by Bill Beverly
East stirred. “No, sir.”
“They know if they want to know,” said Marsha. “And if they ask. If they keep paper. If their records are at all legal, they know.” Her son the lawyer gave a listening nod.
“There’s paper enough,” Perry said. “Precious little, but enough.”
“If your luck holds out,” Marsha said, spearing a green bean. “But you knew, Perry. You knew, and you didn’t even take him anything to make it comfortable. A bed, a hot plate. You could have tried to make it nice. I mean, we must have a dozen toasters in the attic. Arthur gives me one every year.”
“Not every year,” interposed Arthur.
She looked at East then, sad half-moons under her eyes. A silent apology. Maybe she was sorry for watching. But she was watching.
Perry served himself two rolls from the basket. “We’ll see what’s possible.”
Then she addressed East. “What brings this on is, we received the notice. The state: they’ll inspect. Within a month. And if they find you staying there, they’ll revoke the permit and close the business.”
“Which would not make her unhappy,” Perry said, chewing. “Which would not break her heart.”
“Antoine.” She spoke up—the loudest sound East had ever heard her make. Her eyes darkened. “He has to find you a place to live. I will make him. There are decent places.”
“Not for what he’s paying now,” Perry grunted.
“If I have to remind you who owns the land and the building,” said Marsha, “I will.”
Perry wandered the subject around, mentioning an apartment building he knew, owned by a lady down near Chillicothe; down there they used to make truck axles, and they were once the capital of Ohio. Now they had a storytelling festival.
But Marsha cut him off. “They don’t make truck axles now, do they?”
“No, Marsha, they don’t.”
“You haven’t ever gone to the storytelling festival, have you?”
“No, dear. I have not.”
“It’s in September. Almost a year away.”
Perry coughed. The dinner had been an effort for him even without the conversation. He was sick, East had recognized from the beginning, but always florid, forceful somewhere back inside. Now he was tired inside.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “I’ll find you a place. I can help you pay for it.” He stared at the meat piled before him, then at his wife. “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”
So the attorney son served himself more wild rice. He hadn’t had to say a thing. East wondered if he considered it wasted time, coming out here. But his sitting by Marsha’s side had given her courage.
Everyone finished in silence. East chewed his last green beans slowly, one at a time, crushing each little seed out and finding it with his tongue. His plate when he handed it over was as clean as if it had never held food. He stood and pushed his chair in square with the table, as if he’d never been there.
It had been difficult, sitting there. A conversation he could never really speak up into. But he would remember this meal—the good food of a family. Even this one, so far from his own, or what had once been his own.
—
It was the talk of the apartment that unsettled him—the moving, giving up space he knew for something different, threatening. He ruminated and could not sleep. The box was hot with his restlessness. He tipped it off him and listened to the wind creaking the skylight in its frame. He stretched his legs and drew them in again. Finally he sat up and found his shoes.
He locked the front door behind him and walked into town. In the night, the air had warmed, and the snow had thawed to gurgling mush. In the one bright window, a handful of people sat hunched at the doughnut counter. They all looked over at the one at the end, who was telling a story. It was three o’clock in the morning. The street smelled like the sweet, frying dough. The people didn’t look up as he passed the little slurry of light.
Near the gas station hung two black pay phones. East picked up a cold handset and stared at the powdery buttons.
It had come back to him, the number off the flyer, seesawing out of that woman’s body. He could see it now. He dialed.
“Abraham Lincoln, please.”
“Oh, baby,” the operator purred. “He ain’t been to work lately.”
“I got to talk to someone,” he said. “What can you do for me?”
She could have been the operator from before. He couldn’t tell. Some males paid a lot of attention to women, but he hadn’t paid much.
“If you work there,” he said, “you know about Abe Lincoln. You can get him, or you can’t.”
She said, “Hold on.”
The music was high, quavering. Vampire hip-hop. A car slushed by and stopped at the doughnut shop; two men and a woman climbed out, all talking at once.
East heard the different, male breathing first. Impatient. Maybe just woken up.
“Yeah. Who is it?”
“Who’s this?” replied East.
The male on the other end said flatly, “No. The first question is mine.”
He remembered now the chaos of the last time he’d called this line. They’d arrested them all.
“Did Walter get back?”
“Walter who?”
“Michael Wilson? Did Michael Wilson get back?”
“Michael Wilson who?” But the bite was fake. The voice knew this was real.
“From what I’m asking,” East said, “you know who I am. Just tell me. Are they back?”
He stood waiting. The line hummed. The man was waiting him out.
“Just tell Walter for me,” he said at last. “I was out here with him. I’m still out here. Get him on the line. I’ll call you back, half hour.”
“I ain’t your secretary,” the voice said. “Fuck you.”
But this meant yes. That East was still being listened to, the phone still connected, meant yes. “Half an hour,” he said again. He hung up the phone and turned around where he was standing.
Empty street. A big truck headed down the side road over the creek—they weren’t supposed to. They ruined the little bridges that weren’t load-rated, Perry said. But at night they came anyway. Somebody was driving them, and that somebody needed to go home.
—
He bought a chocolate doughnut and ate it at a corner booth. Rivers of glaze and grease on his fingers and the rich, fragrant cake. Dark crumbs on the waxed white bag. The half dozen customers and the night girl stole glances at him. So be it.
He listened. The three who had come in were discussing a card game, bowers and the dead hand. One of the men was the redheaded counter girl’s brother. The girl with the two men had just given up smoking, East observed. It was in her restlessness. He could not smell the smoke on her, but he smelled the need. He knew. The counter girl did not like the ex-smoker who was there with her brother. She said nothing. Nobody knew the one at the end, the balding customer with the round, streamlined head. He tried to insinuate himself; he laughed pleasantly at everything. He wanted to be a part of this place.
East watched the clock, counting off thirty minutes. He zipped his coat and headed for the door. “Good night,” ventured the counter girl from behind him with her plain, flat voice, clear above the murmuring and the bouquet of Christmas bells on the door.
“Good night,” he answered.
Above, dim stars showed, like something unburied.
“I’m gonna put you through,” the operator said. “Three-way call.”
“I just want to speak to him,” East said. “Don’t want a three-way call.”
“Shall I have him call you back at this number?”
“You got it, the number?”
“Yes, I have the number.”
So now they would have an idea where he was.
“How you doing out there?” she added. Like someone had told her.
He grunted and hung up.
East scratched the dry skin above his jaw. For a moment he considered just
walking away—abandoning the phone, leaving just this trace, this much of himself. But that assumed something, he knew. That someone remembered him. That somebody was still wondering.
—
Walter’s voice was muffled. “Who is this?”
“How was your flight?”
“Damn.” Walter whistled. “Man. Nobody knew what to figure about you. Was you dead or in some jail? Or did you get back here and hide out?”
“Is it okay to talk?” East said.
“Yeah,” Walter said. “Yeah, I borrowed a phone, so be cool. But yeah.”
East was about to spill a story. But he swallowed it. “So. Fin still inside?”
“Yeah. He’s gonna be happy I heard from you, though.”
“Who’s running things?”
“Oh,” moaned Walter. “It was gonna be Circo, you know? Everyone was gonna hate it. But then he got a DUI and had weed on him, and Fin, on the inside, said no. Fin hates that, you know, distractions. So it’s kind of complicated, kind of in process. We’re changing up. Getting out of the house business. Some dude actually bought thirty blocks, the houses, the U’s, the kids, everything.”
“He bought, like, the houses? That people live in?”
“He bought the rights,” Walter said. “Any business going on in there, he gets to own that. Paid a lot of money. And—”
The strangeness of news from home. Like a message in a bottle. “Did Michael Wilson make it back?”
“I heard he did,” Walter said. “I ain’t seen him.”
“Why is Fin still in?”
“Aw, man,” said Walter. “He got, like, a billion dollars bail. At first it was a hundred thousand, and we had that easy, so the judge went sky high. They ain’t letting him out. Ever.”
East glanced around in the dark.
“Anybody talking about it?”
“No one saying anything about that,” Walter said.
East felt a twang of disappointment. In spite of himself.
Walter laughed. “You still out there, man. That’s what mystifies me. What are you doing? You need money, I can send it. Or a ticket. You could fly home now, no problem, except there’s a couple things I gotta fill you in on.”
“No. I’m here now.”
“I kept waiting on you to call.”
“No, I’m here,” East said. “So, man. What are you doing?”
“Me? I’m back in school,” Walter chuckled. “Missed a week, nobody said shit. But I’m going to private school in the spring. Last semester, college prep, no more Boxes. They sending me up, I’ll live there. Do a little recon, you know.”
“Like Michael Wilson at UCLA?”
“Maybe. Good school up in the canyons. Kids up there, they’re either movie stars or geeks.”
East tried to imagine it. He didn’t know what to imagine.
“What are you doing?”
“The old thing,” said East. “Just watching.”
“What? You found a house and crew?”
“Different.”
“Different but the same?”
“Yeah,” East said.
“That will hold you,” Walter said, “but that’s little boys’ work, E—you know it. We did that when we were little boys.”
East felt the sting. But it passed. “Walter. I need you to do something.”
“What?”
“Send me something. Go over to my mother’s house and tip my bed up. You’ll find a wood block that don’t belong, with a butterfly bolt. Get my ATM cards, and if you can, get my phone, and mail them to me.”
He gave Walter his mother’s address and the street address of the range.
“I saw that area code. Had to look it up,” Walter said. “Ohio?”
“Ohio.”
“Is it like Wisconsin, all cold?”
“Warm and mountains,” East said, “just like LA.”
“How I’m gonna get in there, your mom’s house?”
“Tell her I need it. Give her fifty dollars, man. She’ll let you in like anything.” Grimly he added, “Probably let you in for five.”
“You ain’t coming back, are you?”
“I don’t think. Don’t tell anyone what I told you.”
“Believe me, man. I’m keeping quiet about all this. You’re not coming back?”
“Don’t tell nobody I’m out here,” East repeated.
“I won’t say a word,” Walter said. “But you’re not coming back. I can’t get my mind around it.”
—
Perry put the mail on the counter and regarded it sideways. Express package, addressed to Antoine Harris. It took a day and a half.
“Last name Harris,” he observed. “First time I knew you had a last name.”
“I lose track myself,” East said.
“I must engrave you a nameplate,” Perry declared.
All day the package glowed in the cabinet, radioactive with his previous life.
That night he tore the brown paper and tape and unwrapped a shoebox that had come from under his bed at home, with a pair of his old, outgrown shoes, battered but still whole, still real. Why had Walter sent those? He almost chucked them into the trash. The stink of his socks, the bedroom at his mother’s house. His salt.
Then he felt around. Down in one toe, a flat bundle was wrapped in brown paper with the scrawl he could barely make out: COULDN’T GET PHONE. WILL KEEP LOOKING. W. Inside the fold, a thousand dollars in twenties, wrapped around his ATM cards, and one more card: a license, State of California.
The name, his own. Strange to read it there, in that official type, beneath the watermark. The address, his mother’s, the birthday, his own. A few days past now—he’d forgotten it. He was sixteen now. A licensed operator.
The photo he remembered taking in a drug house a year ago, a different shirt, a new haircut. Someone had been fighting in a bedroom upstairs as he had sat straight against the backdrop and looked the camera in the eye.
Maybe it hadn’t been much work to make. But Walter had made it. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Was it a reward? An invitation? Or was it a rope, tying him down to a spot on the ground? With Melanie and the Jackson girl clinging somewhere along the line?
He stared at his face for a while, till he felt sleepy. He concealed the license in a small crack behind the baseboard. He reached up and switched off the light.
At some hour in the dark, the thick, cloudy, pressing winter dark, he heard the front bolt scrape, the heavy door pop open. He tipped his box back. Soundlessly he rolled his body onto all fours and then uncoiled, balanced and erect.
With a quick twist he unscrewed a stout broomstick from the push broom and carried it before him, ready.
“Antoine?” came Marsha’s voice.
—
She was too shaky to drive herself. He helped her into one of Perry’s trucks and took the wheel. All that morning they kept vigil at the hospital, in a high room that looked down upon a snow-covered drainage pond. Perry lay sliced open, a network of tubes and lines crossing him like roads and wires on white countryside.
20.
His time at the range seemed to fall off the clock: the light came late, and even the short December day seemed to go on forever, across hours that hadn’t been numbered yet. The regulars stopped in to ask what East knew. They weren’t going to the hospital to see Perry, weren’t sure they were even allowed. But they missed Perry; they wanted to talk. They leaned on the heavy glass of the candy-shop counter. Some of them told East about their fathers’ heart attacks, some about their own. There was a little business going on in back but nothing that pulled East away from the counter. He rented time and guns and sold paints while the regulars loitered around him.
Some of these men had never said an extra word to East before. He hadn’t been among them a month’s time yet. What did it mean, that they came to him instead of Marsha, that they saw him as Perry’s friend, his confidant. They weren’t telling East about Perry—with Perry gone, they were telling him about themselves. “Wi
sh him well,” they said. They left cards for East to take to the hospital, sometimes group-signed: GET WELL, they wrote in ballpoint pen, some neatly, some in childlike scrawl. SEE YOU SOON.
Soon. The time had crawled to this point. It stood still for him, poised like a cat at the top of its leap. He waited for it to begin to come down. He wondered at the future of Stone Cottage without Perry. He had come to think almost protectively of the town, though he had only just arrived.
On the third day she returned. She wore a brown sweater, corded and woolly: East imagined that once her hair had been brown like that. He asked how was Perry, and Marsha asked if he knew what a do-not-resuscitate order was.
“It means he’ll get what he wants,” she said dully. It meant they knew already that Perry would die tonight or tomorrow. Something seized in East’s throat, and he reached the broom handle and leaned until he could speak again.
This could be decided by a piece of paper a man had signed.
“Does he know?”
“Does he know what?”
“Does he know,” East said, betraying something like panic in his throat, “that he’s going to die now?”
She lifted her hand and bit it. She turned, seeming very small, and he waited for her at some distance.
Again he went with her to the hospital. She drove this time, in a long old white car he had never laid eyes on before, a Plymouth.
Perry was still alive in his junction of tubing and wires, the monitors, the cannula, the intravenous lines, an undressed mountain. His eyes were turned up. They were cloudy like the eyes of the fish East would see in the Spanish markets just east of The Boxes, eyes that he never let himself look into, for what they had seen he knew he’d see one day. He let Marsha go to Perry’s body; he stood waiting by the door. The nurses eyed him, this mysterious black boy: what did he mean? There were black nurses, young women he noticed in pale, flowery blue; there were black doctors and black men in hairnets pushing mop buckets along the floor. But this black boy with his bare head in this fat old white man’s room, trying quietly to comfort the widow-to-be, what was that? He did not hide from their eyes.