by Bill Beverly
As long as Walter came back.
A black couple inched forward in the line, one midsize son with his face in a video game and a little girl in braids, up on her father’s shoulder. She eyed East with dread.
“I hitchhiked one time,” Martha Jefferson reminisced. “I’ll never forget. Course, it was in Louisiana, long ago.”
East was going to say Oh, but he hiccupped instead.
“You okay?” said Martha Jefferson.
“Fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” said the lady. She stepped back, and East lacked the strength to argue. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The little girl stared sideways. She closed her eyes and became the Jackson girl.
His stomach flipped, and instinctively he turned toward a trash can. He fought his jaw muscles, but they pried themselves apart, and he vomited into the cups and wrappers with a long, despairing cry.
“Oh, Lord,” the lady was saying. “Look at you now.”
Yellow heat in his mouth. He spat out the rest and felt in his pockets for something to wipe his face. Nothing. Just a granola bar wrapper, a key, a fold of twenties, and a gun. He cleaned himself with the back of his hand.
“I told you,” said the lady. Though she had not told him anything. But he saw that she was not speaking to him; she was speaking to the people in line, now gazing from their cordon at this small misfortune. He saw that she was not going to help him out like a grandmother might. She stood back, marking their distance.
At last, Walter. Bright fat idiot angel, he carried the box of doughnuts with its golden seal before him like a prize. “Here you are,” he sang, flashing Martha Jefferson’s key chain and helping her guide it back into her purse.
He looked around, seeing that something had happened. It was on everyone’s faces. “What’s wrong?”
“Your cousin is sick,” announced Martha Jefferson.
Walter touched East’s forehead, his hand there heavy and soft.
“I’m okay,” East said.
A guard was coming up to see. The line slipped forward. The little sideways girl on her father’s shoulder watched East again.
Walter said, “Well, maybe we should go then, Andre.”
Martha Jefferson agreed silently, stirring toward the line with her eyes. She was eager to be rid of them. Even Walter. She knew how to do it: she did it with such public sweetness. “You have been good to meet. Such lovely young men.”
She and Walter beamed brightly, falsely.
“So happy to have met you,” Walter said.
She fluttered. “And I, you.”
Walter handed the box of doughnuts over and then gasped at it. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “But, Mrs. Jefferson, are they going to let you take this on board?”
Mrs. Jefferson smiled, a final smile, not for them. “Well, it isn’t allowed. But don’t worry. They know me. Everyone in the sky knows me.”
East, bleary though he was, saw different. Nobody knew this lady at all.
—
Walter: “What is it?”
East’s stomach was tumbling to a halt. “Like food poisoning. Something.”
“You’re panicking, man. Your body’s fooling with you.”
East let this go. In the vast men’s bathroom they washed with squirt soap and dried with brown paper. Morning businessmen made hurried passes under the seeing-eye faucets. East stood there a long time. In the mirror he was a different mess than he’d ever seen before: an eye still dark and swollen from Michael Wilson. He’d forgotten about it; he hadn’t had time to hurt. Now, clean, the eye was fat and tender. No wonder Martha Jefferson had looked at him funny. His skin, even after he scrubbed it, was puffy, black, and greasy. The cold water brought his focus back a little.
“I was going to pass out,” he grumbled.
“You did. You slept the whole way.” Walter glanced around at the other men. “Can we go out? We got to talk.”
East nodded. The bouncing daylight outside the bathroom braced East, brought him back into space and time. He and Walter made their way to the exit. Iowa, he mused. Back in Iowa now. Behind them like beads on a string lay the other places: the van, his brother, the wooden house in Wisconsin. And The Boxes, the boarded-up house that was his. Strung out behind, not far, not long, but behind. Links in a chain. Behind, like his black eye, the bruise clouding over.
The noxious air of taxis idling. They found a bench, and Walter dug in his pocket.
“What is it?”
A single key. “Hers.”
“Whose?”
“Miz Jefferson’s. She had two. This is a valet key. It will start the car—I tried it. Just won’t open the trunk.”
East held the key in his fingers, examined it.
“And she won’t be back for two days.” Walter looked down the line of cabs. “Likely won’t notice it’s gone till then.”
East whistled. “Smart,” he said quietly.
Walter laid his legs out straight and crossed one over like an old cigar smoker. “I know,” he said. “I impress myself.”
“Walter,” East said. “We gonna get caught?”
“I been thinking on that,” Walter said. “Looks like police got the van. Question is, why? Because of Wisconsin? Or because of your brother?”
“What does it matter?”
“It does,” Walter reasoned. “Two very different things.”
“You gonna tell me they upset about Wisconsin,” East guessed, “but they don’t give a damn about my brother?”
“Well, there’s that.” Tightly Walter smiled. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe they don’t hunt the one at all. But they gonna hunt them differently. If it’s just Ty they’re looking for here, and they found the van, then we’re just black boys who shot another. Probably didn’t go far. Police are looking in that area. That Denny’s, even. Not an airport. You follow?”
East nodded.
“But if it’s Wisconsin, then they tie in Ty, maybe—there were witnesses, they saw us, man, they got a plate, probably an APB on us all night—then they find the van, that makes a direction. One, two, three. That points west. This way. The way home. Got me?”
“How you gonna know for sure which it is?”
Walter laughed. “Ha. I’m not. East, I’m guessing it was because of you and Ty. Because of the witnesses. I’m guessing it’s your bullet they’re following.”
East sat back. The black string jangling inside.
“But the van isn’t here. That’s lucky—we drove it a few hundred miles last night and ditched it. We made a mystery jump. And we didn’t dump it near an airport. And we didn’t steal a car they can look for. That don’t tell the cops we’re looking to hop on a plane.”
“But we’re not,” East said, “looking to hop on a plane.”
“Well, I was thinking about it,” Walter said.
“You what? You said it was dangerous, man. Even walking in there.”
“Everything’s dangerous now,” Walter said. “Right? But we got cash. They can sell us walkup tickets. They gotta check our IDs, but they’re clear, and we can drop them the minute we get to LA. Kill these names off and never look back.”
Walter sat up out of his crouch and looked around, face wide open, as if they were waiting for a ride, as if he was unconcerned.
“What’s it cost?” said East. “Do we have enough?”
“Don’t know,” said Walter, “but it sounds good to me. See the country from up top. Be home this afternoon.” He traced the idea across his pants and stopped it with a dot. “Nobody knows where I’ve been all week,” he confessed. “Probably worried.”
“Oh, you got people?”
“Yeah,” Walter replied. “Of course. I got people.”
East watched the airport cop down the way, forty yards, directing people with suitcases.
“Quicker we drop these guns, the better, then,” Walter said.
“If we’re done shooting.”
“How we gonna know if we’re done shooting?”
“I’m
done shooting,” said East. He got up and strode over to the nearest trash can, poking around until he found a good fast-food bag, stiff white paper, a little greasy. He picked it out, straightened it, then palmed the little gun into the bag. He walked it back to Walter.
“See if you can put your trash in here. Be cool with it.”
Walter emptied his pockets on the bench beside him: granola bars, van key, the money in a clip, paper napkins clean and used. He covered his pocket with a napkin and fished the gun out into it. Into the bag it went. East crumpled the bag and took it back, tucking it into a corner of the trash can, just so.
“Feel better now?” said Walter, up on his feet.
“No.”
Walter frowned. Disappointment, maybe. What mattered to Walter, East saw, was solving problems. Inventing. Wasn’t anything in East’s stomach that Walter could solve.
A police car went by, white cop, black glasses, who knew what he was looking at. Airport security. Passed without slowing.
East’s mind hurt and he could see only a part of it: the part that was made up. Nothing in him wanted a plane. He didn’t trust it. Or maybe he didn’t trust himself. Sick, tired, out of control. That person he’d always reined in, in himself or others—noisy, violent, fractious—he felt behind him, or just beside him, or attached, like a shadow. Outside him, maybe, but double. Visible.
He’d never been on a plane. But all he knew about them—the getting on, the staying put, the thousand people packed together—was not going to happen today.
“I’m gonna make it on the ground, man,” East declared. “You take your plane if you want to. If you think it’s safe.”
Walter said, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s safe. I mean, this way,” Walter said, and he could not help looking guilty. “For me. Nobody saw me, man. In Wisconsin, because I was running behind. Or with Ty, because I stayed in the van. They just saw you.”
East toed at a spot on the pavement. “All right.”
“I mean—” said Walter, then gave out.
“Come on,” East said. He wanted to be done with it, finally alone. “Let’s see how it goes.”
—
He observed the line to the counter from a bench some distance away. What happened at the gate was out of his hands. He liked Walter. Walter was handy in ways he’d never imagined being. But there wasn’t anything he could do for Walter. Across the country they’d come together—a team. A crew, right? Now scattered to the wind. They’d put bullets in the right guy—finished the job. But all East felt was beaten. That’s what it cost. The week was a wound he hadn’t even steeled himself to look at yet. Yet he felt it bleed.
He had a hundred dollars in his pocket. Walter had the rest. He was thinking about that thin hundred and the little clutch of ATM cards he hid under the block of wood in his bedroom, that he’d agreed not to bring, that he’d hidden away so he could follow Fin’s rules. He wondered about the home Walter had, that steady place with a computer and a library, maybe a piano or a cat, and the people he had there. Who would be in LA when he got back, or when he didn’t? Who might be wondering where he was right now and, if Walter got taken down at the counter, or at the gate, or pulled off the plane, would wish they were here where he was sitting right now, watching Walter make his mistake, watching him crawl up to the backlit ticket counter with his teacher’s-pet grin and his pocketful of twenties? Overconfident. Or maybe just lucky.
Rather be lucky than good, people said. East felt neither.
What East had—the house in The Boxes, a crew, the everyday job with Fin’s gang, and Fin himself, maybe even his place under the office building, and Ty, whatever Ty had meant at the end of that invisible gravity that bound them unhappily to each other across the blocks and years—all that was gone. All defunct. The streets would be there, and the business, and he was skilled. But he was known too, one of Fin’s. Even if he caught on with another outfit, he’d be secondhand, a refugee. Never a citizen. Nothing he’d ever done with Fin would make way for him.
He’d start again from the bottom, like a kid ten years old.
Watching the ticket counter in Des Moines, he thought of LA, the smell of the steady flowers mixed with the smell of sun and desert and cars and food frying. The people he knew, the ghost that was his mother, the guys who had scattered. None of it was anything he’d buy a plane ticket back to today.
That was the business, and the business was closed.
Walter’s agent was a young man, thin, a thin moustache, a face without fat on it. East could see that the man didn’t think much of Walter—fat, black, wrinkled clothes smelling of nights and days. Raggedly cheerful. All his brilliance invisible inside. The agent listened, his lips pursed on the edge of a grimace. Tapping his screen, asking, checking the license, asking again. Soundless from here. Eyebrows working like two small animals.
A moment passed when he was hoping the man would reject Walter. Would stop him dead at the counter, would take him down. So East could retrieve the guns. So East could blow holes right through the ticket agent, renounce himself. Throw everything down in an avenging storm.
He shook his head to clear it. A printed document came over the counter. Walter nodded again. And he stepped clear.
Are we gonna get caught? he had asked Walter.
The fat boy hitched his pants on one side and sauntered back to East, incautious, a little proud of himself.
“How much it cost?” East said.
“Man.” Walter whistled. “Three hundred and some. A lot. You buy at the last minute, they get you.”
Grimly East remarked, “We got to plan ahead next time.”
“There’s one person,” Walter said. “That girl at the doughnut shop. She saw us both. She saw us get into the car. She knew Martha Jefferson, knew she was going to the airport. If they asked her about us, man, she could trip us up.”
“But you got your ticket,” East said. Beyond considering possibilities. “You’re gonna go anyway.”
“I’m really gonna go,” Walter said. “Let’s find someplace to talk. I got to be at the gate in twenty minutes.”
—
They sat apart in bathroom stalls, trying to purge, then huddled together at the sinks. Around them the businessmen cast down their eyes, wet their hands in the basins. Walter slipped East a wrinkled wad of bills. East counted it out. Seventy-one dollars.
“You take it,” Walter said. “Give me back a twenty I can show. Get me on a bus or whatever. Get me home.”
East fed him back a twenty. Now a hundred and fifty-one dollars was his stake in the world.
“Here,” Walter said. He gave East a slip of paper from the airline counter. A suitcase tag, a 310 number on it and an elasticized string. “Give me till tonight, man. Then call me. I’ll take care of you, man. I swear it.”
East laughed hoarsely. “You gonna take care of me? Really?”
Walter stammered. “East. Why I’d wrong you? I mean, you’re a bad man now, right?”
East lowered his head.
“You tell me where you’re at. Town and address. I can buy you a ticket: plane, train, whatever you want. I can rent you a car. I can wire you money. I can probably find you a house to crash in.”
“All right,” East said. “I know it. We better ditch these van keys.”
“Oh shit. You’re right,” Walter said. He grabbed a series of paper towels from the wall, dried his hands, and they wrapped the two keys up in them. Tossed it out.
“What happens to that trash?”
“They burn it. Some incinerator somewhere. They’ll wind up in the ashes. But nobody ever looks at that shit,” Walter said. “Whyn’t we get out of this bathroom? I’m tired of the smell in here.” Suddenly he was smiling, lighter. “E, man. We finished it.”
They walked together into the spilling white carpeted light of the terminal. People flowing around them. East barely noticed them.
“This was terrible,” Walter said. “I hated it. Hitting t
he dude. But I’m glad you were there. It wouldn’t have gone on without you.”
“I know,” East said.
“We did it,” Walter said. “I got to go.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.” Walter slapped East’s shoulder. “Love you, man.”
He slapped Walter back and started walking. He burped; it came up raw, bitter. Love you, man. He didn’t love Walter, and he didn’t say shit like that. He made sure of the bills in his pocket and he looped the luggage tag with the number through the hole in Martha Jefferson’s key. And he made his way out toward the garage. But before he left, he looked back. Walter was in the security line, watching him, his pants sagging already below his belly but the ticket clutched in his hand. East raised a hand and Walter smiled back. There. That much was enough.
He returned to the trash can out front and fetched the greasy white bag he’d stowed. He could feel its contents, the two loose weights inside. The popgun he’d shot Ty with and the other, the Glock that had killed Carver Thompson and his girl. The two guns with history. The third, the Taurus that no one had fired, the clean one, he’d left on his brother, tucked it into his pants at the end. He tightened the bag and clutched it to his hip.
“Can I help you get somewhere?” sounded a voice over his shoulder.
Maybe the airport cop had seen him. Maybe it was taking trash out of the can that had brought him hovering. Maybe it was just the way East looked. Or felt.
“Naw, man,” he drawled without looking. “You can’t help me.” Then he was moving again, off into the garage. He was a bad man now.
—
First he drove south. South was away from the police and the van; it was away from Wisconsin; it was neither here nor there. Farms by the side of the road, naked highways, no trees. Sometimes he glimpsed ghostly barns lost on plains, herds of pigs thwarted behind wire.
His eyes felt caked, sticky, like they’d rolled around in the gutter before he’d popped them back into his face.