by Bill Beverly
A half hour, an hour maybe, before everyone would wake up. That much alone, that much peace. The tires hummed, and he felt what Johnny had said about the van now: sorry-looking, yeah, but solid. He liked being up high, liked the firm seat. He could see the land, the flash movements in the brush, an animal, too fast to spot. Dog, maybe, or coyote. They had coyotes in LA, but they were skulking creatures, big rats. They ran down alleys and stayed in shadows, and before long somebody would shoot them dead. No law against doing it. Just another gunshot in the night.
When the other boys stirred and began cursing, East was sad. They rolled their limbs, spewed their night breath. They would be back with him soon. A chimneyed orange mountain loomed beside him, and East studied it closely as he passed it, its worn layers, saying good-bye. A secret. The last thing that was his alone.
—
Bright morning. East stopped at a shiny new gas station, TV screens humming at the pump. All the boys jumped out: East pumped the gas in the dry air. Los Angeles had dry air, but it smelled like something—always something. The air here smelled like nothing, or nothing that had a name.
Inside the store loomed hanging race cars and inflatable superheroes. A massive grill counter stretched across the back: no one there, yet people were taking food from a window. Walter studied it: you touched a screen till you had pointed out everything you wanted. Every item on every shelf had a price lit up in LEDs. Every little thing made a noise.
“This joint is fucking cool,” said Ty.
Finished pumping, East headed for the bathroom and its cherry-cake smell. Some things never changed. A white boy pulled up at the next urinal. Hat on backwards.
“Sup, homes,” he said.
East raised his eyebrows. This boy right up on him.
“Sup,” he pronounced ironically.
The white boy finger-stabbed. “Manny Ramirez. My man.”
East wasn’t sure. He tightened his eyes, rushed his hands below a faucet, then rushed out. What was it with some people?
This was white boy’s turf—he recognized that.
Outside the bathroom, Michael Wilson stood in line. Prepaid with twenties, so he had to wait for change every time—the price of doing business in cash. Blankly he stared, just a customer, and East watched him from behind. The cashier was an older lady with a huge amber stone caught in a fold of her throat.
“Seven dollars and thirty cents from sixty, sir,” she said.
“Ma’am, you got scratch-offs?”
“There’s no lottery in Utah, sir.” The same note in her voice.
Michael Wilson bobbed his head agreeably, and East let him walk away. What was it? Buying lottery tickets. Stealing a little. How much?
What did Michael Wilson expect to do if he won?
Something hit him on the shoulder. It was the same bathroom white boy on his way back out. “Be cool, bro,” he said, jabbing his finger. “Fly’s open.”
East looked down. Bro was right.
Just ten minutes here, but his morning calm was plucked. The dark string inside blurred and buzzed. He followed Michael to the van, every bit of air a puzzle, every person a future event. He climbed into the back and slid the door shut.
“Awesome station, man,” said Walter, a fragrant family box of chicken biscuits steaming up his lap. “They all need to be like that.”
East buckled his belt. “Who is Manny Ramirez?”
Both boys in the front let go a snort.
“Ninety-nine, Easy,” said Michael Wilson.
“You ever check your shirt?”
East looked down. Dodgers. “What?”
“On the back. His name is on the back of your shirt, man.”
“Yard boy don’t get out much,” Michael Wilson crowed.
After an hour, they crossed into Colorado. East felt the ground rising. He rode up front as Walter drove, Michael dozing, soft-eyed, in the middle. The hot food had upset East’s stomach.
Mountains stood before them, above them, like in LA. But in The Boxes, the mountains were only a thing, like a wall or a tree: a sun-baked ridge above the valley full of everything. Here the ground was nearly empty of buildings and the mountains were like people, huddled figures, blue and gray and white, so high.
They were unmoving stone, but they tore East’s eyes from the boys in the van and the unidentifiable people motoring up the same road. East gave up watching the people so much. They didn’t stare back as much as they had in Utah. The people seemed younger, fitter. Some gazed at the mountains too. Some rode hollow-eyed. Families with kids drowned in their movie players; mountain boys with their racks of bikes and skis and packs; thin, straight-haired white women in their Subarus. They didn’t stare back. Unsurprised by him.
Only one black man they saw, driving a moving truck.
Come noon they bought a tank of gas and two pizzas at an exit called Glenwood Springs. A bathroom stop, a round of sodas, little wooden buffalo roaming the counter near the gray cash register. Boxes so hot they singed East’s fingers; they steamed on the van’s floor till the windows ran wet.
They drove on until a sign announced a turnoff: SCENIC OVERLOOK. “Let’s hit that,” Walter said. “We can eat there.”
“Oh, we?” laughed Michael Wilson, but Walter took it well.
The view, framed between two immense, square boulders, revealed just how far up they’d come. A gorge opened below, green, vertiginous. Two little kids from the gigantic white Navigator next to them hollered, “Wow! Wow!” East started, expecting them to be staring at him.
But they were just teetering on the edge, gaping down into the gorge below.
He slid out of the van. Again he had to find his legs, find his stance. Behind the handrail the ground was slippery pebbles. He approached the edge and looked down gingerly.
It took a moment for East’s eyes to read the scene. He could see the valley’s depth, feel the real wind dipping down it. But he could not convince himself that it was real. Space both vast and unattainable, opening up between the blue walls of stone. The air below was cold, he could feel it, a reservoir, and he could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. More time than he had in a hundred lives like his.
Birds wheeled in midair, far below.
“Mommy, Daddy!” the kids cheered again. “Look! It’s amazing!” East stood there too, the cold air streaming up his face, full of the smell of snow and stone.
—
For hours they worked in and out through the passes: town-size shadows sliding over the mountainsides, dark mossy valleys, clouds on the road that blinded their way. How blank it had looked on the map, this space, this state. How different to have to cross it. The road sank in and swelled out, like intestines. East asked for a turn at the wheel, but his stomach made him give it up right away. Sitting shotgun, next to the guardrail, was worse.
Their next stop was so that he could throw up. He was awake, dripping sweat; he had been dreaming of a terrible yellow goldfish. “Stop the van,” he gasped.
Michael Wilson skidded off along the guardrail.
East fell out, a first taste like cement; then his backbone arched and his lunch rained over the rail.
Pizza, Coke, the rest. Jesus. He looked away, at the miles between him and the next solid ground. Same birds, flecks beneath him. The air smelled wet, like the rock.
He felt better—for a moment, he knew. But he breathed in wetly, the air of that moment.
“Who’s next?” Michael Wilson said. Nobody in the van was even laughing.
“Never been up in the mountains before, huh, Easy?”
“I don’t know,” East grunted. “It’s different than I thought.”
“Never been nowhere, huh?”
It wasn’t in him to argue.
—
Stickers covering the Jeeps and Subarus: THE EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO US, WE BELONG TO THE EARTH. IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A LIFE. CRISTO SALVA. Bicycles on the back, in the bed, on the roof, wherever they could st
rap on. “Crazy motherfuckers riding bicycles up here,” said Walter. “You know there’s no air? Go out and see if you can run a hundred yards.”
“You can’t run no hundred yards,” said Michael Wilson, “anywhere.”
Somewhere in the afternoon they topped out finally and started coasting downhill toward the city of Denver. East eyed the silver Colorado State Trooper cars, Chargers and Expeditions and the long, flat Fords. They scattered everywhere on the downhill, working the speeders like sharks tracking prey. Once a trooper dogged their back bumper for miles. “I’m going fifty-five, motherfucker,” Michael Wilson protested. “Fifty-five minus two.” The trooper hit the lights, jumped out from behind them, and bit on a Jeep. Everyone started breathing again.
Ty’s gun, thought East. Ty’s gun, Ty’s gun, Ty’s gun.
The van knifed past the city, the buildings low and shiny and suddenly too colorful below the cold blue sky long-grained with clouds. As they merged from one highway onto another, East turned back to look. The mountains stood in line behind them, still close but collapsed now, pressed together. No hint of what they were, what they held. Just another line, a little brighter and sharper than the brown line of home.
And they could see what was coming. Flatland, an endless sea of it.
“Someone else drive,” said Michael Wilson. “I’m tired of seeing shit.”
Walter took the wheel. Michael reclined in the shotgun seat, rubbing his face with a pair of fingers. East sat back on the middle bench and watched him fuss and prod. “You learned that where? Tokyo Spa?”
“East, baby, no,” Michael said. “I learned this from your mother.”
East smiled and watched the road, the eastbound trucks. After a while he shut his eyes too. Let himself fall off to sleep.
Except for the chirping. He peeked around at Ty. Ty did not look back. The muscles in his fingers twitched around the gray plastic tablet of his game. Something with aliens and bombs. Ty could lie around playing forever.
“Don’t that thing run out of batteries?” East protested at last.
Ty’s eyes zeroed in. “Run out all the time,” he murmured. “But I don’t.”
“You go see your mother?”
“No,” snorted Ty. “Did you?”
“Yes. I took her some money,” said East. “Night before we left.”
“Well,” said Ty, more quietly, “ain’t you nice.”
East said, matching Ty’s quiet, “Somebody said you might have a gun on you.”
His brother’s eyes ticked up and down, following something minuscule along an inch-long track. Then at last the game flashed in his face, and he relaxed.
“That’s my business.”
“You know you got no need to be holding,” East pressed. “Fin said stay clean till we get the guns.”
“Fin said.”
“I ain’t trying to take it. But you should let me know.”
Ty dialed madly with his thumbs, and his game trilled. “Shit be crazy, ain’t it?” he murmured.
Shit be crazy. Between the two of them, it was a refrain, an old one. It meant nothing and everything at the same time, unreadable and obvious. Like a glance, like a wave in the street. It stood in lieu of ever being in their mother’s house at the same time or knowing where the other slept. It stood in lieu of East having the slightest control over his little brother, or of his owning up to losing Ty. For Ty belonged to nobody now, an unknowable child, indolent as bees in autumn, until he rose up and moved in a spasm of energy and force.
Where Ty had come from, where Ty was now: these things East knew. What had made Ty what he’d become: that was the unseeable, the midair coil the whip made between handle and crack. That was anybody’s guess.
Big brother taking the little, they called it babysitting. But it was not that. Nothing like it.
Deep in his game, Ty smiled. His thumbs drummed out a sprint. Then he relaxed his gaze. “You made me lose,” he said.
7.
East liked driving here—the flat, unruffled fields with no one in sight, blind stubble mown down into splinters, maybe a tractor, maybe an irrigation rig like a long line of silver stitches across the fabric of earth. The flatness. There was more in the flatness than he’d expected. The van’s shadow lay long, and the fields traded colors. The boys slept in intervals or complained. Riding in a car for more than a few hours, he thought, was like suspended animation—somewhere under the layers of frost, your heart beat. To the left, a thunderstorm hovered, prowling its own road.
They crossed under the front end of a line of storms, everything wet and alight in the slanting sun, and then they were out the other side but in the cloud’s dark. The tank was low again, and East angled in for gas and stepped out. Little park of pumps under long white storm shelters and a steak-and-eggs place with a shop under a bright yellow plastic roof. Pickup trucks moved in the low, narrow roads on either side and climbed onto the highway, high and chromed or capped and rattling or stuffed with tools or crops or white bags of dirt. Men and women in their windows looked at him, eyed him with interest.
“You boys the only niggers they ever seen in real life,” drawled Michael Wilson, “except Kobe.”
“That was Colorado,” said Walter. “We’re in Nebraska now.”
“Don’t tell me Kobe ain’t got some girls in Nebraska too.”
East waited while Michael Wilson paid. Then he filled the tank and parked the van. Ty was sleeping, a reptile: East locked the doors around him and went in to sit in a bathroom stall. The farther east they got, the dirtier the toilets. Like every toilet in the country had been cleaned the moment they left LA and none of them since.
East shook his head. Sleepless. The person in the next stall wore his music through headphones and moaned along under his breath. Straining, suffering, only one word audible, at the end of the lines: You. You. He smelled like rotten eggs, like rot inside, and then he was gone. East grimaced and stopped breathing. Trying to press his gut out like a toothpaste tube. His thinking was frayed, sleepless: he had to think straight. They were close to getting there. He had to make sure everyone slept tonight. And walked around, cleaned out their heads.
He zipped up and left, no lighter.
Outside, the storm was about to catch them. It rose flat-faced, a gray curtain, sweeping loose trash along. Walter had taken the wheel and was idling at the curb. East swung himself up and in on the shotgun side. Then he noticed the smell. Like the mall, the kiosks where Arab girls tried to spray you: Sample, sample? You like it. That fruit-sweet smell.
The second thing he noticed was the shoe. A golden shoe, like a wedge of foil, with a girl’s foot in it. It hovered brightly between the front seats.
The rest of the girl sat in the center of the van. Michael Wilson was beside her, all sideways and charming. In the back, Ty sat straight in his seat like an exclamation point. For once aroused but not sure what to do. Walter, steering the van away, was trying not to even look.
She was white. Sixteen, seventeen, red hair in curls and loop-the-loops. Bravely she looked at East, or curiously, as if she were nervous. But she was used to courage seeing her through.
No one else was saying anything, so East said it: “Girl, who the fuck are you?”
Michael Wilson made a crackling with his tongue. “E, this is Maggie. She just might ride for a while, over to Omaha. We can drop her off at the airport.”
East said, “No. She ain’t.”
Michael let out a grin and a sigh.
“E,” he began. “This girl needs help. She was just lost up in this rest stop.” He had a hand snaked across the girl’s belt, which, East saw, matched the golden shoes. “Wasn’t nobody going her way. But we are going her way. Right?”
The girl put her hand down on Michael Wilson’s black track pants. Put it right on his dick.
A cold wave rolled up East’s spine. The yellow-outlined parking space in Vegas. He made dead eyes at the girl.
“No she ain’t. Stop, man.” He whacked Walter. �
��Drive back in there. Back where you were.” Walter exhaled a shaky breath and swung the van back around the apron.
The girl kept her hand on Michael Wilson, and he rolled underneath it.
“E,” Michael Wilson drawled. “Girl needs a ride. That’s factual. May be something in it for all of us. Something in it for me, I know. So why don’t we drive now so I don’t have to fuck you up.” The girl blushed uneasily and Michael laughed his little, trailing laugh. Something had happened to his face. His mouth crooked open as if dangling an invisible cigar. “Drive, Walt,” Michael Wilson added. “Don’t listen to this boy.”
Walter rubbed his cheek, wasn’t sure. “Right there,” East insisted. He pointed out a space. “Right by the door.”
“East, I’m gonna hurt you, man,” Michael Wilson warned.
East dimmed his eyes, stared a cold hole through the girl. Her green eyes bright, but she stared back; she was used to sizing people up. For an instant he was looking at the black girl outside the house, the Jackson girl. The same: defiant. And curious.
“Get out, girl,” East said. “It’s nothing good for you here.”
She did a little hitch with her lips, a smile. Then she leaned forward, her hair swinging like a fragrant bough. Her fingers climbed his left hip.
East uttered a strangled cry and slapped her hand, like a snake lunging. The girl drew her fingers back. He tried to go dead-faced again, but he was shaking.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl, Maggie. Her voice was higher than East had imagined. “Maybe I shouldn’t—”
“Aw, Maggie,” Michael Wilson begged. “This boy, this little boy—Maggie, don’t be listening.”
He put his hands on her and she squirmed. “I better go.”
East reset himself. He knew: the way she glanced back at the station. Like now it held things she’d forgotten: people, stuffed animals. She longed for it. Her nerve had fled.
“Maggie, aw,” moaned Michael Wilson, sticky with desire.
Girls had sense. You could back them down. Girls saw bluster, knew its purpose. Boys, they just flew into the air over nothing, rose up with their dicks all hard, and then people got killed. Like at the house.