by Nick Petrie
“Whyn’t you go to the emergency room? You must’ve passed three or four on the way.”
Coyo shook his head. “Hospitals report gunshot wounds, you know that. Next thing, I’m talking to the cops, after that I’m in jail. I ain’t going to jail.”
Eli didn’t see how jail could be worse than dying. But he’d heard plenty of jailhouse stories, and he didn’t want to go, either.
“You always was stubborn.” He rubbed his chin. “I’m going to the Walgreens, get some supplies. Get you fixed up.”
Coyo reached out a hand, surprisingly strong, and grabbed hold of Eli’s wrist. “No, Ellison. Stay here with me. You got any water?”
“Sure. Be right back.” Eli detached Coyo’s hand, then went out back. He rinsed an old Coke can with water from the bucket set under the gutter overflow, then filled the can up again, nice and clean.
He brought in a cracked vinyl chair from the yard and sat beside Coyo, raised the can to his lips. “You need help. Let me find that old doc does fix-up for the neighborhood.”
Old Doc Schweigart had lost his license before Eli was born. His pale hands were shaky and his brain was wet, but he knew things and he’d help, and you could pay him in liquor. He could even be kind, when he’d had enough to drink. “Call me Bill,” he’d say, swaying on the street corner, and tell unlikely lies about his years in the Coast Guard. Eli had stood in the old doc’s kitchen more than once while he patched up some half-dead boy laid out on the tarnished chrome-legged table.
Coyo’s breath rasped louder. “You can’t go out. It ain’t safe. King’s got riders out everywhere. And you know Doc Schweigart works on King’s people, too. You can’t trust him.”
“We can pay him to keep quiet,” said Eli. “We got something to trade now.”
“That won’t help. He’ll just smell more money.”
Even shot full of holes, Coyo knew all those angles.
“All right.” Eli got to his feet. “Let me go out and look through that truck. Maybe I can find something to help.”
“I saw that old thing. Where’d it come from?”
“I took it,” said Eli. “At the Texaco on Watkins.” He felt neither pride nor shame at the telling. It was what he’d had to do at the time.
Coyo made a face. “That ain’t you.” He pushed himself up on one shaking elbow, straining toward Eli. “Not s’posed to be, anyway. I wanted you to keep making music. I wanted to keep you out of this. I wanted you to be better than me.” His face twisted up with the effort and pain, and he sank back down into the couch. “But here you are, up to your neck, and it’s all my doing.”
“I made a choice,” said Eli. Which was the truth. Nobody stuck a gun in his ribs. “We all gotta eat. ’Sides, that red car crapped out. I had to get back here, is all.”
Coyo’s eyes closed again, worn out from the conversation.
Eli put a hand on his friend’s chest, and saw again the gun tucked beside Coyo’s leg.
He took the gun in his hand and found the release for the magazine. Coyo had reloaded.
Whatever happened, Eli could move forward on the next part of his plan.
This time, alone.
* * *
• • •
Eli went out to the old green truck, took the keys from under the floor mat, and used the last of his cell phone battery to find the odd-shaped key that fit the funny round padlock on the wood cargo box.
He found a short flashlight set in a kind of holster fastened to the back of the hatch. He turned on the light and saw slender darkwood shelves built inside like fine furniture, nicer than Eli had ever seen before. Set into the spaces were all kinds of wooden boxes, sized to fit just right, gleaming with polish, each made of some different kind of wood. Simple curved handholds called out for fingers.
He pulled out one box and saw power tools he recognized from his time with Dupree, laid out neat and clean with their cords wrapped around them. He pulled out another, smaller box and saw hand tools set in padded cloth pockets. Their grips were worn smooth by use, but Eli didn’t need to test the chisel edges to know they were sharp.
He wondered at the kind of person that would take such care to build something this beautiful into the back of an old pickup truck.
Seemed like he was reconsidering that saltine Peter over and over again.
He found a bright red box with a white cross and took it down from its place. This one had a lid with a latch, but Eli knew a first-aid kit when he saw it. He turned to go, but his eye caught on a piece of black clothing sitting alone on a shelf. Eli was chilled by the night, by his constant teenage hunger, so he took it down, thinking to warm himself or Coyo.
He didn’t understand why the coat was so heavy until he unfolded it and realized it was some kind of armored vest like the police wore. He tucked it under his arm, backed out of the cargo box, and locked up, while the mathematical part made changes to his plan’s earlier equations.
He took another hurried minute to search through the cab of the truck. In the ashtray, he found a phone charger for the cigarette lighter and a couple of different power cords. One fit Eli’s phone, so he fired up the engine, set his phone to charge, then left the truck rumbling low and carried the red box and the flashlight and the vest back to Coyo.
Inside the red box, he found a prescription bottle with a label that said, Take two every twelve hours for pain. He shook out four and got them into Coyo with some water. He sorted through the kit, finding the supplies listed on the plastic instruction card while he waited for the pills to kick in and his own courage to arrive.
It never did. But there was nothing else to do but start. “This is gonna hurt.”
Coyo grunted. “Do it.”
He cut Coyo’s shirt open with scissors from the kit and wiped away the blood with a square of wet gauze from a foil packet. He found two small, neat holes, one down low in the torso and another through the meat of the shoulder. He put his forearm hard across Coyo’s chest and trickled alcohol from the kit into the wounds while Coyo bucked beneath him, an anguished growl burbling up from deep inside that Eli knew he’d hear in his dreams for the rest of his life.
Following the instructions from the card, he covered the small holes with gauze and taped bandages over them. Then he rolled Coyo onto his side to see the exit wounds, which were larger and uglier. Again with the cleaning and the alcohol and gauze packed deep into the raw meat, then bigger bandages covering his friend’s ruined body. Coyo was silent now, panting short shallow breaths.
Eli’s vision got blurry. He realized he was crying.
Then he remembered Coyo saying he’d been shot three times. Eli looked him over and realized Coyo’s jean shorts were soaked red at the hip. He closed his eyes.
“Come on.” Coyo’s voice was ragged, nearly unrecognizable. “One more.”
Eli wiped his eyes and cut away the shorts and saw the exit wound in the front this time. Coyo had been shot in the ass, probably as he was running away.
That’s how they do, he said to himself. That’s how they goddamn do.
He cleaned and rinsed and packed and bandaged as Coyo panted and hurt like some car-hit dog left to die in the street. He knew Coyo wasn’t good. Coyo had done way more than his share of bad. But he was Eli’s friend, had always been his friend. And nobody should be left to die alone.
He laid Coyo flat on the couch again, with Eli’s own blanket over the bloody cushions and Skinny B’s sleeping bag over Coyo’s shivering body. He didn’t know what else to do. “More water?”
Coyo opened his mouth a little and Eli poured in a slow stream until the can was empty.
“Goddamn I’m tired,” Coyo said when he was done. “You’ll watch out for me? While I sleep? I’ll be better in the morning, I promise. We’ll get in that old truck and get the hell out of Memphis. Find someplace new.”
He pulled in a deep,
raspy breath, then let it out. His eyes were already closed. “If I don’t wake up, don’t tell nobody.” A faint smile played on his cracked, dry lips. “Tell ’em I went to Chicago. Then you go instead. Use those watches to buy a new life.”
Eli sat on that cracked vinyl chair beside his oldest friend in the world, maybe the only one left. Besides Nadine, who sometimes scared the living hell out of him, Coyo was the only person left who really knew him. Everyone else was gone. His pops in prison for the rest of his life, his mama dead by her own hand. His brother murdered by ambition, his own and King Robbie’s.
Before that moment, Eli had always been able to sit with his guitar and let his fingers turn that pain to music. That’s what the blues was for, wasn’t it?
But his guitar was history. Now, with Coyo lying on that three-legged couch, steeped in his own blood, Eli tried a new mechanism. He built a small fire with his pain, and turned that fire into anger. For his mother, his father, his brother, his friends.
He sat beside Coyo through the long, dark night, stoking the frozen flames into an ice-cold fury. His hand on Coyo’s chest as it rose and fell, listening to that shallow, raspy breath, while his mathematical mind made its deadly calculations.
* * *
• • •
In the faint morning light, he left Coyo just long enough to collect his charged phone from the green truck, turn off the engine, and search the cargo box for something to eat. He found a cooler with a pair of apples and a quarter-jar of peanut butter and a few stale slices of brown bread.
It was enough for what he had to do.
While he ate, he listened to Coyo’s breathing grow ever more shallow.
He went over his plans again.
48
It was well after noon and Coyo had not yet woken. He was bleeding through his bandages. Eli was waiting for something, but he didn’t know what.
He heard a noise at the back door and jumped up with Coyo’s gun in his hand.
“Eli?” Nadine peeked around the door.
She’d found him, of course. Nadine always knew where to find him. She got all over town on that old bike, covered miles like they were nothing.
“Put that down.” She flicked her hand at Coyo’s gun like it was something filthy and not Eli’s tool for revenge. “That’s not you.”
“Somebody’s gotta pay.” He looked at her, suddenly full of icy rage. “You know what King did? To my father? My brother?”
She nodded. “I know what King Robbie is. But you didn’t need to know everything. You could have left it be. Made a different life. Instead, you brought it all back with that robbery. You need to own that, Eli, what you did.” She gave him that calm, steady stare. “You don’t need to make things worse.”
“I need to be a man, Nadine. I need to stand up for what happened to me and mine. To my whole damn family.”
She stepped forward until they were almost touching. He knew better than to touch her first, no matter how much he wanted to. It was part of Nadine. Her gift also carried a curse, the steep price she paid. She couldn’t turn it off. He waited.
Finally, she leaned in and let her full, soft lips gently brush his, just for a moment.
He felt that miraculous flash like touching a live wire, that direct line between them he’d never get tired of.
They’d only ever touched for a few seconds at a time, never done anything more than that brief brush of the lips. It scared him, how exposed he felt, how deeply she could see inside him. But it also made him hope hard for what might come next. Between nightmares about his mother, his brother, his father, his friends, he dreamed about Nadine, that deeper way of knowing, what might be possible.
Now that spark carried a message, because sometimes the current flowed two ways.
She was terrified that he might die.
For all the power of Nadine’s gift, she didn’t know the future.
But she knew something about what he planned.
“Please wait,” she said. “Wait for that Peter and his friend. They want to help you, I know it. They’re good at this.”
“I can’t wait. I got to do this myself. I got to be a man and stand up.”
“What you’ve been through, you’re already a man,” she said. “But you’re waiting on something.” She looked at Coyo, who stirred restlessly on the three-legged couch. Maybe awake and listening, maybe not. “You waiting on him?”
Eli knew then it was true. “Gotta get him good enough to travel. I’ll do what I need to do, then drive him into Arkansas. Find a hospital somewhere nobody knows him.”
“What about you and me? What’s that worth to you?”
“Almost everything,” he said. “You know that. But I can’t let this be. I gotta stand up or it’s gonna eat me from the inside.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said. “Make your peace and walk away.”
The frosty anger turned his heart to ice. “My brother didn’t walk away. Coyo wouldn’t walk away, neither.”
She looked down at Coyo, laid out on the couch. “You know I never liked that boy. He brought you back into this. What’s he ever done but bring grief and harm to the world? Let him die. You and I can move on to something new.”
Coyo’s eyes were still closed, but a faint smile ghosted across his lips. “Always knew you was tough, Nadine.” His voice was no longer sandpaper, but something rougher, wetter. “Had no idea you was so damn hard.”
“He’s my friend,” Eli said simply. “I don’t have so many left I can just let one go.”
Nadine looked down at Coyo for a long moment, considering. Then, with that effortless grace, she seated herself on the edge of the cracked vinyl chair, wrapped one arm tight around her chest, planted her flip-flops firmly on the floor, and laid the palm of her free hand on Coyo’s forehead.
He spasmed on the couch.
Nadine’s face and neck and arms and legs showed every muscle and tendon, but she kept hold of Coyo. He convulsed like a rag doll shaken by a heedless child. Something unknowable passing between them.
When, finally, Coyo sank back into the cushions, his face was smooth and empty of lines for the first time Eli could remember.
Nadine slumped into the chair, exhausted. She took Coyo fondly by the hand, like a little brother. “See, you’re not so bad.” Her voice was soft. “Now you can choose. To hold on or let go. Live or die as you will.”
Coyo gave her the gentlest smile Eli had ever seen. Then he took in a deep, shuddering breath.
He held it for a long moment, as if poised at the edge of some great precipice.
When he let it all out again, it was altogether more air than seemed possible for one gunshot black boy to ever hold inside.
After that, he never took another breath.
Nadine stood, unsteady on her feet, and walked carefully toward the door. She didn’t touch Eli. She didn’t even look at him. Swaying slightly, she stood in the doorway and stared out at the weedy, overgrown yard, at the old green truck parked there.
When she spoke, her voice was distant.
“Time to decide, Ellison Bell. Time to decide who you want to be.”
She stepped outside and climbed on her bike and rode away.
49
It was nearing nightfall when Albert and Judah Lee had parked on the street behind their ancestor’s battered house, and walked silently through a wooded vacant lot to their ancestor’s weedy, neglected backyard. What with the dump truck and machine-gun fire, the house itself was mostly open to the air, but empty-feeling inside, and dark.
Judah Lee had brought flashlights.
Albert wished he’d brought his pain pills. He was starting to ache.
They’d walked through the kitchen and dining room, Albert wide-eyed at how much damage Judah Lee had caused—no, how much damage Albert and Judah Lee both had caused. It was one thing
to catch sight of it driving past, but another entirely to get close up. This was their ancestor’s house, yes, but stepping inside and seeing that woman’s personal things, no matter how scattered and broken, Albert could feel that it could be her house, too.
Judah had argued that, whatever they were looking for, it had to be hidden somewhere in the structure. Otherwise it would have been discovered long ago. Which left the spaces inside the walls, or else the attic or root cellar or crawl space. Albert had agreed, hoping that it would get them out of the house faster, before the inevitable police patrol saw their lights.
He was starting to wonder how much of this whole deal was actual hope in finding their ancestor’s legacy and how much was just Judah Lee’s free-floating anger looking for a place to land.
It turned out that the walls were solid brick, three layers thick, and there was no attic to speak of, unless they were willing to tear into every rafter bay. Doing that would be real noisy, take most of the night, and probably bring the police.
So they went around back to the root cellar. Judah Lee searched behind the shelves and in the joist bays, then began to probe and pry at the loose brick pavers, hoping to find a soft place where a buried strongbox had rotted away.
He gave Albert the job of stuffing himself into the narrow crawl space, bad leg and all.
Albert made his way to the big stump holding up the center of the house without finding anything but cobwebs and old wood and a deep and abiding ache in his hip. Judah Lee met him on the other side of the stump, where the dump truck’s bumper met the ground. Judah pointed his flashlight at the ground.
“You see this, big brother?”
At first, Albert didn’t see anything but dirt. Bringing his face closer, he began to make out rectangular impressions in the packed soil around the stump. The imprints were scuffed around their edges by loose soil and dig marks made with some kind of two-pronged tool.