Dodgers (10 page)

“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.

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.

“Abraham Lincoln,” he said warily.

“Right,” said the man. Deep. Not Fin, but some of his gravity.

Walter hissed, “Who is it?”

“We're in Nebraska,” East reported.

“Where at in Nebraska?”

“Gas station.”

“Listen to me,” the man said. “Where's the station at?”

“Oh. I don't know,” East admitted.

“You don't know? You don't know what town you're in?”

“We been in Nebraska a while,” East stammered.

“All right,” said the voice, grudging. “You made good time. Good work. Call me back in an hour. Make sure you got a pen or pencil. I'll have directions for you.”

“Got it,” said East.

“I'm a confirm it,” the man said. “Make sure you know where you're at. Exactly.”

“Sorry.”

“Call me.”

The line went dead. East stared at the hot plastic receiver. He touched his face again where it still held the mouthpiece's warmth.

Walter was twitchy. “Who was it?”

“I don't know,” East had to say.

“What's the deal?”

“Call back in an hour. Next time, know what town we're in.”

Walter slapped the side of the phone box. “I know what town we're in.”

“You should have said.”

“You should have asked.”

A little pout.
Fat boy missed his chance,
East thought,
chance to ace the test.
He curled the atlas under his arm.

“I'm going to piss then,” Walter said.

East went inside briefly, to buy a cup of lemonade, mostly ice. He took off his socks and shoes and shirt in the middle seat and bathed himself with melting ice. The cold bit clean through his tired skin, but the gray illness throughout his left side still dragged at him. He pulled fresh underwear out of his bag, and the second gray Dodgers shirt, and changed. He put his pants back on and iced his face.

It was beginning to be cold outside. Not night cold but winter cold. Big trucks pounded past both ways, their high exhaust pipes hammering.

Walter returned and they got rolling, the storm behind them again, looming high, boiling. East held the ripe, ripped Dodgers shirt outside his window and let it flap, tattered like a flag. The moment he let go his pinch, it was gone.

East dreamed interstate dreams, dreams he'd never had before, choppy, worrying. Running the wrong way, or driving against oncoming traffic, or impossible land: a highway emptying into a river, a bridge wobbling, a prairie breaking up. Or ahead of them in the east, LA, with its smog and brown mountain scrim, where it shouldn't be. All the land—people talked about America, someday you should see it, you should drive across it all. They didn't say how it got into your head.

He awoke. Walter was intent in the driver's seat, his lips mumbling something, repeating, like a song. He glanced at the rearview mirrors.

“How far we come?”

“I don't know. Fifteen hundred miles. Shh.” Walter gestured back with two fingers.

East blinked, wriggled upright. “What?”

“Shh,” Walter said again.

Out the back window he saw the dying light of the day below the shelf of the storm, a layer of smoky blue. One pair of headlights nosing behind them in the lane.

“That's state patrol,” Walter said.

East looked again at the silhouette behind the headlights. “How you know?”

“Wasn't so dark out when he picked us up,” Walter said. “He's on my ass this whole time.”

“You speeding?”

“No. Right at sixty-five,” Walter said. “I wish this van had cruise control.”

“So maybe we're okay? If he wanted, he'd light you up.”

“Maybe,” Walter said. “Maybe. Maybe he's just taking his time? Maybe he's checking us out in the database.”

“Database?” East yawned.

“Every plate,” Walter said. “I forget what it's called now. Cops run a check. Find out are you wanted, are you missing, is the car stolen, do you owe money. Find out whatever they want.”

“But Johnny said the van was straight.”

“The van is registered in Johnny's family. Someone named Harris who can't be found. Insured. Licenses are straight. I know; I had them made. Everything was straight until Vegas.”

“Stopping at that casino?”

“It wasn't the stopping,” said Walter. “Wasn't even getting up on the tow. You can always pay the guy, give him a hundred dollars, the problem goes away. It was you two, jacking it up. Slugging the guy.”

“That wasn't me.”

“All right. Your brother did.”

“That ain't on me,” East insisted.

He glanced back. Nothing from Ty. No way to know if he was even alive.