by Bill Beverly
He wadded up the last bitter Dodgers T-shirt and stuffed it into the trash. Farewell to baseball. Farewell to all that white people’s love.
His shoes, when he tied them again, seemed ragged on his feet. Dark drops on the toes and laces—he hadn’t noticed them before. Spots. They could be anything. He padded the hallways, keeping quiet. No one stared, particularly; no one ejected him, yet. Weight rooms, a pool where the very air looked blue, the big gym where the game had ended. The crowd had gone, and he entered and drank from the fountain. A small man in a blue work shirt was motoring one set of stands back into a stack against the wall. A team of younger assistants removed the volleyball net with small, flashing tools, then carried off the chairs and official’s tower. Efficiently the blue-shirted man swept the bleachers opposite, stopping here and there to polish with a towel anchored to his belt, then retracted them as well. The whole room changed. It was, to East, an interesting thing. He sat and watched against the wall, the two guns lumpy and hard against his thighs.
At last, the small man locked shut a storeroom, working off a large ring of keys, and then his assistants disappeared. Two black men came in with a basketball, taking the court at one end, dicing, lots of leaning and hand checks. Damn, they laughed. Damn.
One of the two left, and the second noticed East lingering by the stacked bleachers. “What’s up, young man? You looking for a game?” he called over.
East shook his head. But the player stepped closer, scrutinizing. Something changed in his voice. “You all right? Need something to eat?”
East tried tucking his head away in his sweater. He couldn’t begin to talk to the man.
“I can slide you into my dining hall. Get you some help if you need it.”
East shook his head again, stood, crept away. The guy seemed okay. But nothing was enough to trust him. And no sense in just bringing the man his trouble.
—
He slept the night in the gymnasium. Collapsed, the stacked bleachers made a tower of thin shelves on their backside, each one twelve inches below the next. East slid himself onto one of these shelves, waist-high. The next plank was just a few inches above his nose. Like a tool in a drawer, he thought, like a body in a morgue. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he had slept, but even in his dreamless sleep he knew that he must stay quiet.
—
At five in the morning East was awake. The gym must be closed, he judged, but he lay in his safe slice of darkness, mind and body still, until the first sounds careened in the hallway: a mop bucket, the metallic knock of deadbolts. His fingers straightened the guns in his pocket, and he waited until he heard the first voices, early comers. Then he slipped out of the bleachers. He considered taking another shower. But it would only be luxury. He could not stay here in the gym forever.
He drank, used the bathroom, then saw three people on the way out of the building, enduring the briefest of greetings. Frosty air. Except for its watery lights, the campus was largely dark. He felt good after the long night’s rest. Eight hours, nine?
Ninety dollars and change left after gas and tolls and the food of the first day. He bought a bagel with cream cheese at a walk-in place on one of the side streets. A bagel: three dollars and eighteen cents. His first college lesson.
—
Today the road rose and fell. The trees twisted low and misshapen, as if storms had combed them many times. A few dark apples still dangled. He hungered, but he dared not walk into the orchards. Once he found an apple on the side of the road and picked it up. Nearly perfect, like bait in a story for children. He put it in his pocket with the gun.
He noticed tags on the backs of the signs across the road: C+W. Some of the paint weathered, some still glossy fresh. On most of the signs. Then on all the signs. He turned around and looked behind the signs on his side. Tagged as well. He was walking through territory.
A figure came walking toward him on the shoulder gravel half a mile ahead. At a shorter distance he decided that the figure was a girl. He sank his head low into the collar of his sweater. Avoided even taking a good look. A mass of brown hair pinned back. She had a down jacket on, but she was shivering too. He felt relieved when she was by him.
One house caught his interest. He saw that it had burned from the center out, not long ago. The bricks were still smoked black. The roof’s peak had given way to something like the mouth of a volcano. Heavy smudge still bloomed in the air. Across from the front yard, a school bus, still caution-yellow, but its long yellow sheet metal was marked in primer gray: CHRISTIAN WOLVES. Then the plus sign. Like a cross.
Like the van. He stamped it in his mind, then crossed to walk on the other side.
—
Slipping. A light rain had done little more than grease the roadside. His joints were webbed with red exhaustion. He had not reckoned on the cold. Toward midday he crossed a small junction, not even noticing it until a truck hurtled past.
He touched his pocket. The apple was gone. He could not remember eating it or throwing it away. The guns were still there in the loosening pockets, riding the bruises they were making on his thighs.
The next town was two miles off, and he thought that if it had a store, he would buy clothing. If it had a place to rest, he would rest. He imagined Walter walking with him, his voice, his hypotheses: what this closed factory had made, how those trees were planted, how this kind of church felt about black boys. But Walter could never have walked this far. Walter would be home, wondering why East hadn’t called. And worrying about that old lady, Martha whatever. She’d be coming back on the plane, East recalled. Perhaps today. And Walter would be beside himself with guilt over it.
He wondered if he was far enough. He felt far. He felt lost. But if there were such a thing as far enough, it wasn’t a place you could walk to.
The next town was what he settled on. Far enough was going to have to be here, at least for a while, even if he hadn’t glimpsed it yet.
—
This town wasn’t much. A couple of places by the highway, closed or indifferent, cigarette butts and harvest stubs blown clear up to the doors. Telephone books rotting in split plastic bags. East glanced up with effort at what remained of the signs: TIRES, VACUUM REPAIR. It didn’t matter now. A nightclub that once had some style: a splashy sign, now a skeleton, and exterior walls studded up with white stones like a dinosaur’s armor. Some sort of weird, fenced yard like an impound lot that said SLAUGHTERRANGE.COM. HELP WANTED in soaped letters in the window. A matronly farmhouse across the road disapproved of it all.
He turned down the side road and found a main street parallel to the highway. There, an old grocery, a post office full of cobwebbed shipping boxes, a pawnshop. Two stores said ANTIQUES but were falling apart themselves. The windowsills on the hardware store were rotting. A doughnut place seemed to hold the only people now, and one bar, blinking BUD, where they would be tonight. A Laundromat, machines scraped out and yawning.
And the little motel: Starlight. Two little wings of ten rooms each spread from an airy center office filled mostly with dust. Curls of neon tubing still clinging to the sign. It was the sort of motel you found on big north-south streets in The Boxes, but open there, sprawling, a clientele there to use or drink or hide, who sometimes just lived there for decades, disapproving of the others, fallen oranges rotting beneath their parked cars that never moved. But here in Ohio, the Starlight was empty, bleached sun-white and then dusted again, front door padlocked though the sign still said OPEN.
Town wasn’t much. Clearly they’d run the highway just north of it at some point. But the highway had failed to keep it alive.
Boy, this is why you get on the plane, he thought.
Outside the Starlight Motel, he climbed atop a concrete planter full of poisonous-looking dirt and surveyed. Relieved now of its relentless moving forward, his body cracked with want. A passing moment of sunlight lit the houses briefly. In the offing was a church, a shingled thing jumbled together like children’s blocks, a big cros
s, gilt and dirtied.
Two days walking in the air had thinned out his stubbornness. But the stubbornness that remained was choosing. He had chosen. This is where you said you’d stop, he reminded himself. Small, and no people out: everything he saw to hold against the town, to walk away from—to flee it, in fact—were reasons that, standing in the fading light, he steeled himself against.
A pickup truck with five kids in parkas in the back, sitting packed together, rumbled by slowly. All five kids turned their heads to look. Their mother gave him a single glance and blew a plume of smoke out her window, then flicked the lit cigarette butt after it.
He didn’t even know the town’s name.
—
After an hour, when his eyes had measured the town and his body had stiffened with cold, he climbed down from the planter awkwardly and walked to the grocery store. Closed. But oranges and cans on racks inside: at least that. At least the store was alive. He scrutinized the darkness inside, then backed off and read the sign. CLOSED ON SUNDAY. He had never heard of a grocery store being closed on Sunday.
Maybe, then, it was Sunday.
Next he walked to the doughnut shop. It was emptier than before, perhaps. But open. He paid his money for two large fried apple fritters, then added a cup of hot chocolate. He was beginning to treat the cold as a permanent adversary. The hot, doughy air of the shop was worth the people staring. He stood numb, breathing the steam off the scorching cup.
He used the bathroom for what he hoped was not too long. Hot water at the sink up his forearms, over his face, around the back of his neck. Carefully he dried himself. The clatter out by the main highway drew him back that way. The weird impound lot had, in the last two hours, filled with trucks and cars. The building there resembled a small barn backed up to a clumsy, bulldozed berm a story high, blocking off view from the road. A few dim lights burned cold on poles. The clatter back there was shooting. It had started just before sunset. He had heard the first shots from the doughnut shop as he stood there eating a fritter, dreaming on his feet. The first burst made him spill the rest of his hot drink on his fingers. Triggered, not automatic, four or five shots in all. He looked up, shaken: the locals in their booths had looked up too but were already back to their doughnuts.
Shots rang again as he stood at the mouth of the lot. The house. The wondering face of the girl. Involuntarily his body ducked. He looked around in the cold air—one split of dying orange in the dulling sky in the direction he’d come to know as south. A small car sat glowing its parking lights near the barn like a resting hog.
The shots weren’t right—they didn’t sound the same way. They lacked the knock a gunshot had. A tump, a different bang—he didn’t know how to describe it. No houses like in The Boxes to echo off. But the same rhythm, the exchanges of fire, he could hear that—the conversation. The old music of his streets.
A target range? But there were shouts from inside too, and scrambling. An occasional yelp.
Somebody burning their ammo up, he told himself.
He slipped closer to the barn, finding a place to listen.
—
After he’d seen half a dozen men come in or out, singly or in pairs, carrying loads in heavy canvas bags like athletes used, or hunters, he got the nerve to open the door. Slaughterrange. An electronic beep announced him, but a noisy bouquet of Christmas bells rang too, duct-taped to the back of the door.
Long tube lights hung from the rafters hissed and flickered. Maybe the building had once been a garage: the floor was concrete and dipped slightly toward two long, steel-grated drains. The front half was given to two carpets, ratty and colorless, each of which anchored a sofa, a chair, a skid-marked coffee table, and a boxy TV. The back was a counter, antique with glass windows. Over the counter hung a range of weaponry, and a young man stood behind it.
“Hello,” said the man, standing very still. He had a strong gaze and a weak nose, a nose that glistened and twitched like a rabbit’s snout. It was a U’s nose, East recognized.
East said nothing. He studied the guns over the man’s head. Large and gripped out, sniper guns. He’d never seen guns like this in plastic bags before, like hairbrushes at the drugstore. They were not real guns, but he did not know what they were. Some of them looked like fantasy, outer-space guns, colored green and orange like children’s toys.
“Can I help you?” said the man, looking East over. East recognized the small, secret fidgets of his face. He was, maybe, thirty. Behind the counter he would have a real gun.
“What sort of place is this?”
“Best paintball range north of the Ohio River,” the man said automatically, as if it was a phrase he’d been paid to remember.
“Paintball?” said East.
The man reached and drew out a pearl of orange. He tossed it to East. “That’s a stale one,” he said. “That one will hurt when it hits.”
East looked at the faintly luminescent nugget in his hand.
“What are you here for?” said the man. “The job?”
East shrugged.
“Perry’s not here tonight. You might catch him in the morning. He’s in charge; he’ll see you about it.”
“What is the job?”
“It’s, like, assistant. Like a watchman.”
East detected the accent, the harsh sound inside the words. Like a movie spy.
“I can do that,” East said.
“This is a job for a grown man. You have to stay late.”
East said, “I can do a man’s job. I can stay late.”
“What are you,” the man said politely, “thirteen? Fourteen? In school?”
“I’m a man,” East said. “I don’t go to school no more.”
“Ha. Good,” said the man. He had a telltale wetness in his nose, a bubbling. Then two men came in with canvas bags, and East watched them pay and take the tubs of colored balls the man gave them and transfer them into their guns and their own containers with funnel-shaped loaders, perched on the edge of the sofas, mumbling profanely. At last they returned the tubs and moved up a stairway beside the counter and out a door that went to the back of the building, the berm side.
“Can I look?” East said.
“Not tonight,” said the counterman. “Come back tomorrow.” At first he’d seemed friendly, but now he’d seemed to have changed his mind.
In the parking lot East sat far apart from the other men’s cars and trucks and listened to the shooting music fill the air. Dull night. No stars. He found himself starved for sleep. The strange hours.
He awoke with a gasp, leaning against the building. He had been dreaming of the van, someone terrible peppering it with bullets: Michael Wilson, somehow, but with Sidney’s face, firing out the mouth of the cabin in Wisconsin where the daughter was the dead Jackson girl aiming at them from beneath the suitcase. There was no shaking this. There was no far enough to settle his mind at sleep.
Leaned up against the wall was a roll of pink insulation. The wall type, fiberglass. He checked it, shook it—dry, no mice or vermin.
He found the largest truck in the yard, a jacked-up Ford with a work bed. He fed ten feet of insulation in between the huge back tires. Then he crawled in on top of it and fetched the rest of the roll around him, like a blanket, like a wrapper, sheltering under the huge round differential with its burnt-syrup smell. The cold and the lights muffled down, and he slept to the knocking of the shots in the yard beyond.
At one point in the night he woke and saw, through the hole in the end of his pink swaddling, the sky. The truck above him had gone. But he was still there.
18.
The morning light startled East, and he struggled to unbundle himself, unwrap, to find his feet and stumble free. Pink strands in his mouth, drying at his lips. Pink fleece in his hair. All his skin crawled.
Then his head cleared. He went back, picked up the insulation, and rolled it carefully, tightly. Leaned it back up where it had been.
He walked down the highway, furtive in the cold
air, and revisited the doughnut shop, for its bathroom as much as the food. He washed in the sink with the palms of his hands. A spill of salt at the corners of his mouth, streaks of wet on his sweater. The black eye slowly reshaping itself. His muscles lank and dog-tired under his skin. He could not bear to look in the mirror at what was left.
Purchased two doughnuts but could not bring himself to sit in the warm little shop, among other people. He went instead down the street, to brood by himself outside the little closed motel.
—
When East opened the door again, there was one person sitting in the big white building of Slaughterrange: an old man, pink like a ham, larger than the bar stool he occupied. Sandpaper bristle of ginger hair. He was holding a small piece of machinery in his left hand and rendering it with the screwdriver in his right.
“You the one Shandor said was looking for a job?” he bellowed without looking up.
East sized the man up, and he stopped short. Six foot five, three hundred pounds, maybe. The sort of man who was used to moving things. He lay down the tool and the chunk of beaten metal, and he brushed his hands on his Carhartt overalls.
“Was that you lying in the yard last night, son?”
East did not lie. “I fell asleep.”
“Cold,” said the white man, “to be falling asleep, under Tim Crane’s truck. Where you staying?”
East said nothing.
“You the one, then, that wants the job?”
East nodded. Kept his eyes on the old man’s eyes. There was something wrong with them. Sticky. Not high, but lagging a bit.
“I got to ask you a few questions.”
East said, “I know.”
“Name?”
“Antoine.”
“You had a job before?”
“I did security. Two years.”
“How old does that make you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You ain’t sixteen and done two years security, son.”
“I got a license,” said East. “It says sixteen.”
The big man shifted on his stool. He did not ask to see the license. He was not in that sort of pursuit. “You get high? You”—his voice became bitter, humorous—“tweak out?”
