by Bill Beverly
“But what if they don’t answer.”
“Then they don’t. Let’s warm up at least. Get some food.”
“I don’t need to warm up.”
Ty snorted. “Listen to him. Fucking cowboy, man. I seen you get cold last night.”
Darkly East glared.
“I don’t know,” protested Walter. “I don’t know if they’ll answer. But maybe he’s at a hotel or buying gas or at an airport. But I do know if he’s somewhere else, we can find that out.”
“How you gonna find that out?”
Walter pressed his lips together grimly. “Stuff you don’t know about, man.”
“You saying—”
“I’m saying I can’t talk about it. But it’s real.”
“Fuck it,” said Ty. “Fuck you both. I’ll be in the van.”
Walter glanced at Ty as he went. “I gotta agree,” he said.
Quiet now. Even the birds stopped shifting in their trees.
“You coming?”
“Just trying to do my job,” East said.
“Okay. I hear you. But I’m ready to get out of this icebox, man. Come on.”
East hesitated, then followed Walter out to the road. Ty was a hundred yards ahead, out in plain view. At least it was dark. East hurried to catch up with Walter.
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “The judge, could he have gone to LA already?”
“I guess,” Walter said. “Possible. But I’m going to say no.”
“Because of what?”
Walter winced. “Stuff you don’t know about,” he repeated.
“More stuff. Shit.” East kicked a pinecone. “Burn these woods up, man.”
—
Somehow they’d gotten low on gas. All tired. All angry. East took it personally. The empty house was another house lost. He had tried to keep it straight. But now everyone would kill one another at the first sideways look.
East fired the van through the little bubble of light that was the town and back into the dark, pine-jagged night. The big highway home lay to the south, so he took them north—toward the other lake, the ghetto lake, just by instinct. Just a glimpse of the big highway and it was over. The job would be over. If it weren’t already.
All the miles, he thought. Nothing.
“Why we ain’t got a cell?” grumbled Ty. “So much time wasted finding these phones.”
“You know why,” Walter said.
“You know there’s a way to do it. You just too scary of everything.”
“I’m Murder One scary,” Walter replied. Staring out at nothing.
“All right. All right,” East broke in. “Look. Wasn’t there a pay phone up at Welfare Lake?”
“Yep.”
“Do you know, while we were sleeping, some dude tried to rob us up there?”
Walter giggled. “What do you mean, tried to?”
“White dude with a little gun in his hand. I gave him three.” Before it had seemed funny, a story he could save up and tell. Now it didn’t have much in it.
“So he did rob us,” said Ty. “Whyn’t you wake me?”
“Think about it,” said Walter. “Think for a minute why he didn’t wake you.”
—
Yes: a phone booth, a fisherman’s phone, at the second lake. It hung on a power pole beneath a light, the last few buzzing insects struggling through the cold air.
One woman, maybe thirty, forty, in dirty pink sandals, was on the line. Dolefully they watched her.
“What do you want to do?” asked East.
“Wait,” said Walter. “What are we gonna do? Drive around? Go back and freeze? How long you think she can stand there in that housedress?”
“That housedress looks warm,” Ty put in from the back. “I say she’ll be there all night.”
East parked the van two rows of spaces out and killed the lights. Left the van to idle. He broke open a water bottle, but it only made him colder.
“Wonder what she’s talking about,” Walter said, cracking his neck side to side.
Her feet were bare in the fuzzy sandals. She looked over her shoulder and winced at the sight of the van. Then turned back.
“When we get on there, talk if you want. But I got to ask a few questions,” Walter said.
“I don’t even care. You talk,” East said. “What is stuff I don’t know about? That’s what I want to know.”
“We see his credit cards. Okay?” Walter said. “Don’t ask who, don’t ask where. I’ll tell you two things, then you forget them. One, we got people watching his credit cards. Two, if something like an airline ticket came through, Abraham Lincoln would have told us. Told us when, told us where. That’s why I don’t think so.”
“But Abraham Lincoln ain’t answering his phone.”
“Today he ain’t,” said Walter gloomily. “I’ll concede that.”
The woman on the phone held out a hand and backhanded the air five, six times. Like she were reenacting the slapping of a child.
“Shit, I can’t stand it,” said East, and he swung the door open and jumped out. Colder here, now. And quiet.
The woman bared her teeth at him before he was ten feet away.
“You get away from me!” she raged. “You get back! I got here first!”
“Ma’am,” East said. “Ma’am.”
“You git back!” she hissed. “This is my call!” A yellow rubber bracelet on her wrist holding one key. Gripping the receiver jealously, ready to give up everything for it, her one treasure on Earth. “There’s this boy here,” she shouted into the phone. “He wants the phone! Yes! And I told him, it’s my call. I paid! I came first! And now he won’t go away.”
East pushed the air down with his empty palms down, trying to settle. “Ma’am,” he cajoled. “Not hurrying you. Not hurrying you.”
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are!”
He had Ty’s little squirt gun in his pocket. It gave him an odd, lopsided feeling.
“How long you gonna be on, though? Ma’am!”
“How do I know?” the woman protested. “A minute, maybe? A few minutes? Damn!”
Blankly, East stared at the woman. Well, this sawed it. Ride for days, then crash up on this creature. Beggar-woman, they would have called her in The Boxes: steel-wool hair. Shoulder blades quivering under the housedress. His mother in white.
“A few minutes,” he conceded bitterly. He turned and walked to the van, where they’d be teasing him, he knew. Yes. Pealing laughter as soon as he opened the door.
“God damn,” wept Walter. “You should have seen her eyes flash.”
East slid in with what he could salvage of his dignity. “A minute, she said.”
“All night. I was right,” Ty said. “Do what you wanna do. That was funny.”
East tried to consider it funny.
“So, what did this robber look like, anyway?” Walter said. “The one who was gonna take us?”
East shrugged. Stuff you don’t know about. “Big and white. Moustache. Red hair. Teenaged. Wore a green coat like the army.”
“Probably was the army,” Ty said. “Oh! Look!”
The woman was scurrying off in her slippers. Wasn’t taking a chance.
—
The operator was a new one. It took her forever to dial through. “Are you still on?” Walter asked twice. “Did we get disconnected?”
“I’m still here.”
Then the silence of a new connection on the line. “Yeah,” a male voice said.
East put his head in so close to Walter’s that they were breathing each other’s breath.
“Man,” Walter said, “we’re there. We reached it. You guys been offline. And the man isn’t at the house. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“You got any news for me? Anything I can use?”
“We got a different setup,” reported the voice. “Police came down this morning. Arrested a few people.”
The curve of Walter’s ear just past the dark receiver
, pinkish-brown.
“A few people? Who?”
“You know,” the man said. “I don’t really want to say.”
“The big man?”
“Definitely got the big man.”
“Fuck,” said East. His body recoiled beneath him, wanted to smash something, to go running off. He bit down hard and listened.
Walter asked, “The two dudes who sent us?”
“Definitely arrested them. Definitely cleaned out that whole area.”
“How many?”
“Maybe fifteen, twenty. Put it this way. Yesterday there was an organization. Tonight there ain’t. We’ll see what we can do tomorrow.”
Walter put the phone to his chest. “You hear this?”
“Yeah,” East whispered.
“Things are changed,” the voice on the other end said. “I mean, it might be cool, you making that stop. More important now. There’s more people he can talk about now, you dig?”
Walter said, “I dig.”
“But I got no instructions. You do what you got to do,” said the voice.
“You still got him flying out Sunday?”
“Flying Sunday,” confirmed the voice. “Nonstop to LAX.”
“Remind me,” said Walter. “What day is it now?”
“Thursday night,” the voice said tersely. “You boys strong? In your pocket?”
“Yeah, we’re strong,” said Walter.
“Okay,” said the voice. “The next conversation should be like this conversation. Smart.”
“So you’re telling me to make up my own mind,” Walter said.
“Yeah,” returned the voice. “I guess you can do that.”
Walter cupped the phone. “It’s up to us,” he whispered. “What you want to do?”
East looked long and hard at Walter’s brown eyes. “We go,” he said. “We do what Fin told us.”
“All right,” said Walter, and drew a long breath, the van full of guns idling behind them, blind.
12.
Once at the house in The Boxes a boy named Hosea was going to fight a boy they called Cancer. Everyone knew it would happen, and no one wanted it to, because Hosea was well liked while Cancer was not, and Cancer was going to whup Hosea’s ass. None of that was a question. The boys knew, too, that it would happen, because Hosea had asked for it. He told Cancer that nobody liked him, then went on and explained it. He insulted Cancer and then insulted him again. Everyone knew Hosea was telling the truth. Hosea was a good kid.
But stronger than their feelings for Hosea or telling the truth was a principle: Know when you’re fucking with someone. Know who you’re fucking with. Know that things have their cost. The boys knew the fight was on, because Hosea could not say what he’d said and not pay.
And then the fight didn’t happen. It was a windy, blast-furnace day. First Cancer was there, waiting for Hosea. When he left, Hosea showed up. Then they were both there, and ready, but Sidney called out from inside with some work: a U had stopped breathing on the kitchen floor. He had to be taken out. He was all quaky and blue. You did not have people dying in the house. It was best to save their lives, or have them die somewhere else. Either way, you took them out. Cancer and Hosea were both called into that, and they helped carry the U out and put him in a car. In the car, the U went ahead and died, so the event became less a drop-off and more a dropping-the-body. You could not just drop a body anywhere or at any time. Bodies were complicated. And the dead body dissipated the charge between Cancer and Hosea.
But not the other boys. That tension had not been released. And the rest of the day, East had to settle them, to separate them, to keep the electricity that had stabbed the air like a knife from cutting into them, from sending them honed at each other. No matter that Hosea and Cancer stood together and let it drop; no matter that a dead man lay in temporary storage, waiting to be cast aside when darkness came. A knife had been thrown up into the air, and the boys would not settle to their work until they saw it land.
There was a gas station. The lights in the cold made the cars gleam like licked suckers. East pumped and paid, and Walter tried calling the number again. Nothing. Nothing had changed. Nobody knew anything more.
They bought hot dogs out of a steamer and drove off.
It seemed they were reaching the end of the world of people. No towns on this road to speak of, only points where the trees peeled away, the road bent, and suddenly there’d be a house on the land, a single light atop a garage; it blazed, filled the yard as they passed, then the trees snapped shut like a curtain behind them. Roads as dark as rivers, absorbent of everything, only the reflectors in their measured rhythm, here, here, here, on posts, and here, here, down the center stripe.
Scuttling eyes disappeared along the edges of the road.
But Walter, having warned East not to ask, was now conversing on how you tracked a man through his credit cards. “Ain’t hard to get someone’s number,” he rambled. “Any waiter can do it, any cashier at a store. If you don’t mess with it, if you aren’t trying to steal, then no one knows you’re watching.”
“So you doing this?” Ty put in. “On the judge?”
The judge. His name lay low in East’s memory.
“I set the account up. I maintained it. Some people never check their shit online. Sometimes you gotta work at it. Sometimes you set it up once, and it works forever.”
“How you learn?”
“Just learned,” said Walter. “Kids at school.”
East watched the inscrutable dark outside. Had to take this break, he reassured himself. It was necessary. Everyone needed to warm up. The night was even colder than the night before at the gun house, when it had snowed. This cold would freeze you. Everyone needed the heat. Everyone needed the food.
They ate the watery hot dogs and wadded the cartons up. No finding the trash bag anymore. East stuffed his into the crack of the seat.
Ty put his feet up on the back of Walter’s chair. “So you’re following the guy’s cards. How come the dude don’t know?”
“Know what?” said Walter.
“Somebody’s watching him.”
“How come he don’t know? Everybody suspects. Nowadays everybody thinks somebody’s on to their shit. But if you ain’t losing money,” he said, “if your money is still, you don’t do anything about it. And we ain’t taking his money.”
Ty said, “If we got a computer, say at a library, could you see him?”
“No.”
“I thought that was the point,” said Ty acidly.
“I know,” said Walter. “It’s complicated, man. We were tracking more than one guy. It ain’t like I had just one password. I don’t know what his was. I ain’t got these all memorized. And we was faking IP addresses, everything. We had a whole setup.”
“What computer did you use?” said Ty.
“At school.”
“No wonder you still in school,” laughed Ty. “Tell me how come Fin ever had you standing yard. You a smart boy.”
East opened his mouth, shut it again. It was more questions than he’d heard Ty ask in years.
Walter replied, “I stood yard so I’d know the job.”
He coasted to a stop. The highway ended at a stop sign. Ahead, a maze of road signs peppered a luminous guardrail that kept cars from hurtling into the woods. Walter had been running squares, East knew from watching the roof compass switching N, E, S, W. Just going around the block, keeping the lake in the middle. And they’d been riding almost two hours.
“We can decide whatever we want,” Walter said.
It was East they were waiting on.
He stirred. It had been easy to say go in the light of the pay phone, tethered some way, however, to LA, to The Boxes. But here in the dark, the van filled with the things he didn’t know.
Something about talking again seemed difficult. “Should we call them again and see what they know?”
Walter shook his head. “Maybe. But not till morning at best. School’s closed. And I don�
�t even know who’s watching things. I don’t know who’s in jail and who isn’t.”
The turn signal pulsed in the ditch, shotgun side.
“If we went back,” said Walter, “we could see if anything is going on.”
“Back in them pine trees,” East said hopelessly. “With nobody there.”
“Maybe we’d find something,” Walter said. “Maybe if we broke in. Something that would tell us.”
Ty said, “I did break in. At least, I popped a window up.”
Walter turned in his seat. “Why didn’t you say something? Was there any alarm?”
“If there was,” said Ty, “I didn’t hear it. If there was, cops already came and went.”
“You think we should go?” Walter said over his shoulder. “Ty?”
Ty said, “Me? I seen it already. Doing my job. You two make up your minds.” He lay down theatrically, retired.
“Yeah,” East decided. “Circle back.” He had been hugging his knees, and now that he let them go, his whole body hurt. Beaten up from inside. Heading back to the house did not make him happy. But Ty was right. You did your job.
—
Wilson Lake. Reflectors on every post, every driveway, eyeing them. The driveway of 445 Lake Shore empty but for the cold black truck.
Walter idled the van at the lake parking lot while once again they loaded up and got ready. They slipped on the thin, dark gloves. Once again they walked the back track off the road.
The grass had gone quiet, and the branches slapped back when Walter caught one in the dark. Ty led them through the field of pines to where they saw the yellow back porch light. A single moth clapped at it, ineffectual.
“There’s the phone box,” said Ty. A gray box below the kitchen windows.
“So?”
“If you got an alarm, it comes out in that.”
“Some alarms work cellular,” said Walter.
“Ain’t no signal up here,” Ty said.
“How do you know that?” Walter said. “How do you know that?”
Ty had Walter spooked now.
The phone box was cobwebbed. Ty pried the lid up and pinched free the plug.
“If we’re going in looking, what you want to find?”
Walter said, “Anything. Directions? Ticket receipt? A note? We’ll just look. But we ain’t going in there to break and fuck things up.”
