by Bill Beverly
“Bet y’all don’t need no coffee now,” cawed Ty from the back.
Then a whistle came from somewhere back in the shadow of the barn, and the dogs pointed and stopped. Their noses came down, ears spread out. Automatically. Someone hailed them again, and away they went.
“Jesus,” Walter said. “That wigged me out.”
“I hate dogs,” Ty said.
“You do?” said East.
“Yes,” Ty said. “Always making noise, drooling. Trying to be your friend.”
East sat stunned and leery. He did not like dogs either. A dog changed the situation, always.
The bit of light their van threw had not given him any sense of the space around them. And nobody was coming out.
“Everything was right,” Walter said. “Black truck. Short drive. Pickup at a farm. All this I got told by ol’ Abe. All checks out.”
“Let’s wait then.”
“You supposed to get out and go,” Ty said.
For a flash of a moment, East felt everything he’d ever felt for his brother: righteousness and rage, exhaustion at the impudence.
“Take a look,” Ty said. “That window. It’s like a drive-through window off a bank.”
East turned. The window was indeed the right shape, low and wide. A single metal drawer perched along the metal sill, a loudspeaker mounted there.
“I’ll be damned,” said Walter. “I never saw anything like that.”
“They stole a drive-through window?”
“Likely bought it. At some auction for five dollars,” Walter said. “Business ain’t so good out here, if you hadn’t noticed.”
East said, “Maybe you can drive up?”
“They don’t want you to,” said Ty. “Ground isn’t flat. Tip the van over.”
“Shit.” Walter clicked his belt open and unwrapped it.
East looked around again. “Ty? What you think?”
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Ty said. “You two go out the front. Unlock the back gate for me, but don’t open it. I’m a stay in here and watch.”
“Oh?” said East. “You ain’t gonna come?”
“I think that makes sense,” Walter said. “Come out hard if we need you?”
“Right. Keep me a surprise.”
East sighed. “All right,” he said. “Stay in the van if you like.”
“I like,” Ty said.
East opened his door. The cold startled him—his breath became visible and lit in the stray light from the van. East headed around the back and unlatched the gate without opening it. Walter joined him in the exhaust and frosty red light.
“How cold is it, you think?” East asked.
“Not so bad,” Walter said. “It’s the wind that makes it feel cold.”
“Not so bad?” said East. “It’s cold as hell, son.”
“You skinny boys,” said Walter ruefully. “Well. Here goes nothin’.”
They approached the window—loose scraps of concrete and chunks of sod made a pile at its foot, as if they did indeed mean to keep cars away. East looked for a way to step up to the little call button colored an unlikely red. A two-way speaker. It crackled now.
“You the boys?” said a voice from inside. “From out west?”
“That’s us.” East glanced at Walter.
The voice came high but quaky, an old man’s voice. “First off, you boys is covered,” it said. “So let’s do like we said.”
East wondered whether to believe this. Another gun sighted on him—how many was that? He kept himself from looking around.
“Where’s the other two?”
“Other two what?”
The voice said, “The other two boys you got?”
“Oh,” said Walter, taking over. “In the van.”
The speaker crackled. “We got to see them. For safety’s sake. Nothing funny. That’s the deal we made.”
“That’s a problem,” Walter said. “They’re asleep.”
“No matter about that,” the voice said. “You come back when they wake up. Or you can even wake them up, can’t you?”
“We don’t want to wake them up.”
“Seems strange, you’d drive out here,” the voice said. “And then you aren’t willing to wake them up.”
“Well,” Walter said. He bugged his eyes at East.
East had nothing.
“The deal is one, two, three, four. We done our part of the deal. I got a package here for you, exactly what you asked. And I’ll be here when your boys wake up,” the voice said.
“Hold on.” East stepped back from the dark-tinted window and studied the barn. The wind-blasted house, the two anonymous silos. Every window and shadow too dark to read. There may have been half a dozen gunners covering them. Or no one at all.
The cold prickled on his bare arms.
Walter retreated with him and leaned in close.
“Like he’s trying to trap us,” said Walter. “Bank robbery: you put all the people together so you can cover them.”
“Why’d you make it so we have to have four?” East hissed.
“I didn’t make it, I told you,” said Walter. “Be different if I did. I would have been happy doing the deal back there at the grocery store.”
East rubbed his cold palms together and cursed.
“Old people,” Walter said. “Country-ass religious people. Somebody told them four, now that’s the scripture. I dealt with people like this before.”
“You dealt with everyone.”
“Tell you a story sometime. You want to fetch your brother out?”
East said, “He ain’t gonna make four.”
Shivering now, again they approached the window. The speaker shot a burst of static as they neared it, then cleared.
“Hello again.”
Walter cleared his throat. A burst of mist rolling out. “We put one out on the road,” he said. “So we’re down to three. That’s all we have.”
“I seen you talking it over,” came the voice. “I just do what I’m told.”
“Come out and look. Ain’t no fourth to see.”
“I ain’t stupid,” said the voice. “And I cain’t change on the plan. We agreed it was four. You show me four and I place your order in the drawer.”
“The plan changed,” Walter said. “Let me make a phone call.”
The static came thick, like fry grease. “Go ahead.”
Crestfallen, Walter said: “I mean, if we can use your phone.”
“No phone,” said the voice of the man.
East eyed the hard glass, the reflected blur of the van, the frost-lit world. His lips and skin were shrinking, emptying of blood. Black sky, taunting stars.
“Search us,” Walter was saying. “We got three. That’s all. Tell me what you need. But don’t waste the whole day.”
“I do what I’m told,” the voice came back, unruffled.
“This is a whole organization we’re here for,” Walter tried. “You are stopping it up. I don’t know how or why you got put in the way. But you got to understand that you are now a problem.”
The old man coughed into the microphone. “That’s why I sit in here, where it’s safe.”
“Can I make a new arrangement somehow?”
“Yes,” said the voice. “You made an arrangement before. Follow it again.”
“Can’t you call your boss, whoever that is?”
The crackle insisted, without annoyance: “No phone.”
In his shirt in the cold air, East had detached from the moment, detached from responsibility for it. Their strangeness in this wind-whipped Iowa farm field was plain—three black boys, deal gone bad, needing guns and knowing nobody. He watched Walter, watched the fat boy solving problems, inventing. Walter was an option man. He played around a thought, discarded it, played around another. That was what a furnace-size body afforded him, the time to try every key.
You could see what people liked about him.
East himself, he had been cold before. Never this
cold. Back in the van there were sweaters. But he didn’t want to break off from this old man. To credit the cold that the old man seemed the soldier of.
He wasn’t sure he cared to stay. He wasn’t sure he cared to win this. Guns, after all. Never had he cared for them. The noise, the mess. He’d held a gun before but never felt safer for it.
All the same, he was no fool. He knew guns made his world go round.
He shivered, and the air inside his mouth was no warmer than the outside. The bite inside his cheek stood out like a wound.
This black man, this judge they had come all these roads to shoot, the mission he had defended: he couldn’t see it. Couldn’t imagine. The bullets, the body. Not shooting him, he saw that now. Not going on, not succeeding: that was real. That was a bone in his freezing body now. There was no getting it out.
This old man saying no made that bone hurt. Made it harden.
But there was no sharing this with his brother, ever. No having that discussion. His brother, his blood, had different bones.
East breathed in the icy air. His eyes were caked with something, starting to freeze. Walter stood lit pink, making his arguments to the tinted window. East couldn’t even hear beyond the blood churning in his ears. The problem was beyond discussing.
“Walter,” East said. “Fuck it. I’m too cold.”
Walter broke off and looked sideways. Surprised. Sometimes you could read him like a book. “All right,” he said.
But as they turned away, a scraping sound at the window made them jump. An old, rusty machine sound. The drawer waggled open, like a silver tongue.
“Go to them boys,” the amplified voice said.
Walter stepped back up the mound of rubble to the metal tray and pulled something out.
“Them boys will sell you what you need.”
“Wait a minute,” said Walter. “They’ll set us up? How do you know that if you don’t have a phone? If you didn’t call them?”
“I know. They’ll sell to you,” the old man said. “They’ll sell to anyone.”
East opened the back of the van, behind Ty’s bench, and found the sweaters. There were four—woolen, all dark, the kinky weave, cold already, prickly on his skin. Two were small—one he left for Ty. One was a large—Michael Wilson’s. He put it on over his own. The 4XL he handed across to Walter.
“What’s this?”
His face was so cold, he couldn’t make a word.
Walter looked amused, then sympathetic. “Easy,” he said, “I ain’t even cold yet.”
East was half deranged with cold and lack of sleep. The dark of the night started flaking away. Bugs, East’s mind said, and then: Something is wrong with me. Something wrong with my mind. Then he saw it: the lightest snow. The most helpless bits, riding instead of falling on an imperceptible wind. Unseen, unstoppable, brushing past them like strangers.
By the time he had put words to it, it was gone.
Walter made the heater blow its hottest. East bent to it, but it did not warm him. He shook like a machine spinning off center, like a clothes dryer walking and breaking apart. He quaked. Slapped his arms, his palms, his sides, his thighs. “Ty, man,” he began, and he lost it. Walter touched him: “East, man? East?”
Could not hold his jaw still on his face. Cold drool dripped.
“East? East?”
—
At last it lifted, the palsy, the shivering, and East’s mind came back into his body, the touch came back to his fingers, he could hold his mouth closed. Embarrassed but surprised too, to feel himself together again.
With some effort he talked. “Ty, man. The gun you have. Is that enough? Will it do?”
Ty drew out the silence. As if, even after his brother’s suffering, it cost him dignity to make an answer. At last he conceded: “Not this little gun. We gonna need more guns.”
East nodded. At least he’d gotten an answer.
The soundless dogs poured forth to chase them out.
“Lord. Get us the fuck out of here,” Walter said, though he was the one driving.
—
They regained the pavement, leaving the way they had come. East deciphered the old man’s note. They made away north, to the same town with the glowing grocery sign: HY-VEE FOOD STORE. Three skateboarders in parkas traced the lot. One cop watched them from his Impala.
East was quiet. The cold had mortified him.
“I see three options,” Walter said. “We can go on to this other house. I don’t know. We could call ol’ Abe and ask what he can do. Or we can drive around until we spot some black dude and ask if we can borrow him.”
“You ain’t finding nobody black out here,” East said. “So let’s call Abe.”
A pair of phones waited in front of the Hy-Vee. But Walter didn’t like the cop being there. So they searched until they hit a gas station: brushed steel box, quiet radius. Walter pulled the van up close.
“You want to do it this time?”
“You can,” East said. But he got out and stood with Walter at the receiver—somehow the predawn neon buzz of the gas station made it seem less cold—and he made the call. Cold buttons, still sticky. The same quiet operator: “I will connect you.” But then the phone went quiet.
Walter fished out more change, and East dialed again. The sexy girl blared, welcoming—East dreaded her now. She went on forever before the operator picked up.
“Abraham Lincoln, God damn it,” East said. “It cut us off.”
“No, sir. I tried to connect you, sir,” protested the operator. “Please, sir. He isn’t answering.”
“All right,” fumed East.
“Please, sir. I’ll try again. It’s a relay line: someone will always pick up.”
East grunted. The operator was afraid of him. He put his elbow up to lean, but the steel box bit through the sweater, too cold. A truck splashed into the lot, and a woman with wet hair and a bright, glowing cigarette hurried in under the lights. One bicyclist wobbled up the road in the dark, dun jacket, gray hat, the reflectors on the bike the only concession to visibility.
“Look!” hollered Walter.
“Yeah.”
“He’s black.”
“No he ain’t,” East answered automatically, and then the operator was in his ear.
“Sir? Sir? There is no one answering.”
A dark buzz of alarm spread down East’s back. “Did you try everybody? The relay, like you said?”
“I relayed to three numbers. Each number rang and rang. I tried each twice,” the operator explained. “I’m sorry. It’s late here. It’s three in the morning. They’re supposed to pick up, sir, but I can try again.”
Her politeness infuriated East, moved him to fury. “Yes! Ring them again.” He faced Walter, and Walter clutched at him.
“Let me go get that dude. He could be number four!”
“Let me finish.”
“He’s gonna get away!”
“On a kid’s bike. On a highway,” East said dubiously.
Walter said, “I’ll circle back. Pick you up.”
Like a ram East lowered his brow. “Not leaving me in the cold, man. Not for ten seconds.”
The biker receded into the gloom.
The operator: “Sir. I rang them again. All three. No one is answering, sir…Sir?”
East thanked the operator and hung up the phone. “What do you think that means? Nobody answering the line?”
“No idea,” Walter said. “Let’s chase that damn bike while we can.”
“Okay,” said East. “We’ll chase your damn bike.”
—
The bicyclist was still weaving along the north-south road into town, advancing crazily. His knees chopped sideways like wings. Twice as large as his tiny bike. Walter backed into a driveway fifty yards ahead of the wobbling bike and rolled down his window.
“Hey, my man,” he called. “Hey.”
The black bicyclist stopped and stood astride his bike like a gray scarecrow. His gray hat was tied down over his
cheeks with flaps. His coat was grime-streaked—this wasn’t the first ride he’d had on the highway. In Los Angeles, East thought, this was a crazy man. Here and now, he envied the man’s outerwear.
“Where you headed?” said Walter, friendly.
The man gave a minimal shrug, more a pinch, and pointed ahead. “Going down here, boy.”
“Listen, man, we need somebody,” said Walter. “We need somebody black. We got to pick something up, man, and we need another man for it.”
“Somebody black?” the man said. “What you picking up? Like a sofa? At five in the morning?”
“We can pay you for your time,” Walter said. He showed a split of twenties out the window.
The man’s eyes dropped to the money, then came back up. “Good luck.” Flat.
“It’s nothing heavy. Just fifteen minutes. Take a ride with us.”
“Oh, no,” said the man on the bike. “No, no.” He dropped his weight back onto the seat.
East leaned over and showed his face out Walter’s window. “Hey. Check us out. We ain’t bad boys. We’ll give you a lift where you going.”
“I’m just going down here, son,” the man said, and he put feet to the pedals. As he passed the van, he spat.
Ty laughed. “He’s sure he’s gonna die in this van.”
Walter fished out the crumpled paper with the address. Now it was all they had.
—
Plain little bungalow the color of butter. East wanted no part of it. A street they’d never seen, a town they knew nothing about, a deal they didn’t even know if they could make. But now this house seemed locked around their necks. They sidled the van down the street, squared around a few blocks, tried to feel things out. Regular. Chain-link sectioning off almost every yard. Small boats rusting on trailers, a few lawns with newspapers waiting in blue plastic bags. A few dogs out early, testing the air. Trees unlike the trees in LA: these rooted hard, grew up tall, muscular, their bare limbs grabbing all the air in the world.
Nothing moving. For East it was strange, this looking, this studying a neighborhood again. The way he had at the old house. The dogs, the doors, the windows. Scanning the surroundings for eyes.
Walter stopped down the block, and they watched the yellow house. The whitish farmhouse next door to it had security bars on every window.