by Bill Beverly
“You get one more. Thirteen for a dozen,” the thin boy said.
East said, “No thanks.”
“What,” said the boy, “happened to your arm?”
East looked at it in the light for the first time. It was a whacked mess, the sleeve soaked and blackening. His stomach slunk downward. “Thanks,” he said.
Five people. It didn’t matter who was in there or what he might have spoken out loud: they couldn’t change things. But what Ty had said was right. If he were here to kill East, it already would have happened.
Though he could still take a notion.
Ty waited in a doorway, reviewing the morning Plain Dealer. Seeing East, he rolled the paper again and bagged it. The angle of a pistol sprang in his pants.
He fell into step beside East. “So this your house? You standing yard still?”
“Kind of the same deal.”
“Paintball? There’s money in that?”
“There’s money.” It would only amuse Ty if he said how little.
“What you running besides?”
“Nothing.”
“Straight up?” Ty laughed. “Huh.” They walked back along the highway without a word.
The day was coming up, black thinning to silver. The two boys crossed the damp lot, and East unlocked the door. The holiday bells rang. They’d been on there since he arrived, but weeks had gone by without his really hearing them.
Ty stalked around the place, examining the counter and the merchandise, trying on a pair of goggles. East stood watching until he felt time again, stretching long. He went to unknot the rope that slung the bag from the rafters and lower it to the floor.
Ty finished his circuit. “Now you sit down,” he said. “I brought a message.”
Gingerly East sat on one of the sofas. Ty took his perch opposite.
“Ready to listen?”
“I guess,” said East.
“Then—you’re coming back. This ain’t home. You don’t belong here.”
East shrugged.
“The organization changed. So I came to get you. Here on, it’s business.”
“Business,” East repeated blankly.
“Maybe the fat boy told you. Somebody bought The Boxes.”
“Walter told me,” East said. “So, they sold Fin out?”
“Streets and houses. Those shit holes you stand by, man,” Ty sneered. “Like this place. You remember how your place got taken down? That took five minutes. Police took two more while you were gone. It ain’t even hard for them; they come before lunch. So, yeah, we sold them out.”
East shook his head.
“Things change,” Ty insisted. “They paid us like fools. Businessman from Mexico. In love with America, man. Paid us one and a half million dollars.”
East whistled. “But what’s left? What’s the business now?”
Ty’s face tightened. “Don’t you ever pay attention, man? Houses got no future. Police like hitting them, mayors like hitting them, news likes hitting them.” He wiped his mouth. “You the only one doesn’t get it. Your boys, your crew? They back in school now. Making something of themselves.”
“What about us?”
“Us. We’re making money. All that what Michael did at UCLA, we work other colleges now. Them schoolkids love weed. Smoke too much. Pay too much. They’ll even go pick it up. Walter’s back in school too. But he still works Saturdays at the DMV. They think he’s, like, twenty-five. So far up in them computers now, they can’t stop him.” Ty smiled. “You know Walter just makes up people, man.”
“He makes up licenses.”
“No. He makes people. He made you, Antoine Harris. We talked about this.”
East’s arm smarted. “So how you gonna make money on that?”
“Shit, boy. People pay. You know what a college kid will pay to be twenty-one, have a second name? What a Mexican dude will pay to be in the computer for years going back?” Ty wiped his mouth. “People make lives on that shit.”
“Police gonna catch you on that too?”
“Walter is smart,” Ty said. “And careful. You don’t even know his name.”
“Walter is his name,” snapped East.
Ty laughed in his face. “You don’t listen. You don’t even know who you are.”
“Your brother,” East said.
“Half brother. Right,” said Ty. “We got your mother in common. But since you always been Fin’s boy, that organization gonna be yours. That’s what Fin wants.”
“Fin’s boy?”
Ty’s face filled then, no longer just a talkative skeleton. It filled and flexed with the old hatred.
“Nigger, you know,” he said. “Half brother. But you are what I ain’t.”
People had always whispered at it. But there was nothing he could trust upon. A father wasn’t anyone he’d ever known.
It wasn’t anything he could use now.
“We left town for that reason,” Ty said.
“What reason?”
“Protect the core.”
“The core?”
“You think Fin gonna send the four of us to kill a dude?” Ty said. “Makes no sense. Why not just two guns? Why not one?”
“To protect us,” East said dubiously.
“Get you out of town. Walter and you. Brains and blood.”
“But what about…” East said, and then it was as if he couldn’t remember anyone’s name. “What about Michael Wilson?”
“Michael Wilson was a babysitter. Bad one, we found out. He handled the polite situations. I handled the impolite ones.”
“But people higher up,” East said. “Sidney. Johnny.”
“There is no Sidney or Johnny.” Ty made a quick gesture that East didn’t want to see. Something slipped, pulsed under East’s ribs.
“But what about the dude?” he protested. “The judge? Why was that?”
“An excuse.”
“An excuse?”
“Prosecution got a hundred witnesses, man. They didn’t need Judge Carver Thompson.”
“Why we kill him, then?”
“You,” said Ty.
“Me?”
“You were the only one took that seriously. It was you who kept on. Mission-focused—I hand it to you, man. Fin says something, you do it.”
Ironically Ty bowed.
“No,” East said. “That ain’t how it was. Don’t put it on me. We killed the man. What comes of that?”
“Nothing comes of it.”
“Nothing? People are dead now, man.”
Ty ran his fingers over the box and picked out another doughnut.
“Shit be crazy,” he said.
—
All that time, flickering again inside his skull. The van, the hours of country. Rolling under their wheels like wave tips passing his brown calves at the beach. The same feeling, the same dull roar, tires, water, the same laying out of light on the sand and fence posts and all there is. Lightly flying. He still felt it.
He shook his head out, the way he would sometimes after waking from a dream.
“How is Fin?”
“Fin?” Ty chewed slowly. “Two days after we left town, he turned himself in.”
“He did what?”
“He walked into a police station and sat down. Tired. Living house to house,” Ty said. “Don’t think they weren’t surprised, though.” He held up a finger while he worked something in his mouth. “Come back, man. It’s what Fin wants. Fin knows you shot me. But he don’t have but one bastard son.”
East rubbed his eyes. The light of day was finding the skylights.
“Terms of my employment,” said Ty, “is, I have your back.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said at last.
“If I was gonna kill you,” said Ty, “this was my chance. No, come back. ’Cause Fin is giving us hell till you do.”
East stood. He tested his shaky legs. Ty made no objection to it.
“These doughnuts.” Ty was mumbling through a full mouth. “Good. I s
ee why a girl like you would settle down.”
“I never heard you talk so much,” East said.
“Well,” said Ty, “we all got to do things we don’t want to do.”
—
In The Boxes, when someone insulted you, you insulted them back, or if someone punched you, you punched them. But everything was subject to organization. If an insult came from inside, you threw it back. If it didn’t, you found out first. Found out what you could get away with. It was possible you could get away with nothing. Possible you would need to swallow your pride.
If somebody really hurt you, bruised or beat or shot you, you didn’t need to ask. Injury called for injury. No need for organization. These rules of living were inside out. These rules of living kept boys polite day to day, even if they had free rein to kill.
A brother putting a bullet into a brother was unacceptable. It had happened, no doubt. One must have had a reason. But there would be a response. East had known this without consultation. He knew it the way he knew walking, he knew language. He had come to Ohio expecting to be kicked, to be gutted, for the last bullet in the world to find him and spit in his face.
He did not expect to be fetched back. He did not expect doughnuts, still soft from the oven, or to be handed an air ticket reading FIRST CLASS LAX DATE OPEN with a name he’d never heard, clipped to a California state driver’s license with that same name. Same name and a picture of his face, taken back one day when everything made sense.
—
Ty’s car was a sleek gray Lincoln, parked a quarter mile down.
“How’d you get hold of this? You’re thirteen.”
Ty fiddled with knobs. “You forgot my birthday. I’m fourteen now.”
That’s right, fourteen now, East thought. Both Sagittarius, born early December.
“Steal it?”
“No, man. Just a car service.” Finally Ty exploded with disgust. “Fuck this motherfucker. How you get defrost and heat at the same time?”
East flipped through the knobs, chose something. Ty shook his head and gunned the engine. It was smooth, new and powerful. “Couldn’t figure out the radio either,” he confessed.
East had told a lie—that he had business to close up. Money hid and deposited, debts to be collected and paid. Otherwise, he feared Ty was just going to put him on a plane, today. It surprised him when Ty simply said okay.
As for Ty, he was flying home immediately.
“Don’t make me come back,” he warned. “This car, we got one week.”
“We got?”
“You got six days left. More than that, I have to make a call. I don’t want to make that call. So six days.”
“All right,” East said.
The wound was bandaged now. Ty had helped him disinfect it back at the range. The big first-aid kit had everything he needed. But picking the shirt out of the sticky, clotting blood hurt almost as much as the whupping. Ty bandaged the arm and taped it down. Squeezed it once, like a joke, and East screamed. “See?” Ty murmured. “See?”
Light rain fell. The temperature was dropping again.
“One thing I forgot to ask. How’d you get here?” Ty said.
East considered. This too, this memory, seemed like a train on a different track than he’d been on. “Old lady rode us to an airport. Walter flew home. Then I stole her car.”
“You stole a car? You stole it? From a lady who gave you a ride? Cold,” said Ty. “You get rid of it?”
“Left it two days back.”
“Two days, what?”
“Two days of walking.”
“You burned the car, right?”
“No. Left it by a police station.”
“Crazy,” Ty said. “So why you stop there? At your store, paint guns, whatever?”
East had to remember before Shandor, before Perry, when he was just a kid in the street. “I got cold, man. Cold and tired. Sign said HELP WANTED, so I went in.”
“I know they liked you, didn’t they? Had you pushing a mop?”
East shrugged. “Hundred dollars a day.”
“White man stealing from you,” Ty jeered. “I hope you stole a little back.”
“I don’t steal,” East said.
“You stole that lady’s car.”
“Yeah.” East’s blood quickened. “That was different.”
“Oh.” Ty’s fingers tapped the wheel. “Tell you one thing different. Bet it wasn’t no white lady’s car you stole.”
East shut his mouth and looked out at the dirty snow, stinging. Ty hummed. He drove fast, relaxed. Fourteen now, and he seemed to know driving by heart. He seemed to have the airport route in his head. He seemed just to pick things up like that.
East said, “Ty. Back at the gas pumps, when you held the gun on that dude. What were you thinking? What was the play?”
“You mean,” Ty said, “before you shot me?”
“Before I had to. You were out of control, man.”
“Maybe I was,” said Ty. “But come off it. Who was saving your ass, every time? In Vegas, from Michael Wilson, from that hick-ass town? And who did the job?”
“What job?”
“The judge.”
Then East remembered the judge: his name, his face. The dark shape of him moving around in the bright cabin like a rat in an experiment. “Ty. Did the judge know you? He looked at you.”
“I bet he did.”
“He smiled at you,” East said.
Ty just laughed.
“You ain’t gonna tell me?”
“No,” Ty said.
This shit, thought East. “But now you’re saying I’m in charge.”
“Play that,” said Ty. “You always in charge. Fin had a hundred hungry niggers working, but you’re the only one ever follows directions. Did you ever wonder how I had a gun after they took one off me?”
“You had a second one,” East said, “they didn’t find.”
“Same one,” said Ty. “Fin gave it back. You listening now?”
“Forget it,” East seethed.
“East. You got your way. You understand that your way goes on top of my way. But your way don’t stop me?”
“Just be quiet, man,” said East. The rain was letting up, and Ty took the exit to the airport. But East was in his mother’s apartment again, arguing. Arguing for his life against this impossible boy.
“You stick to business,” said Ty. “But I am business, East.”
They sat hot in their seats, hating each other like brothers, till they pulled up to the terminal, gray planes hanging in the sky.
22.
Along the departures curb, the gray Lincoln stopped. NO PARKING. DROP-OFF ONLY.
Ty said, “When you’re ready to drop it off, call this number.” A sticker on the dash. “Give them one hour. They meet you here. Or wherever you need.”
“What do I need? Credit card? Fill the tank?”
“Bitch, this ain’t Avis. Just give the car back.” Ty handed East the keys. “Walter said you don’t fly. So if you got to drive this car back to LA, okay. But call and let them know.”
East scanned the line of windows along the terminal. Airline porters. Police. Families pulling suitcases on small invisible wheels.
“Two more things,” said Ty. He popped a compartment between the two seats. “There’s your phone. A charger too.”
East spun his phone in his fingers. The familiar weight and shape.
“Just be careful. Don’t say much. Be smart. I called you. So my new phone is the last number on it.”
East stared at the phone. “Thanks,” he made himself say.
Ty reached down into the compartment again and came up with a roll of bills.
“Three thousand dollars, if something comes up,” he said. “This is my money, now. A loan to you from me. Understand? Say it.”
“It’s your money.”
“All right. Take it.”
East let the money sit in Ty’s hand for a long time. A debt he didn’t want. But there wa
s nothing else now.
He put it away in his pocket.
“Don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
“Plus this.” Ty fished a little silver gun out of the compartment, showed it, and replaced it. Then he took an envelope out and laid it on his thigh as he threaded the zipper on his jacket. FIRST CLASS, it said, just like East’s. DATE OPEN. JOE WARNER.
“So, this is it,” East said. “No luggage? Nothing?”
Ty shook his head.
“So. Six days. You got what you need. Any questions, you call me.”
Ty picked up his ticket. East studied him for a long moment. The sharp easiness. His long little balding head. Kidney bean—that’s what their mother had called him.
“I don’t want to come back here. Winter and shit. If I do, it’s the old rules. There will be consequences.”
“I hear,” said East.
A hard chuck on East’s arm, right on the bandage—East kept from crying out. Ty unsealed the door with a rush of wind. He climbed out and straightened his colorless jacket. Ticket folded over once in his hand, he checked the traffic behind them and then mounted the sidewalk, passing people in parkas and colorful letter jackets. East watched Ty hurry toward the electric doors, which slid open for him, just another young man on the way somewhere else.
It took East a moment: now he was expected to drive the Lincoln off. DROP-OFF ONLY. Not to slide over: to get out and walk around the big car. He did so, his hands and chest tingling. Paused at the driver’s door and checked the little chrome key ring: DODGERS. The brand of home.
A girl passed on the sidewalk, small and black, leading her parents, who were all burdened down with garment bags and ski poles. East didn’t look: he knew she would be the Jackson girl, all big eyes and bravery. That face swimming atop her face.
Then she was gone.
He coaxed himself onward, opened the door, lowered himself into the driver’s seat.
—
Barely any noise. Solid. He checked the mirrors, moved the seatback up. He wished he’d watched the route more on the way. Ty drove the roads as if he knew them. East knew only one town.
If he could find his way back to the long old highway, he’d be all right.
The wind moved the trees. The rain was stopping. But the pavement was already dry.
