by Bill Beverly
“Be ready tomorrow, nine o’clock. You’re gonna clear out straight. So bring clothes, shoes. That’s all. No wallet. No weapons. We gonna take everything off you. Bring your phone, but you can’t keep it. No phones on this trip. And no cards—we’ll give you money. You hear?”
“All right.”
“Keep your phone on, and Sidney will call.”
“Sidney ain’t too pleased with me right now.”
“Sidney ain’t got no choice,” Fin said. “Okay? Be some other boys too going along. They a little older, more experienced. You might not feel you fit in. They might wonder too. Especially after today.” He swabbed the moisture from the inside of his cup with his fingers. “But I think you got something they need.”
This praise from Fin warmed him.
“Gone five, six days. You got a dog or a snake or something, find someone to feed it.”
East shook his head.
“Good,” said Fin. “Then we ain’t talking about nothing in here. Just catching up. Stay a minute and drink your tea.”
East picked up the heavy cup. He wet his tongue. The tea tasted old, like dust at first. Like something collected from the ground.
“You like this?”
East didn’t, but he tried not to show. “What is it?”
“No name. It’s good for you, though,” said Fin. “That woman, she owned a tea shop. Then she fell into some things. I helped her. She knows business. She knows about bringing in off the docks. And she knows how to brew.”
East nodded. “She’s from China?”
“Half Thai. Half everything else,” said Fin lazily. “How’s your mother?”
East coughed once. “She’s all right. She got a little sick, but she’s better.”
“House holding up?”
“Holding up,” said East. “Hold up better if she cleaned a little.”
“You the man of the family,” said Fin. “You could up and clean it. Stop and see her before you go.”
“Yes, sir. All right.”
“All right,” Fin said. “This is a big favor, man. This is not easy, what you’re doing. I want you to know that it is important to me.” Fin’s hands clasped his feet and stretched them, twisted them. Like bones didn’t matter, like they could be shaped any way you wanted. “I will remember it was you that did it,” Fin said again. He put his cup down with East’s. The two cups touching made a deep sound like the bell of a grandfather clock.
“Boy, go,” Fin said. “Not a word. Nine o’clock. Sidney will see after your crew, take care of them. Don’t worry. Stay low.”
East stood. He felt childish in his white socks.
Fin brought out a thick fold of bills. He counted out twenties—five hundred dollars. He handed it over without looking at it.
“Some for your mother there.”
“All right.”
“One more thing you want to know. Your brother, he’s in. He’s part of the trip.”
East nodded. But a little pearl of anger splattered inside his chest: his brother. Babysitting. Not that his brother was any baby.
“Maybe you ain’t gonna like it. Figured I’d give you a night to get used to the idea.” Fin rubbed down his feet, popped a toe. “You know why he’s going.”
East put the money away and laid his hand over his pocket. “Yeah, I know.”
—
A bad street. Dogs bashed themselves against the fences. Televisions muttered house to house through caged doors and windows. East was the only person moving outside. He stepped up to a porch and unlocked the door.
In the living room, in a nest of dull air, his mother lay watching a game show. She looked older than her thirty-one: runny-nosed, fat and anemic at the same time. She drank from a plastic cup, a bottle of jug wine between her knees.
East approached from behind. She noticed, but late.
“Easton? What you doing here?”
Her fierceness, as always, was half surprise. She sat up.
“Hello, Mama,” East said. He looked sideways at the game show.
“You come and sit down.”
He sat beside her, and she smothered him in a hug that he received patiently, patting her arm. She did not turn down the TV: it made the windows hum. When she released him, her nose had grown wet again, and she was looking for somewhere to wipe it.
“I thought I might see you. I made eggs and bacon.”
East stood up again. “I can’t eat. I just came by to check.”
“Let me take care of you,” she reproached him.
East shrugged. The TV swerved into a commercial, even louder. It made him wince. He split off half the fold of bills Fin had given him, and she took it without resistance or thanks. The money curled unseen in her hand.
East said, “Nice day. You see it?”
“Huh?” his mother said, surprised again. “I didn’t get outside today. Maybe. Where’s Ty? You see him?”
“I ain’t seen him. He’s all right.” He retreated to the kitchen, a little preserve behind a white counter littered with empty glasses. He could see her craning her neck, tracking him.
“He ain’t been to see me.”
“He’s doing fine. He’s busy.”
“He my baby.” Her voice rose frantically.
“Well, he’s doing fine. He’ll come around. I’ll tell him.”
“East,” she commanded, “you eat some eggs. They’re still in the pan.”
Let me take care of you.
When he flicked the switch, one of the two fluorescent tubes on the ceiling came to life. The kitchen was a wasteland. East bagged what could easily be thrown out. With a napkin from a burger bag he smashed ants. The eggs on the stove were revolting—cold and wet, visible pieces of shell. He turned away.
His mother had gotten up. She stood in the doorway.
“Easton,” she breathed, “you gon stay here?”
Embarrassed, he said, “Mama, don’t.”
Proudly she said, “There’s sheets on your bed.”
“I can’t tonight.”
“I ain’t seen either one of you,” she sniffed.
Like every minute weighed a ton. “Mama, let me get this trash out.”
“Whyn’t you have some eggs?”
“Mama,” he pleaded.
“Don’t neither my boys love me,” she announced to something on the opposite wall.
East dropped the bag of garbage. He found a fork in the congealed eggs, hacked out a mouthful, and shoveled it in. Sulfur. He tried to chew and swallow, eyes closed, and then turned to his mother. Eggs still milled around the sills of his teeth, horrible.
“You see.” His mother beamed.
—
East’s room was small but neat: twin bed with pillow, two photos on a shelf. A carpet he’d pulled up because he didn’t like the pattern and laid back upside down. A little dust but no clutter. He shut the door, but the TV noise still buffeted him. He picked shirts, socks, and underwear out of the pressboard dresser and stuffed them into a pillowcase. He looked around for a moment before the door opened.
His mother, weary on her feet but still pursuing, stood in the doorway.
“Any of Ty’s clothes here?” he asked.
She let out a sickly laugh. “Ty’s clothes—he took them—I ain’t seen—I don’t know what Ty wear.”
“Shirts? Anything?”
Two years younger, but Ty had left first. Even the room they’d shared for ten years—Ty barely ever seemed to live there. No toys, no animals, nothing taped to the wall. Like it was never his.
She zeroed in. “You going somewhere? You look like a tramp.”
“Me and Ty need clothes for a few days.”
She hummed, casual but knowing. “In trouble?”
“No.”
“Suitcases in the closet. But they old.”
“I don’t need a suitcase,” East said.
He stopped and waited stock-still till she retreated. After a moment he heard the squeak of the couch springs: she was down. He
was alone. He checked the block of wood he’d mounted inside his bed frame, underneath: tight. He loosened it with the thumbscrew. He left his ATM cards there, then tightened it back down.
At the door he said, “I’ll be back in a few days. Come see you then. Come and stay with you.”
“I know you will. I know you gon come back,” his mother cooed.
He took out the remaining money, peeled off three bills, and gave her the rest.
“I know you ain’t in no trouble,” she begged. “My boys ain’t.”
He tilted his face down, and she kissed him good-bye.
—
Down the street, freed from the shout of her TV, East heard the silence hiss like waves. He walked north until he entered an office park of sandy gray buildings nine stories high. Two of them stood in a sort of corner formation, and East walked around them. A faint hubbub of raucous people drinking came from somewhere in the darkness.
A narrow sidewalk led behind the air-conditioning island. The concrete pad full of AC units lent cover as East bent at the last building’s foot. His fingers found the makeshift metal stay wedged between the panes of a basement window. The window fell inward, but he caught it before it made a sound. Quietly, twisting his body in one limb at a time, he crawled through.
The basement crawl space, dim behind dusty windows, was clean, its packed-dirt floor higher at the sides than in the middle. It was empty save for East’s things and a faucet in one corner. It didn’t turn on, but it wouldn’t stop dripping either, and East had placed a wide stainless-steel bowl beneath it; there was always water, clear and cold. He tossed his bundle down and put his face over the bowl, watching his reflection swim in upside-down from the other side.
He drank. Then he washed his face, his hands, the caves of his armpits.
The spot where he slept was a pair of blankets, a pillow he’d bought at a roadside mattress store, and a large, heavy cardboard box the size of a washing machine. The air conditioners hummed all day, all night, washing out the hubbub and street noise. But that was not enough. East paused, stretched, then knelt on the floor beside the box. His hole. He tipped the cardboard up one side and straightened the blankets on the floor beneath it. He smacked the pillow straight and put his bundle of clothes down at the foot of the blanket. Then he slithered beneath and let the box drop over him. Like a reptile, a snake, calmest in the dark. Even the sound of the air conditioners vanished. Nothing. No one.
He breathed and waited.
3.
Near East’s upturned box lay his pad of blankets and pillow. His shoes waited together in the shallow dirt, next to the old pillowcase full of clothes. Through the basement windows, early light crept in, the palest blue.
Sleeping through the night wasn’t what he was used to. A long time, he’d been standing yard midnight to noon. He cleaned his teeth with the cold clear water brimming in the steel bowl. He cleaned his gums, fingers stretching his face to strange masks. He washed his arms again and his neck and face. He lowered his pants and washed his flanks and all around his balls, and shivered in the morning chill.
He checked his phone—Antonio, Dap, Needle, Sony. Nothing.
The house. He needed to go back and see. It was ten minutes’ walk out of the office park to the house. East crossed the main street where the awnings were going up, taquerias and rim shops, the outer crust of the neighborhood. Then in, past the houses where everything was waking up, men hopping down their steps with cups and bags and keys, jumping into cars. Joggers and dog-walkers, old women smoking in their doorways.
A few blocks deeper, the cars turned older and were packed less tightly at the curb. The row houses sat blind behind plywood doors and windows—just a few at first, then more. Then two out of three. This was The Boxes.
He turned onto his street. This spot was where Dap kept one end’s lookout. But he hadn’t called. Needle watched the other end, five blocks down. He’d called too late. Sidney said back before cell phones was better: you knew who you could get in touch with and who you couldn’t. You never sat and worried why somebody didn’t answer his phone.
Two old gray women stood clucking on the shelf of their lawns. Most days when they rattled out to judge the morning, he’d been there for hours, eyes and skin already tuned to the movements of the day. But this morning they had the drop on him.
As he neared the house, he studied it sideways: brown face bullet-pocked, splintered, upper windows open like eyes. Smoke still seemed to hang. Now the door was just a sheet of plywood, bolted on. Yellow police tape stickied the yard side to side.
He ducked under to check. Power cords, recharging cables, all gone from the porch. So he had maybe an hour of battery left. Well, they’d be taking his phone. He gazed around the yard, but it told him nothing.
A patch on the sidewalk was still unmistakably bloody. He tried not to look. The Jackson girl’s face was right near the top of his mind and he did not want to be seeing it, inside his head or anywhere else.
A man in a suit came walking past. Every day he walked by wordlessly, but today he nodded at East and thundered, “Good morning.”
East nodded back.
“They caught you, didn’t they, boy?” The man was jolly. “Shut you right down.”
East ignored him, but the man kept on, made cocky by yesterday. “I see you got a pillowcase. Got your life in there?”
East shrugged and walked faster. He could have broken off a stick and beaten the man, bruised him, made him shut up and run. And for what?
He tried his phone in the open air, tried Dap, tried Needle. Neither of them answering. He left brusque messages: “Call me.” But he’d trained his guys: if we run, stay off the phones. Now he was crossing that up.
It was ninety minutes before he needed to show up. He’d get a walk and eat breakfast. He picked his way south through The Boxes. Birds and small bugs stirred among the trees, buzzing like phones. Three little girls were out early, playing chalk on the sidewalk, colored tizas as big as their wrists.
A cough from a porch was directed at him. “Hey, man. Hey,” the voice came down.
East looked, then stopped. It was a man, maybe thirty-five, maybe forty, a U who’d come to his house some days. The man sat drinking out of a tall paper cup.
“What you need?” East said.
It was strange what he knew and didn’t know. He knew this man, his secret hours. He remembered when he’d first showed up in the evening hours, still with a neatly made face, a thick gold band. Then he’d come more often. East remembered when he’d lost his job, and he’d marked the passage of drug time across the man’s face, the thinness he’d taken on and the way his eyes now had that light to them, that ingenious, failing light.
The man’s name was the one thing he didn’t know.
“What you doing now?” the man said.
“Nothing.”
“Where am I gon go?” asked the man indignantly.
East shrugged. He heard again what Fin had said. Submarine. People gonna have to look elsewhere. He knew a house a mile away, one that wasn’t Fin’s. But you didn’t talk about other houses you knew. You didn’t connect the dots.
The man coughed three times and spat out a large, silvery thing. “You don’t know? Unacceptable, man.”
East lowered his eyes and got walking again.
“Boy, don’t deny me,” the voice came, following him.
—
At eight, Sidney called him, told him where to go. A mile away—down off the south end of The Boxes. “Make sure you bring clothes for a couple days.”
“Fin told me,” East said.
“Course he did,” sneered Sidney. Then East’s phone died.
He bought a glazed doughnut to eat as he walked, then pulled down an orange off a low branch. He turned it in his hand as he walked, a small, heavy world. It was ripe, but he waited to eat it.
—
In the alleyway behind a line of stores, Michael Wilson was telling East about his car. Michael Wilson had
the police interceptor and new glows down front and back and underneath. With a second battery Michael Wilson could run his system all night, loud as a club, and still crank it up and drive it away.
Michael Wilson was twenty—long body, long teeth, big brown eyes he liked to keep behind silver shades. Always laughing. Always telling a story. He had been a guy who came around The Boxes, sometimes keeping an eye, sometimes delivering a payday or food. He was an up-and-comer. He had gone away to college, UCLA, and East hadn’t seen him since. He’d been a lot of noise to start with, and now he impressed himself even more.
Michael Wilson was shucking peanuts out of a blue plastic bag, tossing the nuts into his mouth, flipping the shells over his shoulder onto the pavement. Michael Wilson worried that the other guys might be stupid. Said he didn’t have time to be riding with no one stupid, because stupid didn’t stay cooped up. Stupid infected everyone. Little gangsters always thought they had a code, when really what they had was a case of stupid. East nodded, and he pretended to listen, because Michael Wilson was going to be a part. But God damn, he thought.
For the longest time it was only the two of them. East checked his phone—dead. He shook his head. “What time you got?”
“Like nine,” said Michael Wilson.
“What is like nine?”
“It means almost nine. Approximately nine, motherfucker.”
East sighed. “Let me see your watch.” He grabbed Michael’s wrist, eyed the watch’s gold hands, the shining stones. “That’s eight fifty-four. Not like anything.”
“It’s like nine, old man,” Michael said.
A couple of raggedy cars and a blue minivan shared the early light. Bulky air conditioners rusted on raised pads, muscular posts sunk in concrete to protect them from the drivers. Most of the stores were dark. One Chinese restaurant belched its fryer smells, and the women peered out at the boys and smoked in the safety of their doorway.
The next to arrive was a pumpkin-shaped boy in a green shirt. He waddled slowly, carefully; fat made his face young, his gait ancient. He breathed hard, excited, scraping his feet as he came. “Whew,” he said. “Michael Wilson. What’s up.” They grabbed hands. Then Michael recognized him.
“I remember you. Walton? Wallace?”