by Bill Beverly
“Abraham Lincoln,” he said warily.
“Right,” said the man. Deep. Not Fin, but some of his gravity.
Walter hissed, “Who is it?”
“We’re in Nebraska,” East reported.
“Where at in Nebraska?”
“Gas station.”
“Listen to me,” the man said. “Where’s the station at?”
“Oh. I don’t know,” East admitted.
“You don’t know? You don’t know what town you’re in?”
“We been in Nebraska a while,” East stammered.
“All right,” said the voice, grudging. “You made good time. Good work. Call me back in an hour. Make sure you got a pen or pencil. I’ll have directions for you.”
“Got it,” said East.
“I’m a confirm it,” the man said. “Make sure you know where you’re at. Exactly.”
“Sorry.”
“Call me.”
The line went dead. East stared at the hot plastic receiver. He touched his face again where it still held the mouthpiece’s warmth.
Walter was twitchy. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” East had to say.
“What’s the deal?”
“Call back in an hour. Next time, know what town we’re in.”
Walter slapped the side of the phone box. “I know what town we’re in.”
“You should have said.”
“You should have asked.”
A little pout. Fat boy missed his chance, East thought, chance to ace the test. He curled the atlas under his arm.
“I’m going to piss then,” Walter said.
East went inside briefly, to buy a cup of lemonade, mostly ice. He took off his socks and shoes and shirt in the middle seat and bathed himself with melting ice. The cold bit clean through his tired skin, but the gray illness throughout his left side still dragged at him. He pulled fresh underwear out of his bag, and the second gray Dodgers shirt, and changed. He put his pants back on and iced his face.
It was beginning to be cold outside. Not night cold but winter cold. Big trucks pounded past both ways, their high exhaust pipes hammering.
Walter returned and they got rolling, the storm behind them again, looming high, boiling. East held the ripe, ripped Dodgers shirt outside his window and let it flap, tattered like a flag. The moment he let go his pinch, it was gone.
East dreamed interstate dreams, dreams he’d never had before, choppy, worrying. Running the wrong way, or driving against oncoming traffic, or impossible land: a highway emptying into a river, a bridge wobbling, a prairie breaking up. Or ahead of them in the east, LA, with its smog and brown mountain scrim, where it shouldn’t be. All the land—people talked about America, someday you should see it, you should drive across it all. They didn’t say how it got into your head.
He awoke. Walter was intent in the driver’s seat, his lips mumbling something, repeating, like a song. He glanced at the rearview mirrors.
“How far we come?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen hundred miles. Shh.” Walter gestured back with two fingers.
East blinked, wriggled upright. “What?”
“Shh,” Walter said again.
Out the back window he saw the dying light of the day below the shelf of the storm, a layer of smoky blue. One pair of headlights nosing behind them in the lane.
“That’s state patrol,” Walter said.
East looked again at the silhouette behind the headlights. “How you know?”
“Wasn’t so dark out when he picked us up,” Walter said. “He’s on my ass this whole time.”
“You speeding?”
“No. Right at sixty-five,” Walter said. “I wish this van had cruise control.”
“So maybe we’re okay? If he wanted, he’d light you up.”
“Maybe,” Walter said. “Maybe. Maybe he’s just taking his time? Maybe he’s checking us out in the database.”
“Database?” East yawned.
“Every plate,” Walter said. “I forget what it’s called now. Cops run a check. Find out are you wanted, are you missing, is the car stolen, do you owe money. Find out whatever they want.”
“But Johnny said the van was straight.”
“The van is registered in Johnny’s family. Someone named Harris who can’t be found. Insured. Licenses are straight. I know; I had them made. Everything was straight until Vegas.”
“Stopping at that casino?”
“It wasn’t the stopping,” said Walter. “Wasn’t even getting up on the tow. You can always pay the guy, give him a hundred dollars, the problem goes away. It was you two, jacking it up. Slugging the guy.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“All right. Your brother did.”
“That ain’t on me,” East insisted.
He glanced back. Nothing from Ty. No way to know if he was even alive.
“All right. Anyway. So what you gotta ask is: Did they call it in, those guys? Is there some bulletin out on us? Or did they keep it in house, make themselves a promise they’d kick our ass next time?” said Walter. “Wisconsin plates. So they knew there probably wasn’t gonna be a next time.”
East said, “How’d you learn all this?”
“That’s what I do,” Walter said. “Projects.”
“Projects?”
“I know people,” said Walter. “I got jobs. I watched a house for a bit like you. But I moved up.”
“You made the licenses,” said East. “What’s that mean? That license ain’t real, that’s what it means.”
“East. Fin has a whole setup. People in the DMV. People at the state. I got a part-time job there; they think I’m twenty-two. So we can float records. We can make people up. Some sit in the system for years, man, before we use them. When we need them, I take care of it. I make it happen.”
“You make what happen?”
“I make a license,” Walter said.
“You an artist? You print it?”
“No, state does that. I used to, but it wasn’t good enough. Get you past a bouncer. But a cop would spot it. Now they’re real.”
“But they ain’t real.”
Walter said, “What is real? These got everything a California license has. There’s backup in the statehouse says there is an Antoine Harris. State trooper calls it in, it checks out. That real enough for you?”
“I don’t believe it,” said East.
“Well,” Walter sniffed. “Best hope you don’t have to prove it. Antoine is clean, man. Keep him that way.”
“I’m clean,” said East. “I never been picked up. My name’s good.”
“Ain’t you lucky,” Walter said. “Shh, here comes the man.”
The trooper had hit his light, blue and white pulsing off everything. Walter cut speed and shifted his path right.
But the cop sped on by.
“See?” East said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Walter exhaled a long, tense breath. He smelled like fried food, sweat, and oil. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I should have woken you up earlier. Talking to you, it’s sure to make me feel better.”
—
Walter was floating before the headlights, big 4XL Dodgers jersey lit to boiling. Another dream East was having about the road—or so he thought. Then he saw the chain-link, that they were in a rest stop, not in a lane. Behind Walter’s body was a pay phone.
Walter was making the second call. East bolted up in his seat. But Walter was already hanging up, the pink flyer in one hand, atlas in the other. He turned, spotted East behind the windshield, and nodded.
“Got it,” he grunted, opening his door. “You want to drive, or should I?”
“You must have crept out smooth,” East accused him.
“You were sleeping.”
“You got no business making the call without me.”
“I’ll drive, then.” Walter tugged the seat belt around himself uncomfortably. There was no good fit. “Yeah, I got business.”
Bi
tterly East said, “I need to be on there when we call.”
“East,” Walter began, “I ain’t your boy. I made the call. Like you did before. Do I feel better, since now I know? Yes. Who got directions? The one who can read did. Read a sign. Read a map.”
“I can read,” said East.
“Ain’t you lucky,” Walter said. “You ready?”
East snatched the flyer from Walter. Handwriting covered the back side now—terrible writing, scratches, loops slanting downhill.
“I can’t read this,” East said at last. “No one can read this.”
“That’s right, son,” Walter said. “Nobody but me. I can read every word.”
It was night now, thickening. A bread truck sat disabled two spaces down, the doors gaping. Like a foreclosed house.
“What they say about Michael Wilson?”
“We didn’t talk about Michael Wilson. Why we want to talk about him?”
“Don’t sneak around on me,” East snapped.
“You’re so angry,” Walter said. “Put me out too. Go on. It was always gonna come down to you. You and your little brother. I knew it. You headstrong street Negroes. You were always gonna win. So do it now.”
“Come on,” East said, steaming.
“I mean it,” Walter said. “Here the keys, then. Put me out.”
Schoolgirl drama. But Walter had him beat.
“Come on,” East groaned again.
Walter spat out the door and palmed the keys back. He started up the van and checked the mirrors. “About an hour,” he said. “Then we get off the road.”
Finally East relented. “What did they tell you? About the stop?”
“Easy. Grocery store about twenty miles off the road. We meet up with a truck. Follow them. Everything’s paid for. They don’t know us. We just get and go.”
“What kind of people?”
Walter picked up speed. A strange field of lighted wire deer glowed in the distance. “They didn’t tell me that.”
9.
“What state are we in again?”
“Iowa.”
Walter was still frosty at East. He’d dropped off the interstate without an announcement. When East had asked, after some driving, “You headed where the guns are?” Walter nodded once. Merely.
“This the way the directions said?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was their first real stretch off the interstate. First time East had seen country like this. All East thought of Iowa was a map and outlines of products: corn, a tractor, the smiling head of a dairy cow. That was Iowa to his mind.
This road had none of those. Houses thrown up like milk cartons in lonely space—dingy, flat, unpainted cinder-block foundations. Strips of siding hanging off the corners like bandages. In front of each waited a little collection of beat-up vehicles like a boy would arrange in a sandbox. Cheap LED Christmas lights glowed from behind the windows, and sometimes, behind the drainage ditches, a Baby Jesus was standing yard.
Their backyards stood empty, a darkness forever.
The boys rode quiet and tense, East feeling the shifting road through his seat. A little town arose with its dull light reflected on the bottoms of clouds. Signs, steeples, a little grocery store closed for the evening, red still glowing in the plastic letters along the roofline.
“This is it,” Walter said. He coasted into the lot, splashed through the puddles. Out here it had already rained, or been hosed down, one or the other.
“This is it?”
“Ain’t it enough for you?”
“Walt, man,” East said. “Just, you don’t run guns at the food store.”
“They do.” Walter pulled the van around once and then sat idling, lights on. “You feeling better?”
“Fine.”
“You look a little less green than you did,” said Walter. “Thought you’d be puking again.”
East snapped, “It don’t hurt so much if you don’t talk about it.”
A light drizzle speckled the windshield.
“How you doing, Ty?” Walter called.
The reply came, “Fabulous.”
“You psyched, man? Getting your hands on more guns?”
“Yeah. All I ever think about,” said Ty drolly. “Guns. Guns. Guns.”
Something, East thought. Something Walter knew about talking to his brother that he didn’t. Even jiving him. As if they knew each other, when they didn’t.
He and Ty, they didn’t know each other, when they did.
Then, from behind the grocery store, a small black pickup tiptoed out near them, not a glance from the driver, no signal, almost indifferent.
“Is that it?” said East.
Walter’s eyes were buzzing. The truck’s turn signal pulsed once. Toward the road.
Walter pulsed the light back, and the pickup revved and began to crawl out. “We’re in business.”
Walter crouched over the wheel, maintaining the distance between the van and the little black truck. Back down the highway the van unwound them, past the houses and signs and fields they’d already seen, then onto an eastbound route. Here, fewer houses and no maintenance—the pavement was lined by dropouts, potholes the size of dinner plates chipping off onto the shoulder. Both vehicles nosed along the center line.
“You set this up too, Walt?” said East.
“No. They did,” said Walter. “I mean, there’s a guy. A broker. Guy they call Frederick. He does it all by phone. He never handles a gun.”
“Is he here? Or in LA?”
“This ain’t my bailiwick.”
“It ain’t what?”
“I don’t know where the man is. I didn’t set this up,” Walter said through gritted teeth. “Ask me a few more questions, why don’t you?”
“All right,” said East. “All right.”
Another road, wider, ran straight between two fields dressed in stubble. The headlights touched the white, embarrassed carcass of a deer. Then the pickup slewed diagonally and stopped astride the center line. It surprised Walter: he chirped the tires stopping.
A passenger leapt out. Blue sweatshirt, hood knotted tight around his face. Just a nose, a white nose, a pair of eyes like coal-black holes. Walter grabbed the shift lever. But there was no time to do anything, nowhere to go.
“Be cool,” East cautioned.
The passenger strode past them into the field, up the beginning of a beaten two-track. He popped a bolt on a metal gate. Then, turning, he beckoned.
“This freaks me out,” said Walter. “They could lock us in.”
“Well, that fence ain’t much,” East murmured.
Walter swung the van toward the track. The hooded passenger motioned to roll down the window.
“Grim reaper–looking motherfucker,” Walter said under his breath, and cranked the window down.
The air pushed in, starry-cold. They saw the ball of the boy’s head turning but not the face, heard his words but nothing in his voice. He could have been the grim reaper. He could have been anyone. “You’re going to go till you hit a barn that’s got two Harvestores. Tall blue silos,” the voice came. “It’s about a mile up over the hill.”
Courteously Walter said, “What hill?”
The passenger gave no sign Walter had spoken. “Follow that trail. On the other side, you will find it, down the hollow. You can’t miss. Understand?”
Walter and East both nodded in a daze.
The boy’s nod back was a single chop of his nose.
“You can get back out this way,” the nose said. “Or there’s a drive out the other side if you can find it.” He pushed the long gate and it creaked open before them.
The boys sat stricken. Not sure of the etiquette. Like being little at Halloween, at the weird house, when somebody’s dad answers the door in a costume and offers you a pull off his whiskey—what you do then.
“Go,” the nose said. “It ain’t no good out here waiting.” He scented something up the road and tossed his head: In.
Walter touched
the accelerator and the van lurched through. In the taillights the boy swung the gate shut and departed. His small taillights moved away like tiny stamps.
Walter stopped, distracted, the van idling, working his chin with his fingertips.
“I don’t know, man.”
“What?”
“Do you like the feel of it?”
“The feel of it?” East sized up Walter. Got this far before he decided it was scary? “Like you said, it’s set. It’s all ready. No time to change our mind.” More gently he said, “Go on, man.”
Walter strapped his fingers around the wheel again.
But the van pitched this way and that, as if carried by hand. The track was a rough bargain between tires and ground—polished in places but muscled and bushy with weeds in others. The headlights danced ahead in the mangled fields. After a short time they made a shallow climb on a long, triangular bulge in the earth.
“This must be the hill,” Walter said.
“Was that a mile?”
“I got no idea. I could use some coffee,” he admitted.
On the other side, only dark fields.
Two more such ridges, and then they saw it: twin silos, strange and quiet, nearly invisible below their galvanized caps. A farmhouse two stories high, unlit, paintless, or left unpainted so long that its paint had darkened to match the wood. On the far side, a barn. They rattled their way past the farmhouse and descended to a large bald spot beaten flat by tires, not by treads or hooves. The barn was large, corrugated aluminum. One large low window suggested a light somewhere behind it. A little grass fared poorly.
Walter eased the van in, peering up at the alien silos.
Ty drew his breath loudly. “And here come the wolves,” he announced.
East caught his door again. Two dogs came galloping—the footsteps sounded through Walter’s window, and he rolled it up at once—loosed from somewhere, dull teeth flashing as they rounded and reared in the headlights, snarling. They knifed in and spurred back. Vicious and giddy, gang animals doing simple math, two of them, one truck, therefore with an edge. Was something wrong with them? East wondered. They reared and howled at the van, throats open, but made no sound—nothing but the scuffling of their paws on the beaten ground. East cracked his window: not a thing. Dogs without voices. Like in a movie.
