by Bill Beverly
Michael Wilson was going to fly up now. Had to.
He pled with her first, grabbed at her. “But I can’t,” she said, and then the gold shoes were on the pavement. The glass door—WELCOME, THESE CARDS ACCEPTED HERE—opened for her.
Michael Wilson made a little click in his mouth. “Damn,” he said. “There she goes.”
He clenched the hand he’d been grabbing at Maggie with and fired it at East’s head.
East ducked and sheltered down. “Drive,” he muttered, and Walter did. Michael rose up under the low blue ceiling, but he couldn’t throw a right, not with East balled down in the shotgun seat. Between the seats, he came with two lefts, the second hard enough to light East’s eyes with salt.
“Go!” East gasped. “Drive!”
The sliding door hung open, cool air rushing in. Again East ducked and the turn around the lot rocked Michael Wilson. He recovered and swung again, and East deflected it—another hard turn made Michael brace.
Walter sped the van up the ramp hard, as if he could stop this fight with gas. “Careful, Mike,” he complained. “You gonna make me crash.”
“Pull off, then,” Michael steamed. “Because I’m gonna whup this bitch.” He sat back, fists clenched. “Fuck you up,” he promised East.
As soon as an EXIT 1 MILE sign came up, Walter hit the turn signal. East touched his face. His blood was in his ears and head now, the black string yawning, almost audible. He knew he had to play his cards now.
“What’s up with you, Walt?” he appealed. “You just, ‘Cool, we with this girl now’?”
Walter whined something indistinct. Hunkered down with his steering wheel. Behind him Michael Wilson sat and laughed, stretching his shoulders, limbering.
East turned on him. “Oh, now you’re a muscleman. Just do your job.”
In a high, public voice Michael Wilson declaimed: “Easy. I know where you’re at. You just a little street faggot, ain’t ever seen a girl. But I have. That girl was pussy for everyone.”
Trying to line the boys up.
Walter braked the van down from eighty, seventy, fifty-five. The exit was a dead one, disused fields, one cracked concrete lot where someone had built once to make money. Across the highway, one lone gas station still hoisted its sign.
Nobody in sight. Here is where it was going to happen.
“Boy, you do not do to fuck with me,” Michael Wilson boomed, “and now you will know.”
Walter put the van in Park, and East just held on. This is it, he thought. Didn’t know when it would come, but he knew that it would.
If all there was was a fistfight, he was going to get beat. Maybe worse than beat. But if there was a vote, maybe he’d win it. East had Walter. Walter had wanted that girl, but he’d dropped her off too. Walter wanted what was right. Maybe he would help.
Ty? East didn’t know what he had.
Michael Wilson was getting up. East hollered, “Everybody out!” and jumped out first. Sweating already.
He made two fists, weighed them. His arms had never seemed skinnier.
This is it.
Then Michael Wilson was rushing across the cracked pavement.
They said that sometimes when you got your ass kicked, your mind sold out your body, stopped taking it personally, only crept back when the whupping was done. East’s mind went nowhere. Calculating. Michael Wilson wasn’t gonna kill him, not over this girl. But what did a fool do when he’d shown himself? He built up. He went pro on it. Became the hardest fool he could.
Michael Wilson stopped then, to strip off his meshy white Dodgers shirt and drape it on the van’s side mirror. Gym muscles down his belly like puppies in a litter. The muscles were what broke the bottle of fear inside East.
“Listen, man,” he pleaded. “I’ll spell it out for you.”
“Shut up,” said Michael Wilson. “Should have done this a thousand miles ago.” Some Chinese tattoo in the meat of his arm. He locked his fist and drove.
East ducked. But Michael was quick. He got an arm around and slugged East’s kidneys: East felt that bitter spurt inside. “Come on, Easy,” Michael grunted, wrapping East with his long arms. East grappled for footing. Stay up, you had to: the pavement was not your friend.
Michael Wilson tried harder. He wrenched sideways, lifted East around the ribs, trying to slam him. East spread his feet wide to catch himself. Michael sucked air, swore, and spun again. Again East got a foot down, fought to stay upright. Walter bounced by, shouting wildly. Michael’s arms cinched, and East smelled his lotion. One fist peeled off and shot up, off his eye this time. At once he felt it throb and swell. With hard nails, Michael probed East’s head; he took the ear and started to twist, to tear at it, until East let go a shriek. Then everything stopped.
Silent: the silence of hard, wet breathing. Something black and cold teased East’s face, like a dog’s nose. Ty had a small gun leveled at him, lazy and straight.
“Quit it,” Ty said. Aiming the gun as if it didn’t even hold his attention.
Michael Wilson cursed. He popped East free, right into Ty and the cold black barrel.
A big truck with a cartoon milkman on its side flew by.
“So, you got a gun,” Michael Wilson said.
Ty didn’t answer. East tried to clear his eyes, get his voice back. He’d bitten himself inside his mouth. But now was his best chance.
“Give Ty the money,” he slurred, his mouth swelling around his teeth.
Ty kept the gun on him, though.
“Fuck no,” Michael Wilson said. He caressed one fist with the other. “Your boy gonna shoot? Don’t look like he’s decided who. So what you gonna do? Put me out?”
“Yes,” said East. He’d thought it before. But now that Michael had said it, it was the only way.
Michael Wilson surged from his toes and hooked East once more, side of the gut. Sucker punch. It crumpled East, and he heaved with the pain. “See?” Michael Wilson smirked. “You ain’t shit.” He stepped and loaded up for another, when a hard crack like thunder hit them all, and East was untouched, backpedaling in the light.
Ty held the gun in the sky. Its hard gray pop echoed back from nothing.
Michael Wilson spat. “Oh, nigger, please.”
Ty aimed the gun at Michael for the first time.
“I’ll take that money now,” he said.
Michael Wilson scowled a terrible scowl at Ty. From his hip pocket he threw a curve of twenties to the ground. They fluttered, and Ty put a foot on them.
“There you go.”
Walter spoke up. “That ain’t all the money.”
Michael Wilson glanced across, measured the overpass to the station.
“Give up the rest of the money, Mike,” said Walter.
“Let him keep the rest. He’ll need it,” East said. “Now you go.”
Michael Wilson chuckled. “Just right out here on the farm?”
“That’s right,” East said. He grabbed the white mesh shirt off the mirror and tossed it at Michael Wilson. Michael shook it out and put it on. “Let me get my bag, then,” he said. East nodded, and Michael fetched it out of the back.
“Pretty bag,” East couldn’t resist remarking.
“Let me tell you something,” Michael Wilson announced. “I ain’t sorry to leave you. I’m glad. I get home with one phone call. And you are lost. You can’t get guns without me. You can’t find the man without me. Don’t none of you even look old enough to drive a car.”
“We don’t need you,” East said.
“Ain’t talking to you,” Michael Wilson said. “I’m only talking to the youngster with the gun.” He turned his back on East. “You a neighborhood boy. You ain’t in no neighborhood now. There is plenty you don’t know, gangster. You don’t know you can’t go back, because when you fail, there’s no place for you. Johnny and Sidney will kill you just for knowing what you know. Or somebody will—it don’t matter.”
“Say what you got to say,” said Ty.
“Just understand the
picture.” Michael Wilson chewed off the words. “You ain’t even grown.”
“I hear you,” said Ty. “Good-bye.”
With his immaculate sneakers, Michael Wilson tested the ground. Here, after the fight, in the middle of a cornfield, he looked as polished and bright as he always had: black track suit pants, glossy gym bag, white nylon shirt with his skin dark in the mesh. Stray raindrops blew at him and disappeared.
“Just remember,” he said. “You will die. And fuck you.”
Michael Wilson nodded—at the gun, not at East—and turned and took the first step away. Then he jogged. He ran, and Ty pocketed the gun. For a moment East couldn’t believe it, that Ty had jumped in like that, and then he was letting Michael Wilson go. The Ty he’d expected, the Ty he wanted in the red, bruised part of his brain, would shoot Michael Wilson and leave him off the road for the birds. Not this. Not Michael Wilson on the country road, white shirt billowing under the roiling clouds, his necklace glinting. In a minute he had crossed the bridge and was descending. He did not look back.
8.
East’s fingers knew more than the mirror did. His eye looked all right but felt fat and hot, liquid beneath. The napkin full of ice from Walter’s drink just made him wet.
“How bad he get you?” Walter asked again. Checking the mirrors every second. As if Michael Wilson could some way be gaining on them.
Ty sat dully in the backseat, staring out.
East remembered the last time he’d been beaten up. He was eight or nine. Yes, nine—it was in third grade, a week before summer. Third graders were going up to the next school. But four who were being held back would catch a boy each day and whup him, just to say good-bye. The principal wouldn’t suspend them—to be suspended was what they wanted. One of them was being held back for the third time. He was eleven already.
They’d bruised East’s face and shoulders, blacked his eyes, loosened a tooth. His mother screamed how she’d go to the school and there’d be hell. But she’d never gone. That was worse. But this hurt more.
That was the year Fin started taking East under his wing. Started showing an interest, making sure East had what he needed. Ty, he didn’t take much notice of. Ty was not his blood.
—
When East took the napkin off his eye, something was coming out of his skin. Walter took a look and bugged out.
“Telling you, man. Let’s get to a pharmacy. Get you some ointment. You need medicine on that. And bandages.”
East’s voice came small and faraway. “How does it look?”
Walter stifled a giggle. “Like you got your ass kicked.”
East put the napkin back.
“You all right?”
East nodded. He didn’t want to talk about it.
The high battling wall of cloud cut off the sun. Cars switched on headlights along the road. With stiff, trembling fingers, East opened his wallet and counted, one-eyed. He had two-sixty. He checked it again.
“How much money you got?” he asked Walter with his little hollow voice.
“Three hundred twenty-two dollars,” Walter replied without looking.
“How you get three-twenty-two if we started with three hundred?”
“Man, I had money. What, you don’t carry any?”
“They said no wallet,” East said. “What’s two sixty and three-twenty?”
“Five-eighty. And whatever Ty has.”
“Ty. How much money you got?”
They waited, Ty looking mutely out the window.
“Ty,” East said again. “We trying to find out what we got.”
Nothing.
“Here’s a town,” Walter announced. “Let’s get off. I’ll find you a store.”
East surrendered. “All right. How’s this gonna work, five hundred eighty dollars?”
“Minus gas,” said Walter.
“Minus guns,” said East.
Ty coughed. “They said you ain’t have to pay for guns.”
East said, “Oh? Did I hear a noise?”
“You heard me,” said his brother.
Now East turned, showing his brother his swollen eye. It hurt, hot, like a wound that’s poisoned, like a snakebite. “You want to tell me more?”
Ty stared mutely at the sunken median running by.
“You two, man.” Walter shook his head. “I need to be getting combat pay.”
—
East stayed in the van outside the drugstore. Ty didn’t budge. They watched the doorway glowing blue and white, a plastic city. White people teemed in and out, carrying chips bags, cases of drinks. Everyone seemed to know each other, talking or at least waving.
“Ty,” East called back. Here goes nothing. “What do you know about the guns?”
“This don’t seem like a drugstore,” Ty said.
“Says right there. Drugs.”
“Oh,” Ty pronounced ironically. “Guess it is, then.”
“You going to answer my question?”
“No,” said Ty.
“Did you set it up? Do you know the people?”
Ty just snorted low, like an old man.
It was like that, talking to Ty. He’d been a willful baby, a stubborn child. Now he was a wall. Every conversation, he made East feel like the police. Sometimes he thought Ty must have been learned from being brought in once or twice, spending time in questioning, stone-facing it across a police desk. But you couldn’t ask Ty. You would never find out.
Ty’s inscrutability refused the mother’s blood they shared. East could rally a gang of boys his age, shepherd junkies in and out safely. He could stare down a gun. But Ty had found a way to negate their childhood together, the two years of age East had on him. There was nothing East could do with him.
—
Walter brought antiseptic and a bandage as wide as a credit card. “I ain’t wearing that,” East said.
“You’re welcome,” Walter warned. “See how you feel by tonight. Might wish you had.”
“We’ll be at that gun house tonight?”
“You better hope Michael Wilson didn’t tell that girl where we’re headed.”
East thought about it. “Too stupid. Even for Michael.”
“Even to say Wisconsin, though. Even to say east. She knew we were going east.”
“He didn’t say nothing.” Here he was, defending Michael Wilson’s good sense. “Man, everything’s going to be all right.”
“The reason we are out here is,” Walter said, “everything is not going to be all right.”
The ointment stung, but East made a slick of it, along his brow, under the eye. He rubbed with his fingertip as they regained the road. Now the van with only three in it seemed too long, voluminous, a dark burrow from front to back. East rolled the window half open, taking air and the afternoon light. The same storm was behind them now, piled up and coming. Across a fence East saw a new little neighborhood already policed by streetlights, rows of houses in a knot. Two white girls shot hoops in a lighted driveway.
His face had stopped hurting after the first hour. Now it was the drawn-out, scraped feeling inside, where Michael Wilson had slugged him in the back and then followed up, sucker-punched him, in the side. Hot mixed with cold. Like purple bruises going all the way, meeting in the middle: he pictured a rotten pear. His breath had a hitch, like a child trying not to cry. The pain angered him, and the anger made him quiet.
He took the road atlas up from between the seats, flipping through listlessly. State by state. Arizona. Arkansas. California. He stopped and studied the full-page city map of Los Angeles. He recognized names in the sprawl of towns. But could not find The Boxes on there. Nobody had ever taught him maps. It took faith in them, believing they were going the right way. Faith in the road, the book, the plan. That whatever they were following made it to somewhere.
He came to Iowa with its plastered pink flyer. Black woman with long tits like footballs. The phone number beamed out beneath her like a black seesaw.
Traced the number with his
finger. “When you want to make this call?”
Walter sipped a drink. “When do you?”
“Next stop is good.”
“All right. I’m a need to stop again anyway. That drugstore didn’t have a bathroom.”
“Piss out back.”
“You piss out back,” said Walter. “With your ghetto ass. I was brought up with some dignity.”
East let himself laugh.
“How you feeling?”
“Tell me how much money again.”
“Five hundred eighty-two dollars. Minus five for your Band-Aid.”
“All right,” said East. “Don’t ask me how I’m feeling no more.”
—
“You gonna need quarters, E.”
In back of a gas station, air hissing from the fill hoses, East and Walter huddled together at the phone, road atlas in East’s hand.
“It ain’t a cell phone. It don’t dial free,” Walter said.
“I know it,” East said, but he gaped at the dial, the instructions. Resenting.
Walter read the number out: 213. Then 262. Then 8083. The buttons were sticky.
“Ask for Abraham Lincoln, then?”
“Abraham Lincoln.” They kept straight faces.
“Shit. Get this done before it rains.” East rechecked the pink flyer. A voice in his ear asked for the money then. “Give it up,” he said spitefully, till Walter held out the silver coins, shining, warm.
Something in him was tired of Walter too, the chirpy voice, the can-do all the time. Something in him was not content yet.
At first came some slow jam and a woman’s recorded voice: Hi, baby. Glad you called me. Half a minute. The live operator was quieter, just wanted payment information. East had to cough up his voice again. “Let me talk to Abraham Lincoln,” he managed to say.
Walter giggled this time.
“I will connect you,” agreed the woman.
Who was it? A cool voice, anonymous. The slit-mouthed woman at Fin’s house? No, but he thought of her again, the net of shiny beads in her hair. Her hands, bringing the tea.
A man’s voice came next.
“How you boys doing?”
Automatically East said, “All right.” A new strangeness took the next moment to get over. For two days they’d been riding, mouths zipped, their mission buried deep. All the worries of the van. Now it was back on the table.