by Bill Beverly
Six-eleven on the clock. Six-thirteen. How long did they give? The pink of the morning clambered across the ceiling of the sky.
East knew this hour from years standing yard—in minutes, light would ooze down the treetops, color the chimneys, charge through the yards. The shabby street dawn tightened East in the way he had tightened for years—the standing there, regardless; the watching everything that moved. The not blinking.
The molding a group of boys you’d maybe met yesterday into the people your life depended on. And never to know whether you’d succeeded. Only to await the moments of test. Like this one.
Six-sixteen. A work truck with a big white Reading box mounted in the bed rumbled by slowly like a cart drawn by invisible horses.
Walter said, “How long you think we can wait?”
“I know,” said East. “I know.”
“Time is gonna come we have to decide.”
East kept his eyes on the gun house.
“He’s your brother.”
“Not that I’d die for,” said East curtly.
Six-eighteen.
He’d always been bigger than Ty, stronger. Always been older, and also the good son, such as it was. Always the one who tried to put a good face on it for their mother. Always the one she could count on, even if Ty was her baby. He remembered the first time he’d tried to celebrate his mother’s birthday with a cake he’d bought with his own money. Brought it home and hid it, but Ty found out. He slipped out before dinner and stayed out, unaccountable, until three o’clock in the morning and her birthday was through. Just daring East to go ahead and serve it. Without him. And he didn’t. That night he cried bitterly at his defeat. Nine years old and just trying to be the man of the family.
That unaccountability was the trick Ty had. The way he’d found of taking those two years East had on him and shattering them.
At nine he’d begun tomcatting out in the street for nights at a time. Had left the house entirely at eleven. His mother’s baby.
“You decide,” said Walter. “He’s your brother. You want to gun up and go, I’m good. You want to drive away—either way. Who knows when one of these town ladies calls up the police—could be already. And then we’re in some shit.” He stopped and rolled his chin around on his knuckles. “Like, if he’s still there at seven? At eight?”
“I should have followed him,” East murmured.
“Let me ask you a question,” Walter said. “We’re supposed to have four guys. Without him, we got two. You and I, we’re the same type. We’re watchers. We manage. We ain’t gunners, particularly. If we went, two of us, who does it? Who shoots?”
“You mean the guy?” East was annoyed, distracted, keeping his eyes peeled. “I can shoot.”
“Yeah,” said Walter, “but are you gonna shoot? You ain’t that crazy about guns.”
“I can shoot,” said East blankly. “He’ll be back.”
“Not if he isn’t.”
Then dogs exploded, barking, and Walter started; East sat bolt upright. A dark slash between the houses. Ty was sprinting out, footing it down the street toward where he’d jumped out of the van. “Catch him,” East said, and Walter put the van in Drive and veered it. Ty held the gun out plain as he ran: Do not fuck with me. Sprinting down the street as if he didn’t even see them, didn’t even care.
At the last moment he cut to the van and popped the door.
“What?” East demanded. “What did you do?”
Ty slid onto the middle seat. Panting and laughing both. “I told you, man, you paid too much.”
Walter ran the stop sign heading them out to the county road. “What did you do?”
“I told you.” Ty threw down the fold of twenties. “Four hundred eighty dollars. Now who’s your daddy?” Regally he surveyed the world through the windows, the morning coming down.
10.
It was natural, Ty said, the way into the yellow house. A window up high was cracked open to the cold. He’d stolen a stepladder off a garage. If he could make the back-porch roof, he could get inside.
But he hadn’t had to. He was crossing the backyard with the aluminum stepladder when someone came out of the house. “Crippled dude. Bad spine.”
“Phillip,” said Walter.
“Skinny. Look like he hurt to walk.”
“Yeah. That’s him.”
“Phillip. First thing Phillip sees, black boy stealing a ladder. He came for me, man, gonna whup me with his car keys. You know, crime stopper? So I take my ladder and I knock Phillip on his ass, thinking, this will work: I’ll just walk him back in with a gun in his ass. But guess what’s in Phillip’s hand with the keys?”
East said, “Four hundred eighty dollars.” So crazy, he marveled, this charging on, with no idea what lay ahead.
“So beautiful,” Walter cheered.
Ty grinned, angelic, contemptuous. “Thinks he got mugged by some kid from the block!”
—
Twenty miles east, they picked out a pancake house for the first sit-down meal in two days. Pancakes like no pancakes East had ever seen. Fluffy, meaty, thick as steaks.
“We’ll make it today,” Walter was saying, “just a few hours.”
Euphoria had chased off the morning chill. It was easy to explain: new guns. Plenty of bullets. Money back. Ty smirking, all his dice landing sweet. That afternoon they could find a place, get some rest. But that wasn’t everything on East’s chest. The other thing that had warmed him that morning, even in that horrible house with the men and their pioneer ancestors standing guard together, and the baby on the gunpowder floor like a business card—even there, East had found himself hungry to make it work. To make the deal, straight, shake hands with the bastards. They had almost closed it, businesslike. Then Ty made his raid, and they all had that to hoot about, even if it was cheap and hard, even if it marked them, set them apart.
So that’s it, he thought, working on his stack of pancakes, which he never should have ordered; he could never eat all that. So that’s us. Just some thieving hoodlums, all across America.
—
Back outside, the cold was a jolt.
East drove. He nudged Walter: could they afford to stop somewhere, anywhere, get a room, shower, and a good sleep? “Don’t want to do that,” Walter replied. “Don’t want to have to register. Not now, not this close to, you know. Where we’re going.”
So they would go until they got there, they decided. Arrive, circle, spot out the land. Make a plan and follow it.
Walter took the wheel back after a couple of hours. He exited onto a smaller highway, a Wisconsin state road, two-lane, rich black pavement, deep flood ditches dug on either side. The trees grew higher—and closer to the road. Pines, not thin and fire-hungry like California’s, but tight-knit, impassable, winter-coated trees, their cones as thick as cats on the branches, green so deep it was blackish. Passing so close, they ripped East’s eyes with their tiny, intimate spaces, tree to tree, branch to branch, too quick to see. They flashed by like the opposite of mountains, the grand spaces, the eons of time. Here, too many things to see and zero time to see anything. Around the back of every trunk, something could be hiding. East closed his eyes, but he didn’t feel comfortable not watching either—Walter, the van, the narrow road. The deep, unforgiving ditches, the reaching trees. His eyes saw faces in them, every frightened bird an attacker, every mailbox a blaze of threatening color.
He was exhausted and could only watch. Walter was exhausted and could only drive. Like neither of them knew how to stop. And then they were there.
—
WILSON LAKE, read a tall green sign posted on redwood beams, surrounded by the emblems of clubs and lodges and churches of the town. Then another mile of jacketed pines.
Then a hill and a dip and the lake showed itself: just patches between the trees, a blur, the blue a murmur below the noon-white glare. The houses that appeared were not the bins of siding they’d seen for the last day, but triangles of stone and brown wood, frames of w
ood, walls of wood, jutting up like cabins, or in A shapes, from clearings in the pines. Names on signs out front by the driveways: WEE SLEEP, GREASY LAKE. And the mailboxes were fancy too: not just plain black U.S. Mail, but barns or jolly men with mail holes in their stomachs or monster animals whose heads hid the box.
“What the fuck is that one?” said East.
“It’s a badger,” said Walter.
Ty said, “A what?”
“A badger. It’s the state animal. You ain’t heard of badgers?”
They zigzagged quietly, getting the layout. There wasn’t much. Big old houses. The lake was mostly round—half a mile across, maybe. Two beaches, three ramps, and a little strip of quiet stores. Three streets running parallel, a handful of connectors, and one road that looped around the far side of the lake. The address, Walter figured out off his page of scratchings, was 445 Lake Shore Drive. That turned out to be the road that circled the lake.
There on the far side, the houses were new, cabins and party houses, with skylights and roof decks thrust high like helipads, gas grills left out in their weather shrouds, flags East had never seen flying everywhere, in driveways, over doorways. He wondered at them as they drove by. People here were gonna know each other. Wedges of pines curtained the lots off, but next door could be a yard of noisy dogs, or a single nosy lady. It was a neighborhood. You never knew.
Some squirrel or small creature zipped in front, and Walter pumped the brakes: East looked up. Nobody watching them.
They were so tired.
“This is it,” Walter announced.
The driveway forked. Two mailboxes at the foot, 435 and 445. Quietly the van crawled past: no other cars on the road right then. No one near, no one to mark the van cruising slowly. The house was an A-frame with bedrooms popped out on either side of the base. Two stories. Jagged corners with log-cabin beams, a grayish mortar holding them together.
Big windows cut either side of the door, and no flag.
“Big house,” East said. One little sport truck out in front, black.
“These are vacation homes,” said Walter. “Big and empty. By the way, shouldn’t you wake your brother up? He might want to see it.”
East peered back, tried to see Ty. “Naw. Let him sleep.”
Two women approached, jogging down the road. In their fifties, wearing thin fleeces and mittens with reflectors. They raised hands at the crawling van, and Walter raised two fingers back. A natural.
No yards full of dogs. No high decks nearby with neighbors looking out over the trees. East’s eyes ran a check automatically.
“Phone wires come in there,” said Walter. “Pole behind the house, lines in on the back to both houses. We could take them out.”
“Why? They got cells.”
“But do they get a signal out here? Negative bars,” Walter giggled.
East grunted, eyes on the woods. A tire-track path led back into the woods behind the row of houses that included 445. “You could park the van and walk up on that, get in from the back.”
“Watch out for badgers,” Walter said.
They looped back around the lake and headed into town. Found the police station, small, tucked behind the firehouse. Two black-and-whites in the lot and one unmarked, a little white SUV with good cop tires and a winch. Good to know.
“I got to sleep, man,” said Walter. “I keep thinking I’m gonna throw up.”
“All right,” East said. His exhaustion had begun crashing down.
Walter put them back on the highway, the pines ever closer and closer around them, and cruised up until they found the next little village with its lake. It was smaller, this lake, the banks rough and muddy, the public lot an old reach of concrete leading down to some crumbling boat ramps. The homes along the shore had once been vacation homes, but the people living in them were no longer vacation people. Broken chairs and propane tanks in the yard, small sedans turning the color of dirt.
“We found the ghetto lake,” East remarked.
“The people’s lake,” insisted Walter. “You think it’s safe?”
“We got guns.”
Walter laughed and set the parking brake. The whole lot banked downward to the shallow, dark beach.
“Your brother,” said Walter, “that boy can sleep through anything.”
“I’m full awake, son,” Ty spoke up.
“Better sleep,” admonished East. “We gonna need to be awake and available later on.”
“Oh, I will be.”
They closed their eyes on the bright, final day.
11.
East slept like a drowned man. One time a pair of kids ran by with fishing lines, disturbing him. Their footsteps and yelling: his tongue in his mouth felt hard and lost. He remembered something people said: Never eat a fish so sick you could catch it.
That was The Boxes. Who knew what kids caught out here?
Walter had moved back to the middle bench. East curled up in the shotgun seat. He closed his eyes again. Sleeping without cover wasn’t as hard as he feared. Maybe there was something different here, out of the city.
Or maybe he’d just given up on peaceful sleep.
—
Later the sun crossed behind the pines, and now their jagged shadows lay on the icy water. Three metallic knocks sounded nearby.
East raised his head. It was a red-haired kid outside, seventeen or eighteen, maybe, his face as flat and empty as a dinner plate, a young moustache that looked just combed. And he was rapping on the window with a pistol.
“Open up.” A cop? East’s mouth was sour. He cranked down the window partway and said, “What?”
“Right now,” the red-haired kid said hurriedly, “you’re gonna need to give me your fucking money.”
East squeezed his face and yawned. “Hello,” he said. “You see we’re asleep?”
“Wake up,” ordered the red-haired kid. He might have been a year or two older than East. His moustache was brave, hairs ranging from orange to fishy white. He tapped the window with the gun barrel once more. Punctuation. Like a schoolteacher, East thought.
“Man,” East yawned. “I don’t want to make you sad. But everyone up in this van got a bigger gun than you, dig? The more people I wake up, the more people gonna be shooting at you.”
From underneath the pale moustache came “Bullshit.”
East considered this. A kid was gonna do what he wanted. It wasn’t your job to change his mind.
“I’m gonna give you five dollars,” he offered, “and you go away. Or else I’m gonna wake everyone in this van up, and then you in some shit.”
“Fuck that,” the moustache said.
“Whatever you decide,” said East. “You woke me, man. Only reason I’m not shooting you right now is I need you to go tell all your friends to let me rest.”
The redheaded boy scratched his face with the barrel of his gun, then pointed it here and there, disheartened, as if picking out a substitute target.
“Here,” said East. He rummaged around in his pockets. Nope: most of his roll was with the gun money Ty had retrieved. He had a ten and three ones left.
“You got change for this?” he said, holding the ten up behind the window.
The redhead squinted. “No, I ain’t got change.”
“Then you can have these,” said East, offering the ones instead. “I ain’t trying to scant you, man, but I need this money worse than you do, so.”
This kid. East saw that bored excitement in his eyes. Every neighborhood had a few of these.
The redheaded boy put the gun away in the gut pocket of his sweatshirt. He reached up to take the ones. East held on tight to make a point.
“If I see you again,” he warned, “I’m gonna shoot you in the stomach, man, first thing. Right in the stomach. Nine millimeter. You might live. It will hurt, though. It will change your life.”
“Okay,” said the boy, and East let the dollars go.
“Be cool, gunner,” he said, and rolled up the window.
 
; East watched the boy pocket the three dollars and go, walking off past a playground, where he gave each empty swing a frustrated shove. Soon the pines swallowed him. East closed his eyes.
But he couldn’t go back to sleep. It wasn’t smart, staying here. It wasn’t The Boxes. No home-field advantage. Chances were that Gunner wasn’t coming back, coming with ten or fifteen friends, all packing. Chance was that Gunner had his three dollars and was done for the day. But you could be wrong about that.
You could be wrong about anything.
He moved over to the driver’s seat and ran the van slowly, gently, another mile up the road, finding a place to park it in the back of a Lutheran church. A group of boys and girls were holding a mad-scramble basketball game fifty yards away. Four adults—parents, maybe, or ministers, whatever, it didn’t matter—stood with coffee and watched the battle. East parked the van in among their Fords, their Hondas. He would accept their company gratefully for an hour or two.
—
Thicker clouds, dull sun. Since late morning they’d slept. Six hours. Not a whole night. But it would focus them, East thought, let them work in the dark. Tonight’s dark. On the middle bench, Walter was still knocked out, whistling and wheezing.
Then he realized with a punch: no head in the backseat, no knees or feet propped. Ty was gone.
He sat up, damp with sleep sweat. The gray lot, yellow lines. The kids had left their basketball game, and the lot of cars had emptied. Nearly six on the clock.
Then he located Ty, sitting at a picnic table across the grayish lawn, looking out across the yard into the trees. His sweater was dark green, like army leftovers. However cold it was, he wasn’t bothered. Skinnier than East, even, but he stretched his head back, eyes closed in the feeble light. Cracked his neck.
East sat still, listening to the saw-blade whine of Walter snoring, watching his brother through the grimy windshield. He stretched his legs and arms, but they were leaden.
Ty. East had let him sleep as they’d found the house and checked it out. No—decided not to wake him, to let him sleep. But even that wasn’t it. Postponed it.