by Bill Beverly
In the dark of the van sat Fin, alone. Waiting in the middle seats, head bent low under the headliner, arms wrapped around his shoulders like pythons.
“Come on in,” he said.
They exchanged glances and climbed in—Michael and Walter in the front, Ty sliding into the back. East sat on the middle bench next to Fin.
“You boys know how to lock a car?”
“Yeah,” said Walter. “But we ain’t gone anywhere yet.”
“You got keys, though. Lock the doors. Or someone like me will be sitting in here when you boys return. Got it?”
They all nodded assent.
Fin’s voice was deep, but his face was pinched, unhappy. “If I could,” he said, “I’d do this myself. But I gotta trust you. You know the job?”
Four heads nodded yes.
“Michael Wilson, these the right boys?”
Michael Wilson found his voice, tried to steady it. “Yep.”
“Anyone can’t do it, walk away now.”
Quietly they waited, reverent and impatient both.
From the center of the van came a black flash: Fin had drawn a fat pistol and cocked it, barrel at East’s temple. East felt the cold metal burr scratching at his skin.
“You know East is my blood. Now I am sending you all out as my blood.”
East’s eyes kept a flat stare. Practiced. Like he didn’t care.
“This gonna go all right?” said Fin.
“It’s gonna go all right,” Michael Wilson repeated.
Walter nodded, eyes large.
“I need you boys,” said Fin. “And I don’t like to need.” Slowly he drew the gun back, then slipped it away somewhere. “Michael Wilson, you’re in charge. You’re the oldest. East and Walter, you keep him honest. Keep him straight. And, Ty, you make sure it gets done.”
He slid the side door open.
“Any questions?”
Four boys shook their heads.
Fin lowered himself to the ground dryly, tenderly. “Don’t make no friends.”
Michael Wilson fired the engine. They watched Fin walk away down the row of loading docks, just a large, slow-moving man in the sun.
4.
A little compass on the ceiling glowed E. Only once did East turn to look back. Everything he recognized was already past: The Boxes. His gang. His mother. The abandoned, bullet-pecked house. The jimmied window and his crawl-space den. Fin and the gun he’d put to East’s forehead. Now it was just these boys he had left, this van. Nothing.
Behind him lay his brother, a video game squeaking under his thumbs. Uninterested. East tried to remember the last time he’d seen Ty. Maybe late summer. A couple of months at least. He hadn’t known where or how Ty was living. Not that Ty would tell. Talking to Ty, you ended up knowing less than you started with. He took a pleasure in sharing nothing, enjoying nothing, a scrawny boy who’d almost starved as a baby, didn’t eat, didn’t play—failure to thrive, the relief doctor said. Smart but didn’t like school, fast but didn’t like running. Never cried as a baby, never asked questions. Never loved anything but guns.
Hadn’t even said hi to East yet, his brother. Hadn’t acknowledged that he’d noticed East there. East wasn’t going to be the one to break the chill. He touched his forehead, the invisible scrape there, the gun’s kiss that said, This is important. He stared away sideways through the curved, tinted glass: the traffic crawled and the streets changed, a scroll of places. East had never seen these streets or the ones beyond. Fifteen years old, he had never left Los Angeles before.
In the center seat he had an overview—he could watch the streets, watch these boys. Michael Wilson’s head bobbed as he drove, talking, talking. Talking all the time, to everyone, even himself, a flow: he made music of it, he breathed through it. His sunglasses rode up top, and his head swung side to side, his white eyes dancing this way and that. So busy, thought East, working so hard. Walter, his head was lower down, bushier. He bulged off the seat into the middle and against the door. East had known some fat kids before, smart ones, worth something. But you couldn’t work them in the yard. Not outside, a standing-up job.
But Walter was getting tight with Michael Wilson. Giggling at him. “Never thought you’d be driving a fuckin florist’s van,” he proposed.
Michael Wilson lifted his hands from the wheel. “It don’t smell like flowers.”
East didn’t mind the van. He liked the seat, the middle view, the drab shade. The carpet was blue. The seats were blue. The ceiling was a long faded grayish-blue, little pills of lint in the nap. Where he sat, the smoky windows were an arm’s length away. They wouldn’t roll down; they only popped out on a buckle hinge. That would do. Everything was an arm’s length away.
He tucked his pillowcase under his seat and scouted in the knapsack hung on the back of Walter’s. Pens, a notepad. Soaps and towels, toothbrushes and paste. The sort of kit somebody’s mother would pack. And under the seat, a first-aid kit: gauze, ice packs, a flimsy red blanket that felt like wood splinters. CALL FOR HELP—AMBULANCE/POLICE was spelled out on one side. And four pairs of thin black nylon gloves.
Then the fat boy, Walter, cleared his throat and turned. He locked in on East. “Man, what you think when Fin held that barrel on you?”
“What’d I think?” East sniffed and looked off out the window. “Nothing.” He didn’t say: that is the second gun I’ve looked down in a day.
“Would stress me, man,” Walter said. Still staring at East. Finally East looked back, and Walter gave a little nod and turned forward.
“Nigger, for blood, Fin must not like you all that much,” said Michael Wilson.
“Fin says don’t say nigger,” East said flatly.
“Nigger, that’s unrealistic.” Silently Michael Wilson laughed at the windshield and bobbed his head to music, to a rocking horse in his mind. “In the man’s personal presence, I defer. But be for real.”
Walter said, “Michael. That word don’t mean nothing to you?”
“Not like it means to Easy.”
East shrugged. It was just a thing, a rule. Everyone broke it. But this trip was supposed to run tight. Rules were what they were. He supposed it would get wild at the end. That was later. Ty would see to that.
—
Out of habit, he studied them. Already bickering. “You got to get to I-15, man,” Walter was saying. “You gotta hit Artesia Freeway before you get to 605.”
“But you don’t even say it right. Ar-tess-ya.”
“It says it right here. Ar-tee-sia.”
“You ever been there, man? Cause I had a girl that way, and she said Ar-tess-ya.”
“You ain’t never had no girl except off a corner in the ghetto,” said Walter. “Just get us moving out this shit.”
“Play some music, then, Walt,” Michael Wilson ordered up.
For a minute, crouched over his stomach, Walter reached and fiddled with the radio. Nothing.
“Doesn’t work.”
“We supposed to have a genius,” mourned Michael Wilson. “Can’t even switch on a radio.”
“It don’t work.”
Ty’s game buzzed triumphantly. The screen for a moment turned his hands bright white.
“What you thinking back there, Easy?” said Michael Wilson, shimmying his head a few degrees over.
“He don’t talk much,” Walter opined. “He and his brother.”
“No, he don’t.” Michael Wilson stopped at a light. “He don’t like you.”
Walter giggled. “He don’t like you.”
East kept his mouth shut. Now they’d be teasing him. You just listened. You let it go, you came in when it was done, you kept your hands clean. Otherwise never built anything.
He didn’t see how he’d ever get any sleep in this van.
“You know, we might want to get some food before we hit the road,” Walter suggested.
“Oh, we,” retorted Michael. “I didn’t hear you taking no vote.”
Walter too let it slide off, East noted.
You didn’t get to him by calling him fat boy. He’d heard it before. “Good chicken coming up on the right. What kind you want? They got both.”
“Both what?”
“Both kinds. Black chicken and Spanish.”
“If black chicken what made you fat, I’ll take Spanish.”
A noisy drive-through lane threaded between hedges and the little building. The loudspeaker squawked like a fire truck’s horn. Michael Wilson paid and fetched out king-size drinks and a bucket. Walter passed the big drinks back, member VIP cups—you could refill them if you ever came back. Napkins. Hundreds of them.
They crawled onto the Artesia Freeway.
Ty finished a drumstick and twisted his fingers clean in a napkin before he picked up his game. The boy still barely ate. Barely moved sometimes. Unnatural.
They crawled past big yellow lights saying something was happening up ahead. East tried to see over the people in the other cars racked around the van. White man in an Acura to the right, phone pinned to the top of the wheel. Line of little Latin boys in the cab of a pickup, sullen and sleepy. Walter was fishing out a third piece of chicken. “Gonna be Christmas before we get out of LA,” he mumbled.
East tried to look ahead at the brown mountains, to think about the way ahead. He tried not to watch. But it wasn’t in him. A career of watching—a few years was a career in The Boxes—had made him the way he was. He spent his days watching, keeping things from happening. And sometimes he could see things coming. Sometimes he looked through a pair of eyes and saw what a U was deciding, what a neighbor feared.
Sometimes this watching wound East up. It was never finished. There would always be another thing, another thread, another pair of eyes. Days began sharp and tuned themselves sharper, until by the time it was over, the world made a quivering sound, like a black string humming. He could barely stand to be near things.
He slept in his box at night just to dampen the sound of the string. To blind him, deafen him, gratefully. Sometimes in the night beneath the box he woke up gasping.
Cars merged fitfully: they’d reached the obstruction. A vast brown Pontiac lay beached in the right lane, broken down and proud of it. Two women, bleached hair shining and loose, awaited the tow like parade queens. They sat up on the back, perched, putting lotion on. After them, the speed picked up.
—
The air conditioner was killing him. East weighed a hundred ten pounds, give or take. He reached into the first-aid kit and wrapped himself in the flimsy red blanket. The boys in the front seat laughed.
The traffic thinned out, and as the van climbed toward the mountains, they darkened, the solid brown breaking into purples and grays. All East’s life the mountains had been a jagged base for the northern sky. It was the first time he’d been this far toward them, in them. He’d never seen them broken into what they were, single peaks dotted with plant scrub and rock litter, and the open distances between.
He couldn’t stop looking—the slopes and tops and valleys that slowly revealed themselves. Like a new U moving in slowly, taking a look at the house, at the boys, maybe going away, maybe hanging around, deciding he’d just go up for a look, deciding he’d go inside. They all went inside sooner or later. He wanted those U’s to decide, to go in or go away, come again another day, so he could stop watching them. In the same way he willed Michael Wilson to drive faster, to pell-mell it down the highway past the Pathfinders and Broncos and Subarus heading up into the hills for the afternoon. He wanted into the mountains. Almost wanted them over with.
Light poured between them, careened around them.
The purple and brown details opened, resolved themselves, then whipped away as they were passed. Shattered pieces of things. At length the van passed through a canyon where an entire hillside was on fire, white smoke fanning low in the wind.
The boys made no comment on this apparently normal disaster. East studied it, not breathing. Then it too was past.
—
Green signs flared by. Cajon Junction. Hesperia. Victorville. Thousands of windows punched into the valley, cars sliding on and off, streets littered with people. His eyes sought them out and registered. Hard to stop.
When he closed them, let his eyes rest, he felt, as he always did, that someone or something had turned its gaze on him.
“Go on and sleep if you like, Easy. I got it,” Michael Wilson murmured. “Fat boy already checked out.”
“All right,” East said quietly. Walter had gone facedown on the tray of his breast.
Ty’s video game behind him trumpeted happily. A new level.
In the afternoon darkness, they stopped for gas.
The ground had flattened—hills and fences, scrub and arroyo. But mostly empty. Sometimes East found his eyes had gone blurry, the miles spinning past like bus-window reflections. Normal afternoons, he’d sleep seven hours and get up for a while before heading to the house. Last night’s sleep had been full but fruitless: his head was dried up, his lips stiff. The sun lay way over on the mountains, behind a shelf of cloud.
“Where are we?” said Walter, blinking too.
“This the desert, son,” declared Michael Wilson.
Shimmering heat. The low sun wasn’t sending it, but the pavement below them glowed white. East stepped quickly across.
The bathroom outside was locked, so he pissed in the back between two sun-cooked cars. Around him, the ground made a cracking sound, fine dry things touching in the breeze. Part of the moon was up, a white tab.
Inside the gas station, different oils, girl magazines. One ice cream cooler and one for drinks. Next to the counter where you paid for the gas was a grill.
“I can make you something, hon,” said a woman, white, sun-scraped.
There was nothing in the place that he needed. He wandered outside. Michael Wilson stood squeegeeing the windshield.
“Boy, did you just piss out in the field?”
East glanced down. “Yeah. I just pissed out in the field.”
The older boy laughed. “Country already.”
East didn’t answer. The jokes, the small laughs. He recognized Michael Wilson working, trying to do his job. The light talk of the leader. He dawdled past the van and stood on the apron of concrete and loose stones, looking around at the unbuilt land. Something moved in the distance, a ghost or tumbleweed. He’d seen a tumbleweed once, in a cartoon. This looked like that, a cartoon tumbleweed in cartoon land, hills and rubble, nothing with a name. Nothing real.
“Get in, Country,” called Michael Wilson. “We got to find something for y’all to eat.” And East turned back to the van, pale blue and dusty, like the sky.
5.
Only once did Michael Wilson try talking to Ty. They were riding out what was left of California. Or maybe it was Nevada. The land was dark, and sometimes the spread of headlights showed them low, brushy hills. Michael Wilson leaned away from the wheel.
“What’s your story back there, young’un? Fighting them aliens still?”
A long, intent wait, and then the voice floated back, quavery, almost a little girl’s: “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah.” Michael Wilson, for once, was not laughing.
“Tired of riding, man,” Ty said. “Tired of bullshit. Why we ain’t flying?” He switched back on the game with a musical flourish, as if the conversation were over.
This pushed Walter’s button. “Oh, no. Really, man? Impossible. No way.”
Michael Wilson: “We trying to keep low, young’un. You gotta use a credit card to buy a plane ticket. ID to buy, ID to get on. It don’t matter if the ID ain’t real; they still gonna track you.”
Their song changed quick, thought East. Bitching about it themselves an hour ago.
“We’d be so fucked,” said Walter. “They would know where we get off, where we catch a ride.”
“So there’s some trouble? Four little black boys done shot a man? A man who’s a witness in LA next week? Look, I see where we got these four little Negroes just flown in from
LA.”
“I wonder when they flying back.”
“Let’s get a picture of them off the video.”
“Let’s call up the SWAT team.”
Michael Wilson laughed. “Airborne Negro Detection System activated.”
To all of this Ty snarled, “So what if they do?”
Michael Wilson and Walter glanced across at each other, holding their merriment.
“Fuck you,” said Ty. “The both of you.”
East sat with hands folded inside the red blanket. Pinning it shut. So this would be it. The funny faces in front tangling with Ty. For days.
“Oh, maybe you could fly,” said Walter. “But you a wanted man then. This way, we’re sneaking in, sneaking out. You remember that astronaut lady who wanted to kill her boyfriend’s new girl? Drove all the way from Texas to Florida to get away with it? She had gas cans in the back, never stopped. She wore diapers, man, trying to keep off the cameras.”
“You remember that astronaut lady?” Ty sneered, and in the back he muttered softly to himself like an old injured dog. Again his thumbs worked the buttons of his game. And that was the end of Michael Wilson talking to Ty.
—
They were awake, but softly. Then Michael Wilson spoke. “You want to take a little drive into Vegas? See the sights?” The instrument panel lit the curve of his cheek like a moon.
“No,” said East.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Walter.
But then the hollow dark of the desert was pierced, and colored light caught the undersides of the clouds. The boys stared ahead, rapt.
The van crept smoothly toward the emerging city’s glow. It was like the orange flare of a cigarette—crawling, twinkling, growing bright. Buildings rose out of it like a great lighted forest. Vehicles of all descriptions visible on the road again in the spilled light. Then they were flashing through it, and everyone was watching, even Ty.
“Listen. We got to get off for gas anyway,” Michael Wilson suggested, and Yeah, yeah, they all agreed.
So much light. Crossing, cross firing, leaving nothing empty, no shadows. Barely had the van cleared the ramp before a pyramid appeared. A grand white pyramid, razor-edged, spotlit. Everything dressed up: even the parking ramp had a fairy on it, or a genie.