Dodgers (14 page)

“This Glock, nice,” said Ty. “Other one, a piece of shit. You could smack somebody with it, I guess.”

Walter smiled. “See?”

“What you pay?”

“Four-eighty for all of it and bullets.”

Ty gaped. “Four-eighty? These guns? Four
hundred
eighty?”

Walter turned a corner. “That a good price?”

“I get Glocks like this in The Boxes, two hundred,” Ty said. “How many dudes were there?”

“Three,” said Walter. “And a little baby.”

Ty said, “Stop the truck.”

“No!” said East. But Ty didn't wait. He threw back the side door and took the street at a leap. East popped his door too, but the seat belt caught, and then the van bounced as Walter pulled it over, and he cursed and fumbled with stinging fingers. Ty darted between houses and was gone.

Back on the seat he'd left two guns. He had the Glock. There was no chasing him.

East slammed his door. “Are you stupid? Never do what Ty says.”

“What's he doing?”

“We'll find out,” East said grimly. “Take us back.
Go
.”

Lights were waking now in the kitchens, behind the porches with their hollow Christmas lights. Walter downed the windows: no dogs barking. Nothing. No sign of Ty. Silently they rolled toward the gun house.

“You want me to stop here?”

“Not right in front,” East said. “Don't want them noticing us and wondering.” He scanned the block, eyes burning.

“Do we go look for him?”

“No. Not yet.”

Walter said, “What's he gonna do? Walk in and ask for a refund?”

“Walt,” East steamed. “Nobody knows what Ty's gonna do. He don't plan things. It's always
pow
with him.”

“Ty saved our ass,” Walter reasoned. “Got us out of Vegas all right—and when Michael was latched on to you? Ty improvises.”

“Listen to you, man.
Last night
you were saying he was trouble. He's an animal.”

“Maybe he's lucky,” said Walter. He pulled a three-point turn at a cross street. Jubilant accordion music spilled from a parked car there, all four doors open. A short Latin man was shining his dashboard in the cold.

They made one more flyby. East's stomach burned cold. He wished he'd marked the time. Walter pulled the truck up fifty yards from the house, and they quieted and watched.

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.

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 wood, 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.