Dodgers (22 page)

“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 the 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.

Brown signs pointed the way to a state park: picnic, camping, river access. Something in his mind started at the idea of a river—it promised crossing, crashing, the cold water dividing this from that. He turned off the highway down the old, tree-lined road.

A cruiser rolled by.
STATE PARK RANGER
. Cop of a different color is still a cop.

Then he neared a little farmhouse a quarter mile before the wooden park gate. The old house stood gray and alone on a big swath of forgotten land. Weathered past color, the way the gun barn had been. Weeds the height of a man had grown up all around. Two signs advertised it for sale, but sun had baked their red to pink. They'd been there awhile.

He nosed Mrs. Jefferson's car in. The drive circled around to the back. He could almost bury the car in these weeds. There was a space beneath a tree where small gray birds dove in and out. Birds so small they might have been babies. He hid the car in the shadows there, tucked the greasy bag under the seat, and watched the birds until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was coming out of him like magma, like a volcano, punching a hole through the rock, spilling down his face. The black eye giving forth its flood. The back of the house, the abandoned oil tank, the meadow of weeds, the belly of the tree. A place where people had lived and left. He sobbed until it gave out. But he knew as it did that it had changed nothing. No words, no pictures, no thought. It was just a trick of the muscles, a release of the glands.

His skin grew dry and cold as the car cooled, and it was night when he woke up again.

Not afternoon dark but night dark. The stick-on digital clock on Martha Jefferson's dash read a quarter past eight. So he'd been asleep for six hours.

Not a night's worth, but a good sleep. He hadn't had a night's sleep since they'd left The Boxes on Tuesday.

If he was right, it was now Friday night.

He stood and pissed into the roots of the tree. A choir of small voices chirruped in the darkness. Something moved, and he startled. Wind. Weeds and wind. The back of the house, nobody's house.

He waited outside.

The car was old but well kept, well tuned. It rolled smoothly on the polished, rolling, back roads. Like the van, it was better than it looked. East filled the tank at a station where two empty roads crossed, each road a story lit by the station's glow. He wiped grime off Martha Jefferson's windshield and dried the runoff with a paper towel.

He was sorry to do the old lady wrong. But he wasn't going back to Des Moines, Iowa—to the airport or anywhere else. That lady had had a good look at him; she had heard him sleep. She had his measure. There was no guessing the things she knew about him, or what Walter had said while he snored. It was not impossible that after everything, Martha Jefferson would be the one who called him to account, for sleeping in her backseat, for stealing her car away. So he polished her windshield clean, and the cold biscuit sandwich he bought out of the cooler, he ate outside the car—no crumbs, no wrapper.

He switched on her radio, but it was all static. Loath to disturb the station knob where she had it set.

Each time a junction opened the four directions for him, he went away from home. He went east.

He passed signs for Chicago at four o'clock in the morning. For a moment he considered it. Chicago: everyone knew that was a town for gangsters, Michael Jordan's city, full of people and ways to make money. He had guns to travel by. But the gray-yellow light of the city under the clouds brought back Michael Wilson's crawling into Vegas.
Just a taste.

The billboards advertised everything, promising everything.

The long, steamy reach of the city flanked him for miles, gray factories lit by orange bulbs on his left, huge skeletons of iron that had held trains or loaded boats or moved the road over rivers or launched rockets into the sky.

In Indiana, on a larger road now, he had to stop with other cars at a booth and take a ticket out of a box, like at a parking ramp. He sat still and read it. It was going to cost him four dollars somewhere down the road. Someone behind him honked.

Booth, camera, stolen car. Keep doing what the others do.

Then the last signs of the city dropped away, and he was back in darkness, the highway narrowed down, the starry blocks of houses placed just so behind the trees.

At sunrise he'd reached the end of the state. A gauntlet of booths blocked the road; cameras everywhere now. He pulled in slowly where it said
CASH
and surrendered his ticket. “Four sixty-five,” the woman said.

He'd barely heard humans speak since he'd left the airport the afternoon before. A sign advertised the last exit before a new toll pike. It was Ohio now. He took the little road south, Highway 49, then again turned east.

About eleven o'clock in the morning, in a small town with a sagging water tower, where the sun had quieted itself behind clouds, he had gone far enough in Mrs. Jefferson's car. His tank of gas was nearly gone. He had crossed three state lines.

On the main street, he located a little corner police office. Meters out front. He stopped in a space and made sure his money was with him. He took one gun out of the bag, rolled the bag shut on the other, and shared the guns out between his two front pockets. He left the key in the center ashtray and left the car unlocked.

For a moment he felt a panic. Was this an error, giving the car up? Walking out again into the winter?

One-hour parking. It would be found.

Ty would have pulled it behind a building and set it ablaze.

Quietly he dropped a quarter into the meter and walked away.

Out of town he walked on tipped, sunken sidewalks, passing bacon-smelling restaurants and used-car lots laid out precisely, wheel facing wheel, headlights polished and aligned, everything eyeing everything else.

In a low gray midday, the windows of the buildings were mirrors, glass glaring back, insides invisible. The lots lay squared and similar, and seams and borders separated every this from every that. A fence, a rail, a line of grass or littered shrubs like the alley where they'd waited for Martha Jefferson. Or just a line of curb coated in tar. Each place marked the line between this and that, here and there. Each one he passed ticked off the passing from then to now.

He heard the motor first; then tires scratched the pavement behind and stopped at his heel. Little fat-tire police car with the windows rolled down. A moustache, bristling.

“How you doing this morning?”

East stopped. Helplessly he imagined the parking meter—it had to be still ticking. Not that. An age of dealing with cops had taught him what not to do.

“Fine,” he mumbled.

“Going anywhere special?”

“Just a walk.”

The cop looked skeptical and East squeezed his shoulders together, mute.

“Know anybody in this town?” the cop added. They asked a question, then stared into you like a fishing hole, like sooner or later the truth would swim up.

“Not really.” East stood still, hands down in his pockets, where now there was only a small fold of bills and the bent California shapes of some guns.

The police radio burped and whistled. The cop glanced at it, then stilled it with a hand.

East gazed down the road and said, “You got what you need?”

The moustache stared through him. Like a gaze you could actually feel, could round on if you wanted to sleep tonight on a concrete floor.

“You take it easy,” the cop said. Not a farewell. An instruction.

East volunteered nothing. Behind him the engine flared. The tires didn't crawl but cut a hard U-turn. So somebody had sent the cop out just to take a look at him.

The town smelled like corn cooked too long. Up the road, the two-lane broadened out as it sped up—flat shoulders spreading, cars at fifty or sixty, tossing up black grit and cinder tornadoes that bit his ears. He burrowed down in his sweater. No trees to hide behind, no woods line to trace—this would be straight country walking. Out where anyone could see.

A mile of level fields. Stalks sawed into splintered bits, scraps of wind-trash bright in the ruts. He heard Michael Wilson's laughing voice:
Country.

A sign said it was four miles to the next town.

At a junction gas station kept by a teenage girl, he bought a long sub sandwich and a stocking cap. The caps said
BROWNS
and came in two colors, orange and brown. He chose brown. He chose ham. Inside him, his stomach was a drifting ship. But he should eat. He knew that.

By the door, as the nervous girl prepared his sandwich, a map with a yellow tape arrow showed
YOU ARE HERE
. No Wisconsin, no Iowa, none of those places on a map that meant what they had done. Just this state, just Ohio, the town where the brown car slept somewhere to the west. He didn't remember the name of the town. He just wanted away. This was running. From the police and from the spinning inside his body, the yaw.

The girl patted his ingredients together through plastic-bag gloves. When he asked for more tomatoes, she took her phone out of her pocket and laid it on the chopping surface, near onion half-moons, within reach. Her movements sharpened: she pressed the sandwich and sliced it with the quick blade, and then she was done with him, everything but the making change.

He knew he must look horrible.

He took his bagged sandwich and used the little restroom. Everything looked like it had sat for years in rusty water. He would have liked to take a shit, but his insides were dry. The fountain,
Halsey Taylor
, was just a husk.

When he stepped out, the girl was half-hidden in the back room, on her phone. She saw him and disappeared completely. He would have liked a cup of water.

Outside was a picnic table made of concrete with stones inset, under a hard steel umbrella. It was winter-cold, and the umbrella had once been white with a large red logo, but now the red had faded in the sun and was mostly rusted, and the rust had dripped down and begun to stick at the edges of the stones, like cuticles. It was the least comfortable table he'd ever seen, so he ate the sandwich as he walked, shedding bits of food, bouncing them off his trousers and onto the gritty shoulder of the highway.

In the bottom of the bag, a pawful of napkins, maybe twenty. A long slash of orange in the southern gray sky like a headache, like a crack.

The land changed, from flat and open to woods brooding over a series of prone, steplike hills. People here had hollowed out deep spaces—a long drive back from their armored mailboxes to their houses in the trees. Some were big and pointed, full of shapely windows; others were little boxes made of cinder-block. In front of or beside their houses the people here arrayed their cars and pickups and boats, and some kept dogs on leads or in stockades.

On the shoulder where he walked, East felt the eyes of every driver on the road. He would have kept to the woods, but the last thing he needed was some person's dog latching on.

Here and there he saw a horse or cow. Or raised boxes in a little cloud. Meat smoking, he thought—or something. Then he got a good look and saw one clouded by bees. Bees: one time back when he still went to school, they'd shown a movie about them. Little colonies, getting along, everyone doing for the queen. Some teacher tried to start a hive up on top of the school—got beekeeper suits and everything. But then a boy had been stung fifty times and had gone to the hospital, and that was the end of lessons with bees.

He kept walking, getting far from the little town, the little car. That car was the bone that connected him to Iowa. In Iowa, the van was the bone that connected him to Wisconsin. Somewhere the judge and his daughter lay, and somewhere his brother lay, unable to say his name. Bones. Walter and Michael Wilson, on the ground in LA or anywhere. They could be anywhere. Walter would keep it airtight. Michael Wilson: all East could hope was that he stayed out of trouble, stayed free of anything where telling what he knew was something he could bargain with.

He wondered who was watching. Not about the police—of course they were. Of course they looked funny at every step he took. He knew how to walk around the police. Even carrying the gun in his pocket, he didn't fear being stopped by them.

It wasn't just the police that worried him. It was the stop he wouldn't see coming. The little town centers had been swept and were quiet, older white men catching him in their eyes, holding him there a moment:
Single skinny black boy walking nowhere. Had a cap on.
Enough to remember him by. Enough to provide a description, or to find him again. They said “Hello there,” and East nodded, walked by. Grateful for daylight.

It was on the unswept edges of town that East noticed the litter of the life—the little circles of stamped-down wrappers, abandoned bottles. He veered off his line on the shoulder of the road to look: yes. The vials and pinchies, the little knots of activity, torn-off matchbooks, plastic ice cream spoons scorched half through.
Firing up a plastic spoon,
he thought, shaking his head. Over in the blacktop refuse and colorful trash that waited outside the border of the lot for nothing, splotches of vomit and the warm, sad smell of piss.

Right out on the edge of the main road they were doing it. It was these people he needed to avoid. He had had plenty of friends who'd used, who'd become deep U's before they were teenagers. He could resist them. But he had no friends out here. He wondered how young they would be.

The old lady's face returned to him, her pointed voice, and he heard her talking to Walter as he walked in the cold. He saw her looking at him. Or sometimes it was the face of the Jackson girl, leaking blood and going to sleep on the street, or the screaming mouth of the girl in Wisconsin. Her body, under the toppled suitcase. All of it inside him now, screaming to get out. Everything.

Another mile, he thought. Another mile.

As he passed a gas station, two men asked did he need a ride. He looked up, but then one was talking to the other, even though they were both looking at him. Two of them, one of him. He put his head down.

His sense of the direction was partial. But the winter sun kept slipping to the right. Soon he could walk under the cover of darkness.

A while after every intersection, the highway sign said
EAST
. So he kept on.

Inside he was used up, but his body pleased him, as if it were a specimen he were observing. Even after hours of walking, his body was light. When it rained lightly, the rain did not chill. He breathed it, absorbed it with his skin; it sated him, and the wind dried what it left in his sweater. The wind pushed him. His legs, so soft after driving, came back warm and good and hard. When he bent to retie a shoe, they quivered like engines idling.

How long he had walked he had no idea. It grew dark and colder, and he would have to decide. It was going to get a lot colder. He could see the plants shrinking, small plumes from chimneys. A regret hit him: couldn't he have driven the car one more day? Couldn't he have driven this all in an hour?

No. He had to keep telling himself. The car, he'd had to leave it behind.

By now it had a ticket. By now it was in the computer. Unless it was Sunday and the meters weren't enforced. This too he wondered about. He forgot what day it was.

Signs promised the next little town a mile out—churches, Neighborhood Watch, a billboard for a Chevy pickup built in America. The trees walled off the neighborhoods from the last ruined fields. The first liquor store, just outside the line. The streetlights began just beyond it, windowpane-yellow under the trees.

As he walked past houses again, his body came back into focus, took on color and shape. People crossed the street—walking together, older, twenty, dressed loosely or lightly, jackets open or sweaters and scarves. Dressed to walk outside but not for long, drinking from paper cups in the cold, disappearing into houses or coming out, holding hands, worrying, laughing. East stared at the big old houses with flags and open windows, even in the cold. At last a large stone sign the size of a bedroom wall announced it: it was a college. These were students, like Michael Wilson once was.

He couldn't stop looking. The way they walked—they met and bunched on the sidewalk, sat on the porches. They crossed the highway carelessly, and cars slowed for them. So sure of their world.

He broke from the road and followed a group of six that was cutting across a parking lot. Shiny sedans like he hadn't seen since they'd left LA: Volkswagens, Acuras, Hondas, Hondas, Hondas. Two students split off toward a building with a hundred long, lighted windows. East stuck behind the larger group. Three boys and a girl. They crossed between buildings and across a green field. Like kids rambling a neighborhood. At last they approached a large squarish building. East caught up and followed them in. A gymnasium: a desk said
ALL VISITORS MUST SHOW ID
, but the boy at the desk was on his phone. East ignored him as the others had, and the boy never looked up.

Inside, the four students turned left into a noisy arena: girls playing volleyball under blue-white lights. East followed the polished hallway. He knew what he wanted:
MEN'S LOCKER ROOM.
Inside, on a toilet, he sat and waited until he stirred inside, that ship, that load, until he could rid himself of it. Then he followed the sound to the showers—quiet lights, two older men cleaning off, pump tubs of soap and shampoo on the wall.

He opened an empty locker and stripped off. He hung the pants with the two guns gingerly. If someone were to find it now. Well, if someone were to find it ever.

But his money he drew out and took with him into the showers.

The tiles, square and divided by the lines of white grout, rectangles from here to forever, were gritty under his feet. That was his feet's grit. His body was caked with it, the grime of a week, all the way back to The Boxes. His body reddened in the scalding water and hurt the same inside and out, softening like meat under a hammer. He kept his head in the stream and tried to wash it clear.

In one locker, a forgotten pair of clean socks. A worn red T-shirt lay atop a locker. It had a dusting of sawdust, but that shook out. The breast read
CHAMPION
.

He wadded up the last bitter Dodgers T-shirt and stuffed it into the trash. Farewell to baseball. Farewell to all that white people's love.

His shoes, when he tied them again, seemed ragged on his feet. Dark drops on the toes and laces—he hadn't noticed them before. Spots. They could be anything. He padded the hallways, keeping quiet. No one stared, particularly; no one ejected him, yet. Weight rooms, a pool where the very air looked blue, the big gym where the game had ended. The crowd had gone, and he entered and drank from the fountain. A small man in a blue work shirt was motoring one set of stands back into a stack against the wall. A team of younger assistants removed the volleyball net with small, flashing tools, then carried off the chairs and official's tower. Efficiently the blue-shirted man swept the bleachers opposite, stopping here and there to polish with a towel anchored to his belt, then retracted them as well. The whole room changed. It was, to East, an interesting thing. He sat and watched against the wall, the two guns lumpy and hard against his thighs.

At last, the small man locked shut a storeroom, working off a large ring of keys, and then his assistants disappeared. Two black men came in with a basketball, taking the court at one end, dicing, lots of leaning and hand checks.
Damn,
they laughed.
Damn.