by Bill Beverly
For all the planning, they had nothing now.
“We got any help from here on out?” he asked Walter. “Or are we on our own?”
Walter opened his hands slowly and closed them.
“Ty?”
“You got a car,” Ty said brutally. “You got a gun. Make your way.”
“You got to change cars,” Walter said. “We’re just gonna have to get a new car.”
“Could call Abe,” said East. “See if he can hook us up.”
Said Walter, “No. Listen to me. We’re on our own now.”
A little town was coming up, and East slowed for its speed limits. The van passed through the center of light—a gas station, bright as the vault of a refrigerator, and two late-night girls out pumping gas, brown hair fanned out over their fur hoods. They turned, watched the van roll past, painted words like a banner on the side they could see.
Fuck you niggers.
If nobody knew who they were, still, everyone would remember seeing them. When it came to connecting the dots, everyone would draw lines.
They had most of a tank of gas and a few hours before daylight.
—
Two more towns and East found a gas station with a blue-lit phone on its outskirts. He pulled in. “I’m gonna call,” he said.
“They won’t know anything,” Walter said. A beaten-down quiet in the middle of his voice. “Do what you want,” he conceded.
Ty had gone silent in the back. Sunk back into his bench. Like a monster who rises out of the sea and then submerges.
East climbed out with a handful of quarters and gritted his teeth at the loud sexy recorded lady. Then the bloodless operator who tried to connect.
A red light blinked ceaselessly over an intersection.
He looked back at the van, battered now—they’d smashed the plastic grille trim with something, those kids. Taken out one of the front turn signals. This, he thought. This is what it’s like. It hadn’t been his bullet, but he’d said, It’s him. He’d risked his life to prove it. Get him was going to be the next thing he said, if not for the girl standing there.
He didn’t want to think about the girl right then.
—
“Y’all did it?” Abraham Lincoln said. Surprised. “I mean, the whole deal?” Like nobody had any idea.
Some sort of muttered consultation kept East waiting, looking sideways out of the wind. Finally Abraham Lincoln came back on the line. “Okay, thanks for calling.”
“That’s it?”
A long silence.
“If it makes sense, just go on home,” the voice said.
—
They sat in the lot near the blue pay phone’s glow, a bone-dry wind scraping under the van. It rocked them side to side like a cradle.
Walter sighed. “So we’re here. Making it out is up to us.”
East watched the red eye of the traffic light switch on and off.
“One idea,” Walter continued. “Go on. Find a store, buy some paint and tape, fix the window and the taillight. Paint the van up. Another idea: we ditch the van and get home some other way. Plane. Bus. Whatever. We might not have ticket money for three. But two of us could hole up and one goes home and wires back.”
If he’d brought his ATM cards, East thought. If he hadn’t come clean the way they said but brought something extra. Like Ty did.
“Better idea,” said Ty. “We carjack some bitch and get out of Dodge.”
“I thought about that,” said Walter. “That guarantees us attention, though. That gives them a car to look for, a car to hunt.”
“Got to get rid of this van,” Ty said. “For real. It ought to be burned. Soaked in gas and burned.” He ejected his magazine and reloaded in the dark.
“Let’s not waste time,” East said. “Decide right here. Can you call someone, man, and fix us up some tickets?”
“Today?” said Walter. “Not today, East. We got us a dead man. Federal witness. Three boys getting on a plane. Nobody wants their name on that purchase. And if they figure it out while we’re still in the air, we’re fucked. We’re locked down. You like those chances?”
“We’ll keep on, then,” East said. “Do something about the van before daylight.”
“Not soon enough,” said Ty from the backseat.
“Ty,” said Walter. “Don’t you want to get rid of that gun?”
Ty said, “This gun’s the one thing I got.”
—
Westward they kept on, cutting a corner off Minnesota, then down into Iowa. Roads nobody hurried on, roads where they weren’t expected. Soon the sun would come up. Walter laid his gun on the dashboard, but it kept rattling, sliding around. So East pocketed it.
Fuck you niggers. They carried it with them through a dozen little towns. First the tall, ghostly farmhouses, then the little shops with their new trades hand-painted over the old signs. AUTO BODY, BEEF JERKY, TAXIDERMY, ASISTENCIA CON LOS TAXOS.
The occasional truck in the oncoming lane, pushing its blast of air.
“It’s getting light,” said Walter. “If you see something that’s open, let’s get some paint.”
They rolled by one large discount store in a shopping plaza, a thousand parking spaces deep. The letters were stripped off the concrete façade. Given up for dead.
“I gotta take a leak, man,” said Ty. “Gas station right up here, man, please.”
“You might want to park a way off,” said Walter.
“We need gas anyway,” East observed.
Maybe they’d been lucky. Maybe they should have expected to be stopped long ago. East walked into the little station shop and found a roll of red tape for broken taillights. FOR TEMPORARY USE, the package said. The cashier wore a red sweater the color of Christmas and a strange thing on her head. It appeared to be a pair of stuffed antlers. She was a big lady, big diamond ring, somebody’s mom.
“You got any paint?”
The lady shook her head. “The new ordinance.”
“What new ordinance?”
“When certain people,” she said loudly, as if it were a rehearsed speech, “spray paint all over the middle school? They won’t find it quite so easy next time.”
East looked away then. He paid for the tape.
“Thank you anyway, ma’am,” he said, his best manners.
The lady put the tape in a useless plastic bag. “You’re welcome, hon.”
Outside, the only person was Ty, standing in the cold in his socks. It was as if the cold and the van had driven something into him, because his eyes were big, and he quivered slightly, the way a cat does watching a yard mouse. The moment East saw him, Ty took the gun out. A car was pulling in, a low white sedan, Infiniti. Ty stepped right into its path and brought the gun up.
The tires chirped, and the sedan stopped short.
What? thought East. Helplessly. For, he saw now, agreeing on a plan, he and Walter, meant nothing to Ty.
Nothing he said or did meant anything in Ty’s mad story of the world.
He wanted to deny it, to return to the starting block and start over. No. In the station’s noisy light, the Glock was a dark fact. The runners weren’t stopping. Ty circled, taking aim on the driver, hollering, “Man! Get the fuck out the car!”
14.
The boy wearing dirty socks yanked the driver out of the car. He thrust the gun against the man’s face until the man was up against the pumps, teetering.
“What are you doing, man?” the older boy demanded, one eye a bruise, the other wild.
The younger boy ducked inside the car to look. No wife. No babies. Just this early businessman in his buttons and tie. Unlucky. The boy popped the trunk release and stood up. He gestured with the gun arm. “Get in the trunk.”
A gold tie. Gold with a pattern of bright blue pearls.
“Oh, no,” the man said. Low and collected, even indignant. “I’m not going in there.”
“Give me the keys,” said the younger boy, “and get in.” He leveled the gun again.
“No,” gulped the man. He appealed to the taller boy, to the cashier inside, with his eyes, one raised hand.
The younger boy raised the gun up and shot one hole through the canopy. The echo bounced down, metallic.
“We can’t do it like this,” the older boy said. “It’s crazy. You need to chill out. We can’t come with you like this.”
“Think I need you?” said the younger one. “You ain’t fit for nothing but standing yard.” To the man he said, “I’m a say it just once. To me you’re just one more bullet.”
The older boy thrust in then between the young one and his prey and shoved, made the gunner bounce off the car, nearly fall. The younger one found his footing and turned. The businessman pressed himself hard behind the gas pump.
“Oh,” said the younger one. “So now we see.”
He raised his gun, and the older boy, a gun in his hand though it hadn’t been there until then, shot the younger in the chest. The younger boy uttered a short cry, and he fell. In a flash the older boy was on him, pinning the arm and taking the gun, rifling the pockets, taking a cache of bullets bunched carefully in a greasy wrapping. Opening the boy’s pants and taking a fold of twenties out of the vent in the underwear. As if he’d known it would be there. He stood again and shut his eyes.
“Jesus,” prayed the businessman. “Sweet Jesus.”
“Shut up,” the older boy said. He turned. Then something overtook him. He bent over the young boy’s body, put something back inside the boy’s pants. He buttoned them and stood again, looking down. The boy on the ground opened his mouth, rolled his head back. The muscles of his neck quivered in the night glare.
A fat boy in a van behind sat stricken at the wheel.
In the floodlights’ glare, the older boy’s face was a mask, angles of hardening bone, the eyes shadowy holes. He faced the man with the golden tie. “Run, God damn you,” he said.
“Sweet Jesus,” the businessman pleaded. In the station the woman with an antler headdress held her phone and stared, holding, holding.
15.
Walter sobbed. “I seen it,” he blubbered. “I seen there wasn’t nothing but this. We knew you would.”
“We who?”
“Me and Michael,” said Walter. “We knew it was gonna happen like this. Mike, he says, one of these brothers gonna kill the other. I thought he was joking. I said, that’s bad news for Easy. And he said, naw, my money’s on East.”
“Bullshit,” East said. “You making it up. Like everything.”
“No,” wept Walter. “It don’t matter.”
East chewed his lip.
“I’m sorry, man,” Walter sobbed. “I saw it coming. I told myself, no, I couldn’t do nothing. I didn’t get out the van. I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t stop you.”
“Stop me?” East said. “Ty’s the one out of control.”
“You the one who shot him. Who was cold to him the whole way.”
“I’m not cold to him.”
“You were,” Walter insisted.
East raced through the dark, dread like two hard hands working his guts, reshaping them, remaking his body. He felt every poke, every lump of food inside him, every stone on the road coming up from the tires to his seat. His road-shocked mind could not even keep time.
He had run from police before: standing yard, after fights, after hurling stones at the windows of stores, hoping something would break. Flight, they called it. One part fear, one part the blindest excitement you’d ever known. It freed you from time, from who you were or the matter of what you’d done. You darted, like a fish away from a net, like a dog outrunning a dogcatcher.
No flashing lights behind them. But no time either to think of his brother, or the other two, knocked down along their trail. And Walter’s grief was unending: his brother’s stoniness, just taking other form.
“I’m sorry,” he said once. But this just started Walter sobbing again.
None of us were perfect, East thought.
“Do you think I killed him?”
“You shot him in the chest, East.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Walter said, “that’s how you kill people.”
—
Once, when Ty was about six, East had been sent to enforce his mother’s word. Back then their mother’s bedroom was sunlit and clean and the TV sat small and quiet in a corner—later, it took over the whole apartment. It was time for the TV to be off, their mother said, and Ty wouldn’t turn it off—SpongeBob or something. So East turned off the TV for him. Ty jumped up and hit him and turned it back on. East repeated their mother’s warning and pulled the plug out of the wall. Ty threw the remote and hit East in the head. When East got back from checking his head in the mirror, was he cut, the TV was back on. Louder than ever. East picked up Ty and locked them both out of the bedroom. He caught hell for it—that old broken lock, if you locked yourself out, the only way back in was to take the door off the hinges.
He toted his brother like a laundry sack, one arm locked around his chest and the other around his hips. Ty caught the hand that had him at the collarbone and bit the fourth finger of East’s left hand as hard as he could. First East screamed in anger and shock—it didn’t really hurt yet. Screaming stopped things: startled them, embarrassed them, gave them satisfaction. With Ty it only stilled East so that his teeth could get a better grip. That was when it began to hurt. East had stopped screaming to begin to fight his brother then—put him down, free his arms up, begin wrestling himself out of a set of teeth that only clamped on tighter. That was when he began to imagine simply living as a sort of undying battle. Sometimes in the right kind of light, he could still see the indentations—the chain of little tooth marks circling—in the brown of his skin.
Different roads, different land, but East, half dreaming at the wheel, imagined the days in rewind: his brother, restored. The van, undamaged. The wooded house, undisturbed. The red moustache with his gun, bored and lonely near the swings. Back out the roads, without the guns, without all the food. Michael Wilson waiting for them by the foot of a bridge somewhere, welcoming. All forgiven. Like sometimes when he would sit up chilled and guilty from a horrible dream and stay there, the black string humming inside him, trying to breathe, to reassure himself that nothing had happened. But there would be no reassuring. Walter’s weeping made sure of that. He looked down at his hands, still clad in the dark gloves they’d been issued.
He stopped the van just one time, to reach behind him, under the middle bench, and find the empty black shoes, sticky with pine sap and crumbly soil, a bud of pine needles caught in the laces. Maybe wet with something, maybe just cold, as the air was. He couldn’t look. He rolled his window down, gunned into the oncoming lane, and let the shoes tumble into a ditch dark with reeds and litter, things that had grown there and things left behind.
—
Outside it would soon be the plain blue morning. The banks’ signs gave different temperatures: 28, 31, 36. Air whistled in around the side window where Ty had managed to sling it in place. East scanned the roadsides for a store. An idea. Anything.
“We gonna paint this thing?” East proposed.
“Whatever you want,” Walter replied, drained.
A small-town discount-store palace. Something about the big crumbly fort of the store, perched atop an old, sloping lot the size of a football field, promised to fix everything. There was a junction here, and around it had grown up a battlefield of paved spaces, a few of the buildings still doing business, some of the lots empty as if the sky had swiped them clean.
Walter sat straight. “Park up behind that Denny’s there,” he said. “Get between them trucks so we don’t stick out.”
The painted words along the blue side of the van were a dark, chalkboard green.
“What you want to do?” Walter asked, his white breath floating away.
East assessed the van. “Paint it over. Quick spray-paint job, good enough. And some duct tape to hold this window in. Tape the taill
ight red. And get going.”
Even at sunrise the store was busy—early-morning women with hair tied back. Single, angry men lugging detergent or powdered milk. Everybody tired, even the people getting paid to be there. Everyone with eyeballs, noticing the black boys. The lady with chin-length, orange-dyed hair, bright sweater, staring in the candles aisle. East felt small, tried to stay small. Fluorescent tubes twenty feet up. Pine chips and needles still dotted his sweater, and a rank, anxious sweat ebbed from his skin.
He felt wired, sick without sleep.
“Back there,” Walter said. “Paint and painting supply.”
The aisle was dazzling. Most of the store was patchy, stock falling over, end caps picked clean. But the paint aisle was straight, tight-packed.
“Help you guys find something?” A twenty-year-old kid poked his head around the corner. Mexican goatee, tattoo on his neck.
“We’re all right,” Walter said.
East noted the kid. Gang stripes on him. Even here. He eyed them with a calmness that set East on edge.
“Right here if you need me,” said the guy, and East could hear the R kick and rumble like a motorcycle. Like the south side of Los Angeles. This guy was from home.
“Thanks,” East said, nodding. As opaquely as he could.
Walter, studying the spray cans: “This will cover. Should we use primer?”
“No,” said East.
“What would Johnny say?”
East said, “Johnny doesn’t ever want to see this van again. Not now.”
“Primer is cheaper,” Walter said. “One can or two?”
“One. Jesus,” said East.
Walter picked out a spray can of primer gray. Shook it once, the agitator bouncing around the hollow can.
The paint man passed suddenly behind them. “Váyanse con Dios,” he whistled, making his accent plain. East watched him disappear around the end of the aisle.
They walked, Walter muttering to himself the whole way. They had paint, tape. Walter pulled a box of granola bars off a shelf in the aisle.
