by Bill Beverly
“Of course,” said Ty.
“Take your shoes off,” said Walter.
The window Ty had popped was on the middle of the back side, over the sink. There was a security lock on the frame, but it left enough room for Ty to squirm his head and shoulders in.
“Maybe they’ll have a flashlight,” Walter said. “You’d think we’d have a flashlight.”
Ty kicked his shoes off. “Lift me up.”
Walter clucked his tongue at East, and East started. Together they made stirrups of their hands. Ty climbed them and got an arm inside and went moving things—a bottle of soap off the sill, two glasses away down the counter. Then he began wriggling in. It was tight. He yelped at something. East passed Walter Ty’s foot and went to help, felt at Ty, at the metal framing of the window. He found what was catching: his brother’s ear. He touched it, little stub of cartilage, strangely warm, and for a flash he thought of their mother’s face.
“Damn, that hurts,” Ty groaned from inside. East pressed the ear, flattened it, helped pass it without abrasion through the hard, slotlike opening. And let Ty’s head go. In. Ty’s head was in.
East threaded his other arm around and began keying Ty’s shoulders into the slot, feeding his body in, inch by inch, rib by rib. His waist and legs wriggled in midair.
“Fuck. Ouch. All right,” Ty said from inside.
“You want us to stay back here?” East said.
“Yeah, let me look. Then I’ll let you in.”
“All right.” East and Walter braced Ty’s thighs as he wormed in in midair. His body seesawed, and his hips disappeared over the sill. Then the pair of headlights swung into the driveway.
13.
There would be a few more seconds where the car would be running, seconds where they might not be heard. East had Ty’s legs in his hands. Ty was still pulling, wriggling in.
“We got to pull you out,” East whispered fiercely through the window, past his brother’s body.
“What? No!”
“They’re here.”
“I just got in,” Ty cursed.
The pair of lights swung away as the car picked its way up the driveway. Then they stabbed again across the open A of the house. The lights bounced off the countertops, the faucet. Then the car stopped—it was something new, little high-intensity bulbs—and the lights were doused.
“Now,” said East, and he caught Ty’s hand and hauled him back, up over the countertop and out the window. Ty’s head bounced on the sill: “Ow, ow, ow, ow,” he complained.
“Shh.”
“The screen. The screen,” said Walter.
“Forget the screen,” East said. He slid the window down and scooped Ty up with him. They scuttled into the pines together. This little square of a yard, the house lights would fill entirely.
“Where my shoes at?” Ty whispered furiously.
“Shh,” East replied.
The doors of the little car popped open. Two people got out: a full-grown man on the driver’s side. Someone else on the other.
“What we got, a girlfriend?” said Walter.
Ty watched intently.
East picked up a pine bough, the needles dry and brittle but still arrayed. He held it over his face, peering through it. The man was coming to the house, thumbing through keys.
He stopped, the man, at the front door and caused an overhead light to come on. They could see him—large, a black man. East wondered: Our black man? The man opened the door and moved through the open space to the kitchen. On the counter he laid a satchel or briefcase. The lights he switched on there were furious, bright, paint-store white: yes. They threw a glare that filled the yard, that counted the trees. East flinched at it.
Were they covered? Deep enough? That last-second dilemma of hide-and-seek: Could you find a better place? Or did moving expose you now?
Slowly the man stepped back out of the kitchen, into one of the sides of the house, soundless—like watching TV with the mute on. Into the kitchen next came the girl. East watched her reach up. She took a cup down from a cabinet and a plastic jug of water from somewhere below and poured a drink.
Dark. Black dark. Hard to make out her features or her age.
“No water,” Ty said. “They’re just camping out here, man.”
“Was that him?” Walter said. “East?”
East stared until his forehead hurt. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Best make sure,” said Ty. “If I shoot, he ain’t coming back.”
Madly East tried to flip through the pictures in the back of his mind. To see again what Johnny had shown them that morning. He could bring up the man’s suit, his heft. Could remember nothing of his face.
Silently the man and girl moved around the lighted house, specimens in a box. So blindingly bright. East felt his stomach begin to knot.
“Just knock,” Ty muttered. “If he answers, ask is he the judge we’re here to shoot.”
“What about the girl?” whispered Walter.
“Don’t shoot her,” said East.
“She ain’t a target,” Ty said, “but she better not fuck with me.”
“That’s cold,” Walter said, “shooting the dude in front of her. Because he looks like, you know—her dad.”
Ty didn’t say anything. East held the fallen bough close. The dry needles prickled across his cheeks.
“You decided yet?” said Ty impatiently.
The neighbors’ houses were distant, dull shapes. The stars wheeled above them, forgotten. East chewed a pine needle. Strange, bitter, sweet, like orange peel somehow. His eyes tightened on the blaring light.
The girl accelerated things. Two people there: one person you had to peel away. To ignore, to not shoot. But that’s how it worked. You thought you had the rhythm, that your pace was the world’s pace. Then someone busted a move. Someone drove up in a fleet of black-and-whites and disrupted. Someone opened a door. The world would have its way with you. You and your plan. There was only that lesson to learn.
You could pretend that it would not, that all your breathing and all your insulation would protect you. Ask Michael Jackson. Ask anyone in LA. Earthquakes rattled up out of nowhere. No radar, nobody yelling Incoming, no warning text on your phone. Only the house jangling, things falling off the wall. East was fifteen. He’d never been through a big one.
Stop. Stop it, he told himself.
He spat out the pine needle and began creeping, moving left along the line of woods around the house. The thrown light was as bright as a ball field: he had to stay well clear. Dark clothes, dark shoes, dark branch, dark skin. One night Sony had brought along his sister’s astronomy book from school—she went to a special all-girl science school she had to ride an hour to get to—and they observed the stars they couldn’t see in the LA sky, they studied the words that weren’t used in The Boxes.
Albedo. Can a body throw back light. It might have been the last word he’d ever learned. East’s albedo was near zero. Not much bounced back off him.
He’d been tracking toward the front of the house, but then the man appeared again at the back, in the kitchen. He lit a match, got the pilot going on the stove. He poured water from a bottle into a silver kettle and set it down. The light over his head drowned his face in shadows. Graying hair. Maybe fifty. Solid, thick shoulders. He washed and dried the girl’s cup.
East stopped and sighted through the bedroom windows. Through one he could see the girl stepping into a bathroom on the other side. Light spilled into the hallway, then the door narrowed and snuffed it out.
Give me a minute, he’d told Ty. Because from what he saw, he could tell nothing, could conclude nothing.
Then the man was moving again, stepping to the front door. East watched him flicker past one window, then the next. At the front door he rummaged in his pockets. Where was Ty now? Ty was waiting. Waiting on him.
The man couldn’t find his keys. He stopped, retraced his path. Back to the kitchen. He reached, took the keys from the countertop.
Yes. Just the girl, just the man. Nothing more.
Where was the man now? He’d come out the front. He was at the car! In the open air, away from her. Keys in his hand, even. East peered back along the trees’ edge, but Ty and Walter weren’t there where they’d been. Everyone was moving now: without anyone saying Go, it was happening. East slipped left, farther toward the front, past the bedrooms, past the short brown stockade around the air conditioner. One lone pine stabbed up out of the earth, away from its pack. Then he was near the black truck and the car—a little Volvo wagon, snub-nosed, Illinois plates.
The man fobbed open the doors and lifted suitcases out of the back. He wrestled with them—big ones, not the little tote size, but monsters. He couldn’t make it with both. He put one down on the beaten dirt and entered with the other. East watched him disappear inside.
The other suitcase sat beside the car, unattended.
Uncalculating, straight and quick, East rushed behind the truck, around the light that spilled out the front door, to the suitcase. Was there a tag? A name card? He reached for it, the pine bough still in his hand. Looked for a name card, something on the handle, down the side. Nothing.
Then he found the golden stitching on the highest flap. Faint in the house’s glow: a monogram. CWT. For a moment his brain buzzed, pulling up the name of the man they were hunting. Then a shriek echoed inside the house: it all clicked in. Carver. Thompson. The right initials.
The right man.
The girl. “Daddy? Daddy? Someone—”
She came running. Not at him—not to shut the door. He saw her eyes. Never mind the initials—this suitcase was what she wanted.
He straightened, raised the pine mask idiotically to his face.
“Daddy!” She burst through the door, came outside.
East’s heart hammered. Discovered now.
The father’s first cry was faraway. Then he came barreling, yelling now: Melanie! Melanie! East spun away—where was his gun, even? He kept his face hidden, for being spotted by her was not like being spotted by him. She was a witness; he was the target. He was the one who knew too much. East cleared his throat, but as he did, she reached her suitcase, and he heard the other pair of feet sliding to a stop on the piney ground: his brother. Arrived.
Ty said, “Here we go, E. Is it him?”
East nodded. “It’s him.”
The judge stopped at the door. East watched him stare and then smile. Half laughing, a curious voice: “Do I know you boys?”
Ty’s arm came up and a growl rose from his throat, a reproach. Then he fired through the screen door. Two shots, three. East heard them punch the man, heard the long, failing gasp.
The girl tugged the suitcase and shut her eyes. Opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Her father hit the floor. Walter arrived.
“He finished?”
Ty leveled the gun at the girl, who hadn’t unsqueezed her eyes. She clutched the black handle.
“Not her,” East said.
Pock. Pock. Twice his brother shot. The noise ripped the black yard. “No,” East said, but already she was falling, the suitcase toppling over her.
Walter’s face was pale, stretched. “Is he finished, I said.”
“Three in the heart,” Ty said. “That’ll do. He’s the right dude?”
East dropped the pine bough. “He’s the one,” he murmured.
And the girl. The girl with her face going still in the lamplight. In the dark, she had the Jackson girl’s face. That same all-seeing look, into a world where nothing moves. East stood near her. “I told you not to,” he said.
“My call. I did it. That was what we said,” said Ty. “No time to talk about it.”
“You want to lose that gun, man,” Walter pointed out.
“No,” said Ty. “Ain’t the way it works. Right now I got to find my shoes.”
He sprinted, dirty socks, back to where he’d mounted the window. East staggered away. The gunshots still echoed around the spaces of his brain. Seconds were passing.
Lights in a house deeply set behind pines. But they might have been on before.
Ty’s feet scrambling in the needles behind the house. Every sound carrying sharply now, every breath leaving its shape like ghosts in the air.
“We got to go,” Walter urged. “East. We got to leave.”
“I know it.” East’s neck crawled. He did not look at the two dark piles, the man behind the door, and the other, under the black suitcase toppled over. He stared down the cleared channel beside the lit, empty house.
“Fuck!” Ty said in the useless dark.
Walter’s eyes swiveled. “East?”
“Did you do something with his shoes?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Walter protested. “He kicked them off. Maybe we should get a head start? East?” Backpedaling already, finding the road with his feet.
Then mad, flying footsteps, and Ty was coming, the stripes of light painting him as he sped beneath the windows. In one hand the shoes, in the other the gun. “Go!” he panted. East turned: already Walter was pumping down the road. No other noise, no movement, no response. The quiet banks of mailboxes marked them passing by.
Quickly they made their way back around the stony road, thudding heavy of foot as it swept downhill, the pines less dense on their left between them and the lake. Their breath came and fled in quick mouthfuls. Around the lakeside curve, the parking lot came into view, the lone light on its pole stained yellow, a glimpse of their blue van shining beneath the trees. Numb, East hastened his steps. Get away, get away, his mind drummed. And also: What happened?
No talking, only the question the girl’s face made.
Then he saw the other car, an old boat of a Chevy jacked up on fat wheels, parked near the van, black like the pines in the yellow light. And two kids swarming around the van. Trouble.
“Look,” he said, pointing.
“Mother fuck,” said Ty, taking the lead. “All right. Guns up, and spread out. I’m a handle it. But be ready.”
“It’s just neighborhood kids,” said Walter.
Ty’s scowl locked down. “Do what I say, Walt.”
He fanned left, and East began a slow run across the lot, taking each yellow-lined parking space in two steps, Walter coming up behind. Ty’s gun made a heavy click, and East pawed at his pockets for the little gun. He found it clumsily, fumbling at it as he ran.
As yet the kids hadn’t spotted them. One might have been the ghetto-lake thug from yesterday. Meaty shoulders, moustache.
“That one got a gun,” East panted. Guessing. But just as much, telling Ty: Careful.
Ty raised his hand and squeezed a shot into the trees. Pock. The white boys saw them now. They clutched at each other, then broke for their car. The rattly engine roared. Ty followed them left, and East went for the van, slapping his pockets for the keys. “Hey!” Ty was yelling. “Hey!”
The dark car burned rubber. It leapt toward a gap in the trees. Instantly its lights were gone, just its whine climbing the road away from the lake. East reached the van, panting, key ready in his fingers.
But it wasn’t any use. The kids, they’d fucked it up. Walter came wheezing up behind, goggle-eyed. “Oh, shit,” he groaned. “Oh, shit!”
East breathed and circled. One side window had been popped off its buckle. It hung askew on its hinges like a flap. That had gotten them in. They’d pulled out everything—the clothes, the food, the first-aid kit and blanket. The case of water bottles, scattered on the ground.
“They took my game, man,” Ty swor
e from the back.
“We got the money, right?” said Walter. “Y’all still have the money?”
“They got my game.”
“We have to leave,” East said.
“Look, though,” Walter said. East stepped back. The problem wasn’t apparent. But down the hidden side of the van, the woods side, it said something in spray paint. It said, FUCK YOU NIGGERS.
“Bashed out the taillights too,” said Ty, shoes still dangling in his hand.
Walter chewed his lips. “We can’t drive like this,” he said. “Like, hello, help us out, every cop in the world. Right at the same time they’re finding bodies.”
“But right now we need to go,” said East. “Get in.”
—
He found a four-lane road westward and took it. Avoiding going back through town, where people would see them. Neighbors. The wind cut in through the broken side window, swirled through the van, searching. Ty was trying to rig a sling for it with the Ace bandage roll from the first-aid kit. East waited until his breath was steady before he turned around.
“The fuck was that, Ty?”
Ty, working on the window, was serene. “What? You hollering at me now?”
“What happened?”
“What happened?” Ty stopped and glanced forward for only an instant. “Mission accomplished, son.”
“The girl. I told you, don’t shoot the girl. Why don’t you just kill everyone you see?”
Ty said, “Thinking on it.”
East banged the steering wheel. “Just evil. Evil! And those dudes. Run right up where they can see you. Why don’t you just tell them how many people you shot lately?”
Ty paused ironically. “Sure. Say. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should be subtle. Driving a van with nigger wrote down the side.”
“People can’t see that in the dark,” East snapped.
“People can see whatever they want.”
It was what Ty did. Move East off the subject. Though East couldn’t bear to move back. It was like a furnace behind them, something blinding hot.
Empty dark road before them. No lights or shapes. East fought his eyes—they kept searching the pavement rushing under them. Had to keep looking down the road.
