Dodgers (15 page)

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.

Cursing silently, he took a breath and popped the door, then climbed out. Ty saw him coming and rose. “Wait a minute,” East said, and Ty, with a sour look, loitered a few paces off.

“Get any sleep?” East inquired. “We rode past the guy's house. I didn't wake you up. Now thinking maybe I should have.”

A shrug. “You thinking,” Ty grumbled.

East swung his legs in and sat down at the table Ty had just abandoned.

“Cold,” Ty said. “I'm about to get in.”

“Talk a minute,” East urged. “Walter's asleep. What do you need? Want to see the place while it's light?”

“Don't matter.” Ty's voice was quiet, almost watery. “You two seen it.”

“It looks pretty straight.”

“Oh?” Ty said. “What did you learn?”

East fidgeted with his key on the pale, weather-brittle planks of the picnic table. Scarred with initials and names of the kids in this town:
BEAU
.
RH AND JM
.
I LOVE SIGRID
. The older marks swamped with the honey brown of the last coat of weather sealer. The new ones raw.

“You want to talk it over, how it's gonna go?”

Ty: “How?”

East blinked. “We're gonna do it, right? The way you want to do, man.”

“You still want to do it?” Ty said softly.

“This is why we're here.” A gust of wind, suddenly a note blowing in the gray air. East glared at it over the trees until it subsided. “But remember,” he said, “be cool. We got a lot of getting away to do.”

“ ‘Be cool,' he says,” said Ty. “I
get
away. The way I do it. Fact, if it was just me, it would be done, and I would
be
away.”

“Maybe,” said East. No: he did not doubt. He imagined Ty flying in and out under his own name: luck and will and a supreme indifference to anything else. “But Fin sent us out like so. The four. So that is the way it has to go.”

“You got all the answers,” said Ty drily, “like always.”

So Ty was making him call it. Making him, then scorning it. East let it go. He stared at his key scoring a line into the old table. “Tell me something, Ty. How'd you start doing this?” he asked.

“Huh?” said his brother, hands in pockets now, edgy. “Did you ask me something?”

“I asked you,” said East, “what happened, man, that now you're a gunner?”

“Sure,” said Ty. “What do you want to talk about? What I do? Or how I do it? Or you want to talk about why I left home?”

The constant difficulty. Like wrestling someone with three arms. East's key slipped, gouging a long splinter out of the table. A woody fiber. Exposing the light softwood below. With spit and his finger he patted it back.

“I don't know.”

“Oh. So you don't
know
what you wanna know.” Balefully Ty eyed the basketball hoop. Its soft-laced net.

“I mean, like…” East said. Another day he'd have scratched his whole name in this table. In another life. “I don't see you, man. I don't know who you work for. Who taught you. Who you run with.”

“Nigger, no one,” Ty growled. “I'm here. I'm ready. I got nothing else to say.”

East said, “You want to be that way, go ahead.”

“I know what you think,” said Ty. “I'm on the inside. Got a steady job, and when you lose it, you get another. That ain't me. I'm a contractor.”

“You're thirteen years old, boy,” East laughed. “You can't be no contractor.”

“Tell Fin that,” Ty said. “I live by my wits, man. Not like you.” A thin, hot line of anger split his clear, high brow.

East stared at his brother for a long moment, then down at his hands. Digging the key along the grain of the wood again, doing nothing.

“Anyway,” said Ty. “It's cold.”

“So we'll go.” East stood. “You want to plan it out, talk about it?”

“Ain't nothing to plan,” Ty said, “and nothing to talk about.”

Midway back, they found a drive-through: chicken sandwiches, milkshakes in the car. East wanted fruit, something natural. Somewhere in the van was the orange he'd picked up in LA. Couldn't find it now.

They made it back to the beach a quarter turn around the north side of Wilson Lake. The lot there was big and shaded, a couple of cars.

They idled the van while Ty checked guns and loaded. He took the Glock and handed the other to Walter. At East he flipped a glance.

“You want me to carry yours?”

An insult. East shrugged. “Give me that little one.”

Ty handed over the little snub that he'd brought. “The lady's pistol.”

Pushing it hard now that it was his time. East kept quiet. They spilled money out onto the seat and split it three ways—Ty put in the Michael Wilson money too. Most of three hundred dollars apiece. Then they pocketed it, because you didn't know.

“I don't have a key. So leave the van unlocked,” Ty said.

“You don't think we're all coming back together?” said East. “You don't even drive.”

Ty just said, “You don't know.”

“It can be unlocked.” Walter shrugged. “People out in the woods don't even care.”

“They don't care. Ha-ha,” Ty said. “All right, let's go for a walk.”

A walk. East closed his door and stretched his arms inside the itchy sweater. The van's engine cooled, ticking. Walter bounced on his toes. Exercising. Ty went into motion without showing a thing. East tried to do the same. He didn't look at Walter. Walter would show back what East was feeling now, as surely as if they'd spoken it aloud. And as impossible to take back.

They walked the curve of Lake Shore Drive, the three of them in single file. But keeping close to Ty. Barely any light left in the day.

As the line of pine-rimmed houses drew near, they cut off on the track running through the trees and behind the cleared-out yards. The path led uphill from the lake. They found a loosening between trees and cut through to spot the houses.

“What's it? Fourth or fifth house?” said Walter. “No numbers on the back.”

“Look for that black truck,” said East.

A swish and hard squawk, and the pine straw beneath seemed to flip up and give forth a black ghost, a risen, screaming thing. East grabbed on to a tree, and Walter fell down. Ty nearly somersaulted to get away. It was a bird, a turkey or pheasant or something awakened in the pine straw, awakened from darkness. East could see nothing of it fleeing, but he heard the legs scrambling, the wings chop the air as the bird beat away, crying harshly.

“Damn,” breathed Ty. “Could have had that.”

“No shooting yet, junior,” said Walter.

“No shooting. I could have
tackled
that bitch.”

East brushed off pine needles. They looked around. Lights burning on half the houses. An old white swing set like a gallows in the dark. No people around that they could see.

Three houses they'd passed. A couple more to get there. They moved together under the pine boughs in dark, scented air. East's eyes were opening up to the dark, but still he could not see all the branches, had no feel for space. There wasn't really space. He listened to Ty creeping ahead, Walter trying to stay on his feet. A snap of branch, a muffled curse.

He breathed it. He could sleep in here. The dark, the soft ground. Not even cold. But he too made his way. Nothing to carry, just the hard little spigot of the gun at his hip.

The ground kept climbing slightly. They passed a fourth house, lights on upstairs but quiet. A ceiling fan turning above the light. The fifth house was dark.

East was separated by fifteen, twenty yards. The fat boy had gotten himself snagged, had to unhook himself, fell behind. His brother likely was already there. That was it. That was the right house; he was certain. He picked a way under pines toward the dim light in the clearing.

Ty was already there, waiting just outside its edge.

“The house?”

“The house,” Ty agreed.

Boxed in tight except for the drive—trees came to within ten or fifteen feet of the house. Not wide enough for a firebreak. The clearing was uncut field grasses, calf-high, still green.

Walter came creeping out, hands and knees. “Easier to crawl,” he grunted. “Not so branchy.”

One yellow light hung unlit over an empty deck, another over the back door.