future.
He drove north until he reached Denver and parked his car in a bad part of town. He left the keys in the ignition, the doors open, and the certificate of title in the glove box. Then he walked to the nearest bus station and bought a ticket to Seattle. This plan made sense to him. He didn’t know anyone who lived within 100 miles of Washington State. He could melt into a world that didn’t care who he was.
In a few weeks, he was working on a fishing boat out of Puget Sound, going by the name of “Tyler.” The captain paid him cash under the table and treated him fairly when he did his job. Tyler worked hard, knowing he was running out of second chances. He couldn’t contact anyone back home for his own protection, which hurt. Still, he was earning respect from the crew. It mattered to him that other strong men who worked as hard as he did depended on him to do things right.
Over the next year, Tyler secured an illegal identity. With this metamorphosis came a different personality he liked more than the one he had spent a lifetime patching together before leaving Colorado. On Puget Sound, he worked an honest day’s work for honest pay. For the most part, the fishermen didn’t put up with backstabbing and laziness. Everyone was expected to stay on task during working hours. They also stayed pretty upbeat because life on a fishing boat worked better that way.
Tyler stopped doing drugs, too. Then he quit drinking himself into oblivion on the weekends. He started finding other things to do, things that kept him from dwelling on his former life in Colorado. Instead of vegetating in his apartment — stoned, drunk, and transfixed by Ancient Aliens — he began strolling through the different communities in the Seattle area and getting to know people. Now and again, he would camp or ski in the Cascade Mountains. He even saw Soundgarden at the Gorge Ampitheatre with his work buddies.
One day when the crew was fishing off the coast of Vancouver Island, a gray whale breached the water within fifty feet of the boat. Tyler had never been so close to such a massive, powerful animal. It performed an impossibly delicate pirouette and then crashed back into the dark waters like a prehistoric memory.
That night, he dreamed of the gray whale. When he awoke the next morning, he decided that it was time to start looking for a home to buy. Maybe he could actually own a piece of property. Maybe he’d finally meet a decent woman along the way, too, someone who would accept him for both who he was and who he used to be. But a part of him wondered if any of this would come to pass. He had to do things carefully, one step at a time. He knew he would be in hiding for the rest of his life.
