by Nick Petrie
• • •
Eli had known Coyo since before everything changed. Before Eli’s pops went away, before his brother Baldwin got shot in the face, before his mama died with a needle in her arm. Even when Eli went to live with his nana, he’d smuggled Coyo leftovers in a paper napkin, until his nana caught him in the act. Then she fed Coyo at her kitchen table, heaping his plate like he was one of her own.
When she passed from a stroke, neither boy had any place to go but the street. Coyo had never forgotten those meals. He’d looked out for Eli when he could.
Coyo had always been his own man, even at the age of eleven when King Robbie had threatened to beat him with a broom handle to prove a point, or maybe just because he liked it.
Coyo had pulled a gun from his pocket, not a big gun or even a good gun, but he held it firm and calm down at his side. He said, “King, I tell you what. Let’s skip the next part and call it even, we both be better off.”
Eli had watched King Robbie look at this half-grown wolf with new eyes. Seeing a tool he could use, sure. But never one he could own.
Coyo was unpredictable, half-crazy, impulsive, but he wasn’t afraid to step into something. He got things done. And he’d always had Eli’s back.
When Eli got fired from the lookout crew, Coyo had told Eli, “You don’t got to be that guy. You got your music. You don’t got to pick up a gun.”
Now Coyo wouldn’t look at him.
Anthony pushed in carrying a big red tool bag, newly battered and stained by the dark dirt and pale gravel dust of the driveway. It had a zip-close top, just like Eli had talked about, to hide what it carried. “Time to go. Mall opens in half an hour.”
A big smile on his face, happy with the decision made, the course of his life set.
Eli could almost hear him thinking it. Fuck school. Fuck those asshole teachers looking down their noses. Fuck those shitty little jobs with their shitty little pay and their shitty little bosses talking to you like you’re nothing at all. Fuck the endless hustle and grind of finding money, a place to stay, food to fill your belly. Time to get paid and be a man.
The mathematical part of Eli knew there was more to it than that. More than just the wanting, more than hoping finally for something good. Wildness factored into it, the urge to take your life into your own hands. Eli didn’t know how it would turn out, none of them did.
He did have a pretty good idea of the odds.
He couldn’t help it, where he lived. What he’d seen. What he knew in his bones.
Eli stared Coyo full in the face. His oldest living friend wouldn’t look him in the eye.
“You’re the man with the plan, Ellison. We need you with us.” Coyo was the only one besides Eli’s dead brother who’d ever called him Ellison. “We’re good to go. We got the car, we got the tools, we got the guns, and the clock is ticking. Your plan, your timeline. Remember?”
“We were just playing,” said Eli, his heart thumping. “We weren’t gonna do anything. How many times did I tell you?”
“About that.” Coyo gave Eli a surprisingly gentle smile, although his eyes were still looking anywhere else. “You made a plan too good to pass up,” he said. “You want to be hungry the rest of your life? It’s time we made a move. Made us some money.”
Eli shook his head. Set his jaw. “I’m not going,” he said. “You gonna shoot me?”
Coyo looked at Skinny. “I told you.”
Skinny nodded, then swooped down and picked up Eli’s guitar. Cheap and battered but his brother had bought it for him years ago. It was the only thing Eli had left of him. The only thing Eli truly owned.
He felt it like a hunger pang, like a sore tooth, but worse. Like his heart had been yanked from his chest, Skinny’s hand on the worn wood neck. Like the neck was his own and he couldn’t breathe.
Then he flashed hot and jumped toward the other boy, but Skinny was taller and held the guitar up and away. The strings thrummed discordantly as the body thumped the ceiling, some piece of Eli’s soul hanging up there. He bunched his fists.
“Careful now, Skinny.” Anthony stepped between them, solid and strong, his meaty fingers wrapped tight around Eli’s wrists. “You know we don’t want to break it,” he said. “We know you love that guitar, and we love when you play it. But right now we need you. Need you with us.”
Eli struggled, but he was held in place by Anthony’s thick hands, the guitar still out of reach.
Without that guitar, all Eli had were the clothes on his back and a hundred forty-seven dollars stuck in the heat vent. The guitar took him outside of himself, away from the memories of his brother, his mother, his grandmother long passed. It was also his living, how he made what little money he could.
“Come on, Ellison.” Coyo shifted the heavy Save-A-Lot bag to his other hand. “Five minutes, in and out. Easy peasy.”
Eli looked at him. “You really with these dumb-ass boys?”
Coyo still wasn’t meeting his eye. “It’s a good plan.”
“I’ve never been to that mall,” said Eli. “I was just talking. What the fuck do I know?”
“That’s why we need you,” said Skinny B. “In case we gotta change up on the fly, like.”
“It’s okay,” said Coyo. “I got your back.”
“Is that what this is? You having my back?”
Eli hated how weak he was compared to Anthony. He hated how his voice sounded, the pleading in it. How had he ever thought he could keep himself out of something like this? The mathematical part told him it was just a matter of time before the street life caught up to him. The guitar was too thin and light and fragile to save him.
“Yeah,” said Coyo. “It’s time for you to step up. Step into your own.”
Eli didn’t have an answer for that. Coyo knew who Eli’s father had been, and his brother too. Eli didn’t want to believe that history was in his blood. He wanted to believe he was only the music.
“Think about the money,” said Anthony reasonably. “What you might do with a couple thousand dollars. Maybe five thousand. Maybe ten. Maybe more.”
There it was.
Hard to argue with that, said the mathematical part. You might not like the odds. But what else you got?
His stomach churned with the thought.
Eli didn’t like it. Didn’t like anything about it.
But maybe Coyo was right. Maybe it was time to learn how to do this shit. Time to make a living.
He twisted himself out of Anthony’s grip.
“All right.” He glared at each of them in turn. “But if I get killed doing this, I’m gonna haunt you motherfuckers into your goddamn graves.”
3
Coyo had found them an old four-door Buick Skylark, janky as hell with the maroon paint faded and peeling off the hood and roof. The interior smelled like old piss and mouse turds. The first thing they did was roll the windows down as far as they could go.
Eli climbed into the front passenger seat. The engine had something not quite right, a high whine in D minor under the regular noise. “This the best you can do?”
“Don’t be complaining ’less you can steal your own car,” said Coyo as he pulled away from the curb.
The steering column was broken open where the key was supposed to go. Wires dangled exposed, bare and twisted together.
Eli hadn’t even known Coyo could drive.
They stopped behind a boarded-up building and got out of the car as Anthony dug into the tool bag for the white disposable coveralls he’d bought at the paint store. They pulled the coveralls over their clothes, but not all the way. They tied the coverall arms around their waists, like a sweatshirt you took off because you got hot.
And they were hot on the warm spring day, the coveralls made from some paper-plastic material that held in the heat, but that wasn’t why they didn’t put their arms in the sleeves. Just lik
e stopping here where nobody could see them get dressed, it was part of last night’s plan. Eli didn’t want anyone in the neighborhood to see four black boys driving around in white painter suits.
Somebody might connect that sight to security-camera footage on the evening news.
Anthony handed out the gloves and the masks and the little paper hats. After they’d put on their gloves, Coyo passed out the guns. “Fingers off the triggers,” he said. “You know how they work, right? Any questions?”
Eli examined the rusty little revolver with the tape-wrapped grip. Something you could throw away and not miss, he thought. He looked at the other boys and saw that their guns were no better. Cheap and disposable, none of them shiny. He found the lever to open the thing that held the bullets. Every hole was filled.
His stomach churned. He’d handled guns before, had shot them, too, but it was just for fun. Showing off, making noise.
This was different.
Once they hit the road again they were quiet, feeling the weight of what they were about to do. The only sounds were the engine noise, the discordant notes of the tires on the road, and Skinny B giving directions from the back, watching the map on his phone.
Coyo took the circular ramp to the highway at speed, and the force of the turn pushed them sideways in their seats. The wind battered them through the open windows, the smell of the warming day rich in their noses. Eli looked out at the city flying by from the height of the road. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden in a car. Mostly Eli stayed local and walked.
The trip was only twenty minutes but it felt like a different country when they turned the tight loop that dropped them onto Germantown Parkway, a concrete boulevard lined with acres of asphalt parking lots almost empty at that still-early hour. On the far side stood neat buildings of brick and glass, the signs crisp and bright. Green plants in long rows or little islands. This was where the good stores were, Eli thought, for people with money in their pockets. People who could afford more than food and a phone, the bare necessities.
“Over there.” Skinny leaned over the seatback, pointing. “By that sign says Macy’s. See the door?”
“Not yet.” Eli’s stomach was not getting better. “Circle around, I want to see all of it.”
Coyo looked at him.
“What if there’s a damn SWAT team at some donut shop on the far side? We need to see all of it.”
Coyo nodded and thumped an elbow into Eli’s chest, but not hard. “This why we need you, Ellison.”
He stuck to the road instead of cutting across the empty parking lots, all of them very aware of the little unmanned police trailer with its security cameras. Around the wide blank block of the Macy’s, then what looked like loading docks with semi-trailers backed up to the building. After Sears and another police trailer, the road looped away and back toward something called Malco with a row of Dumpsters lined up outside.
“What’s Malco?” Eli asked.
“It’s a movie theatre,” said Anthony. “I’ve been to the one by Overton Square a few times.”
Sometimes Eli watched TV at the Lucky, if he got there early or stayed late. Sometimes Saint James let him sleep in a booth if it was cold. He’d never been to the movies.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s where we’re working today. If anybody asks, police or anyone, we’re working at the movie theatre. We’re late, we’re a little lost, we went in the wrong entrance. Got it?”
Murmurs of agreement.
“Say it. Each of you.”
They repeated it back to him, one by one.
Past the theatre, a big round glass entrance glittered in the sun. At the far end of the mall, they curved around Dillard’s with its arched green entryways. Around JCPenney, then back where they started, on the outer edge of the parking lot.
The pit in Eli’s stomach got deeper, like it had a mind of its own, and was not in agreement with the rest of his body.
He couldn’t believe he was doing this. But here he was.
“Stop up there,” he told Coyo, “while we get ourselves straight.”
They already wore the pale latex gloves. They shouldered into the upper part of their coveralls, raised the plastic zippers to their necks. They pulled the white paper painter’s hats down over their eyes and set the white dust masks across their faces. Then turned to look at each other in these ghost getups, four different shades of brown skin now almost completely covered with identical white.
“Goddamn,” said Skinny B. “We some kind of badass space-age motherfuckers.”
Eli just shook his head.
Coyo pulled the car up toward the entrance and left it nose-out in the nearest legal parking spot.
Eli said, “Everybody got the plan?”
“I’m good,” said Skinny, bouncing in his seat.
“Me too,” said Anthony.
“You know I am,” Coyo said.
Eli’s stomach roiled and churned, like he’d swallowed a pair of live eels. “Okay,” he said. “No, dammit, wait.”
He pulled off his dust mask and hat with a single upward shove of his hand, then pushed open the door and leaned out to puke up his greasy Hardee’s breakfast. It burned hot in his throat, splashing red and chunky on the pavement. His gut clenched like a fist until he was empty. He spat and ran his tongue across his teeth and wished for water, but he didn’t have any.
“Okay,” he said. Feeling the jitter in his fingers, a wild energy in his legs. “Okay. Let’s go. Five minutes, in and out.”
Easy peasy, motherfuckers.
4
They walked through two sets of double doors and down a short hall, looking around them at the bright, shiny space so different from where they lived. Anthony carried the tool bag. They each had their guns tucked into the front pockets of their jeans, which they could reach through slits designed into the coveralls. The mall was lit up and stores were open, but Eli saw only a half-dozen people, none of whom paid them any mind. The place had been open just half an hour.
The escalator pulled them slowly up to the second floor, four boys dressed in white work clothes, Skinny B in the lead, then Anthony, Eli behind him, and Coyo at the back.
The first floor had leafy green plants and benches to break up the wide spaces. The second floor had narrower walkways with clear glass balcony railings. The center was open to below.
At the top, Skinny led them to the right and they gathered against the wall at a blank spot between stores. Anthony opened the tool bag, and Eli, Skinny B, and Coyo took out the short-handled sledgehammers. Four pounds, said the sticker on the handle.
Suddenly Eli needed the bathroom. Had to take a dump real bad. He tightened up, looked around for a sign.
“Time to move,” said Coyo. “Everybody ready?”
Eli wasn’t, but when the others nodded, he did, too.
Each boy took out his gun.
Hammer in one hand, gun in the other, except for Anthony, who carried the tool bag.
They stepped off the wall and walked past a shoe store and a perfume store and more shoes. The next place was Crown Jewelry. Two wide glass windows with nothing on display but a big Rolex logo on green velvet, and a wide glass double door without handles in between. Coyo pushed the door, then stuck his fingers in the crack and tried to pull, but it didn’t move.
“Goddamn it, Skinny. What the fuck?”
Eli looked down the walkway. A pair of white people walked toward them, gray hair and sneakers and bright collared shirts, carrying white paper coffee cups.
“Shit, they were wide open the other day,” said Skinny. “They’re supposed to be open right now.”
Eli peered at the mechanism and saw that the glass double doors were meant to slide sideways. Probably motors in those little gray boxes.
Through the doors, he saw a big square room with waist-high wood-and-glass display
cases on three walls, set up like the counter at the Hardee’s, with room behind them for the workers. At the back of the store, a woman stood alone behind a long case.
She was older and elegant in a deep blue shirt with bright pearls standing out against her light brown skin, her straightened hair piled up tall on her head. She held a plastic spray bottle and a cloth. She’d been polishing the glass until she caught sight of the boys.
Now she stared right at Eli, eyes wide.
For a moment Eli hoped they could be done with this. Put the guns back in their pockets and step away. Nobody’d seen their faces, they hadn’t done a damn thing.
He looked at the woman through the glass and knew he could make his own choice. Turn and walk, drop the gun and hammer and white suit in the trash on his way out, find his own long wandering path back to the North Memphis empty. Collect what little he had and find another place alone. No matter that he’d said he’d do this, that he’d be leaving his boys here without him. They’d gotten him here by threat, against his own best intentions. He could decide for himself.
Then the mathematical part weighed in.
It wanted to see how the plan played out. If Eli had the family knack.
Not to mention the money. Steady food. Maybe a real place to stay.
So Eli stepped forward, caught Coyo’s eye, and said, “Break the door with your hammer. Do it now or this is over.”
Coyo looked back at Eli, some live spark passing between them. Then Coyo nodded once, raised his hammer, and swung it hard. The impact showed in the glass like a spiderweb. He swung again and the cracks spread outward toward the edges. With the third hit, the door fell to the floor in tiny rectangular pieces and Coyo walked through the hole with his gun raised, Skinny B scrambling behind.
“Hands up,” Coyo called out. “Stay where you are, don’t touch a damn thing. Hands where we can see them. Be smart and you all live through this.”
Coyo’s voice was powerful and full of authority and Eli could see now what had become of his boyhood friend who had stood up to King Robbie. Maybe all those Coyo stories were true.